St. Cyprian smiled. “You’re welcome.”
“I—I thought you’d come to challenge me. To test the limits of my power,” Wendy-Smythe said hesitantly.
“Are you very powerful, then?”
“I know the Aklo, and the Seven Songs of Alamedas,” Wendy-Smythe said, puffing out his chest. “I even know how to make the Voorish Sign.”
“Bravo,” St. Cyprian said, as he continued to examine the books. “What about the Hloh Gestures?”
“The—ah—the what?”
St. Cyprian nodded and sighed. “No, then.” He was beginning to think that Sadie had set him on the wrong track. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Wendy-Smythe frowned. “I thought, I mean I rather hoped, that you’d come to—ah—invite me to—well—to assist you.” He bit his lip. His fingers worked at his amulets nervously. “I’ve heard that the Royal Occultist needs an assistant.”
“I already have an assistant,” St. Cyprian said, without thinking.
“Oh,” Wendy-Smythe said. His shoulders slumped. All of his earlier pomposity seemed to have drained out of him, like air out of balloon. St. Cyprian felt a moment of pity for the little man, but he quashed it quickly. There were still questions to be asked.
He turned away from the books. “I didn’t come to challenge you, Mr. Wendy-Smythe. I am not, as a rule, in the habit of challenging anyone. I am a singularly unchallenging individual, according to some.” He hesitated. “I’m not entirely certain that last bit is a compliment, actually.”
“Then why did you come?” Wendy-Smythe said, somewhat sullenly.
“Merely to inquire as to your whereabouts on a certain night, and as to your interest in antiquities,” St. Cyprian said. He paused. “And demonology, I suppose,” he added.
“Demonology?” Wendy-Smythe blinked.
“Let’s start with the antiquities, shall we? Work our way along alphabetically, what?” St. Cyprian proposed. He picked a curio up off the shelf and examined it. It was a squat, elephantine-headed thing, crudely carved and badly made. He weighed it.
“Careful,” Wendy-Smythe squeaked. He darted forward and snatched the curio from St. Cyprian’s hands. “That’s the idol of Chaugnar Faugn, stolen ages ago from the forgotten monastery of Deng!”
“No, I’m fairly certain that was made in Deaker’s,” St. Cyprian said. Otto Deaker was a dealer in rare books and erotic bric-a-brac with a shop in the squalid precincts of Clare Market. He also made forgeries of a unique nature. Half of the unpleasantly batrachian idols floating about among the occult libraries of their green and pleasant land had been crafted by Deaker, rather than long dead Polynesians or Assyrians. He took the statue back and flipped it over. “Yes, here’s Otto’s thumbnail mark. Very good at making very bad looking fakes is old Deaker.”
“He—he told me is was carved from a lump of—of cosmic basalt!”
St. Cyprian nodded. “Yes, I can see how you might believe. But no, I’d wager it was made out of a spare bedknob.” He sniffed it. “Teak, possibly. And painted to resemble basalt.”
“Teak?”
“Yes,” St. Cyprian said, handing the statue back to its owner.
“Not basalt,” Wendy-Smythe said.
“Not even fossilized wood, I’m afraid.” St. Cyprian looked at the little man. “Why did they kick you out of the Order of the Cosmic Ram?” He thought he knew the answer already. Wendy-Smythe was an amateur, at best. The books were the wrong sort, the idols and paraphernalia fake, he thought, save perhaps the Nkonde nail-fetish statue lurking near the umbrella stand near the window. He gazed at the ugly little wooden thing—it vaguely resembled a man, if that man were wearing a hedgehog costume studded with nails.
“I—I was never a member. Not really,” Wendy-Smythe said, looking down at the statue. “I was invited to a few meetings but…” he trailed off.
St. Cyprian studied Wendy-Smythe closely. The longer he was here, the less certain he was that Sadie Fleece had been entirely forthcoming. Why had she sent him after Wendy-Smythe? There was always the remote possibility that this was nothing more than an elaborate practical joke that she was playing on him. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He decided to cut to the chase. “Last night, in Limehouse, a shipment of antiquities was intercepted and stolen by men bearing the symbol of the Order of the Cosmic Ram.”
