Nellie barked and pointed to the fireplace. Ambrose spun around and fired both barrels as the demons came roaring out of the chimney. But even riddled with ensorcelled salt, the demons came on, shadowy maws snapping and talons reaching. Ambrose threw the now useless shotgun at them and dived to one side, toward the golf bag perched by his bed, as Nellie snarled and bit at the demons’ heels.
Demon teeth closed on his calf as his hands closed on his weapon of last resort. Between the irons and the woods, Ambrose’s fingers closed on the bone-inlaid hilt of the yataghan that bore the maker’s mark of Osman Bey. Tumbling the golf bag over, he drew the sword and with two swift strokes, neatly severed the faint red threads that stood in the place of backbones in the demons, the silvered blade cutting through the creatures’ infernal salt-pocked flesh as if it were no more than smoke.
The demons popped out of existence, leaving only a pair of three-foot lengths of scarlet cord. Nellie sniffed at them cautiously, then went to nose at Ambrose’s leg.
‘Yes, it got me, damn it,’ cursed Ambrose. ‘My own fault, mind you. Should have had the sword to hand, never mind how ridiculous it might have looked.’
Ambrose looked over at the oracular lantern, which had gone out.
‘Possibly inimical, my sweet giddy aunt,’ he muttered as he pushed down the sock and rolled up the leg of his plus fours. The skin was not broken, but there was a crescent-shaped bruise on his calf. Next to the bruise, the closest half inch of vein was turning dark and beginning to obtrude from the skin, and a shadow was branching out into the lesser blood vessels all around.
Ambrose cursed again, then levered himself upright and hobbled over to the large, leather-strapped portmanteau at the end of his bed. Flinging it open, he rummaged about inside, eventually bringing out a long strip of linen that was covered in tiny Egyptian hieroglyphics drawn in some dark red ink. Ambrose wrapped this around his calf, tapped it thrice, and spoke the revered name of Sekhmet, at which the hieroglyphics faded from the bandage and entered into his flesh, there to fight a holding battle against the demonic incursion, though it was unlikely that they would entirely vanquish the enemy without additional sorcerous assistance. Egyptian magic was older and thus more faded from the world, and though Ambrose had immersed the bandage on his last visit to the Nile, that had been many years before, so the hermetic connection was no longer strong.
Ambrose had nothing else that might work to hand. Nor was there anyone he could easily turn to for assistance. In fact, he thought wretchedly, there were only two possible sources of the kind of help he needed within a thousand miles. One he had hoped to stay away from, and the other was very difficult to reach without extensive and unusual preparations that would simply take too long.
‘First things first,’ muttered Ambrose. Using the yataghan as a crutch, but also to keep it close to hand, he limped to the table. Lighting a match against the back of his chair, he applied it to the bill for the fishing rod and watched his recent appreciation crumble into ash, dousing the blaze with the last half inch of cold tea from his mug when it threatened to spread to the other papers.
‘Just like the war,’ he said wearily to Nelly. ‘Bloody thing was obsolete as soon as I wrote it. I suppose I shall have to—’
Nellie lifted her ears.
Ambrose whipped around to check the oracular lantern. The flame had relit and was even higher now, burning red and gold, signifying danger, but not immediate, and allies. Not friends, but allies.
‘I’m not trusting you,’ Ambrose said to the lantern. Still leaning on the yataghan, he retrieved his shotgun and reloaded it, though this time he did not speak the words. Nellie stayed by his side, her ears up and intent, but she was not growling.
As the sound of a car being driven a shade too fast for the rough track grew louder, Ambrose cautiously opened the door and looked out.
He was not very much surprised to see that the second car was a green Crossley 20/25, the usual choice of the Secret Service Bureau and so also of its even lesser-known offshoot, D-Arc. He even recognized the two men in the front, and could guess at the other two in the backseat. Nevertheless, he kept the shotgun ready as the Crossley skidded to a halt behind the maroon sedan and the men got out. Three of them, two with revolvers by their sides and one with a curiously archaic bell-mouthed musketoon, stayed close to the car, watching the bothy, the maroon car, and the hillside. The fourth, a man Ambrose knew as Major Kennett, though that was almost certainly not his real name, advanced toward the bothy’s front door. The quartet were dressed for the city, not the country, and Ambrose suppressed a smile as Kennett lost a shoe in the mud and had to pause to fish around for it with a stockinged foot.
