Maelstrom (5 page)

“At least he didn’t get away with whatever
is in the valise,” I said as I knelt to open it. “Your aim was
excellent as always.”

Iskander picked up the obsidian blade and
inspected it carefully. “It doesn’t look damaged, just bloody,” he
said with relief. “What did the fellow take from your office?”

I reached into the valise and pulled out the
Wisborg Codex. Apparently my instincts about the volume had been
right.

Iskander frowned. “What did he want with
that?”

“No idea.” I tucked the volume under my arm
and rose to my feet. “But I think it best to keep it locked safely
away until we find out.”

Griffin

The next morning, I interrogated Whyborne
over breakfast. He’d arrived home rather late, having spent several
hours reiterating his story for the police investigating the
attempted theft, and we’d gone to bed shortly after.

“The detective seemed to find it odd that
I’m always in the middle of anything that goes wrong at the
museum,” he said glumly as we settled into breakfast. “As though it
were my fault! I’m not the one who brings dangerous items into the
Ladysmith. I tried explaining that I merely work long hours and
have terrible luck, but I don’t think he believed me.”

“I take it you’re going to examine the codex
more closely today?” I poured milk over my cold cereal, then passed
the bottle to him.

“Of course. And yes, I’ll be careful,” he
added. “What bothers me is that the thief came prepared to face
me.”

“The dagger.” I frowned. “Might he have
taken it from the museum’s collection? Did it have the same
provenance as the sword?”

“Devil if I know.” Whyborne poked
unenthusiastically at his cereal with his spoon. “If I recall
correctly, Dr. Norris said there was only the sword and the diary,
but he might have been mistaken. I wouldn’t trust him to know every
item the American History Department has squirreled away in its
storerooms.”

His remark put me in mind of Mr. Tubbs’s
comments about the acquisitiveness of the Ladysmith’s staff. “That
reminds me—my case has some aspects to it which would benefit from
your expertise. Your sorcerous expertise,” I added when he
momentarily brightened.

“Oh.” He deflated. “Go ahead then.”

I told him the details of my case as we ate.
“I don’t think either Mr. Lambert or Mr. Tubbs were lying,” I
concluded. “Is it possible Mr. Lambert was under a spell of some
sort? Something to cloud his mind?”

“It is possible,” he mused, sucking on his
spoon thoughtfully. “There are spells for mind control, and the
victims are usually disoriented. Sometimes they remember fragments,
such as having the sensation of being unable to control their own
bodies.”

“How ghastly.” A shiver ran up my spine at
the thought. “As I recall, when the dweller in the deeps influenced
your mind, you believed yourself to be somewhere else.”

“True,” he agreed. “But the dweller didn’t
cause me to act in such a...coherent, I suppose, fashion as Mr.
Lambert. I thought I was in the depths of the ocean, but my body
wasn’t off having conversations and looking at maps in the
meantime.”

“No.” It wasn’t one of my fonder memories.
“You didn’t behave rationally, whereas Mr. Lambert did. Still, it
might be worth investigating.” I added more sugar to my coffee.
“Assuming Mr. Lambert wasn’t simply the victim of some sort of
strange fit or mental disorder, someone chose him in particular to
steal the map.”

“Assuming it was stolen in the first place,”
Whyborne pointed out. “Remember the evening we came home to find
Saul had dragged out your case notes and shredded them?”

I eyed our cat, currently enjoying his
breakfast as well. “I couldn’t forget. So you think a cat, in some
fit of kittenish excitement, came in through the open window and
made off with the map?”

“Well, it doesn’t sound quite so likely when
you put it that way.” Whyborne muttered. “But the window was open,
and if the electric fan was on, the map may have simply blown
away.”

“And the fact Mr. Lambert’s strange attack
took place in the same span of time?” I arched a brow at him. “That
seems a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?”

“Yes, well. You can hardly blame me for
hoping for an explanation that doesn’t involved sorcery, can
you?”

“That seems a bit hypocritical coming from a
sorcerer,” I said, but I winked to show I was joking.

Whyborne shook his head. “Jest all you like,
but you know as well as I that cases involving sorcery tend to end
with a great deal of screaming and blood. Often ours.”

