Balfour paced the edges of the room like a caged tiger, his hand never far from his knives, his gaze constantly on the woman. Meriwether sat near the fire as if the winter storm growing outside were a pleasant spring day, the Czarina a friendly acquaintance come over for tea, and the Queen of England in her right mind.
“And now we seek a Mohommadan wizard who has been invoking Artyadaji?” Meriwether said. “Hardly the sort of thing one finds among the Muscovites.”
“Men say many things. A claim is not the truth,” the Czarina said. “You recall the French poisoner who presented himself as a traveler from the future?”
“Yes, well. That was a bit more complex than public reports let on, but this wizard of yours, pretender or not, unquestionably has ties to the Afghan territories.”
“Opium,” Balfour said. “The resin was on the walls.”
“And the ash in that infernal smoking fireplace,” Meriwether said. “Whatever magic our wizard has employed, it relies on Afghan poppy for its effect. Without intending offense, Your Majesty, your husband’s influence in the region is considerably less than it once was, which would make the decision to begin a campaign by attacking him rather odd. Unless, of course, he presented a particularly convenient target. It follows then, that there have been some…negotiations?”
“Bloody Russians trying to cut off our route to India!” Balfour snapped. “Again!”
The Czarina stretched. A joint in her spine cracked, and as if in answer, the pine in the fireplace popped.
“Would you like me to deny it?” she asked with a deep, throaty laugh. “Of course my empire has been exploring what options and strategies are available to it. Much as yours has. You may as well pretend outrage that the sun sets.”
“And your explorations have met with such success that your husband felt it wise to attend to it personally,” Meriwether said. “That sounds very much as if the recent hostilities might take new fire.”
“That was the hope,” the Czarina said. “Instead, he touched off…this.”
“What can you tell us of these negotiations?”
“Very little, I’m afraid. My husband does not always trust me. It’s something of a game between us. I do not believe the meeting was cheese for the mousetrap. His allies were quite sincere in their hatred of Britain. But a third party intruded.”
“Your wizard,” Balfour said.
“We forget, I think, that being primitive is not the same as being simple,” the Czarina said. “There are as many intrigues in their caves and tents as in our palaces. And yes, Abdul Hassan enchanted the Czar. I was called in on the instant. At first, we assumed you were behind it. The locals swore otherwise, and then I found a workshop in the poorest quarters of Kabul. A den of dark magic. And notes outlining the attack upon your queen.”
“And you let it happen,” Balfour said.
“Consider my position. My options were to track the wizard alone and in the den of my enemy, or with the best and most capable allies in the world, and with the force of the British Empire.”
“Besides which, should we fail, we will both be hobbled by compromised monarchs rather than Russia suffering that fate alone,” Meriwether said.
“Deplore me if you wish,” the Czarina said and sipped her tea.
“Done,” Balfour said.
A soft knock came at the door, and Lord Carmichael stepped in. His cheeks were ruddy from the cold and snow still clung, melting, to his coat. His grin was feral.
“We’ve found him, boys. The bastard’s taken a room behind a slaughterhouse not fifteen minutes from here. Arrived just when the Empress here said he would have. Missing eye tooth. What’s more, when we knocked up the landlord, he said he suspected his new tenant was an opium fiend. Said he stinks of the stuff. I’ve got a dozen men watching the place right now.”
“Well then,” Meriwether said, rising to his feet. “Let us go and make our call.”
It was nearly midnight when they arrived in the street outside Jenkins Brothers Meats. The snow was thick on the cobbles and grey with coal ash. Cold bit at their skin, and the air was rich with the reek of manure and old blood. Lord Carmichael pressed a brass key into Balfour’s hand nodding at the slaughterhouse door.
“The room’s in the back,” he said. “Caretaker’s quarters. Fastest way’s in through the front here, past the counter, and through the killing floor. Take the hall on the right.”
“Charming,” Balfour said, slipping the key into his pocket and drawing out a pair of well-balanced knives.
