The Graveyard Game

Praise for Kage Baker and The Company novels

“Kage Baker has a very good fantasy career in front of her if
Anvil
is a sample. Her style is infused with a subtle humor that had me chuckling. I liked her hero for being such a practical and unflappable person. She kept me turning in directions that I hadn’t expected.”

—Anne McCaffrey on
Anvil of the World

“Kage Baker is a fresh, audacious, ambitious new voice, wry, jazzy, irreverent, sharp as a razor, full of daring, dash, and élan, sometimes surprisingly lyrical. She is also one hell of a storyteller. If you’re reading something by Kage Baker, fasten your seat belt—you’re in for a wild ride.”

—Gardner Dozois on
In the Garden of Iden

“An ingenious gambit . . . a great love story, and a satire on manor life, all topped off by an auto-da-fé. A savory if there ever was one . . . The period detail is delicious. What a treat. A beautiful writer.”

—Cecelia Holland on
In the Garden of Iden

“Combines historical detail and fast-paced action with a good dose of ironic wit and a dollop of bittersweet romance.”

—Library Journal
on
Mendoza in Hollywood

KAGE BAKER has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Centre and has taught Elizabethan English as a Second Language. Born in 1952 in Hollywood, she lives in Pismo Beach, California, the Clam Capital of the World.

TOR BOOKS BY KAGE BAKER

The Anvil of the World

The Graveyard Game

The Life of the World to Come

Kage Baker

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed
in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THE GRAVEYARD GAME

Copyright © 2001 by Rage Baker

Originally published in 2001 by Harcourt, Inc., in the United
States.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book,
or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor
^®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 13 978-0-765-31184-9
ISBN 0-765-31184-4

EAN 978-0765-31184-9

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

This one’s for absent friends.
Miss you, Dave
.

T
HIS IS THE FOURTH BOOK
in the unofficial history of Dr. Zeus Incorporated
.

In the twenty-fourth century, a research and development firm invented a means of time travel. It also discovered the secret of immortality. There were, however, certain limitations that prevented the Company from bestowing these gifts left and right. But since the past could now be looted to increase corporate earnings, the stockholders were happy
.

In the Garden of Iden
introduced Botanist Mendoza, rescued as a child from the dungeons of the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Spain by a Company operative, Facilitator Joseph. In exchange for being given immortality and a fantastically augmented body and mind, she would work in the past for the future, saving certain plants from extinction
.

On her first mission as an adult, Mendoza was sent with Joseph to England, where she fell in love with a mortal, with bitter consequences
.

Sky Coyote
opened over a century later, as Joseph arrived at the research base at New World One to look up his protégée and inform her they had both been drafted for a Company mission in Alta California. Mendoza said good-bye to the one friend she had made at New World One—Lewis—and went with Joseph
.

Near a Chumash Indian village she met a number of the mortal masters from the future, and was appalled to find them bigoted and
fearful of their cyborg servants. Joseph learned unsettling facts about the Company that brought to mind a warning he’d been given long ago by Budu, the Enforcer who recruited him
.

Why was it that, though the immortal operatives were provided with information and other entertainment from the future, nothing they received was ever dated later than the year 2355?

At the conclusion of the mission, Mendoza remained in the wilderness of the coastal forests, working then alone as a botanist
.

Mendoza in Hollywood
opened in. 1862, as Mendoza journeyed reluctantly to her new posting: a stagecoach inn at a remote spot that one day would be known as Hollywood. There, near the violent little pueblo of Los Angeles (one murder a night, not counting Indians), she was to collect rare plants scheduled to go extinct in the coming drought
.

Mendoza found herself now haunted by visions of her mortal lover, and she was giving off Crome’s radiation again, the spectral blue fire of paranormal abilities that no cyborg was supposed to possess
.

In a local spot known for strangeness, she encountered an anomaly that threw her temporarily into the future. There she glimpsed her friend Lewis, who tried frantically to tell her of an impending disaster
.

Into her life came another mortal—Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, an English spy involved in a plot to grab California for the British Empire. Edward looked enough like Mendoza’s first love to have been cloned from him. Mendoza abandoned her post and ran away with Edward
.

As they raced for sanctuary on Catalina Island, pursued by American agents and bounty hunters, Edward began to suspect that Mendoza was far more than a coaching-inn servant. Mendoza discovered that. Edward too was more than he seemed, in fact was connected to the Company in some way
.

But before the lovers could solve their mutual riddle, their luck ran out. Edward was shot to death, and Mendoza went berserk with grief. The Company sent her to a penal station hundreds of millennia in the past—the preferred method of disposing of troublesome immortals
. . .

