The Complete Trilogy: The Books of Conjury #5 Page 5

  I wasn’t sure what even his simpler phrase meant, let alone the sentence he’d quoted.

  “Salem, sir?” I said, instead.

  “The said same feral forest.” He reached for the tea and poured it, appearing satisfied at the steam released and the tarnished copper color of the liquid itself.

  Full or not, my stomach clenched. “The Salem—of the witches?”

  “You are familiar with some other Salem of note?” He sipped his tea and nodded once in approval at the preparation.

  “This is Salem? We’re in Salem, sir?”

  “At the edge, yes. Perhaps you appreciate why I find it ever so curious that you might suddenly arrive here. A witch.”

  Salem. Infamous throughout the empire, dreaded by even the most stout-hearted Englishman. Haunted and forbidden to trespass by order of the Crown. No wonder the darkness stretched without end. I’d heard the stories, as had every citizen of the Crown, no doubt: the seventeen families aboard the doomed ship Westenshire Bell, cast off along the unsettled coast. The town they carved out of the wilderness, and the pact with the Devil that they’d made. Spells and trickery used on the settlers of Boston. Black magic, curses, people flying through the twilight air like storm-tossed scarecrows. Dried up wells, wilted crops, and the unending night that had enveloped the town as the Lord had served his justice. Witches prowling graveyards, vanishing into marshes and woods.

  “But I’m not a witch,” I sputtered.

  “The tests we performed beg to differ.” He tapped the book before him with the spoon. “And the more I read, the more I’m convinced.”

  “But—I’ve never cast a spell. I’ve never made a curse. Or a hex. Or anything.”

  “Irrelevant. Being a witch isn’t about what you do, but rather about what you are.”

  “I’m just me, sir. That’s all. I’ve never been anything else. Not—special.”

  “Save for the demon stalking you. Which, if I were to guess, began at approximately the same time that you—well—began your womanhood. If you see what I’m getting at.”

  I felt my face flush and, after a moment, nodded. My first flow hadn’t been but a fortnight before my father been slaughtered in his workshop. Before that, no hint of tragedy had shadowed my life, save for the death of my mother at the cruel hands of yellow fever some six years earlier, a common enough tragedy for London at the time. But after my father had died—with me fully into womanhood, as Swaine said—the relentless scythe of death had swung in every direction around me, driving me from one side of London to the other, and eventually across the Atlantic.

  “There’s precious little convincing literature on witches, I’m afraid,” Swaine continued. “The usual blather about Satan’s spawn or sinful women. Transparent, hateful nonsense. No, a witch is a human—but with more. More sensitivities to the unseen energies that permeate the visible world. Heightened awareness. Able to manipulate energy, instinctive ways of interacting with such forces. And, of course, a vulnerability to demons. Hence the demon—or demons—that I suspect became drawn to you, causing such havoc to all those nearby.”

  Everything he said, I hated. I wanted him to stop talking. None of it was true, surely. “Then why didn’t it—or they—just kill me, then? If I was—what you say? Sir.”

  “They probably couldn’t find you properly. Or couldn’t harm you properly.” Swaine stirred the mush with his spoon and took a mouthful. “I’d certainly be interested in testing both theories. The question is a fascinating one.”

  “It’s not fascinating. They killed everyone in my life, sir.”

  “Well, of course.” He’d glanced down at the book as I’d spoken. Tapped a finger on the page. “Tragic, yes. Now, I’ve read an account postulating that young witches, as children, possess a form of natural camouflage from demons. They have it, or they’re trained to develop it. Unclear. In either case, it would make sense, and I’m sure there are analogues in nature. And of course there would be the efforts of the parents to protect them, using their own witch-nature, which would presumably be sufficiently advanced. Let’s assume your father wasn’t a witch—the traits favor females, ten-to-one, though there have been males referred to as warlocks, clearly a ridiculous designation. And let’s further assume that if he were a witch, he’d have told you, and also likely not have been killed by the rise in demonic activity around you—then that points to your mother. Tell me about her. What was her name?”

  The mere mention of my mother sent a familiar pang of grief into my heart. “Patricia, sir. Patricia Finch. Born Patricia Carey. She was lovely. And not a witch, sir.”

  “She died when you were how old?”

  “Six.”

  “And she never cautioned you about anything unusual? Never demonstrated any curious behavior? Abilities?”

  “No, nothing.” I pictured her sitting in her sewing room in Mayfair, her skin pale as cream, her lovely hazel eyes not missing a detail, her auburn hair catching highlights like copper in the early morning sunshine of a London spring. Beautiful, clever, fragile, gentle—no witch. “She was lovely and kind, but got very nervous about things. She stayed home, mostly, save for her routine errands. And even then, my father always accompanied her. She didn’t like crowds or noise, sir. She read a lot of books. She couldn’t keep herself in books, she loved them so. She was—just a normal mother, sir.”

  “She never mentioned demons?”

  “No. The thought would have terrified her, sir. She was quite superstitious.”

  “How so?”

  “The usual. Cracking mirrors. The number thirteen. Spilling salt. Ghosts—”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Not like—like demons. Spirits, rather. She wouldn’t go into the cellar alone. She’d always make one of my brothers or Father go with her. The attic, too. At night, the darkness frightened her.”

