Chapter Fourteen

THE FUGITIVE

While Iona was boarding the train to Haddonsburg, Kargas, Rael, and Frederick were enjoying Girls About Town at Mercia’s Oracle Playhouse. The theater was packed, the crowds were enthusiastic, and the play was good. Even so, Kargas felt uneasy as he watched the actors deliver their lines. Kargas had long ago mastered his emotions, so he wondered why he could not identify the reasons behind his anxiety. Maybe, he thought, he was just responding to the unfamiliar environment. After all, he was sitting in a room full of Valgorans. He was also concerned with Rael’s instability and his deteriorating relationship with Iona. As he mulled it over, however, he concluded that there was more to it than that. He had spent the previous week working on a new contingency plan in case they had to flee Mercia. Although he would never say so out loud, he admitted to himself that he was tired of moving from one strange environment to another. He had willingly taken on the responsibility of looking after the royals, but he had not realized what a burden it would be.

The three men left the theater as soon as the play ended and headed down the street in the gathering twilight toward the restaurant at which Kargas had secured reservations. Rael and Frederick were in front, discussing the actors’ performances, while Kargas followed behind. Scanning the crowded avenue in the eerie glow of the streetlights, Kargas noticed an unusual number of young, rough-looking fellows standing along the sidewalks and in doorways. They were not talking to each other, but were instead looking at an older gentleman perched on a brick step, who was in turn staring intently in Rael’s direction.

As they approached an intersection, Kargas suddenly realized that these men were moving toward them through the throng of people who had just left the play. Thinking quickly, he yelled, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” as loud as possible. This interrupted the crowd’s flow pattern as people stopped to look or turned to run. Either way, it interfered with the men rapidly approaching Rael. Kargas grabbed Rael’s arm and pulled him toward an office building entranceway. To his relief, the door was unlocked, so they rushed inside. Although Frederick was only several feet behind them, Kargas opted to shut and lock the door in his face. Waiting for him would have given their pursuers the opportunity to force their way through, but sacrificing him bought them time to escape. Kargas got one look at Frederick’s disappointed and panicked face before he turned away to join Rael.

As the men outside swarmed around Frederick and began battering the door, Kargas and Rael looked frantically around them for an escape route. Kargas suddenly noticed a stairwell and rushed toward it with Rael close behind him. They bounded the steps three at a time, climbing up all eight stories in just a few minutes. By the time they burst onto the roof, Kargas had formulated a plan to get them out of their predicament. Kargas knew that Mercia’s downtown buildings were so close together that many of the side streets were limited to foot traffic only. As a result, there was only six to eight feet between them. Moreover, they all tended to be of similar height. Kargas nodded at Rael, took a few steps back, and leaped over to the neighboring building. Rael quickly followed suit, landing with a thud on a pile of tarpaper. They crossed that building’s roof and repeated the process.

Kargas believed that reaching the next building would put them far enough from the initial ambush for them to descend to the first floor and escape undetected into city streets. He made the jump easily, then turned to wait for Rael. Rael got a running start, but failed to notice a protruding pipe near the building’s edge. He tripped over it and fell eight stories to the concrete below, killing him instantly.

When Kargas saw Rael stumble toward and then over the ledge, he rushed to the side of his building in time to watch the prince hit the pavement below with a silent thud. Kargas called Rael’s name, but knew from the pool of blood rapidly spreading around his body that it was too late. He saw people hurrying over to see what happened. Kargas turned and sat down with his back to the building ledge. The Office of Advisers had given him the difficult job of protecting the royal twins and shepherding them back to power because of his proven record of success in whatever mission he was assigned. He knew that the odds were long, but he had faced and overcome similar odds in Alleria’s service innumerable times in the course of his career. Indeed, he had always had confidence in his ability to mold events in such a way that benefited his cause. Now, though, he had not only failed, but had failed in the most spectacular and irretrievable fashion imaginable. That unfamiliar reality, as well as the accumulated stress of the past year, emotionally paralyzed him. He could not think or act, but simply sat by the ledge and looked out into space. Valgoran police found him there more than an hour later in a state of shock, took him into custody, and, days later, turned him over to the Rowowan Post Office.

