3. The Talisman of Thoth
Chapter 3
The Talisman of Thoth
I should have thought to count those steps: I soon lost all sense of distance and of time. The passageway was narrow and angled downward, the rough-hewn stone arch of it high enough for him to walk upright, though not by much, and scarcely wide enough for me to walk by his side. I do not know how long the corridor could rationally have been, but long enough for a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling that the endless featureless dark stone walls were closing in, a stolen glance backward over my shoulder that was met with the utter blackness behind us. The lone candle he held before him remained the only light, and I wondered what should happen if it were to extinguish for the speed of his long, sure stride through the dank darkness. In that moment I was grateful for my black bombazine dress: it was not fitted so closely to my form as were the fashions of the day, and I had nothing but its weight to impede my movement. The wavering candle flame painted the edges of his vast black shape in a dim halo of hellfire, and he became a will o’ the wisp to follow down, down the blind sloping tunnel to whatever lay ahead, driven on at nearly a run, as if to outpace some unseen devil that followed us behind.
I heard his boots splash in shallow water, and then I felt the cold shock as my shoes dashed through the same, but the ground grew level after the puddle, the way ahead slick with a thin stagnant sheen that shimmered in the glow of his candlelight. More disconcerting was the feeling of space. I could see little of the ceiling, but nothing of the walls, and suddenly I longed for the claustrophobia of the downward corridor, illuminated and defined by the same candlelight that now touched nothing but emptiness on either side. There was a sense now and again in the still air of a draft gaping from the right or the left, an arch into a warmer or colder nothingness, a change in scent I could not place. I heard faint voices, or imagined them, before they vanished again. And still the sound of our footsteps went on, his rhythm and mine a poor fit, the hard swift falls of his boot heels on damp stone and my little shoes hurrying to keep pace.
I paused once, just for a breath—and for a moment, without the sound of my own shoes, I thought there were still two sets of footfalls. One of them was Victor’s ahead of me.
The other was somewhere in the distance behind.
I felt my eyes widen in the darkness.
My heart began to throb in my ears, drowning out the evidence of the sound, but I could not mistake what I had heard: slowly, steadily, something was following us.
“Stay with me!” Victor’s voice was a harsh whisper, pressured and urgent and commanding; I saw from the corner of my eye the flash of his metal mask as he stopped and wheeled back toward me, the shadow of his black cloak flying in the dark.
“Victor,” I whispered, though it seemed nearly absurd somehow that this midnight specter I followed should have so human a name, “I heard?—”
“Do you still have it?”
“The amulet?”
“Where is it?”
“Here. In my hand.”
“What did you hear?”
“Footsteps behind, I?—”
“What do they sound like?”
“You can’t hear them?”
“What do they sound like to you ? Answer me!”
I listened, fingers instinctively curling the amulet deep into the palm of my fist as I glanced up briefly to his eyes under his hood, dark and fiery and nearly feral for the chase. I listened to his breathing and to mine. The footsteps—they were there yet, though faint—were cloddish, hollow, empty somehow.
“Strange, but,” I shook my head in something like relief, “perhaps just a horse on the street overheard?—”
“ Run! ” he grunted, the impossible strength of his hand seizing my wrist in an iron grip and wrenching me to his side as he broke nearly into a run. “ Run, now! Hold onto it, think of holding onto it, and stay with me!”
“Think of holding onto it?”
“Think of it in your hand! Think of nothing else.”
The candle fluttered for our speed, summoning stone walls to flicker out of the darkness; the tunnel had narrowed, and I thought the air was drier, yet for the urgency in his voice I followed his strange command: I fixed my mind upon the amulet in my hand, the size and weight of it, the reversed hieroglyphics it must have forced into my skin for as desperately as I held it; between his panting breaths I heard him mutter something beside me, whispering again and again the same phrase in a language I didn’t understand.
“Turn!” He pulled me closer his candle guttered out, and I heard its holder clatter on the floor behind us while the world turned black. The amulet—whatever it was, whatever made it to him such a matter for all this—was nearly all I had in the darkness: the amulet, the pain of my feet and the strain of my legs, the sweat soaking through the layers of my clothes; the feeling of his terrible, disquieting presence next to me as we ran together; the crushing heat of his rough hand around my wrist—the terror and the strange security of his strength—that was all I had to hold me from the footsteps behind. We turned right, and if not for his grip I would have stumbled as we soon hit stairs.
