Camille Wilmarth was bored to tears with this year’s Season. Ever since R’lyeh had risen from the sea, it seemed that all the ton could find to talk about was the Egyptian Cultist revival in home decorating or how to clean Leng porcelains or whether Lord Byron had bought an original Unaussprechlichen Kulten for his new wife or been hoodwinked by an unscrupulous German forger.
It wasn’t that Camille didn’t appreciate the importance of the Rising. And of course she agreed that Bonaparte had gotten exactly what he deserved — to think that he’d call upon the Elder Gods just to escape Elba! Really, France had been nothing but a trial since the Revolution, anyway, although Camille would miss its milliners.
Still, so few of England’s military officers had come through the Rising unscathed. The list of eligible bachelors this Season was decidedly dismal, with so many army and naval officers slain or insane; only old men and aloof Exquisites were left to entertain all of the ladies who’d descended upon London for the Season.
One of those Exquisites stood beside her now, inspecting the rest of the guests at Almack’s through his quizzing glass.
“Lady Camille, do cast a glance to your right and observe Lord Wilcox’s coat,” Douglas Marsh murmured. “Upon my word, if it isn’t the very garment he was wearing last night when he was dancing court so assiduously over the Misses Merrion. I wonder, were we to stand close to him, which of the young lady’s perfumes might we detect lingering upon its wrinkled velvet like a lloigor over its victim?”
“Really, Marsh,” Camille chided with affection, “you go too far.”
“Indeed. Do you suppose the same might be said of the Misses Merrion?”
She tapped his arm with her painted fan and tried not to smile. Lord Marsh enjoyed going too far. A marquess’s second son and a commander in the king’s navy, he had only recently arrived in London. Unlike so many military officers who’d been left without employment in the wake of Napoleon’s exile, Marsh had done well on the Stock Exchange; avoided loss of life, limb, or lucidity during the Rising; and now seemed to be intent on frittering away his wealth on the most outrageous frivolities. It was a pity, Camille had often thought to herself, that the young man possessed such unfortunate features. His stocky frame wasn’t shown off to advantage by the wasp-waisted, skin-tight fashions he affected, and he was cursed by the Marsh family’s hereditary bulbous eyes and wide mouth. His complexion was very pale and smooth, however, which was unusual in a naval man and counted in his favor among the ladies.
“Oh, my,” Marsh breathed. “You must avert your eyes, my dear; Willy Curwen has done his cravat an unspeakable offense.”
Camille glanced at Lord Curwen and perceived at once that his linen neck-cloth wasn’t up to the consummate standards of her companion’s highly starched, painstakingly arranged work of habilimentary art, but it was Curwen’s companion who drew her eyes.
“Who is that, Marsh? The dark man beside him?” she asked, leaning closer to her companion.
Marsh adjusted his quizzing glass, his wide mouth screwing up in a disdainful moue.
“That is Lord Neely Chambres, the new ambassador from Carcosa,” he replied, contemplating the man’s clothing with the horrified fascination of a maiden aunt who has inadvertently stumbled across a midnight orgy with Shub-Niggurath in the fields behind her country home. “I fear he fell into a lady’s jewel box and encountered some difficulty climbing back out again.”
Camille hid another smile as she inspected the Carcosan. Lord Chambres wore a great yellow gemstone pin in his cravat and heavy golden rings on his slender fingers. A strange, three-armed golden brooch was pinned to his collar. His unfashionably long black hair was held back with a gold clasp studded with small red stones like drops of blood, their sanguine color repeated in the embroidery covering his ornate yellow silk waistcoat.
Marsh sniffed.
“The ladies of the committee will never grant him a second voucher.”
Camille had opened her mouth to reply when Lord Chambres’ eyes met hers across the dance floor. Her heart stuttered, then began to pound, and she forgot whatever it was she’d intended to say.
The ambassador’s features were sharp and hawklike, his mouth severe and his eyes dark and watchful. His skin was deep brown, and his build tall and slender. Camille was suddenly, acutely aware of the raw masculine strength beneath his foreign apparel.
Lord Chambres’ thin lips curled up in a conspiratorial, possessive smile, and Camille averted her eyes, turning to Marsh to escape the scrutiny of those foreign, piercing eyes.
“You look flushed; is the heat too much for you?” Marsh asked solicitously, holding out his arm. “Perhaps a cool drink?”
She took a steadying breath and nodded, allowing the dandy to escort her to the lemonade and a circle of their friends. Her respite was short-lived, however, for within minutes they were joined by Curwen and the ambassador.
“Here, I told you I’d introduce you to one of the most delightful ladies in London,” Curwen said to his companion. “This fetching young lady is Camille Wilmarth, the ruling queen of the Season.”
Camille was aware that Curwen kept talking, introducing her friends, but his voice seemed to fade as her gaze was captured by the ambassador of Carcosa. Such strange eyes, she thought, entranced, as dark as the depths of the ocean but flecked with tiny specks of light, like distant, alien stars.
For the first time in her sheltered life, Camille sensed the attraction of the unknown. It was like staring into an abyss and wondering whether to jump.
“Won’t you do me the honor of permitting me this dance?” Chambres asked, bowing.
“I would be delighted, your excellency,” she replied, her voice sounding faint even to herself as she laid a hand on his arm and let him whisk her away from her friends. Although they only walked a few feet, she secretly felt as though she were accompanying Lord Chambres to a strange and distant land.
Still shaken, Douglas Marsh threw himself into his carriage, heedless of his already damaged finery. What in heaven’s name had overcome him? He pulled off a glove and looked down at his fingers, half-expecting to see webbing growing between them, even though he should still be decades away from the Change.
Nothing. He was still human, and therefore he had no excuse for his irresponsible behavior.
No excuse but the madness that accompanied love.
He rubbed his brow, then stared blindly out the carriage window. Lord Mgl’nath hadn’t invited him to the masque, but by Dagon, he’d be there, and he’d keep those two unscrupulous, inhuman ambassadors away from his Lady Camille!
Lord Mgl’nath’s house on Park Lane seemed quite the proper English abode, but as soon as a visitor approached the door, its subtle differences began to be felt. The old-fashioned bronze knocker on the door was fashioned in a peculiarly squidlike shape, and the servants who awaited at the door to take his guests’ coats and wraps had an oddly xanthous tint to their skin and a saturnine cast to their features.
The interior was alight with black candles that were reflected from a multitude of mirrors on the walls, making Camille feel as though she and the other guests were striding through an endless multitude of possible worlds, gazing at their reflections as if at strangers. She shivered as Lord Chambres draw her closer.
Tonight the ambassador wore long, formal robes of a strange cut and a deep yellow color that he told her was traditional in Carcosa. A yellow silk mask covered his face, startlingly bright against his dark hair. His hands were encased in yellow gloves. The unconventionality of his garments made Camille uneasy; they seemed less costume than pagan vestment. She was relieved, when they entered the grand ballroom, to find that the other guests were wearing costumes as conventional as her own.
The ball seemed a most original event. Lord Mgl’nath had left his gas unlit, and instead two great, old-fashioned chandeliers covered with burning black candles hung over the ballroom floor. His musicians also wore masks, and the music they were playing sounded off-key — a quaint, foreign tune, Camille guessed, from the ambassador’s home of R’lyeh. But card tables had been set up in an adjoining room and a multitude of drinks and refreshments were available, giving the strange setting a welcome breath of normality.
“Come,” Lord Chambres said, doffing his mask and tying it to his belt. “Let me introduce you to the ambassador.”
Lord Mgl’nath was another tall man, like Chambres, but his skin had a sallow cast and his narrow skull was completely bald. He was thin to the point of emaciation, which made his limbs seem unusually long, and Camille wondered if, between his sickly color and build, the ambassador were suffering some grave illness. That would, she thought, explain why he so seldom left his house.
The ambassador’s costume was that of an Egyptian priest, and he bowed upon seeing Camille’s matching dress.
“Lady Wilmarth,” he rumbled, in a low and carrying voice. “Well met. As we are a pair, you must permit me a dance this evening.”
“That would be lovely,” she said, flattered and pleased by the reclusive man’s manners. The ambassador turned his gaze on Chambres.
“I have made all the arrangements for tonight,” he said. Chambres bowed, and then another couple approached and they took their leave.
“What’s happening tonight?” Camille asked. Chambres laid a long finger over his lips.
“It’s a surprise,” he said. “Ah, there is the regent, dressed as a sultan. Shall we pay our respects?”
The evening passed quickly, and after the musicians shifted to more recognizable tunes, Camille enjoyed the dancing. She daringly danced twice with Lord Chambres and of course gave one dance to Lord Mgl’nath, whose gait she found stiff and jerky. She was also asked for a turn about the floor with two dukes, an earl, and a general. Her mother would be pleased — she only had one Season left, after all. It was important she secure a good marriage as soon as possible.
Although … Camille drifted to the balcony and gazed outside. For some reason, she couldn’t shake the memory of Lord Douglas Marsh’s rude and entirely unwanted kiss.
Was Lord Marsh wearing a mask, as well? The mask of a dandy, hiding a far rougher and more passionate nature? He wasn’t handsome, of course. Not at all like Lord Chambres. But he’d always been entertaining company, until tonight. Tonight he’d been … more intriguing.
“My lady.” Lord Chambres stepped out next to her and she started, feeling a touch of guilt. A proper lady did not fall silent in the midst of a ball. “There you are. Lord Mgl’nath has prepared a special surprise for us all in the park.”
“These must be the arrangements you were speaking of earlier,” she said, resting a hand on his arm and smiling up at him. “At last, the mystery is to be revealed.”
“I trust you will find it diverting,” the ambassador said.
The guests, perhaps thirty or so, made their way in crowded carriages from Lord Mgl’nath’s estate through Grosvenor Gate to Hyde Park. A midnight picnic in costume, they all agreed, was a unique idea, and the group’s spirits were high as they rattled down the paths to the Serpentine, shouting and calling to each other from carriage to carriage. They arrived at the boat house to find the ambassador’s servants waiting for them with a line of pleasure boats. Mgl’nath insisted everyone don their masks again for the watery jaunt.
“Dashed original, Migs,” the Prince Regent declared, heaving his considerable bulk into the nearest boat. In threes and fours the guests transferred themselves from carriage to watercraft. Camille blushed to find herself included in the boat with Lord Mgl’nath and Lord Chambres, as well as a fourth party who wore a mountebank’s tattered robe and hood. Their boat and the prince’s were the lead craft, but gradually all the guests were afloat, fiery torches imbuing the assembly with a magical air as their boatmen gently paddled them away from shore.
When all of the boats met in the center of the narrow lake, Lord Mgl’nath arose, a process that set their craft rocking back and forth. Camille clutched Lord Chambres’ arm. The ambassador laid a hand over hers. He’d pulled on his yellow gloves again and drawn his yellow silk mask over his face. He barely looked human anymore.
“Don’t move,” he murmured, his voice muffled by the mask. Then he stood, too, at the stern.
Camille pulled her wrap around her shoulders, feeling dwarfed by the two tall men looming over her on each side.
“In Carcosa,” Ambassador Mgl’nath proclaimed, “it is a tradition on this night for the royal family to take a boat into the Lake of Hali. Since our esteemed friend and colleague Lord Chambres finds himself far from home, I have prepared this outing in his honor.”
Everyone fell silent, finding the ambassador’s words too serious for an occasion that should have been purely festive. Lord Chambres bowed again, his expression hidden by the yellow mask. Then both men raised their voices in song.
Chills ran up Camille’s spine as the two foreign ambassadors sang alien words across the dark lake lit only by torchlight. She glanced at the other partygoers who surrounded them in their bobbing boats and saw that they seemed as surprised as she.
As the two men sang, they reached down and lifted the hooded mountebank who was the fourth guest in the boat. The mountebank’s robe hung from his shoulders to his feet in tattered scallops, and when they pushed back his hood, his face gleamed like pale bone in the flickering torchlight.
Women screamed and men swore as they recognized their aged monarch’s strong nose and receding chin.
King George looked across the water and began shouting, as well, thrashing back and forth. The boat heaved and Camille grabbed the sides, staring up at the ranting madman.
“It’s a mask!” she cried, more from hope than conviction. “It’s just a mask of the king’s face! My lords, this jest is in dreadful taste!”
“Hail the King in Yellow!” Lord Chambres cried, spreading his arms. “Behold the Pallid Mask!”
“Unmask him!” Camille cried, struggling as she, too, rose to her feet. Shrieks rose behind her as panicked guests fell into the water, and oaths arose as men reached for their weapons and found that their costumes included none. She grabbed the mountebank and fumbled at his face, searching for an edge of plaster or fabric; a ribbon or pin.
Lord Mgl’nath grabbed her wrist.
“He wears no mask,” the ambassador hissed. “It is your mad king who stands here — yours and your neighbor Carcosa’s!”
“No mask?” she gasped, horrified. “No mask!”
“Iä, Hastur!” Chambres cried, arms out. “Claim your monarch!”
Something huge plunged from the sky, darkening the stars with its abhorrent silhouette. Tentacles spread, dangling down like living night, to caress the ranting king’s face and shoulders and coil around his arms and waist. Great black wings flapped overhead, raising a demonic wind around them.
“Tekeli-li,” it piped. “Tekeli-li!”
Camille screamed and the boat jolted to one side. To her profound amazement, Douglas Marsh heaved himself over the gunwale, grabbed a handful of Lord Chambres’ yellow robe, and hauled him over the side and into the lake.
Chambres shrieked like a Bedlamite as he hit the water. Lord Mgl’nath swore and pulled a long sacrificial knife from his belt, swinging it toward the disheveled and drenched dandy.
“NO!” Camille grabbed the ambassador’s arm, slowing him in time for Marsh to roll the rest of the way into the rocking craft. Marsh grabbed the oar from the boatman and thrust it forward, catching the tall ambassador in a universally tender spot. The knife fell from Mgl’nath’s limp fingers.
Camille ducked and grabbed the weapon as Marsh swung the oar over her bent head and sent Mgl’nath tumbling into the water, as well. The ambassador’s boatman leaped onto the dandy’s back, trying to strangle him.
“Douglas, behind you!” Camille shrieked. Lord Chambres, snarling, grabbed the side of the boat and closed a dripping, yellow-gloved hand around Marsh’s leg. Horrified, Camille lunged forward and stabbed. The knife struck flesh and she heard the perfidious ambassador yelp with pain as he withdrew, plunging back into the water.
Marsh flashed her a grateful smile, then twisted. The boatman wailed as his arm broke. The dandy hurled him out into the water, too.
Camille, panting, pointed at King George, who was still being enveloped in the dark embrace of the flapping thing above him.
“I say, that won’t do,” Douglas muttered. He stood, unaffected by the wild tossing of the boat that was making Camille feel decidedly seasick, and laid his hands on the monster’s thick protoplasmic limbs. To Camille’s disgust, the limbs shifted and obscene eyeballs opened in their flesh, staring up at him. Marsh spoke to the creature in the Elder tongue, and although she had no idea what he was saying, it worked.
The horrid, batwinged bulk withdrew its tentacles, leaving a slick, pale gloss of slime on the now rather more than merely mad monarch. King George dropped back onto his boat bench with a thud, his mouth moving as he stared up at his attacker. His shirt had been torn off, and a curious, half-formed glyph stood out on his chest like a burn.
With a thunderous clatter of beating wings, the monster rose higher.
“Tekeli-li?”
Marsh pointed to the water, where Chambres and Mgl’nath were struggling to climb up over each other to get into the boat. The creature stretched and altered its form as it dived.
Water splashed over them like a small tidal wave. Camille shrieked.
