A Study in Sable

by Mercedes Lackey

  “That’s an understatement,” John Watson said darkly. “What about the one with the angry face? The one that was lurking within earshot, but not in the circle?”

  “Oh, Alexandre.” Beatrice waved her hands dismissively. “He has ambitions and driblets and drablets of ability. I said to him the other day when he came oozing about, talking about what he was ‘about to’ write, ‘Alex, you don’t want to write, you want to have written.’ Oh, how he glared! He knew exactly what I meant, though it escaped the others.”

  “That he wants the laurels of being a writer without the work?” Sarah hazarded, which clarified things for Nan, who couldn’t work out what Beatrice had meant, either.

  “Exactly, my dear.” Beatrice patted her hand. “He would love to be Oscar Wilde, but he hasn’t a tenth of Oscar’s heart, nor a twentieth of Oscar’s talent. He also fancies himself a grand occultist, and as you might imagine, he’s going at it through the application of drugs and atmosphere. I’ve warned the ones that will listen against him.”

  “And the ones that won’t listen?”

  “I can’t be responsible for everyone,” she replied philosophically.

  “Beatrice, you should be careful about him,” Mary Watson said, suddenly. “I’ve heard things about him. He’s vicious, sadistic, and thrives on revenge.”

  “And I have my little book,” Beatrice said, with a decided nod. “It’s my version of The Woman’s photographs. There are things I know about half of London, and proof of all of them. Why do you think I’ve never been run up before the judges on fortune-telling? No one wants me to start reciting what I know before a judge. But you’re right, and I will be careful about him.”

  Mary relaxed. “Good. He may be a weasel, but a cornered weasel is the most vicious of his kind. The best thing you can do is make him decide you’re not worth the trouble.”

  Beatrice pursed her lips, but nodded agreement.

  By this time they had arrived at Berkeley Square; as directed, the cabby stopped the horses beside the park that made the square such a pleasant place to live. John got out and handed all the ladies out before paying the driver.

  “Well, dearies,” said Beatrice, the jet ornaments on her hat bobbing and shivering as she looked about the place. “Down there, I think,” she continued, nodding at the nearer end of the cartouche-shaped park. “Under that big tree.” The park was relatively deserted—too late for nannies and children, too early for evening strollers. Beatrice led the way down a broad gravel path with the air of someone who knows exactly where she is going and what she is going to do when she gets there. None of the few people walking, reading a newspaper, or simply enjoying the late afternoon air gave any of them a second look. Their timing could not have been more perfect.

  There was a little group of wooden benches at the end of the graveled path, right under the tree, and Beatrice occupied the center of the middle one. “This’ll do,” she said, and closed her eyes with the air of someone about to perform some sort of task.

  Nan didn’t sense anything, nor see anything except a trio of red squirrels at the roots of another tree to their left that slowly, nervously, began to edge nearer. Although it was a little odd for squirrels to be so shy; normally, at least in her experience, the little rascals were as bold as ravens, and here in a park, you’d think they were used to approaching people for food. The pigeons certainly had begun to gather, cooing hopefully and eyeing Beatrice’s big bag.

  Nan wished Neville was here; he could have scouted for Elementals, or other hints of magic.

  The three little rodents ran in short little spurts until they were all huddled together in the center of the path, facing the bench. Beatrice opened her eyes and fixed her gaze on the squirrels. She smiled encouragingly at them. “Ah, there you are, lads. Come on then, show your proper shapes for us.” Now she reached into her bag and brought out the wrapped cakes, letting the handkerchief fall open so the squirrels could see the treat. “See what we have for you, dearies?”

  If Nan had not been so used to magic by now, she knew she might have thought she was going mad. One instant there were three squirrels huddling together in the middle of the graveled path. The next—

  They weren’t squirrels. They were fauns. Goat-footed, handsome little boys with tiny horns peeking through their curly hair, goat eyes fixed nervously on the cakes in Beatrice’s hand. “Come now,” Beatrice cooed. “We’ve no intention of hurting you, and there’s no Cold Iron about us. We just want to have a chat.”

