EXCERPT: Josh Lanyon's The Darkling Thrush
An Excerpt from The Darkling Thrush
Josh Lanyon
Genre: LGBT Fantasy Paranormal Suspense
Length: Novel
Price: $5.99
http://www.loose-id.com/The-Darkling-Thrush.aspx
Fed up with his desk duty in the Imperial Arcane Library, book hunter Colin Bliss accepts a private commission to find The Sword's Shadow, a legendary and dangerous witches' grimoire. But to find the book, Colin must travel to the remote Western Isles and solve a centuries' old murder.
It should be nothing more than an academic exercise, so why is dour -- and unreasonably sexy -- Magister Septimus Marx doing his best to keep Colin from accepting this mission -- even going so far as to seduce Colin on the train journey north?
Septimus is not the only problem. Who is the strange faery woman that keeps appearing at inconvenient times? And who is working behind the scenes with the sinister adventuress Irania Briggs? And why do Colin's employers at the Museum of the Literary Occult keep accusing Colin of betraying them?
As Colin digs deeper and deeper into the book's mysterious past, he begins to understand why Septimus is willing to stop him at any price -- but by then, it's too late to turn back.
Publisher's Note: This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable: Male/male sexual practices.
~ * ~
The sun had slipped beneath low cloud cover. The peppery vapor of summer rain mingled with the scent of passing automobiles as I started down the long pyramid of stairs. I happened to glance up out of my preoccupied thoughts and recognized -- without pleasure -- the tall, thin figure coming my way.
Septimus Marx.
He must have noticed me before I did him, for his light green gaze was fixed upon my face.
"Bliss."
"Marx," I returned, continuing past him.
I was surprised when he stopped long enough to say, "I take it you've already seen everything you wished to?"
"What?" I stopped two steps down from him.
He was already taller than I; positioned as we were, he seemed to tower. He was thin -- sinewy, though, not spindly. In fact, he always gave an impression of barely contained force. His black hair was shoulder length in the affected fashion of the English Societas Magicke, his eyebrows oddly slanted in two slashes that gave his face an exotic, almost puppetlike aspect. His eyes were a very pale shade of green like celadon.
He said in that snooty, studied tone, "It's four minutes past the hour. Was the exhibition not to your taste?"
I'd completely forgotten my official reason for visiting the museum was to see the Botolf Grimoire.
My face must have given me away, because Marx's eyes narrowed. I said the first idiotic thing that popped into my head. "I just remembered I left the stove on in my flat."
Well, it wasn't that bad. It might have even been true; I did frequently forget to turn the stove off and the lights down.
He said, "In that case, as you've probably burned the building down by now, you might as well stay and enjoy the exhibit."
I laughed merrily. "I'll run home and check. I still might be able to hide the evidence of arson." I continued down the stairs, past the big stone griffins, and all the way I could feel the weight of his gaze pinned between my shoulder blades.
Marx already thought I was a waste of space. This would merely confirm it. Not that I cared. Better that than he discover what I was really up to.
As I walked along the street, I considered this. Did I really consider what I was "up to" so wrong? I didn't for one minute imagine I was going to find the Faileas a' Chlaidheimh, so there was no question of a genuine conflict of interest between my role as librivenator and using my book-hunter skills for private gain. Not that I wouldn't try to find the grimoire. I'd try my damnedest, as a matter of fact, but the odds against it were astronomical. No, this was simply a paid-for holiday at a time when I desperately needed one.
By the time I returned in two or three weeks, the tempest in a teapot caused by my affair with Antony would have blown over. Antony would have started some new romantic intrigue, and the disapproving attention at Leslie's Lexicons would have a fresh focus.
This quest of Lavenham and Anstruther's was a godsend. There was nothing to feel guilty or nervous about -- regardless of how it might look to others. However, I wasn't so naive that I couldn't guess how it would look to others; I realized I needed to keep my plans a secret, at least for the time being.
