Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

29. The Madman’s Knife

Chapter 29

The Madman’s Knife

“Buckingham?”

That was Reinhardt’s voice, and at its sound I straightened, drawing in a breath.

“You found the book?”

“Yes, thank you,” I replied. As I turned back to face the three of them, Mistress Savoy smiled blandly—but by her side I saw Reinhardt set his jaw, and Chesterton’s eyes widen as he took an instinctive step back.

I wondered what they felt of my shadow—Victor’s shadow—our sorcery entwined, arisen from its rest within me in the heat of my ire.

I wondered what they saw in my eyes.

A vague pain spread through my legs, masked until that moment by shadow and wrath, and I let myself lean upon the scorpion cane once again.

“I should like to return home now,” I said plainly, though my own voice sounded plaintive in my ears. “I have what I wanted, and I begin to tire from these wounds. The hour is becoming late.”

“Of course,” Reinhardt nodded, stepping toward me and extending a hand.

His gesture was not, I thought, without hesitation; not long ago I would have set my hand in his, eager to test his trepidation at the touch of my present state, but my mind now was too restless, and my legs troubled me. Not the pain itself, which was slight as yet, but the unnerving fact that I felt pain at all: I worried that midnight approached too quickly, that I had expended too much of Victor’s art in the long walks, the stress of the adventure, the excitation of my futile fury.

I remembered the glass flask on my dressing table, filled with the bitter elixir that bound us—our mingled hair suspended in the thick, green liquid—and whether by some design of Victor’s, or the thirst of his shadow or my own, I knew that I needed it soon.

As I had willed myself to find that book, so in that moment did I will myself home: I created in my mind the chill of my chamber, the little hearth just beginning its work of warming the air after my hours away. The ceiling cobwebs quivered in the rising heat. The sheets were still twisted on the bed from when he tended to my hurts. The elixir awaited beside the old bowl with the poultice, and a driving downpour beat against the glass of the windowpane, as if the rain through which Victor had ridden down the night would rise again to spirit him back to me.

Into that imagined vision of my room I stepped in my mind, in my heart, and all that was left was for my body to follow.

But a long trek through the dark earth awaited me—how long, I did not know—and I was eager to bid the spiritualist shop a second farewell, this time as its friend, at once more and less forlorn than when we parted last.

“I can walk,” I said to Reinhardt quietly, and he drew away his hand. “But thank you. I will have to walk, if we are to return.”

“I would hail us a cab,” he offered. After a pause, he seemed to resolve that he was yet more serious, and added with some emphasis: “And pay for it.”

I considered—truly, I considered—but then I slowly shook my head. “I had a bad feeling about taking a carriage here, to Witch’s Corner, and I find that I feel little better about taking one home. My senses have been altered; this morning I foresaw, if only by seconds, an event which I could never otherwise have guessed. And then I chose aright, or so I believe, in electing to come here by the route that I did.”

“And now you have an auspicious feeling about taking the tunnels back?”

I drew a breath, closing my eyes for a moment in endeavor to enhance my senses, but to little avail. “I cannot tell anymore. Even as we speak, I feel the shadow that granted my foresight fading from me.”

I did not know if Reinhardt looked more troubled or relieved, and wondered whether he knew which it was himself.

“Yet it feels better than the cab, at least,” I continued. “That much I know.”

“Then we will trust in that.”

“Reinhardt,” I added as we set out across the small parlor toward the celestial curtains, and I took care this time to step over the slight roll in the tattered fringe of the rug that once had tripped me.

He turned back, his brows raised.

“Is this a library,” I whispered to him, “and do I simply take the book with me?” I meant to conduct myself properly, if I could do so and still keep my dubious, hard-won prize; yet if to do both at once were not possible, then I meant to keep the volume regardless, and thought it best not to draw attention to this design.

“Cyril,” Reinhardt called to his friend with a cock of his head, “what’s for sale here nowadays?”

“Nothing if you’re in the Order; everything if you’re not.”

“Oh hot Hell,” he muttered under his breath. “How does Buckingham take her book, then?”

