Once safely in his study, he sat and stared at the bookcase on the wall opposite while he pondered.
So far, except for eliminating Watson, everything had been going according to plan. When Moriarty perished, the anchor Spencer had constructed had drawn his soul here, and the talisman he had made had contained it. As for the Professor himself, Moriarty could only see what Spencer allowed him to see, and move in the limited space Spencer gave him. Moriarty had supplied Spencer with enough details that he had been able to keep the Organization mostly running. Spencer’s battery would soon be completed, and Moriarty would soon be in a vessel everyone was happy with and running the Organization himself, taking that work out of Spencer’s hands. Perhaps things had been going too well. Whenever things seemed to be ticking along like clockwork, somewhere under the surface there were always gears slipping.
So now he knew things were not going as well as they had seemed, and Watson’s presence in Wapping alarmed him. And that presence suggested something else. Just because Watson was a Hunting Lodge Master, it didn’t follow that he wouldn’t bind an Elemental if he thought he had to. Would Watson have dared to try and bind one of the darker Water Elementals in order to get information?
. . . very probably. There didn’t seem to be much that Watson wouldn’t dare. He was a great deal more like Holmes than his writing would have suggested.
Bad enough that the attempt to kill him had failed. Worse that now—perhaps—he had been warned. Or at least, he was warned against the ordinary sort of attack.
But what about a magic attack?
Watson couldn’t know about Spencer, couldn’t know he worked for Moriarty. Alderscroft might suspect a necromancer was to blame for the headless corpses—in fact, it was entirely possible that despite his best efforts, some signs of Necromantic activity had leaked past Spencer’s carefully built shields. And that was probably what Watson was looking for. Bad . . . but not a disaster.
But he also must have attributed the purely physical attack on himself as something unconnected to that search; that it was Moriarty’s men trying to get revenge for all the times Holmes and Watson had put them behind bars. He couldn’t know Moriarty was still—in a sense—alive. He had no way to know that Spencer and Moriarty were working together. He had no reason to think that Moriarty, a man of science and logic, would give credence to the existence of magic. Which meant he had no reason to think it was Spencer, rather than Moriarty (or rather, Moriarty’s men) who was responsible for the attack.
Which meant he probably thought the necromancer he was hunting for had no idea he was being hunted, and would not in his turn launch an attack against Watson.
So . . . bad, but not a disaster. Because Watson was probably not going to expect a magical attack. And Spencer had no intention of doing that. It would be some other attack. A plain old assault hadn’t worked, so he wouldn’t be trying that again.
Now . . . the question was, what kind of attack? This was going to require some extremely careful planning. It had to be nothing Watson would anticipate coming from a necromancer. No dark Elementals. No undead. This was going to take some bloody clever planning.
He sighed. Just one more damned thing on top of everything else he needed to think about.
But first things first. If Watson had invoked one of the dark Water Elementals, then he probably knew approximately where the bodies had entered the river—but there was a lot of sewer between this house and the river.
So the best thing he could do right now was to strengthen his shields. That was going to deplete his stored energies, but that was all right. There would be a lot more coming from the girls, especially if he spent some time taunting and tormenting them.
He stood up. He was going to have a lot of work to do today. The sooner he got to it, the better.
* * *
The killing table was, fortunately, easily pushed aside by someone as strong as he was. And as long as the talisman remained shrouded in silk, Moriarty was unlikely to notice his presence. He went to the storage chest under the shelves of heads and brought out a small floorcloth, just large enough to cover the center of the room. It had cost him a lot of hard-earned money to have it embroidered exactly the way he wanted it, but the result was worth it. No painting the circles and glyphs and sigils. No worries about stepping wrong and breaking lines chalked on the floor. He inspected it closely every time he took it out of storage or got ready to put it back in. Kelly was capable of mending anything that was damaged; she just wasn’t good enough to have done the initial work.
He placed the floorcloth in the center of the room and drew on the power in his obsidian spheres until he could take in nothing more. Then he stepped into the innermost circle on the cloth and bent his will on the sigil of the west. He smiled to himself a little, as he reflected that he was beginning with Water—John Watson’s power.
Within moments, he had a struggling, dripping wet nixie inside the circle holding the sigil. The creature was about knee-high and looked like a naked, green-haired woman with scaled skin. She looked up at him with angry, bulging green eyes, but he ignored her for the moment. He turned a quarter circle and moved on to the south, and Fire.
He was always very careful with Fire . . . even a necromancer as powerful as he was needed to make sure he did not catch the attentions of the Greater Fire Elementals, creatures which could end him with a thought. So he merely summoned and bound a common salamander. Nothing they would take note of. The salamander, a fire-sheathed lizard the same size as the nixie, hissed angrily at him and writhed in its invisible bonds.
He turned another quarter circle.
For Air, he was very happy to entrap one of Mary Watson’s cherished sylphs, a delicate little thing with dragonfly wings clothed in a wisp of blue mist that looked up at him out of enormous, terrified silver eyes, shedding tears like pearls. And finishing up in the north and Earth, he dragged in a struggling brownie, who spat curses at him in language suited to a dockworker.
