Posted by Even though only four people are actually reading this, the Hooded Hood presents this last slice in the wartime adventures of Sir Mumphrey Wilton for now, until he feels like writing some more on July 04, 2001 at 13:13:08:
Part the Eighth: Camellia of Fey and the Dormaggadon Exchange
The old natural leys
in which the life-energies of the planet coursed had long been disrupted by the
diggings and buildings of man; but in Paradopolis those disruptions had been
with a purpose, and under the hidden sinister genius of city father Wilbur
Parody the telluric forces had been dammed and focussed in certain places.
“Auggh!” the doorman at the Halfway Hotel on the Sheldon waterfront screamed
as Miss Canterbury stabbed him with her brooch-pin. The werewolves leaped out on Sir Mumphrey but found him somehow prepared for
their attack, and with seemingly-lightning reflexes he shot each of them once in
the chest. “So what you’re saying is that when Sir Mumphrey learns of the reasons for
the summoning then he’ll have no choice but to step aside and let the ritual
continue?” Miss Canterbury summarised. She allowed herself a secret little
smile. “Somehow I don’t think so.” “Quite a night,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton said to Miss Canterbury. To be continued…
One of those was the Paradopolis Central Rail Terminal. After all, from
there shining steel rails ran out across the whole continent, offering the keen
occultist both a mystical power source and a modern delivery system. The
constant transit of travellers in the marble-clad station above, one or two of
whom could always disappear without trace, was merely another added
advantage.
“This is as far as I can take you,” the Abyssal Greye, one of the
scholar-ghouls of Gothametropolis warned Sir Mumphrey Wilton. “I hate noise and
fuss. You’ll find the occultists on platform five, where they are hoping to
perform some loathsome rituals to open a doorway and infuse themselves with the
essence of a rather nasty beastie called the Dread Dormaggadon. I believe there
are runaway orphans involved in the transaction and that sort of
thing.”
“Hmph,” hmphed the Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity, “Sounds as
if the ungodly require a firm reprimand.” He reached into his pocket, checked
the ammunition in his Webley service revolver, and went to buy a platform
ticket.
“So it’s true,” the
vicar’s daughter noted. “Faeries don’t react well to cold iron.. Now step aside
please, we need to speak with your mistress.”
“Frail mortal wench, I shall
rend your soul for that, and… aaagh!”
“Iron filings,” Miss Canterbury
explained. “There’s more where that came from. Would you please step aside now
or do I need to start using the hard stuff?”
The Manager of the exclusive
resort hotel appeared as if from nowhere. “What’s going on?” Mr Oxalis demanded.
“Who are you?”
“Names are power,” Miss Canterbury told him. “Let’s just say
I’m the woman with the flatiron in her handbag, and I’m here for a few
answers.”
“I see,” Mr Oxalis frowned. He twisted his huge bearded face into a
polite semblance. “Then we must do our best to accommodate you. Please do come
in. Would you care for something to drink?”
Miss Canterbury and her companion
accepted the chairs they were offered in the reception area. “Not from fairies,
I think,” Miss Canterbury smiled politely. “Now I want to know why you’ve been
encouraging these Dormaggadon-worshippers to steal children and do nasty things
with railway lines.”
“And why should we have anything to do with that?” Mr
Oxalis wondered.
Miss Canterbury scrutinised him closely. “You know, now that
I look, I don’t think that you are Lady Camellia, leader of the fey in this
place from what I hear,” she observed. “At least not unless you’ve really been
letting yourself go. Please ask her to appear so that she can make her own
feeble excuses.”
“Have a care, maiden,” an ice-cold woman’s voice spoke from
Miss Canterbury’s left ear. “You are not as protected as you think, and you will
yet dance to our tune. And what an amusing little broken gavotte it will
be.”
“Camellia of the House of Camellia,” Miss Canterbury surmised. “So why
are you causing all this nastiness?”
“For fun,” the belle dame sans merci
answered. “And in self-defence. You surely approve of patriotism, Miss
Canterbury?”
“Patriotism?” If Miss Canterbury was startled at the fey knowing
her name she didn’t show it. “Self-defence? What do you mean?”
