The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Everything else looked normal. There was no risen disc of trees, and though he could feel the Waldgeist, it was very faint. It slept again, and was sleeping very deep. Whether he had convinced it or not to remain quiescent, it would take far more than the blood of two thumbs and the ritual he had used to wake it now.

Ambrose frowned, but it was a merry frown. He didn’t really understand what had happened, but he knew his object had been achieved. He also felt surprisingly good, almost as happy in himself as he had been in the far-off, golden days before the War.

He clapped his hand against the king-oak in friendly farewell, and set off along the path. Several paces along, he was surprised to find himself whistling. He frowned again, and stopped, standing still on the path. He couldn’t remember when he had last felt like whistling.

There was a rustle up ahead. Ambrose’s attention immediately returned to the present. He snuck off the path and crouched down behind a lesser but still substantial oak, regretting the loss of his revolver. Someone was coming very cautiously up the path, and it could be a German anarchist as easily as Kennett, and even if it was Kennett, Ambrose couldn’t be sure of his intentions, and he was no longer so ready to just let Kennett kill him. There would be time enough to join his friends.

“Ambrose?”

It was Kennett. Ambrose peered around the trunk. Kennett was coming along the path, and he wasn’t brandishing a weapon. But very strangely, he was no longer wearing the same suit with the grey homburg. He was in tweeds, with a deerstalker cap, and there was something about his face . . . a partially healed scar under his eye that hadn’t been there . . .

“Ah,” said Ambrose. He stepped out from behind the tree and raised his hand. “Hello, Kennett. How long have I been away?”

Kennett smiled, a smile that, as always, contained no warmth whatsoever, and was more an indication of sardonic superiority than any sense of humour.

“A year and a day,” he said. “Just as the grimoire said.”

“Not the copy you gave me,” said Ambrose.

“Naturally,” replied Kennett. “You might have refused to go. But from the whistling, the general spring of the step, and so forth, I presume the cure has been efficacious?”

“I do feel . . . whole,” admitted Ambrose. He paused for a moment, eyes downcast, thinking of his own reactions. “And I believe . . . I am no longer afraid to be underground.”

“That’s good,” said Kennett. “Because we have a job to do, and I’m afraid a great deal of it is deep under the earth. High, but deep. I’m not fond of the Himalayas myself, but what can you do?”

“Was there actually a German adept who wanted to raise the spirit?” asked Ambrose, as they began to walk together back along the path.

“Oh yes,” said Kennett. “It’s doubtful if he would have succeeded, and the timing was not quite what we said, but Lady S thought we might as well try to get two birds with one stone. The new doctor brought it to her attention that this old spirit had a twofold nature, that as well as trampling the undeserving and so on, it also traditionally sometimes healed the sick and those of ‘broken mind.’ ”

“Broken mind,” repeated Ambrose. “Yes. I suppose that I wasn’t really getting any better where I was. But those demons—”

“They were the emir’s,” interrupted Kennett. “Forced our hand. Couldn’t be helped.”

“I see,” said Ambrose, with a swift sideways glance at Kennett’s face. He still couldn’t tell if the man was lying.

They walked the rest of the way out of the wood in silence. At the road, there was a green Crossley 20/25 waiting, with Jones and Jones leaning on opposite sides of the bonnet, each carefully watching the surrounding countryside. They nodded to Ambrose as he walked up, and he thought that Jones the Larger might even have given him the merest shadow of a wink.

Ambrose’s yataghan was on the floor behind the front seat, and there was a large cardboard box tied with a red ribbon sitting in the middle of the backseat. Kennett indicated the box with an inclination of his head.

“For you,” he said. “Present from Lady S.”

Ambrose undid the ribbon and opened the box. There was a velvet medal case inside, which he did not open; a silver hip flask engraved with his name beneath a testimonial of thanks from an obscure manufacturer of scientific instruments in Nottingham; and a card with a picture of a mountaineer waving the Union Jack atop a snow-covered mountain.

Ambrose flipped open the card.

“Welcome back,” he read aloud. “With love from Auntie Hester.”

Ivica Stevanovic’s “Relic with Fish,” part of his series “The Silence of Many Pattering Feet: Saints and the Bits They Leave Behind.”

Relic

By Jeffrey Ford