by O. J. Lowe
I blinked. “You’re quite down on her, huh?”
“Didn’t like her,” he said. “Should have killed her when I had the chance.”
“Son, you never had a chance,” I replied, before something suddenly occurred to me which hadn’t before. “When did you visit High Hall?” It was the detective in me. Might have been a long damn time since I’d done much tangible detecting, but the bug died hard.
“Shortly before I was excommunicated from the Shining Council,” he said, his eyes dangerously blank. “About that time.”
“Purpose of your visit?”
“Personal business,” he said. Somehow, I got the impression I wasn’t going to get much more than that out of him right now. It was good, it was fine, it wasn’t like it even mattered. I didn’t particularly give one fig about Moulton’s private life. If he was suicidal enough to bite the hand that fed him by turning against the Shining Council, more power to him. He’d best have a damn compelling reason to do it.
I turned my attention back to the pictures. “So, what are we thinking? Oldest gives us a route out of here?”
“Oldest what? Painting? Event? Person? There’s a lot to go on. What about the last line, about time being an enemy? Aging takes time, right? Maybe it’s nothing about—”
I paused, went back to the pictures. “First what?” I mused. “What would be…” I tailed off, glanced at the picture of the vampire wedding again, my eyes returning to Xarence. Rumour had always placed him as one of the first vampires. Tenuous, perhaps. But there’d always been two queens of fae before Leanna had usurped them, though the picture only showed Titania. When it had come to St Sebastien, there’d been three main protagonists in stoking the fires of civil war, second only to Surtur in the hierarchy of Muspelheim, if the stories could be believed. And what of the fourth picture, the one of Frankenstein getting lynched? I pieced together the pieces of the stories, ignored the work of Shelley for most of that I believe was actually a ghost-written autobiography. Since he’d wound up in the Novisarium, rumour had it that he’d made four monster men, four such figures more than a match for any normal man. Nobody had ever found hide nor hair of them, but…
This was ridiculous, I knew that. I’d taken a theory and run with it, didn’t have a damn thing to back it up and if I got it wrong, it’d be disastrous. I voiced my theory aloud to Moulton, half-expected him to laugh even as the words left my mouth, but he shrugged instead with bemusement. “Not the worst idea. You have to consider; different people mean different things to different races. If this house was built by vampires, then they’d no doubt consider Xarence the first. Vampire hunters might well do the same thing, as patient zero.”
“Screw it then,” I said. “Let’s hit the button and—” I paused; my gaze went to the painting of Titania fleeing through the forest. Unless that was the path ahead, a new way forward for the fae of High Hall, out with the old and in with the new.
I could melt my brain considering this, so many possibly options and so little time. It felt like I’d been here forever. When the movement came, it was only a simple one as I dug my finger into the button and muttered a silent prayer to anyone listening.
Seven.
Going hat in hand before the Shining Council in hope that they might be able to share some hope towards a cure for Merlehaun’s Syndrome was, with benefit of hindsight, a phenomenally dumb idea. They didn’t care much for me, the same was true for me towards them. Given a chance, I’d lock them up and I’d never made much of a secret of that. I’d always considered Thomas Valentine and his cronies to be one step up from gangsters, I wasn’t the only one in the Novisarium, but I’d never made it a secret to voice my contempt for them.
For Carla though, I’d crawl across broken glass and back again. If that made me love’s bitch, then I was man enough to admit that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live without her in my life, not if it’d been in my power to change it and I’d avoided it.
They’d met me in their biggest meeting room, the heads of the five families, the ruling body of the Shining Council. They had underlings beneath them, those who had power in name alone, little more than glorified clerks, men like the fat, balding specimen with the watery eyes and the red nose greeting me. I made him as a wizard, and someone important immediately, for nobody else would have a bearing of self-importance quite as much as someone determined to make the most of what little power they possessed.
“Right, Sevo de Souca,” he said in the oiliest voice I’d ever heard, rubbing his hands together with barely restrained glee. “My name’s Woodbine and I’m here to guide you before our esteemed leaders today.”
