4
“At least allow me to dip the quill in ink for you.” Mercury had been watching the quill on the table in his room twitch about for a full ten minutes, just as had happened the evening before.
The quill grew still. Mercury took that as agreement and dipped it in the inkwell. He set it on the parchment, waiting for the message he hoped would soon be written there.
It simply twitched more.
“Will you confirm if you are, indeed, the Reluctant Recluse attempting to either get my attention or write me a note?”
The quill twitched a few more times, but not in any communicative way. Even with ink, it didn’t make so much as a nonsensical scribble on the paper.
“You can clearly move lightweight things. Is it that you cannot control how they move?”
It grew completely still.
Mercury had never had anything resembling a conversation with his impossible Invisible attachment.
Invisibles could only be seen by the people to whom they were attached.
Well, those people and a certain enormous ghost called the Violet Giant.
But Mercury couldn’t see, hear, or even sense his. At all.
Blast it all. This was the most promising attempt at communicating that the Reluctant Recluse had made yet, and it wasn’t working.
“If you do settle on a more productive means of communicating,” Mercury said, “I would appreciate knowing whether you know why I cannot see or hear you. I certainly don’t know the answer.”
The quill didn’t so much as flutter. He hadn’t ever heard of ghosts growing weary when moving things. Indeed, he’d not ever had the impression that they expended any effort in doing so.
Mercury turned slowly, eyeing the room for any other items moving without explanation. The Reluctant Recluse had, in the past, moved loose feathers and pages of a newspaper. It seemed he was limited to things that were very lightweight. But nothing else was moving.
It seemed the ghost was done trying for the time being.
The door handle shifted and the door opened. The Scholar floated inside, a book hovering beside him. When at Aventine, the Scholar never left his secluded room at the top of one of the towers. This was odd, indeed.
“Has something happened?” Mercury asked, bracing himself for yet another crisis.
“I have been reading in my most recently acquired book.” The Scholar motioned toward it.
“This is the book you stole from the Vanns’ home in London?”
“I prefer to think of it as having rescued the book from imprisonment in a place of ignorance.”
Mercury nodded solemnly. “And what have you discovered in your liberated tome?”
With a wave of the Scholar’s hand, the floating book opened and flipped through a few pages before stopping.
The Scholar cleared his throat—something he couldn’t possibly actually need to do—and began reading.
“‘The first known recording of a ghost being exchanged for another was etched into boulders near a place known as Hrendan Cnoll. The name shifted as the language did, coming to be known as Palatine Knoll.’”
The Scholar looked up at Mercury in the exact moment the significance of that settled on Mercury’s spinning mind.
“Palatine Knoll? That is our village.”
The Scholar nodded.
“The previous name—Hrendan Cnoll—what does that mean?” Mercury asked.
“’Tis Old English. Means ‘the hill of rending.’ ’Tis a name for a place where things are broken and torn and ripped apart.”
Tension wrapped around Mercury’s chest. “This place where the first ghostly attachments were ripped apart was ‘near’ the village of Palatine Knoll?”
“It was.”
“Aventine Manor is near the village of Palatine Knoll.” Mercury had long ago learned to not trust coincidences.
“What was it, Mercury Raine,” the Scholar asked, “that brought you to Aventine in the first place?”
“It was near to London without being too near. It had space enough for my ghosts to not be tripping over each other and for me to have a bit of privacy. It was comfortable, but also oddly fortified. It felt safe, which was a rare thing for me.”
The Scholar shook his head. “I didn’t ask why it was you chose to purchase Aventine. I asked what brought you here.”
“A fellow broker was selling it,” Mercury said. “And his description was intriguing.”
“How’d you meet this broker?”
How had he met him? “I . . . I don’t remember.” That was odd. Mercury had an excellent memory.
“What was his name?”
His name? He didn’t remember that either. Mercury didn’t like these gaps in his recollection. “How is it that there are ghosts remembering things about me they should not know at the same time that I cannot recall things about myself?”
“Something is breaking,” the Scholar said. “And it is connected to you.”
“Granny Grey told me when she first came here that there is a storm building and I am at its eye.”
The Scholar waved his hand. The floating book closed and tucked itself under one of the ghost’s translucent arms. “You were drawn to Aventine. There must be a reason.”
