25. “Think of me, and be strong”
Chapter 25
“Think of me, and be strong”
None , Absolon’s harsh voice echoed in my mind. No goldenscythe—the potent herbal mate of mistletoe—in Victor’s cabinet. Not even a single, sickle-shaped leaf for Absolon to steal from Townsend’s classroom.
In the warming air of my room, in the beating of the rain against my window pane, the very breath I drew into my breast seemed to crackle with the taut quickening of Victor’s deep shadow.
“Then ready my horse,” Victor spoke firmly, swiftly, with all the decisive clarity of a choice that had already been made, all the reckless vehemence of a man driven by the fever of some inner fire. “Prepare my sword and pistol, my spurs, and my traveling cloak.”
I forced my voice to be as even as his own, to betray no trace of the sudden hollowness in my sinking heart: “Where are you going, sir?”
“I do not know yet,” he replied, turning back to me, facing toward the window on the far wall as if the burning intensity of his gaze could penetrate the curtain somehow. “But my Sight will lead me. The moon and the season are right for perhaps two days more. I can reach two, possibly three of the sites where once I knew it to grow—if none risk their luck in resisting me,” he continued, his conviction aroused to impetuous pride, “and if I ride like the Devil himself.”
Lightning flashed for the first time in a while. His masked profile was rendered inhuman by the white light; the vertical slits in the steel became the ghastly frozen grin of a blanched skull.
The glass bottles and flasks on my dressing table chattered in the thunder that followed.
“And,” Absolon closed the distance to Victor’s tall, erect form, bending around him for a better view, and I saw the misshapen flesh of his pineal organ pulse on his forehead, “the Magisophists? Slinking, creeping after me, while Doctor D’Arco is away…”
“Tell them to settle with me , if I make it back. And if I do not,” he paused for effect, raising his black brows, his head cocked in defiance, “tell them I’ll see them in Hell.”
With a raucous, rasping laugh of vicious approval Absolon gnashed his tusks, chafed his claws together as if whetting them to an edge and then pulled his black hood up over his short horns.
After the sound of Absolon’s rushing feet came the sound of the door again, and Victor and I were once more alone. No sooner had I seen him return to his chemistry than he was at my bedside—another unaccountable gap in time—and I became aware that I was halfway sitting up in bed, supported effortlessly by his strong arm and hand. It occurred to me to wonder whether my unbound hair was spilling over his arm again, and whether the covers had fallen down from me—whether I had no more now than the cotton of my nightdress to cover my breasts?—
As I looked down, the cool glass rim of a conical flask pressed against my lips.
“Drink,” I heard him say, his voice not far from my ear; I nodded faintly, and he quickly tipped the flask, watching the slow, green-tinged mixture slide into my mouth. It had an astringent, fiendishly bitter taste, thick and oily on the tongue, coarse with pieces of herbs.
“A more potent formulation of the preparation I made for Greycliff,” he continued, his voice taking on a sardonic twist, “and likely twice as unpleasant. Hold it in your mouth for as long as you can, then swallow slowly.”
The licorice flavor of the fennel ought to have been palatable, but it was too intense, overwhelming, and mixed with the bite of the other incongruous tastes and textures the concoction nearly turned my stomach. Just as I thought I would begin to retch, I swallowed—as slowly as I could—and then leaned back into Victor’s grasp, my eyes clenched shut as the viscous liquid sank gradually down my throat.
“Your hair,” he said, lowering me back down the pillow; I saw the iron-grey flash of his dagger at my side as he swiftly shore the end off one lock of my loose tresses, “and my own.”
“Yours, sir?” My throat was thick and mildly burnt from the slippery, bitter drink, yet but for that it seemed somewhat easier to speak, as if one discomfort had been replaced by another.
Another flash of his dagger, and I watched him cut an inch-long lock of his thick, damp hair, then knead his hands to mix it with mine. I could not make out the words he murmured behind his mask—words he repeated thrice—but I knew from the sound that it was a spell.
It gave me a strange pleasure to know that, in those hands, the reddish-brown cuttings of my hair mingled with the deep black of his, the scattered strands of silver.
“Were it not for the necessity of my immediate departure, you would have remained at my side—the persistent force of my art through you, combined with the influence of goldenscythe and mistletoe, would free you of that horse-face’s sorcery within a week—but now,” he sprinkled our hair into the same flask from which I had drunk and into another like it, adding something from his steaming cauldron to both, something else from a test tube rack on the dressing table, “I must imbue in you enough of my sorcery to last until I return—give you so much of my art as you can endure—bind to you some part of my shadow.”
