A Study in Sorcery: A Lord Darcy Novel

by Michael Kurland

  “How long have you lived among the Azteque, Don Miguel?” Lord Darcy asked, pulling out his notebook and flipping to a blank page.

  Don Miguel looked up at the ceiling and muttered to himself, counting on the fingers of his left hand with his right. He went around the fingers several times. “It would be much of twelve years now,” he said. “I am married the better piece of nine years, which is why I am of the Azteque name at the present. My wife is a lovely girl. All her own teeth. Her family is noble—very noble. I am being of much use to them in things European.”

  “I see,” Lord Darcy said. “Tell me, did you have to give up your religion to marry into this Azteque family?”

  “Oh, no,” Don Miguel said, crossing himself. “Santa Maria, no.” He reached into the neck of his brass-studded leather cuirass and pulled up a small gold cross at the end of a fine gold chain. “I am still good Christian,” he said, “good Catholic. I maybe convert my whole family. It takes time. I go to church maybe two-three times a year. When I can.”

  “Your Azteque family knows this?” Lord Darcy asked.

  “Oh, yes. It is mutual accommodation. I good for them—they good for me.”

  Lord Darcy nodded. It was indeed a complex and wonderful world they lived in. “How long have you known Prince Ixequatle?” he asked.

  “Not long—not well. The Prince, he royalty. Prince—you know? I know of him much well. He very serious young man. Going to reform the religious of his people. He pushing Quetzalcoatl, as God Who Help Man. Much like Christian God. Get rid of other gods. Get rid of blood sacrifice. No good.”

  “I thought your adopted people gave up blood sacrifice a century ago,” Lord Darcy commented.

  “Oh yes, they did—they did,” Don Miguel said earnestly. “But, like hedge magicians back in old country, highly illegal but still being done.

  “A real problem?” Lord Darcy asked.

  “No, no—not a problem. An annoyance. A bother. You see?”

  “Yes, I do,” Lord Darcy said. “Tell me, what sort of European help are you giving your Azteque in-laws?”

  “Very ambitious program,” Don Miguel told him, smiling earnestly. “They want teachers in things European—things Angevin. They want to give up old ways and take on new, better ways.”

  “Are you having much success?” Lord Darcy asked.

  Don Miguel’s smile disappeared, and he cast his gaze sadly down at the table. “Is much difficult,” he admitted. “On two sides; Many Azteques have little desire to change; like most people most places, they are comfortable with what they know. Contrariwise, many Europeans not want to teach Azteques. Is easy to get missionaries, but not teachers. The Azteques, even so as want change, do not want to change religions. Teachers si, missionaries no.”

  “I thought missionaries make good teachers,” Lord Darcy said.

  “In places where they do not have to give up being missionaries,” Don Miguel explained. “Teachers, healers, others of fine profession. But missionaries not willing to give up their god to teach, or heal. And Azteques have their own god. Is a difficult problem.”

  “I can see that,” Lord Darcy said. “How did you happen to come along with the Prince?”

  “Needed someone who spoke Anglo-French, and understood mores and manner of thinking of Angevins,” he said seriously. “I am the closest thing to an expert presently in Tenochtitlan. I am, in truth, hardly qualified, as I spent my youth in Spain without ever crossing the border to any neighboring kingdoms. But Spain is a lot closer than Tenochtitlan, so I am become an expert. It is better, as the Azteques say, than even a small earthquake.”

  “What was the Prince like?” Lord Darcy asked. “Did you like him?”

  “He was earnest young man,” Don Miguel said. “The sort who is not easy to like, even when you agree with him. With the same point, it would be hard to dislike him enough to do anything about it. He was so serious—so intense. And yet there was nothing of harm in him, if you see what I say.”

  “I do,” Lord Darcy said. “And yet somebody killed him. And ripped out his heart.”

  “Is a puzzle,” Don Miguel said. “All I can think is maybe somebody did it to discredit Azteque peoples. But seems a far way to go for such a little effect.”

  “I agree. Do you think it could have been a ritual killing by someone within the Azteque community? Not necessarily someone you came with, but someone else?”

