The train rocked as it slowed and the picture in my hand rocked with it. My finger traced the line of blood that splattered across the scattered feathers, all of which had been cut by something very sharp. The train lurched hard and the photo fell. I bent to pick it up as the conductor announced over the speakers that we would be arriving soon at Penn Station. People rose from their seats and gathered their belongings. No one seemed to be paying attention to me. It felt strange being back in New York, much stranger than I expected. It had only been a few months, but already it seemed like someone else’s city, a place I had visited once and remembered both terribly and fondly but which had since gone on without me. That feeling grew as I left the relative safety of the enclosed train car, full of witnesses, and stepped onto the bustling platform. The confrontation on the lawn of Harrowood House had been designed, if not to capture me, then at least to provoke me from my hiding place. I couldn’t put Annie or Martin in any more danger. And yet, from the moment I left the protections of the Hywrod family and their ghosts to the moment I found Etude, I would be in imminent danger.
Construction in some distant part of the station had limited the number of women’s toilets to a dangerous minimum, and after waiting a small eternity, a bathroom stall finally opened and I went inside and locked the door behind me. I balanced my luggage on the seat cover, popped the latches, and removed the etched lead case from inside. The object it carried was exactly as I remembered. It had been preserved in the basement of the inverted shadow of Harrowood House, and it was neither dusty nor tarnished. It was an amulet on a woven metal collar. A dark violet crystal dangled at the center of a black disc carved in a writhing, slithering mass, like worms or snakes or eels. It hung not from a chain but from the tip of a teardrop-shaped collar made of interlocking brass. The collar’s intricate, woven design—like a sinister Celtic flourish—was hinged to curl down. It was made to be draped heavy over the shoulders such that the points underneath, like dull spokes, pressed hard through clothing to the skin. No magician had ever confirmed it for me—I dared tell no one I had such a thing—but I suspected the collar collected the pain it caused and directed it to the amulet and so powered the spell embedded in the tiny etchings in the crystal, which you could see if you raised it very close to your eye.
It was an amulet of Zaragoza, which I had stolen from the Handred Keep. As with all of its type, it cast its wearer in darkness and as such was key to my escape from that place. I removed it from the box and draped it over me. The discomfort was immediate. I tried shifting my shoulders, which helped not at all. Other than the pain, I felt no different wearing it. But I knew well the side effect of being cast in darkness and what would slowly overtake me if I indulged the amulet for very long. Anger first. Later, fear. Eventually, despair. And then madness. Those feelings accumulated slowly, and yet, like radiation poisoning, took two or three times as long to dissipate. Anyone who wore an amulet of Zaragoza for days or weeks on end—as many warlocks had while hiding in desperation after the war—eventually destroyed themselves.
I draped the straps of my purse over the handle of the suitcase and walked to the center of the busy station and stood. People moved back and forth all around me, but none approached. They didn’t even look at me. No one bumped into me either. It was as if I occupied a dead space in the world. I stuck out my hand and a woman walked around it without raising her eyes from her phone, as if she could sense me without being aware. It was fantastic to witness, and I repeated the exercise twice more before I saw an otherwise kindly-looking elderly woman step out of the ladies’ room and scan the crowd with a scowl. It was a glammer, I was sure. There was no telling what she, or he, actually looked like. I watched as her eyes passed right over me.
Despite the name, the casting of darkness does not make one dark, nor invisible. Rather, it is an obfuscation of the mind. The bearer is neglected, unnoticed, even in broad daylight, but only to the degree the fight or flight response is not aroused. That is, if those cast in darkness move very suddenly, make a loud noise, or attack, those around will become briefly aware, like the flash of a strobe. Otherwise, one is completely obscured—with one exception. Since the warlock Zaragoza distrusted his subordinates as much as his enemies, he designed his amulets such that two wearers in proximity would always be obliquely aware of one another, even though neither would ever be fully revealed. It was, I suspect, Zaragoza’s means of avoiding assassination at the hands of his own invention without diminishing its efficacy in the war. And it worked. The Winter Bureau never devised a countermeasure.