“Books are to be sold to non-Order customers only; if she wants it for a while, she has to get herself onto the approved borrowers’ list, be endorsed by a professor, sign her name and date on the sheet for outbound inventory?—”

“Turn around thrice clockwise,” Reinhardt finished Chesterton’s sentence with an obvious, irritated sarcasm, “recite two scenes of Faust backwards from memory?—”

“—Three scenes, Luther; they amended it yesterday.”

“Surely,” Reinhardt snorted in solidarity, fished around in a pocket inside of his tailcoat, and tossed a small pouch onto the wax-spattered black velvet of the fortunetelling table. Coins, certainly: the bundle landed heavily with a metallic jangle. “Good thing I’m not in the Order anymore—exile has its advantages.”

“I shall pay you back,” I said to him immediately, grateful for his kindness, “as soon as I get back to?—”

He waved me off with an open hand. “You shouldn’t have paid for the Manfredini ticket. Consider us even.”

I thanked him, and he acknowledged me with a shrug and a cautious grin before turning to Chesterton and Savoy with an overly formal bow. “And now I must bid you both a fond auf Wiedersehen ; the night wears on, and I cannot help but think you might have customers waiting. Mistress Savoy, a pleasure; Mr. Chesterton, well, at least you remain a snappy dresser.”

“Wish I could say the same for you tonight,” Chesterton replied with a grin. “Lost a cufflink underground?”

“Something like that,” Reinhardt finished with a rather uninspired riposte, relieving me of my growing concern that I should have to endure more of their banter before being allowed to leave. I bid a brief farewell to the pair of illusionists, and with the book under my arm and Victor’s cane firmly in my hand, I followed Reinhardt through the part in the sequined night sky of the curtains. He picked up his lantern, made his way briefly back to the parlor to light the oil wick from a candle, and held open for me the heavy, groaning door to the sloping passageway beyond.

The eerie sound of it swinging slowly shut behind us echoed in the narrow stone tunnel, and it occurred to me, though I did not know why, to wish there had been some way to silence it.

No matter: it was too late now, after all.

“We could return the way we came,” he said quietly after we began to walk, “up through the old stage of the New Osiris Hall, and from there take a cab to Hargrave’s house. You took a cab to the show, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“Or, of course, we could simply avoid the streets and go up into Hargrave’s library itself—no ladders that way, but there is a flight of stairs at the end, and the way is longer.”

“And I don’t imagine Hargrave would appreciate an Order outcast in his own house.”

“A secondary concern, but yes, there is that. Which is your preference?”

“The theater,” I replied, “for more reasons than one.” I found that I did not wish to repeat the route that Victor and I ran in our escape from Gremio, particularly now with that demon-mule’s alias of Mr. Emory printed in the infuriating dedication of the book I carried in my hand. Nor did I wish to explain all of this to Reinhardt—but he merely acknowledged my choice, and did not press for my reasons.

Onward we walked down the long, cramped tunnel. The monotony of the view turned me to my thoughts: I had for scenery only the featureless, rough-hewn stone of the passage, glistening in the lantern’s light with a damp sheen; ahead of me, the same lantern made of Reinhardt’s form a soft silhouette, the sameness of it all broken now and again only by the light catching the white tip of the wand that he held at his side in his clenched left hand. It was not enough to distract me from the way each step of mine, more cautious than the last, had begun to draw a mild but unmistakable pain from the healing wounds on my lower legs.

The descent was more arduous for me than the ascent had been. I had no longer the sustaining anticipation of my prize ahead to consume my attention; the downward grade, it seemed, was more physically taxing for the nature of my injuries than had been the same slope in reverse; and time had passed. Midnight approached.

I could not bring myself to ask Reinhardt for the hour.

I did not wish to know; the knowledge would change nothing. Whether it was a minute to midnight or an hour or more, whether even the witching hour had already come and gone, the solution was the same: hurry, hurry to your chamber and the elixir, with all the haste you possess.

But every time I tried to pick up my pace, to close the distance that began to grow between us, the pain became all the worse.

“Slow down a bit, please,” I whispered at last, sacrificing pride for comfort.

