Nicnevin: Kit Hardwicke, #4

FORWARD AND GLOSSARY

This novel is set in 1926, a several years after the conclusion of what was known at the time as the Great War, now known to history as World War I. A few of the facts mentioned are true. However, it is for the most part an alternative history, and as such is full of anachronisms, inaccuracies, and plain lies. This is the fourth book in what has been until now a series with a predominantly Steampunk setting. By 1926, the developed world is moving away from Steampunk and towards the combustion engine, electricity and the like. As most of the book takes places on a primitive Greek island without even steam-powered means of transport, there is little technology referred to. A steamgram/steamphone exchange did exist on the island at one time, but has been destroyed. The islanders use mule carts and small fishing boats. The main characters travel by steam train and sailing boat. Modern technology makes a sudden appearance at the end.

CRYPTIDS/CRYPTOZOOLOGY: In ‘real life’, cryptozoology is considered to be a pseudoscience. It was founded in the 1950s, so the use of the word is anachronistic in this work. It includes beasties like the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman, Bigfoot and the like. Cryptids are a gift to the fiction writer, as they can be neither proved nor disproved.

CU SITHE: Speaking of cryptids... The Cu Sithe (the ‘e’ is optional) is a large green dog who roams the Scottish Highlands in popular mythology. It is believed that if one emits three terrifying barks, and you do not run away before the third bark is finished, you will die of sheer terror. It hunts silently. Given the British Royal Family’s predilection for dogs, and the amount of time spent by Queen Victoria and subsequent generations at Balmoral, I can see no reason why they should not have adopted the Cu Sithe as family pets. Kit acquired Garm in In the Bleak Midwinter.  Kaiser Wilhelm gave him to a German general, but Garm ended up bonding with Kit. It is indeed pronounced Cushie, more or less. Are they telepathic? That depends on the powers of their owner.

GARM: Garm (or Garmr) is a wolf (or dog) associated with Ragnarök in Norse mythology. Given the fascination many Germans had for Norse mythology, and the nature of the Cu Sithe, it seemed like a good name.

FORTNUM’S HAMPER: Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly is a cornucopia of delicious groceries that has catered to the British upper classes since 1707. Their hampers are world famous. Could they have delivered one so speedily under the circumstances in this book? I;m sure someone would have tried their hardest to fulfil expectations...

GURNEY CARRIAGE: These steam-powered carriages were invented in the mid-1820s by Sir Goldsworth Gurney, who took out patents on them and attempted to become the head of a dynasty of carriage manufacturers. They could travel at a top speed of twenty miles an hour, and one even managed to make it from London to Bath and back again. But they were not a commercial success. Reasons included protectionist behaviours in the interests of horse-powered carriages. I like to think that nearly a century of progress could have turned them into a far more useful vehicle. Although combustion engines are becoming more common by 1926, Kit and Robbie are the type to stick to Gurney carriages for some time to come. Mack owns more than one combustion engine motor car by this stage, though none of them are used in this book.

HAG STONES: Hag stones are stones with a naturally occurring hole in them. This is usually the result of erosion from water, and they are commonly found on beaches and dry river beds. If the stone has been made through human interference, it is not a genuine hag stone, and will have no magic properties. They are believed to have been connected to Druids, to Arthurian tales, protective magic and other supernatural things. The hole can be a portal – to another world, to the future, to the past... You must find one or be gifted one, never buy one, as they must choose you.  

INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE: What we would consider to be ‘modern’ cars make their first appearance in the previous book, Day of Wrath. They are incredibly expensive, smelly, and it is generally considered that they won’t catch on. Inevitably, they will take over from the Gurney carriage in time.

KNOT MAGIC: Used in witchcraft to cast spells. Using a cord, twine or other yarn, specific knots are fashioned while the practitioner utters meaningful words or phrases. In these books, they are turned into scraps of lace imbued with magical power. Knot magic is not restricted to white witches, as Kit and company find out rather suddenly at one point.

