The Extraordinaires 2

by Michael Pryor

  A few beech trees grew close together nearby. Kingsley and Evadne sat with their backs to one, huddled against the chill. Not far off, Kingsley could hear the small creatures going about their nocturnal business, hunting and being hunted. Momentarily, he wanted to join them, but the impulse passed quickly when he realised he’d rather be with Evadne.

  Dr Ward faced them, his knees drawn up, his head bowed and reflective. Finally, he gazed at them and his spectacles glinted as his leonine head moved. ‘Selene – Mrs Winter – comes from an unusual family. Her father was a colonel in the 65th Carnatic Infantry, and his family has been military for generations.’ He chose his words carefully. ‘It’s her mother’s side that has contributed to the situation in which we now find ourselves. They were Indian, high caste, and much given to mysticism of a particular sort.’

  Kingsley became tense. He could remember little of India, and what he could was a cloth of many patches. Mostly he remembered smells, sensations, the feelings of being protected and cared for – in a way that was entirely non-human. He did have shreds of other recollections, too. These were night-time memories, for the greater part, things the pack experienced that were beyond their ken: shape changers; the sounds of music coming from under the ground; strange lights and movements that were a sign to run in the other direction. These phenomena raised hackles. They were unnatural, to be shunned.

  This was part of his past, but it was a shattered, imperfect past. It was the sort of thing he desperately wanted restored to him.

  ‘I’ve been in correspondence with some learned and informed people in India,’ Evadne was saying. Kingsley shook off the fug of memory and paid attention. ‘Many of them mentioned magic.’

  ‘Selene’s family have been scholars of magic for centuries,’ Dr Ward said. ‘They accumulated much wisdom in those years, but some of the family members decided that knowledge wasn’t enough. They wanted actual magical power.’

  ‘Coming close to power but not having it must have been tempting,’ Kingsley said.

  ‘To some. Selene’s mother had the most overweening pride. She took herself away to a valley in the Western Ghats, all the better to perform rituals designed to attain this power.’

  ‘Ambition?’ Kingsley said. ‘Hunger?’

  ‘I don’t know, but when magical power is at stake the consequences can be profound.’

  ‘Did she succeed?’ Evadne asked quietly. She was a ghostly presence in the dark, her skin almost luminous.

  ‘She thought she’d failed,’ Dr Ward said. ‘This disappointment and the enormity of the ritual itself drove her mad.’

  Kingsley grimaced. Not something I’d wish on anybody. ‘It would have been wretched for Mrs Winter,’ he said. ‘How old was she?’

  ‘She had not yet been born,’ Dr Ward said. ‘Her mother was with child when she performed the ritual.’ Both Kingsley and Evadne gasped, but Dr Ward went on, doggedly. ‘The woman did not know she was expecting at the time – and that’s what I prefer to believe. Eight months later, Selene was born to a raving madwoman.’

  ‘The poor baby,’ Evadne said softly and her pain was so evident that Kingsley, without thinking, put an arm around her shoulders.

  Evadne leaned closer into him. Kingsley held his breath but she didn’t move away.

  Dr Ward raised an eyebrow at this, but didn’t comment. He went on with his story. ‘Selene’s father was shattered by the events, of which his wife had kept him ignorant. He recovered, though, and spent his life taking care of her and Selene.’ He paused. The noises of the night – crickets, the soft soughing of the branches overhead – replaced his voice until he began again. ‘This man was of the same scholarly persuasion, but he never had the lust for power that his wife had. In their home in the Ghats, he returned to his books, tended to his wife and raised his daughter. When his wife died, this man took his two-year-old daughter back to the family of the woman who had dared too much.’

  ‘Normally, that would signal the end of a story,’ Kingsley said at the dying fall in his foster father’s voice. ‘But I sense that there’s more.’

  Dr Ward nodded. ‘Even though they were reclusive, this extended family of scholars, they were not unaware of the world. Soon after the child came home, it became apparent that they were being watched by creatures and people unsavoury.’

  ‘That description would cover a great many things, here or in India,’ Evadne said. Her hands were cold. Kingsley folded them into his.

