Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

19. The Black Carriage

Chapter 19

The Black Carriage

How strange it felt to wear my mourning cap and veil again—how much I had lived since last that shroud of black crepe dimmed and softened the waning light of the winter sun. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

My long hair was twisted into its accustomed tight bun, the pins Victor had returned to me restored to their proper places in fixing its construction.

I wondered if he would notice I was wearing the same set.

It was twenty to three on Hargrave’s clock when I left his front door and walked down the hill, along the half-frozen ground of the path that wove between the green-needled yew trees and the naked oaks. I approached the oak I knew from that afternoon with Victor’s phantom—I could never mistake it now, not among all the forests of England—and dared to touch its rough bark, letting the black lace of my gloved hand linger just a moment as I passed, allowing myself to appear as if I leaned lightly against it to steady myself while I traversed the uneven ground beside its roots.

He was not there anymore. I allowed myself to feel the difference in the tips of my fingers as I tucked my hand back inside my shawl. The oak was alone, for now. Perhaps Victor had already left his underground.

I reached the great iron gate, glancing up to the lions on their massive stone gateposts as I waited in the lengthening shadows of the trees. Was Victor, too, waiting in those shadows, I wondered as I looked back over my shoulder—could somehow I have passed him on the way? Or was he to arrive in a carriage on the road?

The distant sound of wheels and hooves answered me. If this were he, I had arrived at the gate not a moment too soon: I was not even close to being late, but better for him to find me awaiting his appearance than for him to await mine.

Though it would have been better for me , I thought, to not have to suffer this strange anticipation.

Between my black veil and the approaching carriage sounds, I could not help but think of my previous ride: from my husband’s house to Witch’s Corner, through the bleak black fog of the midnight hour. The frothing, champing horse. The cabman hiding his fear. My desperate first meeting with Victor in his guise as a surly fortuneteller (as only a fortuneteller, I should have said: the surliness was not falsified), knowing nothing of his true identity.

And did I know now so very much more?

I shook my head, listening still. The elements of our first meeting were all in place—the black veil, the carriage ride into some arcane danger—only altered in their positions, transmuted by the alchemy of passing days into a new substance. I felt, in some intangible sense, as if tonight I would meet him again for the first time.

Indeed, I did.

As the sound of a carriage grew closer I drew nearer to the gate, wrapping a hand around one of its bars. The early-year chill fogged my breath, and made the touch of iron nearly like ice, but it did nothing to cool the instinctive quickening of my pulse: I saw to the west a growing shadow, lighted from behind by what was left of the sun, as if some vanguard of the gathering night came early down the road.

I needed to see no more to know that it was Victor, though the details of the vehicle resolved as it approached: a pair of fine black horses pulling a great dark carriage, their sullen, black-hooded driver seated with a slight forward hunch—I was not wrong, I thought to myself, about the raven on the tombstone. The carriage, as it drew near, proved to be of a style I had never before seen on the road. In general shape it had the stoic masculinity of a brougham or a growler, with the rear wheels larger than the front, though its longer, prouder, sleeker lines divested it entirely of commonness. It was custom-built, surely, or else so old a luxury coach that I had never seen its like.

Most likely it was both.

It seemed to grow as it approached, like the dark side of a waning moon, and after I thought I understood its size it grew larger yet, until the hunched driver sat up and pulled at the reins, and the tall black horses and imposing black carriage stopped before me at the gate. I could not shake the thought that, but for the size and better privacy of the carriage and its relative lack of ornamentation, the entire equipage seemed in its grim grandeur not entirely unlike a hearse.

A hearse, or some great black chariot of Charon himself, as if the ferryman of the dead had forsaken the River Styx to ride the dimming streets of London. It was either way some conveyance to the other world—into a night beyond the dominion of mortal man.

