Episode XXXVIII - Follow That Geist!

            “Franck!  Franck!” Siren’s breathless voice echoed down the stairs and into the dark laboratory, accompanied by the sounds of feet pounding against the stone steps as she ran down them, “Franck! He’s escaped!”  She skidded to a halt next to the book-covered workbench where the Former Baron Von Spektr was skimming through the pages of Rudigore by the greenish light of a burner.

            “What,” he muttered incoherently, “who has escaped?”

            “Your Great Uncle Adelbert!  He’s vanished from the frame!”

            “Oh, that’s nice.  Did you know that Baronet Rudigore here was held under a curse that was enforce by his – wait, what?”

            “Your Great Uncle Adelbert, the Late Baron Von Spektr, has gone.  He must have become a full Geist!”

            “Oh,” Von Spektr replied, suddenly very still.  He held his pose for a moment in complete silence then, suddenly, he leapt up off his stool, ran to the steps and started dashing up them before Siren could even open her mouth again. “Then we had best hurry up after him!” he called back down to her before vanishing into the hall.

            “I know!” Siren screamed into the empty laboratory, before feeling profoundly stupid for doing so and leaping up the stairs two at a time after her employer.

            Gulliver and Ellis were waiting nervously in the hall, leaning against the walls and tapping their feet, avoiding eye contact.  As the Former Baron stormed out of the basement they were sent leaping from their loitering and into his wake, which seemed to be composed entirely of fervent, but uncertain action.  As they marched out into Tentacle Lane, Siren slipped out of the house behind them and so all four made their way to the end of the lane where, at last, they stopped.

            The Former Baron scanned the street and saw a flickering image, hauntingly familiar, work its way, barely visible, through the busy crowds.

            “There he is!” he shouted, and, as the others followed the line made by his pointing finger, the ghostly form of Adelbert Von Spektr turned round.  As soon as his saw his would-be pursuers he began to change.  His flickering form transformed into a pale, greenish vapour which wafted across the street towards a parked cab.  The vapour seemed to vanish through the vehicles exhaust grille and then, a second later, the cab’s engine started up and it began to pull away down the street, much to the amazement of its driver, who had been seated a few feet away sipping tea outside of a small café.

            As the driver leapt up, shouting and cursing at his runaway charge, the Former Baron took action of his own.  He stepped out into the street, forcing a carriage to come to a halt with a flurry of whips and manes and snorted horse breath, and then he motioned to Siren, Gulliver and Ellis to get in as he himself climbed up behind the driver.

            “Follow that cab, man!” he demanded, tossing a large gold coin into the basket at the driver’s feet.

            “Wh-which cab?” the driver asked as his mind tried to work out if he was scared or excited.

            “”That one,” the Former Baron shouted, pointing up the street, “the one without any driver!”

            There was a crack as the driver let loose with his whip and then the carriage was rolling slowly up the street, cutting a path through the throng of pedestrians.

            “Out of the way!  Out of the way!” screamed Franck as he half-stood at the front of the vehicle, waving his arms and pointing accusingly at those who seemed least willing to move.  “Yes, you!  Wig-man!” he called, pointing at a large, round man with a mass of fake white curls spilling over his head and halfway down his back, “perhaps if you had more sense and less horsehair you’d be able to hear me!  Move, move, move!”

            Inside the carriage, Gulliver was starting to panic.

            “’As ‘e gone mad?” he asked, staring out the window at the angry pedestrians as the carriage finally began to pick up speed.

            “I don’t think so,” Siren replied, “at least, not any more so than usual.”

            “And you saw what Adelbert was like,” Ellis added, “I don’t think the old man’s overreacting.”

            “But, all those people what ‘e’s pushing out of the way – ‘e’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get a pistol shot in ‘is ‘ead!”

            “I’m pretty sure the people around here will know better than to fire on Franck,” Siren said with a half-smile, “he must have earned himself quite a reputation by now.”

            Adelbert’s car turned off into a wider street populated by fewer pedestrians and let out a puff of greenish smoke as it picked up some speed.  Immediately the Former Baron began demanding more of his driver and the poor, terrified horses up front.  The last clump of reluctant pedestrians were forced to jump to either side of the street as the carriage careered around to the left and swept a fruit stall off its legs, sending a torrent of soft, squishy spheres in various colours tumbling down the slope.

