The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

SLIDE 1: —CLASSIFIED—

INTERIM SITREP

OPERATION “BOLSTER GAINS”

From: LESTER (“LES”) HOLGATE

(currently embedded DODO Site Prime—Cambridge, MA)

To: FRINK—EYES ONLY

SLIDE 2: DODO PROGRESS TO DATE

• Key personnel recruited and papered

• Prof. Blevins

• Lieutenant Colonel Lyons

• Dr. Stokes

• Auxiliary personnel

• Dr. Oda

• Rebecca East-Oda

• The Asset

• “Elizabeth Karpathy” (real name, DOB unknown—FOREIGN NATIONAL)

• The Asset’s personal computational device, “Smallogep” (spelling?)

• Functioning ODEC

• Magic

• Diachronic Transport confirmed—multiple insertions/recoveries of 2 DOers (Stokes and Lyons) to 2 DTAPs (Cambridge, MA, 1640; London 1601)

SLIDE 3: CHALLENGES/ISSUES

• General Schneider confirmed KIA—possible fratricide incident?

• Failure to achieve cash flow positivity on sustainable timetable

• Bay Psalter gambit stalled

• Requirement for multiple, redundant re-execution of same DEDE in different so-called “Strands” entails massive duplication of effort and prolonged delays

• Unanticipated requirement to go farther back in time to complete secondary DEDE suggests possible recursive “forking” of tasks/spends

• No end in sight

• Unauthorized involvement of irregular/unpapered personnel

• ? Unprofessional conduct between Stokes and Lyons ?

• Insubordinate/undisciplined witch—murders colleagues, not on board with mission objectives, declines to disclose functionality of Smallogep

• Ad hoc/improvised mission plan

• Lyons: excessive personal investment in current roster & game plan—not enough professional detachment

SLIDE 4: GOALS OF OPERATION “BOLSTER GAINS”

• Overriding goal: secure the future of DODO by aggressively monetizing its unique skill set without further delay

• Strategy: stir the pot/incentivize current roster (the Lyons-led “Blue Team”) via insertion of competitive “Red Team”

• Provisional “Red Team” leader: Lester (“Les”) Holgate

• Insert Red Team Leader @ DODO Site Prime ← ACHIEVED

• Observe/evaluate/report on performance dynamics of existing “Blue Team” ← ACHIEVED

• Challenge Blue Team to raise expectations/boost performance ← ACHIEVED

• Spearhead innovative operational modalities

• Possibly submit Asset’s Smallogep to DC labs for analysis

• Take executive action with prejudice to get current DEDE back on track

• Cauterize Blue Team, replace with new personnel if indicated

SLIDE 5: LESTER (“LES”) HOLGATE

BACKGROUND/QUALIFICATIONS

• Education

• North Pointe Preparatory Academy, Marblehead, MA

• Captain, chess team

• Valedictorian

• Letter (6”) in lacrosse

• Dartmouth College

• Magna cum laude

• Psychology/political science

• Vice President, Gamma Theta Rho chapter

• Intramural lacrosse

• Harvard MBA

• Woolsack McNair Dobermann

• As management consultant for America’s preeminent business consultancy firm, exceeded expectations assisting various public and private sector clients in optimizing operations and maximizing ROI

• Defense Intelligence Agency (classified)

• Worked with multiple stakeholders in the black ops ecosystem to obliterate institutional roadblocks and maximize ordnance on target in complex operational environments characterized by ambiguous/ad hoc chains of command

SLIDE 6: OPERATION “BOLSTER GAINS”

ACHIEVEMENTS TO DATE (1 OF 5), INSERTION OF RED TEAM LEADER TO DODO SITE PRIME, CAMBRIDGE, MA

Transportation from Washington, DC, area proceeded nominally via civilian transport modalities. Exploitation of a remote credentials override on site security system enabled Red Team Leader to achieve ingress to facility without incident at 6:04 a.m. Tactical objective was to arrive, set up temporary work base, and “hit the ground running” prior to the arrival on site of existing (“Blue Team”) personnel, setting an example and jarring them out of complacent work habits.

SLIDE 7: OPERATION “BOLSTER GAINS”

ACHIEVEMENTS TO DATE (2 OF 5), INCIDENT REPORT

Upon breaching secure perimeter and achieving site ingress at 6:04, Red Team Leader was confronted by Blue Team Leader (Lyons), who contrary to expectations was already on site and awake, having pushed all furniture to the walls, stripped to his underwear, and was performing drills with a long, one-handed sword [sic], later identified from Internet research as a “backsword.” Blue Team Leader was perspiring heavily, indicating a high degree of physical activity, and executing a combination of thrusting movements with sweeping cuts at various angles. Upon becoming aware that Red Team Leader had ingressed the facility, and not knowing in advance of his insertion, Lyons placed the tip of his weapon in close proximity to Red Team Leader’s chest. Upon visual inspection the tip was observed to be sharp, in contravention of common-sense safety procedures. Lyons advanced, obliging Red Team Leader to retreat until cornered behind a potted plant (deceased). Having thereby gained tactical advantage Lyons interrogated Red Team Leader as to his authorization, making a cellphone call with his free hand, until satisfied that Red Team Leader was duly authorized. The standoff then terminated without further incident (and without apology).

Action Item: Review and upgrade weapons safety procedures. Institute mandatory training webinars for all DODO personnel authorized to handle weapons.

SLIDE 8: OPERATION “BOLSTER GAINS”

ACHIEVEMENTS TO DATE (3 of 5), “BROKEN WINDOWS”

POLICY PLACED IN EFFECT

Upon initial inspection, DODO Site Prime was observed to be in substandard physical condition with several plants deceased (presumably owing to lack of appropriate watering rota), dirty dishes in sink, a cold cup of coffee in the microwave, a low standard of maintenance in the men’s washroom (the women’s was not inspected), and whiteboards rendered unusable by virtue of being entirely covered with cryptic symbols. Red Team Leader spontaneously took initiative to effect a “broken windows” policy of proactively cleaning and tidying the space as a way of setting an example to inspire/motivate demoralized Blue Team personnel.

SLIDE 9: OPERATION “BOLSTER GAINS”

ACHIEVEMENTS TO DATE (4 of 5), INCIDENT REPORT

Remaining Blue Team personnel filtered in between 8 and 11 a.m., with no clear policy apparently in effect regarding work hours. At 9:13, Dr. Frank Oda and his wife, Rebecca East-Oda, entered the facility. Dr. Oda affected bewilderment at the dramatic upsurge in whiteboard usable space area, and inquired as to the fate of the “calculations” he had left on them the night before. Red Team Leader briefed him on the “broken windows” policy, but before its rationale and benefits could be enumerated, was interrupted by Mrs. East-Oda who went off agenda with a lengthy and impassioned monologue containing a litany of unprofessional remarks as to the qualifications and character of Red Team Leader. The tone and style of her delivery did not meet reasonable expectations as to social skills and concern for feelings of co-workers. Admittedly this may be a high bar for Mrs. East-Oda who according to background checks has no work experience in high-performance collaborative organizations and a history of lashing out in defense of Dr. Oda. Oda himself was entirely silent during this event, staring off into space in a distracted manner possibly indicative of neurological impairment (presumably age-related). The situation was defused when Blue Team Leader (Lyons) emerged from an adjoining room and announced that he was in the habit of photographing Dr. Oda’s whiteboards and archiving the images as a hedge against mishaps of this type.

Action items: Mrs. East-Oda should be placed on a Performance Enhancement Plan with the clear expectation that she will be terminated with prejudice if her attitude does not show clear improvement. Dr. Oda should be closely observed for further signs of senile dementia and placed on medical leave as indicated.

SLIDE 10: OPERATION “BOLSTER GAINS”

ACHIEVEMENTS TO DATE (5 of 5), THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

Red Team Leader took advantage of a clean, available whiteboard to bullet-point a number of gambits, ranging from persuasive to kinetic, that might be employed in order to break through Sir Edward Greylock’s reluctance to pivot his 1601 investment strategy toward the East India Company. Noticing a strong, intoxicating fragrance he turned about to discover that he was under observation by an ostensibly young woman matching the description of the Asset. Other Blue Team members had drifted away one by one, claiming that they had other duties to attend to, but the Asset had arrived quite late and seemed to have been observing me for a little while. She was dressed and groomed in a manner likely (and presumably calculated) to pose a distraction to co-workers. Speaking in a strong foreign accent, she demanded an explanation of what I was doing. She found my response strangely amusing. I inquired as to what was so funny. Offering her a whiteboard marker in a contrasting color (which she refused), I requested that she supply point-by-point rebuttals (anticipating a lively exchange of views, I had left ample whitespace for same between my bullet points). She refused to accept the proffered writing instrument or even to supply itemized refutations in a verbal format, instead issuing what, if I understood it correctly, was a blanket dismissal of the entire way of thinking underlying my program of suggested Greylock inducement modalities. During this time I witnessed her fidgeting with the previously mentioned Smallogep, which resembles a raggedy tangle of yarn. When I pressed her again for more actionable feedback, she waved the Smallogep toward the part of the whiteboard where I had bulleted some more forward-leaning measures and told me that these were utter folly because they ran the risk of producing something that sounded like “near osh.” I requested an explanation of the seemingly undesirable phenomenon of “near osh.” This only produced more laughter from the Asset, who, once she had recovered her composure, assured me that if I were the sort of person who needed to have it explained, there was no point in explaining it to me.

The conversation, if it could even be called that, was cut short when Dr. Stokes emerged from her office carrying what I later understood to be a briefing document that she had prepared for Blue Team Leader. She summoned the other members of the team and led a pre-mission briefing session, short on actual operational detail and heavy on historical trivia. Blue Team Leader seemed distracted and unfocused. At more than one point during the meeting I observed him gazing fixedly at the whiteboard on which I had drawn up my bullet points. When it was time for the mission to begin, Dr. Stokes had to snap him out of his reverie and inquire as to whether he felt ready to venture once more into the ODEC. While I cannot read his mind, I interpreted this as suggesting that my intervention and my suggested bullet points had impacted his thinking. This gave me some hope that during the DEDE that commenced a few minutes later he might take more direct and aggressive action to resolve the logjam that has developed around Sir Edward Greylock’s investment strategy.

SLIDE 11: CONCLUSION TO INTERIM SITREP

• DODO Site Prime in state of general disarray

• Corrective measures under way; some personnel resistant to change

• Abundant grounds for HR proceedings against several members of existing Blue Team staff should that be desirable from tactical standpoint

• Smallogep requires further analysis

• Recommend wait and see approach but only for brief window

LETTER FROM

GRÁINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY

A Sunday of Late-Harvest, 1601

Auspiciousness and prosperity to you, milady!

It’s in a dozen Strands that Tristan Lyons has tried to sway Sir Edward Greylock to put his money into the East India Company, and in each one Sir Edward seems on the verge of doing so, and yet Tristan returns from the future with word of no success. He has now amended his strategy, so that he appears to Sir Edward twice in a week, that they may have an unfolding conversation and he may twice impress upon him, without seeming to do so, the wisdom of entrusting his fortune to the East India Company.

The German with the sharp yellow beard is present in all of these conversations, though according to Tristan he hears much and says little. At least we know his name now: Athanasius Fugger. Himself pronounces it “Fucker,” in the German style, but it’s “Fugger” they spell it when abroad in England. He is some manner of third cousin thrice removed to Sir Edward’s German mother. Like all of his clan, he is a banker, and ’twould seem he has Sir Edward’s ear. Tristan complains that this Athanasius has “a poker face that would make him a million in Vegas,” which means naught to you and me, but to him what it signifies is that it is impossible to make out what the fella is thinking—whether he favors the plan of investing in the Boston Council or the East India.

Nor is it much Tristan can glean from Sir Edward himself. For each time, doesn’t Sir Edward claim he is “seriously considering moving his investments”? And yet each time, when Tristan goes off to spy upon that factory, isn’t the factory still there?

So I made Tristan an offer, and it’s sorely tempted he was to accept: if he would but tell me plainly everything, the whole of his schemes and their necessity—why magic declines, why he wants to save it, and with whom, and by what means—I would find others who might also prevail upon Sir Edward, and I would find other witches for him to talk to, should our witchiness somehow be helping his efforts in the future. Most tempting to him, of course, was when I offered to introduce him to the Court Witches, as they be the only witches with the standing to turn Sir Edward’s head.

Tristan is eager enough to be meeting the Court Witches, once I allowed that there were some. Especially it was the younger ones he wished to meet, for he has a most ambitious plan that is somewhat mad, and yet ’twould amuse me to see it come to pass: he wishes to create a broad constellation or “net-work” of witches who might overlap in time, if not in space, so that he and his brethren, having traveled to some particular time, might freely move about the globe with the assistance of these witches, in any era of their choosing. So if our young witches here can be brought into his fold, then when they be old, they will be alive at the same time as the witches in the New World who are helping him there already, and thus he and his brethren can be moving between the New World and the Old with ease, as Breda and myself move Your Grace’s agents between Ireland and London when the need arises.

A mystery it is to me, why anyone would want to do this in some era not of their own living. ’Twould be exhausting. The complications are legion and you would need an áireamhán so large that it would fill a room, and months it would take to work through all the twigs and stems to guard against the lomadh. Himself seems to understand this, and yet will not be dissuaded. He will not explain more to me, but it’s arrogant he is in believing I should give him everything he wants anyhow. “It’s for the sake of magic’s preservation,” has quick enough become his new rallying cry, and I believe him to a point but ’tisn’t enough to keep me his ally if he will not tell me more. Sure I’ve played enough people in my time that I do not like being played my own self.

Although sure it’s gorgeous shoulders he does have.

So I have told Tristan that until he confesses more of his strategy, he would not be meeting any Court Witches or even being introduced to others who might help change Sir Edward’s inclinations as to his inheritance. But I did agree to introduce him to one other witch, should something ill befall me before his work here is complete.

A wealthy merchant’s daughter she is, fixing to be married by her ambitious father on the Feast of St. Ethelburga to a country gentleman. Rose is her name. I met her when first I came over from Eire, years back. Her father loved the theatre and took her and her brothers to the comedies, where I met her and knew her for a witch. It’s often enough I cross paths with her, and have watched her grow to be a lovely lass. She makes it a habit to go to the plays of a Wednesday, and since Tristan has now taken to returning for a second visit, to “follow up” with Sir Edward, I suggested he come then, and I could introduce them.

So we met up with Rose just outside the Globe gates, because of all the entertainment to be had in London, she always has a yen to see that Stratford Gobshite’s latest. There were mobs of folks streaming in and the chatter was loud, so it was, and not a few of them stank as bad as the backstage fellas. Rose is a wee thing, plump and round-faced, with blue eyes and black hair, almost pretty enough to be Irish. I’d already explained to her all about Tristan.

Tristan was, of course, wearing one of Ned Alleyn’s costumes. Recognized it right off, Rose did, and feigned more interest in it than in our visitor. Tristan doffed his cap and bent his knee—far more honor than a lass of her rank demanded, but he’s a chivalrous type—and Rose instantly said to me, in a tone of delight, “That’s half of Dr. Faustus he’s got upon him, isn’t it?” (For wasn’t Faustus the play of Kit’s at which Rose and I first met.)

