Senior Officer Gordon was short and stocky with thinning hair and a multiply-broken nose. His suit was rumpled and he was wearing a trench coat that reminded me vaguely of that Colombo character on TV. He looked more like one of those long-term London street bobbies who’d somehow wandered into being a detective and had the confused look you’d expect.
I was going to be watching him very carefully. You didn’t become a “senior officer” of MI4, equivalent to an MCB special agent, if you were dumb.
Frye was Briscoe with a few years on him. Medium height, brown eyes, shaved head, very wide shoulders, Popeye forearms. Clearly some sort of Brit special operations background.
I shook his hand too and gestured to wing-backed chairs.
“Nice place,” Frye said, looking around.
The small mansion had come complete with decorations.
“Rental,” I said. “Not as nice as my one in New Orleans. You know that. To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit by England’s Finest?”
“I hear you’re an expert on gnoll,” Gordon said.
“I’ve written a dictionary on American gnoll,” I said, shrugging. “The expert is probably Dr. Witherspoon-Bunders. But…”
“He’s retired,” Gordon said. “We need a gnoll expert who’s still capable of fieldwork.”
“Why?”
“There are various immigrant fey groups turning up in England,” Frye said. “Mostly refugees from Eastern Europe. We don’t have language with all of them. In some cases, even our contacts in the same species don’t have language in common with some of them.”
“Stuff’s coming in from the hills that hasn’t been seen in a thousand years,” Gordon said, growling. “It’s worse on the Continent but we’ve got our fair share.”
“Something’s hunting gnolls in Manchester,” Frye said. “Normally we don’t bother with…supernatural internal disputes. But it’s spilling over to humans.”
“Killing them or eating them?”
“Killing them,” Gordon said. “What would eat a gnoll?”
“Don’t ask a master’s candidate at Oxford a question like that,” I said, smiling. “Giant spiders come to mind. I take it you’ve autopsied the humans. Cause of death?”
“Unknown,” Frye said. “Best our doctors can say is heart failure. No wounds, no toxins, soul was not stripped. No clear indicators of death magic. You’re aware that there is a spiritual mark left from something like, say, a voodoo doll.”
“I work in New Orleans,” I said drily. “Normally.”
“All of them just…died from natural causes. Same apparent cause of death in the gnolls. However, given the fact that one of the dead was a healthy twenty-three-year-old and there have been three sewer workers who died all in the same four-block area, either it’s some sort of disease that’s spreading from the gnolls to humans or it’s the same supernatural entity.
“While some of the gnolls are Brit gnolls, ones we can communicate with, they don’t know what the entity is. They can’t even detect it. But they know, somehow, that another group knows what it is. That group, unfortunately, doesn’t have a common language and are very…clannish. We’re not even sure where they came from. They’ve also have an ongoing territorial dispute with the local gnolls. The locals suspect they brought down this curse on them. We need to determine if that is the case and what the nature of the entity is. To do that, we need to talk to them which we cannot do.”
“So you’re asking me to get the foreign gnolls to confess to murder,” I said. “I take it you’ll have the usual sort of response to that: Kill them all; God will know his own.”
“We just need to get the killings stopped,” Frye said. “And they need to know that there are rules about that sort of thing here. If some of them need to die to get that across, some of them need to die. But to find out, we need to find out what is causing the deaths.”
“So you’d like me to go up to Manchester and try to figure out their language, talk to them and find out what they know about this killing ‘thing,’” I said.
“He’s not as dumb as he looks,” Gordon said.
“Neither are you,” I said. “What you’re probably looking at is an incorporeal given the cause of death. Some sort of wraith. I can see several potential issues to this mission in no particular order. The first that springs to mind is whether you’re going to believe me if I say that it’s not the fault of the foreign gnolls. It’s possible it’s something that followed them here or they’re completely unconnected. Simple coincidence. As you noted, you’ve had various ‘ferenners’ coming over from the East. This could be part of that. The second that springs to mind is that I’m sure as hell not going on an op unarmed. And you Brits get all weanie about people being armed. The third is that assuming an incorporeal, we’re not only going to have to find out what it is, but how to destroy it. The gnolls may not know that. They’re not particularly into the occult per se. They don’t even have shamans.”
