by A. C. Cobble
Frowning, Oliver glanced between his brother and the director. Finally, he turned to the bishop. “Unusual circumstances?”
Bishop Gabriel Yates shifted in his seat, his hands resting atop his prodigious stomach. “Unusual is an apt description. Dark magic, perhaps. That is what the inspectors put into the report, at least. I cannot imagine there is true sorcery being conducted in Enhover. I can’t imagine it is even possible, but because it is written in the official report, it is the Church’s position that this must be dealt with quickly and by someone in authority.”
Oliver grunted. “There hasn’t been sorcery in Enhover since… since father forced the Coldlands raiders back across the sea. As you say, I’ve always been told it’s impossible to call upon the underworld spirits in Enhover. In university, the professors taught that the connection with the spirits had been lost, that technology had supplanted mysticism.”
He glanced between the men in the room, but both his brother and the director simply looked to the bishop.
“I believe that calling upon either life or death spirits is now impossible. That much of what you learned is true,” answered Yates. “According to the report we received from the inspectors, though, it seems they do not agree. And I must admit, if the description they included is accurate, it has the characteristics of a dark ritual. In truth, the mere idea that someone would attempt sorcery here is almost as dangerous as someone actually doing it. I am comfortably certain no connection was made with an underworld spirit, but it is possible someone tried, which as you know has been outlawed by the Church. We cannot sit on our hands and hope this resolves itself. The people should understand the Crown and Church are here to protect them from both mundane and supernatural threats. Even though we don’t believe the threat is real, we should show the people we are acting in their interests.”
“You see, brother?” asked Prince Philip. “This is a sensitive matter, and I wouldn’t ask unless it was important.”
“Crown and Company.” Oliver sighed.
“And Church,” added the bishop.
A wry twist curled Duke Wellesley’s lips. “Crown, Company, and Church.”
The bishop nodded, satisfied. “The afternoon northbound rail, three on the clock, your companion will be there waiting.”
“My companion?”
The Priestess I
The man grunted and rolled over, dragging a fistful of covers with him.
She laid still a moment, hugging her arms tightly in the sudden cold, glaring at his broad back and tussled hair. Muttering to herself, she rolled out of the bed and stood. She guessed it was a few hours after midnight, still a few hours until dawn, but she was awake, and there was no point in hanging around while the oaf slept.
She tugged on her snug leather trousers, her tunic, and a tight vest. She strapped on her belt and felt the familiar weight of her two kris daggers resting against her hips. She removed a dagger from underneath the pillow and slipped it into the sheath at the small of her back, hidden underneath the vest. She pulled on her knee-high boots and checked that both thin-bladed poignards tucked inside of them were secure. Then, she walked out the door.
The man lived in a narrow row house, halfway between the harbor and the prince’s palace at the top of the hill. Average accommodations in Westundon. Nothing that would bring girls panting to the man’s doorstep, but nothing to drive them away either. It was close to where she was going next, which she found appealing.
She walked four blocks, the orange glow of the lamps at the street corners shining like beacons through the soupy fog that rose off the sea. The moon was only a hazy, silver glow, obscured by the fog, but she saw that her estimate was right. It looked to be four hours past midnight.
In the residential quarter, most people were in bed, and it wasn’t until she approached the Befuddled Sage that other sounds breached the heavy fog. Two lamps on the outside of the pub marked the open doorway, though they did nothing to cut through the gloom and illuminate the wooden sign hanging above it. She ducked inside the dim room, a cloud of smoke from half a dozen pipes and short cigars replacing the fog.
“Sam,” called the barman, nodding in greeting. He scratched his short, salt-and-pepper beard then nodded toward the corner of the room with an eyebrow raised. “The usual?”
She followed the barman’s gaze and hesitated, considering turning around and walking back out the open door. Eventually, she shrugged and moved to the bar. “The usual, Andrew.”
“Samantha!” exclaimed a man, scooting out of his corner booth and nearly knocking over a chair as he hurried to meet her.
“Walpole,” she acknowledged, settling onto a stool and leaning her elbows on the bar counter.
The barman was retrieving a cloudy, green glass bottle from a slender cupboard along with a jar of sugar and a spoon. He sat the implements on the bar and then added a pitcher of water and a short glass to the array.
“What is that?” Walpole asked the barman, taking a seat beside her. Andrew ignored the man, turning and fussing with the arrangement of bottles stacked next to his taps. Frowning, Walpole turned to Sam. “He’s not very polite, is he?”
“No, he’s not,” she replied. Glancing at her new companion out of the corner of her eye, she finally explained, “This is a liquor made from wormwood, among other things. Care to try it?”
“I’m drinking sherry,” murmured Walpole.
“A proper man’s drink, that,” she replied.
“It suits me,” he remarked. “I-I’ve been looking for you.”
“I know.”
“Where… I’m glad I found you,” he mumbled. “Bryce told me you came here sometimes. I’ve come the last three nights hoping to find you.”
She snorted, briefly considering storming back to the row house she’d just left. “Bryce told you that, did he? Well, I suppose since I’m here, I cannot very well argue. I do come here from time to time.”