  “But did she ever see ghosts?”

  “No. I think she was just afraid, sir.”

  “And no magic—nothing like that?”

  Her smile was magic. The stories she told me. How she held me, her only daughter. It seemed like a different world.

  “Not like—” I wiggled my fingers in the direction of the candle, “—that.”

  “And her parents?”

  “She was an orphan, sir. A foundling. Her name was pinned to her dress. She remembered nothing of her family.”

  “Curious,” Swaine said. “Still, she may have been a witch. Unless it can skip a generation. Possible.”

  “How could she have been a witch and not known she was a witch?”

  “Remember—a witch is what you are, not what you do. You spotted my glamours, you saw magic, not thinking any better of it.”

  “I thought it remarkable, sir.”

  “But you didn’t think I didn’t see it. You assumed your sensory perceptions were normal. They aren’t. Now, is it possible your mother went her entire life not understanding that her perceptions weren’t normal? Were these fears of hers—the nerves, the superstitions—tied in somehow? A reaction to facets of the world she didn’t understand? How old was she when she died?”

  “Late twenties, sir.”

  “Maybe she resisted it. Fought against it. Ignored it,” Swaine said. “It certainly doesn’t sound like she utilized it.”

  “But no demons stalked us. Not then.”

  “Fair point. Could she have instinctively known how to hide herself? To hide her children? Those are just the first possibilities that occur to me. I suspect we’ll never know—yet the fact remains: you’re here, you’re a witch, and you had to have gotten it from somewhere.” He looked me over. “I’m rather jealous, I’ll have you know. I’ve often wondered what the unseen arts would be like if they could be the seen arts. Yet for all the fuss, historically speaking, over witches—one might as well assign odious motives to being born with blue eyes, or to attaining six feet in height. Random luck.”

  “I’m—not sure it’s lucky, sir.”

  “Note I didn’t specify what kind
of luck.”

  I stared at the flame in the lantern.

  “Well, out with it,” Swaine said. When I frowned, he leaned forward. “I can practically hear the questions clanging around in your head, Finch. So, out with it.”

  “Isn’t Salem cursed, sir?” I said. “By the witches?”

  “Hardly. Rumors carried from fisherman to fishwife to tavern, etcetera, veer ever so quickly away from reality. Still, such rumors serve to keep the deserted lanes leading here quite empty, for the most part. I see to the rest. And do note you’re the first and only witch I’ve seen here.”

  He seemed to mean the last bit as a joke, but I found nothing funny in having just been told that virtually nothing of what I’d believed about my life was correct. I recalled Swaine’s initial assessment of me: if I wasn’t cursed in a technical sense, I was certainly cursed in the figurative sense.

  Perhaps sensing my growing despair, Swaine continued, “Salem is certainly worthy of caution. That said, I’ve managed to live here quite reasonably since late spring, in spite of the alleged inadvisability of doing so. Not to mention the illegality. Strictly speaking. Not nearly as difficult to get around as one might imagine, given that the old gentleman whose primary concern is this unquiet countryside rattles about Boston looking for his teeth, most days.”

  “Old—gentleman?”

  “Doctor Ephraim Rush, yes.”

  “The magician of Boston.” I’d heard of Doctor Rush, of course—famed on both sides of the Atlantic for protecting Massachusetts against a return of the infernal threat—the witches—that once sprang from Salem.

  “The Royal Doctor of Magickal Sciences: let’s give the man his due,” Swaine said in a tone of voice that implied quite the opposite. “And in fact he once did impressive work, albeit five decades ago. I hear these days, the good Doctor confines his magic to the vanishing of delicacies and the conjuring of titters as he beguiles the city’s matrons with his bon mots and clavichord recitals.”

  He reached out and rapped his knuckle on the cover of the book before him.

  “Successor to Fletcher here, as a matter of fact. Fletcher was the first such Royal Doctor to be officially sanctioned by His Majesty—an earlier Majesty, to be clear—in the Massachusetts charter. Fletcher, then a man named Henrik Krauss, then our Doctor Rush, whose tenure has eclipsed that of both his predecessors by four decades. And all three making names for themselves by dutifully standing watch against . . .” He raised his index finger and whirled in a circle as though to say All of this ordinary barn in the midst of an ordinary countryside.

  “But he’s supposed to make sure there are no more witches, isn’t he?”

  “As I said—there hasn’t been a witch here in nearly a century.”

  “Until me.”

  “Until you. But fear not, Finch. I very much doubt you’re about to terrorize the colony, and thus would be of no concern to our good Doctor Rush.”

  “But if he found out?”

  “I’m not sure how he would—especially if you wear the pendant, which, in addition to shielding you from the attention of demons, ought to keep you undetected by any of Rush’s witch-poles.” He clearly saw the question on my face before I even opened my mouth. “Witch-poles. Glamoured lanterns set atop black hickory poles, placed throughout the colony, though most reside in and around Boston itself. Designed to detect witches—or so the claim has been maintained for half a century. I personally believe the Doctor has largely gone through the motions for decades. The witch-poles, along with his planar readings and various attempts at catalogue and cartography of any rumored disturbances in this part of the colony, have likely done more to soothe the worries of one Governor after another than anything remotely useful in terms of the infernal. Still, one can hardly blame the man for justifying his rather unusual position.”

