by Adam Millard
Mordecai placed his glass down upon a stack of papers and stood, clapping his hands together enthusiastically. “Fantastic,” he said. “Well, that’s saved a lot of boring nonsense. You have no idea how much I hate the sound of my own voice.”
Abigale’s head rolled back. For a split-second, she thought she was going to fall unconscious again, but she managed to compose herself. She had to. Something very wrong was happening to her. It would do her no good to miss it.
“What is…this?” she said. She was standing, she realised, tied to a board as if she were one of those scantily clad women whose job it was to remain very still lest they take a knife to the face. Abigale was more than a little relieved to see that Mordecai didn’t have any knives on his desk.
“Well, this is necessary,” Mordecai said. “Completely, utterly, inevitably necessary. I’m afraid that we might have gone a little over the top with our methods, but it’s of the utmost importance that we have your full cooperation in this matter.” He paused, stepping closer to Abigale. The nutty scent intensified, and Abigale held her breath in an attempt to prevent soiling Mordecai Pick’s luscious carpet.
“Kidnapped…” Abigale said. It was a word, and the one that she’d aimed for, which was a bonus.
“Well, if you’re going to get technical, I suppose so,” Mordecai grinned.
Through the gloom of the office, she saw his face clearly for the first time. He was handsome—If you liked that sort of thing—and his beard was neatly trimmed and darker than night. He was a lot younger than Abigale had anticipated, but then again, she’d never expected to meet the commander of The Guild face-to-face. That usually only happened if you were going to die, or find yourself on the wrong end of an exile.
“We would have approached you in a more gentlemanly fashion if we’d thought for one moment that you would agree to our proposition without an extra…incentive.”
Abigale didn’t like that word. It meant they had something on her. Incentive could usually be translated as “article of blackmail that will be of incalculable interest to the local constabulary”. Funny, she’d never had The Guild down as blackmailers. They were the scum of the city, as corrupt as the government, but extortion? Not likely.
“We require your skills to acquire some very important artefacts.” Mordecai walked the length of the room and glanced out of the large window there, his hands laced behind his back. “I’m not talking about a few jewels and a picture of some old biddy with a pearl earring. This is not some small heist that you can just waltz into on a quiet afternoon. I’m talking about three of the most secure museums in the world.” He turned and pointed to the globe on his desk as if Abigale didn’t know what the world looked like.
“How about…you let me go…and I won’t tell anyone…this happened?” It was a good counteroffer as far as she was concerned, but for some strange reason, she didn’t think Mordecai pick would go in for it.
He snorted. “Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen, Abigale. We’ve taken special measures to ensure that you take on this little job for us, which really leaves you with no option.”
Suddenly, she was hit by a strange sensation at the top of her head. A slight stabbing pain, almost as if someone was pulling out individual hairs. Mordecai must have seen her wince, for he began to laugh.
“Yes, the sedative is starting to wear off. You might feel a little discomfort for the next couple of hours, but that should fade. Werner will give you something to take the edge off.” He gestured to a man, the moustachioed surgeon of her dreams, standing to the side of the room.
Suddenly, Abigale realised how bad things were.
“What have you done to me?” she said. It wasn’t quite a scream, but it had the potential to turn into one, should she try again.
Mordecai held both hands out in a placatory manner. His smile never faltered, though, which unsettled Abigale further. Whatever this was, it had been planned to within an inch of its life.
“No harm will come to you if you succeed in retrieving the triptych,” he said, a little too smugly for Abigale’s liking. “And I can assure you that this was the best way to go about it. Werner over there suggested abducting Octavius, but I told him that you would not be able to concentrate on the task if your precious tinkerer was in our custody.”
