The Mongolian Wizard Stories

by Michael Swanwick

  He could not help reflecting that it was a pity Shulamith was in the room with him. It would have been far nobler to die alone.

  Then the cloth exploded beneath his hands, knocking him backwards into the water trough and unconsciousness.

  * * *

  “So!” Sir Toby said. “Awake at last. You were doubly lucky. First that the blast knocked you back into the water trough, and then that your wolf came and dragged you out of it before you drowned.”

  “Not . . . luck. Freki was trained to do that. To rescue me from . . . from fires and such.” Ritter’s entire body hurt horribly. “Am I dying?”

  With an explosive guffaw, Sir Toby said, “You should be, sir! You should be! Half-drowned, half-burnt, and filled to the tits with bubonic plague. There are not ten wizards in the world who could have regrown those hands of yours. You are damned lucky that I had access to two of them.”

  “Thank you,” Ritter rasped. “I think.” Then, “Did Miss Rosenberg . . .”

  Sir Toby lost all his jollity in an instant. Somberly, he said, “No. But our forensic magicians believe she died more or less instantly, if that’s of any consolation.”

  A wash of self-revulsion overcame Ritter. He had known that Shulamith was dead. Of course she was dead. It was weakness on his part to have asked. Disciplining himself to rise above his own petty concerns, he said, “And the king?”

  “The grieving widower,” Sir Toby replied, “dressed in austere black, addressed a joint meeting of both houses of Parliament. He dismissed the loss of his wife in a sentence. He spoke of the darkness rising in the East. He pledged himself to the cause of civilization and promised to pay any price, bear any burden, suffer any loss in order to preserve the freedoms we hold so dear. It was the most god-awful melodramatic claptrap imaginable. But it worked. Our nation is now officially at war with the Mongolian Wizard’s empire of evil.”

  “You wrote the speech yourself.” Ritter knew this for a fact.

  “Yes, I did. Now sleep. The alchemist’s report tells me that your system has been cleansed of disease, and your doctors say you have every chance of recovery. Sleep. Tomorrow will be a better day.”

  Ritter tried to respond to this cascade of information seriously, as a man of consequence should. But he could feel the bed falling underneath him as he himself was falling into sleep and oblivion and his adult persona did not seem to be accessible. All that he found within himself was the long-ago boy who had once thought that it would be grand fun to be a soldier. “This has not been a very satisfactory adventure,” he managed at last to say.

  “No, it has not. But it could have turned out worse.”

  * * *

  Ritter emerged from rehab leaning heavily on a cane which, he had been assured, was only temporary. It was astonishing what the human body could accomplish when it had access to the very best medical magic in Europe.

  The first thing he did was to drop by Sir Toby’s offices in the Palace of Whitehall. There he learned that the elusive Gregori Pinski had been apprehended in Dover while trying to book passage out of the country. “Our best interrogators are questioning him now,” Sir Toby said.

  “If I were to plant a saboteur in my enemy’s capital, I should take great care that he know as little information useful to my enemy as possible.”

  “That is indeed my policy as well,” Sir Toby said. “But it can do no harm to try. Now let me look at you! Thin as a rail, pale as an Eskimo, and weak as my grandfather a month after he died. You are immensely improved.”

  “I am ready to return to work.”

  “Then work you we shall! There is much to be done. But not today. Today you must have a stroll in the park, eat a good dinner, and go to sleep early in your own comfortable bed. Come by tomorrow, and I will have something for you to do.”

  The spymaster went to his desk.

  “Incidentally,” Sir Toby said, “despite the devastation you wreaked on its top floor, much of the Rosenberg house survived. This was among the evidence we seized. I doubt anybody would object to your keeping it.” He handed Ritter a small framed crayon portrait of Shulamith Rosenberg.

  “A portrait of the Jewess? Why would I want such a thing?” Ritter said angrily.

  “I just thought you might.”

  Putting an arm over his shoulder, Sir Toby led Ritter to the door.

