so,” said Erszebet, radiant and fresh-faced, her tone sparkling, “I have shown your master a magic trick.” She walked out into the room, leaving the coast clear for us to see inside. And what we saw—or thought we saw—was the motionless body of General Schneider, crumpled on the floor.
“General Schneider!” Tristan exclaimed, and stepped in through the door. There wasn’t enough room in there for me to join him, so I contented myself with sticking my head in for a look.
Schneider wasn’t actually there. Collapsed on the floor, apparently empty, was the snowmobile suit. An empty oxygen mask was still lodged in its hood. “Where is he?” Tristan demanded, horrified.
“Did you turn him into a newt?” I asked.
She examined her fingernails. “Oh, no! It takes me all day to pull that off.”
Tristan picked up the suit and held it upright; one of the legs fell straight down as if weighted with something, and clanked onto the floor of the ODEC.
“Give it to me,” I suggested, and reached through the doorway. He thrust the shoulders of the suit at me. I grabbed them and pulled the whole thing out through the door and into the room, where I laid it out flat on the floor. Left behind in the ODEC was an articulated contraption consisting of a stump cup, some straps, and a carbon-fiber strut terminating in a man’s dress shoe. Schneider’s artificial leg.
I unzipped the front of the snowmobile suit with some care. I had an idea as to what had happened. Somewhere inside of this bulky garment was a living, breathing newt. I needed to find it, catch it, and return it safely to the ODEC where Erszebet could reverse the spell. No harm done. Point made.
Inside the suit was an empty suit of clothes—shirt buttoned, tie knotted, sleeves of the shirt fitted into the sleeves of the jacket. But no person. Tristan had emerged from the ODEC, carrying the artificial leg in one hand and Schneider’s remaining shoe—sock dangling from it—in the other.
I grabbed the oxygen mask and pulled it carefully away from the snowsuit’s hood. A little gleaming cascade of glinting objects fell out of it, followed by a pair of fake teeth held together by a bridge of pink plastic. That gave me a clue as to the little gleaming things. They were tiny bits of curiously shaped metal.
They were fillings from Schneider’s teeth.
Groping carefully through Schneider’s jacket and shirt, Tristan’s hand found something. He unbuttoned the garments and spread them apart. Exposed in the middle, resting neatly on the back of the white shirt, was a small smooth object with a couple of wires coming out of it.
“That,” Tristan said, “is a pacemaker.”
I couldn’t even speak properly, so I held out my hand with the fillings and the false teeth for Tristan to look at.
Tristan was squatting on his haunches. He looked at these exhibits for a while, thoughtfully. Acting on some kind of military-guy autopilot, he rummaged in Schneider’s clothes until he came out with a small pistol, which Schneider had evidently been packing in a holster on the back of his belt. Tristan ejected its magazine and then worked the slide once to eject a round. Having rendered the weapon safe, he set it back down again, then climbed to his feet and turned to face Erszebet.
“What have you done to him?” Tristan demanded, very calm.
“Google it,” said Erszebet breezily.
“Google what?”
She put her index finger to her chin and looked up at the ceiling. “Mmm, Hungary, Nagybörzsöny, 1564, one-legged man, naked. Perhaps taltos. You might discover something interesting.”
“Stokes!” said Tristan irritably. I grabbed my laptop, brought up Google, and typed in the words. Nothing useful came up.
“Well?” demanded Tristan. I shook my head.
“Try refreshing,” said Erszebet. “Perhaps it takes a moment for it to catch up.”
“Catch up with what?” Tristan demanded.
“With me,” she said, and began humming Liszt to herself.
I opened another window and tried Googling the Hungarian words she’d used. Nagybörzsöny turned out to be the name of a village. Taltos I already knew, it meant something like “warlock.”
I went back to the first window and clicked the refresh button. Tristan came around to my side of the table and stared over my shoulder. Erszebet preened. I refreshed the page a second time.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Try variations,” she suggested, turning away as if in a reverie. “Amputee. Gibberish.”
“Where is he?” Tristan demanded again.
I refreshed the page again. One search result came up.
“There’s a Wikipedia entry,” I said.
“What the—” Tristan muttered, as I clicked on the link.
“I made it into Wikipedia,” sang Erszebet. “I’ll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia.”
The page came up, entitled “Nagybörzsöny ‘Warlock’ incident,” containing a short paragraph, with one notification saying the entry was a stub and encouraging us to help them supplement it, and a second saying the article needed additional citations for verification. The paragraph itself read:
In 1564, in the small village of Nagybörzsöny, a naked one-legged man is recorded as having materialized in the middle of a small lane, babbling in an unknown tongue. The townspeople were weary from a recent outbreak of typhus and on edge from years caught between the warring armies of the Ottoman Empire and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. Once they recovered from their astonishment, the villagers bound the man and dragged him to the town square with the intent of burning him at the stake. This was prevented by the local priest of Szent István, who instead caused him to be taken to the dungeon of the Inquisition. The priest examined and interrogated him for several hours, but was unable to make sense of a word of the man’s foreign gibberish. The local mob, by now in a frenzy, finally broke in, dragged the man out, and burned him to death.
I leapt to my feet. We stared in horror at the entry.
“What have you done?” Tristan cried, practically leaping toward her. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “You killed him!”
She struggled against him. “Unhand me. I did not kill him, the mob did. It says so right in Wikipedia. I’ll bite you if you don’t let me go.”
“What did you do?” he demanded, his voice sounding strangled, but then released her.
She shrugged, adjusting her dress. “I Sent him back to 1564. This is all I did. What happens once I Send him is his responsibility.”
“Time travel,” I said hesitantly. “You can send people back in time.”
“People can be moved to other Strands,” she corrected me. “It is usually just a parlor trick, but sometimes it is useful to get somebody’s attention.”
“How much control do you have over