As I walked swiftly and unimpeded even through the crisscrossing crowd, the spokes of the collar pressed my skin, which made keeping a brisk pace somewhat painful. I couldn’t imagine trying to run with the thing. It was made, it seemed, for skulking and thievery, and I was all too happy to remove it after zigzagging across several city blocks. Confident I was no longer being followed, I returned it to my handbag and hailed a cab. I changed taxis twice before leaving my luggage at a hotel in midtown and taking the subway to Brooklyn. It was a dangerous risk—Etude would say a sentimental one. But I had to see what remained of Bistro Indigenes. Little, as it turned out, just an open pit and part of the old brick facade, which the city had mandated be saved and which now stood by itself, held aloft by high metal piers. A sign on the fence announced another corporate whole foods store would soon arrive. An ignominious end. Not that Etude was ever Michelin-starred.
People on the fringes of the industry, foodies and the well-to-do mostly, were always surprised to hear it. “Oh wow,” they would say. “Really? Well, it’s all political, right?” But I can tell you with absolute certainty that if the dons in Paris had ever slouched their way to the bistro—which none ever did—if they had ever stooped to awarding Etude a single star, he would’ve shut it all down. In an instant. He did as much with the Cirque, which could have made him wealthy, if he had cared of such things. Not that he lived poorly. But he was never motivated by the need for more than what was necessary for his aims. Indeed, on its first few stops, the Cirque was barely noticed, even in the local press. It wasn’t until the unfortunate incident with the flaming magpies that the world of fine cuisine was aware of Etude’s existence. And it wasn’t toward the very end of it all that the food critic at Le Monde even bothered to trash it as the worst kind of showy nonsense. The following year, the critic at The Times, seeking to distinguish herself from her rival across the Channel, used not-completely derogatory adjectives in her perfunctory coverage, appended at the end of two other reviews, one for a new chip shop. She stopped short of praising the Cirque in any way, choosing instead to label it “experimental,” “a notable effort.”
To Etude, it was a sign that the world was catching up, that he needed to quicken his pace, and within moments of reading the article, he began plotting the Dégoûter Gastronomique, which saw half his guests vomit before it was ended prematurely by the American authorities. And that was it. But the existence then of the internet insured none of it would ever really die, and the incident with the vomiting insured that, after we decided to set down roots, after we opened Bistro Indigenes, we would be continually scrutinized—harassed, even—by those very same authorities, who joined The Times and Michelin and the rest in the belief that everything Etude did in the kitchen wasn’t legitimate chefery, that it never rose above “antics.”
And you know what? They were right.
It never did.
It was, all of it, a big show, a sleight-of-hand to keep everyone’s attention from what we were really doing—traversing the globe, chasing the book, doing things that would make no sense to the modern world otherwise, such as cultivating rare herbs and insects. The giant cockroaches that had so incensed Dr. Waxman brought a citation and heavy fine from the Department of Health. But throughout the incident and subsequent lawsuit, not a single person ever asked why he needed them. Not once. It was just assumed to be part of his “antics,” his “experimental,” “just-for-show” cooking. No one considered they were meant to consume an ancient carrion ghoul, which could be destroyed no other way.
That strategy, of using a restaurant as both a cover and a source of income, started in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, on our first adventure together. But now, nothing remained of that life. Bistro Indigenes existed only as an absence, a square hole in the ground.
Feeling something incredible well up inside me, I didn’t linger but made my way immediately to The Barrows, which had fared no better. The front door was ripped away. The subterranean interior was dark, with only dim, pale light reflected off shards of broken glass. By it, I could see that everything was twisted and broken. The entire shop had been wrung like a wet rag. The cracked cabinets and hardwood slats turned over each other in a spiral, as if the ends of the room had been twisted in opposite directions by giant hands. There were shards of broken glass everywhere, and several of the splintered planks and shelf boards were turned up every which way like snaggled teeth. After stepping wide to avoid one, my foot fell on something hard and flat and unforgiving and I stopped suddenly and nearly lost my balance. I knelt to examine the object, which caused the amulet’s collar to shift slightly, and I grimaced as it spokes slid across my skin. The object underfoot was hard and flat—cast iron, it seemed—and cool to the touch. I ran my hand around it and found square edges. I tried to lift it, but it was heavy and I had to shift my stance before I could try again. With a grunt, I heaved it up to catch the faint light. There were crisscrossing footprints on the heavy plaque. It looked like soot had been scuffed loose by the sharp letters chiseled in the metal:
THE BARROWS
Est. 1676 (A.D.)