  Yet when he had dropped Freki off at the kennel and gone back home to his flat, Ritter found himself almost mechanically hammering a nail into the wall and hanging the portrait upon it. Strange how the picture gathered the emptiness of the wall around itself and made all of the room look as spare and devoid of character as Pinski’s had. Why had he never hung any pictures before this?

  Ritter sat down in a chair and rested his cane across his knees. He stared at Shulamith’s pale face and dark hair for a long time in silence, and then he burst into tears.

  Day of the Kraken

  On a cold and misty morning during the Phony War, that strange period when Britain was officially at war with the Mongolian Wizard’s empire but no serious military engagements had yet taken place, Sir Tobias Willoughby-Quirke and his attaché, Kapitänleutnant Franz-Karl Ritter, stood on a dock on the Thames, watching a boatload of watermen hauling a wood-and-metal chest from the water’s depths. The diver who had attached a line to the chest huddled in the rear of the boat under several blankets.

  “How was it found?” Ritter asked. His wolf, Freki, sat, quiet and alert, at his feet.

  “By sheerest chance,” Sir Toby said. “The men who dropped it in the river were overseen by some mudlarks.”

  “Mudlarks!” Ritter exclaimed in astonishment. “Those ragged children who scrounge about in the tidal filth, looking for scrap metal?”

  “Indeed. It has been one of my little projects to befriend such creatures. A few loaves of bread a month will buy many sharp eyes among the poor. They followed the two men and, although they lost one in the crowds, trailed the other to his lodgings. Knowing I will pay for such information, they then came to me. I sent an agent to interrogate the fellow who, rather than face questioning, blew his own brains out. Which roused my suspicions considerably.”

  At last, the trunk was wrestled to solid ground. The workers looked relieved to be done with it. “Maybe you want to call in the bomb squad, sir,” one of them said to Sir Toby. “Might well be anything in it.”

  “I do not think that is necessary,” Ritter said. Pulling his pistol, which he always kept primed and loaded, from its holster in one smooth motion, he touched the muzzle to the lock and pulled the trigger.

  With a loud explosion, bits of metal went flying.

  Ritter threw back the top of the chest. Inside were pale spheroids, perhaps a foot across, coated with transparent slime. “Kraken’s eggs,” he said. “Had they been left undiscovered, in six months’ time the river would be infested with the monsters, and London would be worthless as a harbor.”

  Turning to the watermen, who were looking understandably alarmed, Sir Toby boomed, “Splendid work, all of you! You have my permission to tell your wives and girlfriends that you are the saviors of your city and entitled to such rewards as women traditionally endow upon heroes.” This caused several craggy faces to crack into smiles. One of the men laughed out loud. Sir Toby dug out his wallet and handed several bills to their captain. “You’re also entitled to a drink or two, at my expense.”

  This last earned Sir Toby a heartfelt cheer. Smiling jovially, he watched the men pile back into their boat, push off, and wave as they headed downriver toward the taverns. Then he turned to his attaché and said, “What chunderheaded notion was that? You almost frightened those poor men out of their wits. Half of them were convinced the chest contained explosives.”

  “When on duty, a portion of my thought is always inside Freki’s mind. He could smell the chest’s contents quite distinctly. There was no possibility of an explosion.”

  “Ritter,” Sir Toby said, “there are times when I think that, save for your ignora
nce of human behavior and utter lack of humor, you have the makings of a first-rate aide.”

  “I have an excellent sense of humor,” Ritter said indignantly.

  “Have you really? I must remember to have you tell a joke someday in order to test this hypothesis. For now, I want you to stand guard over the chest while I arrange for a wagon to transport it to the armory. Then report to my office. Things are quiet today, but the saboteurs will strike again and in a completely different manner.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s what I would have them do, were they mine.”

  When the kraken’s eggs had been disposed of, Ritter decided to return to work the long way around. He stopped in a tobacconist’s and, after a leisurely inspection of the wares, bought a package of cheroots. Then he sauntered onward to a pie shop to buy some pork pasties for lunch and dropped by a butcher’s for meat scraps, which Freki received with great enthusiasm. It was only when he reached his ultimate destination that he discovered he had chosen the wrong day for so leisurely a stroll.

