Ghosts of Albion: Accursed Page 28

  Farris stood a bit taller, lifting his chin proudly.

  “And you, my friend,” she continued, casting a harsh glance toward her butler. “Mr. Townsend combats an affliction, but he has acquitted himself admirably as our ally in the past. Regardless of what mutterings you might hear issuing from my brother’s mouth, or your own superstitions, he would risk his life for yours simply because we are all allies in this struggle. Whatever prejudices you have, you must rise above them, or you are of no use to me.”

  Nigel raised an eyebrow and regarded her carefully for a long moment, then turned to Farris.

  “Well, bring it here, then. We shall see if your household skills extend to the kitchen.”

  Farris hesitated only a moment. Clearly Nigel’s jest did not sit well with him. Then the butler looked at Tamara, nodded once, and strode to the desk she had so recently vacated. He set the iron pot down upon the wood, paying little heed to whether it might scorch the surface.

  “I did just as you asked,” he informed them both, gesturing into the pot. “Several branches from a yew tree, a spool of white yarn, three red ribbons, and . . .” He looked a bit regretful, and shot another glance at Tamara. “A photograph of the late Sir Ludlow Swift.”

  Tamara peered into the pot. There was no trace of the ingredients Farris had just described. He had set them on fire inside that iron vessel and let it sit upon the stove as they burned. All that remained was a substantial amount of dark gray ash.

  “All right,” Nigel allowed. “Now, Tamara. The apple, please?”

  She picked up a small, sharp knife from the desktop, and plunged it into the fruit. The smell of it was pungent and delicious as its juice slid down the skin, making her fingers sticky. Tamara glanced at Nigel, who was continuing to coat Gupta’s Vishnu talisman, rolling the candle between his fingers and letting the melted wax drop onto the arcane artifact.

  “Only one seed?” she asked. “Are you sure about that?”

  “We seek one man. Therefore, only one seed,” Nigel confirmed. “The talisman is linked eternally to Gupta by his previous possession, and the link between your grandfather and the Protector of Bharath was strong. We’re simply going to follow it.”

  “So you’ve said,” Tamara replied, “though it still seems difficult to visualize.”

  Nigel smiled. “Let’s stop trying, then.”

  He set the candlestick down and held out his free hand to Tamara. She used the tip of the knife to pry a single seed from within the apple. Nigel glanced at Farris and the pot of ashes, then looked back at Tamara.

  “You’re the real magician here, Tamara. Prepare the map, please.”

  With a nod, she turned to Farris. “Would you mind spreading that on the floor?”

  “On the . . . ?” The man looked stupefied.

  “Yes, yes,” Tamara said, hurrying him with a gesture. “There, where we’ve cleared a space. Right upon the wood. Don’t worry about embers. I can put a fire out fairly quickly, if I have to. Just spread it out into a square or a rectangle, as large as you can without spreading it too thin.”

  As Farris did so, she set the sliced apple on the desktop, and began to reach for the book she had last held, only to pause as she realized how sticky her fingers still were from the fruit. Tamara glanced around for something to clean them and, seeing nothing, began to lick them.

  A flash of memory went through her mind, of the way she had debased herself with John Haversham. In the same moment this memory brought an embarrassing flush to her cheeks and a rush of arousal. Glancing in his direction, she caught sight of Nigel watching her lick her fingers.

  She dropped her hands quickly, wiping any remaining apple juice on her skirts. Nigel gave her a lopsided, playful grin and smiled. But it was innocent enough, and Tamara allowed herself a nervous, rueful chuckle, then shook her head.

  Then she picked up the book.

  As Farris finished spreading the ashes upon the floor, she opened the pages to the one she had marked. Nigel had found the appropriate spell for her, and she had practiced the old Celtic pronunciation. Now she took a deep breath and intoned the words. Her voice was soft, yet she spoke strongly, enunciating carefully.

  Farris wore a grave expression as he stepped back to watch, and as Tamara repeated the words a third and then a fourth time, he gasped in amazement and stared down at the ashes on the floor.

  At the map.

  For that was what they had become. Every single ember, every grain of ash that had been in that pot, had shifted position slightly. And now what lay upon the wooden floor was a light covering that showed, in sharp detail, the entirety of the city of London. Every street, many structures, most of the major landmarks were there. There were no names, of course, but to any true resident of the city, they were unnecessary.

  This was London.

  Tamara smiled proudly and closed the book, then glanced at Nigel.

  “Well?”

  The vampire altered the position of the items in his hands. Now he held the candle beneath the wax-coated talisman, which still vaguely held its shape. The flame flickered up and began to melt the wax again. Nigel crouched over a small saucer he had placed on the floor. Upon it lay the single apple seed. He allowed the white wax to drip from Gupta’s talisman onto the seed, coating it.

  “If he has managed to return to this plane of existence, this spell will locate him. If he is dead, the wax will turn black. If he is still beyond this realm . . . the spell will tell us, though it will take a much stronger bit of magic to locate him then.

  “We’ll start simply.”

  Nigel set the candle and talisman aside, and waited for the wax to dry on the seed. It took only a moment.

