6. The Gathering of Magisophists
Chapter 6
The Gathering of Magisophists
“Excuse me,” I whispered, “is this seat taken?”
So much as was possible, I endeavored to draw no attention to myself and my tardiness: I slipped in late to the Midwinter Gathering of the Esoteric Order of Magisophists through the back door of Hargrave’s great dining room, and (to my relief) I found an empty chair at the hindmost table.
“Not at all,” the woman whom I asked whispered in reply with a welcoming smile. She was, I thought, close to my age, her black hair gathered into a bun like my own. Her keen dark eyes studied my face and dress as a stocky young gentleman to the other side of the empty place rose to his feet, quietly pulling out the chair for me to sit down between them. “Are you new? I didn’t see you at the last Gathering, and I’m certain I would have remembered: there aren’t very many of us, after all—neither women nor people our age, I mean. I’m Iris Everly,” she inclined her head politely, “Magisophist of the First Degree.”
“Augustus Rothfield, Magisophist of the Second Degree,” the gentleman to my other side added, and I thought that his black goatee and the glint of his monocle in the candlelight would have given him a rather sinister look, had only his features been less soft.
“Elizabeth Buckingham,” I replied with a nod to each; I was not one to naturally smile often, and it would not have surprised me to learn that my conscious attempt appeared forced. “Novice of the Order.”
“It’s good that you arrived when you did,” Iris whispered. “All you missed were the Council’s opening remarks, and you’re just in time for the welcoming of the new Novices, so—oh, they’re starting.”
At the far end of the hall, I saw Hargrave rise from the head of his small, separate table: it must have been Hargrave, as no other in the room had a beard so long and white, though he and the rest of his table—the Council, I presumed; I recognized Doctor Karvonen, at least—wore some manner of ceremonial robes I had not yet seen. It struck me that none of their robes were black, nor were any of them masked. None of them looked like Victor.
And if Victor himself were here, wouldn’t I have felt his shadow in the room?
My eyes darted over the dozens of gathered gentlemen (and such few ladies as were included among them); I became intensely aware of the fabric of my own clothes against my skin, straining to feel—but there was nothing.
No cloaked figure looming.
No sense of disquiet.
I wondered then if he were seated at one of the tables, unhooded and unmasked, reining back his darkness as he watched me—I searched for the powerful shoulders, the black fiery eyes, the olive skin and the strong hands ridged with scars—his hair would be dark, surely, unless he were old enough for grey frost?—
“Magisophists,” Hargrave began, unfurling a small scroll with measured solemnity, “since our previous gathering, our Order has been joined by three new seekers: Theodore Connor, Novice of the Order. Richard Valencia, Novice of the Order. And Elizabeth Buckingham, Novice of the Order, Sorceress. Welcome, all. I cede now the floor to Doctor Townsend, for the traditional recitation of the Wise Words of Midwinter before our repast is served.”
But I spared no attention for those words, no matter how wise they might have been: I had not found Victor, but amid the candlelight and the decorative boughs of evergreen that graced the walls and the side-tables, something had altered in the atmosphere of the room. It was no manner of magic, that much I knew—nothing akin to my eldritch misadventure of the night before—only the murmuring of men and perhaps a few women, and the weight of the suspicion in my new acquaintances’ eyes.
“I must be mistaken,” Iris whispered slowly, gravely. “I thought that Lord Hargrave said sorceress .”
“I thought the same,” I replied, my own voice sounding tentative in my ears. “Ought I to understand that as a… matter for concern?”
“It’s unusual— highly unusual—for a Novice to be allowed to declare a specialization. Particularly that one.”
“But I didn’t declare it. I was never so much as asked, and knew nothing of it until now.”
“Stranger yet,” Iris sighed, considering and then shaking her head; I watched Hargrave’s servants readying the food at the sideboard beside the table. “I don’t mean to be rude, Elizabeth, yet I simply cannot think that I’ve seen a sorcerer or sorceress of a rank lower than the Second Degree?—”
“I have,” Rothfield interrupted from my other side, his voice dark and somewhat strained. “They’re dead now, mostly. Don’t mean to scare you off, but it’s only right that you know.”
“I shan’t be surprised if it’s dangerous,” I said plainly as one of the domestics placed my plate in front of me.
“If when your time comes you’re apprenticed to a good professor,” Iris replied, “it isn’t as bad as all that. And most of them are very good indeed. Mr. Rothfield had a poor experience, I dare say—he was apprenticed to the worst professor of the lot—but he pled for a change, and the Council allowed it.”
“The same professor to whom those apprentices I mentioned were assigned,” Rothfield added, in between bites. “The dead ones. I was lucky to leave with my life.”
“Whom should I choose, then?” I asked. “And whom should I avoid?”
