by Kevan Dale
The lullaby continued, sweet and dark.
10
Stony Ground Indeed
The lock rattled, the iron alive. A satisfying nick sounded and Swaine pushed the tall door inward. The spell unwound in moments, leaving a rime of frost on the outside of the lock as the tumblers righted themselves. He paused inside the transept of the church. The sound of the door closing behind him grew into the dark space of the nave. Stained glass windows appeared dull in the midnight: scarlets, pale yellows, and deep azure reduced to colors of mourning, gray, black, leaden. Just as well, as far as Swaine was concerned. Images of apostles, shrubby crowns, and haloed executions left him cold, even at their most colorful.
He whispered a small incantation. A shimmer of white bloomed in the air above his outstretched palm. Enough light to see by, not enough to draw the attention of any of the city’s constables or guard, should they glance in the direction of the fog-shrouded Christ Church on Newgate Street as he searched for the coffin of Catherine Nunn.
Hozier had confirmed the efforts by the Company to keep the actress from a pauper’s grave had been sufficiently successful enough to get her a proper burial. And not just any burial. One of the Company’s benefactors had prevailed upon his brother-in-law, the vicar apostolic of the London District, to hold the funeral in Christ Church, where the coffin allegedly resided.
Unlikely as it was that the tragic suicide of Madame Nunn was linked to the nearly fatal and breakthrough summoning he’d performed in Heggen, the phrase she’d uttered—“A trapped bird—who sings of soaring over forests and foothills”—was altogether too close to the unusual whispers hurled at him by a demon. Probably coincidence, however unlikely. Still, he had to investigate even the possibility—one didn’t trifle with demons. To Swaine, precaution was ninety percent of sorcery.
He peered into the nave. Row upon row of wooden pews stretched beneath the arched ceilings. The aisle ran the length of the enormous room, mirrored by a second one on the opposite side. Following the aisle toward the raised choir and apse, he held his hand aloft. As he suspected, the coffin wasn’t already laid out atop a bier. She was an actress, after all—not a person of proper standing.
Beyond a small chapel with an auxiliary altar, he found the doorway leading down into the crypt, where he guessed the coffin resided. The stone walls exhaled a dank chill as he followed the narrow stairs deeper into the darkness. At the bottom stood another locked door. This time, he used a spell known as ‘Hands of the Rattle Thief.’ It required a different form of conjury from the magic he’d used on the door into the church and would therefore retain an unalloyed strength: repetitions of the same spell quickly diminished in potency. Nor was he eager for the accompanying headache such repetitions inevitably brought about.
He whispered the words of incantation. With each instance of the phrasing, the door vibrated more strongly, until it hammered on the hinges like a bridge beneath a passing company of cavalry. Swaine went silent, holding his free hand an inch above the vibrating wood. He placed his palm on the door. The door fell silent and swung open. Cool air rushed out over him, carrying the musty scent of the tomb. Swaine stepped through the doorway.
Nunn’s coffin lay alongside the wall to his left, raised upon a pair of thick boards.
Swaine allowed the light in his hand to brighten. Beyond the alcove just inside the door, arched passageways and thick stone vaults extended into the darkness. Puddles dampened the corners. The various skulls and skeletons sleeping in the black took no notice of their new visitor, as far as Swaine could tell.
He turned to the coffin. Ropes draped either end, ready for the workers who would carry it up prior to the service. Swaine pushed them aside. Feeling along the edge of the lid, he located the four nails that sealed it shut. Another spell could pull the nails from their embedded state—but so could the steel prybar he’d brought along. Too many spells in one night would leave him weak and cringing at the faintest light for most of the next day. He felt inside the satchel he wore and pulled out the bar. Working it along one side then the next, he loosened the coffin lid. The groan of the nails and wood wavered off into the crypts. Once he pried up the last corner, he stowed the bar back into his satchel and lifted the lid, setting it on end by the foot of the coffin.
