Red Leech

Chapter Seventeen

The horse leaped sideways in shock, saving both of them. Whatever it was that had jumped towards them fell past and hit the ground off-balance in a flash of slashing claws, stumbling to one side but immediately springing back up to its feet. Sherlock had a momentary, confused impression of eyes reflecting moonlight and pointed fangs wet with saliva, gleaming in a slavering mouth.

He ripped the knife from his belt and held it out. It wasn’t much consolation, but it was all he had.

A voice from up ahead said something guttural in a language Sherlock didn’t recognize, and the animal retreated towards it, hissing in frustration at Sherlock and the horse.

He recognized it now. It was one of Duke Balthas-sar’s cougars. That meant the other one was probably out there somewhere. And that meant Duke Balthassar was out there too.

His horse was paralysed with shock: eyes wide and lips pulled back over exposed teeth. It wasn’t going anywhere; not with the cougars around. Sherlock slipped from the saddle, heart pounding in his chest. He was tired, he was hungry and he was thirsty. He didn’t want this. Not now. Not here.

But he didn’t think he had a choice.

He walked forward, into the moonlight at the mouth of the rocky gully.

Duke Balthassar stood a few feet to one side. He was still wearing his white suit, white hat and white porcelain mask, but he had a revolver strapped to his thigh. Behind his right ear Sherlock could see the red leech gleaming wetly in the moonlight, the only spot of colour in the entire scene. It seemed to pulse slightly as Sherlock watched.

The cougar which had leaped for Sherlock and his horse was by Balthassar’s side, tail flicking restlessly. Sherlock noticed how it kept casting glances up at the red leech. It seemed nervous, frightened even. The other cougar wasn’t in sight.

“Sherlock Scott Holmes,” Balthassar said, his voice barely perceptible over the sound of the wind. “I fear we are fated to keep meeting, like Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers.”

“What are you doing here?” Sherlock asked simply.

“I was looking for you,” Balthassar replied. “When I found my dear reptiles still hungry and my observation gallery flooded, I could only assume you and your plucky friends had escaped. You knew too much: I had to track you down and deal with you. My cougars picked up your scent just outside the town and we followed you here, to the hills.” He paused, head cocked to one side. “I must admit, I had expected you to go into the town, but instead you came out here. Why?”

Sherlock thought for a moment. Balthassar must have confused two different trails: the one that Sherlock, Matty and Virginia had left as they went towards Perseverance and the one Sherlock and his horse had left as they went away from the town. That meant Balthassar didn’t know that his plans had been exposed yet. Should Sherlock tell him?

If Balthassar knew that it was too late, that his army had already been discovered, then he would have no reason for killing Sherlock. In theory, at least.

“The Union Army already know about the invasion of Canada,” Sherlock told him. “There’s no point in going ahead now. Just call it off, Balthassar. You can save a lot of lives.”

Silence, as Balthassar considered what Sherlock had said. It wasn’t possible to tell what he was thinking behind the white mask.

“How long have they known for?” he asked eventually.

“Long enough that there’s no chance your army will ever get to the border.”

“In that case, what are you doing out here?” Balthassar asked.

“The Unionists were preparing to drop explosives on your men. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to stop it.”

“I presume that was due to some form of misguided nobility, rather than agreement with the Confederate way of life?”

“I just don’t want to see any more people die,” Sherlock replied wearily.

Balthassar shook his head. “Do you expect me to be grateful?” he asked, and suddenly there was a grating tone of anger in his voice.

Sherlock felt tiredness weighing him down like a lead weight on his shoulders. “I don’t expect anything,” he said. “I’m not doing this for you, or for anyone else. I’m doing it for me. For what I believe.”

“Then you’ve wasted your time,” Balthassar snapped. “The invasion goes ahead, despite everything you have told me.”

“Then your people will be rounded up, and if they choose to fight then there will be a battle.”

