Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes and the Great Game

by Kevin Cockle

Where dogs had got at them, blood was caked into snow — frozen like stained glass in grisly ruby pools.

“Ice picks,” Holmes muttered, indicating trace evidence in the shattered dome of the nearest igloo. “Here. And here, you see.” Watson did not see, though he had no doubt.

“People-killing arrows,” Holmes continued, stooping to examine one of the shafts used against the slain. “Not hunting arrows. Deliberate and pre-meditated Watson, all of this. Very much so.”

Watson shuddered, repressing memories of similar atrocities seen years ago and a world away. Afghan mountains meshed with Canadian ice in his imagination: slaughter was slaughter whenever, wherever; the vividness could not be unseen. He shifted the weight of the Lee Enfield .303 on his shoulder and cast his gaze out into the bleak blue-white horizon. Here and there, a body dotted the landscape. Dark piles of fur stark against the white.

Holmes stood, his tall frame given impressive bulk by the Caribou-skin parka and breeches supplied by the North West Mounted Police. His aquiline nose protruded just past the edges of the hood, betraying his lean lines. If not for that angular, fine-boned face, Sherlock Holmes would have seemed a bear of a man with the weight of kit upon him.

“Not for food, nor materials,” Holmes said, boots grinding on snow as he made his way through the hunting settlement. Stopping at a smaller imploded igloo, he regarded the huddled occupants. “Raiding is a poor strategy in the north, Watson, one rarely sees it. Not slavers…” he paused in mid thought. “Hold on.” He circled the igloo, eyeing the tracks all round.

“Here, Watson! Signs of a struggle … one of these unfortunates being led away. Yes! This was it — this was the prize they sought. Confident beggars — they’ve made no effort to conceal their tracks!”

“We follow, then?” Watson said, shivering at the thought.

“Definitely,” Holmes smiled. “The game, dear Watson, is most assuredly afoot!”

Watson caught the look in Holmes’ eye — that look so often described as a cocaine-induced glaze in the written accounts, but which in truth was of a far different nature altogether.

“Holmes,” Watson said, lowering his voice, “do you really see these clues in the snow, or have you divined them? Are you certain a captive was taken?”

Holmes grinned. “One way or the other, I have seen it, and it is true. Come!”

With urgent energy, Holmes marched back to the dog sled. Two junior constables stood waiting, faces white as the snow they stood upon, anxious eyes peering out from fur-lined hoods like the eyes of wolf-spooked sheep.

“We’re going on,” Holmes informed the men. The man on the left — Ryan — hugged himself in an unconscious gesture of self-preservation. “We’re close now,” Holmes continued, “maybe a few hours behind, and these savages are in no hurry.”

“But our orders sir…” the man on the right — Culloden — began.

“You will follow them. Make camp close by. We’ve two good hours of sunlight left. Let us make use of them. Keep a close watch. These bodies will attract company sooner rather than later.”

“You should’na go just the two of you sir,” Culloden said.

Holmes smiled almost parentally. “You’re good lads, and fine policemen, but you are not up to this. Make camp; get some food together. We’ll be wanting dinner when we return.”

Watson turned from the men, did his own calculations. Going back to Dawson and mustering a force was out of the question. The seal hunting season was drawing to a close and ice would be breaking up soon. Holmes was right: the chance was now, or never.

Two thoughts occurred to Dr. Watson: There is nothing here to indicate that anyone has survived this massacre, or been taken from the scene and Holmes doesn’t want witnesses where we are going.

Anernerk stared at the chains which bound her to the sled, her manacled hands heavy in her lap, and thought: These are too big for me. The iron was old, rusted, foreign. She sat with her legs tucked up underneath her, staying quiet, staying still, as dogs pulled, and a man pushed at the handles just behind her. They need not have bound her. Their precautions were ridiculous. Where would she run? To whom would she go, now that her family had been extinguished?

She tried not to see the details. The moonlight punching through the roof of the igloo as the men bludgeoned their way in. The screams; the dull squish and thud of the killing strokes. She had screamed too, but had been stopped short by a gonging voice in her head — a voice not her own — and images that crowded out her own shrill thoughts of terror.