Iris looked at me quite seriously. “The professor selects you , not the other way around. And not until you are determined by the Council to be suitable for an apprenticeship at all. But in the meantime you could take the classes of the professors you like, perhaps, to try to better your chances.”
“Usually years from your first initiation until you’re selected.” Rothfield adjusted his monocle. “Selections are twice yearly, Midwinter and Midsummer. You’ll see a Selection Ceremony today, probably in a few minutes or so, but this one won’t have a letter for you. June, at the earliest, and even that would be rather remarkable.”
“As for whom to try for…” Iris took a small sip of wine. “Doctor Karvonen seems to be nearly everyone’s favorite, though he becomes a bit strict when he remembers to be. Lord Hargrave himself will take an apprentice now and again, and I haven’t heard anything poor about him. Doctor Townsend has a reputation both for running late and being longwinded, an unfortunate combination, but no one knows folk magic better. Doctor D’Arco is the only one to avoid, really.”
“Doctor D’Arco?”
“He’s a sorcerer. D-apostrophe-A-R-C-O,” Rothfield added emphatically, looking keenly at my face to ensure I understood his gravity. “Pronounced like Darko . In case you hear it, see it written somewhere—and hopefully not on your selection slip someday.” His face darkened at the thought. “He’s the one I escaped.”
“Quite the reputation, then,” I said in quiet conversation, and took another bite—but I saw Rothfield’s eyes grow wide (one larger than the other by effect of his monocle) for what he must have perceived as nonchalance.
“Mrs. Buckingham,” he replied in a steady, grave voice, turning to me in his chair. “We’ve only just met, and it is untoward of me to spoil your meal with such unpleasantries, but I must insist,” he set down his fork with a meaningful tap, “on this point. For your own good—your own life and soul,” his voice dropped to no more than slow, enunciated whisper, “beware of Doctor D’Arco.”
“They say he’s a drifter, a rogue,” Iris added, “a dark wanderer, if he’s a human man at all, and he shows up like a bad omen at the worst times: if you see him, there’ll be trouble. That’s the legend. Some say there’s something in his past about to catch up with him. Others say he’s cursed, or a villain who took up his art for the most sinister of designs. I’ve heard it said that Lord Hargrave invited him into the Order to keep an eye on him, but I don’t believe it. I think nobody wants to admit that Doctor D’Arco forced his way in—that no one could stop him. Avoid him. Do your magic for the right reasons, and (if you are fortunate) he may never take enough interest to trouble you.”
“Which reasons are the right ones?” I had a reasonable suspicion that revenge was not one of them.
“They haven’t told you? Well, the seeking of higher truth— enlightenment , I suppose some call it—becoming one with the whole, you know, or working for the greater good. Not too much focus on the self, or on earthly needs and pleasures, and of course no revenge?—”
She must have read it on my face, or sensed it, because her voice dropped to a thin whisper, and her eyes seemed to fill with concern and disbelief as she faintly shook her head. “Oh, Elizabeth. Please, tell me I’m mistaken. Revenge?”
I nodded, at once resolute and blank. “For my husband’s death.”
“Against whom?”
“I don’t know. Not yet. I have to understand first what happened, then find whoever was behind it. And when I find him,” I felt my shoulders tense, “I hope, by then, to know what I must do.”
She paused, pensive, as if deciding in that moment between what seemed to have been a budding congeniality and never speaking to me again. At my other side, I felt Rothfield pull away.
“And all for him?” Iris breathed. “For your late husband?”
“No. It was a loveless marriage. This is for me.”
“Just tell no one,” Iris whispered to me almost imploringly. “Tell no one.”
“Doctor Karvonen already knows.”
She set her jaw and looked down for a moment. “Tell no one else.”
I said no more, regretting that I had told anyone at all.
We ate in silence then, and I watched with an idle, detached interest as the Selection Ceremony began. After a short speech regarding the nature and necessity of apprenticeship, the distribution of the selection letters began: a rather unadorned process, consisting only of Karvonen in his ceremonial robes finding the few recipients at their places and handing each an envelope. Time was allowed for each new apprentice to read his letter, express his delight, and listen to the quiet applause of his tablemates. And that was largely all.
“My personal congratulations again,” Hargrave, standing once more, declared, “and the congratulations of all the Order to its newest apprentices. Thus concludes our Midwinter Selection, and?—”
I did not understand at first why Hargrave stopped mid-sentence—why a hush fell over the room—why Iris gasped softly at my side, and Rothfield muttered something under his breath.
And then, following their disbelieving gazes—leaning over in my seat to see around the men who stood up suddenly before me, blocking my view—I saw that a door near the front of the room was newly ajar, and caught sight of a figure in a black hooded cloak handing an envelope to Hargrave. Not Victor, surely: this man in black was shorter than Hargrave, whereas Victor was significantly taller, and he moved not with Victor’s commanding stride but with a surreptitious, slightly uneven gait. His hand was too fleshy and too pale, and once the letter was taken by Hargrave, the cloaked figure turned at once and hastened away, slamming the door shut behind him.
