The Guild Chronicles Books 1-3

by J M Bannon

  14

  Wednesday, the 23rd of June

  11:00 AM, a café near Scotland Yard

  The front page of the Guardian showed a lithoprint of the HMS Warrior passing over the billowing smokestacks of the alchemical works.

  The caption read:

  Airship struck awe in the gaswerks rabble as its enormous hull blotted out the sun; 60 guns trained on the dispersing crowd.

  Dolly read the main story that detailed one hundred and sixty-eight dead and fifty-seven wounded in the blas,t including three shot in the subsequent looting. He thought about the shooting of a certain police detective. That was left out of the papers.

  The first three pages were all stories related to the disaster at the Baden Gaswerks. One article was on the LQ gas leak being contained by the alchemists shutting safety valves and reducing gas production and how there were no hazards to the public from the gas being breathed.

  Another story opined that, with LQ production not damaged, the transfer line would need to be a priority repair to get the HMS Victoria’s flotation cells supplied with lift gas. She was grounded until the repairs on the line were completed, adding to the British authorities’ suspicion about the nature and intention of the explosion.

  Dolly set the daily paper down on the small cafe table. Seated at a sidewalk table, he was enjoying his tea and a poached egg and toast. Passersby did not avert their gaze from the man with a broken nose and two swollen black eyes. What they could not see were the bruises on his throat under his collar.

  Guild Master Gerard took a seat at his table. “Very unfortunate,” he said as his finger tapped the front-page story. “I assume from your condition you were on the front line breaking up the riot.

  “It was...” Dolly’s voice was faint and hoarse. It hurt his throat to breathe, even more to talk. “It was sabotage, not a riot. We will look at your government as the obvious instigators, but that is not why I wanted to meet. What do you make of this?” He put the man-shaped effigy on the table. The guild master picked it up and studied the front and back of the doll.

  “This is what is commonly referred to as a Voodoo doll. It is a talisman used to influence the spirit of the living. It can be used to cure ills, bring good fortune or bad,” said Gerard.

  “Or to control a person?” asked Dolly.

  Gerard knew of this practice, recalling Papa Lafayette creating a similar doll and the using it to dominate a wayward villager. “Oui. In the hands of a powerful witch doctor, this can be used to inflict excruciating pain or control a subject as if they were a puppet.”

  “I found this near the gaswerks” whispered the detective.

  “Do you believe she controlled the saboteurs with this fetish?” asked the guild master.

  “No. She used it to manipulate Detective Keane. He tried to kill me in a possessed state,” answered Dolly.

  Gerard picked up the figurine again and studied it. “You see these markings where the eyes and ears are?” the Frenchman said as he pointed them out to the detective. “This indicates she was also using him as a spy. Angelica could channel what your detective saw and heard. Did this Keane know of my existence in London?” The seer looked concerned at this development.

  Dolly thought for a moment. “No, he knew that I had identified Angelica and was working on her whereabouts and capture. I mentioned the identity was confirmed by a foreign source, but he assumed I learned about her through an occult specialist I confer with from time to time.” Dolly stopped to drink some warm tea to sooth his throat.

  “You mean the angel summoner, Caldwell?” asked the necronist, knowing the Englishman’s answer.

  “Yes,” replied Dolly. He had heard Rose called a lot of things but never an angel summoner.

  “You would be wise to assume there are others under her spell,” said the guild master while he played with the salt shaker on the table.

  Dolly thought for a moment. Shit, she could have half the city under her control. “How do I know you’re not one of her minions?” asked Dolly.

  “I can divine that you are not one of her thralls. As to me, you don’t know. All you have is my word that I possess powerful wards that protect me from her charms and incantations,” answered Gerard.

  Dolly accepted the answer and thought about the ward Rose gave him. “She tried to kill me, and in the process, got a friend of mine killed. I need to stop her from doing any more damage.”

  “Dolly, you were close to this Keane?”

