Seven Dreams (24 page)

‘
Shall
we dispense with this absurd charade?’ he said abruptly. ‘I am not
the Baron Anserval, in point of fact, and there can be no sense in
continuing the pretence out here. My name is Farran Bron—’ here he
paused to bow once more to Llandry and Pensould, though without the
oily grace that had characterised his courtesies before ‘—and I am
in the employ of G.A.9.’

Serena
stared.

GA stood for
Government Agency, which was terrifically unimaginative but nobody
cared; they were about efficiency, not creativity. Irbel’s ninth
agency was devoted to... well, nobody knew quite what, save for
those on the inside. That they dealt in espionage, there could be
no doubt, but what else they might do? Perhaps it was best not to
know. They had a reputation for a cool kind of ruthlessness which
made them somewhat unpopular.

‘
It’s
their airship,’ Anserval — or rather, Bron — continued. ‘And this
is their mission, I’m afraid. The LHB will have to stand
aside.’

Serena found her
voice. ‘Why couldn’t you have said that to begin with? Why were you
pretending to be Anserval?’

He just looked at
her. ‘You really didn’t know?’

Serena lifted her
chin and made no reply.

Bron began, with
impatient movements, to strip off the facial hair he wore. ‘Same
reason you were pretending to be Lady Fenella,’ he returned. ‘Not a
bad act, by the way, although I could’ve wished her a little less
gushing.’

‘
I
could’ve wished Anserval a little less obnoxious!’ Serena replied,
stung.

He ignored this.
‘Bastavere, on the other hand, is pitch-perfect.’ He awarded Fabian
a grand nod, a professional according a high compliment to
another.

Fabian said
nothing. He was thinking deeply; Serena recognised that posture and
the intense silence that went along with it. He was doing the same
thing she was doing: thinking back over all the dealings they’d had
with “Baron Anserval” and trying to work out what it all
meant.

Serena failed
there. ‘Anserval is a major masquerade,’ she said, frowning at the
erstwhile Baron. ‘Lady Fenella’s just a persona, with a carriage.
But the Baron? The house, the servants, the
collections?’

Bron shrugged.
‘The aristocracy’s frequently up to no good, both in Irbel and
abroad. G.A.9 likes to keep an eye on them, and for that, you need
someone on the inside. Someone fully accepted, not just an
occasional character. They chose me.’ He evidently considered this
an achievement, but Serena wasn’t so sure. His acting talents were
undeniably superior, but in his place, she wasn’t sure she would
have been pleased to be assigned such a long-term role.

‘
I
don’t buy that,’ Serena replied. ‘All that, just for basic
surveillance? Come on, really. What was the game?’

‘
Nothing to do with you,’ he said briefly. ‘You were a useful
cover once or twice, I admit. And then you provided an easy
entrance into all this riddle stuff.’ He cast a scornful glance at
the Seven Dreams rhyme still glimmering in the sky, making his
feelings about the whole assignment painfully clear.

‘
So
you knew about the key all along?’ Serena said. ‘The one that was
in “Baron Anserval’s” collection?’

Bron hesitated.
‘Yes,’ he said.

He was lying, and
making a remarkably inept job of it considering his apparent
aptitude for deceit. Serena hid a smile, and did a horribly inept
job of that, too.

‘
All
right, no,’ said Bron irritably. ‘We don’t know where it came from
or how it got there. Probably we got it as part of a job lot of old
rubble. Stuff to line the shelves, you know.’ He eyed Serena, and
his irritable manner vanished behind a smooth smile. ‘Did you think
we were infallible?’ he said, eyes sparkling with amusement.
‘That’s cute. We do our best, of course.’

Serena opened her
mouth to offer some deservedly harsh retort to this nonsense, but
she was distracted before she could speak. Fabian moved. In one
gesture, he ripped off the blond, perfectly styled Bastavere wig
he’d been wearing so much lately, and threw it. It sailed a long
distance, and landed in the waters of a tiny, swift-flowing beck
that passed nearby.

‘
You
just pissed Egg right off with that, there,’ Serena
commented.