Mercury shook his head firmly. “No more mysteries. No more secrets I cannot even begin to uncover. I am drowning in them as it is. They are endangering me and my ghosts and Tacey.”
“This is a place of fractures. It’ll break us all, I suspect.”
Mercury forced a thick swallow. “‘Unless.’ This is the point where you say, ‘Everything will be terrible unless. . .’ What is the unless? What do I need to do?”
“So much about you is impossible, Mercury Raine. You have more ghosts than any one person has ever been known to have. Ghosts with Phantomic Memories of you—memories of things you, yourself, do not even remember—are being pulled to you. And I would wager there are things your ghosts should remember, but inexplicably cannot.”
Mercury didn’t nod; he was certain he didn’t have to.
“Your life is broken in many ways,” the Scholar said.
“And you have been brought to this place that further shatters things. There must be a reason. The mystery of why you have been led here and why you have spent your life encircled by brokenness is, I suspect, crucial to solving all the other mysteries surrounding Mercury Raine.”
Mercury carried a ladder-back chair down one of the dark tunnels. Torches had been lit, but it didn’t render the space truly bright. He stepped into the ghost-trapping room where he had placed a lit lantern upon retreating below ground after his conversation with the Scholar.
The mysteries surrounding Mercury Raine.
The Scholar couldn’t possibly have known how vast those mysteries truly were. Everything about Mercury’s life was a mystery. Everything. And those mysteries were dangerous.
The mystery of why he had been led to Aventine, a place that shattered things, was tied to all the others. The truthfulness of the Scholar’s pronouncement hadn’t left his thoughts. It refused to.
Mercury set the chair near the high window in the entrapment room, attempting to keep his thoughts focused on the mundane task of preparing this very room.
But its unique ability to hold ghosts only brought to mind the reason he needed it.
Because his dangerous secrets were coming to life and bringing to Aventine people and ghosts capable of shattering him.
Focus, Mercury. Focus.
The entrapment room had two beds inside and now a chair. There were blankets folded on the ends of the two beds. “Utilitarian” was the best that could be said for the furniture in any of the tunnel rooms. But that was all that was needed.
“Is this how food would be given to the people in here?”
Mercury turned at the sound of the Cream Canary’s voice. She hovered just beyond the door, motioning at a pass-through in the wall this room shared with the tunnel.
“Don’t come inside this room,” Mercury warned her, crossing to the door.
“You wouldn’t close me in.” The Cream Canary didn’t seem worried.
“Of course I wouldn’t.” Mercury picked up the lantern. “But I don’t like the idea of any of the ghosts being inside.” He stepped out into the tunnel.
“We don’t overly like the idea, either.”
He walked at the Cream Canary’s side back toward the main tunnel.
“Your new wardrobe really does make you look like a servant.” The ghost motioned to Mercury’s working-class clothing. “I wouldn’t have recognized you if I hadn’t already known who you were.”
“That is the hope,” he said. “We won’t know when bounty hunters arrive, so they will have the element of surprise. But they won’t know who I am, which tips things back in our favor.”
They reached the tunnel crossroads. Granny Grey met them there.
“All the tunnel rooms are ready now,” she said. “Are you?”
“Ready to defend Aventine and everyone here? More than ready.” Though he made the declaration confidently, he was secretly glad they had avoided the necessity thus far.
They continued on toward the start of the tunnel, where it met the dungeon.
“They are coming, Mercury Raine.” Granny Grey’s voice took on a tone of warning. “The people chasing down a bounty. But also the ghosts I’ve told you of from the time of our first meeting. The ghosts who know your secrets. Secrets those seeking the bounty could use against you.”
“They will collide here?” he asked.
“They will.”
This was the storm she’d spoken of those months ago. A place of rending. The secrets of his past. The dangers of his present. They would converge here and tear everything apart.
“If I cannot escape this storm,” he said to Granny, “promise me you will do all you can to make certain Tacey does.”
A quiet sadness touched Granny’s ghostly face. “Her life has become entwined in secrets since coming here. And she has no home to return to, no family she dares trust. Should you be destroyed by this storm, she no doubt will be as well.”
He refused to accept that. “I will see to it that she has what she needs to survive without me. More than survive, live.”
“And how do you mean to do that?” Granny asked.
He stopped at the base of the stairs leading from the dungeon up into the house itself. He looked back at the elderly ghost. “I am Mercury Raine. I have a talent for doing the impossible.”