“Oh, I am sorry,” Marsh cried, pulling out a scented handkerchief and dabbing Camille’s cheeks and hands.
“My lord….”
“You called me Douglas just a moment ago,” he said, hopefully. Behind them, the water roiled and Chambres gave a chilling cry that broke off mid-note. Marsh turned to look.
“The rest of you ought to get out of the water,” he advised the ambassador’s splashing guests. “That’s a shoggoth, and they have a most deuced insatiable appetite once their digestive juices start flowing.”
The resulting rush to climb back into the boats nearly drowned the entirety of London’s remaining social elite.
“Oh….” Camille gazed at her friend’s familiar bulbous eyes and wide mouth and realized that she owed him her sanity — and perhaps her life. “You’ve saved us all.”
Marsh’s smile was strained as he looked down at his ruined shirt and pantaloons. “It was my pleasure.”
“Oh, Douglas!” Camille threw her arms around him and narrowly avoided slicing off his ear with her knife. “I’m sure the Prince Regent will buy you a dozen pairs of new pantaloons.”
“Well, I don’t know that he’ll be as grateful as that,” he demurred. “Might have preferred I’d dropped ‘Farmer George’ into the lake, too, so he’d be king.”
A growled curse across the water confirmed his guess, and Camille sighed. It appeared only she appreciated her friend’s act of selfless bravery.
“But it don’t matter,” Marsh continued, magnanimously, as he gazed into her eyes. “I’ll regret nothing at all, if you’ll only consent to marry me.”
Flustered, she blushed.
“Douglas….”
“I have a title, and land both above and below the sea, and a family line that dates back to before humans lost their gills,” he pressed. “Won’t you make me a happy man, at least for the next thirty years?”
“What happens after that?”
“I turn into a Deep One, and you have the run of the house.”
“Oh, Douglas!”
Behind their boat, the satiated shoggoth shot up from the water and hurled itself back into the night sky. Its haunting song of tekeli-li, tekeli-li faded into the darkness as Douglas and Camille embraced, murmuring their endearments beneath the ancient, brooding stars.
“This will be an adventure,” Camille Wilmarth told her reflection in the mirror. Her voice wasn’t as confident as she might wish it to be, and her expression not as happy.
In fact, she felt a little frightened.
A month had passed since she’d met Lord Neely Chambres at Almack’s, and during that time she’d found herself gradually drifting away from her former circles and being engulfed by his. The company was lofty but intimidating, as the Prince Regent’s companions were a hard-drinking, gluttonous, gambling lot. Until tonight, Lord Chambres had only taken her to the most reputable of the royal occasions — nothing at all like the debauched parties she’d heard whispered about by her simultaneously thrilled and scandalized peers.
But two nights ago, over cards, talk had turned to a private ball to be held by the mysterious ambassador from R’lyeh itself, Lord Mgl’nath, a man who did not usually entertain and seldom accepted invitations. It was to be a small affair in honor of the new friendship between England, R’lyeh, and Carcosa. Camille had indulged her curiosity about the reticent R’lyehian ambassador by asking Lord Chambres for more information, and he had promptly invited her to attend the ball — a masque — with him.
She smoothed her dress with her hands, all too aware of their slight tremble.
She was no green girl; she’d read enough novels to comprehend the sorts of scandalous things that might occur at a private ball, especially in a racy crowd like that of the Prince of Wales. But it was that sense of risk, of taking the plunge into the unknown, that had attracted her to Lord Chambres in the first place. The world had changed; the stars had changed. How could she possibly stay the same?
Not to mention, attending a private ball with the cream of society would surely secure her place in the Prince Regent’s circle and make her a much more desirable marriage prospect.
She studied her costume in the mirror.
Her dressmaker had assured her that her gown was the dernier cri in fashion, influenced by the Egyptian Cultist fashion that had swept the ton. It was supposed to be the dress of an Egyptian queen, although Camille doubted the Egyptians had worn petticoats, or quite the amount of golden embroidery that had been sewn over the panels of her gown. Her hair had been piled on top of her head and bound with golden chains, and a delicate gold mask rested on her bed.
“My lady?” Her maid appeared in the doorway. “Mister Harolds sent me to tell you that you have a visitor. Lord Marsh.”
Camille frowned and picked up her mask, heading downstairs.
Lord Marsh’s expression was distraught as he stood in the salon, holding his hat under one arm. His bulbous, slightly protruding eyes swelled even further as he straightened from his bow and took in the magnificence of her gown.
“Thank you for receiving me, my lady,” he said, after a speechless moment. “I apologize for the hour.”
“I can only assume you have something urgent to convey, my lord,” she said, walking to the divan and sitting.
“I do.” He perched on the edge of a chair, setting his hat on his knee. “I’ve come to warn you about tonight’s ball at Lord Mgl’nath’s.”
Camille felt a prickle of apprehension that she defiantly shrugged away.
“What warning is that?”
“The ball …” the dandy hesitated. “I have recently made a point of acquainting myself with the customs of Carcosa, and tonight is a special occasion in the country. They call it the ‘Night of the Living God,’ and I fear its celebrations aren’t entirely wholesome.”
Camille looked down at her mask, then lifted it by its handle and set it over her eyes.
“It is an ambassadorial affair, Lord Marsh,” she said, gazing at him through the eyeholes, “and the Prince Regent shall attend. I’m certain that nothing terrible will happen there, and if anything remotely scandalous should occur, I shall be masked and unrecognizable.”
“I’m not afraid for your life or your reputation,” Lord Marsh declared, rising. “I’m afraid for your sanity.”
Camille stood and turned away, lowering the mask. The homely dandy’s warning struck a strange chord in her heart, but she would not, could not, pay it any regard.
“I thank you for your concern,” she said, stiffly. “You have acted as you thought best. But I believe your concern is misplaced. Lord Chambres will keep me safe from harm.”
“Damn Lord Chambres!” Marsh burst out. Camille gasped as he grabbed her arm and spun her about. “He’ll rob you of your sanity and sacrifice you to He Who is Not to Be Named!”
“Lord Marsh!” she protested, dropping her golden mask and trying to push him aside. He pulled her against his impeccably fitted clothes, heedless of how her struggles might wrinkle or crease them. She gasped.
“Let me protect you,” he pleaded, holding her with more strength than she had imagined could exist in his stocky frame. “My blood may be mixed with the protoplasm of the deepest ocean dwellers, but at least I belong to this Earth. Do you think it’s an accident that Lord Mgl’nath is holding a masque? Those ambassadors are both wearing masks!”
Camille fought to escape, certain the dandy had gone mad at last — that some latent insanity acquired while he was on his ship during the rising of R’lyeh had come round at last to be born in his fevered brain.
“Lord Marsh, release me at once! This is utterly improper!”
“I swear, I should abduct you, after all!” He pressed his lips down upon hers.
Camille froze. How could the polite, delicate Exquisite who’d been her casual companion for so long possess such ferocity beneath his limpid exterior? The expensive fabric of his coat wrinkled beneath her hands as she clutched him for balance, her head spinning. Had she been fooled about his true nature all along?
For a moment her eyes closed and her lips parted as she allowed herself to forget the Douglas Marsh she knew, the frivolous fop peering through his quizzing glass, and imagine another Douglas Marsh entirely, the much-decorated commander in the king’s navy who’d been in the Pacific when R’lyeh had arisen and had lived to tell the tale. Without a straitjacket.
Why, even now she could almost smell the ocean on him….
Then, abruptly, she collected herself and thrust him away. Marsh staggered backward.
Camille gave him her most withering glare. Lord Marsh’s eyes were a limpid blue and reflected her furious face back at her like a clear pool on a bright day. His gaze held no danger, no whiff of the foreign and forbidden. He was comfortable, commonplace, and, in short, uninteresting.
“Leave,” she ordered. “At once.”
He leaned over to pick up his hat and cane, which he’d let fall. His cravat had come loose and his coat was wrinkled.
“I apologize, my lady,” he said, his large eyes downcast. “I can’t imagine what came over me.”
“I have no desire to see you again,” she declared, although even as the remorseless words left her mouth, she wondered if she meant them. Surely he was nothing but a harmless fop who’d suffered a momentary lapse?
Then she remembered the almost inhuman strength in his arms and shivered. No, he was not harmless.
Lord Marsh bowed and wordlessly took his leave.
Still shaken, Douglas Marsh threw himself into his carriage, heedless of his already damaged finery. What in heaven’s name had overcome him? He pulled off a glove and looked down at his fingers, half-expecting to see webbing growing between them, even though he should still be decades away from the Change.
Nothing. He was still human, and therefore he had no excuse for his irresponsible behavior.
No excuse but the madness that accompanied love.
He rubbed his brow, then stared blindly out the carriage window. Lord Mgl’nath hadn’t invited him to the masque, but by Dagon, he’d be there, and he’d keep those two unscrupulous, inhuman ambassadors away from his Lady Camille!
Lord Mgl’nath’s house on Park Lane seemed quite the proper English abode, but as soon as a visitor approached the door, its subtle differences began to be felt. The old-fashioned bronze knocker on the door was fashioned in a peculiarly squidlike shape, and the servants who awaited at the door to take his guests’ coats and wraps had an oddly xanthous tint to their skin and a saturnine cast to their features.
The interior was alight with black candles that were reflected from a multitude of mirrors on the walls, making Camille feel as though she and the other guests were striding through an endless multitude of possible worlds, gazing at their reflections as if at strangers. She shivered as Lord Chambres draw her closer.
Tonight the ambassador wore long, formal robes of a strange cut and a deep yellow color that he told her was traditional in Carcosa. A yellow silk mask covered his face, startlingly bright against his dark hair. His hands were encased in yellow gloves. The unconventionality of his garments made Camille uneasy; they seemed less costume than pagan vestment. She was relieved, when they entered the grand ballroom, to find that the other guests were wearing costumes as conventional as her own.
The ball seemed a most original event. Lord Mgl’nath had left his gas unlit, and instead two great, old-fashioned chandeliers covered with burning black candles hung over the ballroom floor. His musicians also wore masks, and the music they were playing sounded off-key — a quaint, foreign tune, Camille guessed, from the ambassador’s home of R’lyeh. But card tables had been set up in an adjoining room and a multitude of drinks and refreshments were available, giving the strange setting a welcome breath of normality.
“Come,” Lord Chambres said, doffing his mask and tying it to his belt. “Let me introduce you to the ambassador.”
Lord Mgl’nath was another tall man, like Chambres, but his skin had a sallow cast and his narrow skull was completely bald. He was thin to the point of emaciation, which made his limbs seem unusually long, and Camille wondered if, between his sickly color and build, the ambassador were suffering some grave illness. That would, she thought, explain why he so seldom left his house.
The ambassador’s costume was that of an Egyptian priest, and he bowed upon seeing Camille’s matching dress.
“Lady Wilmarth,” he rumbled, in a low and carrying voice. “Well met. As we are a pair, you must permit me a dance this evening.”
“That would be lovely,” she said, flattered and pleased by the reclusive man’s manners. The ambassador turned his gaze on Chambres.
“I have made all the arrangements for tonight,” he said. Chambres bowed, and then another couple approached and they took their leave.
“What’s happening tonight?” Camille asked. Chambres laid a long finger over his lips.
“It’s a surprise,” he said. “Ah, there is the regent, dressed as a sultan. Shall we pay our respects?”
The evening passed quickly, and after the musicians shifted to more recognizable tunes, Camille enjoyed the dancing. She daringly danced twice with Lord Chambres and of course gave one dance to Lord Mgl’nath, whose gait she found stiff and jerky. She was also asked for a turn about the floor with two dukes, an earl, and a general. Her mother would be pleased — she only had one Season left, after all. It was important she secure a good marriage as soon as possible.
Although … Camille drifted to the balcony and gazed outside. For some reason, she couldn’t shake the memory of Lord Douglas Marsh’s rude and entirely unwanted kiss.
Was Lord Marsh wearing a mask, as well? The mask of a dandy, hiding a far rougher and more passionate nature? He wasn’t handsome, of course. Not at all like Lord Chambres. But he’d always been entertaining company, until tonight. Tonight he’d been … more intriguing.
“My lady.” Lord Chambres stepped out next to her and she started, feeling a touch of guilt. A proper lady did not fall silent in the midst of a ball. “There you are. Lord Mgl’nath has prepared a special surprise for us all in the park.”
“These must be the arrangements you were speaking of earlier,” she said, resting a hand on his arm and smiling up at him. “At last, the mystery is to be revealed.”
“I trust you will find it diverting,” the ambassador said.
The guests, perhaps thirty or so, made their way in crowded carriages from Lord Mgl’nath’s estate through Grosvenor Gate to Hyde Park. A midnight picnic in costume, they all agreed, was a unique idea, and the group’s spirits were high as they rattled down the paths to the Serpentine, shouting and calling to each other from carriage to carriage. They arrived at the boat house to find the ambassador’s servants waiting for them with a line of pleasure boats. Mgl’nath insisted everyone don their masks again for the watery jaunt.
“Dashed original, Migs,” the Prince Regent declared, heaving his considerable bulk into the nearest boat. In threes and fours the guests transferred themselves from carriage to watercraft. Camille blushed to find herself included in the boat with Lord Mgl’nath and Lord Chambres, as well as a fourth party who wore a mountebank’s tattered robe and hood. Their boat and the prince’s were the lead craft, but gradually all the guests were afloat, fiery torches imbuing the assembly with a magical air as their boatmen gently paddled them away from shore.
When all of the boats met in the center of the narrow lake, Lord Mgl’nath arose, a process that set their craft rocking back and forth. Camille clutched Lord Chambres’ arm. The ambassador laid a hand over hers. He’d pulled on his yellow gloves again and drawn his yellow silk mask over his face. He barely looked human anymore.
“Don’t move,” he murmured, his voice muffled by the mask. Then he stood, too, at the stern.
Camille pulled her wrap around her shoulders, feeling dwarfed by the two tall men looming over her on each side.
“In Carcosa,” Ambassador Mgl’nath proclaimed, “it is a tradition on this night for the royal family to take a boat into the Lake of Hali. Since our esteemed friend and colleague Lord Chambres finds himself far from home, I have prepared this outing in his honor.”
Everyone fell silent, finding the ambassador’s words too serious for an occasion that should have been purely festive. Lord Chambres bowed again, his expression hidden by the yellow mask. Then both men raised their voices in song.
Chills ran up Camille’s spine as the two foreign ambassadors sang alien words across the dark lake lit only by torchlight. She glanced at the other partygoers who surrounded them in their bobbing boats and saw that they seemed as surprised as she.
As the two men sang, they reached down and lifted the hooded mountebank who was the fourth guest in the boat. The mountebank’s robe hung from his shoulders to his feet in tattered scallops, and when they pushed back his hood, his face gleamed like pale bone in the flickering torchlight.
Women screamed and men swore as they recognized their aged monarch’s strong nose and receding chin.
King George looked across the water and began shouting, as well, thrashing back and forth. The boat heaved and Camille grabbed the sides, staring up at the ranting madman.
“It’s a mask!” she cried, more from hope than conviction. “It’s just a mask of the king’s face! My lords, this jest is in dreadful taste!”
“Hail the King in Yellow!” Lord Chambres cried, spreading his arms. “Behold the Pallid Mask!”
“Unmask him!” Camille cried, struggling as she, too, rose to her feet. Shrieks rose behind her as panicked guests fell into the water, and oaths arose as men reached for their weapons and found that their costumes included none. She grabbed the mountebank and fumbled at his face, searching for an edge of plaster or fabric; a ribbon or pin.
Lord Mgl’nath grabbed her wrist.
“He wears no mask,” the ambassador hissed. “It is your mad king who stands here — yours and your neighbor Carcosa’s!”
