A Peculiar Peril, page 11
The demi-mage known as Burly Karl perhaps felt that being the benchmark for inspection meant he could forego being an inspector, but that would not be the case.
“Bravo!” Napoleon called out from his position over the map. “Insurrection starts at home. You must nip it if you wish to rule secure. Nip it! Nip it good!”
“As you wish, my lord,” Wretch said, genuflecting to Crowley. “We shall upon your order inspect the dung heaps. All throughout Paris, in every arrondissement, on every street. Why, the number may run into the hundreds upon hundreds. It shall be a glorious sight, our inspections.”
Did Crowley detect a layer of sarcasm in the tone? Even of … insolence? Well, Wretch had nothing to be insolent about. He’d proven less than effective of late, even if he did rabbit on about patience being a virtue. The Czech magician had escaped to god knew where, defeating Wretch’s personal minions. (And why did Wretch have his own minions, anyway?)
Nor did they have much clue as to the whereabouts of the Golden Sphere, except for some vague reports from Rome, no doubt apocryphal. The victories in Spain seemed inconsequential given that failure.
Nor had he yet figured out now to extract from the All-Seeing Eye an All-Seeing Puddle that might accompany him on what now seemed inevitable: that he must venture forth from Paris and conduct the war personally to tip the balance, and to claim his final reward. Even an All-Seeing watermark would be of use.
But it was slow-going figuring out the magical equation that would allow this, and Wretch seemed uninterested in the question—still obsessed with the experiment he had been “growing” on the war map and now had taken under his wing, literally, and sequestered in his quarters. Wretch promised a fearful assassin-monster, but Crowley had his doubts.
At least Crowley’s innovation with the Emissaries had paid off—pulling wraiths in from other worlds, weakening the ghosts further, so they became echoes of echoes and thus more malleable to his will. Perhaps they might prove of use in tracking down the Golden Sphere. In the meantime, they swelled the numbers in his fade pens, marinating in useful fashion alongside still-living abductees. Much preferable to using ordinary mercenaries, which were like windfall apples by comparison.
“Pardon, Lord High Emperor, but I must measure …”
A thin demi-mage who looked like a stick insect with a too-heavy face plastered on top had stepped forward with a tape measure.
Crowley withered him with a stare, and then flung him against the wall of skulls.
“Not literal, for hell’s sake! Not literal. Just close. Just close to up to my waist. Just close to the width of Burly Karl.”
“Not literal, you fool!” Napoleon admonished the crumpled pile on the floor, swiveled to address the cluster of demi-mages across from Crowley. “Not literal! Figurative.”
“No, Napoleon—not that, either. Not … oh never mind.”
Perhaps he must acquire smarter demi-mages. But there lay the conundrum: Smarter demi-mages were harder to magically control. Such were the trade-offs and the headaches of his chosen path. Along with the possibly seditious quality of piles of crap.
* * *
Yet even after the daily war room conference, the trials of Crowley’s morning were not over and the next part he must do himself, accompanied only by the demi-mage Laudinum X.
The Inventor in the dungeon came over all funny with Wretch around, could not be counted on to be sensible or un-gibbering, such was Wretch’s unaccountable effect upon him.
Crowley couldn’t say he minded being free of Wretch. The familiar was less and less fun with each passing day, and seemed too eager to attack in all directions, the advice coming with an implied note of correction that Crowley wasn’t bloodthirsty enough. Just because he had yet to set a date for the next assault on Prague. Which Crowley resented.
Why, he almost felt hurt.
Had he not so utterly decimated Rome that it had become a chaotic wasteland of magical discharges? And had he not put so many Decadent authors and artists to the sword that one could say that he had saved thousands and thousands of Parisian citizens from any number of the disgusting diseases their lifestyles encouraged? Although Crowley had not yet found a way to express this triumph via broadsheet in a dignified or elevated manner.
