The Bartered Brides (Elemental Masters)

by Mercedes Lackey

  But they proceeded with utmost caution; whatever was there was strong enough to influence Caro at the distance of about half a mile, and all they knew about it was that it “called” to ghosts.

  None of the sylphs had returned. Was that because they had nothing to report? Or was it because they’d been trapped by whatever was in there?

  Finally they drew near to the center of the roughly circular area on the map. On their map, that center had been occupied by an unprepossessing Methodist chapel; a small, plain building that could barely hold thirty people if they all stood very closely together.

  But as soon as they clapped eyes on it, they knew why this was a ghost-free zone.

  The front door of the chapel had been replaced with something else. A Door. The kind that Sarah created, but much brighter, and clearly much more powerful, if Caro could feel it at the very edge of the zone.

  And, just as clearly, it was imbued with some sort of magic that called ghosts to it.

  The Door was beautiful; it poured its brilliant light out onto the street, a light pure, silvery, and welcoming. The sylphs sat or hovered in front of it, as if they were warming themselves by a fire on a cold day. There was no doubt in Nan’s mind that whatever had made that door was good. There was also no doubt in her mind that it was not something for her. Not yet, anyway.

  “I think—” Sarah said, hesitantly. “I think that there must have been a Methodist minister in the past who was also a Spirit Master, and he put this in place to last past his own death, so he could go on helping lost ghosts.” She sighed. “I can hear it singing.”

  Nan cocked her head to the side, and . . . listened. And even she could hear it, faintly, a siren song of peace and promise. Even the sylphs seemed entranced, though when Sarah called them, they came flitting back to her side readily enough.

  “Well,” Sarah said, a little deflated. “It’s not a necromancer.”

  “But that means we now know where he is,” said Nan.

  * * *

  “I have a proposal,” said John, when they reached Lord Alderscroft’s townhouse and joined him for tea. “Is it logical to assume our necromancer is at the center of the remaining blank area?”

  Sarah looked thoughtful. “I suppose it is,” she agreed.

  “Then I would like to talk to Lestrade and have him send a few men to scout the area—” John began.

  “I have a much better idea,” Alderscroft interrupted him. “I’ll send Fred, George, and Eddie. They won’t attract any attention and they won’t look like constables. What is it you want to know?”

  “What it looks like. Doors, primarily. Windows too, any points of exit. I don’t want to come this far and have the blackguard escape us.” There was a deep anger under his words, and Nan didn’t blame him. “Actually I’d like them to do that for every house on that block. Just in case the one we want isn’t in the exact center.” Alderscroft nodded.

  “You’re right. And once the girls do their reconnoiter we’ll know which house is the correct one. We’ve come too far. The last thing we want is to slip up by being careless. You go speak to Lestrade and let him know we think we’re close to finding the bounder. I’ll contact the lads.”

  John took his hat and left the room, Alderscroft a few paces behind him. Nan, Sarah, and Mary looked at each other and sighed.

  “Well, all right then. Is there anything we can do?” Mary asked.

  “Complain about being made redundant,” Nan said sourly. “Men!”

  “Well, Lestrade won’t listen to us,” Mary pointed out. “It was all very well when it was ‘please help me solve this,’ but once he thinks he has a chance of closing this case, he won’t listen to a mere female telling him ‘wait, wait’.”

  Nan snorted, but agreed. “You’re right, he won’t. And he will listen to John, because he knows John is backed by Alderscroft.”

  “And Mycroft Holmes,” Sarah added. “Well, is there anything we can do in the meantime?”

  “You’re in a new area of London,” Mary pointed out. “You can certainly practice your skills as a Spirit Master by crossing over, building a Door, and either leading or forcing spirits through it.”