“The screams or the blood?”

“Both.” He sipped his coffee. “Has the
morning paper come yet?”

“Let me check.” I rose to my feet. “Don’t
look so glum, my dear. Perhaps we’ll have some luck, and someone
was merely playing a cruel prank on Mr. Lambert. No blood or death
involved.”

“I hope you’re right.”

I retrieved the newspaper from the porch. My
heart sank as soon as I read the headline.

My face must have betrayed me as I walked
back to the kitchen, because Whyborne set aside his spoon.
“Griffin? Is something wrong?”

“I fear your hopes have been dashed,” I
said, and laid the paper on the table.

Horrible murder of a city
clerk!
blared the headline. And beneath, in
smaller type:
Mr. Dewey Lambert arrested
for bloody crime.

Griffin

An hour later, a policeman led me to Mr.
Lambert’s cell.

The jail was as dreary as I remembered it,
having been held here briefly myself on murder charges. That day
had been one of utter misery. First Whyborne had broken off our
nascent relationship thanks to my own foolishness. Then I’d been
arrested for the murder of Madam Rosa, one of my informants who had
died horribly. At the time, I’d made no true friends in Widdershins
save for Whyborne, and all of my old friends from my Pinkerton days
had abandoned me when I went to the madhouse.

I’d sat here alone and afraid, every
remembered terror from my confinement in the asylum playing itself
out over and over again in my mind. Until Whyborne’s godfather,
Addison Somerby, came to pay my bail and take me away from here.
I’d felt a moment of hope.

And then things had gotten exponentially
worse.

My heart raced with remembered fear, and I
took a deep breath to calm it. I wasn’t a prisoner. I was no longer
the stranger in town, friendless save for the cat that had shown up
starving in my back yard. I was here as a free man and would leave
the same way.

Unlike poor Mr. Lambert.

“Mr. Flaherty!” He rose to his feet as I
stopped outside his cell. His face was drawn and pale, his mustache
chewed to tatters. His drab appearance looked even more out of
place amidst the iron bars and moisture-stained brick walls. The
smell of mildew and piss filled the air, and I recalled how it had
infiltrated my clothing and hair when I’d been held here.

I glanced at the policeman. “May I have a
word with my client?”

“Sorry, sir.” And the fellow did look sorry.
“You ain’t his lawyer, so Detective Tilton says I’m not to leave
you alone with him.”

I kept my expression neutral. I ordinarily
did my best to avoid the police, for the sake of both my profession
and my private life. But it was unavoidable to come into contact
with them at times, and Detective Tilton and I had crossed paths
before. He’d made it clear he considered me as much a brute as any
Pinkerton strike breaker. As I thought him too eager to jump to
conclusions, not to mention too willing to be bribed by the old
families, the dislike was mutual.

“Of course,” I said. Turning my back to the
officer, I asked, “How are you holding up, Mr. Lambert?”

“How do you think?” He wrung his hands
unhappily. “Do you have any idea what they’ve accused me of
doing?”

“I read the account in the newspaper.”

He groaned and sank back down onto the edge
of his iron cot. “The newspapers...I’ll lose my position for
certain. The scandal...”

“Don’t lose hope.” I stepped up to the bars
and wrapped my hand around one of them. “Just tell me what
happened, from your perspective.”

“I was asleep in my rooms last evening—I
live in a boarding house with other bachelors—when my landlady woke
me. She said the police wanted to see me.” His face twisted. “I’ll
be lucky if she hasn’t already thrown all my possessions into the
street!”

“I’m certain she’ll be understanding,” I
said, more to calm him than because I thought it the truth. “Please
continue.”

Lambert swallowed convulsively. “I-I thought
the police had come about the map. That they’d found it, perhaps,
or-or something, although why they’d visit in the middle of the
night I couldn’t imagine. Instead, they arrested me. They said
I...they said I killed him.”

“Mr. Tubbs.” I tried not to think of the man
as I’d last seen him: his tentative smile, his disappointment when
I’d refused his offer to meet away from his job.

“Yes.” Lambert swayed back and forth.
“Detective Tilton showed me photographs. It was...horrible.
Unspeakable.”

