More time, he thought. How many lifetimes had he already lived? It was hard to remember. Centuries blurred, and aeons passed in the blink of an eye. Had he truly lived as long as all that—or was he merely mad? Sometimes, he hoped it was the latter.
Madness would be preferable to what he feared was coming.
“Where now, the bejewelled princes of Sarnath and the ancient kings of Khem? Where are the lords of Thule and the priest-kings of sunken Mu? All gone, Mr. Ketch,” Dorr said, softly. “All devoured by the wolf of time. All save me.” He laid his hands flat on his desk. “All save me.”
Ketch said nothing. Dorr looked at the dead man. Cornelius had done a good job. Then, the esteemed Dr. Flamel knew his way around a corpse. The alchemist was as wise in his own way as Dorr was in his. He was a useful ally, like Amelia Glossop and her Gorgon Society, but like them, he needed watching. He had his own plots and schemes, did Cornelius, and sometimes Dorr was forced to remind him of their shared goal. “Witches and warlocks,” he murmured. He straightened. “Mr. Ketch, I do believe that it is time that Cornelius began to play his part in this affair.”
The dead man didn’t reply. Dorr sat back and smiled. The future, ineffable and inevitable, was growing in the womb of the present. A great working had been wrought and soon it would come to fruition. He was determined that his would be the hand which shaped it. He would guide humanity to their destiny. And Charles St. Cyprian would help him.
One way or another.
The Adventures Of The
Royal Occultist
Book IV
PROLOGUE
The Tower of London, a month ago
Enoch Swinburne sat in the dark and hummed to himself. It was a peculiar sound, and one it had taken him years to master: Two hundred, to be exact. It was only in the last decade that he’d perfected it, and all for just this moment.
His cell was a square of stones, an oubliette by any other name. A mattress stuffed with straw was his bedding, and candles set into the cracks and crannies cast a weak light over stones that had been dredged from bogs and fens. The stones were full of the old magic, the stuff of Britain, bought with blood and sacrifice. There were a number of cells like it, scattered throughout the Tower’s length, each with its own unique occupant and specifically designed to hold said occupant. The doors to these cells were accessible only to those who had the wit to see them and their warders never slept.
These special cells were constructed to hold the mad, the bad and the dangerous to know. Swinburne was all three, though he’d argued more than once that madness was a matter of perspective.
Outside of his cell, he could hear shouts and running feet. Unless he was mistaken, someone or something was attempting to break in to the Tower of London—an occurrence the frequency of which had been increasing of late. There was a current in the air followed by the padding of ghostly paws as the warders went on the hunt.
How many times did that make? Five or six at least in the past few months, as the drew nearer to Walpurgis Night. And who was the lucky recipient of such persistence? He smiled. Not himself, obviously. No, if someone wanted him out, they’d have tried long before now. It had been four hundred years since the door to his cell had been locked by the ghost of John Dee himself. The key was probably lost at the bottom of the Thames by now, the only opening ever used being a slot in the door by which a blind mute, a child of one of the warders, fed him.
But his was not the only door that never opened. There were others, a dozen perhaps—a devil’s dozen, indeed. One or two he’d even locked up himself, when he’d held the post of Royal Occultist. Better days, he thought, as he began to tap his fingers on the flagstones. The rhythm was soft at first and then more insistent, merging with his humming.
Regardless of the reasons for the hullabaloo, it was an opportunity he could ill-afford to pass up. Since his last attempt at escape, the warders of the Tower, both human and otherwise, had taken to keeping a close eye on him. They listened at the cracks and murmured curses to fray his strongest spells. They poisoned his gruel to keep him preoccupied and at night, unseen, bony fingers knotted in his hair or clawed at his vitals, preventing sleep. For one hundred and fifty years he had endured the torments of Hell, or at least a suburb thereof.
And now, while those eyes were elsewhere, it was time to take his leave. Time for Enoch Swinburne to once more strut and fret his allotted hour upon the stage. The stars were right; it was time for him to find the telocvovim—the one who had fallen, the dead dragon—and eat of his heart. He would be Siegfried unfettered, if all went according to plan.