  Tamara watched in fascination as Nigel picked up the wax-coated seed, studied the ashen map upon the floor, and then set the seed down at a place on the map that roughly approximated their current location, at Ludlow House.

  Then, of its own volition, the waxen seed began to glide across the floor, moving through the ashen streets of London in search of Tipu Gupta.

  THE FILTHY WATER of the Thames churned ever onward, but the wind had turned blessedly to the south, carrying the stink of the river away.

  The old man was known only as Arun to those who worked the docks, and he wandered now among them. He passed slowly by the endless warehouses, leaning on a hand-carved stick that had been a gift from one of the women he had cured, whose sinister pregnancy he had terminated with a wave of his hand. The woman had been afflicted, but the demonic parasites had not fully taken root within her womb, and he was able to save her.

  She had gotten sick, vomiting up the most hideous green and black bile imaginable, but her swollen belly had gone flat, and she had been spared the fate of so many other ragged women living in these poverty-stricken districts.

  But it was little enough. He might alleviate the suffering of a handful, but they were merely symptoms. The plague was still spreading, a curse that transformed his own people, yet would have far greater consequences than to kill a handful of poor fools tainted by their yearning for the land of their birth.

  No, he had to do more.

  Dozens of men had been twisted and transformed by the curse, by the touch of Shiva, and he knew it was up to him to exterminate them all before the evil could spread even farther. He paused along the river and closed his eyes. Breathing deeply, he caught the scent he had been searching for. No wolf or hound could have tracked it, but he was attuned to it from a lifetime of tasting the arcane.

  Eyes flickering open, the old man wavered a bit, and then pressed on. The London Docks lay ahead. Masts loomed almost spectrally in the night-black sky and the moist curtain of mist that always seemed to enshroud the river on these spring evenings, merging forever with the smoke that belched from towering chimneys.

  He had visited London many times in his life, but he had never stayed very long. Duty had always called him home. How strange, then, that now—at the end of his life—duty would call him here one last time.
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  How many ships were docked here? Thirty? Fifty? A vast forest of masts loomed in the semi-darkness. And there were other docks than these. How many vessels floated in the waters of the Thames this night? He could only begin to imagine.

  The old man continued onward, and soon found himself among the bustle of sailors preparing for departure. They spared him nary a glance as they shouted to one another. Mariners of all stripes, grizzled old men with the sea in their eyes and faces as weathered as the hull of an ancient ship, young boys with no other means of survival than to take to the sea. There were black faces and brown, including some of his own countrymen. He wondered if they missed the hot sun and golden sands of Calcutta. They hoisted pigs and horses on board, and crate after crate of stores for the journey.

  The mates shouted to one another, the only form of communication they seemed to know, these sailors. They shouldered heavy casks with remarkable ease, and set about Herculean tasks as though there were nothing extraordinary at all about their stamina. For to them there was not. These were seafaring men, and their journey was more than just beginning, it was never-ending.

  A Babel of languages swirled around the old man as he maneuvered among the crews of several vessels. Russians and Swedes and Danes and Americans, Spaniards and Frenchmen and Egyptians and Chinamen. This was a culture all its own, one they shared. He considered how much the world could learn from an hour spent in the confluence of the London Docks, among filthy laborers and wandering the mazes of Wapping and Shadwell.

  But such was not to be, for men of consequence would be loath to sully themselves with such an excursion. And what would they see if they did make the effort? The value of the place, the richness of it would be lost on them. All they would find were the rotting boards and loose, slime-encrusted cables, and the despicable and suspicious characters who lurked about, feeding off of the industry of the place or picking the castoffs from the garbage and from the mudflats. Anything to scrape a few shillings together for a bit of drink or a roll with one of the slatternly women whose lives had led them to the numbing, purgatorial existence of the prostitute.

  And yet . . .

  And yet.

  Foolish old man, he thought, and he went about his business. He could not save the people from themselves, but he hoped to be able to save them from a power beyond the natural world. From true evil.

  He had barely escaped with his life earlier in the day, exhausting his body and soul and the reserves of magic that were left to him by opening a second portal in the very instant the first had closed behind him. The dark realm where the Rakshasa resided, a world that existed side by side with this one, had almost claimed him. The demons had clawed at him, tearing at his clothes, and he had just barely summoned a doorway out of their dimension and slipped back into the world of his birth, shutting the door behind him.

  He had survived. He could no longer feel the magic in him, but he had made it out of that dark realm alive. Still, weakened or not, his people needed him, and he would fight for them.

  Once again he inhaled deeply, but this time the wind had shifted, so he choked on the filth in the air and issued a rasping, wet, ragged cough. He shuddered, catching his breath, and then continued on. He knew now where he was going. If not the precise location, at least the general direction. He strode past the vast, two-story warehouses that stored much of the cargo brought in on vessels. There were customs agents in the shadows of those massive structures, but the old man waved a hand through the air and became invisible to their eyes. He had neither time nor inclination to bother with such men, nor offer any explanation for his presence.

  So it was that no human eyes watched him as he went to the Shadwell Dock Stairs and began his descent. He could have taken Wapping Old Stairs, but some of those steps, so close above the river, were chipped and crumbling, and he was an old man, after all.

