Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

33. Subterfuge

Chapter 33

Subterfuge

I stopped beneath the Gothic arch of the heavy iron-clad doors, standing alone.

My hand tightened around the black shaft of Victor’s scorpion cane as I watched the flickering of the light in his great hall: the double row of hollow suits of armor haunted by the glow of the chandeliers; the roaring Hellmouth hearth at the far end of the cavernous room, silhouetting the row of students in their high-backed chairs as they faced away from me, toward Victor’s empty throne.

Five men, I counted: Ashcroft, Forsythe, Reinhardt, Walker, and Lloyd. Other than Greycliff, I would be the last to arrive.

Victor was not here in body—I knew he was not—but I felt him yet. All his underground dominion was soaked so deeply in the sense of him that I could not help but think it was some surfeit of his shadow that slowly, insatiably dripped, dripped, dripped from the long stalactites that hung in the corner.

And I was soaked in it as surely, as completely: he had restored his fading spell by last night’s sorcery, filling me again with his possessing shadow.

The echo of my little shoes sounded nothing like his black Hessian boots as I entered his hall, walking down the center aisle between the still sentinels of the empty knights, but the difference seemed to matter not at all. I sensed the change in the room as I approached the long table, the cold prickling of trepidation in the warm, close air, the collective intake of breath.

As I did in one of my first dreams of him—as I did when I traversed with Reinhardt the old, burnt stage of the New Osiris Hall—I felt, with a shivering thrill, some dim yet unmistakable shade of what it was to wield the vast, uncanny power of Victor D’Arco.

Only Forsythe seemed to question who drew near, looking back over his shoulder as I approached the student chairs from behind; I watched his searching eyes widen as he saw only me, and quickly turned away toward the hearth again.

“Buckingham,” I heard him murmur incredulously, but not to me: perhaps his words were for Ashcroft, or Reinhardt, or only for himself. “Buckingham alone. I could’ve sworn he was—Did he… Did they…”

His words trailed away, and by his posture I thought something in him sank, as if some tightly-held caprice had slipped away into defeat. I knew what he felt. I knew what he thought he understood. Reinhardt had assumed the same, and while the manner of possession that they surmised had not come to pass, I could not say that either man was entirely wrong in effect.

How strange it felt to walk enveloped in the dark, sustaining art of the man I knew I must make to feel my vengeance, wondering how long the strength of my conviction would resist until my hard heart softened and weakened for his shadow’s warmth.

To the right of my accustomed place, Walker rose from some lone and dismal contemplation. He drew my chair out from the table for me in his familiar silent chivalry; as I sat down, resting the scorpion cane in the crook of my arm, I could not mistake the look of sharp intent on his fierce-featured brown face.

“Your shadow,” he whispered as he lowered himself back into his seat beside mine, the words low and discreet, “or his ?”

“Both,” I answered simply. There was no need to say more.

From the flash of Walker’s eyes in the firelight I knew I had done little to ease the interest that still gripped his keen mind, but he did not pry. He only nodded as he turned slowly away, first to the right end of the row of students and then back to his own private reverie, his black hood shadowing his face and his lean arms crossed beneath the folds of his cloak.

To my left, Reinhardt slouched almost comfortably in his chair, with an elbow on the great carven table and the side of his chin propped against his loose fist. The cut on the side of his face was scabbed over and haloed with a yellowing bruise, but he looked otherwise no worse for the adventure: his wand was still at his belt, the buttons of his blood-red waistcoat still holding despite their accustomed strain, and he smelt still of good cigars. I did not know what to say to him in the presence of the others, and with Victor due to arrive at any moment—nor, it seemed, did he know any better what to say to me. We exchanged a small smile of recognition, and let that be enough.

Past Reinhardt, at the far left end of the table, I saw Ashcroft tap Forsythe on the shoulder, the two of them exchanging hushed words: Ashcroft seemed to glance down the length of the table in suspicious interest; Forsythe only shrugged and shook his head, the bear grease on his slick hair shining in the light of the fire and the chandeliers. They were satisfied, I supposed, that Victor had not yet arrived after all; their unease at the sense of his shadow within me assuaged enough to move on to the morning’s next mystery.

And to my right, on the other side of Walker’s brooding form, Lloyd stroked his black beard in waiting silence, seeming to care nothing for the others’ curiosity as he gazed into the flames of Victor’s Hellmouth hearth. I saw him look once over his broad shoulder, down the aisle of empty suits of armor and toward the arched doors, and I wonder if he anticipated Victor’s arrival, or expected Greycliff to appear at last and fill the empty seat at his side.

If it were the latter, he would have long to wait. How long, I did not know.

It was that empty chair—Greycliff’s place at the end of the table; three seats to my right, on the other side of Lloyd—that still haunted Victor’s great hall as the six of us waited, wondering.

