The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(80)

I began my research in the University of London library. Security was almost non-existent, and it was easy enough to pass as a student, swaggering my way into the reading room to pull out tomes on the social history of London. I also began, very cautiously, sending out feelers to other cities. Telegrams to academics in Paris and Berlin, never kalachakra themselves but those who might have an interest in society, enquiring after the Cronus Club on their turfs. Paris came back with nothing, and so did Berlin. In desperation, I sent messages further afield. New York, Boston, Moscow, Rome, Madrid–all silent. The Beijing Cronus Club was, I knew, in too much turmoil at this time anyway to necessarily answer enquiries, as it spent a large part of the 1920s–40s as a shadow Club, referring its members to more prosperous and reliable institutions. Finally I received a hit from a collector of trivia in Vienna, who reported that in 1903 a organisation called the Cronus Club had held a party for the city’s ambassadors and their wives, but in all the troubles of the First World War it had closed its doors and never reopened them.

In London I scoured the history books and finally found a reference in the London Gazette to the Club. In the year 1909 the directors of the Cronus Club were closing its doors owing to “a lack of suitable member interest”. That was almost all I could find.

1909.

The date gave me a clue and to a degree some relief. The Cronus Club had existed until the end of the nineteenth century, which suggested that whatever allies Vincent might have, they could not extend too far back in time. A child born in 1895 would by 1901 have recovered enough mental faculties to hunt down kalachakra at their point of origin and terminate their births. By 1909 the trend would have been noticed, the threat to the Club clear, and suddenly the organisation which was meant to protect its members would be a trap, a lure, and a danger to all who sought its aid.

Then again, even if the London branch was being so targeted, I couldn’t believe the scale of these events, global in their proportion. No one, not even Vincent, could possibly have discovered the points of origins of so many ouroborans and wiped them out, not on such a massive scale. Even as that thought passed through my brain, another promptly occurred–that Vincent did not necessarily need to know the points of origins of Club members to kill them; he merely needed to make them forget. That would do the job well enough, and whole generations of the Cronus Club would tumble. Finding mature Cronus Club members would be easy enough, and I had no idea what kind of action Vincent had taken against them in my last life, since I had died too young to observe. He could have had forty years, maybe more, in which to hunt down every kalachakra on the planet and wipe their thoughts or, as he had intended to do with me, determine their point of origin. Either would be devastating and yes, potentially damaging on a global scale.

If this was so, then I needed to find a survivor, someone to confirm my suspicions.

I headed to Vienna.





Chapter 61


The Vienna Cronus Club stood–or rather, had stood–overlooking the Danube on the edge of town, where the waters flood out fat and rolling, their tossing surfaces hinting at the great currents dragging beneath. The city was, by the time I arrived, little more than a pleasure palace for the gently declining aristocracy of what had once been the Austro-Hungarian empire, who would, in very few years, be ruled by Hitler and his proxies, then Stalin and his. But for now they danced and made music, and tried not to consider these things yet to come.

I had come to Vienna for the very simple reason that it was the only Club I had heard of, in all my enquiries, where it seemed an older generation had willingly dissolved the society. In London all trace of the Cronus Club had been wiped away, and I had received no answers as to my enquiries in other cities, but here, in Vienna, there was some hope that, in dissolving the Club, the directors had left a clue in the stones. Something that Vincent may have missed.

I dressed myself as a student of Austrian history and spoke German with a slight Magyar accent, which entertained my hosts no end. I paid my way through a mixture of deception, theft and, that oldest trick for the oldest kalachakra, remarkably accurate predictions as to what would win at the races. And as I worked, scouring the grounds of the former Club, tearing through the local civic records, I asked myself why had the Forgetting not worked on me?

I could think of only one simple answer–I was a mnemonic like Vincent. But then… did Vincent know as much? The destruction wrought on my kind was a clear indication of how much Vincent knew and how far he was prepared to go with his ambitions, but in my case how much did he truly know? He had a rough idea of my age and possibly my geographical origins, but he couldn’t be sure that my name was my own, nor could he know with any certainty that I remembered a thing. This latter could be a great advantage to me as long as I remained undiscovered. Being caught digging up dirt on the Cronus Club would be highly incriminating and reveal that the Forgetting had failed entirely. While my identity remained hidden, however, I could be the unknown thorn in Vincent’s side.

With this in mind, I lived an endlessly changing series of lives. I stayed in no place for more than a few days, changed my clothes, my language, my voice, on a regular basis. I dyed my hair so often that it quickly became a brittle mousy mess, and grew such an apt forger of documents I was offered a commission in Frankfurt to do a job lot for a criminal mob. I left no traces of myself: no pictures, words, letters, names, documents; I kept my notes entirely in my mind, won only as much money as I absolutely needed from gambling and maintained no close friends. I never wrote to Hulne House, nor told, I think, a single honest truth about myself in all the time that I searched. I was going to be Vincent Rankis’s nemesis, and he was not going to see me coming.