The Serpent's Shadow (10 page)

“We know the general district, Scott; it's down near Fleet, and we've mapped out where the confusion-magic ends, so the source is likely to be somewhere within it.” Alderscroft motioned to Lord Peter, who passed over a map with a ragged ovoid drawn on it. And Scott immediately saw the difficulty.

“You'd all stand out there like horses in a hat shop, wouldn't you?” he said, now with a touch of humor. “By heaven, I believe you couldn't go five feet in that area without losing everything but the lining of your pockets!”

“Now you see our difficulty,” Alderscroft said, with a grave nod. “Can you go in there—and perhaps find the source of this—even give us some notion of who the person is, and why this mage has come to this city?”

“I can try,” Peter acknowledged. “Water's closest to Earth anyway; likely I can get close when none of the rest of you can, at least not you Air and Fire Masters. The little water sprites like to hang about Earth Magic, especially in gardens, so long as the water's clean. I might get some luck.”

“I'll send Gannet over to your warehouse and get things shipshape at your shop,” Lord Peter promised, with a winning smile, that made him look considerably less like a prime silly ass and more like the intelligent fellow he was. “You remember Gannet, don't you?”

Scott managed a smile of his own. “Your pet burglar, I believe?”

“Reformed
burglar, reborn in the Lord, baptized most faithfully in the Blood of the Lamb, I will have you know,” Lord Peter corrected. “Just remember, with him in charge,
nothing's
going to go missing, not so much as a farthing from petty cash. Or—” The smile was still there, but there was a hint of grim chill that reminded Scott just how dangerous Lord Peter really
was.
“He'll be answering about it to
me.
And trust me, he'd
much
rather have to answer to the Lord God Almighty than to me.”

Gannet showed up promptly at seven, giving Peter time enough to give him some basic directions before the crew from the warehouse started arriving. Gannet did not look like an ex-burglar; he looked like a slightly shabby and terribly earnest old watchmaker—until you looked at his hands, with the fingertips sanded to make them that little bit more sensitive to the turn of a combination lock, the click of a lock pick. Still, he seemed sound enough, and by eight, Peter was out on the street, preferring to walk rather than take a cab or the Underground to where he was going. He needed to adjust his attitude and appearance, and the only way he could do that, would be to gradually acquire his local color, like a chameleon. The deeper he went, from upper middle class to middle, to lower, then to genteel poverty, then to poverty that was nothing like genteel, the more his appearance changed. Without adding or subtracting from his wardrobe, his cap acquired a tilt that furtively shaded his eyes, his grip on his walking stick changed to that of the grip on a weapon, his shoulders slouched, his path took him nearer the wall, nearer the shadows, and his eyes got a sideways slant that marked him as a wary, and possibly dangerous, man. And difficult though it was to conceal, he lost the limp entirely.

Slowly, for he did not dare take his attention too far from the real world, he insinuated his senses into the unreal world, the one so few ever knew was all around them, even here in London, where the pavement covered the tender, nourishing earth, the water was awash in poison, the fire smoked hideously, and the air carried nearly as much poison as the water.

It was a long walk, but he was used to walking. A ship captain walked hundreds of miles on the deck of his ship; he probably walked three times the actual distance of every voyage. He walked now to keep that bad knee strong; and a shopkeeper walked nearly as much as a ship captain.

He followed his instincts into the theater district and out again.

Hmm. Interesting.
As he passed from ungenteel poverty back into genteel and adjusted his appearance accordingly, he sensed his quarry, neared it, then arrived practically on top of it.

Very interesting.
It pulsed just beside him, shields and other undefinable things, and over all a shifting, an urge to look somewhere else, that he had to fight to keep his attention concentrated. Power, certainly. But ... it had a curiously cobbled-together feeling. As if it was the sheer strength of it alone that kept its spells from falling to mismatched bits.

Curiouser and curiouser.
He bought a paper from a passing boy, leaned against an entryway fence, and pretended to read.

Definitely not ours. It
should
be, but it isn't.
The spells had a foreign flavor, an unfamiliar spice or savor—as if he'd been served up with Thai tea, cold and laden with sweetened cream, instead of the hot, lemony Ceylon he'd been expecting. It
was
the Earth Magic native to this island Logres, but it was not being
used
in the same way.

A policeman on his beat eyed him dubiously for a moment; Peter met his gaze, straight on, eye to eye, then gave him a friendly nod, waited a moment, and folded his paper, once again on his way.

There was that other thing going on, too—that “I'm not here,” the touch of “go hunt elsewhere,” the gentle but insistent push to go
away and look somewhere else
that the others had described. Definitely there, all right, but not of much use as a defense unless you were trying to scry from a distance. Once on the spot, ridiculously easy to get past. All he needed to do was find the place where the push to
not look
was the hardest, and he'd find the source.

It took some sauntering—cheerful sauntering was good in this neighborhood, though once in a while if he touched his cap to a lady he got an unmistakable invitation in return that he didn't have the time (or the wish, for that matter) to follow up on. Bobbies on the beat had a well-fed and fairly relaxed air about them, which meant that whatever went on around here, as long as it wasn't in the public street, or occasioning a scream for help, they reckoned it wasn't any of their business to interfere.

That was good for him, since they assumed he was either looking for something but wasn't going to make trouble when he found it (oddly enough, the actual truth), or he was out of work, but not so long out of work that he was out of temper as well. He circled the neighborhood like a shark following the scent of blood in the water, moving in a tighter and tighter spiral, until at long last he came to his real goal.