As for myself, I wondered how much each of them knew about Greycliff’s fate—whether Reinhardt, or even Absolon, had given any word—and I wondered what had become of the pale lord himself and his herb-induced madness, and whether he was still alive, and whether his mind had come back to him. I wondered, idly, if ever I would see him again; and I could not help but think of whether he were still in Victor’s dungeon, and what brutal manner of justice he was suffering even now for his desperate crimes.

“Have you,” I whispered to Reinhardt, watching his brows rise in interest, “heard anything?”

“ John? ” He mouthed the name as he looked to me, his voice nearly inaudible.

I nodded.

It was a foolish risk, perhaps, to ask him—to speak to him at all, given the threat of Victor’s impending arrival at any moment—but when set beside the hazard of the Talisman, it was no risk at all.

The Talisman of Thoth weighed heavily on my mind. I had made my choice that morning as to how and where to conceal it, though the lesser of the two evils remained itself a dire danger. The testament to my transgression was here in Victor’s hall, here with me, the ibis amulet hanging on its chain between my breasts like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, concealed only by the layered fabric of my underclothes and my black dress—and the black shawl I wore about my shoulders, its loose knot over the center of my chest granting my dread secret another cover of obscuration. The cold of the morning in the world above was excuse enough. If Victor and Walker could wear their cloaks indoors, I should not be viewed askance for my shawl.

No, I would not go this far into risk, and forego in timidity a mere casual exchange with Reinhardt.

“Nothing yet,” Reinhardt whispered, and I thought I heard some manner of sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. Are you…?”

“Much better. He cured me, or nearly so. Just a bit longer, I think. I didn’t…” I paused. Victor was coming: I felt his possessing shadow within me stir from its restless sleep, a faint, sinking warmth spreading through my blood. “I didn’t tell him all of it,” I continued, my whispered voice dropping lower still. “All of what we found.”

“Ah.”

Something in that single syllable caused me to regret.

He was a good man, Reinhardt, but in my chamber with Victor I had partially abridged the tale of his heroism and generosity, and for my own selfish ends.

“And you?” I asked him in reply.

“You received my letter?”

“Yes, and thank you.”

“Much the same today. A little sore yet. Nothing remark?—”

Reinhardt did not even complete the word. The deep wave of Victor’s shadow I felt rush through my spine must have hit him as well—as it must have hit us all: the murmurs of Ashcroft and Forsythe’s conversation plunged into silence, punctuated by a man’s quiet, reflexive groan. Forsythe, surely: his ability to endure Victor’s art had always been poor.

From the corner of my eye I saw Walker straighten in his seat, pulling back his hood.

Behind us, I heard the arched, iron-clad doors swing shut with a heavy boom , resonating like thunder through the cavernous walls.

It sounded so final, like the fall of a sarcophagus lid. Despite the soaring vault of Victor’s subterranean hall I felt a dank claustrophobia closing in; as I tried to fight against the feeling, drawing in a deep breath, I felt the small, secret shape of the Talisman press closer against the side of my breast.

The fine hairs on the nape of my neck pricked up again. I did not turn to look. For the second time in as many days, as I felt Victor’s approach—as I listened to the firm footfalls of his strong, deft stride—I could distinguish no longer between the pleasure of anticipation and the clenching dread of impending doom.

I did not dream again last night , I reminded myself once more, as I had reassured myself several times since I had awakened. I am not entirely certain it was true.

The echo of Victor’s approaching footsteps was strange, and I realized then that he was not alone.

“From left to right,” Victor’s unmistakable voice intoned, “before you: Second Degree Sorcerer Randall Ashcroft; First Degree Sorcerer Edward Forsythe; Second Degree Sorcerer Luther Reinhardt, Illusionist. In the center,” almost imperceptibly, I thought his tone shifted—sharpened, perhaps, with some heightened interest, “my apprentice, Sorceress Elizabeth Buckingham. Then Second Degree Sorcerer Deep Walker, and First Degree Sorcerer William Lloyd.”

Sorceress , he had called me again, the lone title naked of the limiting niceties of degree; to him I was a Novice Sorceress of the Order no longer. It was an unmistakable exaltation of my art, yet there was a possessiveness in it as well, and I thought of the stifling, sensual feeling of his shadow closing around me: as if he claimed the sole right to adjudge my skill and title, the Order be damned, and in doing so claimed me . I was freed by him, released from the restriction of convention; I was his now, and his alone.

Victor rounded the side of the table, passing the empty chair, his black robes and great black cloak rippling before the fanged demon-mouth of his infernal hearth before he lowered himself into his throne. He laid his powerful arms on the carven armrests, settling in with a mild backward lean: not Walker’s board-straight back, eager for a certain dignity of regard, but a half-relaxed posture of effortless control: the muscular majesty of some conquering prince of Hell surveying his dominion.

“Lord Greycliff,” Victor intoned, “is indisposed.”

He allowed a long silence to follow, and I thought that he took a quiet delight in the sensation of his foreboding words darkening the hall.

It was Forsythe who spoke at last: “For how long, do you think, professor?”