Raw anger surged through Abigale. She pushed herself back against the board to which she was bound. The cords of her neck stood out. “You don’t touch him!” she said. “You don’t—”
“Hey, hey, hey, calm down,” Mordecai said. For once, the smile dropped from his face. “No one is going to hurt Mr. Knight, you have my word, but that’s not what should be concerning you right now. That pain at the top of your head is a healing scar. You see, Werner over there is not as great as your Octavius Knight. He has, however, implanted a small device that will affect you somewhat terminally should you disagree with our proposal.”
The pain deepened. Someone was now yanking her hair out by the handful, or so it seemed. Through gritted teeth, Abigale said, “What have you done to me? What have you put in my head?”
“It’s a clockwork device,” the one called Werner said, somewhat proudly.
It went without saying that Abigale didn’t like him.
“Quite intricate, really, in that it will only dispense the poison at a yet to be arranged time in the near future, or if you should find yourself off course.” He smiled.
Mordecai smiled.
Abigale, unsurprisingly, didn’t.
“Get it out of me,” she said, calmly. “Take it out of me right now.” The pain was immense, but she thought she could cope. The knowledge that there was, somewhere inside her head, a device created to distribute poison directly into her system, well, that concerned her.
“Do we have a deal?” Mordecai said. “You acquire this triptych for us, we remove the device. It’s really rather simple.”
“Simply crazy,” Abigale said. “I’m not stealing anything for you, or The Guild. And your little minion over there better get out his needle and thread again.”
Werner looked nervously toward his superior. It was almost as if they hadn’t expected such resilience. It just proved how little research they had done. Abigale was not one to lie down and take a kicking, especially not from a coalition of jumped-up aristocrats with too much spare time on their hands.
“Fine,” Mordecai said, with a finality that alarmed Abigale. “Werner, can the device be set to introduce the poison immediately?”
Werner nodded. “Whenever you want, sir.”
“Shame,” Mordecai said. “I heard she was the best thief in England.”
“The world, sir,” Werner corrected.
“Yes, well, we’ll have to find the second best. Get her out of my sight and… Well, make sure that venomous little contraption of yours actually works.”
Werner moved across the office. He was almost serpentine, and if it was some sort of bluff, nothing about his mannerisms suggested so.
Abigale didn’t know what the hell she was doing, if not stalling for time. “Wait,” she said. “Look, if you take this thing out of my head and pay me a good fee, I’ll get your damn cryptic.”
“Triptych,” Mordecai corrected. “And that’s a no. Unfortunately, time is of the essence in this matter. I’m sure if you knew what it was you were going after, you would waive your fee.”
Highly doubt that, Abigale thought.
“No, we’ll find someone else to do the job. Werner?”
The weasel-like little shit moved behind her and began to wheel her from the room. The plank she was strapped to was sitting atop castors. And off she went, to her death, no judge, no jury, and her executioner looked like a silly caricature of himself.
“All right, I’ll do it!” Where the hell did that come from? Surely, she’d meant to say, “Go to hell, the both of you.”
Mordecai Pick spun from the window, his face all lit up like a gas lamp. He held his hands out palm up. “This is wonderful news, Abigale.
What made you change your mind? Was it the thought of dying? The idea of poison running through your bloodstream and killing you almost instantaneously?”
“Not instantaneously,” Werner amended. “It would take up to thirty minutes for her to die. Before that, there would agonising pain as her innards liquefied and her vital organs shut down.”
“Yeah, that’s what changed my mind,” Abigale said. “Look, I’ll steal whatever you want me to. Just get me off this damn board. And give me something for this headache.”
Mordecai looked beyond himself with joy. As Werner began to untie her, she toyed with the idea of kicking backwards, knocking the little sawbones off his feet. Then it would just be her and Mordecai, a fight that she was certain she could win. But the pain inside her head reminded her that anyone could trigger the device. The Guild was huge. Even if she killed both men in the room, she wouldn’t be guaranteed that others weren’t aware of the predicament. Anyone could flip the switch that could kill her, and from what she’d gathered, she didn’t need to be anywhere in the vicinity for it to activate. She could be halfway across the country, the world, and all of a sudden…lights out.
