The Jade Suit of Death (The Adventures Of The Royal Occultist Book 2)

by Josh Reynolds

  Melion’s flat was lit up, as if its owner had a terrible fear of the dark. Then, perhaps he did. St. Cyprian couldn’t blame him. Melion had seen more than his fair share of horrors. The thought didn’t mitigate his anger to any appreciable degree.

  When they arrived, he pushed past Ghale and into Melion’s flat. “William, you have some explaining to do,” St. Cyprian said, loudly. “And I must insist that you do so post haste.”

  Melion was in his sitting room, slouched in his chair, his hands crossed over his belly. He didn’t stand as St. Cyprian came to a halt before him. “Have you found my property yet?” he asked.

  “Ask your man,” St. Cyprian said.

  Melion looked at Ghale, who stepped past St. Cyprian. “Have they?”

  “No, they haven’t,” St. Cyprian interjected, before Ghale could reply. The Gurkha took up position behind Melion’s chair. “But we have been attacked by animated statues, ambulatory corpses, excitable demons and what I suspect were some form of elemental spirit.”

  Melion sat back. His eyes flickered up to Ghale. “Ghale, I think we could all do with a cup of tea,” he said. Ghale inclined his head and left, looking slightly relieved. Melion interlaced his fingers. “Now, just what is your problem Charles?”

  “My problem? My problem, William, is that I have the distinct impression that we have been led around by the nose on this particular escapade,” St. Cyprian said. He stepped fully into the sitting room, Gallowglass at his elbow. “I do not appreciate that, I must say.” As he spoke, he realized that there was another person in the sitting room, in the chair with its back to the door. Melion had a guest, it seemed.

  “What you do or do not appreciate is of little concern to me,” Melion said. His face flushed, and his beard bristled with aristocratic offense. His chest swelled, as if he were a frog preparing to unleash a thunderous croak of affront. “I asked you to—”

  The guest raised a hand, interrupting him. It was a wrinkled, spotted thing, that put St. Cyprian in mind of a mummy’s claw. Melion’s reply died in his throat and he sank back into his chair. “Charles St. Cyprian, late of Kensington, late of Chelsea, and Miss Ebe Gallowglass, late of parts unknown and unimportant,” Melion’s guest croaked. “I could rattle off military honors, if you like, as well as warrants for arrest.” The speaker bent around the edge of the chair to face them. St. Cyprian felt a queasy tingle as he recognized their owner.

  “And you would be Saxon Amadeus Dorr, late of—well, no one is quite sure, though England must claim you, if for no other reason than our perverse need to admit our mistakes openly,” he said flatly.

  The man nodded, teeth exposed in a tight smile that put St. Cyprian in mind of a hungry tiger. Saxon Amadeus Dorr was a pillar of the occult community—a basalt one, inscribed with all sorts of grubby sigils and dripping with sacrificial offal. He was a historic cad, a retired rakehell, and older than Methuselah. As well as being a member of Melion’s Kensington Clique, rumor had it that he’d lived through several iterations of the Hellfire Club, and had laid a wrinkly, guiding hand on the leadership of at least three different occult societies. Aleister Crowley might lay claim to the title of world’s wickedest man, but only because Dorr had never seen fit to claim it for himself.

  “Was that an insult? And so soon in our association,” Dorr said.

  “I apologize,” St. Cyprian said. “My mouth exerts a certain irresistible pull on my left pin, I’m afraid.” St. Cyprian cast a quick look at Melion. Why was Dorr here? The other man didn’t meet his gaze.

  A wrinkled hand waved the apology away. “Pish,” Dorr said. He rotated his head, and looked at them fully. Yellow eyes fixed on them with startling clarity. Old he might have been, but Dorr was possessed of a certain, unmistakable vibrancy, as if his veins were filled with lightning rather than blood. “I heard about that unpleasantness with the Whitechapel Club some weeks ago. Dilettantes, of course,” Dorr said, suckling on the cigarette he held. “Not our sort, eh, Mr. St. Cyprian?”

  “No,” St. Cyprian said. “Then, I have never been very clear on just what sort you are, sir,” he said.

  “Was that a compliment? If so, it was a singularly backhanded one. But, to answer your question, I am the very best sort,” Dorr said, blowing smoke into the air above his head. “I am a singular moment, in the stream of years.”

