Gaslight Magick Read online

  She didn’t look happy at my order, but nodded reluctant agreement.

  I threw my cloak on my shoulders and then, as an afterthought, went to the mantel where I removed a sabre from the display. It had a comfortable heft in my grip. When I saw her raised eyebrow that said ‘and I have to hide my gun?’ I slipped the sword under my cloak.

  “Okay,” I said, “tallyho!”

  I have to admit that, despite the circumstance my blood was pumping at full flow with being ‘back in harness’ again, facing action.

  We left our suite and headed down the stairs to the first floor. The background of the howling wind was still a cacophony, battering against the building as if a thing alive were trying to get in.

  “Where do you think they took her?” Auntie asked. I had no ideas at that point but the problem was solved when we reached the bottom of the stairs. We could hear Antoinette’s voice coming from the partly-open door of the drawing room so we moved closer to listen.

  “I promise I was not trying to leave again,” she said.

  “Then why were you in his room?”

  “I was trying to get him to leave, only him and the lady.” Her voice was pleading, reedy and full of pain. “They have no part of this.”

  “They have seen too much,” Mourant said coldly. “I will not have what I have built here compromised.”

  “They know nothing,” she insisted, “let them go. I cannot stand it, Mourant, I can not stand it anymore. When will I have paid enough, when will it be enough punishment? Please, please free me!”

  “You are mine,” our host said in a quiet, forceful tone. “You had no business interfering in my life; I will have you for as long as I want.”

  I had heard enough. I looked at Mini, who nodded and then sprang forward. I thrust the door to the room open and entered.

  Mourant stood by the mantel, now dressed in a smoking jacket, but still wearing his beaded necklace and with a snifter of brandy in his hand. Antoinette knelt before him as if in supplication; the two brutes that had abducted her stood on either side, staring blankly ahead.

  “You will release this girl right now,” I said. “And explain yourself!”

  The Creole’s eyes widened but his voice was icy steady and quiet. “How dare you presume to question me in my own home.” He made his curious gesture again with his necklace and the two brutes turned toward me.

  “Baronet—” The girl turned her emerald eyes to me with a look that seemed to have lost all hope.

  “If you wish to leave, you will come with us; we will leave, storm or no,” I said.

  “Athelstan ain’t lyin’, pumpkin,” Mini said when she saw that look. “We are skedaddling no matter what this polecat says or does.”

  Mourant pointed at us and snarled, “Destroy them!”

  The two sycophants moved at us with rapid, but clumsy steps. I sprang at them, swirling off my cloak to envelop the first of them like a gladiator’s net and swung the sabre at the second. I struck him with a blow to the side of the head, using the flat of the blade. It was a blow that would have toppled most men, but the man simply stumbled aside with a grunt of annoyance.

  The first of the servants pulled free of the cloak and I spun to slam the hilt of my sword to the side of the head. He too staggered but did not fall from a blow that would have split the skull of most.

  “It is hopeless,” Antoinette called. “You cannot stop them.”

  It seemed true, for the brutes came at me again. I dodged and slashed one across the right leg, and smashed the knuckle guard of the sword into the jaw of the other.

  The man with the leg cut stumbled to the ground but kept coming with his wounded knee giving him an odd shuffling gait. The one I had punched had his jaw twisted at an off angle but he made no sound of pain. Both still had the same glassy-eyed stare.

  Mourant watched all this with a cold eye, his fingers dancing on the necklace.

  Suddenly the storm was in the room as three more servants threw open the doors from the veranda and staggered in holding farm implements. One held a hoe, one a machete and one had a pickaxe. They came at me in a semi-circle but with the same deliberate, plodding movements the other men had.

  I ducked under a swing of the hoe, leaping forward to kick that attacker hard in the knee. He dropped with no sound of pain despite the snap of the bone breaking cleanly.

  The machete swung with more speed, but I was able to parry it and riposte with a devastating cut that all but took the arm of the attacker off at the bicep.