Unseeing, I watched couples pass by me, men and women -- or women and women -- strolling arm in arm. A glimpsed face registered on my consciousness. The woman who had just passed me was someone I had seen earlier. I had a vague impression of delicate blue pallor beneath a sheer white veil, blue-black hair, and dark eyes. I turned around, but the tall, slender figure in gray silk was already rounding the corner.
I hesitated. Had I seen an actual member of the Seelie Court? In London? And at such an unlikely time of day?
The summery rain began to fall harder, and every surface, pavement and awning and automobile, was wet and alive with glistening, glinting rain. Parasols and umbrellas popped open like flowers blooming along the busy street.
I decided that I would go back to my flat after all. No one would be expecting me back at the office, and the idea of running into Septimus Marx again was enough to put me off the idea of returning to the museum to view the Botolf Grimoire, as much as I'd have liked to see it.
Turning, I started back the way I had come, and once again I saw the woman in gray silk walking toward me. I couldn't seem to avert my gaze. She was taller than I, as one would expect from the faery folk, very slender. She wore a stylish tricorn hat with a sheer white veil. Behind the veil, her reddish brown eyes held my own as we once again crossed paths. Now I was sure she was Seelie Court. Despite the gloves and veil, I knew I was not imagining the decidedly blue tint to her complexion.
I looked over my shoulder, but she continued unhurriedly on her way down the street. Even in the colonies we knew that one did not speak to a member of the Seelie Court before being addressed.
Most perplexing. I was still thinking it over as I caught a streetcar and continued on my way home.
I was rooming at a boardinghouse on Tabard Street in the Borough. It was a shabby old place, but clean and relatively quiet. The other boarders were elderly pensioners and students. People in transit. The Societas Magicke kept rooms there for exchange members from foreign bureaus, and I had spent an interesting evening or two lately perusing the books left by my predecessors. The perusal had demonstrated more clearly than anything else could have that my affair with Antony was simply -- for him -- one in a long, long line.
I was thinking about that, about Antony, as I sat in the window seat and listened to the lonely music of rain gurgling in the storm drains and the hiss of tires on the street below. I had told myself again and again that I was not in love with Antony, but all the same one week, let alone two, seemed to be a very long time to go without so much as a glimpse of him. It was weak and foolish, but.it's not easy to stop, even when you know your feelings aren't returned.
For many, many reasons it would be a good idea for me to take a holiday now.
But the more I tried to reassure myself what good sense this journey made, the more uneasy I became. Perhaps it had to do with seeing the faery woman. Could it be a coincidence that upon accepting the task of hunting for a famous Scottish grimoire, I should see a member of the Scottish fey folk? Was it an omen? And if so, was it ill or good?
After batting the idea back and forth, I went downstairs and quietly telefoned the Museum of the Literary Occult and asked for Mr. Anstruther.
It seemed quite a time before he got on the line and I remembered, belatedly, that he would still be in the middle of the private showing of the Botolf Grimoire.
"Yes, Mr. Bliss?" he asked at last, impatiently.
"I apologize for disturbing you. I need to ask something, though."
"Well?"
"Why me? I mean in particular? Why choose me to try and locate the -- it?" At the last instant I recognized the danger of speaking the grimoire's name aloud. "There would have to be any number of people better suited to this kind of thing."
"Nonsense. You're ideally suited. Your discovery of the Botolf memoirs."
He went on talking, but I stopped listening. While it was true that I had, technically, recovered the Botolf memoirs and arranged for their publication, it wasn't quite the impressive story it had seemed in the articles I'd written. Well, that was partly dramatic license. The real story was fairly dull, and who wanted to read about a lonely old woman handing over a box of private papers to her equally lonely young lodger?
I said, when he seemed to be slowing down, "But that wasn't the same kind of thing at all, Mr. Anstruther. For one thing, the Botolf memoirs weren't really lost, only.misplaced. And for another, Botolf has only been dead sixty years. You're asking me to find something that has been missing for nearly six hundred."
"You're backing out?" he demanded harshly.
Was I?