Iona’s complacency and relief evaporated the instant she recognized Horace. Instead, she felt a wave of despair overwhelm her. It had turned out that she was not as smart as she thought. She tried to speak, but could not. Finally, she asked, “How did you find me?”

Horace shrugged. “Happenstance.”

When a shocked Iona failed to respond to his flippant remark, Horace continued. “My bosses recalled me from Kirkwell a few days ago. On my way back to Aurora I got orders to go to Mercia immediately. No explanation why. When I was getting off the ferry at Haddonsfield I saw you getting on. I turned around and returned to the boat. What are you doing here?”

“I ran away,” Iona said simply.

Horace cocked an eyebrow. “Doesn’t sound like you.”

“What happens now?” Iona asked.

“Well,” Horace responded, “that depends on you.”

“What do you mean?

Horace sat back in his seat. “Iona, if you had a choice, what would you do with your life? What’s your dream?”

Iona did not hesitate. “I want to live a normal life, a life like everyone else’s.”

“Okay,” said Horace. “What if I could arrange that?”

Iona turned defiant. “I won’t live in some Rowowan gilded cage.”

Horace shook his head. “No, you misunderstand me. What if I can arrange for you to disappear into Valgoran society so you can live your own life?”

Iona narrowed her eyes. “Why would you do that?”

“My bosses don’t want you captured because you might become a martyr,” Horace explained.

Iona looked suspiciously at Horace. “Continue.”

Horace put his hands together. “But understand that in order for this to work, you have to trust me. And if it does work, there will be no turning back. You can never reclaim your royalty. If you tried, no one would believe you.”

“What would I do?”

“What would you do?” an exasperated Horace mimicked. “Whatever you want. Live your life as you see fit.”

“How would you do it?” she asked.

Horace pursed his lips. “I need to figure that out. We’ll stay onboard the ferry until we get to Hollyoake. By then I will hopefully have a plan.” Horace looked at her. “Go back to sleep.”

With that, Horace leaned back in his seat and closed his one eye. Iona watched him suspiciously for several minutes. She did not know whether to trust him. After all, he was a Rowowan agent with an agenda. However, she figured that if he had wanted to capture her, he could have stayed out of sight and had some Rowowan goons follow and kidnap her as soon as they docked at Hollyoake. If the overlord was lying, she was hard put to guess why. For whatever reason, she had an ally. That made her feel better, and within minutes she fell back asleep.

The sun was up when Iona roused herself, grungy and sore from her night in the cramped seat. Horace was already awake, scribbling on a piece of paper. He informed her that the ferry had just reached Ludwig. They agreed to meet on the deck for breakfast after he retrieved a newspaper on the dock and she washed up in the restroom. When she sat down a short time later at the table he had procured for them, he wordlessly pushed the newspaper to her. Its headline announced Rael’s death at Mercia two evenings earlier.

When Iona had played out in her mind how her plan would end, she pictured Rael in a prison where he could no longer hurt anyone. She had not wanted or expected him to die. Although she did not get along with him, he was still her brother. Moreover, how could she be sure he was guilty of the crimes that prompted her to turn him in? Who was she to make that determination? She started crying until Horace warned her not to attract attention to them.

As she struggled to regain control over her emotions, she said, “This is my fault. This is all my fault.”

“How’s that?” Horace asked.

Iona explained that she had sent an anonymous letter pinpointing Rael’s location because she believed he had murdered Anna Mullins. Now, though, she was not so sure.

Horace nodded, “Well, now I understand why Rowowa was sending every agent and his brother to Mercia all of a sudden.”

Crying women had always disconcerted Horace, so he tried to keep Iona calm and focused. He pushed food toward her and asked, “Do you want to hear a long story that may make you feel better?”

“Sure.”

Horace put his elbows on the table and clasped his hands together. “At the end of the war I was a member of an interagency intelligence group called The Inquiry. Our job was to collect and analyze information about the Allerian empire to help Rowowa win the war. On the day Aurora surrendered, we moved into the city early to seize Alleria’s archives before you all could destroy them. We wanted all the information there. After our rangers cleared and secured the building, we entered to see what we could find of value. Our commanding officer was explaining his plan to us when the whole place blew up. Everyone there, all my friends, were killed except for me. The only reason why I survived was because I was standing in the back in a door frame by a stairwell. Even so, I lost my eye and was hospitalized for two weeks. It wasn’t much fun getting wounded the day the war ended.”

