[Back to Surreal Tender the Technomancer. This one picks up a week or so after I Was Called Jane. Surreal, Mr. Carker, and Mr. Quick are going to call on Sarah Norton’s sister. Surreal still hasn’t found Diana von Birkhausen — but she’s on the right track, as we’ll soon see. Need to catch up? You know what to do.]
Surreal Tender had imagined a fairy fortress of some kind, perhaps with castles in the trees. Instead, she saw first the train station, a single public room with a single ticket window, and then outside it on the other side of an unpaved track a long row of crumbling brick houses trailing away into the fog. Graffiti and advertisement posters layered their walls. She had rarely seen paint like it; the lurid pinks and blues glimmered in the dark.
“So this is Fairyland,” she thought, feeling blank.
At least there was no fighting. Here modern humans were not invading aliens but many-times-great-grandchildren of the Twilight Folk. Though Broceliande had no tanks, tommy guns, howitzers, or any war machinery more modern than swords and polearms, fighters from all sides stayed many miles away from the holy forest.
Surreal remembered a schoolchild, more than 80 years ago, raising her hand to quiz an indigenous Nova Terran who had come to address the class for Discovery Day.
“How did you get here? I didn’t see a wolf outside!”
In all the storybooks, Little Blue Men rode wolves.
The old man adjusted his cravat and rubbed his indigo chin. “How did you get here?”
The girl bounced in her seat. “On the omni!” Jane Sumner was proud of climbing on the omnibus herself and holding up her pass for the driver to clip. Ten half-moon clips to a schoolchild’s weekly pass; pass to be had for a penny. She remembered it still.
Her father had a modern house in the suburbs. He was the first in the family to move outside the old walls of Belleville since his farmer ancestors moved in, a hundred years before. But Jane, precious even at six, went to the big girls’ gymnasium in the city, bouncing along in the omni an hour each way, sitting on her knees to peer out the window as the suburban homes gave way to factories, then tenements, then close-crammed brownstones. The girls’ gymnasium was held in a double brownstone. Red geraniums bloomed in pots outside the doors.
“Well, and I came out from the City on another omni.” Mr. Delving took out his watch and polished the face on his coat. “They don’t let wolves run down the public ways, as you young ladies know. I got on the 8:15 outside the museum.”
Now Jane had noticed the watch. “I thought you told time by the sun!”
“And so I do, but it’s tricky indoors.” He winked. “Now if you young ladies like to go into the garden, I’ll show you how we tell time by the sky … ”
“A sundial?” one girl asked.
“No, it isn’t a sundial.”
“A scaphe?” Jane suggested.
“Not an instrument, child. Now come see.”
They followed him, gathering close until the history mistress reminded them to walk in a line — “and silently, ladies, no one should hear anything but the softest patter of feet.” Most had never seen an indigenous person in gentleman’s clothing. They were inclined to think he was enchanting and — despite his assurances to the contrary — magical.
Mr. Carker looked in vain for a coach, car, wagon, or conveyance of any kind. He stepped away to ask the porter for directions to Norton Grange.
Simon Quick glanced after him. Then he looked at Surreal Tender.
“Thank you for letting me come with you,” he said.
“Of course.” She took off her hat long enough to shove a few loose strands of hair back toward the bundle at the back of her neck, then replaced the hat. “She spent hours with you during her last week — much more than with anyone else. I understand why you’d like to share your memories with her sister.”
“She was kind.”
Surreal Tender nodded. Sarah Norton had been a kind person, she thought. A fellow spinster. The world was strange. She was a couple decades older than Miss Norton had been, and of course unmarried. Yet no one — except perhaps Miss Norton herself — had reckoned they had anything in common.
“I wish I spent more time getting to know her,” she said.
“You had a lot to think about.”
“Still … ”
“I know.”
The evening darkened. Surreal’s fog-damp hair clung to her neck. She peeled a few locks off, then gave up. “Next time I see my hairdresser, I really am going to get this mane bobbed off short. — Unless you’d do it.”
He looked thoughtful, then smiled. “That trick’s done with a wig, you know.”
“Of course, but practice is practice.”
Simon coughed. She stepped closer to him.
“That’s nice.” He held out his hands. “You’re like a wood fire.”
“I’d like to have a wood fire.” She looked around for Mr. Carker. “Aren’t they supposed to be dancing around a fire, Oberon and Titania and their whole court? Maybe we’ll find them. This fog looks enchanted.”
“Cursed, maybe.” Simon shivered. “I don’t think you could light a fire in this damp. But what a stage effect!”
The fog wreathed up from the ground.
Mr. Carker returned. “Half a mile to the Lightening Oak, left at the old mill, two miles north to where old Miss Norton lives.” He shook his head. “He seemed to think if you don’t know the local landmarks, you have no business here.”
“Light work,” Mr. Quick smiled. “We’ll be there by suppertime, if we don’t get ourselves lost.”
“He said the strangest thing.” Mr. Carker picked up his small carpetbag. “She’ll be glad to have a visitor like her.”
The three travelers trudged past the strip of buildings — post office, telegraph office, grain elevator — that made up the town. The brick houses looked practically medieval, but a rat’s nest of electric wires connected them. Poles marched drunkenly east and west, trailing loops of wire.
In 10 minutes they found themselves trudging east along the cart road, following the porter’s directions.
“Why did she move here, of all places, from Belleville?” Mr. Carker asked. They couldn’t see the sun, but the air grew dark, then darker — a sepia shade punctuated by raindrops falling from the fir trees that lined the track.
“I think the Norton ladies’ mother came from here,” Surreal said. “Watch that puddle.”
Mr. Carker skirted the dim oval.
“Cows, madam.”
Surreal’s turn to watch her step. “Does she know we’re coming, do you think?”
“I ascertained that, madam. The ambassador wired the police here, and I sent a wire, deliverable to the address Miss Sarah Norton provided.”
“I wired as well,” Mr. Quick said. His hand found Surreal’s and she clasped it.
Once she steadied him as wet leaves collapsed into a deceptive pothole.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Just happened.”
“I don’t mind.” She imagined a smile in his voice. “If you rescue me from mud puddles now, you’ll have to let me do you a good turn later on.”
Technomancers rarely returned to their previous names. Not their Christian names, not their family names. It signaled a desire for reversion, and such a desire — under the circumstances — could be only be taken as nonsense or suicide.
Surreal Tender, Simon Quick, and James Carker dripped on the rug while the maid — a violet-colored woman little more than four feet tall — tripped up the long, dark staircase to let her mistress know her guests had arrived. Before the maid could return, another attendant — a tiny girl holding a towel — emerged seemingly from the air.
“For your shoes,” she piped.
“Thank you, child.” Surreal took the towel and the girl pattered away into the shadows.
The three were so busy cleaning their feet, then studying the hall — a shadowy forest of rugs, ferns, ornaments, velvet curtains, and stained glass — that they did not see Miss December Norton standing at the top of the stairs until she spoke.
“Surreal Tender? Is it you?”
The younger woman glanced up, then stared. A long white hand rested on the railing. Behind the hand Surreal saw a tall, graceful figure wrapped a dark purple robe. Her silver hair was cut and waved in the latest fashion, but her face was gaunt. Her eyes were lost in violet shadow. She was hollow-cheeked, skeletal — but once, powerfully built.
Surreal whispered, “Timothy Norton?”
“That is no longer my name.”
No one in Belleville ever curtsied, nor had for hundreds of years. So Mr. Carker and Mr. Quick both stared as Surreal Tender took a breath, then dropped a deep reverence to the technomancer standing at the top of the stairs.