Deadly Violet - 04

by Tony Richards

  He levered himself out of his chair, rotated his shoulders a few times to loosen them, then made his way to the cellar door.

  The light didn’t work either, when he clicked the switch. Wasn’t that always the way, several things breaking down at once?

  And he couldn’t hear the boiler making any noise below him, but could see a noticeable glow.

  It was coming from the riveted glass pane on the front of the metal box, and ought to have been yellow. But it wasn’t. It was … mauve.

  Fred grimaced worriedly. Had some contaminant got in with the mix, so that the fuel was burning wrong?

  He’d lived in this same house on Crealley Street his entire adult life. The boiler had been there when he’d first moved in, and he had never known this happen. But there was a first time for everything, he reckoned. And so he went down.

  He crouched in front of the device, wondering what on earth was wrong with it. The boiler was still silent. But when he peered in through the hatch, half a dozen flames were streaming from the nozzles, the same way they always did.

  They were as purple as a winter sunset. And his eyes narrowed to slits in their strangely brilliant glow. Whatever color they might be, they ought to be producing heat. The boiler should be making sounds.

  Fred put a palm to the glass, then slid it up across the metal. And the entire surface was cool.

  How did that make any sense? But he knew one thing for certain. He was only good for fixer uppers. And whatever was wrong here, it was way beyond his expertise. He’d better get in touch with a professional, someone who knew more about the subject.

  So he straightened up again, then eased himself around to face the stairs.

  And blinked amazedly.

  The staircase he’d recently come down had vanished. And so had the doorway at the top.

  Was he imagining this? Fred tried not to panic. But when he reached for where the railings ought to be, his grip closed on nothing but plain air.

  He began to shout for help, a short while later. But apparently, no one could hear him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Eye of Hermaneus – a big white diamond on a golden chain – was already floating in the air when we walked into Raine Manor’s ballroom. Hampton – Woodard Raine’s manservant – had been waiting for us by the front door and had shown us through. So his boss was obviously expecting us.

  Only one small problem. As was often the case, we just couldn’t see him. I’m not sure whether he does that for his own amusement or is unaware it’s happening. But when he’s in the darkness of his mansion, Woody is a quite difficult character to pin down.

  As well as the empty cone of brilliance the jewel was throwing out, there were a few lit candles in the room. But it was such a massive space that their tiny flames made barely any impression on it. I swiveled around, and could make out the vague outlines of huge family portraits. But nothing resembling a living human being, if Raine even answered that description anymore.

  “No one home. Wasted visit. May as well leave,” suggested Willets, by my shoulder.

  “So soon?” came a flabbergasted, high-class voice, apparently from thin air. “But I haven’t even offered you a seat.”

  There were no chairs in here, and so that didn’t make the slightest bit of sense. But when you considered the source of the outburst …

  A massive pair of golden eyes, catlike in shape and with slitted pupils, came open in front of us, and we both flinched back.

  Woodard Raine – the last descendant of the man who had founded this town, and a magician of incomparable strength – came a pace closer, not realizing that he had startled us. I could hear the motion, but could not see it. He doesn’t like too many lights on in his home. And has taken to dressing entirely in black these days, which makes him about as easy to catch sight of as a half Rice Krispie in a sandstorm.

  He’d altered himself physically several times the last few years, which explained the eyes. And had been out dancing with the fairies as well during that period, which told you why the doctor was uncomfortable.

  Me? I tightened my face, stood my ground. It’s always been that way with me and Woody. I’ve got better things to do with my time than go around being intimidated by an airy, self-important, never-worked-a-day-in-his life screwball.

  “What are you fellows doing here?” he asked us.

  He’d been aware of that, by the reception we’d received. But then, he had gone and forgotten it again. Which was pretty typical of him. He has a mind like a colander with an extra set of holes.

  With Willets adding details in, I explained the situation to him all over again, making sure that he got the important facts. He took them in, and then blinked nervously.

  “So … you want to look into the past?”

  “That’s right, Woods. The Victorian Age.”

  “But what exactly are you looking for? And where?”

  He had a point. This was a whole big town, larger than it ought to be, since none of its inhabitants could ever leave.

  There was a subtle cough from the open double doorway. Hampton was still standing there, a massive, rotund outline in the dimness. He wasn’t trying to be impolite, but he had obviously been listening.

  “If I may, sir?” he put in. “We’re talking about an infant of the very lowest class. And if she stole a powerful device, then she would almost certainly have snatched it from an adept.”

  He faltered, conscious of our gazes on him. Hampton never was what you’d call the most confident of types. But then he reminded himself how urgent our situation was, and he pressed on.

  “A child that age would not be able to rob anyone by force, and would find it difficult to burgle a house. So she was most likely a pickpocket. Which means that she’d have had to do the deed in a place where society’s highest and society’s lowest mingled freely. And back in Victorian times, venues of that kind were rare. The rich kept themselves at a good arm’s length from those in need. But might I suggest Union Square?”

