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

  A head popped up over a coil of rigging rope. Ghale turned and fired, narrowly missing his intended target. The revolver gave a click and he tossed it aside with a disgusted sigh. He wrenched his knife free of the crate as he heard the lorry start up. Cursing steadily, Ghale ran for the lorry as it began to pull away from the quay. He leapt for the back and crashed down amidst the crates. Men moved towards him. Ghale clambered up onto a crate and tossed his blade from one hand to the other. “Come then, gentlemen. One at a time or all at once, it makes no difference to me,” he said.

  A club struck at him, and he bobbed to the side, catching the man’s arm. His kukri ripped through the man’s belly, and the fellow fell screaming. Ghale twisted, and drove his knee into his next opponent’s belly. Without pausing, he flipped him over and out of the lorry. Another came at him from the side, a knife in his hand. Ghale met him blade to blade and they dueled for a moment, before the Gurkha’s greater skill prevailed. He left the man draped over the crate and clambered towards the driver’s compartment. If he could stop the lorry, he could fulfill his task, interruption or no.

  But before he could reach the driver, a foul stink filled the back of the lorry. It dripped down from the underside of the tarp that had been stretched across the back, and rose from the wood planking beneath his feet. For a moment Ghale couldn’t place the odor, then he realized, with a chill, that it was sulfur.

  The tarpaulin over his head bulged downwards, and ten ragged strips were torn out of it. The strips widened with a single convulsive motion as something stinking of the pit dropped down into the back of the lorry with him. He saw curling horns and heard the clop of cloven hooves on the wood as the air was choked with heat and stink. Goat-eyes as red as blood met his horrified gaze and a monstrous bleat assaulted his ears. Clawed hands reached for him, and the Gurkha swiped his knife at the approaching apparition with a bellowed oath.

  Where it had come from, and what it was, he did not know. He had seen many terrifying things in Melion’s service, but nothing like the apparition that now confronted him. Its greasy flesh was covered in matted, bristly hair and it squatted between him and the driver’s compartment on goat-feet. A bloated belly rested beneath a sunken chest, and it had a roughly simian shape, despite its bandy, joined legs and its goatish head. Whatever hell this beast had been conjured from, Ghale was determined that it would not find him easy prey.

  “Out of the way, devil,” Ghale said, forcing himself to speak. “I do not fear you.”

  The monster gave a growl which was simultaneously shrill and impossibly deep. Then, it spoke. Ghale groaned as the words sizzled against his eardrums. They made no sense, and they sped across the surface of his mind like shadows across a wall, burning and fading before he could discern what they had been. He hunkered forward, his hands clapped to his ears. The beast’s eyes blazed like two simmering coals as it examined him.

  The lorry took a sharp turn, and the crates shifted. One barked against Ghale’s shins painfully and he staggered, falling against the side of the lorry. The fiend was on him in an instant, teeth snapping at his throat, and gangly arms wrapping around his neck and head. Its hooves dug into his side and stomach, stamping on him. He thrashed against its hideous strength, chopping at it with the kukri. He felt its foul breath wash across his face. Ropes of acidic drool dripped onto his collar and coat, burning the material.

  Unable to resist, Ghale found himself hefted into the air by the bleating monstrosity, and then he was flying backwards, out of the lorry. He struck the street and rolled until he came to a halt in the gutter. Ghale tried to get to his feet, but he felt as if he’d been trampled by a team of horses. He toppled forward and unconsciousness clawed at the edges of his mind.

  His last sight before darkness claimed him was of the red-eyed goat-thing turning and vanishing into the lorry. And his last thought was that Mr. Melion was going to be very, very angry.

  2.

  Cheyne Walk, Chelsea Embankment, London

  “Careful with the box, Ms. Gallowglass,” St. Cyprian said as he opened the door to No. 427 Cheyne Walk and allowed Gallowglass to wobble past him, the shuddering devil-box held firmly in her arms. “We wouldn’t want our guest to escape, now would we? Be a shame to add to London’s already-overflowing cornucopia of nightmares if we don’t have to, what?”

