Master of the Revels Read online

  Dedication

  DEDICATED TO

  THE BLESSED MEMORY OF

  MARC H. GLICK, ESQUIRE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Acknowledgments

  Cast of Characters

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Also by Nicole Galland

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  Handwritten in pencil on scrap paper

  (Mel, please scan and then destroy hard copy.)

  This memo provides foundational data for new recruits, assuming we can score some.

  My name is LTC Tristan Lyons, USA (Ret.), and I’m one of several ex-employees of DODO, the Department of Diachronic Operations, a black ops arm of the U.S. government that has been taken over and subverted by an enemy agent.

  DODO was formed five years ago with the mission of using time travel (diachronic operations) to benefit the United States. Its staff quickly expanded from only myself (operational command), Dr. Melisande Stokes (historical linguist), Dr. Frank Oda (physicist), and Erzsébet Karpathy (witch) . . . to a sprawling, bureaucracy-sogged government agency.

  Its resources have since been hijacked and misdirected by a rogue witch named Gráinne, with the aim of devolving human society to a medieval-era level of technology. Nobody at DODO realizes she’s doing this.

  Time travel is a form of magic that can only be performed by witches. (If you’re curious about the physics underlying the rest of this paragraph, Frank Oda would get a kick out of talking you through it.) In the present day, magic works only when performed in a dedicated chamber called an ODEC (created by Frank). Diachronic Operatives (DOers) are Sent back to a DTAP (Destination Time and Place). Their activities while on assignment create micro-adjustments intended to have a “butterfly effect” on historical events. (These activities are DEDEs—Direct Engagement for Diachronic Effect.) The butterfly effects result, in the twenty-first century, to advantage the United States geopolitically.

  In 1601 London, I recruited a smart and highly gifted Irish witch—Gráinne—who was invaluable in helping DODO grow our “witch network” through time and space. However, once she realized that after her era, magic was weakened and then completely disabled by advanced technology, she came forward in time with the secret intention of perverting DODO’s resources.

  Dr. Roger Blevins had since taken over operational command. Gráinne used magic to mentally enthrall Blevins to do whatever she wants. Mostly, what she wants is to Send DOers back to DTAPs to carry out DEDEs that will undermine the rise of technology, so that magic is never tamped out.

  She initially convinced Erzsébet to join her in this crusade; at the last moment, Erzsébet switched allegiances and warned me what was happening. After a clusterfuck shitshow beyond the scope of this memo to describe, the dust has very recently settled on this new reality:

  Myself; Melisande; Erzsébet; Frank Oda; his wife, Rebecca East-Oda; and Mortimer Shore (IT ace and Western martial arts expert) have been expunged from DODO and have set up a command center in Frank and Rebecca’s home. Our mission: to counter Gráinne’s efforts by following her DOers back in time ourselves (hopefully with the help of the recruits for whom I’m writing this) and neutralizing those DOers’ work.

  One final part to this equation. The immensely powerful, secretive Fugger banking family has come to understand that something is destabilizing history and that Gráinne is behind it. Saving the world is not their power alley, so they’ve done a few things to empower us to do it instead. With their influence, Frank and I obtained the necessary material to build an ODEC in the basement here, and DODO has been dissuaded from doing physical harm to any of us. Otherwise we’re essentially on our own.

  Welcome to our chaos.

  Prologue

  UNCLASSIFIED DOCUMENT, PINE-SOOT INK ON MULBERRY PAPER, STORED IN A LACQUERED BOX IN NAMONAKI VILLAGE, NEAR KYOTO, 1450 CE

  I am trembling almost too much to write this.

  At dawn, an elderly naked man appeared at our door, with cedar needles poking out of his hair. He greeted us with a wobbly bow and a confused smile, as if he were drunk, and he spoke in a dialect so strange and an accent so bizarre that we could hardly understand what he said. Because we live on the very edge of the village, we are accustomed to receiving travelers from Kyoto in need of shelter—but not of clothing.

