Master In His Tomb Read online

  Master in his Tomb

  Ice Age in Scarlet

  Jack Holloway

  Ice Age In Scarlet Publishing

  Copyright © 2021 by Jack Holloway

  Cover by Brina Boyle

  Instagram.com/brinaboylee/

  * * *

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  This book is dedicated to my Grandmothers, both.

  Table of contents

  1. In a Tomb

  2. From Tomb to Office

  3. Some Witches (friendly)

  4. A Cell of Silver Chains

  5. Some Witches; Rescuing

  6. Retrospection

  7. Oh, Paris

  8. Victorian Johnson

  9. A Collective of Blotches

  10. Tree Wrangling and Ugaritic (Damn it.)

  11. Into the World-Woods

  12. The Woods at Night

  13. Three Across

  14. Prussia Redux

  15. Baronies

  16. Tourist Trap

  17. Words in Stone

  18. From Below, Above

  19. Mr. Thomas

  20. Mr Pole’s Lonely Vigil

  21. Vedyma

  22. Warfare

  23. Human Motivation

  24. In Memoriam

  25. Sunny Jim

  26. Shopping in the City of Lights

  27. Youth, Disrespectful

  28. Clues, Obscured.

  29. Après le dîner

  30. A Pony Is Sometimes Just A Pony

  31. Vespine

  32. Investment Grade

  33. Messages from the Dead

  34. Ariadne

  35. Union

  36. The Political Aspect

  37. An Alliance

  38. Curses, Papers and Tension

  39. To Moscow

  40. Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  In a Tomb

  A momentary loosening of the magical bindings that hold my consciousness deep in the endless night.

  I seize that moment with an effort of my not inconsiderable will and pull away from the enforced darkness, my thoughts bobbing upwards like a balloon freed from its ties, the bindings falling away in a joyous moment of clarity as the world in all it’s beauty and glory spreads out once more before me.

  Darkness, still.

  Anticlimactic, as freedom often is.

  Still, some senses appear to be present and correct. That’s progress of a sort. In particular my head is ringing like a brass bell, so pain’s all present and correct, and the ache in my gut feels like saw teeth gnawing across my vestigial diaphragm, back and forth.

  Hello hunger.

  I’m so starved that my eye teeth itch, and they haven’t done that since the day the stubborn Sailor King and his ridiculous “naval guardians” managed to trap me in an intriguingly antiquarian pentagrammatic ward.

  It was a thing of beauty, something from the Crusader days when west met east and each beat the other over the head with a mace. An impressive effort for journeyman sorcery, and after my escape I had even tried to purchase the grimoire, only to be rudely rebuffed.

  My rescuers are being extremely dilatory in their rescuing.

  I wait for a moment and then another for the refreshing spritz of water to clear the goo from my eyes and a splash of the necessary to give me a bit of get up and go, prior to being welcomed back into the deathly cold embrace of my family. Yet there is nothing.

  The wait becomes a thing of itself, chewing at the edges of my mind like the pain in my gut, continuing long enough for me to realise that neither of the courtesies of civilised awakening are coming.

  Or is it that I have been held in the darkness so long my time sense is off? I reach back through my memory, a defective tool at the best of times, but I cannot fathom how long I have been here, trapped under stone, nor how long I have waited.

  Maybe the Family has become decadent and forgotten courtesy entirely. It would not be the first time. Our kind are dilatory in their observances without encouragement. On prior occasions it has taken me many hard decades of toil to pull it back to the paths of civilisation.

  Or maybe I am in the bad graces of my younger siblings still, and they will simply ask me some question of lore forgotten, before trying to push me back into the outside using whatever advances their inventive minds will have created in the years past.

  The muscles of my cheeks, withered as they are stretch into action. I smile for the first time in centuries.

  They could try. Oh yes they could try. I will not be surprised this time, yet my curiosity is piqued at the thought. What new things await me!

  This is ridiculous. Clearly courtesy is off the menu.

  Oh well. Self help is the best help as I always say. I’ll address myself to the relevant authorities and correct their failings at a more opportune time,

  I clear my own eyes the old-fashioned way with the sleeves of my jacket. The velvet scratches, bristled and hardened with age; I’ll find another soon enough, it’s necessary. Fashions change and it is important to fit in to avoid unwanted questions.

  As my old friend Johnson might say, this is not my first time at the rodeo, though I confess to have forgotten most of the previous instances.

  My eyes now clear, that world of wonder remains dark, in the absolute sense, not in the sense that would allow me to see the patterns of reds and greys of night’s sighs. Is there something still before me, preventing the ingress of craved for light?

  I inch my head upwards. Or try to. All I get for my efforts is a nasty crack on the forehead.

