After Beltran’s visit, some of my restrictions were lifted. I was not allowed to speak to Etude and had no idea where in the cavernous dungeons he was being held—the same dungeons where the Eye was discovered by the first maestri some seven centuries before. I was also kept from the high towers, where everything important seemed to happen. But there was a garden promenade left open to the sky and I was allowed access to it and to the library. Both were utterly, unspeakably magnificent. The library was large enough that one could genuinely get lost. I was never a scholar like Hank, but being raised in the centuries before television, books have remained my first love, and over the next several weeks, I spent many hours between those stacks in the company of voices past—not just the books but also the ghosts that would sometimes steal them when my back was turned. I learned quickly to feign disinterest before making a selection, lest the book I had chosen be whisked away behind me. Their thefts were an attempt, I’m sure, to get me to go innocently searching, to explore the buttressed vaults, caged nooks, and octagonal chambers that connected each to the other inside that great place.
Of all the spirits that pestered me, I made acquaintance with only one. Judging from her dress, which I only caught in glimpses, my girl was a servant in the time of Cromwell. She must have spent much of her life scrubbing the floor, for that is what she did compulsively. When she spoke, it was always to herself or to someone else not present. I heard only fragments of stories, and she would often disappear midway through. Sometimes she would glance at me first, like a wild animal, as if just realizing I was there before blinking away in fright. But as one week turned to two, and two to three, my continued presence in the library coaxed a certain calm, as with a tiger, and her stories lengthened. She didn’t relate them directly, but if I sat and read near the lower arches—which were close enough to the sea that in the quiet I could hear the gentle lapping of the Mediterranean—she would often appear, scrubbing the floor (always scrubbing, scrubbing) and talking to herself, which was of course talking to me. She seemed terribly lonely, and I would put a finger in my book and close it and look away from her and listen as she told a friend named Charlotte, who was never present, all the reasons she should stay away from the farm boy down the lane, for he was a ne’er-do-well if ever there was one. I listened to numerous one-sided arguments about why she hadn’t cleaned the kitchen or brushed the horses. She told a great many lies, especially about where she went when she wasn’t needed and why it was she lingered so long there.
How she came to the Keep of Solomon, I could only guess, but the reason for her departure seemed clear. Her unconsummated dalliance with the farm boy down the lane had turned sour after she caught him mounting her friend Charlotte behind a tree. Realizing he had no intention of honoring his promises, she demanded the return of her dowry. But the boy had already spent it on drink. My maid immediately reported him to her lord but was told she shouldn’t have been so foolish as to give it to such a man in the first place, and the matter was dropped. It was only later, after the farm boy had broken Charlotte’s heart as well, that my maid plotted her revenge.
She visited a “lady of the dells”—a witch—and gave of her hair and of her womb. It was not meant to damage him. She repeated that many times. It was merely supposed to teach the boy a lesson. What happened next, I was not told, but having dealt with a number of witches, it’s easy enough to guess. My maid was arrested and spent several years in a brutish prison, as I had, before being offered clemency in exchange for a report on the witch, who was later hanged. In consequence of her service, she was indentured to the servants of The Masters and later met her end within the walls of the Keep of Solomon, where she remained as a wayward spirit.
Early one morning, while busy with a pail and brush, my new friend airily explained to Charlotte that she was so beautiful and could do so much better than a simple farm boy from down the lane, and that if she would go to the city, she was sure to catch the eye of a gentleman. Amid the rambling, which clearly predated the rest of the tale, I heard a stray word: escape. It was spoken in the same voice, but the tone and cadence were different, as if interjected from a different time and place. I looked up and the young woman was peering at me. Then she disappeared again.