LITHOMANCY: A means of divination using stones. There are lots of methods. You can toss two or three onto the ground and see how they fall. You can polish one wide of the stone and use it for scrying. Laura carries hers around in her reticule, along with her knot magic materials and her silver needlework tools, and runs them through her fingers, and sees pictures in her head.

PHARMAKOS: A scapegoat sacrificed in times of crisis in Ancient Greece. Usually a slave, a criminal, or a disabled person was sacrificed, either by being put to death, or stoned, and usually men. This was intended to purify the community by discarding the sins, a practice used in many ancient cultures.

SENTORI: A totally imaginary small Greek island in the Aegean. Any resemblance to any real location is entirely coincidental.

STEAMGRAMS/STEAMPHONES: Steampunk demanded steamgrams instead of telegrams, and steamphones instead of telephones. However, whenever I have tried to write descriptions of them, I have ended up plagiarising the late Sir Terry Pratchett. So, I’m leaving it up to your imagination. I can’t think of a better explanation of them than his.

TAIBHSEAR: Pronounced, approximately, ‘tivesher’. A person possessed of second sight.

WITCH’S LADDERS: A form of Knot Magic, whereby charms (often feathers) are knotted or braided into a rope/string/cord and a specific spell cast for each charm. The number of knots and charms depends on the intention. They are frequently used for protection.

Date (redacted)

TO (REDACTED)

From (redacted)

Dear (redacted)

Thank you for sending me this manuscript of the fourth volume of these so-called ‘memoirs’ for clearance. He’s remarkably unstoppable. I anticipate the next offering in due course.

Please see that they are published in the Fiction list.

I have removed any sections that are contrary to national security, despite the writer’s insistence that this was all a private matter. I am fully cognisant of the events and the individuals involved. Please rest assured that, as before, the supposed author is well known to certain parties as an exceedingly unreliable narrator. They have however done a decent job of muddying the waters so that no-one will ever be able to identify them or their ‘companions’.

I apologise for the fact that the manuscript is, yet again, much shorter than the original. But you may publish what is left over, with my blessing.

I might even buy a copy. I have found the previous volumes to be unexpectedly entertaining.

Yours

(redacted)

CHAPTER 1

Iwas still alive when Robbie and the others arrived the morning after my epic fight with Kelb tal-Fenek. Just. I remember nothing of the next few days, so can only repeat what I was told. I was hauled off to hospital in Portree, where they took one look at me and organised an immediate transfer to Edinburgh. It’s probably a good thing that I was unconscious at this time, for I believe it involved a lot of uncomfortable travelling. The medicos in Portree patched me up as best they could, cleaned my wounds, gave me some fluids and so on, but insisted that I needed plastic surgery by a specialist. The wounds were full of splintered rock and vegetation and far too much dirt, none of which was surprising given what I had been attempting to do, and there was a real fear that I might lose my hand if infection set in.

While I did not know any of this, I remembered later that I had vaguely dreamt about the events of the last few months while I was in a coma. I was surrounded by green dogs, fires, never-ending chases up and down razor-sharp cliffs; at one point I believed I was hanging off the hands of Big Ben trying to persuade someone to follow me down. I was a prisoner at the Unseelie Court. I escaped by charging with Cossacks and duelling with great winged harpies. A witch dressed in white cast spells on me, while another dressed in black hurled curses at me. I ran through the underworld, unable to recall if I had paid the ferryman.

I had been pumped full of morphine at the Portree Hospital.

The first moment of reality I experienced was even worse than the fever dreams. I came to in a hospital room in what turned out to be Edinburgh, surrounded by Robbie, Mack, Simon and Garm, all fast asleep. Only I thought they were dead and that I had stumbled into yet another underworld, only this time a pure white one. My screams woke everyone up and brought half the hospital staff running. I was out of bed and trying to punch invisible enemies by the time Robbie woke up enough to grab hold of me and calm me down. There was some talk from the nursing staff of finding me a straitjacket, but once I had realised something of what was going on, I promised to behave.

