The Bartered Brides (Elemental Masters)

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I can only get about a block away from the locket,” Caro said. “Once you go past that, I can’t help you.”

  Sarah nodded, and concentrated on moving. She found that if she “walked,” she could go faster than if she was just hovering, and it was a distinctly novel sensation, to be walking along in midair above an empty street.

  Sure enough, when they reached the intersection with the next street, Caro abruptly stopped, as if she had run into an invisible barrier. “This is my limit,” she said apologetically.

  “Just keep an eye on us back at the flat,” Nan said, and Sarah nodded. Caro saucily tipped her cap to them in farewell, and strode confidently back toward their flat at about ten feet off the “ground.”

  “How far out from our flat have you cleared out ghosts?” Nan asked, when Caro was gone.

  “Probably about to here,” Sarah told her. “If Caro is typical, that is probably as far as most spirits can travel.”

  “Then we can probably expect—” Nan began, when Neville uttered a harsh bark of warning, and Grey screamed.

  Sarah caught the rush of movement out of the corner of her left eye just in time to intercept a tattered, frenzied looking thing flying furiously at her, clawlike hands outstretched.

  And it was strange—she should have felt a jolt of terror at the moment. She felt fear, but it was—distant. What she felt was something like what she had once experienced when she held two wires to a battery at a demonstration of electricity—a kind of jolt, that sent her into instant action. She swung at it with the butt of her spear, like a cricket batsman swinging at the ball, and knocked it into the middle distance. It tumbled over and over in midair, and finally came to a halt and stared at her in what looked like shock and surprise. Evidently it had not expected opposition.

  It was as solid as Caro, but . . . very different. It looked like something that had forgotten how to be human—or never had been in the first place. It lacked legs and a lower torso; it was a floating mass of rags and tatters from which a pair of emaciated arms and a skull-like head emerged. The eyes were the only things recognizably alive, and they burned with insanity.

  “Bloody hell,” Nan murmured, and readied her sword.

  But Sarah already had a plan. The fact that the revenant had fixated on her only helped that plan along. “It just seems to want me. I’ll take this thing,” she said with confidence, braced herself with the spear held for a two-handed swing, and held the Portal to the next world balanced in her mind.

  The revenant screamed; the birds answered its shriek, and it charged again. Grey mantled her wings and Neville poised himself to intercept the thing if Sarah missed, giving her more confidence in what she was about to do. Sarah had just enough time to judge where it was going to go when she struck it, and place the open Portal there, when it reached her.

  The spear struck true. The revenant went flying again—

  —through the open Portal, which Sarah closed behind it.

  She relaxed and regarded the spear in her hands thoughtfully. “A cricket bat might be better,” she said aloud. “Or a tennis racquet.”

  “Not enough reach,” Nan opined. “I wonder what would have happened if I’d given it a good hit with the sword?”

  “I have the feeling that you would hurt it, perhaps weaken it, but not actually damage it,” said Sarah, looking anxiously around for another such spirit. “Remember, this is where they are at home. We’re on their ground, now. It would take something or someone extremely powerful to affect a spirit here. Time—”

  “Or a necromancer?” Nan hazarded.

  Sarah nodded. “On the other hand, as a medium, I don’t encounter nearly as many of these sorts of dangerous and insane spirits as I do the ones that are lost or have some sort of task to perform. And it would be a great deal easier to help those spirits when I’m on their ground.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Nan muttered, also looking around, but warily. “I’d hate to find myself with one of those things sinking its claws in my back. I couldn’t even tell if it was male or female! Have you ever encountered anything like it before?”

  Sarah shook her head. “It’s either a ghost that has completely lost any semblance of a mind, or something that actually lives here. If they’re solid enough for us to affect them, the reverse is probably true, and I don’t want to find out for certain the hard way.”

