Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  The person who had touched him took its hand back, wiping its fingers on its coat with an expression of distaste, and turned to stalk away. Its companion put an arm around it, as if to comfort or reassure, and the two of them ignored Ruthven completely, heading on up the staircase as if the little encounter had never happened.

  The people around them didn’t seem to have noticed anything at all; nobody was pointing and staring at him, and while Ruthven would very much have liked to shout after the departing strangers “what the livid fuck was that about,” he didn’t particularly wish to die of embarrassment, and the latter took precedence.

  He looked down at himself. The place on his chest where the person had touched him looked perfectly normal: there was no scorch-mark on his shirt, no stain of any kind. There wasn’t any pain, either; when he prodded experimentally at the place, it didn’t feel bruised despite how hard that shove had been. Despite the shock.

  “What’s the matter?” said Grisaille behind him, and Ruthven jumped.

  “Where did you come from?—Never mind,” he added quickly, but Grisaille never, ever let an opportunity like that pass him by, and was already drawling, “Well, when a gentleman and a lady love each other very much…”

  “Shut up,” said Ruthven, but he couldn’t help a smile. Grisaille handed him the tiniest paper cup in the world, grinning back.

  “Espresso,” he said. “I thought you could use some extra energy, after all that shopping. At your age, one tires easily.”

  “You know perfectly well I’m only four hundred and thirty,” Ruthven said mildly. “But thank you.” In fact, the coffee did help clear the lingering unease from the earlier encounter: he felt better with the first sip, settled enough to mention it. “You don’t happen to know a pair of unspeakably beautiful twins who for some reason hate me, do you?”

  “That’s both peculiar and specific,” said Grisaille. “I think I need more information, although I am sure the list of people who hate you for having hair like yours is quite substantial. Why?”

  Ruthven told him what had happened while the two of them sat on the steps. Grisaille listened with first interest and then intensity, and when Ruthven got to the bit with the shock, his eyes narrowed. “Let me see.”

  “I’m fine,” said Ruthven, defensive. “It doesn’t hurt, it didn’t even leave a bruise—”

  “Let me see,” Grisaille repeated, and Ruthven sighed and undid the top button of his shirt despite the fact they were in public: he knew Grisaille wouldn’t let this go, either. He held still while Grisaille peered closely at the skin of his chest, touched the place gently with his fingertips. The dissonance between that careful touch and the stranger’s vicious shove made Ruthven close his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them Grisaille was looking at him with an expression he was not used to having directed at him: he knew quite well how it felt from the inside, sympathy and protection dissolving together into a vast wave of care.

  “I’m taking you back to the hotel,” Grisaille said, holding up a hand to stall Ruthven’s protestations that he was absolutely fine. “I’m tired myself, and I want to look up some things on the Internet, all right?”

  “I—” Ruthven stopped and sighed. It was strange to be looked at with that particular expression, and it was strange to be told what to do, and it was also rather lovely: the abdication of responsibility, being someone else’s problem for a while rather than his own. That aspect of being in a relationship didn’t pass him by without notice. “All right,” he said, and didn’t miss the flicker of worry that crossed Grisaille’s face at the capitulation. “I’ll be good. But I do want to go out tonight.”

  “Of course,” said Grisaille, “the dissolute nightlife of Rome is at our disposal.” He held out a hand to help Ruthven to his feet. “Untold perils haunt the streets, and so on.”

  “They’re not untold,” said Ruthven, and smiled for the first time in a while. “They’re us.”

  In the great library at Dark Heart, evening was drawing in. Varney had lit a fire in the hearth against the constant drawing dampness in the air; outside the vast windows, the parkland was smudged into a grey-green blur by the rain. This part of the house was still in reasonable shape, but the far wing nevertheless had a patchwork of tarpaulins and plywood over parts of the roof, and Varney fancied he could hear the strange jangling concerto of drips into the thousands of buckets arrayed beneath, like a thoroughly modern and unpleasant piano piece.

  He was on edge. The conversation he’d had with Nadezhda Serenskaya had been—encouraging, certainly, but he did not want to do what he was about to do for several reasons, and one of them was that he wasn’t sure he could pronounce all the words correctly.

