The Complete Trilogy: The Books of Conjury #5 Page 9

  The intruder stared at me. “Ignis,” she whispered. The candles on the workbench and writing desk sprouted flames a foot high. Fire blossomed in the corners of the walls, on the papers on the floor, at the spines of his hundreds of books. Swaine’s trousers caught fire. I heard the shattering of windows throughout the house, the creak of post and beam as the walls tilted, quaking of floorboards and timbers. Swaine hit his legs, slapping the flames out with his bare hands, dancing in a panic. I scanned my skirts and sleeves, but was spared the touch of fire.

  The woman lifted her arms. Windings of light appeared to wrap her, silken and brilliant. In the flaring light, she approached me, reaching out. I backed off, careful to remain within the protection. When I could go no farther, I stopped—she stood before me. She put a pale hand to her throat.

  “Wæron æþelingas eft to leodum fuse to farenne!” Swaine yelled. A wind whirled in a vortex in the middle of the study, then boomed out into a gale. Magic danced across the walls, the ceiling, everything in Swaine’s study as the winds rose. In an instant, the woman disappeared. The fire on Swaine’s breeches blew out. As the wind rose, the flames huffed and tore, sparks pulled straight into the air. Faster and faster it spun, taking every paper with it, pulling over candles, sending quills flying. I shielded my face with my arms. The door banged open. Then, the flames were out, snuffed.

  Swaine staggered and whispered, “Steppen.”

  The wind ceased. Papers kept twirling, gliding to the floor. Wisps of smoke circled. The room fell silent save for the settling of the building, boards and sills groaning and popping. The room reeked of soot. I took a few shaking steps and grabbed at the mantel above the hearth, my hands trembling.

  “My God.” Swaine put a hand to his forehead. His voice sounded unsteady. “That power—did you feel it?”

  “Who was she, sir?”

  “I saw nothing but a ripple of shadow—a demon, no doubt. But with strength beyond the manifestation of fire. The planes themselves trembled.”

  When I described the woman I’d seen, he shook his head. “Don’t pay too much attention to the guise. Perhaps your incessant questions about the witches are being picked up on and manipulated. We need to be careful.”

  “I didn’t think she was a witch, sir.” Or had I? I wasn’t sure.

  “Demons sometimes know more about our thoughts than we might imagine.” He knelt by the motionless revenant and closed his eyes. Shook his head. “My demon is gone, the binding shorn. Unheard of. I feel nothing, sense nothing.” Even after he’d removed his pocket-watch and manipulated the magic, nothing changed. “I don’t even know how it’s possible.”

  “Gone?”

  “Not a trace remains.” With a sigh, he stood, massaging his temples. Patches of his clothing hung loose, burned. “Concerning. Also, intriguing.”

  “Sir?”

  “I believe we just witnessed an expression of the richest vein of demonic activity known to sorcery,” he said. “Untapped. Ready to harness.”

  He ran a shaking hand through his hair. Possibility gleamed in his eyes. No, it wasn’t a set-back, as far as Swaine was concerned—it was a glimpse of what might be. The future. His next great breakthrough, drawing ever nearer. I didn’t share his enthusiasm. Every shadow seemed to hold a threat, as far as I was concerned. A faint ember glowed in the hearth while darkness pressed in from the silent woods.

  9

  Without These Books

  Daylight revealed the damage. After checking and re-checking every glamour on the grounds, unwilling to take further chances with this new power showing itself in Salem, Swaine bade me to catalog the harm the house bore while he set about salvaging the books in his study. The stinging odor of blackened wood and scorched paper hung in the air, and would in fact take weeks to fade. When I returned to the study, I found my master slouching in his chair by the hearth, hands over his face.

  “Well?” he asked, not moving, his voice muffled.

  I glanced at the list I carried. “Seventeen broken windows, sir. A number of bent hinges. Great chunks of fallen plaster in four of the upstairs rooms and the hallway. Four doors with loosened stile, mullion, or panel. Six of the runners are cracked on the stairs. The bannister looks—”

  He raised one hand. I stopped.