“Take a seat, Abigale,” Mordecai said, signalling to a chair opposite. “Werner, fetch Ms. Egars something for the pain.”
The surgeon bowed before hurrying from the room. The speed with which he left suggested he was afraid of missing something. Abigale guessed she wouldn’t have to wait long for her painkillers.
“So what is all this about?” Abigale said, relaxing into the chair and pinching her nose between thumb and forefinger. The light streaming in through the window was enough to blind her. At least she was certain that Mordecai Pick wasn’t a vampire, as the rumour going around London insinuated. “I mean, this is a little low, even for The Guild.”
Mordecai lit a cigar, turned it slowly in his mouth. He considered Abigale silently for a moment as if she was a long lost daughter, and he was searching for the right words to reintroduce himself. After a while, he said, “Do you believe in magic, Abigale?” He shifted in his seat, causing the leather to creak beneath him.
Abigale snorted. It hurt her head, and she made a mental note not to do it again. “I believe in the power of illusion,” she said. “Smoke and mirrors, misdirection, pick a card, any card…”
“What if I told you magic, real magic, existed?” His eyebrows knitted together. “That this little world of ours has been harbouring wizards and necromancers since the beginning of time?”
“I’d say somebody has been topping off your cigars with something highly illegal.” She hoped he was testing her for some reason. She wasn’t prepared for something of this magnitude. “Aren’t wizards just fantasy? You know? Merlin? Big, long beard you could choke a donkey with? Bit of tree trunk, wave it around, and say something in Latin? Poof, you’ve got yourself a frog.”
Mordecai rolled his eyes. “Yes, that’s what the uninformed believe, but wizards seldom transform people into frogs. In fact, they’re more likely to just turn you inside out.” He chewed on the end of his cigar for a moment, watching Abigale as she tried to digest his words, as unbelievable as they were.
“So, you’re saying that magic is real? That there are actual wizards out there, and if you’re not careful, they’ll turn your innards into outards?” It sounded ridiculous, and yet Abigale’s interest was piqued, and she wondered what did any of it have to do with her, or The Guild. The pain in her head wasn’t getting any better, but for the time being, she pushed it aside.
Mordecai leaned forward. Abigale couldn’t help but notice he had heterochromia iridis, causing him to have one azure eye and one russet. It was unsettling, and once she’d seen it, she couldn’t look away.
“A wizard will do anything in its power to become more formidable. The more potent their magic, the more dangerous they become. Think of it as dilution. A wizard, to begin with, is a thinned down version of what it’s capable of. The more they learn, the stronger they become. Add more focus, more intensity, and before you know it, you’ve got yourself one hell of a powerful being.”
“Like Merlin?”
“Can we just get past Merlin for the time being? He was a hack, barely able to wipe his own…” He trailed off, and when he next spoke, it was with controlled assuredness. “A weak wizard falls by the wayside, but a powerful one can do anything. The Guild has been aware of magic, in all its forms, for centuries. We’ve crossed paths with many wizards in that time. Until now, we’ve successfully, managed to keep them at bay with sheer force and by outnumbering them a hundred-to-one.”
That made sense. The Guild was not an organisation you’d want to be on the wrong side of, whether you knew a few magic tricks or not. Who knew what they were capable of?
“So what does this have to do with me?” Abigale said. “And why are you telling me this?”
Mordecai grunted. “Unfortunately, it has been brought to our attention that the wizards are planning something big, something that will change this little world of ours forever, and not in a good way.”
He sighed and Abigale could see he was a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’d aged since the conversation began a few minutes before.
“The three artefacts we intend for you to steal are more than just ancient fancies. They are the final parts of an extremely important and intricate puzzle, a puzzle that the wizards are close to solving. We cannot let that happen.”
Abigale shook her head. It was all a little far-fetched. As much as she loved a good story, she didn’t know how much of what he was telling her could be true. “So that’s why you dragged me from my bed and implanted a clockwork poisoner in my head? Because you want…. No, need me to help? Have you ever thought about counselling?”
