Chapter Two: A missing report
A few weeks passed and the Summer Solstice turned. Mother Night began her slow reconquest of the afternoon hours. Lars spent hours each day pouring over reports from agents and acquaintances in every corner of Europa, mapping the ebb and flow of wealth across the content. Occasionally he found a piece of city business slid into his paperwork, which he dutifully signed off.
When he wasn't doing paperwork he was reading. He got weekly copies of new journals and procedural papers on a number of topics. He got a letter from an old professor asking him to provide peer-review feedback for Het koninklijke tijdschrift voor financiën, economie, statistiek, sociologie en haring, the prospect of which filled him with a dark glee. And, of course, he received and sent weekly reports to his mother's expedition, although the increasing distance was causing them to suffer a from of correspondence Doppler.
When he wasn't reading paperwork or reading research he was reading loan requests and, occasionally, conducting interviews. Most of the requests were for paltry amounts from desperate or otherwise hard-to-finance individuals (not just criminals, although to be fair it was mostly criminals. There had been a dispossessed noble who noble a bridging loan until he could gain access to the embezzled remains of the family treasury and a reasonable number of constructs), but a few were worth more investigation. He noticed that whenever he asked Her Von Mekkhan to arrange a meeting with one of these people it turned into a working lunch. As did a number of official meetings with staff, guild-masters and Van himself, although Lars was amused to note that this didn't extend to the quarterly readiness review of the city's defences his father had instigated. Presumably they thought lunch with Jagers would put him off his feed for the rest of the week.
Fools.
And then, with the suddenness of a building collapse, it didn't happen. One day Lars was reading over an interesting but badly argued and scantily supported argument on the supposed mechanism behind the correlation between the price of peppercorns and the rate of non-injurious construction accidents and was musing on how best to turn supports of the thesis into intellectual rubble that he realised that, even when you factored in a very generous margin of error for the difficult terrain and other issues she would be dealing with, mother's report was at least 3 days overdue. There were only a few reasons why she wouldn't have written, none of them good, and anything with her seal on it, addressed to Castle Heterodyne, would be passed between delivery agents like it was about to combust rather than be target for tapering. Still it was possible it had been lost or damaged and mother was writing to multiple people, he could easily check with them.
"Castle?"
"Yes?" Did he detect an edge to its tone? Was it also worried?
"Can you arrange for me to speak with Her Docktor Von Spix?" The Empire's deputy-director of expedition co-ordination was a safer bet than his imediate superior as he was known to be a fan of the old style Heterodyne shows. "Its important, but not urgent."
"Of course." There was a faint buzzing sound, a side effect of The Castle's radio system that they hand't managed to resolve. "In the meantime Frau Patenaude has arrived." The sculptor? Was it instead excited? The buzzing stopped. "And Von Spix claims to be busy in meetings all day today. And tomorrow. And over the weekend. I took the liberty of advising his secretary that in that case I would arrange for Von Spix to speak with you this evening in person and he became available this afternoon."
Typical Castle. Still, four days? For a member of his family? Outrageous.
"Very well. Tell Pierrette to meet me in The Hall of Crystal and we will have a look over her designs." Pierrette Patenaude was a short, round, woman with skin as rough as sandstone and head of white curls that were as dense as marble. She had been a minion for a minor Parisian spark before they died in a soup-related incident. They had inherited their Mistress' not inconsiderable wealth and decided to travel Europe in that aimless way of a disconnected minion. They arrived in Mechanisberg just in time to have been ensared in the city's time stop. In the wake of that mess her expertice as a stoneworker had seen her drafted into one of the hundred or so minor repair and renovation projects and never wound up moving on and was now the owner of a statuary workshop. When the question of who to comission for the Castelan's cladding had arisen she had been at the head of a short list.
It was a productive meeting. At first there had been some concern that the cladding might be too thin in certain places, but The Castle had directed Lars to an old set of forumlas, dating back to Faustus time, that would transmute the substance of the rock, rendering it as hard as airship-grade steel. It took a few hours, which was mostly The Castle and Pierrette arguing over where on the scale of distinguished-and-majesterial to nightmare-rendered-in-stone they were going to be. Pierrette, perhaps because she had worked on The Castle before or because she had a true Parisian's soul when it came to art stood her ground and the end result (for a total of 8 units, it had been decided) was something that Lars could best describe as "The Jagers of The Round Table". They were even going to possess functional stone weaponry, if Lars would be so good as to get some apropriate weapons perpared as samples to base the work on.
Well, it wasn't as if Mechanisberg of all places lacked for swords. Or axes. Lars vetoed the flail.
He barely had time to grab a cup of coffee and a quick bite from the tray of sandwiches which had somehow been left in the radio room when the time for his conversation with Von Spix rolled around.
Ten minutes after the agreed start time, just as Lars was contemplating how much of a diplomatic incident arriving on Von Spix's door with a half-dozen Jagers would cause the man's voice finally crackled into audability.
"Terribly sorry, didn't realise the unit was turned off, damn girl turned it on for me, didn't tell me, so I turned it off, isn't that always the way? In any case I am sorry for the delay, He-, Si-, um, My Lord."
Even if it currently didn't have eyes with which to do so, Lars could feel The Castle rolling something at both the craven display and weakness of excuse.
"Well seeing as you are so very clearly overworked, I shall make sure to mention it to Dr Linken when I next speak to her." Which might well be soon, if Lars had guessed the reason for Von Spix's evasion correctly. "I am sure she can do something to lighten your workload."
"Ah, well, I am sure that won't be, that it, how may I be of service to The House of Heterodyne?"
"Tell me, when was the last time you received a report from my mother's expedition?"
There was a long pause during which the faint sounds of a young female voice could just be made out on the signal. It was indecipherable until the phrase "Because I've already checked five times!" came through loud and clear.
"Ah, ehem, well, it seem that our last report, and indeed the last communique to any part of The Empire or indeed anyone, expept possibly yourself, is now 13 days old."
Lars pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, it was just as he expected. He gave Von Spix explicit instructions to contact him as soon as he heared anything further and ended the conversation.
The Heterodyne Expedition to the Semi-Sunken City was officially "Late Reporting - Presumed Missing."
That was really going to eat into his reading time.