THE EIGHT REINDEER OF THE APOCALYPSE

look out for

Josiah Bancroft

The first book in a wildly inventive and mesmerizing new fantasy series from acclaimed author Josiah Bancroft, where magical mysteries abound and only one team can solve them: the Hexologists.

The Hexologists, Isolde and Warren Wilby, are quite accustomed to helping desperate clients with the bugbears of city life. Aided by hexes and a bag of charmed relics, the Wilbies have recovered children abducted by chimney wraiths, removed infestations of barb-nosed incubi, and ventured into the Gray Plains of the Unmade to soothe a troubled ghost. Well acquainted with the weird, they never shy away from a challenging case.

But when they are approached by the royal secretary and told the king pleads to be baked into a cake—going so far as to wedge himself inside a lit oven—the Wilbies soon find themselves embroiled in a mystery that could very well see the nation turned on its head. Their effort to expose a royal secret buried under forty years of lies brings them nose-to-nose with a violent anti-royalist gang, avaricious ghouls, alchemists who draw their power from a hell-like dimension, and a bookish dragon who only occasionally eats people.

Armed with a love toughened by adversity and a stick of chalk that can conjure light from the darkness, hope from the hopeless, Iz and Warren Wilby are ready for whatever springs from the alleys, graves, and shadows next.

1 THE KING IN THE CAKE

“The king wishes to be cooked alive,” the royal secretary said, accepting the proffered saucer and cup and immediately setting both aside. At his back, the freshly stoked fire added a touch of theater to his announcement, though neither seemed to suit what, until recently, had been a pleasant Sunday morning.

“Does he?” Isolde Wilby gazed at the royal secretary with all the warmth of a hypnotist.

“Um, yes. He’s quite insistent.” The questionable impression of the royal secretary’s negligible chin and cumbersome nose was considerably improved by his well-tailored suit, fastidiously combed hair, and blond mustache, waxed into upturned barbs. Those modest whiskers struck Isolde as a dubious effort to impart gravity to a youthful face. Though Mr. Horace Alman seemed a man of perfect manners, he sat with his hat capping his knee. “More precisely, the king wishes to be baked into a cake.”

Looming at the tea cart like a bear over a blackberry bush, Mr. Warren Wilby quietly swapped the plate of cakes with a dish of watercress sandwiches. “Care for a nibble, sir?”

“No. No, thank you,” Mr. Alman murmured, flummoxed by the offer. The secretary watched as Mr. Wilby positioned a triangle of white bread under his copious mustache, then vanished it like a letter into a mail slot.

The Wilbies’ parlor was unabashedly old-fashioned. While their neighbors pursued the bare walls, voluptuous lines, and skeletal furniture that defined contemporary tastes, the Wilbies’ townhouse decor fell somewhere between a gallery of oddities and a country bed-and-breakfast. Every rug was ancient, ever doily yellow, every table surface adorned by some curio or relic. The picture frames that crowded the walls were full of adventuresome scenes of tall ships, dogsleds, and eroded pyramids. The style of their furniture was as motley as a rummage sale and similarly haggard. But as antiquated as the room’s contents were, the environment was remarkably clean. Warren Wilby could abide clutter, but never filth.

Isolde recrossed her legs and bounced the topmost with a metronome’s precision. She hadn’t had time to comb her hair since rising, or rather, she had had the time but not the will during her morning reading hours, which the king’s secretary had so brazenly interrupted, necessitating the swapping of her silk robe for breeches and a blouse. Wearing a belt and shoes seemed an absolute waste of a Sunday morning.

Isolde Wilby was often described as imposing, not because she possessed a looming stature or a ringing voice, but because she had a way of imposing her will upon others. Physically, she was a slight woman in the plateau of her thirties with striking, almost vulpine features. She parted her short hair on the side, though her dark curls resisted any further intervention. Her long-suffering stylist had once described her hair as resembling a porcupine with a perm, a characterization Isolde had not minded in the slightest. She was almost entirely insensible to pleasantries, especially the parentheses of polite conversation, preferring to let the drumroll of her heels convey her hellos and her coattails say her goodbyes.

Her husband, Warren, was a big, squarish man with a tree stump of a neck and a lion’s mane of receded tawny hair. He wore unfashionable tweed suits that he hoped had a softening effect on his bearing, but which in fact made him look like a garden wall. Though he was a year younger than Isolde, Warren did not look it, and had been, since adolescence, mistaken for a man laboring toward the promise of retirement. He had a mustache like a boot brush and limpid hazel eyes whose beauty was squandered on a beetled and bushy brow, an obstruction that often rendered his expressions unfathomable, leading some strangers to assume he was gruffer than he was. In fact, Warren was a man of tender conscience and emotional depth, traits that came in handy when Isolde’s brusque manner necessitated a measure of diplomacy. He was considerably better groomed that morning only because he had risen early to greet the veg man, who unfailingly delivered the freshest greens and gossip in all of Berbiton at the unholy hour of six.

