Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

7. The Lair of Doctor D’Arco

Chapter 7

The Lair of Doctor D’Arco

Victor lowered his dagger and sheathed it under his black cloak.

“Doctor Victor D’Arco.” I tested his name, and he made no objection nor correction as he seemed to measure me, his fiery gaze lingering longest on my hands and wrists—the parts he must have remembered—and then my unveiled face, studying it for the first time.

“Your hand.” His voice was familiar: the same bone-deep pitch, the same faint edge of an accent I did not know.

I extended the selection letter to him and he ignored it entirely, seizing my wrist with a sudden, familiar force; I knew my danger immediately, but by the time I thought that I should try in vain to pull away, he released me with a quiet affirmative grunt and a satisfied nod.

“You are Elizabeth Buckingham,” he intoned, comfortable enough in my presence to turn and shut the cabinet door behind him. “Good.”

“Should there have been some question?”

“You will pardon the brusque welcome.” He walked past me, dark cloak rippling at his broad back, and after several steps motioned for me to follow with a curt nod of his head toward the stone archway before him. “I have had unpleasant callers of late, some of whom have imagined themselves clever.”

I looked to his hearth as we passed it, and saw on the heavy granite mantel only lighted candelabras of a very old style, running with frozen trails of old wax.

He chuckled darkly, aware of me somehow, or else I had simply missed a second backward glance. “And no, not a single calling card to show for it.”

I followed him down a long hallway, bare but for the gargoyle wall sconces, and we passed several doors along the way; only one was open, with what looked to be a study beyond it, but I took care not to move the candle in my hand, not wishing to draw attention to my curiosity. The hall terminated in an immense pair of heavy wooden doors that joined in a peaked Gothic arch, ornamented with a hundred carved grotesques and girded with black iron. It took some measure of his strength, from the look of it, to heave the two massive rings at the center apart. He stood with his back to one of the doors to hold it open for me, and I could feel him watching as I passed him and stepped inside.

The door swung shut behind us with a solid boom that reverberated in what sounded like a vast stone room, shutting out all the light but that of my small candle alone.

I looked up to what I could see of his face. His eyes were focused intently on something ahead in the blackness.

“Stand back,” he muttered, never breaking his concentration to see if I obeyed him. “Get behind me.”

I wondered what he must have seen, or sensed, and what peril might have awaited us in the dark, yet he had none of the urgency that once drove him from Witch’s Corner through the tunnels. By my candlelight I could make out the details of the back of his cloak, the fine black-on-black embroidery of uncounted ancient signs; the few that I recognized from my Novice class were all spells and symbols of protection. I heard him recite words I could not make out, the same phrase three times over in the same cadence and speed, and as the dark room burst into light I felt a surge of vertigo hit me hard in the chest and wash through me like a wave, leaving a vague and nauseous disquiet in its wake. I leaned forward with my left hand on my knee, looking to the natural stone floor to steady myself, but the unpleasantness of the feeling passed more quickly this time. It left behind a slight tingling, a heightening of the nerves.

“You feel it,” his deep voice rumbled in the cold air of the room, “do you not?”

I nodded, raising myself back to standing on my own—he did not propose to help, and as such I did not demean myself to solicit his assistance. He had turned to observe me again, a shadow wreathed in the glow of flame: around and before us, every candle in the room was now alight.

They revealed the vast, echoing chamber of what looked to be a once-natural cave transformed into the vaulted hall of some forgotten king, and I thought myself in a dim dream of the inside of a sandcastle drowning in the tide. The entire far left quarter of the room dripped with calcium formations like drooping ivory flowers and venom-slick vipers’ fangs, trickles of cold mineral water shining on the sides of long stalactites and falling drop by slow drop onto the striving stalagmites below.

Where the walls were not calcified, they were hung with immense tapestries, in fine condition for their age, and before them full suits of knights’ armor stood sentinel, flickering in the light of great golden chandeliers. He led me toward the table at the far end of the great hall, past the empty knights—their hollowness was a ghostly contrast to the solid presence of Victor walking beside me, the sense that the black robes veiled hard muscle and heavy bone—and I could not help that my eyes lingered on the lower halves of their steel helmets as I thought of Victor’s mask.