“Pace yourself,” he breathed.
“Is it coming for me? Or for you?”
“Yes.”
With the amulet fast in my fist and his vise grip on my other wrist I had no free hand to hold my skirts, treading the hems as I searched for footing in the utter blackness. One foot, then another, then the first again, struggling behind him as he pulled me up, trying to think of the amulet in my hand, trying not to listen to the horse-hoof steps behind as they grew louder, surer.
Nearer.
Had whatever was following us gained the wide hall now? Was that why the timbre of the echo changed?
But another step and Victor let me go, cursing under his breath as he fumbled in the dark with what must from the sound have been another door, another lock. I heard metal on old metal and he pushed, pushed harder—metal on metal again—I wondered what hooves would sound like on stairs, listening to the sound of my own blood pounding in my ears—he cursed under his breath, then grunted in effort as he threw his full weight against the door, ramming it with his shoulder and forcing it in, a faint light glowing through the gap as he shoved himself through and pulled me in with him.
He slammed the door behind us and wrenched a locking bar down into place. There was light here—light!—though not much, and all of it from the crack under the next door a few feet ahead. I watched him lean back against the door we had just passed, the one he had nearly broken off the hinge in his vehemence to get through, with a low growling sigh of what must have been relief.
We made it.
I rubbed at my wrist with the back of my closed hand, watching his broad shoulders heave as he let himself catch his breath. I wondered whether I had been taken or rescued, and why, and whether I should try to escape him if I could—and what was behind us, and why it should stop now, and why in the tunnel I had an uncanny urge to let the amulet fall?—
“You still have it?”
I opened my hand, letting him see it gleam golden in the dim light.
“Good,” he breathed. “Good. You wanted to play with real magic,” he looked me up and down, as if measuring how unlikely he thought it for me to have survived. “How’ve you enjoyed the magic life so far?”
“I say,” came a new voice, a man’s voice, faintly through the light of the door ahead, “that sounds like a certain damned sorcerer we know.”
“A man in those catacombs after midnight, a crash like someone broke down a door, and you think it might be him?” This was a second man’s voice, with a smug, chuckling laugh. “Doctor Karvonen, who else do you imagine it would be?”
“I had become rather used to him staying underground where he belongs. Less trouble that way, and a few fathoms closer to Hell.”
“Less trouble? Good God, Charles, don’t get complacent. He’s been a menace ever since he drifted in. When he comes to a bad end— when , mark me—one can only hope he doesn’t take too many of the good ones with him, and no, I don’t mind for him to hear me say it.”
“Lord Roderick Hargrave, founder and master of the Esoteric Order of Magisophists,” Victor whispered to me darkly, his voice edged in cynicism, “and his professor of alchemy, Doctor Charles Karvonen.”
“Are they…”
“Real occultists with some degree of real magic , as you prefer to call it? Yes. Will they do anything to you? Yes, bore you to death. Go.”
He opened the door and we stepped into what must have been a dim library, to consider its impressive size and count the number of lighted candles, though after the dark of the subterranean tunnels I squinted my eyes for the brightness of it, even behind my veil. There were shelves upon shelves of books, rising from the fine fringed carpets on the floor to the few strands of cobweb that trailed from the vaulted ceiling, and seated in upholstered chairs on either side of a crackling hearth I saw a keen-eyed man with long hair and a long white beard, and a younger, dapper man with a groomed mustache and a drink in hand. They were dressed both as gentlemen, though but for the length of the older man’s beard and the lateness of the hour I saw nothing sorcerous about them. I might have thought them a pair of academic colleagues, debating some finer point of philosophy until long after the rest of the guests left the drawing room.
The younger man set his snifter glass on a clawfoot side table and stood abruptly, taking a pair of spectacles from the pocket of his black waistcoat. “Who is this?” His brows furrowed, urgent concern in his voice. It was not difficult to discern that this was not somewhere I was meant to appear. “Why is she here?”
“You can answer Charles first, sorcerer.” The man with the white beard rose to his feet more slowly, with the kind of practiced, purposeful bearing meant to suggest dignity. “And then I should like to know, for my own curiosity, why you found it necessary to do whatever you did to that door rather than wait to properly cast. What’s the hurry, man?” The space between his mustache and beard twisted into a smile of anticipation at the thought of his own forthcoming slight. “Running from a bad contract?”