  She’d given him a book and, humiliatingly, made him practice some of it, and judged him capable of performing the basic invocation it contained. “Better you should do it yourself,” she’d said, “than having me play metaphysical phone operator; and you’ll want privacy.”

  Now he took a deep, mostly unnecessary breath, and sighed it out. He picked up the piece of chalk she’d given him wrapped up in a silk handkerchief like a particularly valuable un-set stone, and—wincing at the necessity—began to draw a circle with it on the polished wood of his desktop. The chalk squealed thinly in his fingertips, making his teeth hurt, and he had to check with the book several times in the process of adding various small sigils to the rim of the circle.

  They looked all right, Varney thought, sitting back, and then bit the edge of his thumb; face slightly twisted in distaste at the mess, he dabbed blood at five points around the edge of the circle, saying one of the strange words from the book at each dab. As he did so, he was aware that something was happening; he could feel a sense of gathering charge in the air, like the atmosphere before a lightning-storm, the roots of his hair trying to stiffen. He had a nasty blank moment before the final word he needed to speak came back to him, and he said it slightly louder, slow, hoping he wasn’t somehow transposing syllables and calling down a plague of something other than just rain—and as soon as he had spoken the word, as soon as the last smudge of blood met the circle, an invisible shock-front raced outward from it like the pressure-wave ahead of an explosion. The flames in the fireplace blazed tall, roaring up the chimney; a quick flux of heat washed past him, and a hole opened up in the surface of Varney’s desk, through which the transparent, staticky, grey-glowing image of a man’s head rose.

  It was buzzing, indistinct; after a moment the head tilted as if its owner were tapping on something, and the focus shrank into sharpness. It appeared to be the head and shoulders of a dark-haired man in his fifties, wearing an impeccable double-breasted pinstripe suit. Varney had last seen this particular individual in Paris, this spring, under very peculiar circumstances indeed, although the current situation was fairly high on his list of peculiarities.

  “It’s el-epheth,” said the man in a cut-glass BBC accent, sounding brisk. “Not al-epheth, although it’s easy to get wrong. Hello, Sir Francis, what can I do for you? I’m a little busy at the moment, I’m afraid.”

  Varney couldn’t help remembering the first time he’d encountered the demon Fastitocalon, in the middle of the business with the Gladius Sancti: back then he’d been rather less self-possessed and rather more self-deprecating, as well as chronically ill. Now that the projection of his head had stabilized, he appeared to be in quite good shape.

  “Ah,” Varney said. “I’m sorry; I don’t have a great deal of practice. Miss Serenskaya strongly suggested I attempt to contact you myself, rather than having her open the connection. I, ah. I have something I should like to ask for your advice on, Fastitocalon.”

  Fastitocalon narrowed his eyes. In the projection he was totally black-and-white; Varney knew that in real life the eyes were occasionally slicked with a faint orange luster. “Yes?” he asked. “I can give you ten minutes. What’s on your mind?”

  Varney took another deep breath. “I’ve asked Greta Helsing to marry me,” he said, gla
d for once of his control over his voice: it sounded as graceful and mellifluous as he could make it. “And I should like to ask for your—blessing is the wrong word, approval, I suppose, and your advice on the design of the ring.”

  He had the pleasure of seeing Fastitocalon completely taken aback, just for a moment, and then the rather more significant pleasure of seeing him smile. “Goodness gracious me,” said the demon, “I wasn’t entirely sure if you’d ever get around to that; I’m terribly glad—she did say yes, did she?”

