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CHAPTER 16


Couple months into the second semester at Oxford I got a visit from MI4.

“Is sir in?” Remi asked.

It was winter in England. Most people hate English winters. After two years in New Orleans, I loved the rain and the cold. But it wasn’t weather to leave people on the doorstep. On the other hand…

“Depends on who is calling upon sir,” I said, turning over some notes I’d found regarding the second Dutch expedition to destroy the Indonesian mava. They were internal memos of the Dutch colonial administration. I had to wonder how Oxford came up with them. I’d also had to learn Dutch but, eh, Dutch, Deutsch, whatever.

“They would not vouchsafe their identities, sir, but I would tend to surmise members of Her Majesty’s government,” Remi replied. “Some version of MCB would be most likely, sir.”

“MI4,” I said with a sigh. “Please tell me they made it as far as the parlor and are not on the stoop.”

“I rather considered sending them to the servant’s entrance, sir.” He’d had to nurse me back to health after the beatdown and wasn’t favoring government entities at the moment.

“Show them in, Remi. We’re playing nice with these assholes.”

* * *

“Mr. Gardenier,” the lead officer said, shaking my hand. “Senior Officer Gordon and Officer Frye, MI4.”

Senior Officer Gordon was short and stocky with thinning hair and a multiply-broken nose. His suit was rumpled and he was wearing a trench coat that reminded me vaguely of that Columbo character on TV. He looked more like one of those long-term London street bobbies who’d somehow wandered into being a detective and had the confused look you’d expect.

I was going to be watching him very carefully. You didn’t become a “senior officer” of MI4, equivalent to an MCB special agent, if you were dumb.

Frye was Briscoe with a few years on him. Medium height, brown eyes, shaved head, very wide shoulders, Popeye forearms. Clearly some sort of Brit special operations background.

I shook his hand too and gestured to matching wing-backed chairs.

“Nice place,” Frye said, looking around.

The small mansion had come complete with decorations.

“Rental. Not as nice as my one in New Orleans. You know that. To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit by England’s Finest?”

“I hear you’re an expert on Gnoll,” Gordon said.

“I’ve written a dictionary on North American Gnoll,” I said, shrugging. “The expert is probably Dr. Witherspoon-Bunders. But…”

“He’s retired,” Gordon said. “We need a Gnoll expert who’s still capable of fieldwork.”

“Why?”

“There are various immigrant Fey groups turning up in England,” Frye said. “Mostly refugees from Eastern Europe. We don’t have language with all of them. In some cases even our contacts in the same species don’t have language in common with some of them.”

“Stuff’s coming in from the hills hasn’t been seen in a thousand years,” Gordon said, growling. “It’s worse on the Continent but we’ve got our fair share.”

“Something’s hunting gnolls in Manchester,” Frye said. “Normally we don’t bother with…supernatural internal disputes. But it’s spilling over to humans.”

“Killing them or eating them?”

“Killing them,” Gordon said. “What would eat a gnoll?”

“Don’t ask a master’s candidate at Oxford a question like that,” I said, smiling. “Giant spiders come to mind. I take it you’ve autopsied the humans. Cause of death?”

“Unknown,” Frye said. “Best our doctors can say is heart failure. No wounds, no toxins, soul was not stripped. No clear indicators of death magic. You’re aware that there is a spiritual mark left from something like, say, a voodoo doll?”

“I work in New Orleans,” I said drily. “Normally.”

“All of them just…died from natural causes. Same apparent cause of death in the gnolls. However, given the fact that one of the dead was a healthy twenty-three-year-old and there have been three sewer workers who died, all in the same four-block area, either it’s some sort of disease that’s spreading from the gnolls to humans or it’s the same supernatural entity.

“While some of the gnolls are Brit gnolls, ones we can communicate with, they don’t know what the entity is. They can’t even detect it. But they know, somehow, that another group knows what it is. That group, unfortunately, doesn’t have a common language and is very…clannish. We’re not even sure where they came from. They also have an ongoing territorial dispute with the local gnolls. The locals suspect they brought down this curse on them. We need to determine if that is the case and what the nature of the entity is. To do that, we need to talk to them, which we cannot do.”

