What Stalks the Deep (Sworn Soldier #3)

1

S o this was America. Fresh off the war with Spain, which was all that anybody was talking about.

Guam. Everyone on the ship over had been full of opinions about Guam.

Several people asked my opinion “as a military man.” They were wrong about the man part, but the thought of explaining Gallacia’s sworn soldiers to a boatload of Americans was so exhausting that I needed a gin and tonic just to contemplate it, and a second one to decide that explaining would be a bad idea.

As for Guam, my opinion was that it was probably a fine place and the weather was undoubtedly better than in Gallacia.

I developed the habit of smiling down into my gin and tonic and saying that I had never been to Guam, and so wouldn’t presume to know more than the people on the ground there.

This had the advantage of being true, and also generally made at least one other person in the conversation look like an absolute tit.

And if I passed our days at sea having gin and tonics and no opinions about Guam, that meant I was definitely not worrying about the telegram that I had been sent by my American friend, Dr. James Denton.

BEGGING YOU TO COME WITH ALL HASTE STOP NEED YOUR HELP STOP brING ANGUS STOP

If it had been anyone other than Denton, I would have sent back another telegram to the effect of “What the devil is the problem stop?” but Denton and I had faced down horrors together two years prior, and I knew that he had a cool head and was, if anything, far more skeptical than I was.

If he thought he needed my help, then I would damn well come and help him.

Also, he included two tickets to Boston.

(Also, my sister was going to have another child and while I think babies are fine in the abstract, my sister has a regrettable belief that if I just hold one long enough, I will come to enjoy it.

I will not. I have proven this to my own satisfaction, but apparently not to hers, and America seemed like an excellent alternative.

Land of opportunity, they say, which presumably includes the opportunity not to hold a baby.)

I say this all very flippantly, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t much care for the telegram.

Not that I objected to Denton asking for my help—far from it.

There are some experiences that bond people together more closely than blood, and the nightmare we’d faced had been one of them. If he needed my help, I’d come.

No, what bothered me was the idea that whatever trouble Denton was in, it was the sort of trouble that required Angus and me to cross an ocean. As if, given the entire North American continent to draw from, Denton needed the two people he knew with experience in nightmares.

I tried not to dwell on it, and instead lost myself in listening to people be wrong about Guam. It almost worked.

Our ship steamed into Boston on a brisk October morning.

The sun was shining, the water was relatively calm for the season, and the air smelled only slightly of brine and dead fish.

Our crossing had been uneventful, our docking equally so.

The jaws of the wharf closed over our ship and held it fast. The streets of Boston looked like the streets of any other port town I’ve encountered.

It could have been London or Hamburg. Make half the people darker and half the walls lighter, and you could be in Barcelona or Istanbul.

Skin and stone changes, but not much else does.

There are always children pelting around and harried-looking men moving cargo into wagons and a few extremely worried men who do not have cargo and don’t know why and a dozen horses looking bored and one horse looking like it is about to go on a rampage and a couple of lost passengers huddled together like a clutch of baby chicks.

Inevitably, a vendor is trying to sell something to one or more of these groups, except possibly the horses.

The familiarity was oddly comforting. In general I rather like Americans—they’re usually so terribly earnest—but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit nervous. One American can really fill a room. I assume it only takes a hundred or so to really fill a country.

A man threaded his way through this mess, avoiding the vendor, and approached us. He was fine-boned and neatly dressed, like a small bird wearing a clean, unassuming suit.

“You must be Lieutenant Easton,” he said, shaking first my hand and then Angus’s. “I’m Kent, Dr. Denton’s assistant. I’m to see you to the hotel where you’ll be meeting him and Mr. Ingold.”

“Lead on, then,” I said, trading a look with Angus. We don’t shake hands in Gallacia, but Americans are completely mad for it, and you can’t refuse or they get this confused, somewhat hurt look. I resigned myself to shaking a great many hands in the next few weeks.

Kent secured a cab. Angus and I hefted our luggage onto the roof. “Is that all?” asked Kent. “No more trunks? No equipment?”

“We travel light,” I said, wondering what sort of equipment he expected me to bring. Angus had the rifle case. Did that count as equipment? Or did he think that all Europeans were like the upper-class Brits, and had five different outfits for each meal of the day?

(Come to think of it, maybe Americans did that, too.

If so, thank God I’d brought one of my dress uniforms. You can always get away with wearing a dress uniform instead of formalwear.

Although Denton had never struck me as a formalwear type.

Someone who would help you finish off a fungal abomination that had taken over your childhood friend, yes.

Someone who wore a tuxedo with tails to dinner, not so much.)

Our cab left the docks, trotting past rows of horse-drawn streetcars.

We don’t have those in Gallacia. Then again, we don’t have that much flat ground in Gallacia.

It is a very small country made of very large mountains.

We grow turnips and sheep, but our primary export is people who want to get the hell away from it.

I was farther away now than I’d ever been. “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what this is all about?” I asked Kent.