He wrinkled his nose at the stench of decay that lolled from the interior. Holding his hand over the coffin, he frowned. There it was—the reason for the church, the reason for religion, the reason for every tale of the afterlife, the reason for half of what humanity had done since the first light of civilization had broken over the mists of time.
Catherine Nunn looked like a statue. A bloated, sallow statue, her once beautiful face thrown back in a silent, frozen gasp, her head wrenched unnaturally to one side from the damage of the rope she’d hanged herself with. However many roles she’d played in life, they’d all been working up to this, her final part. Swaine—having seen more than a few corpses in his studies of the unseen arts—thought she played it better than most. Perhaps the poor woman would have been pleased to hear it. Then again, all the applause of London hadn’t been enough to sufficiently tether her to life, so maybe her heart had been stony ground indeed, no matter what magic she’d worked on the boards.
Swaine covered his nose with the cuff of his sleeve and leaned over the body. No signs of disturbance. Hands, pale as wax candles, folded one on another. Bloated middle. Ankles demurely aligned beyond the hem of her burial gown.
The best we might all hope for, he thought with a sigh. Dressed, posed, boxed up, and ready for an hour-long ceremony before being lowered into the soil, where our memory might well fade more quickly than the bones would return to dust. No, Nunn had it as well as any, and all that implied. Drive, accrual, station, respect, love—no amount could stave off the full stop at the end of the sentence that was life.
And what did the world do about the ever-present anticipation of reaching the end of the sentence? Shrink away beneath their sheets like children frightened by thunder. Primly recite platitudes like students before their stern professors. Claim certainty, all the while shaking their heads and squeezing their eyes shut. All well and good if one lacked the verve to actually plunge into the mystery. None of that would do for Swaine, however—which perhaps went some distance to explaining why he stood peering into a coffin while the bulk of London slept peacefully.
He snapped out of the reverie and reached into his satchel. He pulled out a wide candle and lit it with his tinderbox, balancing it on Nunn’s chest.
“Never fear, this won’t hurt a bit,” he whispered.
With his hands once again free, he retrieved a stoppered flask from his satchel and held it before him. Popping open the flask, he poured a thin stream of oil over her forehead and throat. When he slid aside the lid of a small wooden box and sprinkled the mixture of ground minerals so that it landed in the lines of oil, the combination of ingredients flared a deep rust color, the final light of day. The flame on the candle fluttered on the wind that rose from the darkened crypts behind him. Ghostly sighs echoed from the arched passages, the still air disturbed for the first time in decades, maybe longer.
In the shifting light of the glamoured lines of magic and the snapping flame, Swaine spoke the octet of lines of the spell, the ‘Divination of Spectral Fingerprints.’ A rather a blunt tool, it could potentially save him the trouble of a more complex test for signs of demonic influence. Corpses could be tricky. Some might yield their secrets with hardly a nudge; others might remain in one peculiar state or another, refusing anything definitive even as the incantations grew more and more exotic.
As the words flowed, Swaine’s concentration deepened until only the corpse and his magic existed to him. Each syllable took on more weight, the contours of sound matching the intent he filled it with. Once reaching the end of the final repetition—the incantation required three full passes—a shudder passed through the lifeless limbs of Nunn, heels and head banging on the boards of the coffin. Swaine scanned the
corpse for telltale hints of illumination proclaiming a touch of the infernal.
Nothing.
He watched for another quarter of an hour as the magic dissipated from the glamouring like embers fading to ash.
Still nothing.
So good, so far. While such a test proclaimed with near certainty that the poor woman hadn’t counted demonic infestation among her troubles, Swaine wasn’t entirely satisfied. Corpses, after all.
Crouching, he felt through his satchel until he found the small compass-like device known as a calibrated enharmonic gauge. While not designed to reveal the presence of demons per se, it was extremely sensitive to fluctuations in the unseen planes, capable of registering even the slight disturbances—wakes, if you will—left by infernal entities.