“As long as it takes,” Victor’s deep voice rumbled. “Until he understands and atones for the gravity of his transgressions against me.” Another long pause. He must have felt—relished, perhaps—the tension in the warming air. “I am not particularly cruel,” he continued, his dark gaze briefly meeting mine, “but nor am I inclined to swiftly relent. Let that serve as warning to you all.”

“Doctor D’Arco,” I heard Ashcroft’s voice to my left, somewhat hesitant in tone, and I watched Victor slowly shift the weight of his regard, the light of the chandeliers flickering across his steel mask as he turned, “if I am at liberty to ask: what’s happening to Greycliff right now?”

“Healing from injuries. And no,” Victor chuckled darkly, “I did not inflict them. Yet, as the sensation of my art so unsettles him—as it does most of you,” his eyes flashed to me again, “to greater or lesser degree—I do not imagine he is especially enjoying himself. As you know, I do not prefer to teach caution. But if any others of you have considered crossing me,” his voice grew low, and I stilled my instinct to shudder, “I advise reconsideration.”

A general warning to all, I reassured myself. It could not be for me, when he could not possibly know how I crossed him even now.

He did not know that the Talisman he dared not touch was across the table from his throne.

Surely he would have addressed the matter of Greycliff’s absence regardless, no matter what he suspected of me; surely, even had I been absent, he would have used Greycliff’s example to remind the others of their fearful aversion to the very thought of defying Doctor D’Arco.

I should have understood that it was only the torment of my own conscience that made every word and every warning meant for me, that heard the phantom syllables of my own name at the end of every bleak admonishment against betrayal, that sensed the gravity and peril of his consideration pinning me helplessly to the back of my chair even when I could not see into his burning eyes. But no veneer of brittle rationality could ease the sinking sense within my viscera, nor cool the warming sweat of my palms.

“Yet one sorcerer’s fall,” Victor gestured with his hand to someone behind the row of student chairs, “is another’s opportunity to rise. I present to you my new student—your new ally, colleague, or rival, as you will—Cyril Chesterton,” I turned to look behind me with a small smile of recognition, “First Degree Sorcerer and Illusionist.”

Drumming his thick fingers briefly on the table in a kind of satisfaction, Reinhardt turned to watch his friend and fellow illusionist take a seat in what had until now been Greycliff’s empty chair. Chesterton was precisely as I had remembered him from Witch’s Corner: the dapper, fitted tailcoat with the royal purple waistcoat; the well-formed, dark-complected face; the little spark of roguishness in his eyes as he met Reinhardt’s glance.

“Another illusionist ,” Walker muttered to my right as I looked past him to Chesterton, his voice sharpening the word into an insinuation of contempt. “At least Greycliff had some notion of true sorcery—interests and ambitions beyond levitating furniture on wires.”

Victor was watching, listening: I saw him turn his gaze to Walker, his head half-tilted in a kind of sardonic scrutiny. “Does the arrival of a second illusionist threaten you, Walker? Perhaps you consider yourself outmatched.”

“No, professor,” Walker replied.

“Will your summoned disprites neglect your call, then? Do you expect the likes of Baron Malavros to feast his glowing eyes upon this pair of illusionists and slink back cowering to his tower on the Black Lake?”

“I doubt that very much, professor.”

“Good!” Victor grunted with a low chuckle, and from the corner of my eye I saw Walker’s tight grimace. “Then, Walker, if this change gives neither side the undue advantage, I expect the feud to continue unabated.”

“With pleasure, Doctor D’Arco,” Reinhardt answered from my other side before Walker had a chance to reply. I felt the tension thicken between them as they both leaned subtly forward to see past me to each other: Walker’s severe features were tense with indignation; Reinhardt raised his brows with an assured, satisfied grin; at the end of the table I thought I saw Chesterton watch with interest and a mildly bewildered look.

“Enough,” Victor commanded after a few moments more, if so leisurely an exhortation should be called a command at all: I thought that he was testing the extent to which his ominous hints about Greycliff’s fate deepened his utter mastery of the room, and as Reinhardt and Walker promptly adjourned their feud and turned their attention back to the throne, the look in Victor’s eyes seemed pleased. “Rarely a dull moment, is there, Chesterton?”

“Haven’t seen one so far, professor.”

“Nor will you see your first today, I expect—though I prefer theory over practicum for our first class after my return.”

“Where were you, Doctor D’Arco?” This was a voice I did not recognize, and therefore I took it for Lloyd’s: so seldom did I hear him speak in class that the sound of his voice remained unfamiliar. “Absolon announced your absence when I arrived, but told me nothing more.”

“Then Absolon did well in upholding my command.”

And had Absolon done well in upholding Victor’s command against me as well, I wondered, when he nearly trapped me between the slowly falling gates of the dark hallway, causing me to abandon my quest for the library and seek only to escape? I had suspected as much at the time, and in my mind it now was all but confirmed: Victor had commanded Absolon not to bar me entirely from his domain, but to frighten me away if I drew too close to his library—I thought again of the gates falling slowly, so slowly, and all the time I was given to run away—and the arch and impish Absolon was all too delighted to oblige.