“No mask?” she gasped, horrified. “No mask!”
“Iä, Hastur!” Chambres cried, arms out. “Claim your monarch!”
Something huge plunged from the sky, darkening the stars with its abhorrent silhouette. Tentacles spread, dangling down like living night, to caress the ranting king’s face and shoulders and coil around his arms and waist. Great black wings flapped overhead, raising a demonic wind around them.
“Tekeli-li,” it piped. “Tekeli-li!”
Camille screamed and the boat jolted to one side. To her profound amazement, Douglas Marsh heaved himself over the gunwale, grabbed a handful of Lord Chambres’ yellow robe, and hauled him over the side and into the lake.
Chambres shrieked like a Bedlamite as he hit the water. Lord Mgl’nath swore and pulled a long sacrificial knife from his belt, swinging it toward the disheveled and drenched dandy.
“NO!” Camille grabbed the ambassador’s arm, slowing him in time for Marsh to roll the rest of the way into the rocking craft. Marsh grabbed the oar from the boatman and thrust it forward, catching the tall ambassador in a universally tender spot. The knife fell from Mgl’nath’s limp fingers.
Camille ducked and grabbed the weapon as Marsh swung the oar over her bent head and sent Mgl’nath tumbling into the water, as well. The ambassador’s boatman leaped onto the dandy’s back, trying to strangle him.
“Douglas, behind you!” Camille shrieked. Lord Chambres, snarling, grabbed the side of the boat and closed a dripping, yellow-gloved hand around Marsh’s leg. Horrified, Camille lunged forward and stabbed. The knife struck flesh and she heard the perfidious ambassador yelp with pain as he withdrew, plunging back into the water.
Marsh flashed her a grateful smile, then twisted. The boatman wailed as his arm broke. The dandy hurled him out into the water, too.
Camille, panting, pointed at King George, who was still being enveloped in the dark embrace of the flapping thing above him.
“I say, that won’t do,” Douglas muttered. He stood, unaffected by the wild tossing of the boat that was making Camille feel decidedly seasick, and laid his hands on the monster’s thick protoplasmic limbs. To Camille’s disgust, the limbs shifted and obscene eyeballs opened in their flesh, staring up at him. Marsh spoke to the creature in the Elder tongue, and although she had no idea what he was saying, it worked.
The horrid, batwinged bulk withdrew its tentacles, leaving a slick, pale gloss of slime on the now rather more than merely mad monarch. King George dropped back onto his boat bench with a thud, his mouth moving as he stared up at his attacker. His shirt had been torn off, and a curious, half-formed glyph stood out on his chest like a burn.
With a thunderous clatter of beating wings, the monster rose higher.
“Tekeli-li?”
Marsh pointed to the water, where Chambres and Mgl’nath were struggling to climb up over each other to get into the boat. The creature stretched and altered its form as it dived.
Water splashed over them like a small tidal wave. Camille shrieked.
“Oh, I am sorry,” Marsh cried, pulling out a scented handkerchief and dabbing Camille’s cheeks and hands.
“My lord….”
“You called me Douglas just a moment ago,” he said, hopefully. Behind them, the water roiled and Chambres gave a chilling cry that broke off mid-note. Marsh turned to look.
“The rest of you ought to get out of the water,” he advised the ambassador’s splashing guests. “That’s a shoggoth, and they have a most deuced insatiable appetite once their digestive juices start flowing.”
The resulting rush to climb back into the boats nearly drowned the entirety of London’s remaining social elite.
“Oh….” Camille gazed at her friend’s familiar bulbous eyes and wide mouth and realized that she owed him her sanity — and perhaps her life. “You’ve saved us all.”
Marsh’s smile was strained as he looked down at his ruined shirt and pantaloons. “It was my pleasure.”
“Oh, Douglas!” Camille threw her arms around him and narrowly avoided slicing off his ear with her knife. “I’m sure the Prince Regent will buy you a dozen pairs of new pantaloons.”
“Well, I don’t know that he’ll be as grateful as that,” he demurred. “Might have preferred I’d dropped ‘Farmer George’ into the lake, too, so he’d be king.”
A growled curse across the water confirmed his guess, and Camille sighed. It appeared only she appreciated her friend’s act of selfless bravery.
“But it don’t matter,” Marsh continued, magnanimously, as he gazed into her eyes. “I’ll regret nothing at all, if you’ll only consent to marry me.”
Flustered, she blushed.
“Douglas….”
“I have a title, and land both above and below the sea, and a family line that dates back to before humans lost their gills,” he pressed. “Won’t you make me a happy man, at least for the next thirty years?”
“What happens after that?”
“I turn into a Deep One, and you have the run of the house.”
“Oh, Douglas!”
Behind their boat, the satiated shoggoth shot up from the water and hurled itself back into the night sky. Its haunting song of tekeli-li, tekeli-li faded into the darkness as Douglas and Camille embraced, murmuring their endearments beneath the ancient, brooding stars.
Douglas Marsh stormed down the tight, narrow cellar stairwell of his ancestral home, fuming. That blasted ambassador from Carcosa was positivly wiling his way into Lady Camille’s affections, seeking to impress her with his close acquaintance with the Prince Regent. And perdition take the girl, she had fallen for it! She’d even asked him what to wear to Brighton Pavilion!
Of course, it wasn’t Lady Camille’s fault. She was young, three years younger than Marsh himself, and this was her second Season. Without any great title or inheritance of her own, she was without a doubt feeling great pressure from her family to obtain a wealthy or titled husband, especially now that so few suitable men remained alive and sane. Even if she found the ambassador unsuitable — and by Cthulhu, Marsh hoped Lady Camille understood how very unsuitable the man was! — having an entree into the Prince Regent’s social circle would open up many more possibilities, introducing her to men of higher rank than she might otherwise meet, and dignitaries both English and otherwise.
All of which left Marsh, who might otherwise have been able to offer himself to her with some measure of confidence, standing in the dust with his hat in his hand.
He feared he was already too late. Camille was all that was respectable, to be sure; that wasn’t the problem. She had been careful to spread her company among her male and female acquaintances in such a way that nobody could suggest she had a favorite. But Marsh had seen the way her eyes grew distant when she spoke of the ambassador, and it worried him.
Worried him so much, in fact, that he’d taken the grave social risk of leaving London for a week to go home.
Marsh made a face as his impeccably polished boots sank into the translucent slime that coated the stone floor. The Marsh mansion’s ancient tunnels ran all the way down to the ocean. The familiar scent of tidal pools and rotting seaweed greeted him as he drew near the audience chamber.
The elder Deep Ones were already there, crouched on their glistening, moist stone chairs like breathing batrachian idols. Marsh made a leg.
“Well, son, here we are,” his father croaked, disgusted. “Sacred Mother Hydra, are you still dressing like a demmed molly? Tell me them pantaloons ain’t purple! You look like bloody Froggy-Gone-A’Courting.”
“They’re not purple, Father, they’re lilac. And I thoroughly intend to enjoy myself while I’m still capable of wearing clothing, so you may as well not bother reanimating that old argument again.”
His father snorted, an unpleasant, gurgling sound that wasn’t quite as intimidating as his human snort had been.
“Your letter said something about Carcosa,” he grumbled, dissatisfied.
“So it did.” Marsh pulled out his scented handkerchief and carefully laid it on the seat of the damp wooden chair that stood before the circle of thrones. Between the slime and the salt spray, being a cultist of the Old Ones posed an indisputable sartorial challenge.
“There is a young lady in London for whom I find that I’ve developed a tendre,” he explained as he sat, “but she is being pursued by Lord Neely Chambres, the ambassador from Carcosa. I need to know more about the Carcosans.”
“Why?” croaked one of the elders. “Just kill your rival and abduct the breeder.”
Marsh gave his ancestor a strained smile.
“Abducting one’s intended is no longer the thing, Most Ancient One,” he replied, evenly. “And although killing the Carcosan isn’t out of the question, I would like to know how dangerous he is, first. Is he a cultist? A wizard? Can he change shape? Would killing him offend the Great Old Ones?”
“The Great Old Ones don’t give a rip for any of us,” Marsh’s father gurgled.
“As well they shouldn’t!” another of the Elders snapped, shifting with annoyance on his stone seat. “They’re the Old Ones! Ancient, powerful denizens of the timeless cold reaches between the stars! We mortals are as nothing to them!”
“That’s not what the prophecies promised,” his father muttered sullenly. The rest of the Deep Ones shifted and cleared their throats, looking around with marked discomfort. “When R’lyeh rose, things were supposed to change. Cthulhu was supposed to rule Earth and we’d be right there beside him, lording it over all the dryskins.”
“Dread Cthulhu acts in his own time,” the Elder rebutted, “and if you don’t cease your croaking, the rest of us will be enjoying a batch of extra-large les cuisses de grenouille at dinner tonight.”
Marsh rolled his eyes at the old argument. The Deep Ones hadn’t been happy to learn that their Lord Cthulhu had apparently spent the strange aeons of his imprisonment contemplating the perils of over-hasty action. When R’lyeh had burst to the surface during Napoleon Bonaparte’s dark rite only to face a fleet of the Royal Navy’s bravest, the octopoid deity had swiftly realized that the world had changed since the good old days of acquiescent Elder Things and psychically enslaved servitor races. He had retired into his monolith-crowned citadel to consider his options.
Like the madness of King George, the hesitation of Great Cthulhu was a bit of a social embarrassment.
“O Most Respected and Feared Ones,” he murmured diplomatically, “what can you tell me of Carcosa and its ambassador?”
The disgruntled Elder looked back at him, his great round eyes glimmering.
“Carcosa is a backwater from the Hyades. Pretty lakeside property,” the Deep One said, begrudgingly, “but it doesn’t get along with its neighbor. Dynastic monarchy, political connection to Hastur, some unsavory rumors about the royal family. The usual.”
“History of black magic? Pacts with alien races?”
“Some runic folderol about a yellow sign. I don’t know all the details. Carcosa hasn’t been on Earth that long,” the elder grunted. “Bunch of cultists-come-lately.”
“Mushrooms,” another sniffed.
“So, who is this girl, anyway?” Marsh’s father asked, bringing the conversation back to the important point. “Good family? Wide hips?”
“Lady Camille Wilmarth. Lord Daniel’s daughter.”
“Hmph. Not wealthy.”
“Beautiful, though.”
“Beauty.” The former baronet dismissed the term. “Is she intelligent? Adaptable? Can she swim?”
“She’s bright enough, and judging from her social success with the ambassador and the Prince Regent, I wager she’s proved herself a quick learner,” Marsh sighed. “I haven’t any idea whether she can swim, Father. It’s not important, is it?”
“Of course it is. Your mother could swim like a fish. Had us some fine old times in these very tide pools,” his father boasted. Marsh shuddered and raised a hand in an attempt to forestall any further reminiscences. His father plowed on. “Besides, times are changing. Don’t need to be ashamed of the family anymore, hey? You can bring her down to meet the rest of us.”
“I’ll be certain to do that,” Marsh murmured, standing. “But only if I can pry her out of the grasp of that infernal Carcosan. If I do, will you raise any objections, Father?”
“Make sure she can swim,” his father said, waving him off with one clawed, webbed hand.
“This will be an adventure,” Camille Wilmarth told her reflection in the mirror. Her voice wasn’t as confident as she might wish it to be, and her expression not as happy.
In fact, she felt a little frightened.
A month had passed since she’d met Lord Neely Chambres at Almack’s, and during that time she’d found herself gradually drifting away from her former circles and being engulfed by his. The company was lofty but intimidating, as the Prince Regent’s companions were a hard-drinking, gluttonous, gambling lot. Until tonight, Lord Chambres had only taken her to the most reputable of the royal occasions — nothing at all like the debauched parties she’d heard whispered about by her simultaneously thrilled and scandalized peers.
But two nights ago, over cards, talk had turned to a private ball to be held by the mysterious ambassador from R’lyeh itself, Lord Mgl’nath, a man who did not usually entertain and seldom accepted invitations. It was to be a small affair in honor of the new friendship between England, R’lyeh, and Carcosa. Camille had indulged her curiosity about the reticent R’lyehian ambassador by asking Lord Chambres for more information, and he had promptly invited her to attend the ball — a masque — with him.
She smoothed her dress with her hands, all too aware of their slight tremble.
She was no green girl; she’d read enough novels to comprehend the sorts of scandalous things that might occur at a private ball, especially in a racy crowd like that of the Prince of Wales. But it was that sense of risk, of taking the plunge into the unknown, that had attracted her to Lord Chambres in the first place. The world had changed; the stars had changed. How could she possibly stay the same?
Not to mention, attending a private ball with the cream of society would surely secure her place in the Prince Regent’s circle and make her a much more desirable marriage prospect.
She studied her costume in the mirror.
Her dressmaker had assured her that her gown was the dernier cri in fashion, influenced by the Egyptian Cultist fashion that had swept the ton. It was supposed to be the dress of an Egyptian queen, although Camille doubted the Egyptians had worn petticoats, or quite the amount of golden embroidery that had been sewn over the panels of her gown. Her hair had been piled on top of her head and bound with golden chains, and a delicate gold mask rested on her bed.
“My lady?” Her maid appeared in the doorway. “Mister Harolds sent me to tell you that you have a visitor. Lord Marsh.”
Camille frowned and picked up her mask, heading downstairs.
Lord Marsh’s expression was distraught as he stood in the salon, holding his hat under one arm. His bulbous, slightly protruding eyes swelled even further as he straightened from his bow and took in the magnificence of her gown.
“Thank you for receiving me, my lady,” he said, after a speechless moment. “I apologize for the hour.”
“I can only assume you have something urgent to convey, my lord,” she said, walking to the divan and sitting.
“I do.” He perched on the edge of a chair, setting his hat on his knee. “I’ve come to warn you about tonight’s ball at Lord Mgl’nath’s.”
Camille felt a prickle of apprehension that she defiantly shrugged away.
“What warning is that?”
“The ball …” the dandy hesitated. “I have recently made a point of acquainting myself with the customs of Carcosa, and tonight is a special occasion in the country. They call it the ‘Night of the Living God,’ and I fear its celebrations aren’t entirely wholesome.”
Camille looked down at her mask, then lifted it by its handle and set it over her eyes.
“It is an ambassadorial affair, Lord Marsh,” she said, gazing at him through the eyeholes, “and the Prince Regent shall attend. I’m certain that nothing terrible will happen there, and if anything remotely scandalous should occur, I shall be masked and unrecognizable.”
“I’m not afraid for your life or your reputation,” Lord Marsh declared, rising. “I’m afraid for your sanity.”
Camille stood and turned away, lowering the mask. The homely dandy’s warning struck a strange chord in her heart, but she would not, could not, pay it any regard.
“I thank you for your concern,” she said, stiffly. “You have acted as you thought best. But I believe your concern is misplaced. Lord Chambres will keep me safe from harm.”
“Damn Lord Chambres!” Marsh burst out. Camille gasped as he grabbed her arm and spun her about. “He’ll rob you of your sanity and sacrifice you to He Who is Not to Be Named!”
“Lord Marsh!” she protested, dropping her golden mask and trying to push him aside. He pulled her against his impeccably fitted clothes, heedless of how her struggles might wrinkle or crease them. She gasped.
“Let me protect you,” he pleaded, holding her with more strength than she had imagined could exist in his stocky frame. “My blood may be mixed with the protoplasm of the deepest ocean dwellers, but at least I belong to this Earth. Do you think it’s an accident that Lord Mgl’nath is holding a masque? Those ambassadors are both wearing masks!”