  “I was. We both started as constables. Our beats were near each other. We both moved into the detective branch around the same time. I’ll admit I was always envious of his eye for detail. He was a natural detective and a good friend.”

  “You see now that your police force is not equipped to deal with someone like Angelica. To be frank, I would not attempt to confront her on my own, and I am a master seer.”

  Dolly swallowed hard as he drank his tea, wincing with each gulp. “How do you propose I apprehend her if even you’re not strong enough to defend against her?”

  “Our affiliation with Emperor Napoleon has made the Crown and the mechanists suspicious and prevented our guild from growing our membership or establishing a guild house on your soil. However I am traveling with two other guild members who can assist, and I can reach out to members of the Lodge here in London for additional help,” answered Gerard.

  Dolly said nothing. He had heard of the Lodge but thought of the organization as quacks and charlatans, not real metaphysicists, and certainly not as well-organized as the guild.

  “For complete safety, I would need to go after Angelica with a full wyrding of twenty necronist seers,” said Saint-Yves, but he knew that the police and the government would never stand for that many of his guild in London. “But without that, I am thinking some from the guild at the embassy and some patriotic Englishman with have spiritual insight could find her and rid London of her treachery.”

  “When you say rid her you mean kill her?” Dolly said bluntly.

  “I truly hope it does not come to that,” said Gerard.

  Dolly couldn’t breathe through his nose, and every breath he took through his mouth made his throat throb. He wanted Angelica dead, but it had to be at his hands or at the end of a hangman’s rope. “Well that would be murder under English law, and I would haul you in along with your pack of spiritualists as vigilantes,” said Dolly making an effort to raise his voice.

  “I know Angelica. We have a past, That may be just what will get her off this path of death she is on. The group I can put together will be better equipped to defend against her sorcery and minimize any additional loss of life. The incident yesterday was not a failure on your part. I am surprised that you’re still alive. You should be proud of that fact.”

  It sure felt like failure yesterday. The thought of almost dying at the hands of Keane or later when he washed Keane’s blood and brains of his face were fresh in his mind and a reminder of his failing his friend. “If you know her, maybe you can answer this question. Why didn’t she kill me yesterday? She had the chance. She reanimated my dead partner, and rather than sticking around to have him finish me off, she ran.”

  The Guild Master paused, as if thinking about Dolly’s question. “I lived with her for two years in the jungle. She was happy studying the arts. She had a true devotion to them. Now, as an outsider, you may assume that her, and even me are bad or touched by evil because we study the metaphysics of the afterlife. Making that gross assumption may make it easier to justify your actions towards her, but assuming she is evil because she practices Voodoo is as naive as assuming everything you do is good because you are an officer of the law. She has always been determined. Perhaps part of that devotion was to get the means of her revenge for her mistreatment as a slave. That she has gone to this extent to exact her revenge does not mean she wants us all dead. I believe that Angelica sparing you is a sign that she still can be redeemed.”

  The waiter came by the table. “Would you like to see a
menu, sir?”

  “No, I ate earlier.” The guild master replied.

  The waiter looked to Dolly. “Just the check when you get a chance,” he said in his hoarse voice. After the waiter left, Dolly continued. “It sure seems like you want her dead.”

  “That’s where you’re confused, Detective. Your way is the way of more death. I see three paths. One, you capture her, and she will be tried, convicted and hanged. Two, she fights and dies during her apprehension, or three, she kills you and others in her escape. All paths have death at the end. You are the guide on her pathway to death. I, on the other hand ,only want her to stop practicing her craft where she detracts from our mastery of the metaphysical. I can be a guide to life. English justice may not be served, but others need not die and she could live in cloister with the necronists,” answered Saint -Yves.

  The guild master’s words sunk into Dolly. He wanted the Voodooist in the Old Bailey, not for Moya and Chilton, but for Keane and himself. At the same tim,e he didn’t want to be back in that situation again of being powerless to the mystical. “You put me in a shitty spot, guild master. Get your team together and find Angelica Du Haiti, and make sure when you do, that you tell me so I can be there.”