“Karvonen,” I watched Victor incline his head, first to the younger man and then to the older, “Hargrave.” He took a few slow steps toward them, back straight and shoulders high—still in his great black hooded cloak and steel half-mask, a world away from their modern apparel—and I saw them both tense for his approach, almost imperceptibly shifting away.
They were afraid of him.
They outnumbered him two to one—unless they thought me, in my black dress which had grown so damp and dirty around the hem, something more than who I was—and yet they shrank from him, even if ever so faintly, and I wondered if they sensed that same darkness that spread from him like a shadow across the moon.
He motioned for me, and I followed out of habit. He had guided me through that underworld after all, and never led me astray; though I did not know why, nor to what end, nor whether despite appearances I may have been led to somewhere worse.
“This is Elizabeth Buckingham,” he introduced me, “widow to S.R. Buckingham. A Discovery of Minor Artifacts of the Egyptians. ” Hargrave’s eyes widened under his white brows. Karvonen kept his gaze on me as he reached for the snifter, took a swallow of brandy, and set it back down on the side table with an unsteady thump.
“Show them,” Victor whispered to me, an unmistakable satisfaction in his voice.
I extended my hand and opened it, letting the gold of the amulet shine in the light of their candles and their fire. The design was simple: an ibis in lapis lazuli, rows of hieroglyphics, and an ankh.
It nearly stopped their breath.
“Damn my soul,” Karvonen managed as he stepped forward, adjusting his spectacles and peering into my hand from what remained a cautious distance. “Simon Buckingham had it after all? Was it never lost, or was it found again?”
“It was never lost to me,” I said. I cared little if it was ill-advised to speak. In the company of three supposed magicians (and what seemed some point of contention among them) I was likely in mortal danger either way, and was not about to be spoken past as if I were no more than a decorative amulet rack. “Mr. Buckingham gave it to me the afternoon before he died, and it has been in my possession for this past year, or year and a day, depending upon what time it is now.”
Karvonen examined his pocket watch with a mildly sheepish look, likely trying to be conciliatory. “Past one, Mrs. Buckingham.”
I thought of the driver and his champing horse waiting at the corner in the dripping midnight fog. I had meant at the time to return to him, but he seemed now a lifetime away.
“We hear generally that your husband disappeared ,” Karvonen continued. “Yet you seem particular about died .”
“I came home to find signs of a struggle in the parlor,” I replied, aware of them watching me. “Broken things. Some blood. He and the household staff and all the artifacts were gone, never seen again. Fog inside the house; I cannot explain how or why. The garden outside was trampled down as if a cavalry had ridden through, the threshold black as if burnt. You may say disappeared , sir, if you please. But I would be a fool to imagine he survived.”
Karvonen nodded. “You are right, of course, Mrs. Buckingham. I believe your instincts are correct. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Tell me, then.” I closed my hand, covering the amulet and bringing it back to my side. “You knew my husband’s name; you associated this piece with him before I said a word. Please. Tell me what you know.”
But Hargrave cleared his throat, and Karvonen stepped back to let him pass. By my side I thought I felt Victor tense, his shadow growing.
“Mrs. Buckingham,” Hargrave forced a congenial smile, “I would not presume to get your hopes up, nor to waste your time. I will be plain: I must acquire your amulet, yet due to its nature and circumstances, there are certain esoteric laws which bind me. Most relevantly, I cannot successfully possess it for our research unless you release its power to me of your own free will.”
Victor shook his head as I looked to him, his deep voice bitter. “Release its power to you? An abjuration vow, Hargrave? Unless you believe her to be a sorceress, your desperation for your prize is palpable.”
“A limited abjuration. We don’t know her potential. Is there any price,” Hargrave turned to me, still watching Victor out of the corner of his eye, “for which you would give up the amulet?”
Victor was silent. Karvonen looked on as he swirled the brandy in his glass.
“I was under the impression,” I began, slowly, “that there was a school of magic connected to the spiritualist storefront on what is commonly called Witch’s Corner.”
Hargrave raised his brows in interest, enunciating a single word: “Correct.”
In the depths of my damp mourning weeds, my heart leapt. “I want to learn magic.”
“Done.”