  “Very poetic,” St. Cyprian said.

  “I have always had a fondness for poetry,” Dorr said. He glanced at Melion, as if sharing a private joke. “Not poets, mind. Pretentious jackanapes, the lot of them.” He grinned at them, showing teeth the color of strong tea. “I can’t stand pretension, no, nor hypocrisy. I’m too old to appreciate either. Isn’t that right, Melion?”

  “What about antiquities?” St. Cyprian said.

  “Antiquities are a hobby. Demonology, however, is an abiding interest,” Dorr said. Smoke filled the air above him and he leaned through it. He pointed at Gallowglass. “Don’t look so puzzled. I can smell the ripe tang of the infernal choirs on your young friend.” He smiled widely at Gallowglass. “You should feel proud, my dear. Few can engage a demon in a pugilistic confrontation and survive unscathed. Even the redoubtable Ghale there would be hard pressed to last more than a few, painful moments. You are made of stern stuff indeed.”

  St. Cyprian felt Gallowglass tense beside him and cleared his throat. “You seem to know quite a bit about why we’re here, Mr. Dorr.” He tried to catch Melion’s eye, but the other man looked away.

  “Did I say that? Well, maybe I do.”

  “And what else do you know?” St. Cyprian said.

  “I know a name,” Dorr said. He blew a thin stream of smoke into the air and said, “Baphomet…it rolls off one’s tongue, doesn’t it. Rather like an unfortunate noise accompanying the eating of a back alley butcher’s pork pie.”

  “Yes,” St. Cyprian said. He looked at Melion. “What I didn’t know is that you procured said beastie for Hermes Fleece, William.” He stepped forward. “That’s what you were doing in Damascus, with the Order. Hunting down their white whale for them.”

  “It was a mutually beneficial association,” Melion said stiffly.

  Dorr laughed harshly. “Baphomet gives you the means to achieve your desires. Power, knowledge, wealth, all these things are his for the giving. And he does it freely, because he is an old and cunning beast, and was such even in the desert, when the Templars bound him in iron and salt. Demons desire misery the way addict longs for the pipe, and they will do anything to cause it, even if that means giving their chosen victim their heart’s desire.” He gestured at them with his cigarette. “He will help them, tell them things, and see that their desires are fulfilled in the most perverse fashion possible. If you wish for a sorcerer’s knowledge, Baphomet will bring you the corpse of a long-dead wizard, and tell you to devour every scrap of mummified flesh. If you wish treasure, he shall lure you to a hidden tomb, where you must barter with devils for cursed gold.”

  St. Cyprian looked at Melion. “And what was your heart’s desire, William? Did it have anything to do with a fellow named Zhang Su, by chance?” Melion made a strangled noise and closed his eyes. Dorr laughed again.

  “I think you’ve been rumbled, old boy,” he said.

  St. Cyprian ran a hand through his hair and looked at Dorr. “You seem to know quite a bit for a man who professes to be uninvolved.”

  “Did I say that?” Dorr said.

  “Are you then?” St. Cyprian asked.

  “I admit nothing,” Dorr said mildly. The old man sucked in a lungful of smoke. “I merely speculate,” he continued, through a cloud of smoke. “It could be said that life itself is but a series of speculations and wrong guesses, don’t you agree?”

  “If I had any idea what you were talking about, possibly,” St. Cyprian said. He looked at Melion. “What were you arguing about with Fleece at the Savoy some months ago? Did it possibly have to do with your trip to China, and this Zhang Su character? What the devil did you bring back to Blight
y, William?”

  “A singularly apt choice of words,” Dorr said. He blew a thin plume of smoke towards Melion. “Yes William, by all means share.” Melion glared at the other man, but said nothing.

  “That’s not a normal cigarette, is it?” Gallowglass asked, waving a hand in front of her face. “Smells like a fire in a tannery.”

  “Tobacco is for commoners,” Dorr said. “This is a far finer leaf than any back-alley Limehouse den of iniquity can provide. Straight from the plateau, this.” He extended the cigarette. “Care to give it a pull?”

  “No, thank you,” St. Cyprian said, before Gallowglass could reply.