  ‘It would,’ Dr Ward said. ‘Many of these watchers were simply pairs of eyes willing to watch and report for a coin. Some were unnatural creatures born of sorcery.’

  ‘Spawn?’ Kingsley asked and had to quieten the uneasiness that was only partly a product of his Inner Animal.

  ‘The description is consistent, although some may have been insane blends of animal and sorcery. Regardless, the elders in the community, through their wisdom, divined two things. The watchers were interested in the child and they were agents of the sorcerers we call the Immortals.’

  ‘The ritual had drawn their attention,’ Evadne whispered.

  ‘Precisely. The community was afraid, but nothing happened. For years, the watchers were present, circling the enclave, but doing nothing. When challenged, they melted away. When confronted, they ran – but they always came back.’

  Kingsley frowned. ‘I’d never call the Immortals patient, despite their years. They flit from plan to plan, never settling long.’

  ‘What you see as flitting may simply be the way they’ve learned to lay many plans all at once,’ Dr Ward said. ‘Many may never come to fruition, but some may, to our cost. They think in centuries, not hours.’

  ‘So they can endure setbacks,’ Evadne said. ‘They simply shift their energy to another scheme that is already in train.’

  ‘Not happily, I imagine,’ Kingsley said. He had seen the rage and petulance of the Immortals. They weren’t sombre and magisterial beings. He bit his lip. Perhaps their peevishness was a recent thing, a result of their body-shifting and extreme age?

  Dr Ward shifted his position a little. ‘Nothing happened for a long time. Selene was a happy child, and when her father died – worn out from the shock of his wife’s betrayal – she was adopted by the entire community. She was adored, but she soon displayed an ability that nearly rent the community asunder.’

  Dr Ward lifted a hand, struggling for words. Kingsley and Evadne were silent while he took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes. ‘It is hard,’ he said, ‘imagining that poor child, shocking a community of intelligent, loving people with an ability she never asked for, an ability passed from an arrogant, unbalanced mother.’

  ‘The power,’ Kingsley asked. ‘What was it?’

  Dr Ward touched his jaw with a hand, as if the very words were painful. ‘She has the power to open the way for gods.’

  ‘You mean deities like the lar that she conjured up to save us.’

  ‘No, not “conjured up”, never that. She doesn’t create them from thin air. That’s more along your line. She simply allows a god to enter our world.’

  ‘From where?’ Evadne asked.

  ‘From wherever it is the gods have gone.’

  ‘Which is an explanation singularly empty of meaning.’

  ‘It’s the best I can do. Look around. We don’t have the gods surrounding us any more. When I think about it, the world must have been swarming with them when it was young. So many little gods – gods of localities, gods of rivers and streams, gods for crossroads and trees and mountains and clouds, all deities with their own power and being. And that’s not counting the big gods, the Olympian thunderbolt hurlers, the Asgardian giant killers. They’re gods of an altogether different magnitude, but they’ve gone, too.’

  ‘And your Mrs Winter opens a crack for them to come back?’ Evadne said.

  ‘It’s more like she invites them. Very compellingly.’

  ‘And she did this as a baby?’ Kingsley pushed his hair back. ‘That must have been unexpect
ed.’

  ‘As an infant, not a baby. She needed language to shape her will. Playing with blocks one day, she was frustrated. She asked for help in a way that allowed the god of the house – a long gone, long forgotten, very minor godling – to reappear and build a tower of blocks that stretched to the ceiling.’

  ‘Impressive,’ Kingsley said.

  ‘And dangerous. She was startled. Fortunately enough, when she told the godling to go, it did. But not before it and its works were seen by the girl’s ayah and a visiting scholar. The women knew they had seen something of great import, and brought it to the elders who soon determined what had happened. But it was too late. The child had gone.’

  ‘Taken by the gods?’ Evadne said, her hand to her mouth. She was upset – and increasingly furious. Kingsley squeezed her other hand. She looked at him sharply, then took a deep breath and leaned back against the tree.