“And people will die anyway,” Balthassar snarled. “So you have failed.”

“I can’t control the world,” Sherlock pointed out. “Just the bits I can reach. At least I’ve done what I can to stop a massacre. The rest is up to you, and Amyus Crowe, and the Government.”

“Your problem,” Balthassar pointed out, porcelain face impassive and glowing in the moonlight, but voice bitter, “is that you let your emotions get in the way of logic. If I had any advice to offer you, it would be for you to suppress your emotions. Keep them in check. They can only lead you astray. They can only hurt you.”

Sherlock’s mind flashed with memories of his mother, and his sister, and the memories were coloured with emotions, and those emotions hurt. But then there were memories of Virginia too, and those memories didn’t hurt. They made him happy.

“I appreciate the advice,” he said, “but I think I’ll hang on to my emotions, if you don’t mind. I like them, for better or for worse.”

“I would say you’ll live to regret it,” Balthassar said, “but you won’t.” He snapped his fingers. The cougar at his side advanced towards Sherlock, teeth exposed and eyes narrowed.

Sherlock brought his hand around in front of him. The blade of the knife caught the moonlight in a liquid gleam.

The cougar didn’t even hesitate. It just kept on coming.

Feet padded on rock behind him. Sherlock turned his head, slowly.

The second cougar was behind him.

His thoughts raced through possibilities, none of which helped. How could he fight two wild animals with just a knife?

But they weren’t wild, were they? They were partially tamed — or, at least, they obeyed Balthassar. They feared him, and that gave Sherlock a chance.

A sudden acceleration in the padding of feet behind him made him drop to the ground and roll sideways. Something dark flashed over his head. He jumped to his feet, but the cougars were quicker. They were side by side now, snarling at him.

Cats could climb trees, but they couldn’t climb rock.

As fast as he could, Sherlock scrambled up the sheer side of the gully; fingers scrabbling for gaps in the rock, feet trying to find small ridges and shelves that would take his weight without crumbling.

Below him, the cougars leaped.

His fingers closed over a flat area of rock and he hauled himself up desperately, just as a clawed paw caught at his boot and pulled him backwards. He put all of his strength into one tremendous heave, and pulled himself to safety on a ridge that ran along the side of the gully, heading upward in one direction and downward in the other.

He looked down, checking that his feet had survived unscathed. The heel of his boot had been pulled off by the big cat, but other than that he was intact.

From below, the gleam of the cougars’s eyes vanished as they headed off in different directions, looking for a way up to him. And this was their territory, not his. They would find a way.

“Entertaining as this is,” Balthassar’s voice called, “you are just postponing the inevitable. That isn’t a logical course of action. Just give in; it’ll be easier and less painful.”

“You promised me that before,” Sherlock panted, “and you lied.”

The ledge was barely wider than his body, and he sprinted along it, trying to get to somewhere relatively safe. He could hear the click of claws on stone from somewhere off to one side, and the deep rasping of breath echoing throughout the gully.

If he didn’t do something soon, he was dead.

Pressed against the side of the gully, he glanced downward. He could just make out Balthassar’s white hat below.

With a momentary prayer that his deduction about the cougars and their relationship with Balthassar was correct, he jumped.

He crashed down on to Balthassar, knocking the man to the ground and sending his revolver skittering away into the darkness. Sherlock’s left shoulder hit the rock of the gully floor as he tried to roll away, sending a spike of red-hot agony through his body. By the time he climbed to his feet, Balthassar was already standing. He was cradling his left arm with his right. It looked malformed, as if his thin bones had snapped in the fall.

His porcelain mask had been knocked off. It lay on the ground a few feet away, broken into three pieces. His face, bereft of the mask, was twisted into an expression of pure hatred.

“Southern courtesy aside,” Balthassar snarled, “I will see my pets strip the flesh from your bones while you are still alive and screaming.” The smaller, black leeches on his face looked like holes through to the darkness of the night sky behind him. Balthassar looked past Sherlock. “And here they are,” he said, and barked three words in the guttural language that he used to communicate with the animals.