  “I don’t care a whit about hinges,” he said. “Or cracked runners.”

  I folded the paper I held. He mightn’t care at the moment, I knew—but he would care eventually, when the moment came. I slid the paper into my pocket.

  He took his hands from his face and sat up. “Does a mother value her children, Finch?”

  “Sir?”

  “Does a mother value her children?”

  “A mother—loves her children, sir.”

  “Would you say I value my books?”

  “You love them, sir?”

  “With more ferocity and devotion than any mother ever has, Finch. Any mother.” He swept his arm. “And look about. The ruin. The catastrophe. Each volume licked by the flames is a wound I bear in my heart.”

  Most of his collection had gone untouched. Many bore superficial wounds confined to their covers, perhaps with edges smudged with soot. Yet some looked beyond salvage, covers hanging by singed threads, blackened spines crumbling to ashes. As I stared at the books, damaged and otherwise, I found myself thinking not about Swaine, but about my own mother. She’d loved books every bit as much as Swaine, as well as I could remember: they were her solace, her sanctuary. When my father ran errands, she lost herself in books, re-reading the same one over and over if no other was available. She was thrilled to borrow one or two books during a season, and I could only surmise that a room shelved floor to ceiling with books would have been her idea of Heaven.

  Yet would she have been pleased to see her only daughter surrounded by books if she also knew of the corpses, demons, and unseen arts that comprised my days? Such thoughts left me uneasy. Who had she really been, passing on her dark gift to me without a word? Had she been waiting until I was older? Had it all been a terrible miscalculation? Such thoughts soured in my mind the longer I examined them, the conclusion inescapable: her silence had brought ruin to our family and kept me from ever having a normal life.

  I approached one of the damaged books, Thomas Wexler’s Mediam Regionem. I tried to line up the scorched portions of the volume.

  Swaine rose, shaking his head. “I can’t even bear the sight of such a magnificent book reduced to ash.” He stormed from the room. I listened as he banged around the first floor and the kitchen for half an hour. I busied myself, trying to bring some order to the shambles of his study. When he at last returned, bearing a full kettle of tea, I worried he’d object to my handling of his books. Instead, he looked resigned.

  “Each one, you see, is a locale I’ve visited. Dwelt in,” he said. “Each acquisition a prize. Each author an old friend. An inspiration. A vexing instructor. A rambunctious fool, in some cases.” He set the kettle down on his writing desk. “Here’s the thing, Finch: read enough books, and eventually the larger contours of reality begin to reveal themselves—one thread crossing here, another leading there, yet another intersecting the first two, and soon the vast beauty and breadth of life stretches out from your vantage, connected by that sumptuous web of words and the minds who spun them. Without these books—I wouldn’t be who I am.”

  “I’m—well, I’m so sorry, sir.” I shifted, unsure what else to say. “I’ve put the worst ones over here, sir.”

  Swaine poured himself a cup and sighed. “I suppose I can’t put it off forever. Let’s have a look. Don’t mind me if I weep.” He came over to the table where I’d gathered the casualties.

  He poked at the ruins of one thick book. “Well if I had to pick a book to go up in flames, Hoell wouldn’t be the last on my list.” Another sigh. “Sixteenth century, Welsh. Gwillim Hoell. Once devised a notorious spell alleged to turn a ram’s horn into an instrument designed to peer into Hell and locate the souls of the more sinful among the English aristocracy. It did nothing of the kind, of course. It only served to help the charlatan peer beneath the skirts of wealthy widows.”

  Next to it sat another volume with half its pages charred to cinders.

  “I could make out the name Barnave on the front-piece, sir,” I offered.

  “Yes. Jérome Barnave of Dauphiné.” The recognition elicited no more than a deep frown. “Barnave’s contribution to the arts was a technique for spying on individuals using entrained pairs of mirrors over great distances.” He sipped his tea. It seemed as though speaking of the contents of the books was at least pulling him from the gloom. Or maybe it was simply the tea. “The chief danger with mirror magic being that opening such channels is a two-way proposition, and there is often no telling what sort of planar entities might gain an interest in the caster themselves. In fact, Barnave eventually disavowed his eponymous spell, and would under no circumstance tolerate the presence of any mirror or reflective object in his presence for the remainder of his life. A polished silver tea set would send him fleeing, by all accounts. Can you imagine?”

