The Affair of the Mysterious Letter

by Alexis Hall

  Miss Viola attempted to supply her with the offending document, but Ms. Haas waved it away. So I stepped forward and took it instead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Second Letter

  To the Lady Eirene Viola Delhali, daughter of the late Count of Hyades,

  I told you not to test me.

  I have been reasonable so far, but if you do not break off your engagement to Miss Cora Beck immediately I will be forced to take action on your behalf.

  Be assured my knowledge of your affairs is intimate. I know, for example, that two days ago you took Miss Beck to the Lake of Stars in Little Carcosa. You put your arms around her and showed her your favourite constellations in the dim waters.

  This is your final warning.

  I hold your future in my hands.

  “Tell me you didn’t.” Ms. Haas draped her wrist despairingly across her brow. “I’ve never heard anything so cloyingly sentimental.”

  Miss Viola snatched up the untouched cup of tea from the foot of the chaise and upended its contents over Ms. Haas’s head. She then emphasised her displeasure by flinging the now empty receptacle into the fireplace. “Just because you have never cared for anything or anybody, that doesn’t mean you—oh, what’s the use.”

  “If this is what caring leads to”—Ms. Haas settled herself more comfortably as the beverage soaked gradually into the chaise—“I want no part of it. What happened to you, Eirene? We used to do such extraordinary, remarkable, terrible things together. And now you’re canoodling with a fishmonger in front of a magic pond moping about your lost homeland.”

  “Because it’s so much more glamorous to live in a dingy set of rooms you rent from a swarm of sentient insects and share with a complete stranger because nobody who has known you for more than six months can stand your company, and to spend your days drugged out of your mind on a dirty sofa because you can’t bear to be alone with the cacophony of demons you call your thoughts?”

  A smile curled the corners of Ms. Haas’s lips. “I’m starting to remember why I liked you.”

  “Should we,” I suggested, “perhaps turn our attention to what we may deduce from the contents of this latest communication?”

  Miss Viola subsided into one of the wingbacks. “I hate the idea that someone’s watching me.”

  “On the contrary”—Ms. Haas at last deigned to sit to upright—“I believe you can take enormous comfort in it. Our previous difficulty has been that your enemy gave us scant indication of his, her, their, zir, or its methodology or capabilities. But the means by which an entity observes another entity can be most revealing.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “We have three suspects remaining. One is a mortal woman from the professional classes, one a vampire, and the last a former aristocrat turned party loyalist in a shadow-haunted otherworld. While any one of them might employ anonymous notes as a means of coercion, the resources and strategies that they would have available for the undertaking of surveillance are quite different. Eirene, have you happened to observe anything suspicious of late?”

  The sound Miss Viola uttered at that juncture was perilously close to a snort. “I know you think I’ve lost my touch, but I would have noticed if I had a byakhee following me while I go shopping for hats.”

  “Gods,” sighed Ms. Haas, “your life has become so bourgeois. Of course, the absence of cadaverous, bat-winged, mole-faced vulture-beasts doesn’t rule out a Carcosan connection entirely. I’m sure your former fiancé has the resources to hire mortal agents as he wishes. But what of—?”

  “No, I haven’t seen any wolves, bats, ravens, or mysterious and unseasonable mist trailing after me either.”

  “Still, I assume the Contessa has tasted your blood. Then again, haven’t we all?”

  Miss Viola lifted a brown glass bottle, mostly denuded of laudanum, from the side table but appeared to think better of throwing it. “Your point being?”

  “That such connections can be used to spy upon a person’s thoughts and may, depending on the Contessa’s precise nature, provide her with sufficient power over you as to thwart even the protections of the Mocking Realm. Have you experienced any strange presences in your dreams or an unaccountable sense of being spied upon?”

  “I’m Carcosan. There are always strange presences in my dreams.”

  “Not helpful.” Ms. Haas began refilling her pipe. “Which means we shall simply have to continue as planned.”

  “You mean I’m just supposed to sit here and hope whoever this is doesn’t ruin my life while you’re continuing as planned.”

  “Eirene, my dear, when you brought this case to me I developed a stratagem. This new information has not allowed me to formulate a superior alternative. Therefore, I shall carry on exactly as I am.”

  Miss Viola rolled her eyes. “We’ll carve that on your tombstone. But what am I to do?”

  “If you must do something, then I suggest you take Miss Beck away for a while. Removing yourself from your usual haunts may make it harder for this blackmailer to follow you.”

  It seemed an eminently sensible suggestion to me, but Miss Viola did not look reassured. “You’re using me as bait again, aren’t you?”

  “Amongst other things.” Ms. Haas issued forth a stream of smoke. “A change of scenery would clearly do you good and if your nemesis proves able to track you no matter where you go that will tell us more about their capabilities. You should also have ample opportunity to indulge your new fondness for holding hands in twee environments. It’s a win-win.”

  “Cora’s going to Aturvash on business next week. I suppose I could go with her.”

