Guillemin Hall was as dark as such a mansion can be. Heavy curtains blacked out the windows but for the occasional seam of light that broke the monolith of the Hall’s facade.
Earlier in the evening, as Chand and I watched from a nearby corner, the servants left, often with children in tow, smiling at the surprise of free evening. Under the gas lamps, the streets hid in the quiet murkiness. In a narrow, dark space between two mews, I smoked my pipe while Chand vibrated with anticipation. With Guillemin Hall dominating the Knights Crossing district, its slumber lay like a blanket across all the streets around it, as if smothering the pedestrians or horses no longer there to make noise. In Dunhill, usually dense in its activity, even at night, such silence felt unnatural.
“Why are we here?” Chand asked, not for the first time.
“To rescue Lady Pawlett, of course,” I answered tapping out the pipe on the heel of my boot.
“To what end?”
“Chand,” I whispered his name, savoring it. “She’s promised us a handsome sum. She can’t pay us if she’s the victim of whatever his Lordship, her husband, has planned for her. I suspect that, whatever it is, is a factor in her desire to rid herself of him.”
“She promised us a bounty for her husband,” Chand replied, fiddling with his cane. “From what you’ve told me of your conversation with that Blackcoat, the Redcrosse Knights are going to take care of that for us.”
“Precisely.” I pointed the long stem of the pipe at him. “We need her to be alive and aware that we’ve removed him from the situation in order to receive our crowns.” I shrugged. “And if that does not turn out favorably, perhaps in the confusion raiding the lockboxes is still an option.” Putting the pipe in a loop on my repeater holster, I added, “None of which we can do from out here.”
If Inspector Rotella had indeed managed to get the Redcrosse Knights to act in time to catch the Duke, they had not yet arrived. I checked my phial box and cartridges, rapier and pistol. “You can stay out here if you like. I would understand reluctance to rescue a woman that has wronged you and yours as she has.”
“And let you disappear into that Hall of hellions and never return?” Chand snorted in a way that, even in the dark and danger of that alley, pierced me with a desire that his professed motives were only an excuse to accompany me. “No. You’ll need someone to back slang this when your ridiculous scheme fails.”
I couldn’t help but let out a mad laugh at that. As if daring him to chase me, I dashed from our espying spot and across the street. A small tunnel, only wide enough for a single adult, burrowed through the massive tick that was Guillemin Hall. This led to a small courtyard, decorated with nothing but rainspouts and a set of stairs that led down to a modest wooden door. This was one of the servants’ entrances to the Hall, one that was recommended by Lady Pawlett as our main point of entry if we had decided to poison Lord Guillemin within his home. I crouched by the door, trying to use the lessons Erin had given me on lockpicking.
I was still fumbling when Chand approached at a nonchalant pace that, with his new top hat and cane, made him fit right in with the wealthy setting. Only someone who somehow noticed his darker skin in the night would be able to tell he didn’t. At my continued failure to unlock the door, and thus impress Chand, I felt embarrassment heat my skin. This became greater even than the fear of being caught as he stood over me.
“Would you like assistance with that?” I could hear the smirk in his voice, infuriating and charming all at once. I didn’t know if I wanted to kiss him or throw my glove in his face.
I pivoted to him from where I knelt by the door, the tools Erin had lent me still in hand, “When I’ve seen such success?”
Despite dimness of the sequestered courtyard, I could see Chand’s grin transform into a smile. He took the picks from me, his hand on mine sending a charge through me. He crowded next to me in the narrow doorway as he bent to the lock. “Let me take care of that for you.”
I muttered something like a gratitude as he set to work, hoping the gloom hid my blushing as his lithe frame rubbed against mine. It wasn’t a quick process, even with Chand’s expertise, so I used it as an excuse to lay a hand on his back as I glanced between his work on the lock and the stairs behind us. I felt his heartbeat and breath, both causing my hand to burn with the wish there was nothing between my skin and his.
In a space of time too short for the satisfaction of my hand, the door opened. Chand smoldered back at me with a grin and wink. “Et voilĂ !”
“You’ll have to help me practice that,” I said, moving forward. The fact that I was in the middle of this ridiculous escapade and trying to plan an excuse for Chand and I to spend more time together in the future made me wonder at my sanity. We might not have a future beyond this night, so how ridiculous to worry about that now. And yet.
Beyond the door was a small room of plain wood, benches lining the walls with coat hooks mounted at regular intervals above them. Several doors led out of the room, but only one at the top of a half-flight set of steps. I wagered that one led into the Hall and went.
I peeked through revealing a banquet room, its emptiness lit by dim chandeliers hanging from a high ceiling. I almost retreated to see what might be through the other doors when the first sound that was not my own stopped me. It was a droning originated from somewhere deeper in the house.
I gestured for Chand to follow me and he did, each of us quiet on our soft-soled boots, listening intently to the sound we followed. As we moved through the manor the droning became louder until it was unmistakably originating from behind massive double-doors. Even closed, the powerful bombination sounded from behind it.
Not knowing of any way to open such a portal without notice, we dodged back into the servants’ halls and followed the droning until we reached a small servants’ door that hummed with sonic energy. It was fortunate that it was hidden by a curtain from the great room it let into. Large enough to be a ballroom, it was furnished in dark woods and candelabrums bright enough that they shined on all of the men dressed in black within it. They were separated into two groups that were indistinguishable from one another, but organized in rows so straight they could have been standing between pews.