I fixed him with a glare, held my tongue. It wasn’t worth getting into an argument with the help, it’d likely be taken the wrong way and that threw off my chance of getting the help Carla needed. A slim chance at best, I had to admit, but there wasn’t much I could do about that now. I had to make the effort. At a time like this, a man regrets the choices he’s made, but I’ve always found that to live life is to have regrets. You can’t hold within yourself just because one day you might need to have not upset someone.
“I’m one of the senior members of the Shining Council,” he said, as if desperate to beat his tongue. “Second only to the great Boubacar Benneg himself.”
“Fascinating.” I said the words, my lips barely moved. I couldn’t be bothered, truly. I knew of Benneg, though much about the asshole in front of me escaped my mind. “A pleasure to meet you, Woodbine.”
Call me suspicious, but I found it hard to trust him, something in his demeanour that didn’t entirely sit right with me. I’d met men like Woodbine before, schemers to their rotten core, they didn’t care what they did as long as it bore fruit that tasted pleasant only to themselves. If he was one of the higher ranked members of the Shining Council, it said much about how far the organisation had dropped. I found it hard to believe he possessed any sort of magical talent or innate cunning to be in the role.
Something, I reminded myself, a lot of people had said about my equal, Cameron Cavendish over the years and he’d always had the capacity to surprise them. Maybe, just maybe, Woodbine could do something similar. Beneath the softest of men often beat the hardest heart.
“Not often we get one of the top cops of the Novisarium wandering through our doors,” Woodbine remarked. “Might I ask what this is about.”
“You can,” I said, couldn’t fail to miss the sudden perk in his disposition as the images flooded his mind at suddenly being privy to sensitive information nobody else knew. An illusion I rudely shattered the first chance which arrived. “It doesn’t mean you’ll receive an answer though.”
I’d like to say my waking hours improved at that point, though it’d be a damn dirty lie for sure. The meeting last all of five minutes before I’d found myself met with an overwhelming refusal. The general gist, I’d found, being there was very little chance of a magical cure for Merlehaun’s syndrome and even should one exist, I’d be the last person they’d give it to. Not a lot of love existed between the Vigilant and the Shining Council, especially where I was concerned. There’s a train of thought which says we hate those who remind us of ourselves the most of all because it makes our flaws all the more noticeable. In me, the Shining Council saw everything that they weren’t, someone who’d actually tried to make the Novisarium a little safer for everyone and not asked for much in return, while in them, I saw everything I could have been had I simply taken another path. I could have been great and powerful; I could have been a king amongst wizards if only I’d had the mere nerve to be able to take it ahead of those who’d been more selfish, who’d only thought of what they could be and not what they should be.
Could a man like that have possessed the power to save someone he loved from certain death? I hoped not, for it might well bring into question every choice I’d since made.
I think at this point, I probably started to get desperate, and as history tells us, desperate men have a habit of doing truly deplor
able things to try and save it all.
Well, pressing that button hadn’t killed us. That was a relief, I guessed as the lock clicked ahead. Whatever it’d done, it’d been enough, we’d be out in a moment. Still, I let Moulton go first, just in case. He was that little bit harder to break than I was. He pushed it open, I followed him through and as the door slammed shut behind us, the lock clicked again. Idly I wondered what the other buttons would have done, but perhaps I was happier not knowing in hindsight.
Our next room brought us out into a grand lobby, scarlet rugs of crushed velvet covering silver stone embossed with flecks of bronze and copper, a strange effect but powerfully haunting, a pair of grand spiral staircases leading to the second floor. Looking around, I counted three, no four ways out of here, including a pair of double doors, black-brown wood with an intricate design and silver handles no less exotic in their design.
I went to them, raised my hand to touch the handles, only to withdraw as the door burst into flames, I jumped back in surprise before they could lick my hand. Definitely wasn’t going that way, it would appear. A sentiment Moulton echoed, before the cough rang out behind us, strangely echoed in the spaces of the lobby.
“You got here at last.” At least it sounded a damn sight more human than the voice on the speakers in the dining room. Though, I guess it could have been at his bequest. Was it the same person who’d soaked me and woke me earlier before casting me into the basement? I couldn’t tell, not without more to go on. “I was wondering if you’d make it past the previous room.”