‘I see we’re a little late,’ said Kennett as he pulled at the heel of his shoe. He was a handsome man, made far less so as soon as you saw the chill that always dwelled in his eyes. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘Late for what?’ asked Ambrose.
‘Your earlier guests,’ answered Kennett. He held out his hand. After a moment, Ambrose balanced the shotgun over the crook of his left arm and shook hands.
‘You knew they were coming?’ asked Ambrose.
Kennett shook his head. ‘We knew something was coming. Quite clever, really. We’ve been keeping tabs on a private vessel for days, a very large motor yacht owned by our old friend the Emir and captained by Vladimir Roop. It docked at Fort William, the car was lowered, and off it went. Nothing … unwelcome … touched the earth, you see, and it’s a hard top, windows shut, keeping out all that Scottish air and lovely mist and those who travel with it.’
‘Did you know I was here?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Kennett. He looked past Ambrose, into the simple, single room of the bothy. ‘Rather basic, old boy. Takes you back, I suppose?’
‘Yes, it does,’ said Ambrose, without rancor. Kennett, like most D-Arc operatives, was from an old and very upper-class family. Ambrose was not. Everything he had achieved had come despite his more difficult start in life. He had taken a long series of difficult steps that had begun with a scholarship to Bristol Grammar at the age of seven, the first part of a challenging journey that had taken him far, far away from the ever-changing temporary accommodations shared with his father, at least when that worthy was not in prison for his various ‘no-risk lottery’ and ‘gifting circle’ frauds.
‘Each to his own,’ remarked Kennett. ‘I take it you’ve dealt with the visitors?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’d best take you away then,’ said Kennett. ‘Lady S wants to have a word, and I expect you’ll need that leg looked at. Demon bite, is it?’
‘Lady S can go—’ Ambrose bit back his words with an effort.
‘Quite likely,’ replied Kennett. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. But I don’t see the relevance. Lady S wants to see you, therefore you will be seen by her. Unless, of course, you want to stay here and turn into something that will have every Gaelic-speaking entity of wood, air, and river rising up to assail?’
‘No,’ replied Ambrose. He knew when it was pointless to rail against fate. ‘I don’t want that. Do we have to go all the way to London? I don’t think I can make—’
‘No, not at all,’ said Kennett. ‘Lady S is on a progress through the far-flung parts of the D-Arc realm. She’s in Edinburgh, taking stock of our new medical advisor.’
‘New medical advisor?’ asked Ambrose. ‘What happened to Shivinder?’
Kennett turned his cold, cold eyes to meet Ambrose’s gaze, and held it for a second, which was sufficient reply. Whatever had happened to Dr. Shivinder, Ambrose would likely never know, and if he did find out by some accident of information, he would be best to keep it to himself.
‘The new chap is quite the prodigy,’ said Kennett. ‘Oxford, of course, like all the best people.’
Ambrose sighed and limped a step forward toward the car. There were tiny wisps of smoke issuing from under the hieroglyphic bandage as the small angels of Sekhmet fought the demonic infestation. Whil
e it wouldn’t actually catch alight, the pain was quite intense, which was another sign that the demons were winning.
‘Spare me the jibes,’ he said. ‘Can we just go?’
‘Yes, we should toodle along, I suppose,’ said Kennett. ‘Jones and Jones will stay to secure the place, and they can bring your gear along later and so forth. Do we need to shoot the dog?’
Ambrose bent down, gasping with the pain, and took Nellie by the collar. Turning her head, he looked deeply into her trusting brown eyes, and then ran his hand over her back and legs, carefully checking for bites.
‘No, she’s clear,’ he said. ‘She can go back to the big house. Nellie! Big house!’
He pointed to the garden gate as he spoke. Nellie cocked her head at him, to make sure he was serious, yawned to show her lolloping red tongue, and slowly began to pick her way through the mud.