Camille fought to escape, certain the dandy had gone mad at last — that some latent insanity acquired while he was on his ship during the rising of R’lyeh had come round at last to be born in his fevered brain.
“Lord Marsh, release me at once! This is utterly improper!”
“I swear, I should abduct you, after all!” He pressed his lips down upon hers.
Camille froze. How could the polite, delicate Exquisite who’d been her casual companion for so long possess such ferocity beneath his limpid exterior? The expensive fabric of his coat wrinkled beneath her hands as she clutched him for balance, her head spinning. Had she been fooled about his true nature all along?
For a moment her eyes closed and her lips parted as she allowed herself to forget the Douglas Marsh she knew, the frivolous fop peering through his quizzing glass, and imagine another Douglas Marsh entirely, the much-decorated commander in the king’s navy who’d been in the Pacific when R’lyeh had arisen and had lived to tell the tale. Without a straitjacket.
Why, even now she could almost smell the ocean on him….
Then, abruptly, she collected herself and thrust him away. Marsh staggered backward.
Camille gave him her most withering glare. Lord Marsh’s eyes were a limpid blue and reflected her furious face back at her like a clear pool on a bright day. His gaze held no danger, no whiff of the foreign and forbidden. He was comfortable, commonplace, and, in short, uninteresting.
“Leave,” she ordered. “At once.”
He leaned over to pick up his hat and cane, which he’d let fall. His cravat had come loose and his coat was wrinkled.
“I apologize, my lady,” he said, his large eyes downcast. “I can’t imagine what came over me.”
“I have no desire to see you again,” she declared, although even as the remorseless words left her mouth, she wondered if she meant them. Surely he was nothing but a harmless fop who’d suffered a momentary lapse?
Then she remembered the almost inhuman strength in his arms and shivered. No, he was not harmless.
Lord Marsh bowed and wordlessly took his leave.
Still shaken, Douglas Marsh threw himself into his carriage, heedless of his already damaged finery. What in heaven’s name had overcome him? He pulled off a glove and looked down at his fingers, half-expecting to see webbing growing between them, even though he should still be decades away from the Change.
Nothing. He was still human, and therefore he had no excuse for his irresponsible behavior.
No excuse but the madness that accompanied love.
He rubbed his brow, then stared blindly out the carriage window. Lord Mgl’nath hadn’t invited him to the masque, but by Dagon, he’d be there, and he’d keep those two unscrupulous, inhuman ambassadors away from his Lady Camille!
Lord Mgl’nath’s house on Park Lane seemed quite the proper English abode, but as soon as a visitor approached the door, its subtle differences began to be felt. The old-fashioned bronze knocker on the door was fashioned in a peculiarly squidlike shape, and the servants who awaited at the door to take his guests’ coats and wraps had an oddly xanthous tint to their skin and a saturnine cast to their features.
The interior was alight with black candles that were reflected from a multitude of mirrors on the walls, making Camille feel as though she and the other guests were striding through an endless multitude of possible worlds, gazing at their reflections as if at strangers. She shivered as Lord Chambres draw her closer.
Tonight the ambassador wore long, formal robes of a strange cut and a deep yellow color that he told her was traditional in Carcosa. A yellow silk mask covered his face, startlingly bright against his dark hair. His hands were encased in yellow gloves. The unconventionality of his garments made Camille uneasy; they seemed less costume than pagan vestment. She was relieved, when they entered the grand ballroom, to find that the other guests were wearing costumes as conventional as her own.
The ball seemed a most original event. Lord Mgl’nath had left his gas unlit, and instead two great, old-fashioned chandeliers covered with burning black candles hung over the ballroom floor. His musicians also wore masks, and the music they were playing sounded off-key — a quaint, foreign tune, Camille guessed, from the ambassador’s home of R’lyeh. But card tables had been set up in an adjoining room and a multitude of drinks and refreshments were available, giving the strange setting a welcome breath of normality.
“Come,” Lord Chambres said, doffing his mask and tying it to his belt. “Let me introduce you to the ambassador.”
Lord Mgl’nath was another tall man, like Chambres, but his skin had a sallow cast and his narrow skull was completely bald. He was thin to the point of emaciation, which made his limbs seem unusually long, and Camille wondered if, between his sickly color and build, the ambassador were suffering some grave illness. That would, she thought, explain why he so seldom left his house.
The ambassador’s costume was that of an Egyptian priest, and he bowed upon seeing Camille’s matching dress.
“Lady Wilmarth,” he rumbled, in a low and carrying voice. “Well met. As we are a pair, you must permit me a dance this evening.”
“That would be lovely,” she said, flattered and pleased by the reclusive man’s manners. The ambassador turned his gaze on Chambres.
“I have made all the arrangements for tonight,” he said. Chambres bowed, and then another couple approached and they took their leave.
“What’s happening tonight?” Camille asked. Chambres laid a long finger over his lips.
“It’s a surprise,” he said. “Ah, there is the regent, dressed as a sultan. Shall we pay our respects?”
The evening passed quickly, and after the musicians shifted to more recognizable tunes, Camille enjoyed the dancing. She daringly danced twice with Lord Chambres and of course gave one dance to Lord Mgl’nath, whose gait she found stiff and jerky. She was also asked for a turn about the floor with two dukes, an earl, and a general. Her mother would be pleased — she only had one Season left, after all. It was important she secure a good marriage as soon as possible.
Although … Camille drifted to the balcony and gazed outside. For some reason, she couldn’t shake the memory of Lord Douglas Marsh’s rude and entirely unwanted kiss.
Was Lord Marsh wearing a mask, as well? The mask of a dandy, hiding a far rougher and more passionate nature? He wasn’t handsome, of course. Not at all like Lord Chambres. But he’d always been entertaining company, until tonight. Tonight he’d been … more intriguing.
“My lady.” Lord Chambres stepped out next to her and she started, feeling a touch of guilt. A proper lady did not fall silent in the midst of a ball. “There you are. Lord Mgl’nath has prepared a special surprise for us all in the park.”
“These must be the arrangements you were speaking of earlier,” she said, resting a hand on his arm and smiling up at him. “At last, the mystery is to be revealed.”
“I trust you will find it diverting,” the ambassador said.
The guests, perhaps thirty or so, made their way in crowded carriages from Lord Mgl’nath’s estate through Grosvenor Gate to Hyde Park. A midnight picnic in costume, they all agreed, was a unique idea, and the group’s spirits were high as they rattled down the paths to the Serpentine, shouting and calling to each other from carriage to carriage. They arrived at the boat house to find the ambassador’s servants waiting for them with a line of pleasure boats. Mgl’nath insisted everyone don their masks again for the watery jaunt.
“Dashed original, Migs,” the Prince Regent declared, heaving his considerable bulk into the nearest boat. In threes and fours the guests transferred themselves from carriage to watercraft. Camille blushed to find herself included in the boat with Lord Mgl’nath and Lord Chambres, as well as a fourth party who wore a mountebank’s tattered robe and hood. Their boat and the prince’s were the lead craft, but gradually all the guests were afloat, fiery torches imbuing the assembly with a magical air as their boatmen gently paddled them away from shore.
When all of the boats met in the center of the narrow lake, Lord Mgl’nath arose, a process that set their craft rocking back and forth. Camille clutched Lord Chambres’ arm. The ambassador laid a hand over hers. He’d pulled on his yellow gloves again and drawn his yellow silk mask over his face. He barely looked human anymore.
“Don’t move,” he murmured, his voice muffled by the mask. Then he stood, too, at the stern.
Camille pulled her wrap around her shoulders, feeling dwarfed by the two tall men looming over her on each side.
“In Carcosa,” Ambassador Mgl’nath proclaimed, “it is a tradition on this night for the royal family to take a boat into the Lake of Hali. Since our esteemed friend and colleague Lord Chambres finds himself far from home, I have prepared this outing in his honor.”
Everyone fell silent, finding the ambassador’s words too serious for an occasion that should have been purely festive. Lord Chambres bowed again, his expression hidden by the yellow mask. Then both men raised their voices in song.
Chills ran up Camille’s spine as the two foreign ambassadors sang alien words across the dark lake lit only by torchlight. She glanced at the other partygoers who surrounded them in their bobbing boats and saw that they seemed as surprised as she.
As the two men sang, they reached down and lifted the hooded mountebank who was the fourth guest in the boat. The mountebank’s robe hung from his shoulders to his feet in tattered scallops, and when they pushed back his hood, his face gleamed like pale bone in the flickering torchlight.
Women screamed and men swore as they recognized their aged monarch’s strong nose and receding chin.
King George looked across the water and began shouting, as well, thrashing back and forth. The boat heaved and Camille grabbed the sides, staring up at the ranting madman.
“It’s a mask!” she cried, more from hope than conviction. “It’s just a mask of the king’s face! My lords, this jest is in dreadful taste!”
“Hail the King in Yellow!” Lord Chambres cried, spreading his arms. “Behold the Pallid Mask!”
“Unmask him!” Camille cried, struggling as she, too, rose to her feet. Shrieks rose behind her as panicked guests fell into the water, and oaths arose as men reached for their weapons and found that their costumes included none. She grabbed the mountebank and fumbled at his face, searching for an edge of plaster or fabric; a ribbon or pin.
Lord Mgl’nath grabbed her wrist.
“He wears no mask,” the ambassador hissed. “It is your mad king who stands here — yours and your neighbor Carcosa’s!”
“No mask?” she gasped, horrified. “No mask!”
“Iä, Hastur!” Chambres cried, arms out. “Claim your monarch!”
Something huge plunged from the sky, darkening the stars with its abhorrent silhouette. Tentacles spread, dangling down like living night, to caress the ranting king’s face and shoulders and coil around his arms and waist. Great black wings flapped overhead, raising a demonic wind around them.
“Tekeli-li,” it piped. “Tekeli-li!”
Camille screamed and the boat jolted to one side. To her profound amazement, Douglas Marsh heaved himself over the gunwale, grabbed a handful of Lord Chambres’ yellow robe, and hauled him over the side and into the lake.
Chambres shrieked like a Bedlamite as he hit the water. Lord Mgl’nath swore and pulled a long sacrificial knife from his belt, swinging it toward the disheveled and drenched dandy.
“NO!” Camille grabbed the ambassador’s arm, slowing him in time for Marsh to roll the rest of the way into the rocking craft. Marsh grabbed the oar from the boatman and thrust it forward, catching the tall ambassador in a universally tender spot. The knife fell from Mgl’nath’s limp fingers.
Camille ducked and grabbed the weapon as Marsh swung the oar over her bent head and sent Mgl’nath tumbling into the water, as well. The ambassador’s boatman leaped onto the dandy’s back, trying to strangle him.
“Douglas, behind you!” Camille shrieked. Lord Chambres, snarling, grabbed the side of the boat and closed a dripping, yellow-gloved hand around Marsh’s leg. Horrified, Camille lunged forward and stabbed. The knife struck flesh and she heard the perfidious ambassador yelp with pain as he withdrew, plunging back into the water.
Marsh flashed her a grateful smile, then twisted. The boatman wailed as his arm broke. The dandy hurled him out into the water, too.
Camille, panting, pointed at King George, who was still being enveloped in the dark embrace of the flapping thing above him.
“I say, that won’t do,” Douglas muttered. He stood, unaffected by the wild tossing of the boat that was making Camille feel decidedly seasick, and laid his hands on the monster’s thick protoplasmic limbs. To Camille’s disgust, the limbs shifted and obscene eyeballs opened in their flesh, staring up at him. Marsh spoke to the creature in the Elder tongue, and although she had no idea what he was saying, it worked.
The horrid, batwinged bulk withdrew its tentacles, leaving a slick, pale gloss of slime on the now rather more than merely mad monarch. King George dropped back onto his boat bench with a thud, his mouth moving as he stared up at his attacker. His shirt had been torn off, and a curious, half-formed glyph stood out on his chest like a burn.
With a thunderous clatter of beating wings, the monster rose higher.
“Tekeli-li?”
Marsh pointed to the water, where Chambres and Mgl’nath were struggling to climb up over each other to get into the boat. The creature stretched and altered its form as it dived.
Water splashed over them like a small tidal wave. Camille shrieked.
“Oh, I am sorry,” Marsh cried, pulling out a scented handkerchief and dabbing Camille’s cheeks and hands.
“My lord….”
“You called me Douglas just a moment ago,” he said, hopefully. Behind them, the water roiled and Chambres gave a chilling cry that broke off mid-note. Marsh turned to look.
“The rest of you ought to get out of the water,” he advised the ambassador’s splashing guests. “That’s a shoggoth, and they have a most deuced insatiable appetite once their digestive juices start flowing.”
The resulting rush to climb back into the boats nearly drowned the entirety of London’s remaining social elite.
“Oh….” Camille gazed at her friend’s familiar bulbous eyes and wide mouth and realized that she owed him her sanity — and perhaps her life. “You’ve saved us all.”
Marsh’s smile was strained as he looked down at his ruined shirt and pantaloons. “It was my pleasure.”
“Oh, Douglas!” Camille threw her arms around him and narrowly avoided slicing off his ear with her knife. “I’m sure the Prince Regent will buy you a dozen pairs of new pantaloons.”
“Well, I don’t know that he’ll be as grateful as that,” he demurred. “Might have preferred I’d dropped ‘Farmer George’ into the lake, too, so he’d be king.”
A growled curse across the water confirmed his guess, and Camille sighed. It appeared only she appreciated her friend’s act of selfless bravery.
“But it don’t matter,” Marsh continued, magnanimously, as he gazed into her eyes. “I’ll regret nothing at all, if you’ll only consent to marry me.”
Flustered, she blushed.
“Douglas….”
“I have a title, and land both above and below the sea, and a family line that dates back to before humans lost their gills,” he pressed. “Won’t you make me a happy man, at least for the next thirty years?”
“What happens after that?”
“I turn into a Deep One, and you have the run of the house.”
“Oh, Douglas!”
Behind their boat, the satiated shoggoth shot up from the water and hurled itself back into the night sky. Its haunting song of tekeli-li, tekeli-li faded into the darkness as Douglas and Camille embraced, murmuring their endearments beneath the ancient, brooding stars.
Camille Wilmarth was thoroughly enjoying herself, perched on the high-seated phaeton next to Lord Neely Chambres as they made the Kensington Gardens circuit with the rest of the ton. They stopped on a regular basis to exchange greetings with other riders and drivers, and Camille felt that the Season was looking up at last.
“Tell me, Lady Camille, have you been introduced to the Prince Regent?” Chambres asked, as they rode.
“Not personally, although I saw him at the Opera earlier this year,” she replied, giving him a quick, curious look.
“I confess myself surprised that he has not sought out your acquaintance,” the ambassador said. “He is a great admirer of beautiful women, and surely you are the loveliest in London, just as our friend Curwen declared.”
“Too great an admiration no longer flatters,” Camille demurred. Like many young ladies, her feelings toward the Prince of Wales were mixed. He was a member of the royal family, true, but so terribly subject to the excesses of masculine folly — gambling, women, wine, and spending far too much money on his beloved Carlton House. There was something about him that wasn’t quite respectable.
“Wisely said.” Chambres shot her a sideways glance. “Although it is a difficult business for those of us who have fallen under your spell to hide the depth and sincerity of our admiration.”
Camille gazed into his star-flecked eyes a beat too long. She forced herself to laugh lightly and look away. To her relief, she spotted Lord Douglas Marsh riding a splendid chestnut in the company of Lord Wilcox. She waved. The dandy returned her wave with a languid gesture and Wilcox gave her a broad smile. The two rode up to join them, and Camille made the introductions.