  They eventually discovered their own limit, when both of them stopped moving at the same time, feeling an uncomfortable tugging in their chests. This, Sarah guessed, was about half a mile, which was better than she had feared. They didn’t encounter any more crazed revenants, but they did find a few of the wispy, sad spirits that did not understand what had happened to them, and did not know what they should do. This was the sort of thing Sarah handled all the time, and it was with a feeling of great confidence that she set them to rights, comforted them, opened a Portal for them, and sent them on their way. And that was another thing that she noticed immediately. Opening Portals to the next world was much, much easier here.

  Many of these poor little wraiths were children between the ages of about three and six. Babies and toddlers, she suspected, being too young to have anything but instinct, moved on to the next world immediately. And older children, in this part of London at least, had been indoctrinated by their Sunday Schools and the religious lessons taught in school to respond to the Portal when it opened for their deaths and they saw it. But children still in the nursery were sometimes confused and shaken, particularly if they had died suddenly, and simply didn’t understand what had happened to them. Perhaps they were still so attuned to the material world that they saw it more clearly than the spirit plane. Perhaps they found the spirit plane terrifying and fixated on the material plane. And when they did that, they could see and hear their parents, friends, siblings, and were heartbroken that they could not touch them or get a response from them.

  These were the easiest ghosts to help. Sarah had sent so many of these little ones on that helping them was as easy for her as breathing, and she no longer felt grief at seeing them. Instead, she experienced great pleasure in showing them the way out. But they affected Nan deeply. After the second, Nan couldn’t bear it; she had to move off while Sarah tended to them. Instead she concentrated on searching for the horizon for danger. And in between they both looked for any other sort of ghost that might be able to give them information on the murdered girls.

  The only ones they found were the kind that ignored them both entirely, lost in some sort of dreamy reverie, or focused on something they could not see. For now, Sarah decided to ignore them. They had a specific mission, after all.

  Finally, after searching the area they could currently reach that was nearest the Thames, even Sarah had to admit they had probably done everything they could do. It was time to go “home”—and make a report to John and Mary.

  * * *

  They all met at 221C, over tea and cakes that Sarah had bought from her favorite bakery. All the windows were open to the breeze, but there was a hint that the dog days of summer would be approaching soon. Sarah was not looking forward to continuing this investigation in the heat. Three more bodies had been found, and she was just grateful that John Watson had been the one to determine there was nothing new to learn from them, because the growing heat was probably making the morgue unbearable. Poor Lestrade was beside himself, and Sarah suspected that it was only intervention at the highest levels of government that was keeping this out of the newspapers.

  I suspect if the papers did start trumpeting stories, white dresses would suddenly go right out of fashion.

  “Well, now that you both can walk about in the spirit plane, perhaps the best idea would be to go to a decent little hotel as near as we can get to the spot where that first body was found,” Mary Watson suggested practically. “You can go talk to ghosts and John, I, or both of us can make sure nothing happens to your sleeping bodies.”

  “That was more or less what I was going to suggest,
” Sarah replied, as Grey nodded. She smiled thinly. “If at all possible, let’s find one with a good dining room. We have discovered that we are ravenous when we awaken, and if Alderscroft is going to task us with this, the least he can do is pay for our dinners.”

  John Watson evidently found this highly amusing, as he snorted with laughter. Then he sobered. “Given the number of accidents and river suicides that could create hostile ghosts, not to mention that the Water and Earth Elementals along the Thames are not . . . friendly . . . I am concerned for your safety, and I won’t deny this.”

  Sarah exchanged a look with Nan, and Nan nodded a little. “Actually, John, the really dangerous spirits are surprisingly easy to dispatch to their ends. They don’t seem to be able to think and reason. All that occurs to them to do is to attack. Nan and I didn’t even need to interact with the last three at all; all I did was wait for them to rush us, invoke Portals in their paths, and they were swallowed up before they could stop themselves.”

  John blinked. “Really?”