  “Oh . . . that’s right. I can.” Sarah brightened. “Nan do you—”

  “Do you actually need me? If you do, I’ll go, but to tell you the truth, I don’t like that place and I’d rather stay out of it.” The words were out of her mouth before she thought, but as soon as she spoke them, Nan realized they were the truth. She hated the spirit plane. And she’d much rather not go there again until she had to. Besides—

  “I do have Caro,” Sarah said thoughtfully, as though she had just picked the words out of Nan’s head.

  “Exactly!” Perhaps Sarah had been afraid that Nan would feel jealousy; all she felt was relief that she wouldn’t have to go, and that Caro could do just as good a job of protecting Sarah as Nan could. Better, perhaps. “And if anything happens, you can send Grey back to get me.”

  “In that case, I’ll take a book and come sit in your room to keep an eye on things and send my sylphs with you. They can bring me messages as well as Grey can,” Mary offered.

  “There. Everything is taken care of,” Nan told her.

  “But what are you going to do?” Sarah asked.

  She smiled. “Probably scandalize his Lordship’s servants by practicing my knife and stick work.”

  And that was exactly what she did. There was a bit of walled-in yard at the rear of the townhouse. She changed into her practice clothing and did all the exercises Agansing, Gupta, and Karamjit had taught her. Selim did not have as much to teach her, because he had a knife style of his own and didn’t want to interfere with the Gurkha style Agansing was teaching her. Gupta taught her short stick, and Karamjit taught her staff.

  She caught sight of some of the servants gawking at her from the windows and kitchen door before the housekeeper or cook shooed them back to their work.

  She soon discovered what they thought of her. When she finally finished, dripping with sweat and more than ready for a bath, and walked in through the kitchen door, all the work stopped. The kitchen staff—all female, since unlike many of the rich or noble, Alderscroft employed a cook rather than a chef—stared at her with wide eyes.

  She stopped in the middle of the kitchen grounded her staff, and said “Ask me anything.”

  The staff looked to the cook. The cook tried to look stern, failed, and said, “Fifteen minutes by me timer, if ye keep workin’!”

  “Miss!” the girl in charge of chopping vegetables raised her hand, then dropped it to go back to chopping. “What was ye doin’?”

  She explained the three fighting styles she had been practicing, and after that the questions came thick and fast. Finally, when the fifteen minutes were almost over, the scullery maid, up to the elbow in suds and greasy pots, asked wistfully, “Could we learn thet?”

  “Not this, no,” Nan said, to sighs of disappointment, “But if you want to learn how to protect yourselves, I can teach you some simple things that will make anyone that tries to snatch your purse or interfere with you regret the day he was born.”

  “Ye’d do that?” the cook said, wonderingly.

  “Happily.” She held up a hand as the babble started. “I’m doing something for his Lordship right now, but as soon as that is over, we’ll arrange an hour a day, or every other day, and I’ll come over to teach you.”

  With that, she left the kitchen buzzing, feeling an odd sense of accomplishment.

  * * *

  A hot bath and a change of clothing later—Lily carried away the practice clothing with the promise that even though it wasn’t laundry day, she would have them clean and dry by tomorrow—Nan checked on Sarah. Grey looked like a stuffed parrot, she sat so still. Mary Watson looked up from her book, smiled and nodded. That left Nan free to call Neville in from where he was hanging about on the rooftops bullying the jackdaws and bring him inside to do more research in Lord Alderscroft’s library until dinne
r. She didn’t find a great deal of information she could actually use, unfortunately, and she looked over at Neville, who sat on the back of a chair with a bit of newspaper under him. “I’m beginning to feel rather useless,” she confessed to him. “My talents don’t seem to have a great deal of application right now.”

  “Hurr,” Neville agreed.

  “I think I am a bit jealous that she can do all these new things,” Nan continued, then shrugged. “Then again, it means she has to spend time in the spirit plane. Thank you, no.”

  Neville bobbed his head.

  Their conversation was interrupted by a footman, who had come to tell her that “The gentlemen are back, miss, and dinner will be served in fifteen minutes.”

  A moment later Sarah appeared, looking—contented.

