The Bartered Brides (Elemental Masters)

by Mercedes Lackey

  Lestrade sighed. He still wasn’t reconciled to Alderscroft’s “Queen’s Special Agents,” which was what he was claiming the members of his Hunting Lodge were. And he didn’t at all like breaking into private property to take it over, even for a day.

  He’d have been even more upset if he’d known the three “lads” that were along as “Special Agents” were Mary Watson, Nan and Sarah. But Alderscroft had a paper signed by the Prime Minister (courtesy of Mycroft Holmes) authorizing him to do this, and another from the Chief Inspector tell him to cooperate, so he really didn’t have any choice in the matter.

  The lock yielded, and both parties traipsed in. Alderscroft immediately set up in the kitchen, since there was still a huge wooden table in the middle of it—it was so big that clearly the reason why it was still there was that it was impossible to fit through the door. One of the Lodge spread out a detailed map of the area. Everyone crowded around, obscuring the fact that Mary, Nan and Sarah slipped away, found the staircase, and went up to find a room on the side nearest the target house.

  The house was overly warm due to the closed windows, and smelled a little of mildew and dust. But at least it didn’t smell of mice.

  Mary spread a comforter on the floor to make it a little less punishing to lie on and dropped two small pillows on it, while Nan opened the window, and the birds flew in, bringing a welcome breeze of fresh air with them. They hadn’t had the birds with them, of course. That would have been a complete giveaway to Lestrade that two of the “men” weren’t what they seemed. But Nan had been very nervous the entire time the arrangements were being organized; if they couldn’t get into place by sunset, they’d have had to smuggle the birds in their jackets and take the risk of being spotted.

  Nan was barely lying down when she found herself back in the spirit world with Sarah, Caro, and the birds already there and waiting impatiently. Getting their bearings, they hurried toward the house. Contacting Lestrade and Alderscroft and summoning the Lodge and Lestrade’s men had taken a much longer time than any of them had liked. The sun was about to set—and while that would make surrounding the house and setting watch on the front and back doors a great deal easier for the combined forces of Lestrade and Alderscroft, they were now entering the necromancer’s favored hours, putting him at a distinct advantage. Even Caro sensed that the situation was a good deal grimmer now; her face was set in an expression of determination, and she had none of her quips ready. She just listened to the plans, nodded, and followed.

  They forced their way inside at the corner of the house, and already there was a change. The strange objects in the sitting room moved restlessly inside their confining bubbles; when they saw the girls, some of them even flung themselves against the sides of their prisons, as if trying to attack.

  When they came to a stair leading up, and a door that presumably led to the cellar in the wall opposite, Nan looked at Sarah. “Up or down?” she asked quietly.

  “The last magician we dealt with had his workroom in the cellar,” she pointed out.

  “Down it is,” Nan said, when Caro held out her hand to stop them.

  “Can’t you feel it? And hear it?” the ghost asked.

  Nan tried, and had to shake her head. “Nothing—”

  “No, Caro’s right,” Sarah said. “It’s faint, but it’s there. Something . . . nasty. And it’s up, not down. The top floor, I think.”

  Nan shrugged, and turned to lead the way up the stairs.

  Only to encounter a door at the top of the stairs leading to the third floor. “Huh . . . I think you must be right,” she said, “I can’t imagine why there’d be a door here unless there was something to hide.” She hesitantly laid her hand on the door, and after a moment of resistance her hand went right through it. “And whatever magic is on the outside of the house isn’t on the inside nearly as strongly.”

  But Caro and Sarah had both gone into a defensive crouch, as if they both sensed the enemy near. “It’s close,” Caro whispered. “We need to be really, really careful.”

  “Well . . . we can go through walls. Let’s go through a wall instead of a door. And let’s put our heads through first. . . .” Nan suggested.

  “From near the ceiling and hope whatever is in there won’t look up.” The tension in Sarah’s voice put the hair up on the back of Nan’s neck. Whatever she could sense was not good. Nan took a tentative sniff of the air to see if she could at least smell anything, and at that point realized that the spirit world was devoid of any scent whatsoever. It was just chill, mostly quiet, and very dim, as if the entire world was one vast, clean cave.

