floor. In the dim light that spilled in through the high windows, the skinless things hanging from hooks might have been anything: beef or rabbits or men. Even in the cold, the reek was overwhelming.
A rat scuttled along the wall, startled by its unexpected guests. By unspoken agreement, Balfour took the lead, his wide frame moving through the shadows with the agility of long practice. The others followed only a few steps behind, Meriwether dividing his awareness between the dark spaces behind them and the snake-smooth motion of the Czarina, prepared for surprise attack from either quarter. It seemed hours that they negotiated the abattoir, the dead around them like the trees of an infernal forest, and then Balfour made a low clicking sound at the back of his throat.
Meriwether went still, and a moment later, the Czarina as well. Balfour opened the door slowly, a dim, dirty light outlining its frame. From the hallway beyond, a faint voice came. The syllables were incomprehensible, but they had a wetness and roughness that spoke of a throat abused from long use, hoarse as a man accustomed to screaming. Balfour lifted his head, sniffing at the air, and a moment later, the others caught it as well. The sweet, pungent scent of opium, but also something else. Something deeper and more intimate even than the spilled blood through which they had travelled. The Czarina’s long, slow exhalation reminded Meriwether to breathe as well. Her eyes, the brown gone slate gray in the dim light, were fearful and reckless at once. She saw the question in his expression and nodded once. She was prepared.
Quiet as thieves, they crept forward.
At the end of the hall, light spilled from the edges of a poorly-fit door. Red and gold, it danced like flame, but there was no roar of fire to accompany it, only the rough, ruined voice lifted in its incomprehensible chant. Balfour crossed to the far side of the door, his drawn blades glittering. The Czarina placed herself at the door’s nearer edge just as Meriwether moved to the same position. Their bodies collided silently, and Meriwether took a step back to steady himself. A floorboard creaked under his foot.
The chanting stopped.
“Grand,” Balfour sighed, and then twisting from the hip, kicked the door open. The lock shattered. The bolt tore free, splintering the wood. All three leapt into the room.
What had once been a modest caretaker’s residence—a cast-iron stove, a small cot, a single gaslight—had been transformed. The stove’s plate was open, the burning coal within heating the air like a furnace and filling the room with demonic light. The ancient, black robed man kneeling before it could have been drinking at the back of any pub in England. Close-cut white hair frosted his pale scalp. The patchy beginnings of a beard clung like lichen to his loose jowls and wattled neck. His alarmed eyes were the blue of ice at the iris, the sclera a uniform, blood- bright red. He shouted, his bared teeth revealing the pale-gummed gap of a missing eye tooth, and threw a handful of dark powder into the flames.
Meriwether lifted his revolver toward the man’s skull.
“In the name of Victoria, queen of England, stand down!” he shouted.
The dark-robed man rose, his arms raised at his sides in a gesture that could have been surrender or a show of fearlessness. At his breast, a huge and ornate silver medallion glittered as if with a light of its own. When he spoke, it was with the unaccented English of a London native.
“In the name of Victoria?” he said. “You have no idea what I have seen and suffered in that name. It has no power over me any longer, God help us both.”
The three exchanged confused glances. The wizard hoisted the corner of his mouth in an amused smile. His medallion glowed silver in a world of honey-gold. There was a ruby set at the center, red as the old man’s eyes.
“Forgive me,” Meriwether said, his revolvers still trained at the man’s forehead. “Abdul Hassan?”
“If you like, son. I’ve been Abdul Hassan. I’ve had a dozen names. What does it matter what a man’s called? Call him king or cobbler, it’s what he does that matters.”
The heat of the fire redoubled, the flames licking at the black iron.
“You have injured my husband,” the Czarina said. “You will tell me now how to cure him.”
“Balfour?” Meriwether said.
“I see it,” Balfour replied. At the edges of the room, the shadows were growing solid. Darkness made its web. “It’s the smoke fumes.”
“I believe that it isn’t,” Meriwether said.
“
“You’ll find me a harder man to kill than that,” he said, and the shadows swept down around him moving through the air like ink dripped into water. There were eyes in that darkness, shining like black water. Searching for them. Meriwether felt the hairs on his neck and arms standing too, his deep animal nature recognizing something that had threatened him since before evolution had brought men to walk upright.
Something detonated soundlessly, and the iron stove gone, the caretaker’s room gone, and rising behind the ancient man, a huge goat-headed thing. Its pendulous belly shifted as it shuddered from one awkward, bent leg to another. Its eyes were malefic and intelligent.
“
“Meriwether?” Balfour said, and there was a barely controlled panic in his voice.
“I suspect we’ve been exposed to…some sort of hallucinatory agent.”
“That’d be good,” Balfour said. His voice echoed, as if coming from a great distance away. Meriwether took careful aim at the beast shuddering before him. A huge, honey-colored moon was rising over its shoulder. His service pistol barked in his hand, and the demonic face rippled like a reflection in a pond when a stone has been dropped into it.
“Stop that!” the Czarina said, and the world smelled of her clove perfume and the richness of her flesh. “You could have killed me.”
“Get on the floor!” Balfour wheezed.
With his head pressed to the filthy floorboards, Meriwether’s mind slowly cleared. A greenish haze poured up from the iron stove, floating about three feet above the floor, venomous and threatening. A calm and poisoned ocean, seen from beneath the waves. Of the ancient man, there was no sign.
“Stay low,” Meriwether said. “We have to get to the street. And quickly.”
When they had reached the curb again, their clothing ruined by the return trip through the frigid gore of the slaughterhouse, Lord Carmichael had a carriage waiting. Wrapped in woolen blankets, the three were pulled quickly through the night streets.
“We saw him slip out,” Lord Carmichael said. “Leapt off the rooftop. I’ve got men in pursuit. I was about to send a squad in when you three stumbled out. What happened in there?”
“Hell opened,” Balfour said. The Czarina leaned her head against the rattling side of the carriage and wept silently.
“It’s well you didn’t send any others in,” Meriwether said. “Especially not men who were armed. We’d all have been shooting one another down as devils until morning.”
Slowly—the opium had done something unpleasant to his ability to find words—Meriwether recounted the events from within the slaughterhouse. Lord Carmichael listened, his eyes wide and his expression the rapt fascination of a boy sitting at a campfire, regaled with ghost stories. When Meriwether came to the end, Lord Carmichael slapped his back, grinning.
“Well, this is all to the good, then, isn’t it? We may not have caught the bastard, but at least we know it’s all drugs and mesmerism. Not real magic at all.”
“I’m afraid we don’t know that,” Meriwether said.
“You recognized him too?” Balfour asked, his bear-deep growl softer than usual.
“I did,” Meriwether said. The carriage lurched, the team of horses whuffling in complaint. “Our so-called Abdul Hassan is, in fact, an Englishman.”
“Scot.”
“Born in England, of Scottish descent,” Meriwether said, giving half the point. “I’ve never met the man, but I’m quite familiar with his portrait. William Brydon.”
“I don’t know the name,” said the Czarina, her attention suddenly sharp and bright as a blade’s edge.
“Assistant surgeon in the East India Company. When Elphinstone retreated from Kabul to Jalalabad, he had an army of forty-five hundred men. Only one man reached safety, and that was William Brydon.”
