A Study in Sorcery: A Lord Darcy Novel Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1989, 2011 by Michael Kurland

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Randall Garrett,

  Founder of the Angevine Empire,

  Wearer of the Secret Talisman,

  Inventor of the Ball-Bearing Mousetrap,

  Who never let a day go by

  Without praising the Lord.

  INTRODUCTION

  My good friend and master fictioneer Randall Garrett one spring day had a wonderful idea. “Suppose,” he said, “that, in some alternate universe, King Richard Plantagenet, Richard Cœur de Leon, survived the wound he incurred at the Siege of Chaluz and returned to England to rule wisely and well for the next 20 years. And upon his death in 1219, suppose his nephew Arthur had taken the throne instead of his brother John (King John, who as we all know was not a good man, having died two years before). And suppose Arthur had done an even better job of ruling than Richard and had gone down in history as ‘Good King Arthur,’ and was often confused in the popular mind with the earlier King Arthur of the Sixth Century.

  “And further,” proposed Randall, “in this alternate universe, where the Plantagenets are still on the throne of what has grown into a mighty Empire, just suppose that magic works!”

  And upon that rock Randall, in a dozen or so short stories and one novel, Too Many Magicians, built the Angevin Empire and introduced his readers to Lord Darcy, chief investigator for His Royal Highness Duke Richard of Normandy and Lord Darcy’s associate, Master Sean O Locklainn, Chief Forensic Sorcerer for the Duchy of Normandy.

  For the reader the partnership proved—dare I say it?—magical. An editor told Randall that when a Lord Darcy story appeared in his magazine the monthly newsstand sales went up substantially. And Randall thoroughly enjoyed his creation, working out the rules and limits of Magic and discovering what, in his alternate universe, magic couldn’t do. (As Master Sean O Lochlainn occasionally pointed out to His Lordship of Arcy when asked to do something beyond his powers, “I’m a magician, Your Lordship, not a miracle worker!”) After all, if magic could do everything there’d be no mystery, there’d be no tension, there’d be no story. The magician would merely wave his wand and all would be revealed, the bad guys would be punished, and goodness and mercy would reign supreme.

  Randall had an abiding interest in things medieval; as Lord Randall of Hightower (his house was at the top of Bernal Heights in San Francisco) he had been one of the founding members of the Society of Creative Anachronism. He put all of his knowledge and his considerable talent into the Lord Darcy stories and, just for his own pleasure, filled them with invisible puns and in-jokes. He believed that a well-crafted in-joke should be seen only by its intended audience and be invisible to all other readers. If spotted but not understood, he thought, it would annoy the reader, and Randall was too fond of his readers to ever want to discommode them even for an instant.

  Randall inserted some of his real-life companions into this alternate world. Our good friend Tom Waters appeared in several stories as Sir Thomas Leseaux, master of magical symbology, and I was cast in one story as a serjeant of the guards and in another as a bottle of fine brandy. Which, considering how Randall loved fine brandy, was a compliment indeed.

  I took over writing the Lord Darcy stories in the 1980s, after Randall became sickened by a mysteriously-acquired encephalitis and was unable to work. I produced two novel-length forays into the Angevin Empire, Ten Little Wizards and A Study in Sorcery, doing my best to remain faithful to the characters and the world Randall had created and, as Randall always did, to amuse and entertain my readers.

  Randall left this universe on the last day of 1987. What alternate reality is now graced with his at times overwhelming presence I cannot tell. I like to picture Lord Randall of Hightower sitting in the back room of The Queen and Castle, nursing a pint of the landlord’s best and discussing the finer points of the Law of Similarity with Master O Lochlainn or listening to Lord Darcy explain just how the victim came to be stabbed to death in the middle of a field with no prints in the fresh snow except his own and no weapon in evidence. And, maybe just for a few hours one last time, I’d like to join him in that pub.