  “We have a theory,” Sarah continued. “We think the older the spirit, the madder it becomes, and the less able it is to think. It just acts on emotions, and if it is a dangerous spirit, its chief emotion is rage at the living. That would be why some of the older ghosts seem to be more of a memory than an actual being—they are just shadows of what they once were, endlessly reenacting the moments that led to their deaths.”

  “It’s a good theory, and I will defer to the expert,” John opined, eyeing first the last petit four, and then his wife, for whom they were favorite. Mary gave him tacit approval with a little nod of her head, and he helped himself to it. “And if you are quite confident that you can handle yourselves safely, then one or both of us can certainly keep an eye on you—”

  “Actually, I had an idea,” Mary interjected, “I wonder if our Elementals would be of any assistance? If they can move about in the spirit plane and help you there?”

  Nan shrugged, and looked at Sarah, deferring to her. “I think it’s an excellent thing to try,” Sarah agreed. “We can certainly see them on the material plane, thanks to Robin Goodfellow, but we can’t always understand what they mean to tell us. Perhaps on the spirit plane we will be able to speak with them as you can.”

  “I’ll find a hotel and make the reservation,” John said, and shook his head. “Though what is going to happen to my reputation if anyone discovers I am entertaining two young ladies and my wife in a hotel room, I shudder to think.”

  Grey made a rude noise, and Neville laughed. “Chaperones,” the raven suggested slyly, and clacked his beak.

  “Well, you’d be pretty effective if you chose to be, old man,” Watson agreed. “I certainly wouldn’t want to cross you.”

  * * *

  Nan and Sarah pretended to peruse the selection available at the tobacconist’s across from the modestly named Hotel Meridian as the gentleman in charge studiously ignored them. He probably thought they were awful Modern Emancipated Women who had Loose Morals and smoked. Nan wondered what he would do if they actually tried to purchase cigarettes or—horrors!—cigars or tobacco. Would he continue to ignore them, or raise himself up to his full height and attempt to stare them into shame?

  Of course, they were modern, emancipated women, and he’d probably have a stroke if he knew all that they were capable of.

  She felt someone behind her and a hand lightly brush her skirt at the same time as she sensed John Watson’s familiar presence. She put her hand behind her. “Room 302,” said John Watson, passing the key to Nan discreetly. He left, and Sarah approached the tobacconist and politely asked for a packet of mints. Suddenly mollified, the man “noticed” her and supplied her with her request.

  Once John had long passed into the door of the hotel, Sarah and Nan crossed the street together and followed in his wake.

  The hotel had a small lounge with nobody in it and a modest front desk with a clerk busy with something behind it. The girls passed on to the staircase without him taking notice, and up to the third floor they went, bird carriers in hand, which probably looked like small hand luggage to anyone who was watching.

  When they unlocked the door of 302, John and Mary had already taken up their places in the two armchairs in the tiny room, leaving the bed for them. “At least I won’t fear for you catching a cab here,” John said, as they closed the door behind them. “A few streets over, however. . . .”

  “We could always have walked to a better neighborhood, had you taken a room there. And your reputation would not have been tarnished by having three women in your room. Plus, it would be amusing to give some purse-snatching thug a lesson if one was foolish enough to meddle with us,” Sarah said demurely. Mary Watson laughed, as John winced.

  They let the birds out and lay down on the bed, arranging their skirts so as not to make John even more uneasy; the birds flapped to the bed and hopped up onto their chests. “I feel like a voyeur,” Watson muttered. Then said aloud, “Mary will summon her Elementals, and I will direct mine to meet you at the Thames.”

  “Which way is the Thames?” Nan asked, practically. John pointed at the blank wall at the head of the bed. As a Water Master Nan suspected he didn’t ever need to actually do anything to know where water was.

  By this point, slipping out of their bodies was easier than slipping out of their clothing. A moment, and they were standing in the spirit plane, the shadow-shrouded spirit-plane version of this hotel room around them, the walls glowing with the wards of Water and Air Masters. Caro and the birds were already waiting for them, and they walked through the warded walls of the hotel room and toward the Thames. They could have walked straight through rooms and buildings if they had chosen to, but that gave Nan the same queasy feeling she suspected John was feeling as he and Mary watched their still bodies. Of course, she wouldn’t see anything of what was going on in those rooms unless she chose to, but the mere fact that she would be blundering through someone else’s private space bothered her.

