Crusader

  He waited.

  The shower of sleet moved closer.

  Raspu waited.

  A gust of cold air struck him squarely in his naked back, and Raspu shifted impatiently.

  “Ahem,” he said.

  Nothing happened.

  Raspu’s eyes narrowed in furious concentration. He threw all his power at the door.

  It trembled, but did not budge.

  Raspu screamed with impatience. “Let me in!”

  The door remained quiet, and Raspu’s face tightened, malformed, then relaxed.

  He sighed, leaned forward, and banged the doorknocker several times.

  Instantly, the door swung open, and there stood Gwendylyr. She was dressed in a stiff black gown, tightly buttoned from its high neckline down the whale-boned bodice to the starched and snowy apron tied firmly about her waist. Sensible brown polished boots peeked out from beneath the perfectly straight hem of the dress.

  Gwendylyr’s hair was pulled back into a severe bun, and her face was scrubbed and earnest.

  Not a hair was out of place.

  “Thank goodness you’ve come!” Gwendylyr exclaimed, and, reaching forward, hauled Raspu inside.

  The door slammed shut.

  Chapter 48

  Gwendylyr’s Problem

  “I have such a problem,” Gwendylyr said to the Demon, hurrying him through the mansion’s foyer. Raspu was so nonplussed he still could not speak, nor resist Gwendylyr’s efficient bustling.

  “It’s the staff,” Gwendylyr continued, moving Raspu towards an inconspicuous green baize door set behind the sweeping grand staircase. “I don’t know what to do with them. That’s why I’m so glad you’re here!”

  Raspu opened his mouth, but couldn’t think what to say. This was not quite what he’d expected.

  A flash of lightning, a clap of thunder and a clash of powers yes, but not…not…not this.

  “My last butler couldn’t cope,” Gwendylyr said. “And, to be frank, I don’t really blame him. The help are simply frightful.”

  “I don’t know what this is all—”

  Gwendylyr threw open the green baize door, and propelled Raspu through with a none-too-gentle shove in the small of his back.

  She did not appear to notice the slime of his encrustations left on the palm of her hand.

  Beyond the door was a long narrow stone corridor, all functionality and no beauty. Small doors opened off at infrequent intervals along its length.

  Gwendylyr gave Raspu no respite, nor time for questions.

  “The linen closet,” she said as they passed a half-open door on their right, and she pulled Raspu to a brief halt.

  Caught in Gwendylyr’s efficiency, Raspu pushed the door fully open and looked in.

  The closet was a mess. Sheets and pillowcases tumbled uncaring from shelves and drifted in creased and grey rivers across the flagged floor.

  There was a small dog curled in a nest of scratched and tangled blankets in a far corner. It had left a foul-smelling mess on a pile of flannels.

  “Do you see what I mean?” Gwendylyr said. “Give them an hour to their own devices…”

  “I don’t understand what is happening,” Raspu said, loathing the uncertainty in his voice.

  “My dear man,” Gwendylyr said, her voice husky with solicitousness, “you are here to set all this to rights.”

  She smiled, and Raspu took half a step backwards.

  “If you can,” she continued. “If,” her smile broadened and became almost predatory, “you make the right choices.

  “Now, here,” Gwendylyr pulled Raspu down to the next door and kicked it open with her foot, “is the butler’s closet.”

  Like the linen closet, the butler’s closet was lined with shelves. And, as in the linen closet, the contents of the shelves—dusters, cans of boot polish, candles, flints, sewing threads and bobbins, flea powder for dogs, bundles of sharpened pencils, yellowed stationary, blocks of starch, bottles of ink, smelling salts, emetic salts, several years supply of old newspapers and enough wads of tobacco to keep an entire army unit happy for over a month—had spilled beyond their allocated space and spread across the floor.

  “You’ll have to fix it,” Gwendylyr said. “No way around it.”