When I didn't answer, he coaxed, "Go to Scotland, Mr. Bliss. Poke around; see what you turn up. Either way you'll have your article or even your next book perhaps -- and we will have our curiosity satisfied. And perhaps you will turn up a new lead."
The old man knew the right buttons to press, all right. What scholar of antiquities didn't hope to uncover some long lost artifact? Say it: treasure.
"I don't suppose it would hurt to poke around a little," I conceded finally.
"Excellent!" Once again he was all warmth and cordiality. "The fact that someone of your caliber will oversee the adventure will be something -- to have our questions at long last answered. Does that make sense?"
Not really, but.oh well, what the devil.
"Very well. If you're sure you want me for this." I prepared to disconnect, but Anstruther said suddenly, "Mr. Bliss!"
I paused at the urgency of his tone. "I'm still here."
"You asked why no one else had been asked to undertake this.quest. The truth of the matter is we did hire someone else. Briefly."
"Who?" I asked with foreboding.
Anstruther sidestepped, saying instead, "You know, there's no danger in this quest, no threat to you, no peril in it at all. It's an academic endeavor that's all. We -- Lady Lavenham and I -- wish to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. If we believed there was any risk, we would not.fund such a venture. We're not adventurers or treasure hunters, you know."
I withheld comment.
Into my waiting silence, Anstruther admitted, "However, we did interview a few people before you came to our attention with those articles on your discovery of the Botolf memoirs. We knew at once that you were the right person for this job. It requires someone of imagination and.delicacy."
Delicacy? Not something we're often accused of in the colonies.
Anstruther was still talking in that awkward, stilted way. "One of these people was most unsuitable."
"Unsuitable how?"
"Would you happen to know of a woman named Irania Briggs?"
"I don't think so. Who is she?"
"She's a -- It's difficult to know how to describe her."
Never an endorsement.
Anstruther seemed to settle on, "She's an oddball. An eccentric."
Well, it took one to know one.
Before I could interject anything, he added, "I might as well not beat around the bush. She's a villainess. A good old-fashioned adventuress -- and crook. They say she murdered her lover, Lord Rockinghill."
"Did she?"
"Probably. It doesn't matter. She knows her stuff."
The stuff, it appeared, that a crook and a murderess would know. I asked, "And she is also now looking for The Sword's Shadow?"
"Unfortunately, yes. Don't worry. She doesn't know the second half of the story. She can't know about Ivan Mago and the attempt to purchase the grimoire by Agro Urquhart's lady. As far as she knows, the grimoire disappeared five hundred and seventy- two years ago after the Battle of the Standing Stones. But she has a sort of instinct -- yes, that's the word. An uncanny instinct for the beautiful and rare and powerful."
"Is she magus?"
"No. No, a more nonmagickal, earthly creature you couldn't hope to find. She's a book dealer. Mostly old books and rare books, but strictly -- at least up until now -- nonveneficus."
"What's her interest in the -- it?"
"Lavinia -- Lady Lavenham -- and I consulted her early on. She has an instinct for these things, as I said, but we quickly realized we needed to bring on someone with an academic background. The original idea was Irania would work with that person."
"So we're working together?"
"No."
"No?"
"Irania has many contacts, many resources, but the more we considered the matter, the more uneasy we became. She's been involved in too many shady transactions. Nothing proved, you understand, but.upon further reflection we realized it would be most unwise to bring in someone with a criminal background."
"I thought nothing was proved?"
"Where there's smoke, there's fire."
"So she's out of it now?"
"Yes. Except.we thought we should warn you."
I repeated carefully, "Warn me?"
"Since she's liable to take an interest."
My stomach dropped. "Does Irania -- Miss Briggs -- know she's out of it?"
"Er.no."
"And when she does know she's liable to decide to proceed on her own?"
"Er.it's possible. Not probable, but.we can hardly stop her. It's not as though we own the rights to Faileas a' Chlaidheimh." He seemed to run out of words. It took me time to find some of my own.
"And you think she might prove.dangerous?"
"No, no!" Anstruther was practically squawking with alarm. "No, no! Nothing like that."
All these noes seemed to mean something very different.