Amid the shelves of the library, I rediscovered bits of my past, including a rare manuscript by Wilm Castleby, penned in his hand. Seeing his familiar scratch brought back memories I had completely forgotten—not ones eaten by the forest but those simply lost in the years. I also discovered a collection of antique photographic plates made of glass, some of which had cracked and been mended with tape or glue. They filled a series of chests inlaid with wood grooves, each holding a single vertical slab. The Masters, or rather the librarians and scribes who worked for them, had used the new medium of photography to record the last of the woodfolk and the other child-races, whose numbers had by then precipitously declined. Many had fled to other realms after the pogroms of the 17th century, but many more had been “harvested” a century later during the so-called Age of Enlightenment, when innumerable pieces were cut from their bodies, living or dead, and sold to fill wunderkammer and gentlemen’s cabinets of curiosity. By the 19th century, precious few were left, and The Masters’ scribes made portraits, etched into glass with salts of silver. I saw twig-fingered treeherders mourning ricks of corpses, giggling gnomes hidden under furniture and machinery, preens of pixies pushed under rulers and tape measures, naked and ashamed. Some of the images were quite poignant, such as the satyr mother bent over the still body of her faun, her breasts still heavy with milk. Others were inimitably disturbing. Many of the pixies were cowed by rough-gloved fingers, their tiger-striped wings forcibly and painfully spread. The presence of several empty slots in the progression suggested there were images missing—I expect the most explicit ones.
But my greatest discovery was a secret manuscript that I myself had smuggled to America, for which I was later imprisoned for heresy. I assumed it had been destroyed, along with my freedom, and as soon as I recovered from my shock at their continued existence, I shuffled to the nearest chair and scoured the yellowed pages. I didn’t stop reading for hours.
After being rescued from the attic in Whitechapel, I was arrested and given a choice: prison or deportation, which is how I found myself sailing to India. I had finally caught the attention of the lords of magic. I had triggered it, in fact. I had never completely given up my desire to be rid of my curse, and as it happened, two years before the madness in the attic and shortly after Durance and I came to London, I happened upon a speaker standing before a large crowd—a woman, which was unusual, more so that she had the distinctive cadence of a Russian accent. There were not many Russians in London then. The British had expelled most of my countrymen during the war in the Crimea. It was rare to find one at all, let alone speaking openly before a large crowd. So I stopped.
In five minutes, I could tell she was from Ukraine, not all that far from where I was born. She was also apparently a spiritual leader, a representative of something called the Theosophical Society, a kind of magico-religious fraternity built on Eastern mysticism and worship of the occult. The Masters had been so successful in their persecution of magic, which was part of daily life as late as the seventeenth century, that by the nineteenth it was making a comeback. Not in earnest, of course. More as a quaint affectation, the way certain fashions of a bygone era will reappear ironically. Victorian gentlemen in particular, having made a fortune in machine industry, were often members of secret societies based loosely on Egyptology, Hindu spiritualism, or other bland cults of the Orient. These were generally toothless but attracted many followers. Indeed, as I moved around the crowd, I realized the speaker had already packed the hall on whose steps she now stood and that she was giving a second, abbreviated talk to the poor and the latecomers who had gathered in the hundreds outside. Since there was little chance of meeting her amid such numbers, I made a note of her name, which was printed on the marquee—Madame Helena Blavatsky—and went on with my business.
I wrote to her, explained my heritage, and told her enough of my encounter with the woodfolk that I thought I might at least get an audience. I delivered it to the hotel where she stayed, but the disinterest of the clerk suggested my post was only one of perhaps dozens or more. Several days passed and I noted in the paper that “Mme. Blavatsky, Noted Medium and International Speaker, Sails for Hindustan.” Life went on and I forgot all about it. Thus, I was quite surprised when the police, having thrown me in a prison hospital to recover, informed me that I had a solicitor and that he had secured for me an exit from a lengthy prison sentence. The solicitor, a Mr. Bentley, told me he was employed by another attorney, an American named Olcott, who had been part of the tribunal charged with investigating the death of President Lincoln. When I asked why Mr. Olcott had freed me, Mr. Bentley said he didn’t know, that he was instructed merely to secure my release, which he did. I was then taken under police custody to a steamer ship, the first I had ever seen, and placed immediately aboard.
We stopped in Cairo. I have never been so hot. I saw the pyramids and so much more squalor than I had presumed could exist in the world. The British seemed as interested in their empire as a dog its fleas. But of course in that, they were hardly unique. Within the week, thankfully, we set sail again from a port in the Red Sea. It was a further two weeks before I met the woman who had freed me. She was as curious a figure as any I would encounter—warm and genial but also much coarser in her manners than I expected. She made crude jokes, often involving bodily functions, and cackled at them herself. Her clothes never fit, her hair was frizzy and unkempt, and she never shaved. Her insults were rare, but when they came, they were vicious, direct, and incisive. I cannot recall anyone the Madame insulted who did not instantly become a lifelong enemy—including, eventually, Mr. Olcott, who had been her first and staunchest patron.
