Shadows Against the Empire Read online

  Shadows

  Against the

  Empire

  An Interplanetary Steampunk Adventure

  The Adventures of Folkestone & Hand #1

  by

  Ralph E Vaughan

  Dog in the Night Books

  2013

  Shadows Against the Empire is an original work of fiction, and all characters and events are products of the author’s imagination, or, in the case of recognizable historical figures or events, are portrayed in a fictional way either to advance the plot or provide a sense of verisimilitude.

  Shadows Against the Empire

  An Interplanetary Steampunk Adventure

  The Adventures of Folkestone & Hand #1

  ©2013 by Ralph E Vaughan

  DEDICATION

  To the memory of ERB, ACD, HPL, REH & CAS, not to mention CL Moore (thanks for the segir). Also, for very obvious reasons to Frank Chadwick, and for, perhaps, not so obvious reasons to balladeer and writer Paul Roland, who has not only been an encouragement to me but also provided the soundtrack for my writing.

  EXPLANATIONS & SUCH

  The conditions portrayed on the planets of the Solar System in this novel and the existence of the aether is very much in accordance with the theories and beliefs of Victorian scientists, which did not undergo any radical changes until the advent of satellite exploration in the later half of the 20th Century, when the Solar System became much less interesting, at least for those seeking adventure, mystery and romance…and a glass of segir in a smoky tavern on Venus.

  Also by Ralph E Vaughan:

  Paws & Claws Series

  Paws & Claws: A Three Dog Mystery (Paws & Claws #1)

  A Flight of Raptors (Paws & Claws #2)

  K-9 Blues (Paws & Claws #3)

  The Death & Life of an American Dog (Paws & Claws #4)

  Dogs of S.T.E.A.M. (Paws & Claws #5)

  The Dog Who Loved Sherlock Holmes (Paws & Claws Special)

  Sherlock Holmes Adventures

  Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories

  Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Ancient Gods

  Sherlock Holmes in The Dreaming Detective

  Sherlock Holmes in The Coils of Time (Gryphon Books)

  Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures

  Sherlock Holmes in The Terror Out of Time

  Professor Challenger in Secret of the Dreamlands

  Folkestone & Hand Steampunk Adventures

  Shadows Against the Empire: Interplanetary Steampunk Adventure

  Other Works

  Reflections on Elder Egypt (nonfiction)

  HP Lovecraft in the Comics (nonfiction)

  The Doc Savage Concordance (nonfiction)

  Life & Death in the Alien’s Universe (literary criticism)

  Oh, Mr Yoda! (play, with Patricia E Vaughan)

  The Horses of Byzantium & Other Poems (poetry)

  A Darkness on My Mind (poetry)

  Midnight for Schrödinger’s Cat (poetry)

  As Editor and/or Illustrator

  The Many Worlds of Duane Rimel (Duane Rimel)

  The Second Book of Rimel (Duane Rimel)

  Dreams of Yith (Duane Rimel)

  Fungi From Yuggoth (HP Lovecraft; with Nick Petrosino)

  Ancient Nights (anthology)

  Beneath Twin Moons (anthology)

  Fantastic Realms (anthology)

  A Walk in the Dark (anthology)

  Prologue

  Daraph-Kor squinted through stinging, flaying snow as he pulled himself from one craggy outcropping to the next.

  Summer in the austral climes meant the sun never dipped entirely out of sight. While Sol was not any brighter here than anywhere else on Mars, its persistence overwhelmed its dimness. Around its spectral glimmer played sundogs and prismatic rings, shimmering through drifting crystals of ice and carbon dioxide.

  Slicing wind screamed and roared in his ears, like ancient demons laughing.

  He was so very far from home, far from the murmuring blue canals of Syrtis Major, the capital of lowland Mars and centre of British influence; far from its more temperate clime and thicker atmosphere. He was even farther from his family, now lost forever, and the villa in which they had lived. All gone, all abandoned, lost in time as well as space.