The table matched the doors: the heavy wood, the iron, the twisting figures of man and monster. He pulled out a chair for me and set a fire in the towering hearth—the place for the fire itself, I noted with some consternation, was inside the gaping mouth of a great gargoyle face—and sat down himself with his back to the flames. His immense high-backed chair for all the world resembled a wooden throne, and I wondered if indeed it might have been, and which king he must have ruined to steal it.

The selection letter was warped now for the dampness of my hand. I set my candle on the table to my side and clutched the letter in my lap as I looked to my professor before me.

My professor . I nearly laughed for so mundane an appellation. The flames danced in a devil’s mouth behind his throne, and I thought that I rather sat before some warlord of Hell.

“You will grow more accustomed to the feeling of it,” he continued where he left off, “after a while. Those who feel nothing have no capacity for it. Those who lose their minds or become violently ill will likely never master it. But you,” he shifted in his chair, leaning slightly back against one carven arm, “might show some promise.”

“I’m glad to know it, sir. Is this the sort of magic I will study? The Council seems to have named me a Novice Sorceress, yet I know so little of?—”

“In part,” he interrupted. “And as a general rule, you would be wise to mistrust anything which calls itself a Council .”

I paused, waiting for him, but he said no more. Without my black mourning veil, and in better light, I could see somewhat more of him than I had before: the half-mask that obscured so much of his face, now so clearly to me (and so strangely) part of a knight’s helmet, was a fine piece of metalwork, engraved between its skull-like vertical slits with twisting filigree of leafy vines that curled down the metal throat and disappeared into the cloak and black robes. “And the rest of the magic? If that feeling is part of it?”

“I deal with spirits. Surely,” a tone of bitter amusement crept into his voice, “someone must have warned you?”

“Augustus Rothfield said you summon demons.”

“Augustus Rothfield is afraid of his own damned monocle. But—for once—he is not wrong. Spirits both disembodied and corporeal, disprites, demons , if you prefer the word; faeries , should you be feeling particularly genteel. In any event, you have an intriguing talent in summoning.”

Summoning. Of course. I felt myself tense as I fought back a faint, cold tremor. Was he there, really there, last night when I cast my circle in ash? Was that vanishing apparition of his form—moon-white skull and all—something more than the feverish vision of a dream?

“So boldly cast, Mrs. Buckingham, and now so demurely remembered?”

“Elizabeth, if you please.” It was so paltry and domestic a thing, to sit across from this haunting sorcerer in his dark domain and yet assert my preference for the impropriety of him calling me by my Christian name instead of the surname that had belonged to my husband: a latent, instinctive expression of the nerves I thought that I had mastered. “I don’t know precisely what I did, sir.”

“I can show you.”

“I would like that.”

Something in my tone must have amused him again: he seemed first to chuckle quietly—an ominous, sinister sound—and then to relax, leaning deeper against the arm of his throne with his elbow on the wood and his hooded head half supported by his loose fist. But his eyes never left me. There was an effortless arrogance in his posture, a dominant confidence somehow more commanding for its slip in strict formality. And yet, seeing him in his relative ease, I felt myself a touch more inclined toward him somehow—this dark sorcerer in his lair, armed and partially armored, whose face I had never seen—because it made him, I supposed, more human.

The fuel in the fiery devil’s mouth at his back crackled in a burst of sparks, illuminating long sharp teeth behind his throne, mocking me for the commonness of my presumption.

“You would like that, would you? And spoken so plainly, with such certainty. Your friend Mr. Rothfield thought he would like that, and he nearly drove himself insane. Broke my circle. You were with him just now—he was my apprentice, and I sense him on you—a rather young man to be wearing a monocle, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would, sir.”

“When he dropped his guard, the disprite we had summoned together tried to enter him through his eye. I ripped the damned demon off of him, wrestled it down, but not before some damage was done. Any visible scarring, Elizabeth, near the eye with the monocle?”

“None that I noticed, sir.”

He inclined his head in a slow nod. “Primarily a magical injury. I fixed it quite well—none here could have done better—but I could not restore it entirely to its original state. His vision is altered in daylight. By twilight or moonlight I suspect he sees out of it all too clearly. And so, as it turns out,” I could nearly hear a sort of wry, devilish edge to his voice, “Mr. Rothfield didn’t like it very much.”

“I’m not Mr. Rothfield.”

