Chapter 19

As Dax and Raleigh stood on the sidewalk looking at each other in startled amusement, Pringle’s door opened and who should step out but Angela Cross. She carried a basket on one arm. A linen table napkin covered the contents, but Raleigh didn’t have to guess at the contents. Angela could only be shopping for one thing at Pringle’s—the place where all the Guildsmen of the Martial Arts came to buy their weapons.

Angela frowned at Dax and Raleigh, one after the other. “What are you doing here?”

“We found Bishop.”

Angela’s eyes flew open. “You did? Is he alive and well?”

Raleigh grimaced. “He’s alive, but he’s not very well, and he won’t be either of those things if we don’t act fast. What did you find out in Kaldkirk?”

Angela inclined her head down the street. “Walk along with me. I’ve taken a room at a tavern down here. We can sit down and talk it over.”

Dax and Raleigh accompanied Angela back to her room, where she set her basket on the table. Raleigh sat down in a chair while Angela busied herself opening the windows and pushing back the curtains. She smiled and hummed to herself while she bustled around the room.

Raleigh waited until Angela took the napkin off her basket. She set out grenades, weapons of all sorts, and a few assorted sensors and measuring devices. “You should have brought more grenades with you, Raleigh. I hate to think of you coming to Hinterland unprepared. You, too, Dax.”

“We had plenty of grenades. The problem is Bishop never showed us how to program them. He was going to show me when we got home, but then he got…he got taken.”

Angela bent over her purchases. “Never mind. Tell me what you found out.”

“Bishop is being held in the basement of the Guild Elementary School. A very kind Eol’i, who is the School Master, let me talk to him. He’s in a pretty bad state, and he doesn’t want to believe he’ll be rescued. He’s hopeless. He’s so hopeless he didn’t even want to see me.”

Dax gasped. “You didn’t tell me that!”

“I didn’t want to upset you.”

Dax paced around the room. He glared out the window. “That’s it. We have to go get him.”

“How are you going to do that?” Angela asked.

“We have a couple possible strategies,” Raleigh told her. “There is the more direct route, which involves large numbers of Eol’i, not to mention Uk.”

“Don’t forget the Eochehxea,” Dax added.

Raleigh waved her hand. “At least with that way we know where he is and when. We’ll have him in sight. We don’t have to go hunting him or worrying about anybody finding us. We go in. We start fighting.”

Angela stared at her. “What’s the other option?”

“We know where they’re holding him. We find him and sneak him out.”

“Don’t forget the Eochehxea,” Dax chimed in again.

Raleigh wheeled around. “Will you be quiet about the Eochehxea? You’re making this a whole lot more complicated than it has to be.”

“You can’t forget the Eochehxea,” Angela told her. “No matter what you do, they’ll know. There is no sneak in and take him in Solaris. That’s for certain.”

“The second plan has a couple of other problems, too,” Dax remarked. “For a start, we don’t know how to find the Elementary School or how to get into the basement. None of us has Epistemological powers like Teif does.”

“You do,” Raleigh returned.

He colored and turned away. “I wouldn’t call it that.”

“Listen, babe,” Raleigh told him, “if you can transport us back to Solaris in the first place, you can get into that basement or anywhere else. You just think about it, and you’re there.”

“While you’re at it,” Angela added, “why don’t you just transport yourself to Bishop’s cell, put your arms around him, and transport him and you back to his house? Nothing is off the charts for you.”

Dax looked the other way. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Raleigh clapped her hands. “Anyways, that’s not relevant. You don’t have enough control over your power to do that—not yet, anyway. We have to find another way to get Bishop out. I favor the direct route myself, but Dax disagrees.”

“I don’t like any of it,” Angela muttered.

“Well, what did you find out?” Raleigh asked. “What did your friend say?”

“He didn’t say anything about Bishop, but he did say there’s a big move afoot to relocate the Guild of Martial Arts. I thought they would set up their new headquarters in Pernrith, since that’s been their stronghold for so long, but Chairman Kuntz has other plans.”

