Kiernan Davies tapped his foot impatiently as he waited for his requests. He'd put them in nearly an hour ago. He had no idea what was taking so long. He'd been waiting at the Watcher library counter, nervously glancing at his watch every few minutes. He didn't have long and he had no idea how much time all this research would take. No one was watching Miranda and Ianto. If something happened while he was gone, Kiernan could face disciplinary action and even worse, have his field certification revoked permanently. He was taking a risk but he knew that Ianto Jones had just come into play and that Miranda would be taking extra precautions. There were no indications that any of the other immortals in UK were moving anywhere near the vicinity of Cardiff. In fact, Kiernan had gone as far as to check the movement database for the whole of Europe and he was absolutely certain that for the next forty eight hours, there would be only four immortals in Cardiff - Oren Connolly, Jacob Rosen, Chen Mao-Lin and Ianto Jones. With that certainty under his belt, he had gotten on the train to London and checked himself into a cheap hotel. He'd arrived at the Watcher's UK headquarters and had headed straight for the library.
"Kiernan? What are you doing here?" came a familiar female voice.
Kiernan rolled his eyes. The voice belonged to Moira Jenkins, a squat woman about ten years his senior who had harbored a bit of a crush on him when they'd worked in the research department together.
"Just looking a few things up, Moira," he said tersely.
"Thought us lot in research were too good for you… bright shiny mister field agent," she said with a smile.
The librarian called out his name and nodded, holding out a small USB drive. Perfect timing… "Sorry, Moira, I can't talk, I'm pressed for time," he said.
"You doing more research on Chen's chronicle?" she asked, pointing at the drive.
"A bit, yeah," he said, looping the drive's strap around his wrist and signing his name to the request.
"I heard you talk to her, all friendly like. You shouldn't do that you know. They could pull you off her," Moira said, crossing her arms over her chest. "No more fancy mister field agent."
"It's not like that, Moira," Kiernan said with an eye roll. "If I'm friendly, maybe she'll tell me something real."
"What? About Qin Shi Huang? Or maybe Queen Mary?" Moira said sarcastically.
"Maybe," Kiernan said. "Sorry, Moira, I really have to dash."
He didn't care if he was being rude. He pushed past Moira, and walked off to one of the private research rooms. He shut himself in and locked the door. He inserted the drive into the research unit and it sprang to life, quickly downloading the drive's contents. The Watchers were well funded and their equipment was state of the art. All original paper chronicles were in the climate controlled archives in France. Every single piece of paper had been digitally scanned at the highest quality. There was no more crumbling paper or cotton gloves or turning pages with spatulas. Everything was done on the touch screen. Kiernan could manipulate the documents how ever he wanted with no thought of damaging the original. He could view the front and back of a page simultaneously. He could have several different pages, all within the same book, open at once. And he could flip back and forth to his heart's content, without a single worry of damaging the original document. Every manipulation was done on the nearly wall sized touch screen in front of him. Displayed currently were the ten separate materials he had been given to fulfill his request. The early volumes Chen Mao-Lin's chronicle and nine ambiguous chronicles.
Chen Mao-Lin's chronicle was one of the pride and joys of the Watcher archives. It was one of the few female chronicles from so far back. Most chronicles had massive gaps until the industrial revolution but Chen Mao-Lin's chronicle was an exception to that. The Watchers hadn't been greatly organised until after the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and Chen Mao-Lin's chronicle was largely complete after that. Shockingly enough, even her abduction from China had been recorded. In the sixteenth century, such an event should have spelled the end of a chronicle but The Bristol, the ship that had brought her to England had had an immortal on it. Adaf Terfel, a Welshman masquerading as an English sailor, had had a Watcher who had sailed with him. The two years detailing her time aboard the ship were a nauseating read. What also made Chen Mao-Lin's chronicle exceptional, was how much information they had managed to piece together before the fifteenth century. Due to her association with the famous emperor, they had been able to piece together information about her mortal life as well as some of her early immortal life.
Kiernan knew Chen Mao-Lin's chronicle backwards and forwards. He'd studied it for so long that he'd memorized every detail. After her first death, Chen Mao-Lin lived quietly for four hundred years, taking only two heads. Then she had travelled north into Mongolia, joining the army of Genghis Khan and rode to war in the Mongol invasions. And that had always bothered him. It didn't make a lot of sense. The female elite of Mongolia were afforded a great deal more freedom than other women of the time and they were militarily trained but Chen Mao-Lin would have been an outsider. How would a woman of Chinese descent, a courtesan, prove herself to the elite battle force that almost took over the world? Surely it wasn't her skills in the bedroom.