“From last to first,” Frye said, nodding. “Find out what it is and we’ll figure out how to destroy it. As to the second, we’ll send in a support team to cover you.”
“Nice knowing you, gentlemen,” I said, standing up. “Remi will get your coats.”
“Look, you,” Gordon growled.
“Two issues,” I said. “First, gnolls under the best of circumstance are skittish. If they’re being hunted they’re going to be even more skittish. One person is the best choice to make contact under those conditions. Second, the best way to protect a person is for them to protect themselves. Third. I don’t know the backup team and I trust about as little as any person you’ve ever met, both assurance that they’ll do their job if the shit hits the fan and assurance that they’re competent to do it.
“I’m not knocking your people but I have a different view of what ‘competent’ means and even competence has different meanings. Are they going to follow my fire/no-fire order? You’ll notice I haven’t thrown in ‘how am I getting paid for this?’ I’m going to be armed for my own protection, I’m going to be either solo or with at most one other person at my back or you’ll need to find another linguist. As to my fee, standard rates for this sort of thing. Much less than I usually get paid, I’ll add. But the conditions are firm. I will be prepped for battle. Or find another linguist.”
“It is illegal to arm a foreign national for this sort of thing,” Frye said placatingly.
“It is illegal under British law to do more than half the sorts of things that are your daily bread and butter,” I said, sitting down. “Ditto US law for the MCB. Strawman argument. Gentlemen, I’m not going to go all cowboy on your turf. I don’t know what sort of exaggerations you’ve been getting from the MCB but I am, generally, discreet, and when I am not, I have a damned good reason. So let’s work something out. Or find another linguist.”
“Wait,” Gordon said, holding up a hand to Frye. “We’ll work something out. As to the believability…you do know what we do for a living, right? This job is like the Mad Hatter’s bloody Tea Party. You have to believe ten impossible things before breakfast. So…we’ll arrange to get your toys. But only for this op. No wandering Oxford dressed for a bloody op.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“Find out what’s killing people,” Gordon said. “We’ll detach Briscoe for your backup. He’s a good lad and steady. Give him some field experience in something other than monster killing. Find out what it is. We’ll probably know how to dispatch it and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Sure,” I said, grinning. “It’s always that easy.”
* * *
The next bit was making contact with the gnolls and learning their language. I wrote the details of who to do that already in the first memoir. So I’ll gloss over most of it. Because the enemy was more interesting.
Turned out the gnolls were from deep inside the Soviet Union. Their language was a gnollish variant of Permian. Not the geologic record—the tribal group. The Permian tribes are an off-shoot of the Finnis
h-Ugric lingual group which is also called “Uralic.” In the human languages, there are about two hundred phonemes shared between several tribal languages, Finnish-Ugric-Permian and some with Samoyedic.
Before going to visit them I’d boned up on every known variant of gnoll in Dr. Witherspoon-Bunders’ seminal Gnoll Dialects of the World. The man had to have had no sense of smell to collect all the variants he collected. But he had missed a few. Despite claiming that it was “a complete collection of all gnollish dialects with etymological tree,” he’d missed pretty much every type of gnoll I’d ever dealt with. Really it should have been entitled Gnoll Dialects of England, France, Germany, and Scandinavia with a bit of rudimentary Finnish picked up thirdhand. That is not everywhere that gnolls are found.
Fortunately, the Finnish section had some similarity and from there I was able to build enough of a basis to communicate. Took about a week.
The Permian gnoll tribe mostly hung out around Hulme Park; Briscoe and I had many a fine adventure suiting up and clambering down into the sewers in the area. From time to time I’d have a lorry of garbage collected to make friends and get some intelligent, for gnolls, conversation. Finally I had the thing pieced together, and we arranged to meet up with Gordon and Frye again.