Horace tapped his eyepatch. “My eye often itches, even though it’s not there. I don’t know why that happens.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “when I got out of the hospital, my bosses assigned me to help our replacements in the Inquiry go through all the papers they had found in the rubble of the archives and elsewhere in Aurora. Our top priority was to use this information to locate you and your brother. The problem was that our replacements were green, naïve, and rather ignorant. They were discovering all this evidence that indicated that Rowowan officials at all levels had collaborated with or spied for Alleria during the war. They also had lots of contradictory information about your identity and whereabouts. See, someone, probably your adviser, had spent weeks, if not months, systematically seeding the files with disinformation. It was quite sophisticated – genius, actually. I recognized it because I was experienced, but these new guys were not. They turned it over to nonprofessionals who used it in their power struggles within the Rowowan government that are still going on. The upshot was that you couldn’t trust any material coming out of an Auroran archive or office file. It was all tainted.

“So while my new colleagues continued chasing their tails, I looked for information about the royal family that I knew was accurate. At the war’s start, Valgor’s ambassador was a man named…Kritchner.”

Iona interrupted. “Oh, Matthew Kritchner. Charming man.”

“Was he? Anyway, as ambassador Mr. Kritchner wrote some very detailed accounts about Allerian palace intrigue that he of course sent back to his superiors in Valgor. Turns out that Rowowan intelligence had bribed his courier to let them photograph these reports, so we had on file around one hundred pages of information that Kargas had not compromised. It’s too bad the Valgoran government recalled him soon after the war began; his reports were a goldmine. One of the big events during his tenure was the murder of a young servant girl on the palace grounds.”

“Brenda Furthermore,” said Iona.

“Yes, Brenda Furthermore. At first her murder caused quite a hubbub in palace circles, but within a few weeks it had disappeared as a topic of conversation. Palace officials acted as if it had never happened. Kritchner wasn’t stupid. He figured that someone high up was involved and that the Allerian government had covered it up. He got his hands on the official police autopsy and attached it to his report to his government, which of course fell into our hands. The autopsy stated that the perpetrator had raped and killed Miss Furthermore, and then posed her body on her back with her arms stretched high above her head and tied together with twine.

“I read through this material more out of curiosity than any belief that it would help locate you and your brother. However, when I mentioned the murder to a couple of my new colleagues, one remembered that he had encountered a similar incident during the war. He said that he was stationed along the Ethosian-Rowowan border after the Battle of Biscuit River. Some local Ethosian bigwig threw his lot behind Rowowa because some Allerian had raped and killed his daughter, but Allerian authorities refused to investigate the crime. The murderer had posed the body the same way as Brenda Furthermore’s. So I checked our records and discovered that the Allerian unit stationed there was the First Royal Division. Do you know who served in that outfit?”

“Rael,” Iona replied.

Horace tapped his nose. “Yes. But I knew that that could just be a coincidence. I therefore spent several weeks following the First Royal Division’s deployments throughout the war. Very tedious work plowing through newspapers, Rowowan intelligence material, Allerian army reports, and local government records. I found three more instances of girls raped, murdered, and posed with their arms above their heads and tied together with twine. As far as I can tell, Rael was the only person in each place at the time of the murder.”

“What about Frederick Fitzpatrick?” Iona asked.

“I didn’t find any record of him in all these places.”

Iona was both surprised and relieved by that specific piece of information.

“Finally,” continued Horace. “Just a few weeks before the Allerian surrender, another girl was murdered on palace grounds. This was right after Rael returned to Aurora.”

Horace let this information sink in. “It seemed clear to me that Rael was a multiple murderer. It was also clear that if he had killed before, he would probably do so again. All that I had to do was to wait until I got a report of a murder that matched those of the other girls, and then I could locate Rael’s hideout.”

Iona interrupted. “But you arrived at Kirkwell before Anna Mullins’s murder.”

Horace laughed. “Yeah, I did. My commanding officer told me that if I was going to wait around for something to happen, I may as well make myself useful in the meantime. There was a shortage of overlords, and the Ladle seemed like one place where you royals might seek sanctuary. So he sent me there. I identified Mr. Kargas as an adviser pretty quickly – he was hard to miss – but I figured he was just another down-on-his-luck former Allerian official. As soon as one of the dockworkers told me about Anna Mullins’s murder, though, I realized that you and Rael were on the island.”