“The poor document of my husband’s will left me with nothing, and soon nothing will be left of the life I once knew. I need somewhere to live.” My confidence grew; this was no time to leave any need unasked. Let them talk me down, if they must. “Enough food to eat, and money for necessities. Protection from whatever killed Mr. Buckingham. And I should like to visit his house one last time, to collect my clothes and some books.”
I could hear Victor’s low, sinister chuckle through his mask, sardonic and amused but not entirely derisive. I was likely proving myself troublesome for Hargrave, which suited him fine.
“Done and done,” Hargrave replied with a straight face. “You will join our Esoteric Order of Magisophists as a Novice, study with us and receive instruction, and be provided with quarters, provisions, and reasonable stipend.”
“For how long?”
“So long as you remain in our program of study, and that for as long as you wish.”
“And the rest?”
“You will be protected, of course—we must protect ourselves and our society, after all, and this will become in part your responsibility, once you become capable of your own protection—but there are no certainties of safe harbor. Not for body, nor mind, nor soul. We deal in forces which cannot be so tamed.”
“I understand.”
“And that is why you cannot go back to that house. If you lend him the key, Karvonen will go and seal the premises, and take for you whatever personal effects you specify, so long as all can be conducted quickly . Does this satisfy your conditions?”
“Yes.”
“And have you any more questions?”
“One, sir. What is this thing? This amulet? And why is it so important?”
“That’s what we hope to find out,” Karvonen interjected.
Hargrave nodded. “Then, if there is nothing else: Elizabeth Buckingham, contingent upon the previous conditions, do abjure now this amulet and release it to me?”
“Yes.” They watched me like hawks or thieves, all three of them fixed and intent.
“Of your own free will, under no spell and compelled by no power save your own?”
“Yes, sir.” I placed it into Hargrave’s open hand. He turned it over once, then held it fast.
“Thank you, Mrs. Buckingham—and welcome to the Order. For now you may retire to the adjacent chamber, which shall be yours until more permanent and suitable quarters are found. Charles,” Hargrave continued as his companion finally drained the last of his brandy, “would you be so kind as to show her?”
“Naturally,” Karvonen replied with a slight bow and a polite smile, taking a candle in its holder from a table nearby. I watched Victor tilt his head to me in a sort of farewell, and realized later I had forgotten to see if Hargrave did the same. I picked up my skirts, following Karvonen into an alcove of newer books and through a doorway much more genteel than the others I had traversed that night.
He led me down a hallway into a small guest room with a bed, chest of drawers, washstand, bookshelf, and dressing table; elegantly though simply appointed, but with the cold emptiness that comes with long lack of use. Karvonen blew dust off the fireplace mantel, lighted its twin candelabras and pulled the fine old chair out from the dressing table for me. In good time he set a strong fire burning while I turned the chair from the mirror and sat down facing him.
“My apologies for the dust,” he said as he worked. “This is Hargrave’s house, if you hadn’t gathered already. He takes visitors at odd hours sometimes—nature of the study and the practice, after all—but seldom overnight.”
“Why were you here?”
“Alchemical problem,” he replied quite matter-of-factly. “Seemed urgent at the time, until we sorted it out.”
I heard Victor and Hargrave’s voices in the other room, though not clearly enough to make out words, and as Karvonen went on about alchemy I tried to divide my attention, listening with interest and yet suspecting him of purposeful distraction. To little use: so long as he kept speaking he was effective, whether or not he meant to be, in foiling my eavesdropping.
“My wife doesn’t mind too much, at least,” Karvonen concluded after a while with a light shrug, “but she’s in the Order as well. I respect the double lives of those who lead them, though I couldn’t possibly, myself. Between my teaching and my own research I haven’t enough time for a respectable cover and a marriage. In fact,” he stoked the fire a last time and then wiped the soot from his hands with his pocket handkerchief, “I don’t mean to be rude, but…”
“It’s getting late.”
“Quite. I mean to bid Hargrave a farewell and then go home.”
“You don’t mean to go home through those tunnels, surely?”
“No, though I appreciate the concern. That said, such places aren’t a particularly pressing danger to me, as they might not have been to you, if you had somehow got into them without… ah.”
He pressed his lips together beneath his finely kept mustache, too late now to correct his overstep and hoping, to judge from his expression, that I wouldn’t press him.
I did. “Do you mean without Victor?”