And when he found it, his source, the place from which the skewed and strangely sculpted magic emanated, he stared at it with a gape on his face like a country cousin at the British Museum.

Doctor M. Witherspoon,
said the discreet brass plaque beside the door.
Physician and surgeon.

He shuttered his expression quickly, and wandered a slight distance away for a moment, taking out his paper to distract the eyes of passersby again, and sending out his
own
peculiar magic callings.

And got yet another gob-smacking shock.

Yes, there were happy little water sprites within that wall of protection. And no, they were
not
coming out, thank you. It was
nice
here, and they weren't going to leave—or provide him with any information—without being forced.

Peter Scott had never forced a Water Elemental to do anything it didn't want to in his entire career as a Master, and he wasn't about to jeopardize his standing with them by doing so now. There were, after all, more mundane ways of getting at some of the information locked inside that shell of magical protection.

He suddenly developed a much more pronounced version of his limp, and staggered, leaning on his walking stick, to the white-painted doorway. He stood there just a moment, then reached out and rang the bell.

It was answered, with great alacrity, by a stony-visaged, gray-haired man arrayed in pristine white chalwars and tunic, who looked him up and down with the same disconcerting thoroughness that Lord Alderscroft had used.

Peter hastily removed his cap. “Knee went all wonky,” he said with great earnestness. “The doctor free?”

The Indian gentleman gave him a second head-to-toe examination, then nodded, though grudgingly. “You may wait,” he said, as if conferring the Victoria Cross, and motioned Peter inside.

There was only one other patient waiting on the benches lining the hall, a young woman with a distinctly worried expression wearing a very cheap imitation of a fashionable gown (taffeta instead of satin, and trimmed in ribbon already fraying), who kept twisting her handkerchief in her hand as if to wring it dry. Peter studiously ignored her, keeping his eyes on the floorboards, as the Guardian of the Door kept watch over them both. They were very clean floorboards, that much he saw. There was a faint astringent scent in the air, but no odor of sickness.

A moment later, one of the doors into the hall opened, and a woman with a baby in her arms emerged. There were signs on her face that she
had
been weeping, and her eyes were still red, but her face was wreathed in smiles. “God bless ‘ee, Miss Doctor!” she whispered; to
whom
these words were addressed, Peter was left in doubt, for between the bulk of the lady herself and the shadows of the doorway, he could only make out an imperfect form.

“Never hesitate to bring her in again, Delia,” said a low, pleasant voice. “I've got plenty of stockings and other things needing mending, and I'd be just as happy to barter your skills for mine. Just take her home, put her to bed, and come back for the mending when you've got someone to watch her. Gupta will have it for you.”

The patient—or perhaps, more correctly, the patient's mother, bowed her head in a brief nod of relief and agreement, then the shadowed figure caught sight of the first patient as “Delia” hurried out the door that Gupta (Peter presumed the man was the “Gupta” previously mentioned) held open for her with a more polite bow than he had offered to Peter.

The girl sprang up off of the bench as soon as Delia had cleared the way, and the shadow exclaimed, “Oh, Sally, not
again!”

Whereupon Sally burst into tears and fled into the inner sanctum, leaving Peter wondering just what sort of “not again” could be going on here. His imagination supplied him with plenty—and the likeliest, given the girl's tawdry, cheap taffeta dress, rouged cheeks, and kohled eyes, gave him a moment of queasiness.

However, before his first impulse to flee had managed to manifest itself, Sally reappeared, all smiles again. Whatever had been transacted within that surgery, it had not taken as long as—well, what he had feared would have taken. “Yer a bleedin' saint, ye are,” the girl said as fervently as the mother had. “I gotter get back—”

“Off with you, before that blackguard manager docks you for not being at rehearsal,” replied the doctor, making a shooing motion and coming fully into the light. “And don't forget that if I'm not here, I'm generally at the Fleet, and you can come to me there.”

This was Peter's day for shock, it seemed. It was not merely enough that the Doctor M. Witherspoon was female—nor that she attended to women no
lady
would be seen associating with—nor yet that her Door Dragon was Hindu.

No, there was no doubt whatsoever in Captain Peter Scott's mind, he who had made the voyage to and from Calcutta any number of times, that Doctor M. Witherspoon was, if not fully Indian herself, certainly of half blood.

He rose to his feet, drawn by the sheer force of her personality. Stunningly attractive, despite the severe black twill skirt and suit coat, with its plain black blouse buttoned up to the chin and what
must
be a luxuriant fall of raven hair tightly wound into a chignon atop her head without the tiniest strand awry, she would have made him stare at her anyway. Skin the color of well-creamed coffee, enormous eyes so brown they were nearly black, and the faintest hint of sandalwood perfume coming from her, she made it impossible, for a critical moment, to remember what it was he was supposed to be here about.

Which was, of course, his undoing. For he stood with his weight distributed equally on
both
legs, and had risen without a hint of a groan or the help of his stick.

She pierced him with those eyes, like an insect to be studied, and he felt a flush creeping up from his collar.

“Well,” she said at last, “you certainly aren't having any difficulty with that leg
now,
are you?”

He swallowed, with some trouble. “No,” he replied, in a very meek voice. “At least, no more than usual.”

“Then shall we come into my office and discuss why you
really
came to see me?” she asked, her voice as icy as the wind off the North Sea. “Or would you prefer to leave now—bearing in mind that my patients have a number of very large, very inhospitable friends of their own, who would
not
care to see me or my practice inconvenienced?” He ducked his head, squared his shoulders, and followed her direction—into the mysteries of her office.