  “She did,” said Varney. It was impossible to hide the faint blush he could feel heating his face. “In a car, on the way to the airport—she’s in France again, but don’t worry, it’s—she’s over in some fancy resort for the undead gluing parts of mummies together, it’s quite safe,” he hastened to add. “I asked her if she liked diamonds and she said yes, she did, and I—don’t know quite what she’d like in a ring, and so I went to ask Miss Serenskaya and she said that nobody has known Greta longer than you have, so…”

  Fastitocalon’s smile was thin, but real and warm. It was true: Varney knew he’d been a friend of Greta’s father, Wilfert Helsing, and after his death had been the closest thing Greta had to family; had, in fact, taken it upon himself to watch over Greta and try to keep her safe. He’d been exiled to Earth sometime in the seventeenth century after a management shake-up in Hell, and had only just recently made his way back Below.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “To both of you. I’ve meant to be in closer touch with her, but this job’s taking up all my time, I’m afraid—Asmodeus left M&E in a hell of a state and there’s mounting evidence to suggest something rather larger than sheer incompetence has been going on for a while now—but never mind that. Do you intend to have something custom-made for her?”

  “Yes,” said Varney, “I was hoping to be able to put some of my, ah, hoard of jewels to constructive use. I’ve had them for centuries and they do nothing but take up space and need polishing, and some of them might or might not be cursed. A bit. I’m not sure.”

  “Well, we can easily check on that for you,” said Fastitocalon. “The jewelers of Dis are experts at identifying, tracing, and customizing curses, protective and otherwise. I have a meeting in five minutes, I’m afraid, but after that, if you’d like to come and chat with some of our people, I’d be happy to escort you.”

  “… to Hell,” Varney said, not quite sure how he felt about that. “I’m—damned. Aren’t I?” Several times over, he didn’t say, starting with the turning of Clara Crofton, centuries back. It was something he tried not to think about, but could never entirely forget.

  “To some extent all of us are,” said Fastitocalon. “As a guest, you won’t be set upon with pitchforks and torches, I can promise you that, and Sam is very much aware of how much you mean to Greta.”

  “And I’d be able to—leave, afterward?”

  Fastitocalon smiled. “I give you my word. Besides, I think you’d like Hell, at least the nice parts of it. Nor will visiting Hell do anything to your pneumic signature if you have a safe-conduct pass.”

  Two years ago Varney would have recoiled at the very thought of visiting the underworld, even if he’d thought such a thing was possible; he’d always known he was bound for Hell in the end, but he’d certainly had no desire to see what awaited him below. He had to smile back, a little. “Very well,” he said. “I confess the sin of curiosity.”

  “Jolly good,” said Fastitocalon. “I’ll be back in about two hours to fetch you, then. And congratulations again, Sir Francis. I’m so happy for you both.”

  He popped out of existence as if he had never been there at all, leaving only a faint wisp of smoke rising from the chalk circle on Varney’s desk; and when Varney wiped away the remains of the chalk, there wasn’t even a scorch-mark left.

  I’ll be back to fetch you, he thought, smiling at himself, thinking of all the dreadful plays in which the demon king waved his pitchfork at hapless idiots who had tricked themselves into trusting Hell. Varney had trusted Hell several times now, over the course of his acquaintance with Greta Helsing, and it had proven rather more worthy of that trust than had the world of men.

  He sat there for a few minutes, listening to the never-ending rain, and then wondered what one wore to harrow Hell these days, and went upstairs to change.

  Elsewhere, Greta Helsing was having rather a less exciting evening. She’d found it was actually hard to fall asleep without the constant hissing of the rain outside, no matter how tired she was; leaving the windows open to let the night breeze in brought with it the faint sounds of insects singing, leaves rustling, but not the familiar white noise of rainfall—and so she had brought an armful of reference books back to her private quarters to get some research done. She’d be awake until late, anyway, and the diagnostician in her was intensely curious about Maanakhtef’s symptoms.

  Sister Brigitte had looked briefly guarded, and then relieved, when Greta asked her about the strange episodes and what Dr. Kamal’s approach to them had been.

  “He’s not the only one, I’m afraid,” she said. “Poor Mr. Antjau had one not long ago, and—oh, several of our patients over the past two months, I should say. In most cases it’s been just a brief moment of weakness and vertigo, but some of them have been quite exhausting and traumatic to the patient. Dr. Kamal wanted those cases to stay on at the spa for further observation, but no one has ever had multiple episodes until Mr. Maanakhtef, and the other patients—” She shrugged, her white scrubs rustling, still reminding Greta of some kind of ceremonial garb. “It is… financially unsustainable for most of them to extend their stay with us for very long, I’m afraid.”