  “I will, Detective,” answered Gerard.

  “I just can’t have some sorcerer turning us on each other,” replied Dolly.

  “Rest assured, Detective. The decision to involve us is a sound one. You’re a fine officer of the law, but this woman works outside the bounds of earthly laws and physics. We are better equipped to stop her before another person is killed.”

  “Guild master, just make sure you stay within the earthly bounds of commonwealth law, and we will be fine. If you find her, wire-type me and I will act immediately,” said Dolly.

  * * *

  6:30 PM, across the street from Silkwood & Company

  The only way this would go well for Jimmy Lin was if the first time that Weng Lo heard about the heist was standing in front of his cut of the gold. That meant he had to keep his knowledge of his plans to a minimum until he was ready to act. Therefore, he was back to the boring low-level job of casing a joint. Jimmy needed the luster of a pile of gold on Weng Lo’s desk to cloud his boss’s memory of denying help to Sister Rose.

  Jimmy would have eventually ended up at Silkwood & Company. Silkwood & Company was a nondescript building in the Hatton Garden area at the end of a T-intersection and not like the other jewelers with a storefront and display windows; it had no windows and a solid iron door. Silkwood was a jeweler's jeweler. They dealt in wholesale and did setting and work for the shops in the area. It was owned by the widow Silkwood, an old crone, but she had nothing to do with the business after her husband's death and left the shop to be managed by Simon Biel, a mild-mannered Hasidic gentleman that Jimmy and his ilk called Simon the Jew. He didn’t move stolen property but would rework stones and precious metals for a fee. That made Silkwood one of three places that Jimmy would have gone to, as they would take under the table work. Along with re-cutting stones and breaking down jewelry, they had a smelter for the melting of precious metals, and for a jeweler, it was a good-sized one. Jimmy didn’t need to run around looking because Trevor laid out how he was hired to paper the job to look like the gold was minted in Antwerp years ago then sat in a Venetian bank until sold to a trust, a trust managed by Chilton, Chilton, Owens and Strathmore. The re-struck gold would move back into the Chilton House vaults. Brilliant! Who would look for stolen gold in the place it was stolen from? The cops would be up and down the wharf looking for the bullion, and it would be home and hosed with a clean title right back where it was nicked from. That told Jimmy there was a partner or someone high up involved in the burglary. He liked this job. Nothing better than robbing a robber since they couldn’t call the cops, and in this case, the criminals were blue bloods. They had been amateurs in how they have been getting work done, not that they were stupid. On the contrary, this caper showed ingenuity. The difference was he was a professional outlaw, and they were not. They were making simple procedural errors that left bread crumbs for someone of his ilk to follow.

  Jimmy pondered how events played out; someone at the Chilton bank knew about the gold and likely kidnapped old man Chilton to open the safe. They had to be a manager or some higher-up that understood what was required to deal with that amount of gold. This person also knew the likes of Trevor Conroy and Simon the Jew, not the type of folks you meet shooting quail with your high society friends. The part that puzzled Jimmy and made him a little worried was that the old man was killed by some kind of witch and Rose the witch lady wanted to get her.

  He had met Rose's negro sorcerer. Walked right up to her door and knocked. Him being able to do this was another reason to think he was dealing with amateurs. They had hired Trevor to create travel papers for a Swiss national named Bertha Helstrom, rather than splitting the job between Trevor and another forger. Next upon completion, the travel papers were to be delivered to a certain address. Jimmy took it upon himself to be the delivery boy and chase down this lead. He brought the completed documents to the location, expecting it to be a drop and he would have to follow that person to the final destination. He almost shit himself when the door opened and an African woman answered the door. He played his charade as the Chinese delivery man. He even waited for a tip.