The dark curtain of the window on the coach’s flank was pulled aside by a hand I did not see; the black-hooded coachman laid his reins and whip against the dash-board and climbed down from his high seat, rather like an animal climbing down a treacherous rock. There was something mildly ominous in the fact that he seemed to find no need to tether the horses—not that I feared for a moment that they would run away with the driverless carriage. Quite the opposite: I wondered whether a spirit in the shape of a man drove by reins alone, or halfway by his art; whether the horses dared to escape, and if even they could.

As Absolon (the driver could have been none other) opened the door, I thought that I saw below the window a subtle design of a bow and arrow, nearly black on black—in the manner of a nobleman’s coat of arms, though strange in its lack of color—and I remembered at once the archer’s bow of the emblem on the hairpin-box.

But I did not linger on this matter for long: the firm, solid thump of an immense black Hessian boot onto the passenger step drew my attention, and as a great shadowy form descended to the road and the door was closed behind him, it was all I could do (the concealment afforded by my veil momentarily forgotten) to press my lips tightly together and curtail the expanse of my smile.

Towering before me was Victor, familiar and yet not. In place of his accustomed hooded mantle was a somewhat more genteel cloak, a bit stiffer of material and sharper of cut, but still as long and dyed in as deep a black—perhaps it should have smoothed and civilized that look of primal, unbound strength, but the short overcape seemed only to emphasize the muscular breadth of his body, the mass and power of his shoulders. The effect of the black top hat was similar. While its crown was rather lower than most, as was the new fashion, the added height made him all the more imposing a figure; the subtly audacious angle to which he cocked it on his head suggested a kind of arch defiance, a vague standing challenge to the world.

I thought I saw the starched white collar of a gentleman’s shirt between his cloak and the long black scarf he wore wrapped around his neck and up the lower half of his face, obscuring all sight of his mask. His strong hands, sheathed in the black leather of his gloves, seemed liable to snap his fine walking-stick in two: he carried the cane in his hand as he approached the gate with Absolon, as if he could not suffer it to impede his stride, and I saw that its silver pommel was fashioned into some unusual shape I could not quite discern.

Victor handed Absolon a key, and the latter unlocked the gate and held its barred doors just wide enough for me to step through. There was something mildly unconventional in the way Victor’s servant moved his hands—but they were human hands this time, as they had been since the Sight left me. I passed him by with a nod of greeting, aware of him watching me. He tracked me more with his forehead than his eyes as he closed the gate and set the lock again.

“Good afternoon,” Victor said, the muffling effect of the black scarf doing little to hide the deep rumble of his voice.

A thin wind picked up, rippling the edges of his scarf and cloak even as it pressed the latter closer against the solid shape of his body. At the rasp of dry leaves swirling across the road he turned his head slowly toward the sound, his dark eyes flashing with life, and he breathed deeply of the cold air like a hunter scenting his prey.

I watched him from behind the obscuring darkness of my crepe veil, unwilling yet to look away. Somehow, the civility of his sheep’s clothing only made him more a wolf.

“Good afternoon, sir,” I replied to him, the breeze stealing away some part of my voice.

“You are prepared?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any questions, before we depart?”

“Many.” Against the wind, I reached up a lace-gloved hand to pull my shawl a bit closer about me. “But I do not wish to delay, and they can be asked just as well on the road.”

“Very well,” he nodded, seemingly pleased, and I sensed somehow that this was not a place he wished to linger long. He motioned to Absolon, who opened the carriage door for me—but it was Victor who gave me his hand, assisting me as I stepped up into the coach.

I settled into the forward-facing seat inside, and in my ensuing half-second of solitude I closed my eyes and drew a slow breath: perhaps it was only the cold of the season, but his hands were warm, even glove to glove.

And then he was with me again. I felt the weight and warmth of him as he sat down beside me, the light creak of the black leather upholstery as he leaned slowly against the seat-back. I wondered that he rested his walking-cane not between us, but against his outer thigh and the side of the coach.

Indeed, despite the imposing outward form of the carriage—built, surely, in part to more comfortably accommodate his size—there was not very much space between us at all.