  Then Nan had a better idea. “We’ll go up to the attic,” she responded. “And look down through the floor.” They drifted upward, following the staircase, as the best way of avoiding being spotted.

  The attic, unlike the sitting room, had nothing in it in this spirit-world analog of the real house. It was also one, long, peaked-ceilinged room, with no indication of what or where the rooms beneath it were. The got down on their hands and knees, even Caro, and worked their way along the floor until Sarah whispered “here,” and Caro nodded in confirmation.

  Then cautiously, they pushed their heads through the floor; there was more resistance, not as if Nan was pushing her head through thick goo, but more as if she was pushing it through an elastic membrane, even though the floor itself didn’t stretch or deform in any way.

  The first thing that Nan saw when the front of her face got below the level of the ceiling was so fantastic that she frankly did not believe her eyes. It was a Chinese girl, exquisitely beautiful, in the most fantastic robes Nan had ever seen in her life. Her face was as perfect as a porcelain doll’s. Her robes had huge, hanging sleeves and enveloped her from throat to foot in layer upon layer of soft pink, lavender, and pale green, held to her waist with a heavily brocaded belt. Nan had never seen a woman with “bound feet” before, but those tiny brocaded shoes, no bigger than you’d put on a toddler, were almost certainly bound. Her hair was held into an impossible coiffure of twists, braids, knots and loops with jade pins. More jade beads hung about her neck. Wide cuff bracelets of gold were connected to golden chains, but Nan’s attention was so riveted upon the girl that for a moment she couldn’t look away.

  She sat in a jeweled throne, and her demeanor was so haughty that in that moment, Nan was convinced they had found their necromancer.

  And yet—

  And yet there was no sense of power about her.

  And she didn’t seem to be a mortal crossed to the spirit plane. Something about her, some faint transparency, told Nan that this was, in fact, a ghost.

  But what would the ghost of a high-caste Chinese girl be doing here?

  Two more Chinese girls knelt at her feet, one holding a jade cup, the other a jade plate full of sweets—at least, Nan assumed they were sweets. The girls were each dressed in much more simplified versions of the first girl’s robes; their hair hung loosely down their backs, and they too had cuff bracelets and chains, but not of gold.

  Finally Nan tore her attention away from the first girl to follow the chains—to discover they led to yet another group of spirits, all girls, this time mostly very ordinary creatures she wouldn’t have been surprised to see walking the streets of the East End. Though there were four Chinese girls among them, huddled away from the rest. None were pretty, though all wore white gowns, or white shirtwaists and skirts. Here, at least, were the missing ghosts of all those victims—and more. Many, many more.

  Nan now noticed that there was a sort of bubble, a transparent shell, around the girls and most of the rest of the room. “Is that . . . ?” she breathed to Sarah.

  “I think it is,” Sarah replied. “Some sort of shield. I think it’s backward of what you’d expect. It isn’t to wall anything out, it’s to keep whatever is inside that bubble in.”

  “I probably shouldn’t cross it then,” Caro observed.

  As they watched and took mental notes, another spirit faded into view in the c
enter of the room; this time a man, with white hair closely cropped to his head, a face that would have been handsome if it had not been so cold, and the aura of great power that was absolutely missing from the Chinese girl on the throne.

  As if to prove this, the Chinese girl flung herself down from the throne to the floor at the man’s feet. “Husband!” she cried. “I have been chastising your concubines, and we have filled yet more orbs with the blood of heaven!”

  The man smiled faintly, and reached down to caress the side of her face. “Very well done, Xi’er,” he said, the lack of a “hollow” tone to his words telling Nan that this was their necromancer. “Tonight will be the night. The man is ready, we have sufficient power, and the stars align.” He moved across the room, apparently picked up something from a shadowy table, and removed a piece of cloth from it.

  And a third spirit appeared; a powerfully built man that Nan recognized with a start from John Watson’s memories. Professor Moriarty!

  Now it all made horrible sense!