“Hey,” I said. “What is this place?!” I peered up, tried to catch a glimpse of the figure. He wore a bright purple robe, almost a dress in truth, a silver scarf around his neck. When his mouth split apart, I caught sight of fangs. Something Moulton apparently didn’t miss either, his own fangs, as small and stunted as they might be now, flashed into view and he let out a hiss of challenge.
“Quiet, little one,” the man said, his voice a deep basso, a rumble of indifference. His skin might well have been a few shades lighter than mine, his skull devoid of even a single strand of hair. “This isn’t your place. You’ve been chosen to be tested, but it does not mean we believe you capable of passing.”
“I think you’ll find me capable of surprising you,” Moulton shot up at him. “And cut this little one bullshit. Because—”
“Silence!” The solitary word cracked out like a whip, had the desired effect as Moulton went quiet. “And as for you, wizard—”
“Not just a wizard,” I said. “A sevo. The sevo. How about you identify yourself before this goes any further? I like to know who I’m going to kill in self-defence beforehand.” I gave him a roguish grin he didn’t return.
“Your intransience might amuse some, it might aggravate others, but you will not find me capable of playing word games with you. If weapons are the bullets, consider yourself firing blanks,” he said. “I’m know who you are, John de Souca and I know why you’re here. Consider me unimpressed by the way you’ve inserted your way into things that you cannot understand.”
“Well, I think you’ll find that’s my MO,” I said airily. “It’s part of my creed. I see something to get involved in, I’ve inevitably got to do it.”
“You are aware of what they say about what curiosity does to cats, correct?”
“You’ll find I’m more than a cat,” I shot back. “Identify yourself.”
“I have no name,” he simply said. “Once upon a time, I was someone, but now well, I’m am simply a humble servant, a shepherd in the land of the dead serving as an escort from one life to the next. If everyone is someone, then I am no-one.”
“Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, huh?” I said, giving Moulton a sideways grin. He didn’t reply, stared silently up at the figure above us. “Garrett, you there?”
“He understands, even if you do not,” the stranger said, “there is no more, there is nothing else. Only the very immediate and very painful future. For centuries, this house has been a proving ground, a means of displaying your worth for all to see. Every room is a challenge, some are trials of the physical, some are mental. With every passed challenge, you become that little bit worthier to reach the end.”
“And what happens when we reach the end?” Moulton demanded.
“That, dear little one, is entirely up to you,” he chuckled. “Perhaps you’ll find the answers you seek. Perhaps the thing you desire. Perhaps you’ll simply wander into the afterlife without even realising it.”
He cocked back his arm, hurled something pointed and silver at me, something all too familiar. I snapped up my hand, caught the silverthorn by the hilt, the burn sweeping through me as my magic returned to me, momentarily snatching my breath from my lungs, doubling me over with momentary discomfort. By the time I’d straightened up, he’d vanished, though not before his voice lingered in the air with bemused malice.
“I think you might need all your little tricks from now on,” he laughed. “Both of you. You might have been something once, but you’re in my domain now. My home. If you think this ends any other way than my inevitable victory, you’re mistaken, and I look forward to breaking your spirits.”
“Better beings than you have tried,” I said, though whether he heard or not, I couldn’t say.
Silence accompanied his departure, a long void hanging in the air and I turned my gaze to Moulton, shrugged. “You ever seen anything like this before?”
“If you haven’t in all your years of experience,” he said, “then I’m sure I haven’t either. That was unsettling.”
“What was he? What did you see?”
“Somewhere between the living and the dead,” Moulton said. “Not quite here, not quite there. Every iota of my senses tells me he’s someone to be avoided.”
I considered the chances of that to be unlikely, shrugged my shoulders instead of voicing it aloud. If Moulton was half the man that I considered him to be, he’d already know that. The chances were that he was already spoiling for a fight, that we’d have to do that before we got out of here.
“Best be careful then,” I said. “I don’t know how many hoops we got to jump through before all this is over, but I guess we best put on our dancing shoes.”