  The damn lid is still in place. I push my arms out. Still incarcerated? Now there is lack of courtesy and then there is this. This is damnably rude. Damnably. Maybe there has been a change of the guard and the young and hungry are in charge. This would then be an ill-considered practical joke by a youth.

  And that could be more problematic. The young have hunger and the young pass down shadowy paths without guidance.

  I thrust my arms outwards, with all the force I can muster after my incarceration. There is a sucking resistance from my physical bindings and my stomach burns with the effort before my palms connect and the stone lid holding me in place shatters.

  Now I am covered in dust and ebony shards, but at least I can see the world once again, after however many years it has been, and taste air heavy with dust and stone clippings.

  I can finally express the words I have held inside me for so long.

  “I was right you know!”

  Darkness and silence, save the glow from the pentagram around my tomb, and my own toad’s croak of a voice. Is it too much to ask for a cup of water, at least? Why are they hiding?

  Where are they hiding? A change of tack.

  “I was wrong! Let’s discuss this like civilised beings?”

  And… I’m talking to myself as there is no one else here. Just poor Albrecht in his tomb where his Family put him after a simple misunderstanding, and the desiccated mummies embedded in recesses placed at a decrepit blood magic pentagram’s focal points.

  Competent at best. I shan’t be seeking the book from which they deduced this clunker.

  The dried corpses held up by stakes driven through their chests are the key. The connections we had in life pinning me as I was entombed in the most mundane form of magical binding I could imagine. No artistry, no inspiration, a dozen inanimate objects I has touched could have done much the same.

  I grimace. I h
ad already been nailed in place with silvered-washed iron by the time my erstwhile peers completed their clumsy little ritual, but I was still sentimental about my former followers and it hurt my soul to see them slain that way. An aspect of age in our kind is the need for human contact and an empathy for the short-lived progenitor species.

  An aspect of development. “We are not set in our ways, you know.” I am left breathless, no joke, at the thought of what we could become given enough time.

  The shadows of my friends flicker against the wall, mocking me with my ignorance. Time for enlightenment.

  I clamber out of my tomb, nails scraping stone, knees popping back into place, elbows cracking as I swing my arms to loosen the joints and stretch tendons long tightened into knots.

  I brush away the dust of ages and pull out the rusted iron nails that hold me in place. Then I stagger over to those focal points and carefully remove the stakes from the chests of my friends. Each in turn falls forward, raising clouds of dust.

  Leather bags of skin and bone, the trails of dried blood that formed my holding cell snaking out from where they died.

  Helene, Albert, Harry Moore of the ebon eye clan, Johnson the American and old reliable Stanley, Stanley of the snail terrarium and the inexplicable slime trails over my diaries in damp weather. The ache in my chest from old wounds spreads to my leathery old heart, as dead as my friends but still capable of immense pain.

  I do not wish to linger here.

  “Time to be going,” I mutter to the silence. There is a missing actor here. Something or someone must have woken me, as it most assuredly wasn’t these beloved relics of the distant past with their shrivelled eyes and hollowness. All they could have been has been bled out of them to hold an old man down.

  I think the other Masters may have wished my incarceration to be unending, but here it is possible that Mother Nature has taken a hand.

  I examine the walls and the paved floors. Some damage, cracks along the joints and in the rough cement. Not recent though and the tomb feels whole. I am not having to dig myself out of a collapsed sepulchre. Again.

  Small mercies.

  Then there are purest accidents. Tomb robbers, a lost child, an archaeologist unknowing of the impact of their activities, fleeing when they hear motion from inside an ancient tomb. I look around. Anything out of place?

  There. And there.

  A break in the pentagram. A clean cut across the writhing lines of words drawing the floor's dust across the bindings that held me in place magically as the iron nails and stone sarcophagus held me physically.

  I run a finger across it and the words writhe to escape my touch. Too clean to be an accident. Someone broke this with a kris knife or maybe a thrice-blessed blade, something in the inherent rather than the expressed. Who though?

  No fresh corpse by the cut to provide the raw power of our kind, and no tickling malice of the witch’s nature magic, a Fae would have done more than a mere cut, so they were something else and they came empowered and prepared. Or they were just unnaturally lucky.

  Magic claims its price one way or another.

  Mystery approaches solution. An intruder released me, something on two legs or four or eight. So where did they go and am I able to follow?

  The most obvious exit point is the door. The next thing to examine.

  A heavy lead and door, filigreed in silver and fitted after my entrapment. Above it a strange mechanical device. A thing out of place and unrecognisable to the sum of my knowledge. It is shaped like an elongated tube on a cantilevered structure of thin pipes and gears.

  With what looks like a spectacle lens at the front.

  I look around for any of its kin and notice from the corner of my eye that as I move the device moves with me. Back and forth like a metronome, the lens follows with a quiet whir.

  Interesting. Some kind of watcher. I leap to the left, a blur of movement, and it follows. A little slow but a fine effort. Finally some indication of intelligent life!