  It didn’t strike me as comforting in the slightest to realize I found myself in the only colony armed against witches by the only Royally-sanctioned magician in the empire.

  “But everyone knows the stories, sir,” I said.

  “Of course they do. Because people are parrots. The vast bulk of what anyone says is merely a repetition of some other person’s words, passed on like cheap currency, ad infinitum. Hoping for an original thought from someone is distressingly akin to shouting down a well and waiting for a reply.”

  Not knowing what parrots and wells had to do with witches, I carried on. “The witches could cast spells, though—couldn’t they?”

  “Of course they could. And so could you, with practice. So can I,” he said. With a flick of his fingers and a whisper I didn’t catch, all the books before him lifted inches into the air, and dropped again with a bang that made me jump back a step. “There. A spell. And I’m no witch.”

  I eyed the corpse of the enormous man behind the chains. “But what you did with him, sir.”

  He straightened up and sniffed. “Yes, well I’d like to see a witch try that.”

  “It’s magic, though. Isn’t it?”

  “Magic? No.”

  “Witchcraft?”

  That latter suggestion was met with a roll of the eye that made me wonder if I’d pushed too far with my questions. “Hardly. And since you seem determined to chase this point the way a wily barn cat might chase a furtive mouse, I will explain this to you. Once. Listen carefully.” He paused until I met his gaze. “A witch is born a witch, no more, no less. Such an individual can see into a darkness that others can’t, they can manipulate the currents of planar energy that courses between worlds by some form of instinct. By birth. Witches and only witches. I suppose a witch might learn any number of spells, as well. As a magician might.”

  “So you’re not a magician, sir?” I said.

  “Not when I can possibly avoid it. No, within the study of the unseen arts, for those of us not born witches, there are two paths one might take. One is that of magician—Doctors of the Magickal Sciences as they are known, and of course now mostly faded into obscurity, their heyday passed, no new such practitioners in the making thanks to the outlawing of English magic at the end of the last century. And in Europe before that by a good fifty years. No, not for me, treading the well-travelled paths of incantation-based thaumaturgy.” He poked at the bowl. “The way that you made this, the gathering of ingredients, the following of basic directions: that is a magician. Part soup chef, part schoolboy memorization, and entirely beholden to what their circumlocutory predecessors deemed proper approaches to the unseen.”

  He crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. “Then what am I? That’s what you’re getting at, I can feel the question gathering up behind your lips, my mysterious, half-strangled little Finch.”

  He walked over to the pair of bodies behind the chains. “There is a second path within the unseen arts—a less trod path. A shifting, difficult, and treacherous path.” He lifted one hand. The corpses’ limbs jerked. I stepped back. Both corpses opened their eyes, turning their heads to face Swaine. “That other path is the art—and I mean art in the highest sense—of sorcery. The summoning, binding, and manipulation of the denizens of the unseen worlds that collide with our own. Hunting, seeking out, and mastering. My will against theirs. My life risked against even darker perils. All for a glimpse behind the curtains that separate the limited reality that we see from the magnificent reality that is.”

  He waved his hand and the corpses fell still once again.

  “Denizens, sir?” I said.

  Swaine turned to me. “Demons, Finch. Demons. The very same infernal spirits that hunted the last known witches to extinction. Until you appeared, that is.”

  My mouth had gone dry again.

  6

  The Study of Genius

  And so began my education in the study of genius.

  Upon announcing that my fearful plight was fascinating, Swaine’s full attention swung to the books before him. Half an hour went by. Another trip to his study to retrieve yet more books. An hour passed. Curiously, I appeared to be as forgotte
n as the wagon outside, or the daylight past, or the breakfast he’d presumably consumed that morning. I saw firsthand that whilst genius often burns with a tremendous glare, likely as not it will only focus its brilliance in one direction, as a bulls-eye lantern illuminating but one part of the surrounding darkness.

  I waited off to the side, taking a seat on an empty wooden box. Swaine turned from one book to another, mumbling to himself as he did. He might pause and tap a finger thoughtfully on a page, or bark out a quick laugh as though he’d proven—or disproven—an argument. Now and then he stared at lantern flames, or at the corpses, or at me. At one point, he muttered “Such utter nonsense,” closing and shoving aside the book he’d been reading as though it had personally offended him. He looked through another stack of books as yet untouched, shook his head, and grabbed up a lantern. He almost faltered when he spotted me. “Ah, still here, Finch. Of course you are. Well. No more pussy-footing around this magician’s opinion or that. Let’s try something.”

  He stepped over to the chained pen beyond which lay the old man and the huge man with the bashed-in head. “Our friends here might be able to help me make up my mind as to whether I believe half of what I’ve just read. Come.”

  The skin on my face tingled as I approached the chains, a prickling sensation as if I’d just walked face-first through a spider web, perhaps one crawling with spiderlings. “These chains are glamoured, sir?”