The Cthulhu Encryption (24 page)

Dupin turned to face the newcomer, and looked him up and down. “We have never met,” he said, confidently.

“It was a long time ago,” conceded the man that the Comte de Saint-Germain had identified to me as Oberon Breisz. “I apologize for interrupting you, but I really had grown very impatient, even though I did not complete my return from Paris until yesterday. I had hoped that you might demonstrate more urgency, and more cleverness…but you are here now, and you must come to the house without further delay, where you can wash and change your clothes, while my servants prepare a meal. You’ll have to leave the carriage and horses here—there are steps that only human feet can climb—but they’ll be quite safe. No one dares steal so much as a rabbit or an apple from my land.”

Dupin was about to ask another question, but Oberon Breisz had already turned away from him, to confront Ysolde Leonys. He made no move to embrace or kiss her, or even to greet her with a polite bow.

“You shouldn’t have run away, my child,” he said.

“I know that now,” she replied, “but I
was
a child, was I not, in spite of my years? I was foolish…and there was something within me that moved me to revolt. If I had only kept the medallion…but even you could not keep my dream unsullied, while you were ambitious to direct it to your own ends.”

“That’s true,” he admitted. “It wasn’t your fault—not entirely.”

Personally, I thought that she should have left out the last two words; the fact that he had felt obliged to include them was revealing of his character. He was a vain man, and not a forgiving one, although he knew how to keep a straight face.

“Can you save me, my king?” she asked. “Can you still make use of me?”

“I believe so,” Breisz replied. “I’m a magician, after all—more powerful now than the old Mahatma. Besides, you were my queen once…together, we might accomplish anything. Provided that you are obedient….”

He left it there. Arrogance again—but if he really was a powerful magician, perhaps arrogance was unavoidable, if not forgivable.

Madame Lacuzon tugged at Dupin’s sleeve very urgently, and he was forced to listen to a whispered speech longer than I had any I had ever seen her utter before. I studied them closely, hoping to pick up the thread of their conversation, and was slightly startled to find Ysolde Leonys suddenly beside me.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, in a low voice—perhaps addressing Chapelain as well, since he was also close by. “You’re under my protection. You’ll get back to Paris safely, I promise you—even if I have to summon help. I believe that I can do that…if the old man is still able to come.” She dropped her voice even further, and leaned close to my ear, to add: “Oberon doesn’t know everything.”

I looked at Chapelain, wondering how long he would grant his patient to live now, in his expert opinion. The physician was evidently troubled, but he said nothing, contenting himself with a slight bow by way of response to her promise. He knew as well as the rest of us that we really were standing at some kind of boundary, neither wholly in the world we knew nor wholly in Oberon Breisz’s curiously mislabeled Underworld.

“Thank you, Madame,” I said, on behalf of both of us.

Dupin finally looked up again. “Madame Lacuzon will stay here, with the horses,” he said. “The rest of us will be pleased to accept your invitation, Monsieur Breisz.”

Oberon Breisz bowed to the gorgon. “I’ll have some food and wine sent down to you, Madame,” he said. “I harbor no hard feelings over the fact that you would not let me see Monsieur Dupin in Paris. That was your home after all—and I delivered my invitation regardless.”

As Oberon Breisz turned away to lead us out to the stone circle and up the hill, I made haste to fall into step with Dupin and whisper to him in m turn. “What should I do?”

“Be polite,” he murmured. “We have been invited to visit this man’s house—let us do so. Perhaps it is not quite as fully in the word we know as any other dwelling we have ever visited, but I doubt that he intends to hold us prisoner within his crypt. I don’t know what business he thinks he has with me, but I dare say that we can settle it like gentlemen.”

The way up to the house was steep, and the crude stone steps that wound around the hill were chipped and crumbling, but the mist was clearing now, and I had no fear of missing my footing by virtue of poor sight. There were brambles growing on the hillside—which, was, in truth, more like the face of a cliff, and at one point there was a rickety wooden bridge over a mysterious torrent that had no obvious source, but no more than a quarter of an hour had passed when the house appeared.

I had been half-expecting a vast Medieval edifice with turrets and battlements, but it was far more compact that that, and if any of it was genuinely old, the building had certainly been renovated to modern standards. Its windows were square and neatly glazed with the aid of sturdy wooden frames. Its roof was tiled and pitched to accommodate mansards to serve as servants’ quarters. The edifice did have rounded corners, but they only gave the illusion of towers; that was an affectation, such as one sees in the more pretentious town-houses in every city. It undoubtedly deserved the title of manor-house, perhaps that of château, but it was no quasi-Medieval fortress or relic thereof. The perron leading up to the front door was in much better condition than the steps leading up the hillside, and the brass fittings on the door were brightly-polished.

When he reached the perron, Oberon Breisz paused, and so did we. He turned and gestured expansively with his arm, inviting us to look back the way we had come.

We did. We were above the mist now, but it still filled he valleys between the various hills stretching away to the east and south. There were, however, plenty of ridges and crags looming up above the silver ocean. Many of those peaks, I knew, should have had human dwellings on them: not merely ruins of ancient feudal holds but farmhouses and cottages. There should have been roads looping over the shallower hills. Somewhere, between my station and the distant horizon, there should have been towns and cities, whose church spires and high flagpoles, at least, ought to be projecting from that silent silver sea.

There was nothing—except for a few single standing stones, like gorgonized sentinels keeping watch on a deserted land. Much of it was heath, but the entire horizon seemed to be ringed by a vast, illimitable forest.

“We really have stepped back in time,” I murmured to Dupin.

