Kingswraith: Taste no Pity

By Derek E. Pearson

When Scotland Yard involved the Professor and his young ward Martin Kingswraith in the strange case of the 'Depleted Men', neither of those skilled white wizards, or Lux Texentes, could foresee the terrible dangers they would face. In the soot-coated cobbled streets of late Victorian London, Kingswraith must overcome his greatest challenge or pe

• Language: English
• Publisher: GB Publishing Org
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912576142

Derek E. Pearson

2016 FINALIST twice over at the Foreword Indies BOOK AWARDS, American Library Association Annual Conference, Chicago, 24 June 2017: • SCIENCE FICTION with Soul's Asylum - Star Weaver • FANTASY with GODS' Enemy THE SUN: "Soul's Asylum is a weird, vivid and creepy book, not for the faint hearted. But its originality and top writing make for a great read." In his Body Holiday adult sci-fi trilogy Pearson introduced readers to Milla Carter, a beautiful telepath and killer, whose adventures have continued in the Soul's Asylum trilogy. The last volume, The Swarm, was published 15 April 2017. With GODS' Enemy Pearson introduced readers to the enigmatic Preacher Spindrift, in a series that continues in 2017 with GODS' Fool and in 2018 with GODS' Warrior. Pearson lives on the London/Surrey borders where he spends most of his time at his keyboard imagineering new worlds or twisting existing worlds through the dark prism he uses instead of a brain. He says, "When someone dies it has to matter. You have to believe a life has been lost. An author learns to love the people he lives with in his mind. They become real."

Book preview

[1]

It was a space between worlds. Colourless and drab. The ground met the sky in a seamless expanse without any horizon. There was nothing for the eye to focus on, because there was nothing to see. Except the pallid, grey body of a weeping child. It was folded around itself, crouched low on the shadowless ground. Its thin shoulders heaved and words spilled from its trembling lips. ‘Please, please, let me go, let me die.’

Then it looked up, and its pale eyes glowed with the sick phosphorescence of stagnant ponds at midnight. The weeping ceased and the mouth creased in a mirthless smile. ‘Not yet, my little one,’ it crooned. ‘Not yet. Soon we shall feed.’ And laughter bubbled from its narrow lips. It was an evil sound.

...

It was late afternoon and the sun, shafting down in lemon-coloured bars from the great skylights, caught the dust gently swirling in the still air and sparkled like a host of lazy fireflies. The Professor and his ward sat still as waxworks, crouched forward and intently gazing at a complex construction that was moving without any obvious means of propulsion.

It consisted of a number of gold and silver discs rolling swiftly around each other. Mounted on an intricate framework of diamond-axled gimbals, and attached to orthogonal pivots, the wheels were confined within an open square frame, measuring eight inches on each side.

The frame alone was a jewel of craftsmanship: fashioned from finely tooled polished wood, it had been finished with ornate corner pieces and laced with seams of purest silver. Evidently the work of a gifted silversmith and carpenter, its beautiful, wheeled mechanism had been constructed so precisely that it spun smoothly without the aid of any lubricants.

The instrument, which he had named his ‘Thaumatograph’, had been devised by the Professor in his youth. At first it had been nothing more than an interesting thought experiment, and then he had made a few rapid sketches in his notebooks, and finally a series of detailed diagrams.

After a year of fastidious research into arcane lore, he had selected his raw materials, including carefully cut and seasoned rowan wood, and the purest of precious metals. The manufacture itself had taken months of careful labour. The finished device contained not a single trace of iron, of course. Iron sucks the juice out of magic.

The Thaumatograph had a specific purpose; it measured and recorded magical activity in an area with a radius of several miles. During the last hour its glittering mechanism had begun spinning in an ever more complex series of loops, which told its operators that powerful magic was being performed somewhere in the city of London. And, for once, it was neither the Professor nor his companion doing it.

The Professor’s young ward, the Baronet Lord Martin Alexander Simon Kingswraith, was the last of his distinguished family line. Growing up, he had suffered from the drollery of nasally voiced toffee-nosed wags, who would invariably twit him about his surname.

