Wicked Ways: An Iron Kingdoms Chronicles Anthology

by Douglas Seacat

  Mel made a face. “We don’t try to keep them around. Like I said, we send them on. No one wants a bunch of ghosts.” She looked thoughtful and added, “Though Blackwell Hall does have quite a few of its own, down below. Okay, we’re here.”

  The Omnibus glided to a halt in the middle of a block-long grassy park surrounded on three sides by some of the city’s older businesses. The buildings clustered together like the elderly under an umbrella in the rain, their storefronts weary and out of style but respectable in their own secret ways. Kincaid watched Grimes hop down and then, when he was sure no one else was watching, help the sickly Elliot climb down as well. Mel was already gone, trekking across the grass to meet the Strangelight’s wagon, which had just pulled up in front of one of the buildings.

  “Ceryl-in-the-Round,” Kincaid said, surprised. The theater’s front even formed a half-circle to the edge of the walkway with its doors on either side. On one side was a moneychanger service that looked to be on hard times; on the other was an armory with two suits of eye-catching armor parked outside its doors. The marquee read Pride of Cathmore: SOLD OUT.

  “The Majestic,” the trollkin said as Kincaid descended the car’s steps. He looked up at her. She rolled her eyes. “It hasn’t been Ceryl-in-the-Round for years. Where you been, under a rock?”

  “My barrister says I don’t have to answer that question.”

  The trollkin chortled with amusement, and Kincaid waved to her as the car rolled on.

  He crossed to the others. Mel was up in the back of the wagon, unloading the crates down to Grimes and Elliot. Abigail, laden with cameras and equipment bags, had disappeared through one of the theater’s doors as Mel handed a pair of cages to Kincaid.

  “What’s with the cats?” he asked. He held the two cages at arm’s length; the cats in each glared out at him. One of them was the grey one he had seen back at the mansion.

  “You don’t like cats?”

  He felt the sneeze coming. “No, it’s not that.”

  “You hear that, Artis, Yu, Gin?” Mel stretched her back and then hefted the last crate. “He doesn’t like you.”

  “I like dogs better.”

  “Uh-huh. Guard dogs, I bet. You know who else doesn’t like cats? Gremlins.” She lugged her crate off the wagon. “Gremlins tear up equipment, but they really hate cats, so we use cats to guard our stuff. Now, let me ask you a question, Kincaid: are you a gremlin trying to pass himself off as a mechanik who’s saying he’s an ex-con while he’s acting as our bouncer just so you can mess up my equipment?”

  Kincaid sneezed, causing the cats to yowl when he almost dropped the cages, and said, “I wasn’t sure before, Mel, but now I’m pretty sure of it: you’re crazy.”

  Mel followed after Grimes and Elliot. “Oh, you wanna see crazy? Come on. Let’s go find us a ghost.”

  • • •

  AN OLDER REDHEADED WOMAN who wrung her hands incessantly met the Strangelight team in the theater lobby. She introduced herself as Cecilia, manager of the Majestic Playhouse, and then indicated a middle-aged man with a scruffy beard who hung back as her assistant, Kellyn. Abigail shouldered the burden of dealing with them; Kincaid was grateful to busy himself alongside the others in cracking open the equipment crates.

  “We are desperate,” Cecilia explained in a high-pitched voice that Kincaid imagined would deter any ghost from sticking around. “We have a sold-out show scheduled for tonight, and there will be no refunds.”

  “I’m not here to pass judgment on your business practices,” Abigail said. She took a small notebook out of her shoulder satchel. “I understand you’ve been seeing this ghost for almost a week now?”

  “Yes. Ever since opening night for the new play.” Cecilia frowned. “Aren’t you supposed to just stuff it in your ghost bag and be on your way? This is already more dialogue between us than I expected.”

  Kincaid was impressed—Abigail didn’t bristle. She said, “Well, sadly, we don’t have a ghost bag. The causes for a spirit’s manifestation can help us determine the best course of action in responding to it.”

  “It’s so nice you can quote the ghost-catcher’s handbook, sweetie girl. Now, can you quote the page that says ‘this is how we get to work’?”

