“I took that fool’s money to give to you,” he shouted. “It was to help you settle into a new life—”
“After I left Toriana with you for some secluded lovers’ nest overseas,” I tacked on, “ where I could nightly entertain you until you tired of me? I’d rather work for Rina.”
“You might as well.” He turned away. “I’ve tired of you already.”
That stung, more than I cared to admit. “Problem solved, then.”
I came round and sat in the armchair. “Before I’m forced to leave the country and flee for my life, perhaps you should tell me about this thing between you and Harry. Start with how you’re able to see his specter, and exactly how you sent him off.” I was particularly interested in the latter so that I might do the same if Harry became troublesome.
Dredmore went to the overly large secretary and opened the upper cabinet, sliding aside a panel. “He’s not a specter. He’s a manifesting spirit.”
“There’s a difference?” I frowned as he shifted and I saw the rows of switches that the panel had hidden. “What’s that for?”
Dredmore put his thumb beneath one switch and glanced back at me. “You.” He flipped the switch.
Two velvet-covered bars shot out from the ends of my chair’s arms, bending at hidden joints and locking together at the ends. Before I could get to my feet, they retracted, shoving me back against the cushions. A smaller pair of bars swung out beneath my skirts and did the same, trapping my ankles in place. When I pushed at the bars locked across my waist, two cuffs popped out of them and snapped round my wrists.
“Don’t bother struggling,” Dredmore told me. “You haven’t the strength.”
I tried but I couldn’t budge the chair’s automatic manacles. I’d never heard of such mech, but Dredmore could afford things other mortals could only have nightmares about.
I looked up at him. “When you’re finished,” I said pleasantly, “you’d better plan to sleep with one eye open for the rest of your bleeding life.”
“That I do already, Charmian.” He turned his attention to the panel, and I heard doors being bolted and window latches fastening, and then a white-painted board descended from the ceiling.
I had nothing to do but wait and plot his slow, painful death, but still I jumped when the table beside me sprouted a complicated pile of gears, pulleys, and lenses.
“Is it a torture device?” I asked, wondering if he meant to feed my hands to it.
“It is called an illuminator. Let’s hope it lives up to its name.” He left the secretary, going round to all the lamps and turning them down until the room became shrouded in darkness. He pulled the chair to the other side of the table machine, and popped a matchit.
The bizarre rituals confused me, but the matchit didn’t. Surely he wouldn’t set me on fire, trapped as I was. “Lucien, perhaps I’ve been too harsh. You and I should talk more—”
“Do shut up, Charmian.” He used the flame to light a small row of candles inserted in the back of the device. As soon as their wicks caught, he adjusted a row of small mirrors, and several shafts of light merged and formed a glowing circle on the hanging board.
“There is a difference between spirits and specters,” Dredmore said as he placed a cylinder lined with tiny, silverblack-etched glasses in front of the rows of candles. “We didn’t know what it was, not until after the war.” He switched on the machine.
My eyes widened as a flickering picture appeared on the white board. In it tiny figures of soldiers marched across a field toward a forest, and they moved just as if I were standing there behind them, watching.
“The illuminator uses a zoopraxiscope to show many images in succession,” I heard Dredmore say.
“Then it needs a shorter name.” Angry as I was, I couldn’t stop watching the moving pictures. “Who are they?”
“A regiment in the North country.” Dredmore left the machine running, picked up a fire iron, and poked at the logs in the hearth, creating an updraft of orange and yellow sparks. “Your grandfather and my father were among them. They were friends once.”
“Lucien, your father is titled,” I said. “I know he’s exempt from service. Think of a better lie.”
“Lady Travallian was my mother, and her husband recognized me as his heir, but Jack, the man who sired me, was a commoner.” Dredmore came to sit on the floor beside me. “He was also a tintest, attached to your grandfather’s regiment.”
Having such a large, dignified figure at my feet seemed ridiculous, especially when I couldn’t kick him in the head, but it wasn’t as if I could change seats. “Is that why Lord Travallian disowned you and left the title to his nephew? Because you’re a bastard in truth?”
“No.” He curled a hand round my calf. “After I discovered that Jack was my father, and what he could do, I told my mother’s husband to disown me, and I cut all ties to my family.”
The rub of his thumb against the bare back of my knee made me grit my teeth. It also made my shoulders turn to pudding. “How noble of you.”
“Before I reached my majority, Jack came to see me. He told me how he and my mother had met, and why she married Travallian. He explained what had happened to him during the war.” He glanced up at me. “My father was a Lost Timer. So was your grandfather.”
Chapter Six
For all his obsession with sciences and mech, my father had dearly loved history. Each night, when he came to tuck me in, he’d tell me a story about strange people and their forgotten worlds, as if they were faeriestales. He particularly loved the mysterious and unexplained, like how the Nile people had built such enormous pyramids, or why four hundred Norders had vanished overnight from their first Torian settlement.
Da had mentioned the Lost Timers to me once, too, and now I searched my memory until I recalled something of what he had said. “That was what they called those soldiers who went missing in Britanny during the war. They got lost in some forest and weren’t seen for months.”
“That is how it began.” Little prisms, cast off by the glass cylinder as it turned, slid down Dredmore’s face and chest. “Ordinarily the regiment’s tintest remained behind the lines to protect their equipment, so my father wasn’t even supposed to be with them. The depth and breadth of the Brecheliant made it impossible for Jack to capture the fighting from a safe distance, and he was obliged to follow the regiment into the forest. He thought he would be safe if he stayed in the trees.” His voice went hollow. “He didn’t know what was waiting for him . . . for all of them.”
A deep suspicion began to gather inside me as I looked at the moving picture again. It had started over from the beginning and was showing the men crossing the field. “Is this your father’s work, then?” I asked, nodding toward the board.
“The original ambrotints were his. I had copies made smaller to fit the device.” He glanced at it and then got up to change out the glass cylinder, replacing it with another.
This time, the moving picture showed the soldiers creeping through the trees, sometimes looking back as if they sensed we were following them.
“Jack told me that from the moment he crossed over into the forest, he felt as if something was watching them,” Dredmore said. “When it grew dark, he began packing up his tinter to wait to shoot until he had morning light, but then there was light. Strange light that came out of nowhere.”
Strange indeed. On the board I watched bizarre glowing streaks darting behind the trees, and while the silverblack on the glass ambrotints rendered all of the light gray, the faster the streaks moved, the brighter they seemed to flash.
“Lampflies,” I murmured to myself as the soldiers came upon a dense grove of old oaks and more lights began filling the moving picture. “A swarm might look like that.”
“I thought the same,” Dredmore said, “until Jack told me the frost a month before the battle had already killed off all the insects.”
I felt impatient. “Then what were they? More specters? Leg-sprouting candles? Dancing Yuletide trees?”
The moving picture stopped as Dredmore changed cylinders again. New images appeared that showed the