Tristan straightens up, frowning a bit, and Rose gives him a brief courtesy, hardly more than a dip of the head. “God ye good day,” says she to us both. And to Tristan, “You must be Gracie’s new friend.”

“She’s been very kind to me,” said Tristan.

“I’ll wager she has,” chuckled Rose, more to me than him. I shook my head no; she shrugged (she doesn’t take to the lads much, does our Rose). Tristan either truly did not understand, or chose to counterfeit ignorance.

“I am on a mission that requires the aid of many of you,” he continued. “I hope that you will support my cause as generously as Gráinne—as Grace has.”

“We could have met inside the gates,” Rose said to me, as if Tristan was not even there.

“If we’d gone inside, we’d have had to pay a penny each, just to watch Dick Burbage recite lines Will Shakespeare probably nicked from Raff Holinshed,” I retorted. “Including his usual insults ’gainst the Irish.”

Rose smirked and said to Tristan (as if she’d never been ignoring him), “Has Gracie been bending your ear with her rant about how Will Shakespeare hates the Irish? She’ll go on all day if we let her. So then. What is it exactly that you’re asking of us? You may safely call me a witch here, nobody’s listening and anyhow they wouldn’t care, not here.”

“My brethren and I are seeking witches who would be willing to align themselves with us, so that if we come here on certain quests, we might be Sent to other places or times, and most especially, that we might be returned to where we came from.”

“Gracie says you’re doing this on account of centuries from now, magic is lost from the world and you are trying to restore it.”

“Aye.”

“How does it come to be lost?”

He shook his head a wee bit, looked exhausted for a heartbeat. “That would be a very long discourse,” he said.

She shrugged. “I am in no hurry, the worst that will happen is that I miss the players today.”

“I will tell you more if you agree to help.”

“You’ve got it backwards, sir. I will agree to help you after you tell me more. For instance, how does your romping around through space and time bring magic back? What exactly is it you be doing?”

He grimaced briefly. “I cannot tell you all that yet,” he said. “If you work with us, and it is a fruitful relationship, then I can reveal more.”

She frowned at him. “Do you perceive yourself to be doing me a favor? What do I care what happens to magic a thousand years from now? I’ll be dead and gone. I’ll help you now only if you make yourself interesting to me, and prithee pardon me but you are failing mightily to accomplish that.”

“I swear in God’s own name that I will tell you more just as soon as I can.”

“Will you?” She gave him the friendliest of smiles. “That’s lovely. Let me know when you’re capable of doing so and we can continue this discussion. God ye good day, sir.”

And off she sallied into the Globe, reaching into her pocket for a penny.

There’s many better a thing I can think to do with a penny. But at least the two have met, and under circumstances that make Tristan’s situation here plain to him.

Tristan, so unlike his usual stoic self, seemed dismayed as he watched her flounce off into the theatre yard to join the other groundlings.

“It’s nothing worse than anything I’ve said to you, lad,” I said, with a comforting hand on his shoulder because I do so like the curves on him.

“I must get home,” he said. “If you will not help me directly, I must get back to my time. ’Tis difficult there now. They need me.”

“You look like you could use some relaxing, Tristan Lyons,” I said with a smile, and put my hand on his arm. The gates closed to the theatre and the trumpet sounded within. “Come back to the Tearsheet.” I smiled invitingly.

He moved away from me, but I noticed it was in the direction of the Tearsheet he was walking anyhow. “That’s right,” I said, purring. “That’s the way you want to be going.” I walked past him toward the tavern. I heard a little irritated sigh as he followed me. “What’s making it so very hard back home?” I asked in a sympathetic voice, looking over my shoulder.

“There’s a new man where I work,” he said in clipped syllables. “We have different . . . methods. He is more forceful, and I am more strategic.”

“I like forceful,” I said, smiling. “I pray you, do tell him he’s welcome any time.” Tristan made the briefest expression of dismay, and kept walking.

We got back to the brewery and marched right up to my closet, as always. By now our established method was that we stood in the room together, he in Ned Alleyn’s stolen costumes, and I Sent him away and then just folded up the clothes and locked them in the chest. But he really did seem so distressed, and I love the scent of a man under pressure. Playful I decided to be, and so I said, “Tell me everything in detail, or I won’t be Sending you home at all.”

The look of shock on his face was so fetching, I couldn’t keep myself from laughing.

“I’m codding you, Tristan Lyons—what would I gain by keeping you here when you won’t even kiss me? You’d scare all my customers away and I’d die of starvation, so I would.”

’Twas both relieved and annoyed he looked, briefly, then said, “I don’t believe that. You do not make your living as a bawd, as much as you want it to seem so.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Do you know that, or is it guessing you are?”

“Common sense. If a witch can evade torture, as you mentioned, she can evade poverty and degradation. The harlotry is a cover. For what, I wonder?”

I leaned in closer to him. “I’ll tell you my secrets if you tell me yours,” said I, and gave him the sweetest smile in my broad collection.

His eyes narrowed a touch and he looked sideways at me. “I’m not an idiot. Make me that offer without the smile and I’ll consider it.”

“What if I keep the smile but drop the offer?” I said. “Is it a smile I get from you in exchange? Perhaps a little something more?”

“We are in league together,” he said, holding up his hand as if I were the devil and he a priest. “I cannot do that with a colleague.”

“Delighted I am to hear we’re colleagues!” I said. “Pray tell me what scheme it is, in which it’s colleagues we are? And don’t be saying classified because if we’re in league, then we should be pooling our secrets, not keeping them from each other. It’s a waste of your time to be asking me for help if you’re not willing to take me into your confidences.”

He sat a moment considering, then nodded grimly. “I understand your position, yours and Rose’s. And it is reasonable. Send me home and I shall talk of this with my brethren in my era. I must not act without their knowledge.”

“That’s grand, but do not come back here unless you are prepared to tell me everything.”

“So be it.”

And off I Sent him, once again, and now there’s naught to that but seek out other Strands where he might be carrying on in like manner. Meanwhile I’ve naught else to report to Your Grace, so once again it’s off I go to meet my sweetheart.

Whether I be near or far, may I hear only good things of you, My Lady! Yours ever, Gráinne in London

Diachronicle

DAYS 380–389 (AUGUST, YEAR 1)

In which we meet the Fuggers

ANOTHER VENTURE TO 1640 CAMBRIDGE resulted in another failure. This was duly boiled down into a series of bullet points by Les Holgate, and transmitted to Frink in Washington. I’d been doing my best to avoid the man. That said, it was unavoidable but to interact with him. My academic career had left me in possession of a certain toolkit. As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Reader, I learned his language. I hoped that mirroring and echoing some of his speech patterns, or (those being non-intuitive) at least inserting some of his vocabulary into my conversation with him, might put him at his ease and allow him to relax enough to behave as a human being might, should he wish to emulate one. What follows is an approximation of my first attempt at such a discourse.

LH: As I anticipated, this last insertion to the 1640 DTAP was yet another confirmed failure.

MS: It was a tactical failure in that it failed to accomplish the primary stated goal, however, it was strategically useful in that it enabled Blue Team Leader to break trail on formation of an alliance with a potential Asset in that DTAP.

LH: Try to focus, Dr. Stokes. That was not the indicated goal of this mission, nor does it move the needle according to the operative metrics. The goal of this mission is to monetize the skill set we already have on deck in the form of the Asset and the ODEC.

MS: Yes, but only after we have monetized the skill set by gathering low-hanging fruit. Blue Team’s road map is to utilize the transport modalities available to us due to the Asset and the ODEC, to incept a diachronic network and exploit resulting network effects that will enable DODO to scale.

LH: That level of strategic vision is above your pay grade, Dr. Stokes. Your task is to maintain laser-like focus on Phase 1 deliverables. And the fact is that in all of your dozens of diachronic transport insertions, which have taken weeks to accomplish and have generated operating costs now far exceeding your allowed budget, you have found a total of three potential but unauthorized Assets in two DTAPS, without any confirmed achievement toward actually securing the monetizable artifact by liquidation of the blocking factor.

MS: You mean we still haven’t yet secured the psalm book by preventing the maple syrup boiler.

LH: Isn’t that what I just said?

With this example, it should come as no surprise to hear that the other five of us got into the habit of meeting away from the office, at Frank and Rebecca’s home. I have no idea what Les was doing most of the time, and I didn’t much care, because he was just an irritant and I’m sure he was getting paid as much as all of us together. He also slightly resembled his uncle, Roger Blevins, chairman of my former department, only without the grey hair, and more slender. But a trick of the voice and the general body language was enough that I had a visceral desire to simply avoid him.

And I enjoyed the ambience of my alternate workplaces: Rebecca’s home, and Widener Library.

It was in the latter that I began to dig into the history of the Fuggers. This was the third time in the short history of DODO that the name had unexpectedly come up. And even though they were a famous old banking family, well known to any student of European history, this seemed like too many coincidences to me.

They had first entered the story very early, when Tristan and I had been going through the boxes of old documents that needed to be translated. Some of them had been marked with a logo that looked familiar to me. I couldn’t place it at the time, and it nagged at me until a few months later, when I was leafing through a copy of The Economist in my dentist’s waiting room and saw a similar logo in an advertisement in the back of the magazine. It was an international charity announcing a job opening. When I pulled on that thread, taking advantage of some of the secret government databases we had access to at DODO, I learned that the charity in question was the non-profit arm of a complex of holding companies that, to make a long story short, was the survival into modern times of the medieval Fuggers.

The second incident had occurred shortly before General Schneider’s brief but tragically eventful visit to DODO HQ. Tristan had asked Erszebet whether she could turn lead into gold. As I later understood, he didn’t really care about gold at all—what his higher-ups at the Trapezoid really were after was plutonium. But Erszebet had scoffed at the idea and spoken about the “Fuckers”—her pronunciation of “Fuggers”—in a tone of voice that bordered on fearful. Not her usual style at all.

And now here was a real live Fugger, one Athanasius, who seemed to be directly intervening in Tristan’s DEDE in Elizabethan London.

Even with the combined resources of Harvard’s library system and U.S. intelligence databases, I wasn’t able to find much. The medieval part of the story has been common knowledge for centuries. The Fucker family had migrated to Augsburg in 1373 and prospered in textiles. In 1459 the family had produced Jacob, the seventh surviving child in a large brood. Seeing few opportunities at home, where his older brothers were dominating the Fucker family business, Jacob had traveled over the Alps to Venice, where he had served an apprenticeship in the German merchants’ warehouse on the Rialto and learned about banking. Upon his return to Augsburg, Jacob had begun lending money to broke but powerful nobles on stiff terms and, to make a long story short, become the richest person in the world.

The Fuggers (somewhere along the line, they’d switched to a more palatable spelling of their name) had become as famous and as well documented as they were rich. The research skills I’d developed while earning my Ph.D. weren’t even needed; hundreds of books about Jacob Fugger and his family could be summoned up with a few keystrokes. The great man had died at the end of 1525 and handed the business off to his nephew Anton, who seemed reasonably talented, and made some investments in the Americas. But he’d been caught in the mangle of the Catholic/Protestant wars, lending money to warmongering kings who didn’t pay it back. In the end he had essentially liquidated the business and distributed the proceeds among a few dozen family members who were content to live off the interest as members of the titled nobility or the landed gentry.

By 1601—the year that Tristan was visiting—the trail had gone cold. There was no one single entity that could be pointed to as the Fugger bank. The last person to wield any kind of central authority over it had been Markus Fugger, a grandnephew of Jacob, who had died four years earlier after distributing most of the remaining assets to the family. And Markus seemed like someone who would have been interesting to idle away the hours with: a patron of arts, a history buff, a collector of old artifacts, an ancient-languages geek.

Athanasius Fugger—at least, the Athanasius Fugger described by Tristan—was completely absent from the historical record.

Which was not a big deal. No one knows better than a historian how tattered that record is. But it did whet my curiosity. The obvious explanation was simple enough: he was some descendant of Markus, sharing the same family name, who had inherited a share of the money and was now hanging around in London just because he liked it there and had the freedom to live wherever he wanted.

And yet, judging from Tristan’s story, this Athanasius wasn’t merely a drinking buddy. He was acting as some kind of financial advisor to Sir Edward Greylock, which probably meant he was still active in the banking business.

I tried working from the other direction, getting what information I could about the modern-day organization, and working backwards. But they were discreet to the point of paranoia, running their business through a network of offshore companies registered in places like the Cayman Islands, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. They only allowed the Fugger name to break the surface when it was to their tactical advantage, as when trying to hire employees for one of their humanitarian NGOs.

So my studies into the Fuggers produced very little that Tristan could actually use. Discussing it over an Old Tearsheet Best Bitter in the Apostolic Café—served as usual by the woman with the eyebrow tattoos, Julie Lee (Professional Smart-ass Oboist)—we agreed on a plausible scenario: some of the younger Fuggers, tired of the wars and turmoil in central Europe, had moved to London and put down roots in its banking scene. Athanasius was one of those, and the business had grown since then as a private bank with tentacles all over the place.

Erszebet had told us once that a Fugger branch office was probably nearby, and indeed we were able to find that they had an unobtrusive space in an old building near Boston Common. There was a similar but somewhat larger office in lower Manhattan, and others in different financial centers around the world.

Anyway, the research kept me out of the office, which had become a disagreeable place to work. Tristan was fairly immune to ambience and had a far higher tolerance for annoying personalities than I did, but he was just as happy as I was to avoid Les Holgate.

The advent of Holgate had dramatically increased Erszebet’s regard for Tristan, now that she had another by-the-book thirty-something white American male to compare him to. She became almost pleasant toward him. That said, when he expressed pleasure that the “node” for diachronic transport was developing in London, Erszebet’s immediate response was suspicion.

We were in Oda-sensei’s study on a drizzly afternoon, and Rebecca had just served compote of warm peaches. (At the time it seemed so quaint and tasteful—now my stomach nearly heaves at the thought of adding yet more sugar to my diet.)

“Why do we need a node?” Erszebet asked. “Aren’t we just supposed to make money?”

“Yes,” said Tristan patiently, who had inhaled all of his peaches without tasting them or possibly even chewing them. “But we’re doing that in order to start funding the actual work that is to be done. Having a node—and later, a network of them, in various DTAPs—will help with all that future work.”

She shook her head in an I-don’t-know-about-that way. “I did not promise to do anything beyond helping you make money from the Bay Psalm Book,” she said. “And that is only because I want to go spit on the graves of my enemies.”

“You won’t be allowed back in the ODEC unless you’re doing the magic we need you to do.”

“Cruel,” she hissed under her breath.

“Practical,” said Tristan. She turned her back on him to stare out the window in a sullenly coquettish way (we had become used to that), so he returned his attention to the rest of us sitting around the coffee table, and we continued to discuss strategy: before he returned from the DTAP, Gráinne had demanded more transparency if she were going to continue to abet him.

Frank Oda and Rebecca both sounded cautious approval of this request.

“She sounds like a worthwhile connection,” I agreed. “I think you should open up to her a little more. If she is willing to introduce you to the Court Witches, they could provide another angle of approach with Sir Edward.”

“Good luck with that,” said Erszebet, her back still to us, knees crossed, waggling one high-heeled sandal. “You are not likely to win any witchy friends if the witchy friends knew the whole truth. I certainly would not help you if I had known the whole truth.”