Wendy-Smythe gawped at him for a moment. “I had nothing to do with that! Is that why you’re here? Are you—are you going to arrest me?”
St. Cyprian shook his head. “I’m not the police, Mr. Wendy-Smythe. I am merely seeking information about the crime in question. I heard it mentioned in passing that you might know something.” He smiled. “I was told that you were a man with your thumb to the pulse of the demimonde, as it were.” Wendy-Smythe might not be a member of the Order of the Cosmic Ram, but he might know something. London was a stew of occult goings on, and not every spoonful passed the lips of the Royal Occultist. Carnacki had made a go of trying to catalogue every mystical society and dabbler, a sort of Who’s Who of the forbidden, but he’d never finished it, and St. Cyprian hadn’t been inclined to take up the task. He was too busy, and he’d never been one for record-keeping anyway.
Wendy-Smythe inflated slightly. “I might know something at that.” He tapped the side of his nose. “I keep my ear to the ground. Got to know which way the old eldritch winds are blowing, what?”
“Oh yes,” St. Cyprian said. “I’m certain a man of your resources would be able to, say, give me the name of someone involved in the theft?”
Wendy-Smythe licked his lips and looked away. “I might, but, well…what’s in it for me?”
St. Cyprian frowned. He’d hoped it wasn’t going to come to this, but Wendy-Smythe seemed to be allergic to common sense. “Oh, and we were doing so well,” he said. He patted Wendy-Smythe’s shoulder. “Mr. Wendy-Smythe—Philip—let me be entirely plain. That was not a request.” St. Cyprian gestured. “This is not a moment for dickering, or for holding back. I am the Royal Occultist, and you are an amateur occultist at best and an annoyance at worst. To put it bluntly, I outrank you. We are not equals, peers or even chums. Now tell me what you know, or I’ll biff you one in the honker.” He held up his fist meaningfully.
Wendy-Smythe’s hands flew to his nose and he squeaked, “Fine, yes, I know a name! Don’t hit me!” But even as the words left his lips, a sound filled the room. Wood creaked and splintered. It took St. Cyprian a moment to isolate the origin of the noise, and by the time he did, it was far too late.
The Nkonde nail-fetish statue creaked into motion, moving far more quickly than St. Cyprian would have thought possible. It tore itself free of its stand and sprang across the floor, tearing the carpet with its nail-studded feet as it scrambled towards them, its wooden features contorted into a malevolent expression of murderous glee…
9.
Limehouse, the East End, London
Gallowglass stood near the dock and looked around. The berth that had played host to Ghale’s defense of his master’s property was quiet, and other than a few beggars, there was no one around. The bloodstains were still in evidence, and if she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could smell a whiff of gunpowder.
An unlit cigarette hung from her lips, and she lifted the satchel she’d brought with her. Inside, a skinny hen, neck freshly wrung, lay atop a few odds and ends. She removed the hen and then a stubby, curved bronze athame that St. Cyprian swore had been forged by the witches of Thessaly, whoever they were. She sank down onto her haunches and laid the carcass and the knife on her left and right. She retrieved a chunk of chalk from the satchel and quickly drew a circle on the flat stones before her. When the circle was complete, she scratched out a series of sigils within it, following the curve.
By now, such preparations were second nature to her. She fancied that she could do them with her eyes closed. When the circle was complete, she hefted the chicken and swiftly gutted it with the athame. Blood splattered the space within the circle,
and other things followed. It seemed a shame to waste a whole chicken, but it had to be done, scarcity be damned. Or so St. Cyprian had told her, again and again.
He said a lot of things, only half of which she listened to. Silence made him itch, she thought, and he tried to fill it any way he could, yapping on about nothing in particular. He’d taught her some things, though. Useful things, if she were being honest with herself.
She felt a surge of something that might have been affection. They weren’t friends, not exactly, but it was as close as she’d ever come in her short life. She had acquaintances, drinking partners, even lovers, but he was her only…whatever he was. Which was slightly surprising, given that she’d tried to kill him the first time they’d met. She wondered if he’d forgiven her yet. She gave a mental shrug. It was unlikely that he’d have let her stay with him if he hadn’t.