  Ms. Haas curled her lip contemptuously. “Charming though I find the idea of you taking a walking tour of a salt mine, I think you’d be better off if you were both somewhere less expected. With a little more time, I’m sure we’ll find whoever is sending these letters, but blackmailers are fundamentally cowardly creatures. And if this person fears exposure, they may decide to intervene with Miss Beck directly, in which case it would be awfully convenient if she was hard to contact.”

  “Shaharazad,” protested Miss Viola, “I can’t just yank my fiancée away from her duties until this all gets sorted out.”

  “Well, you could tell her the truth instead, but I thought the whole point of this exercise was to avoid that.”

  “And of course she won’t get at all suspicious if I turn up tomorrow saying, ‘Darling, I’ve had a wonderful idea, let’s take a spontaneous holiday of indefinite duration and not tell anybody where we’re going.’”

  “Eirene, my dear, I have absolute faith in your talent for duplicity.” Ms. Haas flicked ash casually over the back of the chaise longue. “Now go take the fishmonger somewhere fun. I hear the City of Blood and Glass is wonderful during the current astrological configuration.”

  Miss Viola departed soon after and I, leaving my companion fully insensible in the sitting room, was obliged to make my way rather unsteadily in to work. It was not my finest eight hours of labour, since not only had I scarcely slept the night before but my mind was abuzz with the new and mysterious possibilities laid out before us in the latest missive. And indeed in my fatigued state I indulged in several rather fanciful speculations about the blackmailer’s possible identity, although as it transpired not even my wildest imaginings came close to the remarkable truth of the situation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mr. Percy Lutrell

  The next few days passed quietly. I ran the same tests on the second letter as I had run on the first and came to the same conclusions: that it had been touched by nobody save Miss Viola and myself, Ms. Haas on this occasion having avoided contact with it entirely. The paper and ink were of the same stock as those used previously and still offered no insight into the nature or origins of the writer. Now that the excitement of our recent adventures had subsided,
I became conscious of some doubt regarding our ability to bring this matter to a swift and satisfactory conclusion. Ms. Haas, for her part, spent the time engaged in sundry activities, many of which did not seem directly applicable to the task at hand, but which also included researches into the life and habits of our next suspect, Mrs. Yasmine Benamara.

  In the years since her affaire de coeur with Miss Viola, Mrs. Benamara had achieved some notability as a poet in her own right. Her first volume, Two Parts of the Moon, was well received amongst the literary set in Khel and Athra, or as well received as any such work can be, which is to say it was condemned as reactionary by progressives and as immoral by traditionalists. She was also in the habit of hosting regular literary salons to which she would invite that particular class of intellectual neither too high born nor too high minded to attend upon a barrister’s wife. Unusually, this was a social circle to which I, as a varsity man from no especially exalted background, had greater access than Ms. Haas, who had no time whatsoever for the lives and interests of ordinary people. I was in the process of reaching out to see if any of my university friends might have crossed paths with Mrs. Benamara when Ms. Haas, never overendowed with patience, elected to expedite the situation.

  My first inkling as to her preferred methodology came when I arrived home one evening to discover a strange gentleman in the sitting room. He was a little taller than I, thin lipped and white haired, with a faint hunch to his shoulders. His demeanour managed at once to be unprepossessing and judgemental.

  I eyed the stranger in some consternation. “I beg your pardon. Are you waiting for Ms. Haas?”

  “On the contrary,” he returned, in a voice that aspired to both aristocracy and authority, achieving neither, “I am waiting for you. We have secured an invitation to Mrs. Benamara’s salon and you are to change and come with me directly.”

  “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me, sir.”

  “My name is Percy Lutrell. I am the literary critic for The Esoteric Review.”

  “That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here or why you’re waiting for me personally.”

  Mr. Lutrell raised a meagre crescent moon of an eyebrow. “You appear to be an intelligent man, Mr. Wyndham. Surely you can work that out for yourself.”

  Ordinarily, I would have had no inclination to play such a game with a total stranger who had appeared out of nowhere in my sitting room. But my brief acquaintance with the sorceress Shaharazad Haas had somewhat eroded my sense of normalcy. “I am certain I have no idea. I can think of no reason that a celebrated literary critic in the employ of a respectable periodical would have any connection with myself or Ms. Haas.”

  “Then begin from there.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “You have said yourself that it seems highly improbable that a celebrated literary critic in the employ of a respectable periodical would have any connection with you or Ms. Haas. Yet here I stand. What may you conclude from that?”

  I considered it a moment. “That something very improbable has occurred or that you are not, in fact, a celebrated literary critic in the employ of a respectable periodical.”

  “Bravo, Captain.” Mr. Lutrell disposed himself with disconcerting languor upon the chaise longue. “So who am I?”

  “I haven’t the faintest—”

  The interloper raised an impatient finger. “None of that, if you please.”

  It was becoming rapidly apparent to me that I was being toyed with, which was, in itself, something of a giveaway. “Madam,” I said, “this is most inappropriate. Personating others by sorcery is monumentally illegal for a variety of very good reasons.”

  Mr. Lutrell’s image shimmered in a fashion familiar from my misadventure at Mise en Abyme, and when I was able to focus again I saw Ms. Haas’s laughing face before me. “Come now. If we didn’t do things simply because they were illegal we’d get nothing done whatsoever.”