  “How can two hands be so bloody heavy, is what I want to know,” she wheezed. The devil-box shook in her grip, nearly tearing itself free. “Where should I put it?”

  “Set it down in the sitting room, would you? We’ll toss a rug over it and call it an occasional table until we figure out a more permanent solution. No one will be the wiser,” he said as he closed the door and stooped to pick up the post. The letterbox was full to overflowing, which made for a pleasant change of pace. Popularity was not a perk of the profession, more was the pity.

  Then, that was perhaps understandable, given that the profession in question was the investigation, organization and occasional suppression of That Which Man Was Not Meant to Know—including vampires, ghosts, werewolves, ogres, fairies, boojums, boggarts, barghests and the occasional worm of unusual size—by order of the King (or Queen), for the good of the British Empire. As the latest in a long line of men to hold the post of the Queen’s Conjurer since Dr. John Dee had been named Royal Occultist by Good Queen Bess some several centuries previous, St. Cyprian had made more enemies than friends, and most of the former would outlive him by a ridiculous amount.

  If she lived long enough, Gallowglass would have his job in her turn, and be welcome to it, given that he’d likely be dead. They had never really talked about it. St. Cyprian felt that a death not discussed was one not scheduled. No appointments in Samarra or otherwise for him, thank you very much. And Gallowglass, for all her bravado, didn’t much care for discussing the inevitable, at least in regards to him, he knew.

  He’d tried to broach the subject once or twice early on in their acquaintance, as was right and proper between the Royal Occultist and his apprentice, but she’d gone stone-faced every time. Gallowglass could face death in a dozen different ways before breakfast and her grin would never droop, but she went stiff and flat as a board if she had to consider it in the abstract for even one second.

  He pushed the thought aside and began to sort through the post. As he scanned addresses and the names of the senders, he idly clinked together the trio of strange rings that adorned his fingers. Each of the rings was inscribed with a series of characters that might have been Cyrillic or Hebrew or something else entirely. Like the house, they’d come with the job.

  No. 427, Cheyne Walk had been with the office since 1874, when a spectral entity of one sort or another had reportedly spoken to the then-office holder Aylmer Beamish and convinced him that the house was a necessary addition to the repertoire of the Royal Occultist. It occupied a small plot on the Embankment, had cellars that went deeper than any other in Chelsea and provided access to the Thames, if one were willing to get a bit mucky. It was, like the rings, now part and parcel of the position, to be handed down from one Royal Occultist to the next.

  Still sorting through the post, he followed Gallowglass into the sitting room. It was a pleasant enough sort of space—at once overfull and cavernous, with a bohemian elegance to its furnishings. Pictures of former bearers of the office of Royal Occultist lined the walls of the room, jostling for space with fetish masks, lurid artworks by Goya and Blake and framed pages from books of uncertain merit.

  Great bookshelves groaned beneath a library of occult works, as well as a century’s worth of accumulated bric-a-brac. Over the cavernous Restoration-era fireplace which occupied one wall hung a xiphos—a double-edged, single-handed sword with a leaf-shaped blade. It was a family heirloom, supposedly brought over with Brutus and his Trojans, and St. Cyprian had used it to good effect more than once.

  Gallowglass had set the devil-box down and fallen back into one of the large wingback chairs which now occupied the oddly patterned Turkish rug before t
he fireplace. The overstuffed chesterfield couches which had formerly made that spot their home had been pushed back, after the events earlier in the year. The intrusion of the ab-human entity calling itself the Ripper had necessitated more changes than merely furniture arrangements, however.

  Only someone who knew what to look for would have noticed the great ritual circles now drawn on the walls behind the heavy book shelves and on the floorboards beneath the rug. Those circles contained the strangely curled symbols of the Saaamaaa Ritual, and buffered the room against threats of a psychical or alien nature. The sitting room of No. 427 had, in effect, been transformed into a larger version of the box which Gallowglass now had her legs cocked up on. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but he hoped that should such intrusions become the norm for his tenure, it might at least give them an edge.

  “Anything good?” Gallowglass asked. She spun her cap on her finger.