  Neither man bled. Nor did they stop moving forward.

  I had no time to ponder this as the pickaxe swung at my head. I closed with the servant and tossed him over my hip to slam him into a side table, smashing the furniture with his bulk.

  “Mini—” I yelled, “Ruckus!”

  My aunt raised her revolver and blasted away at the five brutes, each of her bullets striking true with real sharpshooter skill.

  I ran across the room to Antoinette’s side as all the men were slammed by the bullets. Mini hit them directly between the eyes.

  All five of the servants were thrown from their feet but made no sound of pain or shock; however a moment after they hit the floor they all rose again, lumbering and with their broken limbs and wounds unbleeding.

  They moved forward like five nightmares made flesh!

  While the storm screamed through the open veranda doors with stinging rain and driving wind, Mourant stood, eyes fixed on his brutes, his hand at his throat and a wry smile on his face.

  Chapter Five

  Revelations of the Dead

  Suddenly, all the little things I had observed added up and I knew what I was up against.

  “Baronet—” Antoinette said as she turned to me in a gesture half between reaching for me and holding me off.

  “It will be alright,” I said. “I can stop this now.” I stepped past her and with as swift a gesture as I could I snatched the beads from the startled Mourant’s neck and tossed the necklace into the fireplace.

  The Creole screamed as the beads of the jewellery were consumed by the roaring flames.

  The attacking brutes dropped where they were and began to vibrate as if they were aflame themselves.

  Mourant swung at me, a weak, pointless gesture as I outweighed him and easily trapped his flailing arms.

  “No, no! She has to pay!” he said. Suddenly his features were drawn his eyes sunken and listless so he was only an old, frail man and somehow pitiful.

  “I have paid,” Antoinette said. Her voice trembled and seemed far away. I turned my head to see her again on her knees, but with her head bowed and her body in spasm. “Since that day I bought him when he was a child. It was a whim. My daddy said I could have any one of the darkies I wanted. He was such a pretty young boy.”

  She turned her eyes up to look at me and Mourant. “Isn’t more than a hundred years of humiliation enough? I was not much more than a child myself when my family and I died from the fever,” and with that she fell to the ground and lay still. Abruptly she began to crumble into pieces like a sand castle in a stiff breeze.

  Mourant stopped struggling and I stepped away from him to stare at the dust that had been the delicate redhead.

  The five servants also fell still and began to dissolve into fine powder so that in a dozen heartbeats only Mourant, auntie and I were in the room.

  Mourant moved haltingly to kneel by the pile of ash that had been the girl and sifted it through his fingers. “It will never be enough, but there is nothing for me now,” he said. There were tears in his eyes when he looked up angrily at me. “You took it all. Sometimes life is a curse, I—” His words stopped abruptly, his eyes went wide and he clutched at his chest. Abruptly he fell forward. His beating heart, kept so by his will to hate, was now silent forever.

  I ran and slammed the outside doors closed, drenched and blinded by the driving rain.

  “Heart attack,” Mini said as she checked his body. “I reckon hate is a powerful reaso
n to stay alive; that and a desire for vengeance. When it’s gone…”

  “Necromancy,” I said. The beads, carved to represent the individuals he had enslaved, crackled and burned to ash with only the ebony stone of the centre seemingly untouched by the fire.

  “This is not Merlinian magick,” I said.

  “Caribe magick, I reckon,” she said as she looked at the smouldering necklace in the fireplace. “Voodoo. This is sure new world magick, nephew; like the Aztec magick or ‘Nation’s Shaman stuff, nothing European. All home-grown deviltry.”

  I looked at the dead zombie master and the dust of his thralls and my thoughts went to life—to the desperation of all to live and how precious it was. He had more than a hundred years husbanded from the Grim Reaper and yet he wasted it on so petty an emotion as vengeance. Hate is a poor substitute for love and for living.

  “What do we do now,” I asked. “Whom shall we report this to?”

