“Say it, Master Dean,” Malvolio Frost urged gently. “Say it now.”
“No,” gasped the ragged scholar, then screamed as the Provost’s men snapped another of his fingers. “I saw it. I know I did.”
“Oh dear,” Frost sighed, feeding another page of Dean’s notes onto the fire. “It’s going to be one of those evenings, is it?”
“I will not conceal the truth,” vowed Buckland Dean through gritted teeth. “It is the first principle of science.”
Another page of irreplaceable notes turned to ash. “Really?” the Provost asked searchingly. “I thought it was probably ‘Don’t get burned at the stake’.”
“Longitude 34 degrees 17 minutes, Latitude 28 degrees 33 minutes,” hissed the astronomer who was currently pinned to his chair by a pair of burly thugs. “In the shadow of the Harbinger Mountains, north of the Ocean of Storms. You may destroy the notes but you can’t destroy the facts.”
“Facts?” Frost mocked. “If you looked again – had we not shattered that viewing instrument you could never afford to replace – you would see nothing now, Master Dean. Nothing.”
“I don’t think the College of Cardinals can make an entire city vanish,” Dean taunted, somehow beyond that point where any more pain mattered.
“They wouldn’t need to. They would only need to make one man vanish,” the Provost answered. “But I am not here today serving the Lords Cardinal, nor the Dukes of Venice, nor any other lord spiritual or temporal.” He smiled thinly. “This is a family matter.”
“I don’t understand you,” the astronomer challenged. “Speak plainly if you have a point to make, or finish me if you’re going to.”
There was a tentative tap on the door, and it opened to reveal a frightened-looking serving wench with a tray full of flagons. “You… you called for beer,” she said in a timid voice.
“Ha!” snorted Frost, gesturing her in. “Torture with room service. I love Venice. So fortunate you lodged in this tavern bawdy-house, Master Dean. Now I don’t have to go thirsty listening to you priggish homilies on virtue as we destroy you.”
The girl handed the foaming mugs to the two men by the door and the pair holding down the scholar and laid the last in front of Malvolio Frost. He smiled at the dark-haired maid and dropped a silver Florentine penny into her cleavage. “Come back later,” he told her. “Hurting people always gives me an appetite.”
“What… what are you doing to him?” the horrified wench asked.
“Do you want to stay and find out?” Frost asked sinisterly. The girl practically fled out of the door.
“That one’s not for sale,” Dean told him with a pained smirk. “She chooses her own men.”
“I generally find that I get what I want,” Frost assured his captive. “One way or another. A trait from my father.”
“So you know who he is?”
Frost gestured and another finger snapped. “You don’t know what you’ve stumbled into, little man,” he told Dean. “You don’t know what you saw. You don’t know why it’s not there to be seen any more.”
“I saw structures,” the astronomer said. “Houses. Mansions on the moon. In a great bowl of rock, all tinged turquoise. I saw it clearly enough to map it.”
Frost touched the painstakingly-inked map to the candle-flame and held it in front of Dean as it burned. “The Turquoise Zone is not something humans should know about. It’s something built a long time ago by my people, and we like to keep it private.”
“What are you talking about? How could anyone fly to the moon? How could anyone get there to build houses?”
Frost grabbed Dean by the chin and held him in a grip that could easily have crushed his jaw. “My father was not a man such as we,” he boasted. “He was more, Abhuman, the last free member of his once-proud race. A lost wanderer who took comfort in my slut of a mother for a single night, but left her with child. When I tracked him down he taught me many things, and he gave me the greatest gift a human man could hold.”
“You’re a lunatic!” Dean scorned; but his curiosity forced him to ask, “What gift?”
Frost was distracted from answering by one of the guards at the door toppling over. The other one followed suit shortly after.
“What?” the Provost scowled, glaring at the two remaining thugs as they too wavered then fell. Then he glanced at his half-empty tankard. “The beer.”
“I’m afraid so,” said the priest in the doorway. He was dressed in the formal black of a Jesuit father, with a wide-brimmed hat and a silken stole. The man beside him wore the finest linen of a bravo-about-town, with a rapier at his side and a crossbow in his hand. The quarrel was pointed at Frost.
The Provost didn’t seem perturbed. “You have me at a disadvantage, sirs,” he said smoothly.
“I’m sure you don’t really think so,” answered the Reverend Dr Septimo Alarcon. “But let’s pretend we have. Let Master Dean come with us and we’ll have no unpleasantness.”
Buckland Dean looked from one to the other with confusion. He could understand why Sarah the maid might possibly have drugged these intruders’ drinks to try and save him, but he had no idea at all where two such mismatched strangers might come into it.
“I don’t think I can let Master Dean leave here alive,” Frost declared. His voice was still quiet and dangerous. “He knows more than he should. A little knowledge is…”
“A good start,” interrupted Florento de Clement. The famous cartographer had never yet baulked at going places people would prefer him no to map. “Step aside, Lord Provost. You are out of your jurisdiction here.”
“You’ll find my writ runs where I will,” threatened Frost. “And you’ll find that it takes more than a little belladonna in my drink to stop me.”