“Right,” I said, taking a pull on my beer. “Item the first. Not the fault of these gnolls. At least not directly.”
The nice thing about working with the English is unless you’re forced to go “downtown,” you can pretty much figure the meeting will be in a pub. The British, bless their tyrannical hearts, even have a pub in every police station. Right in there. No need to go out to get hammered. It’s better than Germany that way.
“So they say,” Gordon said.
“As I mentioned, trust and belief,” I said. “According to them, their tribe was cursed by a Baba Yaga a long time ago. Don’t ask me how long a long time is. They don’t have a calendar. In the time of their forefathers, before any living gnoll in the tribe. Gnoll average age is about two hundred, so long time. Best I got. The curse was to be haunted by some sort of specter. They leave gifts for it to keep it away. There’s probably been a certain amount of pilfering of food, drink and tobacco in the area as well. I’ve passed on the proper propitiation to the other gnolls so they’re not going to get killed anymore. But you’re either going to have to get the sewer workers to leave out some Guinness and Prince Albert along with their sandwiches or we’ve got to get rid of it.”
“What’s it called?” Frye asked. “We’re fairly good at this sort of pest control.”
“You’re joking, right?” I said. “It’s called ub!tah po hahfack! All that means is ‘evil night spirit.’ It’s a previously unknown dialect of gnoll, Officer Frye! There probably is a name for it. It is probably a recognized spirit. We might be able to figure it out. But just knowing what the gnolls call it isn’t much use. And it is definitely incorporeal. But that’s about as much as I could get. There’s not a lot of terms in their language for boogiemen.”
“I hate this sort of crap,” Gordon said.
“Tell me about it,” I said, sighing.
“This is a Finnish-Ugric linguistic group, yes?” Briscoe said.
“Yes,” I said, shrugging. “Gnoll variant but yes.”
“Then will their ‘boogiemen’ be Finnish-Ugric as well?” Briscoe asked.
“Possibly,” I said, frowning. “There’s only one battle cry at this point, gentlemen.”
“To the Unseen Library!” Briscoe said.
“A para who enjoys research,” I said, shaking my head. “Will wonders never cease.”
“A Marine who can read,” Briscoe replied. “Will wonders never cease…”
* * *
“I had to talk the librarian into letting me leave with this,” Briscoe said, slamming a heavy tome onto my desk. “Is it me, or does he look just like an orangutan?”
“He looks just like an orangutan,” I said, still grading papers. “Balding red hair, long arms, flat face. Where y’at?”
“What?” Briscoe said.
“What do you have for me?” There were times I still missed New Orleans.
I’d more or less deputized him as my…deputy. Research assistant, maybe. I had papers to grade. That sort of thing was what undergrads—and junior MI4 officers—were for.
“Piru,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” I said, then frowned. “You weren’t saying thank you?”
“No,” Briscoe said.
“It’s ‘thank you’ in a rather obscure Indian language,” I said. “Also a type of evil night spirit of Slavic derivation.”
“And the master is beaten,” Briscoe said. “Uralic, not Slavic. Or it was originally Uralic and got transferred to Slavic according to this.”
I picked up the book and looked at the title page. “‘Spirits, Myths, Heroes and Devils of the Finno-Uralic Tribes.’ So that’s saying piru, which I’d sort of put aside as being Slavic not Uralic, is Uralic?”
“According to this,” Briscoe said, grinning.
“So how do you banish it?” I asked. “Does it say?”
“Uh…” Briscoe said, then frowned. “No. Do you know?”
“No,” I said. “We haven’t covered Slavic or Uralic in incorporeal creatures. And I don’t usually get into them since they’re not PUFF-applicable. Guess you’ve got more research coming your way.”
“Drat,” Briscoe said, picking up the book.
I went back to grading papers. Bloody essays. Everything at Oxford was bloody essays and of course the TAs had to grade them. And, no, the students were no better at writing them than American students. I was running out of red pens.