  “But—”

  “I just can’t believe how the staff have let things run down!” Gwendylyr reached behind the door of the closet and, in a motion so swift and magical Raspu could not follow it, whipped a butler’s uniform from a hook. With a cracking flap and a cloud of dust she clothed Raspu in his new attire.

  “There!” Gwendylyr said, tweaking straight the heavy woollen vest and pulling out the wrinkles in Raspu’s coat-tails. “At last you look the part.”

  Raspu blinked, wondering what had happened. This was all rather overwhelming.

  “You must keep your tie straight!” Gwendylyr muttered, tugging at the offending article. “Else how will you maintain respect?”

  Raspu roared, the sound frightful in the confines of the butler’s pantry, and seized Gwendylyr by the shoulders.

  “I will not put up with this any longer!”

  “Excellent!” Gwendylyr cried. “That’s the ticket! I knew I’d done the right thing in asking you to set things to rights!”

  And before Raspu could do anything else—tear her apart, burn down the building, cause havoc, terror and pestilence—Gwendylyr had propelled him out the door and down the corridor towards a plank door (painted a depressing shade of brown) with a small, round, brass doorknob.

  She pulled the Demon to a halt before the door and looked at him sternly.

  Raspu shifted from foot to foot, grimacing at the tight leather shoes encasing his feet.

  His hands, clad in fawn (although now somewhat stained) cotton gloves, flexed at his sides.

  “Behind that door,” Gwendylyr said, “await the staff.”

  She managed a genteel shudder as she momentarily closed her eyes.

  “And,” Gwendylyr opened her eyes, “beyond that door lies a choice.”

  Raspu hissed. “The test! The challenge!”

  Gwendylyr grinned, and Raspu did not like the expression behind her eyes very much at all.

  “Yes. The test. This will not be a battle of magics or swords, Demon, but a far more desperate battle. A man who cannot govern his household cannot be trusted to govern himself. Thus your challenge. Beyond that door lies a household in desperate need of a firm hand. Impose order and control over the household, impose your undisputed rule, and you will win the challenge by demonstrating your right to rule yourself—your right to self-determination. If you cannot govern the household, you will fail, and will—”

  Raspu snarled, already triumphant. This a challenge? Ha! “No need to explain the consequences of failure, woman, because I will not fail!”

  “Fabulous! Just the man I needed!”

  Raspu’s face twitched and he took a deep breath, controlling his urge to decapitate her here and now. Later. There would be time later.

  “I am the Demon of Pestilence,” he finally said. “I can decimate populations, inflict plagues across continents, cause life itself to become nothing but a never-ending scourge. Think you that I can’t manage a bunch of twaddle-headed maidservants?”

  He straightened, lifted his chin, pulled down the cuffs of his black coat, and seized the doorknob.

  With an efficient twist he opened the door, stepped inside, and slammed it behind him.

  Gwendylyr folded her hands before her, her face expressionless.

  Chapter 49

  The Butler’s Rule

  Raspu stepped inside the kitchen, took in the scene in one appalled and angry glance, and roared. Maidservants, asleep on the rug before the fire, screeched and leapt to their feet, hastily trying to pat their hair into some order.

  Footmen, huddled over a poker game under the dish-racks, pushed chairs and stools to the floor as they hastily rose.

  The cook lumbered out of the cold room, a jug of cream in her hands
and smears of the clotted stuff about her chin, and stared gape-mouthed at the Demon-butler.

  Five small children of indeterminate usefulness and sex scrambled out from the stove alcove, biscuits and cakes tumbling from their hands, and stood before the draining boards, forming a ragged, wailing line of carefully-managed pathos.

  Two dogs burst out of a cupboard door, each with a half-eaten joint of meat in their jaws, and fled through an open window.

  Several dishes crashed to the floor as they jumped over one of the benches, and a huge canister of flour fell to the floor.

  Quiet and stillness descended as Raspu stared about.

  Flour drifted down and coated all.

  “What is going on here?” Raspu hissed. “Why this sloth, why this mess, why this chaos?”

  Instantly excuses burst from every mouth.