Reader, know this: I still preferred her to Les Holgate.

WE RETURNED TO the office so that Erszebet could Send Tristan back to 1601 London. Les was there, with an expensive-looking coffee-like beverage (which smelled like that awful thing I’d ordered from the Smart-ass Oboist at the Apostolic Café the day Tristan had first approached me. How peculiar, the things that summon nostalgia.). Les seemed even more smug than usual, as if he had a secret he was just bursting to share with us, but did not want to give up his privileged position of being the only one with the secret. As usual, we ignored him.

Erszebet Sent Tristan back to 1601. Although her Sending one of us somewhere was now a fairly regular aspect of our working life, we were still respectful of its significance, and generally made it a practice that whoever was in the office gathered in the control room to watch through the glass and wave to the DOer as they emerged from the sterilizing shower and entered the ODEC. This time, I noticed Les was not present. Some minutes passed while Erszebet performed the Sending. When she had finished and let herself out of the chamber, I noticed Les walking into the control room from the corridor, smiling in a self-congratulatory way as he slipped his phone into his pocket.

Not ten minutes later, the office phone rang: Frink was calling from DC. He demanded to be transferred to a video conference.

Most of the offices in the building had long since been demolished, but in recent weeks a couple of Maxes had built a new one from scratch in an underused corner of the building. Supposedly it had all kinds of anti-surveillance shielding and other top-secret electronic gear built into its walls. On the inside it looked like just another corporate meeting room, dominated at one end by a flat-panel screen without which Les Holgate would have been effectively deaf and mute, since all of his communication took place through PowerPoint decks. It could also be used for secure, encrypted video conferences with the Trapezoid or other nodes in the dot-mil world. We all gathered around the conference table while Les Holgate connected us.

“I especially need to speak to the Asset,” Frink said as soon as he appeared onscreen.

“I have a name,” said Erszebet. She slithered into a slumped position on a rotating office chair and, like a bored, fidgeting schoolgirl, began to push herself back and forth through a wide arc, chin practically resting on her sternum.

“Glad you’re there. And everyone else? Sound off.”

“I’m here—Mel—but Tristan has just gone back to the Tearsheet DTAP,” I said.

“Here,” said Frank and Rebecca at the same moment, since it was already clear Frink hardly registered their presence.

“Here, sir,” said Les Holgate. He remained standing.

“Okay, good, here are your orders,” said Frink’s voice. “Elizabeth, Send Les back to the Tearsheet DTAP.”

“Who is Elizabeth?” asked Erszebet, without interrupting the arc of her fidgets. “How wonderful you have another witch to boss around. I would like a vacation. Elizabeth can fill in for me.”

“Erszebet, please,” I said.

She stopped twisting the chair. “I am Sending him back exactly where Tristan goes?” she said, sounding wary.

“Yes, exactly.”

She sat up a little straighter. “Why do we have two DOers in the same DTAP?” she asked. “This is a complication. It is hard enough to keep one person on the right Strand. Two is very tricky.”

“It’s time to get fresh eyes on the problem. We need to think outside of the box.”

Erszebet said, “This is a terrible idea, and I do not want to do it.”

“Yeah, I had a feeling you were going to be difficult,” said Frink. “Les, show her the goods.”

Les smiled complacently, opened a manila folder he’d been holding, and pulled out some documents. “Look at these,” he said, as if speaking to an eight-year-old. “Erszebet, it has your name on it.”

He laid it on the table directly in front of her: a British Airways itinerary for Erszebet Karpathy to fly from Logan Airport to Budapest three days hence. Despite herself, she gasped audibly, and on reflex her hand slammed down on the paper so that he could not pull it away.

“Look what else I have,” he said, and from the inside pocket of his blazer he pulled out an American passport. He opened it. There was a photo of Erszebet—I still don’t recall any moment in time when we subjected her to an official government-issued photo, so I don’t know how he’d got it. But he’d got it.

Erszebet reached out for the passport with a rare display of physical impulsiveness. He let her grasp it, but did not let go his own grip on it.

“Once you have Sent me back there,” he said.

I got a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Glancing at Frank and Rebecca, I could see they felt it too. All three of us turned our attention to Erszebet.

For an endless moment her eyes flicked between the passport and Les Holgate’s face, whilst her other hand continued to press down on the British Airways itinerary. Some fathomless gulf inside of her survived a change of moral tides, and then with a look of genuine pain on her face, she released her grip on the passport and crumpled the British Airways page into a ball, hurling it away from the table.

“You are bad men,” she said in a husky voice, and looked away. “You are very wrong to tempt me this way when it is not safe to say yes.”

Les appeared slightly taken aback that his plan had met resistance, but he rallied. “There’s nothing dangerous about this. It’s not like I’m taking a gun back there with me,” he said in a cajoling voice.

She gave him an incredulous look. “You say that as if it were a choice you were making,” she said. “Do you know anything?”

“Don’t overthink this, honey,” said Les. “Do you want to go to Hungary, yes or no?”

At the word “honey,” a look flashed across Erszebet’s face that made me relieved, for Les’s sake, that she could not do magic outside of the ODEC.

“Of course I want to go to Hungary,” she said fiercely. “But not enough to risk performing bad magic at your demand.”

“You’re saying you need stronger motivation,” said Les, in an arrogant yet maddeningly agreeable voice.

“I am saying I need to calculate on my számológép, before anything,” she corrected him. “But I suspect those calculations will tell me not to do it.”

Les’s eyes flicked to the computer screen. I watched Erszebet follow his gaze. Les Holgate and Frink exchanged meaningful looks.

“Do you know what,” Erszebet amended, sounding almost nervous, “you are so undeserving of my trust and cooperation, I must say no, absolutely I will not Send him. It is a terrible idea. I don’t even need the számológép.”

“Well that’s good at least,” huffed Frink. “Since you no longer have it.”

A hardwired reflex sent Erszebet’s hand clutching for her bag. “What?” she cried. She began to frantically grope around in the bag.

“I removed the Asset’s personal computational device for security and analysis,” Les Holgate explained to the rest of us. All the blood had drained out of Erszebet’s complexion as she dumped the entire contents of her large handbag onto the conference table, then began to shove things—hairbrush, tissues, cough drops, lipstick, vintage perfume atomizer—off the edge in her frantic search for the számológép. “Sir,” Les continued, to the face on the computer screen, “I believe this move will now also work as a negotiating tactic.”

“Where is my számológép?” Erszebet demanded, almost voiceless with panic. I had never imagined she could look so vulnerable.

Briskly, Les Holgate pulled out a shipping bill from his other inside pocket. “While you were Sending Tristan, I secured it and shipped it to the Trapezoid.”

“Where is it?” Erszebet repeated, wide-eyed. “I must know this.”

“It’s in transit,” said Les Holgate.

“I need it,” said Erszebet, struggling to maintain her dignity. “I must have it, here, in my hand. There can be no diachronic magic without it.”

“Permission to negotiate with Asset?” said Les to the computer screen. I barely repressed the impulse to throw something at him.

“Granted,” said Frink.

Les turned to Erszebet, tucking the shipping receipt back into his pocket. The glib, aggressive positivity he radiated was the social equivalent to fingernails down a chalkboard. “You obviously don’t need the zamlagip”—(he never once pronounced this correctly)—“for every transfer, since you didn’t have it on you just now when you Sent Lieutenant Colonel Lyons back. Ergo, you don’t need it to Send me back. Just one DTAP, one time, one DEDE.”

As usual, he pronounced it wrong: “dee-dee.” Rebecca rolled her eyes and blurted out, “Deed!” He wasn’t expecting the correction, and faltered for a moment before winding up to the big finish:

“Trust . . . just . . . trust me on this. It’s only going to take one time, because I’m going to crush this!”

I saw her almost answer him, and then restrain herself. She had recovered some color, but only in an unhealthy way, in that she was now slightly green. “You are saying that if I Send you to the Tearsheet DTAP, I will have the számológép returned to me immediately.”

He smiled. “Send me to the Tearsheet. Once I have returned, I’ll issue a recall code to have the zamaligope returned to you.”

“And if I don’t Send you? What happens?”

He shrugged. “The ODEC’s not much good to us if it’s not helping us to accomplish our stated goals. The team members will be considered redundant and their employment terminated.”

“You will fire me?” she said, struggling to regain her derisive demeanor.

He shook his head. “Negative. But your zamlogap is almost certain to get lost in the reallocation of physical resources. That would be a shame.”

“I’ll do it,” she said, looking grimly at the table. “I’ll Send you.”

Everyone pushed their chairs back to go.

“Dr. Stokes,” said General Frink, “if I could have a private word with you.”

It sounded like more of an order than a request, so I scooted my chair forward again and doodled on my notepad while the others filed out of the room. Les was the last to go, and pulled the door closed behind him. He tried to make eye contact as he did, but I wouldn’t give him that victory.

It was just me and General Octavian Frink now, or rather me and a flat-panel screen displaying an oversized rendering of his face from some secure videoconferencing facility in Washington.

“Yes, General Frink?”

“You’re an intelligent woman,” Frink said. “You have to have realized that this is an incredibly expensive and roundabout way to raise what amounts to pocket change, by the standards of the Trapezoid.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” I admitted.

“Nevertheless, what Les just said to you all is an empty threat. DODO is not going to get shut down. Its management may be changed but it will keep on going.”

“Why?” I asked. “Is it because you want cheap plutonium?”

“I won’t lie to you. There is certainly a lot of interest in that. But even if we can never get the Asset to turn lead into plutonium, this project keeps going. It is distressing that you have bungled this bucket-burying project to the extent that you have. There is no way that this passes a cost-benefit analysis even if you get the bucket and sell the book tomorrow. But we are learning, Dr. Stokes. Painful as this trial-and-error phase may be, DODO is building institutional knowledge of how we can conduct diachronic operations in the future—and how our adversaries may be conducting them even as we speak.”

It wasn’t the first time that someone in my chain of command had dropped a hint that foreign powers might have their own equivalents of DODO. It explained a lot about how willing Frink and others were to keep backing such an unlikely enterprise.

“Well, I am glad that we are making progress, however haphazardly,” I said.

“It’s the haphazard part I would like to work on,” Frink said. “There is far too much unpredictability and randomness in these . . . DEDEs . . . for my taste.” I had to give him credit for nailing the pronunciation. “It is for that reason that I am going to bring Roger Blevins into this in a more serious way.”

The general paused, and I could tell he was awaiting some sort of reaction from me.

Which wasn’t something he’d have done if he’d been expecting a negative reaction. No, he was expecting me to jump out of my chair in transports of joy. He was expecting it because his old school chum Blevins had prepped him for it—told him of the superb mentor/pupil relationship we had enjoyed, or some such bullshit malarky.

Instead I was frozen. Like a deer in the headlights. Not one of my more admirable qualities. Later, when I was going through hand-to-hand combat training with military experts, I heard a lot about the predator/prey relationship, and how it was the natural instinct of many to freeze up when in the grip of a more powerful animal. It turns out you can train yourself to fight, or to run away; but I hadn’t been through such training at the time.

“I’ve been discussing it with Roger,” Frink went on. He seemed a little nonplussed by my reaction, but soon enough worked himself back up to his usual brute intensity. “He speaks highly of you, but we have arrived at a consensus that it might not hurt to have a couple of greybeards in the loop—people who know their way around history and dead languages and such. Constantine Rudge is still following along, but he’s busy and can only put so much time into it. So I have asked Roger. And he has expressed a willingness to take a leave of absence from his position at Harvard so that he can throw himself into DODO with a higher level of commitment. It’ll take a few months for him to disentangle himself, but he’s on it. I wanted you to be the first to know, Stokes. Given your warm relationship with him, I expect this will be a load off your mind.”

“Thanks for letting me know, General Frink,” I said. “Will there be anything else?”

“I look forward to hearing good news from your end in a few hours,” Frink said. “Les is a good man. When he says he’s going to crush it—it’s time to pop some popcorn and pull up a chair.”

“I’ll get popping, then,” I said.

LETTER FROM

GRÁINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY

Your Grace—pardon me the rude beginnings, but it’s a terrible, terrible thing that’s happened, I must write quickly to tell you all and I warn you now, it may be the last letter you shall ever receive from me, for reasons that will become clear as you are reading.

Tristan Lyons returned again, still without success, but with a willingness now to be honest with me. But the truth he shared was foul enough to kill an ogre, and that was just the beginning of the woes.

As I told you before, he comes from an era in which magic has been blotted out entirely. Sure he and his brethren are attempting to resuscitate it, but it’s only one witch he has to work with, and it’s a horrible situation she’s in from the sound of it. Lives like a prisoner, she does, under their watch all the time for they want her kept safe else their work comes to naught. So very limited her life sounds. And the worst of it is the work itself! They instruct her on all the magic she may do, and ’tis only ever Sending they want her for, which as you’ve heard myself and my sister Breda tell you, is exhausting and often frustrating, for there are so many particulars to be kept in mind, and the risk of lomadh—and you haven’t the satisfaction of accomplishment, for by its very nature, the results are not where you are.

And even worse than that, ’tis a strange mechanical chamber she must spend her time in, the only place magic will function in their age. Tristan described it somewhat to me and for all the pride in his voice—’tis his creation—it sounds a right horror, so it does. So this poor witch is living under nasty circumstances, and more than that: she is nearly two hundred years old! Magically preserved she is. So for all those years she survived, aging slowly, in a world with no magic, making friends and then watching them die of old age . . . while she waited patiently for the time to come for her to spend her day in a horrible little room doing unpleasant tricks on demand for a secret government.

For that’s the other part of his confession: Tristan and his lot aren’t bringing magic back for the good of the world, or for magic’s own sake, but because his government (what rules over the nation full of Irish who speak English) wants to use magic to spy upon and check the power of other kingdoms. Now I’ve nothing against that, sure we’re doing it ourselves, right now, and who doesn’t? But it’s nothing to the glory of magic, it’s nothing to the artistry or craft, and worst of all, it’s a horrible life they’re giving this witch, by the sound of it. I asked Tristan was she happy, and he said not especially, but he thinks that is due to she’s Hungarian and they’re not a merry race. And he has a point. Still, very sad I was to think of the state of affairs. Not at all as I’d imagined it, when first he told me their aim was to bring back magic.

But all of that is nothing compared to the horror to come. For Tristan’s crew is an evil one, and never was there more evidence of that than the story of Lester Holgate. ’Tis a fell tale I’m about to impart to you, so I hope you are nursing some potent spirits to get you through it.

Tristan was giving it a rest with Sir Edward. As soon as he arrived and told me and Rose all (for didn’t I summon Rose to be a witness to his story too), he went from the Tearsheet Brewery with Rose. She was friendlier to him now, given as how he had spoken with us more openly, as he’d promised. In fact, she had offered to introduce him to other witches around, of whom she knows more than I, having family here. She is about to be married off to a gentleman, pleasant enough, but very dull, and it appealed to her sense of adventure to be assisting a handsome fella from the future, especially in the name of magic. The plan was that Rose would take him to meet her mother and aunts, as they’re a whole family of witches (like Breda and myself), with the grandmother out on the Fulanham estate by the Sheppards Bush Green. So it’s an overnight trip he had left on, and didn’t I feel like a mother seeing her son off to the wars?