When I was finally able to ask my lady why I had been summoned, I was told that after receiving my letter, she had attempted to contact me “on the astral plane,” but that she had been rebuffed by “an immense psychical power,” so strong that she was weary for many days. By the time she recovered, she had to leave for India. Thinking I was a medium of rare and notable ability, she had her agents at the Theosophical Society’s London lodge, which included a number of state luminaries, report on my movements. She said I had been summoned to India so that the truth of the “psychical emanance” would not be lost in some brutish prison. In the meantime, I was given an occupation. I was to be a servant and tutor in my lady’s house. Like many colonial Europeans, she sponsored a small school where poor children were given a rudimentary education.
Though remanded to the Theosophical Society, I was not kept as a prisoner, nor did I think of fleeing. India bewitched me. It wasn’t simply beautiful. It was opulent, and I understood why the British coveted it so. The wealth they drained seemed eternally replenished by the constant motion of the people—more than I had ever seen before. Everything there danced and grew over and above everything else, a boiling mixture of faiths and languages and food. Pickpockets and saints walked elbow-to-elbow in the crowded markets with gods and livestock. There didn’t seem to be any order in any of it, and yet, somehow, everything got done. Fields were planted and harvested. Levees were built or reinforced. Bright festivals were held. Fish were caught and brought to sale. Oh, the British strutted about admirably and said “Here, here!” and “What, what!” but they knew it was a show, and any man outside the range of their artillery was free to live exactly as his fellows had since before the time of Christ.
Despite my many years in her service, I would never come to know Madame Blavatsky well. I was after all but one part of a very large retinue. From time to time, however, she would quiz me about the “emanance,” and eventually my defenses crumbled before her potent wit. I told her I had known only one person who could rightly be called psychic, and that she had been wracked by strange and debilitating visions.
“By the heavens, woman!” my madame exclaimed, “I hope you wrote them down!”
I explained to her that Anya and I had been scullery maids, that we barely had enough to eat and there was no question of affording paper and ink.
“She’s haunting me,” I admitted one rare evening when the two of us were alone. A gentle breeze brought cooler air up to the garden where it mixed with the scent of jasmine and roses. “I left her son in a work house.”
Madame Helena chuckled and shook her head. “It’s not a haunting,” she explained in our native language. She held the bit of a hookah between her lips. “She is not a ghost. You cannot think of her experience of these events as you do your own.”
When I asked for clarification, she took several long drags from her water pipe.
“Imagine your life as a tapestry,” she said, “or a scroll rolled out before you. You would be able to see it all at once—as if it were a single coherent thing. When your friend expired, that is what she saw: your life, her life, the flow of time as a tapestry. These acts you experience as discrete events are for her instances of a single moment whereby she pushed from that tapestry all the threats in it—at once. Not one at a time with years between. For her, it is a single psychic rebellion accompanying the moment of her death. You, trapped here in time, are forced to see each appearance singly. I regret that we have not been able to make contact. At each of these moments we experience, she is just ascending to a higher existence. She would have much to teach.”
I marked my one-hundredth birthday meditating cross-legged on the bank of the Adyar River. I wore shoes of fragrant sandalwood and a beautiful red-patterned sari with a gold necklace. My hair, having not long to regrow, was then very short, a style I have been partial to ever since, even when it was neither stylish nor convenient. By most measures, a century of life made me a very old woman. But I felt young there. It wasn’t just that everything was new, or new to me. It was that all those things that were new to me were so very, very old—timeless, even. It made me feel like a little thing, a young thing after all, and if in my tiny century I had become heavy with misfortune, I shed it like a snake skin somewhere between the river and the elephant grass.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky died in 1891 from a mixture of poor health and acute influenza. At her funeral, I was given a parcel. Inside was some cash, a letter addressed to me, and the loosely bound pages of a manuscript, which I was to smuggle to America.
