The bug-lit path zigzagged through ancient trees and ended in the nook of a cliff whose base was completely overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. A skeleton emerged from the rock face. Its mouth was open. Swirling rams’ horns erupted from its temples. It was a satyr. A crooked goat’s knee and part of a hoof was also visible. He’d been cast into the rock, it seemed. Old wooden buildings were scattered about. They leaned in tatters. Trees erupted from empty doors and windows. Vines snaked across half-fallen shingles. Everything had been absorbed by the forest. I recognized the cracked carvings in the eaves: woodfolk dwellings. Centuries old.
Railway tracks curved into the nook from the forest and passed by a covered platform whose overly ostentatious roof had enough cresting and corner ornamentation for a structure three times its size. From front to back it was spindle-shaped, tapering to a point at both ends. It was more or less intact, save for the single large hole in the roof and in the floor directly underneath, as if a heavy cannon shot had fallen from the sky and crashed through both. From the hole in the floor erupted another large oak. I walked past a stack of rotted railroad ties, crumbling like old bark, and up to the platform, which was scattered in detritus from the oak—dead leaves and twigs and acorn caps. From the platform, I could see where a smaller tree, whose trunk grew many branchlike sections, had grown up in the middle of the tracks, which were just barely visible in the weeds. I wondered how the train could proceed to the tunnel carved into the cliff at the back. Vines and creepers hung down in front of it like a green curtain.
Suddenly, a single rail car appeared from the forest, clacking mightily. It was nearly as ostentatiously ornamented as the platform roof and in a matching pattern. Although it was large enough to carry freight, the car had only a half-height wall around the front and back, attached by posts to a curved roof, like a trolley car without windows or doors. I suspect it was meant to shuttle men and materials from their camp to a dam or mine some distance away. It pulled up and shuddered to a stop. The engine shuddered underneath, between the wheels. Steam hissed as a red-capped gnome, with goggles and a beard that hung over his child-sized overalls, sat on the engineer’s stool in a little compartment at the front of the car, separated from the passenger benches by nothing more than a low gate. In the train’s midline, nearer to the front, the top of a large cog poked through a long rectangular groove in the floor. I knew the type. It was meant to connect with a notched third rail in the middle of the tracks and so propel the train up grades too steep for standard locomotion. A second gnome, blue-capped and beardless and wearing an expertly tailored suit with vest and no coat, stood at the entry way.
“WyyyrdwisherrR!” he called, accenting the Y and extending the final R with flourish. “Wyrdwisher Line!”
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Yes, my lady.”
“Where is this train going?”
“This is the Wyrdwisher Line. And this”—he raised his hand to the train—”is The Wyrdwisher Star. Not the prettiest caboose in the fleet, but always the most reliable.” He slapped a pole. “Our engineer today is Mowinckel.”
The gnome at the front raised his floppy conical hat, which revealed a bald top. So perfectly did the line of his cap fit his baldness that I wondered if that was the reason he wore it.
“My name is Peri,” the fellow in front of me explained. “Your conductor. Ticket, please.”
“I’m afraid I have no ticket.”
“Oh . . .” Peri looked down, disappointed.
The little gnome glanced surreptitiously at the shiny red apple in my hands. I saw it.
“I have this apple,” I said.
Peri’s dim face brightened immediately. “Well, why didn’t you say so? We could trade that for a ticket.” He lowered his voice. “I forgot my lunch.”
“You must be hungry,” I said, handing it to him.
He doffed his cap in thanks. Resting on his bare dome was a bruised and shriveled apple that looked to have been resting there undisturbed for many weeks.
“Mr. Peri . . .” I said. “By any chance, was the lunch you lost also an apple?”
He gasped. “It was.” He replaced his cap, oblivious. “How did you know?”
“Just a guess.”
“Where would you like to go today, my lady?”
“Well, this may seem an unusual question, but where do I usually go?”
“Hmmm.” He stroked his beard. “Is it to see the young man with no hair?”
“Can you really take me to him?”
“Let’s see!” Mowinckel said excitedly.
