A Life Less Ordinary (20 page)

“Your masters,” the monk said. He bowed, slowly. “You do realise that we have little to do with your masters?”

“Our interests are one in this matter,” Master Revels countered. He bowed himself, equally slowly. “We can share information without compromising ourselves.”

“Says the unbeliever,” a new voice said. The newcomer wore purple robes and a golden mask that covered his face, hiding him from the world. His eyes seemed to focus on me before moving back to Master Revels. I shivered. There was something inhuman in that gaze, something that chilled me to the bone. “We of the Order do not wish to deal with those of magic.”

“And yet you are here, within the magical world, because you feel that you are called to the duty,” Master Revels said. He looked at me. “Officially, the Church – the Vatican – doesn’t believe in demons and magic, at least not in the literal sense. Some of the Orders know better and regard themselves as charged to fight for Christ in the magical world. It is a very dangerous place to stand. Raw faith can be turned against anyone by someone sufficiently devious to do so.”

He shrugged. “There are many secrets in the Vatican Library, Dizzy,” he added, “and very few of them have anything to do with any form of Christianity you’d recognise. The secret scrolls of Saint Jude, Patron Saint of Lost Causes; the true story behind how Christianity came to these islands; the secret records of deals made with the Great Powers, trading on God’s name to bind the Great Powers to remove themselves into the magical world; hidden arts and spells that were once used by the Popes to try to secure their position...”

“Enough,” the newcomer said. I realised that Master Revels had been trying to irritate him. It had clearly worked. “We have to uphold the edicts laid down by His Holiness in Secret Council.”

“The ghosts were Christian ghosts,” I said, suddenly. I wasn’t sure what had made me say that, but it was true. “Don’t you have a duty to find out what happened to them?”

There was a long pause. “We have a ministry to the ghosts inhabiting Edinburgh in the hopes that they can be redeemed from their suffering and pointed towards Heaven,” the first monk said. “The ghosts that have drawn your attention are not the first to have vanished.”

Master Revels gave me a sidelong look and then looked up at the masked monk. “Why are you not investigating further?”

“We examined the location of the first missing ghost,” the masked monk said. “We found traces of magic, Elfish magic. The ghost was not destroyed, or taken, by any art known to us. They were taken by the Elves.”

I felt my eyes go wide. “We are unable to follow them into the Elfish Kingdoms,” the masked monk added. “Your masters may not allow you to follow them yourselves. We believe that the Elves have been snatching many ghosts over the past few months. How long has it taken for this to come to your attention?”

Master Revels ignored the dig at him. “Did you sell any of your artefacts to the Elves?”

“No,” the masked monk said. “The Elves are no friends to humanity. Soulless tricksters; godless immortals...they have no place within our world. We are forbidden any intercourse with them.” He looked at the other monk. “You may show them the artefacts and then they must leave.”

He turned and vanished back into the inner recesses of the church. The first monk nodded after him and turned, leading us into a side chamber where there were tables strewn with various wooden artefacts. He chattered happily to us about the church’s duty to confront the more dangerous aspects of the supernatural world, even though the vast majority of the mundane world didn’t believe in magic or ghosts any longer. The Silent Order had freedom to go wherever they needed to go to confront devils and other malign entities. It was a dangerous duty.

“Don’t ever walk into a mental hospital without heavy protection,” he said, indicating a line of crosses and small containers that – I realised – were intended to capture and hold demons. “If you have the sight, you’ll see the demons at their backs, urging them onwards to commit more and more atrocities. Hag-ridden, we call them; men and women who no longer have minds of their own or any sense of right or wrong. We try to trap the demons, but demons are clever and very wary of being trapped.”

I frowned. “What do you do when you capture them?”

“We seal the container and then put them in a vat of holy water,” the monk said. He didn’t smile at the thought. “No one with impure intent can reach into the water to recover the containers, while contact with the water would be enough to destroy the demons completely.”

Master Revels shrugged. “Could you adapt a demon trap to capture a ghost?”

