A Study in Sorcery: A Lord Darcy Novel by Michael Kurland

Author:Michael Kurland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, science fiction, aztec, detective, alternate history
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2011-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Master Sean O Lochlainn set his symbol-covered carpetbag on the large, plain wooden table and spread it open by its crocodile-jaw hinges. “This will be tricky, my lord,” he said, “but, with any luck, it will do the job.”

Lord Darcy, Master Sean, and Lord John Quetzal were in the inner room of a small suite of offices in the Residence, which Duke Charles had turned over to them for the investigation. The rooms were just past the regular guardroom, to the right of the main door as one entered. Plainclothes Chief Master At Arms Vincetti controlled his minions from the outer office, and his clerk sorted the steady influx of reports into file folders. Every hour he added new folders to a growing pile. “You are to gather as much chaff as you can,” Lord Darcy had instructed the lanky Chief Master At Arms, “so that when we learn to recognize the wheat, it will be somewhere in there waiting for us to separate it.”

Master Sean lit a beeswax candle and placed it to one side of the table. Then he took a roll of fine, bleached-white vellum from his carpetbag and unrolled one sheet, placing it on the table. Using a long, thin gold wand with a cat’s-eye opal clutched by five golden fingers at its tip, he touched each of the four edges of the sheet, and then the center, while intoning some Latinate phrases. The parchment became visibly stiffer on the table, as though it had just been magically starched and ironed. He nodded his satisfaction. “Would you take all that material you gathered from the Prince’s room, Lord John, and place it at one end of this sheet, if you please?” he said. “State clearly what you are doing as you do it, if you’d be so kind. Intent is all.”

Lord John pulled the drawstring on the leather pouch he was holding. “The material in this pouch, being detritus which I collected personally from the room formerly occupied by the Azteque Prince Ixequatle, particularly the area around his wardrobe, I now place at the near end of this magically charged sheet of vellum for separation,” he said clearly, shaking the contents of the pouch gently onto the white sheet and spreading them out with the blunt end of a silver pen which he took from his shirt pocket.

“Very good, my lord,” Master Sean said. He took the beeswax candle, which now had a little cup of melted wax at the top under the wick, and pinched the wick with two moistened fingers, putting it out. With a small brush made with hairs from a fox’s tail he drew a line of melted beeswax across the parchment. “As is well known,” he said, “like attracts like, and, by proper application of the Law of Similarity, the attraction can work at a distance. Not a great distance, in this case, but sufficient for the purpose.”

With a smile, Lord Darcy listened to his Master Magician lecture as he worked.

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