Reinhardt turned with his lantern to see me leaning on Victor’s cane, subtly shifting my weight to find a balance that would not aggravate my wounds.

“Then it will take more time,” he said quietly, some measure of concern in his voice.

“I know.” More keenly than do you , I wished to add, but there was little to be gained in saying as much, and so I refrained.

“But you must set the pace you need. If you wish to stop and rest for a while…”

“When we get to the main gallery,” I replied. “I cannot find a painless footing on this slope. Let’s go.”

We reached the familiar standing water at the bottom of the slope soon enough, and again Reinhardt lent me his hand to help me cross. As promised, he allowed me a moment’s respite, and I kept it in standing silence. I suppose I might have lowered myself to sit upon the floor of the gallery for a while—dank and dirty though it was, the appealing notion of allowing my legs a true rest would have made it well worth the price of minor unpleasantries—and yet something more than mere propriety held me upright.

It was no more than an outworn vestige of my perilous run through the underground with Victor, surely, but I felt again the animal instinct of the hunt, and in my dimming premonition I sensed that I should remain at all times prepared to run again. From what, I did not know—I saw in my mind no vision of falling gates, though it now seemed as likely to me that such devices would be present here as well—and the future beyond the glow of Reinhardt’s lantern was as obscure to me as the passageway itself.

“We should go,” I whispered, and with his nod we set out again.

I listened to a distant drip of water—down one of the same side-tunnels as before, perhaps, though I could not say for certain—and I hoped that the cold I felt seep into my flesh through the air and the damp stone, the chill Victor had instructed me to ward away with heat, would dissipate as the walking warmed me again. I wondered if it would be wise for me to attempt a subtle spell, to venture to warm myself by the art of my own will, or whether the greater wisdom would lie in expending not a trace more of sorcery?—

And that is when I first heard the sound.

I must have stopped in my tracks; Reinhardt must have noted at once the silencing of the sound of my shoes and the break in the tapping of the scorpion cane, because he turned to me with an urgency that swayed the lantern in his hand on its creaking handle, and in the wavering light I saw him wipe a sudden sheen of sweat from his brow with his tailcoat sleeve.

The sound—the sound came again—Reinhardt whipped back toward the blackness before us, transferring the lantern into his left hand to hold his wand outstretched in his right.

I wondered what good a stage magician’s wand would prove as I watched the rise and fall of his shoulders quicken.

From somewhere in the darkness ahead of us came a third long, low groan, followed by the slam of a door. I thought of the ghostly hinges of the door to the back room of Witch’s Corner, but no hinge ever moaned with such a lifelike rise and fall. This had far too much of the husky hiss of breath—and then, more terrible yet, it trailed into shuddering laughter.

A thrill of terror flashed through my blood—the heat of Victor’s art answered, rising within me with the first rush of my pulse—I felt my chemise cling to my skin as my slick hands gripped the cane at its seam, ready to twist it apart in desperation and draw the iron blade.

I knew that I could not ask Reinhardt what he sensed, his senses stifled by the shadowy art that half-possessed me; but where his Sight was blinded, my nerves were on fire.

I felt everything—everything—the scintillating, crystalline sound of the ripples in some dark and distant pool as a falling drop of water broke the stillness of its surface—the cold scent of Reinhardt’s fear—the fine, mist-like touch of the wet subterranean air against my face and hands—I looked down, and my hands were Victor’s hands again, emanating a shadow blacker than a new moon.

And then my wounds began to burn.

Whether monster or man, mortal or disprite, the voice out of the darkness rose again, this time as an inarticulate mutter that swelled into a bark of bitter, humorless laughter and fell into a long, low growl.

I knew that voice, but I could not place it, I could not think; it was all I could do to will myself whole, to force the feeling of Victor’s art and mine to knit back together in my breast and staunch what felt too keenly like his shadow bleeding out from my body—to master this wild surge of fading power before it overmastered me.

And yet, all the while, I heard staggering footfalls draw toward us, shuffle and slip and start again, and with my heightened senses I heard the scrape and ring of a drawn blade like the clarion peal of a bell.

Not Victor’s dagger: I would have drawn before this, but I could not manage now without the cane as a prop. Not if I meant to escape.