  They were now but waking dreams.

  No, not even dreams, not even flitting phantasms, not now, not when he was so close to the wellsprings of the Song, when its siren call swelled so loudly in his mind.

  He no longer slept; even when fatigue pushed him to the ground unconscious, true slumber never really came to him.

  Nearly crawling at times, he traversed the dead, dreary landscape beneath an eternal watery light.

  He travelled the savage southern wastes, now not even possessing a beast of burden, for it had died…but he could not recall exactly when the faithful creature had perished. Yesterday? Last week? A lifetime ago? Time was meaningless in the swirling snows beyond the jagged mountains that bordered the Noachis Plain, separating the lowlands from that ancient antarctic region of Mars where Martians had not trod for millennia, where men of Earth had never penetrated.

  When first he had put Syrtis Major behind him, he had had no sure knowledge of his goal, for he was only following a siren call pulling him southward. Now, however, he seemed to hear a name whispered by the keening wind – Misr.

  Mythic Misr.

  Even to the ancient Martians, back before the acrimonious divide between lowlanders and highlanders, the city lost in the southern ice had never been more than a tale whispered around low-burning campfires.

  But now it was more real to him than any of the thriving metropolises of Mars and the other Inner Planets, which had all been part of his mercantile network, the basis of the material wealth he had previously considered the beginning and end of existence, the source of power and leisure.

  His once-aristocratic yellowish skin was tinged bluish, his ivory nails were cracked and broken from clambering up rocky pathless slopes, from climbing frost-glistening cliffs that rose sheer or dropped precipitously into mist-filled stygian gorges, untouched by the diminutive seemingly immobile sun. His pale eyes were sunk deep into his skull.

  The pain and the suffering meant nothing to him, naught but that he had not yet perished.

  Death’s shadow constantly loomed over every step, but even that fell presence seemed to matter little.

  Only the siren Song mattered, ancient yet ever new in his mind, wordless and yet expressing a language understood only by the most primitive part of his soul.

  A life of many interests and ambitions had been reduced to but a single blind quest – to follow the Song to its unknown source.

  Daraph-Kor recalled but dimly now how the Song had come to him in the violet darkness of a deep Martian night, as he relaxed in his one of his villa’s rooftop gardens, lulled by floral perfumes and rustling leaves. Airships streamed across the sky, steam engines throbbing, and aether-flyers dropped through thin translucent clouds. Beyond, stars glimmered like scattered jewels; twin moons raced in silent flight with bright Earth hanging low in the west, blue-green and crystalline.

  Earth.

  Home world of the Humans.

  He had liked Humans in the life he had abandoned, at least for the most part, as much as a merchant could be said to actually like anyone, for in the final analysis, anyone, no matter the planet of origin, was only as likeable as his silver, gold and platinum. They all had vices and virtues, as did Martians. Of course, it was at least conceded, by Martian and Venusian alike, that the Humans were a notoriously seedy lot, on the whole, but Daraph-Kor considered them a vital and exciting race; one did have to keep a close watch over them, however.
/>   Still, they were a multitude of worlds rolled into one blue-white sphere. For mercantile enterprise, the chosen profession of his family for long generations, he preferred the British merchants, along with the American and Texan traders; the French and the Italians, though more sly-eyed, were also of value, however, as they exported subtle wines, and were his best customers for the exotic liqueurs of the savage highland tribes; just as the traders sent by the empires of China and Japan kept him busy procuring the oddest creatures – Martians called them pests, vermin or just vile, but the men of Oriental Earth termed them delicacies. Daraph-Kor shrugged. He would bag manure pods from the purple deserts if he thought someone would purchase them, and if he had searched long enough among the peoples of the Inner Planets he thought he would have found some people to prize them highly.

  He was always searching for something.

  Perhaps that was why, of all those dwelling on Mars, the Song had come to him, sly and seductive.