Stars. The voice had shown her stars, made her see a particular pattern, made her focus upon it. At first, the voice had spoken gibberish to her, but had changed in tone and articulation, almost as though sifting through sounds to find her language, and when it did, it said: “It is time. It is near equinox. You will come to me. You will come to me now.”

She had closed her eyes then, listening to the distant screams, knowing there was nothing she could do. She had kicked out in reflex, fighting in futility as she was bundled out through the shattered ceiling of the igloo by strong, silent attackers. They had made no sound throughout the massacre — no war cries, no exultant shouts of triumph. They had killed with cold ferocity, like an Arctic blizzard unleashed. She was theirs now; she belonged to them even as they belonged to the voice. She did not weep, or wail, or bargain, for that was not the Nunamiut way.

Now, in an effort to repress the memories of slaughter, she recalled her father’s voice singing a traditional lament in his husky, warbling tone:

Hard times, dearth times

Plague us every one

Stomachs are shrunken

Dishes are empty

Over and over she recited the words to herself and stared without expression at her lap. No tears fell, for a hard life had shaped her early for the acceptance of things. Sometimes, the caribou did not come in the spring. Sometimes, the seal holes could not be found. Her only hope was that it would be quick and painless, whatever they had in mind for her.

The sun had crept up on its low trajectory, and the sled had come to a stop at the crest of a shallow rise. Anernerk looked up then, and her mouth gaped open in astonishment for two reasons. The first was for the structure in the distance, immense and dark and utterly beyond her ability to comprehend.

The second was because one of the men had put back his hood to reveal his face. She knew him, had once shed the tears for him that she had yet to shed for her slain kinfolk. It was her grandfather, who had been left to die three winters ago on pack ice, unable at the last to walk on used up legs. He stood strong and straight now, though his hair blew whale-bone white in the slight northerly breeze.

He turned his face to look upon her without recognition, without pity.

His eyes were the washed out blue of a pack dog’s, strange and horrifying and cold.

The jagged majesty of the ice filled Watson with primordial awe. He’d seen a fair piece of the world — been to every corner of the empire either with or without Holmes — but he had never quite seen anything to rival the vast bleak Canadian north. Walls of ivory jutting into the clear blue sky, and drifting, susurrant serpents of windblown snow. Cool pools of blue shadow in the lees of icy rises. Water so clear and clean it looked like glass. And treachery amidst the breathtaking beauty, lying in wait to pounce upon the slightest mistake.

“I quite honestly don’t know what to make of it,” Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Reed had said back at camp in Dawson. He was a priggish man, but resolute enough, with a back straight as a mainmast, and a neck thick as a kilderkin. Before him, on his desk, lay the papers from Whitehall, complete with parliamentary seal, outlining the terms of Holmes’ special service. “They are … well, that is to say … attacks, of some kind, as it were.”

“Attacks.” Holmes repeated. “Implying the imposition of main force? Warfare, I am given to believe, does not exist here, in the sense that we employ it.”

“Whole settlements destroyed, Holmes. Systematically. Casualties exacted to the last man. Pursuit. That is not the tribal, vendetta way, no. It is rather more … European in nature. As it were.”

“And you suspect…”

Reed swallowed, mustering his confidence. “The Russians.”

“The Russians,” Holmes repeated, this time failing to disguise his skepticism. “Hoping to secure control of the strategic seal-skin and blubber markets?”

“Well, damn it all, Holmes … that’s what you are here to determine! All along the seal hunting grounds — entire settlements wiped out, and bloodthirsty work it is too. Not our business by and large, but if it is some Russian gambit…”

“Ah yes: a feint away from Afghanistan. A grand encirclement via the north pole.”

“The Russians, Holmes,” Reed’s voice had frosted over, even as his cheeks warmed scarlet, “are always a potential regional threat; consequently we have an obligation to investigate. You are the pre-eminent investigator in her majesty’s service; ergo you will put the theory to the test. We’ve men and supplies at your disposal, but I have it from The Chamber itself that you are not to engage. Find out what the devil is going on. Find out the why, and the who, but take no chances. London wants you on the case, but they don’t want you harmed, or I shall answer for it.”

“Indeed. So it is the great game of nations that brings me to your wasteland. I should have suspected no less.”