Swinburne wove plans and made preparations like a spider spinning its web. Only his web stretched not from pillar to post but across centuries and events, momentous and otherwise. This was but one of them, one move in a game measured in eternities. A game he intended to win.
But first, he had to escape. And for that, he hummed.
The magics about the Tower were in uproar, but it wouldn’t last. He had hours at most, and possibly only minutes before they came to check on him.
His humming increased in pitch, and his tapping in volume. His skin prickled, and he felt something behind him. It was an old feeling, rising up out of memories embedded in blood and bone—the cave-fear, the fear of the beasts beyond the fire. His smile widened. Fear was good. Fear was like an old friend.
The feeling of being watched, of being stalked, grew stronger. A sound rose up, spreading from shadow to shadow. It was less than an echo at first, but gradually grew stronger. A devilish humming, which made his eardrums throb and his hair prickle. The throb of thousands of wings.
As he tapped the floor, he dug his nails into his palms and red blood ran down his fingers to spatter the floor. The smell, the noise, all grew stronger. Something boiled up out of the shadows, filling the air before him, a thousand tiny bodies, swirling and flowing through the air on iridescent wings. The flies undulated before him, and in their mass were vague shapes which might have been the curves and lines of an inhuman face. A voice thrummed out, its weight striking him like a hammer. He raised a hand.
“Hail, and well met, Beelzebub, God-king of Ekron, Grandmaster of the Order of the Fly, second only to Him Who Fell First in the six-hundred and sixty-six hierarchies of Hell. I have called thee up, in all humility, to beg of thee a boon.”
“We heard you, and we have come,” the cloud of flies said. It was as if a multitude of small voice merged into one and struck with a storm’s force. “Though once the way was barred, its ramparts are now all asunder.”
“Oh yes, my friend,” Swinburne said. “A certain slackening in the ethereal chains hereabouts. How else would I have called you up?”
“We feel it. The world trembles. Someone seeks to free the Dragon from his crypt. He thirsts, in the dark.”
Swinburne fell silent. There was only one prisoner that the demon could be referring to. He laughed. It should have been obvious. Someone wanted to free Dracula. Well, more power to them. Perhaps it was an omen, of sorts. Two dragons, one dead, one un-dead.
“Why did you summon us, Swinburne?” the mass of insects hummed. He was not surprised it knew his name…one of them, at least. His infamy stretched even to Pandemonium. It’s voice was awful; the pitch of it made his teeth itch in his gums and stung his eyes. But those were small things and easily borne, for the sake of success.
“I missed you,” he said, laughing. The cloud of flies swelled and roiled in a way that conveyed annoyance. Swinburne only laughed harder. He slapped his knee and shook his head. “Oh mercy me, why do you think I called you up? It is time at last to bid adieu to this cell of contemplation. I grow weary of silence and the sound of my own soul ricocheting about within my bones.”
“So you will sell it to us?” the demon asked.
“Tempting, but no. Instead, I shall bind you and break you to my will, and then we shall sally forth upon infernal winds,” Swinburne said. He held up his bloody hand and flicked his fingers, spattering the closest knot of flies wi
th his vital fluids. Steam rose from those he struck, and the whole mass made a sound like crystal shattering. A dark heat filled the cell, and the stink of sulfur filled his nose.
“Resist all you like,” Swinburne growled. “As Solomon bound you to build the Temple of Jerusalem, so I shall bind you to take me hence.” He rose to his feet as he manipulated the oppressive air with complex gestures. Despite his bravado, this was no certain thing. Demons were tricky, more akin to forces of nature than the living beings they mimicked. Dee had taught him that much at least, the old fraud.
But he’d had four hundred years to prepare for this moment. Four hundred years to fill every crack and crevice of his cell with blood and spittle and other, more potent, things. This cell, the stones beneath his feet and above his head, might as well be his own body, and he controlled it as easily. “You will obey me, Son of Hell. By my names, true and false, you will bend knee to me, or I shall scatter you through the Outer Dark,” he snarled. He gesticulated swiftly, layering binding upon binding—the wards of Hloo, the thirty-nine gestures of Abakan and more besides.