  They were goat from the waist down, and unlike some fauns Nan had seen in the past, they preserved a vestige of modesty by wearing ragged loincloths. Otherwise they were completely naked. Then again, it wasn’t as if they were in need of trousers. Or shirts, for that matter. None of the Elementals Nan had ever seen had ever shown any hint that they were the least inconvenienced by cold or heat.

  “A chat?” bleated the one in the middle, faintly. “About what?”

  “Have a cake first,” Beatrice suggested. “Then we’ll talk.” She held out the handkerchief, and slowly, slowly, the little Fauns edged sideways toward her, one at a time, getting just close enough to snatch a cake, then dart back to a safer distance. There they crouched over their treats, stuffing their cakes into their mouths so fast Nan feared they’d choke, their eyes never leaving Beatrice’s face. It was only Beatrice they paid any attention to. So far as the rest of them were concerned, the fauns didn’t seem to think they were of any importance.

  Then again, maybe the fauns thought the rest of them couldn’t see the Elementals for what they were. Or, not being Earth Magicians, Nan, Sarah, Mary, and John weren’t dangerous in the sense that they were not able to coerce creatures of Earth.

  “Here now,” Nan said, getting a bit impatient with their near-panic. “Look deeper into the millstone than just the surface, will you? My friend and I have leave under Oak, Ash, and Thorn to come and go and look and know—”

  She was about to add something about the fact that being afraid of them was just silly, but all three fauns stared at her with eyes first rounded with alarm, then narrowed with concentration, then, suddenly, rounded again, but this time with awe.

  “She has the hand of him on her!” the middle one bleated. “The Oldest Old Thing himself!”

  Finally. This was not the first time that Nan and Sarah had to coax Elementals to speak to them, but usually they saw what Sarah called “Puck’s Blessing” on the girls right away, which at least acted as a sort of passport to being considered trustworthy. So her impression had been correct; these three were so skittish that they hadn’t even glanced at anyone but the single Earth Magician that had called for them.

  “And look more. Air and Water Masters here as well, and none of us going to harm you,” Nan continued, since she had their attention. They looked over at the Watsons, and all three nodded respectfully to the pair, then returned their attention to Nan, and to Beatrice.

  Now they crept close again, still nervous, but more willing to trust. Beatrice offered them the rest of the cakes, (probably well aware, as Nan and Sarah were, that by accepting the treats, the fauns put themselves in the Earth Magician’s debt).

  When the last crumb had been eaten, the fauns looked up at Beatrice with a little more calm. “You wished to chat, mage?” said the centermost one, a faun with oddly piebald skin that matched his hairy goat legs and ivory-colored horn-buds that were slightly longer than those of the other two. Nan guessed that he was the eldest of the three. Maybe the de facto leader. He settled onto his haunches, and so did the other two.

  “I need knowledge,” Beatrice replied solemnly. “More than I have. I need to know of the Dark Thing, over yon—” She gestured in the general direction of Number 10.

  The three fauns sprang together again and clutched each other, shaking, as they stared at Beatrice with their eyes starting out of their heads. “We cannot go there!” the middle one bleate
d in a panic. “Do not ask us! It is death! It is death!”

  “Oh calm down, do,” Nan said a little crossly. “No one is asking you to go there. We only want to know what you know about it.”

  Her matter-of-fact tone seemed to snap them out of their panic. They turned to look back at her. “Only that? And nothing more?” As usual it was the middle one that spoke. So far the only thing that had come out of the other two were frightened squeaks and bleats.

  “Only that.” When nothing was forthcoming out of them voluntarily, Nan decided to take the initiative and start asking questions. “Was it here when you first came to dwell here?”

  All three shook their heads.

  “And how and when did you come here?” Sarah asked. “And why?”