Do not read it, she warned in her letter, or you will be complicit in my heresy.
I didn’t then. Not for many days, in fact, when I was locked in my cabin, steaming my way to America.
During her life, Madame Helena claimed publicly to have contact, by means of astral projection, with an ancient and arcane order whom she called The Masters. She described them as Indian swamis and said they had been manipulating the course of human events for centuries from their fortress deep in the mountains of Tibet. All of that is a matter of historical record. And yet, it was not entirely true.
Since The Masters did not allow anyone to speak openly of their existence, she had hoped that by altering certain facts and circumstances, she might escape reprobation. It was also, I suppose, another example of how she was ever willing to knead the basic facts of the world to better suit her ends, especially where that deception made others more susceptible to some higher truth she wanted them to see. Her invented Masters better fit the common preconception of what such a mystical order might look like, with robed ascetics chanting over incense in some mystical mountain monastery. Like many eccentrics, Madame Blavatsky’s profound insights into the universe were matched by an almost perplexing naivete about the people in it. The fact that one of The Masters was in fact Indian meant that even her altered version was too close for their comfort, and as the Theosophical Society grew in popularity, she was warned, repeatedly, to refrain from speaking of the High Arcane. In typical Blavatsky fashion, she laughed off the threats, only to suffer character assassination at the hands of the Psychical Research Society, which issued its infamous report denouncing her as a fraud, and she was forced to retire from the very organization she had founded.
In her unpublished chapters, Madame Helena argued, with her critics, that we can discern the nature of the deep universe from the basic facts in evidence: that the earth spends half of each day in light and half in darkness and that correspondingly there is both suffering and joy in the world. In such conditions, it was impossible for pre-modern thinkers to conceive of the world as existing anywhere but on the border between great warring realms—stuck, as it were, in the middle. For the Norse, Earth was Midgard, the middle realm, just as China considers herself the Middle Kingdom, with heaven above and darkness below. So, too, in Christianity and Islam, where we inhabit neither Hell nor Paradise but some space between.
Madame Blavatsky asked how anyone could possibly believe this. It was perhaps forgivable, she said, when we considered the earth a bowl or plate covered in a shroud of fixed stars—a canopy through which holes had been poked so as to let the divine light peek through and remind us even here of the glory of God. Once it was clear that was not the case, that each of those tiny twinkling lights in the sky was not a pinprick but its own distant sun, our ancient conception of ourselves as the center of things was never updated. It was, like that old canopy, fixed in place. Belief in the middle, she suggested, was psychologically pleasing rather than true. It suggested that everything was in some way about us, that we were yet the axle of the universe—albeit symbolically rather than literally—that the earth was the field of sport upon which every gaze in the universe was transfixed, and that our choices alone would decide the fate of the cosmic battle between light and darkness.
Hardly, she said. The night sky was not a shroud but something closer to an infinite well—cold, barren, and immeasurably vast. We didn’t seem to be in the middle of things at all. We seemed quite far flung in fact. That our planet was tilted and turned every day between light and dark certainly suggested a struggle, a supposition supported by the common occurrences of suffering and joy. And it was also true that the earth seemed to be neither heaven nor hell, as the old religions had correctly assumed. But, she asked, if our planet was the focus of the conflict, if we were the front of the war, why could we not see the forces of light? Why was there only darkness, darkness, darkness on all sides? An endless quantity of it, in fact. Our planet was swimming in an ocean of the stuff, as was the galaxy itself. Here on earth, evidence of malice was patent and universal, while evidence of grace was scant and indirect. What of it existed seemed only to come by our hand. If the divine were acting on earth, it could only be very weakly, as if at a great distance.
But the crown jewel of her argument was what she called “the state of immanent corruption,” whereby the whole of life, as the gurus in India had taught her, survived only by consuming other life. Anything that remained motionless, that took no act, inevitably succumbed to rot, and this applied even to the mountains and the rivers. All things not only suffered, they degraded. Where, then, was the influence of the light, of the incorruptible and unchanging divine whose power flowed from itself and from no other thing? Everywhere on earth there were agents of evil. One tripped over them outside every door. Yet, how rare was the saint? How rarer still were his qualities: knowledge, love, courage, wisdom, and compassion?