Meriwether checked his paired service revolvers, the mechanisms clicking softly in the snow-quiet street. The Czarina took her own gun from her hip, adjusted the complex mechanism at the butt, and then took a second pistol from the small of her back and loaded three cartridges into it. Her fingernails were blue with the cold, but she made no complaint.
“Would you consider remaining with Lord Carmichael, Your Highness?” Meriwether asked.
“No.”
“I thought not.”
The front rooms of the slaughterhouse were cramped. From the ink-stained wood of the counter and the hand-written notices of price, it might have been almost any business. In near-perfect darkness, the trio crept, silent as cats. The door to the killing floor was unlocked, its hinges well-oiled. Within, the room was colder even than the street outside. Blocks of ice stood stacked against the wall, and sawdust soupy with gore covered the floor. In the dim light that spilled in through the high windows, the skinless things hanging from hooks might have been anything: beef or rabbits or men. Even in the cold, the reek was overwhelming.
A rat scuttled along the wall, startled by its unexpected guests. By unspoken agreement, Balfour took the lead, his wide frame moving through the shadows with the agility of long practice. The others followed only a few steps behind, Meriwether dividing his awareness between the dark spaces behind them and the snake-smooth motion of the Czarina, prepared for surprise attack from either quarter. It seemed hours that they negotiated the abattoir, the dead around them like the trees of an infernal forest, and then Balfour made a low clicking sound at the back of his throat.
Meriwether went still, and a moment later, the Czarina as well. Balfour opened the door slowly, a dim, dirty light outlining its frame. From the hallway beyond, a faint voice came. The syllables were incomprehensible, but they had a wetness and roughness that spoke of a throat abused from long use, hoarse as a man accustomed to screaming. Balfour lifted his head, sniffing at the air, and a moment later, the others caught it as well. The sweet, pungent scent of opium, but also something else. Something deeper and more intimate even than the spilled blood through which they had travelled. The Czarina’s long, slow exhalation reminded Meriwether to breathe as well. Her eyes, the brown gone slate gray in the dim light, were fearful and reckless at once. She saw the question in his expression and nodded once. She was prepared.
Quiet as thieves, they crept forward.
At the end of the hall, light spilled from the edges of a poorly-fit door. Red and gold, it danced like flame, but there was no roar of fire to accompany it, only the rough, ruined voice lifted in its incomprehensible chant. Balfour crossed to the far side of the door, his drawn blades glittering. The Czarina placed herself at the door’s nearer edge just as Meriwether moved to the same position. Their bodies collided silently, and Meriwether took a step back to steady himself. A floorboard creaked under his foot.
The chanting stopped.
“Grand,” Balfour sighed, and then twisting from the hip, kicked the door open. The lock shattered. The bolt tore free, splintering the wood. All three leapt into the room.
What had once been a modest caretaker’s residence—a cast-iron stove, a small cot, a single gaslight—had been transformed. The stove’s plate was open, the burning coal within heating the air like a furnace and filling the room with demonic light. The ancient, black robed man kneeling before it could have been drinking at the back of any pub in England. Close-cut white hair frosted his p
ale scalp. The patchy beginnings of a beard clung like lichen to his loose jowls and wattled neck. His alarmed eyes were the blue of ice at the iris, the sclera a uniform, blood-bright red. He shouted, his bared teeth revealing the pale-gummed gap of a missing eye tooth, and threw a handful of dark powder into the flames.
Meriwether lifted his revolver toward the man’s skull.
“In the name of Victoria, queen of England, stand down!” he shouted.
The dark-robed man rose, his arms raised at his sides in a gesture that could have been surrender or a show of fearlessness. At his breast, a huge and ornate silver medallion glittered as if with a light of its own. When he spoke, it was with the unaccented English of a London native.
“In the name of Victoria?” he said. “You have no idea what I have seen and suffered in that name. It has no power over me any longer, God help us both.”
The three exchanged confused glances. The wizard hoisted the corner of his mouth in an amused smile. His medallion glowed silver in a world of honey-gold. There was a ruby set at the center, red as the old man’s eyes.