  “We came with the Legions,” offered their spokesperson, after looking at his two companions for a moment. “Our groves and forests were being cut down for farms. They loaded their ships with stones. We came with the stones and hid in the darkness. It was fearful, but losing our groves was more fearful.”

  “They must have come with the ballast stones,” put in John. “But they aren’t dryads, to be tied to the stones the way a dryad is tied to a tree. The stones must simply have given them something to anchor to, in order to make the crossing over so much water.”

  “Even so,” agreed the Faun. “And we found here, where we are now, these groves near Londinium. It was a fair place, and so we homed. And the Black Thing was not here then. Sons of Adam came and went, but the trees remained, and so we stayed and stayed.”

  “If the Sons of Adam trouble us not, we will not leave,” said the rightmost one, softly.

  “When did the Black Thing come?” Sarah asked. “Did it come on its own? Is it a thing that perished here? Was it brought here?”

  “By a Son of Adam, yes, it was brought,” agreed the talkative Faun. “Five tens of years ago, thereabouts.”

  They all exchanged a look but Beatrice. “That accords with our research,” Mary Watson said softly.

  “And what is it?” Nan asked bluntly. That put the Fauns in a panic again and they clung to one another.

  “It is death! It is death!” the middle one cried in desperation.

  Nan resisted the urge to reach out and shake some sense into the creature. “We already know it’s death,” she said sharply. “We know it has killed Sons of Adam more than once. But besides that, what is it?”

  They were still trembling, but at least they stopped making meeping sounds. “We . . . do not know. It is not of the Legions, though it hates them, and we can feel its hate when it thinks of them. It is not of the tribes the Legions drove away from here. It is not of the tribes that came here when the last of the Eagles left. It is not of the Druids, it is not of the Christians. It is not of the Winged Helms, nor any other invader. It is not a lost spirit, and it is not a dead thing. It feeds upon the living. It feeds upon fear. It would feed upon us, could it reach us. And it is old, old, old. It is a thing that was here before the tribes, but a Son of Adam plucked it from its proper place, where it at least slumbered, and brought it here, and the bringing awoke it.”

  Well, that at least gets us a lot farther along than we were when we started, Nan thought. We know places not to look.

  “That is all we know,” the little faun said, desperately, as they looked at each other in silence. “Truly, truly, truly.”

  “I believe you, pet,” said Beatrice comfortingly. “You’ve earned your cakes. Run along.”

  One moment the fauns were there. The next, there were only a couple of stray leaves where they had been, and three squirrels running for another tree. They swarmed up the trunk and disappeared among the leaves.

  It was pretty obvious from the utter lack of interest that anyone else was showing them that they were the only people who had seen the fauns for what they were.

  “Oh!” said Mary Watson, suddenly.

  They all turned to look at her, because the tone in which she had spoken that single syllable sounded as if she had had a revelation of sorts.

  “What is it, my dear?” asked John, putting a hand on hers.

  “I might know what it is,” she said, a little breathlessly. “I never thought all that delving into Celtic legend was going to come in handy quite so soon. I think it might be a Fomorian!”

  3

  NAN waited for the proverbial “other shoe to drop.” When it didn’t, she sighed. “All right, what’s a Fomorian?” she asked patiently. Why is it that people who know something expect you to somehow pick it out of their mi—oh. Well, I could do that, I suppose, but it would be terribly rude.

  Mary paused a moment, gathering her thoughts. “Well, according to really ancient Celtic stories, humans weren’t the first people here—certainly weren’t the first people in Ireland, where you find most of these stories, although the Celtic stories from Britain often as not mirror the Irish ones. The first ‘people,’ if you can call them that, were the Fomorians. They were extremely powerful magicians. Most of them seem, at least in the legends, to be monsters of various sorts. Creatures with the bodies of men and the heads of animals and reptiles, or reptilian humans. Their leader, Balor, was a giant with one eye.” Mary paused, as Nan frowned.

  “That sounds familiar,” she said.

  “Like a Greek Cyclops,” Sarah added.