Y
OU KNOW SOMETHING
, father? Sin exists. It really does.

I’m not talking about guilt, I’m talking about cause and effect. Every single thing we do wrong comes back to get us, sooner or later. You knew that, didn’t you? And you told me, and I . . . well, I was so much more flexible than you, wasn’t I? I could see all sides of every question. You saw black and white, and I saw all those gray tones.

For the longest time, I thought I was the one who had it right. I mean, you wound up here at last, didn’t you? And I’m still free, as free goes. But whatever you’re feeling, in there, I’ll bet your conscience isn’t bothering you.

You’d have let the little girl die, I know. Sized Mendoza up with that calm ruthless look, seen what she was and given your judgment: unsuitable for augmentation. Sent her back to die of starvation in the dungeon. She’d only have lasted another couple of days, she was so weak. Maybe I’d have let her die too, if I hadn’t thought there was a chance they might interrogate her again before she died, and use the hot coals on her this time.

That was why I lied, father. It seemed doable at the time. Rescue the kid, make her one of us, give her a wonderful new life working for the Company. Nobody would ever find out about that freaky little something extra she had. Hell, every living thing generates the
Crome’s stuff from time to time. Only one person in a million ever manages to produce enough to do things like walk through walls or be in two places at once. How was I to know . . .?

You’re right, it was still wrong. And did anybody ever thank me for my random act of kindness? Not little Mendoza, that’s for damned sure. Not on that day in England in 1555 when I stood beside her watching her mortal lover burn. How could she thank me? Her heart was in shreds and she could never die, no matter how much she wanted to, and it was my fault.

And I wouldn’t be here now, either, would I, father? Going from vault to vault, looking up at the blind silent faces, to see if one of them is hers. Hoping to find her here in one of these houses of the near dead, even if I can’t set her free this time, praying she’s here: because there are worse places she might be.

I guess I was a lousy father to her. I hope I’ve been a better son to you. Yes, father, there’s sin, and there’s eternal punishment for sin. It’s like a rat gnawing at your guts.

Sorry about the metaphor. Don’t take it personally.

Look, we’ve got all night: and you’re not going anywhere. I’ll tell you about it.

S
OMETHING ODD
had happened.

Unless you possessed the temporally keen senses of an immortal cyborg, though, you wouldn’t have noticed, over all the racket floating up from the roaring, grinding city. Lewis, being an immortal cyborg, frowned slightly as he accelerated up Mount Olympus Drive and scanned the thick air. He was a dapper man, with the appearance of someone who has wandered out of a Noel Coward play and got lost in a less gracious place.

Earthquake? No, or there would have been car alarms shrieking and people standing out on the sidewalk, a place the inhabitants of Los Angeles County seldom ventured nowadays without body armor.

Still, there was a sense of insult on the fabric of space and time, a residual shuddering Lewis couldn’t identify at all.

He turned left into Zeus Drive and nosed his jade-green BMW into the driveway of the house. Nothing out of the ordinary here that he could see. He shut off the engine, removed his polarized sunglasses and put them in their case, removed his studio parking tag, and carefully put glasses and tag in the glove compartment. Only then did he emerge from the car and look about, sniffing the air.

Other than a higher than normal amount of ozone and an inexplicable whiff of horse, the air wasn’t any worse than usual. Lewis
shrugged, took up his briefcase, locked the car, and entered Company HQ.

What was that high-pitched whine? Lewis set down his briefcase, tossed his keys on the hall table, and looked into what would have been an ordinary suburban living room if it hadn’t had a time transcendence chamber in one wall. Maire, the station’s Facilitator, was activating it. She turned to him.

“You should have been here, Lewis. We’ve had quite an afternoon,” she said.

He barely heard her, his gaze drawn to the window of the chamber. He gaped, astonished to see a pair of very uneasy horses and two oddly dressed people in there, just beginning to be obscured by the rising stasis gas.

One of the people raised her hand and waved. She was a sharp-featured woman, with cold black eyes and hair bound back in a long braid. She smiled at him. He knew the smile. It made her eyes less cold. The woman was the Botanist Mendoza.

Lewis had loved her, quietly, for several centuries, and she had never once noticed. They were stationed at the same research base for many years before she was transferred. He thought of writing to her after that, but then lost his chance, because she made a terrible mistake.

So terrible, in fact, that it was impossible that she could be standing there now smiling at him.

Then he connected the horses with the nineteenth-century clothing she was wearing. Was he seeing her, somehow, before the commission of her mistake? Was there any chance he might warn her, prevent the catastrophe?