  The War Office had lent Sir Toby temporary facilities, so Ritter was not surprised to find the anteroom thronged with military men in a variety of uniforms. But there were also civilians, weeping women and choleric men loudly demanding a variety of actions, the sense of which Ritter could not untangle from the snarl of voices. On seeing him, Sir Toby’s long-suffering secretary Willice—lean, clad in black, and almost genderless—looked relieved and, without having to be asked, said, “The Mongolian Wizard is advancing on Berlin with giants and flights of wyverns. Meanwhile . . . oh, go in, just go in! Sir Toby will explain all,” and waved him into the office, slamming the door after him.

  Sir Toby looked up from his famously disorganized desk. “Ritter! Where in the name of Cernunnos have you been? Don’t answer that. Our saboteurs have been busy. Five children—all girls—were abducted from public spaces this morning, one after another. In each case, their guardians were with them, yet inexplicably allowed the children to be dragged into a carriage without taking action.” He took a map of London from a drawer and drew five crosses on it. “These are the locations of the crimes. Do you see the pattern?”

  “They are strangely evenly spaced—perhaps points on a circle?” Ritter said dubiously. Then, mentally drawing lines between noncontingent crosses: “Ah! It’s a pentagram.”

  “An inverted pentagram. Imagine a circle around it and you’ve got a pentangle. Imagine a second circle just outside the first and you have the Sigil of Baphomet. Which means—?” Sir Toby pursed his mouth and raised his eyebrows, as if he were a schoolmaster coaxing along one of his slower students.

  “Human sacrifice. But this is monstrous.” Unlike wizardry, demonology was mere superstitious nonsense. Any amount of research had gone into demonstrating that it simply did not work. “Who would even think of such a thing? What would be the point?”

  “Ah. Now we came to the nub of the matter.” Sir Toby produced a band of scarlet silk perhaps two feet long, with embroidered gold crosses and gold tassels to either end. “At the last and I believe final abduction, this was left behind. Perhaps you can identify it.”

  After a perfunctory examination, Ritter said, “It is a maniple, a vestment draped over the priest’s left arm during the Mass. Roman Catholic, obviously—an Anglican one would be longer. The color is reserved for certain feast days, including those of martyrs and of the Holy Innocents. Surely you don’t imagine a prince of the Church was careening through London in full liturgical garb, kidnapping children off the street. The very idea is preposterous.”

  “You do not understand mob psychology. When the girls’ bodies are found, ritually murdered upon a Catholic altar, no one will be thinking logically. There will be riots. Churches will burn. This can only be intended to create religious strife at a time when national unity is of the utmost importance. You must find these fiends, Ritter. Rescue the children if it is not too late. But whatever you do, unmask the men behind this conspiracy as foreign agents. Do it today.”

  Ritter’s mind was racing. If this was the work of the kraken-spawn saboteurs, then their base of operations would not be far from the river. “I will need a list of all vacant or abandoned buildings with Catholic associations within a half mile of the Thames.”

  Sir Toby lifted a handwritten sheet from the top of the heap and handed it to Ritter. “Go.”

  The first thing Ritter did, after contracting for a day’s hire of a carriage (for which he was not at all certain he would be reimbursed), was to return to his flat and change into civilian clothing. Then he began systematically visiting the buildings Sir Toby had listed for him, examining the premises and interviewing the neighbors. It was slow work because occasionally he had to break into a building to be sure it was uninhabited. But he controlled his impatience and schooled himself to examine each site punctiliously, lest he overlook some vital clue.

  As twilight was settling over the city, Ritter checked off the last place on his list. Bitter disappointment welled up within him, but he fought it down. Instead, he went over the list of former abbeys, deconsecrated churches, the chapel of a mansion fallen to ruin, and suchlike, mentally revisiting each to see if he could possibly have missed anything.