“Allow me to put it this way, Mrs. Buckingham: what he does is not what I do. I don’t touch sorcery , much less his brand of it. And therefore I have little to do with the—” he paused, eyes raised for the moment as he chose carefully his next words, “problems, shall I say, which follow him. You will choose sometime, if you haven’t already, what knowledge you mean to pursue and why you mean to pursue it. Some purposes are higher than others.”
“I see,” I replied, standing to walk to the chest of drawers and allowing my voice to grow quiet. “I know well what I want. But I don’t yet know the way to it.”
“And what’s that?”
It was a friendly enough question, at least on its surface, and he a pleasant enough man. I considered for a moment as I pulled out the top drawer, which proved empty but for a surprised spider hurrying to new shelter. I slid it back in on its rails, listening to the hollow thump of it closing for my hand. “I want revenge.”
Sorcery , I knew that I heard him mutter under his breath; by the time I turned to look at him, I caught the last vestiges of a clenched frown before his expression smoothed into polite concern. “You must have loved your husband.”
I shook my head. “I tried. But his will—whether it was a mistake or it wasn’t, the result is all the same: I have nothing left. I’ll lose the house in a matter of days. The case is mired in the proceedings of the law. But revenge is something—something I can do . And so, when I find whoever—whatever killed him?—”
“Understandable,” he interrupted: I could not tell from his face whether he was thinking, perplexed, or merely disappointed, but he was swift to change the subject, and swift to stand up from the fire. “I’ll see that Hargrave knows. And so goodnight, Mrs. Buckingham, if you will excuse me. And welcome—may you find whatsoever you seek, as we tell our new students, but may you first be certain you seek it!”
“Goodnight, Doctor Karvonen, and thank you.”
He bowed lightly and closed the door behind him, and I removed my damp shoes and stepped back to the mirror, savoring the dryness of the short-piled rug under my bare feet. I took off my mourning cap and black veil next, considering my reflection, and found myself to look mildly less disheveled than I felt: stray reddish-brown hairs had escaped my careful bun and clung to my temples and forehead, but I looked little more tired and embittered than when I set out into the fog. I smiled a little at the thought. My brown eyes and my face were still my own—the face I had once overheard a friend of my husband’s call the odd crossroads of haughty and plain, but rather young for six and twenty, and not unattractive —and remarkably, as I peeled off my black lace gloves, I found only a light bruise from Victor’s iron grip. I wanted dearly to rid myself of my wet and rumpled clothes, to undress down to my chemise (which would have to do for nightclothes, if I meant to sleep) and lay the rest to dry before the fire, but thought it more prudent to remain prepared. I did not yet know which of them—if any of them—to trust, and I wondered if I ought to regret already my confession of vengeance.
The voices in the adjacent library became harsher, louder; Victor and Hargrave’s discussion of business had intensified, and Karvonen had joined in as well.
Surely it would be in my interest to listen, if only I could. I walked the bedroom from end to end along the library wall, rolling my steps slowly heel to toe, cautiously changing my footing when a board first began to creak underfoot. I could listen through the crack of the door, I supposed, but the sound would have to carry down the hall, which was likely no improvement. No, I would do better to find another way.
And then I did.
Their voices were clearer by the bookshelf, inset as it was into the wall, and as I moved one of the books to test whether that would help, I caught my breath: behind where the book had been was a crack in the wall itself, large enough to afford even a limited view of the scene in the library. This was a small success beyond hope. As I peered into the gap I saw the back of Hargrave’s shoulder not far from my vantage point—had he been backed up nearly to the wall?—and Victor some distance ahead, difficult to discern in the poor light, a figure made of shadow but for the steel flash of his mask as he turned to Karvonen.
“Another mark of your contempt,” Karvonen intoned, though I could not see him, his voice too aggressively composed to be natural, “for the Order, and for academic processes in general.”
“Was the amulet the goal,” I heard the deep rumble of Victor’s voice reply, “or the academic process ? Did you want the thing itself? Or another year of indulgent sighing over the hunt?”
“I was a fool to think, when I let you join us, that you would care for method.” Hargrave’s voice, louder than the others for its proximity.
“And a greater fool to think you merely let me join you, as if you had such luxury of choice.” Victor allowed a brief, terrible silence, and it struck me that neither of the other men dared break it. “Regardless, my method and my art are my own. And they are older and better-tried than his or yours,” he stepped forward, the sardonic edge to his voice making Hargrave’s very name sound profane, “Lord Hargrave.”