His uncanny coachman shut the door, eclipsing the wan light of the late afternoon, and we were alone together in the darkness.

Not an entire darkness, after all, I discovered as my eyes adjusted. There was some dim light through the sheer black under-curtains that lined the windows, framed in heavier draperies that had been drawn aside, and the glass of one window where both sets of curtains had been moved away. I reached to pull back my veil, deciding after some consideration to forego privacy for clearer sight, but no sooner had I revealed my face and pushed the long black crepe back over the top of my mourning cap than a strange sensation coursed through me—at once heavy and hollow somehow—and something outside the curtains flared to life, shedding light from both left and right into the black interior of the carriage.

Absolon had lighted the exterior oil lamps, both at once, on either side of his high driver’s seat. The feeling faded as swiftly as it had come, and I knew it then to be Absolon’s magia intrinseca .

It was like Victor’s, I thought to myself, and yet unlike. Absolon’s felt dank and earthy in one sense, and yet in another it was fleeting, ephemeral, effortless; it sank suddenly into the senses but then spirited itself away at the speed of thought, leaving little trace.

No, it was not so much like Victor’s after all: I focused on the feeling of his shadow as from the corner of my eye I watched him loosen his scarf, as if to answer my drawing back of my veil. His steel mask flickered—a gust of wind must have hit the carriage lamps. I should not, I thought to myself, have done away with my black veil so soon, but it was too late now to pull it back into place.

I looked past him, so much as I was able, to the window on his side where he had pulled the curtains back, and I watched Hargrave’s iron gate drift away: the great black horses had begun to walk forward, then to trot; the road rumbled beneath my feet with the turning of the wheels. And Victor’s shadow surrounded me, as dark and deep as ever it had been: not evanescent like Absolon’s, but thick and lingering, penetrating, leaving a slow-fading sense of him to haunt all that he and his art touched. His lair underground. The old grimoire.

My body.

I straightened my spine to force back the faint thrill.

I knew that some shadow of his art was in me still from yesterday, and in me now again. I could feel him on my skin and in my marrow—the darkness, the twinge of vertigo—but I found that it did not perturb me anymore.

Not in the same way, at least, as once it did.

I know that I did not mean to steal a glance at him—that I did not intend for my eye to catch his.

“Is my appearance so changed to you?”

I could not allow him to discern how the suddenness of his deep voice caught my breath. At least he had some touch of mercy not to hold my gaze, but looked to the window himself, watching as the passing trees began to give way to gaslights.

Had he invited now my glance?

Was I so forward as to presume such a fantasy?

But, given the opportunity, I allowed myself for a moment to take advantage. I looked to his gloves—his cloak—his hat—the side of his face, such little of it as I could see below the thin brim of the hat and above the hard line of the mask, where I thought I glimpsed for the first time the top of a coarse, dark sideburn.

It was nothing untoward—nothing I had not seen a thousand times in public on conventional men. But convention was no matter. Seeing him for the first time without the cover of the black hood felt strangely intimate somehow.

I turned away, looking with him to the window.

“Yes and no, sir. You are yourself still. But I have grown so accustomed to your robes that you appear now by comparison as if you were en route to a ball.”

“ Walpurgisnacht is some months yet away,” he replied, rather cryptically I thought: I had read that Walpurgis Night was a time of demonic revelry, but missed some of what seemed to be a wry twist of humor on his part. “But we will arrive at our destination in time to walk in the twilight divide between day and night. It is often the folklore that calls those disprites faeries —in the old songs, for example, that I suggested you read—which best understands how they, never quite one thing nor the other, haunt the times and places in-between.”

“I read a few, sir, and some I knew already. I understand the timing of our excursion, but you have not yet told me the place.”

“Have I not?” He turned to look to me with a mild tilt of the head—wondering, I was sure, what manner of creature rode beside him, from danger into danger, without so much as asking first for the name of the destination.

As we passed a streetlight, I saw his burning black eyes flash in the darkness.

