Immortal at the Edge of the World (25 page)

“I didn’t think so.” She picked up the page with the drawing on it and walked over to the computer. “So now maybe I’ll find your astrolabe for you and we can have this conversation again.”

*
 
*
 
*

I spent the next two hours finding the bottom of that bottle of bourbon, and then I stared at the wall for a while and asked Mirella roughly fifty times how the search was going. She was using the Internet to find a match to the astrolabe, this much I understood. I didn’t know
how
she was using the Internet to do this or what kind of success rate I might expect, or how long that might take. The truth was I didn’t expect this to work at all. As positive as I felt about the idea that Hsu’s faery token could still be out there somewhere, I didn’t expect to actually find it. Sure, I had just gone through a lot of trouble to find the right geniza and the right letter, and I hadn’t really expected that to pan out either. Now that I had, the only next step to take was to find the astrolabe. But it just couldn’t have survived.

And if it had? The idea that this object would help me understand what Eve had done was an article of faith at this point, and it wasn’t even my faith. It was Hsu’s. I spent a decade with him and never really decided if he was crazy or not. The faery showing up to carry him away certainly improved his side of the argument, though.

“So far I have found seven libraries of astrolabes online, and it isn’t in any of them,” Mirella said. It was the first time she’d spoken in a while, and the sound of her voice made me jump.

“There are that many?”

“Yes. These things are historical oddities. It improves the odds that the right one will show up.”

There was a trembling sound coming from another part of the cabin. It was barely audible, and really sort of annoying because I was pretty sure it wasn’t the first time I’d noticed it.

“Do you hear that?” I asked.

She looked up from the screen, annoyed, then caught the sound. “Oh that? That’s been happening off and on for a while. I don’t know what it is. It started when you were unconscious. It’s coming from that cabinet over there, but I can’t open it. I’m sorry. I stopped hearing it after a while.”

“Which cabinet?”

She pointed it out for me.

There is a fairly limited amount of storage space on the plane, because as wealthy as I am I wasn’t going to throw in for a jumbo jet to carry just me around the planet. That struck me as actively obnoxious. So it’s not a huge plane, spacewise, and most of the interior storage was taken up by food, liquor, and one or two changes of clothes. The rest of the space was electronics and the mandatory emergency gear, except for the contents of the one overhead compartment Mirella had just pointed out, which contained a bag.

This bag went with me everywhere and contained everything I needed if I had to walk away quickly: fake passports, cash, extra clothing, and cell phones. There were six different phones, all of them prepaid “burners.” The active ones were programmed with one number each, corresponding to a person in my life I might need to contact if I had to disappear, and each of those people had the number for the phone they were programmed into.

I left the phones on, and rotated the charger on them to keep them ready for use. Every time I pulled one out and charged it I told myself this was all silly and unnecessary and dumb and something only Tchekhy would agree with because he was indiscriminately paranoid. But we all have our own outlets for paranoia, and this was mine.

Now one of those phones was ringing. Or rather, vibrating. I didn’t even know I’d set them to vibrate.

It was a good ten minutes before I could get to the bag. First, I had to find the key, which was in the pants that were on the other side of the cabin, which mean walking to the pants in my boxers, which Mirella didn’t seem to care about but still. I have looked better when in front of attractive women than I did at that moment. It especially didn’t help that it was difficult to stand upright due to the battlefield stitches she’d put in my stomach. And those stitches also made it impossible for me to raise my arms over my head, which was something I really had to do in order to get the bag down from the bin. So Mirella had to help with that, and then not only did I not feel particularly attractive, I actually felt old for the first time in a while.

Finally I got the bag down onto the table at the foot of my bed and opened it up. By then the phone had stopped vibrating. I would have had to go from phone to phone to find out which one had received an incoming call, but the first one I checked—the one I was most afraid of checking—was the right phone. It was Clara’s.

I couldn’t breathe for a second so I sat down on the bed and hit the callback button, and waited. It only rang twice.

“Adam?” It was indeed Clara, and she sounded frantic.

“It’s me.”

“Oh my god, where have you been? I’ve been calling and . . . are you okay?”

“I’m fine, but you obviously aren’t. What’s wrong?”

“Oh . . .” She lost her voice for a second and I realized I was hearing her fight the urge to cry. “They took him,” she said, choking out the words. “You have to help me.”

“Took him? Took who?”

“They took him and they told me . . . they told me to call you about it and I didn’t know what else to do but then you didn’t
answer
and I . . .”

“Clara, who did they take?”

“My son, Adam. They took my son.”

Part Two

The God of
Impossible Things

Chapter Fifteen

Clarabelle Wasserman of the Connecticut Wassermans, formerly of New York City and a small island in the Queen Charlottes, lived on a private estate in Southern Italy on a hill that overlooked a valley on one side and the Mediterranean on the other. It was an unpleasant distance from the nearest decent airport and most of the other traditional indices of modern civilization, such as grocers and coffee shops and bars. It reminded me of about ten different places I’d lived at one time or another and, except for the electricity and the running water, it could have been most of them. I especially liked the proximity to local vineyards.

It was also exactly the sort of place I would have loved to spend time in, but I never had because I’d never been invited. This didn’t stop me from learning everything about the place when she relocated to it. I don’t think it’s considered stalking if I don’t actually show up.

Anyway, her estate kind of bothered me. Clara lived with me for about three years, and that was three of the better years I’d had in a long while. But then we started fighting. One of the things we’d fought about was how I never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. My counterpoint had been that she and I had as many centuries to go out and do things as we wanted, but on the island we had everything we needed so why bother? She said she wanted to see the world, though, and decided she wanted to do that without me along.