“Your method and your art?” This was Karvonen again, quavering slightly, and I began to consider whether the brandy had emboldened him beyond good sense. “There is not a single professor in this Order who harbors any illusion , pardon the pun, about you being anything more than a wandering shake-down charlatan and a particularly lucky highwayman who sold his?—”
“Charles,” Hargrave warned, “I do not advise?—”
“Your so-called art borrowed! Bought! Dealt-for!”
“Charles!”
I could see Victor’s great shoulders shake as he laughed darkly at their exchange: a malevolent, ominous sound. “And for all your derision, and your shared year of research and investigation and theorizing, and I deliver into your hands the quarry of your hunt where all the niceties of his method could not. Where you could not yourself, Hargrave.”
Hargrave snorted. “The amulet fell into your lap.”
“Perhaps. But not into yours.”
“And so you brought it here to make fools of us, sorcerer? To prove something to Charles and me?”
“To you. I did not expect Karvonen here, but he is correct that I have been fortunate of late.”
“You endangered that woman in those dungeons,” Hargrave added, “body and soul, for mere spite?”
“She asked to learn magic.” Another step forward. I saw Hargrave shift as Victor continued. “I gave her what she wanted.”
Hargrave gathered himself and stepped toward Victor, away from my vantage point, and it crossed my mind to wonder whether I should get out of Victor’s line of sight, whether even through the wall he could see or sense me somehow, and the fearful thought so consumed my attention that I froze in place. Even the indignation that should have twisted like a knife into my side, the notion that I was no more to these occultists than a pawn to play against one another in some reckless game, I held back in instinct along with my abated breath.
“Your logic,” I heard Hargrave pronounce, “becomes like your associates’. Contend not with monsters , as I used to tell my students, lest ye become monsters . And yet you took her down into that world.”
“With or without me, he would have come for her in time.”
As I wondered who he was, I thought I heard Karvonen mutter something to himself.
“But you could stop him,” I saw the shadows change as Karvonen moved nearly into my field of view, “couldn’t you, sorcerer ?”
“Charles,” Hargrave warned.
“You,” Karvonen sneered, “you and your damned, demonic art?—”
The lights went out in the library: all of them at once, every candle plunged into blackness, and in some strange freak of instinct I clapped my hand over the crack in the wall, in fear of the glowing light of my guest quarters somehow catching their attention through the gap. Inside my hand and through my marrow I felt, impossibly, in the stark stillness of Hargrave’s house the sudden surge of a sensation I did not understand—something like a rush of wind that pierced to the bone yet left no sense of pressure on the skin—no, not wind but water, more impossible yet, as if I were trapped standing against the inexorable swell of a black wave that warped the very equilibrium of nature. Before my eyes was a fleeting heat distortion as the world seemed to pass briefly above a candle flame; I felt a tingling twinge of vertigo, a turn in the depths of my stomach, and I staggered back and sat down heavily on the bed, wondering if I were going to be sick.
With my head in my hands I thought I heard Karvonen cursing and forced myself up—the brunt of the sensation had passed, though I had a lingering unsteadiness, a vague nauseous unease from the memory of the shock of it—and I remembered the light, the crack in the wall.
As I hurriedly shoved the book back where it had been, covering the break and its faint firelight from the library hearth, I could still hear Victor’s voice. “And so, Hargrave,” a pause, “Karvonen,” another, “until we meet again. A pleasant night, even now, for a walk in the fog. I would tip my hat, if I had worn one.”
“Curse you again,” Charles murmured, coughed, and forced the rest of his words through what sounded like a mix of physical discomfort and deep chagrin. “Curse you again—for using magic for—for this .”
Magic. I knew it, knew it could have been nothing else—but to hear him say it, to know beyond any persistent doubt that I had felt magic , no matter how unsettling, sent a thrill coursing through my nerves.
“Is that all?” Victor’s deep voice rumbled.
“One more thing.”
“Yes, Doctor Karvonen?” There was a wickedness in the way Victor enunciated the name.
I could hear Karvonen swallow his pride, and perhaps some part of his most recent meal. “Do you know what that amulet is?”
“Yes, Doctor Karvonen.”
“And?”
“It’s the Talisman of Thoth.”