No, in fact, I didn’t. A bit of a relief it was.

So there I was on my lonesome upstairs at the tavern, taking the rare chance to air out the closet and the bedding, when suddenly there was a shimmer in the corner of the room and there’s another naked fella, with his hair cut in a peculiar way. He’s about as tall as Tristan but thinner, less imposing (good teeth though), and he falls to the floor moaning like they do. He most certainly does not seem familiar, telling me he’s only on this one Strand—something strange is afoot here, one of those things that Tristan would call an Anomaly.

As soon as he could speak, he looks around the closet like it’s Newgate Prison and he’s no idea how he got condemned to be there. “Have a seat,” I say, and pat the mattress beside me, but Mr. Anomaly looks nauseated and stays where he is, covering his shaft but feigning not to. I give him a moment to collect himself, chuck an extra set of drawers and shirt at him and wait for him to dress himself (he’s not so much to look at, a wee bit soft around the waist like a bride he is). As it happens we’ve collected some of Ned Alleyn’s fancier costumes from Dick Burbage, should Tristan ever have occasion to chat up the Court Witches, or courtly associates of Sir Edward, in nicer places. But Tristan was wearing his regular costume that day, so the fancier one was at hand, and I gave it to this new fella. Such a mess he made of putting it on, you’d think he was from the Indies. “Can’t you lace a doublet?” I asked in amazement, and he doesn’t even seem to hear me as he’s trying to figure out what the devil to do with the codpiece. I barely keep myself from crying with the laughter, but finally we get him dressed, and then for the first time, a quarter hour after my hands have been all over him to help him dress, he looks at me directly.

He’s not a bad-looking fellow but it’s city air he breathes a lot, I’m guessing, not like our Tristan, for his complexion is sallow like a hatter’s (although fashionably pale) and he squints a bit like a tailor. He carries himself well enough but unsteady he seems to be, as if a permanent amazement he is trying to hide. And his hair, Your Grace—’tis a thing best not spoken of, but I’ll speak of it anyway, as there is much worse to come, and as it enters into the narrative in a small way. The whole time we were struggling with the doublet his colorless limp hair kept straggling down over his brow and nervous he was in tucking it away.

And didn’t I then remember a thing that Tristan had told me, concerning his unlovable colleague, Les Holgate: “He employs a surfeit of Product.” I’d no idea what he meant by it, but he’d said it as if revealing it was, of something important concerning the man. So I had pressed Tristan for an explanation and didn’t he say, “That means his hair is gelled until it’s hard and shiny as a beetle’s back. It is a kind of pomade that some in my time use.” Tristan, understanding that none of this “Product” or pomade would be Sent with him, had grown out his own hair and had it trimmed in accord with our fashions, so that conspicuous he wouldn’t be. But this fellow hadn’t done so much. And since his Product has stayed behind in the chamber whence he’d been Sent, wasn’t his hair now all over the bloody place and a court fool he seemed to be.

“Les Holgate,” I say.

“The same,” he says, and he holds his outstretched hand toward me. I look at it, wondering if I am expected to kiss it, which I’ve no intention of doing. So I wait. After a moment, he drops it onto his lap. “You must be Gráinne.” He pronounces it wrong and he knows it.

“Why must I? And what business is it of yours if I am?”

“I’m a colleague of Tristan Lyons. You know, from the future?”

“I know.”

“I’m here to help him with his deed.” He pats his hands on the bombast of his hosen, then crosses his arms, then puts his arms akimbo, as if arms are something he’s just acquired and hasn’t yet worked out what they’re good for.

“A colleague, are you now?” I ask. “Let’s have you prove it. Tell me a bit about his deed, and why he would be needing your help, and what kind of help you’re intending to give him.”

“We have no time for that,” he says, frowning. To be honest he looks almost confused that I would be questioning him. Quite peremptory he seems to me.

“I have no time for foolishness,” I retort. “These are dangerous times and I dare not take a stranger at’s word. I’m needing evidence you’re Tristan’s fellow. Tell true.”

Mr. Anomaly harrumphed a bit at that. Then he pushed his hair back, rubbed his hands together, and said briskly, “We are trying to disincent Sir Edward Greylock from investing in the Boston Council. Tristan has tried speaking to him on multiple occasions but the results we seek have yet to eventuate.”

“And those results are?” I asked.

Irked he looked, as if it were an imposition to speak of it. “The removal of a certain building forty years from now in Massive Shoe Hits.”

I continued to question him in this vein, with his impatience and irritation compounding, until, despite his queer language and displeasing attitude, I had satisfied myself that he was indeed on Tristan’s crew, and served the same masters, with the same ends in mind.

“So what exactly are you here to do?” I concluded my questioning.

“We’ve figured out a better way to change Sir Edward’s mind about where to put his money,” he says. “Since Tristan was already here, in 1601, we couldn’t give him the new instructions, so we’ve called an audible and made an unplanned insertion. I’ve got some specific plans to enact, and I need your help just like you’ve been giving it to Tristan.”

“As long as you understand what I have not been giving to Tristan,” I say, for his talk of insertions was putting me on my guard. He was not near so comely as Tristan and I didn’t want him to be making any insertions on my person. But he gave me a strange look, as if he hadn’t the faintest idea what I was referring to. “Certes,” I said, letting it go. “I am in league with Tristan so by association I am in league with you. Be stating your intentions, O man from the future.”

“I’m going to put Sir Edward between a rock and a hard place. Make him an offer he can’t refuse. Turn up the heat.”

“All right,” I said cautiously.

“Yeah. Here’s the plan. The Constable of this parish? St. Mildred’s?”

“I know what parish we are in,” I told him.

“He’s poor. Easily corrupted,” he tells me. I reckon he must know this from his history books—and don’t I know it from my own life! “Introduce me to that Constable. And then, separately, introduce me to one Simon Beresford—the father of Sir Edward’s fiancée.”

“Why’s that, then?” I asked.

“Well, Sir Edward uses this whorehouse, right?”

“Once or twice,” I said.

“There’s a girl here he likes, Tristan told me.”

“That would be Morag. Bit of a gymnast she is.”

“We have to get the Constable to inspect the whorehouse while Sir Edward is here with her—and Sir Edward’s future father-in-law is with him on a ride-along.”

“On a what?” I asked. I did not like his attitude or his strange accent or queer way with words and phrases.

I did not like the notion that Tearsheet would be inspected, but in truth, all the bawdy-houses are targets occasionally and isn’t Tearsheet overdue for it, on account of my magic fending it off so long. Often’s the time a parish constable will squeeze a whoremonger for money. Constables are given power but no money at all, and so usually held by somebody with a high enough opinion of themselves, who happens to be short on coin. “Well enough,” I said. “But Simon Beresford? The father-in-law-to-be?”

“Yeah, I don’t know where to track him down. He’s a lord or something. Knows the Queen. We have to get him to go with the Constable on the inspection.”

“And why would he do such a thing?”

“So that he can report to Queen Elizabeth which of her courtiers was caught in the whorehouse.” He seemed chuffed with himself for this idiot scheme. His arms—when he wasn’t using them to push his hair out of his eyes—hung more casually at his sides now, as if he’d grown accustomed to them. He was finding his sea legs, as Your Grace’s men might say.

“Hardly seems like something a gentleman would care to do,” I pointed out.

“Good way to win points,” himself said confidently, in that tone that says: he has made up his mind about it, and therefore any new information or suggestion has the weight of mist. “Also, if we drop a hint that his future son-in-law might be one of those in the brothel, then Simon Beresford will have a pressing need to see for himself who comes out of the brothel door during the raid.”

I shrugged. “There are hidden exits on every floor for the customers to leave unnoticed,” I said. “Constables have sought them out for years and never found them, it’s a matter of great pride at Tearsheet. Morag knows those exits same as any of us, she’ll take Sir Edward out of there to safety.”

“No she won’t,” said Les Holgate. “I’ll be blocking the exit on that floor. Sir Edward can only get out if I let him.”

I wasn’t so sure about trusting this fellow now, he had such a different sensibility to him than your man Tristan.

He goes on: “I’ll show up at the same time as Beresford and the Constable. You should be in the whorehouse and protest, make a fuss, follow us around. When we find Sir Edward and Morag, you make enough of a fuss to distract the Constable, and I’ll pull Edward aside and offer him a get-out-of-jail-free card: he can run out the front door and be seen by Simon Beresford, and kiss his social-climbing marriage goodbye forever. Or, I’ll get him out safely and Simon Beresford will never know he’s there—but I’ll only do that if he signs his name to an oath, that he will never fund the Boston Council, no questions asked. Got it?”

Absurd, I thought it. Dull-witted. Absolutely mental. But I nodded, grimacing.

So: that was the plan. That is not what happened.

This scheme—this accursed scheme!—was easy enough to begin because of how the stars were aligned. I spoke to Morag, and explained a little of what we were up to—not about Les Holgate being from the future or such details, just that we needed to blackmail her newest customer and she’d be recompensed for her cooperation. Pym the owner has a strict no-blackmailing policy at Tearsheet, but it only applies to blackmail that he knows about, and Morag (being Scottish) is resourceful. To my request, she laughs and says, “Well, Sir Edward and I do have a special little romp planned for tomorrow afternoon. If you want to catch him in the act, this will be the act to catch him in. This will be an act for all the ages to speak of.” And she laughs with such abandon that I can’t help but be a wee bit curious, suspicious even, of what she’s on about, so I ask her.

“What are you on about?” I ask her.

She sobers right up, although her eyes look like the laughter will still come spilling out of them. “Ach, I might have no morals, but I certainly have manners,” she says. “I’ll not reveal a gentleman’s proclivities.” (For doesn’t she like to show off her schooling with these fancy new words.) “But I know he’ll be arriving here just as the bells toll two, so come at half-two and you’ll get at least as much as you’re seeking.” And we’d have to pay her well for that, for it’s true her lips are generally as tight as her character is loose. She’s the one the fellas ask for when it’s especially secret they need to be. She valued her reputation that way, so hard up for money she must have been, if she was willing to play our game with us. Now I’ll always wonder about that.

’Twas easy enough to find the Constable, as he’s also the manager of the bear-baiting pit, so he’s always around Southwark. The Constable is a funny enough fella, perhaps on account of his line of work. His assistants, who feed the bears and file down their teeth, are large fellas, and fierce, but he’s entirely different. Mild and obsequious at once, he is, and doesn’t he smile deferentially even as he regrets to inform you that he’ll be taking advantage.

I did him a good turn once. The bears don’t take to himself or his lads much, yet he’s the one keeps them alive and healthy, for isn’t a bear a terrible expensive thing to come by? Anyhow, I reasoned with a bear whose wounds he was salving, and the bear stopped trying to smack him. So he owed me a favor for a couple of years now. This turned out to be useful.

Les Holgate believed the Constable would leap spurs-first at the opportunity to intimidate Pym, the Tearsheet brewer. He did not take into account that the Constable was less inclined to upbraid brewers than bears, for an upbraided brewer is less likely to pass you a pint. It’s a good thing the Constable was under a compliment to me, for he only agreed to Les’s scheme as a kindness to myself. So in the end, he did agree to put on his constabulary cap and go inspecting the “tavern” the next afternoon.

Les Holgate next wished me to go with him to find this Simon Beresford and induce him to come along with us, but ’twould take more of my time than I’d a wish to give it. So I declined, but (believing I was still abetting a scheme that Tristan was a part of) I did offer to find out Simon Beresford’s location, so that Les might go and fetch the fellow his own self.

This I did, the next day (Les Holgate having slept on a tavern bench overnight and whinging all the next morning). Simon Beresford was on London Bridge seeking to purchase a new hat.

As soon as Les Holgate had set out for the Bridge, up to my own closet I went, and sought out Tristan by scrying, as I knew he and Rose should be on their way back through the city, headed my way. It seemed to me they were by the Paris Gardens. I sent to Rose as much of this message as I could, which was hard to communicate since she wasn’t expecting me to try to reach her: “Your man Les Holgate has arrived and plans to use extortion to accomplish the task at Tearsheet.” So I hoped Tristan would have at least a notion that mischief might be afoot.

Then I went back into the tavern and sat back with a mug of Tearsheet Best Bitter, the finest ale you can find outside of Ireland, and waited to see who would return first. It was quiet in there for the time of day, perhaps half a dozen drinkers. I had no personal need to see the scheme succeed, and guessed it would be a lark to watch. But I did feel the slightest bit of unease deep in my gut, and I hoped Tristan would return, as he had a gravity to him that put me at ease, while this Holgate fella made me a bit squeaky-bummed.

No surprise it was that Les Holgate returned first, with a confused-looking older fella who had to have been Simon Beresford. He was dressed in the old style, all in elegant black, prudish but not quite Puritan (for then his daughter wouldn’t have been one of Elizabeth’s ladies, of that I’m confident). His ruffle was pretentious—as if his head sat on a fancy platter that just happened to be balanced right on the top of his neck. Hard to imagine a fellow like that shopping for himself on London Bridge, but it takes all sorts. I heard his voice out in the street, old enough for childish treble. He was asking someone for an explanation. Answers were coming both from Les Holgate and from a third voice I recognized as belonging to the Constable.

In the tavern I was, as they approached, and wasn’t the doorway open to let in the glorious autumn day, so they stood in the door backlit. Proprietor Pym recognized the Constable by his silhouette, and cursed under his breath. He went out the door, shooing at them, and made a fuss about letting them in, even as the old fella protested he had no interest in setting foot in such an establishment. I followed Pym out just to keep an eye on things.

So, here we all are standing on the gravel street, just outside the brewery door, with throngs of people pushing by us going to the theatre or from the bear-baiting. We were myself, the Constable, Les Holgate, Simon Beresford, and Proprietor Pym. Inside upstairs, of course, were Morag and Sir Edward, carrying on blissfully unawares.

The Constable shoulders Pym out of the way and strides into the tavern, where right off all the customers make a bit of a fuss, like hens in a coop when the farmer comes in after dark.

“Stay outside, sir,” says Les Holgate to Simon Beresford. “It’s not a proper place for a gentleman like yourself to be seen. Stay here and note who comes out.” And then he rushes in after the Constable. I follow after him. And so leaving Master Pym and Simon Beresford outside on the street (with Simon Beresford so dismayed and perplexed to find himself here at all), the trio of the Constable, Les Holgate, and myself are rushing through the tavern to the steep steps that lead to the rooms. We’re not making noise ourselves, but the tavern regulars are making noise enough to surely alert everyone on the floor above. The wenches in the tavern duck under tables, until they realize the Constable isn’t after them at all, then they either return to their work or scurry out the hidden door, just to be safe.

Now up the steep stairs it is we’re going: Constable, Les Holgate, myself. It isn’t too dark at all on the landing, not on a Harvest-season afternoon with unwonted bright sun outside shining in through a small open window. The upstairs, as perhaps I’ve described to Your Grace, has a narrow corridor with rooms off either side, first a couple of rooms big enough for private conferences, and then beyond them, four wee curtained-off closets for more intimate congress. It’s Morag’s closet we’re wanting, and that’s the first curtain to the right after the meeting rooms. It’s the largest of the lot, some three strides square, with a mattress on the floor, and a curtained window what looks out over the street.