My recovery was slow, tedious, and painful. I begged them to cut back on the morphine once I realised that it was probably the cause of the worst of my dreams. I had several operations, and in the end the plastic surgeons said they had done the best they could. I would have to learn to live with a left hand that had only fully intact little and index fingers, and stumps for the rest. At least I was right-handed.

There was inevitably some considerable fuss about the death of tal-Fenek. However, given that he had declared to his host that he was going off for a solitary day of tramping and climbing, his death was deemed to be a tragic accident. Even the frayed remnants of the rope loop tied around him was passed off as being part of that – he was known to be a skilled climber, and no one could say one way or another whether he had taken a rope with him, nor exactly where he had intended to go. His desire to kill me secretly had played into my hands, or what was left of them.

Robbie reported my injury to the local police, suggesting that a member of the feckless party on the adjoining estate were to blame. Again, tal-Fenek’s pot-shots intended to play into that narrative helped me, not him. Everyone staying there that day were questioned, which apparently put the fear of God into them, and they all fled the island as soon as the police let them off. None of them had the wits to have a solid alibi, but on the other hand, their scatter brained attempts to explain how they had been frittering their time away sounded plausible enough to satisfy the local police. Once I was well enough, I was asked if I wanted to press charges, but of course I did not, could not in fact, and by that stage Robbie had had a word to Botham and most of the details were ‘lost’ in a convenient paperwork black hole.

I was discharged from hospital just in time to bid Lord Inverie farewell. As Robbie and I sat at his deathbed, he picked up our hands, placed them on top of each other, and told us to live a happy life. He closed his eyes for the last time and there was a smile on his face.

WE DID LIVE A HAPPY life. A very peaceful one for a while. Robbie’s desire for adventure would return in due course, I had no doubt, but almost losing me had frightened him badly, and he was content for the moment. As the new Lord Inverie, he had his own things to do, and he surprised everyone by settling into the role as though he had been born to it. I continued to farm, but was not quite so hands-on as before. I kept my cottage but rarely stayed the night there unless there was lambing or calving going on, which I still enjoyed being involved with. But I let the men who were paid to do the job look after more and more of the daily work. I lived in the Castle now, though with my own suite of rooms to keep appearances up – bedroom, bathroom and sitting room. I took Simon’s advice and started to dabble in writing. After much faffing around, I produced a brief but, I thought, fast-paced and exciting account of the little caper I’d been involved in, a few weeks before the War started, and was rather miffed when the Censor threatened me with the Tower if I so much as mentioned it again. Apparently it was still far too delicate in terms of national security, etc, etc. And if you have read my previous books, you will know that nothing has changed there, and I will probably be long dead and buried before anyone is allowed to know what happened to me in the Scottish Highlands in that hot summer of 1914. Anyone, that is, except for the countless influential people who keep bringing it up with me whenever they want me to do something nefarious for them...

We were able to travel, for fun, and not to save the world – I had almost forgotten what it was like to go on a real holiday. One particularly memorable one saw us spending three months touring the United States with Laura and Dixon. The highlights of that trip including riding through the Grand Canyon, exploring the Rocky Mountains, and spending time in the desert with Indigenous shamans who took our minds to places which, in retrospect, should probably have remained undisturbed. On the whole, however, the hairline crack in my mind stayed closed during this happy interlude.

It was during this trip that Laura became interested in lithomancy, which I suppose I could describe as divination with stones. The general public might think of crystal balls, which of course are rarely crystal. Others may think of fake practitioners hung around with actual crystals, smelling of patchouli and incense. Laura liked to pick her stones from beaches and dry river beds, and only kept those which spoke to her. Some she would polish on one side until they gleamed, leaving the other side in its natural state. There were always some small stones in her reticule these days, alongside the scraps of lace and thread and silver needlework tools. She did not make a big deal of it, but often if we were sitting around talking she would fiddle with them, running them through her fingers. Occasionally afterwards she would mention something minor that was going to happen, and it always did happen. But it did not feel like she was telling the future. It tended to be things that were likely to happen, all things considered – like the way the fountain in the courtyard of our next inn would look, when we were travelling through an area with a defined style of architecture, in which many places had fountains in courtyards. That sort of thing. I think now that she was playing with us a bit. It had taken a while for me to understand what her knot work involved, and other things she did, and now I took them for granted. Likewise, I would come to take her playing with stones for granted.

