Witchfinder, Free Novel — Chapter 8 and some “director’s commentary.”

UPDATE:  A SLIGHTLY EDITED AND PRETTIED UP COMPILATION OF ALL CHAPTERS UP TO A WEEK OLD IS HERE

*I’m posting this novel here, free, one chapter at a time.  This is being posted as I write it, so it’s in pre-earc (for those from Baen) or in close-to (but not quite) -first draft state. Once it’s finished it will undergo editing and then it will be published in some form. I’m going to put this up with its own category so you can find it.  For those interested in throwing something in the storytellers bowl, there is a donate button on the right hand side of the site.  Anyone contributing $6 or more will get an electronic (non DRM) version of the novel upon completion.  Of course, donating is not mandatory.  I hope you enjoy the chapters.  For Director’s Commentary of sorts, look at the bottom of the chapter. *

For first chapter, look here

For seventh chapter, look here.

A Step In The Dark

Nell concentrated on the coordinates to her room and stepped through.  There was the moment of bitter cold of the betweener, the sense of winds howling around her, even though in fact wind could not exist in this dimension that was wholly devoid of air or any other element needed for life.

And then she was stepping into the familiar confines of her room, almost ontop of chalk drawings and a bowl shattered on the floor.

She surveyed the chalk drawings, with dismay, noting that the water had splattered out to mark the floor indelibly with the chalk dust. This was going to be very hard to clean, and before she was done she might very well need to scrub the entire floor and wax it, lest the landlady get upset.  Which she would.  Particularly since Nell had also broken one of the bowls.

It had taken Nell quite a while to truly believe that common belongings were considered precious, or that they were as expensive as they were.  A simple glazed bowl, a platter, anything like that would have been thrown out on Earth the minute it became cracked.  Here, even when broken, the shards would be collected in the hopes that the plate mender might fix it when next he did the rounds of the neighborhood.

She picked up the shards of the bowl carefully and stored it in the cupboard in the corner, hoping to mitigate her landlady’s annoyance by telling her she’d saved the shards to be mended.

Nell couldn’t understand it, and couldn’t work it out logically.  On Earth she’d had plenty of friends who read fantasy and it had been assumed in almost any novel that a society with magic was by necessity prosperous and clean and all the other things real, pre-industrial societies hadn’t been.

But this one wasn’t.  Though Nell wasn’t sure if it was in the past in relation to the world in which she’d grown up and which she still considered the real Earth, this Earth seemed to be stuck somewhere around the regency.  Time was hard to pin down exactly, because this England didn’t seem to have any of the same monarchs.  Or rather, it had the same monarchs up to a point, that point being around the time of Arthur, who in this world was a real documented king, with his prime minister and court magician, Merlin.  In fact, Seraphim, Duke of Darkwater, was supposed to be descended from Merlin and Morgan le Fey.

The thought had brought her right back to the subject her mind had been hoping to avoid.

Having come to it, she realized she couldn’t avoid her obligations another moment.  Taking a pocket watch from her desk, she looked at the time.  Yes.  She had to see Sydell.  For one, he would be expecting a report.  Which would mean that he would be in the park down the street, standing by the lake and scaring the mothers and nannies and the children they supervised by glaring at all of them, taking out on them the fact that Nell was now three minutes late.

Sydell counted punctuality a virtue, one of the many things upon which he and Antoine seemed to disagree violently.  Antoine had told Nell, very early in their acquaintance, that the only appointments worth keeping were those to which both heart and mind concurred and that if an assigned meeting didn’t inflame your heart with wild excitement it wasn’t worth keeping.

The appointment with Sydell, so far from inflaming her heart with wild anything, gave her a strong feeling of having been encased in ice and wishing to run away.  But if she had to hazard a guess, she would imagine that Antoine would actually wish her to keep this one.  Else…

Else, she wasn’t sure exactly what, but she was sure it wouldn’t be pleasant.  Antoine had been arrested the night they’d first set foot in Avalonis.  She’d never been told why or what he had done to deserve that fate, but she thought it was no criminal matter so much as something between Antoine and Sydell – some old vengeance or some unfinished game – because Sydell hadn’t told her that Antoine would be going to trial, or that he would have to serve some sentence for some determined set of time.  Instead, he’d told her that he, Sydell, was holding Antoine D’Argent at the pleasure of the king.  Which pretty much meant, if Nell understood properly, what used to be called in France, in her world, before the revolution, a lettre-de-cachet, that is something that said to apprehend an individual, keep him indefinitely and tell no one where he was.