“Forgive me,” Meriwether said, his revolvers still trained at the man’s forehead. “Abdul Hassan?”
“If you like, son. I’ve been Abdul Hassan. I’ve had a dozen names. What does it matter what a man’s called? Call him king or cobbler, it’s what he does that matters.”
The heat of the fire redoubled, the flames licking at the black iron.
“You have injured my husband,” the Czarina said. “You will tell me now how to cure him.”
“Balfour?” Meriwether said.
“I see it,” Balfour replied. At the edges of the room, the shadows were growing solid. Darkness made its web. “It’s the smoke fumes.”
“I believe that it isn’t,” Meriwether said.
“You will tell me how to cure him!“ the Czarina shrieked, and her pistol barked twice. The black robe bucked and puckered as the rounds pierced it. The wizard chuckled.
“You’ll find me a harder man to kill than that,” he said, and the shadows swept down around him moving through the air like ink dripped into water. There were eyes in that darkness, shining like black water. Searching for them. Meriwether felt the hairs on his neck and arms standing too, his deep animal nature recognizing something that had threatened him since before evolution had brought men to walk upright.
Something detonated soundlessly, and the iron stove gone, the caretaker’s room gone, and rising behind the ancient man, a huge goat-headed thing. Its pendulous belly shifted as it shuddered from one awkward, bent leg to another. Its eyes were malefic and intelligent.
“Artyadaji,” the Czarina breathed.
“Meriwether?” Balfour said, and there was a barely controlled panic in his voice.
“I suspect we’ve been exposed to…some sort of hallucinatory agent.”
“That’d be good,” Balfour said. His voice echoed, as if coming from a great distance away. Meriwether took careful aim at the beast shuddering before him. A huge, honey-colored moon was rising over its shoulder. His service pistol barked in his hand, and the demonic face rippled like a reflection in a pond when a stone has been dropped into it.
“Stop that!” the Czarina said, and the world smelled of her clove perfume and the richness of her flesh. “You could have killed me.”
“Get on the floor!” Balfour wheezed.
With his head pressed to the filthy floorboards, Meriwether’s mind slowly cleared. A greenish haze poured up from the iron stove, floating about three feet above the floor, venomous and threatening. A calm and poisoned ocean, seen from beneath the waves. Of the ancient man, there was no sign.
“Stay low,” Meriwether said. “We have to get to the street. And quickly.”
When they had reached the curb again, their clothing ruined by the return trip through the frigid gore of the slaughterhouse, Lord Carmichael had a carriage waiting. Wrapped in woolen blankets, the three were pulled quickly through the night streets.
“We saw him slip out,” Lord Carmichael said. “Leapt off the rooftop. I’ve got men in pursuit. I was about to send a squad in when you three stumbled out. What happened in there?”
“Hell opened,” Balfour said. The Czarina leaned her head against the rattling side of the carriage and wept silently.
“It’s well you didn’t send any others in,” Meriwether said. “Especially not men who were armed. We’d all have been shooting one another down as devils until morning.”
Slowly—the opium had done something unpleasant to his ability to find words—Meriwether recounted the events from within the slaughterhouse. Lord Carmichael listened, his eyes wide and his expression the rapt fascination of a boy sitting at a campfire, regaled with ghost stories. When Meriwether came to the end, Lord Carmichael slapped his back, grinning.
“Well, this is all to the good, then, isn’t it? We may not have caught the bastard, but at least we know it’s all drugs and mesmerism. Not real magic at all.”
“I’m afraid we don’t know that,” Meriwether said.
“You recognized him too?” Balfour asked, his bear-deep growl softer than usual.
“I did,” Meriwether said. The carriage lurched, the team of horses whuffling in complaint. “Our so-called Abdul Hassan is, in fact, an Englishman.”
“Scot.”
“Born in England, of Scottish descent,” Meriwether said, giving half the point. “I’ve never met the man, but I’m quite familiar with his portrait. William Brydon.”
“I don’t know the name,” said the Czarina, her attention suddenly sharp and bright as a blade’s edge.