The monk considered it. “It would be possible, I suppose,” he agreed. “The demons provide most of the power to trap themselves, while ghosts cannot really be used as a source of power, so the trap would have to be adapted...yes, in theory it could be done. I’ve never heard of anyone actually doing it.”

“I see,” Master Revels said. “Can we borrow a couple of traps for experiments?”

“If you wish,” the monk said. He passed Master Revels a pair of jars. They looked like sealed jam jars to me, although I could sense the spells crawling around them and waiting for their victim. If they fed off demonic power and used it to keep the demon imprisoned, the only way out would be for the demon to exhaust all of its power, which would destroy it completely. Or so we believed. At least they never came back, which was the important matter. “Just be careful with them. You can’t get the wood these days.”

He lifted his hand, there was a blinding flash of light and we found ourselves standing back in the mundane world. Master Revels checked the two jars quickly and then smiled at me, leading me back towards the castle. I hoped that we were going home. I wanted to rest and inspect my wounds in the mirror.

“Elves,” he said, thoughtfully. “Why would elves want to kidnap ghosts?”

I looked up at him. “We could always ask...?”

“Don’t ask that half-elf anything to do with your work for me,” Master Revels snapped. I realised that, for some reason, it was a line he was unwilling to cross. I felt a twinge from my rear end and decided not to push it. At least I hadn’t been forbidden to see him ever again. “You have to learn to keep secrets if you live in this world.”

He tossed one of the jars in the air and caught it neatly. “Why
would
the Elves kidnap ghosts?” he repeated. “There’s no power in them, no real way of tormenting them worse than they torment themselves and very little fun in it. Even if they want to experiment, they normally prefer to experiment on living humans or animals. Why would they bother with ghosts?”

I frowned suddenly, remembering something from a fairy tale I’d read back in childhood. “Can an Elf even enter a church?”

“Only if they were invited in, just like vampires,” Master Revels said. “Back before the Elves left the human world, the only safe places from them and their malice were the churches and the handful of Places of Power in the world. Some people believe that God granted them an exception so they wouldn’t be seduced into worshipping the Elves instead, while others believe that Elves are inherently evil and couldn’t enter a church without permission from God Himself. There’s no way to know.”

“Can’t you ask them?”

Master Revels snorted. “People who ask questions of Elves on matters they consider sensitive are lucky if they
only
get killed in a terrifying manner,” he said. “The Elves will not answer questions like that, Dizzy. Don’t even think about it.”

He shook his head. “But we will have to walk into the Elfish Kingdoms to ask them about the ghosts,” he added. “The deals they struck with the Thirteen should allow us to do that.”

We walked on for nearly an hour before we finally reached home. “You go inside, wash yourself and let Fiona know what is going on,” Master Revels said. “I have to go talk to my superiors and then see if they will let us investigate further.”

I pushed open the door and blinked as I saw the letter on the floor. It was addressed to me and was – I found myself laughing as I puzzled out the name – from Cardonel. It thanked me for a lovely evening and invited me out again in three days, hopefully for less exciting diversions. At the bottom was an elaborately scrawled, and charmed, signature that I could use to get in touch with him. The magical world wasn’t a place for mobile phones.

Fiona fluttered down to greet me as I entered the main body of the house. “He asked me out again,” I said, unable to conceal my delight. After everything that had happened that night, I would have forgiven him if he had never wanted to see me again, although I doubted that anyone would have caned him for his role in the great escape. “He likes me!”

“If you go,” Fiona advised, “try not to get into trouble this time.”

I laughed as I ran upstairs to my room and lifted my dress. The marks had faded, although I could still make out the lines on my buttocks where the cane had struck. I still didn’t dare wear underpants, but at least I could get a proper wash and shower before redressing and walking downstairs for a mug of tea. I used the signature to call Cardonel and told him that I would be delighted to meet him and the gang again, if they would have me. The chat should have taken five minutes, yet somehow it ended up taking over an hour. Cardonel kept me laughing until Master Revels returned home.

“I have good news and bad news,” he announced, once he’d gotten himself a cup of tea and sat down by the fire. “The good news is that we’re going into the Elfish Kingdoms. The bad news is that we’re going into the Elfish Kingdoms.”