The room felt as a blasphemous reflection of a church congregation, with the body dressed all in black and, at its head, the Duke of Glevum dressed in fine golden pallium with a white mitre, standing before an altar, a blanket covering an all too human shape before him. I recognized the Duke by his wife’s description and him being the only one of the fanatics that had any fat about him. Behind his Lordship, raised on the wall where a Cross might be, were the four-pointed Hands of God.
I tapped Chand on the shoulder to follow me, then led him along a colonnade that lined the walls in the room, its columns hiding us from the distracted cultists. As we made our way I realized our hiding spot was indeed within the Stations of the Cross. The room we were in was indeed the Hall’s chapel. Whatever Duke Guillemin and his Trzciniec were into was indeed sacrilegious beyond the pale.
Even if we had not been hidden by the pillars of the arcade, the Duke’s guests would not have noticed our presence. They were all rapt by his speech, ecstatic in their ritual as he raised his hands, beseeching some unseen presence. I listened to his words, my hands moving dexterously to my phial box as I did, removing two chemics that might be of use. I took out my dirk and poured a few drops from one into the sheath, sliding the knife back into the case, thus covering the blade with a lethal toxin.
The Duke cried out across the hall:
“We call forth Zaman, of the greedy eyes and wide-spread mouth,
You eat the pains of the world.
Zaman, show us the ancient track,
Zaman, remove the Hands that hold us back.
Come into the world to show us the way.”
At those words, the Duke pulled the shroud from the figure on the table, revealing a naked and supine Glenda. I could hear her struggling against whatever gagged her prodigious mouth. I was grateful, for both our modesties, that her higher place on the dais and altar kept most of her nakedness from us.
The Duke continued:
“We throw this orchard at your feet,
so you may come from past times that are eternal,
to rise from this womb as the moon,
as you inhabit your supplicant
to seed my bride with your brood.”
At this last pronunciation Glenda’s cries, muffled as they were, could be heard across the hall. The Duke continued without notice, sounding like a priest who was in love with his own homily. He showed no signs of stopping, so I whispered to Chand, “Let us round behind the altar so we can take him when he leaves.”
We crouched and snuck towards the altar, passing Our Savior as he went from being laid in his tomb to being condemned to death. It was then that Guillemin repeated, “Show us the way,” and began chanting. I would have thought he had begun to speak in tongues if it were not for the unctuous words that spilled out from him, the intonations dimming the bright chapel and thickening its air in the steady cadence of his speech. His unholy congregation of acolytes repeated his words, intensifying with each refrain.
The words made no sense, did not sound pronounceable by humans, but stopped me as they pierced my ears, circling my brain like a noose of piano wire, forcing my eyes shut and halting my will to go forward.
I forced an eye open, pushing through the shake in my soul. I looked up to witness the Duke’s mitre begin to glow with a phosphorescent light. As this grew in intensity, the two acolytes on the altar moved forward to undrape the Duke from his vestments.
With Glenda spreadeagled on the altar, I realized the Duke’s disrobing could only mean one thing. The robes fell away from him, revealing the pudgy, pale, privileged body of a middle-aged Dunhill noble, reminding me too much of my uncle and his late night visitations to me when I was young. My hands found my blade and repeater, prepared to storm up the altar to slay my way to the rapist.
Even the courage brought to me by this resolution was challenged by a thundering that boomed from the chapel’s rafters. Looking skyward, I saw that impossible lightning had begun to flash there, never touching the ground, but jumping from one space to another, connecting and reconnecting, as if Jacob were descending his ladder. As booming sounded, the bolts increased in their connection until each began to merge into four orbs, sickly glowing balls connected by palmate flashes of light the likes of which Dunhill has never seen. Or, at least, that is my hope.
I cannot say how long this thunder and lightning lasted. I stood frozen, my brain pressured to the point of crushing by the congregation’s chanting and the elemental forces they summoned. I willed my feet to move when I saw that the awful glow of his mitre had spread to the Duke’s being. His nakedness had too transformed, whereas his manhood should be was a twisting thing like a primordial snake, so massive and undulating it could be seen over the rise of the altar. Another horror brought to this unholy ritual kept me paralyzed under the chanting and thunder.
The eternity I stood there was only broken by a different booming, a sound like wild animals fleeing a predator, as if a herd were in the house and running from the evil emanating from the chapel.
The gallops grew louder, not fainter, though. The huge chapel doors burst open with such a racket to frighten even the worshipful cultists. Armed men with pikes, visored helmets protecting them from the sights before them, stormed in. Behind them, having ridden their horses through the mansion, knights bearing shields said to be blessed by Queen Gloriana herself, embossed with the red cross that gave them their name, raised sword and shield to strike out against the cultists.
The black-clad congregates turned and threw themselves at the Redcrosse Knights, suicidal in their disregard for their own safety. The two men with the Duke at the altar moved forward, drawing blades to defend him or, perhaps, whatever was between his legs.
As the two sides collided I pulled Chand with me behind the reredos, as afraid of being seen by the Redcrosse Knights as by the acolytes. The Duke continued his chant, its tempo and intensity increasing such that it could be heard even over the hooves of horses, clash of blades, and screams of wounded. Slowly, he began to move to the end of the table where her Ladyship’s feet were secured, his unholy snake dancing with anticipation.
I moved out from our hiding spot to throw the other phial into the head of one of the Duke’s attendants. It crushed into his skull, wounding the man and spreading its smoke, hiding the altar in a fog as he fell. This did not cease the Duke’s chanting, but I closed the distance and silenced him with my blade between his ribs. A man possessed, his mouth continued its utterances, but slowed and gurgled as he choked on his own blood and my poison. In the smoke, I whispered in his ear, “Your wife has made other plans.”
See the author’s published work here.
To read the previous chapter, go here.
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