He bent at the waist, scooped up the torn scrap of paper. The printed words were blurred by rain and sun, but he guessed that it was part of one of the revolutionist’s pamphlets.
The Constable sighed and turned away from the shop. As usual, there would be no real justice in Tourvallon.
A Night at the Opera
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are best known for their Liaden Universe novels and their several short stories featuring a bumbling wizard named Kinzel. Steve was the founding curator of the University of Maryland’s Kuhn Library Science Fiction Research Collection; Sharon has been executive director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and has also served as vice president of that organization.
They live in Maine, with lots of books, almost as much music, more computer equipment than two people need, and four muses in the form of cats. As might be expected of full-time writers, Sharon and Steve spend way too much time playing on the Internet and have a Web sit at www.korval.com.
She was old money. He was old magic.
Together, they were a force to be reckoned with on the social circuits of half a dozen capital cities. It was said that they might reverse a fashion, make a playwright, or declare an early end to a tedious season. They were patrons of the arts—scientific, magical, and creative—and stood on terms of intimacy with the scions of several royal houses.
Despite all that—or because of it—they were popular hosts: full of wit and fire, certain to have an opening-night box at the brilliant new play, after which they would preside over an animated table of friends in a little-known gem of an eatery. It was therefore not at all unusual, when the daring new opera The Fall of Neab opened at Chelsington Opera House, where her family had kept a box for several generations, that they should host a party.
Nicholas—Lord Charles to most; Nick or Nicky to some few intimates; and “Nicky dear” to one alone—had early discovered that the hidden tax on old money was the absolute necessity of sharing the more public extravagances with others—and as many of those others as possible. It mattered little that he found the tax neither convenient nor fair; if he and his lady wished to go on more or less as they pleased, then these small payments to society must be made.
Since he very much wished them to go on more or less as they pleased, the inconvenience of hosting a theater party now and then did very little, really, to blight his horizon.
He did grumble, of course—a gentleman did not like to disappoint his wife—on this occasion as he knotted his tie, glaring quite fearfully at his reflection, one eye on he wife under discussion, who was nicely en deshabille and clearly visible in the glass.
“I don’t see why we have to play host to the National Zoo at these affairs,” he said, his long, clever fingers deftly manipulating the ivory silk. “It would be very enjoyable, I think, to once attend the opera tete-a-tete with my wife.”
In the glass, Denora was sliding a confection of silver-shot midnight blue up over her legs, her luscious thighs, her delicious belly…
“Now, Nicky, you know you like Carrington, and the last time we had Brian, I swear the two of you spent the whole evening in each other’s pockets. I was very much the jealous wife that evening.”
He concocted a fierce frown for the mirror. “And I suppose the attentions of Beyemuir to yourself are only what the husband of a beauty of the first water should resign himself to bear?”
She laughed, easing the cloth over the dizzying mounds of her breasts. “Certainly, it would be, were you the husband of a jewel. As it is, you must allow poor Beyemuir to demonstrate a gentleman’s natural charity to a matron of limited charms.” She wriggled one last time, emphatically. The blue dress was a tight, clinging sheath from breast to hip, where it softened into a wide, inverted tulip shape, allowing Nora her length of stride while still displaying an alluring tendency to cling to her long limbs. In all, it was something of a marvel, this dress, and Nicky gave it full honors, gazing into the glass, his hands quiet amid the intricacies of his tie.
Nora turned her back to the mirror, showing the unsealed row oftiny silver buttons; and smiled at him over her shoulder. “Do me up, please, darling?”
“Certainly.” He winked, the air heated briefly, and the silver buttons glittered, sealing from bottom to top. He was rewarded with another smile as she wriggled appreciatively and adjusted the fabric for maximum fashionable decolletage.
He turned way from the mirror and reached for his coat. She spun, the tulip petal skirt floating above her ankles, the silver threads flashing like meteors through a midnight sky.
“Do you like it?”
