The Gates of Sleep (33 page)

The main offices were vacant, and unlit but for a single
gaslight on the wall, but her managers knew what to leave for her. Her office,
a spacious, though spartan room enlivened only by her enormous mahogany desk,
was cleaned three times daily to rid it of the ever present clay-dust. This
occurred whether she was present in Exeter or not, so that her office was
always ready for her. Reggie caught up with her as she entered the main offices
and strode toward her private sanctum. By the light shining under the door,
someone had gone in and lit the gas for her; she reached for the polished brass
knob and pulled the door open, stepping through with Reggie close behind her.

The doctor—one she recognized from past meetings, an
old quack with an addiction to gin—stood up unsteadily as she entered. He
had not been sitting behind the desk, which was fortunate for him, since she
would have left orders never to use him again if he had been.

A whiff of liquor-laden breath came to her as she faced him”Well?”
she asked, shrewdly gauging his level of skill by the florid character of his
face and steadiness of his stance. He wasn’t that bad; intoxicated, but
not so badly as to impair his judgment.

He shook his head. “They won’t last the week,”
he told her. “And even if they do, they’ll never be more than
bodies propped in the corner of the poorhouse. One’s blinded, one’s
lost an eye, and all three are maimed past working, even if their injuries
would heal.”

He didn’t bother to point out that they probably
wouldn’t heal; the lead-dust they ate saw to that. The lead-poisoned didn’t
heal well.

She nodded briskly. “Well, then, we’ll just let
them lie in the infirmary until they die. No point in increasing their misery
by moving them. Thank you, Dr. Thane.”

She reached behind her back and held out her hand. Reggie
placed a folded piece of paper into it, and she handed the doctor the envelope
that contained his fee without looking at it. He took it without a word and
shambled off through the door and out into the darkened outer office. She
turned to Reggie, who nodded wordlessly.

“We might as well salvage what we can,” Arachne
said, with grudging resignation. “Tomorrow I’ll find replacements.
I’ll try, at any rate.”

“We’re using up the available talent, Mater,”
Reggie pointed out. “It’s going to be hard to find orphans who can
paint who are also potential magicians—”

She felt a headache coming on, and gritted her teeth. She
couldn’t afford weakness, not at this moment. “Don’t you
think I
know
that?” she snarled. “Of all the times for
this to happen—it could take days to find replacements, they probably won’t
be ideal and—” She stopped, took a deep breath, and exerted control
over herself. “And we can burn some of the magic we salvage off these
three to help us find others. We might as well; it’ll fade if we don’t
use it.”

“True enough.” Reggie led the way this time,
but not out the door. Instead, a hidden catch released the door concealed in
the paneling at the back of the office, revealing a set of stairs faced with
rock, and very, very old, leading down. “After you, Mater.”

They each took a candle from a niche just inside the door,
lit it at the gas-mantle, and went inside, closing the door behind them. The
stairs led in their turn to a small underground room, which, if anyone had been
checking, would prove by careful measuring to lie directly beneath the
infirmary.

At the bottom of the stairs was a landing, and another
door. Arachne took one of the two black robes hanging on pegs outside the door
to this room, and pulled it on over her street clothing. Only when Reggie was
similarly garbed did she open this final door onto a room so dark it seemed to
swallow up the light of their candles.

She went inside first, and by feel alone, lit the waiting
black candles, each as thick as her wrist, that stood in floor-sconces on
either side of the door. Light slowly oozed into the room.

It was a small, rectangular room, draped in black, with a
small altar at the end opposite the door; it had in fact
been a
chapel, a hidden Roman Catholic chapel that dated back to the time of the
eighth Henry, before it became what it was now.

It communicated with an escape tunnel to the
river—the doorway now walled off, behind the drapery on the
right—and its existence was the reason why Arachne had built this factory
here in the first place. It wasn’t often that one could find a hidden
chapel that was both accessible and had never been deconsecrated.