Horace sipped his tea. “The point is that Rael was a bad guy. He raped and murdered girls. I know he was your brother, but I think that he got what he deserved. Don’t let his death trouble you. You did the right thing.”

Iona wanted to believe that, but it still weighed heavily on her conscience. At the same time, though, she was mesmerized with Horace’s revelations. She felt as if she was talking with someone who knew the answers to many of the world’s questions and was willing to divulge them to her for a limited time. She searched her mind for other enquiries with answers in which she was interested.

“Did you ever come across a Lieutenant Colonel Turnkey in the course of your research?”

“Sure,” Horace replied. “Eric Turnkey was your father’s military aide at some point early in the war.”

Iona searched her memory. There were always officers around her father who came and went with depressing regularity. She did not remember him, but why would she? However, if he worked for her father, then that meant that he had sent Turnkey to investigate Brenda Furthermore’s death and escort Royo to Lollister. It also meant that he had not only known that Rael was a murderer, but had also sought to eliminate Royo for suspecting Rael of the crime. As she processed this information, Iona felt her heart crumble.

“I think my father knew about Rael,” she said. “How could he have known and not done anything about it?”

“Beats me,” Horace responded. “But remember that people often sacrifice their morals in wartime for the sake of victory.”

Iona nodded unconvincingly. She had never been ashamed of her father until now. But she was more disappointed than angry. What more was there to say?

“Why did you send Royo away after you got the city council to reconsider its verdict?”

Horace put down his fork. “It wasn’t safe for him to stay there for several reasons. Someone would have discovered sooner or later that he had worked for us.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Horace looked surprised. “I assumed you knew. We recruited him a few months after he was captured.”

Iona could not believe it. No one seemed to be who he claimed to be. “Royo…was a Rowowan spy?”

“Well,” responded Horace. “I wouldn’t call him that. He didn’t have the temperament. Too honest. We put him on a Valgoran merchant ship and asked him to report information on the vessels he saw in the ports he visited. He did a fine job until he disappeared. Imagine my surprise when I learned that he had quite literally washed ashore at Kirkwell.”

“Isn’t that the very definition of a spy?” Iona asked.

Horace noticed Iona’s anger. “Yes and no, but I won’t argue semantics. I wouldn’t blame him if I were you. Remember that he was Ethosian, not Allerian. Also, he probably would have died had he remained in that prison camp.”

“I don’t care. He was a subject in our kingdom. Where is he now?” Iona asked.

“I don’t know. He disappeared again. He never even picked up the money I made selling his shop and its contents.”

Iona glumly poked at her food. “I don’t know what to think.”

Horace returned to the matter at hand. “Do you still want to live an ordinary life?”

Learning these secrets had reinforced Iona’s dislike of the life she had been living. “Yes.”

“And do you still want my help to do so?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Horace continued. “Here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to fake your death. But remember, once we do this, there’s no going back.”

Iona pursed her lips. “I understand. How do we do that?”

“I’m still working on that. Give me some time to think.”

When they reached Hollyoake later that afternoon, they disembarked and walked to a modest hotel in the western part of the city called the Palisade. Horace told her to check in under an assumed name and handed her a list of chores. He then left to run some errands and returned a couple hours later with a bag containing an inch wide, four feet long chain he had procured. He fetched her from her room and together they walked to a nearby diner to go over the plan’s specifics while they ate.

After he finished explaining the plot, a dubious Iona asked him, “Do you think this will work? Can’t we come up with something…more plausible.”

Horace did not take offense. “Well, we don’t have time to be thorough. You’re right to question the plan’s viability. But the thing is to remember that people usually believe what they want to believe, what’s in their immediate best interests to believe, not the truth. That’s our ace, but you’ll have to trust me to play it.”

