“Oh…” I muttered. “Until…”
“Yes. Thank you for your kind letter. But now, I feel we must address the matter of the day. Holmes, I have reason to believe that one of the nine foci of Montevbello Goosh is currently on your person. Give it to me.”
“Not likely,” Holmes snorted.
Moriarty raised the Webley up beside his face, waggled it back and forth and clarified, “Give it to me, or I will shoot Watson.”
Holmes’s eyes narrowed with anger. He thrust one hand towards my revolver and cried, “M’gnan Verveviroth!”
And I resolved to go pistol shopping. Because, clearly, my current one was about to melt. Or fly apart. Or turn into a duck, or something.
But it didn’t. Nothing happened. A look of confusion spread across Holmes’s face. Moriarty’s eyes twinkled.
“You do not seem to trust my powers of foresight or the depth of my knowledge, Holmes,” he said. “You should extend me more credit. For example, all those demons that whisper in your mind—I know what they are saying to you, right now.”
Holmes’s look of confusion deepened, then gave way to one of concentration. Suddenly he gasped, his face a perfect mask of wonder. “Nothing!”
“Nothing,” Moriarty agreed.
“Watson! Nothing!” Holmes crowed. “It’s just me in here! Oh, for the first time in two hundred and forty years, I can hear myself think!”
“I’m not convinced that is a good thing, Holmes.”
“Oh, but it is, I assure you! It’s wonderful! So funny, how you don’t notice silence. It’s been so long since I heard it, I forgot!”
I know I have told the reader before of the constant tumult of demonic voices in my friend’s head, but just let me take a moment to say how deeply I do not envy the man who can stand next to a 360-foot waterfall and be amazed by the silence.
Holmes began to probe his face and the side of his head with his fingers. “Wow… it’s weird!”
Moriarty—very charitably—allowed Holmes a moment to marvel at it, then said, “I’m pleased you are enjoying it. Of course, it also means that the army of demonic friends who have been keeping you safe from me for so very long can be of no service to you.”
“I… I can’t do magic?”
“In this very special place, nobody can,” said Moriarty.
“Because of the smiff?” Holmes wondered.
“The… I’m sorry, the what?”
“It’s a word Holmes invented,” I explained. “It means a weakening of earth’s anti-magic barriers.”
“Ah,” Moriarty said. “Yes. A porte. A thinning of the veil. You will find nothing of the kind here, I’m afraid. All you’ll find is earth’s pre-eminent dead spot and a rather clever lure.” Moriarty indicated the monstrously deformed ball of balsa.
My brow wrinkled. “If you used magic to make that,” I wondered, “why does it work here? Wouldn’t its magic be drained by a place like this?”
A flicker of reluctance crossed his features, but he did answer me. Ha! Too many years the teacher, Moriarty. Too many times frustrated that students and underlings failed to ask the right questions.
“It is drained. Any magical item that spends more than a day or two here would be. Whatever latent magic that sphere might have possessed can no longer be detected. Only its emotion can.”
I harrumphed. “Sounds like magic to me.”
“And thus we see: you are no mage,” Moriarty scoffed.
Holmes shook his head and said, very quietly, “He’s lying. There is a smiff here, Watson; I can feel it.”
“If that were true,” I hissed, “wouldn’t this place be just swimming in magic?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “Oh! Unless… unless somehow magic were pouring out, instead of pouring in!”
The look of profound annoyance on Moriarty’s face gave me to know Holmes had guessed it right.
“Anti-smiff! Brilliant! Where is it?” I whispered.
Holmes closed his eyes and moved his head experimentally, back and forth. After only a moment, his eyes popped back open. He pointed down into the frothing cauldron at the base of the falls and said, “Down there.”
“Ah… so, nowhere we could access it, then?”
“Not with any degree of safety or convenience, I would think.”
“If we could get to it, could we—”
But Moriarty cut me off. He pulled back the hammer of my Webley, pointed it at my chest and said, “Holmes! The focus, if you please.”
“What? Oh! Hey! No, don’t hurt Watson! Here! Here, take it!”
Holmes dug about frantically inside his greatcoat, spilling a few of his remaining bills out onto the muddy path. In only a moment, his hands found the little wooden box that contained the Fasces. He pulled it forth and held it out towards Moriarty, even as I shouted, “Holmes, don’t! He’ll shoot me anyway!”
Moriarty laughed. “You seem not to know your friend very well, Dr. Watson. Don’t you realize: Holmes will always cave in to a threat like that. He will always follow his heart’s dictates in the most immediate situation. You and I are thinkers. Planners. Holmes is a reactive creature. How unfortunate for him that I thought to bring a firearm, while all he brought was you: his pre-eminent emotional liability. Now, Warlock, I wish you to take three steps forward, place the box on the pathway, then walk back to where you are now.”
“Holmes. Really. Don’t,” I urged.
He gave me a helpless grimace. “I can’t let him shoot you, Watson.”
“Well good luck stopping him,” I pointed out. “This path is hardly a yard wide. We’ve got a sheer rock wall on one side, a fatal fall on the other, a crashing waterfall behind us, and an armed antagonist blocking our only path back to safety. He’s holding all the cards, I fear.”
“Not all of them, Watson.” Holmes turned from me, extended the box before him and began creeping cautiously towards Moriarty. He began lowering the box towards the path, but just before it touched, he yanked himself back upright, raised his left hand towards the sky and cried “Melf—”
He might have saved himself the trouble. Even as he’d begun to