Watson scowled at the memory. It was always difficult to interpret Holmes’ motives, or even accept the initial premise of any case at face value. Was it the government asking for Holmes’ assistance in this instance, or had he somehow engineered the invitation? Was Holmes truly acting in his capacity as special investigator for the empire, or did he have his own private reasons for pursuing the matter? Watson couldn’t say, but the mere fact of his speculation told him how far their friendship had evolved over the years.

Watson’s back ached, and the occasional step was announced by a loud, sclerotic popping of his right knee. The air was not so frigid as it would have been in high winter, but it still clawed at his tobacco-coated lungs. And his shoulder of course — the one that had taken that Jezail bullet at Maiwand — that throbbed in echo to his laboured heartbeats. Shoulder, he chided himself ruefully. Be honest with yourself. Be as honest with yourself as you are suspicious of Holmes. That bullet took more than shoulder, and you know it.

Holmes set a tireless pace, his long-shanked stride crunching rhythmically against hard-packed snow. Here and there, tracks were visible even to Watson, but Holmes did not trust to them alone. Now, out of sight of the constabulary, Holmes freely referred to the fourteen inch, cruel-looking Zulu blade with its elephant-tusk pommel and strange glyphs upon the steel. The metal glowed with an eerie incandescence, gently guiding Holmes towards his quarry with more surety than any tracker.

Watson suppressed a shudder. Again the Zulu knife was leading them on; the knife that Murray had laid upon him after defeat at Maiwand; the knife that had stopped the bleeding of his open and failing heart, and made him whole again. The knife that had kept them hidden all during that nightmare retreat to Kandahar, with Afghan warriors harassing and killing at every step of those 314 infernal miles.

“I dreamed of you,” Murray had said, on the night that Watson had cheated death through Zulu sorcery. “I brought this damned thing out of Africa … for you. I want no part of it, John.”

Murray had given him the knife, and soon thereafter, Watson had begun dreaming of Holmes — seeing him clearly before even knowing his face or name.

The injury, the long retreat, his honourable discharge … all in the service of delivering an arcane artifact to a total stranger who would one day become closer than family.

Closer perhaps, but not nearly as familiar.

“You’re brooding,” Holmes said, without looking at his friend.

“I knew it was magic, Holmes, back at the settlement. Blast! Why the charade?”

“Leadership, my good doctor, the men were terrified. Brandishing a sorcerous artifact might well have routed them. Nothing holds the line like the imposition of true reason. They heard me make order out of chaos, and were becalmed.”

Watson snorted.

“You’re in a mood,” Holmes observed.

“It’s the forced march, I’m afraid. I’m feeling my age. We could at least have taken the sled.”

Holmes smiled. “That’s not entirely precise, is it?”

Watson scowled. “Damn it Holmes, I just … I do not understand why I can’t simply tell the truth in my accounts. Every time I recount how you glean facts from observing minutiae, or deduce conclusions from seemingly unconnected events, I feel a charlatan. It weighs on me, you know? You have a singular talent — a gift beyond all science — yet you insist on these elaborate, outrageous tales of deduction.”

“Are they not popular?”

“Yes! Yes damn it, they ARE popular, but that makes the lie all the heavier.”

“Watson. There is no point in telling a truth to people who will not credit it. Look at Challenger’s nonsense: tales to amuse old ladies and young boys, or so they are perceived. By couching my exploits in the language of science, you do more good than you know. I daresay you are pivotal to the entire enterprise, Watson. Trust me. You serve a higher purpose.”

Watson glared. It was not the first time Holmes had deflected him from this topic.

“Could all this possibly be the Russians?”

Holmes barked laughter. “It may well turn out to be Cossacks, though I wouldn’t lay odds on it. No Watson, there is a great game being played here, but I do not think the players are kings and earthly governments. I have never felt the pull of the blade as strongly as I do now. Something massive lurks in the distance Watson, I feel it!”

Holmes’ eyes shone, catching the dagger’s light, and Watson swallowed. The dagger had used them both — Watson as a messenger, and conveyance from Africa to England via Afghanistan; Holmes as an agent — but for what design, the Doctor had never been able to conceive. Were the horrors all connected in some way — all the stories he had retold as logical puzzles — could they be sewn together into a larger tapestry if the real details were laid out plain?

Watson simply didn’t know. He was complicit in an elaborate ruse, the truth of which made no sense, and the lies of which proved best-sellers. In the end, he had to do what he had always done: trust Holmes. A hard thing to do, made harder with each passing adventure.

