Gaslight Magick Read online

  Gaslight Magick

  A tale of the Pendragon Empire

  by

  Teel James Glenn

  A Wild Wolf Publication

  Published by Wild Wolf Publishing in 2020

  Copyright © 2017 Teel James Glenn

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, businesses, characters, and incidents, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales, or any other entity, is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  www.wildwolfpublishing.com

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  World of the Pendragon Empire

  About the Author

  Dedication

  To Carol G., my Evil Twin, an amazing person who has supported, encouraged and abetted me in the most amazing ways. I can never repay your kindness.

  And To Terry S. who first encouraged me to write more Athelstan stories and who had been an unfailing friend and supporter for longer than my failing memory can recall…

  Acknowledgments

  Parts of this book (in different forms) have appeared in the anthology “Dreams of Steam,” Scifan Magazine and Silverblade Magazine.

  Chapter One

  The Die is Cast

  It was another week of cups for me, both dicing and drinking. I was attempting to fill the empty spot inside since my muster out, after recovering from my wounds received in the second Crimean conflict.

  The local Merlin at London’s Crockford’s Club had just renewed the ‘protection from cheating’ spell in the plush gaming room. That meant that the particularly bad run of luck I was having was due entirely to the fact that I really didn’t care all that much about winning or losing. It all was just something to pass the time.

  I’d had a weeklong bumpy run at all the golden halls of the city, only to end up at Crockford’s, where I sipped hot chocolate spiced with cognac in the gaslight. I had gambled my way through games of queek, hazard and, of course, my favorite, whist.

  “It is eighteen ninety, Athelstan, dear fellow,” Byron, one of my Toff friends said as I shook the cup and threw the dice on the green felt tabletop. “Not the Dark Ages. You are dreadfully dreary; I say ‘Rise Lazarus!’ and smile; you just don’t seem to be in the game at all.”

  “I tell you, Byron,” I said with a shrug. “If you want to find a real fellow to have a good time with you have to meet a chap I know from Cairo, old Mad Mike. Now that is a man who can laugh. An American fellow—”

  “Like your aunt, Lady Camden?”

  I snorted and shook my head. “Oh, no,” I said. “No one’s like Aunt Minerva; but Mike is jolly good fun, comes from New York, you know?” I thought about it for a moment and then added, “Now he’s a man who knows what life is.”

  I felt a strange sense of sadness when I thought of him and said aloud. “I’d like to know how to live. Not much to keep time without beat to quarters, eh?”

  “Oh, my dear old fellow,” Byron said as he signaled the serving steambot to roll across the plush carpet of the gaming room with another drink for him. After selecting a glass of port from the tray on the rolling bar, he kissed the doxie at his side and added, “You are becoming positively dull these days, Athelstan.”

  “Yes, Baronet Grey,” the lady standing at my side said to me, putting a frown on her unlined face. “You were jolly when you promised to show me the clubs, but you just complain it is all so dull.”

  I had not been to the family townhouse for a week while I went in search of something to make me feel alive. I had not particularly felt one of the fully living since I left the service two years before. Even the presence of a lovely young lady on my arm did not seem to make a difference. I didn’t even remember her name by the third day of this particular gallivant, but she enjoyed the drinks I bought her and she laughed at my jokes as if she thought them funny and that was all I required at that point in my life.

  I looked up at the flaxen-haired lovely that had followed me on my gambling odyssey and recovered her name from the musty corners of my cognac-besotted mind. “Dear Pamela.” I stood and did an elaborate bow to the lady. “I am afraid I am not quite up to entertaining even myself these days, let alone you. For that I humbly apologize.”

  “Oh, road apples!” a familiar shrill voice called from the entrance to the gaming room. With the sound of the voice all other sound in the oak-lined room stopped. “You is just full of your own ill humors, nephew!”

  All the men rose and acknowledged that my aunt, Lady Camden, had entered the room. She stood in her full fury—all five feet of her—with hands on hips in the doorway to the gaming salon. She wore a gold and crimson traveling gown and had on a wide-brimmed hat that had an explosion of feathers atop it.

  “Mini!” I sighed. “What have I done now?”

  “Nothing I know of fer sure, nephew,” she said with her Arkansas twang that had not been softened much by forty years of living in England. “I’ve just taken a long time tracking you down. That is neither here nor there—truth be, we have to leave directly for America tonight—I’ve had word by teleglass that my brother is doing very poorly and we need to get there as soon as possible. I’ve reservations on the midnight airship out of Victoria Aerodrome, so shake a boot, boy!”