It still was a chapel—but the crucifix above the
altar was reversed, of course. This place belonged to another form of worship,
now.

Arachne went to the wall where a black-painted cupboard
waited that held the black wine and the special wafers, while Reggie readied the
altar itself. She smiled to herself, in spite of their difficulties; if it was
rare to find a chapel of the sort needed for a proper Black Mass, it was even
rarer to find someone who was willing to go through the seminary and ordination
with the express purpose of being defrocked just so he could celebrate it.

Clever Reggie had been the one to think of going to the
Continent and lying about his age, entering a Catholic seminary at the age of
fifteen, being ordained at eighteen—and being defrocked in plenty of time
to pass his entrance examinations and be accepted at Cambridge with the rest of
the young men his age. It had taken an extraordinary amount of work and effort.
But then again, Reggie had enjoyed the action that had gotten him defrocked
quite a bit. Enough that he hadn’t minded a bit when it had taken him
several tries to actually be caught in the act by the senior priest of his
little Provence parish.

He had made
quite
certain there could be no
forgiveness involved. Bad enough to be caught
inflagmnte delicto
with
a young woman of the parish. Worse, that the act took place in the sacristy,
with her drunk and insensible. But when the young woman was barely
pubescent—and feeble-minded—and especially put in his charge by her
trusting parents—and to cap it all with defiance of the priest, saying
boldly that it was no sin, since the girl wasn’t even human—well.

The old man had excommunicated him there and then, and had
gone the extraordinary step of reporting his behavior to Rome to have his
judgment reinforced with a papal decree.

Had all this happened by accident, it would have been
impossible to hush up, and would have ruined Reggie.

But he and Arachne had been planning it from the moment he
was old enough to understand just what it was that his mother was doing in her
little “private bower.” He had gone to France under an assumed
name. No one ever knew he had even left England.

As for Arachne, she had been planning to
somehow
find a true partner from the moment she found those old books at the sale of
the contents of a Plymouth townhouse.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and savored the memory of
that moment. Those books—they might have been waiting for her. It had
only been chance that led her to be in Plymouth
that
day, to go down
that
street to encounter a sale in progress. Had her parents known what she’d
brought home, hidden among the poetry books, they’d have died from
horror. Or else, they’d never have believed, magicians though they were,
that anything like the Black Mass truly had existed, far less that their
daughter, their pitied magicless daughter, was learning how to steal what she
had not been born with.

That Reggie was only too happy to fall in with her plans
had been the keystone that had allowed her to realize her plans in a way that
fulfilled all her hopes and the wildest dreams she had dared to imagine.

And this had brought them both prosperity built from the
beginning on the power drained from her poisoned and dying paintresses; power
that no Elemental Mage would ever detect, for it was so far outside the scope
of their experience.

She had gone beyond anything described in those books, in
no small part because the Satanists who had written them had been so lacking in
imagination. Yes, the
potential
power gained by sacrificing children was
great—but their souls were lost to the Opposition, which was a loss as
great as the gain. Why sacrifice infants, when the power generated by girls
just at adolescence was so much stronger? Why sacrifice those whose souls were
clean when one could engineer the corruption of potential victims, and gain not
only the power from the death, but from the fall, and the despair when, at the
last, they realized their damnation?

And why “sacrifice” them by knife or garrote or
sword, when one could still be the author of their deaths by means of the way
in which they earned their livings, and do so with no fear of the law? It was
the slow, dull blade of lead that killed these sacrifices, making them briefly
beautiful and proud (another sin!) and then stealing strength, intelligence,
will, even sanity. And no one, not the police, not her social peers who
gathered at her parties, not the government, not even the other workers,
guessed that she was slowly and deliberately murdering them. In fact, no one
thought of her as anything but a shrewd businesswoman.

