by Andrew Smith
“Hi,” said Grace to the group. “We’ve got a lot to talk about. Let’s get inside. And you might want...” She trailed off as she looked around for the person she had wanted to address: the Crusader. He was gone. “Where did armor guy get himself to?”
No-one had an answer. They went in and sat down. Clement ate far too much despite Mme. Rumella’s warnings not to do so.
“So it was Lionel?” Mme. Rumella asked.
“Definitely.”
“How did you defeat him?” Mary had to ask.
“I put my knee in his groin and my boot in his face.”
“Impressive,” said Mary.
“The Peelers arrived seconds afterward, if you’ll believe it.”
“They’ve always had impeccable timing,” Mme. Rumella commented.
“With Lionel arrested, perhaps this whole ordeal is winding down.”
“It’s more a thing than an ordeal,” Leila interjected.
“I hope so,” Grace said to Mme. Rumella. “I’m no expert, but... What part of England was he supposed to be from?”
“That question has plagued me for years, Grace,” Mme. Rumella replied. She looked to Clement Jones, currently demolishing his third bowl of soup, and asked whether he knew where he had been held.
He just nodded till he finished swallowing. “It was a Spanish-looking villa, five, maybe six centuries outwise.”
Mme. Rumella and Leila exchanged a look. “Would it, by any chance,” Mme. Rumella inquired, “be over in the First Quarter?”
“Mmmhmm,” Clement acknowledged as he lifted the bowl to his lips
“Oh my,” said Mme. Rumella, equally distressed by that action as she was the location in which the linguist had been held.
“And the Standard,” Leila asked him, urgently, “was it there? Were you working directly with it?”
Clement wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I could have brought you a napkin,” said a disconsolate Mme. Rumella.
“I was.”
“Let’s get the hell over there before someone else does,” says Leila, leaping to her feet. She drew her fountain pen Focus from her breast pocket. “Come on.”
Mary laughed as she stood from her chair. “Look who’s Miss Action all of a sudden.”
Everyone rose except Grace. “I’ll stay here and, you know, keep watch. That kind of thing.”
“Do you have a shower I could use?” Clement asked
“Third floor,” Mme. Rumella replied. She glanced around the room. “Wyyla, are you coming?”
“No,” came a voice from the hanging light fixture. “I’m going to get a little rest then head back over to McLenen’s. I have a bad feeling.”
“Bless you, small one,” Mme. Rumella said as the rest made their exit.
Leila and Mme. Rumella took the lead.
“Don’t you think we should have taken the guy with us?” Voz asked.
“We know where we’re going,” said Leila. “We’ve been there before.”
“Vacation?”
“Fight scene.”
“Right. Of course.”
“I must say,” Mme. Rumella chimed in, “that I feel much better about this time round. We may not have the Crusader, but with Mary, Hunter, and Voz with us, no couple of young, er-”
“Damn kids,” Leila supplied.
“Just so, pet. No ‘damn kids’ will give us any trouble.”
“Damn kids?” Mary inquired.
“Um, let’s go ahead and not speak of it,” Leila suggested. “I’m sufficiently embarrassed just thinking about it.”
No-one pressed them. The villa came into view ahead of them. Leila was about to stride boldly into the courtyard before Mme. Rumella grabbed her shoulder.
“What?” Leila complained.
“Caution, pet,” Mme. Rumella whispered.
Leila whispered, grudgingly, “Why? Lionel’s been arrested. Why can’t we just walk in there are take it?”
“Oh honestly,” said Mme. Rumella.
“It’s alright,” Voz assured them. “We’re the only ones here. I hear nothing else.”
“Now we can go,” said Mme. Rumella.
The walked beneath the overhang to the far corner, and ascended the stair. One door was ajar. Light spilled through to light a trapezoidal slice of the exterior walkway. The door the Crusader had destroyed on their last visit had been repaired and replaced in its proper position. Leila pushed the door all the way open and looked with in. Within were a table and chair, and a blazing torch on a stand. And nothing else
“It could be in one of the other rooms,” Leila said without much hope.
