Chapter 21
“Are you certain you should go alone?” élise said. It was nearing nine o’clock, opening hour for the shelter, and we’d just finished the morning checklist. Our newest volunteer, a retired surgeon named Geoffrey, was completing Thoreau’s grooming, combing out a mat with gentle hands.
“Quite certain,” I said. We needed to find Vortigern’s book, and that meant I had to start looking for the damn thing at some point. “Especially since, between the two of us, I’m less inclined to provoke magicians with cataclysmic powers.”
She didn’t look in the least apologetic. “I got what I wanted.”
I didn’t see how this could be the case, unless what she wanted was to be properly terrified of Havelock or to terrify me. Now that I considered it, it seemed entirely possible.
élise pointed to the counter, where, as usual, she’d left a paper bag full of bagels. “Eat breakfast before you go down there.”
“Why, because he’ll only enchant me if I’m hungry?” But I helped myself to a bagel nevertheless—élise had bought chocolate and orange this time, my favourite from Rémy and Oliver’s menu, which I took as the apology it likely was.
After I’d eaten—and downed the rest of the coffee élise had left out—I felt marginally more confident. I gathered my supplies and made my way to the basement, as behind me élise flipped the sign in the shelter window from Fermé to Ouvert.
I hadn’t seen Havelock since he cast his terrible enchantment two days before—we’d been too busy trapping as many cats as possible to stock the second shelter.
We now had eighty-five cats and kittens in total, as well as a sizeable veterinary debt, though Dr. Para had graciously allowed us to repay her by installments.
Also, despite the lurking danger presented by Valérie, I hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to see him.
For some reason, Havelock’s illusion—for that was all it had been, a mere echo of what we’d lived through three years ago—hadn’t touched the cats at all.
After I recovered, I’d picked myself up and rushed to their cages, only to find the majority asleep as usual, and others picking at their food or grooming themselves.
They had gazed at me with confusion as I stood before them, panting and overwrought.
Even Banshee had been perplexed. She had endured my odd embrace—when the illusion lifted, I’d found her assiduously licking my arm—then watched me with concern as I to’d and fro’d before seeming to determine that there was nothing meaningful to worry about, just human business, and wandered off.
I could only assume Havelock hadn’t bothered to extend the illusion to the cats.
So I tromped down the stairs to Havelock’s shop, bracing myself for another blast of hail or at least a volley of sarcasm, but the first floor was deserted.
The spiders glowed gently on the walls and ceilings, and the place smelled as it always did: like a museum, wood polish and old things with a charcoal undercurrent of magic.
I checked the lower floors, shuddering at the disorder, and even knocked on the trapdoor leading to Havelock’s library. If he was there, he didn’t trouble himself to reply, and I lacked the bravery to intrude.
So I simply set to work. I had decided to tackle the floors in descending order, largely because the lowest floors were such a horror that I needed time to gird myself for them.
I spent an hour or so rearranging boxes and crates so that they were easily accessible—some were stacked so high I needed a ladder to reach them.
Then I placed my scale, labels, and glue on Havelock’s desk and started—very gingerly—to catalogue his Artefacts.
I’d decided I would examine the cabinets first—there were ten on the first floor—before going through the boxes and crates one by one.
Some looked as if they’d never even been opened, their lids still glued shut.
I had ordered a vast quantity of wood shelving, which would be delivered the next day, and which I intended to hammer into the walls whether Havelock liked it or not.
What was the point in having a shop if you couldn’t see half your wares?
As I worked, I heard intermittent rustling from other parts of the basement, as well as occasional thumps, which I assumed was just His Majesty, making mischief, although it was a magician’s workshop, and perhaps some of the Artefacts were not as inanimate as they appeared.
The spiders proved themselves an utterly impractical source of illumination.
Some stayed put, allowing me to see what I was doing, but others crept from place to place, so that I ended up following them around with my notebook, squinting down at the page as I tried to write.
I eventually grew so fed up that I found a glass jar and trapped one of the larger spiders inside it.