  “Ain’t nothing to report, nephew.” She pointed to the piles of dust. “Just an old man who passed to his maker with nothing good to say and nothing to positive done for the world.”

  I could not argue with her on that, but then I couldn’t argue with Mini on much.

  She stood and stretched, her grey hair having come loose from her hair comb. She brushed a stray lock out of her eyes and said, “No reason to leave till storm clears up; I’m going back to bed.” She marched out of the room and I could do nothing but follow.

  Outside the storm screamed and howled, very much like the sound of tormented souls in hell.

  ****

  I slept uneasily though my door was barred and barricaded, but when the dawn came we discovered that we were, in fact, the only living thing on the plantation, save for our horses.

  Though, for that matter, considering the occurrences of the night before we had been the only really living things since we arrived. Around the mansion, we discovered, all the servants had crumbled to dust as well.

  We did a little exploration of the house that confirmed the twisted story that the plantation had once belonged to the family of the dead Antoinette DuBeau, but the last member of the family we could find recorded in a bible died in two hundred years ago 1790.

  “Well, I didn’t expect much else,” Mini said. She was dressed in her split-skirt traveling clothes, holding a clutch but had Little Ruckus strapped in a holster around her slender waist. When she saw me looking at her pistol she shrugged. “Ain’t gonna feel all together comfortable till we’re quit of this golly hoop!”

  We headed out the front door and stood on the porch while the early morning mist crept across the lawn in front of the building. I had already brought the carriage around and loaded our luggage. It reminded me of monsoon season in Bombay as the sun was barely up yet the air was so humid that my jacket was already sticking to me.

  “I’ll ride up top with you, nephew; it’ll be boring in that hot box.”

  I jumped up and offered a hand to her though she was spry enough to need little help.

  “On to New Orleans?”

  “Sooner the better, nephew.”

  The road was rutted, muddy and littered with downed branches from the storm. It was slow going as I kept having to jump down to clear the way.

  After one such foray, as I was climbing back on the boot auntie said, “You gonna moon over that girl, nephew?”

  The question caught me off guard and I almost slipped back from the seat. “What do you mean?”

  “I saw a spark in your eyes when we got run int’a her and the moon eyes you made at her at dinner.”

  “That wasn’t moon eyes, Mini, I was trying to figure it all out.”

  “That’s a relief; I was a feared you were gonna go all mush on me or lose that spark.”

  “Spark?”

  “You know, nephew. You been a mopin’ around this whole two years.”

  That made me snicker, which she mistook for disrespect and so she swatted me with her clutch.

  “I was agreeing with you, Mini,” I said. That stopped her cold and she arched an eyebrow.

  “How’s that?”

  “When we found the girl and were in the building it all seemed like something was important again. A kind of thrill I haven’t had since I was with my troopers.”

  “Thrill of the hunt?”

  “No, Mini, not that. Nothing so superficial; no sport hunt really matters to people who have enough to eat on a daily basis. It mattered that we were there to save her—and then it mattered that we confronted him to stop his evil. I haven’t mattered since the Crimea. There I mattered to my men. To the Empire!”

  She snorted. “Well then, nephew, you gotta find out what it is that makes you matter and go do it.”

  I contemplated that for a time then asked, “What matters to you, Mini?”

  “After my Tolley, Athelstan, it was you.”

  I almost teared up at that and it made me all the more determined to find out what it was that really mattered to me to make Mini proud!

  Chapter Six

  Above the Mississippi

  “Tarnation, Althelstan,” my aunt said to me as she looked out the window of the forward lounge, “I do believe those ships are coming off the river after us and mean us some harm.”

  I found my Aunt Minerva’s statement to be inconceivable. For any criminals to risk an attack on a great state-of-the-art airship like The Pride of Prussia, traveling a thousand feet above the great muddy Mississippi seemed beyond any logical reality.

  Yet, there they were—three sky-sloops, lifting off the river and moving upward steadily toward us. There were figures holding onto lines on their decks and I could clearly see harpoon-grapple guns mounted on them. There could be little doubt that they were intent on piratical activity.

