A Study in Sorcery: A Lord Darcy Novel

by Michael Kurland

  “I’ll bring the brazier with me,” Lord John said, picking it up gingerly by one of its tripod legs. “I’m going to need it in a minute. Let’s go on up.”

  They mounted the central staircase, with Father Adamsus and Lord John in the lead and Count de Maisvin a few steps behind. About a third of the way up, Father Adamsus paused and looked at Lord John Quetzal with a questioning glance. Lord John shook his head.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

  By this he meant that there was no trace of the presence of black magic. That was Lord John Quetzal’s very special gift, in addition to his Talent as a sorcerer. While not a sensitive, he was psychically attuned to sense the presence of magic that was used in evil or negative ways. Commonly known as “witch-smelling,” it was a rare gift; of the psychic gifts, rarest of all but for precognition. It was the one of the reasons Lord John had been chosen for today’s tasks.

  Father Adamsus shook his head, puzzled. There should be something that one or the other of them could sense. With Lord John now preceding Father Adamsus, the three men resumed the climb toward the pair of temples that shared the top of the pyramid.

  As they drew level with the temples, the psychic pressure Father Adamsus had been expecting finally made itself known. Yes; there was the sense of evil here, of blood and death. But again there was something wrong. What he sensed now was not the collective death agony of many, but of just one or two—a sudden, jolting shock, not that of a long-drawn-out torturous death. But none the less horrible for that.

  And whatever he was sensing had not happened five centuries ago, or even five weeks ago. This was a horror that had happened within days—perhaps hours. “Do you sense it?” he asked Lord John Quetzal, realizing he was whispering.

  Lord John looked puzzled. “Sense it? No. As I told you, there is no trace of sorcery used with evil intent here.”

  For the very briefest of moments Father Adamsus thought he might be losing his mind, but that thought vanished as an iron-hard determination took over. I am not mistaken; there is death here. And if it is not magic, then it is something else.

  The right-hand temple, consecrated to Tsaltsaluetoi, where the Eternal Flame would be rekindled, stood open and empty, its great wooden doors fore and aft swung wide, as they had been for the past week or so, awaiting the ritual cleansing and reconsecration by the Azteque priests. But the left-hand temple, formerly the home of Huitsilopochtli, bloody god of all bloody gods, was the object of their present interest. Its massive double doors were sealed with a heavy bronze lock, put into place a century before, along with the avoidance spell, to protect the interior of the temple from those strange sorts of people who would be attracted to a house of the Devil, even when the Devil was no longer in residence.

  A wax seal impressed with the ducal arms was affixed over the keyhole. Father Adamsus had been given the huge key for the lock by Duke Charles himself, an hour before the boat had left the Palace dockyard. The seal and lock, however, were only the visible parts of the closure; a hermetic spell had also been placed on the door and lock, and this—if not removed—would prevent anyone from shifting the bronze wards inside the lock, with or without the key. According to the Palace records, this spell, like the one already removed, had been renewed eight times in the past century.

  Father Adamsus examined the ducal seal. It was intact. Carefully peeling if off, he inserted the key in the lock and, experimentally, tried to turn it. It would not budge. He turned to Lord John Quetzal.

  “It’s all yours now.”

  Lord John nodded. He put down the brazier and took some small items from his sorcerer’s bag. Dropping a small handful of some dark substance into the brazier atop the charcoal, he set it alight. As the plume of smoke began to rise, Lord John sprayed powder from a small insufflator onto the lock and key. Then, from a small phial, he sprinkled more of the same powder onto the burning brazier.

  Immediately, the smoke turned a bright crimson, and now—instead of rising straight up until it was whipped away by the wind—it curved in toward the door and began to surround the lock and key with a rolling red cloud.

  Lord John now took from the bag a small wand with a blue stone set into its tip. He held it in the stream of smoke for several seconds as his lips soundlessly formed strange words. Then he withdrew the wand from the smoke and held it horizontally by its center.

  He twirled the wand between thumb and fingers. As he did so, the key rotated in the lock. There was a click from somewhere within the mechanism, and the door moved open slightly.