REINTERRED 1848
at this location with
Generous Donations from
THE ROEBLING FAMILY
& H. Morton Ramsay & Sons
& Eleanor Peas
I had known one of the sons of H. Morton Ramsay—a grandson, actually. He was H. Morton Ramsay III, who introduced himself as Mr. H on the day I found him sitting in my living room. The Winter Bureau hadn’t yet been founded in those days and each of The Masters maintained their own, often competing network of informants. Mr. H worked for Master Thrangely, who was a prodigious hunter and was said to have tasted the flesh of every animal that walked, swam, or flew. His offices in Cairo were fully adorned with the taxidermied remnants of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he could summon them to life when needed. Mr. H told me that the world had recently become imperiled and that I was thought to be useful in a struggle. Against whom, he wouldn’t say. When I suggested I wasn’t interested, he made it clear that he knew I had committed numerous crimes in my time with the mizzen. Furthermore, in India I had spent many years in the employ of a known heretic. I was given 24 hours and encouraged not to refuse. He told me to meet him at The Barrows, which was then very different—sophisticated, urbane, a place for the highest of magical society to gather.
But now it, too, was gone, strangled to death around me. That’s what they’d done. They’d strangled knowledge, wrung the place dry of it. Out of a sheer sinking sadness, my fingers loosed the heavy plaque, which hit the ground with a loud thud and sent several shards and splinters into the air. I realized my mistake immediately. As soon as the plaque had left my hands, it had been freed from the amulet’s spell, and whatever noise it made could be noticed. But the force of the fall had knocked a small object into flight. A feather. A colorful plume of a bird of paradise flew into the air and then settled slowly down. I caught it in my hand. Benjamin was right. Etude had been here. He had carried his battle garb with him when he left.
There was a slight clink behind me then and I turned. It was still dark, but it certainly seemed as if someone had knocked loose a piece of glass. I heard a step to one side, as if I had just been passed. I grabbed a shard of glass and listened. But all I heard was the rush of my own heart in my ears. I was obliquely aware someone or something was in the room with me, but I couldn’t detect a single trace, which meant that they were cast in darkness as well. Whatever creature had come to Harrowood House, it seemed there were more of them. The interloper and I circled each other like submarines at depth, and I was terrified I would step into the point of a knife.
I withdrew. I ran at first but stopped after three strides due to the pain of the collar and instead walked as briskly as I was able. It wasn’t until I reached traffic noise and daylight that I noticed the dark smudges on my hands. They were black and powdery, like ash. I wiped them on my dark jeans and didn’t think anything else about it until I caught a whiff of my fingers. The scent was faint but unmistakable: burnt sulfur. Brimstone. But it was very weak. Fresh brimstone is potent, which is why absolutely everyone mentions it when it hits their nose. It’s impossible not to. The scent on my hands, however, had all but faded, which meant the brimstone was very old indeed.
That night, under cover of darkness, I watched as men with flashlights searched my dummy lodging across the street. I had checked in as Milan Roman and left enough old clothes from Annie and Martin’s attic to make it look like I was coming back. Then I paid cash for a second room in a hi-rise hotel across the street, where I was Annette Dunlop. I had no idea how they found me, but there was no shortage of spies in the city. It was the only warning I would get that I was indeed being hunted and the longer I stayed, the more likely it was that I would be captured.
I slept poorly. I had deliberately limited my use of the amulet, but even such a short exposure gave me horrible nightmares. In the shower, I noticed that my fingers still smelled of it.
“Brimstone.”