  I felt a sudden almost electric thrill race up my spine, a premonition, if you will, that perhaps my lethargy and aimless time was over. Aunt Mini had been after me for a while to buck up, but I just hadn’t been very inspired being back in England. Perhaps a trip to her home country would shake me up a bit. It would at least be different; I had not been across the pond for decades and then only to New York, I had not seen t
he Mississippi.

  I rose, handed my tankard to Pamela and bowed. “Familial duty calls, fair one!” I turned to Bryon. “Do see she is home safe, good fellow!”

  I followed Mini out of the room with only Bryon’s wry smile as an answer and to several jeers from my fellow gamblers. Byron cheerfully embraced Pamela and called, “Say hello to the new world for me, Athelstan!”

  I had come by flying carpet I had picked up in Cairo on a whim—the novelty of which the ladies, Pamela included, seemed to enjoy. I gathered my Persian conveyance from the cloakroom, left the club and followed my aunt into a hansom. Mini was not one for carpet travel.

  “We’ll leave that fool thing at the aerodrome,” Mini said. “No sense taking extra weight on the airship.” She pointed to my carpetbag in the roof of the cab. “Put it up by your traveling bag—I packed for you.”

  “I hope you brought my new blue jacket.”

  “Of course I did,” she said. “I know how you like to fancy yourself up.”

  “The ladies do like a presentable fellow,” I said. She snorted.

  “Nephew, you don’t need no fancying, you’re as handsome as your uncle, my Tolliver ever was and a darn sight nicer to look at than your daddy was.” I raised an eyebrow at that but she pressed on. “So you need to stop struttin’ in front of empty hen houses, ’cause you end up with empty hens. Ain’t never gonna find your fate if you wander in the dark places of life.”

  “Come on, Mini,” I protested. “What else am I supposed to do to relieve the boredom of all this . . . this civilian existence?”

  “Your problem, nephew,” she said as the cab moved through the rain-slicked streets to begin our trans-Atlantic journey, “is spending your time with crude women and strong drink; what you need is exactly the opposite!”

  Of course, in time, as usual, I would find out she was right.

  Chapter Two

  A Delta Damsel

  I had no immediate thoughts of fate as I drove a carriage along the night-dark roads of the American state of Louisiana. And I had no idea that fate would take the form of a woman.

  I had few thoughts of any consequence these days, having done little but wander metaphorically or literally since I mustered out of uniform.

  My mind was fully occupied at that moment with attempting to control the skittish horses in a driving rain on the narrow, overgrown bayou road. The sandy soil was saturated and pooling water everywhere and many of the thin pines were swaying dangerously in the wind.

  We had made it to the plantation of Mini’s brother, my uncle Josiah just in time for her to have a final visit before he expired from complications from pneumonia. We had stayed just long enough to begin closing out the holdings then decided to try and make it north to see Prince Edward when he came for a long-announced visit to the Commonwealth.

  On our way to New Orleans our driver had decamped, leaving me and my aunt to fend for ourselves. Obviously, he thought we two Brits mad to try to reach the city in the storm coming in off the gulf.

  Yet our dirigible ride north was three days hence and my Aunt feared there would be no other airship going north in time for us to make it to Montreal to see Prince Edward for his visit.

  Suddenly a white streak appeared before the rain-blinded horses. I was barely able to rein the team as a woman collapsed on the bayou road in front of them. The horses snorted and fought but I was able to pull them up mere inches from the fallen figure.

  I jumped down from the seat and raced to the girl’s side where I discovered a delicate, red-haired thing in her twenties, that seemed half dead from exposure to the elements. Her soaked clothing seemed more nightclothes than dress and her feet were bare.

  “Help me!” was all she managed to whisper before she fainted.

  “Get her up here in the coach, Athelstan,” my Aunt Minerva called from the compartment of the carriage. “We have to find some place to hold up till this dooly-hoop blows over—this storm is getting worse!”

  Hard to imagine the violence of the hurricane getting worse, though the winds had risen steadily in intensity since we left her dead brother’s plantation in Slidell. The girl was all but weightless when I lifted her to the coach and Auntie helped me place her on the floor of the conveyance.

  At that moment two hulking figures suddenly appeared from the underbrush. They were roughly-built fellows, dark skinned but otherwise the night and the rain made them ciphers.

  “Come!” One of them called to us in a dull, flat but booming voice. He pointed up a side road I had not seen before.

  Having placed the girl in the coach, before I could regain the boot one of the men took the bridle of the lead horse without a word to me. I decided not to argue and climbed in with Auntie and our rescued damsel.

