The Eleventh Plague cq-2

by Darren Craske

  'So your lot get your poison, and Cornelius Quaint gets thrown into the bargain, eh? Talk about killin' two birds with one stone!' laughed Ferret.

  Nadir smeared a grin over his thin mouth. 'Actually, Herr Ferris, the Hades Consortium prefers to set a cat amongst the birds…and let them kill each other.'

  CHAPTER VI

  The Parting Shot

  BY THE TIME Cornelius Quaint and Prometheus returned to Grosvenor Park station, the party atmosphere had long since ceased. All that was left on the platform were some discarded banners and streamers – as well as Jeremiah, surrounded by empty bottles, snoring like a hibernating grizzly bear. The conjuror and the strongman retired to their bunks, with Quaint contemplating where the night's discovery had taken him, and how much further he would need to go before he saw its end.

  The following morning, Quaint and Madame Destine were up before the lark, and were packing to be ready for the long voyage. Butterflies swarmed in Destine's stomach, and unremitting tears stained her soft cheeks as she said goodbye to her friends, flittering from one cabin to the next. Quaint was his usual insular self. The woes of his mind had yet to lift from the previous night's foray into London's backstreets.

  Out on the station platform, the company of circus folk lined up alongside the steam train. Quaint spoke to them each of them in turn, striding down the line with his hands linked behind his back like a sergeant major inspecting his troops. He shared a wink with Jeremiah, a tug of Peregrine's beard and a warm smile with Yin and Yang. Quicker than he anticipated, he came to the final three performers in the line – the three he had dreaded bidding farewell to the most: Butter, Prometheus and Ruby. He spoke to them all at once, spreading his gaze between them, never letting his eyes linger long before switching to another, keeping one step ahead of his emotions.

  'Well…this is it,' he said, tilting on the balls of his feet. 'Butter…I leave our family in your very capable hands. They can be a rowdy bunch, but I have no doubt that they will continue to function as exemplarily for you as they do for me.' Quaint cupped a hand to Butter's ear. 'If the clowns get out of hand, just threaten to set Rajah on them – that's what I do.' Butter sniggered into his hands as Quaint turned to Ruby. 'My dear child, it is with my sincerest apologies that I was forced to miss the send-off that you so thoughtfully organised on my behalf last night. An urgent situation arose that commanded my full attention, but know that if there were any way that I could have avoided it, I most certainly would have. You are a very special young woman, my dear. You make me, and your old mentor Viktor, most proud.' He leaned closer and pecked the knife thrower on the cheek, sending a crimson flush to Ruby's cheeks. Quaint took a deep breath as he gripped Prometheus's great hand. 'And as for you, my friend…it'll take some getting used to, you know, turning around expecting you to be watching my back and yet finding you absent. Fear not, though, the Madame has offered to step in and be my brawn should the need arise…of which there is a high probability, it must be said.' Quaint took a step back, raising his voice to address the entire troupe. 'Madame Destine and I will only be away for a couple of months at the most. In that time, I expect each and every one of you to pull together like the family you are, and continue to do what you do best – namely, put on the best damn circus that this country has ever seen, bar none!' Quaint lowered his head. 'You may disperse to your duties.'

  As the rabble broke ranks and rushed to shake Quaint's hand and hug Madame Destine, the fortune-teller felt a great twinge inside her heart. The conjuror had made a vow that he would come back home to their family. She only hoped it would not become a vow that he was forced to break.

  A short time later, Quaint was alone in his office onboard the circus locomotive, packing a large canvas bag. There was a gentle tapping against his door, almost too faint to be heard. The door opened slowly, Butter's wizened faced poking gingerly around it.

  'Am I not intruding?' he asked.

  Quaint smiled. If ever there were something to lift his spirits, it was Butter's cheerful demeanour. Although the cloud hanging over his head could not be ignored indefinitely, perhaps Butter might succeed in pushing it aside for a while.

  'No, Butter,' replied Quaint, a trifle confused. 'I mean, yes, Butter. That is to say: no, you are not intruding. Come on in.'