  Her assistant Kellyn promptly intervened as Cecilia tapped one foot impatiently. “So, why don’t I take you to the stage?” he suggested, sweeping with one hand to encourage the Strangelight team to join him. “It’s the last place the ghost showed up.”

  The team gathered their gear, studiously avoiding Cecilia’s impatient glare. As they followed Kellyn through the auditorium doors, Grimes growled, “As long as we’re here, should we go ahead and catch the witch?”

  Kincaid suppressed a smile; the assistant, Kellyn, pretended not to hear.

  “Miss Cecilia is justifiably worried about what could happen if we don’t open the doors tonight,” he said. “We’re expecting a full house.”

  “Yep, you wouldn’t want a mob of old ladies throwing their opera glasses at you,” Mel chimed in, grinning.

  “Naval officers love this play.” Kellyn grinned back, though it seemed forced for the sake of camaraderie. “And we sell them cheap alcohol during the intermission. They love that, too. Let’s not see if they love having their show canceled.”

  The house was situated in the round, much as Kincaid remembered it, with seats on all sides of the sizable diamond-shaped stage sunk in a shallow arena. He scanned the exposed overhead catwalks and the balconies on three sides, but except for the Strangelight team, the auditorium was empty.

  The performance area itself was dominated by an elaborate warjack costume—at a glance, he guessed it would take a man of Grimes’ build or bigger to operate it. It had a sizable cannon for one forearm and a single “steam engine” on its back bracketed by double makeshift smokestacks. When the team reached the stage, Mel put down her crate and approached the costume. She circled it, banging on it in various places.

  “It’s mostly made of wood, but it has enough metal in it that it must weigh a ton,” she said with satisfaction. “You wouldn’t want to fall down when you were wearing it, that’s for sure.”

  Grimes and Elliot set about assembling components of Grimes’ armor, including its mechanikal rig on his chest that attached to an array of thick hoses and voltaic chargers, which Grimes attached to the armor’s gloves. Elliot then opened a crate containing a peculiar metallic box adorned with dozens of dials and switches around its base. Kincaid moved to help them.

  “Don’t,” Mel advised him. “They don’t like us touching their stuff, unless they’re already broken.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, if one of us connects the wrong charging unit to one of our light projectors—like that one over there by Abigail—then we just have to rejigger it. But if we messed up the flow of charged air through his suit, then Grimes gets possessed, and that makes him really grouchy. And Elliot’s equipment is designed to let him talk to ghosts and opens up his mind to them, which is already pretty dangerous. So, we don’t touch their stuff. Unless they ask us to.”

  “Fair enough,” Kincaid said. He turned to see the manager Cecilia hurrying down the aisle. “Looks like our villain enters stage left.”

  “Well?” Cecilia asked as she ascended the stage’s short flight of steps. “Did you find it? How long will it take you to finish up?”

  “We actually haven’t even confirmed you have a manifestation yet,” Abigail said diplomatically. “But let us assume you do. Ghosts leave traces and trails, but their malevolence and toxicity are relevant to how easily they’re revealed.”

  “In other words,” Grimes grunted without looking up from his armor, “the scary ones are easy to find. The mean ones hide till they get to ambush you and suck your soul out your eyeballs.”

  Kincaid shot a glance at Mel. She shrugged and made a helpless yeah, that can happen gesture with her hands.

  “They’re less predictable,” Abigail continued, raising an eyebrow at Grimes. S
he then focused on the manager again. “We need to prepare for the worst, again assuming there’s an actual spirit haunting your theater.”

  “It wears a mask,” Kellyn offered from behind Cecilia. “A raging ogrun mask. Big fangs. Very much like the ones you see on playbills for dramatic productions. And it’s been seen on the stage and down below in the dressing rooms multiple times.”

  The manager ignored him. “Whatever you need to do, please do it quickly. If the director Faulkner finds out you’re here, I’ll never hear the end of it. He’s already convinced a ghost will just help us sell more tickets.”

  A voice from the back of the theater called out, “And I am not mistaken.”

  Cecilia groaned quietly as a man with long gray hair covered by a black bowler hat hurried to join them from the back rows. Kincaid noted that as fastidious as the man looked on first blush, the bulge beneath his jacket’s left armpit suggested he was armed.