“There’s a weapon,” I whispered to Reinhardt, the urgency of my own breath thick and fast. “Far away I think—I hope—Whoever it is, he has?—”

“ Ich bin der Spiegel des Spiegels! ”

I do not think he understood the perfection of his timing (his friend Chesterton, I mused, should have been again impressed), nor could I have known until that moment how his art would hit me. I felt the force of it strike against my breast like a dull weight, the blow superficial and yet strong; the vertigo was mild, without the bottomless drowning depth of Victor’s heady sorcery, and yet I welcomed its brief alteration of my senses: like being shaken by the shoulder from a dark daydream, something in the transient impact of Reinhardt’s sorcery seemed for a moment to shock me back to myself.

“Ironic,” he muttered to me, his voice quiet and tense as the outstretched hand that held his wand began to shake, “to announce myself to this whole damned underground just to cast a glamor. But I had to,” I heard him swallow, “I had to. It’ll make us harder to see—harder to find. It’s nothing real. An illusion?—”

Another moaning cry out of the darkness silenced him, this one closer than ever before, and I held my breath as a ghost-pale figure lurched into the dim margin of the light and broke into a run toward us, metal flashing in his hand?—

I stopped my breath; with the book trapped under my arm I gripped the cane, ready to twist and draw Victor’s long dagger, my heart thundering in my ears?—

But after only a few steps the man-like creature suddenly stopped, staggered, arched his back with his head held in his hands, and shambled to the side and out of sight. What black corridor swallowed him, I did not know; I heard the uneven footfalls fading, the sound of a key in a lock, terrible triumphant laughter—and then the slam of a door, and silence.

And then there was only the sound of Reinhardt’s breath and mine, and the distant drip of water again.

Out of all that I had heard and seen, it was the stranger’s paleness that disturbed me the most. I shivered at the thought. But the gait was wrong, I told myself—that ghoulish, lurching stagger had nothing equine in it; I heard no hooves, I smelt no sulfur, I felt no twinge of that other world.

Despite that deathly pallor, this was not Gremio. It could not be.

I could not think that a mortal illusionist’s forged faerie glamor would foil the revenge of the Duke of Tartarus.

“Now,” Reinhardt whispered, wiping his brow again and entirely missing the drop of sweat that rolled down into his short sideburn, “do we walk past the mouth of that tunnel as slowly as we can, and make no sound?” He looked to me—to my eyes, but then away again, as if he had forgotten what terror they held for him. I saw his gaze settle on my ankles and feet, his jaw half-clench as if he ground his teeth. “Or do we run?”

“We walk,” I whispered slowly, abhorring the timidity of my choice even as I spoke it. The brief disruption of Reinhardt’s sorcery had rallied me, but now that feeling was fading, fading along with the ebbing of Victor’s vital art, and with it some of the courage I once had known. “Until we get past the door he went down.”

He nodded solemnly, and we began: setting each step down slowly, rolling each silent footfall from heel to toe, and all I could imagine, somewhere unseen above the city streets, was the moon rising higher in the dark sky.

Time was wearing on.

In the frustration of each slow, careful step, I thought I would go mad.

And so when once more the slam of a door echoed into the main gallery, and Reinhardt’s eyes widened as my own heart froze, in some unfathomable way it was nearly a relief.

“Now,” I breathed as Reinhardt cursed under his breath in his native tongue, “we run.”

And run we did.

I steeled myself against the pain that burned through my legs, the sense of hollow emptiness that sank through my chest, the mingling of my blurring vision and quavering Sight that made pale ghosts of the lantern light’s flash in the splash of every shallow pool; I gripped the book and the scorpion cane and ran as I had run with Victor, all fear and freedom, unleashed from the horrible creeping doom of silence.

By the sickly swaying glow of Reinhardt’s lantern we ran down the dark gallery, two sets of pounding footfalls across cold stone, joined all too soon by a third as we passed the open arch of a corridor on the left?—

Whoever, whatever it was, it was following us now.

“Get me to a locked door,” I panted, endeavoring to keep my voice low even as I gasped for breath, “one he can’t open with his key.”