  “How many?” Nan asked.

  “Lots,” Sarah replied. “I lost count. I can’t imagine why Lord Alderscroft never noticed this house had six separate ghosts in it!”

  “I suspect they stayed out of his way,” Nan observed. “Servants?”

  “I think so. Most of them were just threads of their former selves.” Sarah reached up to her shoulder to give Grey a head scratch. “I could do this a great deal, I think. Or I could find out how that Methodist minister made that permanent Door and start placing them all over London.”

  “Well, right now you can turn around and come with me to dinner,” Nan told her, holding out her arm to Neville, who hopped to it with three flaps of his wings.

  They reached the dining room just as the butler was poised to sound the gong. “Everyone’s here, Charles, I don’t think we need that,” Alderscroft said. “We’ll just go in now and you can serve.”

  Alderscroft waited until they had all been served the first course. “The lads will have us exterior plans of the houses by midmorning tomorrow. So that’s done. John?”

  “I managed to hold Lestrade off, but it was a near thing. There’ve been more bodies turning up, and he was ready to marshal a small army and search every house in that block—and I have to say I was tempted to let him.” John paused while he finished his soup. “We won’t be able to hold him off for long.”

  “Then we should get to that lodging house as early as we can tomorrow morning,” said Nan, and Sarah nodded. “The sooner we can confirm the exact location of the necromancer, the sooner we can let Lestrade unleash his hounds.”

  Nan was amazed at the level of professionalism of Alderscroft’s servants. Here they were, discussing Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard as casually as Mrs. Horace spoke of her butcher, and talking about necromancers, and they weren’t turning a hair. The reactions of the kitchen staff were fairly extraordinary, too. They’d wanted to know how they could be trained, and hadn’t reacted with horror or affrontery at the sight of a woman doing what she had been doing.

  Or maybe it was something else entirely. It would make good sense for a man like Alderscroft to have carefully tutored his staff in the basics of some magic, so they would be prepared for the unusual.

  And it wasn’t as if they could gossip about this to other servants. Who would believe them?

  “We haven’t got much of a plan once we do discover where he is,” John observed. “Just you and some members of the Lodge watching the front door, while Lestrade, the Yard, and the local constables break in the back, and Sarah, Nan, and Caro keep watch to try to prevent him from any dirty work until he’s in irons.”

  Alderscroft made a face, but it was Nan who replied. “We can’t do much more of a plan than that, John. Do any of you actually know what a powerful necromancer can do?”

  They all shook their heads. “And we also do not know what he has been doing, besides murdering girls. The way they are dressed suggests he is performing some sort of ceremony that I am not familiar with,” Alderscroft added.

  “So we clearly don’t know what we need to prepare for,” Nan pointed out. “That’s the other reason for our foray. To see if we can deduce that.”

  “I’m ready, and so is Caro,” Sarah said confidently.

  “Then the best thing we can do is get a good night’s sleep and start early in the morning, and see what happens from there,” said Alderscroft. “Next course, please, Charles.”

  * * *

  “We,” of course, did not include Alderscroft, Nan noted wryly as she rose with the sun in the morning. She was dressed long before Lily arrived to see if she needed help, and went quickly downstairs to fortify herself for the expedition to come.

  They were, of course, all dressed very shabbily, and got into the carriage in the carriage house to avoid anyone seeing a lot of tramps leaving the house. The driver made sure there were no witnesses when he dropped them off as well, just outside an East End warehouse.

  This time the person in charge of the fourpence lodgings was a man instead of a woman, but he was just as incurious as the woman had been once their fourpence was his.

  The room showed every sign of having been used last night, and why it was vacant now, Nan had no idea. But at least in this room there was glass in the windows, and the mattress on the bed was cleaner.

  This time Nan was ready for Sarah’s impatient tug, pulling her into the spirit plane. There were not nearly as many ghosts this time, either, which made Nan wonder what it was about that other neighborhood that had made it so thick with them. Had their been a cholera outbreak? That would certainly account for all the children.

