Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

Chapter 35

Summoning

For the days that followed, the hours passed quickly at Victor’s side. I accompanied him in his herbal chemistry—the compounding of various mixtures and tinctures, some medicinal and some for sorcery alone, which were best prepared with the sun in its present sign of Aquarius and beneath the waxing moon—and at his command I indulged in the enjoyment of reading, the close air of his library thick with the earthy-sweet tang of old books, as he searched his shelves of dusty codexes and calfskin scrolls for historical accounts of dual banishment spells.

Again after breakfast I descended his cold stone stairway as he had bid me, the lingering chill of the upper world and its February fog vanishing with every downward step into the closer, warmer air of the underground. There was no class that day, and a fiendishly grinning Absolon (surely remembering the success of his past trickery) led me back to the library. There I found Victor much as I had left him, amid the teeming shelves and crooked piles of books, yet this time there was a look of triumph in his eyes: he raised his head from the decayed old tome he held in his hands, then set the battered volume down carefully on the bookstand beside him.