He swirled the contents of the flask, holding the grass-green mixture up to the candlelight.
I swallowed to test the condition of my throat, trying not to remember the texture and taste.
“Your ability to endure my art has improved since our lighting of the candle?”
“Yes, sir. Considerably so.”
“The sensation of my sorcery no longer unsettles you?”
“Not nearly in the manner that once it did.”
“Then drink this,” he intoned with urgency as he extended it back to me; I sat up, bedclothes clutched to my chest in one hand, and took the mixture from him in the other. “The entire flask. The pain of your injuries will begin to subside,” he continued, the authority in his voice easing as he watched me fight to swallow the modified concoction, contending with the burning bitterness, the terrible sensation of the shorn hair brushing the back of my throat, “but the effect of the elixir itself may at first be overwhelming.”
Scarcely had he finished speaking than a strange feeling swelled within me, as if the sensation of his sorcery spread slowly through my body, radiating from inside me, slackening my strength—the emptied flask slipped from my fingers, clattering onto the floor—and I leaned back, expecting to meet my pillow, and finding myself sinking instead into his arms again.
“Take my hand,” I heard his deep voice not far from my ear, his hand closing around mine to the sound of a distant roll of thunder. “It will pass soon—but feel it, while it lasts. Let my art into you. When my shadow from within you meets my shadow from without, the temporary binding will be complete.”
Dimly, I felt my muscles tense: the terrible thought drifted through my mind that he had drugged me, falsified his purpose and rendered me helpless before his will—the familiar darkness of his shadow enveloped me, soaking in through my skin even as the effect of the potion began to rise into my head like a black tide. I wondered how long I would last until I was again insensible in his arms—but no—no—he had had his chance so many times before—a sorcerer who could conquer and overbear with a word, with a thought, had no need for this pageant of herbal chemistry—no need for the rushing of the pulse in his wrist?—
For a moment I was aware only of the feeling of him, the low resonance of his voice as he murmured three times behind his mask, the rise and fall of his powerful chest, the dark and heady scent of his sweat-damp skin—the way he shifted his warm grip on my hand—the subtle, secret stroke of his thumb across my limp palm.
I shivered at that touch, too faint to restrain myself from trembling against him. My thrill was not of fear, but of the realization that my fear was ebbing from me: that I felt safe somehow, even now, in his grasp—that I no longer wished to resist the sensation of falling under his power.
And then I felt a shift—a change—a welling flood not of intoxication but of renewed strength and vitality.
“You feel it,” his voice rumbled near my ear as I stretched lightly against him, “do you not?”
“I feel… strong, sir, after all. After it nearly overwhelmed me.”
He grunted, seemingly pleased as he let go of me, letting me sit up under my own power as he returned swiftly to his makeshift chemist’s bench. “Continue.”
“I think that I can speak freely again, or nearly so. There is some pain still in my legs, but less, and even as I speak it seems somewhat to subside. The warmth from beneath them is a comfort too, though I feel warm now throughout—overly warm, almost—as if some dark fire has been kindled in me, at once steady and restless. It does not smoke, but transmutes into shadow. Sorcery. Yours, and yet…”
“Mine, and your own. If you cannot feel it yet—some of that horse-face still lingers, after all—you will in time. Your shadow grows, Elizabeth.”
I nodded, trying for the moment to feel it somehow. I watched him hurriedly crush herbs in the mortar again, now that he stood at an angle which allowed me a greater view of his work. “I should like to ask you again about Walpurgisnacht, before you depart, since Absolon interrupted us the first time?—”
“Your mental facilities and penchant for inquiry have evidently been restored as well.”
“I should say so, sir,” I replied, allowing myself a small smile.
“Then ask what you must,” he said, pouring a deep red liquid from a small bottle into the mortar. I chose not to dwell on its nature or provenance as I watched him swirl the mixture, then dump the mortar’s contents into an old bronze bowl. A pair of monstrous mouths gripped the ring-shaped handles that hung at either side. “But be swift.”
“If your life is to end on Walpurgisnacht—three months from now, on the Eve of May—how can that be called a bargain with Gremio for more time? And if all Gremio wants is the Talisman, why not give it to him? You could send Absolon to steal it from Hargrave, or Karvonen, or whoever has it now, and drop it into Gremio’s hands—once he grows new ones—and live , sir. You could spare yourself the trouble of banishment.” I paused. “And of apprentices. But I cannot blame you,” I lowered my voice, but I did not let it falter, “if it has come to be a matter of pride, when my own mind has been bent so long on revenge. With all my heart I want to banish him with you—to annihilate him from this world by whatever means I can, after what he has done to me—but how, sir, can I expect you to imperil your life?”
