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‘As you say, sir,’ said Hodgeman loudly. He stepped back, the sound of his heel on the concrete snapping through the tension that had risen in the room. ‘I’m sure you know what you’re doing.’
That was a warning of consequences to come, Nick knew. But he didn’t care. He wanted to save Malthan, but most of all at that moment he wanted to get out under the sun again. He wanted to stand aboveground and put as much earth and concrete and as many locked doors as possible between himself and the creature in the case.
Yet even when the afternoon sunlight was softly warming his face, Nick wasn’t much comforted. He watched Constable Ripton and Malthan leave in a small green van that looked exactly like the sort of vehicle that would be used to dispose of a body in a moving picture about the fictional Department Thirteen. Then, while lurking near the footmen’s side door, he saw several gleaming, expensive cars drive up to disgorge their gleaming, expensive passengers. He recognised most of the guests. None were friends. They were all people he would formerly have described as frivolous and now just didn’t care about at all. Even the beautiful young women failed to make more than a momentary impact. His mind was elsewhere.
Nick was thinking about Malthan and the two messages he carried. One, the obvious one, was addressed to Thomas Garran, Uncle Edward’s principal private secretary. It said:
The other, more hastily scrawled, said:
There was every possibility neither message would get through, Nick thought. It would all depend on what Dorrance and his minions thought they could get away with. And that depended on what they thought they could do to one Nicholas Sayre before he caused them too much trouble.
Nick shivered and went back inside. As he expected, when he asked to use a telephone, the footman referred him to the butler, who was very apologetic and bowed several times while regretting that the line was down and probably would not be fixed for several days, the telegraph company being notoriously slow in the country.
With that avenue cut off, Nick retreated to his room, ostensibly to dress for dinner. In practice he spent most of the time writing a report to his uncle and another telegram to the Magistrix at Wyverley College. He hid the report in the lining of his suitcase and went in search of a particular valet who he knew would be accompanying one of the guests he had seen arrive, the aging dandy Hericourt Danjers. The permanent staff of Dorrance Hall would all really be Department Thirteen agents, or informants at the least, but it was much less likely the guests’ servants would be.
Danjers’s valet was famous among servants for his ability with shoe polish, champagne, and a secret oil. So neither he nor anyone else in the belowstairs parlor was much surprised when the Chief Minister’s nephew sought him out with a pair of shoes in hand. The valet was a little more surprised to find a note inside the shoes asking him to go out to the village and secretly send a telegram, but as the note was wrapped around four double-guinea pieces, he was happy to do so. When he’d finished his duties, of course.
Back in his room, Nick dressed hastily. As he tied his bow tie, his hands moved automatically while he wondered what else he should be doing. All kinds of plans raced through his head, only to be abandoned as impractical, or foolish, or likely to make matters worse.
With his tie finally done, Nick went to his case and took out a large leather wallet. There were three things inside. Two were letters, both written neatly on thick, linen-rich handmade paper, but in markedly different hands.
The first letter was from Nick’s old friend Prince Sameth. It was concerned primarily with Sam’s current projects and was illustrated in the margins with small diagrams. Judging from the letter, Sam’s time was being spent almost entirely on the fabrication and enchantment of a replacement hand for Lirael, and the planning and design of a fishing hut on an island in the Ratterlin Delta. Sam did not explain why he wanted to build a fishing hut, and Nick had not had a reply to his most recent letter seeking enlightenment. This was not unusual. Sam was an infrequent correspondent, and there was no regular mail service of any kind between Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom.
Nick didn’t bother to read Sam’s letter again. He put it aside, carefully unfolded the second letter, and read it for the hundredth or two hundredth time, hoping that this time he would uncover some hidden meaning in the innocuous words.
This letter was from Lirael, and it was quite short. The writing was so regular, so perfectly spaced, and so free of ink splotches that Nick wondered if it had been copied from a rough version. If it had, what did that mean? Did Lirael always make fine copies of her letters? Or had she done it just for him?
Nick stared at the letter for several minutes after he finished reading it, then gently folded it and returned it to the wallet. He drew out the third thing, which had come in a package with the letters three weeks ago, though it had apparently left the Old Kingdom at least a month before that. It was a small, very plain dagger, the blade and hilt blued steel, with brass wire wound around the grip, the pommel just a big teardrop of metal.