Gallowglass wondered sometimes why she’d stayed, after she’d done what she’d come to London to do. He hadn’t asked her to, and she hadn’t asked for his charity, but, somehow, she’d never left. In her quieter moments, when he wasn’t nattering into her ear about whatever he was worried about at the moment, she thought maybe it was because she simply had nowhere else to go. She’d never been one for homes. Places were better. Places could be left, at a moment’s notice, but you carried homes with you, wherever you went.
She dropped the wreckage of the chicken atop the pile of entrails and set the athame aside. Then, she rocked back on her heels to wait. There was no telling how long it would take. It wasn’t an exact science. Another of St. Cyprian’s homilies. She rolled the cigarette between her lips, savouring the peculiar tang of it. It was one of his—she’d snaffled it from his cigarette case when he wasn’t looking. It tasted funny, and she wondered what was in it. St. Cyprian had them made especially by a Moro woman who claimed to be a witch, and who charged a pretty penny for her efforts.
He was peculiar about his cigarettes, was St. Cyprian. About his clothes, too. And his tea. Fussy, some might have said. Gallowglass understood, though. The cigarettes, the clothes, they were talismans—things he used to keep himself sane. He was twitchy at the best of times, starting at shadows and crying in his sleep, flinching away from the memory of explosions. She had sat and watched him sleep more than once, wondering what was going on in his head. He didn’t like it when she did that. He didn’t like most things she did. Not that he got a say, no matter how much he might harp on masters and apprentices.
She grunted. Anything that kept him on an even keel was fine by her. She idly stroked the Seal of Solomon that decorated the grip of the Webley-Fosbery holstered beneath her arm. It was picked out in ivory, and it felt warm to the touch. The pistol had been her father’s, or so she’d been told. Her father was an unknown quantity even now, four years after his death. She barely remembered him—all brogue and beard and not much else. She’d seen him once that she could recall, and he’d smelled like gunpowder and incense. Her mother had hated him so much it had almost been like love, but to Gallowglass he was nothing more than a shadow on the wall of her memories.
Unlike her mother. She closed her eyes. In her mind’s eye, she saw the rough-hewn tunnels far beneath the city of her birth, and smelled the stink of the torches that had lit the interior of the chamber that had been her mother’s palace and place of worship. She remembered the men and women who had clustered in the chamber and made obeisance before the great cat-headed statue of the goddess. She shuddered and shook her head, forcing the memories back down, into the dark places of her subconscious.
Her mother was dead, a victim of her own followers. Or some of them, at any rate. Gallowglass had tracked the murderers across the world, tracking them for almost two years before she’d caught up with them in London and settled accounts. That night was one of her few good memories, and she smiled as she thought of it. The past was the past. Dead was dead, done was done. Here and now was all that mattered.
And here and now was full of ghosts.
She lifted her chin slightly, taking in the vague, foggy shapes that wafted about her. Some of them reminded her of crumpled linen blankets suddenly thrown into the air, while others were merely flickering hints of shape and form. Mouths moved in inaudible wailing and ragged fingers thrust towards the carcass of the chicken. The circle stopped them as surely as if it had been stone, rather than chalk. The smell of the blood had drawn them. It only worked in places where death was layered thick like mortar, or where it had been dealt recently. Limehouse was both.
Gallowglass watched the ghosts pulse and waft about her without fear. Damp, chill, feather-light touches graced the nape of her neck and her cheeks, and she waved a hand as is shooing a fly. The insect-buzz of thin, wasted voices tickled her ears, urgent and demanding. She’d seen St. Cyprian do this more than once, but she’d always watched from a distance. This was her first time going it alone. ‘It’ll be a learning experience,’ he’d said.
She snorted and stood. She’d never had a problem seeing ghosts, even as a child. Hearing them took some getting used to, however. Ghosts scattered as she moved, wafting like leaves caught on the wind. They came back again though, and quickly. More and more of them, culled from the alleyways and under the docks, out of the waters and from over the rooftops. Men and women and things so indistinct as to be neither. She felt them press about her, snuffling and murmuring in their thin whistling voices. The blood had stirred them up, and woken their hunger. The reluctant dead were always hungry.