“I admire it without reservation,” he told her. “As will every other gentleman in the house—and those not so gentlemanly, too.”
She arched a sable eyebrow. “Oh, come now, Nicky! At the opera?”
“Rogues are found everywhere,” he replied. “Recall where you found me.”
“Too true! Who would have thought Balliol harbored such vice!”
He bowed and went to fetch their cloaks.
The party was complete, with the exception of one, which of course engaged Brian’s attention.
“Our esteemed Dr. Hillier not here yet?” he asked, twinkling at Nicholas over the rim of his wineglass. “Home sulking, do you think?”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “Now, why sulking, I wonder?”
“Ah, you haven’t seen the latest Magician Internist? Mine arrived today.”
“I’ve let the subscription lapse,” Nick said, flicking an imaginary fleck of dust from his sleeve. “All that learned discourse—too fatiguing, Brian! Not to mention all those rather graphic descriptions of disease and malformation.” He shuddered, deliberately, and fortified himself with a sip of wine.
Brian laughed. “Trust me, you’ll want to look this issue up and take a look at Wolheim’s refutation of our dear Hillier’s pet theory.”
“Not the spellchucker again?”
“No, dear boy—you are out of touch! Hillier’s got himself a new pet theory. Mind you, he hasn’t given up on the spellchucker, but if you’ll recall, that little bit of legerdemain required an organic host—and a very specific host at that. Now he’s gone the next step and declared thatit is possible to store— store —a spell! Rather like a battery, you see. Well, as you might expect, Wolheim was all over that. The usual thing: states that his own tests, following Hillier’s method, did not produce the results described, prosed on about the philosophy of magic, the theory of conservation of energies—oh, and the obligatory insult. Rather a nasty one this time. Said he hoped Hillier is a better engineer than he is magic-worker, else the city is in for a rash of bridges falling down.”
“Well, that was too bad of him,” Nicky said. “But, really, Brian, there’s no need to suppose Hillier to be sulking. He and Wolheim have been at each other’s professional throat for years now. Nora swears that they each live for the opportunity to refute the other’s newest favorite theory or method.”
“Oh, it’s worse than that!” Brian said earnestly. “Wolheim lost Hillier a perfectly good assistant a few years back. You and your lady were traveling at the time, I believe.”
Nicky frowned. “You mean Sarah Ames? I remember hearing about that. A tragedy, of course. But I really don’t see how Wolheim can be blamed for the lady’s decision to end her own life.”
“Wolheim had cost her a fellowship, as I heard it. Hillier was badly broken up for—well, here’s the fellow now!” he cried, turning his head with a wide smile for the tardy guest. “Hillier, old thing! It’s been an age.”
“Or at least a week,” the doctor returned, removing his top hat. He nodded cordially at his host. “Nicholas.”
“Benjamin. Denora was concerned.”
“Then I’d best make my apologies at once,” he said, and stepped energetically forward.
“Benjy!” Denora looked around Beyemuir’s shoulder and held out her hands. “You are so terribly late! Look, t
he lights have gone down once already.”
Hillier kissed both hands, with flair and a careful eye to a husbands pride, and stepped back, smiling. “My apologies, dear Lady Charles! That a mere inconvenience of traffic should cause you an instant’s worry!”
“At least it was worry rewarded,” Nora said, smiling brilliantlyupon both Hillier and Beyemuir. “Elihu, do pour Benjy something while he tells me how his daughter goes on.”
“Aletha goes on quite well,” the doctor said promptly, with another smile for her sweet courtesy. “Her talent for the Arts Magical is growing. Her tutor is quite encouraged.”
“I am gratified to hear it,” Denora said warmly. “So she is responding well to the treatment?”
Hillier’s face darkened as he glanced aside to take his glass from Beyemuir. “Thank you, Elihu.” He sipped and looked back to Nora.