  “We’ve not been paid in a month—”

  “It’s cold outside—”

  “My granny died five months ago and I’ve not been able to think straight since—”

  “We’ve done our best, sir, truly—”

  “—but things ’ave been against us, sure for a fact—”

  “It’s been cold inside, and not fit to work in—”

  “Benny beat me up—”

  “Frankie knocked me up—”

  “No-one’s been here to tell us what to do—”

  “What shall we do, sir?”

  Raspu strode forth and began to snap orders, tug uniforms straight, and jerk braids so painfully that girls cried.

  “Clean this up—and yourself—now!

  “Why has this been left to rot? Dispose of it. Now!

  “Why do you cry, girl? There’s work to be done. Now!

  “Take this broom, and wield it!

  “Have you no pride, cook? No sense of joy in your work? Find some. Now!”

  And so Raspu twirled about the kitchen like a mini-tornado, venting anger and orders in equal amounts, pinching and shoving, nipping and poking, sending pages and maids screaming to their tasks, kicking footmen over doorsteps in the pursuit of their vocation, and shoving the cook’s face in the pot of cold, starchy porridge on the stove top until she pleaded (somewhat damply) for mercy.

  Finally, the kitchen was emptied of the majority of the wantonly lazy staff and those that were left were well on the road to making the room and its utensils sparkle with polish and use.

  “So,” Raspu said smugly as he stepped outside the door and confronted Gwendylyr. “Have I won the challenge?”

  A maid brushed past them, her face terrified, a pile of neatly-folded linen in her arms.

  “You have made a good start” Gwendylyr said, “but the challenge lies in being able to keep the staff at work. How will things be in a month, Raspu? In two? Will the house be running efficiently, or will it, its staff, and its butler have slid into irretrievable sloth?”

  “A month! I don’t have to do this for an entire—”

  “I’ll give you two,” Gwendylyr said. “Have fun.”

  And she vanished.

  Enchantment gripped Raspu and the house into which he’d walked, and the sun and moon whirled overhead.

  “Interesting,” Qeteb remarked. He and DragonStar now inhabited the same hilltop, although there was more than five paces between their respective positions. “She’s not someone I’d care to meet over breakfast.”

  DragonStar turned his head slightly and looked at Qeteb, but he did not reply.

  The two settled down to wait, and to watch.

  The sun and moon twirled overhead, moving so fast the shadows fluttered unceasingly across the hilltop.

  Raspu found he did not like being a butler. The staff had remained in awe of him for an entire three days, and then subtle changes slowly crept into the daily routine.

  The maids who once had wept at the very sight of him, now smirked and moved more insolently when he appeared. They still swept and scrubbed and polished, but their mouths curled in secretive smiles as he passed, and their eyelashes dipped in flirtatious fans over the curve of their soft cheeks whenever he paused to shout more orders at them.

  Raspu found that his voice noticeably softened whenever they did that, and one day he found himself reaching out to caress the cheek of one particularly fetching lass.

  He jerked his hand back, but not before he saw her mouth arrange itself into a seductive pout.

  Moist, red, beguiling.

  With just the hint of pearly white teeth behind those plump, tempting…

  Raspu jerked away, roared, and vanished down the corridor in stiff-legged (and almost unbearably frustrated) affront.

  The maid giggled, and wriggled her hips in anticipation.

  In the kitchen the cook pounded and rolled and sweetened and basted to Raspu’s satisfaction, but after a week or so he noticed that not all the meat he put out from the now-locked cold room appeared at table. When he accused the cook of stealing, she wept and wailed and wrung her hands and fell down in an epileptic fit.

  The Demon repressed a sigh. It was too much effort to continue with the harangue, and only a small bit of meat had gone…

  Raspu turned his back and left her massive mound of flesh to twitch and quiver triumphantly on the rug before the fire.

  As soon as the kitchen door slammed behind him, the cook’s flesh trembled to stillness. She smiled, and her hand drew out the small joint of meat she’d secreted in the voluminous pocket of her apron, and she began to chew vigorously, setting her flesh to trembling all over again.

