Dream Thief, page 13
Departed, Augustus closed the door, then set the lock and few other things.
“Captain, you may emerge,” Augustus said simply.
The door to the closet opened and the man stepped out, looking around once before holstering that dire cannon under his jacket.
Augustus moved to the window and opened it.
“My pardons, Captain, for making you watch this next bit,” he continued, then ignored the giant by the door and began a conjuration.
Not the tracker he got along with so charmingly. Nor the hunter he’d used last night.
This was something a shade darker. More inimical, as such things counted.
Far more dangerous, but Augusts presumed that things had escalated greatly over the last twenty-four hours, and subtlety was a thing no longer necessary.
In form, a smallish winged humanoid—some eight inches tall—in a manner some innocent children might call a pixie. Assuming they’d never read deeper into the Grimm Brothers. The original German version. In power, perhaps a high Two. Dangerous, but Augustus had need at the moment.
And a willingness to push boundaries rather farther than normal.
He disliked being played for a fool, and Mlle. Guérin had gone that far, however innocently or foolishly she might play it off later.
Perrin was no casual drunk, caught in recovery and willing to work cheap. The suit was, but it was a mask. The man had power. Not much, but any put him above the vast majority of players in this game, if only because power could bring exquisite employment opportunities. Or a lifetime in acquisitions, if that was your bent.
Behind him, Digby gasped as the creature stepped into existence. It was not to be helped.
“A man was just here, just left, just about to depart the hotel,” Augustus commanded the creature. “Acquire his scent and track him without being seen. Follow him until he comes to rest, then return to me, and tell me where. Do not try to pierce the veil protecting him there, as he might be too much, and I’d rather speak with you again than have you angered at being dispersed in combat by those within. Questions?”
“Only track?” it asked in a voice that sounded like four people in perfect harmony, three of them men.
“For now,” Augustus nodded. “As I said, I intend to go after him and his mistress later and would like to be able to call upon your willing assistance then.”
“Excellent,” the demon-thing replied, smiling with a mouth full of teeth such that a shark would be jealous.
Then it scampered out the window and vanished.
Augustus turned to Digby, noting that the man had gone a bit green about the gills.
“That one seemed more…” the giant man began.
“Powerful?” Augustus nodded. “Deadly? You would be correct, Captain. I find that my abilities to summon and control such things has increased over the last year. And I might myself be a bit put out this evening, to be treated as a common criminal.”
“Of course,” Digby nodded. “You are a most exceptional criminal.”
Augustus fixed the man with a scowl, but the Captain merely grinned in response.
“And now?” Digby asked.
“Now, we shall close up shop here and immediately vacate to talk to Lady Claudette,” Augustus replied. “Hopefully, her efforts will yield a less bitter fruit.”
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
Augustus had led the Captain by certain back alleys and lesser avenues that were probably unsafe for most folks. Even locals who knew these confines. Between his own rage and Digby’s size, Augustus had no worries that some fool would seek to ambush them here.
A wiser man would send an entire army, while remaining aloof someplace he might hope would protect him from Augustus’s wrath. Like Tibet or Samarkand. Someplace that might give him enough of a head start to flee, once Augustus and Digby were on his trail.
Not that he could ever escape.
But the fools had all retired. Perhaps they had smelled the danger on the air, like small forest creatures, as none were to be seen.
They arrived at the back of Digby’s hotel and ascended via something of a servant’s entrance, where his own scowl was sufficient that a maid working late pressed her back flat against a wall to allow him to pass.
Augustus took that as a cue and paused.
“My apologies, madame,” he said in French before continuing, working to fulminate a bit less as they ascended the stairs and rapped on Lady Claudette’s door. She opened it almost immediately, dressed for the field in mannish attire.
At least she had taken his hints and found a tailor that would work with her to give the woman’s current androgyneity a greater freedom of movement with cut and stitch.
They entered. Digby closed the door. Lady Claudette moved to the bed. Augustus paced.
It was to be that sort of an evening, it seemed.
“Perrin is not what he seems,” Augustus began, framing things quickly because neither of his cohorts had the power to see the truth of what had gone on in that room. “He appears to be a mask worn by another, and claims that Marie-Rose sent him. I had thoughts as to how such a thing could be done, ruminated upon while making this most recent trek, but I would need to consult a few sages and at least one other library besides my own to confirm how it could be done, let alone undertaking it myself.”
“A mask?” Lady Claudette volleyed back at him.
“An illusion, but one that was not being actively maintained, as most esoteric practitioners such as myself would have done it,” Augustus nodded.
“Ah,” she nodded. “I wondered, since you had previous stolen a mask. But our vocabulary is somewhat constrained.”
Augustus felt the entire room shiver once as Lady Claudette’s words rang home. Then he considered the ancient saw about forests and trees.
He snapped his fingers.
“Of course,” he muttered.
“Derlyth?” Digby asked.
“A mask,” Augustus turned to the man. “A literal mask. An item such as this ring I occasionally wear, but one dedicated specifically to cloaking a figure. Not in shadows or invisibility, but in the guise of another. A fully developed character, as if from a book.”
