“Lady S will see you first,” said Kennett. “Afterwards . . . I suppose the medico can sort out your leg.”
Ambrose caught the implication of that phrasing very well. Any treatment would be dependent on Lady S and how Ambrose responded to whatever she wanted him to do: which was almost certainly about him returning to active duty with D-Arc again.
“In you go,” said Kennett. He rapped on the double door, turned the knob to push it open a fraction, and released his supporting grip on Ambrose’s elbow.
Ambrose limped in, wishing he was elsewhere. Kennett did not follow him, the door shutting hard on Ambrose’s heels with a definitive click.
The room was dark, and smelled of orange zest and the sickly honey-scent of myrrh, which was normal for any chamber that had Lady S in it. Ambrose peered into the darkness, but did not move forward. It was better to stay near the exit, since he knew that only a small part of this room was actually connected to the building and to Edinburgh itself. The rest of the room was . . . somewhere else.
He heard a rustling in the dark, and swallowed nervously as the strange smell grew stronger. A candle flared, the light suddenly bright. Ambrose hooded his eyes and looked off to one side.
Lady S was there, some feet away from the candle, again as expected. He could see only her vague outline, swathed as she was in gauzy silks that moved about her in answer to some breeze that did reach the door.
“Dear Ambrose!” exclaimed the apparition, her voice that of some kindly but aged female relative welcoming a close but morally strayed junior connection. “How kind of you to call upon me in my hour of need.”
“Yes,” agreed Ambrose. “I could not, of course, resist.”
Lady S laughed a hearty laugh that belonged to a far more full-fleshed person, someone who might have triple chins to wobble as they guffawed. The laugh did not match the narrow, dimly perceived silhouette in her fluttering shrouds.
“Oh you always could make me laugh,” she said. “I don’t laugh as much as I should, you know.”
“Who does?” asked Ambrose, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.
“Now, now, Ambrose,” said Lady S. Something that might be a finger wagged in the air some distance in front of his face. “No petulance. I can’t abide petulance. Tell me—your father, he of many names and aliases, may he rest in peace—his birth name was really Farnowitz and he was born in Germany?”
“You know he was,” said Ambrose tightly. “It’s in my file and always has been. My mother was English, I was born in Bristol, and what’s more I have served my country more than—”
“Yes, yes dear,” comforted Lady S. “We’re not holding it against you. Quite the contrary. We need someone with a modicum of the art who also has German blood. Apart from the king, who naturally isn’t available to us, the combination is rather scarce among our ranks.”
“What do you need me to do, and what do I get out of it?”
“Oh, my dear young man, such impatience and, dare I say, rudeness will not serve you well. But perhaps it is the demon that is gnawing its way up your leg? I will make some allowance for that.”
“I beg your pardon, Lady S,” muttered Ambrose. Even at the best of times, it did not pay to offend Lady S, and this was far from the best of times.
“Oh, do call me Auntie Hester,” cooed the apparition in the darkness. “You know I do like all my young men to call me Auntie Hester.”
“Yes, Auntie Hester,” said Ambrose reluctantly. He could not suppress a shiver, as he knew exactly what she was: a revenant who survived only thanks to powerful magic, numerous blood sacrifices, and a budget appropriation that was never examined in Parliament. Lady Hester Stanhope had been dead for eighty years, but that had not ended her career in one of the predecessor organizations of D-Arc. She had gone from strength to strength in both bureaucratic and sorcerous terms since then. Though she was severely limited in her physical interaction with the world, she had many other advantages. Not least were her unrivalled political connexions, which ran all the way back to the early nineteenth century, when she had managed the household of her uncle William Pitt the Younger, then prime minister of Britain.
“Very good. Now, it has come to our attention that someone exceedingly naughty in Solingen . . . the Rhineland, you know . . . is trying to raise a Waldgeist, and not just any sixpence-ha’penny forest spirit, but a great old one of the primeval wood. They’ve got hold of the ritual and three days from now they’re going to summon up the old tree-beastie and set it on our occupying forces—and we can’t allow that, can we? Therefore, Ambrose my darling, you will dash over to Solingen, call up this Waldgeist first, and bind it to our service, then have it destroy the second summoner. Are you with me so far?”
“I know very little Teutonic magic,” said Ambrose. “Surely there must be someone else better—”
“You’ll have a grimoire, dear,” said Lady S. “You can read Old High German?”
“Yes, but—”
“That’s settled then!” exclaimed Lady S. “Our new doctor will cut that demon out for you, he’s a darling boy and such a fine hand with the blade. Major Kennett will accompany you to Solingen, by the way. In case you need . . . assistance.”
“What about the attack on me today?” asked Ambrose quickly. The windswept figure was retreating further into the dark, and the candle was guttering. “They were Anatolian demons! Why would the emir be sending them against me now?”
“You will be protected,” said Lady S. Her voice was distant now. “D-Arc takes care of its own.”
“I know it does!” shouted Ambrose. “That’s why I want to know who really sent those demons! Did you set this all in train—”
“Au revoir, my dear,” said a very remote voice, no more than a whisper on the wind.
The door behind him snapped open, and an inexorable force propelled Ambrose back out through the doorway. Landing on his injured leg, he fell and sprawled lengthways across the carpeted hall. Kennett looked down at him for a moment, sniffed, and helped him up.
“Doctor Lambshead is all ready for you,” he said. “Gunderbeg is standing by to eat the demon when it’s cut out, and we have all the recuperative apparatus prepared. Best we get a move on, I think.”
Ambrose looked down at his leg. The bandage of Sekhmet was now just a few strands of rag, and it was being chewed on by a mouth that had grown in his calf muscle, a black-lipped, razor-fanged mouth that was trying to turn itself upwards, towards his knee.
“Yes,” said Ambrose faintly. “If you don’t mind.”
AT NOON THE next day, his leg salved, bandaged, and entirely demon-free, Ambrose was on the boat train to Dover and thence to Calais, with Kennett keeping company. An uneventful channel crossing was complete by midnight, and after only changing trains twice, they were in Solingen the following morning.
Ambrose spent a good part of their travelling time reading the grimoire that Kennett had handed to him in Edinburgh. The book had come wrapped in a piece of winding cloth cut from the burial shroud of the Scottish sorcerer Thomas Weir, a fabric made to stifle sorcery, indicating that the D-Arc librarian believed the grimoire had the potential to act of its own volition. Accordingly, Ambrose treated it with care, using reversed gloves to turn its pages and marking his place with a ribbon torn from a child’s bonnet.
The grimoire was a typeset version of a much older text. It had been printed in the late sixteenth century, and a note with it attributed the book to the German sorcerer and botanomancer Bertin Zierer, though, as the flyleaf was missing and the original binding has been replaced several times, this was noted as being speculation rather than fact.