At the time she hadn’t realized this, and she’d been too numb, too confused, wondering why Antoine would take them to a world where he was likely to meet with such a reception, to be able to even ask how to free him.  Fortunately Sydell had told her, unasked.  You’ll work for me, he’d said.  Three years, three days and three hours.  You are a competent witch and, as the king’s spymaster, I am always in need of one such who can nose out illegal use of magic, crimes against the innocent of unprotected worlds or other things against our law.  You serve me well and you and your paramour will be able to leave Avalonis in peace.

Am I arrested then? She had asked.

Detained, you mean?  No, you are not.  You can leave this very moment, if you wish.  But then your paramour cannot go with you.  And his freedom will be entirely dependent on my benevolence, of which I have very little towards Antoine.

Nell sighed.  Yes, Antoine would definitely want her to keep this appointment.

She picked up her cloak and wrapped herself in it.  It was, like most of her clothes, serviceable.  It had looked Romantic and interesting when she’d first arrived here and all their clothes seemed to be like something out a fairytale.  Now it was just a cloak, a little threadbare, bought second hand because Sydell’s stipend rarely extended beyond the bare necessities of food and lodging.

Clasping the cloak in front, she picked up her reticule and headed out the door, closing it carefully behind her lest the landlady discover the damage to her floor and decide to throw Nell out without ceremony.

On the way to the park she tried to set it in her mind what to say.  Normally, when Sydell had asked her to find out what someone was doing, she found things she didn’t mind telling him about.  Like that woman a few months ago who was sacrificing newborns in order to use their hearts in love potions.  Nell had felt absolutely no qualms about turning her in to Sydell’s justice even though she suspected Avallonis had horrible penalties for her kind of crime.  No.  She hoped Avallonis had horrible penalties for her kind of crime.

But then there was Seraphim.  His crime was terrible by Avallonis standards.  Because, from what she understood, Avallonis was such a strongly magical world, doing business in other worlds was strictly forbidden.  And doing business could be interpreted as merely visiting for some minutes.  But taking people or things out of those worlds – or bringing them in – definitely fell within the definition.  The penalty for that sort of infraction was death.  And the death penalty for Dukes might be beheading, supposedly a quicker and more dignified death than hanging, but someone who was beheaded was still very thoroughly dead.

Yet Nell could see, in her mind’s eye, the boy-shifter pursued by those horrible men with the magic guns, and Seraphim risking his life to save him.  Risking his life to save her.  And then Gabriel Penn…  She shook her head.  She couldn’t imagine turning either of the men in.  But then, she couldn’t imagine not turning them in.  What could she tell Sydell that would satisfy him?  If he thought she hadn’t fulfilled her part of the bargain, what would Sydell do to Antoine?  At various times, the King’s spy master had intimated that only Nell’s good behavior kept Antoine alive.

“Ah, Nell, in a brown study, I see,” Sydell said. Even before she looked up, she knew he was in one of his moods.  It was in the voice which had the biting edge of a chill wind.

Looking up only confirmed it.  Sydell was a man of maybe forty, with black hair, carefully combed back from his forehead, in the style at the moment fashionable for men.  His clothes were as exquisitely tailored as Seraphim Ainsling’s had been: tight coat of blue superfine, so carefully fitted to his powerful torso that she thought it might require a spell to get him into it, and butter yellow breeches, so tight that wearing them in public should constitute an offense against morals.  His cravat: tall and arranged in graceful folds about his neck, was a thing of beauty.

But the face of such a carefully attired gentleman was pale and at the moment peevish, his lower lip slightly advanced, his eyes darting daggers in her direction.

The park, filled with mothers and nannies and children, from those so small they were in carriages, to the ten year olds chasing each other around the lake or feeding the ducks, was a place of life and sound, but everyone seemed to avoid Sydell’s periphery.  Everyone but Nell, and she only because she couldn’t avoid it.

She bobbed a curtsey by habit and with no thought.  It was amazing how quickly such habits developed.  “I beg your pardon, Sydell,” she said.  “I got myself… accidentally enmeshed in a spell, and it took a while to extricate myself.”