  Butter entered, seating himself upon the edge of Quaint's bunk. He pulled down the hood of his sealskin parka and fixed his dark eyes onto the conjuror's like a hound awaiting a scrap at his master's table.

  'Something on your mind, Butter?' enquired Quaint.

  'I wish to speak prior to your departure. Is that agreeable to you?' Butter asked, in his usual childlike fashion.

  'My Inuit friend, it is most agreeable to me,' said Quaint, 'as long as you don't mind my continuing to pack as you talk. The Madame and I leave for Dover within the hour.'

  'Indeed, and it is of your journey far that I wish to speak,' said Butter, toying with the fur trim of his sealskin parka, stoking his courage. 'You say I now take care of circus whilst you are gone away, yes? I wish to know how long please?'

  'As long it takes,' replied Quaint gruffly. 'That poison could be halfway to Egypt by now, and my best bet is to try to stop it at the source. The Hades Consortium is a crafty pack of buggers, they'll have covered their tracks. Thankfully, I know the country well. I spent a lot of my time there back when I was with…' Quaint's eyes dimmed as an old reminiscence passed through his mind. 'Well…I mean, when I was a younger man.'

  'And what am I to do whilst you are gone, boss?' the diminutive Inuit asked.

  'You carry on as normal, of course. You're my deputy, Butter. I'm relying on you to hold the troops together in my absence.'

  'But…what if I cannot live up to your example, boss?' asked Butter.

  'I wouldn't expect you to,' smiled Quaint, with a pat on the Inuit's head. 'But you'll be perfectly fine. You won't be on your own. Ruby and Prometheus will be about if you need them, and there's always Yin, Yang and Kipo too. And then of course if you get really desperate you can always rely on the clowns…although for the life of me I can't imagine for what.'

  Butter cocked his head. 'But why must Madame Destine go also?'

  'To keep me from making a fool of myself, keep me on the right track, and to stop me from getting myself killed,' Quaint said, with a grin. 'Although, not necessarily in that order.'

  Butter rose from the bunk and threw his arms around the conjuror, his stature bringing him just past Quaint's waist. The tall man looked down in surprise at such an unexpected display of affection.

  'I think that I will miss you much, boss,' Butter sniffed.

  'As I will you, my Inuit friend,' replied Quaint softly. 'As I will you all.'

  'You will promise me something, yes?' Butter asked, looking up at Quaint eagerly.

  'Anything!'

  Butter gripped his fists tight together. 'Numbers one, you come back alive.'

  'And number two?' asked Quaint.

  'Numbers two, you punish the Hades Consortium for their bad plot.'

  'You have my word, Butter,' said Cornelius Quaint, 'on both counts.'

  CHAPTER VII

  The Terminal Introduction

  THE DECEMBER WEATHER pulled no punches as Madame Destine and Cornelius Quaint stepped out of the horse-drawn carriage onto the crowded concourse that ran parallel to Dover's docks. The chill wind whipped in from the English Channel and scratched at Destine's cheeks, forcing the Frenchwoman to tighten her white headscarf.

  Quaint paid the cab driver and looked up at the ice-white SS Silver Swan moored to the wharf, one of the first passenger steamships in existence. The tickets had cost Quaint an arm and a leg, but he would have paid the price twice over if it secured a swift passage to Egypt. A sailing vessel would have taken far too long for his needs, whereas the Silver Swan boasted that she could do the trip in half the time. It was a proud boast, but one that Quaint was willing to place his faith in. After all, time was a commodity in very short supply. With the mention of A
l Fekesh, Egypt's most notorious port, it meant that intercepting the poison was an even greater priority. Little did the conjuror know that at that very moment, the poison was nowhere near Al Fekesh, or even anywhere near Egypt. In fact, it was as far away from Egypt as Quaint was.

  Almost exactly to the yard, as it goes.

  Heinrich Nadir pushed roughly past Quaint, jogging his elbow intentionally, as he bustled into the terminal dragging a large wooden trunk on a trolley.

  Quaint gave him a scathing look. 'Excuse me!' he snapped, feeling Madame Destine's grip tighten on his arm.

  Nadir spun around and his beady eyes flicked up and down, measuring his broad-shouldered mark. 'So sorry, sir! My trolley has a life of its own. You are sailing today onboard the Silver Swan I take it?'