“Because of the Serious Matter in your head that makes you an Emissary of Order?” Father Septimo asked. “Yes, we know about your shining silver gift. We know about your father Maximess of the Abhumans. And we know better than to drug you with belladonna.”
Sarah of Dunboggie poked a cheerful head around the doorway. “Right. So we used opium distillate and psilocybin and ergot and all kinds of hallucigens,” she added. “They should be kicking in right about now.”
Frost lurched up from his chair but the pixies seemed to be holding him back.
Buckland Dean took the opportunity to pick up his ruined telescope and smash it over the back of the Provost’s head.
“That had to hurt,” flinched Florento de Clement.
“I think we should leave,” Sarah suggested, “before he, you know, wakes up and slaughters us all?”
“Sarah?” Dean puzzled. “You’re with these men?”
“Somebody had to keep a watch on you while you were making your grand discovery, now didn’t they?” she grinned back at him. “I volunteered.”
Then the astronomer was being whisked off, downstairs to the gondola that was waiting and to the coach on the nether shore ready to taken them away.
“I don’t understand,” he worried as they punted over the black starry waters. “Who are you? What’s that Turquoise Area? Who’s Frost?”
“All in due time, Master Dean,” Father Septimo promised. “First let’s get you to safety, get those fingers treated, and find you a new telescope. Then there’s a lot for you to learn.”
“And teach,” Florento added eagerly. “The Turquoise Area is usually shielded, but sometimes when the sun flares and shows spots then the city becomes visible for a moment. I suppose that’s why your visitor wanted to silence you and preserve whatever secrets his people left in that place. Contrary to your view there are beings able to travel to Luna if they know what they’re looking for.”
“What? How? Where are we going?” Dean demanded, more amazed than alarmed. The world had just become a fascinating new place.
“Later,” Sarah soothed him. “I promise. For now… welcome to the Improbable College.”
***
Pseudo-Historical Notes:
In pre-history, the Celestian Space Robots conducted experiments amongst the proto-humans of Earth as they had on many other planets. They abandoned their equipment on the Moon, in the area now known as the Turquoise Zone. Later the space-faring Skree Star Empire found the equipment, erected the city in the Turquoise Zone around it, and created the reclusive Abhumans. The Abhumans conquered the Turquoise Zone from their alien progenitors, and later warred with another of the Celestian’s experimental sub-species, the Deviates. They used the same equipment again to breed the Sea Monkeys, Racoon People, and others. The Celestians stepped in to prevent the escalating war from interfering with their experiments, imprisoning Deviates and Abhumans alike. The Abhumans were confined to their hidden city, the Great Relief (having long-since abandoned the Moon as a home), and placed in stasis in the Negtivity Zone, where they remained until the 1940s.
The only Abhuman known to have escaped confinement and stasis is Prince Maximess, psychic mad brother of the Abhumans’ ruler Black Blot. Malvolio Frost is clearly one of his by-blows. Abhuman-Human offspring breed true to either one or the other race, and Frost appears to have been born wholly human; except that his genetic heritage may have been passed to his own descendants. There is no evidence either way as to whether Jeremiah Frost, a.k.a. Balefire, is one of these, or whether the genetic inheritance he might have held contributed to his developing mastery of corpuscent fire.
One of the six fundamental elements of the Parodyverse is Serious Matter, the embodiment of Order. On Earth this Serious Matter has traditionally been implanted into Order’s champion, often under the command of an Emissary of Order, and invests its wielder with variant abilities around borrowing and duplicating others’ abilities. In most cases the wielder of the Serious Matter has been driven insane by the burden placed upon him or her, as with the Brain Butcher fought by the League of Improbable Gentlemen in Untold Tales #42. In the modern Parodyverse the Emissary of order is Gideon Book, the Word. The possessor of Serious Matter is Hatman, who has gained abilities unlike any of his predecessors and who does not follow the Word of Order.
It is not clear how Malvolio Frost gained the Serious Matter, but the rigid effects of Order upon his twisted mind would surely not react well to the hallucigenics entering his system from Sarah’s drugged beer.
The Improbable College appears here for the first time, a secret society of free-thinkers, adventurer-philosophers, and Renaissance interferers dedicated to fighting oppression of the imagination. Like many memorable teamings in the history of the Parodyverse, certain names and character-types keep coming up. Often this is because of the covert meddling of the Paradox Stranger of one of the many enigmatic men with the initials HV, but one can’t help feeling the narrative streams of the Parodyverse themselves are trying to bring together certain characters anyway.
Astute readers may recognise nomenclear links with modern protagonists Fin Fang Foom, Yo, De Brown Streak, and Dancer. De Clement in this story is undoubtedly white, unlike the modern Josh Clement, who may be a descendant or may simply derive his surname from a slave-owner some two centuries back (as Josh tells me his family actually did). Yo’s historical link may be via her host body, Pilar Alancon. I apologise to Yo for not being able to find the cedilla on my keyboard.
Finally, a word of thanks to AG, without whose persistent questions regarding a detail of a story he intends to write I wouldn’t have had to create the characters in this story nor had the sudden urge to commit them to narrative.
HH
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