And after a moment, as if satisfied, he turned slowly back to the window. “Crystal Palace Park, in the south of the city. The grounds of the geological display, to be precise.”

“The lake with the great statues of the antediluvian beasts? Dinosaurs , as I have heard them called?”

“Correct. You have been there before?”

“Once, sir, but only during full daylight.”

“And did it leave any particular impression?”

“A vague sense of unease, I suppose—only what I thought at the time one ought to feel when contemplating such monsters. An awe at their ferocity, yes, but perhaps more yet at what they imply of time and the untold mysteries of the ancient earth. They threaten to make the very world a stranger.”

I thought that I felt him chuckle darkly as he watched the city pass. He turned to me and spoke again: “Then it is a place between time and time, is it not? Between one thing and the other?”

“Indeed, sir.” I had caught his drift, and allowed myself to smile. “And the visitors come and go, never knowing—as I did not—that their consternation has any source besides the cement teeth of a man-made Megalosaurus.”

He nodded, but as the rhythm of the horses’ hooves slowed, and the wheels beneath us rumbled to a stop, he cast a brief glance back to the window. “Traffic,” he grunted in irritation, sliding the sheer black under-curtain to cover the remainder of the window glass before he turned back to me. “You warned me that you had many questions.”

I heard the trot of a single horse outside, and the sound of wheels catching in a gap in the paving stones before rolling on: some nimble phaeton or hansom cab passing us by.

“You should consider it a standing warning, sir. I am seldom without them.”

“As it should be. Should you happen to have one that does not require the security of my hall, yet necessitates a long answer—judging by the congestion of the street, now would, unfortunately, be the time.”

“Then I should like to ask you for the story of Absolon—why he made an attempt on your life, and how he came into your service—if it is one which can be recounted now. It seems that it might prove some further preparation for the disprites and the coming twilight.”

“You mistrust him.”

“Not so long as you are here,” I replied, and then wondered that I had—but it was the truth, after all, and innocent on its own. “But I cannot say I would entirely trust him if I encountered him alone, and under no command.”

He nodded with a quiet, approving grunt, shifting his weight to settle against the black leather upholstery of the corner: making himself a bit more comfortable, I thought, in anticipation of a long tale. As he turned himself more towards me in this way, his knee brushed the side of mine, and like a fool my first instinct was move my leg away to allow him enough room on the bench seat.

To move away, and then to regret.

Quietly I leaned back into the mild creak of the leather, orienting myself to better face him. The black skirts of my dress were against the lower part of his cloak, as they had been, but our legs did not touch.

I could not allow myself, beside him in the close quarters of his coach, to imagine that moment’s contact to be any more than an accident of our limited space.

“In the deep earth,” he began once he saw me settle, the gravity of his gaze fixed on me, his voice low behind his steel mask—I found myself leaning closer in to hear, “near the burning core, are the great warring city-kingdoms: Dis, Erebus, Tartarus; the others, I am told, have fallen by the wayside and been destroyed. Few of the people of the depths, occupied with their own politics and battles, have interest in our green earth. It is to them a foreign pleasure-garden, not of much use in their struggles and grand ambitions, except perhaps as a place to which to escape when one is on the run, or exiled, or losing, or has a price on one’s head. Nonetheless, they expect for it to await them, should they develop some predilection for it, and for it to remain largely unchanged.

“The people of the shallow earth, conversely—beneath the lakes, the mounds, the hollow hills—are our near neighbors in the world, and most take an interest in the green earth of man. More interest,” he muttered, his voice taking a darkly sardonic edge, “than do the larger part of our own kind.”

“Of which variety of disprite is Absolon?”

“One should rather ask from whence he comes,” Victor corrected me, the harshness dissipating from his voice. “They are all of the same kind —so much, that is, as any one of them is like any other at all. They are quite varied. It is more of a tendency in type and temperament, as one may say of a mortal man who prefers the countryside or the city. The impetuous, the furious, and the warlike test their strength and cunning in the great game below: they are commanders of legions, strategists and sly courtiers, dukes and princes of the infernal realms.