We rush past the two meeting rooms, both with doors ajar letting light through the windows, both empty (it’s day, and these are the sorts of rooms more used to candlelight). Following Les Holgate’s, commands, aren’t I tugging at the Constable’s sleeve and complaining of his being here.

We come to Morag’s curtained doorway. Les Holgate tugs open the curtain. And there’s the unglazed window with the afternoon sunlight tempered only slightly by a linen kerchief, so we can see clear as if we were standing in a market square. The Constable, Les Holgate, and myself fill the cramped doorway, with me cackling like an angry hen—until I see what is happening inside the wee room, and then my voice does fail me.

Your Majesty, I can scarce bring myself to write what we do see there. For it is not Morag there with Sir Edward, but Sir Edward with a third party altogether. From Morag’s tone the day before, I confess I had expected a surprise. But I had assumed it might be another wench.

It is not. ’Tis a man, and he and Sir Edward are at it with each other, which is a hanging offence here. Morag is not even present. She was but a cover for them to be together. The two men freeze and stare up at the three of us crowded at the doorway so, and quickly part.

Les Holgate looks very surprised, but I ken he doesn’t understand how dreadful this situation is. Tristan told me that in their age, it’s only the most religious of zealots (belonging largely to sects of churches that do not even exist in our day) who are much bothered about buggery. In his day, ’tis lawful and unremarkable—even in London! So I’m thinking Les Holgate does not understand that he is looking at two dead men. Unless we can bribe the Constable with a lot of money straightaway.

But I’ll be honest, that’s not the only thing that shocks me. It is the fellow Sir Edward’s buggering that shocks me more. For a famous bloke it is. A very famous bloke.

There is a commotion back down the corridor, of somebody climbing up the stairs in a hurry, clear enough to hear due to our amazed silence. The Constable is goggle-eyed, and finally he says, “I cannot believe what I am seeing. The heralds and the chronicles will never let us hear the end of this. Never.” Myself, I can’t stop staring at the two men. At the one man in particular. For that man—the famous man—is my lover. Who I believed until that moment hadn’t a secret from me in all the world.

The scuffling on the stairs has turned into footsteps beating their way down the short corridor, and suddenly there’s a heaving Tristan Lyons, who grabs Les Holgate and shoves him back down the corridor toward the steps. “You fucking moron,” he says, but then immediately turns his attention back into the room. Pushes the Constable out of the way, he does, and sees the two on the ratty mattress. He points to my darling, sitting there staring at me wide-eyed and naked beside Sir Edward, and asks, “Who is that?”

I could barely make myself speak the words. “That,” I said, “is Christopher Marlowe.”

Tristan frowned in confusion. “Christopher Marlowe is dead. He died in 1593 in a pub brawl. It’s almost the only thing I know about him.”

Kit and I are staring at each other with a shared look of stupidity I did not think either one of us capable of. “A counterfeit death, it was,” I say, my chest tight. “Staged, for convenience sake. He was a spy, so he was—”

“Gracie,” says Kit in a quiet, warning voice.

“Sure it came out after, everyone knows you’re a spy by now anyhow,” I said. And explaining to Tristan: “I had just been Sent from Ireland, and so in love with him I fell, and him with me, we would do whatever we asked of each other.” Those huge, beautiful brown eyes of his bored deep into mine as I spoke, as I gave away the secret I had kept for years, kept even (I pray you forgive me) from you, Your Majesty: “’Twas the greatest bit of magic I have ever done. He told me they needed to counterfeit a wound that would give him the freedom of seeming to have died, but it must be so thoroughly accomplished that even a physician examining his body would reckon him dead. So they claimed there was a pub brawl, and a spell of protection didn’t I put on him, that when he was stabbed, he seemed dead but wasn’t, although he was close to the shadows for awhile. Then I spirited him away and nursed him back to health in secret.” And still those eyes how they looked at me, and how I looked at them. “And for these eight years gone,” I went on, “in secret I have loved him and he’s loved me. I knew he had other dalliances and I was not jealous of him. But the secreting of it—oh, Kit—the concealment, in my own home—”

Before Kit could respond, or I could say anything else, Tristan pushed me aside into the room and grabbed the Constable by the back of his collar. The Constable had been staring at the two men all this time, and while I hadn’t been listening to him on account of my own confessions, I realized now he was muttering over and over again how all of it—their impending deaths as well as this revelation—would shake the city, would shake the nation, to its very roots.

Tristan lightly slapped the Constable’s cheek to get his attention. “The two sodomites must be released unconditionally at once,” he said. To Sir Edward he said firmly, “Get your clothes on. While you’re at it, open your purse. You will reward the Constable handsomely for this act of mercy on his part, and in exchange, the Constable”—and here he released the Constable’s collar but only to grab his shoulder and turn him squarely to face him—“the Constable will never speak a word of anything that has happened today.”

“But that is Kit Marlowe,” repeated the Constable in awe, gaping still. Then turning to Tristan, does he offer up this: “He was arrested for heresy just before his death. Did you know that?”

“Atheism,” clarified Kit promptly, for sure he hates it when people think heresy suggests he was a believer in some sect.

“They meant to put him on trial,” said the Constable. I realized from his obsequious tone that he was collecting his wits now, and expecting Tristan to reward him for this information. “All of England was waiting to hear what he said at the trial. There was no pub brawl. He was assassinated to keep from spilling state secrets, secrets all of London was waiting breathlessly to hear. He can finally spill them, now he is alive!”

“No he cannot,” said Tristan very firmly, as my da used to speak to me when I was a wee lass throwing a tantrum and he needed me to shut it. “You are about to be given a lot of money to agree, for the rest of your life, that Marlowe died in 1593.”

The Constable had recovered from his amazement, and was ready to see reason. “I’ve certainly heard that rumour,” says he. “If you’ll show me where it’s written in gold, I’ll happily swear to it.”

“I have no gold with me,” fretted Sir Edward. “But I do have plate enough back at my lodgings. If I am allowed to dress, and somebody shows me the back-exit, the Constable may follow me—”

Listening to him, I felt something beginning to move in my chest. Nothing good, nothing pleasant. Jealousy was a foreign thing to me, I’d no experience of it ever in my life, not that I could recall, and so a moment it took me, to realize the name of this horrible feeling. Sir Edward must have sensed my gaze on him. He glanced in my direction, and then casually away again, as if I counted for nothing. Jealousy at once bred with rage inside of me, and made such an inward clamour that I heard the next bit of the conversation as through a hailstorm.

Les Holgate, having recovered from being shoved down the corridor, now pushed back in, stepping between me and Sir Edward and shouldering Sir Edward down onto the mattress. He then stumbled over Sir Edward’s flailing legs and was obliged to steady himself at the far wall by the window. He spoke to Tristan. “Stay on task. This other guy’s not important. All that matters is making sure Sir Edward doesn’t give his money to the Boston Council. The rest of it, these other people, it’s a sideshow. You,” he continued, to Sir Edward, “your future father-in-law is standing outside. You do as we say, or he’s going to know you’re a sodomite and you won’t get to marry your rich girlfriend.”

“And what is it you want of me?” asked Sir Edward, scrambling to stand.

“Swear on the Bible not to give any of your money to the Boston Council.”

“Abort,” said Tristan crossly, as Sir Edward gaped, perplexed. “This is not the time or the way, Les. You’ve royally fucked this up. For now, for today, we pay off the Constable and everyone disappears out the back way. You and I go straight back to the ODEC. But first, you need to go downstairs and tell Beresford there was nobody here. You’ve botched this.”

“I haven’t!” Holgate said. “You’ve been totally ineffectual for all the times you’ve come here. I’ve come here once, and look: results!” He gestured round the wee room.

“Abort,” repeated Tristan. He reached to a peg on the wall and threw the clothes that hung there—shirt and drawers and a very fine vest it was—at Sir Edward, and spoke to him: “You, sir, go out the back way with the Constable, and pay him whatever is required for your own good. You”—Tristan turned his eye on Kit now—“will vanish. Disappear. Wherever you’ve been hiding, go back to hiding there. Sir Edward will keep your secret. Will you not, Sir Edward?”

“Naturally,” said wan Sir Edward, looking ever so much more wan.

“This is the perfect moment to demand submission,” said Les Holgate to Tristan.

“Shut up,” said Tristan, almost fatigued he sounded, and not bothering to look Holgate full on. “Don’t you get this situation? If these two men go outside and are revealed to Simon Beresford, there will be such a scandal—”

“Exactly!” trumpeted Les Holgate. “That’s why this is the perfect moment to make demands of Sir Edward! That’s our leverage—their wish to avoid that scandal!”

“That scandal cannot happen,” said Tristan, in a low, quiet growl. “We—you and I—we cannot let it happen. The consequences are too great for us to allow it to happen. It’s on us, it’s not on him.”

Exasperated Holgate looked. “You idiot, by saying that in front of him, you’ve just lost our best bargaining chip. If he even understands what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I do, sir,” said Sir Edward, as he dressed with shaking hands. He was trying to calm his breathing, and his color was returning somewhat. “You yourselves do not want this to be revealed. Therefore I need not pay you to prevent you from revealing it.”

“You do have to pay me, however, milord,” the Constable reminded him, with a neighborly chuckle, and waving a finger at him all affably-like. “As I have no hesitation to reveal it.”

“Neither do I,” said Les. “This man”—it’s Tristan he means—“does not speak for me.”

“Yes I do,” said Tristan. “I have operational command here.”

“He doesn’t,” Les assured Sir Edward. “Listen, Ed, I don’t want your money, I want your compliance. I’m revealing you to Simon Beresford unless you agree to my demands. He’s right below this window.” And he called at once: “Simon Beresford! Lord Simon Beresford!”

“Shut up,” Tristan commanded of Les Holgate, and immediately stepped right over Kit, snatched Sir Edward by the arm, and hauled him back toward the door, while the poor fool sputtered in amazement that he was being trundled about so.

Shutting up was not of interest to Les Holgate, who continued to call out: “Lord Beresford! There’s a fellow up here who looks a heck of a lot like Sir Edward Greylock.”

“Sir Edward Greylock? Up there?” cried the older man’s voice from below, and horrified it was he sounded. “Sir Edward! Pray reveal yourself, sir!”

“Of course he won’t reveal himself,” called Les. “You’d better come up here and see for yourself.”

Moving with the swift and sleek efficiency of a wolf, did Tristan now fling an arm around Les Holgate’s neck and get Les’s throat nestled in the crook of his elbow. With his other hand he pressed forward on his captive’s head, shoving him deeper into the trap. Les’s voice dried up into a squawk. His eyelids fluttered. And then he went altogether limp. Tristan let him down onto the mattress like a sack of grain, and devoted a moment to arranging him on his side.

“What have you done!?” the Constable demanded.

“He’s fine. I put him to sleep with a vee choke. Now I’m putting him in the recovery position,” Tristan explained. “He’ll wake up in a few minutes.” He stood up and turned to face Sir Edward, who by now was sufficiently dressed that he could move about in the streets without drawing overmuch attention to himself. “Go with the Constable out the hidden exit,” Tristan commanded. “Give him a lot of money and do not set foot in this building again. Never speak to anyone in this room again, except for me when I come to find you at the Bell. At that time you will agree to obey my further instructions to make sure there is no further scandal. Do you understand?”

Sir Edward nodded, looking ill at ease. Tristan stepped back to the window and showed himself at the casement. “Pray pardon us, m’lord,” he called down. “There has been a confusion. There is no Sir Edward anyone up here.”

“Who are you?” came the agitated voice from below. “What in the name of Heaven is going on up there?”

“’Tis nothing to do with you, milord,” Tristan returned, and gestured at me. I understood at once and joined him. This took me past Kit, who reached out a hand toward me, but I slapped it away. I had a score to settle with him; but there’d be time for that later.

“Is that Milord Simon Beresford?” I asked, using my best London accent. Tristan backed away into the room, leaving me to hold Beresford’s attention. Like Juliet with Romeo. Not an easy performance, what with the jealousy and rage in my heart and the squabbling behind me: Tristan again commanding Sir Edward and the Constable to leave by the back way, the two of them protesting they didn’t know where the back way was, Kit scrambling to collect and don his drawers and shirt, offering to show them the back way as soon as he was dressed. He only knew the back way because of all the times he had visited me here and taken such delight in me. And now he was using the knowledge he had of me to save that ponce of a so-called gentleman? Why should he care if Sir Edward be saved or not? ’Twas the shock he was causing upon myself that should be chief amongst his worries!

“And what shall we say when the likes of you are seen loitering about a bawdy-house?” I meanwhile asked down to Beresford with a smile.

“’Tisn’t a bawdy-house,” Pym shouted up at me in annoyance. “’Tis a respectable establishment and you know well!”

“Politely waiting your turn, is it?” I grinned at Simon Beresford. “Don’t be shy, come on up!”

The man’s face reddened. “I will not set foot in a place of ill repute.”

“Oh, but milord, it’s marvelous repute we have,” I informed him cheerily. “Sure nobody’s got better repute than the girls of Tearsheet Brewery. It’s the talk of London, so it is. Just ask the proprietor, that’s him beside you.”

Pym was scowling up at me. “What mischief are you up to there, Gracie?”

I give him a playful smile. “A bit naughty I’m being,” I sing out. “Pardon me, and I’ll stop it now.” I turned away from the window.

“Show them the back exit,” mutters Tristan to me. “Take Marlowe too.”

So now I’m to be saving Kit and the fellow he betrayed me with. As I again brush past Kit, he has finished donning his undergarments, and he reaches his hand for mine again and this time I grasp it, tight, so tight as if I will never release him, for in truth all I care about is getting him to safety.

Him, yes, but not Sir Edward. For what benefit is there in securing Sir Edward’s safety? It keeps him free to continue his dalliance with my love, and it keeps him free to pledge his money where Tristan doesn’t wish it. Suddenly as clear as day, I see the single stroke that will bring succour to both Tristan and myself.

As Kit and I approach Sir Edward so that I may lead us all from the building, I bend over a moment, rise up quick, and then quicker still, I make that stroke.

Sir Edward puts both of his hands to the close of his velvet vest. A dizzy spell takes him and doesn’t he reach out with one of his hands to steady himself against the doorway. The hand is red, and makes a bloody print on the wall.

Tristan takes this in, his face a handsome study in consternation, and his clever mind soon arrives at the only possible explanation. He looks at me and sure I show him that bloody dagger still in my hand. ’Twas the very weapon he himself had wrested from my dim fella on his first arrival, and kicked across the floor to me. I’d snatched it up then to prevent further violence, and hadn’t its owner stormed out of the place without reclaiming it. Since then, I’d got in the habit of carrying it. Its sheath was bound to my leg under my skirts. It had found a home, just now, in Sir Edward’s heart.

Tristan’s amazed to learn it’s capable of murder I am (not knowing a thing of my life back home, and the uses Your Grace has put me to over the years), and so silent he is, as we watch Sir Edward settle to the floor, looking a bit like Juliet at the end of that detestable tragedy. He hardly has as much of a beard as Saunder Cooke himself.

“Well there,” I say to Tristan, “he won’t be funding the Boston Council any more, will he?”