  “Good morning gentlemen!” I say and wave at the spying device. “A moment of your time please!”

  By some unfortunate chance I find myself standing next to Albert. He looks up from the ground where he lays with shrivelled eyes. I can see from the jaunty set of his jaw and the glitter of the gold caps of his teeth that he agrees with my approach. Start in a positive frame of mind, maybe a little revenge on my captors later? We will see.

  “Friendship and good will to all, a fresh start. No need for the shadows of the past, you’ll get them when they’re at their weakest, quiet though, they’re watching, the shadows, the watchers, you might not like them,” he mutters from the dark, watching me, the judgemental old fellow.

  “Are you certain?” I ask, in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “Yes. That’s why it moves.”

  I tap the lens. It is well grounded and resists my attempts to move it in the direction of my choosing making a whirring noise which eventually stops as the mechanism dies.

  “You broke it. They won’t like that.”

  “Hmm. Mechanical arts eh? The arts of far scrying have changed greatly since one merely drew an orb of watching on the wall, eh old friend?” Memories of the intelligencer’s arts. “And then you would have a thrall set up in a comfortable armchair in a good club somewhere near the river to use their mind’s eye to watch with appropriate encouragement and reward. I can’t say that this shiny device is a step forward. Seems... mundane.” I pull it down and the item’s structure breaks in my grip in a rain of cogs. “Flimsy too.”

  “Maybe easier on the thralls,” Albert suggests silently. “Many thought it wasteful. Mutterings in the Masters’ Sanctum.”

  “They were always muttering.”

  Who ever is watching me had not originally relied solely on their mechanical trifles. There had been the traditional type of watcher put in place by the Family, set into the walls. Inked in place and bound by blood. But the complex angles of their structure, linking sign to eyes to mouth have been scraped away.

  The tool? The same sharp knife as gouged the breaks in the pentagram. I trace my finger against the gouging, precise and inhumanly straight. Maybe another machine? Some form of mechanical Turk?

  A red light set into the wall mounting which formerly held the mechanical eye blinks on and starts flashing.

  “An alarm, Albert?”

  “Sounds about right. Not long now.’

  I sort through the cogs sliding them into a pleasing pattern to pass the time. Soon, I hear approaching footsteps, feel the vibrations through the floor. My words or actions have attracted some attention.

  “A step forward.” I settle myself on my erstwhile home in a circle of cogs, and wait.

  The drum roll of a cadenced march of military strides from outside. Thralls then. My kind can’t be persuaded to take that sort of thing seriously. Why march in lines when you can hurl yourself a hundred feet forward and smash the approaching shield wall, or impale yourself on bayonets and snap them against your body?

  A heretical thought floats across my mind in time to the boot fall. Quickly dismissed, but still there like the ache of my eye teeth.

  Wouldn’t it be ironic if it were some descendant of the Sailor King's be-hatted hunting ladies who approached? Free humans, a delight and a concern. Amongst my other heresies I warned the younger Masters of the Family to take our mortal friends more seriously. They had been learning and adapting to our manipulations and every year they came up with something new to vex our plans.

  I think the others tired of it in the end, even amongst my supporters. I think I may need the vote lists. Find out who put me here, ask some hard questions of my siblings and descendants, once I have have addressed the matter at hand.

  “Time to shine, old Albrecht. There’s a whole new world out there and progress will have done what progress does, so you’ll have a lot to learn… maybe a fresh look at the past too? For old times sake?”

  Albert falls silent as if anticipating what will happ
en next.

  “You’re a perceptive fellow, Albert. I think I may do just that.”

  The entrance to my tomb grinds open and I am free.

  But just for a moment.

  2

  From Tomb to Office

  This is a comfortable captivity.

  Almost civilised. The thralls that march carry complex mechanical weapons similar to the rifles of my day, but shorter in the barrel and with a low-slung hopper which I assume feeds each machine ammunition when it fires.

  An advance of a century or more, I shall keep a tally of the technological advancements I observe to help me estimate how much time has passed. I have found that there is a rhythm to such things, like waves piling up against a beach before the cliffs of decadence and the pull of the moon of savagery throw them back once more into barbarism.

  I have seen it more times than I care to remember, each time the tide has risen higher before it fell, and each fall has been more destructive.

  The thralls with their suspicious faces and rhythmic step escort me, not unkindly, through the cobweb haunted stone corridors leading upwards, out of my tomb and into a structure of canvas and steel poles in which are set multiple desks with glowing windows set atop.

  How to catalogue that? Good heavens! The shock of the new!

  My escorts are in uniforms, dark in hue but simple, silver buttons and chevrons of colour across the arms denoting rank. That has not changed. The others behind the desks are in a pseudo uniform of grey cotton suits and dapper little triangular hats, the peak over their eyes dipped down.