Someone had tracked it into The Barrows, which meant it was caked on their boots. But the smell was faint, which meant it was very old. I knew of a place, a hidden place, that was once filled with very old brimstone.
I left my hotel through the service exit and took a taxi to the East River bike path, which followed the water line under the bridge on the Manhattan side. The wind off the river was stiff and cold, and I walked briskly, glancing behind me periodically, while I scanned the fence for some evidence of an entrance. I saw nothing. After passing back and forth under the Brooklyn Bridge, I stopped and looked up at its iconic tower, rising like a monument to industry. The caissons for the bridge had required excavation of the riverbed, just as the anchorages did of the shore. The west side of the Brooklyn Bridge was dug much deeper than the east, and for a very specific reason. They were burying something. I was just then standing over it. But I didn’t know how to get in. The riverfront had completely changed since the era of carriages and gaslight. The tangle of overpasses that now connected the bridge with the FDR Parkway were crammed with traffic, which made it a very bad place to have a secret entrance to anything. There must be another way in.
Like most cities, New York was built on the remnants of its own past. Unlike most cities, I had been there often enough to observe it. The very first subway line, which opened shortly after I arrived from London, included a beautiful station directly under City Hall, complete with chandeliers and arches decorated in colorful tiles. It was closed after the war, as were the local platforms of the nearby Brooklyn Bridge Station, which I had used many times in my first years in America. But the express platforms of the station were still in operation, and after waiting for the cover of a departing train, I forced my way through a maintenance door which now blocked the passage to the unused sections. From there, I could make it to the derelict tracks. A wall-mounted camera caught me, but I would be gone before anyone could arrive to stop me.
From the silent tracks, I found a small tunnel that turned back toward the river, and I followed it to the caisson. But there was no light down there, which required I keep a hand on the wall for balance as I stepped over dust-blanketed debris. There was an old pallet on the ground, and as I stepped over it, it splintered, with nothing but a hole underneath.
I fell down a steeply sloped shaft for several seconds before hitting still water hard. Without balance or footing, I was confused and struggled to find the surface, even as bubbles rose around me. My handbag sank. I saw it disappear with the amulet into the dark. I inhaled sewer water, which was the shock I needed to force myself upward. I coughed and struggled for breath the moment I felt air and gradually pulled myself, wet and sopping, onto a concrete platform. I had landed in a pool that filled the irregular base of a large, vaguely dome-shaped space, although no two sides of it were the least bit symmetrical. Light fell from a single round shaft, high at the top, which suggested an exit to the surface—a vent of some kind to equilibrate pressure between the sewer and the atmosphere above. But resting as it did twenty feet above the surface of the water, there was no way to reach it. The rest of the room was almost LEGOlike in its construction. Various block protrusions and brick platforms of different heights, each dating from a different era of construction, stuck out at angles. Water dribbled from small open pipes. Larger ones zigzagged up and down between the platforms.
I sat up and brushed my hands, and what I thought were pebbles fell free from my palms. But they were not pebbles. They were bones. Tiny bones. They were everywhere, especially at the margins of the irregular space, where they gathered like cobwebs. Thousands. I stood and listened, which was when I heard a slight chime. A hinged bar stretched in front of the hole through which I had fallen. It was attached to a string that dangled half a dozen cowbells—a makeshift alarm. Someone—or something—was alerted to my presence. I climbed to the highest platform, hoping for a quick exit. I found a manhole at the back, but it was too heavy for me even to budge. There was a low arched grate across the water to my left, but after scampering down to it quickly, jumping across a gap between platforms, I found it solidly locked. I sighed and looked around. It seemed to me then that the space was a kind of hub, a meeting point of several paths, for at least four separate conveyances converged there: the gate, the manhole, the gap above, and a small grate near the base through which foul water ran. I suspected there were yet more hidden in the shadows. It was the hub of a web.
I glanced again to the bells hanging in a string from the ceiling. “I need to get out of here,” I said in a whisper.