Thus Victor had anticipated that I might come.

I should have liked for these puzzle pieces to fall inexorably into place by the hush of night, in the privacy of my cooling bedchamber, the fire banked and the evening’s last candle melting down to the last of its wax. Not now. Not here.

But with his art rekindled within me I was restless again, as I had been the morning after he rode away. My mind and my will were burning with the revelation, and once so fixed and fevered they could not be turned aside: I understood now why he had changed the subject every time my questions about the Talisman probed too deeply, and why he ordered Absolon to send me away from his library: because I was not to learn the Talisman’s true purpose. I was not to learn what it might do, nor to whom.

Because he knew me well enough to understand that if I learned the rest—if I were to discover it was the grey flash of his blade that ended my damned husband’s life, triggering the miswritten will that stripped me of all that I had—in my blind vow of vengeance, silently sworn before I ever knew his name, I could turn the Talisman against Victor himself.

Even Karvonen, I was certain, never knew what a potent weapon against the crimes of Doctor D’Arco he once held in his very hand.

I drew a deep breath, fighting back the shiver of a terrible thrill: worse yet than the thought itself was its arrival into my mind here, not alone in my darkened chamber but amid the other students, in the heat and the penetrating glare of the Hellmouth hearth, seated directly before Victor’s throne, awaiting the eyes and regard of the man who destroyed my life, who possessed my body, his darkness spreading through my marrow and my blood. Despite my silence I felt trapped and revealed; despite my layers of garments and the folly of my knotted black shawl I felt naked before him, utterly exposed.

And then his gaze turned, locking inescapably with mine—to my desperate horror, my latent delight—and I began to sweat in the heat of my own deadly game as all the rest of the room seemed to melt away.

“As I instructed Absolon to tell you,” Victor continued, still speaking to Lloyd as he looked into my eyes, “an unforeseen development required my immediate action—a matter served best by speed and silence. And, this morning, by a rather less strenuous class.”

If he knew my mind, if he had read my thoughts, he gave no sign of it: a rather less strenuous class for me , I knew, and for my recovery. He was altering the course of the class for me, for my advantage and my comfort, as if never had my villainy nor his own ever come between us—and all that I had so fervently buried stirred to return, haunting me again, rising like a revenant from a hasty grave. If only I could rest my mind, as I longed to do, in that sympathy I felt even now for his last strange shred of innocence: the way that he seemed not to push me away but to draw me in, deeper into his shadow’s embrace, as if he knew of nothing I had done nor meant to do that would break his dark heart.

For all my cruel devices and my secret guilt, he trusted me yet. He kept our secrets. I felt almost soothed by the steadiness of his black gaze and the discretion of his words—by all that he did not say: there was a deep intimacy in the knowledge that all that had passed between us would be his and mine alone. The wonder and horror of Crystal Palace Park, his nights ministering to my wounds and ills in my bedchamber, his desperate midnight quest (I thought, unaccountably, of that spatter of dark red I had seen on his muddied white shirt), his shadow inside me when I lay dreaming of the satisfaction of his touch—I saw all of it in his eyes. The rhythm of my breath deepened and slowed. I did not realize, until a few moments passed, that I had matched the rise and fall of his great shoulders—and not until he calmed me somehow did he turn again to Chesterton.

Had he merely sensed my tension, and eased me for the sake of my recovery? Had he mistaken my thrill of fear for sheer desire, and slowly smoothed its forbidden edge?

And whether or not he had meant to accomplish such a thing, or known even that he should, he had gently conquered my vengeance for a while: the warmth of his shadow spread through me, and I did not like to think of his demise anymore.

And yet, if all were as I had surmised, why had he told me last night that the Talisman might harm him, if he did not wish for me to know? Why?—

But his voice, to my relief, interrupted this new abstraction.

“As it is your first day, Chesterton, you may choose the topic of instruction: circle casting for magia intrinseca , or the fundamentals of summoning?”

“Summoning,” Chesterton replied, and I glanced down the table to see his slow smile, “Doctor D’Arco.”

Beside me, I felt Walker straighten again in his seat.

“Summoning,” Victor intoned with a nod. I watched him shift his weight in his throne, settling himself for a lecture. “ Magia evocatoria , as it is called,” he began in his professorial tone, and I could not help but remember when I heard him speak in such a way last night, just for a moment, when my back rested against his chest and my head on his shoulder. “The magic of evocation—the calling forth of any manner of disprite—is generally regarded to be a form of magia esterna : external magic, in which the source of the magic originates from outside of the sorcerer. Under what circumstance might this generalization ring true,” he paused to scan the row of his students, searching for his first target, “Ashcroft?”

“When terms like summoning and evocation are used to speak of sorcery performed or assisted by the summoned disprite,” Ashcroft answered with his mannered, academic air. “A disprite acting under a sorcerer’s command is perhaps the most time-honored example of magia esterna .”