  “I know,” said Greta ruefully. “I’ve sent several patients to you, and it’s not cheap. It’s worth it, I know that, too. But Dr. Kamal hasn’t been able to work out what if anything the patients who experience these attacks have in common?”

  “Other than being mummies, very little,” said Sister Brigitte. “Different periods, different embalming practices, different origins—well, no, actually, several of them share tomb locations, but little else.”

  “They might be from the same cache,” said Greta. The thing about burying your dead with ceremony and care and a lot of very easily liquidated treasure was that you inevitably developed a problem with tomb robbers; the trade had flourished for as long as people had been building tombs to rob. Over the centuries, Egypt’s tomb robbers had looted thousands of burials, leaving the mummy behind and taking everything else they could carry and sell; these abandoned mummies were sometimes salvaged by priests and stored together in a secret cache to protect them from further desecration. It was a fortunate archaeologist indeed who happened to find one.

  She might look up cache locations, actually. “Could you remind me where the library is?”

  Sister Brigitte had shown her, and Greta had been pleasantly unsurprised yet again to find that Oasis Natrun had a very well-stocked catalog, including modern and historic volumes going back as long as the field of mummy medicine had been around. The field, at least in the West, was relatively new: there simply hadn’t been much call for it until the early eighteen-twenties, when the fad for mummy unwrapping as parlor entertainment began.

  Greta had treated several mummies who had actually been unwrapped back in the Victorian era, the shock and horror of it bringing them to consciousness for the first time in thousands of years, and could roundly sympathize with those of them who wanted revenge. Being a human was, in general, not a thing she thought one should be proud of.

  She was sitting now in the middle of the giant bed in her private quarters, the night breeze stirring her curtains gently, and reading Diseases of the Mummy, third edition, circa 1945. It was fascinating to see how the clinicians of the day had tackled—or not tackled—problems that she would have solved without thinking: at the time, tuberculosis chemotherapy was in its infancy, had only really begun in 1944, and the section of Diseases that included TB simply suggested treating
troublesome symptoms empirically and having somebody recite appropriate spells. She wondered what the authors of Diseases would have made of canopic teletherapy, and had to smile a little.

  Also: modern dental equipment, dual-cure resin, elastic that won’t go floppy or perish, 3-D printing, irradiation therapy for fungal infection, and a much better grasp of what spells and how to pronounce them, she thought. It was a pretty good time to be a mummy specialist, even if you did have to deal with the nagging background tomb-robbing species guilt.

  None of this was helping solve her current problem, though. She did find some references to vertigo in mummies, but all of them seemed to involve loose dried-up fragments of brain or linen packing shifting around inside the skull and causing discomfort and disorientation, and Greta knew Ed Kamal would have ruled that out first of all. It was easy enough to see inside somebody’s head with the 3-D spiral multi-slice CT scanner, even if they were still inside layers and layers of linen wrappings, and a piece of loose desiccated brain tissue would have been obvious. Nor could there have been anything else in the skull that would suddenly start to cause disturbances, she thought; practically nothing would be able to get in there without the patient at least noticing it on the way.

  Ew. She sighed, put the book down, picked up another. The idea that—how many was it, anyway, had Sister Brigitte actually given her a total number of incidents—the idea that a lot of mummies should suddenly develop some kind of intracranial foreign body without noticing was ridiculous. It wasn’t mechanical, whatever it was.

  Nor was it pathological, or at least she didn’t think so. Mummies weren’t really susceptible to pathogens except fungal infections; any diseases they had were ones they’d had as living people, like Mr. Antjau’s case of antibiotic-naive TB, and most of those were barely symptomatic other than inflammatory arthritis. Dry rot, yes, and infestations of various unpleasant kinds, but a mummy didn’t have a circulatory system to speak of—sure, the heart was there, the heart was of paramount importance to the ancient Egyptians, but the rest of the big veins were completely missing and therefore hemodynamic instability was completely ruled out as a cause of syncope… what else could possibly cause fainting, anyway… you couldn’t have insufficient blood flow to the brain without blood or brains to do it with… this didn’t make any sense…