“Why Miss
Canterbury,” Camellia smiled most charmingly (but not too charmingly given the
rowan twig in Miss Canterbury’s buttonhole), “we are helping those cultists save
democracy from the Nazi threat, and saving the free world.”
“Fool!” the High Priest of Dormaggadon gloated. “Normal bullets
can’t harm…”
“Give me some credit for not being a complete amateur,” Mumphrey
chided him as the four lycanthropes fell dead on the ground and shifted back to
human form. “Silver ammunition is de rigeur for these occasions. And holy
water, of course,” he added, splashing the creature that had just formed up from
the mists behind him. “Asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to mix this lot up for
me a while back, just in case.”
The High Priest raised his runestaff and
unleashed a Vile Curse of Shredding upon the intruding Englishman. Mumphrey
timeshifted it forward to a time when he wouldn’t be around to receive it.
“And d’y’know the best thing about silver bullets?” Mumph smiled
unpleasantly, orienting his Webley on his adversary. “They work on slimy
child-kidnappin’ cultists as well.”
“Shoot, and you doom your country,” the
High Priest warned. “And this nation, and all who stand against the power raised
by the Axis alliance.”
Sir Mumphrey held his fire. “What d’you mean, sirrah?”
he demanded.
“I mean that we’re performing a ritual of defence, you fool,”
sneered the High Priest. “In exchange for a few paltry lives that nobody cares
about anyway, our master Dormaggadon will protect this nation from the
aggression of the Nazis, both magical and mundane. What are a few meaningless
sacrifices to keep our land free and safe?”
“You… you’re fighting the Nazis
with this ritual?”
“Of course. Do you think either our cult or the House of
Camellia or any of the other hidden clans would prosper under Nazi rule? Now
step aside and let us do our part in our mutual defence. It is a necessary
evil.”
“To fight the enemy we must become the enemy, sort of thing?” Sir
Mumphrey checked. “Victory at any cost, even eternal debt to your demon lord?
Not in my book, you bounders. Better to lose cleanly than win and not deserve
the victory, what? Now let those children go.”
The High Priest looked at his
adversary in disbelief. “You’re going to kill us, even thought that means the
Nazis will win?”
“Of course not,” Mumphrey assured them. “I’m going to shoot
you in the kneecaps.”
Lady Camellia’s serene beauty cracked a
little as she saw the faith in the young woman’s mind. “He… he wouldn’t stop
it.”
“Oh, I think he would,” Miss Canterbury assured her. “Why else do you
think Mr Faust would pick him for the job, over all those other possible heroes
he could have inveigled into the mission?”
Camellia and Mr Oxalis exchanged
worried looks.
“Well, thank you for clarifying all of that for me,” Miss
Canterbury told them, rising from her seat. “I must be off to meet Sir Mumphrey
and get on with our own little adventure. I trust you will think twice before
attempting anything like this again, knowing that you are being watched to make
sure you behave yourselves.”
“Oh, we shall be much more careful in future,”
Camellia promised. “But what makes you think you are leaving us, Miss
Canterbury? Now, or ever?”
“All that iron and rowan stuff might work on the
lesser faeries,” Mr Oxalis warned, “but I think you will find the noble clan a
different and stronger breed.”
“Then it’s a good job I wasn’t depending on
that then, isn’t it?” Miss Canterbury told them. “I don’t think I introduced my
companion, who asked me to visit here with him, and who has been diverting your
attention from himself since we arrived. Lady Camellia, Mr Oxalis, this is Mr
Lucius Faust, sorcerer supreme and master of the mystic crafts.”
“Greetings,”
scowled the archmage.
“Yes,” she
agreed. “And then there was the stuff with the ghouls and the cultists and the
fairies as well.”
“Still, at least we stopped the baddies and got Faust to
tell us who could break that code in Bertam’s instructions for us,” the
Englishman noted.
Then a hush fell over the breakfast room as frightened
anxious staff turned up the wireless so that everybody could hear the
announcement which was coming over the airwaves: “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 - a
date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and
deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan…”