Dream Thief, page 1
Dream Thief
AUGUSTUS DERLYTH: OCCULT DETECTIVE
BOOK TWO
BLAZE WARD
KNOTTED ROAD PRESS
Author’s Note
You will encounter occasional British spellings of things, as the main character is extremely English.
For Stone, the original Derlyth
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Read More
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
Chapter
One
Augustus looked around Farouk’s somewhat famous but largely hidden tearoom, deep in UnderLondon.
He would have liked to be able to say that he’d learned something from the arrogance of this past spring. He would, however, be lying. He was not above fabrications and misdirections, mind you, but not to himself. Never to himself.
The overestimation of his abilities that had nearly caused him and his friends to be captured and destroyed as part of a certain affair both here in London and in the north of England.
For weeks, he’d risen in the morning to shave his greying whiskers smooth and study the face thus reflected. Seen the lines that hadn’t been there in his decadent and somewhat dissolute youth. Wondered if perhaps forty-eight was too old to yet be in this business.
Should he retire to a life of quiet ostentation and research, rather than undertaking those activities that certain folks so disgracefully called tomb robbing? Perhaps write a memoir, careful to leave out all the details that might cause him to yet be prosecuted? Or burned at the stake?
Perhaps a few treatises on the sorts of esoterica that was his stock and trade?
But then, redemption had arrived. And from the most unlikely of sources.
Capital, that. And grandly epic in the timing. He’d risen one recent morning to a note from an old friend, asking for assistance to translate a tome thought to be Middle German, when it had in fact ended up being a rather obscure Slavic dialect, written by some ancient scholar who had puzzled his way through an even older argot phonetically.
It had ended up being a copy of Gelderstein’s Daemonica.
Augustus had never seen an original copy of the master tome. Only copies of copies, often fragmentary at best, and usually mistranslated at that.
The original, of course, was in safe hands under lock, key, and several rings of holy power designed to repel the sorts of silly buggers that might use it for fell purposes.
Augustus approved, though there were times he would have liked to have consulted it for answers to certain esoteric questions that occasionally arose in his own research.
And then he had access to a copy himself.
Gelderstein had proposed a classification schema for certain fell creatures, ranging upwards from the most mundane haunts up to several proposed Princes of Hell. And he’d even gotten a number of those correct.
Best of all, he’d numbered them, rather than using the Greek lettering system that everyone else had taken to, making it easy to quantify a beast without having to work at it.
The thing that had taken the sister of the Duchess Dudley had ended up being about a Six. At the time, Augustus had thought her a Four at best, and thus had fallen prey to ego, thinking himself the equal of a Five with the assistance of his two cohorts, Captain Digby and Lady Claudette.
That she had been a Six suggested that his own power had grown to a stage greater than he had anticipated. Equal to some of the truly dangerous monsters out there, merely with the tools, trinkets, and articles he carried about himself on a normal day. An Eight was within his power, with a bit of work and a week or two of solid preparation.
Not that he would summon such a thing himself. At that scale, they tended to be incredibly arrogant, but rather boring conversationalists. Intent on power in all its possible manifestations, rather than tidbits of knowledge that tended to be the cash of the lesser incarnations.
His ego had gotten him in over his head. He was willing to admit that. But against a Six, not a Four. And he’d not only survived, but sent the bitch back to the hell that she deserved.
Again, with the help of a few inestimable friends.
Thus, his bout of depression had parted like Moses at the water’s edge, leaving him sunnier than usual this last week. Bright. Chipper, even, though that might be pushing things the slightest bit.
Still…
Of course, that was probably the thing that set those gods of dark, British irony against him. At least today. Man getting perhaps a shade above himself. Knock him down a peg. Or three, depending.
He eyed the stranger across the room. Not a face he knew, but Zahid had admitted the man to Farouk’s tearoom here in UnderLondon, so the fellow was at once either a known quantity, or knew a password granted him by such. The front room was an overdone hookah bar, with such devices filled with any mixture a creature might endeavor to enjoy, from the simplest tobacco blend up to the sorts of things that left one frozen into immobility for a day.
Not for Augustus that loss of control. He had too many secrets and leaving his corporeal form unattended like that was just an invitation for some manner of shenanigans.
They were both in the back today. The tearoom side of things, as it were, where Farouk the Tea Master held Court.
Augustus was down here offering trade for value. Teaching Farouk a few new things, should he ever need to assume the identify of a tall Irishman running a pasty shop in Devon, as the joke this past spring had gone.