So after all of that
see the world
nonsense she ended up seeing herself to a walled estate in Italy that was almost exactly as isolated as the island, and she hardly ever left the place.

This made me bitter, and contributed to the conclusion that it wasn’t the island she needed to get away from at all.

I said
centuries
because, as I mentioned before, Clara won’t be getting any older. It’s a long story, but the short version is she received a medical treatment that isn’t going to be repeated anytime soon because everyone involved in creating it is dead. This makes her the only other person on the planet that’s like me—aside from Eve, the red-haired woman who may not actually be like me at all given she can vanish and I can’t. Clara’s utter uniqueness is one of the reasons I like to keep tabs on her, even if that comes off kind of creepy.

But I obviously didn’t do a fantastic job of keeping track given I managed to not have any idea that she had a child, so I can’t have been
that
obsessive about it.

*
 
*
 
*

It was three days before we made it to her front door. This was partly due to the estate’s distance from any meaningful form of civilization, but not entirely.

First we had to extricate ourselves from the Istanbul airport. This took half a day because the airspace above Turkey is somewhat complicated. It could have been worse. It turned out Mr. Acar from the museum had not been damaged in any way, which we discovered after Acar reached out to Mr. Heintz to ascertain why it was that we had left the museum hurriedly without addressing him, and also whether by any chance we had removed anything before departing. Heintz assured me this inquiry would be the extent of any official issue provided I didn’t need to get back into the Archeological Museum again anytime soon. Had Acar been caught in the mess that happened outside the museum he would have been dead, and I expect then we’d have had to deal with the police, which would have been a lot more time-consuming.

Istanbul to Rome is an incredibly short flight. I think if planes had been around when it was still Constantinople that whole Eastern/Western church split would never have happened, only because those guys would’ve been an afternoon’s flight away from a decent conversation. But once we got on the ground we had to hire a car and a driver who was willing to log in a solid day on the road. Mirella tried three or four times to convince me she could drive the car herself, but I’d seen cars on the Italian roads and I don’t care if she
did
learn to drive in New York City, it still wasn’t a good idea. Plus, it was something best done either by a professional or by more than one person in shifts, and there was no way my getting behind the wheel of a car was ever going to be a good idea for me, Mirella, or the nation of Italy as a whole.

We ended up hiring a very expensive man named Rollo, who spoke no English, owned a town car, and had a home five miles from our destination, so he wouldn’t require overnight accommodations at Clara’s once he got us there. I considered this his best feature.

Speaking of Italian roads, they can be bumpy, especially when you get out into the hills. Given I’d recently had my leg sewn to my stomach, this was a rather awful experience that was only marginally eased by alcoholic beverages.

By the time we got within sight of the estate, about the only one in a good mood about it was Iza, who was pixie-on-meth happy.

“Maybe we should give
her
some of this,” Mirella complained, waving a bottle of vodka at Iza, who was flying in concentric circles in the air between us. It was a small miracle Rollo hadn’t noticed her. Or if Rollo noticed, he did not care.

“I don’t think alcohol calms them down,” I said. “I’m not sure what does. I could feed her some more mushrooms; she might stop for that.”

“I have a better idea. That’s the place up there, yes?”

“That’s it.” We were at the base of the last bumpy hill my stitches were going to have to endure for a while. At the top of the hill was a walled-off building that was reminiscent of the Talus estate in old Mangalore.

“Good.” Mirella lowered her window. “Shoo, bug.”

“Okay thanks,” Iza said, obediently shooing. She zipped out the window and hopefully headed in the right direction.

“I guess that works,” I said.

“Clara will be happy to see her, and maybe nicer to you for it.”

Mirella had heard the entire story of Clara and, really, everything else I could think of that was pertinent to our current circumstance, which was why she had a bottle of vodka in her hands. It was beginning to look like the only way she could handle all of it was if she was at least semi-buzzed. I would have worried that this made her less of an effective bodyguard, but at her most competent she killed a demon. I was pretty sure having her at sixty percent was plenty good enough. Plus, most of the time I can’t handle me unless I’m semi-buzzed either, so I understood the problem.

It was another fifteen minutes before we reached the front gate, and a few more seconds to wait for the gate to open electronically to admit us into the compound behind the walls. I was happy to see Clara put so much money into her own security, even if I never fully understood whom she was trying to keep herself secure from.

The gate closed behind us and we got out of the car into an empty compound. Nobody was there to greet us, which was odd because I was pretty sure she had a half-dozen people on staff for just this sort of thing.

“Hello, Adam.”

Clara stepped out of a shaded alcove at the front of the main building. She was dressed simply in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, barefoot, with a pixie on her wrist. She was tan and beautiful and exactly as I remembered her, which was appropriate given she wasn’t aging.

“Sorry we took so long,” I said. I felt like walking over and giving her a hug was appropriate, but I was still figuring out how to stand up straight without wincing.

“I’m a little out of the way over here,” she said, petting Iza gently without fully realizing she was doing it. It was like her hands automatically knew how to tend to a pixie in the same way someone might instinctively rock when holding a newborn. Clara and Iza had been very close before Clara had moved out.

I watched her eyes track past me and land on Mirella, and for a half second I saw a flash of something that was probably jealousy. “Oh, hi,” she said.

“This is my bodyguard,” I said. “Mirella.”