“Tell me, ambassador, do you race?” Wilcox asked, admiring the sleek little phaeton. In a moment the two men were deep in discussion, debating the merits of various racing vehicles. Camille turned to her friend, who had reined in next to her side of the carriage.
“You’ve forgiven Lord Wilcox, I see.”
“He promised he would burn the offending coat,” Marsh replied, looking rather oddly at her. “How generous of you to honor the ambassador with your company so soon after making his acquaintance.”
Camille bridled.
“His excellency has few friends so far from home,” she said, her voice cool.
Marsh touched the brim of his hat in apology.
“Perhaps you would ride with me tomorrow,” he suggested. “I’ve bought a splendid little filly that I’ve yet to take out, and I think you might appreciate her gentle manners and fine gait.”
“How kind of you to offer,” Camille replied. She was surprised; Marsh had never paid her any but the most casual and friendly of attentions before. “I would be free at five.”
“Splendid.”
A few minutes later, the two men took their leave and rode away. Lord Chambres gazed after them a moment.
“You British are very strange, to me,” he said at last, turning his dark gaze back to her. “You are governed by rules and customs unlike anything in Carcosa. And yet I find this land curiously dreamlike, with its brave men and beautiful women and astounding technological achievements. You are a more determined people than we expected.”
“I am ashamed to admit that I know very little of your country,” Camille confessed, fingering the ivory handle of her parasol and wondering whether she should take offense at being called “strange” by a foreigner. After all, she wasn’t certain Carcosa had even existed before R’lyeh had burst from the ocean.
“That’s not surprising, and certainly no fault of yours. We have always been a small and isolated land, and it was as much a surprise to us to find ourselves here as it was to you.” Chambres lifted his head, gazing around the Gardens with a curiously proprietorial expression. “But we find your king much to our taste.”
“King George?” Camille gave the ambassador a sidelong look. Did Lord Chambres not realize the truth about the king’s long-term “illness”? Or did he simply not care?
To be sure, madness had grown more common since the stars had realigned. Take Admiral Cockburn, whose ship had been close to France when Napoleon’s grip on the shoggoths had slipped. He’d survived the slaughter and returned to London, but he had grown deathly afraid of the night sky. As soon as the sun dipped low on the horizon, the once-great naval warrior barricaded himself inside his house and kept it ablaze with gaslight all night. Nor would he agree to set foot on a ship again, or even venture close to the water.
Too many naval officers and military men had suffered similarly. Camille idly wondered how Marsh had managed to come through the Rising unscathed. His ship, she had heard, had been in the Pacific at the time, and most of his men had been lost.
“King George, yes,” Chambres was saying, “and his son. Which reminds me; the Prince Regent is holding a banquet at Brighton Pavilion next week. It would be my very great honor to escort you.”
Camille’s breath caught.
“Your excellency … I do not possess the rank….”
“A lady’s respectability and beauty is her rank, Lady Wilmarth. I am only an ambassador, myself, who perhaps overreaches himself by aspiring to your company. But if you would forgive me my impertinence….”
Camille looked away, her heart pounding again. Was this the invitation into the unknown that had been promised by the ambassador’s eyes at Almack’s? To venture into the Prince Regent’s exalted company would be to embark upon a new and possibly dangerous journey, indeed. She would be out of her depth, but —
She swallowed. This was the sort of momentous decision that shouldn’t be made on the spur of the moment.
“May I give you my answer tomorrow, Lord Chambres?”
“Of course.” He inclined his head.
“I will be home between three and four,” she said, mentally reviewing her schedule. Yes, that would still give her time to dress for riding with Marsh at five.
Heavens, if she accepted the ambassador’s invitation, she would have to ask Marsh what to wear. The Exquisite’s taste was ever so much better than her own….
Douglas Marsh stormed down the tight, narrow cellar stairwell of his ancestral home, fuming. That blasted ambassador from Carcosa was positivly wiling his way into Lady Camille’s affections, seeking to impress her with his close acquaintance with the Prince Regent. And perdition take the girl, she had fallen for it! She’d even asked him what to wear to Brighton Pavilion!
Of course, it wasn’t Lady Camille’s fault. She was young, three years younger than Marsh himself, and this was her second Season. Without any great title or inheritance of her own, she was without a doubt feeling great pressure from her family to obtain a wealthy or titled husband, especially now that so few suitable men remained alive and sane. Even if she found the ambassador unsuitable — and by Cthulhu, Marsh hoped Lady Camille understood how very unsuitable the man was! — having an entree into the Prince Regent’s social circle would open up many more possibilities, introducing her to men of higher rank than she might otherwise meet, and dignitaries both English and otherwise.
All of which left Marsh, who might otherwise have been able to offer himself to her with some measure of confidence, standing in the dust with his hat in his hand.
He feared he was already too late. Camille was all that was respectable, to be sure; that wasn’t the problem. She had been careful to spread her company among her male and female acquaintances in such a way that nobody could suggest she had a favorite. But Marsh had seen the way her eyes grew distant when she spoke of the ambassador, and it worried him.
Worried him so much, in fact, that he’d taken the grave social risk of leaving London for a week to go home.
Marsh made a face as his impeccably polished boots sank into the translucent slime that coated the stone floor. The Marsh mansion’s ancient tunnels ran all the way down to the ocean. The familiar scent of tidal pools and rotting seaweed greeted him as he drew near the audience chamber.
The elder Deep Ones were already there, crouched on their glistening, moist stone chairs like breathing batrachian idols. Marsh made a leg.
“Well, son, here we are,” his father croaked, disgusted. “Sacred Mother Hydra, are you still dressing like a demmed molly? Tell me them pantaloons ain’t purple! You look like bloody Froggy-Gone-A’Courting.”
“They’re not purple, Father, they’re lilac. And I thoroughly intend to enjoy myself while I’m still capable of wearing clothing, so you may as well not bother reanimating that old argument again.”
His father snorted, an unpleasant, gurgling sound that wasn’t quite as intimidating as his human snort had been.
“Your letter said something about Carcosa,” he grumbled, dissatisfied.
“So it did.” Marsh pulled out his scented handkerchief and carefully laid it on the seat of the damp wooden chair that stood before the circle of thrones. Between the slime and the salt spray, being a cultist of the Old Ones posed an indisputable sartorial challenge.
“There is a young lady in London for whom I find that I’ve developed a tendre,” he explained as he sat, “but she is being pursued by Lord Neely Chambres, the ambassador from Carcosa. I need to know more about the Carcosans.”
“Why?” croaked one of the elders. “Just kill your rival and abduct the breeder.”
Marsh gave his ancestor a strained smile.
“Abducting one’s intended is no longer the thing, Most Ancient One,” he replied, evenly. “And although killing the Carcosan isn’t out of the question, I would like to know how dangerous he is, first. Is he a cultist? A wizard? Can he change shape? Would killing him offend the Great Old Ones?”
“The Great Old Ones don’t give a rip for any of us,” Marsh’s father gurgled.
“As well they shouldn’t!” another of the Elders snapped, shifting with annoyance on his stone seat. “They’re the Old Ones! Ancient, powerful denizens of the timeless cold reaches between the stars! We mortals are as nothing to them!”
“That’s not what the prophecies promised,” his father muttered sullenly. The rest of the Deep Ones shifted and cleared their throats, looking around with marked discomfort. “When R’lyeh rose, things were supposed to change. Cthulhu was supposed to rule Earth and we’d be right there beside him, lording it over all the dryskins.”
“Dread Cthulhu acts in his own time,” the Elder rebutted, “and if you don’t cease your croaking, the rest of us will be enjoying a batch of extra-large les cuisses de grenouille at dinner tonight.”
Marsh rolled his eyes at the old argument. The Deep Ones hadn’t been happy to learn that their Lord Cthulhu had apparently spent the strange aeons of his imprisonment contemplating the perils of over-hasty action. When R’lyeh had burst to the surface during Napoleon Bonaparte’s dark rite only to face a fleet of the Royal Navy’s bravest, the octopoid deity had swiftly realized that the world had changed since the good old days of acquiescent Elder Things and psychically enslaved servitor races. He had retired into his monolith-crowned citadel to consider his options.
Like the madness of King George, the hesitation of Great Cthulhu was a bit of a social embarrassment.
“O Most Respected and Feared Ones,” he murmured diplomatically, “what can you tell me of Carcosa and its ambassador?”
The disgruntled Elder looked back at him, his great round eyes glimmering.
“Carcosa is a backwater from the Hyades. Pretty lakeside property,” the Deep One said, begrudgingly, “but it doesn’t get along with its neighbor. Dynastic monarchy, political connection to Hastur, some unsavory rumors about the royal family. The usual.”
“History of black magic? Pacts with alien races?”
“Some runic folderol about a yellow sign. I don’t know all the details. Carcosa hasn’t been on Earth that long,” the elder grunted. “Bunch of cultists-come-lately.”
“Mushrooms,” another sniffed.
“So, who is this girl, anyway?” Marsh’s father asked, bringing the conversation back to the important point. “Good family? Wide hips?”
“Lady Camille Wilmarth. Lord Daniel’s daughter.”
“Hmph. Not wealthy.”
“Beautiful, though.”
“Beauty.” The former baronet dismissed the term. “Is she intelligent? Adaptable? Can she swim?”
“She’s bright enough, and judging from her social success with the ambassador and the Prince Regent, I wager she’s proved herself a quick learner,” Marsh sighed. “I haven’t any idea whether she can swim, Father. It’s not important, is it?”
“Of course it is. Your mother could swim like a fish. Had us some fine old times in these very tide pools,” his father boasted. Marsh shuddered and raised a hand in an attempt to forestall any further reminiscences. His father plowed on. “Besides, times are changing. Don’t need to be ashamed of the family anymore, hey? You can bring her down to meet the rest of us.”
“I’ll be certain to do that,” Marsh murmured, standing. “But only if I can pry her out of the grasp of that infernal Carcosan. If I do, will you raise any objections, Father?”
“Make sure she can swim,” his father said, waving him off with one clawed, webbed hand.
“This will be an adventure,” Camille Wilmarth told her reflection in the mirror. Her voice wasn’t as confident as she might wish it to be, and her expression not as happy.
In fact, she felt a little frightened.
A month had passed since she’d met Lord Neely Chambres at Almack’s, and during that time she’d found herself gradually drifting away from her former circles and being engulfed by his. The company was lofty but intimidating, as the Prince Regent’s companions were a hard-drinking, gluttonous, gambling lot. Until tonight, Lord Chambres had only taken her to the most reputable of the royal occasions — nothing at all like the debauched parties she’d heard whispered about by her simultaneously thrilled and scandalized peers.
But two nights ago, over cards, talk had turned to a private ball to be held by the mysterious ambassador from R’lyeh itself, Lord Mgl’nath, a man who did not usually entertain and seldom accepted invitations. It was to be a small affair in honor of the new friendship between England, R’lyeh, and Carcosa. Camille had indulged her curiosity about the reticent R’lyehian ambassador by asking Lord Chambres for more information, and he had promptly invited her to attend the ball — a masque — with him.
She smoothed her dress with her hands, all too aware of their slight tremble.
She was no green girl; she’d read enough novels to comprehend the sorts of scandalous things that might occur at a private ball, especially in a racy crowd like that of the Prince of Wales. But it was that sense of risk, of taking the plunge into the unknown, that had attracted her to Lord Chambres in the first place. The world had changed; the stars had changed. How could she possibly stay the same?
Not to mention, attending a private ball with the cream of society would surely secure her place in the Prince Regent’s circle and make her a much more desirable marriage prospect.
She studied her costume in the mirror.
Her dressmaker had assured her that her gown was the dernier cri in fashion, influenced by the Egyptian Cultist fashion that had swept the ton. It was supposed to be the dress of an Egyptian queen, although Camille doubted the Egyptians had worn petticoats, or quite the amount of golden embroidery that had been sewn over the panels of her gown. Her hair had been piled on top of her head and bound with golden chains, and a delicate gold mask rested on her bed.
“My lady?” Her maid appeared in the doorway. “Mister Harolds sent me to tell you that you have a visitor. Lord Marsh.”
Camille frowned and picked up her mask, heading downstairs.
Lord Marsh’s expression was distraught as he stood in the salon, holding his hat under one arm. His bulbous, slightly protruding eyes swelled even further as he straightened from his bow and took in the magnificence of her gown.
“Thank you for receiving me, my lady,” he said, after a speechless moment. “I apologize for the hour.”
“I can only assume you have something urgent to convey, my lord,” she said, walking to the divan and sitting.
“I do.” He perched on the edge of a chair, setting his hat on his knee. “I’ve come to warn you about tonight’s ball at Lord Mgl’nath’s.”
Camille felt a prickle of apprehension that she defiantly shrugged away.
“What warning is that?”
“The ball …” the dandy hesitated. “I have recently made a point of acquainting myself with the customs of Carcosa, and tonight is a special occasion in the country. They call it the ‘Night of the Living God,’ and I fear its celebrations aren’t entirely wholesome.”
Camille looked down at her mask, then lifted it by its handle and set it over her eyes.
“It is an ambassadorial affair, Lord Marsh,” she said, gazing at him through the eyeholes, “and the Prince Regent shall attend. I’m certain that nothing terrible will happen there, and if anything remotely scandalous should occur, I shall be masked and unrecognizable.”
“I’m not afraid for your life or your reputation,” Lord Marsh declared, rising. “I’m afraid for your sanity.”
Camille stood and turned away, lowering the mask. The homely dandy’s warning struck a strange chord in her heart, but she would not, could not, pay it any regard.
“I thank you for your concern,” she said, stiffly. “You have acted as you thought best. But I believe your concern is misplaced. Lord Chambres will keep me safe from harm.”
“Damn Lord Chambres!” Marsh burst out. Camille gasped as he grabbed her arm and spun her about. “He’ll rob you of your sanity and sacrifice you to He Who is Not to Be Named!”
“Lord Marsh!” she protested, dropping her golden mask and trying to push him aside. He pulled her against his impeccably fitted clothes, heedless of how her struggles might wrinkle or crease them. She gasped.
“Let me protect you,” he pleaded, holding her with more strength than she had imagined could exist in his stocky frame. “My blood may be mixed with the protoplasm of the deepest ocean dwellers, but at least I belong to this Earth. Do you think it’s an accident that Lord Mgl’nath is holding a masque? Those ambassadors are both wearing masks!”
Camille fought to escape, certain the dandy had gone mad at last — that some latent insanity acquired while he was on his ship during the rising of R’lyeh had come round at last to be born in his fevered brain.
“Lord Marsh, release me at once! This is utterly improper!”
“I swear, I should abduct you, after all!” He pressed his lips down upon hers.
Camille froze. How could the polite, delicate Exquisite who’d been her casual companion for so long possess such ferocity beneath his limpid exterior? The expensive fabric of his coat wrinkled beneath her hands as she clutched him for balance, her head spinning. Had she been fooled about his true nature all along?
For a moment her eyes closed and her lips parted as she allowed herself to forget the Douglas Marsh she knew, the frivolous fop peering through his quizzing glass, and imagine another Douglas Marsh entirely, the much-decorated commander in the king’s navy who’d been in the Pacific when R’lyeh had arisen and had lived to tell the tale. Without a straitjacket.
Why, even now she could almost smell the ocean on him….
Then, abruptly, she collected herself and thrust him away. Marsh staggered backward.
Camille gave him her most withering glare. Lord Marsh’s eyes were a limpid blue and reflected her furious face back at her like a clear pool on a bright day. His gaze held no danger, no whiff of the foreign and forbidden. He was comfortable, commonplace, and, in short, uninteresting.
“Leave,” she ordered. “At once.”
He leaned over to pick up his hat and cane, which he’d let fall. His cravat had come loose and his coat was wrinkled.