“Do not underestimate the sorcerer’s necessity of pride,” he replied, taking a candle from the mantel and tilting it over his new concoction, allowing three drops of melted wax to fall. “Pride is the congruence of illusion and action, the union of the mind with its own fulfilled sorcery. But the matter of the Talisman of Thoth is not a matter of pride alone.”
He added a small amount of black dust to the mixture next, poured carefully from a battered powder-horn—I remembered the powder he used to trace a sign on the door of what he called his parlor; the detritus of a banished disprite mixed with filings of iron—and then a yellow-green olive oil, which he poured with his left hand into his right as he held both over the bowl, allowing the thick liquid to drip between his fingers. “I told you that the Talisman will not be the end of it,” Victor continued, watching the oil slip slowly through his hand. “Nor was it the beginning. The contract is a bargain for time, because it does not end until I fail to uphold my side: the span of my existence is to extend indefinitely, until I fail to produce the correct souvenir for Gremio’s so-called museum by his designated deadline, at which point my life is forfeit. I have purposely humored him for the first rounds—swallowed my pride, to my own detriment, in awaiting the greater prize: I have retrieved for him the diadem of a lesser continental noble, and a worthless imitation Baroque figurine that nonetheless struck his inhuman fancy. When you understand my infamy among his people, you will understand his pleasure in commanding me,” he growled, his voice low with resentment, rubbing the remainder of the oil into the scarred skin of his powerful hands as if anointing them in the venom of his own restrained rage. “In reducing me, under threat of death, to a serial procurer of novelties for his entertainment.”
“That scarcely seems like pride at all. If I may be so bold, I cannot imagine you, sir, entering so humiliating a contract.”
“Nor could I.” He chuckled grimly, adding hot water from the cauldron to the bowl along with the earthy contents—some kind of clay, perhaps—of a coarse hemp bag. A restorative scent of the outdoors rose into the room, like moss and leaf-litter in a pathless wood after a rain, concealing for a moment the sharp tang of strange herbs. “I refused him at first: he offered me my desire— time , an extension to my life—but the very notion of the price was an insult. An affront to my dignity as a sorcerer and a mortal man. Yet, before my final rejection, I asked to read the contract. And that is where I found an opportunity.” Pausing, he picked up a short stave and began to stir the thick mixture thoughtfully. “Gremio allowed an unfortunate loophole, loose ends left unbound and dangling before me like a hungry, slackened noose: in his own blind pride, or perhaps merely on account of not being mortal himself, he failed to consider the consequence of his own potential demise. If he were to be banished and sealed—unable to command his legions to destroy me when the deadline for delivering his next museum-piece comes—I would, as the contract is written, continue on in life indefinitely. Because he failed to specify that I would not.
“That,” he continued, “is the nature of the contract. That is why I entered it with every intention of breaking it. I will not live bound to his caprice, a servant and treasure-hunter at his whim, chasing obscure trinkets for the pleasure and amusement of that damned mule . But I can will myself to endure for a while in the game, as I have, waiting for the greater prize—for the moment to rise and strike.”
At the last of his words I thought of the silver scorpion on the pommel of his fine black walking-stick: the tail with its hooked, venomous barb arched over its long back, cocked and ready for the sting and the kill.
“And then, when together we banish Gremio,” I paused—the notion seemed impossible, and yet I believed that I understood him aright, “by default, your life becomes eternal? You outwit Gremio, tricking him into being unable to curtail your indefinite extension , as you name it—and unable to demand of you another wild goose chase after some foolish trinket—and because of an oversight in his contract, you live forever?”
“Perhaps,” he replied, and from the edge of wry, dark humor in his tone, I could not help but wonder if behind the mask were some manner of sardonic smile. He tapped the stave thrice on the rim of the bowl and then carried the mixture to my bedside. The few long strides it took him to traverse the room were quick, decisive, firm. “At least until he breaks free from the seal of his banishment, some decades if not centuries from now.”
“Yet I still cannot help but wonder: why now? Why is the Talisman?—”
I did not expect the word to catch in my throat, nor my body to flinch at his touch as he laid his hands on my bare legs, murmuring under his breath as he trailed his fingers slowly over my wounds. His touch was warm, his skin slick with oil.