“Assistant surgeon in the East India Company. When Elphinstone retreated from Kabul to Jalalabad, he had an army of forty-five hundred men. Only one man reached safety, and that was William Brydon.”
“Elphinstone? No, you must be mistaken. This can’t be the same man. That was…”
“Yes, I know,” Meriwether said. “That was our first adventure among the Afghans. Over four decades ago.”
“The man would be in his sixties,” Lord Carmichael said.
“Seventies,” Balfour said. “Except that he died at sixty-two.”
“Ah,” Lord Carmichael said.
“Yes,” said Meriwether. “So we can’t entirely rule out magic just yet.”
CHAPTER THREE: Remnants of an Army
Dawn came behind a veil of low, grey cloud. The difference between darkness and day was only a greater wealth of detail in the worn faces and cold stone. The traffic thickened the streets, horses and carriages battling the night’s snowfall. The young man in Lord Carmichael’s offices looked at the great brass globe and the citations from the Queen as if he expected to wake from it all. Balfour smiled at him and extended a cup of rich-smelling, smoky tea. Samuel Brydon hesitated, ran a hand through hair still disarranged from the pillow, and accepted the cup. The men around him—men only, for the Czarina was elsewhere, preparing her part of the endeavor—waited patiently for the boy to answer the question.
“No, I’m quite sure Grands is dead. I was at his funeral. I remember it because it was on my tenth birthday,” he said. “Funny, isn’t it, how we’re such selfish beasts when we’re young. Mum lost her father, and all I could think was that it wasn’t fair I couldn’t have my cake. Really, though, you should ask her about it. She’ll know more than I do.”
Meriwether smiled, trying to keep the anxiety presently shaking him from affecting his demeanor.
“Alas, Westfield is a bit too long a journey for us at the moment. Time is of the essence and all that sort of thing. You have, I take it, had no visitations from your grandfather? Dreams or visions, perhaps?”
The young man laughed, and then seeing the grim faces of the men around him, sobered.
“No. Nothing like that. Is this…actually important?”
“Deadly so, I’m afraid. Did you know your grandfather well?”
“Well enough, I suppose. He seemed a decent sort of man. Prone to dark times, of cou
rse. Anyone would be who’d been through what he had. In the war, I mean.”
“Did he talk about Afghanistan often?” Lord Carmichael asked, smiling encouragement.
“Not as such, no,” the boy said. “He’d go back there every few years. Had friends there, he said. And he was very down on war in general. When Pa asked for my mother’s hand, the only condition was that Pa couldn’t take a career with the military.”
“That so?” Balfour rumbled.
“He’d be damned upset with me, I’m sure,” the boy said with a laugh.
“Joined up?” Balfour said.
“Haven’t yet, but I’m going to. Clerking hasn’t exactly worked out, you could say.”
The secretary knocked gently at the door and leaned in to catch Lord Carmichael’s eye.
“Your appointment with the Inspector has been postponed, sir,” he said. It was a code phrase. The time was right to move in. Lord Carmichael nodded and plucked the drawing from his waistcoat pocket. He considered it carefully, then held it out to the boy.
“Have you ever seen a medallion of this sort among your family’s possessions?”
The boy hesitated, frowned, and then slowly shook his head.
“No, sir,” he said. Balfour leaned toward him.
“Aryadaji,” he said. “Mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
“Someone may approach you claiming some relationship to your grandfather,” Meriwether said. “He may particularly be haunting places that your grandfather may have known within London or its surroundings. If any such man approaches you, you must let us know immediately. He is quite dangerous.”
“Is he?” the boy squeaked.
“Yes,” Meriwether replied. “But don’t be too concerned. We are certain to have him captured by nightfall.” He paused, then in a lower voice: “We have a trap in place.”
“Well that… That’s good, then,” the boy said. “Something a bit queer about having one’s dead grandfather about, isn’t there?”
“Thank you for coming in, Mister Brydon,” Lord Carmichael said. “And I apologize again for the abrupt manner of our arrival.”
Balfour and Meriwether in The Vampire of Kabul Page 2