Augustus sat and crossed his legs in the eastern style, drawing his attention inward like a flower closing at night. The portal gave off the impression of having been hardly used recently, which made sense if the revolution had passed back and forth here.
Doubly so with superstitious peasant boys bringing down the old Russian order in fire and blood, however well-intentioned their leaders might be.
Anyone who could access such a portal to escape at that moment probably had, assuming that the other end went someplace useful.
Moscow would be about as bad as it could get.
He closed his eyes and reached out with his mind.
As expected, Marie-Rose had stepped sideways into this portal, though Augustus wasn’t entirely certain where they’d been on the previous jump. And it probably wouldn’t matter, as he doubted that the woman would be excited to help her attackers get home easily.
At least until everyone was certain who was whom in this action.
He listened to the aetherverse breathe beneath him. Indeed, they were in the hills not all that far from Irkutsk. Mongolia stretched out south of him, beyond the hills and the great lake.
Augustus touched the portal as carefully as he could, unwilling to open it and be pulled through when he might jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.
At the far end, he found that it did indeed connect to the vicinity of Moscow. Bad. Even Petrograd might have been an improvement, if only because there they would be so much closer to friendlier borders where he might cross unseen and thus escape.
Not from the heart of the new Soviet Union being born. Not when they might see him as a bourgeois tool of the state, which was not, let us all be honest quite here, that far from the truth, though he rarely liked to see it stated in such bald terms.
He was all for equality of opportunities, even though most societies threw up all manner of roadblocks against whichever minority made a useful scapegoat. It was the fear that they would end up with equality of condition that concerned him.
Utopianists always suggested a glorious, shining future, but Augustus had too much experience with the sorts of small-minded bureaucrats that ended up maintaining the system, with triplicate forms needing multiple stamps and approvals before anything could be done.
Anarchists at the local level were the result. Sabotage, from the French word for the wooden shoes occasionally jammed into early machines to destroy them.
Perhaps the Soviets could manage it, but Augustus suspected that, given the basis of primitive Russian culture upon which they intended to build, it would be a matter of attempting to make bricks without straw.
Even Marx himself had expected Britain or perhaps Germany to lead that global revolution.
Augustus closed the portal again before he sneezed, allergic to small-minded bureaucrats with clipboards.
He opened his eyes and rose from the dampness. The sun would dry everything, and his suit had been chosen for resistance to weather and wilderness.
“Thoughts?” Digby asked.
“Moscow at the other end,” Augustus said. “Unfortunate.”
“Thus, you need a dream thief to escape?” Digby asked, again revealing just how much that giant of a man had quietly absorbed.
Augustus shrugged.
“We might also attempt an overland trek, though that has at least as many risks,” Augustus replied. “The Russians hold Mongolia at present, as something of a bulwark against the Chinese attempting to expand to the north. Getting through them would be taxing for just the three of us. Adding in an unhelpful prisoner would make it nigh impossible.”
“What is to be done then?” Lady Claudette asked.
“For the nonce, we shall remove to the ruins of the manor house,” Augustus decided. “It will put her too far away from the portal to access it, one hopes, while we await her awakening. Thank you for neutralizing her as you did, Digby.”
“There is a line between hitting a woman and striking down a foe,” the big man nodded, emotions, as always, compact.
“Just so,” Augustus agreed.
He felt the same way, though he would rarely hesitate at that moment, where Digby might. Chivalry, and all that. A foolish notion, really, but the English had gotten it into their heads even worse than the French had. Or perhaps hadn’t had any sort of revolution in too long.
Mssr. Guillotine’s device had altered many equations in France.
Marie-Rose still somewhat unconscious, he and Digby took ends of the woman and carried her.
“What’s this?” Lady Claudette asked, bending to pick up a piece of cloth or some such that had fallen from the other woman’s pocket.
Perhaps it was the amount of effort he’d put out already, but Augustus could smell the esoteric power emanating from the thing.
“Captain, can you carry her?” he asked.
“Where to?”
Augustus looked around.
“The shadow of that wall, I think,” he said. “A bit of shelter from any wind, and a nice south facing when the sun warms everything. I shall be along momentarily.”
Digby took his charge and carried Marie-Rose to a mostly intact side of the manor house, while Augustus knelt and studied the thing without touching.
Then he drew the orichalcum blade and used that to turn it over. It opened flat like a kerchief, and Augustus saw the face of Perrin imprinted on it.
So, a mask. He’d read about them, but not had the chance to study such a thing up close.
Still, valuable. Augustus folded it back up and stuffed it into a pocket for now. It might be currently bound to the woman. If so, he would need to find a way to break that linkage at some point. Possibly by binding it himself, though that wasn’t really his sort of thing.