  ‘Taken by the Immortals.’ Dr Ward paused and looked reflective. ‘I have no evidence that the Immortals had been planning this all along, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Perhaps they even organised to expose Selene’s mother to hidden texts, tempting her like that.’

  Evadne was trembling, but her voice was steady. ‘They have little compunction when it comes to child stealing, so manipulating a whole family like this wouldn’t be beyond them.’

  ‘But they weren’t stealing Mrs Winter to use as a vessel for themselves,’ Kingsley said, ‘were they?’

  ‘No,’ Dr Ward said. ‘They raised her.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  Kingsley was angry. His early childhood was unusual, but at least the wolves had protected and defended him. ‘Surely those creatures didn’t raise her themselves. They must have handed the child to someone more . . . more human.’

  ‘As with your recollections of your early life, Mrs Winter’s are cloudy, half-remembered and often shied away from. The Immortals wanted her to be obedient while still being able to exercise her power, and she had nurses who raised her as such. She was too important to damage, but some of the nurses were enthusiastic in their chastisement. Yet she survived and grew. When she was ten, she began to do the bidding of the Immortals, for she was told to obey them. She was strong in her power, but it was a fickle thing. The Immortals were afraid of what she could awake, and afraid she might not be able to close the door if something dangerous were allowed through. The tasks she was given were small and carefully circumscribed, watched by servants of the Immortals who were ready to destroy her if the summoned god went amuck.’

  ‘Destroy her?’ Kingsley said. ‘Why? Would that close the way she’d opened?’

  ‘That’s what the Immortals decided.’ He shook his head. ‘So the poor child had to perform knowing that she could be killed at any time, just for doing that for which she was raised. It was inevitable that she was either going to break or to rebel. It is to my good fortune that, eventually, she rebelled.’

  ‘What courage that must have taken,’ Evadne said. ‘To rebel against your whole reason for being.’

  ‘She is an admirable woman,’ Dr Ward said, then he looked embarrassed and hurried on. ‘With the help of a minor trickster god she summoned, she fled and lost herself in the cities. Calcutta, Pondicherry, Dacca. She kept moving, doing what she could to stay alive. Eventually she fell in with a Colonel Winter of the Madras Light Cavalry.’ He pointed a finger at Kingsley. ‘A colleague of your father, or so I’m led to believe.’

  ‘Colonel Winter was a spy?’

  ‘He was an intelligence gatherer, as was your father. His work as scout took him into the Indian Demimonde as often as not, where he met Selene.’

  ‘He rescued her,’ Evadne said firmly.

  ‘He fell in love with her first, then he rescued her, then he married her. They spent some time together, very happily. He worked for Army Intelligence and she discovered she had a calling as a school teacher.’ Dr Ward paused before going on. ‘Then they were trapped by agents of the Immortals who were chasing her. He gave his life to let her escape.’

  ‘And how did you come to know her?’ Kingsley asked.

  A small, sweet smile crossed Dr Ward’s face. ‘In my time in India I heard stories of many things, and discounted most of them, miracles being a farthing a dozen in that land.’

  ‘Most?’ Kingsley asked.

  ‘Most were just that: stories. Some were not. Some were exaggerations or distortions, but they hid a truth about a world where the rules of everyday life do not apply. A world where magic works and legends still walk abroad. A world that intersects, underlies and nudges against our own.’

  ‘The Demimonde,’ Evadne said.

  ‘It’s called many things in many places, but the Demimonde is as good as any. Wherever people go about their lives in their great diurnal round, there is a shadowy and encircling realm of otherness. Most people are unaware of it. Some are aware of it and shun it. Others pass back and forth and understand that both are parts of the human experience. Once apprised of it, I explored it to gather what I could.’

  ‘Stories?’ Kingsley said.

  ‘Stories, tales, anecdotes and memories. More recondite knowledge too: languages and dialects long thought lost, crafts and practices forgotten in the mundane world.’

  ‘But you’ve kept these secret. They don’t feature in your writings,’ Kingsley said, ‘nor in your lectures.’

  ‘One day, my boy, one day.’ A chuckle. ‘Although I may have to clothe them in the guise of fiction, as others have. The world may not be ready for such knowledge, as Mr Wells has found out.’