  “Excellent,” said Father Adamsus. He had become so involved in watching the young sorcerer at work that, for a few moments at least, he had been able to forget his greater problems. “Master Lord John, I’ve never seen it done better.”

  Lord John Quetzal almost blushed at the compliment. “You’ve never seen Master Sean O Lochlainn,” he said. “He taught me that technique himself.”

  “Well. Shall we go in?”

  Lord John nodded, and pulled the door fully open. The three men stepped in, and sunlight flooded in behind them to illuminate the temple interior. It might better have been left in darkness.

  Father Adamsus stared bleakly at the scene before him, and found that he could not even be surprised. He knew that in some strange way he had expected this, or something like it, since the sensation he had experienced while mounting the steps. All he could feel was a tiredness, and exhaustion of the soul.

  In the center of the temple was the techcatl, the great sacrificial altar stone, a nine-foot-long block of some white mineral. It was indelibly stained with the blood of centuries past.

  On it lay a young man, no older than Lord John, and with skin of the same reddish-brown color. He had been stripped to the waist. On the stone, near the young man’s head, lay an ornately-decorated knife of bone and obsidian, glinting in a random shaft of light The obsidian blade was caked with dried blood.

  There was a gaping hole in the man’s upper torso, where the heart had been severed and ripped from the chest. The blood had stopped flowing from the horrible wound some time before, but to an experienced eye it was freshly dry. The man had been dead less than a day.

  The heart was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Land ho! two points off the starboard bow!”

  At this call from the lookout in the crow’s nest high above his head, Lord Norman Scrivener, one of the fourteen first-class passengers on H.I.M. Steam Packet Aristotle, poked his carefully shorn blond head into the first-class passengers’ lounge and relayed the good word. “The fabled New World awaits us, my lords, gentlemen,” he stated with evident relish. “And you too, my lady.”

  The slender man in the red cloak looked up from the book he was reading. “A quick passage,” he said to his tubby companion. “We’ve been at sea barely a week. With any luck we’ll be in port by nightfall.”

  His companion, who wore a black traveling-cloak over his brown workaday Master Sorcerer’s robes, was concentrating on suspending a silver hoop and spindle in the air in front of him, with the spindle centered in the hoop. He relaxed his concentration and allowed the objects to drop to the table before him. “Aye, my lord,” he said, gathering them up to put them in a small flannel bag. “And I hope we have that good fortune, for my stomach’s sake.”

  “It has been a rough passage, Master Sean,” Lord Darcy said sympathetically. “March is not the month I would pick for transiting the Atlantic.”

  “Nor I, my lord,” Master Sean O Lochlainn, Chief Forensic Sorcerer to the Court of Chivalry, pointedly told his old friend, and superior, Lord Darcy, who was the Chief Investigator of that same Imperial court.

  Lord Darcy raised an eyebrow. “Now, Master Sean,” he said, “surely you cannot blame me for this hasty voyage. It was His Majesty’s express wish that we conduct this investigation for him.”

  “Aye, my lord,” Master Sean agreed. “And is it merely a coincidence that but two weeks ago Your Lordship
was complaining to me about the dearth of interesting crimes anywhere in Europe? I recollect Your Lordship’s very words. ‘The European criminal today is sadly lacking in imagination,’ Your Lordship said. ‘There are no crimes of scope for the fine inquiring intellect to hone itself on. Merely an endless series of piddling problems.’”

  ”Did I say that?” Lord Darcy asked, amused.

  “Yes, my lord. Word for word.” Master Sean nodded. “And when Your Lordship tempts the fates like that, what can Your Lordship expect but to be flung across the ocean in mid-March to investigate a crime that’s more to Your Lordship’s liking?”

  “Well, it was true,” Lord Darcy said.

  “The matter of the Comfiture Diamonds?” Master Sean asked.

  “A simple task,” Lord Darcy said, “once you understood the meaning of the footprints on the ceiling.”

  “The business with Lord Champhire and the trained pelicans?”

  “An elementary exercise in deduction,” Lord Darcy explained, taking a sip of his caffe.