  Two items from the end of the list, he came to something that stopped him cold. “Driver,” Ritter said. “Did we visit a onetime Thames Millbank Priory?”

  “Yes, sir. Not long back, that was.”

  “Odd. I have no memory of it at all.”

  “Well, sir, I’m not surprised. You come back from it looking right dazed, if you know what I mean. I ’ad to ask you three times where we was to go next.”

  “Interesting,” Ritter said. “Bring me back there. But this time pause the carriage a block or so away, and keep a sharp eye on me.”

  The Thames Millbank Priory was a squat medieval building of no particular beauty which had at one point served as a brewery before falling vacant. Ritter hammered on its front door. At first there was no response. But just as he was reaching for his lockpicks, a middle-aged woman in what appeared to be the habit of a nun opened the door. Her features were sharp and her grey eyes widened for an instant at the sight of him. “Yes?”

  “Good evening, madam. My name is Ritter and I have been commissioned by a German gentleman of rank to locate his runaway daughter. I have traced her to this neighborhood and so I am going door to door—”

  “No one here will talk with you.”

  “Perhaps—”

  “Go away.” The woman closed the door in his face.

  Without the least hesitation, Ritter went away.

  “Sir! Sir! Wake up, sir!”

  Groggily, Ritter looked about himself. His driver was shaking him, and he had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there. The last he remembered, he was at the priory door. Now, inexplicably, he was blocks away.

  “Let me give you an arm back into the carriage, sir,” the driver said.

  Seizing control of himself, Ritter shook his head. “Open the door to let my wolf out, and then you can leave. I have no further need of your vehicle.” He dug two shillings from his pocket. “Take these. The first is in thanks for your bringing me back to myself. The second is payment for one last errand. Go back to where you picked me up and ask for Sir Toby. Tell him to come at once to the Thames Millbank Priory with every man he has.”

  When the carriage was gone, Ritter went into a candle shop and bought a penny’s worth of beeswax. He kneaded it in his hands as he walked back to the priory, until it was soft enough to form into a pair of earplugs. thus rendering him immune to the mental arts of the sorceress— for what else could she be?—inside. Then he led Freki around the back of the building.

  Though the priory-turned-brewery had long been neglected, even in decrepitude it was sturdily built and would have been difficult to break into. But all the glass in one of its small windows had recently been smashed—shards lay on the ground below it—and a thick oaken door had been left u
nlocked.

  Warily, Ritter pushed it open.

  The room inside must have originally been the kitchen. There was an enormous fireplace to one side and the walls joined overhead in stone vaulting. It had been emptied of everything flammable, save for a carefully constructed pile of old parchment record books, a loosely folded and dry-as-dust tapestry, and broken-up wooden barrels directly beneath the smashed window. Nearby were two metal canisters. Ritter did not need Freki’s keen sense of smell to tell him that they contained naphtha, doubtless intended as an accelerant.

  It would take but an instant to douse the pile with naphtha and start a fire that would bring the entire neighborhood running, without doing any serious damage to the building itself. Once the neighbors were inside, something—were he one of the saboteurs, Ritter would employ an artfully laid trail of blood—would draw them farther in. To discover . . .

  Ritter focused his thought on Freki’s sensorium. From deep within the building came sounds of people working quietly. And beyond them, of children weeping. All else was silent.

  At an unvoiced command, Freki padded softly forward. Ritter followed him down twisty corridors to a chapel. Inside were two men and a woman, all on their knees, busily painting an elaborate pentagram on the floor before the altar, with the names of demons and popes in dog-Latin around the outside of its double circle and between the points of the star.

  Ritter drew his pistol and said, “You are all under arrest.”

  The saboteurs looked up, startled. The woman’s eyes darted from Ritter to his wolf. He had just enough time to realize that the shapeless black dress and headpiece-like kerchief she wore were not a nun’s habit, though clearly they were meant to be remembered as such by anybody who might catch of glimpse of her, when she said, “Freeze. The both of you.”