They would sneer, ‘So, then, which monarch was it died for you, Kingswraith? Anyone we know?’ The more intellectually gifted, which included those geniuses who could count to twenty without removing their shoes and socks, would snidely ask if he realised his initials spelled out the word MASK? As if he hadn’t noticed in all his fourteen years.

They sniggered, ‘What are you hiding, eh, Kingswraith? Why the MASK?’ The Professor sympathised, after all he had plenty of his own appellation issues. Better known to polite society as the Professor, Viscount Lord Henry Rupert William Cecil Clarence Cubitt Hiram Menzies Whitekirk, amongst other honorifics and titles: he sometimes felt he should be bent almost double under the weight of them. It was far too many names for a single man to carry, and they oppressed him.

When he had read Mr Charles Dickens’ wonderful novella, A Christmas Carol, he had discovered a profound sympathy for the character of Jacob Marley. He pitied the ghostly miser, doomed to shoulder his heavy load of chains and money bags as posthumous penance for a lifetime of greed. The Professor believed his weighty chain of names and titles to be equally cumbersome, when all he had done to earn them was to be born to the ‘right’ family.

It was unfair, but inescapable. They were, he presumed, the cross he must bear in exchange for his privileged birth and aristocratic status. Others, he reasoned with stoic resignation, had much worse things to endure than a surfeit of nomenclature.

Nonetheless, he dreaded those occasions when he had to stand mute and fidgeting seemingly for ages while he was formally announced at balls and state functions. That interminable string of names and titles, he often thought, might be better if put to music. They might be more palatable to the ear if they were reeled off to a waltz or a polka!

To those who knew him, he was, quite simply, the Professor. It was short, sweet, and, to his mind, covered every important aspect of his being. He considered everything beyond ‘the Professor, Henry Whitekirk’ as surplus to requirements. His PhD had been hard earned – it was something he could be proud of. Hence, he was – first and foremost – the Professor.

He had published many celebrated white papers and presented a number of popular lectures regarding the pharmacopoeia of wild plants and herbs, many of which could be found in Britain’s hedgerows. None of the above, however, was his principal interest.

The Professor – and his young ward – were students of thaumaturgy. Put plainly, he was an accomplished wizard, a practitioner of carmini, the magical arts. In previous, less tolerant, centuries, his calling might have seen him hanged and his corpse placed on a gibbet as a warning to others. Otherwise he might have been burned at the stake, or buried face down in the centre of a remote crossroads at midnight.

Most likely his body, to ensure it didn’t rise from the grave, would have had an iron spike hammered through its heart and a silver coin placed in its mouth, which– looking back from the more enlightened era of the late nineteenth century – the Professor considered a trifle excessive.

His understanding of the occult was rooted in traditions that stretched back thousands of years. Ancient secrets had been passed down by the members of a very special family of practitioners. They were proven, they worked, and they did not require a belief in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Barely into his early thirties, the Professor was a tall, aesthetic-looking slender man with thick wings of silken tawny hair descending from a centre parting either side of a beardless, handsome, almost pre-Raphaelite face. His hair acted as the perfect frame for the pair of intense, extraordinarily bright blue eyes which he had inherited from his mother, a noted court beauty.

Such was the impact of his striking features that several artists had begged to be allowed to paint his portrait. To date, the only work he had liked well enough to mount on the wall of his ground floor gallery (or parlour as his housekeeper called it) had been an impromptu sketch in pencil and chalk, completed one wet and wine-fuelled afternoon in a Parisian bar by the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt, a student of Edgar Degas, one of his favourite artists.

Thanks to his fine looks, aristocratic position, and wealth, he was burdened with such a ridiculous cargo of eligibility that he was aggressively pursued by an army of beaux mondes matriarchs, all of them sprung from the crème de la crème of European society.

Behind the mothers stood pouting ranks of debutant daughters; all achingly ready and willing to accept the Viscount’s hand in marriage. He remedied the situation by politely repelling their advances at every turn, and, whenever possible, by remaining safely tucked away behind his stout walls.

Martin had yet to achieve the masculine beauty his high cheeked-boned adolescent features promised, and he was still young enough to cause little more than a stir in the aristocratic espousal waters, but he shuddered at the Professor’s warnings of horrors to come.