Iona returned to her room after their late dinner and carefully followed Horace’s instructions, even though some of them made little sense to her. Most importantly, she composed a suicide note. Horace told her to make is short and vague. She wrote it out on top of a blank sheet of paper, then burned it in the fireplace, but left the blank sheet of paper on the desk. After a sleepless night, Iona woke early and exited the hotel, leaving almost everything behind except for the clothes on her back, money and a bag containing the chain. She walked directly to a boat rental shop on Lake Wagner. There she rented one of the small boats tourists often used for sightseeing. It reminded her of her trips with Royo. She made sure that the clerk saw the chain when she paid. She also insisted that he load a cinderblock onto the boat, claiming that she needed to keep a bad foot elevated. Paddling the quarter mile to a small tree-covered island in the middle of the lake exhausted her. Once there, she tied the chain around the cinderblock, but lacked the strength to lift it over the boat’s side into the water without tipping the vessel. After trying for several minutes, she gave up and laid down on the bottom of the boat so no one could see her and waited nervously for Horace to arrive.

While Iona was paddling her boat to the island in the middle of Lake Webster, Horace strolled into the nearest telegraph office to send a message informing army intelligence of his whereabouts and activities. He did not provide his bosses with the full report they would undoubtedly expect. Fortunately, he knew that the beancounters expected him to place frugality before thoroughness. His message was therefore brief and to the point: “Found lady. Trying to persuade her to return Aurora peacefully. At Palisade Hotel, Hollyoake.” After sending it, he walked down to Lake Webster, rented a boat of his own, and paddled out to the island. He was relieved first to see her boat, and then to see her laying down in it.

Iona opened her eyes when she felt Horace’s boat bump into hers. He ordered her to stay put while he lashed the boats together with the chain and heaved the cinderblock over the side. From there he paddled a half mile to a small hidden inlet surrounded by trees on the other side of the lake. After grounding his boat on the shore, he helped her reach terra firma.

Horace looked around to make sure that the coast was clear. He then retrieved a compass from his pocket and tossed it to her. “Walk due east for half a mile. You should come to a field near the train station. Take the first train you can and keep going.”

Standing on the shore with her eyes wide open, Iona reminded Horace of a scared little girl. He felt sorry for her and tried to reassure her. “Remember everything I told you. Make sure no one sees how much money you have and spend it wisely. Get an identity card as soon as possible. And above all, never admit to anyone who you are. Unless you admit it, there’s no way for anyone to prove your true identity.”

As Horace maneuvered the two boats away from the shore, Iona called out to him. “Thank you.”

Horace waved and awkwardly paddled the first boat away from the shore, with the second one falling in line behind it. He was about twenty feet from the shore when Iona suddenly called out to him. “If you ever see Royo again, tell him I hope he rots in hell!”

Horace watched Iona disappear into the woods before paddling the two connected boats around the lake for a couple hours as if he was looking for someone. He made sure that several fisherman saw him doing so. Finally, aching and exhausted, he brought the boats to the dock and checked them in, tossed the chain in the water, and walked to the Palisades Hotel. As he anticipated, post office intelligence had intercepted his telegram and sent agents to the scene. From a safe distance he watched Walter Lowenbraugh and his men enter and exit the building well before Valgoran police arrived. When he tired of the scene, he took a cab over to the Rowowan consulate to make his report.

A month after Iona disappeared, Horace walked into the old Allerian ministry of intelligence building in Aurora. Although the war had been over for well over a year, the structure was still pockmarked by the Rowowan artillery blasts from the long siege of the city. As soon as Alleria surrendered, Rowowan intelligence agencies moved in to occupy it, leading to an unseemly internecine struggle by the various bureaucrats for the best offices and suites. This hardly surprised Horace. Indeed, he possessed a field officer’s usual disdain for paper pushers. As far as he was concerned, these men were more interested in making problems go away than in solving them. Although he ordinarily abhorred this attitude, he now fervently hoped that it manifested itself in the meeting to which he had been summoned.

The meeting was a weekly one in which representatives from each of the dozen Rowowan intelligence agencies met to review, assess, and coordinate their various activities. It was called the secondary session because most of the agency heads sent their assistants instead of attending themselves. This gave them plausible deniability to disavow or ignore any decisions made in their absence. An appointee from the imperial council named Douglas Horn chaired the secondary session. He possessed little intelligence expertise and no formal power to compel anyone there to do anything, but his recommendations to the imperial council carried weight because it had the final say – at least in theory.

