He pulled down the ladder to the attic, scrambled up the ladder, dashed across the empty attic, opened the window, and pushed a ladder he had waiting right there by the window out across the space between the houses. Like a cat, he got out the window on the ladder and started walking across to the next house.
“He’s going to get away!” cried Sarah—and Nan knew with a plummeting heart that she was right. Even though the night was now bright with the lanterns the Scotland Yard constables had brought with them, no one was going to look up—
It was clear he’d had this means of escape there all along, and had planned and practiced this maneuver until he was as good as a circus rope-walker. And there was nothing they could do to stop him. He had the talisman, which probably meant he could bring Moriarty back from whatever punishment he’d gone to, and this would only begin all over again.
Except now he’d probably do it somewhere other than England, somewhere remote, Egypt or India or Hong Kong, which meant even if Alderscroft warned every Elemental Master and Hunting Lodge in Europe, by the time anyone found out about this, it would be too late. It wouldn’t even be difficult for him to find another young white man whose body he could steal.
With a cry of despair, Nan threw her spectral bronze sword at his back.
It passed right through him, of course.
But the ebony form of an angry raven, flying up into his face from below, did what she could not.
With a screech, he lost his balance and tumbled off the ladder, to land four stories below.
“Back!” cried Sarah, and in the next moment, Nan lurched to her feet, slightly disoriented, but grimly determined. She stumbled out the door and down the stairs, hearing Sarah’s equally unsteady footsteps behind her.
They ran as fast as they could to where they had seen the villain fall. But by the time they got there, there was already someone standing over the crumpled body.
Nan braced herself, getting ready for a fight—
But the person was in the uniform of a London constable, holding a lantern. And when he looked up, his face clear in the lantern-light, Nan saw with a shock of recognition it was Sherlock Holmes.
“Inconsiderate bastard broke his own neck,” he said crossly, “Now I won’t be able to uncover the rest of the Organization without a deuce of a lot of legwork.”
Neville dropped down out of the darkness to land at Holmes’ feet, as Sarah fell on her knees beside the body and began rummaging frantically through the pockets. “Here!” shouted Grey from the darkness, and flapped to Sarah with what looked like a small glass bottle or vial in her beak.
Sarah took it and dropped it on the ground next to Nan, who understood what she wanted and ground it to powder under her heel. Sarah took Holmes’ lantern, opened the side, stuck in a twig to get a light and flung the twig on top of the fragments of the vial and its contents.
They all three jumped back as a tongue of flame as tall as Holmes leapt out of the spot, presumably releasing all that was left of the magic that could call Moriarty back from the dead once more.
“Well,” Holmes said, still obviously irritated, looking at the body of the necromancer. “I suppose at least we won’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“No,” Sarah replied, looking at the scorched earth with exhausted relief. “No, we won’t.”
* * *
The room next to John Watson’s surgery had a bed where he occasionally kept patients he didn’t want to send to a hospital, and that bed was occupied by a haggard young man who would probably be quite handsome when he recovered from the terrible experience of going through opium withdrawal. His cheeks and eyes were sunken to the point where his head looked like a skull, his hands trembled, his skin was sallow, and his eyes looked as if someone had rubbed burnt cork under them. But there was a faint smile on his face whenever he looked down at himself that made Nan very certain he was going to come out the other end of his experience just fine.
“How are you feeling, Ca—I mean, Peter?” Sarah asked with concern.
“Like hell, but it’s getting better,” replied Peter Hughs. Or Caro, in Peter Hughs’ body. I have to get used to calling him Peter. Though he seems to be used to it already. Grey nudged his hand, and he continued gently scratching her neck. “It helps that I finally feel right for the first time in my life. I kept saying I should have been born a boy—not only to you two, but to my own father and brother—and no one took me seriously, but I really did feel . . . wrong, inside my own skin. Now I feel right. As for the rest—” he shrugged. “I may be miserable, I may vomit more than I eat, and I may shake as if I had a fever, but it’s easier than dying was.”
“Well, you can thank Lestrade for finding all those papers who told us who Peter Hughs was, and who his friends and family were,” Nan observed. “He might be pedantic, but he’s a bulldog when it comes to persistence.”