  “Shame,” Dorr said. His eyes glittered with reptilian malice. “Young Beamish quite enjoyed a pull or three on the poppies of Leng, in his time.”

  “Beamish—Aylmer Beamish,” St. Cyprian said, suddenly wary. “You knew Aylmer Beamish?” Beamish had been the Royal Occultist for a good chunk of the Nineteenth Century, and had a reputation not at all dissimilar to Dorr’s own.

  “And his successor, Drood as well. That one was as humorless as a block of wood. All stiff, starched black and pious homilies. He was a Christian, you know,” Dorr said, as if perplexed by the thought. “I knew Carnacki, too,” he continued. “And now, I know you. How time flies as one gets older.”

  “And how old are you these days, Mr. Dorr?” St. Cyprian said, softly. He wasn’t certain that he actually wanted to know the answer. It was sure to be disturbing. But he couldn’t resist asking the question. The urge to know was growing in him, the need to solve a mundane mystery replaced by something more esoteric and unexplainable. Why was Dorr here? Was it a coincidence?

  “Old enough to know when to make an exit,” Dorr said. Cigarette, hanging from his lips, he levered himself to his feet with a cane and smiled thinly. “You and William have much to discuss, I think.” He made for the door, but paused at the entrance to the sitting room. He turned back, and lifted his cane. “I shall be watching your career with interest, sir. Thomas Carnacki was a fine sort of man. I have no doubt that he chose his successor well.”

  When he was gone, Gallowglass said, “Well, he seemed lovely.”

  “Was that sarcasm?” St. Cyprian growled. Dorr’s presence had been a surprise, and it had unsettled him. “Only it’s very hard to tell sometimes, I must say.”

  “ ’S an enigma, innit?” she said. She fell onto the couch and interlaced her fingers behind her head. St. Cyprian looked at her and shook his head in disgust.

  “Well, now that you’ve finished chasing off my guest, maybe you’ll answer my question,” Melion began. St. Cyprian gestured sharply.

  “I’m not your dogsbody, William. As you yourself put it so eloquently recently, I am the sheriff here. And I think it’s time you answered my questions. And the first of these, old thing, is why you’re so concerned about a mummy wrapped in jade.”

  “It’s not a mummy,” Melion said sharply. “I don’t deal in mummies. Only the lowest sort of wallah deals in that sort of thing.” He tugged on his beard. “It was Fleece, wasn’t it?”

  “I have a suspicion that you knew it would be,” St. Cyprian said.

  Melion cleared his throat. “Yes, well, quite,” he said. “Like them or not, the Order of the Cosmic Ram has funds to spare, Charles, and I needed money and access to the…resources they possessed. Our interests coincided. Well, for awhile at least.” He looked down at his hands. “That’s why I had Ghale follow you. I was certain Fleece had betrayed me, but I couldn’t be sure. But now I am, and I’ll make that bastard pay!”

  “And just what are you planning to do?” St. Cyprian demanded. He was calmer now. He’d suspected that Melion had been holding something back, and he took some comfort in the fact that he had been right. But if he’d thought to press the issue sooner, a whole raft of unpleasantness could have been avoided. He cut his eyes to Gallowglass, who looked bored. If she’d been killed, and all because of what was looking more and more like an internecine feud between occultists…he pushed the thought aside. He didn’t want to think about that. Not right now. He tried to concentrate on what Melion was saying.

  “I was planning to get my property back!” Melion shouted. His face flushed, and his hair seemed to bristle. “It’s mine, by Gad, and I’ll not have it stolen from me by a bunch of chinless diabolists.”

  St. Cyprian frowned. “Maybe it’s time you told us just what it was. You said it wasn’t a mummy…”

  “Mummy—Pfaugh,” Melion spat. “It dates from the earliest days of the Qing Dynasty,” he said. “Zhang Su, Charles, as you so ably discovered. A philosopher and a healer and a holy man, if you believe in such things. What little I know of him comes from one of the seven forbidden stories from Yuan Mei’s Zi Bu Yu. Zhang Su, or so the story went, fought a demon who had been terrorizing a certain province, and spreading a terrible pestilence among the people. After defeating the demon, Zhang Su drew the sickness that afflicted the people into himself, and ordered that the jade suit be constructed.” Melion smiled bitterly.