“If he can’t, then I can’t either?—”

“Good,” I managed, unable to articulate the desperate plan that flashed through my reeling brain, “just get me there—get me there—please?—”

“Turn right!”

I nearly slipped in a slick of mud as I turned, thrusting the end of the cane at the stone floor only just in time to keep myself on my feet, and as we ran through a peaked Gothic archway I glanced upward in time to see the subtle grotesque of a sculpted skull that loomed over its peak.

“Left is a loop,” Reinhardt whispered between heaving breaths as we hurried toward a crossroads, “we could try to lose him—right is a long ladder up to the another store—straight ahead, the door you wanted—I tell you, I don’t have the key?—”

“Straight,” I gasped; no sooner had the word dissipated into the cold air than I heard behind us the dull, sickening crash of a body falling heavily onto the hard floor, joined by the brief clatter of a knife hitting stone.

Whether corporeal disprite or mortal man, our pursuer was as susceptible to a mud-slick floor as was I. But I did not look back; and by the time it occurred to me to wonder whether he was alive or dead, and if he might have cracked his head on the rock, I was not allowed to wonder long.

From the growing distance behind us I heard a tortured scramble of limbs—the knife, I thought; he must be searching for the knife—and a long, shuddering cry of inhuman rage.

Soon he would be on his feet again, but we had already reached the locked door: the dead end of the passage, I thought bitterly to myself, but I did not have time to contemplate the sculptural relief of human skulls around the door, nor the arcane signs carved into its planks of moisture-swollen wood, nor the stale air that seemed to gather at the corridor’s final stop.

“Hold him off,” I forced my panting breath into words, the last of them ending in a gasp of pain as I lowered myself as quickly as I could to kneel on the floor before the door, twisted open Victor’s cane and held the long, dark dagger up to Reinhardt with a shaking hand. “Take it and hold him off. I can do this. Give me light!”

I felt Reinhardt’s panicked, incredulous gaze on me as he set down the lantern at my side and took the weapon.

And then I drew a weapon of my own, unsheathing two hairpins from the precise twist of my bun. A door should have a different manner of lock, I suspected, than the familiar one on my husband’s strongbox that I had picked so many times to read the research he had hidden from me inside, though the larger size of the keyhole would give me more room to work.

With deep breath to steady my hands, I slipped the first pin carefully inside.

I can do this .

But I had never done it with a monster or a madman in pursuit.

The uneven footsteps began again, and again I heard Reinhardt’s “ Ich bin der Spiegel des Spiegels! ” echo from the stone walls; I felt the burst and impact of his sorcery against my spine as I worked the first pin, wondering what new illusion he had willed into the world.

The footsteps slowed and staggered; the pale hunter grunted in something that sounded like startled fear—but if he was distracted, terrorized by some fiendish conjuration of Reinhardt’s clever art, he did not stop.

I had the first hairpin nearly in place—after a few moments’ probing I felt the familiar, satisfying pressure of its point finding purchase on a moving piece inside; I subtly altered my angle of attack, I carefully increased the meticulous precision of my force, and the hidden works began to trigger and lift—but “Hurry!” Reinhardt whispered, and in my nervous state his voice startled me: my fingers slipped in their own cold sweat, and inside the keyhole the first mechanism of the lock fell back into place.

“I can buy us time,” he hissed, “but not enough!”

Whether he saw me bow my head in reply and chagrin, I do not know.

Another breath. Another start: my second, and likely my last.

I did not imagine I would have time for a third.

I would not need a third.

Within me I let Victor’s art rise and flourish again, weaker now but still dark and true; with all of my senses I made myself feel the lock open before even I began again, felt the pressure against the tips of my pins resist and then yield before me, heard the latch-bolt withdraw into itself as I turned the knob?—

First comes imagination , I whispered to myself, sliding the first pin inside and probing, probing until I found the spot again—I felt the same pressure—I caught my breath—I angled and pushed?—

Then comes will. I heard another feral cry behind me, closer ever than before; Reinhardt’s frantic voice whispered something I did not understand—I could not listen—holding the first pin in place, I slipped in the second, and with its length pressed against the opposing side of the keyhole I slowly, carefully turned them both.