“He said you’d come here sometimes when you were in a talkative mood.”
“Talk, is that what you’re wanting?” she asked, arching an eyebrow at the man.
“I-I…” stammered Walpole, glancing around at the few scattered patrons in the pub. He rubbed his hands together, looking on the bar for his drink, but it was back at his table. “After last time, I wondered if maybe…”
It was still some time until dawn. Why not? She stood and instructed him, “Come with me.”
Without waiting for the man, she walked toward the back door of the pub. Walpole glanced at the barman, but Andrew kept his eyes down, his hands busy rinsing out glasses, cleaning them enough that no one would complain then stacking them on a shelf below the bar.
Swallowing, Walpole followed Sam out the back door and peered around in the fog, lost.
“Over here,” she hissed, and led him into an alley that ran behind the Befuddled Sage and the adjacent buildings. She peeled her leather trousers down to her knees and then hopped up onto a barrel that rested against the back of the tavern.
“Ah…”
“We both know you didn’t want to talk,” reminded Sam. “Get to it.”
Walpole, like the good bureaucrat that he was, knelt and began to work. She looped her legs around his shoulders, using the leather around her knees to pull him closer. With an eager tongue, sensual lips, and those thick stubby fingers she remembered from before, he began caressing her in steady, workman-like fashion. She tried to ignore the cool puddle of moisture that she’d sat in on top of the barrel and leaned back, letting the man do what he did best.
She hadn’t been in the mood for the man’s ministrations, but as she recalled, he had a single-minded determination. Like a dog gnawing on a soup bone, he wouldn’t give up until he was finished, and in time, he did.
Her body tensed and her thighs clamped tight around his head. She bit her lip and moaned as a wave of shuddering ecstasy cascaded through her body. She held him there, gripped between her legs, until the trembling stopped, and she could relax her muscles
enough to let the poor man go.
Walpole staggered back, wiping his mouth and touching his ear tentatively where she must have crushed it tight with her thighs. He stood still, watching her.
Taking a moment to catch her breath, she finally slid off the barrel and pulled up her trousers, grateful to feel the leather cover her damp bottom from the cool air.
“Thanks, Walpole,” she said and turned to go back in the pub.
“Wait!” he called.
She looked over her shoulder at him. His eyes were downcast like a little boy who was waiting on a cookie. He shifted and adjusted his belt. She’d come to the Befuddled Sage to drink, and she was ready to get to it, but she supposed the man had done the work and earned his turn.
“Take it out, then.”
Walpole looked up, a smile playing on his lips. He began unfastening his belt, fingers clumsy with excitement.
She stepped forward, helping to shove his pants down, and she took him in her hand.
He gasped and instantly responded to her touch. She began to stroke, twisting and pumping.
He leaned his hips forward. “Are you… are you going to, ah—”
“No,” she replied and gripped harder.
Emboldened, Walpole claimed, “Bryce told me…”
“Bryce should keep his damn mouth shut,” she hissed, pulling hard and eliciting a squeak from the man. “I was drunk that night, and it was the only time he ever got anything but this.”
“I’m sorry,” muttered the man, trying to relax, evidently not wanting to lose the little bit of attention he was getting.
Walpole wasn’t a good man, but he wasn’t a bad one, either. Sighing, she used her free hand to open her vest and unlace her tunic before leaning toward him. “You can look, and touch, a little.”
Three minutes later, they re-entered the pub. Sam led the way. Walpole staggered in after her, a silly grin plastered on his face.
She frowned and almost stopped walking when she saw the man sitting at the bar next to where she’d been. Close-cropped white hair with a beard to match. He wore loose, undyed robes and was unarmed. He was pouring himself a drink from her bottle. She knew from experience his robes were a fine cut, but in the dim smoky air of the pub, he looked as if he could have strolled in from the beggar’s stairs near the Church. Walpole certainly thought so.
“Hey, now!” exclaimed the bureaucrat. He charged past Sam, prepared to defend his paramour against the theft of her drink. He cut his eyes to the barman. “You let rabble like this in here? That’s Samantha’s drink, man!”
The barman glanced up at Walpole and then returned to stacking glasses without offering a response.
“It’s all right,” said Sam, placing a hand on Walpole’s arm. “I know him.”
The low-level minister’s eyes dropped to her hand and he smiled.
Cringing, she removed it from his shoulder.
“Do you want me to—”
“No, Walpole, I need to talk to him. Actually talk. Go back to your table and your friends.”
“I-I’d like to pay for your drink, if that’s—”
“I’m not a prostitute,” snapped Sam. “Go back to your table, Walpole. Maybe you’ll find me again someday. And tell that bastard Bryce to keep his mouth shut if he ever wants a chance of me opening mine again.”
Walpole scurried to the corner, his eyes darting back over his shoulder, smiling at her as he slid in next to his friends. She watched as they huddled close, excitedly quizzing the young minister about what he’d just done.
Shaking her head, she forced the boys from her mind and took a stool next to the old man. “Pour me one?”
“You shouldn’t drink too much of this,” advised the man. “It can be dangerous.”
She didn’t reply.