  But however much the staff managed to annoy him, Raspu found that the household accounts managed to drive him almost insane with exasperation.

  Every morning Raspu had to check the shelves and count all the packets and cans and wedges and jars.

  Then he had to check them all off in his account book.

  Then he had to consult with the cook and the downstairs cleaning maids to see what would be required for that day’s cooking and cleaning. Then he had to dole out with solemn precision, from the cans and jars and wedges and packets, the portions of starches and wood oils and fireplace blackeners and flours and sugars and yeasts required.

  And then he had to mark all those off in his account book.

  Then the upstairs maids needed linens and sheets and pillowcases and dusters, and so Raspu must march to the linen closet and carefully count out the articles required.

  And mark it off in his account book.

  Then, after only a brief respite—not even long enough for a cup of tea and a sit down—they were back with the dirty linen. Raspu must be out again with his account book to check that the dirty linen numbers and quantities matched the clean numbers and quantities he’d dispatched yesterday, and if they didn’t, then everything must be dumped into piles and carefully sorted out under his supervision to find the missing pillowcase, and if the numbers still refused to tally, then Raspu must needs conduct a room by room search of the upstairs corridors, seeking under every bed and in every dirty clothes hamper for the pillowcase.

  And when he’d wasted four hours in that fruitless search, and was nigh tearing out his hair in almost unbearable frustration (and determined to tear the offending pillowcase to shreds, together with the maid who’d lost it, when it was finally found), Raspu sat down to a late and very cold lunch with his account book only to find that he’d miscounted the number of pillowcases on yesterday’s tally, and that in fact this morning’s count had been correct. He’d wasted an entire morning—and let his lunch grow cool and congealed—over a simple error that if he’d not bothered with the cursed accounting and tallying in the first instance would not have bothered him!

  Raspu threw the account book across the room, his plate of disgustingly congealed lunch close after it, and the cook lowered her head and grinned into the pots atop the stove, and the footmen by the door raised their eyes to the ceiling and smirked inwardly.

  Things were going well.

  The challenge was falling into place.

  T
he days spun by.

  “Who is that little girl you sent off with the red-headed birdman?” Qeteb asked conversationally. He could sense Raspu’s dilemma, and it made him rabid with fury.

  But not incensed enough to lose his vision of overall destiny.

  Nothing he said could have dismayed DragonStar more.

  “What little girl?” he said. Behind him the Alaunt shifted, and one or two growled softly.

  Qeteb smirked in satisfaction. The tone of DragonStar’s voice was enough, in itself, to make the probable loss of Raspu bearable.

  “No-one,” he said. “I had grown bored and merely invented a question to while away the time.”

  DragonStar closed his eyes and cleared his mind, hoping that SpikeFeather and Azhure were safe enough in the waterways.

  As far as he knew the Demons had never ventured down there…but was that assumption correct enough to assure Katie’s continued safety?

  One lunchtime Raspu entered the kitchen to find one of the footmen leaning against a maid with his hand nestled inside her open blouse.

  As the footman saw Raspu, he leaned away from the girl, slowly pulling out his hand.

  The girl’s round, firm breast was exposed to Raspu’s gaze before she pulled the material of her blouse closed.

  Raspu, tired by a morning of chasing after a small and almost empty jar of boot black—only to find it on the shelf where it was supposed to be anyway—merely ignored both servants and sat down at the table.

  The cook almost dropped his plate of tripe before him, and milk sauce splattered over the table.

  Raspu opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.

  He was too tired, and far too hungry, to be bothered.

  Later, perhaps.

  And then, later, the girl who’d let the footman grope her in the kitchen accosted Raspu in a dimly lit corridor as the Demon was walking slowly, tiredly, towards his room for bed.

  “I should explain meself,” the girl mumbled, standing before the Demon.

  Raspu sighed. “This can wait until morning,” he said, and tried to push past her.