  Serjeant Michael Kurland

  Company B, The Duke’s Own Dragoons

  The Imperial Legion

  San Francisco, March 2011

  CHAPTER ONE

  For perhaps the thousandth time Coronel Hesparsyn cursed Lord Chiklquetl the Most High; but, as always, he did it silently. It would be horribly improper for a representative of John IV, King and Emperor, to offend an envoy of a foreign power. And it would be foolhardy for anybody to insult the Mexicatl Teohuatzin, the High Magician and Chief Under-Priest of the Azteque Empire.

  The treaty party was, once again, stopped dead in its tracks. Once again Lord Chiklquetl was out of his palanquin and kneeling on the ground, his thick hardwood staff with its massive gold frog-shaped head thrust into the ground before him, his forehead pressed to the brown earth, listening with his inner ear to the messages of Tlaltecuhtli, God of the Earth. Once again the special platform carrying the Eternal Flame for the rededication ceremony was grounded by the twelve slaves on whose shoulders it rested, and the ten special Priests of the Flame were on the ground before it, performing the intricate Ritual of Tsaltsaluetol, God of Fire, to keep the Flame happy while it waited.

  They were progressing slowly, with many stops, up the valley of the Pethmotho-kah-goh, the “Grandmother of Rivers”; the local name for the great river that drained most of the New England continent into the Gulf of Mechicoe. At this rate, Coronel Hesparsyn thought, the treaty party and its accursed Eternal Flame would not make it to New Borkum until July. And Duke Charles would blame him. The Imperial Legion was supposed to get things done, regardless of odds, irrespective of difficulties, despite hardships. Their motto was “The Legion Does” But how to get an overcautious Azteque Chief Magician to keep to schedule when they didn’t use the same clocks or the same calendar, he didn’t know. The Azteques refused to ride horses, although they would use them as pack animals, and they couldn’t use the wheel, which they regarded as sacred, and he couldn’t start them moving or hurry them or do much but attempt to guard them as they moved grandly and slowly along.

  Coronel Hesparsyn raised his hand, palm forward, and lowered it, and Company B of the Duke’s Own dismounted. Get your men off their horses as often as possible; better for man and animal. Hesparsyn stayed on his mount for the moment, to get a better view of what was happening among the Azteque priesthood gathered in the center of his little caravan. At his signal, four mounted scouts moved off in four directions to keep an eye on their surroundings.

  Lord Chiklquetl stood and raised his arms to the sun. Then he gestured behind him. The slaves lowered the other three palanquins to the ground, and three more high-ranking Azteque priest-magicians got out and gathered around their High Magician. Coronel Hesparsyn was not invited to join in their deliberations. They sniffed the ground, peered up to the sky, and did a complex little dance around the six-foot frog staff. The bloated golden frog atop the staff was clutching a large pink gem crystal between its tiny paws. While his priests danced, Lord Chiklquetl carefully placed a highly burnished copper shield on the frog’s head. Blue smoke billowed in thick steady puffs from the frog’s mouth and ears.

  The double file of junior-grade priest-magicians flanking the palanquins stood stiff as statues in their red-and blue-trimmed white mantles, waiting for orders from their chief. They each carried a carefully rolled leather battle-pouch holding the complex stuff of which battle magic i
s made.

  The files of warriors that surrounded the priestly contingent, their polished brass breastplates and shields gleaming in the afternoon sun, stayed on the alert, peering fiercely about them as they waited in place. Every warrior wore a bronze short sword, hardened by the secrets of the priest-magicians to the equal of any steel blade; two out of three had six-foot brass-tipped fighting spears, while every third warrior carried a matchlock musket with a wide belled mouth, filled with black powder and three pounds of copper shot, each peanut-sized shot cast in the shape of one of the many Azteque gods of war and imbued with a potent spell.

  For the Azteques, life appeared to be a very serious matter. In the four months Coronel Hesparsyn had been with them, he could not remember having seen an adult Azteque smile. Life for those tribes surrounding the Azteques could also be singularly devoid of humor. Although they had given up blood sacrifice a century ago, the Azteques still took slaves. And while being a slave to the Azteques, Coronel Hesparsyn reflected, was no longer like being a steer in a slaughterhouse, it was not significantly better than being an ox before the plow.