I was in a nest—almost certainly the home of a vorviggen, sometimes called a maze master, a distant relative of the troll which had adapted much better to urban life than its mountain-dwelling cousin. In their behavior, maze masters were somewhat like hermit crabs in that they preferred to adopt ready-built “mazes,” which included anything even remotely mazelike: dense copses, junkyards, abandoned asylums, and so on. There they would gradually make modifications, like a beaver to a dam, that made it easier for the random wayward traveler to get lost inside. In my time with the mizzen, I had been reliably informed that there were at least three maze masters in the Paris catacombs and that they squabbled with each other over territory. In America, I had heard of another that constructed an elaborate roadside attraction somewhere in the middle of the country—Minnesota, I think: a maze of arched stucco in whose walls were embedded countless baubles: glass bottles, batteries, plastic toys, dishware, postcards, shoes, walking sticks, eyeglasses, fake beards, rings, toothbrushes, playing cards, old cigar boxes, fishing rods and lures, hammers, saws, vases, dolls, tins, typewriters, and memorabilia from several similar attractions—miniature replicas of the House of Mud and the World’s Largest Frying Pan. The wayward child or lone and curious tourist, tempted by a rarely open door at the very center of the maze, would, if they were not careful, disappear without a trace.
This maze master, I was fairly sure, had been collected by Granny Tuesday. Granny had collected all kinds of nasties to be loosed on the city as she saw fit. After her arrest and incarceration, this monster had apparently wandered into the old tunnels, where it had been subsisting on a diet of sewer rats and stray pets, or so the litter of bones suggested. Maze masters swallowed their prey whole and excreted whatever they could not digest. They were also known to be cruel and catlike with their food. Having a constitutional predilection for puzzles and games, they liked to play with each catch before devouring it, which is how they found their way into human folklore: as riddlekeepers who would offer their human victims a chance of escape in exchange for a contest. They were cheats of course but not outright liars. There’s no suspense where one’s opponent has no chance of winning. That meant there was almost certainly a passable exit hidden somewhere in that room. I just had to find it.
I climbed to the next platform, just a foot taller, and looked around. While running my hands carefully over the gaps and protrusions in the wall, I saw my host and stopped. Its skin was pale and its eyes huge—adaptations to a subterranean life. Its elongated, spindly legs would’ve raised it to a height of seven feet, I was sure, if they hadn’t been pressed tightly to its body. The vorviggen had tucked itself into a narrow horizontal nook. I thought it might be asleep at first, but the dark trail of dried blood that ran to the floor suggested something much more sinister. I stepped closer and saw where the vorviggen’s chest had been blown open. That was why it had been clutching its limbs to its body. The wound was brutal, and just then I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the beast. It was monstrous, to be sure, and yet, now that it was lifeless, it seemed such a pitiful thing curled up there in its nook, thin and emaciated, as if it had been starved for weeks. I didn’t want to imagine it rising up before me—or climbing down the wall on those spindly limbs like a spider. I didn’t want to imagine it detaching its jaw, like a snake, and devouring me whole in slow, deliberate gulps. I didn’t want to think about all the animals and perhaps even people it had eaten in its life. But mostly, I didn’t want to think of what had killed it, for surely it was worse.
While staring in silence at the corpse, I heard the slight squeak of metal and turned to see a masked figure—one of several—emerge through the gate. Before I had a chance to exclaim, I was struck hard in the gut, gagged, and bound. A hood was pulled tight over my head and I was carried away.
I was thrown into a spherical iron cell covered in gritty rust. It was not a prison, but it was used as such. I was left bound, gagged, and hooded, but I could hear the sound of the heavy metal door as it opened and closed, which revealed through its echo that the room was very small, like a closet. I could smell the rust over the lingering stench of brimstone. What little I heard of voices revealed a pidgin. I didn’t understand the words—slang changes too quickly—but the syllables and cadence were unmistakable. I had been taken by the mizzen.
After a passing of many hours, during which I heard repeated, muffled conversations outside the heavy metal door, it opened suddenly and I was carried down a passage and my bound hands were hung from a hook such that only the tip of my feet could touch the floor. The air was damp and I heard the tiny sound of faintly trickling water. There were men in the room. One of them beat me across the back with a club and I yelled through my gag.
