The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

“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.