“She doesn’t drink too much of it, does she?” the old man asked, turning to the barman.
Andrew shrugged. “Depends on how much you think is too much.”
Grumbling under his breath at that, the old man refilled the glass with the cloudy, green liquor, scooped a small pile of sugar with the spoon, and then slowly began dribbling cold water from the pitcher onto the sugar, letting the solution drip down into the liquor.
She sat silently, watching him prepare her drink.
“Drinking isn’t the only thing you can do too much of,” murmured the old man, his eyes fixed on the ingredients in front of him.
She snorted. “In years past you encouraged me to embrace life.”
“And you did,” he said, “in a way. The currents of this world run deep. There is a difference between living along the surface and living fully.”
“And you are the judge on who is living a full enough life?” she retorted.
He shrugged. “I am your mentor. Who else would be the judge?”
“You are either alive or you are dead,” she insisted. “I am alive.”
“You are making the motions, but you are not immersed in the full current of life,” he replied, hooking a thumb toward the corner of the room. “Even dozens of encounters like that will form only a weak web to the spirits. For you to fulfill your destiny, you need a stronger tether, you need—"
“Spare me. I know the speech about your prophecy as well as you do, and I know you didn’t come here to give me that lecture tonight. So, why are you here?” she asked as the old man poured. “It’s not like you to be out so late, or to be concerned about how I’m making connections to the spirits.”
“You have a job,” he replied, finishing his preparations and sliding the drink toward her.
“I don’t recall wanting one,” she said, not yet touching the glass.
“You have one whether you want it or not.”
She frowned before reaching for the glass and taking a tentative sip. “Why?”
“North of here, over on the east coast in the hamlet of Harwick, there was a murder,” explained the old man. “A countess was killed.”
Sam waited. She knew there’d be more.
“She was lying in the middle of a pentagram, according to the inspector’s report,” added the old man. “Her face was flayed. She was naked and had been sexually active. No one wants to believe it is what it clearly is, but to their credit, they’ve requested assistance with the investigation. After all, the victim is a countess, though I suspect fear of rumors is what truly motivated them.”
Sam turned up her glass and drained the rest of it in one swallow.
“I cannot go, so you will go in my place,” continued the old man. “You’ll be traveling with a companion who is representing the prince. Ostensibly, you’ll be assisting him and his investigation, but I’m expecting you to follow whatever leads you find regardless of what he wants to do. You have tickets on the northbound rail this afternoon. All the nobleman will know is that the Church sent you, and you should keep it that way. Bishop Yates knows I am sending my apprentice. He knows your name and little else. You understand?”
“Not really,” she responded, twisting her glass on the counter. “I’ll need to gather some things.”
“Yes, I expected you would,” replied the man. “That’s why I didn’t wait until morning. I did wait until…”
She winced.
“You have responsibilities, Samantha,” chided the old man. “You should be more intentional about what you do.”
“True sorcery hasn’t been practiced in Enhover since… well, since your time,” she complained. “We are wasting our effort and our presence in this place. We should go to… to the United Territories, or down south.”
“You are wasting your time in this place,” corrected the man sharply, his finger tapping near the bottle of liquor and cutting his eyes to the back corner of the room. “Just because we have not witnessed it does not mean no one is doing it. The spirits of the underworld have not vanished, Samantha. Despite what the Church says, the possibility of contacting them has not been severed. You know that as well as I. Technology has replaced or harnessed many of the wonders of t
he living world, but it has not replaced death, and it never will.”
While her mentor gave her the description of her companion and further instructions, she opened a pouch on her belt and was dipping her fingers in to pinch out a few shillings when Andrew returned and collected the cloudy green bottle.
He stoppered it and shook his head. “It’s on the house.”
“For you, then,” she said and set the coins on the bar.
“In my day, a drink was only a couple of pence,” remarked the old man.
“In your day, you drank rotgut juniper liquor that was just as likely distilled in a chamber pot as it was in the proper apparatus,” retorted Samantha. “You can still get bottom shelf gin for a few pence, but I don’t know why you would want to.”
“Fair enough,” said the old man, rising off his stool. “Fair enough.”
“Good luck out there, Sam,” offered the barman, placing the wormwood liquor back in the cupboard. “It’s a dark one this morning.”
“And it’s getting darker,” she replied.
She turned, leaving her mentor behind with the barman. She stepped out the open door to where the rising sun was struggling to banish the night’s cold fog.
The Cartographer II
The massive, steel snake perched atop the rail, prepared to lurch into motion the moment the signal was given. A plume of red-flecked silver-gray smoke rose from the lead locomotive and brakemen scrambled about, preparing the train for departure.
Duke Oliver Wellesley threw open the door of the carriage moments before the footman could reach it. The man stood by pouting as the duke tossed a well-worn canvas rucksack onto the cobblestones and then leapt out after it.
“What is travel like on one of those things?” inquired his brother, Prince Philip Wellesley. The prince was leaning his head out of the carriage, looking curiously up and down the length of the train.
“You’ve ridden the rails, haven’t you?” responded Oliver, picking up his rucksack and sliding a basket-hilted broadsword in between the straps.