  “He is from either elsewhere or else-when,” my wife whispered to me, eyes wide. “There is glamour all about him.”

  We invited him to sit on the veranda while he rinsed his feet and brushed the cedar needles from his hair. As he patted his feet dry, he looked up and about vaguely, studying the steep incline of the roof as if he were trying to calculate how fast it might shed its snow-load. “Wooden shingles,” he said to us, as if this were new information. “Not bamboo. That’s interesting, isn’t it? They must be very loosely attached to let the smoke escape.”

  “Of course,” I said, wondering why he considered this a topic for discussion.

  Once he entered, he gazed at every mundane detail of our home with an expression of dazed wonder: the sanded wooden runners of the sliding doors; the tatami mats around the sunken hearth; the kettle suspended from the ceiling; our small family shrine. Indifferent to his own nakedness, he made a circuit, glancing at us and smiling before returning his attention to whatever next fascinated him. I wondered if he was simple.

  “Clothes,” my wife hissed at me, and once I had fetched it, she presented him with my extra kimono. He accepted it with much bowing and thanks and apologies, seeming distracted and amused by the exchange, as if he were sleepwalking through a Noh play. Again I wondered about his mental state.

  However, once he was clothed, he turned his focused attention to us, his hosts. His accent and dialect remained a challenge to understand, but now there was a keen intelligence in his eyes. He introduced himself as Oda.

  He had chosen our home, he told us, because he had ascertained that my wife is a witch, and he requested her services to be Homed, by magic, to where he had come from, once he had completed the task that brought him to our village. Seiko was astonished by this situation, for she has never before received an else-when traveler, but of course she agreed.

  He told us he had come to examine a painted wooden box in the village shrine. We knew which box he spoke of. Legend says it was brought to the shrine centuries ago by a terrifying sea goddess with huge eyes and hair like fire. Sometimes she is said to be a tsukimono-suji with a fox familiar, which explains her strange hair. We asked him questions: What was in the box? What did he want to do with it? And why?

  “Pardon, but it is not allowed for me to tell you anything about that,” he said.

  My wife said, “Then you are surely from the future,” and he bowed.

  We offered him tea and rice, which he accepted, but only to perform the correct etiquette of a guest, for he now seemed impatient to begin his errand. We explained that many in the village visit the shrine each morning, and therefore we should wait until they had made their offerings and departed to their labors. Reluctantly he agreed, and we passed the time in conversation of a most uncommon sort. For example, he did not ask questions about our karesansui garden beside the river, but rather queried us on the engineering details of the dams upstream.

  When we determined the morning crowd had dispersed, we offered him a pair of sandals and walked with him to the shrine. This is in a small clearing surrounded by cedars, a stone’s throw from the steep riverbank. We entered through the torii and paused at the outdoor basin to rinse our h
ands and mouths. Oda-san studied us from the corner of his eye, uncertain of the local customs. We had timed our arrival well: only the priest was present, and as we approached, he headed to the inner sanctum, to attend to the gods. So we had the shrine to ourselves.

  “That is the box,” said Oda-san happily, pointing to a painted wooden cube on the altar. It was about the size of a human head and off to the side of the more usual offerings and incense. Although it is taboo for us to approach even the outer altar, there is no physical barrier that prevents it, and Oda-san began to walk toward it. We hung back, fearing to trespass.

  Suddenly, out of the cedars, as if she had risen straight up from the depths of the river, an astonishing woman appeared and began to stride right toward us. This was surely the tsukimono-suji herself, original owner of the box, for she had unruly hair the color of a sunset and large pale eyes and skin of an unhealthy pinkish hue; she wore her kimono without an obi, just tied loosely around her waist, barely covering her breasts. She veered directly toward Oda-san, and his eyes widened as if in recognition.