“I apologize, my lady,” he said, his large eyes downcast. “I can’t imagine what came over me.”
“I have no desire to see you again,” she declared, although even as the remorseless words left her mouth, she wondered if she meant them. Surely he was nothing but a harmless fop who’d suffered a momentary lapse?
Then she remembered the almost inhuman strength in his arms and shivered. No, he was not harmless.
Lord Marsh bowed and wordlessly took his leave.
Still shaken, Douglas Marsh threw himself into his carriage, heedless of his already damaged finery. What in heaven’s name had overcome him? He pulled off a glove and looked down at his fingers, half-expecting to see webbing growing between them, even though he should still be decades away from the Change.
Nothing. He was still human, and therefore he had no excuse for his irresponsible behavior.
No excuse but the madness that accompanied love.
He rubbed his brow, then stared blindly out the carriage window. Lord Mgl’nath hadn’t invited him to the masque, but by Dagon, he’d be there, and he’d keep those two unscrupulous, inhuman ambassadors away from his Lady Camille!
Lord Mgl’nath’s house on Park Lane seemed quite the proper English abode, but as soon as a visitor approached the door, its subtle differences began to be felt. The old-fashioned bronze knocker on the door was fashioned in a peculiarly squidlike shape, and the servants who awaited at the door to take his guests’ coats and wraps had an oddly xanthous tint to their skin and a saturnine cast to their features.
The interior was alight with black candles that were reflected from a multitude of mirrors on the walls, making Camille feel as though she and the other guests were striding through an endless multitude of possible worlds, gazing at their reflections as if at strangers. She shivered as Lord Chambres draw her closer.
Tonight the ambassador wore long, formal robes of a strange cut and a deep yellow color that he told her was traditional in Carcosa. A yellow silk mask covered his face, startlingly bright against his dark hair. His hands were encased in yellow gloves. The unconventionality of his garments made Camille uneasy; they seemed less costume than pagan vestment. She was relieved, when they entered the grand ballroom, to find that the other guests were wearing costumes as conventional as her own.
The ball seemed a most original event. Lord Mgl’nath had left his gas unlit, and instead two great, old-fashioned chandeliers covered with burning black candles hung over the ballroom floor. His musicians also wore masks, and the music they were playing sounded off-key — a quaint, foreign tune, Camille guessed, from the ambassador’s home of R’lyeh. But card tables had been set up in an adjoining room and a multitude of drinks and refreshments were available, giving the strange setting a welcome breath of normality.
“Come,” Lord Chambres said, doffing his mask and tying it to his belt. “Let me introduce you to the ambassador.”
Lord Mgl’nath was another tall man, like Chambres, but his skin had a sallow cast and his narrow skull was completely bald. He was thin to the point of emaciation, which made his limbs seem unusually long, and Camille wondered if, between his sickly color and build, the ambassador were suffering some grave illness. That would, she thought, explain why he so seldom left his house.
The ambassador’s costume was that of an Egyptian priest, and he bowed upon seeing Camille’s matching dress.
“Lady Wilmarth,” he rumbled, in a low and carrying voice. “Well met. As we are a pair, you must permit me a dance this evening.”
“That would be lovely,” she said, flattered and pleased by the reclusive man’s manners. The ambassador turned his gaze on Chambres.
“I have made all the arrangements for tonight,” he said. Chambres bowed, and then another couple approached and they took their leave.
“What’s happening tonight?” Camille asked. Chambres laid a long finger over his lips.
“It’s a surprise,” he said. “Ah, there is the regent, dressed as a sultan. Shall we pay our respects?”
The evening passed quickly, and after the musicians shifted to more recognizable tunes, Camille enjoyed the dancing. She daringly danced twice with Lord Chambres and of course gave one dance to Lord Mgl’nath, whose gait she found stiff and jerky. She was also asked for a turn about the floor with two dukes, an earl, and a general. Her mother would be pleased — she only had one Season left, after all. It was important she secure a good marriage as soon as possible.
Although … Camille drifted to the balcony and gazed outside. For some reason, she couldn’t shake the memory of Lord Douglas Marsh’s rude and entirely unwanted kiss.
Was Lord Marsh wearing a mask, as well? The mask of a dandy, hiding a far rougher and more passionate nature? He wasn’t handsome, of course. Not at all like Lord Chambres. But he’d always been entertaining company, until tonight. Tonight he’d been … more intriguing.
“My lady.” Lord Chambres stepped out next to her and she started, feeling a touch of guilt. A proper lady did not fall silent in the midst of a ball. “There you are. Lord Mgl’nath has prepared a special surprise for us all in the park.”
“These must be the arrangements you were speaking of earlier,” she said, resting a hand on his arm and smiling up at him. “At last, the mystery is to be revealed.”
“I trust you will find it diverting,” the ambassador said.
The guests, perhaps thirty or so, made their way in crowded carriages from Lord Mgl’nath’s estate through Grosvenor Gate to Hyde Park. A midnight picnic in costume, they all agreed, was a unique idea, and the group’s spirits were high as they rattled down the paths to the Serpentine, shouting and calling to each other from carriage to carriage. They arrived at the boat house to find the ambassador’s servants waiting for them with a line of pleasure boats. Mgl’nath insisted everyone don their masks again for the watery jaunt.
“Dashed original, Migs,” the Prince Regent declared, heaving his considerable bulk into the nearest boat. In threes and fours the guests transferred themselves from carriage to watercraft. Camille blushed to find herself included in the boat with Lord Mgl’nath and Lord Chambres, as well as a fourth party who wore a mountebank’s tattered robe and hood. Their boat and the prince’s were the lead craft, but gradually all the guests were afloat, fiery torches imbuing the assembly with a magical air as their boatmen gently paddled them away from shore.
When all of the boats met in the center of the narrow lake, Lord Mgl’nath arose, a process that set their craft rocking back and forth. Camille clutched Lord Chambres’ arm. The ambassador laid a hand over hers. He’d pulled on his yellow gloves again and drawn his yellow silk mask over his face. He barely looked human anymore.
“Don’t move,” he murmured, his voice muffled by the mask. Then he stood, too, at the stern.
Camille pulled her wrap around her shoulders, feeling dwarfed by the two tall men looming over her on each side.
“In Carcosa,” Ambassador Mgl’nath proclaimed, “it is a tradition on this night for the royal family to take a boat into the Lake of Hali. Since our esteemed friend and colleague Lord Chambres finds himself far from home, I have prepared this outing in his honor.”
Everyone fell silent, finding the ambassador’s words too serious for an occasion that should have been purely festive. Lord Chambres bowed again, his expression hidden by the yellow mask. Then both men raised their voices in song.
Chills ran up Camille’s spine as the two foreign ambassadors sang alien words across the dark lake lit only by torchlight. She glanced at the other partygoers who surrounded them in their bobbing boats and saw that they seemed as surprised as she.
As the two men sang, they reached down and lifted the hooded mountebank who was the fourth guest in the boat. The mountebank’s robe hung from his shoulders to his feet in tattered scallops, and when they pushed back his hood, his face gleamed like pale bone in the flickering torchlight.
Women screamed and men swore as they recognized their aged monarch’s strong nose and receding chin.
King George looked across the water and began shouting, as well, thrashing back and forth. The boat heaved and Camille grabbed the sides, staring up at the ranting madman.
“It’s a mask!” she cried, more from hope than conviction. “It’s just a mask of the king’s face! My lords, this jest is in dreadful taste!”
“Hail the King in Yellow!” Lord Chambres cried, spreading his arms. “Behold the Pallid Mask!”
“Unmask him!” Camille cried, struggling as she, too, rose to her feet. Shrieks rose behind her as panicked guests fell into the water, and oaths arose as men reached for their weapons and found that their costumes included none. She grabbed the mountebank and fumbled at his face, searching for an edge of plaster or fabric; a ribbon or pin.
Lord Mgl’nath grabbed her wrist.
“He wears no mask,” the ambassador hissed. “It is your mad king who stands here — yours and your neighbor Carcosa’s!”
“No mask?” she gasped, horrified. “No mask!”
“Iä, Hastur!” Chambres cried, arms out. “Claim your monarch!”
Something huge plunged from the sky, darkening the stars with its abhorrent silhouette. Tentacles spread, dangling down like living night, to caress the ranting king’s face and shoulders and coil around his arms and waist. Great black wings flapped overhead, raising a demonic wind around them.
“Tekeli-li,” it piped. “Tekeli-li!”
Camille screamed and the boat jolted to one side. To her profound amazement, Douglas Marsh heaved himself over the gunwale, grabbed a handful of Lord Chambres’ yellow robe, and hauled him over the side and into the lake.
Chambres shrieked like a Bedlamite as he hit the water. Lord Mgl’nath swore and pulled a long sacrificial knife from his belt, swinging it toward the disheveled and drenched dandy.
“NO!” Camille grabbed the ambassador’s arm, slowing him in time for Marsh to roll the rest of the way into the rocking craft. Marsh grabbed the oar from the boatman and thrust it forward, catching the tall ambassador in a universally tender spot. The knife fell from Mgl’nath’s limp fingers.
Camille ducked and grabbed the weapon as Marsh swung the oar over her bent head and sent Mgl’nath tumbling into the water, as well. The ambassador’s boatman leaped onto the dandy’s back, trying to strangle him.
“Douglas, behind you!” Camille shrieked. Lord Chambres, snarling, grabbed the side of the boat and closed a dripping, yellow-gloved hand around Marsh’s leg. Horrified, Camille lunged forward and stabbed. The knife struck flesh and she heard the perfidious ambassador yelp with pain as he withdrew, plunging back into the water.
Marsh flashed her a grateful smile, then twisted. The boatman wailed as his arm broke. The dandy hurled him out into the water, too.
Camille, panting, pointed at King George, who was still being enveloped in the dark embrace of the flapping thing above him.
“I say, that won’t do,” Douglas muttered. He stood, unaffected by the wild tossing of the boat that was making Camille feel decidedly seasick, and laid his hands on the monster’s thick protoplasmic limbs. To Camille’s disgust, the limbs shifted and obscene eyeballs opened in their flesh, staring up at him. Marsh spoke to the creature in the Elder tongue, and although she had no idea what he was saying, it worked.
The horrid, batwinged bulk withdrew its tentacles, leaving a slick, pale gloss of slime on the now rather more than merely mad monarch. King George dropped back onto his boat bench with a thud, his mouth moving as he stared up at his attacker. His shirt had been torn off, and a curious, half-formed glyph stood out on his chest like a burn.
With a thunderous clatter of beating wings, the monster rose higher.
“Tekeli-li?”
Marsh pointed to the water, where Chambres and Mgl’nath were struggling to climb up over each other to get into the boat. The creature stretched and altered its form as it dived.
Water splashed over them like a small tidal wave. Camille shrieked.
“Oh, I am sorry,” Marsh cried, pulling out a scented handkerchief and dabbing Camille’s cheeks and hands.
“My lord….”
“You called me Douglas just a moment ago,” he said, hopefully. Behind them, the water roiled and Chambres gave a chilling cry that broke off mid-note. Marsh turned to look.
“The rest of you ought to get out of the water,” he advised the ambassador’s splashing guests. “That’s a shoggoth, and they have a most deuced insatiable appetite once their digestive juices start flowing.”
The resulting rush to climb back into the boats nearly drowned the entirety of London’s remaining social elite.
“Oh….” Camille gazed at her friend’s familiar bulbous eyes and wide mouth and realized that she owed him her sanity — and perhaps her life. “You’ve saved us all.”
Marsh’s smile was strained as he looked down at his ruined shirt and pantaloons. “It was my pleasure.”
“Oh, Douglas!” Camille threw her arms around him and narrowly avoided slicing off his ear with her knife. “I’m sure the Prince Regent will buy you a dozen pairs of new pantaloons.”
“Well, I don’t know that he’ll be as grateful as that,” he demurred. “Might have preferred I’d dropped ‘Farmer George’ into the lake, too, so he’d be king.”
A growled curse across the water confirmed his guess, and Camille sighed. It appeared only she appreciated her friend’s act of selfless bravery.
“But it don’t matter,” Marsh continued, magnanimously, as he gazed into her eyes. “I’ll regret nothing at all, if you’ll only consent to marry me.”
Flustered, she blushed.
“Douglas….”
“I have a title, and land both above and below the sea, and a family line that dates back to before humans lost their gills,” he pressed. “Won’t you make me a happy man, at least for the next thirty years?”
“What happens after that?”
“I turn into a Deep One, and you have the run of the house.”
“Oh, Douglas!”
Behind their boat, the satiated shoggoth shot up from the water and hurled itself back into the night sky. Its haunting song of tekeli-li, tekeli-li faded into the darkness as Douglas and Camille embraced, murmuring their endearments beneath the ancient, brooding stars.
Lord Douglas Marsh smoothed the tails of his Weston coat and threw himself — carefully — into a chair at his club. He had been unaccountably piqued ever since Lady Wilmarth had danced with the ambassador the night before, and his irritation hadn’t abated even after arising at noon and spending three hours before the glass, dressing.
The unwelcome sensation of feeling anything other than smugly pleased with himself was one he’d thought banished forever, now that R’lyeh had risen and certain questionable practices that were part of his family heritage had finally been legitimized.
But there it was: almost a full day had passed since the dance, and he still felt palpably irked.
“You’re in a brown study, Dougie,” boomed Major Reginald Hampton, taking a chair across from him and waving for the port. “Someone scuff your boots?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Marsh crossed his legs and contemplated the flawlesly gleaming surface of his Hessians. The sight, which would normally fill him with satisfaction, did nothing to dispel his glum mood.
“Saw you at Almack’s last night. Got a look at that new wog ambassador, did you?”
Marsh winced.
“Do you mean Lord Neely Chambres, of Carcosa?” he inquired, as though there might have been some other ambassador at Almack’s whose presence had escaped his notice.
“Carcosa.” Hampton snorted. “And what the devil was that last year?”
“Corsica, I believe,” Marsh murmured. The port arrived, and Hampton leaned over to pour them each a glass.
“Ever since R’lyeh popped out of the Pacific, the whole demmed world’s turned upside-down,” Hampton grumbled, handing a glass to the dandy. “Maps no good, celestial navigation shot to blazes, civil wars flaring up right and left, profane cults crawling out of the woodwork — devil of a price to pay just to get rid of Old Boney, if you ask me. Though I would have liked to have seen the look on his face when he arrived on the coast of France and them bloody shoggoths slipped out of his control, haw!”
“They’ve certainly given Spain something to think about,” Marsh pointed out. Hampton’s handsome, freckled face cleared.
“There’s that, by God. To Pax Britannica.” He raised his glass.
“Iä, Cthulhu,” Marsh replied. It was the fashionable toast of the moment. Hampton rolled his eyes.
“Don’t know how you manage so well with that gobbledy-gook, Dougie. Sounds to me like a man having his tongue pulled out through his throat.”
Marsh smiled, inscrutably. Although few of his peers were in a position to recognize it, his pronunciation was precise and his accent impeccable. Discovering which of London’s other lords and ladies were similarly fluent was one of the few things that kept this otherwise lackluster Season lively.
His smile vanished.
One of the few things.
“I say, Marsh, didn’t mean any offense,” Hampton said, eyeing him with disconcertion.
“What? Oh, no, no; none taken.” Marsh took another sip of the port and set his glass down. “Forgive me. My mind is wandering.”
“Yesss … saw that ambassador fellow dancing with Lady Wilmarth last night,” Hampton observed.
“Only once,” Marsh countered. Surely the major wasn’t suggesting Lady Wilmarth had done anything improper, was he? But, no, he realized, looking at the major’s sly grin, that wasn’t what Hampton was suggesting at all. The comment had been a dig at him, not her.