  It was a deep quiet night when the Song sounded in his mind, very faint initially, so soft at first he did not realise it was not just a part of his own mind, an echo of the idle thoughts and fancies flitting through the dark places of racial memory. It was quite late when he sensed it. The city was dark; even the spaceport was quiet, with the sky holding only lazy airships and lazier stars, and all the cargo barges and sail-bearing merchant ships rode their canal lines lightless in their berths.

  The empire of steel and steam slumbered.

  His wife, Mozah-Kor, dreamed of fabrics, gems and the high stratas of society to which she aspired.

  The scents of the bowers were light, especially those ivory and pastel blooms which appeared only when the pastel moons hurtled overhead.

  The night was warm, lulling, deceptive.

  He lay in a hammock slung between two banath-trees, a delicate cup of Mercurian brandy at his side on a table with ornate crystal legs and a mosaic top. The stars wheeled, and now through the entwined vines above he watched the slow navigation lights of airships and aether fliers, some journeying to other regions of Mars, others lifting toward the outer reaches where the planets waited, and still others rose stealthily, not seeking notice as they were about their businesses, nefarious and otherwise.

  Watching the workings of this modern age of clockwork and steam, of differential engines and aether whispers caused Daraph-Kor to consider earlier times, simpler times, when there was but one world, but one people; and the planets were but wandering strangers along unknowable paths. On Mars, as on all Sol’s worlds, its Golden Age was lost in mists, recalled in legends, embellished in dreams, and yearned for even when times were good and profits were fat. It was an apt Martian proverb: “The past is always better.”

  Such fancies held Daraph-Kor’s mind thrall even as he contemplated the fullness of his life and the blessings heaped upon him by the often capricious gods. He drifted into light slumber, the most vulnerable of mental states. It was then the Song came to him, caressing his thoughts, stroking his memories, stimulating dark emotions within him with feral pulses and primal rhythms that were ancient even when Mars was a young hot world savaged by the Dark Gods, now but evil spectres with which naughty children were threatened.

  He was caught in the web of fiery ethereal music.

  Trapped by a siren call none but he could hear, with no wax for his ears, nor a mast to which he could cling.

  Called and listening in a moment of weakness, he answered.

  He said no farewells, put no affairs into order, made no provisions for his abandoned family, no letters of explanation to his former friends. He dressed for a long journey, packed such supplies as he had on hand, and travelled southward.

  He exited the great city by secret means, through tunnels lit by torches and gaslamps, filled with the hiss of steam and the murmurs of polyglot masses on dark errands. He attracted no attention as he passed under the ancient city walls by one of a thousand secret portals.

  He left the green edges of the great canals, the cities that clung to them, trekked across the grey and ruddy deserts, and climbed into the white mountains of the far south. When his pack animal was lost, he continued without it; when his strength faltered, he persevered. Finally, he dug his fingers into the ice and pulled himself over the last crag.

  Days, weeks, months, years – he neither knew nor cared.

  Misr finally rose before him, wreathed about with icy winds, and even though he knew it was draped in silence he also knew it was imbued with ancient melodies, with the whisperings of the Dark Gods. His shoes worn away, his feet bloody, his fingernails worn to nubs from single-minded climbing, he entered the fabled city of an evil past.

  Glassy galleries and crystalline archways soared into vaulted darkness. He had never trod these sacred precincts, no Martian ever had, and yet it was all somehow familiar, like a way prepared before him, paths made straight. He was a lost child of Misr, a progeny of the Dark Gods finally returned to a home of which he should have never been deprived, a world out of which the Masters should have never been cast.

  He entered a vast circular chamber, ribbed with gleaming ice and lighted by shimmering prismatic windows high above.

  In the centre of the chamber awaited the Black Mirror.

  Its surface was an abyss, deep, roiling, glassy; and something within was reaching for him, even as, against his will, such as he had any left, he stretched out his hand.

  Dark contact.

