“History was never my strong point. But you’re trying to draw a parallel with the Great Depression.”
“I sure am.”
“I think you’re reaching. A war followed by an economy going bust and you’re talking about history repeating itself. That’s pretty thin.”
“Okay, try this. In the grim world, about the time we were having the Depression, Japan was at war with China.”
“So?”
“So Noriko told me yesterday that her people, the Wo, are involved in a pointless war with the nations of Shanga. I looked them up on the map. Any guesses as to what Wo and Shanga correspond to?”
“I already know.” Harris frowned.
“So it sounds like another mystery for Doc to go funny about. Like why English and Low Cretanis are the same language. Between that, and the routine with the guns and pepper gas and my wristwatch being all twisted when they got here when nothing else was, he’s chewing on the furniture in frustration. How about you?”
“You know I don’t chew furniture.”
She gave him an exasperated look.
“Okay, okay, it’s weird.” He rose. “Did you find a Civil War?”
“War of the Schism, eighty years ago. The League of Ardree split into two pieces, basically north against south.”
“American Revolution.”
“The Great Revolt, about a hundred and fifty years back. When the League of Ardree was formed. The people of Cretanis call it the Ingratitude.”
“Jesus.”
“The Carpenter Cult.”
“I meant, ‘Jesus H. Christ, you’re freaking me out.’ Okay?”
“Sorry. I got carried away.”
Harris stood. He did some mental calculations. “I don’t know whether you ought to tell Doc about this.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you’re right, events here are sort of following the history of the grim world, and we have a general idea of things that are going to be happening over the next forty or fifty years.”
“So?”
“So we can predict the fair world’s version of World War Two. Should we?”
She frowned, considering.
“I’ll think about it, too. But first I’m going to order us some jeans.”
Once he was gone, Gaby finished up with the broader histories and returned to another subject: Duncan Blackletter.
Reports of him appeared occasionally in the newspapers, and Doc’s library had scores of bound volumes of crumbling periodicals. Of course, there tended to be a problem figuring out when things happened.
By Novimagos reckoning, the current year was 28 R.B.G.—twenty-eighth year of the reign of Bregon and Gwaeddan, the current king and queen. Before these rulers were Gwaeddan’s parents Dallan and Tangwen, who ruled forty-eight years: 1 R.D.T. to 48 R.D.T. Each royal reign reset the year to one, and each sovereign nation had a different chronology. Acadia, to the north, was in its eighteenth year under Jean-Pierre’s widower father, King Henri IV—abbreviated 18 H.IV.R. It was maddening.
Still, there were a few benchmarks. Years were often translated to a chronology dated from the union of the nation of Cretanis, 1435 years ago. Most historical volumes translated one date from each reign to this dating system, usually referred to as “Scholars’ Years.” But not even Cretanis used that dating system routinely; they were currently in year 248 of the reign of their current queen, Maeve X. Gaby marvelled at her longevity.
Duncan Blackletter first showed up in Scholars’ Year 1368, nearly seventy years ago. A young man then, leader of a gang, he was tried for the train hijacking of a gold shipment from Neckerdam to Nyrax. The gold was not recovered, and Duncan and some of his men escaped the next year. The dim photographs of him showed a lean, handsome, arrogant face; Gaby could recognize him beneath the years of the face Duncan wore today.
Over the years, Duncan’s plans became more ambitious and deadly. He constructed a metal-hulled ship with a ram and used it to pirate shipping routes; it was finally sunk by the navy of Nordland, but he escaped. He exterminated an entire community in Castilia because its rulers would not share their scholarship with him. He used his growing fortune to finance the development of new and bigger explosives, then used them to blackmail entire cities. In Scholars’ Year 1398, he nearly bought the kingship of the southern nation of New Acadia through political corruption in its capital, Lackderry. Two years later, he emerged as one of the forces behind the development of glitter-bright, the narcotic liquor that first appeared in the faraway land of Shanga.
It was then that Doc first appeared. Gaby found reports of a brilliant engineer from Cretanis named Desmond MaqqRee building a bridge across the River Madb in the Cretanis capital, Beldon. Doc had uncovered and thwarted a plot by Blackletter to assassinate the Queen. Gaby noted with interest some mild criticism in the newspapers that he had not been knighted for his efforts. This was thirty-five years ago, so she had to revise Doc’s estimated age up again, to sixty or higher.
Not long after, there was an obituary notice for a Deirdriu MaqqRee. A suicide, she’d jumped from one of the high towers of Doc’s bridge. She was survived only by her husband . . . Desmond. Doc.
There was no explanation, no other account of the death, no hint as to what Deirdriu might have been like or why she killed herself. Gaby fumed over the incomplete picture she was assembling. She kept at it.
Duncan had invested in munitions and reaped big profits during the Colonial War between Castilia and the nations of the New World. A few years later, Scholars’ Year 1412, he was at it again. There were hints that he manipulated the kings of the Old World into the war called the World Crisis. The same year, the papers reported Doc refusing a commission in the army of Cretanis and being exiled from that nation; he accepted citizenship in Novimagos.
He was by this time appearing in the news as leader of the Sidhe Foundation, accompanied by an Acadian princess and other like-minded people; they settled disputes, turned the tides of some battles, and followed the trail of Duncan Blackletter across the landscape of the Old World.
Then it was Scholars’ Year 1415. Obituaries for Duncan Blackletter, Whiskers Okerry, Micah Cremm, and Siobhan Damvert—the last survived by her grieving prince of a husband, only two years away from becoming king himself, and her grim twelve-year-old son Jean-Pierre.
The end of Duncan Blackletter . . . until his botched plan to kidnap Gaby resulted in Harris finding the fair world.
Gaby sat back from her studies. With so much history between Doc and Duncan, Duncan and Jean-Pierre, there was no way they were all going to emerge from it alive. She feared for Harris and her new friends.
Harris kept his fedora low on his face and left the Monarch Building by one of its side exits. He tried to use reflections in storefront windows to spot anyone who might be following, but couldn’t spot anyone. If no one were following now, and if the device in his pocket were working right, then he’d be all right . . . but he felt more secure for having the hard, heavy lump pressed against his kidney, the revolver Noriko had given him.
Jean-Pierre’s directions were on target. Damablanca turned out to be a narrow, winding street with two-way traffic moving between tall residential buildings of brown brick; only at street level, where storefronts were crowded with neon and painted signs, was there any color along the street.
And then, a few blocks later, there was Banwite’s Talk-Boxes and Electrical Eccentricities, offering enough color and motion for any two normal blocks of storefronts. The shop’s name was picked out in gleaming green neon Celtic knotwork letters and surrounded by a gigantic yellow neon oval; just outside the border of that oval ran a bronze model train, upside down when it turned to chug along the underside of the sign, always sending gray fog from its smokestack floating up into the sky. Like most of the ground-floor shops in Neckerdam, Banwite’s had no windows at street level, but in the windows up one, Harris glimpsed dozens of talk-boxes and moving mechanical toys.