  'Oui, that is so,' Madame Destine confirmed.

  'Ausgezeichnet!' said Nadir, rubbing his hands. 'Then I shall at least be guaranteed scintillating company upon the long voyage.'

  'She gets that from me, thanks all the same,' said Quaint, taking an instant dislike to the German – and rightly so.

  Madame Destine, on the other hand, prided herself on her propriety, and duly curtseyed by way of an apology. 'Please ignore my companion's lack of manners, monsieur. We have had a long and uncomfortable journey from London, and his temper is most fraught.'

  'Ah! Well, I am certain that the journey will calm your temperament, sir,' said Nadir to Quaint. 'If there is one thing guaranteed to relax a body, it is sailing across the ocean. I wonder, Fraulein, perhaps we can meet for evening drinks after dinner? You and your fraught-tempered companion, of course.'

  'We should be simply delighted, monsieur,' Destine replied, nudging the conjuror's ribs with her elbow. 'Would we not, my sweet?'

  'Oh, yes…simply delighted,' cooed Quaint.

  'My name is Heinrich Nadir,' said the German, removing his hat.

  'Destine,' Madame said, offering the back of her hand.

  Nadir accepted, planting his lips upon it. 'Enchante, Madame Destine! Until tonight then.' He picked up his trolley and idled away towards the check-in desk.

  'What a polite man,' said Destine. 'Most sweet.'

  'Yes, in that he's liable to rot your teeth,' Quaint said.

  'Cornelius, shame on you,' scolded the Frenchwoman. 'He was being charming, a concept that it would not kill you to acquaint yourself with once in a while.'

  'Oh, come on, Destine, don't tell me that he took your fancy. The man was obsequious! Not to mention the fact that you're old enough to be his-'

  Madame Destine brandished her finger accusingly. 'I may not be able to see the future any more, Cornelius, but if you complete that sentence I can accurately predict that you will be in a considerable amount of pain in your nether regions!'

  Quaint held up his hands. 'I was going to say…slightly older sister.'

  'And for the record, he did not take my fancy! I was merely commenting on how polite he was. Companioning you, good manners are a rare commodity.'

  Quaint lifted their luggage, and they breezed on towards the administration desk inside the terminal building. Standing in the queue, the French fortune-teller struck up a conversation with an elderly couple and, in a heartbeat, they were discussing wine, the weather and whist. Madame Destine was soon thriving on sociality and conversation, happily chatting to anyone within earshot without the slightest thought. As her companion, Quaint was reluctantly dragged into the conversation, and he glanced to the heavens as a doddery old lady offered him a sticky boiled sweet. Something told him that surviving the trip with his sanity intact was going to be a far bigger challenge than defeating the Hades Consortium…

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Cruel Mistress

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, once night had fallen, the Silver Swan set sail, leaving the ragged white cliffs of Dover far behind her. The steamship rode effortlessly across the English Channel, the waves parting for her bows' blade.

  In his single-berth cabin, Cornelius Quaint made a final sweep with his cut-throat razor. He examined his face in the mirror as if it were something borrowed from a complete stranger. It had the usual wear and tear for a man in his mid-fifties, but it did not look too bad. His rugged face was decorated with furrowed wrinkles around his mouth and nose; crow's feet spread like forked lightning from the corners of his black eyes, and his wavy, silver-white hair swept back from his forehead culminating in a nest of entwined curls at the nape of his neck. It was seemingly immune to any oil or creamed hair product, and Quaint had long since given up trying to tame it.

  He dressed for dinner in a black, long-tailed jacket cropped tight to his waist, matching trousers, and a broad-knotted bow tie at his neck. Perhaps a good meal would remove the ache inside him, he thought. He heard the reverberations of song floating through the wall from the cabin next door and smiled, reminding himself that he was not alone.

  Madame Destine struggled with a hairbrush through her long silver-white hair, her thoughts just as entangled as her tresses. Although it was not evident from her outer appearance, inside her head and inside her heart she was in mourning.

