Allie's War Season One (101 page)

“Any of them alive now?” Terian said.

Ithren shook his head, clicking softly. “Not on record. We’d have to do more digging to know for sure, given how many changed identities following the war—”

“Do it,” Terian said. “What about the guardian?”

Ithren glanced at the lizard, as if for help. He cleared his throat. “Menlim was relatively unknown in Germany back then, sir. Locally, he was only a Bavarian scholar who adopted an orphan boy out of pity. Locals believed him to be human.

“...A few month’s after his nephew’s death, however, he and his Brotherhood went underground. That was right before they began attacking the French forces openly, sir. And, pardon my saying it, but you know what happened after that...”

A map materialized, showing mountains Terian hadn’t seen with his eyes in thirty years, but that formed a portion of the modern history curriculum of every school-aged child since the end of World War I.

He recognized the most picturesque of the peaks, had a sudden memory of walking up there once, with Dehgoies. It had been the other’s idea of course. Dehgoies never got the Himalayas out of his system; as long as Terian knew him, he always seemed to be looking for a mountain tall enough that he might stretch his legs.

“There, sir...” Ithren pointed to infrared images of caves dotting the cliffs. “They likely hid him there, where Menlim and Syrimne both were reputed to live during the war. The Allied powers only found those headquarters after the Treaty of Versailles. Menlim had them protected with some kind of Barrier trick...”

But Terian was staring at the map, his mouth slightly ajar as the pieces clicked into place.

“Menlim of
Bavaria?
Do you mean to tell me this Elaerian child was adopted by
the
Menlim, the one behind the Brotherhood’s military strategy?”

“Yes, sir.” Remsn sounded relieved that Terian had finally caught on. “Most thought Menlim
was
Syrimne, sir. He was infamous in the Pamir, one of the few known experts in military tactics for seers at that time. He’s one of the only seers who
could
have trained Syrimne to do those things, sir...”

Terian leaned back in his chair.

There was something here, something important yet...and not only the puzzle around the boy from Sikkim.

He couldn’t make the pieces fit, no matter how he assembled them.

“I want every record, every scrap and word you dug up on this person...not just the summaries. I want originals.”

“Yes, sir.” Ithren said. “Now?”

“Yes. Now.” Terian steepled his fingers. “I will wait.”

TERIAN-4 FELL INTO a crouch...focused, attentive.

The cave where they’d stopped was the size of a small cottage—drafty, but a blessing in that it had three solid walls, and not a lot of heat escaped out the low-ceilinged tunnel that led outside. Still, it had been hell coaxing the boy in there the first time. They had to build two fires and illuminate every crack in every wall before the kid would so much as venture past the threshold.

Four studied the boy’s youth-rounded face.

The deep black eyes shone with intelligence...even understanding at times. He reasoned. He quickly grasped multiple variables and drew conclusions. He adapted to his environment. He had adjusted to being outside of that dungeon faster than anyone could have reasonably expected.

But Four still couldn’t reach him...not really. Not enough.

They were being followed. Four knew now by whom. It would certainly be easier if he could make the boy understand as well.

So far, his efforts to communicate had met with no discernible success.

Still, Four was alive...and the chemically-heated food he’d insisted his sherpas pack seemed to be a big hit.

He watched the boy stick small, corpse-white fingers into a bag full of something meant to approximate beef stroganoff. He seemed oblivious to temperature, responding only to the smell as he crammed chunks of seared meat and brown sauce into his dirty mouth. Terian witnessed the process in fascination. He wondered if the boy wonder would ever sleep long enough for a successful attempt to collar him.

He kept the thought very carefully in the back of his mind.

Even so, the black opal eyes darted up.

They met Terian’s, and Four felt the hairs on the back of his neck and his arms rise. A curl of electrically-charged aleimi slid around his skin.

“No wire,” the boy said.

English. That was new.

Up until that point, he’d spoken a form of bastardized Prexci, mixed with what Terian identified as Khaskura Bhasha, or Nepali. Terian also caught a few muttered words in Mandarin and Hindi. But the English was a first.

“Spracken zi deutsch?” he ventured.

“No wire,” the boy said in German.

“I understand,” Terian said in Russian, holding up his hands. “No wires.”

“No wires,” the boy repeated in Czech, or maybe Polish. “Try and...boom!” He grinned, his mouth filled with meat. “Boom!” he said again, throwing his hands up on spidery, stick-like arms.

He spilled some of the meat sauce on the rocks and pressed his foot in it, squishing the sauce between his toes. Frowning, he stopped, rubbing his foot deeper into the loose dirt. Four couldn’t help but find it funny that the boy still retained his revulsion reflex, considering how he’d been living.

He bowed politely.

“Boom, yes,” he said. “We understand one another, friend. No wires. Of course not. It was merely a passing thought...”

