The Great Game (Royal Sorceress)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  Lord Mycroft would have given his eye teeth for a perfect assassin, she thought, grimly. There were plenty of people on the continent, starting with Talleyrand, that Lord Mycroft might have good reason to want removed. Assassination was rare among the major powers, but that was only because it was hard to get away with it – and detection could mean war. If Lord Mycroft had someone who could kill without leaving evidence, he would have used him.

  After Talleyrand visited, Gwen thought slowly, Sir Travis was killed. Coincidence?

  She shook her head. There was no way to be sure.

  Putting the matter to one side, she started to delve into the matters that only the Royal Sorceress could handle. A girl in Newcastle was claiming that her husband had used Charm to convince her to marry him and was requesting that Gwen grant her a divorce. Gwen had no idea why she thought that Gwen had such power – only a court could grant her a separation, depending on the exact circumstances – but she would have to send someone to investigate anyway. If the girl had been Charmed, she would probably receive a separation from her husband without further ado. And the husband would go to jail.

  The next report, from Haiti, warned that Voodoo practitioners might have managed to find another necromancer. Gwen shuddered at the thought; it had been less than twenty years since the last necromantic outbreak on the tormented island and that had been horrifying, worse than London. Haiti was a worthless piece of rock; whatever value it had once held had long since been destroyed by endless fighting between different groups of settlers. Some wag in London had once seriously suggested giving it back to the French. Gwen was rather inclined to agree.

  We might have to send magical reinforcements over there, she thought, as she marked the report for Sir James’s attention. The Governor-General of Jamaica didn’t have many magicians to call upon and it was unlikely that the Governor-General of British North America would be willing to let go of any of his magicians. But that would weaken us over here.

  The odd part of the report was a note that Russian traders had been sniffing around Haiti, for no apparent reason. Maybe they were just looking to break into the sugar and slave trade – the Russians had never expressed any moral qualms over slavery – but it was still odd, odd enough to merit a mention in a report concentrated on necromancy. Gwen frowned as she studied it, then added a postscript that perhaps a Talker should ask the Russians a few questions. A trading agreement might help to wean them away from the French... but if they wanted something else, it would be wise to find out exactly what.

  Shaking her head, she finished the last letter and headed down to the dining hall for lunch. A number of magicians were still in their morning classes, but there were enough there to cast glances at Gwen as she entered the room and sat down at the High Table. She ignored them, concentrating instead on a copy of The Times someone had left for the senior magicians to read. The only article of great interest was a note that Talleyrand had been publicly challenged by an MP to explain France’s involvement in the Battle of London.

  She was still reading when Norton cleared his throat. “A box of jewels arrived for you from Lady Alexandra Milton,” he said. “I have taken the liberty of checking them against the list of jewels in the will and while they are all there, there are also additional jewels that are not included in the list.”

  Gwen snorted. “Send the ones that aren’t included back to Lady Alexandra,” she said. There was no point in worrying about why the girl had sent the extra jewels. “And then we can decide how best to present them to Polly.”

  “I am no expert,” Norton said, “but I believe that their sale would bring three to four thousand pounds. Polly would be set up for life, if she were careful.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Gwen said.

  She finished her lunch and walked up to her study. Master Thomas had designed it, but she’d changed almost nothing. The vast bookshelves suited her too. Picking up Sir Travis’s journal, she started to read through it, even though he was nowhere near as skilled a writer as Sir Charles. Perhaps he’d planned to polish it up before trying to publish it.

  An hour later, she knew that something was badly wrong.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Sir Travis had been methodical above all else, Gwen realised, as she read through his journal. He might not have been quite as good a writer as his friend – in some places, he sounded more like a whiny child than a grown man – yet he was careful to make an entry for every day, even when he had been in Britain. Once Gwen had puzzled out the code he used to refer to his trips to Istanbul, she wrote down a list of dates he had been outside the country and checked them against the records from the Golden Turk.