  Before the elixir had touched her lips, she was in command of a startling array of extrasensory abilities, and chief among them was her clairvoyance. As a sideshow fortune-teller, Destine was gifted with the power to foresee certain events in the future. But as much as the wondrous elixir had given her, it had taken away so much more. She had come to rely upon her clairvoyance but now it had deserted her, purged from her system virtually overnight. Even with Cornelius by her side, Madame Destine felt strangely alone. She had emerged from the cocoon as a butterfly, only to lament the life of a caterpillar.

  On the night that the antidote worked its magic, Destine's mind was bombarded with a barrage of mysterious prophecies, as though her gifts were eager to impart as much information as they could before abandoning her. Destine's gift had never been entirely reliable, but the lines of communication to the future were degraded, muffled somehow, and they swamped her with mismatched images and disjointed words. But as she had told Ruby Marstrand the night before they sailed, there was one residual vision that remained stubbornly present when all others faded away: 'The past and the present shall entwine once more. Beware the dawn of the Eleventh Plague.'

  As far as she could gauge, 'the Eleventh Plague' surely referred to the dreaded poison that she and Cornelius were duty bound to destroy, yet how it entwined with the past was a mystery, one of many swimming around her head. Her premonitions were often irritatingly mystifying, yet there was no misinterpreting the foreboding that chilled her blood.

  Formerly Cornelius Quaint's governess, he had fondly nicknamed her his 'compass'. He relied on her to decipher the indecipherable. But he was not one for prophecies and riddles. He believed in the here and now, his feet fixed firmly in the present where he could see things, touch things – hit things. But in truth she was more akin to his conscience, seemingly the only person that he ever listened to (when it suited him, of course). Destine had resigned herself to a life by his side, for ever his guard, and despite having cause to regret her decision on more than one occasion (usually when the man's bullish bombast got him in trouble with authority in one form or another) she knew that her life would have been emptier without him.

  'It's gone eight, Madame, are you done?' called the subject of Destine's thoughts from the corridor outside her cabin. 'We'll have to hurry if we want to make dinner before the galley closes.'

  'Ayez de la patience, Cornelius,' Madame Destine replied, as she straightened the high collar of her long gown, smoothed down the billowing bustle at her rear and took as deep a breath as she could within the whalebone restraints of her corset. Trying to ignore the impatient tapping of Quaint's foot, she hurriedly arranged her hair into a loose bun at the back of her head, adding a string of pearls around her neck on the outside of her collar.

  'Madame, please,' moaned Quaint, 'my stomach thinks my throat's been slit.'

  'Do not tempt me!' Destine crackled bac
k. 'Do you not realise that a true lady must shine like a lamp at all times?'

  'Even if it attracts the moths?' asked Quaint.

  Madame Destine's brow slowly cleared into understanding. 'You are referring to the German that we met in the terminal earlier. You cannot avoid bumping into him at some point, you know. There are only so many places that you can hide on a ship this size. I am ready now, are you happy?' She snatched open her cabin door and stepped into the corridor like an actress making her entrance onstage.

  'You look divine,' complimented Quaint, stepping back to admire her. 'I honestly don't know why you spend so much time worrying, Madame. You'd still manage to look radiant were you to dress in nothing but a potato sack.'

  'Your flattery is most welcome,' nodded Destine.

  'And well deserved,' said Quaint. 'Is that a new dress for the journey I spy?'

  'It is an old dress, my sweet…but perhaps a new me,' Madame Destine answered, as they began a brisk stroll towards the dining saloon.

  After a few minutes, a comfortable hush had nestled itself between the conjuror and the fortune-teller as they walked along the carpeted corridors. Madame Destine teased her lips with the tip of her tongue. Even though her clairvoyance had deserted her, she was still in possession of her mysterious sensitivity to the feelings of those around her. At that moment she could read Quaint's emotions more easily than words on a page.

  'There is something bothering you, Cornelius.' Destine always had a knack of phrasing each question as a statement of fact. Quaint found this a most frustrating habit – especially on this day, and especially as she was correct.

  'It's that obvious?' Quaint asked.

  'Your eyes always did betray you, even when you were a child. That is why you are a poor gambler,' replied Destine.