Sometimes, now and again, she wondered if other, equally
successful industrialists, were pursuing the same path as she. Certainly the
potential was there. So many children, working such long hours, among so much
dangerous machinery—the potential sacrifices were enormous. Weaving
mills, steel mills, mines—all were fed on blood as much as on sweat. She
wondered now and again if she ought not to expand her own interests.

No, I think I will leave that to Reggie. This is what I
know.
She decanted the black wine into the chalice; arranged the black
wafers on their plate.

But her ways were so much more—efficient—than
the hurried slaughter of the unbaptized infants purchased from their uncaring,
gin- or opium-sodden mothers in some slum.

Not that she hadn’t done all that in the beginning.
It was all she had been able to do, until she had married Chamberten, seen his
pottery firsthand, and realized the
other uses
that could be made of
it. And now and again, at the Great Sabbats, she had gone back to the
traditional ways. But it was always better to be on the right side of the law
whenever possible; it made life so much less complicated.

“Ready?” Reggie asked. She smiled again. And
turned to face her priest and son, with the instruments of their power in her
hands, ready and waiting, for him.

ANDREW Pike arrived back at Briareley in a moderately
better mood than when he had parted from the Roeswood girl and her insufferable
fiance. He
assumed
the man was her fiance. He couldn’t imagine
any man acting so—proprietary—if he didn’t have a firm hold
over a woman.

He’d been so angry at the blighter—
Reginald.
Reginald Chamberten. What does she call him? “Reggie, dear?” He
looks like a Reggie—money, looks and arrogance enough for five
—that
he had just driven poor little Pansy at a trot most of the way on the long way
around to Briareley’s front gate. He couldn’t have turned her, of
course; there wasn’t enough room on that lane to turn a cart. But the
bright sun, the cold wind in his face, his own good sense, and the unexpectedly
positive outcome of his anxious chase after poor Ellen put him back in an
equable mood by the time he reached the last crossing and made the turn that
would take him to the gates. Pansy sensed the change in his mood and slowed to
a walk.

He stopped being angry, and allowed himself to laugh at the
foolishness of even bothering to
be
angry at the arrogant young
jackanapes. Why should one overbearing idiot with delusions of grandeur get his
temper aroused? No reason, of course. What was he to Reggie, or Reggie to him?
Nothing.

So those are the neighbors.
The girl was all
right. No, that was being ungenerous. The girl was fine. Look at how she had
stopped and managed to soothe Ellen—and she’d practically
volunteered herself and her magic to help him with her.

Earth and Water… the problem I’ve had is
that if I could get that damned poison confined in
lumps,
I could get
it out of her. And I could heal some, at least, of the damage. But I can’t
suck it out of her blood, and that’s the problem. But a Water Master can
actually purify liquid
—and
blood is a liquid.

The girl—
Marina. Must put the name to her
—had
said she wasn’t a Master. Yes, but she was the one who’d said she
could help. So she must be able to do
that,
at least, and for his
purposes it didn’t matter if she thought she was a Master, so long as she
had mastered the aspect of her Element that would let her clean out the poison.
She had the power to do whatever she needed to; that much was very clear.
Perhaps it was the will that was lacking to make her a Master; she certainly
hadn’t stood up to that arrogant blockhead who’d turned up to claim
her. With a touch on the reins, he guided the gig between the huge stone
pillars at the head of the drive, past the open wrought—iron gates. Pansy’s
head bobbed as they came up the long graveled drive. The jolting of the gig
ended as soon as the wheels touched the drive—hundreds of years of
graveling and rolling went a long way toward making a stretch of driveway as
flat and hard as a paved street in London. He looked up and caught sight of the
house through the leafless trees.

House? What a totally inadequate word for the place. It was
an amazing pile of a building, parts of it going all the way back to Henry the
Third, and it was no wonder that its former owner had let it go so cheaply. If
it hadn’t been for magic,
he
would never have been able to make
the place habitable. But it was amazing what a troupe of Brownies could and
would pull off, given the reason to.