“Good, Ashcroft. And why, Reinhardt, is the same generalization also false?”

“Because sorcery is not so simple, nor without contradiction,” Reinhardt replied. “As you like to say, professor: small minds prefer pat niceties .”

“Correct. Sorcery is itself a contradiction; as all art, it is the most natural and unnatural act of man: the instinctive primal ambition to create and become, which alters forever the primal state. Therefore we must expect exception and complication. And it should come as no wonder, in that case, that the art used in the initial evocation can, albeit somewhat rarely, originate unaided from within the sorcerer himself.”

“Summoning as magia intrinseca ?” I recognized Forsythe’s voice to my left. “Does anyone?—”

“The sorceress herself ,” Victor interrupted, “I should have said: of all of you, Buckingham is the only one whose initial instinct, uninstructed, was to summon via magia intrinseca .”

His scorpion cane, resting against my thigh, began to slip, and I caught it before it fell: the twitch of tension through my body had unsettled it.

Victor had turned the subject of the lesson to me .

“What’s the advantage, professor?” I heard Forsythe ask.

“None, particularly, on the balance of the matter: as in all aspects of sorcery, it is a question primarily of personal talent and inclination. It has its peculiar weaknesses, as well as its advantages. Like all magia intrinseca it must be felt , in the body and the mind; the senses must be receptive, their memory of sensation strong and true.

“Buckingham,” Victor continued. I had begun to drift into reverie, my mind grasping for any notion as to why he should discuss me so with the other students. Only moments ago he seemed to comfort me with the promise of discretion, yet now I grew determined to gain a foothold one step ahead of him rather than stumble blindly into some unseen trap—but the sound of his voice speaking my name recalled me with a start, and the fleeting seconds before his next words were fraught with my anticipation. “In brief, Buckingham, explain your method.”

He may as well have asked me to explain how I summon him , his phantom, for (aside of the unusual circumstances of Crystal Palace Park) never yet had I evoked any other spirit.

I felt the eyes of the other six men on me, aware of the subtle changes in the light as they turned to face me, but I raised my gaze to meet Victor’s, and I spoke to him alone. “Imagination and will, professor.”

He nodded with a quiet grunt of approval, his dark eyes never leaving mine. “Continue.”

“With or without a circle drawn on the floor—I have accomplished it both ways—” (yet only once each, as he knew, and as I declined to add), “I stand in an attitude of command, not supplication. If I am fortunate to have some manner of artifact,” I thought of his water-stained grimoire, “pertaining to the spirit in question and suitable as a reference for the senses, I hold it in my hands; if not, I am at no disadvantage.”

Beneath the shadows of his hood, his black brows rose in mild interest. “Why not?”

“Because I presume as much, professor.”

I felt a hush descend upon the student side of the table. Walker drew a surreptitious breath.

“Correct,” Victor enunciated, defying their hesitation. “Continue.”

“Then I make myself feel the presence of the spirit, as if he?—”

He . My breath caught at the slip. Perhaps were I to press on, feigning ignorance of the poignancy of the error, I could prevent his notice of how I had accidentally spoken of him ?—

Too late.

“Yes?” I thought that he leaned in toward me, so subtle a shift in his looming form that I doubted the others would mark the change at all. “Continue. Be specific.”

“As if the spirit were already before me,” I continued, the greater part of my composure regained. Something that I took for amusement flickered in his dark eyes. “I create in my mind the sensation of the spirit: the depth and nature of how I remember the spirit makes me feel.” His gaze grew so intent on mine that I found myself averting my eyes, but that was worse: it seemed only to draw him in deeper, the heat and gravity of his regard bearing down on me, making my skin grow damp again with sweat. “The physical shape next, envisioned in detail behind my closed eyes. Then the touch.” I realized, too late, that my breath had quickened. “The scent.”

“And then you call this spirit by name? You recite forbidden texts in reverse, in hopes of drawing its curiosity? How do you entreat your spirit to appear?”

“I do not entreat, professor, though I speak the spirit’s name thrice. I command, and more even than command, I expect the spirit’s presence. I speak as if the spirit were already before me.”

He missed nothing—I never truly imagined he would—and he drew himself up in his throne, stretching his broad back, ensuring I could not escape the knowledge that he understood: the spirit was already before me, indeed. “You leave this spirit no choice, then?”

“None.”

“And do you have success, Buckingham, with this unorthodox technique?”

“It has yet to fail me, Doctor D’Arco.”

He said nothing at first, allowing my words to fade slowly into the crackling inferno of his hearth, but then his broad shoulders shook in taut starts as he began to chuckle with a kind of pride: a low, dark sound, made all the more foreboding as it echoed through his hall. “And how many of you,” his voice rose, deep and harsh, to address his class; his left hand flexed into a casual fist and slammed down solidly on the arm of his throne, “can report that degree of success with your own methods?”

Pushed back onto their heels by Victor’s challenge, several of the students spoke at once, jostling for advantage as they scrambled to reclaim their pride.