He pulled some knobs on the contraption before him and pushed some others and I heard the clatter of the destination placard at the front of the train as it spun through many signs, eventually settling on one. The dynamo under the carriage whirred to life and the car jerked forward, knocking a few acorns loose from the oak in the platform. We were heading right toward the branched tree growing in the tracks. I imagined the car striking it and falling to its side, but it swerved from its collision course at the last second, and I realized the tree had not grown in the tracks but merely between two sets, whose adjacent rails I had mistakenly assumed belonged together. The metal car accelerated through the green curtain and disappeared into the tunnel.
Everything was dark as we mounted an incline. I heard the staccato of the gear as it turned over the notched third rail. When the car broke through the mortared stone arch at the far end of the tunnel, I gasped. We were traversing a block stone trellis that stretched over a deep, jagged gorge. It looked as if the mountain itself had been smote by God’s hammer and split. And yet, the trellis was no wider than the car, and there was no railing. Peering over the side, I saw a very deep, very unnatural hole. It was vaguely conical—that is, it tapered unevenly as it descended into darkness. It had indeed been a quarry. There was something peculiar about the rock of that mountain, which stone-age peoples believed hid their god, and it had been used by the Others, and then by The Masters to construct their enchanted fortress. But now it was damaged. It seemed almost as if a massive screw had turned itself between the cliffs, leaving a great deal of crumbled debris, including boulders the size of houses.
The giant cog turned and propelled the car up the incline at a somewhat worrying speed. After passing the trellis, the rails continued over a flat ledge carved into the side of the cliff. The car banked to the right and we crossed another deep gorge. Here, the trellis was made of wood. The planks were green with moss, and as we crossed at speed, I looked down and saw bits of them break loose and fall towards distant cascading water. We continued apace through a narrow man-made canyon. The tracks ahead descended from the smooth-sloped canyon to the shore of a lake and right into its depths. I barely had time to draw breath before we picked up speed and plunged in with a splash. But before my mind had time to examine the sensation of breathing without air, we rose out of the water into another tunnel. Each time we exited, the landscape seemed to shift, as if they were junctures in a network. When we emerged from the last, we were riding streetcar rails in a European city. Wires stretched overhead. Pedestrians walked to and fro on the sidewalks without taking any notice of us. We passed a corner bakery with a line of customers out the door and banked to the left, nearly striking a yellow sedan, which never slowed. We traveled along a cobbled road with tracks on both sides, although it seemed to me, they were no longer in use.
Mowinckel pulled a knob and we stopped so hard I was nearly thrown from my seat.
“Sorry,” he said, flipping levers and turning knobs.
The train car seemed to settle as I felt my clothes, which were dry. There was no platform. We had stopped on the street. But three metal stairs appeared from under the carriage with a pop.
“First stop, the man with no hair!” Peri yelled right in front of me.
“Thank you,” I said softly. “You’ve been most kind.”
“Will you be needing the train again, my lady?”
I hadn’t realized it was an option. “And if I did?”
“Just show us your ticket.”
“Ticket?”
The little gnome reached into his child-sized vest and produced a paper ticket inlaid with a gold foil design. He punched it and handed it to me. I thanked him and stepped from the train.
“All aboard!” Peri called.
A businessman with his face in the newspaper stepped up without looking.
“Excuse me,” I called, but the train took off, and I wondered where he would be whisked to and who would believe him when he returned.
A second-floor window shattered and sent shards to the street. Shouts of anger followed it. I heard what sounded like someone tumbling down the stairs. Something else shattered, as if thrown against a wall, followed quickly by something heavier, which hit the floor with a thud, and the young man with no hair burst from the door carrying a green vial on a strap. I caught a myriad of scents then, floral and earthy. It was a perfumerie, a rather expensive one by the looks of it. Crystal drops dangled under lace curtains in the window. Tiny labeled bottles, each filled with a few ounces of liquid lust, sat on glass cake trays of varying height.
The young man ran into me, knocking me down. My butt hit the cobbles.
“What took you so long?” he exclaimed. “I summoned you three days ago!” He grabbed my arm and pulled me up. “We must go back!”
He pulled a cork from a greenish vial stuck it under my nose.
“Smell this.”
I retched almost immediately. The scent wasn’t unpleasant—like heavy spice and sandalwood—but it was so potent that my eyes watered and my stomach instantly turned.
“What is that?” I asked between coughs.
“Oil of spikenard. Also called muskroot. It grows in the Himalayas. Its essence was prized by the Egyptians and Hebrews as a vital ingredient of holy incense.”
