Beldan. The viscount's guard Byers had been given a rare half-day off, and he was pedaling his bicycle east toward the film studio — a stretch of the city built in the architectural style of the Fourth Epoch.
The streets were loud with vendors and with the crowd of hopefuls who had descended on the city, each convinced that a single moment on screen would be their ticket to fame and a different life entirely. "Extra" was a word that had filtered out from the Viscount himself, and Byers thought it fit rather well.
The coal mines ran dry years ago, and Beldan hasn't seen anything like this since. Even at its peak, it never looked quite like this. We really did get lucky when the Viscount chose this place.
By the time that thought had run its course, he was nearly at his destination. The buildings around him had visibly changed — a jarring collision of architectural styles, left side nothing like the right. It grated on him for a moment, then he shook his head and put it out of his mind. He had somewhere to be.
The crew filming here was working on a historical drama called The Tudor Dynasty, and Byers had come to pay a visit — specifically, to visit a certain actress he had developed feelings for over the past few weeks. She wasn't a stunning beauty by any measure, and her role in the production was small, but something about their chance encounter had stuck with him in a way he couldn't quite reason away.
He locked his bicycle to a nearby lamppost in front of the prop-built "town," lifted a three-tiered lunchbox from the front basket, and headed toward the set.
The scene being filmed that afternoon involved a Tudor prince getting ambushed in a small town and meeting a common girl in the chaos. Apparently the story originated from a romance novel the Emperor Roselle had published under another name, originally set in a fictional dynasty. The screenwriter had grafted the Tudor name onto it for the prestige.
Byers was not impressed.
Since joining the guard detail and earning Captain Lonzell's recognition — and with it, a Sailor potion and his first steps as an extraordinary — he was no longer the out-of-work miner who knew nothing about any of this. Even from the guard's public records and the odd remark Captain Lonzell had let slip, he understood that the Fourth Epoch was a time when extraordinaries moved openly among ordinary people.
A prince of an empire in that era, even if he himself wasn't extraordinary, would have had Sequence 6 or even Sequence 5 guards around him at all times. The idea that a dozen ordinary cavalry could scatter his escort was completely absurd.
This script is nonsense.
Still internally complaining, he spotted his target: Miss Pasha, dressed in a maid's costume, her dark gold hair loose around her shoulders and her deep blue eyes wide with performed fear as the cavalry bore down on her "prince."
Byers watched her trembling performance and felt a swell of admiration. Her acting really is something — that terror looks completely real, more convincing than either of the leads. The director's wasting her in this role.
Then the set descended into actual chaos.
Something had spooked the horses. They broke from the riders' control and scattered in every direction, and several actors were thrown from their saddles and hit the ground hard.
Pasha isn't acting.
The thought had barely formed when one of the panicked horses screamed and charged straight at her.
Byers didn't stop to think. He sprinted toward it, launched himself into the air, and hit the horse square in the side with his shoulder and back.
The impact was loud. The horse, improbably, went airborne, spun, and came down hard on the ground, where it lay struggling to rise. Byers, his Sailor's balance doing exactly what it was supposed to, landed squarely on his feet in front of Pasha.
Beldan's constables arrived quickly, took stock of the situation, and had things under control within minutes.
Only then did Byers exhale. He turned to her. "Pasha — are you hurt?"
She was still shaking, badly, as though she hadn't registered that it was over.
He frowned. Shock, probably. He grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a firm shake — if he'd been less fond of her, a sharp slap might honestly have worked faster.
The shaking did the job well enough. After half a minute, her eyes came back into focus. Then her legs went out from under her and she collapsed into his arms.
Byers stood there, thoroughly uncertain what to do with his hands, and tried his best to be reassuring.
· · ·
Not far away, in the Collective Subconsciousness Sea beneath Beldan, Ebner was holding a creature up by the scruff of its neck — a thing with an elephant's trunk, a rhinoceros's eyes, an ox's tail, and a tiger's feet — and looking at it with tired exasperation.
"You've been in my territory for five minutes. What do you think you're doing?"
The creature was Chanyou the Dream Tapir, castle spirit of the Observer's Castle.
After receiving the mirror with its imprisoned high-Sequence Nightmare from Lilith, Ebner had used it to subdue the Dream Tapir without much difficulty, then relocated Rhine's old castle to Beldan — concealed behind a psychological invisibility ritual that kept ordinary eyes from finding it.
What he hadn't anticipated was that Chanyou would immediately take advantage of a moment's inattention to go and terrorize a Sleepless-pathway extraordinary living in the territory, nearly causing a serious accident in the process.
And to be clear: Pasha's terror had nothing to do with the runaway horse. The horse had panicked because the Dream Tapir had been rummaging through her mind.
"She's only a Sequence 9 Sleepless," Ebner said, after delivering a thorough scolding. "Why single her out?"
"Her bloodline smells like an old enemy of my previous master," Chanyou grumbled, in the language of the mind.
"Previous master — Rhine Karendia? Vicente Miranda? Or Dennett?"
Those three should have been the only versions of "Liu Bo" who could claim that title.
"Master Rhine. That woman carries the scent of Aucuses bloodline." Chanyou's expression shifted into something unmistakably human in its disgust.
Aucuses. The Eternal Blazing Sun?
Set aside for a moment that the Eternal Blazing Sun apparently has bloodline descendants — why would one of them end up scraping together a living as a bit-part actress in my territory?
And of all pathways to walk — the Sleepless?
(End of Chapter)