I see in the corner of my eye that Kit—more concerned than heartbroken, and a good thing too!—is ushering the Constable out of the room. One of Sir Edward’s legs has kicked out near me, so I wipe the dagger’s blade on his drawers and slide it into the sheath on my leg, just to keep it handy. Then I get up, stepping well clear of the pool of blood that’s been burbling out of Sir Edward, and follow them out.

In the shuffle of bodies in the corridor, Kit arranges himself to be beside me. “I’d sooner slay myself than break your heart, dearest,” he whispers urgent in my ear. “That man was nothing to me, I was just using him to get some information for Her Majesty. I’ll explain my secrecy and make it up to you as soon as we are out of here.” He kissed my cheek and I confess, Your Grace, it made me wobbly. Never was there a lovelier set of lips to be kissed than my dear Kit’s.

Pardon me for that distraction. Back to the events now.

For a moment, every one of us wants the same thing: to get down to the ground floor. For different reasons everyone wants it, but still there is a cooperation that wasn’t there before, and so in very short order we are there. The tavern is deserted; people left when all the shouting started and the blood began sheeting down ’tween the floorboards. A crowd it is now gathered in the street just outside. Although the front door to the street is open, we can’t see out into the glare, so no way to know if Simon Beresford is there. This hardly matters now, for the most important thing now is that Kit Marlowe is recognized by nobody.

The secret door for which we’re headed is in the back corner behind the bar, meaning we must cross by the front door to reach it. Tristan is in the lead, then the Constable clutching at him, so he won’t be separated from the man in charge, who, in the absence of Sir Edward, is the likeliest one to pay him off. Just behind them comes myself, clutching hands with Kit.

Now enters Proprietor Pym through the front door, blinking in the unaccustomed darkness. I turn to greet him, to assure him that—as mad as it might seem to say it—all this chaos is about to be resolved, with the one unfortunate detail that the Constable will be learning of one hidden exit. But certain I am that Pym will prefer this to his establishment being revealed as a trysting place for sodomites.

As I watch Pym’s face, his eyes adjust to the dim, and land upon the half-dressed Kit Marlowe. Kit’s not-being-dead was as much a shock to him as it was to the Constable. But he collects himself almost at once, turns to me and says, “Gracie, do you have this in hand?”

“I do. We’re taking them out the below-exit. None will ever see him.”

I think he will be pleased, but he shakes his head. “Know you not that in Deptford, at the alehouse where Marlowe staged his death—”

“It weren’t an alehouse,” I said. “It was a gentlewoman’s private home, who rented out rooms. What about it?” I ask, with a queer worried feeling in my innards. I glance over to Tristan to see how he is faring with the door.

The hidden door here hides perfectly in plain sight, for it cannot be detected by the eye, only by touch. Tristan is running his hands over the paneling, trying to find it. And as he does, Pym finishes his thought: “They say business in Deptford quadrupled on account of people going to see where the famous Christopher Marlowe was murdered. So imagine what this will do for us!” And he grabs for Kit, meaning to push him outside into the curious Southwark crowd forming around the door of the tavern—most of whom will know him by sight.

Now, Kit knows his way around a fight, but he’s not expecting this, and so before he registers it, Pym’s fist, big as a hamhock, has closed around his arm, just above the elbow. Kit looks like a boy who’s been caught in the middle of some mischief by a fat schoolmaster.

Tristan has opened the hidden door. The Constable has lost no time in scurrying through it; I can hear him rattling down the narrow case of wooden stairs beyond it. That’ll take him down a short tunnel—an expanded kitchen-sewer, to call it by its proper name—to a ditch that runs along the side of the brewery. ’Tis what remains of a creek that, I fancy, used to wind through a field to the Thames; now it is imprisoned between narrow vertical banks that have been built to either side as the city has grown up round it, and it’s been half covered over with platforms and bridges. It matters not whether the Constable turns left or right along that ditch; either way he can slosh for some little distance through the nameless collection of fluids that oozes through it, and choose his moment to clamber back up to the level of the street. So he’s sorted.

Having seen to that, Tristan is turning back around into the room. He sees how it is with Pym and Kit. And he sees, as I do, that there is no earthly way he can reach them before Pym drags Kit outside.

“Pym. Yer mad,” I say, “don’t make me use this.” And I let him see the dagger as I draw it out from beneath my skirt.

That stops him, for a moment.

“No,” Kit says, “don’t go to the gallows on my account, Gracie.” A pleasant thing to say, but it has the unfortunate effect of bolstering Pym’s confidence a bit. Pym gives me a sneer as if to say “you wouldn’t dare,” and drags Kit one step closer to the sunlight. I follow, closing the distance—just in time to be slammed to the floor by one who’s just come flying down the stairs. Before I know it I’m face down on the boards with a knee in the small of my back and my arm’s being twisted the wrong way.

“Got it!” announces Les Holgate as he pries the dagger out of my fingers.

And that’s all he has time to say before he’s cut down by a meaty punch from Tristan. Les Holgate has awakened from the “vee choke” only to be rendered unconscious again by a more kinetic approach. Feeling his knee come off my back, I spring up onto hands and knees and turn to look at the exit, just in time to see Kit, still firmly in Pym’s grip, silhouetted in the bright light of the sun.

It is now impossible to keep Kit secret. Christopher Marlowe is about to be exposed to the world, and it’s as a direct result of magic being used to Send someone. If there be a hundred men standing outside the tavern, I warrant at least three score will know his face. And I know what that means, with a profundity Tristan surely lacks. Voices outside the tavern begin to cry out in amazement, “Christopher Marlowe! ’Tis Christopher Marlowe!”

As Tristan steps toward them, in a bootless attempt to avoid calamity, I reach out and catch his hand to pivot him around, even as I’m making for the secret exit. He understands, and follows. As we stumble down the stairs, we can hear voices in the crowd calling Kit’s name.

A wee, dank tunnel conducts us to the edge of the sewer-ditch-creek. Tristan’s doubled over from the stench, which is a good thing since there’s not enough headroom for him anyway. I lead him toward the Thames. As we scurry along, I note we are being accompanied by an impressive number of rats who seem to have the same idea. Their squeaking is drowned out by the rumble and clamour of the coming lomadh. I knew it was coming the same way you know when lightning’s in the air.

I knew that this could happen, Your Grace, have always known it, in my bones; sure every witch knows it as well as fish know swimming. We see traces of it in the everyday glamour that accompanies our spells. But isn’t lomadh compared to glamour what the firing of a cannon is compared to a wee candle flame?

There are certain changes that must not be made through magic, and while this is true—has always been true—with even the most benign of entertainments, it is far more true and far more dire with Sending, for then you’ve put one person in a place where they don’t know the way of things, and are like to make some dreadful change, and it takes an áireamhán plus common sense to guard against. When the worlds cannot bear the weight of one Strand suddenly altering that abruptly from the others, it is lomadh, as if you’ve snapped off a twig upon a hearth broom: it is broken, gone, and cannot be redeemed. So it was that moment.

As soon as the public saw Christopher Marlowe alive, this broke the twig. But that image is too soft. For it wasn’t a snap, rather the very world seemed to erupt.

It’s news you’ll hear soon that there was a fire at the Tearsheet, leading to the collapse of it and the neighboring buildings too, with many lives lost. ’Tisn’t wrong, that. But ’tisn’t complete either; ’tis but a story they are telling to be making sense of what they cannot understand. Fire there was, or something akin to fire. But cold there was too, bitter cold, and bursts of wind that struck like fists, and inhalations that made stout buildings shrink into themselves like a dried leaf crumpled in the hand. But this was more than a mere trick of the air. The very fabric of the world was misbehaving. Think of how ’tis when vomiting, in the moment just before the muck in your stomach rushes up your gorge, when ’tis as though your entire body is clenching itself, trying to turn itself inside out like a stocking. Now in your mind’s eye see the Tearsheet and the neighboring buildings—the entire neighborhood—the ground itself and the air above it, the very ether, all doing likewise. Tristan and I were thrown down so hard that we skidded, and drew ourselves up to our feet only when the river came after us as if ’twere alive.

Those fortunate enough to be outside the lomadh could save themselves by running fast enough, and never looking back. Nearly knocked down we were, by several who’d tried to get clear by leaping off the embankment and into the ditch. Those on the inside, such as my poor Kit, and Pym, and Les Holgate, were quickly snuffed out with barely time to scream—or so I tell myself, as I don’t like to imagine what worse fates might have befallen them. But didn’t those in between—neither to one side nor the other of the lomadh, but caught in the fringes of it—suffer in the most dreadful ways. Impossible monstrosities their bodies became, like two-headed calves you sometimes see stillborn at home (not among Your Grace’s cattle but often enough around Lough Swilly or Killybegs), and then out of that impossibility, decaying like rotten fish in sunlight, flesh coming off so quickly it fizzed and sprayed, and those it sprayed on caught it like leprosy and went down to fates of the same nature. A mercy it was that flames consumed what remained.

Milady, never have I believed in the priest’s tales of Hell, discounting it all as a load of bollocks. But if the lomadh has occurred in other times and places, surely it explains where stories of Hell originated. Any soul unversed in magic, who wasn’t knowing the true nature of what they witnessed, would try to explain what Tristan and I saw by claiming that the mouth of Hell itself had, for a moment, opened upon this mortal coil.

But only for a moment. After that, just a fire it was. And who’s to say whether ’twas a ravage or a blessing, for it burned to ashes many an abomination spawned of the lomadh. So it seems to me now, upon reflection. But in the moment I could not help thinking of Kit and Morag and Pym and the other wenches of the Tearsheet. No sooner had we got clear of the catastrophe than I wished to return, in case any of them might be saved. We were down in that filthy ditch yet and I began looking about for a handhold I might use to climb up to the street. I saw none, and it’s more and more exasperated I became, until all of a sudden there’s a hand right in front of my face, reaching down. It’s a hand in a white kid glove, expensive, immaculate. My gaze follows the arm upward until I’m looking into a man’s face. He’s above me on the pavement, squatting down, offering his hand to pull me up. A yellow beard, waxed and groomed to a sharp point, and the fanciest and most fetching hat, with a gorgeous plume on it. It’s for the first time now that I’m seeing both of Athanasius Fugger’s eyes, for doesn’t he have the queerest habit of keeping his hat pulled down low and cocked to one side. I’m struck, in the midst of all the chaos and lamentation of the lomadh, by a peculiarity of the man’s face. The pupil of the left eye—the one he prefers to hide behind his hat—is larger than the other. Stuck open, as it were. You might say it were an odd thing for me to attend to in such circumstances, but for some reason it struck me clearly in the moment.

I reached up and lay my palm upon his and felt his strong grip. Putting his legs and his back into it, he drew me up out of that ditch and got me safe up to the street. For the first time now I could see the fire and smoke burgeoning from what was left of the Tearsheet. That held my attention while he squatted down again, and helped Tristan just as he’d helped me. For which Tristan thanked him, in that clipped and wary manner that passes between men who are not sure of each other’s intentions.

By the time we worked our way back round to the Tearsheet’s former entrance, there was nothing left of tavern or of brewery. People had scattered, coughing, bleeding, dazed, gibbering like madmen. I saw old Simon Beresford staggering confusedly down the street. Not one other member of our party was to be seen. Les Holgate was no more. No more Morag, or Pym. The other wenches of the bawdy-house. And worst of all, at least for me although of no note to another soul: no more Kit Marlowe.

And of course, no more Tearsheet Brewery, the only place in London where ever I was safe.

Diachronicle

DAY 390

In which—finally—we seem to learn from experience

TRISTAN STAGGERED OUT OF THE ODEC in a terrible state. He was bruised and his hair disheveled, his eyes bloodshot and his skin almost grey. I felt a little sick seeing him: whatever happened, it could have been worse, and thank God it wasn’t. I reached for the intercom button, then drew my hand back. He did not look in the mood for a conversation. We could only chew our thumbnails and speculate as he put himself through decontamination.

When he emerged, I did not resist the impulse to embrace him. But he caught me up short as my arms reached around him, and politely pressed me away from himself. He gestured gingerly to his left forearm. “Hairline fracture,” he whispered hoarsely. “Possibly.”

“Let’s go to the emergency room,” I said, reaching for his good arm, but he shook his head.

“Debrief first. Call the Odas.”

“They can meet us in the ER—”

“Here. Now.” He staggered down the hall toward the toilets.

I telephoned. Rebecca said they could be there in ten minutes. Erszebet came with them, for Rebecca had been soothing her after the drama of the morning.

Tristan sequestered himself in the conference room, on a video conference to Frink, until the others had arrived. When finally it was the five of us, and the video screen, so long the bane of our existence, had been shut off and unplugged, he glanced about the table at us, then looked down briefly, then back up and said in a heavy voice, “Les Holgate is dead.”

“Excellent,” said Erszebet immediately, before the rest of us could so much as draw breath. “He deserved it.”

Tristan gave her an angry look. He seemed about to say something but then contained himself.

“That’s horrible,” I said. “Who killed him?”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t a who, it was a what.” He took a moment, briefly pressed his good hand to his forehead, and began again. “He arranged a scheme that had elements he hadn’t considered or thought out. I tried to foil it but there were unforeseeable complications. And then . . .” He looked at a lost for words. “The brewery blew up. Everyone inside of it was killed.”

“There was an explosion?” Frank Oda asked.

“No!” Tristan said firmly. “Something I can’t describe. Explosion, implosion, turning inside out, being put through a blender, fire, ice . . . worse things too.”

Erszebet looked solemn, and sighed. “Diakrónikus nyírás,” she said quietly. “Diachronic, mmm . . .” She made a broad, sideways chopping gesture with both hands. “Shear. Diachronic Shear. There is a separating.” She shook her head. “I even tried to warn Les Holgate because his ideas were so extreme. Very bad. I have heard of it but never seen it.”

“What does it mean exactly?” asked Frank Oda.

“And what do we do about it?” Tristan followed.

“Can we go back on another Strand and fix it somehow?” asked Frank Oda.

Her eyes widened slightly, and she shook her head. “Oh. No. No, it’s over. His existence—the existence of everything caught up in the Shear—it is gone forever, across all Strands. You cannot even go to look for him. He is gone. Full stop.”

“That’s horrible,” I said again.

“Why? He was a terrible person,” said Erszebet. And then, softening: “But I am sure there were innocent people destroyed too. It is very sad for them and their families.” She looked thoughtful. “I thought perhaps this was apocryphal because I never met anyone who had experienced it. The last one in Europe was Paris, 1777. I suppose by my time everybody knew better than to risk it.”

“Who else was lost in this Diachronic Shear?” Rebecca asked. “Gráinne must have survived or you could not have gotten back here.”

Tristan looked as if another hundred-pound weight had settled upon his shoulders. “She’s not the one who Sent me back,” he said. “After the chaos, the young English witch named Rose found me and offered to return me here.”

“We’ve lost Gráinne?”

He grimaced. “She’s not dead. She’s not even physically injured, but I think there’s other damage. As well as killing Les, the lomadh took Gráinne’s lover, and her boss, and of course destroyed the Tearsheet itself, which has been her home for ten years. She’s an unwed Irishwoman in Elizabeth’s London. The Tearsheet was her sanctuary. When I last saw her she was hysterical.”