  Don Miguel shrugged. “Who?” he asked. “There are not many people of Azteque background here in Nova Eboracum, and most of them are like your friend Lord John Quetzal there—they are not any longer of the old religion. These people that I came with certainly would not have done such a thing. Besides, on the morning it was done, the only one absent from this house was the Prince himself.”

  “Why did he go alone, without a guard?” Lord Darcy asked.

  “He did not know he had reason to need one,” Don Miguel said. “He was going to meet someone.”

  Lord Darcy raised his head from the notebook. “He was what?”

  “He went to meet someone.”

  “Whom?”

  Don Miguel shook his head. “None of us knows. Prince Ixequatle mentioned to Lord Lloriquhali that he was meeting someone who had information about the pyramid, but he did not say who it was.”

  “What sort of information?”

  “That, also, he did not say, alas.”

  Lord Darcy stood up. “Thank you, Don Miguel.” he said, “you have been a great help.”

  “It was my pleasure,” Don Miguel said, rising. “I, also, feel the necessity of capturing the assassin. Please, if there is more I can do, you will call upon me.”

  “I shall,” Lord Darcy assured him.

  Lord Lloriquhali marched in as Don Miguel left. He stood across the desk from Lord Darcy, ignoring the chair, raised his right hand, and made his speech. He enunciated his Nahuatl clearly so that even a child could understand, and ignored the voice of Lord John as he translated.

  He made it clear that he had warned Prince Ixequatle not to go out that day. That whoever the Prince had gone to meet must have been one of the assassins. That everyone was plotting against them. That he, Lord Lloriquhali, trusted Lord Darcy because it was clear that he, Lord Darcy, was an agent of the gods who would avenge the Prince.

  “What do you suggest that I do?” Lord Darcy asked.

  “Arrest everyone who could have been connected with the plot,” Lord Lloriquhali said firmly. “Torture them until the guilty ones confess. Then give them to us.”

  “Why do you think that there was more than one assassin?” Lord Darcy asked.

  “Because this was the work of cowards, and no coward would ever face an Azteque alone,” Lord Lloriquhali explained.

  “Ah!” Lord Darcy said.

  Lord Lloriquhali wheeled and stepped firmly back into the other room. In a few moments his place was taken by Chichitoquoppi, the dead Prince’s personal manservant.

  Chichitoquoppi was a small, thin man in his twenties, with stooped shoulders and a large head, dressed only in a bleached white maxtlatl, the Azteque version of the loincloth, and a plain wool mantle, knotted over his left shoulder. His hair was close-cropped, and his few garments were meticulously clean. He sidled into the room, as though unconvinced that he wouldn’t be yelled at, and stood behind the chair, holding its back for support.

  “Tell him to sit down,” Lord Darcy said over his shoulder. Lord John did so, and the thin, nervous man pulled the chair out and lowered himself gingerly into it.

  “How long were you Prince Ixequatle’s manservant?” Lord Darcy asked.

  Chichitoquoppi glanced at Lord John Quetzal as he translated, and then focused on Lord Darcy. “For the past six months,” he said. “Before that I worked in the palace. I was a barber. Prince Ixequatle liked the way I trimmed his beard, and he took me into his personal service when his previous man had to stop work because of stomach problem.” Chichitoquoppi held his stomach to illustrate. “He was in great pain.”r />
  “How is he now?” Lord Darcy interrupted.

  “Stuppitiquti? He is much improved. He has retired and opened a pulque shop.”

  “It’s a sort of wine made from agave sap,” Lord John added at Lord Darcy’s questioning look.

  “What sort of man was the Prince?” Lord Darcy asked.

  Chichitoquoppi considered, scratching the side of his head. “Firm,” he said. “Smart,” he added. “When he decided to learn your language, it took him six months to become fluent.”

  “He spoke Anglic?” Lord Darcy asked.

  Chichitoquoppi nodded. “He spoke it well, they tell me. I do not understand it myself.”

