Chapter Twenty-Five #2
“Well, you see.” Bainbridge gestured airily.
“Magic really is not the riotous carnival carousal that the witches try to sell us, but it does have its uses, when soberly applied. As does money, of course. It took me a very expensive day or two to discover that you had, in fact, turned down Colonel Hardy’s offer of employment.
But we got there in the end. Remarkable in itself, that refusal, I must say.
I understand it was a very generous package.
Did you have some…misgivings about the colonel? ”
“Not as many as I have now. Traitorous cunt tried to kill me.”
“Really?”
The archmage’s eyes widened, whether at the revelation or Duncan’s language, it wasn’t clear. Either way, it felt put on—as if neither the news nor the expletive were quite the great shock Bainbridge pretended. Duncan grunted.
“You’re not working with him, I take it?”
“Oh, the Godhead forbid!” Chuckling, shaking his head.
“No, not at all. Some residual rote Protestantism aside—the rind of his childhood faith, I suppose you might call it—the colonel is a staunch materialist. He’d be loath to have anything to do with the likes of me.
Martin Hardy sees the world through a wholly pragmatic lens.
He practices what our German cousins are pleased to call realpolitik. You’re familiar with the term?”
“Sure. Heard it a lot in the war, usually to justify piles of dead men.”
“Well, quite. And of course this realpolitik is why the colonel’s endeavors are doomed to fail.
Hardy seeks to treat the Forest and its denizens as an enemy no different in principle from Germany or Austria.
He eschews the numinous, and the numinous is the entirety of what we are dealing with in these times.
Tell me, have you heard the name Niels Bohr? ”
“Sounds familiar.” Duncan shrugged. “Don’t know why. Who is he?”
“They’ve just given him the Nobel Prize in physics.”
“Right.” Duncan recalled Bohr now, from a newspaper he’d picked up at Grimaldi’s one lazy afternoon—excited headlines, a photo of a haunted-looking young man with fiercely back-combed hair. Some incomprehensible gibberish about atoms. He nodded sagely. “Scientist.”
“He has also founded an Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen,” Bainbridge added.
“Good for him. What does this have to do with Martin Hardy?”
“Oh, nothing directly. But bear with me, please. The men at this institute, the work they are doing, concerns something they call quantum theory. Now, I can’t explain this theory to you, because so far no one has been able to successfully explain it to me.
Even the scientist who helped originate it, one Max Planck, apparently doesn’t believe it to be an actual truth about the universe, merely a mathematical trick.
But others take it far more literally. And what they are saying is that quantum theory demonstrates the laws we thought governed the universe are, in fact, incorrect.
They have broken down. The physical world is not as we believe it to be. There is another world behind it.”
Duncan pulled a face. Bainbridge saw it, leaned forward. In the closer glow of the firelight, his eyes gleamed. His voice had grown taut and earnest.
“Mr. Silver, believe me, these are not fanciful men. They are hardheaded exponents of modern science, working at the cutting edge of their disciplines. And if men of that caliber say that the eternal laws of physics are now failing, falling away perhaps, to reveal something else—does this not speak to our own experiences since the great forests returned? The world is changing at a fundamental level, Mr. Silver, spilling us out into realms and contemplations hostile to the lives humans have lived until now. Our former outlook cannot cope with what is upon us. And navigating our way through these changes cannot be left to men like Colonel Martin Hardy.”
“You’ll get no argument from me there. I already told you, he tried to put a bullet in me.”
“Of course he did. You intended to bring back the child from Faerie, and that could not be allowed.”
“Could not be allowed.” Duncan, tasting the words like unfamiliar fruit. “Allowed by who?”
“Why, the powers that be, Mr. Silver!” Speaking as if to a child. “The secret engineers of the world order. Did you think that they would not react, when such a cataclysm of change sweeps in to demolish the pillars of their design?”
“Right.”
At the end of the war, Duncan had spent an interminable six days at the Thetford Dispersal Unit, billeted in camp and waiting for his demob papers to go through.
Officers got better quarters than enlisted men, but he still had to share, for most of the week, with a hectic-faced captain called Pugh, whose entire conversation seemed to consist of bitter rants against Bolsheviks, Prussians, and Jews.
The Jews appeared to exercise him particularly.
He carried around a grubby pamphlet he called The Protocols and was given to pulling it out and quoting darkly from it, over and over, to anyone who’d listen.
In the end, Duncan’s only enduring memories of Thetford became Pugh’s litany of grimly declaimed phrases like secret world order and pillars of their design, and the dank, industrial waft from the pulpware factory across town.
That Bainbridge talked the same way was not encouraging.
“You don’t believe me?” The archmage had evidently worked this out—whether by magical intuition or Duncan’s face, who could tell. “You think Mimi Rush is just another abducted plaything of the Hidden Folk?”
“What I don’t believe is that there’s any world order, secret or otherwise. The men of power I’ve seen in action couldn’t organize losing their own virginity in a fucking brothel.”
A discreet knock announced the butler, back with a flourish and a broad silver tray of tea sandwiches balanced on one arm.
He was followed in by a maid who brought a second tray bearing a tall glass carafe of what looked like lime cordial and two glasses.
Bainbridge said nothing while the refreshments were laid out and the glasses poured full.
Duncan wondered if he was feeling offended.
The butler and maid withdrew, closed the door soundlessly behind them.
Duncan snagged a sliced chicken sandwich and bit it in half, raised his eyebrows at the other man. Bainbridge smiled back thinly.
“Very eloquent, Mr. Silver. Of course, the horrors and the chaos of your time in the trenches will have given you a…distinct perspective.”
Duncan discovered some appetite, finished his chicken sandwich, and took another. “Take it you weren’t there yourself?”
“No, I did not serve in a uniformed capacity. I was…invited to spend some time in America instead.” Bainbridge drank placidly from his cordial. “Matters I’m still not entirely at liberty to discuss, I’m afraid.”
“You at liberty to discuss what’s so special about Mimi Rush?”
“Can’t you guess?”
Duncan’s gaze iced over. “I mentioned to your acolyte out there that I have a busy day. I’m not here to play guessing games with you.”
“No, of course.” The archmage inclined his head gracefully enough.
But not before Duncan had caught the flicker of offended conceit in his eyes.
“It is not my intention to waste your time, Mr. Silver.
Far from it. To the point, then. Mimi Rush, as far as I can establish, is special because she descends directly from a Huldu clan noblewoman stolen from her people here in Britain more than a thousand years ago.
The Huldu therefore consider her one of their own.
“Does that answer your question?”