Beelzebub shrieked with a thousand tiny throats, and waves of flies coiled about Swinburne, clustering on his lips and nose, darting at his eyes. The cell shuddered around him as the demon fought against him. The air became so hot that he couldn’t breathe, and the soles of his feet began to burn. Swinburne ignored the pain in his lungs and feet, the cramping in his fingers, and continued to chant.
Dust sifted down from above as the cloud of flies assumed a vaguely humanoid shape, gigantic and crouched in the cramped confines of the cell. The shape pressed its shoulders against the ceiling and its hands against the walls. A half-formed face screamed in rage at him. Swinburne laughed.
One of the fly-giant’s hands thrust out and struck the door to his cell. The chamber echoed with the force of the blow. Swinburne saw Beelzebub’s intentions clearly—the demon was attempting to alert the guardians of the Tower. Swinburne grimaced and redoubled his efforts.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the cloud of flies grew quiescent. “We…will serve you, Swinburne. For now,” Beelzebub said.
“Good enough,” Swinburne said. “Now that that’s settled, I think it’s time to take our leave. But first…” He went to the mattress and squeezed out a few drabbles of blood from his palms over the straw, chanting softly. The blood congealed and thickened as he chanted. A shape formed, a crude thing, barely resembling the outline of a man, which shuddered and twitched strangely. “Speak,” he said.
“I…speak,” the blood-thing gurgled, in something approximating his voice. Features swam to the surface of its lopsided head, and he recognized something of himself in them. Gently, he pulled his blanket up over the shuddering blood-thing.
“Good,” he said. He snuffed all but one of the candles in the cell with a gesture, leaving just enough light for anyone looking in to see the shape of a body and nothing more. It would not last, not for long. Once he was gone, it would begin to come undone. But by then, he would be far away, with his would-be captors none the wiser.
Swinburne watched his creation for a moment, fascinated despite himself. Then, with a grunt, he looked up at Beelzebub. The demon glared at him silently. Swinburne laughed. “Let’s do hurry up. I have a date with a dragon,” he said, as he raised his arms and the cloud of flies enveloped him.
A moment later, he was gone.
1.
The Voyagers Club, Mayfair, London, now
“It was the Romans, Mr. St. Cyprian. It begins with them, as so many of these things do,” Dr. Briseus Bonneville said softly, as he gestured airily with the pistol in his hand. The Webley Army revolver was loaded, as was Dr. Bonneville. “Even here, in the waning days of the year of our lord nineteen and twenty, their influence can still be felt.”
His words echoed oddly through the room. The bar of the Voyagers Club was only dimly lit, in accordance with club tradition. It was also empty, thanks to the boisterous greeting Dr. Bonneville had given Charles St. Cyprian upon his arrival—one gunshot and a shattered bottle of gin later, and the room had cleared out.
Now club members were clustered out in the foyer, peering through the open doors with varying expressions of disgruntlement and fright. It wasn’t the first time that a gun had gone off in the Voyagers Club, and it likely wouldn’t be the last, St. Cyprian knew. Though, I daresay I wish that the gun in question wasn’t quite so close, he thought.
Bonneville leaned forward. “History, Mr. St. Cyprian…it weighs on the best of us.” Bonneville was angular and uneven in the face, like a badly chipped flint knife, with moustaches and beard going the color of slate. His eyes were a shade of yellow, shot through with red, that spoke of a faltering liver and too many sleepless nights. “Consider the ancient foundations upon which this very club was built. A temple, they said, at the time. But what sort of temple, and to which god, you might ask?”
“I didn’t,” St. Cyprian said, watching the barrel of the pistol. In contrast to Bonneville, St. Cyprian was tall and rangy with an olive cast to his clean shaven features and hair just a touch too long to be properly fashionable. His suit was a Savile Row original, several shades more expensive than Bonneville’s own. His own revolver sat nestled in the coat pocket of the aforementioned suit, but it might as well have been on the moon for all the good it did him. He had not expected his quarry to be armed, and in a club no less.