The seven of them split up for a quick search and met back in the courtyard. As no-one came hefting a large cylindrical object covered with symbols, no questions were asked.
“I feel a headache coming on,” said Leila. “A very, very large one.”
“I agree that it is more than a touch frustrating,” said Mme. Rumella. “But Mr. Jones is bound to have more information for us.” The group turned to leave. Mme. Rumella continued: “Our questioning was hardly complete. We got ahead of ourselves, that’s all.”
“You mean I got ahead of myself,” Leila mumbled.
“Not at all, pet. Any one of us, including Mr. Jones himself, could have stopped and waited to learn more, but we all went along.”
Leila said nothing. The trip back was quieter and less urgent than the trip out. Clement Jones was showered, but was forced to re-dress in his old clothes. When they arrived, he stood looking over the cases of baked goods, which were always fairly picked over by this time of night. Grace had fallen asleep on a couch.
“There’s only so much free food I’m willing to give to strangers, Mr. Jones. Perhaps you would like a cup of tea? Would anyone else?”
Hunter and Mary both agreed to cup and Mme. Rumella went about preparing it.
“Now Mr. Jones,” she spoke clearly from behind her counter as she set the tea service on a tray, “we have a few more questions for you.” She hefted the tray and set it on the table around which the others had gravitated. “When we arrived at the villa, we found that there was nothing there.”
“Are you sure it was the right one?” Clement asked
“Spanish, Fist Quarter, fifteenth century-”
“Fourteenth,” Leila corrected
“Fourteenth century, lovely mosaics, expansive courtyard.”
“Sounds right.”
“There was a room, up the stairs, to the right, the third door. There was a table and chair and torch.”
“In the front of the room, right hand corner as you walk in the door?”
“Precisely.”
“That sounds like it, alright.”
“Yes, I believe it was the right room. We simply arrived too late. Now I wonder: might there be anyone who would know the Standard’s location well enough to have taken it and absconded before we arrived?”
“The voice,” Clement said heavily
“Excuse me?” asked Voz
“There was this voice. I never saw who it belonged to, but Lionel- that’s what you called him, right?- was arguing with someone, like his boss or something.” Grave looks darted across the room like lightning. “I said I needed to go to the Mulhoy if I had any hope of ever doing what he wanted. The voice said it was almost certainly being watched, which it was, thank God. And you, too, Grace,” he said to the sleeping detective. “Anyway, the voice said it would create a distraction. I didn’t really know what he meant, but then I saw all those... Those things.”
“Damnable ant-spiders,” Mary muttered to no-one in particular
“I guessed that’s what the voice was talking about, seeing as how you all were the ones who rescued me.”
Mme. Rumella poured four cups of tea, and added the proper amounts of cream and sugar to three. “Cream and sugar, Mr. Jones?”
“Please.”
“Two lumps, I’ll assume.”
“Good guess.”
“Guess nothing,” Mme
. Rumella rejoined. “Now this voice of which you speak: was it a man or a woman?”
“It sounded like a man. I’m sorry I couldn’t see anything. I tried, but that old peeking through the keyhole trick wasn’t working for me.”
“No need to apologize,” Mme. Rumella assured him, sipping her tea. “And the owner of said voice sounded more in-command?”
“Oh yeah. That Lionel guy was always nervous when he had to talk to him.”
“Someone more powerful,” Mme. Rumella mused.
“So in the past few centuries... Anyone?” Mary pointed out.
“At least we know that Lionel was working for someone, and that it was a man. That pretty much puts Delilah out of the running,” Leila observed.
“And I do believe that my original theory about Lionel hiding the Standard briefly in the Street of the Dead holds up again,” Mme. Rumella announced.
“The real question,” Mary drew them back to the present, “is whether the voice belonged to Damon McLenen or Ruin.”
“Or someone else entirely,” said Benny, mostly because he hadn’t contributed anything yet
“It had better not be someone we don’t know about. I’d be pissed,” Leila proclaimed.