He frowned at her, then his lipst curved quickly upward, not in a smile so much as in what seemed like pleasure at her having suffered a delay.  “Well,” he said.  “Well.  What workings did you get involved in?  Was it Darkwater?  What has the Duke been up to.  Tell me without delay.”

And that was Sydell all over Tell me without delay was his version of “please make a report” and delivered with even less ceremony than that would have been.  Unspoken and hanging between those words was the sense that what it all actually meant was “Tell me or else.”

But she could not tell.  She thought of the Duke on the floor, his life-force ebbing away, and of Grabiel Penn desperately pushing strength and magic into the duke with his resurection spell.  She could not let them be arrested.  Oh, they’d broken the law.  They’d assuredly broken the law.  But it was for a good cause, was it not?

She had a notion her argument was slippery, yet looking at Sydell’s pale face, his frosty glare she couldn’t imagine that he would be on the side of right in this.  Instead, she reached, desperately for the story that Penn had told the Duchess.  She’d tell the same story.  Something that juicy would be about town in no time, and the two lies, meeting somewhere in the middle would corroborate each other.  Sydell would never suspect and it would give Nell a little longer to study Darkwater and to find out whether, indeed, anything nepharious hid behind the Duke’s seeming benevolence.

She put a smile on her face and told Sydell, “Nothing of consequence.  It’s so diverting.  I don’t know what you thought Darkwater was doing, but what he is doing is what you expect of a wastrel of his kind.  You see, he left in the middle of his own engagement party to meet with a … a married woman.  And I got pulled into his transport spell, and fell atop the lady’s husband who was hiding in the bushes, and the whole thing got blown out of proportion… or perhaps into proportion.  The offended husband demanded satisfaction, and the Duke got wounded, just as you would expect, and then he transported into his room, and his valet tended to him, and I took the opportunity to return here before anyone asked my name.”

Sydell brought up the cane he’d been playing with, an elaborate affair of varnished mahogany, topped with heavy silver, in the shape of a wolf’s head.  What he said was “I see.”  But what he did was twirl the wolf’s head, as though absently.  “And what was this lady’s name?  Or her husband’s?”

Nell forced a laugh that she hoped sounded like an amused giggle, “How would I know.  You are very well aware I know nothing of the fashionable of your world.”

Suddenly Nell felt dizzy and swayed on her feet.  She blinked, and had a sense that a lot of time had passed.  The small park, with its duck pond, had gone marginally darker and colder, and there were noticeably fewer children than just a moment ago.

“My dear,” Sydell said, and the coldness in his voice belied the apparent meaning of that word.  “You should know that when you travel between worlds, there is magical residue left on your clothes.  You should also know that I am a very hard man to fool.  Next time, do not make me resort to outrageous measures to get the information you owe me.”  He got out a small pouch and handed it to her.  “Here is your stipend, Miss Felix, and do try not to give me difficulties next time.  You will continue keeping an eye on Darkwater, for now.  We need more evidence to leave the case.”

It wasn’t till Sydell walked away that Nell’s mind cleared enough for her to realize he’d put a truth spell on her and got her to tell her all.  Truth spells were much more effective than any truth serum on Earth.  They were also almost a dark art, something no honorable magician would use.  Of course, she’d long ago realized that the king’s spymaster might be an honored man, but he was probably not an honorable one.  An honorable man wouldn’t use her lover’s capivity as a lever to move her in whatever direction he wished.

Then another thought came on the heels of that.  A case against Darkwater.  That meant that they were thinking of persecuting him.  And that Nell had just handed Sydell evidence against the Duke.  She must go back to Darkwater.  She must warn those two men of what was about to befall them.

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Director’s commentary:  There isn’t much to say about this chapter.  I know Nell’s background.  Sydell is perhaps a little creepier than I expected, but roughly what I thought he was.

From the craft point of view, in revision I’ll need to make the beginning of the chapter move considerably faster, and give more weight to the dialogue with Sydell.  Perhaps describe how people react to him as a form of foreshadowing.  Believe it or not I did some of this tonight as it was more lopsided before.  However, I’m in the very final phase of A Few Good man and wrote extremely emotional scenes tonight, so while I can apply my reason to these things and know it’s lopsided, I don’t have the necessary emotional sensitivity to fine tune it and I’m afraid I might ruin it if I tamper much further.    Trying to fine tune that kind of timing issue while exhausted and more than half absorbed in another book is akin to trying to tune a guitar while suffering from a head cold.  It will get done when the book is finished.