  “Well, Professor Moriarty, the time has come at last to give you a new mortal shell. The first of many, I do believe,” the necromancer said, in a voice as smooth and bland as cream. Beside her, Nan sensed Sarah’s sudden shock and dismay. “If you will retire to your talisman, I will begin the ritual.”

  Squinting, Nan was able to make out the faint form of a young man lying on what looked like an altar between Moriarty and the necromancer. The Professor nodded with what looked like immense satisfaction, then vanished.

  They both pulled their heads back up. “Good God!” Sarah exclaimed, her eyes wide. “That’s what’s been going on? Sherlock surely had no idea Moriarty had a necromancer in his employ!”

  Caro looked puzzled, but then her expression hardened. “I don’t know who this Professor is, but he’s allied himself with someone who has murdered nearly two dozen girls for his benefit, and I am not going to let him profit from his evil!”

  “I’ll tell Mary,” Nan said, and willed herself to wake up.

  In the next moment she was sitting bolt upright, with Neville shaking himself awake beside her. “The necromancer is in Moriarty’s employ, and he is about to resurrect the Professor somehow—”

  “Dear God in Heaven,” Mary breathed, shocked. “We can’t let that happen!”

  “You run and let His Lordship know—” Nan hadn’t even gotten the words out before Mary was on her feet and running to inform the men. Or Alderscroft, at least; what Lestrade would make of such words, Nan had no clue.

  “You go with her and protect her,” she told Neville. He quorked and flew out the window. She laid back down and—

  Couldn’t get back into the spirit world. With a cry of frustration, she tried to will herself there, when suddenly she felt Grey wake up, hop onto her arm, seize her wrist in her beak and—

  There she was. Except this time she was lying on the floor, and Grey was still holding Nan’s wrist in her beak. Nan shot to her feet as the parrot let go, and both of them raced back toward the necromancer’s house across the shadows of this empty part of the spirit plane.

  Grey flew through the corner; Nan pushed through in the same place in the parrot’s wake, finding it much easier to get in this time. Grey arrowed upward through the ceiling, and Nan followed, ending up at the far end of the attic from where Sarah and Caro knelt.

  “Did you—” Sarah whispered.

  Nan moved silently toward them as Grey landed next to Sarah. “Mary’s telling the men,” she whispered back. “What’s going on?”

  “I think it might be a long ceremony,” Sarah breathed. “He is back in the material plane, and he seems to be setting up a great many arcane artifacts.”

  “I hope it gives the men time to get in place,” Nan replied. “Is it safe to look?”

  Sarah shrugged, so Nan cautiously stuck her head through the floor again. It appeared that the ceremony was in already progress. Moriarty stood inside a circle of shadow, while the necromancer, a shadow-form himself, half-in, half-out of the spirit plane, gestured and muttered.

  And that was when Nan noticed that the bubble keeping everything inside it was gone. But if the necromancer’s prisoners noticed, it didn’t matter to them. Perhaps the chains kept them prisoner even when the bubble of power did not.

  Every ghost in the room stared, mesmerized, at the necromancer. Even Moriarty, who could not seem to take his eyes off the man.

  Nan glanced at Sarah—Sarah was not staring at the necromancer. Sarah stared fixedly at a point just beyond the huddle of ghosts.

  And a tiny point of light formed there. It began to grow, from a point, to a disk, from a disk to a window, from a window to—a Door!

  And Sarah darted down into the room, followed by Caro. And luck was with them, for now at least, for Spencer was so wrapped up in his ceremony he did not notice them.

  At that moment, Nan felt a shock go through her even as she recognized the source of the alarm. Neville! He was trying to tell her something was happening in the real world!

  She pulled her head back in and ran to the window; she narrowed her focus to allow her to stare into the material plane, and to her horror saw that a mixed group of Lestrade’s Bobbies and Elemental Magicians were locked in combat with what looked sickeningly like animated corpses. And even as she gasped in a surge of sickening terror, more of the monsters poured out the front door.

  “Oh God—” she moaned in indecision. Join the fight, or rejoin Sarah?

  No, it really was no decision. The fight was a mere diversion—something to hold off the attackers while the ceremony took place. The important thing was the ceremony, because if Moriarty got a new physical body—

  She wrenched her attention entirely back to the spirit world, dove through the floor, and joined her friends.

