by Laura Bickle
But none of it made any sense. She layered the maps on top of each other, spread them out on Maria’s floor in tiled fashion, trying to fit them together as if they were a sewing pattern that would eventually add up to the shape of a body. Try as she might, she couldn’t figure out which end was up, where the entrance and exit to this labyrinth was. She resolved to take them to her father during the next visitor’s hours. Perhaps he would be lucid enough to give her some insight.
She felt mentally fuzzy. Not at her sharpest. Maybe it was just the fever she felt pulsing behind her brow. Or the ache in her ribs from where Nine had resuscitated her. Nine had left behind bruises that had blackened, almost as if they were oxidizing. Nine had popped a couple of her stitches, and Petra had tried to put the wound back together with some butterfly closures from Maria’s medicine cabinet. Unless Sig was talking, no one had mentioned what had happened at the Eye of the World to Maria, though Petra had caught Maria looking at the top of one of the bruises when she was doing laundry.
She held her head in her hands, staring at the pages, spread about her on the living room floor. Pearl, the cat, picked her way among the papers, refusing to step on them in a game of floor lava.
She ran her fingers through her short hair. “I don’t know shit about this stuff,” she said.
Nine watched her from across the floor. She was eating a sandwich, feeding half of it to Sig. “Have you asked the west wind?”
“I don’t know if the west wind and I are on speaking terms.” The west wind seemed like an abstract entity for serious magicians. Petra was pretty sure that they had never been formally introduced, much less friendly enough to ask for favors.
Nine unfolded herself, stood, and stepped around the pages with bare feet. “Sometimes, in our wanderings in the backcountry, we would get a little lost,” she admitted. “Most of the time, we navigated by sun and stars. But when one got truly lost, the wind could sometimes be asked for guidance.”
“I’m open to anything.”
Nine stood by the door. “Brother Wind, please lend us your guidance.” She took a deep breath and flung it open to the dusk.
The force of the door flying open scattered the papers in a swirl as wind kept at bay behind the chipped door swept in. Petra instinctively snatched at the papers. They slipped from her grasp like birds.
When the breeze settled down, the papers were scattered in a seemingly random pattern.
Nine stood over them and pointed to the kitchen window. “That way’s north.”
Petra bit back questions. She’d seen Nine perform magic that could kill a man. She wasn’t going to quiz her right now on her mapmaking skills. Petra took her pencil and meticulously marked an N on each page as it fell, aligned with the kitchen window.
It was still a gargantuan puzzle, she thought, stacking the pages on top of each other by Nine’s true north. Yet this was still better than nothing—perhaps even the key that could unlock the secret Gabe had left.
But if Petra had learned anything as a scientist, it was the need to shift perspective in approaching a problem, to strike at many angles and begin fresh. Maybe it was time to look at the rest of the evidence and then return to the maps.
She had been reading Gabe’s stories since she’d stolen them from Owen’s basement. There was really nothing else to call them—they were fantastic accounts of what had unfolded in Temperance 150 years ago.
She read them, one by one, pacing around the house, sitting on the couch, sprawled in bed with a bank of pillows behind her. Nine eventually made her go to bed, and she took the pages with her. Nine sprawled at the foot of the bed, rubbing Sig’s ears, while Pearl had taken over her usual post on Maria’s down pillow.
“I can’t imagine what he went through,” Petra murmured. She passed the pages to Nine as she finished them.
“It seems like he knew a lot more than he ever told anyone,” Nine agreed.
“You read English?” Petra blurted.
Nine shrugged. She propped her head against the footboard, pulled up her knees, and propped the pages against her belly. “My father made sure we knew all the languages of men.”
“You really should think about working as a translator. I mean, seriously. You could go work for the United Nations.”
Nine gave her a sidelong look. “The United Nations.”
“Yeah. Where a whole bunch of representatives of different countries get together to argue about stuff. Usually about punishing this country or that or who’s bombing who. And war crimes. Lots of war crimes.”
Nine shook her head. “No, thank you. I would rather talk to the dogs.”
Petra grinned. “It’s mostly asses in politics. Besides, I’m not actually sure you could pass the background check. I’m quite certain that you wouldn’t show up in anyone’s database. Though, that could be a plus.”
“My background is just fine, thank you.”
Petra knew she’d hit a sore spot. There was a deep sadness in the young woman’s posture, a longing. She hadn’t wanted to become human. The concerns of humans were not her concerns. She wanted to go back to the wolves and focus on the true business of living: hunting, sleeping, and chasing sunshine.
“When we find Gabe, I think you two should talk. He knows about alchemy. If there’s a way to bring you back to your pack, I know he will try to find it.”
Nine flicked her a glance. “I am counting on it.”
That startled her a bit. Petra had assumed that Nine was acting out of canine loyalty to her human friends, that she was like Sig in that way. But her first loyalty would always be to her pack, and her interests in finding Gabe surely went beyond wanting to help Petra find her husband. That was more than fair. No one in or around Temperance had simple motives.