Gallowglass bent and scooped up the satchel and the athame. The bronze blade was still wet with blood, and the ghosts squirmed about it, suckling greedily at the blade as she extended it. She felt a flicker of disgust, but swiftly quashed it. She’d seen worse, in her time. She’d seen things with the faces of women, that flew through the air, trailing their intestines after them, and the loping, gaunt shapes that her mother had called the children of Bubastis. Ghosts were dead, and the dead could only hurt the living sometimes. She stepped into the cloud of ghosts and brandished the athame. As she stepped over the circle, she broke it with a scuff of her heel.
Ghosts flooded in, swarming over the carcass. She watched them, scanning their features. The newer a ghost, the more distinct it was. One who’d died only the day before would be easy to recognize, in theory. That said, there were some who looked as if they’d died on the way to a fancy dress party that put paid to that theory. Romans, Picts, Saxons, Normans, men and women in Elizabethan finery or Victorian black, thrust and shoved through the amorphous cloud of hungry ghosts, snatching at the carcass with withered claws. Some of the old dead were far stronger than they ought to have been. They leeched off of the death and darkness of their surroundings, and stayed strong, becoming something other than ghosts.
Or at least that was how St. Cyprian described it. ‘Like a spiritual fungus spreading and creeping in the dark hollows, what?’ he’d said, in that asinine way of his. They didn’t look like any damn fungus to her—they just looked hungry, and dangerous.
Gallowglass backed away, watching. Eyes like black holes sought her out as she moved, and the old, dead things scrabbled silently towards her, mouths moving in a pantomime of hunger. They flew about her like moths attracted to a flame, clutching at her. She felt the cold flood her, and shuddered. They couldn’t hurt her, she thought, but they could make her uncomfortable. Something had stirred them up; it wasn’t just the blood. They were trying to talk, to warn her or bargain for more blood, though she couldn’t hear them. If St. Cyprian had been here, he would’ve known what they were saying. But he wasn’t and she didn’t, which left only one option.
“Bugger.” She flipped the athame up, grabbing it by the tip of the blade, and sent it spinning away. It sank point first into a wooden post, and the ghosts followed it like hounds on the scent, streaming away from her in a great roiling cloud. She’d come back later and get it, or not. Shaking slightly, put off her rhythm by the touch of the dead, she retrieved a match and scraped it to life with her thumbnail. As
she touched it to her well-masticated cigarette, she caught sight of a familiar face. “Ha, there you are,” she muttered. She’d last seen that face on a slab in the Limehouse police station. The ghost wandered around the others, the low man on the totem pole.
Ghost were like recordings, replaying their final hours over and over again until they faded, were banished or became something worse. This one would retrace his steps to wherever he’d come from before winding up on the wrong end of Ghale’s knife. That was what St. Cyprian had said, at any rate. Gallowglass didn’t put much stock in half of what he spouted, but sometimes there was a kernel of sense beneath all the fatuous ishkabibble.
After a moment, it drifted away. Gallowglass hefted her satchel and hurried after it.
Limehouse, the East End, London
Sadie Fleece stepped out of the dark and into the glow of the lantern gingerly. She waved back the men who’d followed her from Mayfair. She’d brought them to help with moving Melion’s property to someplace more secure, but she didn’t want them to see what she feared awaited them. They made no complaint. The Order had its pick of soldiers, and by and large, they knew how to follow the commands of their betters.
The air stank of blood and gunfire, and the noises that echoed up out of the crates were anything but reassuring. “Oh bugger,” she said, as she stepped through the gap between crates. She stopped short, momentarily shocked by the scene before her. Unconsciously, her hand found the comforting shape of her locket, and she clasped it tightly.
The fools had set it loose. Shepherd had given express instructions that they weren’t to open the crates. But judging by the state of them, they had paid the price for their disobedience. The creature had torn them apart.
It was spidery and thin, where it crouched over the body of one of the dead men. Clawed fingers tore gobbets of flesh from the ravaged corpse and stuffed them between snapping teeth. It froze as a board creaked beneath her foot. The thing turned with a grunt, bloody slobber dripping from its muzzle. Its nostrils flared and it turned. Lank white hair covered its starved frame, and beast-eyes blazed beneath a filthy mane.
The Jade Suit of Death (The Adventures Of The Royal Occultist Book 2) Page 8