If Tubbs had died half as
hard as the
Widdershins Enquirer
Journal
claimed, no wonder Lambert looked
so shaken. “What evidence did Detective Tilton present against
you?”

“He said I must have done it. That I was
angry after the accusation of theft, and it drove me into a
murderous rage.” Lambert blinked rapidly, but the tears broke loose
and slid down his face anyway. “When I protested my innocence, he
suggested I was either a liar or a madman.”

“But there was nothing else?” I prompted.
“Nothing of yours at the scene?”

“Of course not! How could there have been?
I’m an innocent man, Mr. Flaherty. You must believe me!”

The desperation on Lambert’s face would have
moved a far harder heart than mine. “I do,” I reassured him. “I
have one last question for you. Have you experienced any more
incidents like the one which first led to your encounter with Mr.
Tubbs?”

He shook his head vehemently. “No.”

“No loss of memories? Moments of
disorientation? Strange visions?”

“No.”

I hoped he was being honest, for his sake.
Certainly he seemed sincere...but at the same time, he might deny
it out of fear such an episode would be used against him.

Could the map have been a misdirection all
along? Did someone harbor a grudge against Mr. Tubbs and wish to
discredit and kill him? It was hard to believe, given what I’d seen
of the man, but I couldn’t simply dismiss the possibility.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Lambert,” I
said. “I suggest you hire a lawyer, if you haven’t already. In the
meantime, I’ll see what I can discover.”

“Thank you, Mr. Flaherty.” Lambert blinked
back tears. “And please, hurry. My life rests in your hands.”

Whyborne

As soon as I reached my office, I removed
the Wisborg Codex from the safe where I’d locked it away the night
before. The cryptic letters of the first few pages seemed to mock
me. Still, the very fact someone else was interested in the tome
suggested the writing could be deciphered, if one only had the
correct key.

Would someone from the Cabal know anything
about the book? My only contact with them had been through Revered
Scarrow in Alaska, who claimed them a loose confederacy of
sorcerers opposed to the Endicotts. Which didn’t necessarily make
their intentions good ones, but Scarrow had saved Griffin and
Iskander’s lives. I was willing to give his organization the
benefit of the doubt.

I skipped forward a few pages in my
inspection, only to be stopped by a brilliant splash of color. A
drawing of a plant filled most of a page—some sort of cycad,
perhaps, although I was no botanist. I paged through slowly and
found more illustrations, plants and animals alike, all of them
beautifully rendered and most of them rather fantastical. I paused
at the hideous illustration of a monstrous hybrid that looked like
a rat with a human face. The artist had certainly possessed a
horrible imagination.

The door to my office burst open
unceremoniously. “What the devil, Whyborne!” Christine exclaimed as
she stormed in. Miss Parkhurst hovered behind her, looking
apologetic. “Kander told me what happened last night, after I’d
left to go home. Why on earth didn’t you call on me?”

Miss Parkhurst cast me an uncertain look.
“Would you care for some coffee, doctors?”

“No, I think Dr. Putnam has already had a
bit too much,” I replied. Miss Parkhurst retreated hurriedly,
closing the door behind her. “We hardly knew someone was going to
try to steal the codex, Christine.”

Christine dropped into the chair across from
me. “Is that the codex? Why did someone want to steal it?”

“I’ve no idea.” I eyed the rattish horror so
carefully inscribed on the page. “Given the craftsmanship and age,
it has a certain value. In other circumstances I might have thought
a collector wanted to make off with it before we had a chance to
have it properly cataloged. But the witch hunter’s dagger suggests
otherwise.”

“Not if the collector belongs to one of the
old families,” she countered. “Or someone else who knows you’re a
sorcerer.”

“Then why not wait until I left for the
day?”

“I imagine they thought you had. Kander said
you’d walked away from your office for a moment,” she pointed out.
“Speaking of which, how did the fellow know it was in your office
instead of the library?”

“Yet another question I don’t have an answer
for.” I rubbed my eyes tiredly. “I assume he was watching the
library...watching me...somehow.”

“How unsettling.” She reached out and turned
the codex around to examine the picture. “Almost as unsettling as
that thing.”