All of which could have been nicely illuminated if we’d turned on the lights, of course. And there was a switch on the wall, right there. But we didn’t attempt to use it. You see, a second rule you learn is this: electricity interferes. It dulls the senses and makes you weak and stupid. It’s much better to watch and listen in the dark. It’s good to have that fear.
We stood in silence, doing what we do. I listened; Lockwood watched. It was cold in the house. The air had that musty, slightly sour smell you get in every unloved place.
I leaned in close to Lockwood. “No heating,” I whispered.
“Mm-hm.”
“Something else too, you think?”
“Mm-hm.”
As my eyes grew used to the dark, I saw more details. Beneath the curl of the banister was a little polished table, on which sat a china bowl of potpourri. There were pictures on the wall, mostly faded posters of old-time musicals, and photographs of rolling hills and gentle seas. All pretty innocuous. In fact, it wasn’t at all an ugly hallway; in bright sunlight it might have looked quite pleasant. But not so much now, with the last light from the door panes stretching out like skewed coffins on the floor in front of us; and with our shadows neatly framed inside them; and with the manner of old Mr. Hope’s death in this very place hanging heavy on our minds.
I breathed hard to calm myself and shut out morbid thoughts. Then I closed my eyes against the taunting darkness and listened.
Listened…
Halls, landings, and staircases are the arteries and airways of any building. It’s here that everything is channeled. You get echoes of things currently going on in all the connecting rooms. Sometimes you also get other noises that, strictly speaking, ought not to be there at all. Echoes of the past, echoes of hidden things…
This was one such time.
I opened my eyes, picked up my bag, and walked slowly down the hall toward the stairs. Lockwood was already standing by the little polished table beneath the banister. His face shone dimly in the light from the door. “Heard something?” he said.
“Yep.”
“What?”
“A little knocking sound. Comes and goes. It’s very faint, and I can’t tell where it’s coming from. But it’ll get stronger—it’s scarcely dark yet. What about you?”
He pointed at the bottom of the steps. “You remember what happened to Mr. Hope, of course?”
“Fell down the stairs and broke his neck.”
“Exactly. Well, there’s a tremendous residual death-glow right here, still lingering three months after he died. I should’ve brought my sunglasses, it’s so bright. So what Mrs. Hope told George on the phone stacks up. Her husband tripped and tumbled down and hit the ground hard.” He glanced up the shadowy stairwell. “Long, steep flight… Nasty way to go.”
I bent low, squinting at the floor in the half-dark. “Yeah, look how the tiles have cracked. He must’ve fallen with tremendous f—”
Two sharp crashes sounded on the stairs. Air moved violently against my face. Before I could react, something large, soft, and horribly heavy landed precisely where I stood. The impact of it jarred my teeth.
I jumped back, ripping my rapier from my belt. I stood against the wall, weapon raised and shaking, heart clawing at my chest, eyes staring wildly side to side.
Nothing. The stairs were empty. No broken body sprawled lifeless on the floor.
Lockwood leaned casually against the banister. It was too dark to be certain, but I swear he’d raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t heard a thing.
“You all right, Lucy?”
I breathed hard. “No. I just got the echo of Mr. Hope’s last fall. It was very loud and very real. It was like he’d landed right on top of me. Don’t laugh. It’s not funny.”
“Sorry. Well, something’s stirring early tonight. It’s going to get interesting later. What time is it?”
Having a watch with a luminous dial is my third recommended rule. It’s best if it can also withstand sudden drops in temperature and strong ectoplasmic shock. “Not yet five,” I said.
“Fine.” Lockwood’s teeth aren’t quite as luminous as my watch, but when he grins, it’s close. “Plenty of time for a cup of tea. Then we find ourselves a ghost.”
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Laura Cecil, Delia Huddy, Alessandra Balzer, and Jonathan Burnham; to the late Rod Hall; and to everyone at Random House, Hyperion, and Miramax. And to Gina, most of all.