The top item on the secondary session agenda was Princess Iona’s fate. Walter Lowenbraugh and his post office boys had secured Iona’s hotel room well before Valgor police arrived, then fanned out across the city in search of witnesses to confirm or refute the imprint of the suicide note they discovered in her hotel room. Based on the interviews they conducted, Lowenbraugh quickly determined that Iona had taken her own life by attaching a cinderblock to her person and jumping into Lake Wagner. Although Valgoran divers had failed to locate her body, Lowenbraugh continued to hold to his theory more to discredit Horace and army intelligence than out of confidence in their evidence. Playing catch-up, army intelligence reached a similar conclusion. Both agencies had submitted reports to the secondary session, but its members wanted to hear Horace’s version of events.

Horace had addressed the secondary conference on several occasions during the war. Each one convinced him that the members heard only what they wanted to hear. He waited outside the ornate conference room for a half hour until an aide summoned him. Scanning the room, he saw Walter Lowenbraugh sitting alongside the deputy director of post office intelligence. After introductions, he stood before the podium at the head of the long table and briefly summarized the post office and army intelligence reports.

Horace took a deep breath and plunged into his remarks. “With all due respect to my post office and army intelligence colleagues, I disagree with their conclusions. In my opinion, Princess Iona did not commit suicide, but instead faked her death and escaped. She is probably hiding on either Valgor or in Alleria.”

Horace presented his evidence. He noted the absence of a suicide note, her positive demeanor during their time together, and, most importantly, the lack of a corpse. Although he understood the desire to declare her dead and move on to other matters, he believed that Rowowa needed to invest all the resources necessary to locate her and bring her to justice. If they did not, she might become a rallying point for Allerians who refused to accept the war’s outcome.

As soon as Horace finished, Lowenbraugh asked to make a few comments of his own. He rebutted Horace point by point. He noted that there was a suicide note, or anyhow evidence that she had written one. Although she may have appeared chipper during her discussions with Horace, that was not necessarily a reflection of her true mindset. And Horace probably misread her anyway. Finally, it was hardly surprising that Valgoran divers had failed to locate Iona’s body in Lake Wagner’s cold, murky, and deep waters. She had after all chained herself to a cinderblock before leaping in, and it was unclear exactly where on the lake she did so.

Lowenbraugh waited a moment to let everyone absorb his statement. “I hesitate to say this, but I believe it is for the good of the empire. I believe that Major Oxenstera is motivated more by personal than professional considerations. As we know, he failed to detect the royals on Kirkwell Island. His neglect of his duty enabled them to escape to Valgor in the first place. Then, after accidentally locating Princess Iona on the ferry, he botched his attempt to bring her back to Rowowa. His efforts to persuade this committee to fund an expensive campaign to find a woman who was almost certainly dead is merely a desperate effort to resurrect an unsuccessful career.” It was, he concluded, a sad commentary on the status of army intelligence.

Horace remained silent throughout Lowenbraugh’s skewering. When it was over, chairman Horn thanked Horace for his comments and excused him, but asked him to remain outside for a few minutes. Horace left, shut the door behind him, and sat on an uncomfortable chair in the lobby. He did not much like being humiliated by Lowenbraugh, but he reminded himself that the only thing hurt was his pride. It would be worth it if the committee stayed true to form. A half hour later, the secondary session recessed for lunch. None of the members looked at Horace as they filed by, except for Lowenbraugh, whose self-satisfied smile irked Horace.

A few minutes later Horace felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see his superior, Brigadier General Mark Embry. Embry was army intelligence’s secondary session representative, as well as his friend.

Embry stared at Horace. “Well, Horace, we let you have your say. However, the committee disagreed and decided to put the matter to rest. Mr. Horn will inform the imperial council that we believe that Princess Iona is dead.”

Embry hesitated for a moment, then continued. “You didn’t do your career any favors. Nor did your comments reflect well on army intelligence.”

Horace rolled his eyes. “I don’t have a career in army intelligence. You promised me that I could go home after this mission.”

Embry nodded. “I did. But I have one more assignment I want you to undertake.”

“I don’t want it,” Horace responded heatedly. “Give it to someone else. I’m going home.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Embry said, “just look into it. If you don’t want the mission, then you can go home. I’ll even give you the demobilization papers before you leave. You can fill in whatever date you want.”

Although Horace resented the Rowowan empire for putting him through the war, he also believed in doing his duty. He sighed. “Okay.”