Marriage, however, was the last thing on their minds that late afternoon while they intently observed the frictionless gyrations of the Thaumatograph. Magic had happened somewhere, and unless it proved to be a burst of residual spell work, an echo of ancient sorcery set free and released into the ether, they would need to know more for their own safety. Magic might mean danger.

They knew about echoes. Old London contained a number of sites that still housed ancient occult energy; the Professor and his ward had begun mapping them. The streets held living memories of the powerful enchantments that had once seared their energy deep into the city’s bones. The more sensitive soul could literally feel them as a vibration underfoot.

The machine finally slowed and then ceased its twirling dance, which meant they could at last move on to discover where the enchantment had taken place. The Professor looked up, ‘Martin, my dear fellow, how are you coming along with your seeker? I swear you’ve been at it for a good hour at least. Are you not finished yet?’

Martin grunted with frustration, ‘Is there anything in your books that will provide me with more graceful thumbs? This delicate lacework is far better suited to finer fingers than mine; I simply ain’t dainty enough. I think I was born to handle a sword, or even a shovel. It’s so frustrating, you try to make me a delicate creature and I’m afraid I am little more than a blunt instrument.’

Then he grinned in triumph and sat more upright, ‘There we are! Look, see! It’s done.’

The younger man held up what looked like a complex web, a cat’s cradle of silver threads woven taut between the extended fingers and thumbs of his hands. It glittered with a violet lustre that had nothing to do with the last of the day’s sunlight, which was now filtering down in dusty pink shafts from the big skylights in the room’s ceiling.

The Professor cheered, ‘Good work, we’ll make a dainty of you yet. You have but one mighty failing, young Martin, you always set your standards just that little leap beyond your reach.’

He gripped the young man’s shoulder, ‘I admire it in you, of course; but you face a life of constant disappointment if you insist on setting your hurdles so high. Now hold the seeker still; and remember, this might tingle a little.’

He bent over his ward, holding between his right forefinger and thumb a beautifully fluted and surgically sharp needle; an ancient family relic fashioned from the purest silver and inlaid with other precious metals.

For a heartbeat, he held the needle poised a precise distance above Martin’s seeker, and then he began to intone an old, well remembered chant in a musical language that Kingswraith had mastered well enough to translate.

Through air I call you, spirit Lord,

Through sun’s light I see you, Adonai.

In the night I hear you. With the breath of stars, you sing.

My words shall bind you, Adonai, and bend you to my will.

Ostende mihi viam, Ostende mihi viam.

The Professor dropped the needle. As he did so the effulgence from the threads of the seeker flared brightly and a corona of blue light formed around Martin’s fingers. The needle fell into the aura of light, then slowed and hovered.

For a moment it hung poised, an arrow caught in mid-flight, and then it began to spin. It spun faster and faster until it was nothing more than a circular silver blur shining against the blue glow.

The Professor smiled, ‘Perfect, you did very well, Martin. Now, please, remain very still, concentrate all your energy; and then let us see what we shall see.’

He walked across the study and opened the brass-bound mahogany doors of a shallow wooden cabinet screwed flat to the wall, revealing a large, intricately detailed map of the city of London. It had been printed on the finest silk, and mounted on a thick cork board. The keenest eye might just have been able to discern the constellation of pinpricks that peppered its fabric.

The Professor stepped lightly to one side. In a voice that was gentle but firm he repeated, ‘Ostende mihi viam.’

Martin winced as a charge of static electricity burned along his fingers and surged up his arms. He could smell ozone so strongly that it put him in mind of a storm-tossed sea. His hair rustled and his scalp crawled; every inch of his body tingled as if his flesh had become home to a nest of writhing snakes.

Then the blue light between his fingers burned brighter and bloomed white as an exploding flare and the needle flashed like a dart across the room. As soon as it struck home, quivering into the map, the aura of light instantly dimmed and the study seemed suddenly much darker. Time seemed to pause for a moment, as if trying to catch its breath.

With the rite successfully completed, Martin stood up. He slid the lacework of his seeker from his fingertips, and smoothed it out before carefully folding the glittering mesh back into its silk-lined box. The professor strongly believed that there was a place for everything, and that everything should be in its place, and Martin agreed. He joined his patron by the map.