  They didn’t match.

  For a long moment, Gwen stared at them, puzzled. How could Sir Travis have been in two places at once? No magic she knew could duplicate someone; the most capable Blazer could not have keep the illusion in place for more than a few minutes. The answer was obvious; Sir Travis had not been to the Golden Turk, no matter what the records said. Or had he lied about going to Istanbul?

  But he worked for Lord Mycroft, Gwen thought, as she studied the records. Sir Travis had been to the Golden Turk at least once a week for the past six months, if the records were taken on face value, but several of the dates coincided with his trips to Istanbul. He wouldn’t get away with not going to Turkey – and why would he bother claiming to go when he didn’t need to fake anything?

  She puzzled over it as she rang the bell for the maid. When Martha arrived, Gwen asked her to find Polly and send her to the study, then looked back at the account books. If one of the records was fake, her father had said while he’d been lecturing David, it was quite possible that they were all fake. And if Sir Travis had had no reason to hide what he was doing...

  Polly entered, her face grim. “Milady?”

  “I need you to recall when your Master was out of the country,” Gwen said. “When were you left alone in the house?”

  She listened to Polly’s answers and compared them to the list of dates. Sir Travis had had no reason to take a second house in London and hide while gambling, not if the pattern hadn’t been consistent. He’d been out of the country while the debts were being run up, which meant...

  They’re not real, she thought. They can’t be real.

  It fitted, she realised slowly. Sir Travis had ignored the demand for money from the Golden Turk – passed on via Polly – because he’d known that he owed them no money. But Howell had read Polly’s mind and believed the debt to be real, giving him the chance to make an up-and-coming government official indebted to him. And Hiram Pasha, who had been supposed to have backed the debt, had been murdered... ensuring that no one would be able to question him. Not even a necromancer could make a dead body sit up and speak.

  Means, motive and opportunity, she reminded herself. Why would someone go to all the trouble of faking gambling debts?

  Lord Bracknell might have had a motive, if he’d wanted to break off the engagement between his daughter and Sir Travis, but it seemed rather pointless. Howell wouldn’t have bothered either, particularly not when the debts could be so easily disproved; his power lay in truth, not lies. And Hiram Pasha... if he had worked for Turkey, why would he want to disgrace the man who had written the Airship Treaty?

  “If this had worked,” Gwen said out loud, “the Airship Treaty would have been destroyed. But how does Turkey benefit from that?”

  Polly gave her a sharp glance. “Milady?”

  “Never mind,” Gwen said, tiredly.

  The answer was obvious; Turkey didn’t benefit. At best, the treaty would have to be renegotiated and every clause would be harshly scrutinised before the treaty was presented to Parliament. But at worst, the treaty would be utterly destroyed. The Establishment had a long memory and remembered the days when the expanding Ottoman Empire had seemed an all-consuming threat. And it might still be a threat. Turkey wasn’t too far from India...

  She looked at the map Sir Travis had sketched in
to his journal and considered it for a long moment. The new Sultan had built a powerful army, tapping both the Ottoman Empire’s vast reserves in manpower and the very latest in military technology. He’d been using it to restore control over the Empire’s semi-independent regions – Egypt, in particular – but it wouldn’t stop there. The old nightmare of Turkey invading southern Europe was one possibility; it was equally possible that he might head east, emulating Alexander the Great. Could Persia block the path to India...

  ... Or would they make common cause against the infidel?

  The East had a reputation – fair, unfair; it hardly mattered – for being devious, sneaky and untrustworthy. How long would the treaty last if that reputation seemed to have been proven?

  I could take this to Lord Mycroft, she thought, slowly. But it wouldn’t be enough. We’d need to know who faked the gambling debts... and who murdered Sir Travis. Because if he was nothing more than an innocent man trying to do his duty, someone else had to have killed him. And then Hiram Pasha. And the Mover.