“So you’re asking me to get the foreign gnolls to confess to murder,” I said. “I take it you’ll have the usual sort of response to that: Kill them all; God will know his own.”

“We just need to get the killings stopped,” Frye said. “And they need to know that there are rules about that sort of thing here. If some of them need to die to get that across, some of them need to die. But we need to find out what is causing the deaths.”

“So you’d like me to go up to Manchester and try to figure out their language, talk to them and find out what they know about this killing ‘thing,’” I said.

“He’s not as dumb as he looks,” Gordon said.

“Neither are you,” I said. “What you’re probably looking at is an incorporeal, given the cause of death. Some sort of wraith. I can see several potential issues to this mission. The first that springs to mind is whether you’re going to believe me if I say that it’s not the fault of the foreign gnolls. It’s possible it’s something that followed them here or they’re completely unconnected. Simple coincidence. As you noted, you’ve had various ‘ferenners’ coming over from the East. This could be part of that. The second that springs to mind is that I’m sure as hell not going on an op unarmed. And you Brits get all weanie about people being armed. The third is that assuming an incorporeal, we’re not only going to have to find out what it is, but how to destroy it. The gnolls may not know that. They’re not particularly into the occult per se. They don’t even have shamans.”

“From last to first,” Frye said, nodding. “Find out what it is and we’ll figure out how to destroy it. As to the second, we’ll send in a support team to cover you.”

“Nice knowing you gentlemen,” I said, standing up. “Remi will get your coats.”

“Look, you…” Gordon growled.

“Two issues,” I said. “First, gnolls under the best of circumstance are skittish. If they’re being hunted, they’re going to be even more skittish. One person is the best choice to make contact under those conditions. Second, the best way to protect a person is for them to protect themselves. Okay, more: I don’t know the backup team, and I am probably the least trusting person you’ve ever met. I’d need assurance that they’ll do their job if the shit hits the fan, and assurance that they’re competent to do it, and you can’t give me that. I’m not knocking your people, but I have a different view of what ‘competent’ means and even competence has different meanings. Are they going to follow my fire/no-fire order? You’ll notice I haven’t thrown in ‘how am I getting paid for this?’ I’m going to be armed for my own protection, I’m going to be either solo or with at most one other person at my back or you’ll need to find another linguist. As to my fee, I’ll accept standard rates for this sort of thing. Much less than I usually get paid, I’ll add. But the conditions are firm. I will be prepped for battle. Or find another linguist.”

“It is illegal to arm a foreign national for this sort of thing,” Frye said placatingly.

“It is illegal under British law to do more than half the sort of things that are your daily bread and butter,” I said, sitting down. “Ditto US law for the MCB. Strawman argument. Gentlemen, I’m not going to go all cowboy on your turf. I don’t know what sort of exaggerations you’ve been getting from MCB, but I am, generally, discreet, and when I am not, I have a damned good reason. So let’s work something out. Or find another linguist.”

“Wait,” Gordon said, holding up a hand to Frye. “We’ll work something out. As to the believability: you do know what we do for a living, right? This job is like the Mad Hatter’s bloody tea party. You have to believe ten impossible things before breakfast. So…we’ll arrange to get your toys. But only for this op. No wandering Oxford dressed for a bloody op.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Find out what’s killing people,” Gordon said. “We’ll detach Briscoe for your backup. He’s a good lad and steady. Give him some field experience in something other than monster killing. Find out what it is. We’ll probably know how to dispatch it and Bob’s your uncle.”

“Sure,” I said, grinning. “It’s always that easy.”

* * *

The next bit was making contact with the gnolls and learning their language. I wrote the details of how to do that already in the first memoir. So I’ll gloss over most of it. Because the enemy was more interesting.

Turned out the gnolls were from deep inside the Soviet Union. Their language was a gnollish variant of Permian. Not the geologic record, the tribal group. The Permian tribes are an offshoot of the Finnish-Ugric lingual group which is also called “Uralic.” In the human languages, there are about two hundred phonemes shared between several tribal languages, Finnish-Ugric-Permian and some with Samoyedic.