Endnotes
Alexandria: 125 B.C.
1 This was one of the peculiarities of their sect: they acted only when the moon was full. It made their tasks more difficult, their challenge greater. And they had never failed. Aside from this, they wore only black, avoided meat, wine, women, and the playing of wind instruments, and curiously ate no cheese save that made from the milk of goats bred on their distant desert mountain. Before each job they fasted for a day, meditated by staring unblinking at the ground, then ate small cakes of hashish and cumin seed, without water, until their throats glowed yellow. It’s a wonder they ever killed anyone.
2 All horrid and curved they were, filed sharp like eagles’ talons. The assassins took good care of their feet, because of their importance in their work. They were washed frequendy, rubbed with pumice, and marinated in sesame oil until the skin was soft as eiderdown.
3 The sect avoided perfumes for practical reasons, preferring to coat themselves with scents appropriate to the conditions of each job: pollen in the gardens, incense in the temples, sand-dust in the deserts, dung and offal in the towns. They were dedicated fellows.
4 I won’t say where he pulled it from. Let’s just say that the knife had hygiene issues as well as being quite sharp.
5 The Hermit of the Mountain trained his followers in numerous methods of foolproof murder. They could use garrotes, swords, knives, batons, ropes, poisons, discs, bolas, pellets, and arrows inimitably, as well as being pretty handy with the evil eye. Death by fingertip and toe-flex was also taught, and the furtive nip was a specialty. Stomach-threads and tapeworms were available for advanced students. And the best of it was that it was all guilt-free: each assassination was justified and condoned by a powerful religious disregard for the sanctity of other people’s lives.
6 And they didn’t intend to start now. The Hermit was known to be pretty sniffy about disciples who returned in failure. There was a wall of the institute layered with their skins—an ingenious display that encouraged vigor in his students, as well as nicely keeping out the drafts.
1
1 There was the time when a small section of Khufu’s Great Pyramid collapsed upon me one moonless night during the fifteenth year of its construction. I was guarding the zone that my group was working on, when several limestone blocks tumbled down from the top, transfixing me painfully by one of my extremities. Exactly how it happened was never resolved, though my suspicions were directed at myoId chum Faquarl, who was working with a rival group on the opposite side. I made no outward complaint, but bided my time while my essence healed. Later, when Faquarl was returning across the Western Desert with some Nubian gold, I invoked a mild sandstorm, causing him to lose the treasure and incur the pharaoh’s wrath. It took him a couple of years to sift all the pieces from the dunes.
2 The obvious solution would have been to change form—into a wraith, say, or a swirl of smoke, and just drift clear. But there were two problems. One: I found it hard to change shape these days, very hard, even at the best of times. Two: the considerable downward pressure would have blown my essence apart the moment I softened it to make the change.
3 Truer, anyway. At bottom, we are all alike in our seeping formlessness, but every spirit has a “look” that suits them, and which they use to represent themselves while on Earth. Our essences are molded into these personal shapes on the higher planes, while—on the lower ones—we adopt guises that are appropriate to the given situation. Listen, I’m sure I’ve told you all this before.
4 I’d have kneed him first, then stuck a w
ingtip in his eye, while kicking his shin for good measure. Much more effective. The techniques of these young djinn were so inefficient, it pained me.
5 Will-O’-the-wisps: small spirits who struggle to keep up with the times. Visible as flickering flames on the first plane (although revealed on others to be more like capering squid), wisps were once employed by magicians to lure trespassers off remote paths into pits or quags. Cities changed all that; urban wisps have now been forced into lurking over open manhole covers, to rather less effect.
3
1 When goaded into invoking the spell of Indefinite Confinement, magicians usually compress the spirit into the first object they spy close at hand. I once cheeked a master a little too cleverly during his afternoon tea; before I knew it I was imprisoned inside a half-filled pot of strawberry jam and would have remained there, possibly for all eternity, had not his apprentice opened it by mistake at supper that same evening. Even so, my essence was infested with sticky little seeds for ages after.