* * *
“I’ve found a book which is said to have various spells and incantations for dispelling Slavic and Uralic spirits,” Briscoe said, dropping the book on my desk again. It was another weighty tome.
“So how do we dispel it?” I asked. “You could have just done notes.”
“I don’t do runes,” Briscoe said. “It seems that the Germans were having trouble with Slavic and Uralic supernatural entities going way back. This was written in the eleven hundreds in Germany but it simply transcribed the Elder Futhark runes for the spells assuming that anyone who was reading it also read Elder Futhark.”
“Go down to the linguistics department,” I said with a sigh. “Ask Professor Furnbauer for his Elder Futhark dictionary with my kind thanks. I’ll need to bone up.”
* * *
“Oh you have got to be fucking kidding me…” I said as I finished the translation. Maybe I was wrong? I’d have to get a second opinion. Was Professor Furnbauer read in?
He was. And the translation was right. Bloody hell. This was going to be complicated…and my orals were coming up. On the other hand, the book was interesting and this was shaping up to be a great paper. I was considering translating the whole thing since it had dozens of wards, traps, dispellations, and charms I’d never run across anywhere else. Publish or perish had serious meaning in our job.
* * *
Two days later I grabbed Briscoe as he was leaving class.
“Go down to the geology department,” I said. “Ask them about some sort of crystal or stone that changes color between ‘firelight and sunlight.’ One color in sunlight, different color in firelight. Only found in the Ural Mountains.”
“If so, it’ll be bloody hard to get our hands on,” Briscoe said.
“Worse, we’ll need one the size of ‘the last joint of a tall man’s thumb,’” I said. “Just find out what it is.”
* * *
“You’re not going to like this,” Briscoe said.
“I’m not liking anything about this,” I said. “I’m not liking having to depend for information on eleventh century alchemists, gnolls whose language I think I’m translating right and an undergrad para who has enough trouble with English much less any other language.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Briscoe said.
“Wh
at am I not going to like?” I asked.
“Alexandrite,” Briscoe said. “Extremely rare color change variant of chrysoberyl. Changes color from green in sunlight to red-purple in artificial light. Named after Tzar Alexander the Second. Only mined in a few areas: the Northern Urals, Sri Lanka, and Brazil.”
“We’ll need the Urals’ one to be sure,” I said, frowning. “Bit of a trick what with that being the Soviet Union. And a good, clear, pure-quality one.”
“More of a trick than you think,” Briscoe said. “The Russian deposits were the finest in the world…were being the important word. They were all mined out in the 1950s. ‘Of the size of a large man’s thumb’ is about ten carats. I asked Professor Shelley how much that would cost and he said, ‘Oh, about a hundred.’”
“Hundred dollars?” I asked.
“Hundred thousand,” Briscoe said. “Pounds.”
“Not my problem,” I said, grinning. “That’s on MI4.”
* * *
“You’re bloody insane,” Gordon said. “A hundred thousand pounds?” He patted his pockets for a moment. “Here, let me just pull it out of my arse, why don’t I?”
“The night creature is a piru,” I said. “Or at least a Uralic version of the piru. It’s found in Slavic folklore as well. Previously—and I’ve checked with Professor Henderson—there was no known way to dispel or entrap one. According to the book Briscoe turned up, there is a way using a Ural alexandrite and a spell. The fact that they’re rare is unsurprising given that piru are really nasty spirits. As I said, Professor Henderson had no answer to how to dispel them or kill them. Generally you do what the gnolls are doing which is propitiate them. But if you want to dispel it, you’re going to need a big alexandrite. And it will be destroyed in the spell so you won’t even be able to sell it afterwards.”
“Bloody hell, there goes my budget,” Gordon said. “We’ve got the area blocked off for now. I’ll have to get back to you. That really is a bit of a budget item for us at the moment.”
“Feel free,” I said. “I’ve got exams coming up.”
* * *
“That do?” Gordon said, setting a large reddish purple gem on my desk.
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