“Our Good Neighbors of the hollow hills are retiring rustics by comparison. Less organized, less driven and martial, more given to dancing in lone summer glades beneath the rising moon. There is some tendency for them to be lesser in stature, only because the more imposing of their kind are drawn naturally to the warring ranks of the deep earth—but more than once has some clever elf of the green hills clawed his way into the throne of Erebus, and in the north of this country I have seen the old war-bands of the fallen cities ride through the heather of the wild moors at dawn. Do not think that the dwellers in the shallow earth are any less perilous. They are less predictable—less bound to the conventions of the cities of the deep. And many, like Absolon, have reason to resent our kind. You have heard, perhaps, of the tales of toads trapped in stone and emerging alive centuries later?”

“Yes, and I once fancied whether there were more to such stories—the odd legends and scraps of folklore that persist and recur somehow but are never entirely explained. But surely you don’t mean he was turned into a toad, like in the old fairytales?”

“No,” he sighed somewhat thoughtfully, and I wondered if he smiled. “I do not think so, at least. I think the toad is rather a metaphor—or a crude pleasantry, a euphemism used in the polite attempt to tame a thing for which one has no name. Many years ago, when the summoning of disprites out of the earth was relatively less uncommon a practice, it was not unusual for mortal sorcerers to entrap such spirits in a tree or a standing stone, particularly when they no longer had use for them.”

“For breach of contract, you mean?”

“Sometimes. And sometimes to wring out a bargain more favorable to the sorcerer—to imprison the disprite, and promise him freedom if only he will accept modified terms—or as a mere display of power, or because the sorcerer had grown to regret his own ways and to fear what he once had sought.”

“It sounds needlessly cruel, if the disprite did nothing to deserve it.”

“Indeed. But such was the way of things: harm done to demons , so the thinking went, was ultimately in the service of good, and therefore no harm at all. And if the sorcerer were to leave for some other land, or die, or did not care to remember where and how the disprite had been entrapped?”

“Then he could be trapped forever—waiting for some other sorcerer to wander by, I suppose, or some accident to free him.”

“Correct. And so, as time passed and the profane excuse of progress drew mortal man to sever trees and smash boulders, and pave the old faerie glades, and drill into the green valleys and the hollow hills?—”

“—The old disprites were broken from their prisons,” I interrupted, and watched him nod in satisfaction.

“The so-called toads,” he said slowly, “were freed from their stones. But they felt the growing rancor of their kind—smoldering from the sorrow for the green earth as once it was—and they knew better than to be grateful for long.

“Absolon is one of these. I do not think he had much to do with the warring cities below, and perhaps less still with the people of the hills. He is a solitary man by nature, content to be alone in the black caverns of the quiet earth. And so you see,” he chuckled faintly, and I smiled, “we had something in common from the start.

“Yet he had been to the surface in his life: some centuries ago a mortal sorcerer imprisoned him in stone beneath this city, before it gathered and sprawled into the present wasteland of cesspools and blackening mills. It was that very transformation—the digging of the past years in particular; perhaps the tunneling for the underground railway—that shattered the rock and set him free. One can hardly blame him for being doubly enraged: firstly for the injustice of his long confinement, and secondly for the desecration of the earth and the ruin of the caves he knew.”

“I thought that I had read in the newspaper,” I replied, “of the unusual deaths of excavators working beneath the city—railways, or foundation work, or sanitary sewers. I cannot remember which; it was some time ago. Some were buried by cave-ins, others never found.”

“Likely Absolon’s work,” Victor responded, more grim amusement in his voice than any manner of displeasure, “though there are others I know who are entirely capable of the same. In any case, Absolon disguised himself as part of a work crew, observed me taking the foreman aside and offering a bribe for a special excavation project for the Order—what was to become the tunnel system and my hall—and knew me for a mortal sorcerer by the sensation of my shadow. A sorcerer concerned with excavation was, naturally, to him the greatest evil. On my way back to Hargrave’s mansion he followed me down a windowless alley, put out the gaslights with his art, and charged me in the dark.”