Seeming to wither in the silence, Mr. Alman repeated, “I said, the king wishes to be baked into a ca—”

“Intriguing,” Isolde interrupted in a tone that plainly suggested it was not.

Iz did not particularly care for the nobility. She had accepted Mr. Horace Alman into her home purely because War had insisted one could not refuse a royal visitor, nor indeed, turn off the lights and pretend to be abroad.

While War had made tea, Iz had endured the secretary’s boorish attempts at small talk, made worse by an unprompted confession that he was something of a fan, a Hexologist enthusiast. He followed the Wilbies’ exploits as frequently documented in the Berbiton Times. Mr. Horace Alman was interested to know how she felt about the recent court proceedings. Iz had rejoined she was curious how he felt about his conspicuous case of piles.

The royal secretary had gone on to irk her further by asking whether her name really was “Iz Ann Always Wilby” or if it were some sort of theatrical appellation, a stage name. Iz patiently explained that her father, the famous Professor Silas Wilby, had had many weaknesses—including an insatiable wanderlust and an allergy to obligations—but none worse than his fondness for puns, which she personally reviled as charmless linguistic coincidences that could only be conflated with humor by a gormless twit. Only the sort of vacuous cretin who went around asking people if their names were made-up could possibly enjoy the lumbering comedy that was the godless pun.

Though, in all fairness, she was not the only one to be badgered over her name. Her husband had taken the rather unusual step of adopting her last name upon the occasion of their marriage. He’d changed his name not because he was estranged from his family, but rather because he’d never liked the name Offalman.

Iz had been about to throw the royal secretary out on his inflamed fundament when War had emerged from the kitchen pushing a tea cart loaded with chattering porcelain and Mr. Horace Alman had announced that King Elbert III harbored aspirations of becoming a gâteau.

His gaunt cheeks blushing with the ever-expanding quiet, Mr. Alman pressed on: “His Majesty has gone so far as to crawl into a lit oven when no one was looking.” The secretary paused to make room for their astonishment, giving Warren sufficient time to post another sandwich. “And while he escaped with minor burns, the experience does not appear to have dissuaded him of the ambition. He wants to be roasted on the bone.”

“So, it’s madness, then.” Iz shook her head at War when he inquired whether she would like some of either the lemon sponge or the spice cake, an inquiry that was conducted with a delicate rounding of his plentiful brows.

“I don’t believe so.” Mr. Alman touched his teacup as if he might raise it, then the fire behind him snapped like a whip, and his fingers bid a fluttering retreat. “He has long moments of lucidity, almost perfect coherence. But he also suffers from fugues of profound confusion. He’s been discovered in the middle of the night roaming the royal grounds without any sense of himself or his surroundings. The king’s sister, Princess Constance, has had to take the rather extreme precaution of confining him to his suite. And I must say, you both seem to be taking all of this rather in stride! I tell you the king believes he’s a waste of cake batter, you stifle a yawn!”

Iz tightened the knot of her crossed arms. “I didn’t realize you were looking for a performance. I could have the neighbor’s children pop by if you’d like a little more shrieking.”

War hurried to intervene: “Mr. Alman, please forgive us. We do not mean to appear apathetic. We are just a bit more accustomed to unusual interviews and extraordinary confessions than most. But, rest assured, we are not indifferent to horror; we are merely better acquainted.”

“Indeed,” Iz said with a muted smile. “How have the staff taken the king’s altered state of mind?”

Appearing somewhat appeased, the secretary twisted and shaped the points of his mustache. “They’re discreet, of course, but there are limits. Princess Constance knows it’s a secret she cannot keep forever, devoted as she is to her brother.”

“Surely, you want physicians, psychologists. We are neither,” Iz said.

The secretary absorbed her comments with an expression of pinched indulgence. “We’ve consulted with the nation’s greatest medical minds. They were all stumped, or rather, they were perfectly confident in their varying diagnoses and prescriptions, and none of them were at all capable of producing any results. His condition only worsens.”

“Even so, I’m not sure what help we can be.” Iz picked at a thread that protruded, wormlike, from the armrest of the sofa.

The secretary turned the brim of his hat upon his knee, ducking her gaze when he said, “There’s more, Ms. Wilby. There was a letter.”

“A letter?”

“In retrospect, it seems to have touched off His Majesty’s malaise.” The royal secretary reached into his jacket breast pocket. The stiff envelope trembled when he withdrew it. The broken wax seal was as sanguine as a wound. “It is not signed, but the sender asserts that he is the king’s unrecognized son.”