Expecting at any moment to feel the weight of a cougar on his back and the agony of its claws ripping through his flesh, Sherlock stepped forward, towards Balthassar.

The thin man wasn’t expecting that. He flinched backwards, still cradling his left arm, but Sherlock reached out with his throbbing left hand and ripped the red leech from behind Balthassar’s ear. It tore free with some resistance. Blood spattered on the shoulder of Balthassar’s white suit; black in the moonlight.

Balthassar screamed: a high, thin noise of distilled rage and shock.

The giant red leech was squishy and wet in Sherlock’s hand. Before Balthassar could do anything, before the cougars could spring, Sherlock bought his knife up and sliced it in half. It writhed and twisted, leaking Balthassar’s blood into his palm. He turned, each hand holding a part of the leech, and threw them at the two cougars that were advancing towards him.

Given their reaction earlier, on Balthassar’s veranda, he had thought they might turn and run in terror, but they surprised him. The cougars snapped the halves of the leech out of the air as if they were titbits thrown as treats and swallowed them whole.

They continued to advance on him.

No, not on him. Their eyes were fixed on Balthassar.

Sherlock moved slowly to one side. The cougars ignored him, and continued moving towards Balthassar.

It made a strange kind of sense. The man who had dominated them was injured, weakened, and the leech that they feared was gone. Whatever power Balthassar had over them appeared to have been broken. They had the power now. He couldn’t hurt them.

Balthassar backed away. The rocky edge was behind him. He said something in the language he used to control the cats with, but they ignored it.

Sherlock watched, his mouth dry and his heart pounding. Balthassar took another step back, hands raised to ward the cougars off, but his right foot ended up past the edge of the rocky overhang, over empty air, and he fell, screaming, into the darkness.

The cougars stood there for a moment, looking over the edge, and then, without looking at each other or at Sherlock, they padded away, into the hills.

Sherlock stood there for a while, getting his breath back and letting the pain in his shoulder subside. It didn’t seem broken. At least that was something.

The cougars didn’t come back.

Eventually he went over to where his horse was cowering and calmed it down, stroking its flanks until it stopped shivering. Then he pulled himself up into the saddle and continued his journey, down the slope that led to the grasslands.

At the bottom of the slope he found Balthassar’s body. It lay, twisted and broken, in a flattened area of grass. The leeches had vanished from his face. Presumably they had left to seek other prey the minute his blood had stopped pumping through his veins. Not necessarily a logical decision, but an instinctive one.

Sherlock must have fallen asleep on the ride back, because the next thing he knew the horse was trotting through the outskirts of town and there was a blue blush on the horizon. He left the horse tied up outside the stable and headed for the hotel. He could pick up his deposit later.

There was nobody in the dining room when he walked in. He headed up to his room. Nobody tried to stop him. He almost expected someone to leap out and attack him, or something to leap on to his shoulders when his back was turned, but there was nothing. Everything was peaceful and calm. He let himself into his room and slipped beneath the covers. It was as if nothing had happened. It was as if he’d not left the room since he’d first entered that morning, after the long trek across the grasslands from Balthassar’s house with Matty and Virginia.

He slept without dreaming, or if he dreamed then he did not remember the dreams when he woke up, and that was probably a good thing.

The sun was shining through his bedroom window when he awoke. He lay there for a while, cataloguing what had happened and consigning it to his memories. Then he got dressed and went downstairs.

Amyus Crowe was in the dining room, talking with two of the Pinkerton’s agents. He said something to them, then crossed over to Sherlock as they left.

“Ain’t seen much of you since yesterday morning,” he said. “I’ve been busy with the Pinkertons, but Matty and Virginia said you never left your room. You must have needed your sleep.”

“I did,” Sherlock said.