Kent folded his hands neatly on his knee. “I am certain that Dr. Denton will explain everything when you arrive.”

So much for that. Angus might have been able to get more out of him, if they’d been alone and doing the “Oh yeah? Well, my boss once made me carry kan ten miles in the snow because ka was too cheap to hire a horse!” dance, but it didn’t look like we’d have time.

We eventually reached a medium-sized hotel. Kent paid the driver and helped Angus pull down the luggage, and we followed him inside.

“That is a lot of mauve,” I said, after a moment of stunned silence.

The wallpaper was mauve, the carpet that stretched across the marble floor was mauve, the draperies were mauve, the upholstery was mauve, and the pillows scattered on the furniture were mauve with gold tassels.

I suddenly knew how a bee must feel with its head buried in a mallow flower.

Kent waved to the front desk and a man came out from behind it, wearing a mauve tie.

He shook our hands and said that it was the hotel’s great pleasure to serve us.

He clapped his hands and summoned a bellhop, dressed from head to toe in mauve, who took our luggage.

I wondered if the bellhops ever stood up against the walls for camouflage.

The hotel man shook our hands again and pressed our keys into them at the same time, in a skilled maneuver that I assume required years of experience.

“Dr. Denton is waiting for you in the dining room,” said Kent, herding us efficiently to one side of the lobby.

We entered the dining room, which had mauve tablecloths, and I spotted my old friend Denton, who, thank Christ, was wearing a dark brown suit and no mauve at all.

He rose to his feet and shook our hands. “Easton. Angus. I’m so glad you agreed to come.”

“From the tone of your telegram, I expected you to be hip-deep in live wasps,” I said, “not dining at such a ... ah ... colorful establishment.”

“We’ll get to the wasps in a moment,” said Denton. “May I introduce my friend, Mr. John Ingold? John, this is Lieutenant Alex Easton and Angus ... ah ... forgive me, it occurs to me that I don’t actually know your full name.”

“No one does,” said Angus gruffly.

I hid a smile. Angus has been with me since I was a scrawny fourteen-year-old with a shaved head and bound breasts who barely knew which end to hold a gun by.

In all that time, I had never learned if Angus was his first or last name or where he came from originally.

If he ever wants me to know, I imagine he’ll tell me.

“Pleasure to meet you both,” said John Ingold, reaching across the table to shake our hands.

He had the tan skin and straight black hair that I associate with the native people of the continent, and when he opened his mouth, his Boston accent was so thick that you could stand a spoon up in it.

(Yes, we know about Boston accents in Gallacia.

We’re backward, but we do occasionally meet people.)

(Okay, fine, I met a Bostonian in Paris once.)

The waiter approached. I half expected him to go in for a handshake as well, but he merely asked for our orders, then retreated into the mauve distance.

“So,” I said, putting my elbows on the table and looking at Denton. “What has you so concerned?”

Denton rubbed his face. “It’s a mess,” he said.

“Dark doings,” Ingold added. The way he pronounced dark as dahhhk was so pure that I had an involuntary urge to snatch up the teapot and find a harbor to dump it in.

“My cousin Oscar’s gone missing,” said Denton. “We grew up together, and we were in very regular correspondence until his letters stopped three weeks ago. I sent an additional two letters, and then went to West Virginia myself to try to find him.”

I settled back against the exceedingly mauve cushions. “I’m sorry to hear it, but you must know, Denton, that I’m no kind of detective.”

“No, of course not.” Denton shook his head. “I know exactly where he vanished. He was investigating an abandoned coal mine outside of Shaversville. That’s what I need you to help me with.”

“I’ve never been in a coal mine in my life,” I protested.

“I have,” said Angus. “In Limburg. Was dark as the pit and we had to walk bent over.”

We all waited politely for him to say anything more, but this seemed to have exhausted Angus’s store of coal mine information. Denton coughed. “At any rate, it’s your experience with ... unusual ... circumstances that I need.”

I raised an eyebrow. Angus raised both of his.

“You mean like what we saw at Usher’s lake,” I said flatly.

“Because I’ll tell you, that was the first time I’ve dealt with anything like that.

” (Sadly it was not the last, but what had happened a year ago in Gallacia was not something I wanted to dwell on.)

“The first time for me, too,” said Denton.

He looked suddenly weary and much older than I remembered.

“But you did deal with it, and you know there are terrible things in the earth. If you encounter another one, you won’t waste time insisting that there must be a different explanation or that I’m lying to you or that none of this can possibly be happening. ”

Terrible things in the earth. Yes. Denton and I had seen a terrible thing in the earth and ended it, with the help of Angus and a brilliant Englishwoman who knew everything worth knowing about mushrooms. The only reason that I slept at night was because we had destroyed it. I did not want there to be another one.

“Another fungus?” I asked sharply.

Denton drank down his whiskey and signaled for another one. Ingold watched me, his arms folded, and I wondered how much Denton had told him about what we saw in the tarn.

“Not a fungus,” Denton said, when the waiter had left again. “At least, I don’t think so. But more lights in the deep.”