“No.” I heard him draw a breath as he straightened in his great chair and then leaned forward toward the table, the force of his regard bent on me like some great prowling beast crouching for prey. The dark sense of him intensified: the stifling closeness, the visceral sense of unease that sunk deep into the bone. I remained still, holding myself unflinching before him as I allowed him to eclipse me in his shadow. “No, you are not. You have no fear, then? Of me? Of that which you presume to undertake?”

“You could have killed me in the underground passage, sir, and none would have been the wiser. I am a widow with no one and nothing to my name, save what I have been given by Lord Hargrave, and that only in result of your bringing me before him. And now I am in your dominion, and at your mercy.”

“Answer me.”

“I don’t know, sir. You have—I do not have the proper words, but—a deep shadow surrounds you; I feel it, and its touch unsettles me. Yet you have not harmed me, despite every appearance and every chance. I do not know why you risked us both in the underground—I trust you that we were in deadly peril—nor why you could not simply have taken the amulet from me, if you and the Order wanted it so badly.”

“You trust me?”

“Yes. I think you mean, on the balance, to keep me alive. But I do not know why.”

“Why should I want you dead?” he grunted, straightening his spine and broad shoulders to sit upright in his grim, muscular majesty. “I need an apprentice. You show promise. Does that satisfy you?”

“For now.”

“Then leave me.”

I felt my stomach drop. “Leave you, sir?”

He lowered his voice, intoning each word as no more than a deep slow thunder in the air of his fearful, regal hall. “You must be insatiable. You must desire one thing, and one thing only, with every atom of your being, and until you achieve its mastery you must not be satisfied.”

“Magic.”

His eyes flashed beneath the shadows of his hood, fiery in the candlelight. “You would give up all else for magic?”

I closed my eyes, nodding. “Everything, sir.”

“You will desire nothing else.”

“Correct.”

“Nothing in this world nor any other can move you to temptation.”

“No, sir.”

“Demons are tempters. It is their nature. The strength of your desire will draw them, and any desire not fixed they will attempt to turn aside. They hunt me already for my transgressions against their laws. When I say you will desire nothing else I mean also that you will be celibate, strictly celibate, not for any precious notions of purity but for your survival and mine. Is that understood?”

“I will be celibate, sir.”

“Strength of imagination is our shot, force of will is our gun; in these are our power, and in these are the misfires of lesser men. Half-hearts are broken, scattered with their brittle bones, and what is left of them I have buried in these catacombs. My apprentices are dead because they did not want it badly enough, because the power of their desire was weak before the forces that would tear them apart. Rothfield is fortunate; but he is half-blind by sunlight and haunted by moonlight because his will faltered in its force. Elizabeth Buckingham, do you dare presume before me that the implacable strength of your heart will overpower the forces of Hell?”

Insight came to me in a sudden flash: the once-disparate details fell into place like pieces of a puzzle—if not all of them yet, then nearly so. There I was that night at Witch’s Corner, a widow in mourning attire, and therefore likely at the present to be celibate; a young woman venturing alone on the midnight London streets, and therefore brave, or desperate; I did not recoil at his uncanny presence, nor attempt to escape him, but allowed him to lead me through the dark; I gave up the Talisman to Hargrave, because greater to me was my desire for magic and for life, and those alone became my asking price; I conjured him in the guest bedroom of Hargrave’s house, using my rough magic to summon rather than repel his apparition. I was everything he sought in an apprentice. And so Doctor Victor D’Arco, or the Order at his bidding, named me a Novice Sorceress prior to my knowledge and despite the rarity of such a thing, expedited my selection letter, assigned me to him as apprentice.

He was behind it all. He had to have been. And he was therefore my great and only hope: despite the danger and his darkness, my dream of magic, and my revenge, must bear their fruit through him or wither on the vine.

“I must, sir.” I opened my eyes, seeking his, meeting his black, burning gaze. “There is nothing else for me.”

And, truth be told, I would have had it no other way. For all the alleged wisdom and mystery of the Order of Magisophists, there was not a one of them who had his sense of untamed power: he seemed at times a vast force of wild shadow, tethered to a human shape by some spell that threatened to fray at the stretched seams, and I wondered if under the mask and the black mantle was a human man at all.

Whatever he was, he nodded, and his deep voice sounded pleased. “Then you might survive. The initial term of your apprenticeship shall be a twelvemonth and a day, as is the tradition, renewable by our mutual agreement, supposing we are both in such condition to do so. Should you expire before the contract does, you are released from its obligations; should I expire before the contract, you shall remain contractually bound for the remainder of the term—the traditional mourning clause , as it is called, in contracts of this nature.”