“Automatically? How does that work?” Benny puzzled.
“She means she’d be angry, nephew.”
“Oh. That makes much more sense.”
“So,” Voz prompted, “what now?”
“I can leave after I get a little more sleep and watch McLenen, like I said,” Wyyla suggested.
Everyone looked around for the source of her voice. Only Voz found it immediately. “Alright, but what about Ruin?”
“We do not want to go looking for Ruin unless we are absolutely sure that he’s involved,” Mary warned. “The last thing we want is a mighty battle with him to deplete our energy, and possibly our numbers, with the Standard, and the power within that, I might remind everyone, we do not understand at all, still waiting out there.”
Voz growled. “I’ll deplete his ass down to its component molecules, that son of a bitch.”
“Well that was unconscionably vulgar,” Mme. Rumella remarked.
“And we still don’t know what we’re going to do,” Benny reminded them
“Hunter?” Mme. Rumella asked. “What do you think?”
Hunter, who sat quietly with arms crossed, when he wasn’t sipping his tea, said, “I don’t care. I’m here for one thing. Once this Standard business is over, I’m going to finish my own. Just point at whatever you want me to shoot.”
“Hunter! You’re too clever to be speaking that way, and I, if anyone, know that,” Mme. Rumella admonished.
Hunter didn’t reply.
“I know what we could do,” said Mary, pensive and not meeting anyone’s eyes. “We could take McLenen out. Take him out and if he doesn’t have the Standard, we’ll know it was Ruin.”
“Process of elimination,” muttered Leila harshly.
Mme. Rumella stood. “We’ll sleep on it.” When nearly everyone asked her what she was talking about, she continued: “This whole business has been very trying, and we all need our rest. And, sadly, I cannot think of a better idea than Mary’s. There are ten people in this room, and if none of us can think of a better idea by morning, then, perhaps, we will have to act. We will, of course, try to leave the man alive,” she said with a sideways glance at Hunter. “But now to bed.”
Everyone rose in an uncomfortable silence and began to filter up the stairs, leaving Grace asleep on the sofa.
“Would you,” Clement started, “would you mind if I stayed here? I don’t want to walk home.”
“Perfectly understandable,” Mme. Rumella said. “We’ll see if there’s still an empty room here in my boarding house which occasions to serve tea.”
Sorcery, Extra Dark
It was still dark when Wyyla rose, perhaps an hour and half after the others had gone to bed. She had been resting during their excursion to the villa, but they had awoken her upon their return. She sat up from her place on the modest chandelier and stretched her tiny arms. Standing, she tested her wings and swooped down to the doorway. Wyyla sighed. She doubted that anyone sleeping upstairs had left their window open after what had happened earlier. The door opened outward. Wyyla pushed on it with her surprising strength, without having to worry about reaching the handle, before winging away into the night.
She perched on the same windowsill as she had the past few nights. The room was abandoned, but only for a moment. Damon McLenen reentered, looking as though he had been away too long. He opened the cabinet and looked within with a widening smile.
There came a knock at the door. Damon’s ebullient look faded into disappointment as he closed the cabinet once again and exited to answer the door. Wyyla flew around to the front of the house. There at the door was the dark sorceress herself, Delilah Runestone, standing insolently on one hip. Her arms were crossed, one hand tucked lightly up a sleeve. The surrounding night paled against the blackness of her eyes. She did not look happy.
The door opened. Wyyla buzzed a few feet out from the wall. Damon McLenen appeared in the doorway. Neither looked Wyyla’s way.
“Delilah?” McLenen asked, sounding confused.
“There’s the surprised look I’ve come to love,” said Delilah. Her words were easy but her tone was frosty.
“How did you know where I live?”
“I know a lot of things,” Delilah replied, silently cursing herself for talking like Tina Virtue. Then she fixed him with a look that informed him she wasn’t going to wait very long for whatever it was that she wanted.
“Listen, you shouldn’t be here.”