They soldiered on, passing from ridge to ridge at a steady pace. A gloom had descended upon Watson: too much mention of Afghanistan with its horrors both human and supernatural. Holmes for his part hummed as he strode, drifting from classical passages to music hall refrains as his mood dictated. With the dagger feeding him, drawing him on, he seemed to pulse in sympathy with its hellish glow. Cocaine had always seemed to Watson an appropriate metaphor for what the dagger did to Holmes.

With the sun sliding inexorably into the ice, and the indigo shadows growing longer around them, Holmes and Watson topped a gentle slope and dropped immediately to prone positions. Holmes grinned too hard and too wide, his eyes dancing. Watson sucked in his breath, squinting his eyes against the cold. His vision was not what it once was, but it wasn’t the clarity of what he saw that made him doubt his senses — only the sheer improbability of the hulk in the distance.

It was a galleon — shattered and ragged and black against the ice — which listed a quarter turn on its starboard side. She was three-masted, Spanish hulled, and a gigantic gash split her side, half filled in with blown snow. She was an old ship, probably three, four hundred years out of date — one of the great Atlantic deep-sea traders the Dons had used to empty Mexico of its gold.

Men moved upon the derelict’s frozen and desolate decks, shuffling and battening down against the coming night. They had built and added onto the existing structure of the ship, ramshackle constructs, like webs stretched between rotted tree trunks. Canvas lean-tos and wooden sheds broke up the nautical lines of the once-proud vessel; hanging lanterns illuminated the scene in a hard yellow light.

“Our quarry, Watson,” Holmes breathed.

The doctor shifted his position, wincing in discomfort. “They have the advantage of us, Holmes.”

“We shall see. You’re a fine hand with the service revolver, but how are you with the rifle?”

“Respectable, I daresay. But Holmes…”

“They are vermin, doctor. We shall show no mercy.”

Watson thought of the hunting camp they had left behind; saw red-coated bodies slumped in their lines at Maiwand. He swallowed, and his throat was dry.

“Do we offer battle, or attempt a skulk?” Watson asked.

“There is a captive in the game,” Holmes replied. “Perhaps dead already, though likely not. These reavers will fight to keep what they’ve shed so much blood to take. And if they fight, I would rather meet them out here, than in there.”

Watson grunted, rising to one knee. The resulting pop was so loud, it almost sounded like the first gunshot. He slung the Enfield off his shoulder, and withdrew ammunition boxes from the cavernous pockets of his parka. He tilted the rifle up and let loose a shattering salvo into the twilight, the frozen air lending a sharpness to the retort that hastened its shriek across the ice.

Instantly, pack-dogs yelped and howled; men on the ship whirled and stood motionless, astonished at the presence of intruders. The amazement passed, and Watson saw the figures vanish into the ship’s hold like a swarm of cockroaches to stream out onto the snow from the jagged tear in the ship’s hull. Eight dark-cloaked figures fluttered in the distance, running full-tilt towards the duo like great rushing bats just skimming the surface of a great frozen lake.

Watson nestled himself soundly on one knee, slowing his breathing.

They had a good two hundred yards or more to clear to his position, up a gentle, but long incline. Not a rifle amongst ‘em, Watson thought. Not even a bow.

They were all as good as dead, every man jack of them.

KRAK! The Enfield slammed against Watson’s shoulder and he saw a figure jerk and drop backwards as though clothes-lined by an unseen wire. His accomplices rushed on, plunging forward as Watson ejected the cartridge and calmly reset the bolt. He had been modest in his self-assessment: he was a dead shot over the killing range of the Enfield. He’d proven it many times over the years, though his skill rarely made the written accounts. “It must be brains over brawn; science over force that forms the thrust of these tales,” Holmes would frequently emphasize. It would never do to mention the blood Dr. Watson had been obliged to spill, on top of everything else.

KRAK! Watson recalled the ragged line at Maiwand: volley fire shredding howling ghazis on the approach.

KRAK! The tips of his fingers singed by the scorching heat of the chamber as comrades fell, and ragtag squares formed in doomed isolation.

KRAK! He’d killed men at Maiwand with this same lethal precision, and none of them, he knew, so deserving as the ones he claimed today.