Thus I should mourn you , but you should not mourn me, I thought with some private mixture of annoyance and amusement. He went on for some time regarding contractual specifics, and where I had imagined him only a moment ago to be some shadowy inhuman will in the counterfeit shape of a man, he seemed now to me halfway a modern London lawyer. Most of his clauses struck me as oddly gruesome formalities for prospects I would have thought unnecessary to itemize—the various hellfire repercussions for the apprentice if she should prove false, or attempt in various ways to harm or kill him—though I listened with attention, intrigued by a sorcerer’s interest in contracts, and wondering with whom or with what he was accustomed to entering into such macabre pacts.

I might have taken it as a slight upon my character and trustworthiness, to hear him bind me from using my newfound art to his detriment, and intercept at every turn all the ways in which, presumably, he thought I might slip out of control and turn against him. But that was not my mind: neither to attempt to defy him, if even I could, nor to find offense. I took it rather as a welcome into his world of danger, and as a token of respect approaching almost flattery: I was to him no poor penniless widow on a dingy midnight street corner, but a potential threat, a danger in myself, a sorcerous power who might one day surge into challenge with his own.

My posture was straight already, but I sat a little taller in my chair, and wondered if he noticed the change.

“Thus you shall be bound to me in apprenticeship, Elizabeth, yet not bound to my will: note the distinction. For all the strictness our particular practice requires, you will find me quite permissive on this point, far more lenient than certain professors,” the caustic disdain in his voice was clear, “who prefer to enforce for the sake of mere order and control. No. As I said: our power is imagination and will. Both must be unfettered. You must come to me freely. There is no advantage nor benefit to me in enforcing you.”

“I understand.”

“But I invite you, if you would, to attend my sorcery class. I do not care whether you wish the camaraderie of your fellow sorcerers of the Order—at your age, I would sooner have swallowed hot nails than purposely sought out the society of my supposed peers —but I care for your appraisal of their abilities, and you may find them amusing: a regular rogues’ gallery. I want you to compete with them, Elizabeth. Outdo them. Show me that you are stronger. Here, in this room, tomorrow at nine in the morning.”

“I’ll be there, sir—though I ought to advise you that I have not yet undergone the Order initiation.”

“Good!” he grunted, and I sensed a certain satisfaction in his posture and tone. “Even better. Then—if we have an agreement as to your apprenticeship?—” I nodded with some gravity, and he reached for my letter, “let us sign and seal it in the true old style.”

I handed him the envelope across the table; he opened it and unbent the folds to allow it to lie flat before him on the carved surface. A brief curiosity arose in my mind as to where he had in his grand glowing cavern-hall something so mundane as a pen and ink, or whether he professorially kept such things on his person, or whether I was to remain here while he adjourned briefly to his study—but I did not have long to wait for the answer.

He drew his dagger.

The firelight and candlelight flashed on the long blade, which shone more lustrous grey than bright silver; the sweep of the crossguard had a fine, archaic style.

“I, Victor D’Arco,” he intoned, clearly, his eyes fixed on me, “take Elizabeth Buckingham for my apprentice.” He pricked his right thumb on the edge of the tip—solemnly, yet with no hesitation, as if this were a matter of course—waited for the blood to well, and streaked his thumb across the paper. “My will be done.”

“I, Elizabeth Buckingham, shall be apprenticed to Victor D’Arco.” The words seemed suitable enough; I wanted to do , not to ask, not at a moment such as this. He grunted in affirmation and rose, letter and dagger in hand, and walking around the table to my side he laid the letter before me. I saw the streak of his blood underlining the name Doctor D’Arco , and extended to him my open right hand. He took it firmly in his left, but did not crush me: the warm, inexorable strength was familiar, the grip no longer vise-like but almost protective—almost possessive somehow?—

He released me slowly: only then did I notice my thumb had begun to bleed. The blade was so sharp, the wielder so steady, I scarcely felt its bite.

I passed my thumb across the letter, setting my blood streak under his. “My will be done.”

Then he helped me to my feet, and as I stood before him he set our right hands together in a sort of handshake with our thumbs hooked, the small incisions pressed into one another, some measure of my blood mingling with his own. He covered the back of my hand with his left. I mirrored him, though my small hand was dwarfed by his, and my fingertips rested on the low ridges of his scars.

