Witchfinder– Free novel — chapter 21 and 22

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet.  I hope you enjoy the two chapters.  These fall under “in which things turn… odd”*

For previous chapters, look here:  https://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/
A World of Hurt
They were in deep trouble.  That much Seraphim knew, and he wished he didn’t feel as though he’d very much like to sleep for the next several months.
He felt weak and vaguely ill, not to mention nauseated as though he’d swallowed a good portion of this particular alternate of the Thames which might not have as many houses around it, but probably was none too wholesome to drink.  And they were going to be pursued.  There was not the slightest doubt about that.
As though cued by his thoughts, he sensed magic groping towards them, the feel and gentle probing of the magical police in this world – he didn’t know much about them, but he and Gabriel had once had a brush with them and – he seemed to remember they were called the Imperial Pures.  He allowed himself to mutter a word between his teeth, and was amused to see Miss Felix’s eyes open very wide and her cheeks tinge a dark pink color.  So, she was female and delicate enough to be shocked, was she?  And what kind of insanity had possessed him that made her look devilishly alluring in soaked night clothes and with her hair plastered to her face?
On the other hand, the soaked nightgown was terribly revealing of her curves, and he almost wanted to laugh at the thought that perhaps he was his father’s son after all: he couldn’t be ill or tired enough not to react.  But he tried to keep it from showing on his face, and instead he said, all propriety, “I beg your pardon, Miss Felix, but they are looking for us, and we must escape.  I’m not absolutely sure what we can do, but I can think of only one place I can take us.  Only one place they won’t dare follow us.  It’s terribly dangerous, as it is a world where magic is absolutely disbelieved and, in fact, where only a very strange kind of magic works.  I will be utterly helpless there, but the chances of anyone trying to find us there are close to none, and even if they try, there is a good chance they will not be able to find us, because the world is choked with iron and therefore it is hard to find anyone there.  In fact, it is dangerous to any magical pattern but the strongest.”
Her eyes looked into his, and a small frown was forming, making a vertical wrinkle between her dark, arched eyebrows.  “But–” she said.
“No,” he said.  “Do listen to me.  I don’t know how long I have, and I would have you understand what I’m trying to do.  If I transport us there, it will use the last of my magical strength.  If I should die–” He watched her opening her mouth and put his hand up, to stop her talking.  “No.  If I should die, which is possible, though not probable, or not merely from the spell, I wish you to keep track of how I transported us, and use those coordinates, in reverse fashion, to take you back to Avalon.  There you are to evade capture, and procure…”  He seemed to think for a moment.  “Gabriel Penn’s help, but if you fail at that – as I think the concerted effort to bring down my house might include him – then you are to procure my fiancé, Miss Blaine, and tell her what happened to me, and to seek redress before the king’s high justice.  Trust me, she will be anxious to do so, as she will not want her name to be linked to someone who has broken the law by willingly traveling to other worlds.  And then you are to convince the king to find who was at the back of the conspiracy and to do your utmost to recover my brother, Michael, from Fairyland.”  He recalled himself, and, this time, gave a startled laugh.  “Listen to me,” he said.  “Laying down the law to you, as though I had the power to compel your obedience in the case of my death.  I absolve you from all responsibility in following my wishes, of course, only beg you to consider that without me, or Michael, my house will devolve to a distant cousin, and the family will be left destitute.  But of course, my transporting us and saving you,” he added, urgently.  “Has absolutely no conditions.  If we are captured here, my family will just as surely be disgraced and thrown into poverty.”  He inclined his head to her.  “But I would appreciate–”
Something like a look of dismay crossed her features, and she protested, “Of course I’ll do what I can to save your family.  Only tell me why you think you might die, but not immediately?”
“In my weakened condition,” he said.  “Being in a world with so much cold iron and so hostile to magic will–”
At that moment, he felt the probe again, and this time, felt the end of it fasten on them.  Through the probe came a voice, unctuous and fullsome, as the voice of a functionary who has completed a difficult task, “I found them, oh, gracious one.  The witches are–”
Seraphim took a deep breath.  He called the last of his magical strength to him.  He could feel his power fighting, his instinct of self preservation attempting to keep him from doing such destructive magic, which could only result in his death or at least in serious damage to his magical power and his shields.  It didn’t matter.  If they stayed here, she would have to fight for him.  And that, he doubted she could do.  Then they would both die.  This world, one of them at least might survive.