“Nearly so, professor, and at considerably less risk,” I thought I heard Walker say above the low din of injured bravado; “Because she’s his apprentice,” I made out Ashcroft’s voice as the murmurs died down, his words soon more exposed than he presumably intended, “and that’s why he tolerates her unfettered recklessness?—”

“You have mistaken cause for effect, Ashcroft.” Victor’s deep, restrained growl rumbled like thunder through the flesh itself as he turned to my left, his eyes ablaze with a deadly light, his hand that gripped the armrest of his throne arching gradually into a rigid claw.

I turned to see a sickly ghost-white pallor cross Ashcroft’s face, his eyes wide.

“As you know, Ashcroft, I feel no personal inclination to defend my choice, but since you expressed to the class so keen an interest in my selection,” Victor was nearly gloating now, grinding the other man under his heel, and I watched the remaining color in Ashcroft’s face fade bloodlessly whiter, “allow me to make it clear to you that I selected Buckingham as my apprentice precisely because she is, as you say, unfettered from all that starves the vital art by binding it to convention. Reckless enough to remain bold. Hers was, and remains, precisely the nature of talent I require.”

“I—I understand,” Ashcroft stuttered weakly, sounding as if he were about to faint, and I wondered if it was a focused surge of Victor’s art or his own fear alone that nearly overcame him. “Doctor D’Arco,” he swallowed, “I apologize for?—”

“No apologies,” Victor interrupted. “Do not waste any more of your time, nor mine.”

Even two seats away, I could feel Ashcroft’s relief as Victor turned back to me and released him from his gaze. It seemed as if the entire student side of the table at last exhaled.

But far more distinctly, I felt something like a query in the back of my mind, wordless and unshaped and yet unmistakable: I could not tell if it meant to ask whether I was content, or whether I understood, but it felt at once comfortable and unyielding, and I nodded as I met Victor’s eyes again.

Victor was protecting me.

Not just from the jealousy of Ashcroft—who clearly held that he deserved to have become Victor’s apprentice himself, and had been unrighteously usurped by the likes of me—but from them all: Victor knew what they guessed about the cause of his shadow within me, he understood that they would ultimately conclude from so false a notion that my position was bought and undeserved, and he deftly countered and crushed them without ever descending to acknowledge their argument at all. In coaxing me to lay my talents out before them—in calling me Novice Sorceress no longer—he reinforced my dominance, upheld my dignity, and vindicated us both.

Lowering my eyes from his, I bowed my head again in silent thanks. His shadow warmed within me in answer, spreading deeper through my blood.

I should by rights have thrown off the Talisman then and there, trod it underfoot, and renounced my dreadful vow of vengeance. But even then, I could not, and the knowledge rankled within me like old venom, tainting and diminishing all that ought to have uplifted me. I wondered what it would take, what rare herb would prove balm for this poison, what spell or poultice or elixir would purge the bitter hemlock from my heart.

And I had no answer. No answer at all.

“Yet I would be remiss,” Victor continued: masterfully, almost casually, as if to emphasize the insignificance of Ashcroft’s objection, “if, for Chesterton’s sake, I did not consider the counterpoint and address the more traditional methods of summoning. Aside from personal talent or inclination—the greatest influence over all choices in sorcery—why, Chesterton, do you imagine a sorcerer might prefer to cultivate skill in one method over the other?”

“I shouldn’t—ah—like to cast aspersions,” Chesterton answered, “over any particular method?—”

“Cast aspersions, Chesterton,” Victor replied with some measure of dark amusement.

With a private smile, I wondered if I ought to feel sorry, if only a little, for my fellow students’ predicament in navigating the treacherous shoals between Victor’s defense of me and his contempt for servility and hesitation.

“Well then,” Chesterton paused, “it seems to me that a peculiar weakness, as you called it, of summoning via magia intrinseca would be the need for memory. If one can’t remember a feeling one hasn’t yet felt, how then can one summon a new disprite for the first time?”

“Good, Chesterton! Worthy speculation, and nearly correct. While it is possible to use magia intrinseca to summon an unfamiliar disprite, speculating upon all sensations in the absence of tangible memory, the risk remains that the spell will not connect as desired—will not draw in the precise spirit the sorcerer endeavors to call.”

“And what if…” Chesterton’s voice faltered slightly. “Something else comes instead?”

“Then you banish it, if it is hostile; or you greet it, if it comes in friendship or aid.” One of the students chuckled appreciatively; Victor ignored him as he spoke on. “Yet your concern is not unwarranted. While it is less common than our art’s detractors would prefer you to believe, it is true that the other world has its share of opportunists, pickpockets, and mountebanks. A self-assured sorcerer’s simple mistake is unlikely to draw attention. Most disprites have their own concerns, and are not particularly enthralled by the notion of watching you read old grimoires aloud and waiting for you to mispronounce the Latin. Make yourself interesting, however—powerful yet naive, or temptingly incompetent, or have something they desire—and, not unlike on the streets of that world of men that carry on above us, you may one day find yourself in questionable company.”