“A sallow faced chap?” Digby asked, harking back to earlier descriptions Augustus had supplied. “Down on his luck. Poor to the intent of a threadbare jacket and worn pants? A disguise meant to cause you to overlook him as a threat?”
“Exactly so, Captain,” Augustus nodded. “Perrin doesn’t exist, I’ll wager.”
“Who was under that mask, then?” Lady Claudette drew him back around with her incisive brilliance. “Or rather, would this be your Marie-Rose, pretending to be a man of little threat and means, in order to entrap you into a confession?”
Augustus considered it. The French authorities were hopeless when it came to the esoteric arts. And other things. A decade ago, the Germans had come so close to winning, not because of their supposed, vaunted Teutonic might, but because there were days the French government couldn’t arrange an orgy in a brothel, as that one American woman had explained it to Augustus.
That left the underworld. A range of thieves, whores, vagabonds, and charlatans. Augustus’s sort of folk, most days, as at least they were honest about it.
“She might be,” Augustus mused.
“Then will your little pet demon have a problem tracking her?” Digby asked.
Lady Claudette let a single, perfect, arched eyebrow speak multitudes. She really was exceptional at that.
“I conjured a thing perhaps an order of magnitude more dangerous than is my usual wont,” Augustus informed her. “Bid it track Perrin. And it should, because he will have left a trace, even after that mask comes off. I shan’t know who until the creature returns with a report, but I think we might profitably assume that Marie-Rose awaits at the center of the web. And she is more than she seems as well.”
“Indeed, she is,” Lady Claudette spoke up.
Augustus turned to the woman, then thought wiser and moved to the chair as she rose.
“Based on your thoughts, I asked London to delve some into Mlle. Guérin,” Lady Claudette continued. “They confirm the death of her father in 1921, during pro-monarchist riots in Paris. However, they also suggested hints that the man might have been a cat burglar at one time, though he seems to have retired from the business roughly fifteen years ago, and the British government was never able find sufficient evidence to charge the man with any crime.”
“Fifteen years ago, Marie-Rose would have been seventeen,” Augustus mused. “How old would the father have been?”
“Jean-Paul Guérin was born in Paris in 1873,” she said, reciting details from a memory Augustus occasionally wondered might be eidetic in nature. “Widower with one daughter, born in 1893. After 1913, he seems to have taken a job in a factory, for all intents being a model citizen during the war.”
“And unable to have been a roving burglar?” Digby confirmed.
“Correct,” Lady Claudette nodded. “That stability led the file on him to be closed after the war, as the crimes that he might have previous been accused of seemed to continue, on both sides of the war, during the fighting itself.”
“But if he had a daughter who had followed her father into the family business…?” Digby mused.
“My same thought, Captain,” Augustus agreed. “Now, let us extend our logic a shade. Suppose that Jean-Paul was in possession of a cloak that would allow him to appear as someone else? Someone with a sallow complexion, easily overlooked and underestimated. And suppose that at age forty, roughly, he decides that he has become too widely suspected of certain crimes, so he retires, at once providing himself an alibi against future activities, while allowing said daughter to work under the cover of misdirection.”
“Is she Jean-Marie Lachance?” Digby asked. “Were they both?”
Augustus turned to Lady Claudette.
“When did Lachance’s crime spree supposedly begin, according to spies, whores, and liars?” he asked, referring, of course, to various HM’s various governments over the last thirty years.
“Whitehall suspects that he got serious in 1894,” she said. “Thus, a young man with a young daughter.”
“Who may have found or created the thing I encountered tonight that left me so confused,” Augustus nodded. “Then passed it on to a beloved daughter when he retired.”
“And Jean-Paul’s death triggers a rage?” Digby asked.
But then, Captain Digby bore his own grief with stoic calm, most of the time, having lost Gladya to a fever while he was away in the fields of France during the War, not to remarry afterwards.
“It is a working theory that holds much water,” Lady Claudette stepped in. “The Kaiser is exiled. The Czar fallen. The Austro-Hungarian Empire broken down into smaller component parts. France has rebuffed the Bourbons several times, as well as the Bonapartists, intent on retaining their republic. Britain is really the last great power dominated by a strong aristocracy, with kings and princes ebbing as folks demand greater rights. Even there, Britain has moved power to the Commons for the most part, down from the Lords.”
“But a woman possessed of rage and ability can still strike deadly blows,” Augustus noted. “And that, my friends, is what drew us to France in the first place. When I penetrated her defenses, I noted a small stepping circle. Not much more than a portal, unlinked to anything as far as I could tell without actually opening it. But if she had the skills of a dream thief, it is all Marie-Rose might need.”
“Can we draw her out of her lair?” Digby asked. “Or do we risk a confrontation there, where she might manage to escape?”
“She might manage to flee, Captain,” Augustus corrected the giant. “She will not escape. Lady Claudette, gather your coat and your camera, not that it will be of much use to see the esoteric matters at play, but evidence of other things might be necessary.”
“Are we about to confront her?” Lady Claudette pressed.