My hood was removed and a bright light shone in my face such that most of the small space was shrouded in dark.
“I trust we have your attention,” a man said.
He had been sitting, and I heard him stand. I tried to tell him I was not a threat, but I was still gagged and all that came out were vowels.
“You wanted to destroy us, is that it?” the man asked as he paced around me. The others in the room remained near the circular wall. “Well, you succeeded.” He motioned down the open passage. “There aren’t but a few dozen of us left.”
There had been at least a thousand mizzen on the East Coast. Was it possible that many had died?
“Men become desperate when you give them no choice but extinction. Reckless. I think you’ll find we won’t go without a fight.”
He nodded and I was beaten with the baton again. I yelled. It hurt.
“The other side,” I tried to say calmly.
When he didn’t understand, the man pulled my gag down around my throat.
“The other side,” I panted. It hurt to breathe, and I held my breath between gasps. “You have to . . . spread it around . . . a little . . . Otherwise, I won’t make it.”
He nodded grimly to the fellow with the baton, who stepped around and struck me again on the other side of my back. I grimaced.
“That’s better,” I said through gritted teeth.
“It’s true,” my interrogator said. “Those of us who are left are novices at this kind of thing. Wallace here”—he nodded to the man with the baton—”was a family man.” He paused. “Your masters took that—”
“They’re not my masters,” I objected.
“Yes.” He smiled. “We thought you’d say that.”
“It’s true. We’re on the same side.”
“Then how do you explain this?”
The heavy amulet of Zaragoza landed on the metal floor with a clatter. The sound resounded off the rust-stained walls. I’m sure a look of shock flashed across my face. I had seen it sink with my handbag. It occurred to me a moment later that that very same look of shock would be interpreted very differently by my interrogators.
“Or are you going to tell me that’s not yours?” he asked close to my face. All I could see of his features was his dark skin and high cheekbones.
Knowing I would only have a few words, I tried to think of what set of facts would be the most convincing, but before I could decide, the man nodded again and the baton struck my back. Then my thighs. Then my shoulders. As each blow fell, I felt my strength leave me. The tips of my toes tired of holding my weight, and they began to shuffle like restless children, leaving my bound wrists to painfully bear my weight.
“Where are your masters hiding?”
“I told you—”
I was struck again.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who does?”
“There was a man,” I said. “A clever man. But he was taken.”
“Taken? Taken where?”
“Everthorn.”
“Lies!”
He nodded and I was beaten again. I was losing strength. Every breath sent a painful sting up my spine.
“The old prison is a derelict, like the rest of the old regime.”
“Perhaps . . .” I said at a whisper.
I was struck again.
“Where are your masters?”
“i—i don’t know . . .” I whimpered.
I was struck again. And again. And again. And then I passed out.
I was tortured by the mizzen through the night. Back in my cell, I was given nothing to eat and had to lick trickling water from the rust-covered walls of my cell, which is also where I relieved myself. After a short rest, I was dragged down the passage by men in masks. When my bruised and battered body was too broken, the burlap sack went around my head again and water was poured over my mouth, giving the sensation of drowning. My body reacted involuntarily with panic, but all I could do was keep to the truth. I had served in the war, I said, and had acquired the amulet after infiltrating the Handred Keep. I was called a liar and doused again. Having no lie to satisfy them, eventually their patience ran out, and a rope was draped over a pipe on the ceiling.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“What does it look like?”
I watched a noose being tied. “Please,” I said.
“Since you won’t cooperate, you’ll serve as a message to your masters instead.”
“Please,” I repeated as the loop was draped around my neck.
I had been hung three times. I had never gotten used to it.
“Please, you don’t understand. You’re giving them exactly what they want.”
The man stepped close. “I want you to know something before you die,” he whispered in my ear. “I want you to know you’re going to lose. We have a seer. She can see those things you sent after us.” He held up the amulet. “Now, we’re the hunters.”
I was lifted onto a chair, the rope was pulled tight, and without ceremony, I was hung until dead.