Still, if it had turned Marie-Rose Guérin into the sallow-faced Perrin, perhaps it had its uses. If nothing else, he might find a way to replicate the magic into another cloth, for whatever shenanigans he might be able to cause as someone else.
Augustus smiled and joined the good Captain.
He showed Digby the thing, rewarded by the big man’s flinch as he recognized the face.
“Indeed,” Augustus nodded.
Marie-Rose was stirring. Augustus felt the need for conversation, so he undid some of the things he’d done to scramble her mind. A mind migraine, as it were, but not one of the terrible ones some people were subject to.
Merely enough to keep her from being a problem until Augustus was ready to deal with her.
Like now.
He even removed her gag, though he left the blindfold intact.
“Marie-Rose, it’s Derlyth,” he said in that soothing voice one used when dealing with horses on the edge of spooking. “I know you can hear me. And that you are awake. Do you feel like talking?”
The string of profanities that emerged from her mouth was quite colorful, though not all that charming. And he’d been called worse in his time.
Deservedly so, but that was an entirely different story.
“I know that you are Mssr. Perrin, Marie-Rose,” Augustus continued. “I did not when he visited my room, so I tracked the man to you. And I have questions.”
“Why would I help you, Derlyth?” she growled, face almost turned toward him, but Augustus put that down to the sorts of mild concussion one might get on the receiving end of Digby’s mighty blow.
“Because I’m looking for a man,” Augustus said. “If you are not him, then all of this has been a dreadful mistake and misunderstanding on my part, for which I would apologize. On the other hand, if you know the man, then you might become my enemy.”
“Who?” she demanded bluntly.
“Jean-Marie Lachance,” he said, invoking a bit of fluff and circles around the woman to gauge her reaction.
“Never heard of him,” she said.
Pity then, that she was lying. The circles showed that as they lined up. But that still wasn’t damning. Many thieves might know one another. It was, to a great extent, a rather incestuous industry, with only a small group who might all know one another, though competitors still.
Augustus considered the mask that had concealed her as Perrin, wondering if there were others, or if that was the other face she showed the world, with whichever name might mislead the most.
“Are you Lachance?” he asked.
Her gasp was tiny but noted.
“No,” she lied a second time.
Augustus nodded, though she would not see it. He turned to his two friends and gestured them to walk with him. Far enough away that he could speak quietly and clearly.
“She lies,” he said simply when they were distant. “I had wrapped a small something around her to determine veracity. It would not work against someone who believed the lies they told, through confusion or mistake, but she knows the truth.”
“That woman is Jean-Marie Lachance?” Lady Claudette asked.
“The mask,” Digby noted. “It makes her appear as male. Even sound male. The man in the Derlyth’s room had a deeper voice. Raspier. I assume it changed her shape as well?”
“It did,” Augustus replied. “Not her height, though, so there are limits to the illusion. I presume that I would find Perrin’s suit in her effects, were I to go looking. Or at least one she wore, with the mask’s power disguising it in poorer shape.”
“Where does this leave us?” Lady Claudette asked. “I understand that the government wishes the woman stopped. And I have felt her power to infiltrate any place not sufficiently guarded, and then flee easily again. Can you stop a dream thief?”
“Not easily,” Augustus agreed. “Lock them in a cell that is thoroughly ensorceled against her managing to scribe a portal out of chicken fat and dirt. Or their own blood. Perhaps if we went about destroying all the stepping portals in Great Britain and forbade them under pain of Star Chamber punishment, but we all know that there are greater fools out there who would resist, and thus provide our little dream thief a way to come and go.”
“Does it become necessary to kill her in cold blood?” Digby asked now. “Simply execute her for the potential crimes?”
Augustus grimaced. At least the man understood his situation.
“She has threatened to do a thing,” he replied. “That is crime enough to lock her up. What Whitehall would do were she to fall into their power might be worse, but the woman is, according to everything I have been shown, an avowed enemy of any aristocratic class that still dreams of ruling.”
“The Americans seem to be doing well without such a thing,” Digby, of all people, noted dryly.
“Perhaps,” Augustus agreed. “Though I would point out that there have been two Presidents Adams, and a great many sons of politicians that seem to follow in their father’s footsteps. Mayhap not a ruling aristocracy, but the classism in the New World shares many of the same trappings.”
More words were cut off by Marie-Rose’s voice.
“Derlyth?” she called loudly.
Whether angry or scared, Augustus could not tell. Highly emotional, but that might be having confronted her foe, then having been chased halfway across the world without escaping him. Then left alone in the darkness of her blindfold.
He nodded to his companions and returned to his prisoner.
It would be necessary to make certain decisions shortly.