KRAK!

KRAK!

KRAK!

He’d missed once and two men kept up their headlong pace, now less than a hundred yards from him. Blinking to refocus, operating in strict military cadence, he ejected and reloaded, brought butt to shoulder … and froze, momentarily stunned by what he was seeing.

One of the downed had risen, was shaking off the shot, and was staggering forward once again! Another man Watson had sworn he’d hit square to the left side of the chest got to his knees, and reeled to his feet to renew his lurching advance. They were slowed, but those who had gone down now rose again, forcing the doctor to hasten his tempo.

He put another round into the first man he had downed, and another into the second. He shot the third man’s thigh and dropped him again, only to watch him writhe, roll, rise and now walk forward. The hackles on Watson’s burly neck rose, and he knew it wasn’t from the cold. “Good Lord,” he whispered, awe-struck.

“Indeed,” Holmes countered.

The reavers had closed to within twenty yards.

Holmes grinned, and lunged forward, a canine snarl rippling his thin lips.

Watson had seen Sherlock Holmes close for hand-to-hand on many occasions, knew that his friend had made no little study of the combative arts, but the chilling efficiency and balance of the man routinely amazed nonetheless. He was wiry-strong, and naturally agile, but these components amplified by the dagger’s eldritch energy made Holmes a thing of slashing lethality. And even without Zulu magic, no man alive was better at obtaining and keeping initiative. Holmes’ judgment of distance and timing were exquisite.

Holmes bent low, put his shoulder into the first man’s hip, using his own momentum to hoist him up and over in a tumble of seal skin cloak and hide-bound legs. The second man rushed in with a thrusting harpoon in both hands, but his angle was bad, and Holmes had position. He swept the point aside with his left forearm, and walked his man onto the point of the Zulu knife — the broad, killing blade sighing into the man’s ribcage as though pushing through dense, wet clay.

The tribesman’s hood fell back, and Watson felt a thrill of fear pulse down his spine at the sight. The man was native, distant kin to those butchered some leagues to the south, but his face was a feral, twisted parody of theirs, and his eyes shone an impossible robin’s-egg blue. He clutched at his wound and slid off the blade, falling back onto his shoulders, his knees bent beneath him. Though he bled from a bullet wound in his chest, it had taken an African dagger to end the unspeakable life of this hellbound slayer.

Holmes whirled as the first man closed again, the tribesman’s face grotesque with hate. The man had produced a rust-encrusted rapier, of all things, holding it as one might hold a simple club. Holmes sidestepped awkwardly, stumbling as snow bit at his calves, but he recovered nicely, drawing the keen edge of his blade across the man’s jugular from an oblique angle. The native pitched face-first into the snow, hands clawing at his throat as his eerie life bled out crimson against the crisp, pristine white.

From there, Holmes pressed his attack to the others, but found that Watson’s bullets had done most of the work after all. Incredibly, the wounded had dragged themselves up that sweeping ice hill, lungs collapsed or thighs belching blood from throbbing arteries. They clung grimly to savage life, and their faces bespoke the same dark, malicious energy upon which the first two had drawn.

The dagger took each in turn: one touch of it, so long as it drank of their blood, was all it took to still them. In moments, Holmes stood alone, chest heaving, breath condensing fog-white in the Arctic air. Watson closed from a respectful distance, eyeing his friend warily, noting the barely contained bloodlust in those usually reserved eyes.

“Holmes?” Watson said from fifteen feet away, not pointing the rifle at his friend directly, but holding it at the ready nonetheless.

Holmes nodded, panting. “Fear not, doctor. I am in complete control of my faculties.”

“Grand,” said Watson, not comforted by the fact that he needed to be told.

Holmes smiled. “Shall we?”

They stepped their way to the galleon, Watson noting eight fallen foes en route. Poor devils, he thought. He could not help but feel that ending them had saved them somehow, from something darker than death.

And then a thought unbidden: would Holmes not also be saved thus?

Watson clenched his teeth so hard, he heard them squeak in his head.

At the gaping maw of the hull breach, Holmes stopped, resting a foot against the lowered shards of shattered planks like so many broken teeth. Watson crept close, peering in around Holmes’ shoulder, sensing large crates just out of sight in the gloom, and smelling a peculiar, vaguely familiar reek. Shouldering the Enfield, Watson prepared his service revolver, and whispered: “Ready.”