  ‘Mrs Winter was a story, then?’ Evadne said. ‘A damsel in distress?’

  Kingsley had never thought of his foster father as a knight errant. He was fond of the old man, and grateful for his upbringing, but Dr Ward had always been a fusty dodderer, in his mind. Hidden depths, he thought.

  Part of Kingsley, too, was responding to the tales of India. Surely there were still parts of that great land that were untamed, vast enough to become lost in, to roam free.

  He shook his head angrily. Enough of that, he told himself.

  ‘Mrs Winter was rather more than a story. The military intelligence operatives had a standing order to find her, to look out for her as a dependant of one of their own. As I was helping them at the time, I was aware of this. I had gone to a cave outside Chamarajanagar, drawn by rumours of a cache of pots with some highly interesting, potentially crypto-Dravidian scrolls. She was hiding in the cave. We made our acquaintance when she nearly stabbed me with a bichawa, but I was able to avoid the sting of the scorpion knife.’

  ‘An unconventional introduction,’ Evadne said, ‘but it established that she was not a helpless waif.’

  ‘Even though she looked like one,’ Dr Ward said. ‘She was bedraggled, gaunt and fearful of eye. Strangely, she looked both much older and much younger than her twenty years. And she was terrified that I was from the Immortals.’

  Kingsley raised a finger. ‘Why didn’t she just call up some of these gods to help her if she was in trouble like that?’

  ‘That was something else she was afraid of: the gods that she could sense all around her. She didn’t think she could trust them, that they’d turn on her.’ Dr Ward shook his head. ‘Can you imagine living for so long with so much fear?’

  Kingsley knew about fear. It was a great weakness for a professional escapologist, for it clouded the mind at times when it needed to be clearest. He also knew of it from the wild. In the wild, fear was as near as the noise behind the bush, the shadow in the tree, the movement unexpected.

  ‘I explained that my intentions did not include harming her, and she told me part of her story,’ Dr Ward went on. ‘I could not leave her. After determining that the scrolls were merely last year’s Bombay Times, we crept out of the cave to where I had left my horses. The journey to Bangalore was hair-raising, and is worth its own story one day, but it’s enough to say that the scorpion knife had its chance to sting before we were safe.’

  Kingsley’s
eyebrows rose. He had trouble imagining Mrs Winter as a knife-wielding beggar woman.

  ‘She wouldn’t have been safe, even in an army cantonment,’ Evadne guessed.

  ‘Indeed. That’s why I decided she would be better in England.’

  ‘Oh, that’s why you offered to marry her,’ Kingsley said, ‘to make sure of her passage to England.’

  Dr Ward took his time before answering. ‘Kingsley, I offered to marry her because we love each other. She is a remarkable woman, unlike any I’ve met before.’

  Well, she does have the ability to tell gods that they’re welcome to drop in, Kingsley thought, that’s enough to put her in the basket labelled ‘remarkable’.

  ‘Sorry, Father.’

  ‘No need to apologise. You’ve always known me as a bachelor. Why would you think a romantic bone had ever existed in my body?’

  ‘You can’t predict when these things will strike,’ Evadne said. ‘And it’s sometimes against one’s better judgement.’

  Kingsley swivelled his head and locked eyes with her. She held up her hand, the hand still intertwined with his, in a deliberate declaration that he took as a very fine thing indeed.

  ‘Quite,’ Dr Ward said. ‘We made arrangements, but I was called away on a special assignment before we could depart. When I returned, she was gone.’

  ‘You must have been distraught,’ Evadne said.

  ‘Distraught, afraid, desolate. I searched for her everywhere. I called in what favours I had among the military and the intelligence service. I looked for months, but it was as if she’d simply been swept off the face of the earth. I was willing to search until the end of days, but something else came up.’

  Kingsley wondered what could be important enough to keep him from the woman he loved, but he saw Dr Ward’s steady gaze. ‘That’s right, Kingsley. I found you.’

  Kingsley straightened, and nearly banged his head on the trunk of the tree behind him.