With all four creatures bound and held, he began the spell that would strengthen his wards and shields against all of them, until even the Greater Elementals would have a difficult, possibly even impossible, task penetrating them.
A shrill keening arose from all of the bound creatures, a wail of pain as their very substance was drawn from their bodies and incorporated into the shields. This took more of his power and concentration than summoning and binding the Elementals themselves. He had to keep them from breaking their bonds, spin out threads of power from their bodies, and weave it all into his shields.
The Elementals wailed with pain as he did this, the sound of their cries penetrating his skull and sending lightning bolts of agony from his eyes to the nape of his neck. But that was part of the price to be paid, and he gritted his teeth and went on with the work. The first time he’d done this, he’d tried using earplugs of wax, which had been completely ineffective. Now he just worked through the pain, knowing a very, very small, carefully measured dose of opium would ease his agony until the pain faded on its own. This was just about the only time he ever resorted to drugs. He’d seen the deleterious effects on others too much to want to hazard them himself.
The Elementals began to fade, growing more and more transparent as he literally spun them into his shields, their cries growing thinner and weaker, until they faded into nothing, and were gone.
He took a long, deep breath and regarded his handiwork with satisfaction. Nothing, not a Master, not a full Hunting Lodge, nothing short of a Greater Elemental was going to get through those shields or realize he was there. He had learned well from his former Master, whose specialty had been shields. His protections were also camouflage. From outside, there was literally nothing to see.
With a suppressed groan of pain, he dismissed his protections, then bent to pick up the dropcloth. And had to catch himself on the side of the killing table as a wave of dizziness overcame him.
This had taken even more out of him than he had anticipated. But it was so v
ery worth it.
Too bad he had one more task in front of him before he could count himself safe.
* * *
“Blimey,” Kelly said mildly, as he dragged himself to the supper table. “Yew look like ye run ten mile in yer stockin’ feet.”
Should he tell her? Well, why not. She ought to know what he suspected so that she could take her own precautions. Their interests were exactly aligned on this point.
“The men I commissioned failed to kill John Watson,” he told her, “And I have reason to think Scotland Yard has recruited him to discover where my leftovers are coming from. I believe he invoked a Water Elemental in Wapping to determine just that. And I believe the Hartons have loaned him some of their servants to guard him, at least when he undertakes excursions away from home.”
Kelly’s chin hardened. “Thet ain’t good.”
“No, it’s not,” he agreed. “So I just strengthened the shields to the point where an entire Hunting Lodge will neither be able to see them nor break them. And I am going to try and find out what, if anything, Watson learned. If there are any preparations or moves you need to make to protect yourself, I suggest you make them.”
“Closin’ me ’ouse down an’ movin’ ’ere,” she said immediately.
He had anticipated this. “Clear the rubbish out of the upstairs bedrooms into the attic and take however many you need,” he replied. “It’s in my best interests that neither of us get pinched by these people. Once we get the Boss back in place and running the show, we won’t have to worry about them anymore.”
“Too roight.” She licked her lips. “Oi’ll git on cleanin’ out the rooms then. Oi c’an move termorrer.”
“Meanwhile I need to have a bit of a lay-down.” He ate soup he had no appetite for, drank half a pot of tea at a go, and swallowed his tiny ball of opium. Once in the cool and dark of his bedroom, he sighed, and slowly felt the lightning bolts of pain behind his eyes fade.
At least he had warning to get his protections in place. If those men had killed Watson . . . he might not have had that. They wouldn’t necessarily have told him where they had ambushed the doctor. He’d never have been able to put two and two together and come up with “Alderscroft is interested.”
So . . . perhaps this wasn’t a disaster after all. . . .
He felt the opium take the last of his pain and drifted into sleep.
* * *
One of the few benefits of opium in his opinion was that it tended to allow the imagination complete free rein. He knew that he was not an imaginative man—or rather, he was a methodical man, not given to leaps of intuition. Opium freed his mind from those inhibitions.
He emerged from his short rest with the germ of a plan uppermost in his mind. Moriarty had wanted to use the death of Watson as a means of making Holmes more cautious.
But something that would serve just as well would be striking indirectly, rather than directly, at Watson. And what would take Watson right out of the game, thus proving to Holmes that his friends and allies were all potential targets?
Killing Mary Watson.
The only question was, how to accomplish this? After the attack on John Watson, the couple would be alert and ready for anything like another straightforward attack or an ambush. No, this would have to be subtle, and require finesse.
Finesse meant he would have to use magic. But fortunately, Spencer had experience with much more than just necromancy. He had always been interested in things that granted mental control of others. Compulsions, especially; modifications of the old-fashioned “love” or “lust” spell or the “geas” that would compel someone to a particular action. He thought he had a good idea, but there was one aspect that was not in his area of expertise.
Although he was loath to do so, it was time to inform Moriarty of developments, and consult him.
It was night when he awoke, but night or day meant little to him for this purpose. It wasn’t as if he was going to wake the Professor, after all.