Before going to visit them I’d boned up on every known variant of Gnoll in Dr. Witherspoon-Bunders’ seminal Gnoll Dialects of the World. The man had to have had no sense of smell to collect all the variants he collected. But he had missed a few. Despite claiming that it was “a complete collection of all gnollish dialects with etymological tree,” he’d missed pretty much every type of Gnoll I’d ever dealt with. Really it should have been entitled “Gnoll dialects of England, France, Germany, and Scandinavia with a bit of rudimentary Finnish picked up thirdhand.” That is not everywhere that gnolls are found.

Fortunately, the Finnish section had some similarity and from there I was able to build enough of a basis to communicate. Took about a week.

The Permian gnoll tribe mostly hung out around Hulme Park, and Briscoe and I had many a fine adventure suiting up and clambering down into the sewers in the area. From time to time I’d have a lorry of garbage collected to make friends and get some intelligent—for gnolls—conversation. Finally I had the thing pieced together, and we arranged to meet up with Gordon and Frye again.

* * *

“Right,” I said, taking a pull on my beer. “Item the first. Not the fault of these gnolls. At least not directly.”

The nice thing about working with the English is unless you’re forced to go “downtown,” you can pretty much figure the meeting will be in a pub. The British, bless their tyrannical hearts, even have a pub in every police station. Right in there. No need to go out to get hammered. It’s better than Germany that way.

“So they say,” Gordon said.

“As I mentioned, trust and belief,” I said. “According to them, their tribe was cursed by a Baba Yaga a long time ago. Don’t ask me how long a long time is. They don’t have a calendar. In the time of their forefathers, before any living gnoll in the tribe. Gnoll average age is about two hundred, so long time. Best I got. The curse was to be haunted by some sort of specter. They leave gifts for it to keep it away. There’s probably been a certain amount of pilfering of food, drink and tobacco in the area as well. I’ve passed on the proper propitiation to the other gnolls so they’re not going to get killed anymore. But you’re either going to have to get the sewer workers to leave out some Guinness and Prince Albert along with their sandwiches or we’ve got to get rid of it.”

“What’s it called?” Frye asked. “We’re fairly good at this sort of pest control.”

“You’re joking right?” I said. “It’s called ub!tah po hahfack! All that means is ‘evil night spirit.’ It’s a previous unknown dialect of Gnoll, Officer Frye! There probably is a name for it. It is probably a recognized spirit. We might be able to figure it out. But just knowing what the gnolls call it isn’t much use. And it is definitely incorporeal. But that’s about as much as I could get. There’s not a lot of terms in their language for boogiemen.”

“I hate this sort of crap,” Gordon said.

“Tell me about it,” I said, sighing.

“This is a Finnish-Ugric linguistic group, yes?” Briscoe said.

“Yes,” I said, shrugging. “Gnoll variant but yes.”

“Then will their ‘boogiemen’ be Finnish-Ugric as well?” Briscoe asked.

“Possibly,” I said, frowning. “There’s only one battle cry at this point, gentlemen.”

“To the Unseen Library!” Briscoe said.

“A para who enjoys research,” I said, shaking my head. “Will wonders never cease.”

“A Marine who can read,” Briscoe replied. “Will wonders never cease…”

* * *

“I had to talk the librarian into letting me leave with this,” Briscoe said, slamming a heavy tome onto my desk. “Is it me, or does he look just like an orangutan?”

“He looks just like an orangutan,” I said, still grading papers. “Balding red hair, long arms, flat face. Where y’at?”

“What?” Briscoe said.

“What do you have for me?” There were times I still missed New Orleans.

I’d more or less deputized him as my…deputy. Research assistant maybe. I had papers to grade. That sort of thing was what undergrads, and junior MI4 officers, were for.

Piru,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I said, then frowned. “You weren’t saying thank you?”

“No,” Briscoe said.

“It’s ‘thank you’ in a rather obscure Indian language,” I said. “Also a type of evil night spirit of Slavic derivation.”

“And the master is beaten,” Briscoe said. “Uralic, not Slavic. Or it was originally Uralic and got transferred to Slavic according to this.”