“Of course she was,” said Erszebet quietly. She had gone quite pale and still. “It is a horrible thing to be torn from your security. This poor woman.”

Something didn’t add up. “How could you leave her in that condition?” I asked. For all of Tristan’s mysterious ways, I knew him well enough to know that he would not simply abandon Gráinne.

“She’s being looked after,” Tristan said, “at least temporarily.”

“Who’s looking after her?”

“Athanasius Fugger.”

There was a long pause while we absorbed that.

“You left her in the hands of a Fucker!?” Erszebet exclaimed.

“Why would he, of all people—” I began.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” Tristan said. “He was there. On the scene. Close enough to see it, far enough away that he didn’t get—involved, or whatever you call it—in the Diachronic Shear. He must have followed me and Gráinne. He helped us up out of the ditch. He accompanied us back to the scene of the fire. Gráinne was losing it. Fugger puts an arm around her shoulder, draws her in, she’s sobbing on his shoulder. He looks up at me—there’s something very weird about his gaze—and says, ‘I believe it’s time for you to go back to where you belong. You know another witch who can do it. Go and reflect.’ And he nodded at the fire, then looked back at me in a very serious way. ‘I’ll see to her,’ he added, nodding at Gráinne, and then he turned his back on me. That was the last I saw of them.”

“‘Go back to where you belong . . . go and reflect . . .’” I repeated. “He knows.”

“They all know,” Erszebet spat. “All of the Fuckers. They always have. How do you think I have survived all these years without my own means? The Fuckers knew I was temporally indentured and saw to it that I remained alive and functional. They know everything.”

“Well, this particular one knew something, that’s for damn sure,” Tristan said. “In a weird way, I trust him to look after Gráinne, at least temporarily. It almost felt like Athanasius Fugger came to the Tearsheet to clean up my mess.”

“Our mess,” I corrected him.

“Les Holgate’s mess,” Erszebet said.

“Anyway, Gráinne’s part of that mess and Fugger’s overall vibe was like I got this, fool, get out of here. So I got out, with Rose’s help. I don’t know what Rose really thinks of this project either now, but she at least was calm enough to realize that there was no benefit to anyone, for me to remain. That’s why she Sent me back. I wouldn’t call it a working relationship yet.” Tristan sat back in his chair, wincing from the arm injury, and sighed. “Anyway, so let’s avoid 1601 London. Maybe go to early 1602 and see how Gráinne has recovered and if she’s still willing to work with us.”

Frank Oda had been gazing thoughtfully into space. “If Sir Edward Greylock’s existence has been obliterated across the multiverse,” he said, “that should mean the maple syrup boiler does not come into existence in any Strand.”

Erszebet considered this. “There is possibly some other Strand where another investor might be approached to fund it, but I would say you are most likely correct.”

“How long will it take you to calculate that likelihood?” Tristan asked Erszebet.

Immediately the standard look of contempt. “How can I tell you?” she said. “I have been tricked. Les Holgate stole my számológép.” And then a look of horror came over her face just as it occurred to myself and to the Odas: “Now we may never recover it.”

Tristan looked weary. “I missed that—what?”

“Your rude boss in Washington with the big table, he forced me into sending Les Holgate back to that DTAP by stealing my számológép, and now it is lost.” She was so distressed by this realization that she was enervated, and so seemed oddly calm. “This means I will never perform magic again.”

Tristan, exhausted, misread her meaning. “Are you saying you quit?”

She clearly had not been thinking that—until he said it. “I cannot work without my számológép,” she said harshly. “It is gone. Because of very bad people. So yes, I will quit. This is all hülyeség.” She rose from the table.

“Where are you going?” asked Tristan, not even turning to look at her. “Where do you intend to live and work and pass your time? You’re an immigrant without a legal identity and pretty much no marketable skills.”

She paused at the door. “Your boss is a terrible man,” she said, sounding on the verge of tears.

“He did a terrible thing,” Tristan agreed unhappily. “And a terrible price has been paid for it.”

“But your walking away right now does nothing for you,” I added.

“I cannot Send anyone without my számológép!” she said. “It is too dangerous!” For a moment, I could see the very-very-very old woman peering out from her stormy, youthful eyes.

“I might be able to help you with that,” said Frank Oda. “I was starting to get the hang of it. Give me a few days and I might have something to show you.”

Erszebet gave him a wearied, disbelieving look.

“Meanwhile,” I said, treading gently, “you do not need the számológép to Send me back to the 1640 Cambridge DTAP, and we are so very close to accomplishing this thing. Please do not abandon us quite yet. You will get your share of the money. We’ll find your passport in Les’s things. We’ll buy you new plane tickets to Hungary, if we must. You’ll never have to speak to Frink again.”

There was a long moment as she stood in the doorway, troubled. Then whatever was going on inside her resolved itself, and she nodded once, decisively. “All right,” she said. “I am not happy to be doing this, but I will help you complete the mission with the psalm book. But let us do it now, and be done with it already.”

I have already described the events of my DEDE enough times—for indeed, I had lived through them enough times!—that I need not recount them now in detail. I now knew what to expect so well, knew the nuances of all these people who thought that they were meeting me for the first time (although as usual Stephen Day, the printer, commented that there was something very familiar about me).

Having been clothed by Mary Fitch, hauled by Goodman Griggs, ferried by the handsome brothers, having conned Hezekiah Usher and Stephen Day, having avoided the lechery of the cooper . . . having done all of these things as efficiently as possible, I headed out on the Watertown Road in the soggy August air, sealed bucket under my arm, using the shovel as a walking stick . . . praying that this time, I would not see that fucking boiler-foundation.

I did not. The erasure of Sir Edward Greylock from Elizabethan London had likewise erased all his possible investments, including this one.

Heartened by this, I measured out the length of my arm away from the boulder, and dug the length of my arm in depth. The clam and oyster shells seemed like old friends as I unearthed them. I settled the bucket in the hole, shoveled all the soil back in, stamped it down with unwonted exuberance, and headed back, a final time, toward Cambridge.

And then as ever, returning through the town, across on the ferry, back along the oxcart path, to the home of Goody Fitch. A final conversation with her and her young daughter Elizabeth about working with us. And then home.

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

AUGUST 22

Temperature 89F. Dusty, dry. Barometer steady. Lettuce bolted. Kale ready to harvest but will be too bitter. Perennial herbs in fine form. Asters magnificent.

It finally happened today. In the former vegetable garden, which had been dug up so often earlier in the summer but lately lay unmolested while Tristan went to the London DTAP. We gathered around it. Mel dug a hole. Tristan has one arm in a homemade sling he had fashioned from two T-shirts tied together, and could not dig; Erszebet was in stockings and heels; Mel insisted Frank and I are age-exempted. So she dug it all herself. No doubt it gave her satisfaction, for all the times she had to bury it before.

And there it was. The barrel. Quite small, and very old, and soft around the edges where damp had found its way into the wood. But not rotted away. That cooper knew his business.

I have not been to a DTAP. I was not in residence during Erszebet’s first few weeks exploring her powers in the ODEC. Other than seeing her transform herself, this was my first concrete experience of magic. I have seen that plot dug up a dozen times, and it has never contained a small well-sealed barrel containing an unspeakably valuable seventeenth-century hymnal.

Until today.

Diachronicle

DAYS 391–436 (SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER, YEAR 1)

In which we sell a book

THE CATASTROPHIC DEDE FROM WHICH Les never returned, and the recovery of the Bay Psalm Book from Frank and Rebecca’s backyard, occurred at the beginning of the final week of August. Not until early October did we actually bank the money. In the meantime, General Frink continued to sign our paychecks, for our recovery of the book had saved our bacon politically. As with General Schneider, Les Holgate’s death was deeply and sincerely regretted, but apparently considered to be just one of those things that happened when patriots went into harm’s way for the defense of their homeland.

So, September was a month of unruffling all the legal feathers, getting the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed. Frink’s brain trust concocted a story to explain Les Holgate’s disappearance. It wasn’t a very convincing story, but it didn’t need to be; friends and family of people who worked in clandestine service knew that mysterious, unexplained death was something that happened.

There was a no-casket memorial service for him. This was attended by his family—including his uncle, Roger Blevins, who, like Tristan and myself, flew down from Boston. There was (obviously) no interment, but at the solemn reception afterward, in a bland conference room with recessed fluorescent lights, we were fortified with bad institutional coffee and Royal Dansk butter cookies. Tristan and I were there to represent the Cambridge office; the others had sent cards and flowers. I had hoped to avoid Blevins. Our turbulent past included two incidents of sexual harassment that would have sufficed to get any other man fired. Somehow, however, he cornered me at the hazelnut-flavored-cream dispenser, all smiles and smarm.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, refraining from direct eye contact.

“It’s terrible,” he said, slightly hurried, as if to get the formalities out of the way. “But I must say, Mel, it’s good to see you’ve landed on your feet. I don’t need to tell you how concerned I was when you left the department so suddenly. I was afraid your head was turned by, let’s say, non-professional considerations.” He gestured vaguely toward Tristan. Tristan pivoted and took a stride in our direction. I hadn’t told him about the harassment, but he knew how to read me, and he seemed to have an overdeveloped damsel-in-distress radar.

“I have no regrets,” I said, deciding to skip the creamer.

“Oh, neither do I,” Blevins said. “It’s a far better fit for you.” The insult didn’t need to be spelled out: You were going nowhere in academia.

“It’s an excellent fit,” I heard Tristan say from over my right shoulder. Blevins’s eyes rose to see him. Tristan rested his hand on my upper arm and squeezed gently. “This woman is the most talented linguist, translator, scholar, and researcher I’ve ever encountered. And a brilliant team player. Worth her weight in plutonium. Thank God we ended up with her.” Reader, I do believe I blushed the slightest bit with pleasure.

Blevins gave us both a forced smile, as if somebody were tightening his belt without his consent. “I’ve been a mere advisor until now, as you know, and my involvement is to be ramped up, or so I’m told,” he said, with a glance across the room at General Frink, who was offering his condolences to Les Holgate’s mother. It was a classic Blevins move—making it seem as though he was being drawn unwilling into the project, affecting a sort of patrician befuddlement.

Tristan’s hand almost imperceptibly tightened around my arm. “So I’m informed,” he said.

“I’ve been working with General Frink and Dr. Rudge for years on the precursors to DODO, always on the assumption it would peter out. Never saw myself as the cofounder of a new department. But life takes us to surprising places!”

Tristan’s grip now tightened considerably. Shut up, Stokes! “When I approached you, sir, you refused involvement in DODO,” he said.

“Not exactly, Colonel Lyons,” said Blevins, always happy to seem wiser than anyone else. “I was just making it clear that I wasn’t right for that particular role. Which”—and here he had the audacity to reach out and pat my left arm—“clearly was the right move, as it left a space open for our Mel here to fill. I knew my skills would be better applied elsewhere, as is proving to be correct.” He smiled. “I look forward to working with you. Just like old times, Mel.”

WE HAD MADE no preparations whatsoever for actually selling the book. We’d hardly even thought about it. Once it was in our hands we realized that this was going to be complicated. The mere existence of DODO was a highly classified secret, so we couldn’t very well sell it openly. To make a long and tediously legal story short, we ended up establishing a private trust to act as a front operation for DODO. It was called the East House Trust, and the story was that it was the legal owner and custodian of Rebecca and Frank’s house, with the two of them being its trustees. As such, the trust now became the legal owner of the book, which had, after all, been discovered on the property. Rebecca and Frank named Tristan and me officers of the trust, with authority to conduct certain business operations, and on that authority we opened an account at a bank in Harvard Square and rented a large safe deposit box where we placed the book for safekeeping while we entered into negotiations with various auction houses. Expert advice was that we would get the highest price in New York or London, and that we should wait for a few weeks so that the auction house could advertise the book and spread the word to collectors around the world.

So it was that in the first week of October, Tristan and I flew down to New York, he carrying the book in a locked metal briefcase. Sitting in the window seat, I gazed out at the fall colors sweeping down across the countryside from the north. The forests of Connecticut were nearing their peak in a glorious carpet of fiery red. I couldn’t help thinking of Goody Fitch, who had been dead for over three hundred years, but who to me was every bit as alive as Rebecca and Erszebet and the others. After all, with the assistance of Erszebet and the ODEC, I could go and visit her anytime I wished, and so, to me, she really was alive. How would she and the others in the colonial Boston DTAP look upon the changing of the leaves? Probably as a warning of bitter cold and hard times to come.

The auction house was on Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park, and not too far from the Met. The neighborhood was, of course, where the richest people lived, and had been living for a long time, and so as we walked into the establishment and conducted our business with the proprietors, I had the comforting sense that we had come to the right place.

Our copy of the Bay Psalm Book was the fourteenth and last item on a list of high-priced antiquities that were auctioned off over the course of a couple of hours. I’d grown up in a family that respected books and old things, but I’d never experienced anything remotely like this auction. Sitting there in my new skirt suit from Lord & Taylor and my mom’s best strand of pearls, watching the rich people and their representatives bid millions of dollars on various ancient artifacts, was a view into another world as strange to me as anything we could have visited through the ODEC.

The Bay Psalm Book had clearly attracted the attention of several well-heeled, highly motivated collectors, and so the bidding was intense. In moments it had blown through our expected price of five million dollars and shot upwards from there. Not until we got above ten million did bidders begin dropping out. It came down to a bidding duel between a collector from Los Angeles, who’d been sitting in the front row the whole time, and a man who had walked into the auction house and taken a seat at the back only moments before the bidding had started. In the end, the latter won, calmly nodding to the auctioneer whenever the man from LA raised his bid. The entire process had lasted less than a minute. The book sold for fourteen million dollars.

I assumed that payment, and the physical handover of the book, would be taken care of later, with the buyer and the auctioneer involving lawyers and bankers and so on. But after the auction finished and the room cleared out, the man who had bought the Bay Psalm Book walked up the aisle, pocketing a phone on which he had just finished making a call. He was dressed in an impeccable dove-grey suit, with a vest under the jacket that gave it a distinctive look—either retro or fashion-forward, I had no idea. He was in his fifties, well built, trim. He was groomed meticulously but a bit oddly, with sideburns that were longer than the norm. He wore rimless eyeglasses with tinted lenses. This detail had been noticeable when he had first walked in from the street. I’d guessed at the time that the lenses were those photochromic things that darken automatically in sunlight, and that they would lighten over the course of a few minutes indoors. But they had not changed; his eyes were still just barely visible behind a grey screen of tinted glass.

Tristan and I were standing in the aisle as this man walked by us. “If you would just give me a minute,” he said, on his way by. We were too surprised to answer, so he looked back over his shoulder with a slightly bemused expression. “I won’t be long.”

“Of course,” Tristan said, just to be polite. But I sensed he was a little uneasy. We were here under cover, pretending that DODO didn’t exist, that we were just representatives of the East House Trust. Our job was to hand the book to the auctioneer, watch what happened, and get out. Not to socialize. We had a flight back to Boston in a couple of hours, and a dinner date with our colleagues. But it would be bad manners to bolt out of the place, ignoring a man who had just handed over fourteen million dollars, and so Tristan and I drifted to the back of the room while the buyer conducted a discussion with the auction house staff. We looked out the windows at Central Park, which was glorious, approaching peak color. Strollers and bicyclists were out enjoying the crisp autumn day, and park employees were out in force, raking up leaves and fallen branches.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” said the buyer, as if reading my thoughts.

