The Cthulhu Encryption (25 page)

“But he and Taylor did capture
Nossa Senhora del Cabo
, did they not?”

“They boarded her, it’s true—but they did not cripple her and they certainly did not destroy her escort. They were merely the carrion crows, descending on to the bloody field when the battle was over—and what a battle it must have been! I would have played my part in it had Angria let me, but…well, I was his guest, after all. He rescued me from the island where Jack Taylor left me to die, and there was some justice in his notion that he had the right to command me…and some justice too, in his claim that I was then too precious to be risked in mere pirate enterprises, since I was operating as his go-between with the Company. At any rate, It was Angria’s fleet that found and fell upon the
Lady
’s guardians, and engaged the in the fiercest conflict the Indian Ocean had ever seen. The
Lady
escaped, after a fashion, but she would certainly have had to put into port somewhere for repairs. She was dead in the water, ripe for the plucking—but Jack and
La Buse
should never have imagined, even for a moment, that they’d be allowed to keep their booty.

“Jack was the more cunning of the two—he went to the British first, knowing, as I did, that John Company would be obliged to root Angria out eventually—but they weren’t yet ready to try, even though his naval capacity had been badly dented, and Mackra still had a powerful grudge against Jack. Instead, Jack had to go to Callaba, simply to avoid being sent home to hang—but he dared not go there until he knew that I had put to sea. Angria would not let me play my part in the battle for the
Lady
, but he knew that I was the best man to chase and make a deal with
La Buse
.

“As things turned out, I had to follow Levasseur all the way to Brittany, and then convince him of the necessity of making his peace with Angria, which wasn’t easy, once he was on home ground and thought himself safe. The mere fact that the French wanted to hang him wasn’t intimidation enough; the Bretons have never considered themselves French, and they make their own assessments of a man’s criminality. In fact, it wasn’t until
he
had seen shoggoths that the inclination to treachery finally deserted him. Eventually, he agreed to go back, albeit very reluctantly, taking all the manuscripts that Angria wanted but insisting on leaving the gold and gems hidden, for the sake of further leverage—that was in ’25.

“I went back too, as I had promised—but I went back equipped to make a new deal of my own. Jack Taylor fled to Poona before I arrived, else I’d have killed him.
La Buse
and I came back to Brittany again in ’27, and Taylor returned to Callaba. Levasseur had no alternative but to take the flaming cross and the greater part of the gold and gems to Angria, but he never made it back here, and I can’t say that I’m sorry. I suspect that Angria betrayed him to the French, but I don’t know for sure—
La Buse
wasn’t short of enemies, any more than Jack or I was. Men like us are never short of enemies, are we Monsieur Dupin? I stayed here when
La Buse
returned for the second time, and didn’t get back to Callaba until ’31. Taylor fled again to escape me. It wasn’t easy persuading Angria to let me return, let alone to bring the girl with me, but the Mahatma hadn’t made much progress with her, so he gave in. I had no choice—I needed her, if I were to make progress in my own endeavors. I broke some of the promises I made to Angria, of course—but we were all pirates then, no matter what we had been before and were ambitious to become again. I knew that the British would smash him eventually, and that I only had to play a waiting game. There’s a price to be paid for immortality, even though it’s a slippery prize at best.”

Again, Dupin refused to take the bait—but he was pensive now, as if he were trying furiously to work out what Breisz could possibly mean.

“What possible need could you have had for Taylor’s thirteen-year-old daughter?” I asked our host—although I have to admit that I was risking disobedience of Dupin’s injunction to be polite. “Were you intent on exacting your revenge on her, since her father had fled?”

Oberon Breisz met my gaze frankly, and laughed. “Do you imagine that I debauched her?” he said. “She was far too precious—and anyway, I’m not the sort of man to hold a child guilty of her father’s crime. He betrayed me; she had not…not then, at any rate. No, I had very different plans for her, far more ambitious than mere rape, and my need had little to do with her being Jack’s daughter—if she was offered as a tribute, that was in response to Angria’s demand, not mine. I’ve been a bad man in my day—as bad as Jack Taylor, some might say—but I’m not a
vile
man, no matter how history paints me. I’ve cherished that child like a true father, and made a better job of it than Taylor or Angria could ever have done.”

“But you
have
used her,” I retorted, unwilling to be fobbed off so easily. “She is in your possession now, is she not?”

“I have kept her alive,” Breisz retorted in his turn, showing a little intemperance. “Had she not run off with the ghost that Angria sent to worm his way into her dream, she’d have avoided a great deal of pain and suffering. Do you really think that she’d rather be dying in Bicêtre than here with me? Ask her, if you doubt it.”

I didn’t have to ask; she had already told me the answer. Even if she hadn’t, I would only have had to look at her. Reflexively, I did look at her. She met my eyes, and said: “I’m better now. I’ve been punished enough. I didn’t want to die.” There was a hint of a strangeness in her lovely blue eyes, though, as if she were asking silently for forgiveness, for bringing us here. I was convinced, at least, that she
wanted
to protect us, even though I wasn’t sure that she could.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” I said to Oberon Breisz, stubbornly. “Why did you want her, and how have you used her?”

“I wanted her,” he replied, looking at Dupin rather than at me, “because of what Angria had made her.”

“What was that?” Dupin asked, this time answering his cue mildly.

“A skryer.”

“And what did that involve?” I said, attempting to take back the initiative—but my question overlapped Dupin’s, which was: “And how did Angria do that?”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Dupin’s question to which Breisz elected to reply directly—although, in fairness, he did eventually clarify both.