The truth, Madame Blavatsky argued, was obvious. We were not the middle kingdom. Earth was not the center of the universe, nor was our universe the center of all universes. Ours was patently a realm of corruption, a realm of the dark powers as other universes were realms of light. Adrift in some distant corner, we had cast off our shackles in a great conflagration, just as the ancient texts had taught us, but we had not been strong enough to embrace the divine, which is why things stood as they did, where the earth spins equally between light and dark. Our planet is not the focus of the fighting. It is an enclave of resistance well behind enemy lines.
If this doesn’t seem heretical to you, it is only because science would eventually come to vindicate it, at least in its significant facts. My lady’s views on “immanent corruption” presaged the laws of thermodynamics, which were just then being formulated. She also suggested that the distant dots of light in the sky were, like our sun, symbolic of individual acts of rebellion and that the true nature of a dark universe must be cold, bleak, and unradiant. And in as much as our cold, dark universe had been created—forged was the word she used—by the lords of night as a font of suffering from which they could power their armies, that suggested, first, that suffering should be plentiful and grace scant, and second, that such a place would have a violent beginning: a big bang. This latter observation is especially noteworthy since it contradicted the prevailing scientific view of the time that the night sky was a reflection of the divine creator: glorious, eternal, infinite, and unchanging.
And that was the danger. For if people knew—if they really knew—that our dismal planet was adrift among the dark, literally and figuratively, they might realistically lose hope. More than that, they might come to question The Masters’ grand enterprise. And that could not be tolerated.
Madame Helena bade me give her manuscript to a young goblin, Anson Gruel, who had recently taken proprietorship of The Barrows in New York City, where my lady had lived for a time. It was her hope that by surrendering it, I might negotiate clemency on the remainder of my sentence, and that by keeping it in trust with Anson, who was as greedy with books as most goblins were with money, it might avoid the flames.
One of those, at least, had come to pass. I shut the loose-bound pages and held them to my chest. I found the guard at the door of the library and asked him to bring a message to Master Yeĉg. I told Beltran I would not contest the council’s decision, I would forgo my right to trial, if Etude was allowed pen and paper so that he could at least leave some mark of himself for posterity, as Madame Helena had.
After the library, the castle garden was my second refuge. It was much smaller in scale but no less magnificent. On clear days, I sat and read on the mezzanine. If it rained, I walked the arched-and-columned promenade that encircled a gaming floor, which could only be entered through a pair of curved staircases made from the living branches of a tree. Over many years, its arms had been clipped and bent until they formed steps and a twisted railing, still very much alive. One descended in a tunnel of leaves to a floor of irregular beveled stones. Thick growth hung from the promenade, sprouting like festoons from niches in the high walls above. Flowers and shrubs and ivy and bright blooming azaleas burst from every surface and butterflies and bees flitted tirelessly between.
As it circumscribed the gaming floor, the high promenade cut a figure 8, also the sign of infinity. Below the north loop was a small stone court across which a net could be stretched. Below the south loop was a small lawn for bowling or croquet. Between them, at the center, the paving stones were square and of equal size, and moss grew on every second one such that you could play chess or checkers on a board four meters on a side—half of it made by man, half by Nature.
Etude had written to me. Or rather, he had written to the world and addressed it to me. It seemed my plea had been granted. It had been weeks since our capture, and I was delighted to hear from him, and to know that wherever he was in that place, it was not far away. He had filled a stack of pages. By the fevered writing, it was apparent he was producing as fast as his supply of paper allowed. There were gaps, which suggested some pages had been removed. What remained were instructions for spells—ideas that had come to him either prior to his incarceration or during it, when he had ample time to think. The first was a recipe of resurrection. That’s what he called it. There was so much mixing and baking, he said, that it seemed more like a recipe than a spell. He lamented that it wasn’t generally applicable but applied only to spontaneous pairs, who were known to share a soul. If one were still living, he surmised, it would be possible to bring the other back from the dead—not a spirit-raising, akin to necromancy, but a genuine reconstitution of body and life.