Among those Crowley had spared was the Inventor, a prize catch during his siege of Paris. The Inventor had been found as the Eiffel Tower laid waste to Paris, trying to escape in a one-person underwater vessel of his own creation, desperate to push the “submarine” contraption off the stubborn muddy banks of the Seine and head for parts unknown.
Before Crowley, the Inventor had squandered much of his time writing for broadsheets and the like, rather than applying his talent to something useful. Fanciful depictions and blueprints of machines he no doubt thought would never leap off the page and into the world.
“This isn’t like writing for your penny dreadfuls,” Crowley had growled at the Inventor, once he had been ensconced in his fancy prison in the dungeon. “This is for something important.” Something that could get you turned into a goat to feed the war machine if you failed.
“What I need from you,” Crowley had told the Inventor, “are not delicate contraptions but beasts of war, legions of mecha-animals of death and dread. And lots of them. And very fast.”
It was the Inventor who had allowed Crowley to abandon the exhausting, sometimes harrowing task of animating local monuments and statues and buildings to terrorize their own citizens. Much less enervating to make creatures from scratch and imbue them with magic, receptacles built for the purpose. Once Crowley had the specifications for the framework, he and his demi-mages could do the rest. With signs and symbols, incantations and dark magic, using the inversion of some of the French magicians’ knowledge of animal energy.
Out of the Inventor’s head had come the giant mecha-elephants and the smaller bear-machines and any number of other terrifying marvels that Crowley had, with the appropriate sacrifice of thousands of small mammals, made come to life, to be more than just metal and wood, but breathing creatures that adhered sharply to his command and the control of his underlings. They had made further conquest possible, and had loyalty to Crowley and Crowley alone.
“I was not meant for this kind of work,” the Inventor would protest in those few instances when he had gathered his nerve. “I cannot continue. I cannot do this.”
“Of course you can,” Crowley would coo. “You were born to this.”
“But this—this is always the same task over and over, to explore cryptozoology of a crude sort. All that changes is the type of animal, and the only challenge is whether the jaws on a crocodile can reasonably be expected to fit onto a bear. For example.”
“Now, now,” Crowley would say. “Not everyone is lucky enough to have the opportunity to make a croc-bear, and sometimes it is not so much functionality that matters as the horror inflicted by the sight.”
Crowley was doing the Inventor a favor. After all, the man had been a failure before, in a way. Most spectacularly, he had invented a crude version of internal combustion engine like a fool with no sense of timing. Who on this world much cared about such an unwieldy contraption when you could just shove five hundred goddamn goats through a magical grinder and power a preternatural elephant for a month? Goats and goat substitutes were thick on the ground wherever the campaign led, while oil was difficult to magick and too far down in the ground. Meanwhile, the engineers of the Republic were already beginning to create electricity from water and wind.
“Have I not given you a spacious room in which to work?” Crowley would also point out, noting with a sweep of his upturned palm how long and wide the dungeon was, and how the iron bars had a delicacy rarely seen in most prisons, etched with a pattern of tiny grotesques besides.
Not to mention the ubiquitous audience of burnished skulls peering from every wall. The sumptuous desk, all bloodstains scrubbed from it, that Crowley had brought from the former interior minister’s offices. The finest parchment, and even the slick new blank paper used by the Republic, captured from the abandoned tents of enemy generals as they fled the Spanish front. Not just nubs and fountain pens and quills, but the blasted enemies’ cartridge pens. Not just the normal lantern light one might expect in a dungeon, but the electric lights used, again, by the goddamn Republicans and their infernal allegiance to science. (Not that Crowley minded electricity per se, but why not start with better indoor plumbing? Aurora had terrible toilets in his experience.)
Did not the Inventor have the power to control his own illumination by virtue of the stationary bicycle attached to the generator? Did not the smell of the dungeon, redolent from the candles placed beyond the bars and replenished weekly, seem more reminiscent of Versailles than of a dungeon full of dead things, located within a catacomb bursting with old skulls and next to the war factories? Did not Crowley also endeavor to conduct all torture of traitors at such a remove that the screams fell light upon the Inventor’s ear?