‘
Um,’
said Fabian. ‘Yeah. Oops.’ He shook out his much longer dark hair
and tied it back into a tail, already looking more comfortable. So
much more so, in fact, that Serena felt a moment’s gratitude to
Anserval or Bron or whoever he was. Maybe Fabian just needed to
stop pretending for a while, and he’d be okay.

By the time
Anserval-Bron had finished removing the immediately disposable
articles of his disguise, he looked very different. He was younger
than Serena had supposed, and he’d lost the Baron’s smug manner and
air of self-satisfaction — though he had gained more than a hint of
cockiness and self-importance to balance it out. Serena still felt
little liking for him, although perhaps that was merely discomfort;
all her fine efforts as Fenella, wasted! She was downright
embarrassed to think that he had known all along that she was
acting, but she hadn’t guessed that about him.

‘
Don’t
feel bad,’ he said kindly. ‘We’ve worked with Torwyne before. You
do all right, with what you’ve got.’

He probably meant
it well, Serena was charitable enough to concede, but his comments
still rankled. He was magnanimous, as though her precious Agency
was a minnow compared to the shark of G.A.9, and she and Fabian
were children flailing about with a few cheap toys. ‘Thank you,’
she said stiffly, earning herself a knowing grin in
response.

Damn
him.

It occurred to
her that Eva and Tren were silent in the face of these revelations.
Llandry and Pensould merely looked confused, but Eva looked nicely
composed. She caught Serena’s eye, and Serena detected a faint
twinkle before her ladyship looked away.

Oh, dear. Eva had
known. She had known! How mortifying. But then... Serena’s quick
brain flashed through the connotations of that, and came up with an
answer to Fabian’s questions of only a little while earlier. What
was she doing on this flight? She was here to counter Bron, that’s
what. Eva had needed an airship to go after the keys, but the LHB
couldn’t muster the funds for that; only G.A.9 had that kind of
money. So she’d used Serena’s — or rather, Lady Fenella’s —
connections with a man she knew to be a G.A.9 agent to gain access
to his ship, knowing that, sooner or later, he’d break cover and
take over the expedition.

He’d try to
commandeer any keys they found, too, and that was where Serena and
Fabian came in. Eva was relying upon them to prevent Bron from
walking off with the keys, by any means necessary.

She smiled
inwardly, feeling at once much better about everything. Bron
thought that she and Fabian were just little amateurs, did he? He
would regret that. She’d make sure of it.

Catching Fabian’s
eye, she gathered at once that he’d grasped everything she had and
felt much the same way about it. They exchanged a tiny nod, and an
even tinier smile. In that moment he looked more like the Fabian
she remembered, and she could’ve blessed the idiot Baron Bron for
his subterfuge and manipulation. For the first time, Fabian was
interested in the job at hand; his pride was injured, and he’d do
anything he could to outdo the other agent.

The next few days
would be very interesting indeed.

‘
So,’
said Llandry with a frown, ‘You are not Lady Fenella Chartre after
all?’

Serena cleared
her throat. ‘Uhm. No, in fact. I apologise for the deceit, only it
was... well, it was...’ she searched for the right word. Necessary?
More or less, but that wouldn’t make sense without a lengthy
explanation. Fun? No, how inappropriate. Also untrue, on this
occasion; her joy in Lady Fenella’s character had gone, and she
wouldn’t regret leaving the role behind.

Fabian saved her
with a little of the charm he rarely showed, but which tended to
conquer when he did. He made Llandry a graceful bow, smiled
winningly at her and said, ‘It’s complicated. While my sister
searches through her vocabulary, allow me to introduce myself? I am
Fabian Carterett, of the Torwyne Agency of Irbel. The lady is
Serena, the younger and much finer Carterett.’

‘
And
why were you all pretending to be other people?’ interrupted
Pensould, with a sweep of his arm which took in the former Baron
Anserval as well as Serena and Fabian.

‘
It’s
our job.’

Pensould stared
at him. ‘You mean that somebody pays you to pretend to be fake
people?’