  Ahead I could see the lights of a mansion through the swaying trees and driving rain.

  The two men, with nary a look back at us, began to walk the carriage toward the building. I started to rise, intent on stopping them, but my aunt called me back.

  “Might as well sit in here, nephew, afore you get yourself a chill.”

  “A little late for that, Auntie,” I said, “but I guess there is not much else to do.” I knelt in the compartment beside the unconscious girl. The pulse at her throat seemed nonexistent and her flesh cold to the touch, but her chest rose and fell gently.

  The girl seemed little more than a child yet there seemed lines of pain etched in her delicate face, or perhaps I imagined them, considering I felt miserably cold and wet myself.

  Odd to think about it, but the quality of the rain seemed different from that on ‘that sceptred isle’ or even the monsoon rains of India where I had served for some years. It was somehow oppressive and gave me an eerie and ominous feeling. At the time I chalked it up to personal discomfort and nerves; I should not have.

  The coach was led slowly up the narrow, rutted road that was little more than a slash in the wildly dancing foliage; had we not been stopped at that very spot we never would have realized there was a side road at all. The road was overgrown so heavily with branches arching overhead that it was like entering a living tunnel. It snaked lazily toward a slowly revealed building that might have been stately in the daylight but was a dark hulk in the stormy night.

  “I hope they have stiff brandy up there, Auntie,” I said. “This chill is going all the way to my bones.”

  “Think about this poor child first, nephew—she is all but dead in this weather. What would possess her to run out into this, dressed this way?”

  Her words sent a deeper chill into me, as I considered, “What indeed?”

  The two men led our carriage to a portico beside the tall columned house. It was only a temporary respite from the driving wind and rain, but it allowed us to disembark.

  I carried the unconscious girl while Aunt Mini jumped down behind me, as spry as if she were half her sixty-plus years old.

  “Get her inside, nephew,” she said. “We will get our bags later.”

  There was a door open into the building from the portico and I moved in quickly, glad immediately to be out of the knife-edged driving rain that matched or surpassed the worse London’s downpour. A servant, much like the two hulks from outside was directly inside in what was a side hall to a great galley that I imagined ran the length of the house. The burly, liveried servant took the girl from my arms unbidden.

  A second figure seemed to appear from nowhere and faced me. “Please, Loral will show you to rooms and you will find dry clothing there,” the tall, spare Creole man said. He had a fringe of white hair and amber eyes that commanded with their intense glare. His clothing was of an older style, with a long frock coat and an unusual necklace of wood and ivory carved beads that looked to be of African origin, worn at his neck instead of a cravat.

  “I am Monsieur Mourant, master here,” he said and nodded his head in a slight bow, “ please, there is time for conversation later. Make yourselves comfortable; your bags will be brought in. Pierre will take care of Antoinett
e.” Before my aunt or I could speak a serving girl appeared and with silent gesture indicated we should move further into the opulently appointed mansion.

  “Thank you sir,” Aunt Mini said to our host.

  “You are welcome, madam,” Mourant said, his voice with a gentle southern drawl and a hint of Caribbean accent. “There will be dry robes waiting for you.” He gave a royal nod and turned from us to talk to a servant; we had been dismissed.

  I looked to my aunt who raised an expressive eyebrow but said nothing.

  Our guide, holding a candelabra whose flame danced in the air currents, led us up a narrow staircase to the second floor. She stopped and pointed to two open doors.

  Glancing into the two rooms I could see that there were robes set out on the beds—one large and one that looked small. That would be for Aunt Mini, who lived up to her name at being barely five feet tall.

  “Thank you, pumpkin,” she said to the servant who turned silently and walked away.

  The room was well appointed in an antique style and the robe heavy and warm. My image in the looking glass made me laugh; my straw-coloured hair, that I tended to wear long was soaked and I looked like nothing so much as a drowned tabby cat. I worked it with a towel to dry it and then did my best to comb it out so it would not tangle.

  There was a knock on the connecting door to Mini’s room and she entered. Even though it was an adult small size, the robe was still oversized so that it looked like my tiny aunt had dissolved from a bigger model.

  “There is something here that smells like a week-old raccoon pie, Athelstan,” Auntie said. Though she had lived in England for nearly forty years she was as American as a dime novel. It was that very ‘charm’ that had captured my Uncle Toliver’s heart for the former Miss Minerva Strump when he saw her sharpshooting act in a Wild West show—during an exhibition at Hyde Park.