  Mary nodded. “It does, doesn’t it? We all know that some of these legends have some basis in fact, and this may well be one of them, given that the Greeks and the Celts are not the only cultures to speak of one-eyed giants. But we can explore that at a later date.”

  “Right.” Nan nodded. “So you were telling us what you know about the Fomorians.” The sun was getting low, and Nan really wanted to be back in the flat before dark.

  Mary’s brows creased a little in thought. “The Fomorians were conquered by the Tuatha De Danaan, another nonhuman race, but not until after some really terrible wars that left the earth torn up and melted in places and the lakes boiled dry.”

  “Which sounds like a fight between Elemental Masters . . . or a fight between an Elemental Master and a very powerful Elemental.” John pursed his lips. “Interesting.”

  “The Fomorians were supposed to be immortal. Although they could be killed, it was very difficult, and it was actually easier to imprison them somewhere. Under hills, in trees . . . or in objects.” Mary glanced in the direction of Number 10 and shivered. “And if this thing is a Fomorian, whatever a Fomorian might actually be, I don’t think we are nearly prepared enough to take it on.”

  “Not today, certainly.” John frowned, but agreed, and Nan breathed a sigh of relief.

  “There are old warriors, and bold warriors, but no old, bold warriors,” Beatrice said philosophically. “And now that you have some semblance of a clue, I would very much like you to find me a nice hansom cab to take me back to Chelsea, John Watson. I fancy a bit of soup, and I promised one of my flock of chicks I’d read his sonnets before bed.”

  “And I would very much like to do that for you, Beatrice Leek,” John replied, getting to his feet and offering a hand to Mary, then one to Beatrice. “You’ve been immensely helpful. I don’t think we’d have gotten nearly this far, this fast, without you.”

  They all returned to the street, where John had the luck of hailing two cabs: a hansom for Beatrice and another hackney for the rest of them. He put Beatrice into the first, paid the fare in advance, and handed the rest of them into the second. “221 Baker Street,” he told the cabby through the little hatch in the roof.

  “Right, guv’nor,” the cabby replied, and closed the hatch, and they were off at—an amble. This was a very stylish and quiet neighborhood, with the exception of Number 10, and one just did not send a horse into a noisy trot on this street. Which was fine with Nan; those sandwiches at tea were enough to keep her until dinner, and only Beatrice had actually expended any energy calling th
e fauns.

  “I think more research in Lord Alderscroft’s archives is in order,” Mary Watson said, as the cab turned onto a less refined street, and the cabby gave his horse the signal to go a bit faster.

  Nan nodded agreement, as did Sarah. “Do you think there would be anything more about Fomorians in the British Museum?” Sarah asked.

  But Mary Watson shook her head. “I embarked on a course of study of Celtic legends because they had become so popular,” she explained, “And I wanted to be ready in case some fool accidentally invoked something. I’ve gone over every book they have on public offer, and I have checked the catalogue in the Rare Manuscript Room, but there is nothing of interest there. Most of what is there is analysis by linguists and other learned gentlemen who pay more attention to declensions of verbs than context.”

  Nan raised an eyebrow. “Do people often invoke things by accident? I thought magic was harder than that.”

  Mary shrugged. “Sometimes it’s a matter of will and a smattering of Talent. Sometimes it’s because whatever breaks through was trying very hard in the first place, and the person in question just managed to open a crack that it could exploit.”

  Sarah nodded sagely. “That happens with malign spirits, too.” She sighed. “You just can’t save fools from themselves, can you?”

  “Would that we could,” John replied. “That’s one reason why Beatrice is here in London—well, Chelsea—rather than some place out in the deep countryside. She’s trying to keep an eye on the artistic set, since that lot are the ones most likely to go into obscure religions and mysticism and get caught up in magic. As a magician rather than a Master, she’s not quite as sensitive to the poisonous things people in town have done to the earth. If anything comes up that she can’t head off, she’s got the Hunting Lodge at her disposal.”