‘
Exactly.’ Fabian smiled. ‘Pays rather well,
actually.’

Pensould threw up
his hands in disgust and turned away. ‘Never will I understand you
humans.’

‘
I
have a plan,’ announced Teyo.

After two days of
waiting around in a tiny, run-down farmer’s cottage in Tarvale,
which was damp and cold and not at all the kind of hideout that any
of the team would have preferred, Teyo was growing bored and Egg
and Iyamar were bickering back and forth all day long.

Simply waiting
for somebody else to do something remarkable had never been high on
Teyo’s list of priorities, and if he didn’t find something for his
esteemed colleagues to do, he might end up killing them both. Or
himself.

At this promising
pronouncement Egg and Iyamar instantly stopped sniping at each
other and sat looking expectantly at him. They were huddled in the
cottage’s tiny and ill-equipped kitchen, gathered around the small
fire in a largely futile attempt to stay warm. The three of them
were certainly well-hidden and out of the way, but Teyo couldn’t
help wondering what they had ever done to Oliver to deserve these
privations.

‘
Two
keys have been found, not including the one from the Baron’s
collection,’ Teyo began. ‘The two we know about were discovered in
Irbel and Orstwych. Meanwhile, according to the rhyme we can expect
to see one coming out of each realm. With me so far?’

‘
Six
of them, anyway,’ Egg pointed out, ‘since the Baron already had one
from who-knows-where. So, one of the “Dreams” must already be
missing its key.’

‘
Right. No way of knowing which one that is, at the moment. For
now, we can assume that any of the following realms may produce a
key, and four of them certainly will: Glinnery, Glour, Nimdre,
Ullarn and Orlind.’

Egg and Iyamar
nodded.

‘
We
can’t reach Orlind, nor Ullarn either, as the Tillikor Mountains
are virtually impassable this time of year. So that leaves us with
Glinnery, Glour and Nimdre.’

‘
Okay,’ said Egg. ‘Where are we going with this?’

‘
We’re
going to Glinnery, Glour or Nimdre,’ Teyo said. ‘That’s what we
have to decide.’

‘
What?’

‘
There’s no point sitting here waiting for someone to find a
key. It could be days, weeks or months, and besides, by the time we
reach the site the key’s long gone and it gets harder to track it
down. What if we’re already there when it’s discovered?’

‘
But
how do we know which one will be discovered next?’ said Iyamar
reasonably.

‘
We
don’t. It’s a bit of a gamble.’

Egg raised her
brows. ‘How much of this has to do with being bored out of your
head, Tey?’

‘
Um.
Some of it might be because of that, yes.’

Her response to
that was to climb to her feet with a slightly disturbing cackle.
‘I’m bored with Nimdre and I don’t like the Darklands,’ she
informed him.

‘
Glinnery it is, then,’ Teyo said, beaming. ‘Is that okay with
you, Iyamar?’

‘
I...
um, yes, but isn’t Glinnery north?’

‘
More
or less.’

‘
And
Nimdre is south?’

‘
Right!’

‘
What
if we go north to Glinnery and the next key is discovered in the
south, in Nimdre? We’ll be way out of position to get
it.’

‘
Not
much more than we are already,’ Teyo argued. ‘Anyway, it’s a
free-for-all out there. Tracking down and retrieving the keys is
going to be really hard whatever we do. Might as well do something
proactive, and have a bit of fun while we’re at it,
right?’

Iyamar looked
dubious. ‘It’s a rubbish plan, Captain.’

Teyo sighed. ‘I
know, but it’s the best one I’ve got. Unless you’d rather sit here
and argue with Egg for the next three weeks?’

Iyamar blanched.
‘When you put it like that...’

Egg grinned.
‘Good choice. I can make your life
really
miserable,
girlie.’

‘
Like
you aren’t already,’ Iyamar muttered.

‘
I
heard that.’

This plan was
reinforced the next morning. They left early, provisioned for a
considerable stay, and stopped at the bulletin boards on their way
to the railcar station in central Irbel.