"In any case, Irania's had some legal difficulties recently and is not likely to be traveling. She would have to invite someone in as a partner, and given that she's most untrusting, most suspicious minded, that's quite unlikely."
I had so many questions I wasn't sure where to start. I could ask for no clearer indication that I needed to withdraw from this project. Yet my uppermost thought was that if this Irania Briggs, with her instinct for the beautiful and rare and powerful, was still concerning herself with this hunt for the Faileas a' Chlaidheimh, it was an indication that it did exist.
And my excitement that the grimoire might be real far outweighed my concern that so might a threat from the mysterious Irania Briggs.
Mr. Anstruther concluded, "So it seems to me, Mr. Bliss, that the sooner you make your traveling arrangements, the better." He put the receiver down with a faint but definite click.
* * * * *
"Marx said you failed to attend the viewing for the Botolf memoirs," Basil said, when I saw him the next morning.
Basil, Antony's younger brother, was the procurator of Leslie's Lexicons and my immediate supervisor. He was my height, a little stocky, with pale blue eyes and sharp features. He looked like a watered-down version of Antony. Less hair, more teeth -- and minus the charm.
I said, "I felt unwell."
"That's not what you told Marx."
"No, it's not. I didn't think it was his business why I chose to leave."
This offended Basil, although I knew for a fact he was resentful of Marx's position and equally supercilious attitude. "As a high-ranking officer within the Societas Magicke, Marx is your superior," he said.
"I can't help it if I felt ill. Of course I didn't want to advertise the fact."
Basil continued to eye me suspiciously from behind the barrier of his large and immaculate desk. Basil's office was not the largest, but it was by far the tidiest space at Leslie's Lexicons. A fact he was inordinately, in my opinion, proud of. "I can't think why they invited you in the first place. It's very difficult to get an invitation to the museum's private viewings. All but impossible."
"There's no mystery. They invited me because of the articles I wrote about the Botolf memoirs."
"Yes. The memoirs." Basil gave me a chilly smile. He'd made it clear from our first introduction that he thought my "discovery" of the memoirs was a fluke. And since he was largely right, I resented him in equal measure.
"Was there anything else?" I inquired.
"No. Today you'll be transcribing the text from Professor Paradise's fourth volume."
All at once, I'd had enough. "Basil, I'm not a librireddo. I'm a book hunter. Why am I stuck here doing translations and transcriptions? Why won't you ever send me out in the field?"
Basil actually smiled, as though I had finally fulfilled some expectation by balking. "You're not ready."
"I'm a fully accredited librivenator. I've been successfully book hunting for over three years."
"That was in the colonies. You would never have been accredited here. I'm not absolutely convinced you would qualify as a librireddo, if I may be blunt, but we'll train you to the best of our ability while you're with us."
I straightened. "Are you telling me you're never going to send me out into the field?"
He didn't have to consider his answer. It was obvious to me that he'd been waiting for me to ask so that he could put me in my place once and for all. "Correct. For the year you're with us, you'll train as a librireddo. What you do once you return to your home base is up to you and your superiors." It was clear from his tone he thought my superiors were mad enough to do anything.
There were rumors about this, of course. Rumors of snobbery and bipartisan treatment of colonial exchange officers at the London bureau. But I'd never heard of anyone being told they were unfit for service and being relegated to another position.
"Does Antony know about this?" I asked, and despite everything, my voice wobbled.
"I am in charge of day-to-day operations at the library," Basil said loftily. "But in answer to your question, yes. Of course Antony knows. And concurs."
I would dearly have loved to pop him right in his well-fed, smug, smiling face. I was too angry to think of anything very smart to say and only managed a short, "I see."
"Good. Then as we both have busy days ahead of us.?"
He picked up an envelope addressed in brown ink, and I turned to walk out of his office -- and crashed right into someone walking in.
Hard hands closed on my upper arms, which is probably all that kept me from bouncing back into Basil's office on my ass.
Septimus Marx's deep voice said, "Whatever did you forget this time? The lights? The bathwater?"