Hushed words I could not hear were exchanged among the Council. The envelope passed from Hargrave to Karvonen.
And then Karvonen walked down the aisle between the sideboards and the tables, away from the Council at the head of the room—past the main student tables, as those seated there stole glances at the sight—toward, impossibly, the table where Iris and Rothfield and I were seated at the back?—
To me.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Buckingham,” Karvonen intoned with a solemn nod, laying the envelope down beside my plate, and in my state of utter surprise I had no presence of mind to thank him, nor to wonder why his congratulations sounded more like an apology, before he was gone again.
Rothfield adjusted his monocle, his eye behind it squinting as if he were straining to make out the faint shadows of words through the paper of the envelope.
Iris leaned in close toward the sealed letter. “Oh, Elizabeth, how can you bear to wait even a moment?” she whispered breathlessly, and yet by the hesitant undercurrent to her words I knew that she dreaded her own unspoken suspicions.
The truth was that despite it all—the entire unexpectedness of being selected so soon, the strange black-cloaked messenger—once the shock subsided, my heart leapt: magic, magic was to be mine; those glimpses of an unseen world which had so tantalized me in their promise would open to hidden vistas unfurling at my feet.
I took the envelope. I broke the seal. And with the letter inside unfolded and held close to my chest, I read it quietly aloud for them both: “ Dear Mrs. Elizabeth Buckingham, Novice Sorceress: It is our honor to congratulate you upon your selection for advanced study in the esoteric arts. You have been chosen for apprenticeship to ?—”
I caught my breath, laying the letter face up on the table before me.
Iris grasped hold of my arm, as if in urgent concern that either she or I might faint.
“No,” Rothfield muttered, scarcely audible yet deeply felt.
Doctor D’Arco .
“ You have been chosen for apprenticeship ,” I read again in disbelief, as if staring at the letter long enough might cause the words to change, “ to Doctor D’Arco .”
Iris began to softly applaud, and Rothfield followed suit; it was the proper thing to do, and they remained outwardly decorous even as their eyes betrayed them. “I’m so sorry,” Iris spoke in silence as she clapped, relying upon me to read her lips. “Elizabeth, I’m so sorry.”
“Well,” I replied, not knowing at all what to think or to do, other than to draw and release a deep breath as I folded the letter back into its envelope. “When does it begin?”
“Traditionally,” Iris cleared her throat behind her fist, working to compose herself, “you go to meet with the professor and discuss the apprenticeship after the gathering concludes.”
“Then I’ll summon my courage, I suppose. Make the best of it. That’s all I can do, after all.”
“You’ll be summoning more than that,” Rothfield replied.
“More than that?”
He paused, letting my question linger until he chose his words: “Part of his sorcery. D’Arco conjures demons.”
“Perhaps she’ll be taught only the theory behind it,” Iris said to him. “The symbolism of it, as a station along the path to?—”
“I saw him summon,” Rothfield interrupted, his voice haunted and his face pale. “I don’t care to see it again.”
Those were the last words exchanged between us for a long while. But with wine, food, and time, my shock at seeing that professor’s dreaded name on my selection letter faded into resignation, and resignation into curiosity. As I finished my dessert, I wiped the light, warm sweat of my palms onto my napkin. It was not precisely fear—and even if it were, I shouldn’t have liked to imagine myself afraid—but a kind of mild trepidation, a faint thrill of excitement, mixed with a perverse and morbid fixity of mind. My fate sealed, I wondered how terrible this Doctor D’Arco could truly be.
And, warmed by my own small, unspoken pride in having been selected so early, there was a reckless part of me that looked forward to finding out.
Rothfield was rather less inclined toward the occasion. He was assigned by the Council to escort me to Doctor D’Arco after the Midwinter Gathering dispersed, because he knew all too well the way to reach his former professor, yet but for his directions I had the distinct and unpleasant impression that I was escorting him .
“There’s the door,” Rothfield said as we entered Hargrave’s library, his face tinged with a damp-looking pallor. “There’s another door past it—left open during the day—and then the long stair down.”
It was the door near the hearth, the door back down to the underworld. The dank tunnels through which I had run with Victor, perhaps for my life.
Some part of my private bravado cooled.
“After the stairs,” I found myself staring at the wood of the door, thinking of Victor again. “What then?”
“D’Arco’s door is a fairly long walk from the landing. Third door on the right. Once you’re through his door, there’s a narrow stair down. Winds a bit. After that…” Rothfield paused, and I looked to him. “The tradition is to say his name, and yours, so he knows your business. But he’s also supposed to be expecting you.”