“I might have frightened her sufficient that she runs,” Augustus replied. “Such was my intent with Perrin, not connecting the dots directly to Marie-Rose Guérin in my urgency. We will head that direction immediately, and hope to catch her before she can depart, pending news from my esoteric associate.”
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Augustus was leading both Digby and Lady Claudette through the darkness of Marseilles. It felt odd, having friends he would absolutely trust in a situation like this.
Too many years in his youth, one foolish lad against the world, but he also had learned self-sufficiency at that time as well.
Neither of his companions had any training in the arts. Nor did they desire to rectify that, much to his surprise. But Digby brought with him a force of personality that made him a bulwark against which all things would recoil. And Lady Claudette had already overcome an abundance of hurdles cast into her path to carve out her own life independent of being the youngest daughter of a wealthy English duke.
There were some folks who had no idea that Claudette Faulkner was Lady Claudette. Worse, he had the intimation that she had created at least one pen name for the sake of publishing some of their more lurid adventures under the guise of fiction.
Worst, by leaving out certain bits that a casual reader might consider impossible happenstance. When Augustus still bore some of the scars.
But they were here, and he would have it no other way. Unimpeachable witnesses, if nothing else.
Marie-Rose had stayed not all that far from Lady Claudette’s hotel, at least as a crow flies. Socially in a different place, being at the bottom of middle class, as such things went, while Lady Claudette and Digby had been closer to the top.
Augustus had chosen the Imperial specifically to cater to a certain clientele on his arrival, then stayed in place while hunting.
He mentally whistled, and the tiny, terrible pixie demon with all the teeth appeared as they approached an alley that would debouch out on the streets opposite Marie-Rose’s southwest-facing room. The tiny thing glowed slightly, but Lady Claudette knew better than to try taking a picture. She had wasted enough film before finally admitting that Augustus was right on the topic.
How many priests and politicians would have seen him burned at the stake, were there photographic evidence of his doings?
“Did the man return to that place?” he asked, nodding.
“He did,” the pixie replied in that quiet, unearthly chorus of a voice.
“And did he remove the mask while in flight?” Augustus continued.
“Indeed,” the pixie nodded.
“Was there a woman underneath?” Augustus pressed.
That was the question he would have missed asking, and the pixie probably would not have volunteered the information. They were still linear creatures, when bound up thus.
“Yesssssss,” it hissed merrily.
Augustus nodded. Marie-Rose, most likely. And he would find out shortly. For better or for worse.
“Would you like to go hunting with us?” Augustus asked his little friend.
“Indeed.” The pixie’s smile was all teeth.
Lady Claudette gasped, but she’d not seen it prior. Digby had and was made of stern stuff. Even when confronted by lesser demons who might prove to be allies of convenience.
As long as you never made the mistake of trusting one unbound.
Augustus turned to his two human friends.
“I propose a direct approach,” he said. “Literally charging in and taking the woman into our own custody for now, while we sort out certain truths before escalating to the sorts of ugliness that Whitehall no doubt expects of me in this situation.”
“Can it be contained?” Digby asked.
“Hopefully, we will have surprise on our side, Captain.” he replied.
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
Augustus studied her door, as yet closed and unapproached. They had both played the game of testing the other’s defenses. Augustus felt that he had gotten the better, at least in that he had been able to confirm certain things about her that Marie-Rose only suspected of him.
Digby was close by, poised, but as yet not holding his cannon. Similarly, Lady Claudette had her camera on a loop around her shoulder and down at her side but was not taking pictures as yet.
As yet.
The pixie had alighted on a wall sconce intended to mimic an older gaslight lamp but done with incandescent electrics.
Augustus studied her door.
Previously, he had severed three bands holding things like circuits, then been able to regrow them later, such that perhaps she had not seen the welds.
Or perhaps she had, and that had caused Mssr. Perrin to appear for a conversation.
Subtlety was called for, but Augustus suspected that that time had passed.
He turned to Digby.
“The door is ensorceled,” he said bluntly. “But such protections are intended to keep a common burglar or a lesser esotericist at bay. At least until she grows alerted by them breaking.”
“What do you need here, Derlyth?” the big man asked simply.
“I had considered knocking, then rushing her when she opened it,” Augustus replied. “Now, I fear she may instead take flight instantly, having determined that one Augustus Dexter Derlyth is much more than he seems. I would have you simply batter the door open, charging into the room. I shall protect you as best I can while attempting to neutralize the woman. Lady Claudette will watch our backs and use her charm on anyone arriving later, at least until such time as I can twist their minds and memories to fit the situation as I need it remembered.”
Augustus paused and got nods from both.
The use of blunt force was usually an admission of failure in this business. It might yet be here, as he didn’t feel like he had the time to handle this with the delicacy of a proper seduction.
Not while playing with live explosives, as it were.
He turned to the pixie.
“I need the woman alive, for now,” he instructed it simply. “Anything you can do to distract her without permanent injury is fair game, as long as it does not harm myself, my friends, or the room. If she flees, I would normally have a tracker, perhaps one you know. Are you prepared to take that one’s place in a chase?”