Instantiating the proper conductivity by holding it in the palm of his left hand while passing his right hand above it and reciting the activation spell, he watched as the dual-armed needle within the glamoured oils trapped in the glass stirred to movement, sweeping in counterclockwise circles at an accelerating pace. Soon, the needle was no more than a blur. It felt alive in Swaine’s palm as he held it out over the corpse, moving it carefully from her head to her toes. Seeing no deviations, he slowly paced the coffin itself. The air crackled as hidden threads of energy that crisscrossed the planes snapped and zinged like miniscule, unseen bolts of lightning. Nothing broke the steady whir within the glass.
“Well, Madam Nunn,” he said, returning to where he began, “it appears that your demons were sadly your own. I only wish I could’ve done something about those. You were a true artist.”
He was about to put away the device when it twisted in his hand, a gyroscopic force laying claim to the spinning needle. Sounds from the top of the stairs echoed out into the cathedral above. A thudding step, a sliding scuff. A step, a scuff. Step, scuff. Step, scuff. As the steps neared the head of the stairs, a faint whistling came clear, tracing a simple tune—a lullaby.
“Steppen,” Swaine spoke. The candle atop the corpse extinguished. Darkness swallowed the crypt.
As the intruder drew to the top of the stairs, the gauge in Swaine’s hand went wild. He had to clamp his fingers down tight to hold it in place, and even then it fought to fly from his grip. The footsteps and whistling stopped. Swaine listened, not moving.
“I feel you down there, my friend.” The words floated down over the steps, amplified by the stone of the walls, scurrying off into the passages behind Swaine. He didn’t recognize the voice—dry like the inside of a cedar trunk seasoned by decades in a forgotten attic—but noted no accent that might mark the visitor as anyone who hadn’t grown up in Lincoln, where Swaine himself had been raised. “Your sorcery entices me once again.”
The frown on Swaine’s face deepened. He held his tongue, resisting the urge to step back into the empty passages behind him, to flee.
“Come, come—no need to be as silent as your unfortunate companion. You know I’m here. I know you’re there. It’s time we got better acquainted, don’t you think?”
Swaine moved his hand above the gauge and its motion ceased. He slipped it into his coat pocket. He no longer needed it to detect whether a demon was present.
“You’re a long way from where we met, demon,” Swaine said. “Have you missed your friends?”
“Long way. Short way. There’s no difference, sorcerer.” The figure descended with uneven steps.
Swaine cast a spell of illumination, the pale glow pushing out from his hands and arms to reveal a man dressed in filthy garb. Tufts of beard traced his pale cheeks and rode his upper lip. His wide head showed thinning hair beneath a woolen cap. Half the teeth in his mouth were gone and his nose looked to have been on the receiving end of one too many blows. Thick arms perhaps compensated for his crooked leg dragging behind him, barely able to keep him upright. The foot angled to a shocking degree inside a shoe barely three-quarters the size of his other shoe.
“Distance is nothing,” the man with the crooked leg said. “Time is nothing.”
“Is that why it took you so long to find me, then?” Swaine didn’t move, watching the man carefully as he reached the bottom of the stairs into the crypts. He searched for signs—was the man possessed, under the thrall of the demon? Or was this a corpse in which the demon had taken up residence? Either scenario called for a different strategy if he was going to leave the church with his sanity—and his soul—intact.
Or leave it at all.
“I’ve watched you the whole time,” the man with the crooked leg said.
“Of course you have. So powerful.”
Demons despised condescension, riven as they were with an endless appetite for self-aggrandizement. Such unquenchable flames, yet it was often their downfall, a poisonous pride capable of engulfing them.
The man with the crooked leg reached the bottom of the stairs and gave Swaine a ghastly smile. Swaine watched the eyes, the gaze, the movement of the pupils, scrutinizing the demeanor for the subtle signs of possession. He found none.
Corpse, then, Swaine thought. It wasn’t unheard of for a demon to occupy a dead body—theory held that such a vehicle offered a more stable passage through the world than in the native state, where currents of the planes as well as the risks of other, more powerful demons striking out posed unpredictable threats. Or perhaps they enjoyed the mechanics of the flesh—no one really knew. Still, it gave Swaine clearer choices.