That alone was a career-making discovery, and if he had written it as his final thesis at the academy, it would’ve not only earned him a doctor magicus arcanae but immediate notoriety as well. But it was not alone. He had written an entire “recipe book.” There were instructions for turning the binding on a demon (or other spirit) into a kind of leash, allowing the holder to let the entity loose in the world without breaking its confinement. He explained how dreamcatchers could be used as traps and how food could be prepared to give the same effects as potions. He designed an impregnable sanctum, a magical fortress that no known magic could pierce, with its axis a living tree. But it was the last entry that was the most fantastical. It was also incomplete. He had in his solitude been turning his mind to the problem of the missing saints and of how the book might possibly be destroyed without one.
Where a thing does or can not exist, he began, it can only be conjured.
What followed were notes and speculations on how one might conjure a saint. I admit I did not follow it, especially what he called the distillation of virtue. Nor, it seemed, did the censors. They struck a few phrases here and there as if to demonstrate their power over the document, but other than that, it was largely untouched. The only part of it I remember with any clarity is the pentacle he had sketched, around which were the five attributes.
It rained often in those days. I thought nothing of it at the time, but in hindsight, it was the surest sign that Etude, buried in the depths of that place, was brooding as deeply as me—a shaman’s first dance calls the rain. I wrote to him immediately. Three days later, more pages appeared—fifty-seven, front and back. I replied before reading much of it, although I admitted that and said it was more important that we address the pending trial, whose date had been set for the following week. I asked if anyone had reviewed the charges with him and offered to act as his legal counsel.
His reply was brief, which is to say one line: How do we dispel the feast of shadows?
My answer was considerably longer. It included summaries of several relevant matters of arcane law as well as a detailed account of the procedure of the trial, both of which I had uncovered in the library.
In his reply, he answered his own question. It was an illusion.
But this illusion is not a mist you can pass through. Truly, it is real. Completely real, with all the qualities of reality. It pinches the world as surely as objects of mass and energy—but only as long as men believe in it. The feast of shadows is that to which the world is now fully engaged: a great banquet where everyone chatters to each other and gorges on illusions—on things that are not real but seem so, on money and fame and rectitude—which is how they can feast and feast and feast and never be filled. That is the point of it, that we should never stop feasting, nor that we should come to see our plates are empty.
And on and on to the end.
One dispels a shadow, he said, by turning on the light.
And that was it.
I collected his writings and gave them to the chief librarian, who was blind and therefore allowed to handle forbidden arcana. For many days thereafter, I tried to compose a defense for my friend, often working in the promenade above the garden, where a man appeared one day strolling about. I took note of him with some annoyance. For weeks, I had been alone in the garden and had come to see it as my own personal refuge. It was the only place where I was allowed to stand under the sky.
“You’ve changed your glammer,” I told the interloper as he wandered by.
“Excuse me?”
I did not raise my eyes from the notes I was taking. “You’re still slouching, Mr. Morgan.”
He smiled.
“Come to check on me?” I asked. “Or are you simply worried I might’ve worked out the truth.”
“What truth is that?”
“That you’re a warlock, of course.”
He paused, but not out of fear or surprise. He seemed relieved, in fact.
“I thought we could have one last chat,” he said, strolling casually about, “before your trial. I don’t think we’ll get the chance after.”
Since it seemed my work for the day was done, I began packing my books and papers.
“How did you figure it out?” he asked as he strolled down the steps to the stone court.
“I admit, it took some time.”
“How?” he insisted.
“Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? I know why I wanted to blot my memories. But I didn’t know how. How had I come up with this plan? How did I even know of the forest? Beltran would never have mentioned it. He was trying to maintain the lie, to me as to the world, that the book had been destroyed. He would never reveal its resting place. And then it occurred to me. There was a report.”
“Report?” he asked.
“It was on Beltran’s desk. I had been summoned, supposedly to handle matters of our separation. I was indignant, especially at having to wait. I was shown to his office where I was left alone for some time. On his desk were a stack of files and papers. At the very top, in clear view, was a report on a series of experiments conducted by the Winter Bureau on the effects of the forest on human memory. When one of Beltran’s male underlings appeared sometime later to retrieve the files, I thought it was to correct the mistake of leaving them there. But it wasn’t a mistake, was it?