  I was going to confirm that I couldn’t, but he’d already grunted in frustration at the sight of the next book, a stout volume blackened on the outside, half the pages devoured, reduced to cinder.

  “Blackwell,” he said. “Lord Humble Blackwell. Damn it all.”

  I saw the cloud descending on his brow again. I hoped to stave off the darkest of his despair. “What did he study, sir?”

  “Glamours and the planar implications of warded metals used in them. Only the most widely regarded authority on the subject, which I’ve consulted dozens of times since arriving here.”

  “And did he recant his work, sir?”

  “Recant? Heavens, no. Not Blackwell. The man was t
he son of the 7th Baron Blackwell of Warwickshire. A promising young alchemist who turned to sorcery after marrying a local commoner. She was alleged to be a witch, interestingly enough. Said marriage, naturally, forced Blackwell to sever his ties to the Blackwell fortune. His family never gave up the conviction that he’d been spellbound, seeing signs of the Devil in all circumstances surrounding the affair. He never spoke to them again. His work is—was—lively, thorough, committed.”

  The morning sunlight fell in across the scorched books. “Are there any books by women, sir?”

  “Of course.” He looked over the collection. “Though, thankfully, none appear to be among the murdered here in this gruesome mortuary.”

  He pointed to a few spots along his shelves. “Right over there is Milread Laird. Also known as Sister Agnes of Deeside. She spent her life in the Abby of St. Hilda, in the Grampian Mountains of Scotland, creating that lovely, exhaustive encyclopedia of demons. She claimed they were shown to her in visions from God that spanned nearly her entire life. Let me add my voice to those who contend that Laird was herself, in fact, a sorceress. Striking accuracy and detail fill her work. Further, records of the Abby indicated that the sisters never suffered from the notable depredations, robberies, or malnourishment common to the sparse villages and towns in that notorious area of the Highlands, lending credence to the theory.”

  Stepping to a closer bookcase, he tapped the spine of a slender volume. “Emelie Du Marien, a French noble woman whose travels to Safavid Persia uncovered a strain of planar entities known by the Sufis as shadow-asps. Quite an inspiration. She lived a life free of convention, notably eschewing dresses for breeches. How shocking. Sadly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, she was shunned by most of the leading male practitioners of the art during her time. Pure foolishness. She disappeared while crossing the Southern Carpathians with her longtime companion Claire Claudel, herself something of an underrated practitioner of magic.”

  His voice held no scorn, no mockery, no condescension. I realized that Swaine’s dedication to the art was so profound as to negate any such distinction as sex, nationality, or ethnicity. He cared for the work. The intellect. The art. He held his finger on the edge of Du Marien’s book for a moment, then turned back to me. “Let’s get through this grim accounting. What next?”

  “This one is only damaged on the bottom corner, sir.” The brown cover bore the title Die Schimmernden Rand Mitternacht.

  “Ah, The Glimmering Edge of Midnight,” Swaine said. “Werner Schmeling’s insights into the nature of those entities dwelling just below the surface of the visible world. I adore it. The muscular prose—it captures the exuberance of proper pursuit of the sorcery. Schmeling left Saxony as a young man, pursuing sorcery from Amsterdam to Vienna to Kalmar during his short life. The man was a genius. Died at the age of twenty-seven, decapitated by a mirror during a summoning gone awry. A bit how I feel seeing that rare book damaged.”

  “I wonder if we mightn’t get this one back together, sir.” I nudged the first one I’d touched, the one that had driven him from the room earlier. “It seems to have split down the middle, with only the center of the pages scorched. Maybe just a few pages are lost.”