The professor muttered ‘Lux spiritus’ and a bright ball of concentrated white mist appeared at his shoulder. It was enough for him to see by. He tapped the place where the point of the needle was embedded in the map.

‘Here it is, just off Ropemaker’s Field in Limehouse. What a place, typical! Home to the stews, rotten with opium dens, and at the nethermost reach of the Pool of London where the tide washes up the last vestiges of the outcast dead.’

He sighed, ‘Martin, don’t you ever wonder? Why can’t carmini ever happen somewhere civilised? A bit of magic on Regent’s Street, Pall Mall, or around Green Park would make a pleasant change, don’t you think? But no, it’s always in the filthiest, meanest streets imaginable. And now, my dear fellow, we shall have to go see what’s been going on!’

[2]

It was the frantic barking of a panicked street dog that brought the curious young constable trotting to the scene. He discovered a starving yellow mutt worrying at what looked like a pile of abandoned clothing. The dog was yapping at the clothes and creeping close enough to sniff them, but then it instantly scampered backwards and circled as if afraid to stay too close.

The constable shouted and used his baton to drive the dog away, then stepped closer to discover what had caused it to become so agitated. It took him a while to understand what he was looking at; longer still to believe it.

The obscene thing at his feet was an impossibility, or at best some kind of prank. Then he caught the unearthly stink of it. With iron self-control he fought his strong urge to vomit everything he had eaten for the last week, then blew three long blasts on his whistle.

He was badly rattled and it was a welcome relief when the familiar figure of detective Sergeant Charlton, accompanied by two constables, clattered to his side. The young man said nothing, just pointed down towards his grisly find.

The sergeant bent to look at it, then swore, ‘God’s teeth! What the hell am I looking at here, constable?’ Charlton was talking to himself. The young uniformed policeman was no longer listening. He was too busy vomiting to hear any questions, let alone answer them.

Charlton couldn’t blame the lad. Despite all his years with the force he had never seen anything like this terrible item in its greasy mess of clothes. It was evidently a corpse, but what had happened to it?

It was a boneless jelly and its exposed flesh glistened oddly. The skin was pale, translucent grey, mottled, and loose as a sack. Its hair stood unnaturally proud, jutting outwards like a stiff brush of black needles.

Charlton held his breath and braved its fusty chemical reek to examine it more closely, then shook his head and reeled away, coughing and trying to catch his breath.

The victim no longer appeared human. The sergeant believed he had seen things a little like it before, preserved specimens floating in strong spirits in an apothecary’s jar, all but rendered to jelly. But if that’s what it was, why was it here?

He sniffed again at the body then straightened up. He was an old and experienced soul on the beat, a copper who thought he had seen just about everything, but even he was shaken to the core.

Charlton looked around the squalid, urine-stained alley and breathed heavily through his mouth. Policemen quickly learned not to breathe through their noses while in the docks. The afternoon was well advanced, and the street was already growing dark.

It was a bad time for a copper to be abroad in Limehouse. These few hours were the most dangerous, when shadows crept up out of the sewers and silently followed a man through the alleyways and warrens.

These were the dark hours before the yahoos, bingo boys and toughs got too drunk to fight. They would be out looking for beer money, and they didn’t care where they found it. This was a corner of the back slums where the Queen’s law was forgotten – and even her uniformed officers were considered fair game.

He was reminded of Inspector ‘Forlorn’ Hope’s comment one night after they had shared a few beers. He had said that he had ‘watched death waltz across the cobbles and take its partner without so much as an excuse me. Never even gave them time to check their dance cards, the shameless old tart.’ He knew that blood lay heavy on London’s soot-drenched streets, but Charlton had never seen anything like this before. He crouched closer to the victim, ‘Poor bastard. What in the name of all that’s holy have they done to you?’

The constable was still doubled over, dry heaving. One of his colleagues was holding him by the shoulders and talking quietly and reassuringly. The other stood on watch.

Charlton wondered if the ‘Ben’ ‒ all young constables were called Ben or Sam ‒ might not be better doing something else for a living. Working in an abattoir perhaps, where at least the killing was clean and the butchery honest. But he knew he was being unfair to the boy.

Despite his youth the Ben would have seen more than his fair share of corpses. In London’s warrens, death walked at one’s shoulder, or waited for you around the next corner.