“The treatment is not panacea, and not even those who love her best believe that she will ever embrace a normal life. Indeed, her tutor speculates that her affliction adds potency to her talent. I find no collaboration in the literature, and one does not like to subject her to any further testing…”
“Certainly not!” Denora said warmly, and met her husband’s eyes across the box. “Nicky dear, I think we should get everyone seated, don’t you? I do believe the lights have gone down again…”
It was Nicholas and Denora’s pleasant habit, on the mornings when they were both at home, to breakfast together in their private room, sharing buttered toast, coffee, and the Times between them.
Two days after the opera party, they sat cozily together in the window nook, she in her carmine silk robe, he in the kimono Lord Murasaki had given him for his assistance in repairing a certain irregularity in His Lordship’s love life. The window was open in the nook, admitting an agreeable bustling from the street below. The late morning sun bathed the table and remains of breakfast in languorous yellow light.
Nora, her father’s daughter to the fingertips, was immersed in the business section, one slim hand curled round her coffee cup. Nicky slouched in his chair, lazily perusing the world news. According to the Times, the world was going to pot—no surprises there.
He turned the page to city news, one hand groping toward the table in pursuit of his cup—and froze.
“I say,” he began, and paused as he read it again.
“Nicky?” Nora’s hand dropped lightly to his sleeve. “What is it?”
He lowered the paper to meet her deep brown eyes, and found his voice. “Wolheim’s dead.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, no, darling! An accident, I suppose?”
Anyone who knew of the nature of Dr. Sir John Wolheim’s experiments with the Force Magical would certainly suppose an accident. Nicholas glanced down at the paper. Yes, the damning phrase was there…
“Nicky?”
“Suspicious circumstances, it says here.”
“Blast.” Nora crumpled her paper onto her lap with a frown. “Dickon will be calling, won’t he?”
Dickon—that would be Prince Richard—would most assuredly be calling, Nick thought sourly. The wonder was that he hadn’t called already. He sighed, folded the paper, and dropped it on the table.
“I’d better dress,” he said, pushing out of the chair. He smiled down into her eyes and playfully tapped a finger against her cheek. “Come, now, darling; it’s not as if I’m being sent to Timbuktu.”
“This time,” she said darkly just as the phone rang.
It was midday when Nicholas arrived at the house of the late Dr. Sir John Wolheim. The police were there before him, of course, but Dickon’s office had been kind enough to let them know to expect the prince’s sorcerer.
Despite the news report, Nicky had more than half expected to confront the remains of a catastrophic release of magical energy. Wolheim’s spells always carried a taint of brute force; a hint of rather too much power used. It was a flaw that would have earned him the most stringent censure of the dean at Balliol, Nick’s alma mater. Wolheim had been an Oriel man, however, and after all these years remained primarily a student of the philosophy of magic, rather than a practitioner. Benjamin Hillier, who had as deft a touch with a spell as anyone of Nick’s acquaintance, himself a graduate of Balliol, had read practical magic, with a second in engineering. So it was that Hillier kept a house in the city and was no more a danger to his neighbors than the heedless town traffic, while Wolheim held to a country estate, where his frequently explosive explorations endangered no one but himself and his peculiarly devoted house staff.
Nick was let into the house by one of Appleton’s men and escorted to the laboratory at the back by another.
“Here you are, sir,” his escort said as they reached a doorway filled by a stern and wide-shouldered policeman. The door leaned against the opposite wall.
“Had to take it off the hinges,” the guard said. “Locked from the inside, it was. Housekeeper called us when he didn’t answer the house phone.” He stepped aside, giving Nick room to pass.
“Lieutenant!” he called into the room. “It’s His Lordship.”
Even here, in the belly of the beast, there was no overt damage. Nicky paused on the threshold to admire the neat ordinariness of the room. Tools were hung away; vessels lined up by kind and capacity; books shelves; poisons behind glass; the famous collection of windup toys tidily arranged on their special shelf, except for one—a chimp mounted on a tricycle—sitting quietly, its energy spent, in the center of the otherwise empty worktable.