  Spirits were far fewer here than they had been a few blocks from their flat, and the ones they spotted ignored them completely. But they had not gone more than a few dozen feet before a half dozen tiny, butterfly-winged girl-creatures about a foot tall came whizzing up to them and hovered in front of them, gazing at them with excitement and anticipation. Nan knew what these were—sylphs, the smallest and most delicate of the Air Elementals.

  Caro stared at the little creatures in openmouthed amazement. “Pretty,” said Grey. Neville made kissing sounds. The sylphs erupted into high-pitched giggles.

  “What need ye, Daughters of Eve?” asked one of them, finally getting over her fit of laughter.

  “Warning of anything ill-intentioned in our path,” Nan replied. “Guidance to the Great River. And last of all, someone to call to the Water Spirits so that we may speak to them when we arrive there.”

  “Ye give us light tasks, Daughters of Eve,” said the one that seemed to be the spokesbeing for the group. She was a lovely little thing, dressed in little more than a wisp of dark blue scarf, with wings that matched. “Follow, oh follow.” She fluttered off at a pace they could easily match, while the others raced on ahead.

  Suddenly they moved into a neighborhood that, even in the spirit plane, was shabbier and more sinister. Caro stopped, and sighed. “I can’t go any further,” she said, and shrugged.

  “You can keep watch back at the hotel,” Nan told her. “We’re only half-warded there, from Air and Water. Anything nasty from Earth or Fire could get to us, and John and Mary wouldn’t know until it was too late to do anything. Just call up your bow and arrow and shoot anything that tries to get through the wards.”

  Caro brightened. “So I can,” she agreed, and turned back, guided by the pull of the locket.

  Sarah stopped a half dozen more times as the sobs of a child that had long lost any hope drifted softly to them through the grayness of this strange, sad place. Nan and the birds stood vigilant watch as she followed the sounds of weepin
g to small children, called to them, and sent them quickly through a Portal.

  And then they saw it, in the distance, a place that immediately caught their attention by the movement around it. A ramshackle building, differentiated chiefly by the ragged things that drifted in and out of its walls. Although not identical, they were not unlike the skeletal, crazed things that Sarah had dispatched near their flat. And just then, one of the sylphs came speeding back to them,

  “Around you must go, and still, still, still,” she said, as their guide nodded.

  “What are those things?” Nan asked.

  “Nightmares,” said the new sylph.

  Their guide elaborated. “When the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve have black hearts, these things are born of their thoughts and dreams. They feast on the evil,” she said. “They, too, are creatures of Air, but . . .” she shivered visibly.

  Sarah eyed them speculatively. Nan knew exactly what she was thinking. She wanted to destroy them. “We can’t take on that many, just us and the birds,” she said. “And what good would it do? There would be more tomorrow. We have a job to do, and this isn’t it.”

  Sarah sighed, but nodded. Descending to street level, they slunk along under cover of the buildings as directed by their guide. It seemed that either the sylphs could partially conceal their presence from the things, or that if they were not in direct line-of-sight the creatures could not sense their presence.

  At last, they reached the waterfront, and drifted down to the muddy verge. There were the rest of the sylphs, and with them, humanoid creatures with scaled skin and huge golden eyes, webbed fingers, and presumably webbed feet.

  “Greetings, friends,” Sarah saluted them, with a little bow.

  That seemed to please them. “Greetings, Daughters of Eve,” one said. “The Master tasks us to aid you.”

  “We know that you have not been able to find where the dead one the Master told you of first entered the Great River,” said Sarah, as Nan noted she seemed to have a natural knack for communicating with these Elemental creatures. “So we wish to find the spirits of those who met their end in its waters and speak with them.”