I did ask her if she thought the things she saw in the stones, if that was what happened, were definitely going to come true. Certainly, the minor things she told us about seemed to come true, but as I’ve said, they were not that hard to guess anyway. Did she often see things that she did not tell us about? If so, did they come true? Must something come true once she saw it? If she saw her own death, could she prevent it? Or saw an earthquake – could she warn the authorities? Her response was amused. ‘I’ve seen things that I haven’t mentioned, because I know they are not going to happen for some time yet. I’ve seen things that do happen, but not quite the way I’ve seen them – like looking at a landscape from one perspective but then seeing it totally differently from another. I tell Marcus most of the things I see, more than I mention to you two, so he might be a better judge of their accuracy. And he is more likely to pick up on the things that I have predicted that happen in a different way from how I interpreted what I saw. Interpretation is a big part of it. If I just see, say, a rocky outcrop in the desert, the chances are we will ride past it sometime soon. But it might actually be hidden behind a bigger rocky outcrop, and even though we ride past it, I might not know that we have done so, unless we change our route and go beyond the bigger outcrop. And that would mean changing our plans, either to a tiny degree or for something bigger, and then does that mean that what I saw was true in itself, or did seeing it in some way affect the choices I made? Or the choices of other people, if I told them about it. One of the problems with trying to tell the future is that, once you’ve told someone, their behaviour will be affected by what you’ve told them. Even if they choose to ignore or forget what you’ve said, it’s still changed something in their subconscious, I think. If I saw my own death, I don’t know that I could stop it – it would be like that old tale of the man who bumped into Death and left town to try to escape him, only to find out that Death was in his hometown for someone else, and was on his way to the other place to collect the first man on the following day. We all die. I could foresee my death being bitten by a snake, and spend the rest of my life living in a city with no snakes, and be bitten by an escaped pet snake. If I saw an earthquake – do you think the authorities would listen to a middle-aged woman with no scientific qualifications telling them to guard against a major earthquake next week? I do believe that anything I see is likely to come true, though usually in a minor and harmless manner. I don’t think there is any point trying to stop it happening, because it will still happen, but you would have wasted your efforts in trying to stop it, rather than in living your life.’

‘Do you ever see someone’s death?’

‘No. Not so far, and I haven’t gone looking for it. And I don’t want to. That would be too much responsibility, too heavy a burden for me to bear. And as I’ve said, knowing about it would not do any good, whether I told someone or not. And I don’t ever want to be in the position of having to decide whether to tell someone something like that, or not.’

‘You wouldn’t tell your husband?’

‘Especially not him. Though I don’t know what be worse – telling him, and seeing what it might do to him, and to us, or not telling him, and having to live with the knowledge. And I don’t think I could live with that knowledge without it affecting the way I behaved, and possibly destroying what we have.’

‘So you don’t believe in Free Will?’

‘No, I do believe in it. I believe that everyone can choose their actions, and the vast majority of people do, but we can never see the entire stream of our whole life in one go, so we can never know precisely how one choice affects the rest of it, or leads to the next choice. And my Free Will can contradict your Free Will, for example, and then we both end up making choices that may differ quite a lot from the ones we might otherwise have made. On the other hand, I think I believe in the theory that everything actually exists all at the same time, while simultaneously being pulled in multiple directions by everyone exercising their own Free Will. I am searching for a practitioner who can teach me how to see what that looks like. I feel sure that there is a way, if only I could find it, to peek into the timestream and, maybe, learn to focus myself so that I can see the time and space I want to see. I know it sounds crazy, and I’m sure I have contradicted myself six times to Sunday in what I’ve just been saying. But it’s such an overwhelming topic and I keep being drawn back to it. I feel like I did when I was a teenager and I had just started to discover Knot Magic. And it took me several years to get good at that,