A fat man hobbled down the steps of the perfumerie, cursing and shaking a cane. He was so round and stuffed so tightly into his suit that he looked like a winter berry.
“You stole it?” I asked.
The corked vial had a long leather strap, which he draped over my head. The glass was teardrop-shaped and tinted a lovely shade of chartreuse. Imprinted on it were Cyrillic letters.
“Come.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me away.
I looked back at the irate man as my feet shuffled down the cobblestones. Once we were safely out of sight, he spun suddenly.
“You must smell again.”
He uncorked the vial and shoved it under my nose and my eyes burned. I coughed, which prevented me from objecting.
“Where are your supplies?” he demanded, as if just noticing I was lightly encumbered.
I looked down as if I had left a nonexistent bag on the train.
He examined me skeptically. “Did you at least bring the compass?”
“Yes, of course,” I said, nonplussed. Until that moment, as far as I knew, I was the only living person who knew of its existence. I held it up, and he snatched from my hand in a way that suggested he was not inclined to give it back.
“Thankfully,” Etude said proudly, “I have enough food and water for us both.” He looked up at the sky. “And today is fair weather. What you are wearing will suffice.”
Then he started off again.
I remember thinking he was such a funny young man, and that I liked him instantly. Not a single hair grew on his head. It wasn’t that he shaved it. It was completely bare. And his skin was an unusual color. Definitely not European. And yet, there was a French tinge to his accent.
“What is this for?” I asked, lifting the cord around my neck.
“To smell,” he said. “The senses are a direct path to memory. We have now exposed you to a novel scent. Very powerful. And very, very unique. Once more, please.” He waved back to me.
Having no choice but to keep up the ruse, I uncorked the chartreuse vial and smelled again. After clearing my throat, I rubbed the water from my eye and ran my thumb over the bumps of the Cyrillic letters on its surface. It said SMELL ME in my native Russian.
“And what am I to remember by this scent?”
“That you are,” he said.
As I was wiping my eyes, he pulled off his gloves and held out both his hands, palms down, in a style of greeting not in much use anymore. I let the vial fall and took them.
“Take these,” he said with a bare grip.
As his arms moved back to his sides, I glanced at my palms. They were covered in marks. My fingers as well. Strange symbols of a type I didn’t recognize. They seemed to be under my skin, like tattoos. I rubbed my hands together instinctively.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “They will return in a few days’ time. But until then, they will protect you.”
“Protect me?” From what? I almost asked.
After that, my memory is as blank as all of our earlier meetings. Bits of our journey can be pieced together from later conversations and events. I know we rode in the Carpathians. I know we entered a dark and silent wood. I know a braided black-and-orange cord had been tied around my waist. But I have no idea how long I wandered, trailing it behind me. I have no memory of climbing the long ridge over a narrow U-shaped gorge. What I do remember—clearly—is standing confused near the top of the crevasse at the very moment young Etude came up behind me, following the cord as a lead. He touched my shoulder as I stared in confusion at his marks on my palms, having totally forgotten what they were and how they’d got there. Seeing the vial of muskroot oil that hung from my neck, I followed the directions. I coughed and my nose and eyes watered. And pieces of myself trickled back like falling coins.
The wood encompassed the crevasse as far as we could see. It was different than any forest I had encountered before or since. The tall trees had thin, whitish trunks mostly bare of branches until the very top, where they sprouted an irregular umbrella of leaves. They towered over the pines below and swayed gently in the wind. Spindle-shaped leaves turned in the sun and I listened to their lonely rustle. There were no bird calls in that place. No buzzing insects. Nothing stirred. It was quite bright. Shafts of light danced across a floor of sienna and crimson. But it was as still as the grave. The silence between the branches almost beckoned you to sleep forever.
“Come,” he said. “The cemetery is hidden. Just there.” He pointed to the U-bend in the tree-lined chasm below.
