Grimoires of london 2, p.1
Grimoires of London 2, page 1
part #2 of Grimoires of London Series
Grimoires of London 2
DB King
Copyright © 2023 by DB King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v001
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Contents
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Contents
Series by DB King
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
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Support DB King on Patreon!
Series by DB King
Apocalypse Knights
Crafter’s Fate
Death’s Chosen
Dragon Magus
Dragon Rider Chronicles
Dungeon of Evolution
Elemental Mastery
Fatehaven Farm
Grimoires of London
Kensei
Mage’s Path
Night Guild
Ranger’s Magic
Shinobi Rising
Spellweaver Codex: Elder Mage Chronicles
Summoner’s Shadow
The Last Magus
The Lost Mages
War Wizard
World End
Prologue
The two old men ambled north along the Cholmondeley Walk, sensible black leather shoes scraping through the first of the autumn leaves. They walked side by side, their arms swinging, with the pococurante, oblivious, pavement-hogging walk that has made strolling nonagenarians the bane of pavements the world over.
The two old companions had enjoyed what many might have considered a boozy lunch at the White Swan. However, having been in the habit of adding whisky to their morning teas instead of milk for the past half-century or so, neither man’s wits were any more clouded than they usually were—which, in the pair of ninety-year-old widowers, was not saying all that much.
“… So, I walked Beryl back to the car and handed her the leash,” the one with so much hair protruding from his lugholes that it looked like he had toilet brush stuffed into each ear was saying. “And I was thinking that if only I hadn’t forgotten we were walking along the edge of the Beachy Head cliff and thrown the damn ball quite so hard, it would have been a faultless first tryst…”
As they strolled along the Cholmondeley Walk, on the Richmond side of London’s most famous waterway, the two pensioners couldn’t help but feel content with the world. The sun shone down on them, warming their backs, and a gentle breeze carried the languid sounds of the river up to their ears. Their bellies were full of hearty pub fare and a half-dozen pints of good English ale apiece, and they felt the milk of human kindness coursing through their veins. They laughed and chatted as they walked, enjoying the simple pleasures of life.
“I was meanin’ to ask you, Alf,” the man without the extraordinary ear hair, but with a nose that looked like almost exactly like a beetroot, said, “how was that slice of shepherd’s pie you had at lunch?”
“Meaning to ask me, was you, Reginald? After you’d finished ogling that waitress, you mean?”
“I ain’t never ogled nothin’ in my life, Alfie Coates,” Reg retorted haughtily.
Alf waved a hand. “Bah. How else do you explain having to pick your teeth up off the carpet after she walked away from dropping our meals off? A jaw’s got to be fairly dislocated for these new-fangled dentures to slide out of your mouth. Don’t I know it.”
“I bet you do know it, you old lech. Being married to Beryl—”
“Speak not the old hag’s name lest she rise from the grave to bloody nag me to death,” Alf said, pulling out his pipe.
Reg snorted with mirth, something unidentifiable flying from one bristly nostril. “Fair enough. Still, that lass was young enough to be your granddaughter, for crying out loud.”
“Young enough to be your great-granddaughter, then,” Alf said, chewing contentedly on his pipe stem. “Anyways, the pie was grand, just grand. Good beef. Here, you know what they call a cow with no legs, don’t you, Alf?”
“What’s that?”
“Ground beef,” Alf said, peering at his old friend out of the corner of one rheumy eye.
The fact that he was laughing at Alfie’s jokes was an indicator to Reg of just how replete he was feeling—and just how much beer he must have consumed. Reg usually found Alfie about as funny as suffering a violent bout of gastroenteritis on a packed tube train—something that Reg had actually experienced…twice.
The scenery around them was breathtaking. Lush green trees towered above them, their leaves rustling gently in the breeze. Colorful flowers dotted the edges of the path, and the occasional butterfly fluttered by, adding a touch of whimsy to the scene.
“With that hearin’ o’ yours I don’t suppose you heard that bloke who came into the pub just before we left and ordered a drink, did you, Reg?” Alfie asked as they shuffled serenely along.
“What bloke was that, then?” Reg asked.
“The bloke wearing the what-do-you-call-it, you old fart,” Alfie said vaguely. “The bloke the bartender noticed something was up with and asked to tell him his troubles.”
“Hold on…” Reg said suspiciously.
“‘Oh, it’s nothing, I’ve just been under a lot of pressure at work lately,’ the bloke said to the landlord, downing three inches of his pint in less time than it took me to say it. ‘What do you do?’ the bartender asked the bloke. ‘I’m a deep-sea diver,’ the bloke says…”
Reg chuckled under his breath and patted his old friend’s arm. “Blimey, those were a couple of stinkers, Alf,” he said. “Don’t give up the day job, eh?”