“When Beltran finally showed up, he claimed not to have summoned me. I was furious. So much had transpired between us by then that I never once had the thought he might be telling the truth. In my defense, I never would’ve assumed, not in a thousand years, that anyone in the Bureau had been compromised.”
Mr. Morgan, in his glammer, was beaming. “Well, we had to set you on the path somehow. I hope you aren’t offended. You must realize I have nothing but the utmost respect.”
“So it’s to be flattery, then?” I made a face. “Fair enough. I’m old enough to admit it would’ve worked at one time.”
I joined him on the mossy chessboard, where he strolled in thought.
“Does anyone else know?” I asked.
“I think Baba is beginning to suspect. The rest of them are too busy trying to outbid each other to care about mere mortals like me. Makes it easy. It’s somewhat your fault, you know, if we’re speaking candidly.”
“Mine?”
He nodded. “Before you, it was just assumed there would be no way to infiltrate each other’s camps, that it would be impossible to preserve the lie in the face of defensive magicks. Then you came along and proved us all wrong, proved it could be done—if one were sufficiently motivated. The things you did to convince my masters that you were who you said you were . . .” He shook his head. “Do you still want to know?”
I clenched my jaw.
“Do you want to know if you slaughtered babes and ate of their flesh, or tortured your captured colleagues—men with families?”
“No,” I said flatly. “I do not.”
“Then as proof of respect, I will not burden you. Indeed, I thank you. For blazing a trail. I studied you, did you know that? Your missions. The debriefings and case notes are all in the archive. You made it seem so effortless. Being someone else. But then, you’ve had several lifetimes to practice. I didn’t have the benefit of immortality. I had to learn quickly, and the hard way. But I am your shadow, you see. Your dark reflection. What you sacrificed everything to steal, I have stolen in turn. Where ultimately you failed, I have succeeded.”
“And what are you going to do with a book you can’t read?” I asked.
“We deciphered it once. We can do it again. Even if it takes 20 years. It sings to us, you know.”
“And then? Another war?”
“Oh, lords no. Why would we ever give the world such an obvious target? I have great respect for my fathers, but their naivete was astounding. Still, I can’t blame them for trying.”
“What’s it to be then? Famine? Pestilence?”
“Let’s just say no one will see it coming. Or rather they will, but they’ll blame it on everyone but themselves. But truly, I must apologize. I didn’t come to talk about myself, and yet here I am rambling away.”
“Why did you come?”
“To talk about you. Are you really going to end like this? Is this truly your final move? To sacrifice your king? After such magnificent play? Your young friend, you know, has so much less to lose. He can only suffer for so long. You, on the other hand . . . You can suffer forever. What do you hope to gain?”
“Gain? Why must there be something to gain?”
“Does that mean you’re going to go through with it, then? This fiction you’ve invented. The noble old woman, or whatever you’re pretending to be. Do you even know anymore? How many have there been? The fallen aristocrat. The secretive governess. The devoted auntie. The carnal thief. The penitent acolyte. The long-suffering prisoner. The intractable spy. The enduring wife. Or have you gotten so good at being other people that you just keep making it up as you go along?”
“We all make it up as we go along,” I said.
He sat down on a stone bench opposite from me. He seemed tired then. But not a sad tired. More like the elated exhaustion after a successful marathon. If my description of him seems lax, it is because of his many glammers. Even now, if you showed me a picture of him, I doubt I would recognize it.
“And you, Mr. Morgan, who are you?”
“Me? Oh, I am much less complicated. I am what you see when you look up at the night sky.”
“Darkness?”
“People, you know, they’re so used to life on earth that they don’t realize there are realms without corruption, realms where dust doesn’t gather, where people don’t need to sleep, where animals don’t have to kill each other to survive because everything doesn’t just wind down on its own, so you don’t need to keep consuming others to forestall your own disintegration. The old gods are cosmic beings, interdimensional warlords you might say, and this is their realm. They created it. They rammed two branes together and BANG, made our universe, made it to empower them, like a reactor—a universe of darkness and entropy, a place from which to siphon and feed and grow strong. That’s where it all goes, our life and vitality, our malice and envy, our violence and cruelty. We feed them. Everything you do, every effort you expend, ultimately benefits me.