  St. Cyprian nodded. “That jibes with what I know. Jade was thought to be a curative.” He looked around. For a moment, he’d caught a whiff of something that might have been sulfur. Gallowglass met his gaze, and he realized that she’d smelled it as well. She raised a finger towards the ceiling.

  Melion nodded. “In this case, it was less a curative than containment. In taking the sickness into himself, Zhang Su fell prey to the very thing he’d sought to eradicate.” He held up a finger. “He was circumspectly edited out of history after he succumbed to his illness, according to his own wishes. He wanted no man to know of him, or his tomb, lest he be discovered, and the illness he had fought so hard to contain be once more unleashed upon the land. There were scattered folktales and references of course, but by and large he was erased from the minds of men.”

  “But you found him, with the help of the demon you captured on behalf of the Order of the Cosmic Ram,” St. Cyprian said. Ash fell into the fireplace, knocked loose from somewhere in the flue. The sulfur smell was stronger. He wondered whether Melion had noticed yet.

  “And after spending much blood and treasure, I can assure you,” Melion said, not without some pride. St. Cyprian shook his head.

  “But why? Why, William? You, of all men, should know that there is inevitably some dark truth to such stories. Why would you risk bringing such a thing here?”

  Melion’s face darkened. Then, abruptly, he slumped. “Why? I should have thought it was obvious.” He looked at St. Cyprian. “I’m ill, Charles. Dying, in fact.”

  14.

  Mayfair, City of Westminster, London

  Hermes Fleece stared out of his office window, into the Mayfair night. His hands were clasped behind his back, to keep them from trembling. “Baphomet is gone,” he said, fighting to keep his voice steady. “How do you explain this?” he asked, turning to look at the other man in the room. Albert Shepherd raised his hands in a placatory gesture.

  “I can’t,” he said. “The creature was still safely locked away when I checked…”

  “Was it? Because I’ve learned that the creature never made it to the bloody Hebrides, Albert,” Fleece snapped. He took two quick steps and grabbed twin handfuls of Shepherd’s coat, driving the man back against the edge of the desk. Though he was older by two decades, Fleece had lost none of the vigor that had seen him through the Battle of Talana Hill. He shoved Shepherd back and said, “So where is it?”

  Shepherd swallowed, but said nothing.

  “Don’t play coy with me, boy,” Fleece growled. “The creature is necessary to the future of our Order, and if you’ve let it escape…”

  “It hasn’t escaped, father. Now do please release poor Albert. You’re scaring him,” Sadie said, from the doorway. She stepped into the office and shut the door behind her, then leaned back against it. “I had hoped to discuss this with you before you found out.”

  “Discuss what, exactly?” Fleece asked. He released Shepherd and stepped
back.

  “There’s been…a change of plans. We won’t be asking Baphomet to supply us with answers as to the Order’s future endeavors.”

  “And why not?” Fleece said, though he suspected he already knew the answer. He felt a sinking sensation in his gut, and he moved to his chair.

  Sadie smiled, and for a moment, she was a little girl again, racing about the garden and organizing his medals. “Because, I already have, father. And what he told me will keep us busy for years to come.” She moved to his side as he sank into his chair.

  “Oh my girl, what have you done?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “Why, I’ve only done what I have always done, father. I’ve taken care of things. That’s why you’ve always left the mucky matters to me, isn’t it?” She perched herself on the edge of the desk and pulled his hand into her lap so that she could pat it comfortingly. “Who was it, after all, who convinced poor, ill-starred Gladstone to go on his well-timed rampage? We received quite the influx of new members—not to mention their much-appreciated money and resources—after that. And who was it, who located Baphomet using that influx of money and resources, so that that loudmouthed fool Melion could capture him for us?”

  Fleece didn’t look at his daughter. She continued to speak, gently, calmly. “I even helped Melion find his jade-shrouded prize, after you refused. Really father, was that any way to treat an old friend?”

  “You what?” Fleece hissed, horrified. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? What you’ve let into our country?”

  “Oh I have a notion, yes,” Sadie said. She reached up to toy with her locket. “Baphomet was quite forthcoming on that point, father. Interesting friends you have, by the way. What’s the difference, after all, between William Melion and that horrid thing in jade?”