Indeed, he had not even truly known that Bonneville was his quarry, rather than merely another link in a bloody chain that stretched from the courtyards of the East End to the gentlemen’s clubs of the West. Three bodies—three women—murdered and mutilated, and certain…sigils left on nearby brickwork. It was those sigils which had necessitated his intervention into the investigation. Such symbols, and what they represented, fell well within the remit of the offices of the Royal Occultist. It was, in fact, the very thing the office had been created to handle.
Formed during the reign of Elizabeth the First, the office of Royal Occultist (or the Queen’s Conjurer, as it had been known) had started with the diligent amateur Dr. John Dee, and passed through a succession of hands, some good and some bad, since. The list was a long one, weaving in and out of the margins of British history and culminating, for the moment, in one Charles St. Cyprian and his apprentice, Ebe Gallowglass.
The latter, thankfully, was waiting outside in the Crossley. The situation was tense enough without Gallowglass waving her own revolver about. But it wouldn’t be long before she noticed that something had gone wrong. God alone knew what she would do then—hopefully something ingenious, but more likely something exceedingly violent and loud.
“Liber Pater,” Bonneville said, loudly. “Divine patron of the plebs, fornication and the grape!” The barrel of the Webley swiped through the air, as if for emphasis. “But the Romans—ah, the Romans—were great ones for extending the remit of religion, and gods bled into one another like the tributaries of some great cosmic river, in the Aventine and here in Londinium. Liber was soon Dionysius and Bacchus as well, father, drunkard and madman all in one.” He spread his hands. “And here we sit, in this city which is his temple.”
“Fascinating,” St. Cyprian said, trying not to flinch as the pistol whipped back in his direction. That explains the markings at the crime-scenes then, he thought. Bonneville was a historian of Latin bent, and knew whereof he spoke, as far as gods went. That he was also a raving loony was unexpected. Then, the Dionysian Mysteries weren’t the sort of thing that one spent any time studying unless one were already slightly doolally.
But Bonneville wasn’t simply insane. St. Cyprian could feel something rising about, or perhaps from, the other man, flitting at the edges of his conscious mind. He felt as a hare must, as the fox closes in. Something was coming, something vast and terrible. He had no idea where it was coming from or what form it would take, save that it was centred on the disordered soul of Dr. Briseus Bonneville and that made him very nervous indeed. “Please, Dr. Bonnevill
e, elaborate at your leisure.”
“I will,” Bonneville said, as he reached for the bottle of wine standing on the occasional table beside his chair. As he refilled his glass, he said, “A fine vintage. Are you sure that you won’t join me? A toast is in order, after all, given what I have accomplished—and what I will accomplish this very evening.”
“Quite sure, thank you. No head for drink, what?” St. Cyprian said.
“Ah, an Apollonian. I can tell, you see,” Bonneville said, conspiratorially. He gestured with the revolver in an alarming fashion, like a priest giving a blessing. “I can see the rigidity in you, my friend. All straight lines and rational angles. A brittle thing, your soul, and prone to breaking at the merest hint of excess. What can you know of the beautiful horrors I speak of? Of the grand terrors of the Dionysian initiations?”
“More than you might think,” St. Cyprian said.
Bonneville laughed. “I doubt that, my good chap. I alone dwell safely in the forests of the irrational,” he said. He tapped the side of his head with the barrel of his pistol. “My mind is attuned to the Bacchic Mysteries. The secrets of wine and blood are mine, as they were to the Romans. Did you ever wonder why they gave grapes to the chosen sacrifices?”
St. Cyprian licked his lips. “I hadn’t, no,” he said as he traced the sacred shape of the Voorish Sign on the arm of his chair with a finger and let his inner eye flicker open. The spirit-eye, some called it, though his acquaintances in the Society for Psychical Research insisted that it was merely a very focused form of extrasensory perception. Whatever it was, it had taken him several years to learn how to utilize it safely.
“Maenads, man,” Bonneville spat. “They were divine whores, the raving ones, the Thiasus, promised body and soul to Bacchus. Their blood, ripe with the fruits of carnality, was spilled to awaken the soul of this place. As I will awaken London, to stir it in its chains of smog, stone and steel!” Bonneville’s voice rose. As he spoke, St. Cyprian studied Bonneville’s ka through his inner eye.
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