  He stopped and turned to face her. He took a deep breath, and then he nodded a little bit and adopted an air almost of resignation. He spoke to her softly, in a most bizarre language. It had no beauty to it, his language. He sounded like he was having a seizure. She laughed at him and responded in the same tongue, although from her it was more emphatic—both louder and more singsong.

  She bore down on him with a fierceness as if she would strike him. I rushed to step between them, but she stepped around me and grabbed Oda-san by both shoulders, their faces only inches apart. She stared at him with those scary pale eyes, like the eyes of a ghost or a demon.

  And she began to speak.

  It was in their language, so I could not understand it. But the words had a simplistic, childlike pulse to them—da-da da-da da-da da-da—and the lines rhymed, as is the case with my wife’s spells sometimes. I looked to Seiko, questioning.

  “This one is a witch,” she whispered. “I do not understand her language but I feel something . . .” She looked down at her hands and wiggled her fingers as if they were stiff. “My thumbs are prickling. Whatever the language is she speaks, she is casting a very wicked spell. We must get him away now. Now! Grab him away from her!” With growing panic on her face, she turned and ran back the way we had come, her shoes clattering on the stone walkway.

  I know better than to grab hold of a witch while she is casting a spell, but I slapped this one’s arm to make her release Oda-san. She did not release him—in fact, she gripped tighter, and her words became louder. He was staring back into those freakish eyes with a look of confused disappointment on his face. The sound of her language was so guttural and strange that I cannot write even an approximation of the words; we have no characters for such sounds.

  “Stop it, witch!” I shouted, and struck her hard across the cheek.

  Or tried to. She released the grip of her right hand on Oda-san long enough to backhand me across the face—incredibly hard, as hard as a boxer might, knocking me onto my ass so hard I tumbled away and ended up two arm-spans distant. The spell she recites must give her an unnatural power, I thought, and I began to rise.

  Before I was even to my knees, the effect of her spell on Oda-san had begun to take place. It was horrifying, beyond words. She was summoning a force field around him, as if he were enclosed in an egg. The air shimmered vividly and wildly about one handspan wide all around him, like a thousand dragonflies snagged in a net together. Then the trembling air seemed to implode—and penetrated him in a dazzling white flash. His entire body became translucent, wobbling and glimmering as if transformed into some otherworldly substance. Oda-san shouted—it sounded more like shock than pain—and then his voice was cut off.

  I felt the charge in the air as if lightning had struck inches from my head, and the smell of singed flesh filled my nostrils and made my gorge rise. The egg-shaped clap of lightning briefly bulged out, and the very air seemed to be sucked toward it. On reflex, I dropped to the ground and rolled farther away from it, so that I would not be sucked into it too.

  Then there was a deafening boom, as if an entire roll of thunder had been compressed into a snap. It made my bones and viscera shudder.

  Then all was still.

  And Oda-san was gone. There was only a small dusting of ash on the soft earth and a puff of smoke that wafted on the gentle breeze.

  I rose, gaping in amazement at the witch. She grinned at me, laughing, her teeth large and ugly, everything about her strange and terrible. “Sayonara, Oda-sensei,” she said with satisfaction. She turned and strode off through the cedars with a gait like a samurai warrior.

  I rushed to the ash on the ground. In texture, it resembled cremated remains, but there was very little of it, as if the body had mostly atomized from the force of whatever had claimed him.

  My wife has described to me the unutterably horrific event known as okaji sendan. When magic causes something incorrect to happen in the cosmos, the cosmos must resort to violence to contain the incorrectness. But in all those descriptions, the violence is explosive and large—an entire village will go up in flames, or a mountain will transform into a volcano. In contrast, the spell this witch had uttered was controlled. It was as if she had funneled all the fury of okaji into one carefully restrained pocket of space-time, where Oda-san had stood . . . and she released it all on him.

  Once the witch was out of sight in the trees, Seiko returned at a run. She bent over Oda-san’s ashes, sobbing.

  “Dear one, do not weep. This is a tragedy, but we did not know the man.”