Warren moved to stand behind his wife’s chair. He clutched the back of it as if it were the rail of a sleigh poised atop a great hill. Iz reached back and, without looking, patted the tops of his knuckles. “I imagine the Crown receives numerous such claims. No doubt there are scores of charlatans who’re foolish enough to hazard the gallows for a chance to shake down the king.”

“Indeed, but there are two things that distinguish this particular instance of blackmail. First, the seal.” Mr. Alman stroked the edge of the wax medallion, indicating each element as he described it: “An S emblazoned over a turret; note the five merlons, one for each of Luthland’s counties. Beneath the S, a banner bearing the name Yeardley. This is the seal of Sebastian, Prince of Yeardley. This is the stamp of the king’s adolescent ring.”

“He identified it as such?” Iz asked.

“I did, at least initially. Of course, I like to believe I’m familiar with all the royal seals, but I admit I had to check the records on this occasion. Naturally, there is much of his correspondence that His Majesty leaves me to open and deal with, but when something like this comes through, I deliver it to him unbroken.”

“The signet was no longer in the king’s possession, then?”

“No, the royal record identified the ring as lost about twenty-five years ago, around the conclusion of his military service, I believe.”

“That’s quite a length of time to sit on such a claim.” Iz reached for the letter, but the secretary pulled it back. She looked into his eyes; they glistened with uncertainty as sweat dripped from his nose like rain from a grotesque. “What is the second thing that distinguishes the letter?”

“The king’s response to the correspondence was… pronounced. He has thus far refused to discuss his impressions of the contents with myself, his sister, or any of his advisors. He insists that it is a hoax, that we should destroy it, though Princess Constance won’t hear of it. She maintains that one doesn’t destroy the evidence of extortion: One saves it for the inquiry. But of course, there hasn’t been an inquiry. How could there be, given the nature of the claim? To say nothing of the fact that the primary witness to the events in question is currently raving in the royal tower.”

“The princess wishes for us to investigate?” she asked. Though Isolde held little affection for the gentry, she liked the princess well enough. Constance had established herself as one of very few public figures who continued to promote the study of hexegy, touting the utility of the practice, even amid the blossoming of scientific discovery and electrical convenience. Still, Isolde’s vague respect for the princess was hardly sufficient to make her leap to her brother’s aid.

Mr. Alman coughed—a brittle, aborted laugh. “Strictly speaking, Her Royal Highness does not know I am here. I have taken it upon myself to investigate the identity of the bastard, or rather, to engage more capable persons in that pursuit.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Alman, but what I said when we first sat down still holds. I am a private citizen. I serve the public, some of whom come to me with complaints about royal overreach, the criminal exploitations of the nobility, or the courts’ bungling of one case or another. I don’t work for the police—not anymore. Surely you have enough resources at your disposal to forgo the interference of one unaffiliated investigator.”

“I do understand your preference, ma’am.” The royal secretary rucked his soft features into an authoritative scowl. “But these are extraordinary circumstances, and not without consequence. The uncertainty of rule only emboldens the antiroyalists, the populists, and our enemies overseas. You must—”

Isolde pounced like a tutor upon a mistake: “I must pay my taxes. I may help you. Show me the letter.”

Mr. Alman tightened like a twisted rag. “I cannot share such sensitive information until you have agreed to assist in the case.”

“There is another way to look at this, Iz,” Warren said, returning to the tea cart. He poured water from a sweating pitcher into a juice glass and presented it to the dampened secretary, who readily accepted it. “You wouldn’t just be working for the Crown; you would be serving the interests of the private citizen who has come forward with the claim… perhaps a legitimate one.” The final phrase made Mr. Alman nearly choke upon his thimble swallow of water. “If the writer of this letter shares the king’s blood, and we were to prove it, I don’t think anyone would accuse you of being too friendly with the royals.”

Isolde bobbed her head in consideration, an easy rhythm that quickly broke. “But if I help to prove that he is a prince, I’d just be serving at the pleasure of a different sovereign.”

“True.” Warren moved to the mantel to stir the coals, not to invigorate them, but to shuffle the loose embers toward the corners of the firebox. “But if you don’t intervene, our possible prince will remain a fugitive.”

“You think we should take the case?”

“You know how I feel about lords and lawmen. But it seems to me Mr. Alman is right: If there’s a vacuum in the palace and a scramble for the throne, there will be strife in the streets. We know who suffers when heaven squabbles—the vulnerable. Someone up on high only has to whisper the word ‘unrest’ and the prisons fill up, the workhouses shake out, the missions bar their doors, and the orphanages repopulate. And when the dust settles, perhaps there’ll be a new face printed on the gallet bill or a fresh set of bullies on the bench, but the only thing of real consequence that will have changed is the number of bones in the potter’s field. Revolution may chasten the rich, but uncertainty torments the poor.”