Finally, had Crowley not, out of concern for the Inventor’s ceaseless need to roam, fashioned a halter and harness, based on the Inventor’s own designs from the aforementioned penny dreadfuls, and attached it on one end to the Inventor and, on the other, via a light but ensorcelled metal chain, to a stalwart rod running across the top of the room and stuck in the rock at both ends, which allowed the Inventor free movement across the magnificent dungeon room, including bicycle access, without any possibility he might slip free of the bars, given his increasing skinniness despite being plied with the best food, and do himself a mischief getting lost in the tunnels under Paris?
Thus spake Crowley gentle to the Inventor when necessary, with a restraint and refinement unbecoming in a Lord Commander who believed in the rule of fear. But the Inventor’s nerves jangled too easily. And the diagrams must keep coming.
Now, for example, Crowley needed the final details for the mighty burrowing wurm currently in production in the war factories. The Burrower—a mighty beast that could smash through or dig beneath, say, a long tall wall protecting a land bridge to England, and erupt up from under the enemy on the battlefield, and wreak the kind of havoc that caused full-fledged panic and flight.
Lately, Crowley thought the Inventor might be fudging the schematics, the framework for the Burrower having run into production difficulties. Was the Inventor brave enough and ungrateful enough for that?
Laudinum X stepped forward with a list of entirely new schematics required from the Inventor, supplemented with terse instruction. Frustratingly, Laudinum X had a scritchy balloon voice that Crowley found hard to understand. Such a valuable lieutenant, the essential link with the war factories, and yet more than once Crowley had to interpret for the Inventor.
The Inventor, for his part, nodded, looking very pinched-lipped, and in the harness perhaps a bit awkward, but taking down accurate annotations. When Laudinum X had finished destroying the French tongue with his scratch-talking, the Inventor handed over the corrections for the Burrower requested by Crowley the week before.
“It was all a matter of scale, Lord Emperor. Just as a recipe for chicken marsala cannot be doubled without adjusting the amount of the ingredients, so too increasing the size of the Burrower by a third required accounting for structural stressors. If you had only told me that you had decided—”
Crowley cut the Inventor off, for the man’s own safety; that sentence had appeared to be curving toward criticism.
“Just remember, your counterpart in England is working on some sort of horrible mechanical contraption to foil us, and we all know how much you hate him.”
In other words, these changes had better work. The Inventor could not know it, but the contraption Crowley had housed him within could also draw and quarter him in a second flat. Crowley believed in inventions that could be used for many purposes, and once the Inventor left the dungeon—on a mission he meant to reveal to the man soon—Crowley planned to repatriate the space with the interrogation quarters.
But the Inventor could not concentrate on the warning. A stabbing anger came over his face, and a disdain, that faded back into agreement. Really, truly, the Inventor hated his counterpart Wells, “the socialist bastard,” as he called his rival. Wells had been critical of the Inventor before Crowley’s ascension, but Crowley had made sure that Laudinum X gave the Inventor current press clippings from English papers, in which Wells’s attacks on the Inventor had become ever more vicious.
“So you will get to work on these new diagrams.”
The Inventor nodded, jaw tight, gaze elsewhere.
“Excellent! Then I will leave you to it!”
Truly, Jules Verne in his chains could not realize that the contraption flaring out behind him, imprisoning him, took the outline of Wretch’s form and that when he struggled it resembled Wretch unfolding himself from some hidden part of the ceiling of Notre Dame. A little joke on Crowley’s part, one that now sometimes gave him the creeps.
And still Crowley’s rounds were not yet over.
There were several levels below this one, and many doors, besides.
Part II
QUICKSAND
“Everything will get darker soon.”
Chapter Twelve
THE TEA TRAY IN THE TOWER
At the top of the stairs, Jonathan came from dark to light, half-blinded by a searing blue sky, the sun a blazing halo.