Holmes eased himself into the ship with a lithe, silent cat’s step, and Watson followed with the scrabbling grace of a bulldog charging a hedge.

The ship creaked and groaned under its own shifting weight, making Watson flinch at the erratic noises. Dim arctic light spilled in between gaps in the ancient planks, or through the massive puncture, turning absolute darkness into a frigid murk. Snow ground beneath their boots for a ways, then wood alone sounded out. Wooden crates lay in haphazard piles, worrying Watson with their proximity. Anything could be lying in the shadows, hidden from sight — just waiting for them to pass.

Inching forward, Holmes made the bulkhead door, sheathing the knife to work the portal with his gloved hands. “Heat,” he murmured, glancing back at Watson, and gesturing at the sliding bolt that held the door fast. Slipping the latch back, Holmes shouldered the door open, and both men were instantly met by a fetid, sweltering breeze drenched with the odor of rotted vegetation, dank soil, and endless rain. It was downright tropical, that wind. Watson placed the smells, the temperature, and the humidity as something more Caribbean than Arctic in derivation.

A small access corridor cut longitudinally across the length of the ship, leading to darkened stairwells at both ends. Before the intruders, and slightly to the right, another bulkhead door led into what Watson supposed would be the cargo-hold proper. He grunted, and lifted the pistol off his hip, edging in front of Holmes to take the lead. With the clear view, he could see a pale, feeble light shining around the edges of the door. “Shoot to kill,” Holmes whispered from very close behind. “This will be hot work at close quarters.”

Watson heard the oily rasp of the knife being drawn from its sheath, and the sound made him think of Indian cobras.

Watson approached the portal, braced his legs wide as if in a scrum. He tried the knob and found it sticky, but unlocked. Turning it, he shouldered the door in and crouched down, blinking as a gust of air hit him in the face as though he’d just opened a baking oven.

Hanging seal-oil lamps cast even, gentle light around a large room, and Watson’s mind reeled at the sight. Chests of doubloons and small ingots of gold lay open, or in smashed piles of wood and metal. Light caromed off emeralds and rubies set in rings and bracelets; turquoise and silver belts and bangles lay in casual heaps. It was all the wealth Watson could have imagined in three lifetimes of adventure, but he barely registered the opulence, so thunderstruck was he by the room’s other contents.

The floor was overgrown with moss and a thick, spongy loam. A great tree trunk pushed up out of the floor and thrust up through the roof, presumably spreading out amongst the upper decks. And at the base of the tree lay an altar of human skulls, bracketed and reinforced with golden framing. A large gong stood off to one side, its face engraved in the style of the Aztecs to reveal a circular procession of creatures real and imagined. As Watson’s eyes scanned the room, Aztec fixtures and carvings, furniture and treasure littered the scene: looted, and herein preserved before they could have been melted down and recast in Spanish forms.

A Nunamiut girl lay upon the altar, her arms and legs outstretched and quivering as though restrained by some unseen force. Her eyes stared and rolled in their sockets, reminding Watson of the horses at Maiwand as they bolted in panic. She was dressed head to toe in ornate woven feathers and reeds: a great head-dress; a sort of corset; a skirt and loincloth. Her pale limbs trembled, her northern pallor utterly alien to the clothing and the scene around her. Upon her breast, a cruel silver dagger lay flat, its edge curved like the undulating path of a winding serpent.

Watson moved into the room, throwing back his hood against the heat. Sweat poured from his brow, and he wiped his face with the sleeve of his left arm to clear his vision. Stepping towards the girl, he felt a thrill of shock shoot through him, like a tremendous charge of static electricity, and all at once he found himself transported…

From a great height, as though he were a gull on the wing, he looked down and watched as members of the Netsilik tribe abandoned one of their elderly to die alone on pack ice. In his fear and isolation, the man called out, and many leagues to the west, the altar answered. “I am Tezcatlipoca,” a voice crooned in the tribesman’s head. “Come to me and live.”

The man came. On foot and alone, he should have perished, but he came. He and other outcasts, over the span of centuries crossed the ice at the altar’s will, and were preserved by it in perpetuity. Hunting settlements with shamans and spells of protection could not hear the voice, would not heed it: when such settlements came close enough to the wrecked ship, they died. Watson saw it happen, heard it explained in a language not of words, knew it to be true even as all sense of distance and time drifted away from him.