  When he saw how blank our gazes had become, he practically choked up once more. But then he managed to continue, his thin voice trembling a little

  “I like to read history books, when I’m not on duty. Yes, I do,” he told us. “And I know for a fact that there used to be a market there, attended by most people in the town. Adepts would have been there. Little beggar girls as well. Merely a suggestion, sir. I hope that you don’t mind me saying.”

  Woody’s bright gaze disappeared from view a second time. But on this occasion, it was because he’d turned away from me and Willets. I could hear soft footfalls on the parquet floor. And then, part of Hampton’s outline was eclipsed by a far narrower human shape. And the next sound that we heard was Woody clapping the big man around the shoulders.

  “My friend, you are a genuine marvel!” we could hear him murmuring. “What would I do without you, Hampton? What?”

  It was hard to tell in this lack of good lighting, but I thought that I saw Hampton blush.

  Raine stepped back up to the empty cone of light cast by the Eye of Hermaneus. He muttered the words of a spell, and its base started to fill up with detail.

  Tiny buildings appeared first. Tinier figures began scuttling in between them. None of them were real. They were simply figments made of colored light, like you might get from a cinema projector.

  We were looking at Union Square a couple of years back. But almost immediately, the scene began moving in reverse, and very quickly. The cone filled up with hurrying people, all of them walking backward.

  Modern clothes gave way to denim ones, then bomber jackets. Past that, there was a propensity for long overcoats, and the majority of the men were wearing hats, homburgs and fedoras mostly.

  Those gave way to derbies, top hats, and embroidered waistcoats. The cars around the square got fewer, smaller, boxier, and then started making room for horse-drawn cabs and wagons. And those dominated more and more until they took over the streets completely, every last motor vehicle
gone.

  The lights around Union Square, as each night flitted past, were being lit with gas flames by this stage. And, as Hampton had predicted, the canvas awnings of a marketplace sprang up.

  We really were looking back into Victorian times. Woody had gotten far more skilled when it came to using the Eye, and slowed its progress down.

  “What is it we’re looking for?” he asked us.

  Willets rolled his eyes, and I tried not to.

  “Something purple, maybe?” I suggested.

  “You’re not being terribly specific, are you?”

  Which was the first even mildly sour remark he’d made since we’d arrived. He was being as friendly and accommodating as all hell. Which told me that either he’d forgotten the way he’d ducked out on us, leaving this town in mortal danger, during the course of the hominid attacks. Or else he remembered all too well, and was now doing his best to make amends.

  Other matters had been going through my mind, during the time that I’d been waiting. What Willets had told me – “I can sense no evil intent.” And the fact that most of the bad stuff that we’d encountered had come to us in the hours of daylight, which wasn’t usually the way things worked.

  I still wasn’t sure what we were dealing with, and could only hope that this peculiar process would tell us.

  The tiny figures of the Victorian Age strode past our gazes, walking in the right direction presently, but at a greater speed than normal. They were finely dressed or ragged, or else somewhere in between. Some were corpulent, while others were obviously pretty hungry. Watching them, I thanked the Lord we lived in easier and less demanding times.

  Willets’s sparkling gaze narrowed, and he let out a faint grunting sound. He was staring at a scruffy little brown-haired girl who – to my eyes – was acting oddly.

  “Slow it down some more,” I told Woods.

  “Down to what, old chum?”

  “To normal speed.”

  He did that. And all four of us watched as the beggar girl approached a rich man from behind. She lifted something from his pocket. And there was a tiny flash of purple, just before she turned and fled.

  “Can you run that back?” I asked.

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  He was being more efficient than was normally the case, and was in one of his rare lucid moods. But I wasn’t sure I liked him any better.

  Raine took the scene back to the point where the man’s pocket was being dipped into, then froze it there. The others paced around the cone of light, taking in the victim’s size, his bald head and his big drooping moustache

  “You know who that looks like?” Lehman Willets pointed out.

  As it happened, I was thinking the same thing.

  “Could it be an ancestor of Gaspar Vernon?”

  Woody absorbed that, his golden eyes gleaming with an unconcealed expression of delight.

  “Let’s ask him,” he suggested cheerfully.

  He snapped his fingers. And the man in question suddenly appeared in front of us.

  Except that nobody had asked him if he’d wanted to come here, or even warned him what was going to happen.

  To say that he was pretty surprised would be putting it too mildly. Poor old Gaspar Vernon – he was absolutely thunderstruck.

  He’s one of the Landing’s richest inhabitants, and a mighty adept too. A man of massive pride and self-regard. And so to be abruptly conjured here, without the slightest bye or leave, hit him where it really hurt the most. His dignity.

  He was in his usual jeans, but had on only stockinged feet, and his plaid shirt was unbuttoned. He had a half-eaten sandwich in his left hand, and there was mayonnaise smeared on his lip. He’d been relaxing in his own mansion, in other words, and hadn’t been prepared for any of this.

  The man gawped at his surroundings, figured out where he’d wound up and what exactly had been done to him. And his face turned vermillion.

  “Raine?” he bellowed, rounding on our host. “What do you mean by this? How dare you?”

  Woody was unfazed, as if he hadn’t even paid much notice to the way that Vernon’s voice was raised.