From behind that spotless work surface arose the long and dour form of Inspector Appleton. “Your Lordship,” he said. “Here it is, sir. We’ve left everything as it was found.”
Nick did not number precognition among his talents, but there was something in Appleton’s face that put him on his guard. Carefully, he walked forward, steeled for the worst.
It was well that he was, for the object lying on the floor bore no relationship to the dapper and impatient little man Nicky remembered meeting at various professional symposia across the years.
The corpus was hirsute and thick, where Wolheim had been bald and thin. Rags of what had once been a laboratory smock and corduroy trousers clung in ribbons to bestial arms and trunk. The head was misshapen, showing a curved growth of horn from the temple, sweeping back around an oddly elongated ear. The face… Nicky sank carefully down on his heels. The face was as hairy as the rest of the body, the features thickened into something apelike or worse.
Nicky looked up to Appleton. “You’re certain this is Sir John?”
“Sergeant Beerman cast the True-See, sir. Housemaid identified the ghost.”
Nicky nodded. Sylvia Beerman was a first-rate ‘caster. Wasted inthe police force, really. He rose and stood staring down at the thing on the floor.
“Beerman said you was to check her, sir. Said she didn’t believe it herself.”
“Well, then. We mustn’t disappoint a lady, eh?” Sighing, Nicky slid his wand from its long pocket inside the lining of his jacket and held it poised, eyes half-closed, gathering energy. The tip of the wand glowed a ridiculous bright green, which had pained him in his youth when he first learned that the wand lights color reflected the magician’s life force. He had been quite the aesthete in those days and would have given his soul for a wand-glow of icy blue or starry silver. Thank God Nora had come along and knocked that nonsense out of him.
He glanced at Appleton, who held the police department’s camera obscura at the ready.
The glow from the wand tip was steady. Nick drew the pattern in bright green fire around the corpse, murmuring, “I will see with the eyes of truth.”
The pattern flared, bathing the monstrous corpse in a brilliant wash of color. Superimposed on the bestial body, emblazoned in brilliant green, was the image of a thin and tidy little man in rumpled lab coat and at-home corduroys, his face hairless, his features contorted in agony.
“Got it!” Appleton said over the snap of the shutter closing. He fiddled with the camer
a a moment, then nodded and held up a glass slide. “Same as Beerman caught, sir. Hers was a little fainter. Shall I run this past the maid?”
“It can’t hurt, I suppose. Please express my compliments to Sergeant Beerman. First-rate work, as always.”
“Will do, sir.”
The green image above the horrid body was fading. Nicky stood with the wand between his palms, watching the last of the spell dissolve. He glanced at Appleton.
“I’ll need some room, Lieutenant.”
“Of course, sir. I’ll be right outside the door.”
Nicky stood, his attention focused on the… thing… on the floor. His next order of business was to identify the magician responsible for the spell—or spells—that had beset Wolheim during his last hour of life. This was work of high order, less energy-intensive than the
True-Seeing, but more wearying for the magician. It was not Nicky’s favorite spell, though it was certainly among the enchantments he worked most often.
It had become something of a challenge among mages of a certain level of skill (and mischief) to conceal—to attempt to conceal—one’s magical signature. In some circles it was a parlor game. Among the criminal element it was far from a game, and there were those who were quite ingenious in their methods. But it all and always came down to cover-up, obfuscation, and misdirection. No one—no matter how skilled—could completely erase all trace of their own signature.
Sighing, Nicky had recourse once more to the wand, this time enclosing himself and the corpse within the same circle of glowing green fire. He spoke a Word and the flames leaped upward, meeting over his head, sealing out the world and any random magics still afloat in the late doctor’s laboratory.
He closed his eyes, feeling the wand vibrating in his hand; the air, warmed by power, caressing his face. Invoking the trance was a matter of a measured breath, the deliberate forming of a Word in the blackness behind his eyelids.
Murder by magic: twenty tales of crime and the supernatural Page 20