  She reached for a piece of paper and wrote out a short note to Inspector Lestrade, asking him to arrange for the Manager of the Golden Turk to be taken into custody... and then stopped. How could they hold him for long? Was faking gambling debts actually a crime? Gwen thought it should be, but she honestly didn’t know. If nothing else, he had been trying to claim from Sir Travis’s estate – which made it her problem. She crumbled up the piece of paper and scribbled out another one. The manager could be charged with fraud, which would allow the police to hold him long enough for a Talker to ask some pointed questions. It was of dubious legality, but few people would complain. The manager wasn’t British.

  “Take this to the dispatch room,” she ordered Polly.

  The maid nodded and left the room. Gwen turned back to the journal and started to read her way through it, right from the start. Sir Travis had gone to India to seek his fortune, as had so many other young men – and his talent had made him quite successful, working for the East India Company and the Viceroy. Maybe he’d intended to hire Sir Charles to rewrite the journal into something more exciting, particularly for the average reader. The journal managed to sound boring, even when talking about death-defying adventures across northern India.

  There was a gap midway through the journal, she realised, that corresponded with the time he’d been in Bukhara, locked up in jail. Most of the entries on either side of the gap were even more elliptical than usual, intended to confuse readers. At times, she couldn’t help wondering if Sir Travis had been drunk while he’d been writing in his journal. A reference to ‘Indian crud’ left her completely confused. Other references were even worse.

  Sir Charles made his first appearance shortly after Sir Travis had gone to India. Oddly, Sir Travis – who never spent much time writing about his friends – had quite a bit to say about how much he’d enjoyed Sir Charles’s company. Gwen wondered just what he meant as she read through some of the more colourful phases, before deciding that Sir Travis had been attempting to link his written work with Sir Charles. She couldn’t help a smile as she realised that he’d hoped to attract readers through the link.

  But it might not have worked, she thought. Sir Charles is a good writer as well as an adventurer.

  There was no reference to gambling, she realised, as she read onwards. Instead, Sir Travis noted that he and Sir Charles had moved from kingdom to kingdom, often disguised as traders or preachers. One entry referred to a religious debate with a local priest, which had been a pleasant diversion, and included a whole series of elliptical notations that Gwen couldn’t puzzle out at all. What was a ‘shortened man?’ The only time she’d heard anything like it had been a reference to a man being hanged for murdering his mother.

  Sir Charles had made it sound exciting, when he’d been telling her stories. Gwen couldn’t help thinking that Sir Travis sucked the life out of everything he touched, at least judging by his journal. Lady Elizabeth might not have found him such a good husband after all... although he would have had to work hard to be worse than her parents. And besides, a Sensitive would be sensitive. He would know when something was wrong with his wife.

  Part of the journal discussed returning home and securing Mortimer Hall – one entry, relating to Polly, noted that the girl’s wages would be raised – and then a series of missions to Istanbul. Gwen had read that section before, but she went through it again, hoping to spot something new. But again, all of the detailed comments were written in a manner that seemed designed to confuse the reader. No doubt Sir Travis had intended to decrypt it before actually publishing it. Only medical textbooks could get away with being so elliptical.

  Sir Travis had a very lonely life, she realised, as she finished the journal. The last entry seemed to refer to the Airship Treaty, but thanks to the cryptic comments it was impossible to know for sure. There was hardly anyone he could be near for long.

  It was true of all Sensitives, she knew. Even the most controlled of them were unnaturally aware of their surroundings. Sir Travis had probably refused to hire any other servants because too many of them would make it harder for him to concentrate. And Polly’s youth would work in her favour. She would simply have less of an impact on his mind, just by existing.

  And yet he’d somehow managed to serve as a diplomat as well as an intelligence officer.

  She looked back at the gap in the journal and shuddered. If she’d reacted so badly to the farms, what would Sir Travis have felt when he’d been locked inside a jail? Gwen had seen the inside of a madhouse, back when Master Thomas had been training her, and she’d picked up some of the impressions permanently burned into the stones. An oriental jail would be so much worse. Sir Travis would have had to be on the verge of madness.