  Sarah had gotten hold of one of the girls and was dragging her to the Door. The ghost-girls didn’t seem to understand that she was trying to help them; they clawed and scratched at her in a typical fashion for East End street waifs who found themselves weaponless.

  Caro held off the necromancer, keeping him from using any of his powers on her, Sarah, or the girls by firing arrow after arrow at him. From the way he yelped as they hit, although they probably weren’t doing him any physical harm, they certainly hurt, and broke his concentration. That left Moriarty, who clutched the end of the shadowy table the young man lay on, staring fixedly at him with an expression of fierce hunger.

  She hadn’t even had a chance to make up her mind what to do when Sarah finally managed to shove one of the girl-spirits through the Door. Not only did the girl vanish—but the chain ran rapidly in through the door, as if something was pulling on it. The next girl on the chain found herself jerked away from Sarah, and pulled through the Door. And the next . . . and the next . . . Sarah jumped back out of the way before a loop of the chain tightened around her ankle and watched as the girls were yanked off their feet and on to the other side . . . and whatever awaited them there.

  The elaborately gowned girl that the necromancer had called “Xi’er” began screeching, and tried to loop her golden chains around the throne. But the other two Chinese girls threw their burdens aside, each of them taking one of her golden chains, and ran toward the Door. Unable to do anything to stop them, tottering on her tiny, bound feet, Xi’er found herself pulled off balance. She landed on her back, shrieking and cursing in Chinese as she slid on her back in the direction of the Door. The two girls dove through it, hauling Xi’er with them. The last Nan saw of her was the trailing sleeves of her silken robe vanishing into the darkness of the Door, as Spencer tried desperately to get past Caro to stop it all.

  Before Nan could act, Moriarty came to life. “Finish the spell, you damned fool!” he shouted “Before your power runs out!”

  The Professor tried to come to the necromancer’s aid, but Nan jumped down to intercept him. She thought she had the upper hand since she was equipped with a little round shield and her bronze Celtic sword, but the professor shoc
ked her by turning to meet her with a cavalry saber in his hand. With her heart in her mouth and the metallic taste of fear, all she could do was deflect his blows. He was bigger and stronger than she was, despite his age, and his sword had the same properties here as it would have had in the real world. It was steel, and her little wooden shield and short bronze sword were no match for it. Even fighting defensively, her shield soon had deep cuts marring its surface, and bits were missing from the edge of her blade. Moriarty clearly knew how to use what he wielded.

  So she stopped fighting defensively—and ran, hoping he would follow.

  But he didn’t, and at that same moment, as the last of the girls hurtled through the Door, pulled by the chain that had bound them all together, Sarah flung herself at Caro, holding her back with one hand while desperately trying to get the Door shut.

  In that moment, the necromancer acted.

  He bellowed some words, and to Nan’s horror, the transparent image of a young man in his early twenties emerged from the shadowy man-shape on the table, and snapped through the Door as if he’d been shot out of a cannon.

  Startled, Sarah let go of Caro, who moved just as quickly.

  But not through the Door.

  She made a dive for the man-shape . . . and disappeared. Into it?

  Moriarty howled with fury, and contorted himself into shapes no human could take, trying to force his way into what had been the young man’s body. But Caro was not to be dislodged, no matter what he tried.

  “It’s too late! Back in the talisman, Professor!” the necromancer cried. “The police are coming up the stairs! We must escape while we can!”

  But Sarah was quicker than that. She rushed Moriarty while he was still concentrating on the body that was supposed to have been his. She was half his size, but she caught him off guard, and with a wail of despair, he, too, vanished through the Door.

  The necromancer vanished.

  “Where?” Sarah cried in anguish, but Nan already knew the answer.

  She moved her vision into the real world, just in time to see the necromancer snatching up something from a small altar-like table beside a second table holding a young man’s body. He dashed out of the room—but Nan ran after him in spirit form. I can’t do anything to stop him, but at least I can see where he’s going! As quick as thought, Sarah was right behind her.