Peter nodded. “Watson made up some faradiddle tale about going on a walking tour to ease his sorrows over his dead wife and finding me half-dead of pneumonia in a shepherd’s hut. That covers all my symptoms, at least to the uninitiated. Peter’s old friends might have had some suspicions, but they’ve hidden them well, and they certainly aren’t going to bleat to Peter’s family.”
“Are you going to meet with them?” Sarah didn’t bother to contain her curiosity.
Peter smiled shakily. “Already have. The father’s stiff as two boards, but genuinely broke down when Watson told him I’d been near death. The mother’s a smotherer; I’ll have to take her in hand a bit. The sister’s a sweet little thing. It helps neither parent actually knew a whit about Peter; I was pretty well able to pull the wool over all their eyes, and Watson’s told ’em my memories are half gone, and I may never get them back, so that’s all right.” He brightened. “And when I mumbled something about going back to University to get a law degree once I was well, I thought the old man was going to do a double backflip in joy. I always wanted to go into law, but of course, even if I’d been well, I’d never have been allowed to.”
“Good, good,” croaked Neville from the foot of his bed. Neville flew to Nan’s shoulder, and Grey walked ponderously across the bedclothes to be picked up by Sarah.
“It sounds as if you have everything in hand,” Nan said with relief. “But you look ghastly, so we’ll come back and visit you again later. Tomorrow, probably.”
“I feel ghastly, but I’d love to see you. Peter’s friends are a lot of addle-pated poets and artists, and there’s only so much empty-headed prattle I can stand before I pretend to go to sleep so they’ll go away.” Peter smiled again. “I never thought when you found my locket I’d end up with my dearest and most secret dream coming true. I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough.”
“Don’t try, just get well,” Nan advised. “You can pay us back with free legal advice when you become a barrister.”
“That’s a bargain,” Peter agreed, and shut his eyes as they left.
They went up the stairs to the Watson’s flat-of-record, where Holmes, the Watsons, and his Lordship were having a late tea. It was the first time they had all gathered together since the night of the raid. Nan was looking forward to giving Holmes no mercy about why, if he’d been keeping track of them all along, he hadn’t helped them.
“Well, here is our Spirit Master at last,” said Alderscroft as they opened the door to the flat. “And our Spirit Magician!”
“Spirit—what?” Nan was taken completely off guard and stared at him in shock, while Neville laughed wickedly, as if he had known this all along.
“After a great deal of consultation among the Lodges of Paris, Venice, Rome, Marseilles, and Nuremberg, who are the only ones who actually have currently, or have had recently, Spirit Masters, we are all certain that not only is our Sarah a Spirit Master, but you, my dear, are a Spirit Magician as well. It’s the only reasonable explanation for why you could have mastered the spirit plane as quickly as you did,” Alderscroft explained. “I was just telling John and Mar
y about our discussions.”
“And now you have no excuse for excluding females from the Lodge,” Mary said tartly. “Unless you intend to keep the only Spirit Magicians in England out.”
Grey made a rude noise.
Alderscroft coughed uncomfortably. Nan took pity on him, and rounded on Holmes. “What I want to know is, if you knew what we were doing and how many dead ends we ran up against, why didn’t you help us?”
“Elementary, my dear,” Holmes replied. “It was obvious to me when I had eliminated every other explanation that these were ritual killings of some—” he coughed “—arcane sort. The usual mentally damaged ritual killer escalates. He no longer receives the thrill he once got from the murder alone. He begins to elaborate into torture before murder, and he takes riskier and riskier chances to obtain victims. And he invariably begins to taunt the police. Our killer did none of these things, so he was killing, not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end, in a way that he did not dare to change. So I stayed out of the picture, and began following the leads you took me to.” He actually beamed at Watson. “Good work, old man. Good, solid work.”
Watson’s expression softened into one of embarrassed pride.
“What was that madman trying to do, anyway?” Holmes continued.
Alderscroft immediately jumped in. “Gathering power to use to influence the minds of those of the Organization that were left to allow him to take Moriarty’s place,” he lied.
“Ah, something like . . . oh . . . psychical manipulation?” Holmes hazarded.
“Something like that, yes,” said Alderscroft.
Nan kept her mouth shut. So did everyone else.
“So there is justification to the fairy tales that ritual sacrifice creates power,” Holmes said, making it a statement rather than a question. He shook his head. “Is he the only one of Moriarty’s Organization who could do this sort of thing?”