  “The ego enters stage right,” Kincaid muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?” the man called Faulkner said.

  Mel rolled her eyes. “Good acoustics in here, too.”

  “You people are here to take my ghost away, aren’t you?” Faulkner ignored the manager Cecilia as if she were an extra, Kincaid thought amusedly, and proceeded straight to Abigail. “This violates every creative instinct known to mankind. Do you even understand, madam, the allure in the risk of a performance being visited by a ghost? It’s a trapeze act without a net. We’ll be packing the house.”

  “It’s a danger,” Cecilia snapped at him.

  “You mean it’s a liability,” Faulkner said. “And I’m telling you, it’s an asset.”

  “It’s sure as hell not an understudy,” she retorted, “which is the way you’ve been acting since your male lead bailed out of this silly production. Your ‘creative instinct’ is stronger than your survival instinct.”

  Leaving the two of them to argue, Abigail gathered her people. “Grimes and Elliot, I’d like you to check out the dressing rooms. See if you find any evidence of manifestation. Get that assistant Kellyn to show you downstairs. Kincaid, you’re with them to watch their backs. I’ll deal with these two and then help Mel unpack the rest of the equipment.”

  Kincaid removed his baton from his hip. “What am I watching for?”

  “Hecklers?” Mel suggested.

  Abigail said, “Anyone who tries to stop you. People will go to extreme lengths to preserve their privacy, but we cannot operate from ignorance, so we will dig as deeply as we must to find out what’s happening here. Anything that’s private here may well become known to us if necessary to find this spirit.”

  Kincaid looked over at the theatrics of the two theater people. The director, Faulkner, had taken off his bowler as he argued to reveal that, despite his long hair on the sides, he was in fact bald on top. He now used the hat to fan himself. Cecilia, the manager, routinely interrupted him by shouting financial figures at him. Though Kincaid wasn’t following the specifics, he suspected they were bad numbers. Her face was already redder than her hair.

  “This doesn’t strike me as a very private place,” he said to Abigail.

  • • •

  THE HALLWAYS BENEATH THE THEATER were exactly where Kincaid expected to find a ghost, but they were also vaguely familiar. Following Grimes and Elliot, he tried to recall if he had ever been in this particular corridor before. The lighting was mediocre, it smelled of sweat, and it looked essentially like the two corridors they’d already passed through. He couldn’t be sure.

  The assistant, Kellyn, stopped in front of a curtained entryway. “The dressing rooms.”

  The chambers beyond were interconnected by more curtains and were stocked with a host of different wardrobes and closets. Elliot set down a portable lightbox, flipping switches with practiced ease, while Grimes adjusted his goggles and activated the voltaic charge in his gloves.

  “I hope we don’t have to haul the containment devices down here,” he grunted. “It’s close quarters.”

  “They’re big?” Kincaid asked.

  “You loaded them. You didn’t notice?”

  “No. What are they for?”

  “For those spirits who aren’t ready or able to move along to Urcaen,” Elliot added. “Even the purest of beings can have moments of doubt, and fear of what awaits us does not dissipate after the covenant with our greatest fear, death, has been fulfilled.”

  Grimes smiled. “Every caller’s a little preachy.”

  Kincaid turned away, taking in the rest of the dressing room. It had been used for storing props as well, he noted. Fake blades, a small armory of pistols and muskets, shields from a host of different kingdoms, even religious symbols for various faiths. As Grimes and Elliot proceeded, he stepped out into the hallway again. He kept his baton in hand, but he also double-checked the pistol he kept secured up his left sleeve. Like his old picks—which he kept in a small pouch on his waist—it was a throwback to his time before incarceration. And it gave him a hell of a lot more comfort than the simple stick did.

  Farther down the hallway, he had a moment of recognition: on the same side of the hallway as the dressing rooms hung a rectangular silver plaque: CERYL-IN-THE-ROUND, Est. 590. He stood before it for a moment, staring, then turned around sharply to face the blank wall behind him. Its stonework was mismatched, innocuous, nondescript. He ran one hand over it thoughtfully; it was smooth beneath his fingertips.

  “Bouncer,” Grimes called as the jammer emerged from the dressing rooms. “We’re going back up. There’s nothing here.”