  Only the toads observed him.

  The toads had been watching him all along. They seemed not to realize or to care that he noticed them, but he could not have missed those bulbous, sickly yellow eyes with their unnatural radiance gleaming from the darkness in dirty alleys and the thresholds of closed-up shops, from the pylons around the docks and between crates of cargo. They watched.

  In fact, even without the scent, he could have tracked his prey simply by following the toads.

  Now, though, as he drew closer, he could sense them. He no longer needed even the scent of their iniquity; their very presence radiated an unease that made him queasy. Carefully he descended the stairs, the river roiling by, far too close now.

  At a landing, he started off into the darkness of a ledge that ran along just above the river, to a door that he had been certain he would find. There were other ways into the vaults beneath the London Docks, but this was the oldest, a private door, constructed in a time before these vaults were used for their present purposes.

  It was a heavy iron slab with only a ring to serve as both knocker and handle. Even had it not been locked—as he was certain it was—the old man’s meager limbs could never have drawn it open. Instead he placed the flat of his hand upon the cold metal and whispered a prayer to his ancestors, and the iron door swung inward, scraping stone.

  Torchlight burned within.

  He entered and began to explore. Wine casks were piled on either side of the vast room. There were corridors upon corridors lined with casks and crates. He smelled spices and tea, tobacco and sugar, all of which were stored in massive quantities in that labyrinth. The vaults were like the catacombs beneath Paris or Rome, but instead of the dead, they stored the economic lifeblood of London.

  There were acres and acres of tunnel vaults here. Torches burned in sconces on the walls and lanterns hung from hooks, throwing flickering shadows upon the casks. Puddles of bloodred wine had formed beneath taps. The sickly sweet smell of brandy clashed with the acrid odor of burgundy. But most remarkable of all the characteristics of this vast underground—in a city where there were so many secrets—was the fact that only a meager wall of earth and stone held back the power of the river’s current, preventing it from flooding the vaults.

  It was an old place, here, filled with mystery and reeking of commerce. Only a comparative few had access to these vaults. Tonight, though, they had been invaded by things that didn’t belong, creatures that sucked the light out of the air and trailed shadows in their wake.

  The old man was all too aware that he hadn’t seen a single toad since he had entered the place. Yet he had no illusion that this might indicate the absence of his enemy. Rather, it was certain that those lowly, mindless creatures, the eyes of evil, dared not come so close to their master. No, the evil that threatened London had been here, and recently.

  Exhausted and in pain from the ache in his hips and knees, the brittleness of bone and muscle, he walked on and on, around corners and through the valleys between tall stacks of crates and casks. But he moved quietly.

  Quietly enough that when he at last rounded a turn and entered through an arched doorway into one of the smallest, oldest, and deepest vaults under the docks, the monsters did not hear him arrive. He caught his breath in his chest as he slitted his eyes, trying to pierce the gloom.

  There were four, perhaps as many as six or seven, if the shifting shadows beyond them materialized into something more substantial. His hands trembled and his heart fluttered in his chest. All of them had once been men. Some were dressed in the garb of Hindustani men, long brown tunics over ragged trousers, waists girded with sashes of black or white. Others, however . . . it was clear they had once been men who worked in this place. Sailors and customs agents whose occupation had been to inspect the goods stored there.

  They were not men any longer.

  They hissed in the shadows, their brown and green scales gleaming in the dim torchlight. The old man had wondered what their presence here might mean, but he thought he understood now. The customs agents had been tainted by the smuggled icons, the little gods, as retribution for their part in the at
rocious theft that had been conducted for so very long by London shipping companies. With them transformed, these vaults had become a natural lair for the accursed things.

  A nest of vermin.

  And he would exterminate them.

  With a deep breath he intoned the words of a tantric incantation.

  “Om navah Shivayah. Om Shakti,” he began. He was weakened, but not so much that he could not wield any magic at all. There was a moment when his body trembled, and then the power shuddered through him.

  Once upon a time it had flowed through him, from the heart of the Earth itself, from Shiva, from the world and into his own hands. He could still touch the magic, but it was no longer inside him. Yet if he could grasp it, he could wield it. And he would. He recalled all the spells and rituals. His fingers could still weave.

  Motes of golden light danced in the air around him, and he felt an unseen wind tousle his white hair. He let go of his walking stick; it clacked to the floor.

  The creatures stiffened and then, as one, spun to face him. They hissed, forked tongues snaking from their mouths. Their sickly yellow eyes locked on the old man, and one by one they began to slither toward him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Come to me.”

  Those sparks of magic coalesced around his fingers, and once again he began to chant. He inhaled the breath of confidence, of righteousness. He had been charged with a holy mission, a sacred trust, and he would fulfill it.

  A low snarl came from the archway behind him.

  The old man turned, magic spilling from his hands, and blinking out as pain from the sudden movement—from the rigors of age—shot through him. He staggered without his stick, but even as he did so he saw them, two slavering demons lunging into the vault toward him. Their eyes gleamed red, and their claws slashed the air. Their snouts snuffled and they uttered low hyena laughter as they bared rows of jagged needle teeth.