Tristan and I turned away from the window to see him approaching us. He was holding the Bay Psalm Book on which he had just spent fourteen million dollars. “My name is Frederick,” he announced. Then he casually tucked the book under his left arm, as if it were a paperback he’d just bought in an airport bookstore, and extended his right hand to shake.

“Mel,” I said, since it seemed we were operating on a first-name basis.

“Tristan,” said my companion. We shook hands with Frederick. Still keeping the book tucked under his arm, he pulled a nice pair of gloves out of the pockets of his overcoat and pulled them on while moving toward the exit. Tristan held the door open for him, and for me. A fortuitous gap in traffic enabled us to cross Fifth Avenue, and a few minutes later we were strolling in the park together.

“Where on earth did the East House Trust find this remarkable specimen?” Frederick asked. He moved briskly. Tristan kept up with ease; I had to step lively in my borrowed heels.

“Respecting the confidentiality of the trustees, I’ll treat that as a rhetorical question, Frederick,” Tristan answered.

Frederick slowed to a stop and turned toward us. “It’s new,” he remarked.

Both of us must have looked goggle-eyed. This amused him. “The trust, I mean. Only established a few weeks ago. Oh no, I wasn’t referring to the book. The book is obviously quite old!” He pulled it out from his armpit and opened it up, flipping curiously through a few pages.

“You are correct on both counts, Frederick,” I said. I found it strange to be looking at those pages, darkened and mottled with the passage of hundreds of years, which I had seen fresh from the printing press only a few weeks earlier. To be quite honest, it gave me a feeling of satisfaction that bordered on smugness. DODO had come together, as I’ve explained, in a crazily haphazard and chaotic fashion, with many twists and turns, and a few tragedies, that we’d never foreseen. But it had come together. I had traveled back in time, on many occasions. I had achieved my mission. Proof of that was right in front of me, in Frederick’s gloved hands, and in the enormously swollen bank account of the East House Trust.

Frederick turned his back on us, a bit rudely, and resumed walking. He forked off the main path onto a smaller trail that rambled off through a wooded section of the park. We followed him, kicking through fallen leaves. He said, “I suppose you’re going to tell me that this was discovered squirreled away in the attic or something, and once the East-Odas understood its value, they decided to form the trust in order to manage the financial ramifications. I suppose that story hangs together reasonably well.”

Lagging half a pace behind him, Tristan and I exchanged a glance. It was a bit difficult to hear him, because we were approaching an area where some groundskeepers were cleaning up fallen branches and leaves, tossing the debris into a gasoline-powered chipper that reduced everything to confetti and hurled it into the back of a truck. It was noisy. Frederick drew to a halt not far away from this machine and turned to face us again.

I understood. Or I thought I did. He wanted to speak to us privately, without fear of surveillance microphones picking up his words, and so he had moved to a noisy environment.

“Do you know anything about markets?” Frederick asked. “Given your professional backgrounds, Dr. Melisande Stokes and Lieutenant Colonel Tristan Lyons, I’m guessing not really. Oh, you’ve read the odd article in the business section of the New York Times, and, as educated persons, you have some general background on which to draw. I like to think I’m a bit more up to speed on such things, as being related to my profession.”

“What profession is that, Frederick?” Tristan asked.

Frederick had tucked the book under his arm again—a habit I found quite annoying given the rarity and fragility of that artifact. No book collector would have treated it so cavalierly. This had freed his hands. Turning slightly away, he reached up and removed his shaded eyeglasses, folded them up, and slid them carefully into the breast pocket of his overcoat. For a moment he squinted against the bright golden sunlight of the New York autumn, showing creases around his eyes. He blinked a couple of times and then turned to face us. “The sort of profession,” he answered, “that places me in a position to spend fourteen million dollars on a book.”

“Touché,” Tristan said. Then his face went slack with amazement. He was staring at Frederick. I turned to look in the same direction, but didn’t see anything to explain Tristan’s reaction. There was something odd about Frederick’s eyes, which took me a moment to process. They were asymmetrical. His left pupil was dilated to the point where the blue iris could scarcely be seen, but the right pupil was constricted, as you’d expect when outdoors in broad daylight.

“It’s simple,” Frederick said, “but it’s not. Supply, demand, individual transactions, such as the one we have engaged in today—child’s play, on the level of a sidewalk lemonade stand. But when billions of them are integrated over centuries—not so simple at all. The resulting flows of information, encoded as fluctuations in prices, shifts in markets, are far beyond the ability of any one human mind to comprehend. Which is why such things are best left in the hands of professionals with the requisite training and, if I may say so, lineage. Good day.”

Frederick turned his back on us and walked directly toward the wood chipper. The crew members, distracted by their work and rendered deaf by their hearing protectors, didn’t see him coming until he was just a few yards away. Then, sizing him up as a gentleman of a certain bearing, well attired, they straightened up and regarded him with a kind of wary curiosity. Frederick acknowledged them with a polite nod, then took a step closer to the roaring maw of the machine while reaching under his arm. Suddenly I knew what was about to happen, but I could not believe it.

Glancing back over his shoulder to make sure that Tristan and I were watching him, Frederick pulled the Bay Psalm Book out from under his arm and gave it an underhand toss into the chipper. The machine made a brief coughing sound—as did I—and we saw a spume of white confetti spray into the back of the truck.

Frederick walked away into the park.

“There goes one strange fucker,” Tristan remarked. “Let’s go home, Stokes.”

THE APOSTOLIC CAFÉ had expanded its offerings to include Euclid’s Grill—casual buffet by day, fine dining by night, served in the former nave. Tristan and I went directly there from the airport that evening. Waiting for us were Frank, Rebecca, Erszebet, and the newest member of our little band, Mortimer Shore. Mortimer was the historical swordfighter whom Rebecca had recruited from the park, and who had trained Tristan in the use of the backsword. He was a tall, rangy Californian with a mop of wavy dark hair and a bushy beard that as often as not framed an easy smile. He was double-majoring in metallurgy and computer science at MIT, but Tristan had talked him into putting his academic career on hold so that he could go full-time as DODO’s systems administrator and in-house swordfighting expert. These four had already grabbed the big booth in the corner of the restaurant, reserved under the name of the East House Trust. Resting in an ice bucket nearby was a magnum of champagne that looked expensive. To judge from the high fives and hugs with which they greeted us (yes, even from Rebecca), they were already well into it. We hadn’t told them the weird story about Frederick yet, and it wasn’t clear that we needed to.

Julie the Smart-ass Oboist (who always seemed to be our waitress) uncorked the magnum and came to our table to pour flutes of champagne for Tristan and me, and we went through several rounds of toasts. Erszebet, looking like she’d been born with a glass of bubbly in her perfectly manicured hand, was determined to teach everyone how to toast properly, in the traditional European style: you had to look each person straight in the eye as you clinked glasses with them. She was looking more cheerful than I’d have expected, given that her precious számológép was still locked up in some vault in the Trapezoid. I said as much to her. She allowed as how she was so very (grudgingly) chuffed by the success of the venture, and her role in it, that she had decided to delay her relocation to Hungary until we were able to replace her, by bringing forward through time more witches to work in the ODEC.

Tristan got to the bottom of his champagne glass pretty quickly. He still had a haunted look about him, as if he’d seen a ghost in Central Park. Not really the champagne type, he raised one hand and hailed the Smart-ass Oboist.

“What can I get you?” Julie asked.

“The usual,” he said, his attention already on the dinner menu.

She faltered, her face pinkening slightly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel like I should know what that is, but the memory escapes me . . .”

“Old Tearsheet Best Bitter!” he said, glancing up.

She frowned. “I don’t think we have that,” she said. “Is it an import?”

He gave her an Eagle Scout smile, but his tone was firm. “You know. I’ve been ordering it since this place opened. You definitely carry it.”

“All right,” she said with a skeptical smile, writing. “T-e-a-r-s-h-e-e-t? Bitter?”

“That’s right,” said Tristan.

We all perused the menu, until she returned a moment later with the announcement that they did not carry—and had never carried—Old Tearsheet Best Bitter. Tristan half stood up and looked incredulously over at the barman, who shrugged broadly, indicating he had never heard of that ale. That ale he’d been pouring Tristan for years.

Erszebet tugged at Tristan’s sleeve, pulling him back down into his seat. “This is the Diachronic Shear,” she said quietly. “There is no Tearsheet Brewery. After September of 1601, there never was.”

“That’s almost as big a tragedy as losing Les Holgate,” Tristan muttered under his breath.

IT WAS ODDLY intimate yet oddly formal, the six of us sitting around a proper dining table that was not littered with coffee cups, whiteboard markers, handheld devices, and notepads. That we were holding actual silverware, and napkins larger than a coaster. That we allowed a stranger to approach us and do something exquisitely mundane: serve us a meal that was not delivered in to-go containers or rewarmed in a microwave. That we ate slowly, savoring our food and relaxing in the hum of conversation around us, and feeling a part of the human race—or at least, that fraction of the human race that frequented the Apostolic Café.

As we ate, we reviewed our lessons learned about the use of time travel, all of which Erszebet felt the need to point out she was already aware of.

“Very well,” said Tristan, setting down his fork. “If you know everything, save us the time and aggravation and tell us what we don’t know yet.”

She made a tch’ing sound and shook her head. It is fair to say her condescension toward him was softening now—a little—into something more resembling big-sister exasperation. “What you do not know is almost everything. Quite literally. Except what my számológép could anticipate on any given Strand.”

“Clearly we’re still in the learning process there,” said Tristan. “We need to think in a little more depth about how to master the Strands.”

“You cannot master the Strands,” said Erszebet. “It is like a doctor with medicine. You can only practice. And you cannot do even that without the számológép.”

“It does seem to me there are discernible algorithms regarding the Strands,” said Frank Oda. He touched his wife’s wrist gently and she reached down to the floor for a bookbag, which she raised and handed to him.

“There is always, what is the term, wiggling room,” corrected Erszebet.

“It is a complexity theory problem—a branch of what mathematicians call graph theory,” said the professor.

“Graph? As in graph paper?” I asked.

“Math geeks use the term differently,” Oda said, “to mean structures of nodes connected by branches. Like a számológép, or Gráinne’s broom, or Rebecca’s heirloom.”

“Or the many forking Strands of history,” Rebecca said.

“Point being, a lot of progress has been made in recent decades around just these sorts of problems,” Oda said. Anticipating an objection from Erszebet, he added, “Which isn’t to say there’s no more ‘wiggling room,’ but we can tackle these questions now with well-tested algorithms, and graphical UIs.” He opened his bag and reached inside.

“We are better than any other humans at extrapolating from what the Strands tell us.”

“That’s true,” said Oda. From the bookbag, he withdrew an iPad. Rebecca took the bag from his lap and returned it to the floor as he set the iPad on the table before him. “However, computers can enhance and sharpen the abilities you already have. With all respect, even witches can benefit from an app.”

Erszebet looked at the iPad. “What is this?”

“It’s a present,” said Frank Oda. “I would not insult your history with the missing számológép by calling this a replacement számológép, so let us say it is your quipu.”

“That is a computer,” she argued. “It is a piece of machinery. It does not even have moving parts.”

Oda smiled at her, undisturbed by her attitude. “I took the premise of the quipu, and what you had shown me of your számológép, and I designed a program to do algorithmically what you do intuitively. Plus a graphical user interface to go with it!” He held up the iPad so that everyone could see it. On the screen was a branching diagram that might best be described as a mathematician’s attempt to reproduce the structure of those devices used by the witches. Call it a quipu, a broom, or a számológép if you will; they all had the same many-branched structure, and so did the thing that Oda-sensei had rendered on this screen. It was a constellation of small gleaming figures in various shapes and colors, like a Christmas tree; the structure that held it together was a snarl of fine colored lines. He dragged his finger on the glass, and the thing rotated around, showing that it was three-dimensional; he swiped, he zoomed, he tapped, and things happened. “It’s a work in progress,” he said shyly, “but with time and resources, we should be able to build it out.”

Erszebet looked profoundly insulted. “You are saying you can replace me with a machine?”

“Not you. Your számológép,” he said. “Except even better.”

Every so often, Frank said exactly the right thing. This was one of those times. Erszebet’s face softened. She reached out for the iPad. He handed it to her. She pulled it into her lap and gazed at it in fascination. Her fingers began to move across the glass, halting at first, but quickly gaining fluency.

“Dude, that’s sick,” said Mortimer reverently.

“That’s beautiful,” said Julie the Smart-ass Oboist, pausing at our table with a pitcher of red ale and a platter of onion rings. “That looks like my grandmother’s Yao Jìsuàn qì”—and before any of us could think to question her, she had moved on to deliver her burden to a table of bearded CS nerds scholars.

Oda-sensei went on: “If we’d had something like this in place, fully realized, for the Bay Psalm Book gambit, for instance, it might have predicted the possibility of the maple syrup boiler being there if we didn’t first go back to the earlier DTAP and deal with Sir Edward Greylock and his investment schemes. It might have predicted the danger of Christopher Marlowe being in the Tearsheet Brewery that day.”

“It would take forever to imagine all such possibilities!” I objected.

“It’s not just about imagining,” he replied. “We can integrate this with historical databases, and we can improve those databases as we go back in time and learned what actually happened.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We have all just had a very sobering lesson as to why nobody should rely on diachronic travel, ever, and instead you respond by saying, ‘Oh, let’s find a way to rely on diachronic travel.’”

“I’m pretty beat up,” Tristan admitted. “But I’ll bet the first person to survive an airplane crash, a hundred years ago, was pretty beat up too. You can limp away from the crashed airplane saying, ‘Man wasn’t meant to fly, I am done with this,’ or you can be saying, ‘I just learned how to do it better next time.’”

“What’s the point of it? Why even bother?” I asked. “We went to all of that effort, and people died, so we could make fourteen million bucks. We’d have been money ahead if we’d just founded a tech start-up instead.”

“There are other powers in this game too,” Tristan said, “who can do what we can do, and who most definitely think there’s a point. We can’t let them have a monopoly on this kind of force.”

“So it’s back to the Magic Gap argument.”

“In a word, yes.”

Erszebet had been oblivious to the conversation ever since she had seized the iPad, but now she broke in with a question for Frank. “So many different colors and shapes of little blobs! What is this one? The little white cloud with the question mark?”

“That’s where the system is telling us it needs more input.”

“Input?”

“Information about something that happened in the past.”

“It knows about known unknowns?” Tristan asked. I gave a little snort, thinking he was making a joke at poor Les Holgate’s expense, but it seemed he was serious.

“Yes,” Oda-sensei responded, “this is a case where we would have to send a DOer back to collect information.”

“Holy crap,” Tristan said. “How much computational power—”

“More than can fit in an iPad,” Frank answered, cutting him off. “This is linked to a small cluster running in the cloud. But it’s still just a toy. It needs to be scaled up radically. To be really useful, it will take an immense amount of computing power.” With an almost impish smile, he added, “We’re gonna need a bigger quipu.”