There isn’t a common name for the magical community—other than that cumbersome phrase. Not that there hadn’t been attempts. Simply, no one could agree. But whatever you call it, it is a tower on a hill, a bastion, a keep . . . and a prison. It gets its share of tourists, but those who stay tend to make it a lifestyle rather than a hobby. It permeates their identity. The closest thing to it, I suppose, is the taking of holy vows. Once entered, one has difficulty approaching life in any other way except through the keyhole of Solomon, as it were, which is why there is so little mixing. In my long life, only Abraham Dunvluddich, my cellmate in Everthorn, attempted any serious syncretism, but that was simply his megalomania. Everyone else trucked with their school: the Illusionists in Vegas, juggling phosphorus and smoke; the Hermeticists in Rome, mumbling over stars; the Alchemists in Moscow, leaking lead and fire; the Conjurers in Sao Paolo, drawing circles within circles; the Necromancers in Tibet, turning holes in the earth; and the Sorcerers in Hong Kong, who speak only in secrets.
But it wasn’t always so, not until the priests and astrologers erected towers, and having ascended them, turned round to look down on the world of men, now beneath them. The shamans, who served mankind before the wizards, took the world as it was. They lived alongside the people rather than atop ziggurats, and their trade was practical. They were expected to know both the white and black arts and to employ whichever was necessary to cure the sick or protect the village. A shaman had no school, but did whatever worked, chasing demons or summoning them close, even where that put their own lives at risk. But then, he who serves the rich desires money, whereas he who serves the community desires wealth.
I say this only to qualify my reaction to young Etude. He was so unlike any of the grand old men I’d known, which is why it was so easy for everyone to mistake him for a charlatan. Here was a young man who, regardless of his age, had a repertoire of skills that would’ve put any of the High Arcane to shame. And yet, he employed no attendants to prepare his mixtures, as I had done for Wilm. He had no disciples or cult of hangers-on nor even a cadre of benefactors seeking to profit from his talent, as had Henry Hunter. Like any good shaman, Etude took the world as it was and, using his own hands, employed whatever worked, which meant not only the magical arts but the sciences as well. They were for him one and the same: the world in truth without division or affectation. And that was how he had done the impossible.
As we passed the boulders, the slope lessened and we stepped into a crack in the mountain, a tiny canyon, at most two meters high, with undulating walls pocked in holes from which shrubs and saplings grew. A narrow patch of flat earth stretched between the rock faces, covered in leaves. Bushes and shrubs lined the top of the short ridge. Beyond and around were the trees, whose parasols of leaves hid the canyon even from the air. Ancient stone markers, and several metal ones, had been hammered into the rocky overhang of the miniature canyon, half hidden by bramble and dead leaves. I parted them and read faint, rain-weathered letters. It was Greek, which I had been taught to read as a girl. Sealed in a nook under the stone plate was something called The Candle of Athanasius, interred in the year 6783 on the Byzantine calendar.
“It will be fake,” Etude said.
He had the compass in his hand and was turning about, apparently looking for whatever it liked least.
“You did it . . .” I breathed.
“Of course!” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Although I admit, it took longer than I promised.”
I touched the rounded canyon wall, for I then knew where we were.
Sown one and a half thousand years earlier by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, in what was then the frontier of the civilized world, the Cemetery of the Secret Canon was made to hide weapons and artifacts confiscated from the marauding Turks. In their destructive centuries-long march westward from their ancestral homeland in central Asia, the Sultan’s armies had amassed an arsenal of the occult, which elicited from the Byzantine Christians much the same reaction modern peoples have to chemical or biological weapons. In the wake of the plague that bears his name, the Emperor ordered that all such artifacts should be destroyed. But it would not be so easy. Justinian and his generals soon discovered that many of the objects were mere vessels and that smashing them would release the evil they contained. Others simply couldn’t be destroyed, for no one knew how. And so a secret place was chosen at the barbarian fringe of the empire, a mountainous crevasse carved long ago by a river that no longer ran. It was consecrated and ceremonial graves were dug, and around them, the old forest was cut and a new one was planted, grown from seeds that had been dipped in the river Styx. And it became a place of forgetting, a secret place where secrets were buried—anything the world wanted to forget had ever existed—and whosoever wandered in soon wandered blissfully out again, unaware of why they had come.
One path was kept, its entrance and meanderings a carefully guarded secret, known in any time only to the seven maestri themselves—and no others. They used it to inter the fraught and the deadly such that what was feared would be forgotten, and what was lost would stay lost. It was a place thick with years, as if time congealed around it. Standing inside, it seemed not that the forest had been forgotten, but the world itself, which ran with such speed that nothing of it persisted from age to age. Constantly made and destroyed, it was always forgetting itself, always a memory, whereas that place endured. Like me.