Since Chen Mao-Lin's teacher had been Jing Ke, no one questioned that her training had been exceptional and that Jing Ke had trained his young female student in more than just the Game and the sword. But after Jing Ke was killed, his chronicle came under scrutiny. The documents that had been used to prove Chen Mao-Lin was Jing Ke's student came under fire and several of the documents were dismissed. It was now ambiguous as to whether or not Chen Mao-Lin was Jing Ke's student or had merely been warming Jing Ke's bed for her own protection, a common method of survival for female immortals in antiquity. Kiernan was already suspicious about the chronicle. Adding fuel to the fire had been her first death information. It was inconsistent with what he knew about the treatment of courtesans and concubines of the time. Kiernan had begun to formulate the theory that Chen Mao-Lin was not who she appeared.
Which is why he had requested every ambiguous female chronicle from between five hundred BC and one thousand AD. He had received nine. They weren't true chronicles. They were stories or folklore or pieces of lost documents. Some were little more than apocryphal tales. These women weren't even known to have truly existed and so they were filed in obscurity. Kiernan didn't know what he was hoping to find but he sat down and started to read the translations nonetheless.
As the day wore on, he returned most of the ambiguous chronicles and requested more, going further back. He was looking for anything similar to connect any of them to Chen Mao-Lin's chronicle looking at patterns of behavior and geographic movements. By the time the library was nearly closing, Kiernan felt that he was on to something. He had uncovered a pattern of geographic movement across the India and Pakistan, stretching back across Iraq and Iran and all the way to the Etruscan civilistion in Italy around seven hundred BC. He may not have uncovered Chen Mao-Lin but he may have stumbled onto someone else.
Frustrated that he had to halt his search, Kiernan returned to his hotel and tossed and turned all night in the lumpy bed, staring at the ceiling until eventually falling into a fitful sleep. He arrived at the library the moment it opened and started back at work, piecing together more and more pieces of his geographic pattern. And the more half myths and tales he read, the more startling the picture he was uncovering became. If he was right, he'd discovered an immortal woman who had existed for thousands of years across antiquity which was more than exceedingly rare… it was nearly unprecedented. Even today, immortal men outnumbered immortal women twenty to one.
The further back he went, the more Kiernan began to think he was deluded, grabbing at straws and imagining things. He had discovered an immortal woman who, if she was alive today, would be nearly four thousand years old. The Watchers called the oldest immortals the Lord and Lady Methuselah, a biblical reference. Currently, Methos held the title of Lord Methuselah, an immortal man over five thousand years old. The Watchers currently believed an immortal woman named Cassandra was the oldest female, at nearly twenty five hundred years old. Their information on Cassandra was erroneous.
Before delving further into the obscure past, Kiernan hoped to piece together more of a concrete future for this unknown woman. He had stumbled upon her around thirteenth century China, so he tried to pick up her trail there, but the trail went cold. Frustrated, he assumed that she must have been taken and started to dig harder, looking for the immortal who had killed her. He wasn't surprised when he found nothing. Chronicles from that period were sketchy and incomplete or nonexistent. He chuckled for a minute, it was almost as if this woman had disappeared just as Chen Mao-Lin had…
Kiernan felt everything line up in his head and he took two rapid steps back from the touch screen. It wasn't this mysterious woman who had disappeared. It had been Chen Mao-Lin who had vanished and this mysterious woman had risen up in her place. Kiernan had to marvel at it. It was perfect. He had traced this mysterious immortal woman back four thousand years. What better way to protect yourself than to convince the others you were poorer game, just old enough to be a threat but not old enough to actively pursue. It would explain Chen Mao-Lin's mysterious flight north and her change from quiet courtesan to Mongol warrior woman. The realisation lit a fire under Kiernan and he started to put in more requests for solid, true chronicles of immortals dating back to a thousand BC that crossed the geographic path he'd laid. There were only a handful. Any immortals that had lived and died back then had done so before the existence of the Watchers and their stories were lost forever. Any living immortals who were alive three thousand years ago were few and far between. Taking a chance, Kiernan had even requested the Methos Chronicle and that was when an e-mail alert was sent to Joe Dawson.