  “No offence, Gaspar.” He smiled brightly and his gold eyes shone a lighter hue. “We simply have a bit of a poser here. And we were wondering if you could help us out. It’s rather urgent.”

  A half-chewed piece of bread flew past my ear.

  “Urgent? I’ll give you urgent!” Gaspar raged. “Why, I’ll –“

  But then he noticed the frozen tableaux that we’d been examining, peering across at it with genuine surprise. His head dropped lower, and his eyes bugged out. He was staring at the guy whose pocket had been picked.

  “Why, that’s my granddad, Clayborne!”

  Yup, we’d been bang on the money. Truth to tell, the family resemblance was unmistakable.

  Gaspar looked at the young girl behind the man in question, peering at the object she was taking from his pocket. And his face went even paler, slackening with astonishment.

  “Oh, my good Lord! It was stolen?” he asked, so loudly that Willets winced.

  We waited to find out what he meant.

  “This is 1896, right? Pretty late on in that year?”

  We were finally getting somewhere. And so I asked the adept to explain how he knew that.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I mostly only have vague memories of my granddad,” Gaspar Vernon told us, once he’d settled down. “He passed on when I was still young. But he was, by all accounts, a remarkable man in many ways. A clever, almost visionary businessman who swelled the family coffers greatly. And a learned man as well, and a devotee of the arts. He passed that on to his children, and made the Vernons what they are today. But apparently, he had one fatal flaw.”

  Gaspar paused, part of his face shadowy in the white light that was being cast down by the Eye.

  “From what I understand, for all his smarts and wisdom, he was a deeply clumsy and forgetful man. Always bumping into things and breaking them, quite valuable things sometimes. Always putting stuff down and forgetting where he’d left it. Never on time for appointments, when he remembered them at all. The first motor car he ever owned got crashed into a wall within five minutes.”

  Gaspar shrugged.

  “My father and my aunts and uncles used to laugh about it. But – in the winter of 1896 – he did something that cut the laughter short. He managed to lose the most powerful artifact the Vernon family has ever owned. Morgana’s Amethyst.”

  An almost palpable hush fell across the room till I spoke up and broke it..

  “Please don’t tell me,” I asked softly, “that’s ‘Morgana’ as in Morgana le Faye?”

  Gaspar straightened up and nodded.

  “Exactly that, Devries,” he said. “The self-same woman from Arthurian legend. The most powerful witch of her or almost any other time. She beguiled Arthur with her powers, destroying his kingdom and his life. And she even bested Merlin, putting him to sleep in a sealed cave. And Merlin wasn’t even human. She could not have managed what she did without the Amethyst.”

  The air around me felt a little heavier and colder. Maybe I was imagining that. But when I glanced around at my companions, they looked like they’d sensed it too. Willets had gone very still, his red-flecked gaze taking on a hollow quality. And Raine appeared to be a little deeper sunken in the shadows, his eyes gleaming dully.

  “So what exactly does it do?” the doctor asked.

  “It gives its owner absolute dominion over any other person who wields magic. It negates their powers, or else – even worse – turns them against their user.”

  And we were living in a town where nearly everyone employed a little of the magic arts. So that didn’t sound exactly dandy.

  “Additionally, it increases the power of the one who holds it, several dozen times.”

  Which made Raine flinch. He muttered something underneath his breath, then returned his attention to the scene the Eye was showing, the Amethyst being snaffled by a
ragged little infant.

  “She doesn’t look like she has too much sorcerous ability to me.”

  But I was remembering what Willets had found out, and I relayed it to the others. Violet was a telepath.

  Gaspar Vernon’s cheeks puffed out when he heard that.

  “If she has that ability, and the Amethyst’s in her possession, she probably no longer only reads minds. She can most likely control them.”

  “Which still doesn’t explain what’s happening,” I pointed out.

  I looked around for Willets to confirm that, but was disappointed. He was standing perfectly still, with his eyelids almost shut.

  I’d seen him act like this before. He has this habit of withdrawing deep into himself, focusing inwardly and thinking matters through on an extremely intense level. And perhaps he was doing something else as well. Maybe he was reaching out, following the patterns left by this particular magic and tracing them back to their origins. As I’ve said, he has a talent for it.

  But what had he found out this time?

  Nothing too terrific, apparently. Because his body shuddered, and his face screwed up like he had chewed into a lemon.

  Then his lips shifted. “Oh, no.”

  He didn’t say it urgently. More like in a weary and defeated way.

  “What?” I asked him loudly, hoping he might be a little more specific.

  “That dumb, ignorant kid,” he mumbled.

  I could only guess that he was talking about Violet.

  His lids reopened. There was pain in there, deep anguish, and a glint of horror too. Whatever Willets had found out, it looked like it was bad for everyone concerned.

  But he ignored my worried glances, focusing instead on Raine and Vernon.

  “Think of what this Violet has done,” he asked them. “She’s increased her telepathic powers to the point where she can even get to someone like the Little Girl. She’s reached across more than a century to do that. She’s sought to spread her influence into this modern age. You’re two of the most powerful magicians in this town, and could either of you manage that?”