behind the desk, watching her, sat an elderly man with a crisp Vandyke beard, white threaded with black. He was sitting perfectly still. When he saw that she had finally noticed him, he smiled slightly.
She stared at him. While his face was normal, almost kindly, his staring eyes were totally black from lid to lid.
He wore a strange machine on his body. His arms and hands were encased to just above the elbow in metal plating that was ingeniously crafted to fit together as precisely as the scales of a snake. Flexible rubber tubes ran backward from the wrists of the gauntlets to two glass bottles that were fastened to his back by thick leather straps. Emily could not see what was in the bottles, but whatever it was glowed, illuminating the back of the chair in which he sat.
The man sat forward slowly. His chair creaked, and the armoring around his hands and arms clanked faintly. He looked Emily up and down.
“Where am I?” Emily’s voice caught on the words.
“You’re in Charleston, South Carolina,” the man answered, his words lightly accented in French. “And you are in the offices of a company called Baugh’s Patent Magicks.”
Baugh’s Patent Magicks? The establishment that had almost run her and Pap out of business in Lost Pine? Emily’s apprehension was buried momentarily under astonishment.
“Are you Baugh?”
The old man looked at her quizzically. Then comprehension dawned on his face and he chuckled.
“Oh, yes. Baugh. I’m afraid there never really was a Baugh. Or rather, there was, but I only had the pleasure of his acquaintance for a very short time. He met with an accident. He bled to death.” The old man’s black eyes narrowed. “I am Rene, Comte d’Artaud.”
“All right, that’s who you are,” she breathed, “but what are you? A sangrimancer, like Caul?”
Artaud made a face.
“No, I am not a Warlock,” he said. “I am a consultant. An expert. I happen to have a large contract with the United States Government.” He gestured toward her arm. “The stone in your hand is going to help me fulfill it.”
“What kind of expert are you?”
“I am an expert in power,” Artaud said. “The finding of it, the refinement of it, and the extraction of it. The stone has so very much power locked inside it, and Captain Caul felt I was just the man to get it out.” He cocked his head. “Where is Captain Caul, anyway?”
The question seemed easy, but Emily had to think about it, sorting through her jumbled memories one by one. They were horrible images, edged with steel …
The Great Trine Room. A black-handled knife. Blood.
Caul and Stanton, battling for ownership of the Great Trine over Mirabilis’ gory corpse. The memory made Emily breathe in sharply. Stanton had to win, she thought. He had to. She looked up at Artaud, teeth clenched.
“Caul is dead,” Emily spat, putting all the force of her belief into the words.
“Oh, I doubt that,” Artaud said. “But I was counting on him to retrieve that Otherwhere Marble device.”
“Well, he didn’t.” Emily lifted her ghost hand and waved it in his face spitefully. “That means you’ll never get the stone.”
Artaud shook his head and sighed extravagantly. Lifting a hand, he leveled one of his metal-scaled fingers at her. Light massed around his metal-clad hand, nacreous and pale, and flashed in a bright bolt toward her. Flames engulfed her body, scalding along every nerve ending with brilliant agony. Emily shrieked and writhed, her fists clenching involuntarily, her muscles spasming in torturous unison.
The pain subsided after an eternity. Emily lay on the floor, breathing hard, her muscles twitching. She moaned, fighting the humiliating urge to sob like a child.
“You see, ma petite, that’s where you’re wrong.” Artaud was standing over her, looking down at her, his black eyes flat as scuffed obsidian. “It just means it will take longer and hurt more.”
Artaud pushed her down a hall that was hung with advertising posters for Baugh products. His metal-sheathed hand was clamped around the back of her neck, its strength obviously reinforced by whatever strange power the gauntlets possessed. The little shoves he gave her were made painfully insistent by the shocking jolts he delivered with them. Every time his cold metallic hand pressed against her flesh, she winced, cringing.
“It’s really too annoying, leaving me in the lurch like this,” Artaud muttered as they walked, punctuating angry words with twinging shocks. “All this dirty business simply isn’t in my scope of work. Well, if I must, I must. Warlocks!”