“There’s scratches on your hands that I don’t recall from yesterday’

“I think they came up overnight,” Sherlock said.

“Maybe they did.” Crowe gazed at Sherlock levelly for a few moments.

“What’s been happening?” Sherlock asked. “What’s the news on Balthassar and the invasion of Canada?”

“The balloon attack on the Confederate Army was called off,” Crowe replied. “Someone set fire to the balloons. Probably one of Balthassar’s agents. That’s the general theory, anyway, and who am I to disagree?”

At least a massacre was avoided,” Sherlock pointed out.

“It was,” Crowe agreed. “The Secretary of War was all for a big confrontation between his troops and Balthassar’s, but his orders got held up somehow, an’ I took the opportunity to put a plan of my own into effect. We used John Wilkes Booth to tell Balthassar’s Army to disperse. He can be very persuasive, when he’s given the proper medication an’ when he’s offered an alternative to the gallows. I don’t think many of the troops had the stomach for a real fight. They were glad to be told to go home.”

“And John Wilkes Booth?”

“As far as history is concerned, he’s already dead. A man named John St Helen will be committed to a lunatic asylum in Baltimore. If he’s given the correct medication at the right dose, he should be manageable. Until his death, at least.”

“Incarceration,” Sherlock said.

“He’s an assassin, when all’s said an’ done. It’s better than he deserves.”

Sherlock nodded, not so much in agreement but more because he didn’t particularly want to argue. And what about us? What happens next?”

“Next,” Crowe said, “we return to New York and get tickets for England. That’ll probably take a day or two. I think we’ve spent more than enough time here. Much as I love the country of my birth, I do enjoy England. Overcooked vegetables and steamed puddings excepted.”

“You’re not... staying?” Sherlock asked tentatively.

Crowe shook his massive head. “Too much to do elsewhere,” he said. “There’s lots of us here, but only me in England. I got a job to do. An’ I promised your brother I’d teach you to think logically an’ use evidence, an’ I suspect I’ve not done as much on that front as I should’ve done.”

Later that day the four of them — Crowe, Virginia, Sherlock and Matty — took a train back to New York, and Crowe found them tickets on a ship leaving in a few days for England. They even managed to eat at the famed Niblo’s Garden on their last night — oysters, of course, an huge steaks — but Sherlock found himself distanced from it all, watching it go past with little emotion. It was as if he’d been through so much over the past few days that something had been burned out in him. He hoped it would come back some time soon. He didn’t like the feeling of being separate from the rest of the world.

Virginia was worried about him, he could tell. She kept glancing across at him while they were eating, and once or twice she would just rest her hand on his arm for a moment, then take it away when he didn’t react.

A few days later, on the ship, watching from the rail as New York harbour slipped away in the distance, Sherlock found himself shivering despite the warmth of the sun and the lack of wind. He felt ill, out of sorts, but he didn’t know how to make himself better.

“So,” a familiar voice said from beside him, “how was the great metropolis of New York? Did you do whatever it was that you needed to do?”

He turned his head. Rufus Stone, the Irish violinist he’d met on the journey out, was standing nearby, leaning on the rail. His violin case was slung across his back and his long black hair was loose across his collar.

“I thought you were staying in America?” Sherlock said, surprised.

Ah, about that,” Rufus said ruefully. “I may not have mentioned, but I was in a bit of trouble, back in the old country, and I was hoping that seeking the fabled pot of gold at this end of the rainbow would be a good move, but it turns out that people have been sending messages along that very same rainbow, and someone was waiting for me when I got here.” He sighed. “Who would have thought that the Irish would have the whole criminal underworld in New York sewn up like a corpse in a shroud?”

“So what happens now?” Sherlock asked. “Where do you go?”

“That depends,” Rufus said, gazing out across the water. “Do you know of anyone who is in desperate need of a violin tutor?”

“Funnily enough,” said Sherlock, “I think I do.”