“And desire itself, Doctor D’Arco? You told me that if I were to join your class, I’d have to… limit myself,” I caught the flash of firelight on Chesterton’s polished watch-chain as he shifted somewhat uncomfortably in his seat, “in certain regards.”

“For a while,” Victor replied, his voice somehow at once conciliatory and grim. “As I have said to each of you, at least twice in recent memory, and as I remind you now again.” He turned his head slowly as he scanned the row of his students, his gaze hard and his deep voice grave. “The need for celibacy is unfortunately imperative; not for any puritanical concept of propriety or ascetic superstition of moderation, but because the disprites of the cities of the deep earth— demons , Chesterton, as you have likely heard them called—are presently in the hunt. A period of heightened disprite activity and interference. Desire is the core of all sorcery and all art, the root of both the imagination and the will, the vital engine of the soul; they know it as well as do I, as well as do you, and unfixed desire draws them like a beacon through the London fog. Fix your desire upon magic. Desire nothing else. One way or another,” his deep voice turned cynical and ominous, “I expect that, come the month of May, the situation will change.”

“A premonition, professor?” Lloyd asked in the silence that followed.

“You might say as much.”

Lloyd had, it seemed, no particular association with the date, but I understood Victor’s insinuation all too well: Walpurgisnacht , as Victor called it, the Eve of May, the fateful night when time would run out for Victor to banish Gremio with me, or to deliver the Talisman and fulfill his side of the contract—or else time would run out for Victor himself.

And I would not allow that, I decided then, had I any power to stop it. I would not allow Gremio to rob me of both my protector and my revenge. If Victor were to be slain—unthinkably, impossibly—it must be by my hand alone.

At least there would be an intimacy in that.

The little death , as the French say, foregone for the greater.

A log cracked behind the silhouetted tusks of the monstrous mouth of Victor’s hearth, and my heart twisted and sank, racked and wrung by the half-forgotten truth that I was still before his throne, that we were still in class, that only seconds before the intrusion of my villainy and my bitter lust he had once more forbidden all his students from desire.

That should have stopped me. It had to stop me. But I was still unsettled, unquiet from his possessing shadow?—

“Walker,” Victor said, and once more I was grateful for the interruption to the course of my thought, “as you claim your rate of success in summoning is nearly the same as Buckingham’s, but with considerably less risk , I will ask of you a version of what I asked of her: describe your method, and how in your estimation it reduces the potential for misfortune. I presume you still use a variation on the old Quattrocento style?”

“As you first taught me, Doctor D’Arco,” Walker replied, weaving his long fingers together as he rested his hands before him on the great table, “with my own modifications.”

“As is befitting. Proceed.”

“My method is targeted. Specific. Precise. In its initial, most elaborated form, it requires two drawn figures: the circle, which surrounds the sorcerer; and the triangle, into which the disprite is called.”

“A little fearful,” I heard Reinhardt mutter from my left. “ And a little formal.”

“Formal by design.” Walker scarcely hid the casual vitriol in his voice: he was savoring his moment, clearly, and seemed to fashion himself as a younger, slighter Victor, though I thought his performance (how ironic, given that it was performance which so galled him about Reinhardt) fell short of its subject. Yet his devotion to his art was genuine, and he spoke with a strange, dark purity of will. “Around the circle I inscribe words pertaining to my own power—in my father’s language of English, or my mother’s language of Hindustani, as I see fit—as well as such marks as befit the moon phase and the hour. Elements in the aspects I prefer. Planetary associations. In the triangle, I draw the sigil of the disprite I mean to summon.”

“Explain the significance of sigils,” Victor interjected at Walker’s pause, “for Chesterton.”

For me, as well, I understood, as Victor wordlessly glanced to me from the corner of his dark eye before looking back to Walker. I had read enough in Victor’s assigned grimoires to grasp the concept of sigils, though he had not yet discussed the matter with me, and I knew now that I was not to divulge the depth of my inexperience.

“A spirit’s sigil is its seal,” Walker continued. “The words are one and the same. It is a version of the disprite’s true name, a mark and description of its identity, yet the connection between spirit and sigil is somewhat closer than between a mortal man and the stamped wax that closes his letter. Not to say you couldn’t use a wax letter seal to curse the man it signifies. A quite effective magical correspondence, in fact.” The natural timing of Walker’s self-pleased pause made me suspect he spoke from experience. “And so, as the disprite’s sigil is so efficient and direct a microcosm of the disprite itself, its use is the most reliable, replicable method of summoning. Get the sigil right and you get the disprite right, whether or not you have encountered the disprite in question before. But eventually, with familiarity, the disprite will come to expect you, and will answer your call without as much ritual needed.”

“To play the devil’s advocate,” I ventured as Walker concluded, “if I may.”

“A worthy pursuit,” I heard Victor’s deep voice rumble in approving anticipation, though I could not tell if it was in my ears or my mind. “Proceed.”