I felt a little guilty about this, so I took the time to poke airholes in the jar lid and toss in a few dead termites I found in one of the crates.
I had given some thought to categorization systems before largely abandoning the endeavour; I didn’t know enough about magic, though I’d gleaned a little from Havelock’s tedious speeches, to guess which system would be most useful.
Instead I’d simply decided to number the Artefacts and divide them into portable or non-portable, which was likely to be of interest to magicians, given that they were always duelling each other.
I’d noted that Havelock seemed to like wearing his enchantments in order to have them close at hand at all times.
Thus the first Artefact I examined, a plain brass thimble, was labelled 1P, while the glittering silver orrery beside it—which would attract a few stares if one hauled it down Rue du Parc—was 1N.
I was just gluing a label to a delicate wooden music box—12P—when I was startled by a soft creak from the stairs behind me. I whirled and found a stranger looking back at me, who had crept down the stairs as quietly as a ghost. He had sandy hair and close-set eyes above sharp cheekbones.
I cried out, hoisting the music box to hurl it at him.
“No, no, no!” the man exclaimed, raising his arm, and it wasn’t a stranger’s voice, but Havelock’s. “That’s a nine-layer summoning spell so powerful it could enchant an object in Australia and pull it through the earth’s core. Also, I haven’t finished examining it.”
My initial reaction was relief that it was only Havelock, not some thief come to murder me and steal Havelock’s Artefacts; my secondary reaction was astonishment at myself that I had come to see the Witch King’s company as preferable to anyone’s, murderers included.
I put the music box down. “So you do know what some of your Artefacts do.”
“The ones that can bore holes through the planet, yes.” He narrowed his eyes at me, and I felt a spasm of disorientation, seeing one of Havelock’s expressions on a stranger’s face.
“What on earth have you done to yourself now?” I couldn’t help demanding. His old face had been much more interesting than this new one, and I felt strangely annoyed with him for changing it.
But he only blinked at me, seeming for once at a loss for words. “Which one are you?” he said finally.
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t know any sane person who would speak to me like that after the illusion I cast the other day,” he said. “And given that Agnes Aubert is the most scrupulously sane person I’ve met, I can only assume that she has yet another twin sister, and that I am trapped in some Shakespearean comedy.”
“I don’t know about that last part,” I said, “having never read Shakespeare. But I haven’t forgotten that little display of yours, and I’d thank you not to do it again.
Though I’ll admit that élise should know better than to provoke magicians who will take any excuse to show off. Also, we aren’t twins.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand you at all,” he said in an almost despairing tone.
I laughed—it seemed the only possible response to such a hypocritical complaint.
Frowning, he brushed a hand across his face as if wiping away rain, and I stumbled backwards with another yelp and crashed into the worktable as Havelock’s face appeared beneath the stranger’s—he had wiped the enchantment away.
He removed his glasses from a pocket and placed them on his nose, then he ran his hands over his hair, which darkened beneath his fingers and grew longer.
He brushed his hands together with a little grimace, as if scraps of the stranger’s visage might have stuck to them.
Then he was removing his boots and placing them beside the stairs with the same unhurried movements, as if there were nothing materially different about this than what he had just done.
“I do leave the shop sometimes.” He doffed his coat, turning his back to me as he placed it on a hook close to a particularly well-fed spider.
“Unfortunately, when you nearly bring about the end times, the authorities tend to take an interest in your whereabouts and circulate your image among themselves—hence the disguise. Were you imagining I lived like Dantès down here?”
“I don’t know who that is,” I said. Frustration rose within me. “I don’t know what you mean half the time. I know you aren’t an ordinary person, but can’t you at least talk like one?”
I regretted my outburst immediately. But he only removed his gloves one finger at a time, watching me warily, which nearly made me want to laugh again. I wondered if I would always be veering back and forth between fearing him and wanting to take him by the arms and shake him.
“You claim the police will recognize you, but I don’t see how anybody learns what you look like if you’re always putting silly beauty spells on yourself,” I said. I noted with relief that his eyes were both the same dark brown again.