He reached with the last of his strength for the coordinates of the world he and Gabriel had called the Madhouse, the world he and Gabriel had sworn never to visit again, not since the last time when the sheer amount of cold iron had almost killed them.
At the last minute, as he was reciting the transport spell, he heard Miss Felix say “Oh!” and reaching in, reaching right into his spell and… twisting.
It was still the madhouse, he thought, frantically, even as the spell activated.  But she had set different coordinates.  What could she be thinking?
The cold of the inbetweener hit him, and then he felt himself fall onto a hard surface, even as the sapping feel of cold iron leeched at his magic.
As consciousness ran away from him, he heard Miss Felix pound on something – sounded like a door – while screaming “Grandmother.  Grandmother.  Please, help me.”
Into The Lion’s Den
Marlon had been reclining on a rosewood sofa upholstered in blue velvet, with a book on his knees.
Gabriel’s first thought was that he’d changed not at all.  His second thought was that he’d changed completely.  And both were true.  Marlon’s hair remained that blond on the edge of red – the flame about to catch – and as unruly as it had been at Cambridge, whisps of it standing on end and forming a hallow around the oval face.  His body remained long and lean, and he wore – as he’d tended to do at Cambridge – blue pants of some serviceable material and a shirt that looked too large for him.
But at Gabriel’s arrival, he looked up.  And in that moment Gabriel sucked in air, remarking the difference in his erstwhile friend.  Marlon had grown almost gaunt, and his blue eyes looked haunted, as though he’d looked too closely at horrors he couldn’t forget.
*Good,* Gabriel thought. *He also didn’t escape unscathed.* And immediately despised himself for it.
After the first start, the shock that widened his blue eyes, Marlon controlled himself and looked as though Gabriel transported into his house every day and twice on Sunday, and not as though they were seeing each other for the first time in years – and after they’d parted in anger and bitterness.
He flowed from the sofa, with slow calculated movements, his fingers between the pages of the book, holding the page he’d been reading.  Standing he came to a little above Gabriel’s shoulder, but managed to give the impression of towering over him, and also of distant, cold dignity.  As though he were the offended one, and not the guilty part.
“You honor me with your visit, prince,” he said, in extremely polite tones.
Gabriel opened his mouth to protest the title, then bit his tongue.  When he spoke, he’d brought his own abominable temper under control, though nothing could stop his heart pounding, or the vague feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach.  All the furniture here, everything, was what had been in Marlon’s room at Cambridge, and it remained only the question: where was it?  Where was that which had once been Aiden Gipson?  Gabriel took light breaths, feeling as though, should he breathe deeply he would smell the faint scent of corruption in the air.
“I came to you,” Gabriel said, with as much dignity as he could muster.  “Because you told me I could always come to you if I ran out of places to go, and if I had no one else to help me.”
Marlon’s eyebrows went up.  They were the exact same color as his hair, and when they rose like that they gave the impression of twin flames, dancing above his eyes.  “No where to go, prince?  You astonish me.”
“Don’t call me that.  You know very well I am not a prince.  I gave up my dignity and my power long ago.”
“Oh, I don’t think you can give it up.”  A smile without myrth, an absolutely ghastly grin as unpleasant as a corpse’s bared teeth, contorted Marlon’s face.  “I think if you’re born to it, you will always be a prince.  Not like the rest of us, who are born to less exalted positions.”
“For the love of heaven, cut the tomfoolery,” Gabriel said, impatient.  “None of– None of what happened had anything to do with the fact that my mother was an elf princess or your mother a mere elf commoner.  As different as those are, we still have more in common than with– Than other people.”  Which had been more than half of what had thrown them together.  The other half…  Gabriel looked down, trying to discern any hint of the easy laughter that had once sprang between them, or that wordless understanding that had allowed them to communicate without the need for sound.  He found nothing.  All of that had shattered, years ago, when they’d last seen each other.  “You told me I could come to you, if I were out of all other resources.”
“Your high born brother abandoned you then?” Marlon asked.  His look was almost hungry.  “The Duke’s family has disowned you?”
In the face of that hunger, Gabriel hesitated.  How much could he trust Marlon?  If he told Marlon exactly the trouble he was in, would Marlon betray him?  Run to the authorities?