The boy gave him a sharp look, and Terian realized he’d reverted to talking to him as though he were a much younger child. He would need to be careful if he wanted to avoid offense. Adolescent seers were prone to a bit of hyper-sensitivity when it came to being treated with respect.

Somehow, that struck him as a bit funny too.

The boy turned back to the bag.

He dug his hand into the metallic wrapping, bringing another fistful of meat and noodles to his lips and sucking the juice greedily off his knuckles. Terian’s eyes fell to the boy’s narrow ribcage, the bones poking through the skin of his small chest. He would clean him up first. Make sure he knew food was no longer a luxury...nor a bed, blankets, clothing, electronics, a roof, baths, cars, servants. Hell, he’d get the kid a pony if he wanted one. He might wait until he’d fattened him up a bit, though, so the kid didn’t eat it.

The boy laughed, throwing a handful of the stroganoff in Terian’s direction.

Terian sidestepped it neatly, keeping the smile on his face. If there was one area he excelled in, it was in providing material comfort. He’d make sure the kid had all the comfort he could ever hope for, more than he’d dreamed of in that foul-smelling cave. Then they would talk.

The boy laughed again, dripping more meat juice onto his lips and into his mouth. His eyes narrowed at Terian, and the intelligence shone there again.

“Talk. Yes.” He grinned, his teeth shockingly white under all the dirt and now juice running down his face, neck and fingers. “I like you, Sark. You get me things, and we talk...”

He flung the remains of the bag at Terian. This time, he managed to hit him, splattering his coat and pants with brown sauce.

Terian merely bowed as the young seer laughed again. He smiled politely.

“Of course, my dear friend. Whatever pleases you.”

Still, in looking at the gleam in those fire-blackened eyes, he found himself glad, not the first time, that he still had a few bodies to spare.

“Bye-bye, Terry,” the boy said. The smile remained on his face, but the black eyes once more turned sharp, hawk-like. “Bye-bye.”

Four smiled stiffly, trying not to react to the familiarity he heard in that voice...or the fact that it suddenly sounded much older, and less randomly crazy.

Bowing lower still, he removed himself from the boy’s presence and into the adjoining opening in the cave, where the sherpas crouched in a corner, muttering amongst themselves and avoiding his eyes.

Terian squatted against the rock wall, and began wiping his trousers with a damp rag. Smearing and rubbing off the worst of the juice, he resigned himself to the fact that he’d likely attract mountain cats for days.

Pouring water on the same rag and then his pants, he cleaned his hands thoroughly before extracting the leather-bound diary from the inside pocket of his coat. Three sent the original to Four in Beijing for safekeeping, not knowing he would end up in the middle of a shooting war within a matter of weeks, and the book on his person. If he had to do it again, Four would have brought a copy.

Settling his weight in a flat spot by the rock wall, Four flipped it open.

There had to be a key in here, somewhere. Some clue to getting the creature to cooperate. Something the boy cared about. But between the two Terians, they (or he) had read the damned book cover to cover five times. If the formula for enticing sanity from the child was written in code behind Revi’s neat print, it eluded him.

No, the answers for that wouldn’t likely come from Revi’. Dehgoies had been the cage builder, the one who figured out how to keep the boy hidden. The real answers would have resided with Galaith. Galaith would have researched the boy incessantly. He would have studied his every move, for years on end, looking for a way in...finding every access point. Ultimately, he hadn’t succeeded in time, but he would have been in process with this, somehow.

Terian himself found nothing in Galaith’s records even referencing the boy. Nothing in the organic-based computer library. Nothing in the originals he’d appropriated before Alyson could find them, or the Barrier fragments he’d managed to track following the Pyramid’s demise.

Which meant that if anything still existed, it remained lost.

Or Alyson had it.

In any case, the boy’s presence explained a few things...notably why Galaith had been so ridiculously cautious in approaching Alyson while there was still some chance Dehgoies might kill her. Galaith couldn’t possibly have intended to pass up a breeding attempt on two full-blooded Elaerian. Whatever the boy’s age, given the odds of ever coming across a biological pair again, it was inconceivable that he wouldn’t have considered it.

It had occurred to Terian already, of course, that whatever sanity once existed in the boy had long ago ceased to be. It wasn’t like Galaith or Revi’ to waste resources; if they’d resorted to chaining a seer of that talent in an underground dungeon like a rabid dog, it was likely because they’d exhausted every other means of securing his cooperation.

Sighing, Terian tucked the book back into his jacket.

All of his answers only seemed to breed more questions. Where had they found the wretched creature? How had they managed to keep his existence a secret all that time, with nothing but a doddering human and a dimwitted nun to guard him? How was it the boy didn’t appear to have aged?

Terian asked the Barrier, hoping faintly for some kind of inspiration.

None came.