Nick held it up to the light. He could see faint etched symbols upon the blade, but that was all they were. Faint etched symbols. Not living, moving Charter Marks, bright and flowing, all gold and sunshine. That’s what Charter-spelled swords normally looked like, the marks leaping and splashing across the metal.
Nick knew he ought to be comforted. If the Charter Marks on his dagger were still and dead, then the thing beneath the house should be as well. But he knew it wasn’t. He’d seen its eyes flicker.
There was a knock on the door. Nick hastily put the dagger back in its sheath.
‘Yes!’ he called. The sheathed dagger was still in his hand. For a moment he considered exchanging it for the slim .32 automatic pistol in his suitcase’s outer pocket. But he decided against it when the person at the door called out to him.
‘Nicholas Sayre?’
It was a woman’s voice. A young woman’s voice, with the hint of a laugh in it. Not a servant. Perhaps one of the beautiful young women he’d seen arrive. Probably a not very successful actor or singer, the usual adornments of typical country house parties.
‘Yes. Who is it?’
‘Tesrya. Don’t say you don’t remember me. Perhaps a glimpse will remind you. Let me in. I’ve got a bottle of champagne. I thought we might have a drink before dinner.’
Nick didn’t remember her, but that didn’t mean anything. He knew she would have singled him out from the seating plan for dinner, homing in on the surname Sayre. He supposed he should at least tell her to go away to her face. Courtesy to women, even fortune hunters, had been drummed into him all his life.
‘Just one drink?’
Nick hesitated, then tucked the sheathed dagger down the inside of his trousers, at the hip. He held his foot against the door in case he needed to shut it in a hurry; then he turned the key and opened it a fraction.
He had the promised glimpse. Pale, melancholy eyes in a very white face, a forced smile from too-red lips. But there were also two hooded men there. One threw his shoulder against the door to keep it open. The other grabbed Nick by the hair and pushed a pad the size of a small pillow against his face.
Nick tried not to breathe as he threw himself backward, losing some hair in the process, but the sickly-sweet smell of chloroform was already in his mouth and nose. The two men gave him no time to recover his balance. One pushed him back to the foot of the bed, while the other got his right arm in a wrestling hold. Nick struck out with his left, but his fist wouldn’t go where he wanted it to. His arm felt like a rubbery length of pipe, the elbow gone soft.
Nick kept flailing, but the pad was back on his mouth and nose, and all his senses started to shatter into little pieces like a broken mosaic. He couldn’t m
ake sense of what he saw and heard and felt, and all he could smell was a sickly scent like a cheap perfume badly imitating the scent of flowers.
In another few seconds, he was unconscious.
Nicholas Sayre returned to his senses very slowly. It was like waking up drunk after a party, his mind still clouded and a hangover building in his head and stomach. It was dark, and he was disoriented. He tried to move and for a frightened instant thought he was paralysed. Then he felt restraints at his wrists and thighs and ankles and a hard surface under his head and back. He was tied to a table, or perhaps a hard bench.
‘Ah, the mind wakes,’ said a voice in the darkness. Nick thought for a second, his clouded mind slowly processing the sound. He knew that voice. Dorrance.
‘Would you like to see what is happening?’ asked Dorrance. Nick heard him take a few steps, heard the click of a rotary electric switch. Harsh light came with the click, so bright that Nick had to screw his eyes shut, tears instantly welling up in the corners.
‘Look, Mr. Sayre. Look at your most useful work.’
Nick slowly opened his eyes. At first all he could see was a naked, very bright electric globe swinging directly above his head. Blinking to clear the tears, he looked to one side. Dorrance was there, leaning against a concrete wall. He smiled and pointed to the other side, his hand held close against his chest, fist clenched, index finger extended.
Nick rolled his head and then recoiled, straining against the ropes that bound his ankles, thighs, and wrists to a steel operating table with raised rails.
The creature from the case was right next to him. No longer in the case, but stretched out on an adjacent table ten inches lower than Nick’s. It was not tied up. There was a red rubber tube running from one of Nick’s wrists to a metal stand next to the creature’s head. The tube ended an inch above the monster’s slightly open mouth. Blood was dripping from the tube, small dark blobs falling in between its jet black teeth.
Nick’s blood.