He said nothing to me, and I watched him withdraw his hand, dip his fingers into the grey mixture in the bowl, and then touch my left leg again. I do not know if it was the thick, tingling heat of the poultice he rubbed into my broken skin, or his vital shadow within me setting my nerves alight, or the sight of his rough hands touching me gently in all the places where once I had hurt—but I heard myself make a small, soft sound of comfort in the back of my throat. I laid my head back into my pillow to compose myself—to allow that I had done no such thing—to look away to the ceiling, the better to hold back against the instinctual shiver that threatened to betray me and make my skin again tremble under his touch.
“Why is the Talisman different somehow from the previous trifles?” I forced my voice steady, as if it should at once prove to him that I maintained an unperturbed state and distract me from his ministrations. “You cannot remain yoked to his whim forever, but give him the Talisman and you could at least turn the hourglass again: survive past Walpurgisnacht, and buy yourself time for whatever he determines to be your next inane quest. Time to teach me, sir, and to prepare a surer strike when the moment becomes right. My vengeance will not cool for the wait.”
“Because the moment is now .”
The heat of his touch faded, and I heard the heavy movement of the bronze bowl against the floor; I allowed myself a breath of reprieve, guessing that he dipped his hand into the grey poultice once more. But I had no liberty to speak again, nor scarcely to think: he touched me again, his fingers circling around and into each point where Gremio’s claws had sunken into my flesh, rubbing the healing mixture in deeper. I felt no pain—only the tingling sensation of his strange concoction and the heavy, insistent pressure of his touch—and with a silent sigh I closed my eyes, fighting to listen to the sound of his words.
“Gremio has broken already a part of his side of the contract,” Victor continued, his impassioned voice urgent and intense even as his hand seemed to slow, “and in his incredulous ire at the events of this evening, in his new understanding that he is in dire danger from us—from you —he will break it yet further. And because, initially, when he assigned me to procure for him the Talisman of Thoth, I could find no trail of it—I thought it was, as you said, a wild goose hunt, a fool’s errand designed for my failure, all for a quarry which perhaps never existed at all—and now that the Talisman is found, I will not allow him to have it. To set it uselessly on his shelf, gathering the ashy dust of Tartarus.”
“It seems likely now to gather the dust of Hargrave’s house instead,” I replied as he finished with my left leg, beginning the same process on my right. “I remember,” I drew a breath, steadying myself against my skin’s helpless quiver beneath his hands, “that you told Gremio the Talisman was useless to him—useless to Gremio, I mean—and likely as useless to you. I thought perhaps you knew it to be of little value after all, despite Lord Hargrave allowing me to name so dear a price in exchange for it.”
After stroking the poultice across my right leg he began to rub it in deeper, as he did with my left: the same firm, slow circles with his strong fingertips, around and into each wound. Despite the coiled tension in his voice and his body, I thought that for a moment he must have forgotten the urgency of his impending departure—he took his time, his scarred hands growing languid and lingering, a warm wave of his shadow suffusing through me—and were he not my professor, were it not for the necessity of the imperiled vow I made to him, I would have surrendered the long battle against my own unutterable desire: a few moments longer and I might have let down my last defenses to allow myself to give in, to relax entirely, to melt into his touch.
“What I told Gremio was not entirely true.” He drew his hands slowly away from my skin, and the moment passed, but my nerves were alive in the wake of his touch. I blinked, fighting to settle myself—and then I dared look to him again as he took up the long pieces of clean cloth he had lain under my legs with the bedwarmer, wrapping me from ankle to knee in these new bandages. “The properties which allegedly attend an artifact of this nature are indeed useless,” he continued, “or nearly so, to a disprite such as he. As for Hargrave, he took a great gamble: he bet all that you asked of him on the slim chance that your amulet was indeed the one that he and Karvonen sought, and that it was as potent as its obscure legend implied. And despite his rampant disdain for me,” he chuckled darkly as he finished binding my legs, sealing the ends of the wrappings with dabs of the poultice and pressing his hands against them, “Karvonen, although fettered by his own insipid insistence upon the most banal conventions of this age, is a competent alchemist. I have been in contact with him regarding the results of his experiments on the Talisman.”
His words shocked me into full command of my senses: how long now had Karvonen known the Talisman’s secrets? And what was there to know? I said nothing, watching Victor as I waited in anticipation, wondering if he felt the weight of my gaze on him—whatever weight it may have held, however deep my own shadow may have grown—in some dim echo of how I so often felt the inexorable gravity of his own.
“Hargrave wagered well,” he intoned.