“I’m reasonably sure of that,” said Watson. “Lestrade is going over every scrap of paper we found in that house, and it appears he was the highest ranking of Moriarty’s minions and the only one with any sort of pretense to esoteric abilities.”
“That is a great relief.” Holmes nodded. “In that case, I can leave the cleanup to Lestrade. He’s as dull as a tarnished spoon, but he’s doggedly persistent, and this is exactly the sort of thing he’s good for. I’ll be going over to France to deal with whatever viper’s den Moriarty left there. From there—I’m not sure. Perhaps as far as Russia. But I will be back, and I will leave you some information on where letters might find me.”
“I believe I will remain ‘dead’ for a while longer,” Mary told him. “It gives me a great deal more freedom to operate. Eventually, perhaps after you return, John can ‘marry’ someone else called Mary—or at least allude to doing so in those tales he writes.” She patted his hand fondly.
“Good, and I expect you and Nan and Sarah to continue your lessons in disguises,” Holmes told her, with feigned sternness, as Watson looked decidedly uncomfortable. He handed her a card. “I want you to go to this lady. She’s truly an expert. She has even gammoned me a time or two, in my younger days.”
“Only a time or two?” Watson asked archly.
Holmes ignored him.
“We’ll certainly do that,” Sarah agreed. Nan might have said something, but she was still turning the fact that Alderscroft had deemed her an Elemental Magician over in her mind. She decided that she was ridiculously pleased with the fact. After all, this should mean that Alderscroft would be trusting the two of them with even more interesting work.
“I will definitely be back,” Holmes continued, smiling. “I’m definitely looking forward to our adventures together in the future. This is certainly not goodbye.”
“Au revoir!” said Grey.
“Precisely,” said Holmes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mercedes Lackey is a full-time writer and has published numerous novels and works of short fiction, including the bestselling Heralds of Valdemar series. She is also a professional lyricist and licensed wild bird rehabilitator. She lives in Oklahoma with her husband and collaborator, artist Larry Dixon, and their flock of parrots.
www.mercedeslackey.com
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THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS
Mercedes Lackey
Mercedes Lackey’s bestselling fantasy series set in an alternative Edwardian Britain, where magic is real—and the Elemental Masters are in control.
The Serpent’s Shadow
The Gates of Sleep
Phoenix and Ashes
Wizard of London
Reserved for the Cat
Unnatural Issue
Home from the Sea
Steadfast
Blood Red
From a High Tower
A Study in Sable
A Scandal in Battersea
The Bartered Brides
“Fantastic… this is Lackey at her best.” Publishers Weekly
“Intriguing and compelling.” Library Journal
“Colourful characters… great fun.” Booklist
“Innovative historical fantasy.” Romantic Times
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THE COLLEGIUM CHRONICLES
Mercedes Lackey
Follow Magpie, Bear, Lena and friends as they face their demons and find their true strength on the road to becoming full Heralds, Bards and Healers of Valdemar.
Book One: Foundation
Book Two: Intrigues
Book Three: Changes
Book Four: Redoubt
Book Five: Bastion
“Lackey makes a real page-turner out of Mags’ and the collegia’s development… this book’s outstanding characters, especially Mags, will greatly please Valdemar fans.” Booklist
“The tone, characterization, and rampant angst recall Lackey’s earliest Valdemar books… this is a worthy entry in the overall saga.” Publishers Weekly
“Lackey’s Valdermar series is already a fantasy classic, and these newest adventures will generate even more acclaim for this fantasy superstar.” Romantic Times
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THE HERALD SPY
Mercedes Lackey
Mags was a Herald of Valdemar. But he had once lived the brutal life of a child slave. When he was Chosen by his Companion Dallen, his young life was saved, and he slowly adjusted to being well fed, educated, and treasured as a trainee in the Herald’s Collegium at Haven. Singled out by the King’s Own Herald, Mags would thrive in his secret training as a spy. His unusually strong Gift—an ability to Mindspeak and Mindhear anyone, not just others who were Gifted—made him a perfect undercover agent for the king.
Closer to Home
Closer to the Heart
Closer to the Chest
“A welcome addition to the Valdemar canon…a fast, page-turning read.” Shiny Book Review
“You can feel Lackey’s passion for her characters… funny and entertaining.” The Qwillery
“Mercedes Lackey is a master storyteller and Closer to Home is a masterful, satisfying visit to Valdemar.” Bitten by Books
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