A Peculiar Peril, page 5
It was Robin Hood’s Bay, as observed from some hidden grotto or ruined tower or light station high in the cliffs. He was staring out at the coast of north England. He was hovering between the haunted mansion, from Dr. Lambshead’s ancestral home, and a place over two hundred miles away.
For a flickering second, a moment of vertigo, Jonathan wasn’t sixteen. He was a little kid at Robin Hood’s Bay, sneaking off to the rocky stretch of coast to the south of their cottage. There, along the empty beach, except when disturbed by a rare tourist or two, Jonathan could pick a natural alcove in the stone cliffs for shelter, looking out across the bay, and in its cool, smooth embrace fill his composition book with short essays or blunt poems (“Oh, how I love the sea.”), or anything else the bright, bold day might bring to him. Barnacles on a sea wall. A curious gull peeking in at him. The way the surge of water would begin to warn him of high tide and a sad early end to adventuring.
Now he knew for certain what Sarah had meant when she had told him, more than once, “It’s okay not to be here all the time. But just know when you’re not. Know when you’re not here but somewhere else.”
With a pointed look, as if she understood those moments of reverie in the wilderness where he wasn’t sure, where the animals began to speak to him, those cliffs and caves and black water places where when he turned the corner he no longer knew for sure where he was.
Could have been anywhere, even another world.
* * *
When Dr. Lambshead had died, Jonathan had felt a need to talk, had let R & D console him. But he hadn’t wanted to talk about Dr. Lambshead; he’d wanted to talk about Sarah, one loss dislodging the grief of another.
Danny had asked him what Sarah had been like. That rare probing question, but he hadn’t minded. Just … where to start?
“I mean, what did you like about her? And didn’t like, maybe?”
“Didn’t like?”
“Well, she was a person, wasn’t she?”
What he couldn’t say: That Sarah had been too secretive, not open enough, in his opinion. That she’d forced him to grow up too fast in some ways, and not enough in others.
What he did say: That he liked that she was deadly because she was so smart. And fiercely protective. And terse. And didn’t suffer fools. Which maybe all sounded like bad things, but they weren’t. And that she could be demonstrative, loving, and very funny. But, he realized now, just couldn’t afford to be most of the time, because most of the time she’d been on her guard.
For that reason, he knew there were no easy answers here. Whether he followed the intent of Dr. Lambshead’s letter or stepped away, spent a month or a day in the mansion, he could not get free of this.
From this door, Dr. Lambshead or Sarah would have been able to check in on him with ease. Perhaps that had been the plan before she had disappeared and Dr. Lambshead had been attacked. From this door, perhaps, too, someone or something could have been let in. It implicated Poxforth Academy and Robin Hood’s Bay both in a larger mystery.
There was such a wider world out there as well. He was just starting to see that, even as he still didn’t know what Sarah had truly thought about him being out in it.
The vastness of his discoveries felt like a weight on his back, but also an exhilarating, liberating relief.
Chapter Five
WAR PLANNING IN THE CATACOMBS (NOT AN OSSUARY)
“All goats must be given up to the empire. All goats in Paris are the property of Lord Master Crowley, by official decree. They must be brought to the appropriate processing station. Anyone harboring a goat will be punished. Noncompliance will result in imprisonment or immediate execution.”
—From “On the Importance of Goats to Your Country,” a broadsheet issued by Lord Master Crowley and dispersed by amphibious mecha-croc
Napoleon and Wretch had been in Crowley’s underground war room for at least half an hour before Crowley could put in an appearance. The governance of Paris as an occupying force took up precious time, was both tedious and frustrating. But unless Crowley just fed everyone into the war factories, it was his lot in life to hear complaints about irregular garbage collection and the need to appoint a new mayor. (The old one had, somehow, been turned into a goat and fed to the war factories.)
He also had to listen, from atop the catafalque-turned-into-throne on the altar of Notre Dame, as the liaison for the ungrateful Parisian population went on about how the moratorium on team sporting events had affected the morale of Paris.