  “Well,” Lord Darcy said to Lord John, “that explains something that has been puzzling me. It’s easier to imagine the Prince going off with somebody, now that I know he could talk to him.” He turned back to Chichitoquoppi. “What did you do for your master?” he asked.

  “I brought his food. I saw that his clothes were clean, and that he dressed properly. His mother made him promise to dress warmly, so I made sure he had his wool mantle when he went out. I brought him things and delivered messages. I did whatever the Prince wished me to.”

  “Did you give him his wool mantle when he went out the morning he was killed?” Lord Darcy asked.

  Chichitoquoppi nodded his head emphatically. “It was cold,” he said. “The Prince wore his embroidered wool mantle. Also cotton foot-wrappings under his sandals.”

  “Thank you, Chichitoquoppi, you can go now,” Lord Darcy said. The little man scurried out of the room.

  “What do you suppose happened to that wool mantle?” Lord Darcy asked, getting up and stretching.

  “He certainly didn’t have it when we found him,” Lord John said.

  Lord Darcy strode to the connecting door and opened it. “I want to see the Prince’s room,” he told Don Miguel Potchatipotle, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor by the fire.

  “Right away, Your Lordship,” Don Miguel said, pushing himself to his feet. “I, myself, will take you.”

  “Indeed,” Lord Darcy said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Master Sean O Lochlainn set his symbol-covered carpetbag on the large, plain wooden table and spread it open by its crocodile-jaw hinges. “This will be tricky, my lord,” he said, “but, with any luck, it will do the job.”

  Lord Darcy, Master Sean, and Lord John Quetzal were in the inner room of a small suite of offices in the Residence, which Duke Charles had turned over to them for the investigation. The rooms were just past the regular guardroom, to the right of the main door as one entered. Plainclothes Chief Master At Arms Vincetti controlled his minions from the outer office, and his clerk sorted the steady influx of reports into file folders. Every hour he added new folders to a growing pile. “You are to gather as much chaff as you can,” Lord Darcy had instructed the lanky Chief Master At Arms, “so that when we learn to recognize the wheat, it will be somewhere in there waiting for us to separate it.”

  Master Sean lit a beeswax candle and placed it to one side of the table. Then he took a roll of fine, bleached-white vellum from his carpetbag and unrolled one sheet, placing it on the table. Using a long, thin gold wand with a cat’s-eye opal clutched by five golden fingers at its tip, he touched each of the four edges of the sheet, and then the center, while intoning some Latinate phrases. The parchment became visibly stiffer on the table, as though it had just been magically starched and ironed. He nodded his satisfaction. “Would you take all that material you gathered from the Prince’s room, Lord John, and place it at one end of this sheet, if you please?” he said. “State clearly what you are doing as you do it, if you’d be so kind. Intent is all.”

  Lord John pulled the drawstring on the leather pouch he was holding. “The material in this pouch, being detritus which I collected personally from the room formerly occupied by the Azteque Prince Ixequatle, particularly the area around his wardrobe, I now place at the near end of this magically charged sheet of vellum for separation,” he said clearly, shaking the contents of the pouch gently onto the white sheet and spreading them out with the blunt end of a silver pen which he took from his shirt pocket.

  “Very good, my lord,” Master Sean said. He took the beeswax candle, which now had a little cup of melted wax at the top under the wick, and pinched the wick with two moistened fingers, putting it out. With a small brush made with hairs from a fox’s tail he drew a line of melted beeswax across the parchment. “As is well known,” he said, “like attracts like, and, by proper application of the Law of Similarity, the attraction can work at a distance. Not a great distance, in this case, but sufficient for the purpose.”

  With a smile, Lord Darcy listened to his Master Magician lecture as he worked. Master Sean worked better if he talked out his actions; the necessity for clear description made him focus his mind intently on what he was doing. It also made him a superb teacher in the art and craft of magic. After long years of association, Lord Darcy now understood fully most of the more common magical procedures associated with forensic sorcery. Of course he still couldn’t do any of them; no amount of magical knowledge could substitute for the Talent, and if it was absent, the magic just wouldn’t work. It was one of the mysteries of the universe that was not even close to solution: why the laws of magic would work for one person and not another. But it was certainly so.