I nodded, changing my grip on the selection letter I still held in my hand as I watched him light two candles in their holders.
He opened the first door for me; the next was indeed standing open, as Rothfield said it would be—I tried to see, but to little avail, whether there were any signs of Victor really having broken it that night, what seemed like a lifetime ago—and together we took the long stairway down. It was colder even than I had remembered, the kind of penetrating chill that creeps up through the stone and through the soles of your shoes and into your skin. But the light of two candles made it entirely unlike the blind darkness in which I once was pulled up the same steps I now descended, and I was aware for the first time of carvings in stone of the walls, signs and figures which I did not yet understand.
“Like catacombs,” I said softly, hoping for a response from Rothfield.
“There are tombs down here,” he replied, taking my hand as we finished the first stairway and stepped onto more level ground. “But mostly passageways between sites of interest to the Order. Storefronts, houses, some theaters. Places like that.”
I nodded, forgoing the further questions I would have liked to ask: more important now was to listen for the footsteps I had heard here before. But there was nothing so far save Rothfield’s shoes and mine, and a faint, distant sound like the slow drip of water onto stone.
“This is the one,” he sighed, as after walking for some time we stopped before a door: the third door on the right, heavy and well-worn but otherwise anonymous. “Mrs. Buckingham, are you certain? It’s not too late to…”
“To turn back?”
Rothfield nodded, grave and intent, his monocle flashing in the candlelight.
I thought of the driver, the champing horse, the black fog at Witch’s Corner.
“I know. But I don’t want to.”
He drew a breath and nodded again, handed me one of his candles, and opened Doctor D’Arco’s creaking door for me. We exchanged our pleasantries and good-byes, and I stepped inside.
Rothfield shut the door slowly behind me, and as the swollen groan of damp wood and old hinges terminated in the final snap of a latch, I knew that I was alone.
No, not alone : but I was by myself on a narrow, rough-hewn stairway, high stony walls on either side of me, with the letter and my skirts in one hand and the candle—still the only light—in the other, anticipating all the while when I might learn beyond doubt that I was not the only one present.
I made my way down slowly, decisively, the report of each step of my little shoes firm and certain on the uneven stone. Whoever Doctor D’Arco was, I would not reveal to him the vague unease that began to creep up my spine as the stairway took a meandering turn. I would meet him, and whatever else I might find in this dungeon, with such strength as I possessed.
Light ahead, around the next blind bend: oil lamps, one on either side of the stairs, and high above some far glimpse of distant daylight, likely a kind of chimney or vent for the wisping smoke. I was close. I had to be close. I thought I heard the steps of a man’s heeled boots somewhere ahead, or to the side beyond the wall, heavy yet brisk, almost sharp.
A shiver ran through me: not for cold, but for disquiet, the sense of being stifled by a living darkness?—
And then I stopped, listening to the hitch of my own breath. I knew this feeling. Had Victor been here? Was he here now, haunting me, watching me from the shadows beyond the reach of my lone candle flame? Dared I even to think his name again, or to breathe aloud the inevitable question which now consumed my mind?
I resumed my pace on the last few steps, more resolved now than ever for my footfalls to ring undauntedly on the stone, and after a last sharp turn I paused at the stair landing to see a great subterranean chamber arise before my eyes in all its savage majesty: half cavern and half cathedral, grand and terrible, with a high vaulted ceiling that the light of the lamps and dripping candles could scarcely touch.
“Doctor D’Arco?” I remembered, somewhat belatedly, Rothfield’s instructions, though my voice sounded so small to my own ears in that vast chamber of night, too thin to echo from its stone walls. “My name is Elizabeth Buckingham. I’ve received my selection letter at the Midwinter Gathering.”
How foolish I felt, to speak such things when no one appeared to be there to hear. The last sentence felt trivial before the strange grandeur of the place, and as I awaited the response I knew would not come, I watched.
A shadow shifted beyond the arch of an open doorway ahead. I followed, slowly but certainly, and as I crossed the threshold I saw standing before a shelf of jars and bottles the back of a towering, broad-shouldered figure in a hooded cloak of midnight black.
“Doctor D’Arco?”
He turned towards me, the black mantle nearly whipping for the decisiveness of his movement, his dark eyes in the shadow of his hood burning into me as I felt again the ghost of his magic through my very marrow.
His steel half-mask flickered in my candlelight.
So did the long, grey dagger in his scarred right hand.
“Victor.” I breathed the name by which I had known him first, nearly a gasp, as I felt myself fixed in place by the ferocity of his gaze and his overwhelming darkness. I thought he relaxed somewhat at my voice: the fire in his eyes seemed to grow a shade less deadly; the powerful shoulders slackened, almost imperceptibly, in something like relief. “Victor. It’s you.”