I tore free, muttered an apology, and kept walking.
Back in my own office, I took a couple of turns around the small room and did my best to cool down. I was so angry that my first thought was to contact my own bureau chief back in Boston. All at once I was fiercely homesick for humble Blackie's Books and my own friends and family. Perhaps I should simply ask to come home? Not everyone was cut out for exchange programs.
But that was probably exactly what Basil wanted: for me to quit, to turn tail and run home.
And if I fled, what about the Faileas a' Chlaidheimh?
Yes, what about that?
I sat down at my cluttered desk and stared thoughtfully out the round window at the summer's day. The sweet chestnut trees were in golden bloom, and the heavy fragrance drifted through the open window and cut the dry scent of the fungi spores that seemed to permeate this building -- the perfume of old books. As angry and offended as I was that I was not being allowed to do my job as a librivenator, if I gave into those injured feelings and left for home, I'd be passing on the challenge of a lifetime. By which I did not mean translating the prolific Professor Paradise's excruciatingly dull fourth volume.
Whereas before I had felt vaguely uneasy, now the memory of yesterday's strange meeting with the curators of the Museum of the Literary Occult soothed me. I needed to get away from Leslie's Lexicons, and since Basil had basically told me I was worse than useless, he could hardly object to my using some of my accumulated holiday leave.
As I considered the practicalities, my heart stopped jumping in my chest, I stopped shaking, my anger and hurt drained away. Fine. Let them have it their way, then. I had better things to do than sit here transcribing the near-illegible notes of an eighteenth-century illusionist.
Feeling much calmer, I left my office and went downstairs to the main book floor, heading for the history section. I browsed quickly, selected a couple of titles on Scotland, and returned to my desk.
There were a numerous brief entries on Agro Urquhart. He had been a mighty warrior chosen by the Scottish king Donnie Large to rule the wild Western Isles after the Sodreys chieftain had been defeated and killed in battle. There were the usual legends about Urquhart's military exploits. He had proved victorious against the giants of Manx and the rock men of the border. He and a small band of his men had twice eluded the hounds of the Wild Hunt. These stories might have been true, or they might not. It didn't seem to me that magick played much of a role in Urquhart's life. He had encountered the veneficus, of course -- who had not? But he was no practitioner and did not even employ a magician by all accounts. In fact, he was viewed as being largely responsible for the rise of the cult of Christianity in the islands.
At least before his marriage.
Two years after he was granted the rule of the Western Isles, he married an island woman who went by the name of Swanhild. Swanhild was no island name -- and I could find no surname -- so I surmised the woman had been descended from the previous Sodreys landlords. It would be Swanhild who, according to Mr. Anstruther and Lady Lavenham, had arranged for the purchase of the grimoire from the mainland magician Ivan Mago.
Why? Was Swanhild a witch?
There seemed to be no information on her at all, and in fact, it appeared that little more than one year later Urquhart had married again, this time to a young woman from his own mainland clan. This second union had borne two children. The boy had died before manhood. The daughter had married and ruled briefly after Agro Urquhart's death.
What had happened to Swanhild? There was no mention of her death. No mention of her at all beyond the fact that she had married a great warrior -- and that she had once, vainly, tried to buy a famous and powerful book of spells. But even that last was not mentioned in the history books. I only had Lady Lavenham's and Mr. Anstruther's word for it.
If I wanted to dig further -- investigate how the book might have ended up in the hands of Ivan Mago, for example -- I would have to access the records of the Imperial Arcane Libraries, and I was hesitant to do so. Maybe I was paranoid, but I now suspected Basil might be having me watched. Not because he had any inkling of what I was up to, but because, thinking me as inept as he apparently did, he was unlikely to trust me with the most valuable and rare tomes.
Ironically I might have to do my research at the Museum of the Literary Occult.
"You seem to be in a better mood," a familiar voice said from the doorway of my office.
I jerked my head up, hauled without warning back to unpleasant reality. Septimus Marx stood in my doorway.
© Josh Lanyon, April 2010
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