The Adventures of Deacon Coombs (44 page)

The booth was reserved weekly at this time for him; the staff was acquainted with his rigorous demands; every detail had to be perfectly executed. The manager often sat in anxiety until the weekly visitation had been successfully executed.

Outside, the first howls of a bitter autumn wind chucked strewn piles of leaves into the air. Inside, the restaurant was deserted except for the patron and a line of waitresses standing leisurely around a bar, awaiting their next set of orders, all standing in sight of the drawn curtain. This particular night had brought even more worries to the manager; he nervously sat wondering what had ever possessed him to assign a new hire to the client.

In the booth, daily news was displayed on the televiewer. After wiping his lips and smacking them as a reminder of the outstanding food that he had once again sampled, the man settled back to await the special after-dinner liquor that he knew would be diligently delivered. The silence, combined with a weariness of mind, sent him into a temporary trance that was fractured when the drapes were drawn aside. Through the cracks in his eyelids, he saw the waitress deliver his requested aperitif. She was not as appealing as the regular hostess, although her figure seemed full in the form-fitting gown she wore.

“Good evening,” he said, opening the conversation.

She went about her business, first disposing of the soiled tablecloth and then pouring a glass of the dew from the decanter into a small glass. She issued a curt answer: “Good evening, sir.”

“I haven’t seen you here before.”

“This is my first day, sir.”

She closed the drapes and abruptly left him to savor the taste of the rare beverage. This time, as the liquid touched his lips, he lapsed into a blackout, the pains of the day fleeing while he slept. The next thing he knew, he was peering across the table, where he saw her sitting there, the drapes closed. In one hand she held a glass; the other rested in her lap. He thought this gesture impertinent on her behalf.

“You might have at least asked permission to join me in conversation,” he said. “Although I value my privacy, tonight I might have granted permission.”

“I don’t require your permission tonight, Landrew. I simply seize the opportunity.”

“How dare you!” He opened his jacket and placed his hand inside his pocket to signal the guards. His device was missing. She responded by exposing a pistol which had lain in her lap. “So this is how it ends. I am to be assassinated in this secluded restaurant by an unknown female subversive. Lately, I have often dreamt of my death; that this would not be the site. Damn those guards!”

He tried to stand, but his legs were so heavy, so limp, so paralyzed that he felt glued to the seat.

“Listen to me, Landrew. You have been drugged. It is harmless and will last only for fifteen minutes, enough time for us to conclude our business. You will be unable to move. I suggest that you sit still and don’t fight the effect, as no harm will come to you.” He looked behind him to no avail. “There is no one to aid you. The servers here are drugged as well. Your bodyguards also welcomed a hot drink on a night such as this. Your only Owler has been disabled by my escort Owler.”

“What do you want of me?”

“My name is Lyanna. I am a friend and cohort of Deacon Coombs.”

Now Landrew perked up, raising his eyelids. “Your escort, then, must be Jim or Gem. How very effective.” Comfort now engulfed him.

“Jim is here. The Owlers and Deacon have journeyed to worlds beyond your intent to solve heinous crimes, as you asked Deacon to do. Their information has identified a sole powerful being whose powers of the mind are so mighty that he truly possesses a threat to all mankind.”

She paused to let him interrupt. “Schlegar forwarded Deacon’s report to me. I have read it and digested it. I absorbed every detail.”

“Deacon Coombs needs your support on the next phase of this mission. You must meet with him tomorrow evening at the library in the same room where you met before. It must be tomorrow night. Can you clear your calendar? Invite the members of the High Council who can attend. Can you make these arrangements?”

He hesitated and then spoke. “Affirmed. But why all this secrecy? I am a reasonable man.”

“Deacon could not risk a visit to your offices in daylight, nor contact by any other methods. No one knows that he is in Liberty City, and he wishes that fact to remain a secret. Evil forces are at work all around us, as you shall find out tomorrow evening. The plot against the Alliance runs through Nix, but also Jabu, Aralia, and many other areas of the Alliance, including Earth. It is deeply rooted. I will say this once.” She became loud and forceful. “Deacon requires the Council’s support, your personal dedicated allegiance, and your sage advice. We must leave for a faraway destination soon with Alliance support, but not before conversing with you.