But at that moment, he caught sight of it: the mortal remains of Aiden Gipson.  In life, he’d been a tall man, and much of Gabriel’s build.  In death, his look remained the same, and he wore what Gabriel presumed were clean clothes – since the smell was not that obvious – in this case a serviceable brown suit.  Above it, Aiden’s face remained as it had been in life: the well formed features, the dark green eyes, the narrow, high nose.  Only the eyes looked lusterless, and the lips receded slightly to show the teeth.  It took more than that, though, and the yellowish wax-like pallor to know the man was dead and had been brought back to life with a resurrection spell.  You wouldn’t know that he couldn’t rest until the man who’d made that spell allowed it.
But if you were a mage you could see it and you could smell it: the not quite physical smell of the dead flesh that had not been allowed to decay and instead sparked and fizzed with unholy magic.  And if you were a mage, you could see that more horrible thing: Aiden’s spectre, just behind the body, attached to it by a thread of spell, faded and impossibly-tired looking.
How could Marlon live with that ghost?  How could he?  When he’d met Marlon at Cambridge he’d heard of Gipson and the odd, too-close relationship Marlon had had with Gipson until Gipson’s death.  But it had taken him more than a year to find Gipson, where Marlon had hid him, in the attic room of his lodgings.  And to realize what Marlon had done.
In sick waves of horror, Gabriel recalled how – in shock – he’d given the whole thing away and how the only reason Marlon hadn’t been arrested and Gipson destroyed was that the two had vanished.  Gabriel, himself, had been sent from Cambridge in disgrace, though nothing could ever be pinned on him.  And weeks later he’d gotten the unsigned letter with the coordinates of Marlon’s hideout and the line “when you run out of places to hide.”
Well, he’d run out of places to hide, but Marlon could not denounce him or call the authorities on him.  Or on Seraphim.  Necromancers were at as great a risk as those who traded with unauthorized worlds.
In a rush, one eye on Gipson who stood, knit with the shadows against the wall, half-immersed in shadow, he told Marlon a very brief version of the events.  What he and Seraphim had found of their father’s activities.  How they’d resumed them, helping rescue witches from the forbidden worlds.  And then the catastrophic cascade of events of the last few days.
Marlon showed surprise only once: when Gabriel mentioned the role that the elves appeared to have played in it.  And that in a way was a relief.  The thought of Marlon in league with the fairy realm was terrifying.  And though his mother had been a low-born elf, thrown out of fairyland for getting pregnant by a mortal, it didn’t mean that fairyland wouldn’t use her son, and willingly too.
When Gabriel came to the end, he was quiet a while, and Marlon said, crossing his arms on his chest, “And what do you want of me, prince?  Am I supposed to hide you?”
Gabriel shook his head.  “I could have hid myself,” he said.  “That is, I’m not so witless that I could not have contrived to.”
“Ah.” Marlon said.  “Then what am I to understand you to want?”
“Oh, curse you,” Gabriel said.  “Stop playing games.  This is not funny.  You know very well what I want.  I want you to find where Seraphim went.  I want you to find where Michael was taken.  I want you to help me recover them and discover who is at the back of this, and why, and what they intend for my– For the Duke’s family.”
Marlon was very close now, looking up and somehow contriving to give the impression of looking down.  “And what’s in it for me?” he asked.  His voice was harsh.
Gabriel felt a spasm of revulsion, but said, his voice controlled, “Whatever I need to do to convince you to save Seraphim and Michael and… and their mother and sister.”
Marlon laughed, a short bark.  “You couldn’t DO enough,” he said.  “It’s more what you need to give.”
“Give?” Gabriel asked, as his stomach lurched.  And, uncomprehending, “Give?”
“My price, sweet prince, is you.”
“Me?”
Marlon was now so close, that Gabriel felt a though he couldn’t look away, even as, by the corner of his eye, he followed Gipson’s movement as he emerged from the shadow driven by who knew what random impulse.
“You,” Marlon said.  “Body and soul and magic too.”
“You do have a penchant for trying to own people!” Gabriel said, before he could stop himself.
Marlon narrowed his eyes.  “It’s my price,” he said.  “Pay it or seek help elsewhere for your precious family.”
Gabriel felt as though his throat had gone very dry, his mind lurching into horror, his body hovering on the edge of nausea.  But Marlon was the only person he knew whose power was as strong as Gabriel’s own.  And Marlon was ten times as knowledgeable.  And there was nowhere else Gabriel could go.
“Which one is it going to be prince?  Yes or no?”
Feeling as though he had to force his body to obey him, Gabriel lowered his head and hissed through clenched teeth, “Yes.”