She had only gone a few yards when Kennett shot her in the back of the head with his revolver. The heavy Webley .455 boomed twice. The dog was shoved into the puddle by the force of the impact, her legs continuing to twitch and jerk there, even though she must have been killed instantly. Blood slowly swirled into the muddy water, steam rising as it spread.
Ambrose fumbled with his shotgun, swinging it to cover Kennett. But it was broken open, and Kennett was watching him, the revolver still in his hand.
‘There was demon taint in her mouth,’ said Kennett, very matter-of-fact. ‘She wouldn’t have lasted a day.’
Ambrose shut his eyes for a moment. Then he nodded dully. Kennett stepped in and took the shotgun, but did not try to remove the yataghan that Ambrose used to lever himself upright.
‘You’re all right?’ asked Kennett. ‘Operational? Capable?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Ambrose, his voice almost as detached as Kennett’s. He looked down at Nellie’s body. Dead, just like so many of his friends, but life continued and he must make the best of it. That was the litany he had learned at Grandway House. He owed it to the dead, the dead that now included Nellie, to live on as best he could.
‘Did you do that to test me? Did Lady S tell you to shoot my dog?’
‘No,’ replied Kennett calmly. ‘I had no orders. But there was demon taint.’
Ambrose nodded again. Kennett could lie better than almost anyone he knew, so well that it was impossible to know whether he spoke the truth or not, unless there was some undeniable evidence to the contrary. And there could have been demon taint. Of course, with the dog’s head shattered by hexed silver fulminate exploding rounds, there was no possible way to check that now.
Leaning on his yataghan, Ambrose trudged to the standard issue departmental car. He had hoped to avoid any further involvement with D-Arc, but he had always known that this was a vain hope. Even when he had left the section the first time in 1916, escaping to regular service on the Western Front, there had still been occasional reminders that D-Arc was watching him and might reel him in at any time. Like the odd staff officer with the mismatched eyes, one blue and one green, who never visited anyone else’s battalion in the brigade, but often dropped in on Ambrose. Always on one of the old, old festival days, sporting a fresh-cut willow crop, a spray of holly, or bearing some odd bottle of mead or elderberry wine. Ambrose’s adjutant and the battalion’s second-in-command called him ‘the botanist’ and thought he was just another red-tabbed idiot wandering about. But Ambrose knew better.
Once in the car, Ambrose retreated almost immediately into a yogic trance state, to slow the effects of the demon bite. Possibly even more helpfully, it stopped him thinking about Nellie and the long roll call of dead friends, and as it was not sleep, he did not dream. Instead he experienced himself traveling without movement over an endless illusory landscape made up of Buddhist sutras.
Ambrose came out of this trance to find that the car had stopped. He looked out the window and saw that the sun was setting. The gas lamps had just been lit, but it was still quite bright enough for him to work out that they had reached Edinburgh, and after a moment, he recognized the street. They were in South Charlotte Square, outside what at first glance appeared to be a hotel, till he saw a discreet brass plate by the front door that read ‘St. Agnes Nursing Home.’
‘New Scottish office, more discreet,’ grunted Kennett, correctly interpreting Ambrose’s expression. D-Arc’s previous Scottish office had been co-located with the SSB, tucked away in a temporary building on the outer perimeter of Redford Barracks, a position that provided physical security but made more arcane measures difficult to employ.
Kennett led Ambrose quickly inside, through the oak and silver outer doors, past the mirrored inner doors, and across the tessellated, eye-catching tiled floor of the atrium, all useful architectural defenses against malignant spirits. The demon had grown enough in Ambrose’s leg for him to feel its attention drawn by the mirrors, and his leg twitched and twisted of its own accord as he crossed the patterned maze of the floor.
Kennett signed them into the book at the front desk, at which point Ambrose was relieved of his yataghan and revolver in return for a claim ticket, before being helped upstairs.
‘Lady S will see you first,’ said Kennett. ‘Afterward … I suppose the medico can sort out your leg.’