The bolt moved.

Click.

I gasped, triumphant.

Grabbing both pins, the book and lantern, and the bottom length of Victor’s cane I thrust myself up from the floor with all my strength, clenching my teeth through the pain, my free hand grabbing for the handle of the door just as Reinhardt joined me, heaving it open and shoving me through. I stumbled through an empty darkness toward a long, low block of stone, catching myself on its cold edge; the book, dislodged from my grip, skidded across the dusty surface until some shadowy obstacle stopped it from a fall. I heard Reinhardt’s hurried footsteps echo from the floor behind me, smelt the cigar smoke on his clothes mingle with the fetid air of the room—and as I braced myself against the carven block I turned back in time to catch a glimpse, through the narrowing gap in the doorway, of the ghost-pale devil we had almost escaped: the frightful haunting of his blue eyes, the white-blond hair, the mud-splashed suit that must have once been silver, the scar on the side of his handsome face…

In the final moments before Reinhardt slammed the door shut I watched, with the horror of recognition, the way that long, deep scar pulled the madman’s lip from a grin into a jagged sneer—and I cried out as the knife wielded by the unmistakable figure of John Brighton, Lord Greycliff stabbed through the planks of the just-closed door to lodge in the wood above Reinhardt’s shoulder.

“Hell’s teeth!” Reinhardt grunted as he darted away in time, standing sweating and panting with his wand and Victor’s long dagger in his hands, staring at the point of the blade protruding through the door with a look of utter disbelief.

The locked door, I thought to myself as I heard Greycliff wrench and rattle the handle from outside, attempt to use his key, and then pound on the wood with what sounded like a fist.

Greycliff .

I remembered Greycliff on the floor of Victor’s parlor, injured by the disprite Balnock and lying under Victor’s spell, awakening in terror of the darkness of his own professor’s art.

And now the same man—if he were indeed the same man, and his mind were still his own—had pursued us through the underground like a ruthless demon in the hunt, and with the flash of his knife had made an attempt on Reinhardt’s life, and haunted now the door of this?—

This place. Whatever it was.

I lifted the lantern, and something within me sank.

The long, low block of stone upon which I sat was only one of many. Mine was among the nearest to the door, and before it lay only the empty floor across which I first had staggered, but behind it and to its sides were rows of its brethren: raised rectangular stone slabs of every age and description, and among them sculptures of gargoyles and ancient gods, angels and saints. I needed not even to see the human skulls that watched quietly from the walls to understand.

The stale stench of death should itself have been enough.

“Catacombs,” I whispered, watching Reinhardt slowly nod.

He walked to me and handed me Victor’s dagger by its hilt, and taking it from him I folded down the tines of the crossguard and reassembled the scorpion cane. I took it for a sign that we must be safe for now—that either Reinhardt thought a walking prop for me was of greater necessity than a weapon for him, or that the touch of an object soaked in the sensation of Victor’s art unnerved him more than the knowledge that Greycliff waited at the door.

“The Sorcerers’ Sepulcher, as some call it.” Reinhardt’s natural breathing was returning, but his voice was still low. “In modern times it has become the private crypt of the Order of Magisophists.”

“Are they all Order dead?”

“Not all. They say?—”

Greycliff must have rammed the door with his shoulder, but in vain: Reinhardt froze, interrupted by the sudden, heavy crash against the thick wood, a stumble and a fall and a long, low groan.

“—They say some of the remains are much older,” he continued, visibly uneasy, “and some were interred as a courtesy to fellow occultists who did not wish for their mortal clay to be found.”

Beyond the door I thought I heard Greycliff mutter something incoherent that faded into terrible, bitter laughter.

I shook my head and then held my brow in my hand, as if such a gesture had any power to banish this bizarre nightmare from my fevered mind. Even the touch of my own hand was strange—and I realized, with something that felt upon my lips like a wan smile, that I still held the two hairpins I had used to pick the lock. I took a moment to slip them back into my bun, wondering if Reinhardt mustn’t think such a thing the height of a woman’s vanity at a time such as this. I cared little if he did: it was a stolen moment’s comfort of the familiar, a reminder somehow of Victor, in the middle of this bleak and lonesome place.