Farouk was none of them, being rather short, South Asian, and a Londoner at least three generations deep. But the story had stuck. As had the laughter, to the point that the Tea Master had made arrangements with a baker to deliver a regular assortment of pasties, both sweet as well a savory, to complement his teas.
Augustus blew on his mug and considered the stranger at the door as they made eye contact and locked.
Not predatory, but perhaps two predators acknowledging one another at the watering hole.
The fellow nodded and moved deeper into the room with some level of assurance, beelining, as it were, to where Augustus sat in a corner.
Farouk stirred at his bar but made no effort to intercede. Not yet, anyway.
It was his bar. His establishment. And if the Tea Master wasn’t Augustus’s peer in things esoteric—and there were pitifully few that were in England these days—then he was not a slouch either.
The stranger came to rest at slightly more than a polite distance. Grey wool suit, boringly monochrome, suggesting Government rather than High Street. Nondescript red tie, indicating no allegiance to college, fraternity, or organization. Unmemorable face, with pale English skin rarely exposed to whatever wan sun might cut through modern smog. Trimmed brown hair. Not even muttonchops or a mustache, either of which would have improved his look.
“Mister Derlyth?” he asked politely, nodding just so but hardly smiling.
Augustus eyed him somewhat warily, wondering which of his many sins, cardinal or venal, had caught up with him this time. It wasn’t like the list was all that short, after all.
“Indeed,” Augustus replied neutrally, preparing to throw the table in the man’s face, along with his steeped tea, before either drawing a blade from his pocket or perhaps hammering the gentleman in the face with some eldritch bolt.
He’d spent the last few weeks studying some of the more dangerous offensive abilities he might need to draw upon when needed. Today was as good a day as any to start.
“Mr. Clayborne sent me, sir,” the fellow noted coolly, perhaps recognizing the situation for what it was, and the unfortunate crossfire that Farouk might bring to bear if it became necessary.
Sinners rarely sought absolution, after all. Where was the fun in it?
Still, Augustus grunted and gestured to the only chair, letting the man turn his back fully to Farouk and the room. And even Zahid, out minding the closed and locked front door.
“Current file or something new?” Augustus asked vaguely.
Mr. Clayborne was, after all, one of those gentlemen who kept offices not far from Whitehall and the seat of British Government, but rarely emerged into the sunlight to be seen. Augustus, when he had needs of information or official sanction, generally ended up with Clayborne’s signature. Or at least his fingerprints.
This chap looked like a man recently promoted from messenger to clerk, but still capable of delving into UnderLondon to locate a prey hardly hiding.
Augustus wondered if that had been a mistake this morning, save that trouble would have sought him elsewhere. It being Thursday, they’d have appeared eventually on his doorstep, ha
“Something new, I’m given to understand,” the man replied evenly.
Augustus hadn’t asked for a name. They never had any, being grey men in muted suits who came and went without comment, much of the time.
And had the bona fides to gain him access here, which marked him.
Augustus grunted again as a prompt.
The fellow had the audacity to turn in place, studying the room about them. Farouk at one end. Augustus, the other. Two fellows with a Kentish feel about them in another corner, deep in conversation.
It wasn’t like Augustus wasn’t keeping his own perimeter sharp, after all.
Still, the chap seemed mollified, even if his behavior had amped up the tension in the room. Hopefully only an unfortunate side effect, though one never knew with those gnomes of Whitehall.
The man reached into his pocket and withdrew an envelope, sealed in wax with a chop Augustus recognized. Nothing useful. Merely one intended to convey official business.
Such as it might be, when none of this business was supposed to exist, nor could anything be traced back to the current PM in any meaningful way.
Augustus accepted the packet with a nod, then evinced a hint of surprise when the man immediately rose, bowed, and walked away without once looking back.
Even Farouk had a raised eyebrow, but Augustus only met his old friend’s look with a shrug.
This was not the place to read whatever missive had just been delivered. That much was obvious.
Augustus tucked it away and finished his tea with only the slightest hint of urgency.
Chapter
Two
Augustus hadn’t even bothered bringing out the chess set after dinner. Instead, he and Digby sat facing an unlit fireplace with the usual table between them possessed only of a bottle of the nicer port that Augustus had gotten as a present from…no, best not to mention that name, even in passing. Certain officials might take offense.
And a few vicars.
They sipped and Digby watched.
Gordon Digby. British Army, retired. Order of Merit (Military). Officer of the Order of the British Empire (Military Division). Military Cross. Not a man to be trifled with. Even across a chess board, though none interposed this evening.