2 The afrit Honorius was a case in point: he went mad after a hundred years’ confinement in a skeleton. A rather poor show; I like to think with my engaging personality I could keep myself entertained a little longer than that.
3 It is a curious fact that, despite our fury at being summoned into this world, spirits such as I derive a good deal of retrospective satisfaction from our exploits. At the time, of course, we do our darnedest to avoid them, but afterward we often display a certain weary pride in the cleverest, bravest, or most jammy events on our resume. Philosophers might speculate this is because we are essentially defined by our experiences in this world, since in the Other Place we are not so easily individualized. Thus, those with long and glittering careers (e.g. me) tend to look down on those (e.g.Ascobol) whose names have been unearthed more recently, and haven’t amassed so many fine achievements. In Ascobol’s case, I also disliked him for his silly falsetto voice, which ill becomes an eight-foot cyclops.
4 Probably Germanic in origin—it involved nailing someone’s entrails to an oak tree.
5 We were, after all, slaves together; we had both suffered long at Mandrake’s hands. A bit of empathy would not, I think, have been out of place. But the imp’s long confinement had rather soured its worldview, which has happened to far better spirits than it over the years.
6 If memory serves, these included the case of the Afrit, the Envelope, and the Ambassador’s Wife; the affair of the Curiously Heavy Trunk; and the messy episode of the Anarchist and the Oyster. Mandrake nearly lost his life in all of those. As I say, none of them was of much interest.
7 To those of us abreast with human history, the cause of the latest war was drearily familiar. For years the Americans had refused to pay the taxes demanded of them by London. The British swiftly fell back on the oldest argument of all, and sent over an army to beat the colonists up. After initial easy victories, stagnation set in. The rebels retreated into thick woods, sending djinn out to ambush the advancing troops. Several prominent British magicians were killed; the Sixth and Seventh fleets were summoned from the China Seas to bolster the campaign—but still the fighting dribbled on. Months went by, the Empire’s strength was frittered away in the American wastes, and the repercussions resounded around the globe.
8 His chance came thanks to the war. The rebel guerrillas were causing the British army problems. After a year of attritional fighting the Foreign Minister, a certain Mr. Fry, visited the colonies secretly with a view to arranging a truce. Eight magicians watched him as he traveled; a host of horlas guarded his every step: the minister was invulnerable. Or so they thought. On his first night in Philadelphia he was treacherously slain by an imp concealed in his evening pie. Amid general outrage, the Prime Minister reshuffied his ministers, and Mandrake joined the ruling Council.
9 I’m stretching the term a bit here, I know. By now, in his mid to late teens, he might just about have passed for a man. When seen from behind. At a distance. On a very dark night.
10 Following the Roman tradition, the magicians sought to keep the people docile with regular holidays, in which free shows were put on in all the major parks. Lots of exotic beasts from across the Empire were displayed, as were minor imps and sprites allegedly “caught” during the war. Human prisoners were paraded along the streets, or enclosed in special glass viewing globes in the St. James’s Park pavilions for the populace to jeer at.
Alexandria: I26 B.C.
1 Note my restraint here. My standard of conversation was pretty high in those days, on account of conversing with Ptolemy. Something about him made you disinclined to be too vulgar, blasphemous, or impudent, and even made me rein in my use of estuary Egyptian slang. It wasn’t that he forbade any of it, more that you ended up feeling a bit guilty, as if you’d let yourself down. Harsh invective was a no-no, too. It’s surprising I had anything left to say.
2 Patently all lies. Especially the last bit.
3 Hathor: divine mother and protector of the newborn; djinn in her temples wore female guises with the heads of cattle.
4 He was a Ptolemy, too. As they all were, these kings of Egypt, for 200 years and more, one after the other until Cleopatra spoiled the run. Originality was not the family’s strong suit. Easy to see, perhaps, why my Ptolemy regarded names so casually. They meant little. He told me his the first time I asked him.