“You need incentive,” Mordecai said. “And we need those artefacts before the wizards figure out where they are, which they are close to doing. We cannot fail. You cannot fail.”
“So threatening me with poison is supposed to make me more effective?” Abigale didn’t quite understand the logic.
“We know how good you are,” he said. “And we know that you will find it difficult to believe us. What’s to say that as soon as you leave here that you don’t go to the nearest station? Head off to greener pastures, beyond London? We need you to remain focused on the task at hand, at least for the next few days. When you return with the triptych, Werner will remove the device from your head, and you can go back to stealing trinkets from two-bit jewellers.”
“And what are you going to do with the artefacts?” She was getting ahead of herself. She didn’t even know what they were, where they were, how she would get them, or if it was even possible.
“They will be destroyed,” he said, with a decisiveness that caused gooseflesh to rise on the nape of Abigale’s neck. “These are the final pieces. Without them, the wizards will remain weak, in our pockets.”
“And with them?” Abigale said, once again getting ahead of herself. Patience had never been her forte.
“Well, it’s not something that we’ve entertained, but let us say that you, your precious tinkerer, and everyone you’ve ever known will become nothing more than pets to them. The necromancers will be able to summon the most powerful demons that have ever existed, and life on Earth will suffer in the most horrific way imaginable.”
He leaned back in his chair. The leather creaked, and Abigale exhaled a long, weary breath. Lacing his fingers, Mordecai looked like someone about to close an important business meeting, not someone that had just told a young girl the world was about to end. Abigale hated him for it.
She was about to speak, though Lord knows what she was going to say, when the door to the office flew open and Werner came through it. He quickly covered the space between the door and the desk. Abigale saw the glass jar in one hand and the syringe in the other, and remembered that she was about to receive something for the pain.
“So now you know why we’ve been so forceful,” Mordecai said.
We
rner was already preparing the shot, flicking the needle with a trembling finger. Abigale was a little concerned with the man’s unsteadiness, and the fact that he was the one who had implanted the device in her head…with those nervous digits.
“Does she know everything?” Werner said, stepping around Abigale and speaking about her as is she wasn’t even present.
Mordecai nodded. “And I believe she will do what is right.”
Abigale felt a hand on her shoulder, and then a sharp sting to the right side of her neck as Werner plunged the needle deep and forceful into her flesh.
“Get some rest, Abigale,” Mordecai said, but he was already fading, blurring out of existence like a mirage in the desert.
Abigale mumbled something incoherent, and then the darkness enveloped her one last time.
5
“It’s a little early in the morning for jokes, isn’t it?” Inquisitor Lazarus Gurd hadn’t even stood when Alcorn appeared in his office a moment earlier, and he had no intentions of getting to his feet.
A small, wiry man with silver hair and spectacles, the Inquisitor’s appearance betrayed his absolute dominance. He was not a man with whom you messed unless you liked the inside of a prison cell, and Alcorn knew he was pressing his luck just by being there. Gurd disliked him at the best of times.
“You expect me to arm you?” He emphasised the last word to show how much the request had offended him.
“I’m this close,” Alcorn said, creating a minute space between his thumb and fingertip. “You know how dangerous she is, and now she’s got these little contraptions running around with her. I’m not going after her half-cocked.”
Gurd smiled. It wasn’t pretty, nor had he intended it to be. “You’ve been that close since you waltzed into my station three years ago. If I remember correctly, you almost had her then, too. ‘In a cell by the end of the month,’ I believe you said.” He shrugged. “That girl has spent less time in gaol than Sister McPhee over at the nunnery.”
Alcorn shifted from one foot to the other, nervously adjusting his coat. “I know, but I believe she is about to make a huge error,” he said. “I can feel it. She almost got her head blown off last night. That’s never happened before. She’s slipping, Sir, and I’m going to be there when she does.”