I picked up the book and looked at the title page. “Spirits, Myths, Heroes and Devils of the Finno-Uralic tribes. So that’s saying piru—which I’d sort of put aside as being Slavic, not Uralic—is Uralic?”

“According to this,” Briscoe said, grinning.

“So how do you banish it?” I asked. “Does it say?”

“Uh…” Briscoe said, then frowned. “No. Do you know?”

“No,” I said. “We haven’t covered Slavic or Uralic in incorporeal creatures. And I don’t usually get into them since they’re not PUFF-applicable. Guess you’ve got more research coming your way.”

“Drat,” Briscoe said, picking up the book.

I went back to grading papers. Bloody essays. Everything at Oxford was bloody essays and of course the TAs had to grade them. And, no, the students were no better at writing them than American students. I was running out of red pens.

* * *

“I’ve found a book which is said to have various spells and incantations for dispelling Slavic and Uralic spirits,” Briscoe said, dropping a book on my desk again. It was another weighty tome.

“So how do we dispel it?” I asked. “You could have just done notes.”

“I don’t do runes,” Briscoe said. “It seems that the Germans were having trouble with Slavic and Uralic supernatural entities going way back. This was written in the eleven hundreds in Germany but it simply transcribed the Elder Futhark runes for the spells assuming that anyone who was reading it also read Elder Futhark.”

“Go down to the linguistics department,” I said with a sigh. “Ask Professor Furnbauer for his Elder Futhark dictionary with my kind thanks. I’ll need to bone up.”

* * *

“Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me…” I said as I finished the translation. Maybe I was wrong? I’d have to get a second opinion. Was Professor Furnbauer read in?

He was. And the translation was right. Bloody hell. This was going to be complicated. And my orals were coming up. On the other hand, the book was interesting and this was shaping up to be a great paper. I was considering translating the whole thing since it had dozens of wards, traps, dispellations, and charms I’d never run across anywhere else. Publish or perish had serious meaning in our job.

* * *

Two days later I grabbed Briscoe as he was leaving class.

“Go down to the geology department,” I said. “Ask them about some sort of crystal or stone that changes color between ‘firelight and sunlight.’ One color in sunlight, different color in firelight. Only found in the Ural Mountains.”

“If so, it’ll be bloody hard to get our hands on,” Briscoe said.

“Worse, we’ll need one the size of ‘the last joint of a tall man’s thumb,’” I said. “Just find out what it is.”

* * *

“You’re not going to like this,” Briscoe said.

“I’m not liking anything about this,” I said. “I’m not liking having to depend for information on eleventh century alchemists, gnolls whose language I think I’m translating right and an undergrad para who has enough trouble with English much less any other language.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Briscoe said.

“What am I not going to like?” I asked.

“Alexandrite,” Briscoe said. “Extremely rare, color-change variant of chrysoberyl. Changes color from green in sunlight to red-purple in artificial light. Named after Tzar Alexander the Second. Only mined in a few areas, the Northern Urals, Sri Lanka, and Brazil.”

“We’ll need the Urals one to be sure,” I said, frowning. “Bit of a trick what with that being the Soviet Union. And a good, clear, pure-quality one.”

“More of a trick than you think,” Briscoe said. “The Russian deposits were the finest in the world. ‘Were’ being the important word. They were all mined out in the 1950s. ‘Of the size of a large man’s thumb’ is about ten carats. I asked Professor Shelley how much that would cost and he said, ‘Oh, about a hundred.’”

“Hundred dollars?” I asked.

“Hundred thousand,” Briscoe said. “Pounds.”

“Not my problem,” I said, grinning. “That’s on MI4.”

* * *

“You’re bloody insane,” Gordon said. “A hundred thousand pounds?” He patted his pockets for a moment. “Here, let me just pull it out of my arse, why don’t I?”

“The night creature is a piru,” I said. “Or at least a Uralic version of the piru. It’s found in Slavic folklore as well. Previously, and I’ve checked with Dr. Henderson, there was no known way to dispel or entrap one. According to the book Briscoe turned up, there is a way using a Ural alexandrite and a spell. The fact that they’re rare is unsurprising given that piru are really nasty spirits. As I said, Dr. Henderson had no answer to how to dispel or kill them. Generally you do what the gnolls are doing which is propitiate them. But if you want to dispel it, you’re going to need a big alexandrite. And it will be destroyed in the spell so you won’t even be able to sell it afterwards.”