  I am afraid I responded to that suggestion a little sharply. “I have managed quite well these past seven and twenty years.”

  “Not the best example, Mr. Wyndham. You were a child for half of them, which hardly counts. And, as for the rest, they were spent severally under the reign of a charming but, even I will admit, tyrannical sorcerer king, then under the more evenhanded but no less draconian rule of the Lord Protector of Ey, and, of course, most recently you have been in a lightless nonspace beyond reality where the very concept of a functioning legal system is just one of the many abstractions that the Empress of Nothing seeks daily to devour into unmaking. Bless her.”

  Over the entire course of our acquaintance I can recall two and a half occasions on which Ms. Haas allowed another person to have the last word in an argument. This was not one of them and I conceded the point as gracefully as I was able. In truth she had reminded me that these matters were more complex than I am entirely comfortable to own. Although in Khelathra-Ven I have endeavoured always to conduct myself in accordance with the ordinances of the city, the fact remains that there are parts of this world in which the laws of the land are not acceptable to me, and I not acceptable to them.

  “Are you absolutely certain,” I asked, “that this is the most effective way to proceed?”

  Ms. Haas stifled a yawn behind her hand. “It’s the least tedious way to proceed. And also the one that gives Mrs. Benamara the least room for evasion or deception.”

  “And the risk of being arrested and hanged?”

  “That’s precisely what makes it so much less tedious than the other options.”

  I was, by now, beginning to understand a little of my companion’s manner and was able to discern with some reliability when she was being sincere, when she was amusing herself, and when she was merely intending to provoke a reaction. In this case, her remark fell somewhere between the second and third categories. As such, I saw little purpose in pressing the issue. “Do we have an actual plan?”

  “Certainly.” She sounded faintly affronted. “We shall attend the salon in the guise of Mr. Lutrell and his faithful secretary. That’s you. Then I’ll draw the suspect aside in order to ask her some questions about her latest work and use my art, guile, and intense personal charisma to lead her into confessing any role she might have had in the blackmailing of Eirene.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a plan, so much as a sequence of conversations with tremendous scope to go wrong.”

  She rose imperiously from the chaise. “I am the sorceress Shaharazad Haas. I never go wrong. I merely achieve things in a manner I had not intended.”

  And so it was that Ms. Haas, glamoured into the appearance of Mr. Lutrell, and I, not glamoured into anything, made our way to the docks.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Khelathran Strait

  The Benamaras, who it appeared had remained married despite the unfortunate incident involving Mrs. Benamara and Miss Viola, lived in a fishing village turned suburb named Ecet’s Cove. As the great city of Khelathra-Ven had expanded over the years, it had swallowed a variety of such settlements, incorporating them in a manner that it would be falsehood to describe as seamless into its ever-growing conurbation. Although the coastal suburbs could be accessed by road from the centre of Khel and would make for a pleasant carriage journey, they were most conveniently accessed through use of one of the many barges that plied the waters of the Khelathran Strait. I had lived in such an area for six months during my time at university, when I stayed in a cellar room in a house that I shared with four other students. It was swelteringly hot in summer and freezing in winter, and the kitchen was invariably a nightmare of used crockery and absent cutlery. Nevertheless, the beauty of the location made up for the privations of the accommodations and the impracticality of the commute.

  The vessel we boarded on this occasion was operated by an extravagantly dressed woman with mechanical eyes and towed by some mysterious leviathan discernible only by the occasio
nal glimpse of a many-hued fin breaking the water’s surface. Our journey took us eastwards, away from the Rose Gold Bridge and beneath the steel skeleton of the half-constructed railway line that enterprising Athran industrialists hoped would one day allow passengers to travel between the northern and southern cities in a matter of minutes, weather and labour disputes permitting. Given the history of similar projects I was not myself optimistic. A short while later we passed the Isle of the Dead, that ancient necropolis where once the god-kings of Khel had been interred under the watchful eye of Anu, Lord of the Underworld, and which was now home to the headquarters of the Ossuary Bank, reputed to be the most influential financial organisation in six worlds. The countinghouse itself sat atop the great cliff that occupied much of the island and, in the last rays of sunlight, one could just about make out the vast effigies of Anu and Amn carved into the unforgiving rock by hands long stilled and forgotten.

  I turned to my companion, only momentarily disconcerted to discover that she was Percy Lutrell. “It’s a pity, is it not,” I remarked, “that so sacred a monument is now the abode of commerce, necromancy, and usury?”

  “To me it seems rather appropriate. The old gods were always transactional beings. You give this sacrifice for that favour. Make these offerings for those blessings. At least the bankers are honest about it.”

  “But is there not value in the things we create in honour of something greater than ourselves?”

  Mr. Lutrell stroked his chin pensively. “My good man, in all the universe there are two sorts of gods: those that are like us and those that are not. Those that are like us are no better than we are. And those that are not are infinitely worse.”

  “It’s not the gods themselves, Ms. Ha— Mr. Lutrell. It’s the ideals they stand for.”