“It strikes me to wonder—Walker, professor—how, having never summoned a particular disprite before, one can ascertain that a drawing of a sigil found in a centuries-old grimoire is accurate to the disprite in question and therefore advisable to use. It seems to me a matter of blind trust, and I cannot think it any more reliable or free from risk than trusting in one’s own imagination.”

“Walker? Ashcroft?” Victor’s steel mask caught the light of the chandeliers as he leaned back deeper into his throne, seeming to enjoy the show. “Defend your fidelity to your books.”

“Centuries of sorcerers practicing from the same text, professor,” I heard Ashcroft say, his rather conceited conviction apparently enough to rally him from his recent fright, “is all the confirmation I need.”

“Tradition, then,” I replied.

“Reputation,” Walker added, “if you prefer. Why not enjoy the advantage of knowledge that is yours already for the taking? Why spend years constructing a tower when you could climb the backs of giants?”

I looked not to Walker so much as I did to the shadowy figure across the table in the throne, watching him from my peripheral vision as I spoke. “Because everything that raised those giants to their stature was new and untried once.”

“She isn’t entirely wrong,” Ashcroft mumbled grudgingly.

“And I don’t doubt,” I continued, not waiting for Ashcroft nor Walker, “that whoever admonished those would-be giants to abase themselves before the idol of tradition and reputation , discounting them for their novelty, has himself been long forgotten.”

Silence followed. I felt Victor’s gaze weigh heavy on me, though my own was on the carved surface of the table between us: I did not wish to look to either of my rivals, nor yet to allow them to see me look to Victor.

But I allowed a tight smile, regardless.

I had won. I had won and I knew it. I drew a breath, savoring the scent of burning hearth and dank earth as if for the first time.

Yet Walker’s dignity would not allow him to concede without a final effort. “You’d drown your books, then? Like poor old Prospero abjuring his art?” His tone was not so fierce as it might have been, and I suspected that he meant not to contest any longer but only to console his pride.

I shook my head. “No. My books remain. I shall be their adoring audience, their shrewd critic, their inquisitor at times—but never their prisoner.”

Victor punctuated my sentence with a guttural grunt of satisfaction.

None dared speak.

I knew I had pleased him; I had not said what I had said merely to seek his favor, the subservience of such a notion as disagreeable to me as it would have been to him, but I knew I had made him proud. I raised my eyes to meet his, and for a spare, fleeting moment I suppressed in my triumph all thoughts of my vengeance.

His dark eyes were so vivid, so unbearably alive, I thought my heart should burst.

Yet but for a single lost beat, my heart remained, for good or for ill: throbbing against the Talisman where it pressed against my skin, pulsing a wormwood of memory through my veins that slowly quelled my joy but did little to cool my heated blood.

Most of the rest of the class was a blur.

With some manner of sardonic comment Victor transitioned back to lecturing the class, reinforcing and clarifying the matters mentioned previously, then speaking again of the general theory of summoning in its most common permutations. This accomplished, he returned to student questions and comments, then asked the men who had not yet done so to describe in brief their preferred summoning techniques. Ashcroft, unsurprisingly, used the method described in one particularly well-regarded old grimoire, entirely verbatim and with no modifications; Forsythe drew shadow into substance with his actor’s art, performing the part of the masterful sorcerer and the arrival of his familiar spirit until the false became true ( magia intrinseca much like my own, I thought to my mild chagrin, but said nothing); Reinhardt, much to Walker’s dismay, reported having success by drawing a circle around a sigil rather than around himself, leaning back into an upholstered chair, then inviting the disprite into the diagram’s circumference by speaking to it personably and offering it a cigar; Lloyd, whose chief interest was in communication with those free and lawless spirits of the hollow green knolls rather than their infernal brethren of the cities below, called to his Tylwyth Teg as Victor had taught him: Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves , recited within an elemental circle inscribed into earth damp with the dew of dawn—or, when he was feeling bolder yet, from the center of a faerie ring beneath the full moon.

When Victor adjourned the class, Walker made a point of rising before I did, and I felt the young sorcerer grip the back of my chair to prepare to assist me. Despite our differences, his sense of chivalry remained—and, I didn’t doubt, his desire to recruit me to his side against Reinhardt and Chesterton—but once more Victor denied him the chance, dismissing him this time with a nod and a wave of his scarred hand.

Soon I was the only one to remain where I had been: still in my seat, where Victor had bid me wait, my eyes tracing the twisting carvings on the table as time seemed to slow.

Victor was talking to Ashcroft some distance behind me, after the rest of the footsteps faded down the hallway. Though I could not make out either man’s words, Ashcroft sounded merely discomfited rather than terrified, Victor stern rather than malevolent. Some manner of guarded reconciliation, I supposed.

Then departing footsteps once more, their crisp, measured rhythm slowly vanishing. They were not without their own determination, but lacked Victor’s drive and solid strength.

A mere moment more, and I heard the great iron-clad doors close with a familiar, resonant boom .

And then, I knew, I was alone with Victor again.