A jungle rose up before John Watson, and great flat-topped pyramids of stone appeared. An endless parade of human sacrifices came and went, screaming and wriggling in unheeded agony. The sun blazed hot in a cloudless sky, its trajectory assured by the constant killing, and in the minds of the priests a voice was heard: “I am Tezcatlipoca. Kill for me and live!”

Arctic winds blew as huddled proto-Siberians crossed into North America for the first time, bringing with them the voice; naming it; speaking it. They spread down through the continent over the course of millennia, eventually becoming the Inca, the Maya and the Aztec, but they never forgot the ice deep and submerged in their hearts. “I am Tezcatlipoca, who was Tezkul-oc,” the voice said, and the hot, moist, Aztec voice was tinged with ancient frost.

A storm raged at sea; a Spanish captain, eyes wild with hysteria, fought the elements as he lashed himself to his wheel. “I am Tezcatlipoca,” the voice boomed in his head. “I will go home.” That which had been plundered now took command; the altar with a hellish will of its own sped the ship ever northward to its icy doom.

“I am Tezcatlipoca,” the voice now thrummed in Watson’s head, roaring the way a pounding sea crashes against the surf. “Kill for me and live!”

Somehow, Watson had traversed the room, was standing next to the altar. He couldn’t remember dropping his gun, but there it was at the roots of the tree behind him. In his hand, he held the serpentine dagger and had hoisted it high above his head. The girl on the altar squirmed in terror, her neck straining to release a scream that would not come. Watson gasped at the effort of resistance it took to stay his hand — the dagger poised to plunge down and into the chest plate of the trembling sacrifice.

And then: Sherlock Holmes.

The Zulu knife met the serpentine with a ringing clang, and lightning-blue light blasted forth from the contact. The girl unleashed her scream at last, a distant echo to the screams of long lost sisters who had died generations ago and continents away. The girl screamed, and Watson screamed with her as dark magicks surged through his body like a completed circuit. Arcane war was fought out in his cells; his limbic system became a bubbling battleground. And all around, the room was drenched in the sudden white hot light of African and Mexican suns in collision.

The dogs were restless, tails twitching, ears twisting with every new sound. Sacks of golden treasure, jewels, ornaments, trinkets and artifacts weighed down the sled: everything needed for the trip back had been available on the ship. The girl, whose name might have been Anerkernerk, although Watson couldn’t be certain, sat atop a mound of treasure, bundled in caribou skins twice too large for her. She looked in the direction Holmes and Watson looked, and all three faces glowed with firelight.

The ship crackled and blazed, bathing the onlookers in brazen orange hues, and seething warmth. Lights arced into the sky from the burning hold — green and violet and pink — like an Aurora Borealis as the shattered altar within gave up its accursed energies. Watson felt the heat upon his face, smelled the smoke, thought of burning villages and endless campfires while on march with the 66th foot Regiment. I was a pawn then, and am still, he reflected. What on Earth happened here? And what of Holmes? Does he still wield the dagger, or does the dagger wield him?

“I don’t envy you this one,” Holmes chuckled, his voice straining for a jaunty tone, but failing under the weight of extreme fatigue. Watson winced at the sight of his friend: the eyes bloodshot and receding into their sockets; the cheeks sunken — that thin face turned gaunt by the exercise of the Zulu knife. If wielding the blade brought to mind the surging pleasures of cocaine, the aftermath recalled the physical cost of heroin. Whatever game you’re playing at, Holmes, Watson thought, the price is too bloody high.

“Envy?” Watson said. “The devil do you mean?”

“The story. You’ve got your work cut out, I’d say.”

“The story? You mean retelling this as one of your observational fantasies? Insanity! Cannot be done! Where on Earth would I start?”

“I would have thought that was obvious,” Holmes managed a wan, secretive smile. “Start with the Russians.”

* * * * *

KEVIN COCKLE lives in Calgary, Alberta and often incorporates Calgary-style boom-town themes in his work. A frequent contributor to On Spec magazine, Kevin has dabbled in screen writing, sports journalism and technical writing to fill out what would otherwise be a purely finance-centric resume.