“Morale? Would setting loose two hundred wraiths in the streets help with morale? Perhaps they can organize lawn-tennis tournaments. Would that be of use?” Crowley was referring to his “dead-alive” Emissaries, the terrifying used-up wisps everyone thought he had conjured from thin air, but had been there on Aurora all along, waiting for the Crowley touch.
“That might not quite be necessary,” said the liaison, an elderly bald woman in flowing robes and riding boots who had at some point been part of the remnants of a cultural aristocracy. She had survived Napoleon as a youth, apparently had saved up enough fortitude to be brave now, volunteering to serve as the focal point of Crowley’s wrath, the shield between him and the citizenry. This despite having been there to witness Crowley bind the Eiffel Tower and turn it into a walking monster that ravaged the city and then the countryside. Crowley’s finest spell, which had almost killed him, but had broken the will of the French armies at the crucial moment.
“Then I don’t want to hear about it again,” Crowley said. He concentrated his irritation, and three pigeons flapping around dumbly in the rafters exploded into flame.
“But there is still the issue of garbage collection. It befouls the city, and it halts work on reconstruction. People are without clean water,” the bald woman said, ignoring the pigeon ash that spiraled onto her left shoulder.
Crowley groaned. The city stank, it was true, and even as he plunged through the city on the back of a giant spell-fueled mecha-crocodile or, his new favorite, a hybrid rhino-eagle, instilling respect and fear … he could smell the rotting food, the mold, the dead animals. Bore witness to the huge piles on the street.
But why in all the hells was garbage collection such a difficult process? Why couldn’t they sort it out themselves? He would have asked Napoleon how he had dealt with it back in his heyday, but Crowley knew Napoleon would see that as weakness and he would have to listen to any number of lectures. Then Crowley would once again be tempted to toss Napoleon’s head in the Seine, which he could not afford to do. Yet.
“Very well,” Crowley said. “Very well. We will deal with garbage collection.”
Even as he was trying to do something spectacular, something unique, to rule first one world and, soon enough, many worlds.
If only Crowley could keep the complaints about garbage collection to a minimum and find the missing thing that stymied him. The contrasting scale of his problems amused him. He might even have laughed, but without noticing, for he was now so focused on the missing thing, poring over the Golden Sphere in his mind, seeking it reflexively through the senses he had that others didn’t. Still not there. Still not seeable through the All-Seeing Eye. But getting closer, he thought.
“Lord Crowley?” the bald woman queried.
Some minutes must have passed. Had he looked mad, sitting there on his dead throne, half in Notre Dame, half elsewhere?
“I will take three hundred workers from the war factories, and I will place them under your control, but as the devil is my witness, Amantine Dupin, if you do not get the garbage situation under control, I will turn you into a goat and feed you to the war machine.”
Dupin nodded, turned on her heel, and left the hall. Crowley had never seen her afraid. Especially when Wretch wasn’t around, he felt relaxed enough to admire that.
* * *
Down in the war room, Crowley found Napoleon up to his usual antics, and his pasty-faced, too-skinny demi-mages in awe as usual, unable to shake their sense of being in the presence of a legend. It didn’t help they were dead-alive whereas Napoleon’s head was alive-dead.
“The horsies don’t go there,” Napoleon was saying from a huge table in the center of the vast cavern of the war room. “The horsies go over there. And then you need to reposition those things that look like gray rocks to the left. Somewhat closer to Prussia. I hate Prussia—hate hate hate! Stuck-up bastards. Useless military maneuvers.”
And other infantile mutterings beneath the man, but apparently not beneath the man’s head.
Crowley had entered from an irregular tunnel with wooden stairs fashioned makeshift over marble and unfinished rock riven with moisture from the Seine that could never quite be squeezed out.