“Were you hurt?”

He did not answer me at once, but paused, and in the dim light I thought I saw some distant look in his dark eyes—then the sounds of hooves and carriage wheels started up, first from the vehicle ahead, and then from our own. We were moving again, the city street rumbling beneath us.

I wondered if that was why he fell quiet for a time.

“A few more scars for my collection,” he answered me in his deep, low voice with a sort of defiant pride, “nothing particularly memorable. As I said: he did not know me. He hit me with a decent spell and began to tear into my flesh with his claws and tusks, but I unleashed a surge of rage to flare through me until the touch of my skin burned him, lowered my shoulder and rammed him into the wall, crushed him against the force of my will. Not long of a fight. I wrenched him up off the cobbled street, held him at the point of my dagger, and offered him my terms. He accepted, of course, and I bound him to me by my art until we came to a place where we could draw up a proper contract and sign it in blood. And that,” he gestured vaguely with a black-gloved hand, “is how we met.”

“Would you have killed him,” I asked quietly, “if he hadn’t accepted? Or would you have imprisoned him again?”

“They cannot be killed , really—that is part of why the wars of the deep earth do not end. But a sorcerer can damage or destroy a particular corporeal form, and both formed and formless disprites can be banished back to the deepest realms of the underground for a day, or a decade, or a century or more, depending upon the skill and power of one’s sorcery. Some will return to seek revenge. Would I have banished Absolon that night, had he not accepted? Yes. Without misgiving or mercy. But as I have said, he has proven himself trustworthy, and to be tolerable company, and so I am glad after all that I did not.”

Some part of you is lonely, then, I could not help but think to myself, that you care for his company at all.

I nodded to acknowledge him, but I could not look to his face. I allowed my gaze to settle on his hands, the one of them resting now on the ornate head of his black cane: I could say I was looking at that , I supposed, if he asked, and indeed I did look long enough to discern its design. In the gap between his forefinger and thumb were two savage, scissor-like claws and the arch of a segmented tail, the hooked thorn at its tip poised to sting. A silver scorpion. It suited him somehow—but I cared only for those strong hands that had carried me. The warmth. The olive skin. The ridges of his scars. The small dagger-cut on the underside of his thumb, by now surely healed and gone, through which he had blended his blood with my own. All was hidden now beneath the black leather of his gloves, expertly shaped and sewn: a fine gentleman’s accessory, stretched across the hands that grappled demons.

Except for whatever arcane remedies he had worked on his students at need, laying those hands on them as necessary—Rothfield’s haunted eye, or the malaise of Greycliff’s elf-shot—I wondered how long it had been since last he felt the warmth of human touch.

Since last he had held a woman in his arms.

There was a melancholy to the memory now. It was warmer inside his coach with him, surely, than it was outside on the London streets, where the brief day faded towards a winter’s night: we shared heat, and light, and air, and the upholstered bench-seat; our clothes still touched, black on black, as if we rose both from the same shared darkness. We were half an arm’s length away from one another, and I thought, with a private amusement that faded into wistful reverie, that were we to hit a gap or a stone in the road, and I were to fall into him, he still was close enough to catch me.

And yet we were too far apart.

Was it only for my health and recovery, after all, that he had let me lie so long against his strong body? Was I truly so weak that I could not be trusted to walk back to my room alone?

Had he felt nothing at all?

I looked away to the veiled window, though my ruse was poor: from the corner of my vision I saw that his eyes were on me. His hand flexed on the scorpion pommel of his walking-stick.

The hands that battled demons were the hands that had held me. The hands that saved from the floor, one by one, the pins that I wore now in my hair with a thin, quiet, stubborn hope I could not yet bring myself to quell.

I wondered if he heard me sigh.