“Bloody hell, there goes my budget,” Gordon said. “We’ve got the area blocked off for now. I’ll have to get back to you. That really is a bit of a budget item for us at the moment.”

“Feel free,” I said. “I’ve got exams coming up.”

* * *

“That do?” Gordon said, setting a large reddish-purple gem on my desk.

I’d done well on my orals. Now all I had to do was pass the written portion and turn in my thesis and I’d have my second master’s.

“Pretty,” I said. The stone was deeply colored, cut in an oval and just beautiful. “Hate to ruin it.”

I pulled out a loupe and checked to be sure. I’d followed up on pretty much everything Briscoe had brought to me and there was a way to check if it was a Russian stone.

“Bit of a budget line item,” I dropped it in a pocket.

“I had to call in a favor,” Gordon growled.

“Favor from whom, might I ask?”

“MI6,” Gordon said. “Let’s just say it didn’t come out of my budget. Or theirs. I had to get authorization but it came pretty quick. Seems this beastie has gotten out of the sewers. Two people were found dead from natural causes in the area in the last few days. Both were in the prime of their lives. And MI6 had to burn a cell. So this had better work.”

“I tried out some of the White incantations from the book,” I said. “They worked well enough. Only one way to find out. And if it doesn’t, you won’t have my ass to chew, if you know what I mean.”

“When can you get started?” Gordon said.

I had exams all week. If I missed one there went my master’s. And I really needed to bone up before each of them. Not to mention sleep.

Death is lighter than a feather. And I could sleep when I was dead.

“Tonight.”

* * *

“You don’t really need to be here,” I said.

The capture and destruction of a piru takes more than just an alexandrite. First, the piru must be attracted and fed. They liked expensive food, drink, and drugs. Yes, drugs. Tobacco will do but opium has much the same effect on them as on humans for some reason. We were banking on heroin for that. You could find it on various street corners in Manchester, and it wasn’t like we were in danger of getting arrested. On the other hand, MI4 could just get it out of an evidence locker, which they had.

We were doing the rite in an alleyway off of the Sanctuary, which I thought rather ironic in the circumstances. It was where the now three people had died of “natural causes,” one each night.

You bring them in by burning tobacco and alcohol, then set up a little tableau with the various comestibles laid out. Checking the police reports, all three of the dead had been smokers, if young enough that it shouldn’t have caused their deaths, and all three had been drinking. So they’d “called” the piru but hadn’t offered to share. Die, humans, die. Handy tip: always be unselfish if you’re being tracked by a wraith. If one shows up when you’re smoking and drinking, offer them a fag and a shot. Or else.

“Rather want to see what we’ve been chasing,” Briscoe said.

We laid out a brass tray with some shots of rum, a prime cut of lamb, and a small brazier on it. Then we lit the rum and dropped pipe tobacco on the coals in the brazier.

We were right by a storm drain and it took about fifteen minutes for the piru to appear, following the scent of burning alcohol and tobacco. It was just a darker shadow amongst the shadows, a tenebrous fog rising from the storm grating.

The piru floated closer. It was difficult to see in the moonlit darkness even with the help of the streetlights. It moved from shadow to shadow. We’d placed the tray in shadow, knowing it would avoid any sort of light. It was generally bipedal; I’m fairly sure it wasn’t anything derived from human, though. You get a certain feeling around human ghosts and this was definitively unearthly.

The wraith floated to the tray and into the smoke from the tobacco and the burning essence of the rum. It was clear it was feeding in some way. Maybe it just liked the aroma. But it also made contact with the lamb. I’d gotten a tissue sample and I intended to check the differences between the original and the sacrificed. It was pretty sure that the people who had “died of natural causes” had died of some sort of loss of something. Phosphate, calcium, something. It would be easier to find between the two versions of lamb.

Since we were properly propitiating it, we weren’t in any danger at this point so I took notes as carefully as I could. I knew there was no way to photograph it but I wish I could have.