  And there were always the recurring rumors that in some distant corners of their Empire the Azteque priests still practiced the blood sacrifice to Huitsilopochtli, ripping the hearts out of young slaves—and an occasional volunteer—to assure that the sun would rise tomorrow, and the grain would grow, and the Azteques would remain Lords of Creation, as they had been for the past eight hundred years.

  Coronel Hesparsyn dismounted and led his horse to the rear of the column, signaling to his company magic officer, Leftenant MacPhearling, to join him. “What do you think?” he asked MacPhearling. “What’s going on with them?”

  The young leftenant, who held a journeyman rating in the Magician’s Guild along with his military commission, turned to watch the gesticulating group of senior Azteque priests. “They’re looking for the enemy,” he said, calmly.

  “What enemy?” Coronel Hesparsyn demanded.

  “They are determined to find one,” his magic officer said, running a finger along his carefully trimmed mustache. “I would say that most of the tribes whose territory we’re passing through are more or less the Azteque’s enemies.”

  The coronel shook his head. “That’s certainly so,” he agreed. “But they seem to be overcautious to my way of thinking. For a people with such a sanguinary history—bloody destruction of hundreds of thousands of captives over hundreds of years—they certainly have grown cautious since they gave up blood sacrifice.”

  The copper shield quivered and shook and, with a high-pitched whistling sound, left the gold frog’s head and rose slowly into the air, gathering speed as it went. It ascended in a perfectly straight line above the frog staff to a height of several hundred feet.

  “You misunderstand the Azteque, sir,” Leftenant MacPhearling told his commander as they stared up at the copper oval, which glimmered a reddish rainbow in the rays of the late afternoon sun. “They are not being cautious through fear of the enemy. Indeed, I would not say they were being cautious at all. As you must realize, slowing down or stopping a march through enemy territory is not the way to avoid being attacked.”

  “That is certainly so,” the coronel agreed. “Just what I was thinking. I’d say they are wanting to be attacked. And here we are in the middle, as usual.”

  “Yes, sir,” the leftenant said. “That’s what it seems like. It’s just an impression, you understand, sir, but to my mind they’ve been looking increasingly vexed as the days pass and no local tribe has pounced on them from the hills.”

  “Just so,” Coronel Hesparsyn said, keeping his eyes on the small, bright object far over his head. The faint but clear whistle emanating from it rose and fell slightly like the warble of some steam-operated bird. Judging from the pattern of changing colors, it was spinning in place at the rate of roughly one revolution every five or six seconds. “That thing up there—it’s some sort of scryer, is it not?” he asked his Magic Officer.

  “Well—” The leftenant paused thoughtfully, trying to decide the level of magical definition that his commander was seeking. “Yes,” he said after the moment’s reflection. “In a rough, offhand way, I’d say so. That is, it’s providing one of those priests—I should think Lord Chiklquetl himself—with an overhead view of the surroundings. The image is contained in the crystal between the frog’s paws.”

  “I wonder what he sees,” Coronel Hesparsyn said. “You have your spells out, do you get any impression of—anything?”

  “No, sir,” the magic officer said. “But you realize that, in that regard, I have an interesting problem. Most of the spells we use to protect the troop against surprise attack are set to register hostile intent. And they do that, very well.”

  “So?” the coronel said. “It’s not usual to attack someone without first generating some hostile intent—or so I should think.”

  “That’s so, sir, as you say—usually. But in this case none of the local tribes have any hostile intent against us, if I may say so. We’re on very good terms with the Tunica, the Choctaw, the Quapaw, and the Osage. But I fear they will go through us, if they have to, to get to the Azteques.”

  “Then why, would you say, haven’t we yet been attacked?”

  “I’d say they’re gathering, sir. I think we will be, and sometime soon.”

  The coronel nodded. “That’s what the scouts think,” he said. “We’ve passed through several of the hunting and camping areas where we would expect to find one tribe or another at this time of year, and yet we haven’t seen a single native encampment. It’s not natural. And to my mind, what’s not natural is artificial.”