  “I found it compelling enough,” Master Sean commented. “And, as I’m sure you remember, you had the excitement of a bullet from a .23 caliber Douglass-Bizet in your calf.”

  “Ah, yes,” Lord Darcy said, rubbing his right leg reflexively with the memory. “But with all that, nothing to stimulate the intellect, Master Sean; and the intellect is all!”

  “It was sufficiently stimulating for me,” Master Sean insisted stubbornly.

  “Ah, but there, my old friend, you see the difference between us,” Lord Darcy said. “You are a master magician, and a creative forensic sorcerer. And thus the problem, for you, is in the objective evidence, the residue of facts left for magic to uncover and explain. It is, so to speak, Nature herself who is your antagonist, from whom you wrest her secrets. You are always expanding the bounds of magical knowledge with your experiments. Forensic magic is much more advanced today than it was twenty years ago, largely as a result of your work.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” Master Sean said, his round face beaming with the unexpected compliment.

  “But I have no body of knowledge to expand,” Lord Darcy said, “except those skills of systematic thinking that enable me to develop an accurate image of an obscure crime from the few accidental and unintentional clues overlooked by the criminal. Rather as an osteomantic wizard is able to recreate a long extinct animal from its ossified lower jawbone, I must piece together the substance of a crime from a few overlooked bits of its skeleton. And to keep my problem-solving ability properly honed, I have a constant need for new, baffling problems to pit it against. I thirst after the obscure, Master Sean. The ordinary dulls my abilities; the bizarre, the grotesque, the utterly baffling—these provide the stimulation I need!”

  “You may consider your skill merely systematic thinking, my lord,” Master Sean said. “But, as I’ve often told you, there’s more to it than that. You gather what facts you can, and then make a wild leap into the unknown, somehow landing squarely on the truth. It isn’t magic, my lord, as far as I can tell; but I’m damned if I know what it is.”

  “And as I’ve said,” Lord Darcy told him, “it may look like that to an outsider—if you will excuse me calling you an outsider even in this context—but all you’re seeing is the exercise of a well-trained and practiced deductive facility. There’s nothing miraculous in it.”

  “Aye, my lord,” Master Sean agreed, “so you’ve said.”

  Lord Darcy smiled at the doubt in his friend’s voice. “Look at it this way, Master Sean,” he said, “What you do, with your smoking thuribles and your twirling wands, seems just as miraculous to an observer.”

  “Nothing miraculous about it, my lord,” Master Sean said, sounding slightly offended. “It’s just good, clean, applied magic.”

  “It is as a miracle to me,” Lord Darcy told him.

  “Ah, Your Lordship, that’s as may be. But you see, I could teach my techniques to anyone else with the Talent. And often have.”

  “And you think that what I do is unteachable? Well, perhaps it is, but I trust that you are mistaken. Perhaps my Talent, whatever it is, is just more rare.”

  “I would say it’s unique, my lord,” Master Sean said.

  “I wouldn’t like to think so,” Lord Darcy said. “But we may soon find out. I have been thinking recently of putting together another monograph, a little book on the art of deduction, which would force me to codify exactly how I do what I do.”

  “I shall be one of the most earnest readers of that book, my lord,” Master Sean told him. “Right now I think I’d better go back to the cabin and get packed. I don’t think there’ll be any delay in our debarking once the ship is docked.”

  “You’re probably right, Master Sean,” Lord Darcy said. “But, as I am already packed, I believe I shall remain here and have a last ouiskie and splash before we take up our new problem.”

  Master Sean got up and made his way with cautious deliberation across the gently swaying lounge floor to the corridor door, while Lord Darcy signaled the steward to bring him a ouiskie and splash and turned to stare out through the large, double-paned porthole by his table. He pulled the curved, blocky meerschaum pipe from his left pocket and the waterproof pouch holding tobacco and matches from his right. Thoughtfully tamping the Robertia plug tobacco down into the wide bowl, he reviewed the events of eight days ago, the day before they boarded the Aristotle.