Through the black spots that floated across his eyes like intrepid explorers, he made out the curving stone wall of the top of the tower, with crenellations for archers or riflemen. The vague, burnt-out silhouettes of people. More soldiers? He hesitated, leaned there half in the shadow of the steps, where he could still only be seen as a forehead looming out of darkness. If he were seen at all.
At eye level, thirty feet away along the far wall: the unlikely sight of a folding canvas table, atop which sat a wooden tea tray with a blue porcelain pot, two cups, and a plate of small pastries.
He stared at the tea tray as his eyes adjusted to the brightness, shook his head as if that would be any help clearing the cobwebs, tried to slow his breathing.
Focus on what’s important, discard the rest, as his mother would say. The important thing. Not the carrot creature. Not the potato person.
The door was gone and he had no sense of where he was.
The table shuddered, shifted, settled, every few seconds as the tower shook. Hostage to whatever was happening beyond. Which sounded like rocks smashing together, like a pitched battle.
His vision improved against the glare. He saw that the battlements were obscured in part by curling vines and in part by a half-dozen people mostly in motley tunics and trousers. Not modern clothing. Not a costume drama. Not Vikings. Not Visigoths. Not ren faire. Not Britain. Not European. Vaguely … Persian? No, that wasn’t right, either. Clearly, Poxforth hadn’t been very good on Middle Eastern history or military fashions.
They watched whatever lay beyond the ramparts. Some with spyglasses, some with binoculars, both of which looked very non-Earth-standard. Some were in feverish discussion or argument and another frustration re the European emphasis at Poxforth: he couldn’t tell if they spoke Arabic or Farsi or Urdu or something else entirely. He just knew they had the look of battle-hardened soldiers; they read like “army.”
Right. Nothing for it but to plunge ahead.
He stumbled out onto the open top of the tower, a stiff breeze cool against his face, but bringing with it the smell of burning. The tower was perched atop a forested hill. Rough-laid stones bruised his feet through his shoes. He realized there had been a time change. From the quality of the intense sunlight, it was late afternoon here, wherever “here” was.
At his back through the crenellations lay a fringe of dark forest and then the sea—a vast, blue-green sea, sparkling and roiling, with a fleet that floated on it, and small boats rowing out to the ships, while there came the white puffs of cannon firing from the shore. He could see little of the landward side from that vantage, with the watchers standing there, other than that blue sky cut through now with a scattering of metallic gray clouds, columns of black smoke, and a faint cacophony, as of distant but furious battle.
Then he saw Lady Insult. She was splitting her time between looking out beyond the turret and talking intensely to a stranger, the tea tray between them. He wore a sophisticated, silverish armor over his tunic and riding breeches tucked into scuffed black boots. The boots and trousers could’ve been from anywhere. But the armor evoked Persian miniatures to Jonathan, although he so distrusted his paltry knowledge in this arena he felt once again at sea. The armor truly was a marvel, more like advanced tech than protection from the past, so finely wrought as to almost be invisible.
The stranger was of average height, well put-together, with dark hair, deep-set friendly hazel eyes, firm chin, neatly trimmed beard. Maybe just a few years older than Jonathan?
The man saw him. He straightened, brought his hands up in greeting.
“Welcome to Aurora, Jonathan Lambshead!” the man said in a cheerful tone. “My name is Mamoud Abad and I am the one trying to ensure this retreat does not become a rout. So I’m afraid we’ve not laid out what might be considered the customary hospitality.”
Aurora?
Yet he looked as if he’d been expecting Jonathan, even if behind the cheer there was a thoughtful, appraising look. His English had a slightly clipped quality to it. Jonathan couldn’t place the accent.
The others all turned to stare at him. Not in an entirely friendly way. Mamoud waved them back to their work, whatever it was, with a hand gesture.
In the face of that, all Jonathan could manage in reply to the man was: “The carrot spoke to me.”
“And the potato, too, I imagine,” Mamoud said, clearly amused. “You don’t have talking carrots where you come from.”