  They had chosen a lodging as near to the edge of the ghostless zone as they could, and within a few streets it had gone from the usual East End squalor to a better neighborhood altogether. There were actual houses here, just as John had predicted. Proper, detached and semidetached houses. To be fair, this was hardly the East End at all, not as Nan would have called it, but it was served by the same sewer system as the real slums were.

  “Are you hearing or feeling anything like you did the last time?” Sarah asked Caro.

  “No, not at all,” the ghost replied, shaking her head. “If there’s a door to the other side around here, it’s certainly not calling me.”

  Encouraged by this—and by the utter emptiness of the streets—they stopped trying to be stealthy and just moved as swiftly as they physically could. Which still wasn’t as fast as they could run, or even walk, in the real world. It was as if there was something here that resisted them moving about. Perhaps it was just the link to their physical bodies holding them back, although the birds seemed to have no trouble flying.

  They had both memorized the street map and were on “foot,” following it religiously to the center of the zone. And then they turned the last corner, and there was absolutely no doubt that they had found their goal.

  The house—the second from the corner—had a sort of “anti-glow” to it. If shadow could radiate, that’s what this house did.

  “Something tells me we’re going to have trouble getting through the walls,” Nan murmured. Sarah shrugged.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “But first, let’s try.”

  They walked up to the side of the house, and it was exactly like walking into the side of a normal house. Caro actually bounced off, landing on her rump. “Ow!” she exclaimed, rubbing her head where she had banged it against the wall. “I—didn’t know this was possible!”

  Sarah slid her hands over the wall; Nan had no idea what she was doing, but evidently she had something in mind. “The power and protections aren’t evenly distributed,” she said. “It’s thinning out as I move toward the corner.”

  “Why?” Nan asked.

  “Magic likes circles,” Sarah replied absently. “Let’s see if we can get through the corner.”

  The moved along the side of the house to the corner, with Sarah keeping one hand on the wall the entire time. “It’s definitely thinner here,” she said with satisfaction as they reached the corner. She put her hand against the wall there, and pushed. Slowly her hand, then her lower arm, then her other hand and arm disappeared. Then she pushed her entire self past th
e wall and disappeared. Grey followed, though she managed to get through faster. Without hesitation, Nan placed both hands on the walls, one on either side of the corner and pushed as hard as she could, Neville on her shoulder.

  All of a sudden, whatever she was pushing on “gave,” and she tumbled into a sitting room on the other side of the wall. Neville jumped off her shoulder as she fell, and ran out of the way. A moment later Caro stumbled through as well.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you—I was working on making a temporary opening,” Sarah apologized, as Nan picked herself up off the floor.

  “Never mind that—what in the name of God are those?” Nan pointed at the farther wall, where a faint suggestion of a glass-fronted cabinet stood. Crowded onto where the shelves would be were . . . things.

  Some of them glowed, and not in any way that seemed healthy, or anything but wrong. Some of them moved—not a lot, but enough that Nan had the impression the things were alive.

  All of them were contained inside tiny bubbles of power. All of them were half-in, half-out of the spirit world and clearly magical in some nature.

  “The sign we have the right place, I suspect,” said Caro. “Let’s see what else we can find.”

  “No, not yet,” Sarah overruled. “We need to be physically closer to this place before we take a deeper look. And I think we need Lestrade’s men and the Lodge. Let’s go.”

  20

  “I still don’t know about this rally point business,” Lestrade muttered, as one of his men, an expert locksmith, broke into the back door of a vacant house about a block from their target.

  “Well, we can coordinate our forces here, where we are close to the target, can make changes in our plans easily, and can slip up on the house in twos and threes, thus giving the quarry no warning, or we can do it in the police station, and draw attention to ourselves when we all roll up in Black Marias, thus giving the quarry a chance to escape,” John Watson pointed out.