5 They came from his mother’s side, I guess. She was a native girl from upriver somewhere, a concubine in the royal apartments. I never saw her. She and his father died of plague before my time.
6
1 Owing to my weakness it didn’t make it across the pavement. But, boy, the gesture was savage.
2 All part of his attempt to appease the commoners, Mandrake had initiated a series of penny-dreadful pamphlets, which told heroic tales of British soldiers fighting in the American wilderness. A typical title was Real War Stories. They were illustrated by bad woodcuts and purported to be true accounts of recent events. Needless to say, the American magicians were savage and cruel, using the blackest magic and the most hideous demons. Conversely, the square-jawed Brits always insisted on good manners and fair play and invariably got out of scrapes by improvising homemade weapons from fence posts, tin cans, and pieces of string. The war was depicted as being both necessary and virtuous. It was the old, old story—I’ve seen imps carve similar claims on official stelae up and down the Nile delta, defending pharaohic wars. The people tended to ignore those too.
3 Too right he did. His birth name hung over his head like a naked sword.
9
1 Once, when I was employed by the Algonquin shamans, an enemy afrit came to our tribe by night and abducted a chief’s child. When the discovery was made, the afrit was far away; it had disguised itself as a buffalo cow, and spun a Glamour on the child, so it seemed a lowing calf. But afrits have fiery hooves: I followed the singed grass stalks for a hundred miles across the rolling prairie and slew the abductor with a silver spear. The child was returned alive, if a little green from eating so much grass.
2 It tends to be involuntary: i.e. when you hit them with a Detonation.
3 Atlas: a marid of unusual strength and muscular definition, employed by the Greek magician Phidias to construct the Parthenon, circa 440 B.C. Adas shirked the work and bodged the foundations. When cracks appeared, Phidias confined Adas below ground, charging him to hold the building up indefinitely. He may still be there, for all I know.
4 What made it worse was that it was a copy of Real War Stories that did the deed. Mandrake’s paper! Another injury to add to my list of his endless crimes.
5 Insert achievement of your choice from the following selection: (a) fought the utukku single-handed at the battle of Qadesh, (b) carved the great walls of Uruk from the living ground, (c) destroyed three consecutive masters by use of the Hermetic Quibble, (d) spoke with Solomon, or (e) other.
6 Not that I could do anything against him in my current state. At least, not alone. Certain djinn, Faquarl among them, had long espoused col
lective rebellion against the magicians. I’d always dismissed this as so much hogwash, impossible to achieve, but if Faquarl had come up to me with some boneheaded scheme right then, I’d have joined him with much high-fiving and inane whoops of joy.
7 The Pulse had the form of a small green-blue sphere, about the size of a marble, visible only on the seventh plane. It would meander at speed around the locale before returning to its sender. On its return its appearance indicated the level of magic it had discovered: green-blue meant the area was clear; yellow that a trace of magic existed; orange suggested strong enchantments, while red and indigo were my cue to make my excuses and head for the exit.
8 Or indeed by me. The battalions of imps I’d foced into my service had a frightful time, while I reclined in my hammock at a safe distance, gazing at the stars.
9 Lime! That’s the name I was searching for. The fish-faced man in the coffee shop had been one of the conspirators in the Lovelace affair five years before. If he was coming out of hiding suddenly, things were definitely hotting up.
10
1 In contrast to most of my master’s shoes, which just positively stank.
2 It must have been piping hot, too. Boy, he was tough.
3 Poor Truklet’s essence was meager fare. Ordinarily I’d have turned my nose up at it. But these were desperate times, and I needed all the energy I could get. Besides, the little swine was going to snitch me up.
4 It was going to be quite a wait. I should have bought him another coffee.
5 Some of the beauties were real people, though on the higher planes I spotted two who weren’t all they should have been: one an empty shell, solid at the front, hollow at the back; another a grinning foliot with spiny limbs concealed beneath its Glamour.