  And yet... how had he managed to stay so close to Sir Charles for so long?

  Flicking through the journal, she found the first entry concerning Sir Charles and read it for the second time.

  Met the most extraordinary young officer; a soldier who reeks of nothing, but calm control. The Viceroy says that Charles Bellingham is one of the most accomplished agents in India and I believe him. He radiates almost nothing at all. This will not last, but we can work together until it ends.

  Gwen stared down at the lines, reading them again and again. The less emotional a person was, the less impact they would have on a Sensitive; Sir Charles keeping himself under such tight control would have been very welcome to Sir Travis. But there was more to it than that; he couldn’t be faking it, he had to be actually calm. Or...

  She read through the next section and winced.

  The Viceroy knighted Charles today, after we made it back from the Fort. No one deserves it more than him; his calm in the face of adversity saved us both. It was my pleasure to agree to share another mission with him, heading northwards towards Afghanistan. No two sources agree on what we will find there, but Charles is confident. Nothing is quite as dangerous as London, he says.

  There were several other references to Sir Charles further on, including one that came just after the escape from Bukhara, written in a very shaky hand.

  I am broken. The jail nearly broke me. Were it not for Charles, I would surely have died or gone mad like those poor souls in Bedlam. The Emir is mad and his sons are worse, steeped in such cruelty and hatred that even the worst slave drivers would have shuddered. I touch a bed and see a woman battered beyond belief, a man sliced apart for nothing more than not bowing low enough when the Emir made his appearance. Madness would have taken me if Charles hadn’t somehow shared his calm with me.

  The Viceroy congratulates us and tells us that there is more work to be done. We can go to Tibet or China or even Japan, if we see fit. But I have refused and so has Charles. I can no longer face the world. I will go back to London.

  Gwen shivered. For all of his self-control, Sir Travis must have been pushed right to the brink of madness. If he’d snapped while he’d been held prisoner, he would have died in Bukhara. And if Sir
Charles hadn’t been there, he would have snapped.

  Lord Mycroft wishes me to talk with the Turks. I accept; Turkey is more civilised than Bukhara. I go to Istanbul and talk with them, then come home and talk with Lord Mycroft and his allies. They want a treaty so desperately that I don’t need to use my talent to sense it. I give them what they want.

  And the final entry.

  The Treaty is written. Let us hope that it passes.

  Gwen shook her head slowly. The writer didn’t sound like the Sir Travis everyone had been talking about, although – as a Sensitive – he would have had to have learned very good self-control. Perhaps he’d fooled everyone, even Mycroft or Sir Charles...

  The thought struck her like a spray of cold water. Sir Travis had mentioned, several times, that Sir Charles was impressively calm, all the time. No, worse than that; he’d done something to help Sir Travis survive imprisonment in Bukhara. Gwen shivered as it slowly unfolded in her mind. Sir Charles had come out of the farms, yet had shown no signs of magic at all. Or, as sometimes happened with a new talent, they simply hadn’t been recognised.

  “No,” she said, out loud.

  But the conclusion was inescapable. If Sir Charles had been good at avoiding Sir Travis’s senses, he could easily have sneaked up on his friend and attacked him from behind. The Mover who had opened the door could have been murdered afterwards, along with Hiram Pasha... after leaving the notes taken from Sir Travis in his drawer, just to make it obvious that there had been a link between the two men. And the death of the Mover might have gone unnoticed. No one had known that he was a Mover.

  Gwen gritted her teeth as she put it all together. Sir Charles had forced his way into the investigation, offering to help... and pointing her towards the Golden Turk, where she’d picked up the account books that suggested that Sir Travis had been taking money from the Turks. He’d betrayed his friend; no doubt he hadn’t known all of the dates when Sir Travis had been in Istanbul. And he’d betrayed Gwen too.