Ridiculous!
…So why the devil did he feel as though the remark had struck home?
“Of course,” Hampton said with a sage look, “but upon my word, something about that man gives me a monstrous chill. Don’t like any of this new breed that’s popping up all over the place, to tell you the truth — all them heathens from R’lyeh and Carcosa and Leng riding through Kensington Gardens and gaming at White’s like civilized men. Ain’t decent.”
“The ladies don’t seem to mind,” Marsh said, striving to maintain his usual mild-mannered neutrality about everything but the vagaries of fashion. Secretly, though, he sympathized with Hampton’s view. He might be a bit of a half-breed, himself, but it didn’t signify — the Deep Ones had always been solid English citizens. Their sunken cities shared the same wares as Bristol and Southampton, Portsmouth and Liverpool, and their children had sailed on English ships to India, Africa, and the Americas since the Norman invasion. “There’s a dearth of eligible gentlemen this Season.”
“All the better for those of us still standin’,” Hampton retorted, refilling his glass. “It ain’t right for us to sit back and let outlandish upstarts like that ambassador tempt away our honest English ladies. What’s wrong with their own womenfolk?”
Marsh felt another pang of sympathy and frowned.
Great Father Dagon! Could he have possibly fallen in love with Lady Camille and not noticed?
Camille Wilmarth was thoroughly enjoying herself, perched on the high-seated phaeton next to Lord Neely Chambres as they made the Kensington Gardens circuit with the rest of the ton. They stopped on a regular basis to exchange greetings with other riders and drivers, and Camille felt that the Season was looking up at last.
“Tell me, Lady Camille, have you been introduced to the Prince Regent?” Chambres asked, as they rode.
“Not personally, although I saw him at the Opera earlier this year,” she replied, giving him a quick, curious look.
“I confess myself surprised that he has not sought out your acquaintance,” the ambassador said. “He is a great admirer of beautiful women, and surely you are the loveliest in London, just as our friend Curwen declared.”
“Too great an admiration no longer flatters,” Camille demurred. Like many young ladies, her feelings toward the Prince of Wales were mixed. He was a member of the royal family, true, but so terribly subject to the excesses of masculine folly — gambling, women, wine, and spending far too much money on his beloved Carlton House. There was something about him that wasn’t quite respectable.
“Wisely said.” Chambres shot her a sideways glance. “Although it is a difficult business for those of us who have fallen under your spell to hide the depth and sincerity of our admiration.”
Camille gazed into his star-flecked eyes a beat too long. She forced herself to laugh lightly and look away. To her relief, she spotted Lord Douglas Marsh riding a splendid chestnut in the company of Lord Wilcox. She waved. The dandy returned her wave with a languid gesture and Wilcox gave her a broad smile. The two rode up to join them, and Camille made the introductions.
“Tell me, ambassador, do you race?” Wilcox asked, admiring the sleek little phaeton. In a moment the two men were deep in discussion, debating the merits of various racing vehicles. Camille turned to her friend, who had reined in next to her side of the carriage.
“You’ve forgiven Lord Wilcox, I see.”
“He promised he would burn the offending coat,” Marsh replied, looking rather oddly at her. “How generous of you to honor the ambassador with your company so soon after making his acquaintance.”
Camille bridled.
“His excellency has few friends so far from home,” she said, her voice cool.
Marsh touched the brim of his hat in apology.
“Perhaps you would ride with me tomorrow,” he suggested. “I’ve bought a splendid little filly that I’ve yet to take out, and I think you might appreciate her gentle manners and fine gait.”
“How kind of you to offer,” Camille replied. She was surprised; Marsh had never paid her any but the most casual and friendly of attentions before. “I would be free at five.”
“Splendid.”
A few minutes later, the two men took their leave and rode away. Lord Chambres gazed after them a moment.
“You British are very strange, to me,” he said at last, turning his dark gaze back to her. “You are governed by rules and customs unlike anything in Carcosa. And yet I find this land curiously dreamlike, with its brave men and beautiful women and astounding technological achievements. You are a more determined people than we expected.”
“I am ashamed to admit that I know very little of your country,” Camille confessed, fingering the ivory handle of her parasol and wondering whether she should take offense at being called “strange” by a foreigner. After all, she wasn’t certain Carcosa had even existed before R’lyeh had burst from the ocean.
“That’s not surprising, and certainly no fault of yours. We have always been a small and isolated land, and it was as much a surprise to us to find ourselves here as it was to you.” Chambres lifted his head, gazing around the Gardens with a curiously proprietorial expression. “But we find your king much to our taste.”
“King George?” Camille gave the ambassador a sidelong look. Did Lord Chambres not realize the truth about the king’s long-term “illness”? Or did he simply not care?
To be sure, madness had grown more common since the stars had realigned. Take Admiral Cockburn, whose ship had been close to France when Napoleon’s grip on the shoggoths had slipped. He’d survived the slaughter and returned to London, but he had grown deathly afraid of the night sky. As soon as the sun dipped low on the horizon, the once-great naval warrior barricaded himself inside his house and kept it ablaze with gaslight all night. Nor would he agree to set foot on a ship again, or even venture close to the water.
Too many naval officers and military men had suffered similarly. Camille idly wondered how Marsh had managed to come through the Rising unscathed. His ship, she had heard, had been in the Pacific at the time, and most of his men had been lost.
“King George, yes,” Chambres was saying, “and his son. Which reminds me; the Prince Regent is holding a banquet at Brighton Pavilion next week. It would be my very great honor to escort you.”
Camille’s breath caught.
“Your excellency … I do not possess the rank….”
“A lady’s respectability and beauty is her rank, Lady Wilmarth. I am only an ambassador, myself, who perhaps overreaches himself by aspiring to your company. But if you would forgive me my impertinence….”
Camille looked away, her heart pounding again. Was this the invitation into the unknown that had been promised by the ambassador’s eyes at Almack’s? To venture into the Prince Regent’s exalted company would be to embark upon a new and possibly dangerous journey, indeed. She would be out of her depth, but —
She swallowed. This was the sort of momentous decision that shouldn’t be made on the spur of the moment.
“May I give you my answer tomorrow, Lord Chambres?”
“Of course.” He inclined his head.
“I will be home between three and four,” she said, mentally reviewing her schedule. Yes, that would still give her time to dress for riding with Marsh at five.
Heavens, if she accepted the ambassador’s invitation, she would have to ask Marsh what to wear. The Exquisite’s taste was ever so much better than her own….
Douglas Marsh stormed down the tight, narrow cellar stairwell of his ancestral home, fuming. That blasted ambassador from Carcosa was positivly wiling his way into Lady Camille’s affections, seeking to impress her with his close acquaintance with the Prince Regent. And perdition take the girl, she had fallen for it! She’d even asked him what to wear to Brighton Pavilion!
Of course, it wasn’t Lady Camille’s fault. She was young, three years younger than Marsh himself, and this was her second Season. Without any great title or inheritance of her own, she was without a doubt feeling great pressure from her family to obtain a wealthy or titled husband, especially now that so few suitable men remained alive and sane. Even if she found the ambassador unsuitable — and by Cthulhu, Marsh hoped Lady Camille understood how very unsuitable the man was! — having an entree into the Prince Regent’s social circle would open up many more possibilities, introducing her to men of higher rank than she might otherwise meet, and dignitaries both English and otherwise.
All of which left Marsh, who might otherwise have been able to offer himself to her with some measure of confidence, standing in the dust with his hat in his hand.
He feared he was already too late. Camille was all that was respectable, to be sure; that wasn’t the problem. She had been careful to spread her company among her male and female acquaintances in such a way that nobody could suggest she had a favorite. But Marsh had seen the way her eyes grew distant when she spoke of the ambassador, and it worried him.
Worried him so much, in fact, that he’d taken the grave social risk of leaving London for a week to go home.
Marsh made a face as his impeccably polished boots sank into the translucent slime that coated the stone floor. The Marsh mansion’s ancient tunnels ran all the way down to the ocean. The familiar scent of tidal pools and rotting seaweed greeted him as he drew near the audience chamber.
The elder Deep Ones were already there, crouched on their glistening, moist stone chairs like breathing batrachian idols. Marsh made a leg.
“Well, son, here we are,” his father croaked, disgusted. “Sacred Mother Hydra, are you still dressing like a demmed molly? Tell me them pantaloons ain’t purple! You look like bloody Froggy-Gone-A’Courting.”
“They’re not purple, Father, they’re lilac. And I thoroughly intend to enjoy myself while I’m still capable of wearing clothing, so you may as well not bother reanimating that old argument again.”
His father snorted, an unpleasant, gurgling sound that wasn’t quite as intimidating as his human snort had been.
“Your letter said something about Carcosa,” he grumbled, dissatisfied.
“So it did.” Marsh pulled out his scented handkerchief and carefully laid it on the seat of the damp wooden chair that stood before the circle of thrones. Between the slime and the salt spray, being a cultist of the Old Ones posed an indisputable sartorial challenge.
“There is a young lady in London for whom I find that I’ve developed a tendre,” he explained as he sat, “but she is being pursued by Lord Neely Chambres, the ambassador from Carcosa. I need to know more about the Carcosans.”
“Why?” croaked one of the elders. “Just kill your rival and abduct the breeder.”
Marsh gave his ancestor a strained smile.
“Abducting one’s intended is no longer the thing, Most Ancient One,” he replied, evenly. “And although killing the Carcosan isn’t out of the question, I would like to know how dangerous he is, first. Is he a cultist? A wizard? Can he change shape? Would killing him offend the Great Old Ones?”
“The Great Old Ones don’t give a rip for any of us,” Marsh’s father gurgled.
“As well they shouldn’t!” another of the Elders snapped, shifting with annoyance on his stone seat. “They’re the Old Ones! Ancient, powerful denizens of the timeless cold reaches between the stars! We mortals are as nothing to them!”
“That’s not what the prophecies promised,” his father muttered sullenly. The rest of the Deep Ones shifted and cleared their throats, looking around with marked discomfort. “When R’lyeh rose, things were supposed to change. Cthulhu was supposed to rule Earth and we’d be right there beside him, lording it over all the dryskins.”
“Dread Cthulhu acts in his own time,” the Elder rebutted, “and if you don’t cease your croaking, the rest of us will be enjoying a batch of extra-large les cuisses de grenouille at dinner tonight.”
Marsh rolled his eyes at the old argument. The Deep Ones hadn’t been happy to learn that their Lord Cthulhu had apparently spent the strange aeons of his imprisonment contemplating the perils of over-hasty action. When R’lyeh had burst to the surface during Napoleon Bonaparte’s dark rite only to face a fleet of the Royal Navy’s bravest, the octopoid deity had swiftly realized that the world had changed since the good old days of acquiescent Elder Things and psychically enslaved servitor races. He had retired into his monolith-crowned citadel to consider his options.
Like the madness of King George, the hesitation of Great Cthulhu was a bit of a social embarrassment.
“O Most Respected and Feared Ones,” he murmured diplomatically, “what can you tell me of Carcosa and its ambassador?”
The disgruntled Elder looked back at him, his great round eyes glimmering.
“Carcosa is a backwater from the Hyades. Pretty lakeside property,” the Deep One said, begrudgingly, “but it doesn’t get along with its neighbor. Dynastic monarchy, political connection to Hastur, some unsavory rumors about the royal family. The usual.”
“History of black magic? Pacts with alien races?”
“Some runic folderol about a yellow sign. I don’t know all the details. Carcosa hasn’t been on Earth that long,” the elder grunted. “Bunch of cultists-come-lately.”
“Mushrooms,” another sniffed.
“So, who is this girl, anyway?” Marsh’s father asked, bringing the conversation back to the important point. “Good family? Wide hips?”
“Lady Camille Wilmarth. Lord Daniel’s daughter.”
“Hmph. Not wealthy.”
“Beautiful, though.”
“Beauty.” The former baronet dismissed the term. “Is she intelligent? Adaptable? Can she swim?”
“She’s bright enough, and judging from her social success with the ambassador and the Prince Regent, I wager she’s proved herself a quick learner,” Marsh sighed. “I haven’t any idea whether she can swim, Father. It’s not important, is it?”
“Of course it is. Your mother could swim like a fish. Had us some fine old times in these very tide pools,” his father boasted. Marsh shuddered and raised a hand in an attempt to forestall any further reminiscences. His father plowed on. “Besides, times are changing. Don’t need to be ashamed of the family anymore, hey? You can bring her down to meet the rest of us.”
“I’ll be certain to do that,” Marsh murmured, standing. “But only if I can pry her out of the grasp of that infernal Carcosan. If I do, will you raise any objections, Father?”
“Make sure she can swim,” his father said, waving him off with one clawed, webbed hand.
“This will be an adventure,” Camille Wilmarth told her reflection in the mirror. Her voice wasn’t as confident as she might wish it to be, and her expression not as happy.
In fact, she felt a little frightened.
A month had passed since she’d met Lord Neely Chambres at Almack’s, and during that time she’d found herself gradually drifting away from her former circles and being engulfed by his. The company was lofty but intimidating, as the Prince Regent’s companions were a hard-drinking, gluttonous, gambling lot. Until tonight, Lord Chambres had only taken her to the most reputable of the royal occasions — nothing at all like the debauched parties she’d heard whispered about by her simultaneously thrilled and scandalized peers.
But two nights ago, over cards, talk had turned to a private ball to be held by the mysterious ambassador from R’lyeh itself, Lord Mgl’nath, a man who did not usually entertain and seldom accepted invitations. It was to be a small affair in honor of the new friendship between England, R’lyeh, and Carcosa. Camille had indulged her curiosity about the reticent R’lyehian ambassador by asking Lord Chambres for more information, and he had promptly invited her to attend the ball — a masque — with him.
She smoothed her dress with her hands, all too aware of their slight tremble.
She was no green girl; she’d read enough novels to comprehend the sorts of scandalous things that might occur at a private ball, especially in a racy crowd like that of the Prince of Wales. But it was that sense of risk, of taking the plunge into the unknown, that had attracted her to Lord Chambres in the first place. The world had changed; the stars had changed. How could she possibly stay the same?
Not to mention, attending a private ball with the cream of society would surely secure her place in the Prince Regent’s circle and make her a much more desirable marriage prospect.
She studied her costume in the mirror.
Her dressmaker had assured her that her gown was the dernier cri in fashion, influenced by the Egyptian Cultist fashion that had swept the ton. It was supposed to be the dress of an Egyptian queen, although Camille doubted the Egyptians had worn petticoats, or quite the amount of golden embroidery that had been sewn over the panels of her gown. Her hair had been piled on top of her head and bound with golden chains, and a delicate gold mask rested on her bed.
“My lady?” Her maid appeared in the doorway. “Mister Harolds sent me to tell you that you have a visitor. Lord Marsh.”
Camille frowned and picked up her mask, heading downstairs.
Lord Marsh’s expression was distraught as he stood in the salon, holding his hat under one arm. His bulbous, slightly protruding eyes swelled even further as he straightened from his bow and took in the magnificence of her gown.
“Thank you for receiving me, my lady,” he said, after a speechless moment. “I apologize for the hour.”
“I can only assume you have something urgent to convey, my lord,” she said, walking to the divan and sitting.
“I do.” He perched on the edge of a chair, setting his hat on his knee. “I’ve come to warn you about tonight’s ball at Lord Mgl’nath’s.”
Camille felt a prickle of apprehension that she defiantly shrugged away.
“What warning is that?”
“The ball …” the dandy hesitated. “I have recently made a point of acquainting myself with the customs of Carcosa, and tonight is a special occasion in the country. They call it the ‘Night of the Living God,’ and I fear its celebrations aren’t entirely wholesome.”