“What’s wrong with Greycliff?” I asked Reinhardt when I finished, my voice as steady as I could will it to become. “Why is he…”

“Possessed?”

I looked to him in genuine interest, meeting his gaze, and he looked away with a slight shudder I watched him try to restrain: we both, I suppose, had forgotten.

“Ah,” he tapped his wand absently on the stone tomb as some kind of self-distraction, “I shouldn’t have used the word. I haven’t seen him like this—I don’t know.”

“He once mentioned to me a curse.”

“The curse he’s always trying to break. Maybe it’s the curse. Maybe it’s too much of whatever he took last to try to cure it.”

Setting the end of Victor’s cane on the floor for balance, I tested the muscles of my legs to find if I could stand—but a sharp pain shot through my wounds, and with it came a sudden, strange clarity.

Reinhardt’s last phrase echoed in my mind: Whatever he took last to try to cure it.

“And now he’s trapped us here,” Reinhardt continued with a sigh. He ran a thick hand through his sweat-slick hair, idly smoothing back a few of the strands that had come undone. “Don’t mistake me: you chose correctly. You saved us, and I have nothing but gratitude. But the oil in that lantern won’t last forever, and—” He paused to check his pocket-watch, and I was too distracted by my own thoughts to think to tell him that I did not wish to know. “It’s twenty minutes to midnight.”

It was all I could do to quietly fight down the sound of my pulse as it rose into my head.

“If I could find something loose in here, and heavy enough,” he went on, taking the lantern from where I had set it beside me. “Not this, unless we can find something else for illumination.”

Twenty minutes to midnight, and I was fixed so fast by my own nerves that all I could do was listen to my hammering heart.

Strange shadows crept across me as Reinhardt walked the grim chamber, the lantern’s light stretching the sculpted monuments he passed into ghoulish silhouettes. As they drew me halfway back into the world I began to follow him with my gaze, and for the first time I noted the irregular shapes laid atop some of the stone tables before the far, skull-studded wall. As Reinhardt passed one, he peeled back its decaying shroud—through the cloud of disrupted mummy-dust I thought I saw long, brown bones—and then he coughed, dropped the ragged winding-sheet, and quickly moved along. I watched absently as he grasped a small figure of a coiled serpent to test if it were fixed to its monument, then tried to shake an angel’s wing, but I could little tell if he spoke to me or to himself. “Something heavy enough, small enough to carry. I could open the door and knock him out?—”

“Five minutes,” I forced myself to interrupt, straining to hear my own faltering voice over the throb of my pulse. “Give me five minutes, please. I need to rest before we go on.”

To rest and to think, in truth, the latter no less than the former, but there was no time to explain. I should have liked to look around the old crypt myself, at the very least to read the engraving I felt beneath my hand as I supported myself atop what must have been a stone sarcophagus lid—but as if in some last throe of the driving, obsessive heat of Victor’s art within me, the entirety of my consciousness fixed upon the question of Greycliff’s madness—seized a single, impossible answer by the throat and refused to let it go:

Greycliff, I thought to myself, so Iris once told me, had been exiled from the Order for trespassing in Karvonen’s laboratory, seeking a remedy to break his supposed curse.

Someone had trespassed in Victor’s cabinet of herbs, stealing his rare supply of goldenscythe.

Victor rode thundering into the night in search of goldenscythe to heal me—to relieve me of what could, I imagined, be considered some manner of curse itself ? —

I heard only my own heavy breathing, felt my sweat soak into my chemise once more and cool in the charnel air of the subterranean tomb.

Only dimly did I understand that Reinhardt was speaking again as he searched the cold, still chamber. That time was passing. Perhaps the paltry five minutes of respite had already come and gone.

If goldenscythe were as potent as Victor told me—if only the sorcerer who took it from the earth by his own hand had full control of its power—could a man who misused Victor’s harvest lose his mind?

And if it were indeed Victor’s goldenscythe that drove Greycliff to murderous madness, had he used it all? Or did he have on his person some small, precious vial, if it had not already been broken or lost in his deadly chase, with the last few leaves of that arcane herb that Victor required to restore me to myself?