He was relaxed, was he not, in the way he leaned somewhat back into the corner of the coach? Improper, I thought, for a modern man. A sterile stiffness of spine was the mark of masculine virtue in the upper world. And we were together in body in that world again, after all; for only the second time since I sat with him across the fortuneteller’s table at Witch’s Corner, something more tangible than his phantom was by my side in the world above.

Hope renewed itself, albeit faintly: he was comfortable with me. Perhaps a little indecent, by the proper standards I had all but forgotten since my new life of sorcery began.

Not very like a professor at all.

“I am glad to know a bit more about the people I am on my way to meet.” It was true enough, and yet it was nothing, nearly a non-statement, an utterance meant only to assuage the strangeness of the silence between us. The monotonous sounds of the road were not in themselves enough. “I suppose now they will know about me, too.”

“They do not know yet,” he nodded, speaking in a tone so hushed it was only with some difficulty that I heard him above the carriage wheels. “But I think, all options considered, that it is better to address them in strength. Better to declare yourself to them openly than for some fortune-seeker like Balnock to find you hiding, and suspect us of cowardice. Nonetheless, do not give them your true name.”

“They seem to know yours.”

He laughed outright: still an ominous, almost terrible sound. “Yes,” Victor replied, calming himself into a more familiar tone, sardonic and grim, “yes, they do indeed. And they know it well. I was a rash young man, and while some of the rustics beneath the green hills may still account me a stranger, there are few in the infernal cities who have not heard the name of Vittorio D’Arco . I change it, now and again, for privacy or convenience in my dealings with the mortal world—but disprites are not so easily fooled.”

“How do they look,” I asked in time to avert another uncomfortable silence, “when you have the Sight?”

“How do you imagine them?”

“I have only Absolon, and your and Greycliff’s description of Balnock, on which to base my conjecture—and your statement that they can look little like one another. And so I should imagine a few of them like Absolon, in some ways,” I replied slowly, thinking, “and in other ways not at all. I don’t anticipate the dainty pixies of the paintings, sleeping in a cowslip’s bell, nor exactly the barbed tails and bat-wings and hellfire.”

“Good. Very good. Then they will likely appear to you much as they do to me. Though it is true that some are very small, particularly when young—and I have seen a barbed tail or two in my time, uncommon through they are. Cloven hooves as well, and those with some regularity.”

“I suppose I shall see for myself soon enough.”

“Yes. I suspect you will.”

I could not fend off another silence: I allowed it to settle between us, listening to the hollow, rhythmic clap of the feet of the horses on the road.

Cloven hooves . Not horse-hooves, then, I thought to myself as my mind began to wander. The hoof of a horse did not naturally have that goat-like, buck-like split. I thought of the cloven hoof of James Harris in the old ballad, the fearful portent of his true nature. I thought, as I listened to the hooves of the horses that pulled us through the grey streets of the city, of the sound of hoofbeats that seemed to follow us on that first night as we ran through the tunnels far beneath the paving stones of the roads.

And then I caught my breath.

We were chased. We were chased, after all, and that is why Victor gripped my wrist like a vise and ran with all his strength.

We were followed by whatever person—whatever thing pursued him. There had been no horse, no carriage on the road overhead. Whatever manner of disprite it may have been, I had heard the sounds of its own hooves behind us in the tunnel.

We had run that night, it is true. But the time would come, it seemed to me, when we would stand and fight, one of us on either side of our target, facing one another with a devil in between.

The purpose of the tandem spell, the spell for which he took me as his apprentice, was to banish the hoofed thing that hunted him. To void a demonic contract. To blast some grotesque corporeal form into no more than black ash and dissipating fog. It must be.

It had to be.

“Something troubles you.” The low rumble of his voice, muffled by the mask, was scarcely audible above the sounds of the road.

“Just thinking, sir.” I said no more for a time, but the expectation in his silence drew me, as he surely knew it would, to speak again. “Thinking of things I doubt it wise to name outside of the protection of your hall.”

“Then it is not wise to think of them, either, so much as can be helped.”