  Like hair and eye color, color blindness, high intelligence, and the ability to govern, the trait seemed to run in families. You had a much better chance of having at least a trace of the Talent if your parents were Celtic rather than, say, Frisian. If they were Norman, you could peer into a crystal all your life and never see anything beyond your own reflection. The Poles, also, were a people devoid of Talent. But King Casimir’s Magyar subjects were possessed of it to a high degree, so the balance was maintained.

  “Now I’ll take this charged bit of wool,” Master Sean was saying, “and put it on the far side of the beeswax barrier. It’s a sort of magical version of the lodestone, do you see, but type-specific. Like attracting like, as I said. Now it is on the same plane as the particles to be tested, and we’ll shortly find out—There, now!”

  Some of the particles in the little spread-out pile of princely detritus had begun a jerky motion in the direction of the strand of wool; a sort of drunkard’s walk when the drunkard really wants to get home. Slowly and erratically they separated themselves from the surrounding bits of debris and staggered across the stark white parchment surface until they had reached and crossed the wax line. Once on the far side, they seemed to lose interest, and after a few more jerks to one side or the other, they lay where they were.

  “That isn’t how a lodestone attracts bits of iron,” Lord John commented.

  “There are no exact analogies,” Master Sean said, removing his woolen lodestone from the vellum.

  “So now what do we know?” Lord Darcy asked. “Merely that those dancing bits are wool fragments, is that right?”

  “That’s so, my lord,” the tubby forensic sorcerer replied, peering down to examine the fragments under a small but powerful glass that he took from his magical carpetbag. “But, considering that the room was not used for clothing or bedding storage, and that the missing cape is the only woolen garment of the Prince’s that had been unpacked, I’d say there is a reasonable chance that most of these particles are from Prince Ixequatle’s cape.”

  “It’s certainly worth the experiment,” Lord Darcy acknowledged. “Proceed, Master Sean.”

  Putting aside the glass, Master Sean deftly gathered up all the shreds of wool with his right thumb and forefinger and rolled them into a ball the size of a pea. “Now, you see, we have to shift our methods. The Law of Similarity has given us all the information we can squeeze out of it. We no longer concern ourselves with similarities, but with identities. Not, “is this a fragment of wool?’ but, ‘is this fragment of wool from Prince Ixequatle’s mantle, and if so, where is that mantle now?’”

  Maste
r Sean took from his symbol-covered carpetbag a carved crystalline casque the size and shape of a pocket watch and unscrewed the clear, crystal top. Placing it carefully on the table, he gently dropped the pellet of wool inside and screwed down the top. “The Law of Synecdoche tells us that the whole and the sum of its parts are interchangeable. If an object has a unique and vigorous identity, then each of its parts shares in that identity. And those parts that are severed from the whole will seek to regain their position—their identity—as a part of the whole. When properly energized, that seeking will become active rather than dormant. Let us now see whether we can energize this pellet of wool to seek for its home in the mantle of Prince Ixequatle.”

  Master Sean relit the candle and placed it at the edge of the table about eight inches in front of the crystal case. Then he carefully decanted a measured amount of a fine silver-specked green powder onto a small mirror that he held between two fingers. Lord Darcy noticed that Lord John was watching the Irish Master Sorcerer closely, noting the exact position and relative motion of each gesture. The young Mechicain sorcerer moved his hands slightly in imitation of Master Sean’s broad motions, to put the actions into his muscle memory. This sort of imitation, Lord Darcy thought, went beyond flattery. Lord John was, after all, a master in his own right now (or was it, with a magician or priest, ‘master in his own rite’?). His action showed the depth of his belief that Sean O Lochlainn was truly a Master Sorcerer.

  Master Sean measured the angle between the candle flame and the crystal container with his eye, and then, after murmuring the appropriate spell, with one puff he blew the powder through the flame toward the crystal.

  There was a small, high-pitched explosion, and the area was filled with a green glow, and a myriad of bright sparks flashed at random, as though just for a moment ten thousand fireflies had darted through the room.