Etude started suddenly further into the curved canyon, and I followed. The pocked, undulating stone walls gradually widened and grew taller such I could walk under the overhang if I stooped. Here were mossy gravestones, so old the carved inscriptions had all but weathered away. Gnarled roots of ancient trees penetrated the gaps in the cliff, and there was a sense that we were disturbing something that only pretended to sleep and which wanted us to stop making noise so that it could return in earnest.
“Gah!” Etude turned again. He was searching for something, something dark and deadly enough to spin the needle of the cowardly compass away from it no matter what else lay near.
I remembered Anya’s words.
You must stop him. He’ll destroy everything.
“Can I help?” I asked.
He was growing frantic and took off at a clip. I went to follow but stopped after three steps. To my right, an arch of bulbous rock, like blobs of dough that had fallen together, stretched across a V-shaped crack in the wall of the crevasse. A natural depression had been worn into the arch, similar in shape to a low doorway. The crag was covered in narrow cracks from which bright green lichen grew. The leaves underfoot were wet and dank, for the sun never reached them directly. I smelled rot.
“Hurry,” he called, already invisible around the bend.
As I turned to follow, I noticed a wasp exiting the arch. It flew into the air as if it were a spy fleeing to its master.
“Etude . . .” I called
“Here!” came his distant return. “Here! It is here!”
Under the overhang of the crevasse, Etude had found a deeply stained and weathered sarcophagus claimed by dirt and centuries to with-in half a meter of its lid. He set to work immediately. He pulled a folding shovel, not much larger than a spade, from his bag, unfolded it with a click, and started scraping the surface as fast as he could. I had no tools, nor was there easy room under the overhang for two to work anyway, so I sat back and waited. I think that’s when I realized it: the identity of the vile fiend who had stolen my memories.
A heavy THUD brought my attention back. He had slid the sarcophagus lid to the leaf-covered ground. Inside was a coffin. It was old, but clearly much younger than the carved stone that held it. It took him a moment to work the wooden lid. It creaked and hit the rock overhang, under which he was bent. He crawled in, using the curve of his back to prop the lid while he dug through the contents. There was no corpse inside. The coffin was full of books. Stacks and stacks of books. It was a grave of secret knowledge, and soon my young companion was tossing ancient texts onto the ground one after the next without care. I watched them bounce across the damp leaf bed—forgotten knowledge long lost to the world.
“Should you be doing that?”
One gray tome flew out and cracked open as it landed. Its uneven pages nearly disintegrated into a cloud of dust. I bent to examine it. The complete works of Heraclitus. There was also Adversus annulares by John of Pannonia and Galen’s “On the Movements of the Spirit.” I lifted a kind of folding scroll that seemed written in calligraphic Chinese.
“It’s not here!”
More books flew, two and three at a time. He was chucking them out with both hands, like a dog digging a hole. After a moment, I heard fingernails on bare wood. He pounded it. Then he came out from the grave. The lid of the coffin fell with a thud as he looked in all directions.
“It must be here . . .” He started back the way we came. He scowled at me. “What are you doing?” he yelled at me. “We must find it!”
He took out the compass and flipped the lid and very much didn’t like what he saw. The needle was spinning like a fan—round and round and round, so fast that it was beginning to smoke. It was useless. The cemetery and its plenitude of forgotten terrors offered no safe path of retreat.
Just then the compass broke. The thin glass shattered and the spinning needle flew off and landed I knew not where.
I snatched it from his hand. “That wasn’t yours!”
He was vexed. After all his preparation, his stroke of genius, whatever he was looking for was nowhere to be found. We looked angrily into each other’s eyes, both blaming the other in some way for all our faults and fiascoes.
“Did you warn them?” he demanded.
“Did I warn who?”
“Those you seek to escape. I know they have visited you.”
“Have you been watching me?” I demanded. “How many times have we been here?”
“This is the first,” he said impatiently as he stepped away. He appeared lost.
“How many tries?” I yelled.
“Bah!” He looked up at the sky though the jagged gap in the foliage overhead. “We must make our way back down before nightfall. Come. Our partnership has not been completely fruitless. I have something for you.”