  “Then you agree, sir?”

  “Yes, Leftenant MacPhearling, we’re going to get it. And, as you say, sometime soon. More than that, Leftenant, they’ve been forewarned. The local tribes are gathering to hit us a good one; and they knew we were coming.”

  “Forewarned?”

  “Certainly. That’s the only story to be read from the absence of a single hunting party along our route.”

  “We have seen a few hunters.”

  “And they’ve seen us. Scouts to mark our route. Leftenant, you’d better get ready whatever magic you have in that bag of yours, because I think we’re going to be needing it before too long. It’s an interesting problem we have before us.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “We are charged with the mission of protecting this treaty party, are we not? And they’re about to be attacked, I believe, by a group of tribes friendly to the Angevin Empire. Tribes who have somehow been both warned of the Azteque party’s presence on their land, and provoked into doing something about it.”

  The whistling slowly lowered in pitch, and the copper shield spiraled gently to the ground, where one of the under-priests ran out to retrieve it. Lord Chiklquetl spread his arms and chanted a high-pitched, rapid iteration of syllables that was soon picked up by the other high priests, and then the junior-grade priests, until it filled the air with the shrill, irritating noise.

  All at once the chanting stopped as if it were cut off with a switch. Lord Chiklquetl spoke a few words to one of his under-priests, who turned and relayed the message, in a clear, reverberant voice, to the Azteque assemblage. The warriors crossed their legs and sat where they had stood. One of the under-priests trotted back to where Coronel Hesparsyn was standing. “We stay here,” he said, in his guttural approximation of Anglic, “for the night.”

  The coronel shrugged. He had tried arguing this one before. Where Lord Chiklquetl wanted to stop, they stopped.

  The slaves put down their packs and began unloading the pack horses. In ten minutes the cooking fires would be going, the big pots of maize would be suspended over them, and preparations for the night’s encampment would be well underway.

  Coronel Hesparsyn called his company serjeant over. “That’s it for the day’s travel, Serjeant Tavis,” he said, “Settle the men down and start dinner. Post double pickets all ni
ght, and put it in the standing orders that I want to be informed immediately if anything happens. Anything.”

  “Yes, sir,” Serjeant Tavis said, “right away, sir.” He saluted and trotted off.

  “Tell me, Leftenant,” Coronel Hesparsyn asked his magic officer, “who has the stronger magic, or the better spells, or however you would put it; us or them?”

  “You mean the Azteques, sir?” the leftenant asked. “It can’t be answered that easily. Lord Chiklquetl is certainly more proficient than I am; I’m only a journeyman. But their magic is based upon such different premises, we’d have to go head-to-head to find out. That is, one of our Masters would. In the long run our magic is superior, as was proven in the Battle of the Three Prisoners two hundred years ago. Sommerson and Master Methuane and the King’s Hundred stopped the Azteque battle magicians cold. It was that which caused the Azteque priests to give up human sacrifice: They saw that we got better results without it. And in practical magic, results are all. But comparisons are difficult, sir.”

  “What’s the difference?” Coronel Hesparsyn asked. “I thought magic was magic.”

  “At home it is, sir,” Leftenant MacPhearling explained. “But here they started from a different place. Their primary god was Huitsilopochtli, a Sun god. And one of their primary duties was to keep him fed. Which, as he only ate human blood, caused some rather strange—bizarre even, from our point of view—customs to develop. Their whole magic, you see, is based upon blood sacrifice.”

  “I thought they didn’t do that anymore.”

  “They don’t sacrifice people any longer, at least not in public, but they do sacrifice blood. Their own blood. And blood is a very powerful symbol.”

  “Symbol, hell!” Coronel Hesparsyn said. “You mean they cut themselves up?”

  Leftenant MacPhearling nodded. “They draw blood from their own ears, cheeks, shoulders, chest, and thighs. It’s part of the ritual for most of their more important spells and sorceries.”