  “Not as such. Get a fire going, would you?” he said, sitting down in the chair opposite hers. She made a face, but did as he asked, pushing herself out of her seat with an audible sigh. “Thank you,” he called after her, as she trudged towards the rear of the flat to get logs for the fire. She grunted in reply and he smiled.

  Gallowglass had grown up in the slums of Cairo, and come to London, hunting something—and someone—singularly unpleasant the year before. Something that he himself had been on the trail of as well. His smile faded. He’d been freshly mustered out, the wounds he’d taken at Ypres had only just barely healed. At least the physical ones. The mental scars took a few months longer, if they’d healed at all.

  He felt the old familiar burn of bile as it rose in his throat and the memories of those final hours on the Kemmelberg rose up as strong and as fast as ever. He saw Carnacki, reaching out to him through the mud of Ypres, his pale face going slack. He closed his eyes and leaned back. His scars ached. He’d only caught a few in the leg—two deep and one long—and for the most part, it was only bothersome in the damp. Many who’d been at the Kemmelberg had caught far worse. Including the then-Royal Occultist, Thomas Carnacki, who’d been plucked out of one world and sent into the next by a sniper’s bullet. An inglorious death for a man who deserved much better.

  St. Cyprian had been Carnacki’s assistant before the War, even as Carnacki had assisted Edwin Drood and Drood had done for Aylmer Beamish and so on and so forth, all the way back to Dee. While it took a royal decree to make it official, the Royal Occultists had been given tacit permission to pick their own successors sometime after the Restoration. Before then, it had been a royal appointment, and a political one more often than not, which had led to more than one unfortunate incident. The current set-up made things easier all round, and insured, theoretically at least, that the title-bearers were of an appropriate level of competency.

  He’d first met Thomas Carnacki in the crypts below the Guildhall, hunting giant ghosts—that is to say, the ghosts of giants. Carnacki had saved his life that night. Much as he himself had done for Gallowglass, the night they’d met in Blackheath as they pursued a pack of vile leopard-cultists. During that little scuffle they had shed sweat, blood and cartridges in pursuit of the same goal, though for different reasons at the time. When the incident had been resolved, he’d invited her to stay. She’d rapidly made herself at home. Mostly, he suspected, because she had nowhere else to go.

  He blinked as Gallowglass snatched the letters from his hands. There was a small fire in the fireplace. She’d managed to get it started while he was lost in thought. She flopped back into her chair and kicked her legs up over the armrest. “You’re right. This is all tosh,” she said, tossing letters to the floor as she scanned them. “Half of them are invitations from secret societies, and the other half are from people asking you to investigate those same societies,” she said.

  “Don’t generalize,” he admonished her. “A few of them are from friends, or fellow students of the esoteric. This is what happens when we go to the country for a week, dash it all—it’ll take days to sort through all the correspondence.”

  “Better you than me,” she said. She held up a letter. “What’s a Janus House and why doesn’t it have a postmark?”

  “The Sergeant has other methods of posting letters than Royal Mail. What does it smell like, out of curiosity?” he said, looking at the fire.

  Gallowglass sniffed. “Jasmine,” she said, making a face.

  “Then it’s not important. If it’s a citrus-y odor, that’s when we need to worry.”

  Gallowglass’ eyes widened. “Ha!” she barked, extricating a postcard and letting the rest tumble to the floor. “Well, well, well…what’s this then?”

  “What’s what?”

  “This!” she cackled, gesticulating at him with the postcard. “New York postmark, innit? Wonder who that’s from, hunh?” She flashed a grin and flipped the card around to read it.

  “I say, that’ll be for me. Be a dear and hand it over,” St. Cyprian said, half-rising from his seat. Gallowglass squeezed back into her seat, out of reach. “I demand you hand it over at once. That’s a private missive, I’ll have you know.”

  “It’s a bloody postcard from Aife bloody Andraste is what it is,” Gallowglass said. Her expression turned sly as she kept it out of reach. “Bet you never thought you’d hear from her again, did you?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about you annoying ragamuffin—now hand it over,” he snapped. He felt a flush spreading across his face. In truth, Gallowglass was right. He hadn’t expected to hear from Aife Andraste again. In his mind’s eye, he saw her face—dark, and just this side of exotic looking—and her smile and he twitched and banished the images before they had a chance to settle on the surface of his mind. Thinking of her, pleasant as it was, brought with it memories of the Ripper which he was in no hurry to experience again.