Camille looked down at her mask, then lifted it by its handle and set it over her eyes.
“It is an ambassadorial affair, Lord Marsh,” she said, gazing at him through the eyeholes, “and the Prince Regent shall attend. I’m certain that nothing terrible will happen there, and if anything remotely scandalous should occur, I shall be masked and unrecognizable.”
“I’m not afraid for your life or your reputation,” Lord Marsh declared, rising. “I’m afraid for your sanity.”
Camille stood and turned away, lowering the mask. The homely dandy’s warning struck a strange chord in her heart, but she would not, could not, pay it any regard.
“I thank you for your concern,” she said, stiffly. “You have acted as you thought best. But I believe your concern is misplaced. Lord Chambres will keep me safe from harm.”
“Damn Lord Chambres!” Marsh burst out. Camille gasped as he grabbed her arm and spun her about. “He’ll rob you of your sanity and sacrifice you to He Who is Not to Be Named!”
“Lord Marsh!” she protested, dropping her golden mask and trying to push him aside. He pulled her against his impeccably fitted clothes, heedless of how her struggles might wrinkle or crease them. She gasped.
“Let me protect you,” he pleaded, holding her with more strength than she had imagined could exist in his stocky frame. “My blood may be mixed with the protoplasm of the deepest ocean dwellers, but at least I belong to this Earth. Do you think it’s an accident that Lord Mgl’nath is holding a masque? Those ambassadors are both wearing masks!”
Camille fought to escape, certain the dandy had gone mad at last — that some latent insanity acquired while he was on his ship during the rising of R’lyeh had come round at last to be born in his fevered brain.
“Lord Marsh, release me at once! This is utterly improper!”
“I swear, I should abduct you, after all!” He pressed his lips down upon hers.
Camille froze. How could the polite, delicate Exquisite who’d been her casual companion for so long possess such ferocity beneath his limpid exterior? The expensive fabric of his coat wrinkled beneath her hands as she clutched him for balance, her head spinning. Had she been fooled about his true nature all along?
For a moment her eyes closed and her lips parted as she allowed herself to forget the Douglas Marsh she knew, the frivolous fop peering through his quizzing glass, and imagine another Douglas Marsh entirely, the much-decorated commander in the king’s navy who’d been in the Pacific when R’lyeh had arisen and had lived to tell the tale. Without a straitjacket.
Why, even now she could almost smell the ocean on him….
Then, abruptly, she collected herself and thrust him away. Marsh staggered backward.
Camille gave him her most withering glare. Lord Marsh’s eyes were a limpid blue and reflected her furious face back at her like a clear pool on a bright day. His gaze held no danger, no whiff of the foreign and forbidden. He was comfortable, commonplace, and, in short, uninteresting.
“Leave,” she ordered. “At once.”
He leaned over to pick up his hat and cane, which he’d let fall. His cravat had come loose and his coat was wrinkled.
“I apologize, my lady,” he said, his large eyes downcast. “I can’t imagine what came over me.”
“I have no desire to see you again,” she declared, although even as the remorseless words left her mouth, she wondered if she meant them. Surely he was nothing but a harmless fop who’d suffered a momentary lapse?
Then she remembered the almost inhuman strength in his arms and shivered. No, he was not harmless.
Lord Marsh bowed and wordlessly took his leave.
Still shaken, Douglas Marsh threw himself into his carriage, heedless of his already damaged finery. What in heaven’s name had overcome him? He pulled off a glove and looked down at his fingers, half-expecting to see webbing growing between them, even though he should still be decades away from the Change.
Nothing. He was still human, and therefore he had no excuse for his irresponsible behavior.
No excuse but the madness that accompanied love.
He rubbed his brow, then stared blindly out the carriage window. Lord Mgl’nath hadn’t invited him to the masque, but by Dagon, he’d be there, and he’d keep those two unscrupulous, inhuman ambassadors away from his Lady Camille!
Lord Mgl’nath’s house on Park Lane seemed quite the proper English abode, but as soon as a visitor approached the door, its subtle differences began to be felt. The old-fashioned bronze knocker on the door was fashioned in a peculiarly squidlike shape, and the servants who awaited at the door to take his guests’ coats and wraps had an oddly xanthous tint to their skin and a saturnine cast to their features.
The interior was alight with black candles that were reflected from a multitude of mirrors on the walls, making Camille feel as though she and the other guests were striding through an endless multitude of possible worlds, gazing at their reflections as if at strangers. She shivered as Lord Chambres draw her closer.
Tonight the ambassador wore long, formal robes of a strange cut and a deep yellow color that he told her was traditional in Carcosa. A yellow silk mask covered his face, startlingly bright against his dark hair. His hands were encased in yellow gloves. The unconventionality of his garments made Camille uneasy; they seemed less costume than pagan vestment. She was relieved, when they entered the grand ballroom, to find that the other guests were wearing costumes as conventional as her own.
The ball seemed a most original event. Lord Mgl’nath had left his gas unlit, and instead two great, old-fashioned chandeliers covered with burning black candles hung over the ballroom floor. His musicians also wore masks, and the music they were playing sounded off-key — a quaint, foreign tune, Camille guessed, from the ambassador’s home of R’lyeh. But card tables had been set up in an adjoining room and a multitude of drinks and refreshments were available, giving the strange setting a welcome breath of normality.
“Come,” Lord Chambres said, doffing his mask and tying it to his belt. “Let me introduce you to the ambassador.”
Lord Mgl’nath was another tall man, like Chambres, but his skin had a sallow cast and his narrow skull was completely bald. He was thin to the point of emaciation, which made his limbs seem unusually long, and Camille wondered if, between his sickly color and build, the ambassador were suffering some grave illness. That would, she thought, explain why he so seldom left his house.
The ambassador’s costume was that of an Egyptian priest, and he bowed upon seeing Camille’s matching dress.
“Lady Wilmarth,” he rumbled, in a low and carrying voice. “Well met. As we are a pair, you must permit me a dance this evening.”
“That would be lovely,” she said, flattered and pleased by the reclusive man’s manners. The ambassador turned his gaze on Chambres.
“I have made all the arrangements for tonight,” he said. Chambres bowed, and then another couple approached and they took their leave.
“What’s happening tonight?” Camille asked. Chambres laid a long finger over his lips.
“It’s a surprise,” he said. “Ah, there is the regent, dressed as a sultan. Shall we pay our respects?”
The evening passed quickly, and after the musicians shifted to more recognizable tunes, Camille enjoyed the dancing. She daringly danced twice with Lord Chambres and of course gave one dance to Lord Mgl’nath, whose gait she found stiff and jerky. She was also asked for a turn about the floor with two dukes, an earl, and a general. Her mother would be pleased — she only had one Season left, after all. It was important she secure a good marriage as soon as possible.
Although … Camille drifted to the balcony and gazed outside. For some reason, she couldn’t shake the memory of Lord Douglas Marsh’s rude and entirely unwanted kiss.
Was Lord Marsh wearing a mask, as well? The mask of a dandy, hiding a far rougher and more passionate nature? He wasn’t handsome, of course. Not at all like Lord Chambres. But he’d always been entertaining company, until tonight. Tonight he’d been … more intriguing.
“My lady.” Lord Chambres stepped out next to her and she started, feeling a touch of guilt. A proper lady did not fall silent in the midst of a ball. “There you are. Lord Mgl’nath has prepared a special surprise for us all in the park.”
“These must be the arrangements you were speaking of earlier,” she said, resting a hand on his arm and smiling up at him. “At last, the mystery is to be revealed.”
“I trust you will find it diverting,” the ambassador said.
The guests, perhaps thirty or so, made their way in crowded carriages from Lord Mgl’nath’s estate through Grosvenor Gate to Hyde Park. A midnight picnic in costume, they all agreed, was a unique idea, and the group’s spirits were high as they rattled down the paths to the Serpentine, shouting and calling to each other from carriage to carriage. They arrived at the boat house to find the ambassador’s servants waiting for them with a line of pleasure boats. Mgl’nath insisted everyone don their masks again for the watery jaunt.
“Dashed original, Migs,” the Prince Regent declared, heaving his considerable bulk into the nearest boat. In threes and fours the guests transferred themselves from carriage to watercraft. Camille blushed to find herself included in the boat with Lord Mgl’nath and Lord Chambres, as well as a fourth party who wore a mountebank’s tattered robe and hood. Their boat and the prince’s were the lead craft, but gradually all the guests were afloat, fiery torches imbuing the assembly with a magical air as their boatmen gently paddled them away from shore.
When all of the boats met in the center of the narrow lake, Lord Mgl’nath arose, a process that set their craft rocking back and forth. Camille clutched Lord Chambres’ arm. The ambassador laid a hand over hers. He’d pulled on his yellow gloves again and drawn his yellow silk mask over his face. He barely looked human anymore.
“Don’t move,” he murmured, his voice muffled by the mask. Then he stood, too, at the stern.
Camille pulled her wrap around her shoulders, feeling dwarfed by the two tall men looming over her on each side.
“In Carcosa,” Ambassador Mgl’nath proclaimed, “it is a tradition on this night for the royal family to take a boat into the Lake of Hali. Since our esteemed friend and colleague Lord Chambres finds himself far from home, I have prepared this outing in his honor.”
Everyone fell silent, finding the ambassador’s words too serious for an occasion that should have been purely festive. Lord Chambres bowed again, his expression hidden by the yellow mask. Then both men raised their voices in song.
Chills ran up Camille’s spine as the two foreign ambassadors sang alien words across the dark lake lit only by torchlight. She glanced at the other partygoers who surrounded them in their bobbing boats and saw that they seemed as surprised as she.
As the two men sang, they reached down and lifted the hooded mountebank who was the fourth guest in the boat. The mountebank’s robe hung from his shoulders to his feet in tattered scallops, and when they pushed back his hood, his face gleamed like pale bone in the flickering torchlight.
Women screamed and men swore as they recognized their aged monarch’s strong nose and receding chin.
King George looked across the water and began shouting, as well, thrashing back and forth. The boat heaved and Camille grabbed the sides, staring up at the ranting madman.
“It’s a mask!” she cried, more from hope than conviction. “It’s just a mask of the king’s face! My lords, this jest is in dreadful taste!”
“Hail the King in Yellow!” Lord Chambres cried, spreading his arms. “Behold the Pallid Mask!”
“Unmask him!” Camille cried, struggling as she, too, rose to her feet. Shrieks rose behind her as panicked guests fell into the water, and oaths arose as men reached for their weapons and found that their costumes included none. She grabbed the mountebank and fumbled at his face, searching for an edge of plaster or fabric; a ribbon or pin.
Lord Mgl’nath grabbed her wrist.
“He wears no mask,” the ambassador hissed. “It is your mad king who stands here — yours and your neighbor Carcosa’s!”
“No mask?” she gasped, horrified. “No mask!”
“Iä, Hastur!” Chambres cried, arms out. “Claim your monarch!”
Something huge plunged from the sky, darkening the stars with its abhorrent silhouette. Tentacles spread, dangling down like living night, to caress the ranting king’s face and shoulders and coil around his arms and waist. Great black wings flapped overhead, raising a demonic wind around them.
“Tekeli-li,” it piped. “Tekeli-li!”
Camille screamed and the boat jolted to one side. To her profound amazement, Douglas Marsh heaved himself over the gunwale, grabbed a handful of Lord Chambres’ yellow robe, and hauled him over the side and into the lake.
Chambres shrieked like a Bedlamite as he hit the water. Lord Mgl’nath swore and pulled a long sacrificial knife from his belt, swinging it toward the disheveled and drenched dandy.
“NO!” Camille grabbed the ambassador’s arm, slowing him in time for Marsh to roll the rest of the way into the rocking craft. Marsh grabbed the oar from the boatman and thrust it forward, catching the tall ambassador in a universally tender spot. The knife fell from Mgl’nath’s limp fingers.
Camille ducked and grabbed the weapon as Marsh swung the oar over her bent head and sent Mgl’nath tumbling into the water, as well. The ambassador’s boatman leaped onto the dandy’s back, trying to strangle him.
“Douglas, behind you!” Camille shrieked. Lord Chambres, snarling, grabbed the side of the boat and closed a dripping, yellow-gloved hand around Marsh’s leg. Horrified, Camille lunged forward and stabbed. The knife struck flesh and she heard the perfidious ambassador yelp with pain as he withdrew, plunging back into the water.
Marsh flashed her a grateful smile, then twisted. The boatman wailed as his arm broke. The dandy hurled him out into the water, too.
Camille, panting, pointed at King George, who was still being enveloped in the dark embrace of the flapping thing above him.
“I say, that won’t do,” Douglas muttered. He stood, unaffected by the wild tossing of the boat that was making Camille feel decidedly seasick, and laid his hands on the monster’s thick protoplasmic limbs. To Camille’s disgust, the limbs shifted and obscene eyeballs opened in their flesh, staring up at him. Marsh spoke to the creature in the Elder tongue, and although she had no idea what he was saying, it worked.
The horrid, batwinged bulk withdrew its tentacles, leaving a slick, pale gloss of slime on the now rather more than merely mad monarch. King George dropped back onto his boat bench with a thud, his mouth moving as he stared up at his attacker. His shirt had been torn off, and a curious, half-formed glyph stood out on his chest like a burn.
With a thunderous clatter of beating wings, the monster rose higher.
“Tekeli-li?”
Marsh pointed to the water, where Chambres and Mgl’nath were struggling to climb up over each other to get into the boat. The creature stretched and altered its form as it dived.
Water splashed over them like a small tidal wave. Camille shrieked.
“Oh, I am sorry,” Marsh cried, pulling out a scented handkerchief and dabbing Camille’s cheeks and hands.
“My lord….”
“You called me Douglas just a moment ago,” he said, hopefully. Behind them, the water roiled and Chambres gave a chilling cry that broke off mid-note. Marsh turned to look.
“The rest of you ought to get out of the water,” he advised the ambassador’s splashing guests. “That’s a shoggoth, and they have a most deuced insatiable appetite once their digestive juices start flowing.”
The resulting rush to climb back into the boats nearly drowned the entirety of London’s remaining social elite.
“Oh….” Camille gazed at her friend’s familiar bulbous eyes and wide mouth and realized that she owed him her sanity — and perhaps her life. “You’ve saved us all.”
Marsh’s smile was strained as he looked down at his ruined shirt and pantaloons. “It was my pleasure.”
“Oh, Douglas!” Camille threw her arms around him and narrowly avoided slicing off his ear with her knife. “I’m sure the Prince Regent will buy you a dozen pairs of new pantaloons.”
“Well, I don’t know that he’ll be as grateful as that,” he demurred. “Might have preferred I’d dropped ‘Farmer George’ into the lake, too, so he’d be king.”
A growled curse across the water confirmed his guess, and Camille sighed. It appeared only she appreciated her friend’s act of selfless bravery.
“But it don’t matter,” Marsh continued, magnanimously, as he gazed into her eyes. “I’ll regret nothing at all, if you’ll only consent to marry me.”
Flustered, she blushed.
“Douglas….”
“I have a title, and land both above and below the sea, and a family line that dates back to before humans lost their gills,” he pressed. “Won’t you make me a happy man, at least for the next thirty years?”
“What happens after that?”
“I turn into a Deep One, and you have the run of the house.”
“Oh, Douglas!”
Behind their boat, the satiated shoggoth shot up from the water and hurled itself back into the night sky. Its haunting song of tekeli-li, tekeli-li faded into the darkness as Douglas and Camille embraced, murmuring their endearments beneath the ancient, brooding stars.