Everything was a little irregular down in the catacombs—not as fancy as an ossuary—and Crowley hadn’t had the time or patience to fix it up. There were too many other tasks he had to oversee directly or risk trusting his secrets to underlings. Besides, he liked how the place had been dug right from the rock, how he couldn’t see the ceiling in the war room, and how sometimes a bat or two would twitter, or even flitter into view from the gloom. The cool dank smell was glorious.
Not to mention he had a built-in audience for his military genius: the thousands of bright skulls sunk into the walls, which he had imbued through magic with a white glow so further lighting was unnecessary.
“No, actually,” Napoleon said, pondering, from the hole at the table’s edge, “perhaps the horsies don’t go there. Perhaps you should prance the horsies on over to Prague. Why don’t you be good boys and do that now?”
“Goddammit, Napoleon! We have serious business here. And Wretch? Where is Wretch!”
He counted on Wretch to keep Napoleon in line, but Wretch was nowhere to be seen.
As if Crowley had conjured him into being by uttering his name, Wretch promptly descended from the ceiling and in a mean feat of floating hovered onto a chair beside the vast table. Nothing about Wretch looked like the creature should float, and yet it was one of the things at which Crowley’s familiar was most adroit.
“I am here, my most glorious lord,” Wretch said with solemn respect. “My apologies. My thought was that Napoleon might be better behaved had he a chance to play first.”
Crowley considered that, grunted, decided not to take any bait given, and turned his attention to the map of Europe, which in fact formed the surface of the war room table, with Napoleon’s hydraulic column piercing off to the side, raised just enough for him to have a good view—somewhere remote, in the middle of a bit of the Caucasus Mountains no one but a few separatists thought important. Enemy territory anyway.
“Give me the latest reports,” he commanded his demi-mages, who were huddled in a group opposite Napoleon, as far away across the map as they could manage. He’d gotten used to addressing a disembodied head, but curiously they never had.
Laudinum X, the leader of the demi-mages, stepped forward. Crowley had named him after the drug laudanum, which did not exist on Aurora, but a spelling error in human resources had ruined the joke. Laudinum began listing troop advances, casualty estimates, complaints and individual reports from commanders in the field, and, in a quiet voice, LX mentioned a very few areas of “resistance” that Crowley could already tell meant he’d been pushed back.
Well, never mind that for now. The overall trends favored him.
The map had been carefully created by a topographic expert and miniaturist who had constructed the most perfect three-dimensional diorama of Europe and Asia Minor anyone had ever seen. The blue of the rivers and the Mediterranean was stunning and the water seemed almost in motion, and the mountains looked formidable and accurate, down to the goatherd trails through them.
Although he sometimes wished Asia Minor could be torched right off—it was too depressing to look upon for long, given that the Republic controlled it.
“We should press harder,” Wretch muttered in his ear. “Turn it all into blood stew. Stir it up. Turn the heat to boiling.” Somehow Wretch managed to make that sound like a lullaby rather than an intense recipe.
“Hush, Wretch, hush,” Crowley whispered back.
One set of demi-mages projected upon the map, like ghosts, little images of his various armies—one battle elephant stood in for twenty elephants, or, yes, “horsies,” one man for fifty men, and so forth. Along with estimates of enemy forces and their relative positions, much of it confirmed by flyover by his wraiths or even common crows commandeered for the purpose.
Over this, the demi-mages had projected through petty magic, and distilled from the All-Seeing Eye, additional detail that allowed Crowley to look in on conflicts in progress. Although, to be honest, such views often confused him and he disliked making decisions gleaned from such. It all looked like a scrum of men and magic engaged in group Turkish wrestling whilst screaming and bringing down hellfire on one another. Confusing.
“Enough, Laudinum,” Crowley said, raising a hand. There were only so many such reports he could take.
His task as Lord Crowley was mostly at the high level of ensuring the war continued unabated and confirming that his troops took the fight to the infernal Republic, conquered more territory, and that his war factories produced enough war matériel to keep the enemy on their back foot. To know that his magic still trumped the efforts of those arrayed against him, at least for the moment.