  Andraste had been the unwitting cause of and solution to the case they’d investigated at the beginning of the year. A powerful medium, Andraste had been forced by a group of amateur demonologists calling themselves the Whitechapel Club to make contact with the Outer Void for reasons he was still unclear of. Regardless of their intentions, something wholly malign and monstrous had responded, and used the unfortunate Miss Andraste as a conduit into reality. The Ripper, as it had named itself, had carved a red trail of slaughter across London’s East End before he and Gallowglass had managed to send it fleeing back to where it hailed from, its metaphorical tail between its legs. In the aftermath, Andraste had made for New York, where he hoped she’d stay out of trouble.

  “Bugger that,” Gallowglass said. “You’re stuck on her, you are.”

  “Horsefeathers,” he said, lunging for the postcard. Gallowglass’ foot caught him in the chest, and he fell back into his chair. He sprang back up and flung himself at her. She scrambled up the back of the chair as quick as a cat, her hand extended as far out of his reach as she could manage. The chair overbalanced and toppled over, carrying them both with it.

  As he sprawled on the floor, St. Cyprian heard a cough. He looked up and saw a stout figure standing in the doorway. He bolted to his feet. Gallowglass cursed and followed suit, slapping the postcard into his chest as she made to draw the heavy Webley-Fosbery revolver she habitually carried from its shoulder-holster.

  He caught her hand before she could pull the revolver, eliciting a glare from her which he ignored with an ease born of thorough practice. “I’m rather afraid that you’ve caught us a bit out of sorts, Mister…?” he said, addressing the stocky, well-dressed man who faced them. The latter took off his hat and held it to his chest.

  “Ghale, sir. Ganju Ghale. Your door was unlocked,” the newcomer said politely, offering no apology to go with his explanation. “Do I have the privilege of addressing Mr. Charles St. Cyprian?”

  St. Cyprian stuffed the postcard into his pocket and straightened his tie. “Indeed you do, my good man.” He cocked his head. “Ghale, did you say? You’re William Melion’s man, aren’t you?”

>   “Yes sir,” Ghale said. He inclined his head. “I would not have…interrupted, save that Mr. Melion wishes to see you, sir.” He cut his eyes towards the devil-box, which wobbled in place. Inside, the Hairy Hands thumped at their prison.

  “Do ignore that,” St. Cyprian said quickly. “We have a rather ferocious stoat infestation. William wants to see me—now?”

  “Yes sir. It is quite urgent, you see.” Ghale put his hat back on his head. “Something of Mr. Melion’s has been stolen, and he would like you to get it back for him.”

  3.

  Soho, the West End, London

  “Charles, my boy! Come in, come in,” William Melion roared, clapping his hands against St. Cyprian’s arms. “It’s been how many years? Five? Six?” Melion was large and burly, with thick mane of graying hair and eyes like blue marbles set into a face burnt brown by the sun and the wind. He was strong as well. St. Cyprian winced as Melion’s hands caught him. The big man was clad only in a dressing gown, which flapped embarrassingly as he moved.

  Ghale had briskly driven them to the West End, avoiding any and all questions en route. Melion’s man was a tight-lipped as a church gargoyle. Melion resided in a off-center cul-de-sac in Soho, situated amongst the plethora of knocking shops, foreign eateries, down-market music halls and small theaters that now crowded the once-elegant bones of Soho Square and Gerrard Street. It was the perfect place for a man of Melion’s tastes and hobbies, from what St. Cyprian recalled of him, from their brief association during the war.

  Melion had been a member of what Carnacki had jokingly referred to as the Kensington Clique—occultists like John Silence, Saxon Amadeus Dorr, Sar Dubnotal, and Flaxman Low had begun meeting once or twice a month in the years leading up to the Great War. They had come together to pool their knowledge for the common good, or so Carnacki had sworn, and as a body, they had dealt with such menaces as the Brotherhood of Gerasene, and the Hooton Hall Horror.