            Adelbert continued to accelerate, forcing those on the street to run for their lives, sheltering in doorways and diving into alleyways.

            “Coming through, coming through,” the Former Baron yelled as he passed these dazed unfortunates, “chase in progress, coming through!”

            Ellis watched the houses and shops flash by outside as the carriage built up enough speed to keep up.  Despite the fury of the chase, Ellis was easily distracted by what he saw.  He was amazed by the diversity of architecture.  The street was lined with houses in a style he would have described as Tudor, but, every now and then, he would catch a glimpse of some older style – the bases of towers built in stone with portcullis gates and arrow-slit windows, or ornate houses covered in fretwork and arabesque balconies.  Though he could rarely catch the little details at the speed they were travelling, he saw many houses the facades of which were painted in grand frescoes of bright, yet earthy colours.  Occasionally they would pass a street which sloped off towards a palace of columns and colonnades, or long, cloistered complexes dotted with courtyards and minarets.

            “This city never ceases to amaze me,” he said as Siren leaned over to see what he was looking at, “I just don’t know how anywhere can be this diverse!”

            “No one knows how it all started,” she replied, “Some say that it’s always been like this, but I don’t think that makes much sense.  Others say that we started off as lots of smaller settlements, each with their own styles and cultures and languages and so on.  Somehow they just kept growing until everything merged as one and all that diversity bled through the whole city.  It’s certainly true that many districts of the city have architectural styles which are totally unique to that area, like the Rock Boats on Firelake, and there are other areas where a style seen mixed-in elsewhere is used almost exclusively, as if that’s where it originated – like the palaces of Searingsands.”

            “Many of these styles exist in my world as well.”

            “Perhaps they are universal, or perhaps we brought them to you during the Breakthrough.”

            “My people were still living in caves back then, but now we have space shuttles and computers.  In Ten thousand years we’ve come a very long way, and yet it sounds like Shadow has barely changed.”

            “I think everything changes, it just does so in different ways in different places.  If you read the histories you can easily see that Shadow is always changing.  Sometimes it’s all one city, sometimes it’s broken up into lots of warring states.  Sometimes it’s mostly ruled by humans and sometimes it’s the Lithoderms who have the larger stake.  We’ve been ruled by princes, kings, emperors and gods; caliphs, khans, kaisers and cephalopods.  Everything changes.”

            “I suppose so, but it sounds like it all amounts to a kind of stalemate to me.  If you went back ten thousand years, would you understand the world you saw?  I know I certainly wouldn’t have fit in on my world back then.”

            “I’m not sure you’d fit in anywhere, Ellis,” she replied with a laugh.

            “Oh, thanks!”

            The carriage skidded around another corner and Ellis fell backwards from the window and landed on top of Siren at the other side of the carriage.  For a moment he felt perfectly comfortable, and nearly moved his hands so that their strange closeness could become more of an embrace, and then he came to his senses, sat bolt upright and started turning a furious shade of red.

            “Sorry,” he said quickly, before looking out the window again, “I should hold onto something next time… I mean, other than you… I mean, instead of-”

            “I know what you mean, Ellis,” Siren replied, a hint of mirth in her voice, “it’s alright.”

            “I dunno,” Gulliver added gloomily, half under his breath, “I think ‘e needs to be more careful.”

            The carriage sped along the winding streets and avenues and gradually Ellis began to notice a slight thinning in the number of buildings, almost as if they were leaving the city, even though that clearly wasn’t the case.  Soon it became obvious that the decrease in density was not due to approaching the outskirts of any city, but was instead in the increase in the size of the houses and the amount of land they had attached to them.  Soon the carriage was rolling along a broad avenue lined with trees, beyond which lay massive castles and estates.  It would have felt much like the English countryside, were it not for the sheer number of massive domiciles, the city-like nature of the road, the busyness of its pathways and the interconnected hubs of shops and markets sown through them.

            “Where are we now?” he asked,

            “This is the Borough,” Siren replied, “one of the more exclusive parts of the city, although, personally, I don’t think it’s as opulent as Diamondmile, or Palmhill.”