  * * * *

  It was late in the evening, and Lord Darcy had been in his apartments in London, working on the galley proofs of his latest monograph, an essay entitled “Reflexions on the Criminal Mind,” when the summons came, and a queer summons it was. For Lord Darcy to attend His Majesty was no longer an unusual occurrence; as Chief Investigator of the Court of Chivalry for the past six years, he both took orders from and reported directly to His Majesty on many of the cases that were sufficiently important for him to take personal charge.

  But to be summoned personally by Lord Peter Whiss, chief of the Most Secret Service, at ten at night, and taken immediately in a bread delivery van to a side entrance of Winchester Palace, was unique in Lord Darcy’s long experience. To then be wrapped in a dark cloak and surrounded by six of the Palace Guard with drawn pistols before being whisked upstairs into the Royal Presence added a bizarre quality that made the entire interview, in retrospect, seem unreal.

  But real it had been.

  “As always, it is a pleasure to see you, my lord Darcy,” King John said, turning from the window he had been staring out as Lord Darcy unraveled himself from the cloak, crossed the small room adjacent to the Royal Chambers and knelt to greet his sovereign.

  John IV, Dei Gratia King of England, Ireland, Scotland, and France; Emperor of the Romans and the Germans; Premier Chief of the Moqtessumid Clan; Son of the Sun; a handsome, powerful-looking man in his sixth decade of life, had been well-used by the years that had passed over him as he, in turn, had used well the passing years. Not that he looked older than his years; his hair was still largely blond, although the beard was graying faster than that above, and the thin straight hair, combed straight back, was, perhaps, thinner than it once had been. But he looked every day of every one of his years.

  It showed largely in the Plantagenet face, where the fine lines about the eyes and mouth reflected thirty years of truths that could not be spoken, burdens that could not be shared, and decisions that could not be undone.

  “You will, we are sure, forgive the unceremonious way in which you were delivered,” John said, gesturing with his hand for Lord Darcy to rise. “We will more than make up for it in the grateful way in which you are received. For you have all of Our gratitude, my lord, for a life of devotion to the Crown and the Empire.”

  “And, as my life is not over, sire, neither is my devotion to my sovereign’s projects,” Lord Darcy said, standing and stretching a bit to relieve his tensed-up muscles.

  The King smiled. “A subtle way, my lord, of saying ‘What the hell am I doing here at
this hour, in this way?’—is it not?”

  “I would not for the world disagree with Your Highness,” Lord Darcy said, bowing slightly, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

  “Come, sit down, my lord,” King John said, preceding him to the heavy wooden table in one corner of the room, “Once again We require your services. All will be explained to you presently. We merely await the arrival of Lord Peter Whiss, who had to stop at the Ochre Room on the way up here. Join us in a glass of our great-grandfather’s brandy while we wait.”

  King John took the bell-shaped bottle of Imperial cognac from the sideboard and poured about three-quarters of an inch of the reddish-amber fluid into each of two green crystal glasses. He handed one to Lord Darcy, and then sat in one of the six massive oak chairs surrounding the table, allowing Lord Darcy to be seated in another. One did not sit while the king stood.

  “I am doubly honored, Your Majesty,” Lord Darcy said. “To be served the Imperial cognac of eighteen—as I see by the label—ninety-two; and to be served by Your Majesty’s hands. It makes me very nervous.”

  “The King serves all his subjects,” King John said, leaning back in his chair and taking a sip of his great-grandfather’s cognac, “although usually not in quite so direct a manner. What do you mean, ‘nervous’?”

  II makes me think that the secrets that I am about to hear are secret indeed, and that whatever has occurred to cause Your Majesty to send for me is serious indeed. Therefore I am concerned both about the threat to the Realm and about living up to You’re Majesty’s expectations.” Lord Darcy cupped the glass and raised it to his lips, inhaling deeply of the mature bouquet of the Angevin Empire’s finest cognac before taking a small sip. The brandy, as with all fine things, was something to be savored in unhurried enjoyment.

  “Secrets? Threat to the Realm?” His Majesty leaned forward and stared intently at Lord Darcy. “What secrets, my lord? What do you know of a threat to the Realm?”