I felt my breath stop, waiting on his next words.
“Your Talisman, Elizabeth, is more powerful than you understand.”
“Then you want it for yourself, because?—”
“There is no time ,” he interrupted me with a sharp growl, taking his hands from my bound legs and rising to his full height as he looked to the door. “I must go. Now .”
“You could?—”
I watched as he whipped his head back toward me, his eyes burning in the firelight.
As I sat up in bed I held his gaze, my voice reduced to a slow whisper: not for fear, but for the distance between us, the coming separation, the dangers I sensed he would face. “You could send Absolon.”
“No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “No, it must be harvested by the sorcerer who administers it, both for greatest potency and closest command of its properties. In the interest of expediency, I was willing to attempt to work with a harvest picked by Townsend—a fellow mortal sorcerer, at the least—but a harvest picked by Absolon is too great a risk. And Absolon cannot ride,” Victor took the bowl of poultice from the floor and set it down roughly on my dressing table, the gargoyle mouths on the vessel’s sides seeming to champ at the clattering handle rings they held, “with such speed as can I.
“The rest,” he continued, laying a shroud-like black cloth quickly across the grey concoction, “will wait until my return: an unfortunate reprieve for whoever emptied my cabinet of goldenscythe. But a temporary reprieve only: there will be Hell to pay,” his tone darkened, “when I find the thief.”
“I’ll try to find whoever?—”
“No,” he said again, his deep voice firm, his words hurried. “You will change the bindings and reapply the poultice twice daily, dawn and dusk; you will drink a mouthful of elixir from the remaining flask each night at midnight; you will keep your legs warm; you will walk, enough to prevent stagnancy of the blood; and other than that you will rest, and accept so-called healing arts from no one else—the conventional Order methods will attempt to banish my influence—and refrain from any sorcery which demands more of your stamina than the walking itself. Is this clear?”
“Yes, sir. Is there any more I should?—”
“Think of me,” his dark eyes burned in the light of the fire as he turned to leave, and I watched a last flash of lightning blaze across his steel mask, “and be strong.”
“I will, sir.” In the moment I could not think of what else to say; I could not think even how to wish him fortune, or strength, or speed, or what I should now say if never I were to see him again. “I promise I will,” I managed as he strode toward the door of my room.
The words meant so little, and so much.
The door slammed shut behind him. I listened to his swift, firm footfalls in the hall until long after the sound faded into the thunder and the rain.
For the first time, I noticed his scorpion cane leaning against the chair where my rain-sodden clothes lay drying. His herbs and chemistry still cluttered my dressing table. His shadow still lingered in my flesh and my marrow; his scent still lingered in my hair.
I did not cry—I could not: he had fortified me with his art; he had made me too strong. But I slipped his old grimoire out from beneath my pillow, and touched the warped leather of its cover gently, and held it in my arms.
Atop the candles, inside the small hearth, the fires he lighted still burned.
With all my heart , I whispered to myself. I promise I will. With all my heart.
I cannot say how long I remained thus, in bed as he left me, holding his grimoire against me with my hair and the bedclothes undone. Nor can I say when I felt some unaccountable compulsion to stand, to test my legs, to walk to the window.
Putting down the old book, turning down what was left of the covers, I set my bare little feet on the floor, the thin cotton of my nightdress falling about my bound ankles as I rose. My legs held me—I was steady on my feet—but something about the small world of my chamber was strange. Perhaps it was his absence—his presence—the sense of him that lingered in the room and haunted me from within, quickening the throbbing of my heart.
I cannot say whether I saw him before my waking eyes or in my dreams, whether my mind was afflicted by some last vestige of Gremio’s poison or inflamed by the heat of Victor’s art—but I pulled the curtain aside from the window, touched the cold, damp pane where the rain ran down, and I saw him ride, the vision as visceral and as true as if he passed me like a hurricane while I sat on the stile of a country lane: he came thundering down the splashing mud and mire of the road, his black cloak flying behind him, his black steed surging beneath him; there was no light, no lightning to break across his ruthless steel mask, only the flecks of foam and fire from the edge of the slackened bit in his stallion’s mouth, the Hell-red ember glow of its uncanny eyes, and then of Victor’s own as he dared a last, desperate glance to me?—
And then the pummeling hoofbeats vanished into the night with all the speed of his wild rage, and he was gone, as swift and single-minded as a javelin hurled on high, riding in a fury to outstrip Time itself: like a nightmare and a dream, a passing storm, a black ghost in the rain.