“Day job? I haven’t had one of those bloody things for twenty-five years,” Alfie said.
The ancient pair passed by a group of children playing in the grass, their laughter and shouts filling the air. Reg found that he couldn’t help but smile at the joy and energy of youth on display. This made a marked difference to how he usually felt where shrieking children were concerned: e.g. having to thank his body that he was no longer capable of picking the noisy little buggers up and punting them into the nearest body of water or patch of stinging nettles.
Farther along, the old-timers came across a couple taking a leisurely walk, hand in hand. Reg and Alf shared a knowing nod and a wink, remembering their own younger days.
“Beryl ever let you walk hand in hand with her in public before you were married, Alf?” Reg asked as they ambled towards Richmond Lock and Weir.
“Before we were married?” Alfie said. “You’re havin’ a laugh, aren’t you? God, no. No, she was a real stickler for tradition was our Beryl. If I’d have tried a move like that on her, she’d have had me hoisted up by ankles and dangling like a ruddy fruit bat while she kneed me in the old boat race a few times. She was a hard woman was our Beryl.”
“Aye. That she was,” Reg agreed. “A hard woman.”
“Hard as an anvil.”
“She had a lot in common with an anvil, now I come to think of it,” Reg said blithely.
As they ambled north, the old codgers took in the beauty around them, feeling grateful for the simple pleasures that life still had to offer. Those pleasures had invariably grown fewer over the passing years for the two men whose combined age would have turned the clocks back to the year that Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol.
Apart from their aching joints, dicky bladders, and bursts of flatulence that seemed quite out of their control and took them by surprise as much as passing pedestrians, they felt at peace with the world. It was enough, knowing that they had each other and the beauty of nature to keep them company on that splendid autumn day.
Just down from the Richmond Lock and Weir, they stopped by the waterside to admire the view and watch the boats passing.
“Well, this is a mighty fine thing, is it not, Reginald?” Alfie said, his pipe moving from left to right, then from right to left. “A cracking meal, some cracking beer, a cracking walk, and some not-quite-detestable company.”
“Aye, ’tis, ’tis indeed,” Reg said. He had slipped into his usual mode of listening, so far as Alfie went: only paying attention to about one word in five.
“Rummer than usual, you mean?” Alfie said.
“Rummer than usual. And that’s sayin’ something these days. You know,” Reg said, allowing himself, as he so often did (and had been doing for the past fifteen or so years) to get sidetracked, “I saw on breakfast tele the other day some young person getting interviewed—I forget about what, precisely—and they were saying how they didn’t want to be called ‘he’ or ‘she’, they wanted to be called ‘they’.”
Alfie continued to look out over the water, but Reg could see his gaze had become slightly more fixed as he listened.
“Go on,” Alfie said, sounding intrigued.
“Look, don’t get me wrong, Alf,” Reginald said, allowing the beer to take more of a hold on the conversation than he might have liked, “young folk can be and do whatever they want to be or do, so long as they don’t make any noise past eight-thirty. You know that’s been my policy for the past quarter of a century.”
Alfie nodded. “A sound policy, Reg. Very sound.”
“But this gender-neutral pronoun business is takin’ the mick, isn’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, what if you were to invite a chum over for a meal and he was to ask if he could bring a pal, right? And you told him that of course he could bring him, and then he turned around and said, ‘No, no, no, no, not ‘him’. They. And you, being a genial bloke, told him to knock himself out and bring ’em along.”
Alfie laughed softly.
“What’s so funny?” Reg asked.
“Nothing, nothing. Just imagining you as a genial host is all,” Alfie said.
“Anyway, so you go out and buy a load of food for this dinner,” Reg continued. “Your pal turns up at your door, but he’s only got one other person with him. And you, being a bit miffed, ask him, ‘where are they?’ And he says to you, ‘They’re here.’”
“World’s gone mad,” Alfie agreed absently.
“Your tellin’ me,” Reg said. “It’s enough to spin your head.”
“World’s gone mad in more ways than the young ‘uns coming up with fresh ways to get offended,” Alfie said. “Look at the crime.”
Reg made a disgusted noise in his throat as he watched a twenty-foot boat cruise through the open lock.
“Crime and unrest is up all over the big smoke, isn’t it?” Alfie continued. “Ever since that chicken joint got blown up in Battersea, I feel like every day there’s something in the papers about some poor sap getting offed or some building being gutted by fire, mysterious fireworks popping off, and zoo animals escaping.”
“I miss the good old days,” Reg said.
“What ones?” Alf asked wistfully.