“Order a metro car for Blenheim Park, out on the island, at twilight tomorrow. Do you know the park?” He nodded in affirmation. “Once there, order the car to park, and wait for us in front of the main fountain. Then deliver us to the chambers in the library, where you and Deacon and Rande and Schlegar and any other members of the Council who are presently in Liberty must hear what Deacon has discovered. I presume that Schlegar has already arrived?”

“Correct.”

“If you don’t comply, you endanger your political career, even your life, and all peoples of the Alliance. Please call the assembly, but do not risk telling anyone of Deacon’s presence at the meeting. It must remain a secret until the chamber is sealed.”

“You are the doctor from Brebouillis.”

“Yes, I am Schlegar’s assistant and I am Deacon’s ally.” She leaned out of the booth to signal the Owler.

Jim appeared before Landrew saying, “Villya, Landrew!” Jim sounded joyful.

“Sorry for the inconvenience, Landrew, but there are spies everywhere, as you shall learn tomorrow night. Jim and I will clear the tokens from the safe to emulate a robbery. You will confirm this, but with bogus descriptions.”

She rose to depart. “Oh, the thieves will drop the bag of tokens by accident just inside the front door. How unfortunate.” She then motioned to Jim and fled to the arms of her waiting lover.

Spiritual energy

Deacon emerged from the study the following day with messy hair, rumpled clothing, and a radiant, beaming smile. Lyanna, asleep on the sofa, turned, her arms outstretched, accepting his warmth. “I know that smile,” Lyanna said. “You have discovered something.”

“Probably, for I have been up most of the night studying the data we collected on Brebouillis and Aralia, especially the tapes of the
Sleigher
laid open to me by the traders’ union. You remember the incident of the imaginary bird on my flight from Nix?”

“So melodramatically did you reconstruct it that I still have goose bumps on my goose bumps.”

“That incident still puzzles me. Gem monitored space for thousands of miles without a detection of another ship or human. Yet I had the icy feeling that Urzel was so close that I could have touched him.”

“Urzel the spirit, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, maybe you didn’t have the proper equipment on the
Heritage
to identify the spirit?”

“Correct you are, sweetie. On the
Heritage
, I commanded Gem to fix the heavens and scan for a proximal ship containing Urzel. It showed a ship distant from us. You are correct, Lyanna. We should have been searching for spiritual energy patterns.”

A sorrow engulfed Deacon. “I felt Urzel in my mind. He was so close. I survived; Travers did not.”

“You are saying that Urzel surveyed you and decided consciously not to terminate you?”

“Lyanna, when you were young, what did you fear? I mean really fear?”

“Well, when I was five we lived in proximity to cadmium mines. Huge ore freighters landed twice a week in sight of our house. They were ugly planes, the fronts with huge beaks, reaching out to peck you.

“One day, I stood watching the empty yards when, to my surprise, I saw a ship hovering above me, preparing to land. It tilted landward, and I suddenly saw the beak extending to the spot where I stood. Well, I hopped on my scooter and fled to the safety of my bed, where I hid under the covers for an hour. To this day, those freighters scare me.”

Deacon sat on the floor, elbows bent, resting on his knees.

“Your turn,” Lyanna said.

“That’s not the issue here.”

“Wait! I just bared an inner fear to you. Call it bonding. Your turn, friend. Come on, just one juicy tidbit to use in my memoirs of you.”

He sighed, seemingly irritated, and said, “I remember the first time I invaded someone else’s mind. I was six. I didn’t realize what this was until an experience scared me.”

“Whose mind was it?”

“My schoolmaster’s.”

“And what was he thinking?”

“How he would like to beat the stuffing out of a little pompous fat kid in class whom he detested. The kid had a secure upbringing; everything the schoolmaster had wanted in life and never gotten.”

“Did you ever warn this child?”

“No. I didn’t have to.” He paused to recall. “It was me that he wanted to beat.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Deacon.”

“I overcame him. I outgrew him. I never gave him any cause to get angry at me. You feared the planes, and I feared the hulk Mr. Smithinks; I fear him even to this day.”

“You think that Urzel fears you, don’t you?”

“Yes. I felt it on the ship. I think… he may have reached out and killed Travers to warn me—to try to scare me off.”