Even sitting there, no one would mistake this veteran of the recent Great War for anything less than a terrible warrior. Six foot six inches tall and some sixteen and a half stone, even his age at thirty-eight years—a decade younger than Augustus—would only be obvious in the way the man’s brown hair was coming in a little gray on the temples these days, and in those great, woolly sideburns, that, with the fact that he now wore glasses to read. His dark suit, a lighter wool tonight, was certainly a shade more conservative than Augustus habitually wore, but Digby tended to frequent local tailors, while Augustus liked a particular Italian chap out near Camden who knew how to make cloth move with you.
Digby sighed and reached for his pipe, tucked into his pocket with that cherry-flavored tobacco the Americans had taught him to smoke during the War. He spent a few moments digging out the old ash, then packing, lighting, and puffing.
“You have turned entirely inward this evening,” Digby noted with the sort of dry sarcasm that the man excelled at.
Augustus nodded. Considered. Reconsidered. Threw up his hands, however metaphorically, and shrugged.
“Whitehall sent a note earlier,” he began, noting the way Digby’s eyes grew narrow and sharp.
And how a fire appeared in them, as well. One would not ever be far off when using the term paladin to describe a man such as he. Defender of the Faithful. Terrible warrior.
Occasionally, vengeance itself.
“An unsettling one, I gather?” Digby pressed.
As he could. They had been comrades in arms and trouble for some time now, since the Great War ended six years back and other men came home broken and occasionally twisted.
Not this one, though.
Digby had come an unfortunate widower, his beloved Gladya having died of a fever while he’d been away on the front lines in France. Augustus still held out hope that his friend might find love again, even as he himself was certain that such a thing had passed himself by.
Too many of the interesting women Augustus had come across in three decades at his craft had unfortunately ended up on opposites sides of various battlefields. Or undone by the very creatures they had sought to harness in their personal quests for power.
As an old mentor had noted many times in the previous century: always err short of the cliff’s edge.
Too many had not.
But Digby had asked a question. A cogent one, at that.
“Unsettling,” Augustus agreed. “Hints and rumors of certain crimes. A request for a quiet consultation, wherein my own rather exotic background might prove to be something more useful than their usual experts on the topic. Something at once utterly mundane and rather dangerous. Especially if they have been forced to resort to asking my assistance.”
“Anything you can share?” Digby asked quietly.
“There is a certain type of criminal, Digby,” Augustus replied. “In the common vernacular, they are generally called a Dream Thief.”
“I have heard you mention such things, from time to time.” The big man nodded and puffed, sending smoke signals into the room and filling it with a sweetness that added something less sinister to the cloak of shadows that felt as though it had been draped upon Derlyth’s shoulders. “What do they do, again?”
“When you build a circle, such as that one we found in the Dudley palace, you can link it to a second,” Augustus nodded. “Thus, with far less power than normally required, open a permanent portal between the two and step at once across the intervening distance. Power is relative to length, thus anything less than fifty miles usually hardly worth the effort, while one thousand requires vast expenditures of puissance to create as well as maintain.”
“Stepping to the North or Berlin, then?” Digby noted.
“Indeed,” Augustus agreed. “The Dudley one was normal for such things. However, their entire existence creates certain risks, as anyone with the right mindset, training, and a little power could thus open one end and cross. Thus, they tend to be secured, at least physically.”
“I have heard you mention risks,” Digby said.
“Yes,” Augustus stated. “You want both ends safe, but you must exercise care, because having an opening inside your esoteric bounds, within your fortress or sanctum as it were, allows someone to bypass much of you defenses at little cost. Modern portals thus tend to be assigned to palace gardens. Within physical walls, but outside the building itself, wherein you could invest a greater portion of your effort.”
“Because of Dream Thieves?” Digby queried.
“Because of them, yes,” he agreed. “A competent one is capable of accessing such tunnels from the middle, as it were opening a forgotten window into said tunnel, and thus being able to emerge at either end, without risking whatever guardians might await.”
“And someone has broken in someplace now?” Digby pressed.
“Worse,” Augustus declared. “Someone is currently taunting His Majesty’s Government that they can, and will. French chap. Bit of an anarchist at heart. Certainly embodies those elements of the original French Revolution summed up by Diderot.”
“Diderot?” Digby leaned back, confusion on his face.
“Mankind will not be free, until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest,” Augustus translated automatically from the original, in a book not far past Digby’s left shoulder at the moment. “Can’t say I agree with that sentiment entirely, but I do understand what horrible folks the Bourbons were then and often remain today. We’ve had our own issues, to wit Cavaliers and Roundheads, but this strikes at the heart of things, because the government is in something of a tizzy, and asked me to assist.”