She said nothing
“What do you want, Delilah?”
“I’ve been watching you Damon. From right outside that window,” she said, indicating the side of the house.
Wyyla gasped. Delilah looked at her out of the corner of her eye and the sprite disappeared with haste round the side of the house. Was it true? If it wasn’t, how would Delilah have spotted her tiny form so easily? How could she have missed Delilah? And, more importantly, what the hell was going on?
Wyyla slipped over to the nearest window. It showed the spacious entry way with its marble floor and curving staircase to the next level. Delilah stepped inside like she owned the place. Damon said nothing, just stood there looking confused.
“Can I do something for you?”
“Where is it?”
McLenen suddenly looked nervous. “Where is what?”
“Nice acting Damon. I always thought you should be on stage. Where is the Standard of Uruk?”
“Seriously now, what are you talking about?” Damon sounded confused.
“I said I’ve been watching you. That thing in the bedroom upstairs. It’s the Standard of Uruk, isn’t it?”
“Er, no, it’s definitely not that. In fact, I really wish you would tell me what you’re talking about.”
“Is it up these stairs?” Delilah asked, gesturing with her now openly-drawn wand. She didn’t wait for an answer before setting off. Wyyla hurried to the window from which she, apparently they, had witnessed Damon’s rather unsettling displays.
She pressed her ear to the glass and the heard the approaching footsteps and McLenen’s further protests and inquiries. Delilah stopped. Wyyla guessed she was checking the next room. In a few moments, satisfied that there was nothing there, Delilah opened the door to the correct room. In the time it took Wyyla to blink, the cabinet had vanished. Delilah saw the empty room and was about to move on. Wyyla couldn’t tell why she wanted to warn her, but went with the feeling and began rapping on the window.
Delilah gave her an imperceptible nod and began looking more closely around the room. Wyyla crouched safely in the corner of the window, wondering how Delilah always seemed to know exactly where she was. She was so small as to be practically invisible to most people. The sorceress must have very acute vision.
Delilah began tapping on the wal
ls. She came to the place where the cabinet had been. Apparently it was still there: something stopped her hands before she could reach the wall. “Since when were you an illusionist?”
Damon shrugged. Delilah went to open the cabinet. A blue light shone from within. Delilah examined the object. It was a rectangular frame. Bathed in its own light, it was difficult to discern the nature of the material, but Delilah guessed it was silver. For some reason, silver was often a helpful material in the dark sorcery. Fitted within the silver frame were slivers of stained glass, mostly violet, held together by tiny black filaments. And in the center, an orb, emitting the blue light. It crackled out in fits along the rest of the instrument.
“What the hell is this?”
“Well it’s not the Scabbard of Whoever, anyway,” Damon set moving to close the cabinet.
“Then where is it?”
“I don’t even know what it is, much less where. And I can’t imagine why you thought I had it,” said Damon, a little crossly
Delilah was nonplussed. “When you...when you came up to me when I was at Suerte’s Headquarters.”
“What, crouched in the bushes there?”
“Yes. I thought... It seemed like you were trying to draw attention, and I... I didn’t really believe it was a chance encounter. I thought you were there for a reason.”
“Just passing through, D.”
“Don’t call me D.”
“Whatever.”
“Alright then, so what is this thing? I saw it scorch the wall across the alley.”
“Yeah, and they were none too happy about that, let me tell you. I told them it was an accident, though. Which it was,” he hastened to add. “Believe me. It gave me a right scorching, too. I was coughing up soot for three days.”
“Rampant exaggerator,” Delilah accused
“Yeah.”
Delilah thought. He had closed the door, but it didn’t stop her from sensing the object. It was definitely dark, she could tell, but that thing in the middle. Now that she was closer to it, it seemed familiar and strange both. “What is that thing, then?”
“It’s just a little project I’m working on,” said Damon evasively
“I,” said Delilah, “am a very good dark sorceress. And even if I weren’t, I could still be able to sense that thing in there. Come on, Damon. Professional courtesy. Tell me.”