“My will be sealed,” he breathed quietly, enunciating the words.

“My will be sealed,” I repeated.

I could not help but think that it felt like a marriage.

A foolish thought—beyond foolish—yet I cannot be blamed for noting the resemblance.

We stood that way for what seemed a long while, with our clasped hands and our mixing blood, and I would not have minded to stand thus with him longer but for a sudden unease that shook me with a slow, faint tremble, as if the sense of his deep shadow rushed into me all at once when my focus on the warmth of his hands failed to hold it at bay.

“I’m tired, sir.”

“Very well. It is not yet the witching hour”—I wondered how he could tell: there must have been chimneys or vents to the outside for the candle smoke, yet I could see no light from them—“and there is time yet for me to escort you back through the tunnels to Hargrave’s house.”

“What’s there after midnight?”

“Fog, and worse.”

“Fog?”

“Yes. Fog.” He released my hands, and I felt the air of the room cool them for the new absence of his touch. “Any more questions, before we go? Brief ones, pray? Our time is short, and this hall is more secure than any other place we will walk tonight.”

“Yes, one.” I wondered if it was my imagination projecting a kind of sympathy upon him, or if even in a hood and mask he had managed a look of mild exasperation. “You said I must not be satisfied, yet you never answered the spirit of my question. Why do you need an apprentice?”

Then he laughed, really laughed, a sinister sound that echoed from the cavern walls. “For a spell,” he sighed, sobering, “which cannot be performed alone. No, not a sacrifice—I do not worship the thing I mean to cast it on.”

“What sort of spell is it, then?”

“I will furnish the details when we have better time for them. Suffice to say, for tonight, that its purpose is to dissipate its object: to clear some fog, as it were.”

My room was cold that night.

I had been long away from it, after all—the meeting of the Order, the meeting with Victor, and my late, lonely meal afterwards—and now, as I lay beneath the sheets of my bed, the sense of cold kept my nerves sharp, my mind alert.

Lying awake, I attempted to divine my own state. Cold, had I thought? Yes, but not precisely any kind of cold I had known: my feet, my legs, my chest felt warm enough, upon reconsideration; the air against my face was little more chill than that room had ever been. An abstract sense of cold, then: I revised my assessment. And concentrated, strangely, in the hands.

No, I did not feel cold after all, not in any traditional sense of the word—I felt an absence. A sense of being apart.

I rubbed my pricked right thumb against the side of my forefinger. It hadn’t hurt then, and did not hurt now. The entire strange scene might have been a dream.

I startled myself by the notion, sitting up and immediately relighting my bedside candle. No—in the flickering light there was a small, healing cut on my thumb, after all—I sighed in relief, lay back down, and again snuffed the candle out. The memory was too vivid, anyhow, for a dream; I recalled too many of the words. My will be done . My will be sealed .

It was a spell, I reminded myself, and I am bound to him now: there was the logical explanation. Of course I should feel his absence. Of course I should think of him. There was nothing here beyond rational account.

Not even the absence of his touch. The heat and iron strength of his scarred hands around mine.

Part of the spell, I told myself; part of the spell. Under the sheets I chafed my hands together, trying to rekindle heat, hoping to fall asleep with them warmed and forget my foolish imaginings.

Imagination.

My hands paused.

Imagination and will .

Very well, then: I imagined my hands warm, and willed them to be so—but I felt only some faint spark of heat that faded fast, and before I was certain it had truly existed at all. Still, for a novice, it was a hopeful beginning. Perhaps, I reasoned to myself, I needed a more compelling vision?—

His grip. His touch. The memory came to me unbidden, before I could turn my mind away, and warmth rushed through my palms and into my fingertips.

No! No, not that, of all things. I shook my head with a sigh, staring up through the darkness toward the ceiling, letting the magic fade. A foolish fascination, and after I swore to be tempted and distracted by nothing.

And all this consternation over what was clearly the effect of a spell and the nervous excitement of a long, strange day. My entire sense was surely disrupted. Being caught within the tide of his dark shadow was enough to affect the constitution, let alone to linger in it.

I turned over onto my side, trying to notice nothing of my hands. I needed rest. Tomorrow was to be his sorcery class.

I wondered whether he taught in that mask, or whether I would at last see his face, and dreamt of walking with him underground into a dreadfully thickening fog.