  Kincaid glanced at the wall again, nodded agreement, and followed Grimes, Elliot, and Kellyn back to the stairs, but not before he carefully scraped his boot along the bottom of the wall, leaving a scuff mark. Just in case someone moved the plaque.

  • • •

  FAULKNER, THE DIRECTOR, had apparently exhausted the interest and tolerance of the rest of the team, so he drifted over to Kincaid as the bouncer paced the edges of the stage. Nearby, Elliot suggested he might hear the ghost before they could see it, given the range where it had appeared within the theater. He threw a switch on a large square apparatus he referred to as a “resonating chamber” and a humming sound reverberated around the auditorium, its pitch wavering, sometimes disappearing entirely. The caller pulled on his sensory deprivation hood and tilted his head as he adjusted switches near his ears. He seemed to turn with the sound waves. Grimes stood next to Elliot, his armor expanded by the hissing gas.

  Nearby, Abigail was peering through a viewfinder in what Kincaid had heard as a “portable lumitype,” a small boxy contraption with lenses and a violet light that shone through a spinning wheel. He had been told this could capture images somehow. She directed this around, turning slowly. Meanwhile, Mel positioned tripods to which she attached larger light projectors, each with its own spinning disk of tinted lenses, and a similarly scaled up lumitype; she was trying to situate these such that they covered the entire stage. Everyone was clearly tense—they kept looking up to see if something might appear. Abigail had let loose the grey cat Kincaid had first observed back at Blackwell Hall—Artis, Mel had called it, a name shared with one of the three moons. The cat sat near the investigator as if utterly disinterested in what everyone else was doing.

  The manager, Cecilia, and her assistant Kellyn had sat down in the first row of patron seats, though the red-haired woman could not keep still. Her hands worked nervously as her eyes darted back and forth, trying to take in all the activity. Kincaid thought she’d make a better bodyguard than he did—she had an impressive attention span.

  “She’s a fraud, you know,” Faulkner said to Kincaid.

  “Who?” he asked Faulkner. “Cecilia?”

  “No, your so-called investigator.” The director bit off the title with distaste. “You are aware she is an utter novice? You might just as well have had a random gobber lead your team, for all her limited experience. A drunk gobber, I would amend. Your odds of survival would be compar
able, I daresay.”

  Kincaid swallowed and said nothing. He didn’t want to give Faulkner the satisfaction of hearing sudden doubt in his voice.

  “I’m hearing it,” Elliot called out, his voice partially muffled by his mask. “It’s here.”

  The entire group froze. The peculiar flickering violet illumination from the overlapping projectors created a sensation of shadowy movement. The auditorium seemed to change shades. And Kincaid could feel the temperature drop as if a curtain had been thrown back to allow a winter landscape into the theater. Several times he thought he saw the flicker of something at the edge of his vision that was gone the moment he tried to focus upon it.

  “Goggles,” Abigail said.

  “What goggles?” Kincaid started.

  “Increase your focus,” Grimes whispered to Elliot. The jammer held out a hand in front of Elliot’s enclosed face, extending his fingers as the caller twisted the tinted lenses covering his eyes.

  Abigail seemed to have stopped to focus on something unseen. Her lumitype’s attached light projector streamed a purple beam across the auditorium like a lighthouse ray on the blackest of nights. Kincaid could see his and Faulkner’s breath. The stationary projectors hummed and similar frost or steam rose from their tops.

  “Hey, I didn’t get goggles,” Kincaid said.

  “Took an exposure. I’m changing plates,” Mel murmured. She went to the larger lumitype and opened its back, removing a thin sheet of metal strapped across the back, one that curled and rolled up in her hand as she unfixed it from the device. She handed this to Kincaid.

  “Give it to Abigail,” she said as she closed the back of the machine. Abigail was performing a similar operation on her smaller portable one as Kincaid brought her the sheet. Mel checked her brass pocket watch. “Thirty seconds, boss.”

  Elliot’s next words fell on the stage like stones. “It sees us.”

  The cat Artis began to growl. It began as the steady dragging sound of fingernails across rough wood, but it rose quickly in pitch and volume. The other two cats, Yu and Gin, appeared from amidst the piles of spectral equipment, their backs arched, their fur standing on end.