  “Even a few pages of Mediam Regionem burnt is an appalling tragedy, Finch.” Swaine looked over the broken spine. “Wexler was the first English magician to posit patterns of planar variation that follow a cycle that can be tracked. Oscillating in complex cycles of 4 and 11 years for the first, 9, 12, and 23 years for the second. The poor man only lived to see half his predictions confirmed. His apprentice Thomas Adams went on to chart the shifts of three more planes before disappearing during a carriage journey between Burton-on-Trent and Leek in the spring of 1672. According to testimony to the local constables, the driver of the carriage had arrived in Leek empty of his sole passenger, reporting nothing unusual, save for a thunderstorm with little rain that had been heralded by the appearance of a peculiar flock of ravens.”

  “Ravens?”

  “Notably, there exists a long tradition of English raven magic, often used to murderous ends. Perhaps he’d made enemies. The matter was never satisfactorily resolved.”

  Swaine turned to the last two books on display. Pages devoured, spine and binding destroyed, remnants of paper blackened and fragile. He put his tea down and ran a hand over his brow.

  “Those are the worst, sir,” I said.

  “The demon might as well have disemboweled me on the spot. These are the works of giants, Finch. Giants.” He looked as stricken as if his innards were in fact spilled out across the floor. “Irreplaceable.” He leaned over the first book—though it was more ash than book. “The Great Man.”

  I didn’t dare speak.

  Swaine shook his head. “The greatest German magician of them all: Gustav Koeffler. Pioneered the theories of planar behavior. Documented the existence of seventy-nine different planes. In fact, he came to believe there might in fact be an infinite array of them. Planes wrapped within planes in an unending process of bifurcation, a cosmic nesting, a staggering mosaic of realities.”

  “The same—planes mentioned by Wexler, sir? I’ve never really known what that means, sir. Not when you’ve mentioned it.”

  “You haven’t? Good grief—don’t let a mystery linger. You merely have to ask.”

  Easy for him to say—he’d never tried to interrupt himself mid-explanation. A fraught proposition, I could attest.

  He continued, “Planes of existence beyond our own. Invisible realms. Some of pure energy, others of nothing but the absence of light, of life, of matter. Among these are planes that are home to beings and intelligences that are entirely inimical to what we see around us. These would include demons, and other malign entities.”

  “But where are they, sir?”

  “They’re all around us,” Swaine said. “Koeffler memorably described it thusly: ‘You hold within the palm of your hand universes: spiraled, knotted, nested, and alive, over and above, under and through. A vast web of glittering life and beauty, linking all that you see with all that truly is.’”

  I looked at my hand and saw nothing but a streak of soot.

  “Inside,” Swaine continued. “Within. And yet, for the most part, out of reach, save for those locations or instances where one plane—or more than one—collides with another. In those locales, the veil between worlds becomes thin, allowing passage. Much of sorcery depends on these sort of intersections of the planes. They make summoning possible, you see.”

  I wasn’t altogether sure I understood.

  “Koeffler’s methods of planar explorations and cataloguing his findings were exquisite. Such crucial work. Dangerous, as well—yet he lived to be seventy-nine. Towering intellect until the very end. On his death-bed, he retained his poise, his final words a remark of sterling poetry.” Swaine paused as though swallowing down the emotion that had thickened his voice. He cradled the blackened husk of the book in his hands, his face pale. “‘So viele räume innerhalb des himmlischen villa, ich freue mich jeden zu erkunden.’ It means: ‘So many rooms within the heavenly mansion, I look forward to exploring each one.’ Koeffler’s work changed the course of my life.”

  After setting it down with care, he turned to the last ruined tome. Every page had burned, the thick cover barely holding together. “I can’t even touch it,” he said. “A jewel in the art. That foul demon has robbed the world. This is the rarest of the rare: Myrgjöl Grímhildr’s Srávobhiśśravasíyas. An original. From 1483, the classic work on magical wards. Printed, as a matter of fact, in the village of Heggen, before it met the misfortune I told you of. Where I bound the demon now residing within our large, half-headed friend. So many connections to this work.” He stared at the charred cinders. After a good minute, he sniffed and ran a hand across his forehead, leaving a black streak. “I take little comfort in the fact that my copy of Angus Hume’s English translation escaped the flames. Serviceable rending of the text—but no poetry, shorn of its numinous mellifluence, its awe.”