  Jimmy snapped out of his daydreaming when a man walked up to the door of Silkwood’s. He had two loaves of bread, a pail of beer and some packages. He knocked on the door and was let in. The same guy had left about a half hour before. Jimmy surmised he was sent out for dinner as the crew was working round the clock to get the job done.

  The job was a big one. They had four hundred pounds of gold to melt down and recast as 100-gram gold ingots. The equipment they had was some of the biggest in London, but it was meant for mainly doing fine jewelry work so they faced a capacity issue. Melting the gold guineas in the crucibles, casting the ingots and cooling time meant it had to be a twenty-four-hour operation with multiple men to get the job done as quickly as possible. Simon would want to turn this job around fast so he didn’t get nabbed with the stolen property.

  Now Jimmy needed to get a guy inside.

  15

  Friday the 25th of June

  8:00 PM, Rose Caldwell’s Rooms

  Rose was at her desk with notes Preston had written to help with translation of the Chronicles of Ulric and the Liber Loagaeth, both borrowed from Preston's extensive collection. She mouthed the words of the Enochian language while staring at a looking glass and attempting to get the pronunciation of the angelic language correct.

  The was a knock at the door.

  Rose walked over to it, still practicing a word’s pronunciation as she unlocked the door to let in the visitor.

  It was Jimmy Lin.

  "Come in, Jimmy."

  Jimmy was alone, and that was rare. He was usually accompanied by at least one enforcer.

  The thin Chinese native was smartly dressed, only the finest for Jimmy Lin. His attire was striking high-end business man, not the dandy fashion.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure to, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy alighted his narrow frame down onto a threadbare overstuffed chair. "To repay my debt. You are not going to believe this shit, witch lady. Well, maybe you will. Your life is a circus sideshow after all. I got a line on the gold and your Voodoo princess. I wanted to provide you with the address and let you know that she is traveling as Bertha Helstrom to Halifax Nova Scotia on Sunday afternoon." He took out a slip of paper from inside his glove and held it out for Rose to come get.

  She snatched the slip of paper from his grasp and looked at it.

  “You know where that is, witch lady?"

  “Yes, I do,” she answered while thinking about the address.

  "Bet you don't get over there much?" Jimmy said.

  "You would be surprised, Jimmy. Hey, I have a lot going on. Is there anything else?"

  "What's all this shit for?"


  "Well, Jimmy, this is what you would call an Eldritch laboratory and workshop. I do research and figure out how to use arcana to stop bad stuff from happening to good people. For example, right now I'm working on a spell to dispose of sarcastic gangsters," said Rose, arms crossed with all of her weight on her back foot.

  Jimmy looked around. "You’re funny, witch lady. You able to open locks, things like that?”

  "Why, did you lose your keys?"

  “Not exactly. See I was just wondering. Let's say that I needed to unbolt a door. Maybe you could use some of this hocus pocus to open up a lock.” Jimmy stood up and started wandering around, looking at her menagerie of equipment and touching things.

  "Jimmy, Thanks for the address. Is there anything else?"

  "No, just looks like you could use more income, and you did tip me off on the gold, so you are already an accessory, you know… If you could make this easier, you could, I don't know maybe upgrade to a flat with windows and gaslight,” said Jimmy.

  "Thanks for the offer, but I already have enough enemies. I don't need to acquire more," she said, looking to the door.

  He picked up a relic, a silver object in the shape of a skull featuring a glass top so you could see inside. Jimmy saw when he looked inside it that it was an actual skull that had been gilded in silver and in the skull cavity were glyphs and loose items, a feather and what looked like a finger bone. “What the fuck is this? Some guy’s noggin?”

  Rose grabbed it from him. “That is an ancient relic, the skull of a saint. When I learn the summoning, I can use this to call upon the angel Ariel, the lion of God, to assist me.”

  “Looks like it’s worth a bob or two?” said the gangster.

  “It’s priceless.” Rose placed it back in its wooden case and closed the box.

  “You’re not worried about people nicking your priceless items, are you? This dismal neighborhood is full of criminals,” Jimmy asked.