Ambrose caught the implication of that phrasing very well. Any treatment would be dependent on Lady S and how Ambrose responded to whatever she wanted him to do: which was almost certainly about him returning to active duty with D-Arc.
‘In you go,’ said Kennett. He rapped on the double door, turned the knob to push it open a fraction, and released his supporting grip on Ambrose’s elbow.
Ambrose limped in, wishing he was elsewhere. Kennett did not follow him, the door shutting hard on Ambrose’s heels with a definitive click.
The room was dark, and smelled of orange zest and the sickly honey scent of myrrh, which was normal for any chamber that had Lady S in it. Ambrose peered into the darkness, but did not move forward. It was better to stay near the exit, since he knew that only a small part of this room was actually connected to the building and to Edinburgh itself. The rest of the room was … somewhere else.
He heard a rustling in the dark and swallowed nervously as the strange smell grew stronger. A candle flared, the light suddenly bright. Ambrose hooded his eyes and looked off to one side.
Lady S was there, some feet away from the candle, again as expected. He could see only her vague outline, swathed as she was in gauzy silks that moved about her in answer to some breeze that didn’t reach the door.
‘Dear Ambrose!’ exclaimed the apparition, her voice that of some kindly but aged female relative welcoming a close but morally strayed junior connection. ‘How kind of you to call upon me in my hour of need.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Ambrose. ‘I could not, of course, resist.’
Lady S laughed a hearty laugh that belonged to a far more fully fleshed person, someone who might have triple chins to wobble as they guffawed. The laugh did not match the narrow, dimly perceived silhouette in her fluttering shrouds.
‘Oh, you always could make me laugh,’ she said. ‘I don’t laugh as much as I should, you know.’
‘Who does?’ asked Ambrose, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.
‘Now, now, Ambrose,’ said Lady S. Something that might be a finger wagged in the air some distance in front of his face. ‘No petulance. I can’t abide petulance. Tell me – your father, he of many names and aliases, may he rest in peace – his birth name was really Farnowitz and he was born in Germany?’
‘You know he was,’ said Ambrose tightly. ‘It’s in my file and always has been. My mother was English, I was born in Bristol, and what’s more I have served my country more than—’
‘Yes, yes dear,’ comforted Lady S. ‘We’re not holding it against you. Quite the contrary. We need someone with a modicum of the art who also has German blood. Apart from the King, who naturally isn’t available to us, the combination is rather scarce among our ranks.’
‘What do you
need me to do, and what do I get out of it?’
‘Oh, my dear young man, such impatience and, dare I say, rudeness, will not serve you well. But perhaps it is the demon that is gnawing its way up your leg? I will make some allowance for that.’
‘I beg your pardon, Lady S,’ muttered Ambrose. Even at the best of times it did not pay to offend Lady S, and this was far from the best of times.
‘Oh, do call me Auntie Hester,’ cooed the apparition in the darkness. ‘You know I do like all my young men to call me Auntie Hester.’
‘Yes, Auntie Hester,’ said Ambrose reluctantly. He could not suppress a shiver, as he knew exactly what she was: a revenant who survived only thanks to powerful magic, numerous blood sacrifices, and a budget appropriation that was never examined in parliament. Lady Hester Stanhope had been dead for eighty years, but that had not ended her career in one of the predecessor organizations of D-Arc. She had gone from strength to strength in both bureaucratic and sorcerous terms since then. Though she was severely limited in terms of normal physical interaction with the world, she had many other advantages. Not least were her unrivalled political connections, which ran all the way back to the early nineteenth century, when she had managed the household of her uncle William Pitt the Younger, then Prime Minister of Britain.
‘Very good. Now, it has come to our attention that someone exceedingly naughty in Solingen … the Rhineland, you know … is trying to raise a Waldgeist, and not just any sixpence-ha’penny forest spirit, but a great old one of the primeval wood. They’ve gotten hold of the ritual, and three days from now they’re going to summon up the old tree-beastie and set it on our occupying forces – and we can’t allow that, can we? Therefore, Ambrose my darling, you will dash over to Solingen, call up this Waldgeist first, and bind it to our service, then have it destroy the second summoner. Are you with me so far?’