I nodded. “Then I will think, and ask, only this: are you armed, sir? Do you have your dagger with you?”

He said nothing, but he picked up his walking-stick, held it in both hands across his lap, and—once he had made certain I was watching—wrung it in a sharp, firm twist at a distance from the pommel about equal to the breadth of his hand. As he drew the two portions of the black cane apart, I saw a sudden flash of movement between them: the twin tines of a spring-loaded crossguard snapped smartly into place just above his right hand. He freed a long, thin iron dagger from its secret sheath, turned it expertly in his hand to grip the dark blade, and offered the weapon to me handle-first.

I took it from him carefully, trying not to think of how the black lace of my glove would brush the black leather of his, and whether I would feel the heat of his skin through both, and how long some errant contact might linger. But to little avail. After the transfer I hefted the dagger in my hands, only to find that its silver scorpion pommel still held the warmth of his touch.

I traced it slowly with my fingers—the long back, the venomous hook of the tail—but I dared not indulge too long.

“The workmanship is rather clever,” he grunted, and it was all I could do not to freeze in place. “Even the articulated hilt is sturdy enough for a fight. And so you see,” casually he reached under his cloak and drew forth a second dagger, this one the Renaissance-styled weapon that I knew, “we both are armed, in art and in iron—the latter the bane of disprites—should the need arise.”

A light sweat warmed my palm as I gripped the scorpion dagger in my hand, feeling its weight and its balance, watching the hungry glint of its long blade in the glow of a passing gaslight. I felt powerful holding it—powerful and fierce, and yet somewhat awkward for the novelty of it, unused to this new extension of my hand and will. “I’ve never used a dagger before.”

Beneath the shadow of his thin hat brim, his black brows raised as I looked to him. “The basic principle is fairly straightforward.”

I smiled before I could stop myself, and a mild heat found my cheeks as I allowed myself to laugh. “I imagine so, sir.”

He laughed with me then, something like a low chuckle, or so I thought—but when I looked to the blade in my hand and then back again he had already quieted, resheathing his familiar dagger in some hidden scabbard under his cloak.

“Do we pursue now such peril, sir, that you anticipate our need for such things?”

“I would not draw you into danger that is beyond your sorcery.” His words came fast and firm on the heels of mine, almost startlingly so; he had in his deep, proud voice an air of indignation. He held my gaze for a while with his burning eyes, turning away only gradually as the carriage slowed to a stop, as if reluctant to relent. “Not so long as I have my will.”

“Doctor D’Arco,” Absolon’s voice interrupted from outside the coach, accompanied by a strange knock that sounded eerily like claws scraping on wood, “Crystal Palace Park.”

Victor gave the roof of the carriage two solid raps of his knuckles in response, then pulled his scarf back up over his mask. “But I cannot presume that you asked out of fear, when thus far your nature has kept pace side by side with my own: to prepare, perhaps—so much as is practicable before rehearsal dulls the wits—and then to dare.”

I let him see me smile as he opened his hand and looked to the scorpion dagger, and I laid its handle gently in his palm.

And what , I wondered privately as I watched him snap down the crossguard hilt, slide the blade back into his cane and reassemble its parts with a sharp twist, and what does he imagine that I dare?

He knocked again, this time on the inside of the door, and in mere moments Absolon opened it from without. For all Victor’s accustomed morose demeanor, there was a bold drive in the way he rose for the door; as he turned and looked to me, the last vision I saw with all clarity—before I drew my black veil over my face again—was the sight of him half-silhouetted by the lights of his carriage and the fast-fading sun, his muscular frame taut and expectant with all the vital swagger I remembered from his duel with Forsythe, the fire in his dark eyes alight and alive.

“Come with me,” he beckoned as he stepped down from the coach, reaching his hand back for mine. “An adventure, if you will.”

I set my hand in his, felt the familiar heat and strength of his grip soak through our gloves into my skin, and let him draw me out into the winter twilight.