And it did: Although England hid behind a strong navy and a wall across the land bridge to the continent, Crowley held Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, and Italy, along with other, lesser sovereignties.
So-called Eastern Europe, what was left of it, had allied with the Republic, but on the front there his armies would soon push forward. Thankfully, the Siberian Federation held Russia in check, and China’s ongoing civil war had caused many problems for the Republic that made it harder for them to bring necessary resources to bear.
When Crowley’s troops entered Prague, they would know all the way to the Black Sea that he could not be stopped. Then he’d see what new alliances could be formed before he crushed them all anyway.
“You are being outflanked at Austerlitz,” Napoleon said, which Crowley knew was the head’s way of beginning to be serious.
That and the fanatical light in his eye anytime Napoleon even got wind of a battle order or a war map. Napoleon could not help himself. It was in the marrow of his bones—of which few were left, granted, other than his massive head bone, but still … He had been born a general, and if he had not diversified his portfolio his undead head might still be ruling France.
“By which I mean,” Napoleon continued, “you have seen their small beachhead in Sardinia.”
“That backwater full of bandits.” Sardinia was a beautiful island, Crowley recalled, but remote and hard to get to. Also, full of a wild, unkempt magic.
“The Republic wants you to devote resources to Sardinia, but you will not,” Napoleon said. “Instead, you will take the fourth mecha-elephant army and fortify the shoreline between Fiumicino and Latina. You will take the fifth mecha-elephant army and pivot north through Italy. You must let them dig in along the north coast of Sardinia—even take Corsica—while throwing just enough at them—shadow troops, perhaps?—so that they believe you take the maneuver seriously.”
Crowley nodded. Shadow troops “just” meant tossing a few demi-mages into a boat big enough to reach Sardinia and then letting them conjure up phantom armies that, seen through the trees, at a distance, might almost seem real. For a while. The agents of the Republic were always improving their methods of detection, and the demi-mages, recruited from corpses and reanimated, gave off their own distinctive aura that gave them away.
“What else?”
“It would help if you built creatures that could burrow deep and surprise from below. That would add an interesting dimension to this map.”
“Noted.”
Napoleon seemed to have forgotten that demi-mages had already begun work on parts of the Burrower, created to the specifications of the inventor he kept in the dungeon just one level below. It was why he needed a few million earthworms. “What else?”
“You must move the horsie—I mean, the horses,” Napoleon said in exasperation. “Cavalry must be used in support only, for movement behind the lines. You cannot keep sacrificing them on the front.”
“Oh, then you were serious. It is so tiresome to have to guess.”
Winding Napoleon up, for Crowley had endured already one lecture on the charge of the Light Brigade in Crimea, during which cavalry had been transformed into deranged and useless centaurs.
“Yes! I was serious. I am always serious. I am a serious person!”
“Then would you please stop saying the word ‘horsies’ when in my war room, for the love of all that is unholy?”
“Never! No! Perhaps. Someday.”
Crowley considered Napoleon’s defiant head from across the vast map with its forever-toiling tiny mecha-elephant ghosts and antlike troops and even, where a demi-mage had been particularly inventive, some semblance of clouds and precipitation that never made the map’s surface wet. They’d even added what looked like a few dandelions to Sardinia.
“I’m thinking of opening another front. Against Russia,” Crowley said. “What do you think of that? Do you think that would be incredibly stupid for someone to ever contemplate doing?”
What Napoleon thought of that was a stream of curse words so inventive and in such a cross section of languages picked up from various war campaigns that Crowley could make sense of almost none of it. What would he think when he realized the Burrower was meant for the British, so that technically Crowley might indeed be about to open another front? Well, Napoleon would earn his keep then for certain.
Napoleon having been handed his head, Crowley turned to Wretch.
“Have we progress on a plan for locating you-know-what?” The thing-he-had-to-find. Made of gold. Vaguely spherical. The thing he rarely now conjured up by name in front of others, for fear of spies.