The rum had burned out so Briscoe lit another shot. Give the guy credit, para or not he wasn’t fazed by an otherworldly spirit being.

Once the piru was feasting I opened up the nickel bag of heroin and dropped that on the brazier.

The result wasn’t immediate. The thing wasn’t moving real fast as it was but it slowly…slowed until it was simply hanging there in the smoke from the fire like a black sheet on a clothesline.

I got out my cheatsheet and the irreplaceable gem. I laid the gem on the tray, in contact with some of its tendrils of shadow, and began to read.

The toughest part of the whole thing had been finding the proper pronunciation for some of the Uralic and Germanic in the incantation. Dean Carruthers had put me in contact with a traditional Uralic speaker and that had helped. Some of the words were close enough to tribal Tibetan I had to wonder if there was a racial connection.

I began the incantation, calling upon the owl spirit and the moon spirit and the spirit of the gem to bind and entrap this creature of darkness. Three repetitions and I could see it starting to sink into the stone. It also was starting to move so I gestured at the second heroin packet and Briscoe tossed it in. Good little wizard’s apprentice.

It took nine repetitions of the incantation but finally the piru sank into the stone completely.

I picked the stone up with a pair of tongs and winced.

“Let’s hope this works,” I said and dropped it into the brazier.

Nothing happened at first but then a sound started to emit from the stone. It was so high-pitched at first it wasn’t even audible but dogs started barking in all the flats nearby. Then it was in the audible range, for me at least, and I started to get the whole banshee cry thing. Horrible sound, eerie and painful to the ears despite being surprisingly quiet. A bit like what a hamster would sound like if it was being slowing burned to death. At least a bizarre space hamster.

Finally, with one last tortured wail, the priceless gem shattered amongst the charcoal bricks and it was done.

“Did we get it?” Briscoe asked.

“Only way to know is if nobody dies tonight,” I said. “Let’s pack up. We’ve both got exams in the morning.”

* * *

Nobody died that night nor in the subsequent weeks. A guy died of a heart attack three weeks afterwards in the area but he was a risk case, so all good.

The lamb samples were subsequently bent, folded and mutilated by MI4’s labs. There was a significant difference in the levels of isoleucine, an amino acid, between the two samples. Notably less in the one that the piru had touched. So apparently, besides liking to get high, pirus steal isoleucine. The pathologist who gave the report started to explain about isoleucine and I asked him not to. I’ve got enough stuff stuffed in my head. I’ll leave that to the medical professionals. Bottom line, not enough will kill you.

I later went back and translated the book of incantations and traps for various Slavic and Siberian entities as well as adding quite a few others from Europe and Eurasia. The three-book set: Identification of, Protections Against, and Traps for Supernatural Entities of the Slavic, Siberian, Balkans and Eurasian Spirit Tribes by Dr. Oliver Chadwick Gardenier, PhD (CrLing), is available from Oxford University Press. If you have the clearance. There’s a complete copy in the MHI library as well.

Now to explain why I added all that to my memoirs besides as a commercial plug:

My teacher hat is on at this point, so bear with me with the pro-tip. One reason for this long explanation of tracking down one minor entity is this is stuff you’re going to have to learn at some point. You can’t always depend on someone else to do your research for you. I don’t mean you have to learn Proto-Uralic. But you do need to learn the Dewey Decimal System.

It’s also about teaching. I could have taken the time to go look all this stuff up myself. But part of why Briscoe was at Oxford was to learn how to do the research. So I delegated. And that, too, is part of your job once you get past “me dumb grunt.” He learned how to find some very obscure stuff in the sometimes baroque library system. For that matter, he found the tome that had exactly the right information. I might not have. Why? I knew where to look, he didn’t. Sometimes sending out the person who doesn’t know the “right” answer is the right answer. Sometimes it’s not. But until that day, we didn’t have an answer to piru. We found it because Briscoe went and looked in what was basically the wrong place.

Most of this particular memoir, for one reason or another, has been about the background of hunting. Everyone likes the big fight scenes. But hunting is about more. Learn the more.

For God’s sake, at least learn Latin and crack a book once in a while. Don’t just expect me or Milo or Ray or whoever is the equivalent in your day and age to do all the work.



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