“You and I have business, sorcerer.”
“I’ve no business with the likes of you.”
“Let me change your mind.”
“How tedious,” Swaine said.
“You’re the one.” The man with the crooked leg rolled his hands, palms out, as though presenting Swaine to a crowd of admirers.
“Looking to tickle my fancy?” Swaine said. “I expect something subtler than that from someone for whom time and distance mean nothing. Hints of prophecy? A secret just for me? Try again.” As he spoke, he worked his hand into the pocket in his breeches. Deflection and redirection were key—taking the bait was precisely what a demon wanted. More important was the proper state of mind in conversing with the infernal—observing the state of his own mind from a remove was key, keeping distance between his reactions and his responses, always. Otherwise, it was too easy to get swept up in the words of the demon. Exactly why he spent at least an hour each day engaged in a form of intense inner concentration on his awareness.
“I have something for you,” the demon spoke through the corpse.
“No, I don’t think you do.”
“A key. The key.”
“How portentous.”
“You’ll appreciate it. More than anyone else.”
“Appreciate this,” Swaine said. He yanked a disc of hammered silver from his pocket, hung from a length of thin steel chain. Hexed thirty-three times, warded seven times, and glamoured with three layers of invocations of banishment, the medallion glimmered. The demon howled, throwing back the head of the corpse as it slammed into the stones of the wall.
Swaine shouted the accompanying ward.
The corpse lifted into the air, limbs thrashing as the potent magic surrounded it, sinking into the flesh, reaching the essence of the demon within. Swaine was hardly about to wander unprotected into a trap of any kind and had brought the medallion for just such a purpose. Very few demons could withstand the power.
Holding the medallion aloft, he approached the vibrating corpse. “Your name, demon.”
The cords on the corpse’s neck stood out in relief. Veins bulged along the forehead and the hands, curled as they were into hooks. A choking sound tore from the corpse’s throat. Much as it struggled, it couldn’t match Swaine’s banishment magic.
“Fine,” Swaine said, feeling the power swirl around the medallion. The demon growled and thrashed but was pinned against the granite slabs of the wall. “Begone. Trouble me no further. Back to the abyss with you.”
He spoke the words of power he’d woven within the medallion
. The corpse trembled, soon vibrating with such ferocity as to blear and grow hazy.
Swaine shouted the final phrase, and the air within the crypt expanded with intense pressure before sucking away with a bone-jarring whoosh that left him staggering. Within a moment, the air righted itself—the planes righted themselves—and the corpse of the man with the crooked leg crumbled to the floor. A thin exhalation leaked out of his distended lungs, and then he fell silent, still.
As Swaine reached for his gauge again, he paused. Voices drifted down from the church above and footsteps banged about the large space.
“What in the hell was that?” a voice called out.
“Every inch lads—look about,” another voice answered.
“Damn it,” Swaine muttered. Someone had followed the man with the crooked leg. Or seen flashes of light. Or who knew what. In any event, he wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Sweeping the materials into his satchel, he rushed up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. No time to put the lid back on the coffin, no time to drag the corpse of the man with the crooked leg off into the darkness. The strange tableau would have to stand.
At the top of the stairs, he hurried to the auxiliary altar, peering out around the corner. A dozen soldiers spread out, come in through the main door, muskets at the ready, two of them leading the way with lanterns.
Drained as he was, Swaine grit his teeth and whispered ‘Beneath Raven’s Wing,’ a spell of cloaking. His head felt ready to split in two from the effort, but the enchantment wrapped him in shadow, chilling him to the bone in the process. He slid into the nave and traced the wall back toward the door. None of the soldiers would see even a hint of him as long as he didn’t crash into any of them on his way out. He moved quietly as he could, glad for the way the sounds of their boots bounced from wall to vault to window, covering the sound of his own steps.