“You have to understand,” he said, “that the British and Portuguese view of Angria as a pirate or petty warlord does him little justice. Indeed, it was precisely because he had begun his career as a common bandit that he conceived ambitions that would never have occurred to any hereditary maharajah. He became determined to master the secrets of Indian magic, and undertook that quest as a serious scholar. You have doubtless heard traveler’s tales about the magic of the fakirs, including their ability to grow fully mature plants from seeds in a mater of minutes, and their ability to climb ropes and vanish—but the most significant of all those abilities, witnessed on numerous occasions by British observers, is that of suspending animation, to the extent that they can be buried alive for months on end.

“Because they continue to live, their bodily needs are merely slowed down, not halted, so there is a limit to their endurance in that state, but the suspension also slows down the aging process drastically. Fakirs who make frequent use of the ability are able to live for as much as two hundred years—nor is the hundred and fifty years they spend entranced wasted, for it frees their consciousness to undertake explorations in the dream-dimensions. The dreams in question are admittedly slow, but they’re nevertheless enlightening. The most enlightening of all are the ones that are least frequently interrupted—which can be contrived, provided that the individual whose animation is suspended can be fed while still entranced. The magicians working in the more exotic Eastern monasteries place particular value on the hallucinatory explorations experienced by an innocent, unquestioning soul. Rumor has it that there are children concealed in such institutions who have reportedly been in such a state of suspended animation for centuries, directed in their explorations by suggestion and delivering their findings by somniloquism, but rumor always exaggerates. At any rate, that’s what Angria attempted to do with Jack Taylor’s daughter—with Jack’s full, if somewhat reluctant, co-operation.”

Dupin took a few moments to digest that. For once, however, I was quick on the uptake, immediately seeing the consequence of what had been said in the context of my own question.

“You mean,” I said, aghast, “that she really is more than a hundred years old—but that she has spent eighty years of that life
in a deep trance
?”

“It was only a year and a day, subjectively speaking,” Oberon Breisz told me, coldly. “And it was only in dreams within the dream that she did my specific bidding. She was as pliable as I could have hoped, and built her own fantasy to occupy the primary level of her decelerated consciousness: a confabulation compounded out of stories that she had been told and books she had read. You mustn’t blame me for her fantasies of living as a queen in a legendary court, surrounded by knights and magicians. That was her own doing: a concoction cooked up with a little assistance from tales Jack had told her, when he was in a fatherly mood…and perhaps more than a little from the tales
La Buse
told her while he and I were in Callaba together in the mid-twenties. He took quite a shine to her, in his own crude way, and Taylor had run for the hills. The poor child only got to see him once in more than two years. Levasseur tried to take his place, after a fashion.

“In fact, Levasseur even tried to weaken Angria’s control by taking away the medallion that Angria had given her before we set sail for Brittany in ’27, but he had misunderstood its purpose. The amulet was intended to protect her while she was in suspended animation, for that kind of encryption can render a sleeper vulnerable to leakage from R’lyaieh.
La Buse
was no ready-made scholar magician, any more than Jack Taylor was…but they didn’t have my advantages. I could have taken the amulet back from Levasseur, but there seemed to be no point—Angria could have given her another had he thought it worthwhile, and by the time I took her away from Callaba, I was sure that I could provide protection for both of us without the aid of toys of that sort. I went looking for the medallion after Levasseur was hanged, of course, but I never found it, any more than I could pick up Ysolde’s trail. I went back to Paris periodically, using different pseudonyms, discreetly putting the name about, but it wasn’t until…well, you know the rest.”

“You must have spend a good deal of time in a trance yourself,” Dupin observed, evidently having taken that inference from Breisz’ reference to periodic returns.

“Not as much as you might think,” Breisz replied. “I have other ways to preserve myself from aging—but yes, I
have
spent abundant time in crypts of more than one sort. I’ve carried out my own explorations of that dangerous kind. So should you, Monsieur Dupin, if you want to know who you really are, and to come into your full intellectual inheritance.”

“I think I have a sound grasp on my identity,” Dupin told him. “Sounder, at any rate, than the Comte de Saint-Germain.”

“You shouldn’t mock the Comte,” said Breisz. “He has a long way to go yet, but he shows promise. I’m thinking of joining his Society. Cagliostro invited me once before, but I was too preoccupied. Now…perhaps it’s time. It would then be
my
Society, of course, and the Comte my apprentice. It might be a useful resource, for its library is not uninteresting.”

“But not as good as yours?” Dupin was quick to say.

“Perhaps not,” said Breisz, with blatantly false modesty. “Is there some particular text about which you want to inquire.”

“Do you have John Dee’s copy of the
Claves Demonicae
?”

“I have Edward Kelley’s copy of the
Claves Demonicae
,” was Breisz’s corrective counter to that.

“And the copy of the
Necronomicon
that Dee inherited from Roger Bacon?”

“Yes, I have the Latin version—but not the original Sanskrit text from which the Arabic translation was made. I had to cede that to Angria. What use he has made of it since, I cannot tell.”

“Do you have…?” Dupin never revealed the third title he had in mind, however, because the old manservant came in just then to announce, with ostentatious formality, that dinner was served.

According to my watch, it was rather early—but I was ravenously hungry, and did not mind at all. Besides which, what did Paris time have to do with the encrypted time of Oberon Breisz’s lair?

“When we have eaten, Monsieur Dupin,” said our host, graciously, “I shall be very happy to reintroduce you to those two books, and many more of similar interest. There is a great deal more that might be gleaned from them, by two minds such as ours, working in collaboration again.”

Again?
I thought—but Dupin did not query the assertion, which was merely part of a teasing pattern by now.