            “Isn’t this where the Former Baron came from?”

            “It might be, there are plenty of titled nobles around here, governors of their own private acreage.”

            Ellis stared out once more at the grand chateaus and palaces that lay beyond the veil of blurry greenery, sitting atop pristine lawns, or behind ancient mounds, walls and earthen ramparts.  There was a mixture of styles just like everywhere else in shadow, and each stately pile seemed both completely unique and reminiscent of some building that Ellis had seen on Earth.

            The carriage veered off to the right and, once again, Ellis was thrown across the seat, although he was more prepared this time and managed to save himself further embarrassment.

Siren popped her head out the window and shouted up to the Former Baron, “What’s going on?  Are we still chasing him?”

            “He’s gained quite a bit of ground, but we’re still on his trail,” the old man’s distinctive voice filtered back through into the darkness of the carriage, “besides, I think I know where he’s going and, if I’m right, we really have to hurry.”

            There was the sound of a whip cracking and then the carriage jolted forwards, somehow gaining speed once more.  Ellis wondered how the horses were coping.

            Outside, the fields and estates began to grow thinner and were replaced, instead, with wasteland and dotted ruins.  Ellis realised that they were now entering a region which was, basically, countryside, or, at least, an area where the city had been at least partially reclaimed by nature, at least, until such a time came when someone decided to return to it, much like the forest of Blackfeather.  This particular area seemed much less ancient, however, and some of the ruins still had roofs sinking in between their crumbling walls.  The ruined buildings were all still quite large and they were sparsely distributed, so Ellis assumed they must have been much like the estates in the rest of the Borough.

            Just as he was beginning to enjoy the picturesque view of meadow and mouldering masonry, he began to notice how the land was speckled with pieces of metal, shining and rusting in brass, gold and iron, growing more and more frequent the further from the Borough proper they went.

            “This looks like a dumping ground,” he shouted as the piles of debris grew larger.

            “That’s exactly what it is, Ellis.  This is where the Borough’s ancient Philosopher families abandoned their machines, or scavenged parts for new ones.”

            “Why is it here?”

            “Well, I guess that once it would have been a much smaller dump outside some mad Philosopher’s castle, and then he died and had no one to take over from him, but everyone else kept using his dump until it spread past his land and into theirs.  gradually it would have made the wealthier families move away.  Perhaps one day it will consume the current Borough as well, but I doubt it.  people are building more and more machines and it’s so much easier when there is a ready selection of pre-made parts and scrap.”

            “I guess that makes sense.”

            “We’re gaining on him again!” the Former Baron shouted, loudly enough to be heard in the carriage and this time both Siren and Ellis stuck their heads out to see how the chase was progressing.  The Former Baron had certainly been correct, as they could see Adelbert’s vehicle not that far ahead of them now.  He seemed to be slowing down, but not fast enough, as they soon discovered.

            “There’s another ruin ahead!” Ellis shouted.

            “That’s not a ruin,” Siren replied, frantically, “that’s a huge pile of scrap.”

            “Oh, no!” the Former Baron cried as he pulled hard on the reins and made the carriage swerve, ride off the road and come to a stop on the slope of a vegetation-covered mound of debris.

            There was a huge crash behind them and Siren, Ellis and the Former Baron all turned around to see where it had come from.  Gulliver poked his head out from the other side of the vehicle and gasped.

            The car was nowhere to be seen, but it was easy enough to work out where it had entered the scrap heap as there was a large dent from which various cogs and parts rolled away, meandering powerlessly down the road until they clattered to the ground and then everything was still.

            “That did not seem like a good idea to me,” Gulliver said, “but I guess that means ‘e’s not a threat anymore, right?”

            “Oh, no,” the Former Baron wailed, hanging his head and cupping it between his hands, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!”

            “’E’s at it again!” Gullvier said, exasperated, “What?  Was ‘e fond of that mad old git, ‘cos it certainly didn’t seem like it a few minutes ago?”

            “No,” Ellis said, surprisingly calm, “I imagine it will be because he’s expecting that to happen.

            Ellis didn’t need to point.  It was already obvious.  A pile of ancient metal parts cannot just get up and walk without everyone nearby noticing.  And so they did.

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