Once again he went to his workroom, sat down in front of the talisman and removed the silk covering, then closed his eyes and slipped into the spirit plane.
Before Moriarty could say anything, he spoke up. “I followed your instructions about John Watson,” he said plainly. “I sent six of our best men to follow him and ambush him when he was alone. They followed my instructions to the letter. Unfortunately, someone else must have been watching Watson, because the attack was foiled. By Hindus, the men claimed, and I have reason to believe they were not gammoning me.”
Moriarty looked at him sharply. “Hindus? That sounds highly unlikely.”
“It would take too long an explanation; let me just summarize by saying I think Lord Alderscroft is at the bottom of it.” The Professor had not, in life, had the time nor the patience to hear the details of occult life and practices in Britain, but Spencer had told him about Alderscroft and the Hunting Lodge.
“Why would Alderscroft—oh. Yes, I see. But why Hindus?”
“Because these are not just any random Indian servants. These are highly trained fighters.” He shook his head. “The point is that John Watson is protected from a direct assault. I think we need to try an indirect one.”
“Go on,” the Professor told him. “I’m listening.”
Spencer told him the plan, and halfway through, the Professor stopped frowning and started smiling.
“That’s not bad, not bad at all,” Moriarty admitted. “But how do you propose to make sure this works?”
“Well . . . that’s where I need your help,” he replied. “Did you, by any chance, ever get your hands on photographs of John Watson, or his wife Mary?”
“Now that you mention it . . .”
Spencer smiled, thinly.
* * *
Magicians are supremely careful about their belongings and about anything personal of theirs. Such things can be used against them, after all; although Elemental Masters rarely dabbled in the crude spells of witches of old and the like, they all knew there was truth in such things, and that great harm could come to them should anything connected to them fall into the wrong hands. Spencer himself routinely burned hair trimmings, nail clippings, and old bandages, and laundered his own handkerchiefs.
But images can be as potent as personal items in the right—or wrong—hands. And Moriarty not only had photographs of the Watsons, he had something better.
He had the photographic plates.
Moriarty sent him to a particular vacant home that the Professor used for storage. And there he found, neatly categorized and alphabetized, box after box of developed photographs, cross-referenced with the box after box of their corresponding photographic plates. The Professor evidently had several photographers on his payroll whose only job seemed to be to find ways of getting pictures of his enemies and future targets.
Well, he supposed that would be very useful. If you were sending a trio of thugs to eliminate someone, it would be wise to have a picture of them on hand.
Spencer would never have dared to hope for this. A photographic plate, with the image etched on it by light that had directly touched the subject, was as good as a lock of hair to him. He picked one in which the Watsons appeared in a scene along the Serpentine, sitting on a bench, on what seemed to be a lovely spring day. It was clear from the composition of the picture that the photographer had been feigning to take a general “day in the park” picture—but he had very carefully used the Watsons as the focal point of the picture.
He brought the plate back to his workshop and assembled what he needed. The killing table made an excellent workbench, once he leveled it off with the crank, and there was plenty of light to work by.
It had been a very, very long time since he had performed this sort of primitive witchcraft, but it all came back to him quickly enough. It amused him that he was literally playing the role of the Wicked Queen in Snow White, as if this was a panto.
Using a glass cutter, he carefully excised the part of the plate holding the Watso
ns’ faces. Making a circle on his table with thirteen black candles, he put the glass plate fragment in the center of the circle and began lighting the candles, moving in a counterclockwise direction and muttering the words of the first part of the incantation under his breath.
When the candles were all lit, he began the second part of the incantation, dripping three drops of wax from each of the candles in turn onto the plate.
In the third part of the incantation, he muttered two words while dropping three drops of his own blood on the plate. Then he blew out the candles, again moving counterclockwise, wrapped the wax-covered plate in clean parchment, tied it with a scarlet string, and set fire to it, all the while concentrating on what he wanted the Watsons to do.
When the fire had burned out, he scooped up the plate and the ashes, placed them in his mortar and ground them to powder. He mixed the powder carefully with a quick-drying lacquer, and used the lacquer to coat the inside and outside of the sort of common basket made with long wood shavings used by grocers to hold fruit.
When he was finished, he knew he had succeeded in properly setting the spell because he felt as tired as if he had walked ten miles. But his work wasn’t done yet; he needed to consult Moriarty’s notes on the Watsons.
The Professor had also sent him to a series of file cabinets stored in the same vacant house. The details of peoples’ lives housed within those cabinet had left him flabbergasted. There was nothing—nothing mundane anyway—that the Professor did not know about the lives of his targets or potential targets. Small wonder Holmes had considered him the most dangerous man in the Eastern Hemisphere. Everything imaginable was there—potential blackmail material, commonplace details of their lives, right down to the number and kinds of servants that were employed, and even details on the servants’ lives. The only thing that Moriarty had missed about the Watsons was their mastery of magic—and there was a note left in the file written in red ink that said “Spencer claims magicians are associated with Alderscroft and the so-called ‘Hunting Lodge.’ Get details if needed.”
The Bartered Brides (Elemental Masters) Page 20