  “I do not weep for him,” she said through her tears. “I weep for all of us.”

  Part

  One

  LETTER FROM

  GRÁINNE to CARA SAMUELS

  County Dublin, Vernal Equinox 1606

  Auspiciousness and prosperity to you, my new friend!

  Sure ’twas an unexpected blessing to meet you at the New Year’s festivities. Since I told you then that I’d a story for you, I reckoned I’d better get to telling it fast. ’Tis a brilliant presentation I’ll be writing here, with tales of my craftiness sure to sway you away from your poxy masters and towards my noble cause. Our brief acquaintancy has already demonstrated to me that you are admirable resourceful.

  First, though, to speak true: ’twould be much less of a nuisance to simply be telling you all this directly, in that future time we’re both residing in, rather than to go about this peculiar manner of communicating. But just now, I cannot write nor speak in the twenty-first century without surveillance. Sure, even if I master the choreography of fingers on a keyboard, there be no way to compose without the Blevins getting at it, and I can’t be having him see what I do write, or he’ll be after preventing my righteous crusade! Even if I write in the sensible manner of pen and parchment, still I risk him and the rest of them at DODO frisking through my things and finding this.

  And as for speaking face-to-face, like normal folk in normal times . . . your masters plainly did not like to see us murmuring together at the New Year’s gala. Suspicious they’ll find it, if I wander through a park with you for several hours. This story cannot be quickly told.

  Thus the only place ’tis safe to be pleading my case to you is here and now, in my native Ireland, centuries before your birth. I’ve found a place to tuck this proposition when I’ve finished it. ’Tis a secret place where it will sit and wait out the centuries, until I send you to find it hidden in a later era.

  So. To the situation. I must be telling you the truth of it all. I wager my own entrails that your corporate overlords have fed you lies about some things. Consider this to be your education in the history of your birthright as a witch.

  I wager you already know that magic was snuffed out from this world in the year of our Lord 1851, due entirely to the simple lamentable fact that certain kinds of human technology dampened magic’s fire—the worst offender being the photography. In particular, one
photograph of the solar eclipse taken in Prussia in 1851 was the precise event that quashed magical abilities entirely, for reasons I may explain another time. For now, ’tis just for you to know that from 1851 until some five years past, there was no magic anyplace upon the planet. Generations of witches, such as yourself, did not even know themselves to be witches, for magic was not possible.

  Then a couple of genius fellows, name of Professor Frank Oda and some-military-title Tristan Lyons, with their helpmeets and others, did sort out how to go about making a peculiar wee closet, called an ODEC, within which magic could be performed by witches in the twenty-first century. The military and suchlike of the United States took hold of this ODEC project and in very little time developed it into a monstrosity called the Department of Diachronic Operations (DODO), an utterly appalling organisation where, as you know, I “work.” Of course you know a bit about it, but there be some things you mightn’t’ve heard yet:

  First, the overlords of DODO, especially Dr. Roger Blevins and Lieutenant General Octavian Frink, do dictate all the magic that may ever be done in those poxy wee ODECs (of which they now have several). Second, their bidding is almost entirely “diachronic operations”—time travel (hence their eejit name). ’Tis a distasteful and fierce-unstable magic that witches ourselves have never taken to. Third, and worst: DODO uses time travel only ever to Send DOers (Diachronic Operatives) back to specific DTAPs (Destination Time and Place), and never to be learning things or adventuring—oh, no. ’Tis for the sole, ignoble, dull-as-dust purpose of fidgeting with past events to shore up America’s geopolitical advantage on the world stage in the future. ’Tis all magic is to them: a technical aid in their military-industrial complexion! Sure everything about this is as abhorrent to me as fucking the Archbishop of York. It should also be abhorrent to you, friend Cara.

  Now, you may be wondering, how would an Irish witch born in the sixteenth century come to know or care about any of this? ’Tis a strange and wondrous tale, and here ’tis in brief: