11. The Library
Chapter 11
The Library
I must have moved to push myself up from the midst of the circle of candles on the stone floor, or begun to do so, because—as if belatedly conceding to gentlemanly behavior—Victor extended an open hand down to me, the movement swift and firm. “Do not touch the ash more than is necessary.”
“Was something burnt during the banishment, sir?” I set my hand in his, but scarcely got a chance to hold on before he pulled me effortlessly to my feet, and I felt again for the moment that inexorable force of his iron strength.
“In a manner of speaking. Follow me.” He bent down to gather the bottles into his pack, slung it over his shoulder, then picked up the cauldron and walked toward the door, his gaze more strictly ahead once he was satisfied that I walked behind him. I felt a familiar twinge of unease through my body as the room went dark behind us—he must have forced the candles out—and once we were in the hallway, he shifted his grip on the cauldron and pulled the door shut with his hand.
The lock clicked into place. As my eyes drifted up to the lintel, the grotesque face of the gargoyle seemed to smile.
“By design and necessity, that room is the least protected.”
“To allow for the—” I paused, considering my words. “The comings and goings?”
“The arrival and departure of such disprites as I choose to summon. Yet, given that what once was common propriety in such matters has diminished of late—visitors arriving uninvited, unannounced—I prefer, for my sake and yours, to double-lock.”
With the cauldron under one arm, he reached his free hand into his bag; I saw that his finger was blackened as he traced a sign of protection onto the door in some kind of dark dust, murmuring under his breath in a language I did not know.
“I thought one should not touch?—”
“You asked me if something was burnt during the banishment. Yes: the thing I banished, partially. The ash is detritus left by certain varieties of spirits, particularly corporeal disprites when they are physically banished. This,” he rubbed the black powder between his fingers, “is a little ash I collected from inside, mixed with iron powder. A mere mill-soot to us. But disprites cannot abide iron: its presence repels them, and its touch burns. And so,” he chuckled quietly, low and dark, “the combination sends a particularly uncomfortable message.”
He proceeded down the hallway; I caught up my black skirts and walked at his side.
“What was the thing you banished, sir? The thing that attacked Greycliff?”
“He called himself Balnock of the Tylwyth Teg . The latter is Fair Folk —faeries—in Welsh, and his use of that language made me suspect at first that he had come for Lloyd. In any event,” Victor set the cauldron and his pack down beside a door, holding it open for me to walk inside, “I have seldom seen this Balnock before, and he did not know me well, to judge by his strategy against me. A would-be opportunist of no particular power.”
I stepped past Victor and into the room, and as he pulled the door to a close behind us, I realized from the nature of the light that he had carried in a candle from the wall sconce in the hallway. The air hung close and still, and smelt of a dry, bittersweet must.
“There are aspects of my art I prefer not to perform in this place,” he explained as he lighted a tall candelabra from the candle in his hand. “Some of the scrolls and codexes are quite old, and better left minimally disrupted.”
Perish the thought, fleeting though it was, that he meant to grant me a reprieve from the marrow-deep disruption of his magic every time I felt it pulse through my body—his concern was for the bodies of his books. But my irritation was soon nearly assuaged by curiosity and wonder: as he lighted another floor candelabra, two candles on a desk, and more on fixtures on the walls, a full library glowed into view. I found myself surrounded by old shelves of yet older books and scrolls, row upon row stretching from the overlapping ornate rugs on the floor to the dark cave-stone of the ceiling, which was lower and closer here than elsewhere. The room was smaller than Hargrave’s library, but its materials were packed closer, and in a fashion less strictly orderly: books were laid on their sides to fill what shelf space was left above the rows of standing spines; some scrolls protruded further from their shelves than did their neighbors, whether as reminder of their importance or because that was the only way to make them all fit.
“Unlike some archivists, I do not have the time to indulge in little shelving games: presenting the student with a problem and then assuring there are no books she could use to solve it, for example.” He paused with a brief, derisive chuckle. “All that you see is yours to read. The only game is this: what you see here is not all. There is an inner library as well, accessible through this one. At whatsoever time you find yourself able to open it—tomorrow, next week; some years from now, if we should both survive so long—you are welcome to its contents. And while my preference would be for you to read this main part of my collection as you choose, in your own time and in accordance with your own interests and will, after the episode with that self-styled Tylwyth Teg asking after my apprentice,” he turned to his shelves, brushing a hand across the spines of some particularly old volumes before he seemed to find what he sought, taking it from the shelf and laying it near me on the desk with a light swirl of dust, “I suspect the hour might be later than I had foreseen.”
“The disprite asked for me?” By name , I imagined to myself: the thing that had come for my husband now came for Mrs. Buckingham —absent from that hollow night of carnage over a year past—and perhaps for the amulet she had borne. The sole missing piece from the collection of Simon Ronald Buckingham.
The Talisman of Thoth. And I could not help but again wonder why.
“Not precisely.” Victor pulled another book from the shelf, turning the yellow, crackling pages in his coarse hands. “Somewhere beneath the dense, dusty carapace of his skull he seemed to entertain a vague idea of the seasons and practices of the Magisophists, because he expected me to have taken an apprentice at the solstice. He knew I had performed the old rite to seal the apprenticeship.” Shutting the book with a dull thump, he set it on the desk with the other. “And, clearly, he intended to identify and endanger my apprentice to draw me into a fight,” another book, taken sideways from a lower shelf, he dropped onto the desk with a little less care, “taking me for another of these modern magicians whose art wilts like a limp… spine,” he seemed to catch himself, as if remembering his company, “when the tangible world incurs within arm’s length. An unfortunate assumption— for him . And so he knew—and thought he knew—just enough to put himself in danger.”
In his casual, belligerent pride, I should have thought him the demon, had I not known better; and with most of his face concealed by his mask, and nearly all of his body hidden beneath his black cloak and robes, in truth I could not confirm him as a mortal man. And yet, as I watched him search his shelves again, I took some small comfort in the words he did not speak, but that I had now come to understand: whatever the other world might have known of me, perhaps my identity as his apprentice was not yet widely guessed.
But small comfort that was, indeed: though so much had come to pass, it had not even been a full day since I stood before him hand to hand, blood to blood.
And the hunt had already begun.
Victor ascended a ladder—his movements were free and muscular, with athletic, purposeful steps—and rifled through a high shelf of piled scrolls, stirring a light shower of fine dust.
“I should like to know what he said, sir.”
He slowed a little, as if in consideration, taking more care as he tucked two scrolls under his arm.
“And more of what happened. I wasn’t there to see nor hear it,” I did not entirely plan to remind him of my captivity again, at least not at that moment, but the words rang in my ears too late for me to change, “after all.”
“ You. ” He made the word into an incantation as he climbed deftly down the ladder, and I willed my eyes not to widen as he dropped the scrolls next to the previous book and slammed a scarred hand palm-down on the desk.
The room darkened immediately: both candles on the desk had extinguished into rising threads of smoke. I looked away, diverting my eyes from this sudden passion. But I did not step aside, and my back remained upright.
“You are relentless, aren’t you. Single-minded! Implacable! As fixed as the proverbial Devil himself in your desire for one thing,” his arm darted past my side, but I did not see nor feel what the hand gripped, “and one thing only.” I heard him draw a deep breath behind his steel mask, and as his words slowed, their vehemence gradually cooled: “Magic. Magic . Sit down, Elizabeth. You will observe that I have pulled out the chair for you.” And so, to my surprise, I found that he had—and I heard him begin to laugh quietly to himself, as he moved another chair and sat before me, beside the books and scrolls on the desk. “Good God!” He shook his head once and passed his strong hand over his brow, as if he could scarcely believe what he had heard and seen. “You are what I wanted in my apprentice. Precisely the nature for which I had hoped. And so, for your relentlessness, you shall have the story more properly.
“Given the implied antagonism in the visitor’s lack of common manners,” he began, allowing his great, dark form to half-lean against the back of his chair, “as we entered the room we did not make ourselves particularly cordial: on my right and left were Reinhardt brandishing his stage wand and Walker with his bared kukri blade, though I had not yet drawn, myself. At my command we rather matched force with force, Balnock’s trespass and our aggressive defense. Nonetheless, in such an encounter it is traditional to speak first, in case either side means to seek a bargain, and so I stepped forward.
“ Vittorio D’Arco , the thing whispered in my mind—my name as it was first given to me and first recorded in their annals of transgression, and therefore the one which the other world tends to prefer— Which one is the apprentice, Vittorio? Midwinter has passed. The smell of your blood has changed.
“That latter idea gave him pause: he could not match by scent the trace of your blood in my veins to any of the students. He began to creep toward Lloyd, the loose teeth chattering in the black-maned stag skull that he wore for a head; I drew my dagger and commanded him to identify himself. He did, as I have said, and then asked again for the apprentice. Do you hide your disciple from me, sorcerer, to lengthen the legend of your tricks? Is he hidden away somewhere beyond this room? Perhaps one of these—your fellow sons of earth—will prove a more honest creature than are you.
“That is when Greycliff rashly but rather impressively attempted to take matters into his own hands. You had quite unmanned him in class, Elizabeth, with that business of wanting to stand and fight after he had said to run—no, do not apologize, even if you are so inclined: I asked you to compete, to outdo them, and you exceeded my expectations. Greycliff’s response against Balnock was his own, and his injuries are more or less educational, being impermanent and relatively mild. Making a man of himself before the other students, he tried to protect you by risking himself as a decoy: he proclaimed himself to be my apprentice in attempt to dissuade Balnock from searching any further. Whether because Balnock actually believed such a thing, or because he had given up on finding the real apprentice and decided to settle for a student, he attacked Greycliff, who held him off briefly with a binding spell before becoming overpowered. And that was the end of my patience, and of Balnock: I pulled him away from Greycliff's body and grappled with him, as he all the while announced between his infernal howls that he had me where he wanted me and I had fallen into his trap , and attempted a few paltry spells on me besides, until I threw him against the wall with little effort and ran him through with my iron dagger. Physical banishment. All that was left of him here was as you saw: a residue of soot and fog. He will not trouble us again in this world for a while.”