  The music that had drawn him across the sere leagues vanished with a suddenness that was almost painful. Simultaneously, a presence flowed out of the Black Mirror and into his body, into a frame that was no longer frail and upon the edge of death. In that moment, that which had been called Daraph-Kor was brutally pushed aside, replaced by something vile and unnameable, something that had waited an eternity for this moment.

  Just as Daraph-Kor had felt a sense of homecoming at the sight of lost Misr, so did the banished Entity experience such a sense at its return, a portentous advent into a universe from which it, and others of its kind, should have never been banished.

  The Entity was home.

  Eventually, all the Masters would return.

  As soon as the keepers of order were swept away.

  The Dark Gods’ old enemy, the Elder Race, was long gone, but they had been replaced by other beings, other keepers of law, other foes of chaos. The flesh which had once been Daraph-Kor called them Humans, fearing and respecting the might of their greatest empire…the British. If humanity’s most powerful rulers toppled, all others would fall from their own weaknesses.

  Yes, all the Banished Ones would return to blood and death, to the rule of chaos, the triumph of darkness and the final defeat of light and life.

  As soon as the British Empire was crushed and swept away.

  The battered and abused mass of flesh which had been Daraph-Kor waited and gathered strength and planned.

  Chapter 1

  Thoza-Joran crept stealthily through the ancient ruins of Old Cydonia, warily threading his way amongst the lengthening shades of dusk.

  He was a lowlander Martian of middle age, taller than average, gaunt, with eyes sunk so deep into his skull they seemed absent entirely. Garbed in indigo robes, he seemed little more than a shadow himself, or perhaps one of the phantasms with which legend peopled the long-deserted city by the Sapphire Canal, across from the modern city of Cydonia, one of the principle trading centres of the northern hemisphere, close to the air routes of several Terran powers operating on Shemosh, or Mars as all now called the sacred orb, after the manner of the interfering humans.

  Thoza-Joran rested his hand upon one of the many five-sided pyramids lining the pathways of Old Cydonia, feeling the cool, smooth, barely weathered stone beneath his long tapering fingers. He held still there a moment, letting the monument support his weight.

  He was so very tired.

  The infusion of power that had come to him in the sounding blackness, the fire that had coursed through his brain at the comm
and of the Entity, had taken as much from him as it had given, perhaps more, bringing him close to death before letting him return. Even now, weeks after submitting to the process, he quavered at the thought of the Entity.

  At first, he had taken the Entity to be just another Martian, some do-gooder seeking to lift him from his misery, to raise him from the filth of the narrow alleyway in which he had come to rest. At the second command to rise to his feet, he lifted his gaze, beheld those hooded eyes filled with stars. When the Entity took his hand, something like a galvanic shock seemed to leap through his weak and emaciated frame.

  In that moment he felt the ancient power, knew he had been called to something better than an inglorious existence, an unnoticed death among filth.

  Quite literally, the Entity lifted him from amongst the dead and restored him to life.

  And more.

  Much more.

  Revived by memories of that fated meeting, he walked down the path leading to the shimmering canal, flanked on either side by guardian pyramids, much as the Old Ones used to stroll under flaming stars, when Mars was a hot, young world, ruled by godlike beings at a time when humans still stared in fear at the haunted sky.

  At that moment, Thoza-Joran could almost forget his pain.

  Almost, but not quite, not ever.

  The absence of his wife and daughter still afflicted him like a bitter poison of the blood, but the power imbued to him by the Entity enabled him to counter the desolation that had almost carried him to his death; there was no masking the acidic memories, but the Entity had given him the means to avenge their deaths, to bring holy retribution to the humans.

  He wound his way to the canal’s edge and sat upon a platform above which arched two double curves of stone, coming almost together like the horns of a deadly animal. He meditated in the gloaming as stars spread across the welkin and hated Earth rose eastward. The glittering stars manifested themselves in shimmering canal waters as the watery sun’s light fled, and the navigational lights of paddle wheelers and great-sailed xebecs formed floating constellations and slow meteors, and the gaslights of New Cydonia flickered among the far towers and domes.