“Nothing so extreme,” Oberon Breisz interjected. “Civilization is still there…my powers of encryption don’t go as far as projecting my house back in time, alas…but the view is another matter. To play with light…that kind of magic is mere illusion. Think of it as a kind of picture…a landscape in the wild Italian style.”

The servant who opened the door when our host rang was not dressed in livery. He seemed little different in age and bearing from my own Bihan, and might even have been a distant relative.

There was nothing reminiscent of Perrault or Charlemagne in the furniture, either. Some of it was certainly old, but no older than the furniture accumulated in any aristocratic house in the environs of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and much of it was a good deal plainer. There were armchairs in the drawing-room into which we were initially taken, but no sofas and no rugs; the principal item was a huge Breton dresser laden with crockery. There were no sideboards or bookcases, nor was there very much ornamentation on the walls in the traditional forms of paintings, tapestries or the kinds of panoplies that serve as conventional souvenirs of voyages to India or Africa. There was, however, one item of decoration suspended over the fireplace that was as impressive as it was sinister.

It was a flag, torn and tattered now, but still bright enough in the whiter design superimposed on a black background. The design depicted a skull and crossbones. It was what modern legend called a “Jolly Roger.” Indeed, I strongly suspected that it was
the
Jolly Roger: the very one invented by the pirate Edward England.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE PIRATE NARRATIVE CLARIFIED

It was a large enough house, although we were not given a tour, but merely shown to the rooms where we would be sleeping that night. We had one each. The beds seemed comfortable enough, but the furniture was otherwise sparse and the walls undecorated. Better that, I thought, than to sleep beneath the pirate flag.

I was provided with a basin of hot water in a small dressing-room annexed to the bedroom, so I took the opportunity to wash myself thoroughly and change into cleaner clothes. Dupin and Chapelain did likewise before we made our way back to the drawing-room into which we had first been introduced.

When I arrived there, I had the impression that the hollow eye-sockets of the skull painted on the flag were staring at me in a curiously knowing fashion.

Oberon Breisz offered us each a glass of red wine, which we accepted gladly. Ysolde Leonys came in while the glasses were being handed out, but Breisz did not offer to pour her one. She was still wide awake, but was, I thought, still somehow in thrall. I wondered whether her wakefulness might be illusory—a matter of glamour, like her fresh skin and sleek hair. She had undoubtedly recovered a measure of self-consciousness, and probably thought herself free, but I had a suspicion that, as soon as she had stepped into this encrypted space, she had also stepped back into Oberon Breiz’s possession. He had said that he wanted her back, having somehow lost her more than a decade before, but now that he had her, he almost seemed to have lost interest in her. At the very least, he was taking her future compliance with his plans for granted.

Among other things, I thought, that confidence in her total possession probably meant that her promise of protection was worthless. Here and now, we were all at Oberon’s mercy.

Fortunately, the renowned bilbiotaph did not seem to have the slightest shred of animosity toward any of us. He was playing the host gladly—which surely implied that he must want something from us. Obviously, he did not want it from me, or from Chapelain. But what was it that he wanted from Dupin—badly enough, perhaps, to have planned and mounted this entire charade?

“You must have a great many questions to ask, Monsieur Dupin,” said our host, when we were all seated. “I’m sure that Ysolde has done her best to answer the ones you have asked her, but she probably has a great many questions herself, now that she is finally coming round from her long nightmare. That was Angria’s doing, I fear. The British eventually sacked Callaba, as I had known that they would, in spite of any pact made in the past, but he was bound to escape—and they never recovered the Flaming Cross of Goa, as they doubtless hoped to do. With the Buddhists firmly in possession of Karla again, I thought that he would probably head north for the mountains and lose himself there, but the sea had got into his blood too. He did not stay long in Paris in 1830, although it’s possible that he’s come back again, if he’s still alive. It has occurred to me that it
might
have been his presence that mobilized the shoggoths, although I doubt that they needed his mediation. In any case, it seems more likely to me that he followed poor Jack Taylor’s example, if he’s addled enough to think that he can draw any advantage from R’lyaieh.
That
kind of madness, mercifully, I’ve always been able to stave off.”

What kinds
, I wondered,
can he not stave off?
It was a silly question. He was as deeply enmeshed in his own madness as Ysolde Leonys…and his madness, I suspected, extended much further than hers. She was merely a fly caught in his spider-web.

“Taylor, at least, must be long dead,” Dupin observed.

“I certainly hope so, although I’ve heard rumor that he’s encrypted too, on a ghost-ship. It’s probably nonsense, as most such rumors are. I was the one entitled to vengeance, but you understand how these things work, Monsieur Dupin.”

Does he?
I wondered.

“If my crews had only let me make a deal with Captain Mackra while we were fortunate enough to have him in our custody,” the man who had once been Edward England continued, “we’d all have been far better off—but that snake Taylor convinced the men that I was selling them out to John Company for my own selfish profit. If Jack
were
still alive…well, what a
bad man
he would be by now! Fortunately, Monsieur Dupin, men of our sort are rare…and those who need to come back, once having died, have a hard road to follow to remembrance. Few accomplish it without help…but I can help you, if you’ll let me.”

Dupin ignored the bait. “I hope you’ll forgive me, Monsieur Breiz…Mr. England…but I still haven’t quite grasped all the details of the pirate narrative. Would you be prepared to fill in the gaps for me?”

Breisz shook his head, not in denial but in mock-commiseration. “I do hope you’re not still thinking in terms of finding Levasseur’s legendary treasure,” he said. “I had not suspected you of such vulgarity. There’s still a little of it left in my cofffers, mind…most of the gold is spent, but some of the gems remain.
La Buse
had to take the cross back to Angria, though, along with a weighty tribute. He should never have imagined that he could get away with keeping a prize that was not really his.”