I caught a flash of the fire in Victor’s eyes as he rose to his feet with a renewed resolution, retrieving an immense black book from its stand before the corner shelf and brushing a cobweb from its cover.
“Were you hurt?”
At the sound of my words, Victor looked up from the tome with a terrible, slow silence, considering me with the full weight of his intent. I could not say if this time he truly was offended—angered, perhaps, that I should frame him in the new sorcery of my imagination as anything short of consummately victorious (and indeed, in the horror of the moment, locked in his hall, this tenet had slipped my mind)—or merely surprised, but surely I had broken some taboo I did not know. Beneath the shadows of his hood, I thought that something in the dark, fiery eyes looked almost uncertain.
“I’m sorry, sir. The sounds of the battle were horrible to hear.”
“A few bruises,” he shrugged one of his great shoulders as he released me from his gaze. “Nothing of significance. You read Arabic,” he changed the subject, relentless himself on this matter of his books, “do you not?”
I shook my head.
“Greek? Latin? Hebrew? Any of the languages of Italy? German, at least?”
“French, and little German. A very little bit of Latin. A few Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
“Your husband taught you the hieroglyphics?”
“No, sir.”
He grunted in faint disbelief. “He did not have the favor of the public,” Victor set the great black book back on its stand and climbed the ladder again, “though you will find that his work in Egyptology is appreciated among occultists.”
“I don’t doubt it, sir, though I was not allowed any appreciation of it, myself.” Something in the demeanor of Victor’s posture assured me that I had his attention. “He kept his work in a strongbox to hide it from me—he said it was not a woman’s place to know such things—and sometimes, when he was out, I picked the lock with my hairpins. It pained me that I could not entirely make sense of what I found. But I taught myself so much as I could. I suppose I have always been implacable.”
Victor turned his head in silence, watching me over his shoulder, and I thought I saw his grip on the ladder rung change.
“I don’t mean to burden you with my past, Doctor D’Arco. And I don’t mean to speak of it again. I simply wanted you to know the real answer,” I said with a quiet certainty, “about the hieroglyphics.”
I saw, rather than heard him exhale in a kind of contemplation: the slow, slight fall of the broad shoulders beneath the black mantle, its darkness brushed now with a hint of dust from books long untouched.
“There are various accounts,” he began, almost conversationally, as he resumed his perusal of his books, “in several languages, of novices in these arts descending into abject madness upon sight of their first summoned disprite.”
“Is that what you want me to read?”
“Unnecessary, and likely counter-productive. I summarized it thus, so you would not have to read it.”
“Thank you.”
“But, as you know, there is more than one kind of madness.” He put two books under his arm, then a third—a smaller one this time, which was some measure of relief. “Even I would have gone mad, I imagine, to be thwarted—restrained—any longer in my desire for the true wild of the world.” After descending, he dropped all three books in a pile atop the others, and I noticed that one of these new three was in particularly poor condition, its pages stiff and rippled with water stains from who knows how long ago. “I was about your age,” he said more quietly, “when I broke free.”
Being of six and twenty years at the time, I wondered at that. Even if (I flattered myself) he mistook me for younger than my true age—twenty, perhaps, to stretch my self-flattery past its utmost limit—he could not have been terribly old himself: he was too deft and too muscular in his movements to have been the sort of wise old man, as Hargrave was, that one associates with the life-long accumulation of sorcerous power.
I stole a glance at him as he stood beside me, feigning some sudden interest in the bookshelf behind him, and in the brighter light of his library I noted again that he was mildly disheveled from the fight—and that the ends of a single, thick lock of hair had nearly escaped from the shadows of his hood. I thought that it was moderately long with a slight wave, deep black shot through with narrow veins of silver, and I lowered my gaze at once for fear of lingering too long. I occupied myself instead with the books and scrolls on the desk before me, touching them to demonstrate my interest, discovering at least a few to be old grimoires—volumes of spells and signs for summoning—before Victor spoke again.
“When Balnock trespassed, I did not have time to ascertain whether you were ready. But with these volumes read and contemplated—consider all of them, yet take none as blind truth—and with some further practical preparation…”
“Victor.” I took the opportunity of his pause to speak, looking up from the spellbooks on the desk to raise my eyes to his. “I have but one request, if I may.”
He waited, holding my gaze.
“Make me ready.”