Around there, the grave was never further than the toss of a coin away. Death could either creep up behind a man or come at him face-to-face, then the flip of the coin meant the blade of a knife in the ribs, or a lead-weighted billy cracking the skull.

The Metropolitan Police force did what it could – but within the seven-mile radius they patrolled ‒ not counting the square mile of the City which had its own dedicated watchmen – there was just one constable for every nine hundred people in a population of over five and a half million. They were heavily outnumbered.

Some parts of the old town were not fit for decent people to visit – Limehouse was a prime example. And now there was this corpse to deal with. ‘What the hell am I looking at here?’ Charlton repeated, this time to himself. He examined the puddled mess of the victim’s body by the light of the bullseye lamp at his waist. So small, so shrunken, so diminished. ‘How could one of God’s creatures do this to another? This is a crime against God and nature.’

He lifted his whistle to his lips and blew three long notes, and then another three. ‘Let the medical examiner work it out,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Damned if I can. Damned if I even want to try!’

...

Earlier that same day: In the midst of the milling crush of humanity and the raucous costermonger calls of Covent Garden, a tall, well-built, deeply tanned man wearing a heavy black pea jacket paused and gazed around at the dense bustle of people.

He carried a salt-stained canvas sack over his shoulder and held himself with an air of barely contained violence. To his sailor’s eyes the city was suffocating from an excess of humanity. He wanted to lash out and clear the space around him.

There were too many people. And there was too much noise. They were packed together tighter than cattle in a ship’s hold. It reminded him of everything he disliked about the markets he had left behind in India, although London lacked the thick, damp heat, the spice on the air, and the exotic beauty of the Indian people.

The pinkish grey and blotched red faces of the people around him in the Garden lacked any beauty. They looked like oversized maggots packed into human clothes and sent wandering aimlessly around. There were far too many people and there was not enough air, which, he thought, was why the place was rank with the stink of sour breath and unwashed bodies. Disgusting.

He had just spent six hard months as a crewman on a heavily laden cargo ship, bound from Calcutta to Blighty. There had been days rounding the Cape of Good Hope when he had been certain they were all going to die under those pounding seas; but at least up on deck the air had always been clean and fresh.

He hated the stale stink of crowded spaces and would rather take the risk of being swept overboard than to huddle down below with the crew.

But the ship had proved sturdy enough, and the boatswain knew his stuff, even if the captain was ‘nowt but a streak of yellow fish guts in a long coat’. Now, there was a man who would have been better thrown overboard to feed the sharks. He recalled the captain’s quacking voice with contempt. The man had put on his airs and graces, but sounded like a strangled duck.

Standing in that tainted crush of strangers in the flower market he realised how much he missed the sea air, its freshness, coolness and salt tang. And some of the crew had proved fair enough mates during the voyage. Others were not his sort. He had seen them together in the dark corners of the hold. No, that meat was not to his taste.

He preferred sweeter dishes, fresh cherry and cream. Yes, he sighed at the memory, there had been some good things about India. Especially those sweet little black-eyed girls who knew not to fight back. They took what he had to give them – particularly after he’d shown them the back of his hand a few times hard enough to rock them on their heels. And then they’d been good. Very good.

Fear added spice to the moment, and to his refined palate it was a tasty dish. Unfortunately, for him, his appetites had become insatiable. His taste for young girls had been the reason for leaving India and hightailing it to the high seas. It was his own fault. He had got too greedy, got a little bit careless; and the law had been getting much too close.

He had felt it wise to put some clear water between himself and the hempen rope of the scaffold. It would have been a shame to get his neck stretched just because he’d taken his pleasure with the sweet daughters of the brown brethren.

And anyway, why not? Why shouldn’t he? A man had the right to take his pleasures where he could, and who could blame him? Yeah, he admitted ruefully, a judge and jury might think differently.

He had decided it was time to take a little sea air for the sake of his health. Before his collar got felt and his life held forfeit. And now, six months later, he was home.

He scanned the milling crowds and saw the bland, anonymous faces that pressed around him. He swallowed a sudden flood of saliva. He knew what he was looking for, he knew what he needed, and this wasn’t it. After six long, hungry months at sea he could feel his desire building like a hard, physical pain.