“Where do they plan to set it up?”

“Henleyville,” Angela replied.

Raleigh stood rooted to the spot. She opened her mouth and closed it again. “Henleyville? But that’s….”

Angela nodded. “I know. It’s in the other world. That’s what doesn’t make sense, but Chairman Kuntz was most emphatic about it.”

“Didn’t you say your friend is a slipper from the Guild? Maybe he made a mistake.”

“He wouldn’t repeat it to me if he wasn’t sure of his information. Anyways, after he told me, I was so shocked I came back here to confirm it. I checked with some of my old contacts in the Guild while you were gone. I even checked with Chairman Kuntz, and it’s all true.”

Raleigh blinked at her. “But that’s impossible. How did you do all that in the short time we’ve been gone?”

Now Angela took her turn to stare. “You’ve been gone for four weeks.”

Dax and Raleigh looked at each other. “It was only a few minutes, maybe an hour, tops.”

Angela shook her head. “Time operates differently in Solaris. When you disappeared in Kaldkirk, I came back here. I had no way of knowing when you were going to show up, so I just went on with my own investigation. There’s no mistake. The Guild of Martial Arts is moving to Henleyville.”

Raleigh sank into her chair. “This is impossible.”

“I know it’s farfetched.”

Raleigh rocketed to her feet again. She trod around the room while she thought out loud. “It’s beyond farfetched. Not only is it unheard of for a Guild of Hinterland to set up shop in a human town, but there are a lot of other forces converging on Henleyville at the same time.”

“Like what?”

Raleigh counted off on her fingers. “First of all, there’s a trainload of blue mussels heading for a factory in Henleyville. Do you know what that means? It means there’s a twen farming operation getting started there.”

Angela shuddered. “I don’t even want to know what’s second of all.”

Raleigh paced up to her. “Listen to me, Angela. Do you remember what you told me about Bishop getting obsessed with his father’s death, with him turning over every stone in the hunt for some sign it was foul play? He wrote a letter to the cab service that ran his father down. He was trying to find the driver, but the driver quit the service and retired to a farm in Henleyville.”

Angela whispered low. “What are you saying?”

“What if Bishop was right all along? What if his father really was murdered? Bishop said his father knew a lot of the Guild’s secrets. He thinks that’s why the Guild ran him down in the street. Then the cab driver runs away and hides in the same town where the Guild is setting up long-term shop. What if the driver was a Guildsman? What if the Guild orchestrated the whole accident? Now the cabal has stolen his father’s notebook to get information about the Elixir of Life. It’s all too coincidental. There must be a connection.”

“What are you going to do about it?” Dax asked. “We can’t break off now and go hunting after a murder twenty years old.”

“We can’t break off until we get Bishop back,” Raleigh replied, “but the first thing I’m going to do when we get back to Perdue is track down that driver. I’m convinced he holds the missing piece of the puzzle.”

“We’re no closer to getting Bishop back,” Angela pointed out, “and there’s another problem. The Guild plans to go up to Solaris and bring Bishop back. They plan to relocate him to their new headquarters, too. They’re going to discipline him as a member of the Guild.”

“When’s that?”

“Three days’ time,” Angela replied. “If you coordinate your attack for their visit, you could have a couple thousand Guildsmen on your backside, along with the Eol’i, the Uk, and of course the Eochehxea.”

Raleigh slapped her thigh. “That’s it. We have to move now. We have to get him back before they go to Solaris. I don’t suppose you know how the Guild is getting to and from, do you?”

“The Eochehxea transport them to and from,” Angela replied. “The Guildsmen don’t have to do anything. They’ve got the Eochehxea’s permission to come.”

Raleigh sliced her finger through the air. “Gather up your weapons. We’re going back.”

“You can’t just go in there guns blazing,” Dax repeated. “The Eochehxea will flatten you.”

She patted his shoulder. “You’ll deal with the Eochehxea, darling. Every time someone has threatened you, you tapped your power to defeat them. You’ll do the same thing now. Now stop arguing and come on. We don’t have a lot of time.”