“I need to speak to Greycliff.” I did not know whether I said it aloud, or whether the words rang so loudly and clearly in my mind that it seemed that it was so.

Perhaps only the last: Reinhardt kept speaking as if he did not hear me, Greycliff’s voice beyond the door sank to an inarticulate murmur and then fell into a hush—more ominous even than the sounds of his lunacy and despair—and for the moment it seemed that in this chamber of death we were all three shut inside our own separate, silent caskets.

“And some of them wished to be buried with their work,” I heard Reinhardt say as he walked back toward where I sat, and I wondered if he spoke to me, “and yet for that work to remain at least somewhat accessible—prevent the temptation of disinterment, most likely. This fellow,” Reinhardt pointed with his wand to the base of the great carven coffin beneath me, “looks to have a drawer.”

Looking down almost absently toward whatever interested him, I moved my feet and cane away.

He set the lantern on the floor and knelt before me, and it struck me how the charming Manfredini, who had seemed so playfully fiendish with his two devil-women on stage just hours ago, now so scrupulously avoided the brush of my skirts as he found the stone handholds of some hidden cabinet. I appreciated his being a gentleman—I knew that he feared me yet, and I allowed that knowledge to bring me once more some distant glimmer of satisfaction, even now as I felt Victor’s sorcery fading from my body—and yet I could not shake the notion that he treated me as he treated the dagger from the scorpion cane, as if all that belonged to Victor was too disquieting to touch?—

All that belonged to Victor. I could not let the thought pass.

I had not told Reinhardt how my state of partial possession came to be, how Victor’s skill in herbal chemistry and the potency of his intrinsic art had combined to fill me with his shadow, and a strange, subtle warmth began to wash over me as I wondered now what my companion guessed, or assumed he understood.

In Reinhardt’s mind, did I… belong already to Victor?

I was no object, no thing to be owned, and yet the thought of falling willingly under Victor’s fearful, overmastering power sparked at every end of my heightened nerves like the thrill of sorcery itself.

Did Reinhardt surmise that Victor’s shadow in my blood was the lingering mark of a consummated union, a quiet but indelible sign that Victor had already lain me down and taken me?

And if—I felt my eyes begin to drift closed, fighting back a feeling I feared I could not control—if one day Victor were to take me… possess me again by a different power… is that how it would feel?

I had to stop—I had to stop! I could not think such a thing; not here, not now, not ever?—

The complaint of stone over stone broke the waiting silence of the chamber, freeing me from the consumption of my thoughts as Reinhardt heaved open the drawer beneath the casket.

“This will do!” he announced quietly. “Some kind of locked metal box. A little large, but a good weight.”

He rose to his feet, held out his discovery to show me, and my heart nearly stopped.

I knew that box.

I knew its lock: its keyhole stared me in the face like a single, empty eye, and if Reinhardt had raised the severed head of a Cyclops itself before me it would have horrified me far less: I had picked that lock with my hairpins to avail myself of the contents of that very box—that damned metal strongbox that hid my husband’s research?—

“No, Reinhardt,” I gasped, incredulous, this nightmare in which I found myself growing by every second more surreal. “No… no, it can’t be…”

“Buckingham—are you all right?”

I could not bring myself to answer. I only turned, moving aside the book and wiping my frantic hand across the dust that clung to the stone slab of the grave beneath me, desperately trying to read the inscription by the poor angle of the lantern’s light.

The light rose—Reinhardt must have lifted it behind me—and in the retreating shadow of a sculpture of a jackal-headed god I beheld, utterly aghast, the impossible shapes of the graven letters that appeared before my eyes, and I blinked through the blinding heat of my gathering tears of rage:

Here lies ? —

Trembling, trembling in disbelieving fury, I slammed my hand down on the unfeeling plane of the stone tomb, frenzied in my sudden lust to dash aside every fallen tear from the sarcophagus; not a single drop wrung from the human heart must warm the cold dust of that accursed, undeserving name I read again:

Here lies Simon Ronald Buckingham.