He shrugged. “Listen very carefully,” he added. “A single mistake there could mean certain death, or worse. It won’t be a simple caning this time.”

Chapter Eighteen

“I want you to be clear on one point,” Master Revels said, the following morning. “While we’re on the Fairy Roads and in the Elfish Kingdom, you follow the rules I told you. Do you understand me?”

I nodded, mutely. My initial excitement at visiting another world, even the one belonging to the Elves, had faded overnight. I’d read a handful of books on the Elves and I knew that, even if we followed all the Rules, the visit could still go horribly wrong. The Elves made the touchiest human culture look weak and permissive. Even sleep hadn’t come easily and I’d had to resort to a Dreamless Sleep potion, which had knocked me out for several hours. Fiona had made a number of sarcastic comments over breakfast, reminding me that using potions to sleep was dangerous. Master Revels hadn’t commented.

“Good,” he said. He stood up and picked up his hat and coat. He’d ordered me to dress in my best, the finest clothes in the wardrobe I had inherited. I felt like a cross between a princess and a whore, even though I’d lost my breath when I looked at myself in the mirror. The Elves would probably not appreciate it, but I certainly did. The golden dress, the pair of glass slippers and the jewels hanging around my neck produced a stunning effect. I would never have dared to wear such an outfit in the mundane world. It was a walking invitation to a mugger. “Follow me.”

I’d expected him to lead me out of the door and onto the streets, but instead he led me downstairs and through a series of corridors I had never explored. The strange interior dimensions of the house - Master Revels had never explained just how large it was, or who had created it in the first place – concealed hundreds of miles of rooms and storage space, some holding artefacts and books that were long forgotten. I promised myself that when I succeeded him and the house was mine, I would map it out in my head, if that were possible. It sometimes seemed to me that the dimensions altered themselves when no one was looking. I had no idea how Master Revels and Fiona navigated themselves so perfectly. One could live in the house and never come out into the rest of the world, both worlds.

We passed through a portcullis and then a secured trapdoor, dropping down further into the lower dimensions, if they
were
the lower dimensions. I had a hazy idea that the house had been built
into
the magical world, with the building in the mundane world merely the gateway to the
real
building. Master Revels had promised to teach me how to construct my own buildings one day, but that required thought and careful planning. A single mistake could prove disastrous. He’d told me, probably remembering when I’d freed the slaves, about a group of magical thieves who had extended their own buildings so that they intersected the locations of other buildings, bypassing the wards in a single moment. After that, the magical world’s denizens had grown a great deal touchier about several buildings occupying the same space and time.

Master Revels stopped in front of a large wooden door and pressed his hand against the wood. It was absolutely
crawling
with magical spells, each one designed to keep out intruders and woven together in a manner that seemed to defy analysis. I reached out with my senses and picked up wards, change spells, freeze spells, time stops, death spells and other unpleasant surprises. Unpicking them all would be impossible, at least for me. I doubted that even one of the Great Powers could have done it quickly. Master Revels concentrated, working his magic, and the security measures started to unlock. He removed his hand and stepped back, waiting for them to finish unlocking. I realised, suddenly, that if someone pressed the spells beyond a certain point, they bit anyway. They had to unlock, once the process was started, on their own.

“Dizzy,” Master Revels said, calmly. “It isn’t too late to turn back.”

I was tempted to flee back to Fiona and safety, but I shook my head. “No, thank you,” I said, through a suddenly dry mouth. “I’ll stay with you.”

Master Revels smiled. “Brave girl,” he said, and shook his head. “You might be very foolish at times, but you are certainly brave.”

I flushed. “Thank you, sir,” I said, and meant it. “I’d still have to go one day, wouldn’t I?”

“True,” Master Revels agreed. He placed a hand on my shoulder. “This door isn’t part of the building, Dizzy. It’s actually something far older. Just because it looks like a wooden door to us doesn’t mean that that is what it
is
; it takes on a form that we would understand. It is probably the single most dangerous thing in this area.”