He wanted a tender cherry he could pick off the tree. A sweet little darling who wouldn’t be missed until later, much later. She would be perfect. All he needed was a little time, time to take her somewhere quiet, time to entertain her, and let her entertain him.

And then, when he was done, he’d make sure to show the place a clean pair of heels. Best keep your head now. Don’t get careless. Don’t get greedy.

‘Buy some lucky heather, darlin’? Handsome man o’ the world like you, you probably think you don’t need the luck. But if it’s a lady you’re looking for, she’ll find you all the sooner with some heather pinned on your collar. Garn, darlin’! Buy a sprig of lucky heather for a threepence, and you’ll have the woman of your dreams in your arms before bedtime.’

He paused and regarded the hugely fat woman beaming up at him from her seat on a groaning stool beside a barrow-load of bright posies. She was round and squat as a cottage loaf, swathed in a rainbow of coloured shawls, with a grinning prune of a face set above a bulging cushion of concertinaed chins.

She seemed to flow down and outwards from beneath a tall, black, narrow-brimmed Welsh hat, her body a pendulous pudding in a sack. Her voice was hoarse from gin, and phlegmy from the corrosive London fogs.

‘Where I’ve just come from, I could buy a woman for threepence,’ he growled back at her. ‘Strikes me the price of your luck is for knobs, not an honest grafter like me. While you’re busy flappin’ your sauce box why not come up with a decent price? What do you charge to a working man?’

She laughed; the sound of stone grinding on gravel. She spat on her palm and rubbed her chubby hands together.

‘So then, a haggling man is it? I like a haggling man. It means you’ll be buying once we agree the price. A knob is it? A toff you say? Taking the luck for threepence? Nah! I’d ask a proper gent to cross me palm with a silver sixpence before giving him Rosie’s blessing, that I would.’

She smiled, ‘But I like yer face. It’s a face ‘as seen a few horizons close up. Right then, right you are, me bonny lad. I’ll ask you for a tuppence and we’ll shake on it and then you’ll have the luck of the heather and me blessing to warm your cockles for the day.’

She slapped her ample thigh, which set her whole body to quivering, then grabbed up a fistful of the motley fabric she was wearing. ‘Take the heather and the girl of your dreams is as good as sitting in your lap and a’ wriggling of her whoops a’ daisy, tah, rah, rah by bedtime, so she is! She’ll be the butter on yer bacon, the jam on yer strawberry, and fresh as the morning dew.’

She laughed, ‘An’ all for a lousy tuppence! You know you can’t afford not to, my lovely. Rosie brings the luck of all old London Town right down here to Covent Garden. And she wraps it up for you in a pretty little bundle of heather so’s you can pin it to your coat. Garn, you want to say yes. You know you wants to, don’t you!’

She hawked noisily and spat on her hand again, then held it out for a shake. He shrugged, plunged his muscular fist into his trouser pocket, pulled out a handful of change from which he extracted two pennies, then placed them in her palm.

The money vanished into her shawls with a magician’s swiftness. Then she held up the sprig of tied heather and, after trousering his remaining change, he took it from her, being careful not to stab himself with the pin.

With great speed and uncommon strength, she grasped at his left hand and held it firmly. She panted heavily while she studied the lines on his palm. He could feel the damp heat of her breath scorching his flesh, so hot it felt as if she had sucked his hand into her open mouth. Goosebumps crawled up to his armpit and he felt sweat trickle down his ribs.

Rosie carried an air of authority that startled him; there was obviously more to her than heather and flowers. She looked up at him and he found it difficult to decipher her expression. Buried in its layers of lard, her hard-eyed, bruised prune of a face held an odd combination of amusement, surprise, and, he was certain now, contempt.

‘So, my bonny lad, that’s how it’s been. There’s been much that you’ve done, so much that you’ve seen. Over the hills and away you went, that’s the life that you chose, the hard years that you’ve spent.’

Her eyes glittered bright as black beetles, ‘You’ve travelled the oceans and ploughed the seas, and you took what you wanted without thank-ye or please. You’ll find the girl of your dreams, and that right soon. With Rosie’s blessing, me boy, she’ll be singing your tune.’

Her eyes closed, and she folded his fingers around