“People think they’re free because they feel no chains, see no walls. But entropy is the whip that lashes us forward. Consume or perish! When beings must struggle against one another to survive, conflict is inevitable, and there can be only two kinds: predator and prey. Those who do not endeavor to be the one end up the other.
“But there are other places, places where the beings are more like you than me. Your cells are imbued with the white curse. They don’t degrade. They don’t wind down slowly to death. They’re constantly rejuvenated. Such things are against the laws of our universe, but not other universes. But, those ‘higher’ beings . . .” He raised a finger. “They don’t share, do they? They keep that to themselves.
“The secret truth of the world is that we’re all in bondage. All of us. Inside this feral prison, we only have what we can take from others. My people know this. They have always known this. It is the Truth.”
He sat back as if he’d made a move on the mossy board between us.
“My colleagues used to think you were all the same,” I said, “that the only good warlock was a dead one. But it’s not true. You’re not the same. Some of you are cowards. Still, if there’s one thing that unites you, it’s your insufferable sense of entitlement. You think that if you take something, therefore you were deserved of it, because if not, someone would’ve stopped you—or taken it themselves—and that those without a pile of takings are simply weak or timid and equally deserving of their lot as you are of yours. You accuse the divine of being selfish, of not sharing, but the fact is, the Others keep nothing from us. They take nothing. What they have, anyone can have. It’s free to all. The Truth, as you call it, is that you’re nothing but thieves. And petty ones at that. You deny an eternal fortune in favor of earthly trinkets.
“You know what else I see when I look up at the night sky? Not just darkness. Millions upon millions of lights—lights that weren’t there when this place was made. And with each passing eon, with the birth of each new star, this place, this ‘well of power’ gets a little weaker, doesn’t it? Your gods are losing, Mr. Morgan. Madame Helena taught me that. You’re just too stupid to see it.”
He smirked at me. “It’s too bad you won’t be around to prove it. We have to keep up appearances, of course, and act like the book is truly missing. There has to be a trial. Someone has to be blamed. Master Yeĉg could pardon you, of course—but only if he resigns.”
As with departing American presidents, any Master laying down his mantle in good stead had the right to pardon as many people as he saw fit.
“Leaving you to take his place,” I said.
“The youngest member of the High Arcane in its entire 700-year history. Thanks to you. Of course, if he elects instead to keep his post, you will be found guilty. And I happen to know of a little glass vial down in one of the lower vaults. Sealed inside under wax is the saliva of Der Erste Vampyre. Still quite potent, I’m told. All someone would have to do is inject a little in your blood. You’ll spend an eternity writhing in a cell in Everthorn.
“You could, I suppose, hold out hope that someone will repeat Dr. Hunter’s trick. Being the dutiful scholar, he of course wrote it down. Alas, the manuscript in which he recorded his discovery seems to have disappeared from the library . . .”
He pretended to be shocked.
“And as for your little friend,” he went on. “He’s really quite extraordinary, isn’t he? My colleagues wanted to be rid of him as soon as we found him. Too dangerous, you see. But I had an idea. I thought perhaps he could do what we could not. And look. He penetrated the impenetrable. I’m not sure there’s another person in the world who could’ve done it, if I’m honest. That’s the thing about youth. So eager. They don’t always stop to think things through, do they? Or take adequate precautions—say, against being watched. They think they’re invincible. But then . . .” He looked down at my hands. “He nearly was. I wasn’t sure how we were going to kill him with those on his hands, but now . . . I suppose I should thank you for that, too.
“There’s a secret room in Everthorn. Did you know that? It was built during the war. The coal larder and the boiler weren’t of much use anymore. Your friend will be taken there. If you see him, tell him I’m going to enjoy crushing his teeth in his jaws and flaying his skin and pulling his nails from his fingers—not because I enjoy such things. To be honest, I’ve gotten bored with them. No, I’m going to enjoy it because I’ll be doing all of that while the High Arcane watch, while they repeat a question he cannot answer: ‘Where is the book? Where is the book?’ I’m going to do all of those despicable, awful things by their very authority, in their house, poisoning it from the roots. And to me, the irony of that . . . Well, there’s nothing sweeter.”
He nodded to my marked hands. “Enjoy your book.”