“Deacon, please don’t think that you are responsible for Travers’s death.” She hugged him. When they released, he addressed her.

“Children do not strike out against those elements that pose a threat to them through fear. They hide, just as you did from the planes, as I did from Mr. Smithinks. Urzel might be insane, he may yield gargantuan powers, but he is still a child. He fears me, and I know it. I am just not sure how to use this to our advantage.”

“And you think that Nedilli, his mother, could hold a key to why he fears you?”

“I don’t know. But who knows a child better than its mother?”

“Why didn’t the
Heritage
and the
Sleigher
detect Urzel’s presence? Come on, Deacon. We’re soul mates. I’m in this mystery to help however I can. Share with me what’s on your mind.”

“Both ships, the
Heritage
, the
Sleigher
, failed to detect Urzel’s presence. There are gadgets to decipher everything imaginable on both ships—state-of-the-art technology to detect all forms of energy.”

“So why did they fail?”

“For the same reason that Urzel was not detected on the palace grounds on Aralia when he slew Como. For the same reason that Urzel was not detected when he invaded the private gardens of Geor. For the same reason that the
Heritage
did not detect the culprit as a bird. For the same reason that Urzel was not detected by systems on the
Sleigher
, even with Landrew’s manipulation of the data.”

“Which is?”

“I have come to a brave conclusion about Urzel. Either the equipment is faulty in all four cases I cited, or he exists for periods in another spiritual dimension.”

Lyanna’s eyes bulged. Frightened by this conclusion, she prepared to address her options. Instead, Deacon waved to her to be silent. “Hear me out. All our instruments are calibrated to the dimensions of space that we occupy, plus time. But this Urzel the spirit, the Medullan, is the first Medullan to leave Medulla. We have no comprehension of what these spirits are about. Their energy fields have been studied very little. It occurred to me that these energy fields may not be detected or measured by the calibration of our current instruments and technology.”

“So that’s why we journey to Medulla, not only to visit the mother of Urzel but to confirm your idea that the Medullans’ presence can go undetected by our technology.”

“The Medullans are going to have to cooperate.”

“This terror that you referenced to Chubby and me back in Ketapongo—you told me that you would reveal it to me in Liberty City.”

“It is real. Landrew will confirm it. You shall be present tonight for the unveiling.”

Although Lyanna pressed him for additional details, Deacon’s moonlike eyes stared into space for hours as he sat silently cogitating the crisis. Once in a while, he rubbed his forehead and then tried to comb his disheveled hair with his fingers. She was content to sit beside him, her arm around his shoulders, her head resting, her eyes closed.

Confrontation

Landrew conveniently dismissed himself from previous commitments that night, ordering his personal driver to Blenheim Park. As the vehicle sat in the shadows, Deacon strolled briskly in the chilly winds, Jim yards behind. He stopped to catch his breath and clap his hands, and a gust of wind almost drove him off balance as crisp brown leaves scurried by.

As he sought the shelter of a bench behind a row of high bushes, he anxiously looked to and fro. Finally, far down the path, amid the large, nude trees, Lyanna approached, signaling to him that the escort was solo. Deacon proceeded over the mound to the black metro car, opened the door, allowed Jim to enter first, and followed Lyanna and Quobit inside. Jim monitored their route carefully.

Deacon had rehearsed over and over what he would say to the audience that night. Lyanna nervously folded and unfolded a piece of paper as Jim conversed with the Owler driver about the sights of the Alliance that he had seen on this adventure. The driver was silent. After emerging from the underground, the metro car halted at the exact spot where Deacon had commenced his adventure weeks ago, in front of the History Archives Library.

In the grand hall, Deacon saw the twinkle in Quobit’s eyes that Deacon thought he himself must have had when he first entered. This time Lyanna and Quobit lagged behind to examine statues, admire watercolors, and identify busts. The door to the conference room was slightly ajar. Deacon felt déjà vu as Rande emerged into the hallway on cue, his face fraught with distress. They shook hands as Deacon introduced Lyanna and then Quobit. Then they entered to find Landrew and Schlegar at the head of the granite table, the other members on the sides. Lyanna ran immediately to Schlegar, who did her the privilege of introducing her to the group. Deacon presented Quobit to the audience.