“When there was a better class of criminal,” Reg explained. “When a gangster might kick your teeth in if you gave him provocation but wouldn’t shy from walking your old mum across the street.”
“They might’ve shied away from walking your old mum across the street, Reg,” Alfie pointed out. “She had a voice that could shatter a pint glass from ten paces that woman.”
Reg opened his mouth to argue out of habit but then stopped to consider this. He closed his almost totally toothless maw. His old mum had once given him such a hiding that his backside couldn’t have been in worse shape had he disguised it as a ham, displayed it in a butcher's shop, and then turned a pack of pitbulls loose.
“Aye,” he said after a moment, “London would seem to be going to the dogs somewhat.”
Reg and Alfie continued to stare out over the peaceful river scene.
After a moment, Alfie cleared his throat and said casually, “Reg?”
“Mm?” Reg said.
“You see those people across the river there?”
“Aye. Looks like they’re moving into that swanky three-story place with the fancy roof and the tall windows, don’t it?” Reg observed.
He had been watching the group of people walking from the bizarre moving van, which looked to Reg like nothing less than one of the old circus carts he’d see being pulled around the place by Shire horses when he was a lad, to the huge old house without actually seeing them.
He pushed his enormous glasses up his nose and squinted. There was an old geezer, a couple of young lads, and a tiny woman that Reg would have called a midget—only he wasn’t sure if you were allowed to call ’em that anymore.
“Odd bunch to be moving into a place like that,” Reg commented. “The old bloke looks like he’s wearing one of them Japanese dresses.”
World culture did not figure hugely in Reg and Alfie’s lives. The closest they came to dipping their toe into the traditions of other races and places was their fortnightly catch up at the Naan-Sense Curry House in Brick Lane.
“That’s odd, I grant you,” Alfie said, one gnarled hand held up to shield his pale blue eyes from the sun sparkling on the water, “but not half as odd as that roof statue thing.”
Reg adjusted his gaze and looked at the roof of the mansion across the Thames. “What roof statue thing?”
“The one that looks like one of them ones you’d see on the big churches in Europe. The one flapping around, waving its arms, and looking like it’s bossing everyone around,” Alfie said.
Reg looked down. A small grey figure was, indeed, flapping around like a statue come to life. It was pointing from the strange moving van to the mansion as if giving orders while the others staggered under boxes of stuff.
He was about to point out to Alf that they couldn’t be seeing what they were, in fact, seeing because statues, even foreign ones, didn’t make a habit of flying about.
Then he stopped and instead said, “Alfie, the flying statue thing is queer, I grant you, but do you see that book flying about after that young man over there as well?”
“Sure do, Reg,” Alfie replied, his tone indicating that he was completely unruffled by this phenomenon. “Why’s that?”
“Just making sure I wasn’t imagining it, that’s all,” Reg said. “You know what too much of that Parson’s Old Remarkable does to me.”
Alf grunted. “Could be that AI,” he hazarded.
“What’s that then?”
Alf hesitated. “Some kind of spaceship, I think. Or some money that ain’t really money. Here, does that little one and that chap in the dress remind you of anyone? We seen ’em before?”
Reg searched his memory. It didn’t take long.
“Don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sure I’d remember clapping eyes on a bunch such as this. Don’t often see stone fellas flying about now, do you?”
To Reg’s surprise, Alfie raised his hand and waved across the slow-moving river.
“What’re you doing?” Reg asked.
“Just playing all the angles, Reg,” Alfie said out of the corner of his mouth that wasn’t already occupied with his pipe.
“What are you on about, you daft old sod?”
“Well, when the likes of that sort of motley collection of wotsits start moving into areas as select as this one, you know that things are going to get interesting pretty soon,” Alfie said. “If the city’s going to the dogs now, won’t be long ’til it’s going to the… I dunno. Wolves, maybe?”
“Badgers?” Reg tried. “Nasty buggers, badgers are.”
“Well, it ain’t a good sign,” Alfie said.
Reg raised his own hand and started to wave towards the other bank, too. “‘Specially when one of the buggers looks to be a flying book.”
“Not to mention a foreign statue,” Alfie added.
The two old men continued to wave vaguely for a moment or two.
“What do you reckon their story is, Alf?” Reg asked. He found he had adopted the out of the corner of his mouth mode of speech like his friend.
“Not the foggiest, Reg, not the foggiest,” Alf mumbled back, still waving. “But I’ll tell you this, it’s all well and good to have your ducks in a row, but it’s much better to have a whole flock of the things ready to take flight at a moment’s notice.”
Reg considered this. Thanks to the pints of Parson’s Old Remarkable that were still sloshing around inside him, it took him a little while longer to interpret his companion’s words than it might have done ordinarily.