  When my aunt and I made it to New Orleans she had run into her old acquaintance, Herr Baron Von Burton and she had let it slip that we were heading to Montreal for Prince Edward’s visit. So the Austrian had invited us, in confidence of course, to take the flight on his new ship. It had given us several more days in the delta city that allowed us to be there for some of Mardi Gras. And for me to contemplate my new quest to find purpose, though the revelry of the Mardi Gras, I must say, was a bit distracting.

  “There’s no way they should be able to match our speed,” Baron Von Burton, the burly Austrian millionaire said as he looked at the suspicious sloops. He, like we others were seated at the Captain’s table in the empty grand salon area of the great airship. We were two days out of New Orleans on the secret inaugural flight of the luxury flying craft. It had a twenty-man crew and only we seven special guest passengers. No steambots were on board, however, because of weight considerations so we had a single steward attending our afternoon tea.

  “Certainly they should not be able to match us without Merlinian magick,” Captain Leblanc said as he dabbed a napkin at the corner of his mouth. “So there is no reason for alarm at all, good folks.” He stroked his long moustaches, smiled and rose slowly. He was the image of a stalwart sort of fellow and I knew he had served in Afghanistan in the last conflict in the Royal Air Corp before taking service with the Austrian flying company. “However, if you’ll excuse me I should return to the bridge to monitor the situation.”

  The Captain gave a salute to Herr Von Burton and left the seven of us to look out the window as he went aft to the stairs that would lead him to the control gondola below us.

  “I must agree with the Captain,” the Austrian owner of the airship said. “You see, Lady Camden we have the latest in Merlinian advances in our engines by agreement with your Queen, as well as vacuum tanks; no way those little ships can reach us. It is the best of old world magicks and science.”

  “There are more magickal powers in the world, Herr Baron Von Burton,” Chichua, the ambassador from the Mexhican Empire said. He was a tall, brown skinned statesman with long black hair going to silver, dressed in long ceremonial robes that were brightly coloured yet dignified. “That little island’s mag
icks are only one of many shades of such in the wide world,” he continued.

  It was said in an even, patient tone with no challenge yet I felt it was my turn, as a servant of the realm to speak up for Albion, even if my world travels meant my private beliefs agreed with the ambassador’s assessment.

  “The Albion Empire has flourished these many years with state approved and very powerful magick,” I said. “The official Merlin is descended by nomination directly from that first, great, original Merlin, Mr. Ambassador, so—”

  “Oh horse-apples, Athelstan,” Aunt Minerva said with her typical bluntness. “You know Ambassador Chichua is darn right, them varmints must be using some sort of other magick trickery than Merlinian in them craft, maybe even some of the Aztec kind.”

  “The power of the gods is not trickery,” the ambassador’s male bodyguard, Eztl said. He and the female jaguar clan guard might have been carved from teak, both with sharp cheekbones, searching ebony eyes and long, slicked black hair held back with leather bands on which was embossed the jaguar symbol of their status. They had feathered cloaks over their shoulders and facial tattoos that both announced their rank.

  “Oh you marvellous hunk of hero,” Aunt Mini said with her sweetest smile, “I didn’t mean any offence.” She was dressed in a scarlet dress with royal blue trim and a feathered hat that had a big enough brim to shade a small group.

  “I am sure that Lady Camden was not attempting to disparage our deities, Eztl,” the ambassador said with his own studied smile. He invoked a friendly uncle with his manner. “It is just her quaint American way of speech.”

  “Yes, quaint,” Eztl’s jaguar female counterpart, named Nenetl said coldly. She, like her partner, had elongated earlobes from which dangled jade orbs, and also had a gold ring in her nose. She was dressed almost identically to Eztl in male Parisian style clothing but in bright colours that somehow served to make the two of them seem all the more barbaric. Her clothing, however, did nothing to conceal her athletic female form just as her words did not conceal her contempt. “Americans are quaint,” she added.