“Trials of strength, trials of the mind,” Moulton mused. “God alone—” He made a face of disgust at the word, as if speaking it made his mouth hurt. Maybe it did— “knows what we’re going to end up facing in this fucking place.”
“What, like revolting flesh monsters or collapsing floors?”
“If we’re lucky,” he deadpanned, turning his attention to the doors ahead, those not blocked by flames. “Door number one or two?”
“If in doubt, go left,” I said. “That’s always been my philosophy.”
“And how’s that worked out for you?”
“Well I’m still here, aren’t I?”
“Touché,” he mused. He knew as I did, the truth of the matter that if something didn’t kill you, then it only made you stronger. I’m not saying everyone touched by magic is superstitious, I definitely know I’m not. But sometimes, if something works then you keep going with it until it doesn’t. And hopefully, it won’t be something which costs you. “Split up? Cover more ground?”
I audibly snorted at that. “We could do, this already feels like a low budget horror movie, you really want to make it worse.”
Moulton scuffed one of his shoes against the floor beneath, let out a whistle. “Ain’t nothing low budget about this place, Sevo, believe me on that. This is real money that put this place together, the sort you don’t fuck around with if you know what’s good for you. Only the poor and the dead make those mistakes.”
I probably shouldn’t be so worried. I could cover this alone, in theory. Of course, when wandering hostile territory, it was always good to have a partner, someone to watch your back when you couldn’t see in all directions at once. It’s the reason all Vigilant officers in the field are assigned one. Mind you, it helped even mor
e if you could trust them. Did I trust Moulton? Not even in the slightest, I’d done it once already and I’d had to stab him in the eye to get him off me.
The part of myself I’d always found a cold, hard bastard reminded me that it was always nice to have someone to sacrifice if things went badly wrong, give me that chance to get away, a moment’s respite to regroup. Unfortunately, such is the nature of life, that went both ways. No, this partnership wouldn’t work, long term. It’d survive until it didn’t, and I don’t think either of us were under any illusions it would last beyond leaving this house.
Somehow, I just knew one of us was going to end up killing the other before the night was out, couldn’t explain it, didn’t even mean that I liked the thought, but alas I’ve lived long enough to know when the end is coming. Sometimes, it’s all you can do to accept it, to hope that being forewarned is forearmed.
Eight.
If magic had failed me, then I found myself wondering where next to turn. As I said previously, should you come to rely on magic too much, for every little thing, then inevitably you’ll come a cropper, something will happen that drags you down, either addiction or it’ll fail you when least you expect it. The Shining Council had been unable, scratch that, unwilling to help, even if I believed them when they said there wasn’t a damn thing they could do.
That had left me considering other options. Conventional medicine had failed me, I knew that much. If Dee Lindley had been able to do anything, she would have. I had faith in her talents, she took her Hippocratic oath very seriously. You can’t trust half the people in the Novisarium to be who or what they claimed to be, but Lindley had never given me any such impressions she was anything other than an overworked physician.
With that in mind, I’d moved onto unconventional medicine, the Vigilant kept a list of known mad-scientists, I’d worked my way down the list, from men who specialised in grafting extra limbs onto their subjects in hope of creating a more efficient worker, to one who claimed to have unleashed the HIV virus in order to kill visitors from another dimension, to one who’d had a bad experience in his earlier life opening a door he shouldn’t have and now had a mess of wormy grey tentacles covered in suckers sprouting from his head. He looked like a rejected idea from Star Wars, I’d always thought, I’d tried to avoid staring but the funny thing about human nature, the more you try not to do something, the easier it becomes to ignore. I’d spoken to a woman more mechanical spider than flesh and blood, everything below her neck replaced by cybernetic parts as she skittered about on eight legs, and one who had the appearance of a six year old African girl but spoke with the accent of an elderly Teutonic man and had most of the similar attitudes. I didn’t know whether it had been punishment, pleasure or necessity that had forced him into such a form, but either way, it wasn’t my place to judge any of them. As long as they didn’t try to blow up the Novisarium or unleash something that would kill the majority of the population, the Morningstar and the Conclave were happy to let them go about their work in peace.