Sig yawned and snuggled up closer to Petra. She rubbed his belly. Maybe Sig had pure motives. Lunch meat was as pure as motivation got around here.
Petra flipped to the next page of Gabe’s account and began to read.
I did not come to Temperance expecting to be hanged.
I had been investigating Lascaris as a Pinkerton agent for many months by the autumn of 1861. I had come to town posing as a merchant from Boston. I presented myself as a dealer in iron, seeking to expand my business west with the railroads. I came with the right clothes on my back, the right credentials, and the right amount of money to spread around.
When a stranger comes to town, there is always some measure of curiosity. So it was not surprising that the moment I stepped off the train in Temperance, I felt eyes on me. The eyes of pickpockets on my purse. The eyes of socialites on my luggage, assessing my marriageability by its weight and quality. The eyes of the local priest, wondering if I had a soul worth saving.
And of course the eyes of Lascaris were upon me—though I did not know it at the time. Lascaris had a vast network of prying eyes and furtive whispers that observed and reported everything of import in Temperance, not to mention most pieces of minor gossip. Information, no matter how benign it seemed at the moment, was currency to him, to be pieced together and used as leverage later.
Temperance was in the middle of a building boom. The streets were dirt, the townsfolk were a little grimy around the necks, and the whole place smelled like fresh sawdust and avarice. But those were all signs of growth. Logs had been freshly sawn from the nearby pine forest as lumber, hauled in, and used to build a general store, a train station, and a church. The walls still bled sap. I had arrived in town on a Sunday afternoon, just as church was letting out. All of Temperance’s society poured out into the street—the ladies in their finest dresses, dour gentlemen staring at pocket watches, and the priest glowering over them all.
I tipped my hat at him. Some of the ladies lifted their eyes at me and looked away, smiling. The priest continued to glower. A shame; a priest could be a great ally in these sorts of investigations concerning supernatural happenstances. A priest who was sensitive to the work of the devil, as he perceived it, was worth his weight in gold. When I wo
rked on an off-the-books assignment in Rome years before, a priest had been invaluable to me in hunting down a killer who believed himself to be Judas Iscariot. The deluded soul filled a wine chalice over and over again with the blood of murder victims.
The way this priest looked at me, I wondered what he would think about a chalice filled with my blood.
There was one inn in the bustling little town in 1861. The Dogwood Inn shared a wall and more than one door with the whorehouse next door. Prostitutes slipped in and out of the halls like ghosts, sliding through passages and cellar doors. Their soft laughter could be heard through the walls late at night. I didn’t avail myself of their services, pleading that I was a freshly married man. The women at first were skeptical. But as I settled down at the inn, they became used to my presence. I overheard much gossip and was told more than a few secrets about men who are now long dead. Priests and prostitutes know all the truths of men, I am convinced.
As I made my way about town, I began polite inquiries about real estate, population growth, and the regularity of the train schedule, as a good businessman surveying his prospects would. All the business in the town, I noticed, was conducted in gold nuggets. There was just too much of it in circulation, in pockets, in cash drawers, and left behind on the bar.
Gold had been faked in societies ever since it was discovered. For many ancient alchemists, like the Egyptians, the transmutation of base metals into gold was considered complete if the appearances were similar. If it looked like gold, it was considered to be as good as gold. Much the same was true for medieval alchemists. More than a few passed off brass as the real thing. I had suspected this kind of pale chemistry to be at work in Temperance, to find a community of people trading in brass or plated metal.
I got a few sample pieces from around town and tested them, etching the samples in nitric acid. To my shock, all of them retained their color.
That had been my mission in coming to Temperance. Lascaris’s investors back east were suspicious of the amount of gold that had been coming from the town. There had never been anyone who reported back from a mine. It simply appeared to be conjured from thin air. It was my mission to assess where it came from. I had an inkling that the idea of conjuring it from air was no exaggeration.
But pure gold had not been conjured in such a large scale before. I began to wonder if some alchemist, somewhere in the past, had figured out how to do it. Maybe Paracelsus. Maybe Cleopatra. If anyone had figured it out, though, they had kept the secret well, hid the formula in long-rotted skulls or indecipherable codes. They hadn’t been so bold as to spread it about in the town whorehouse or to use it to pay for steak. It was the reckless act of someone either brilliant, lucky, stupid, or a combination of all three. Whoever was doing this might have information about those ancient processes and deciphered their cryptic notes. That was a fearsome enough thing. But what might be worse was a modern alchemist who had figured out the process independently. That would take a magical talent and an intellect that was even more dangerous. If he knew how to make gold, what else might he know how to do? What other experiments had he conducted along the way? The alchemist would be a dangerous man.
It did not take me long in town to realize that Lascaris, of course, had been watching me. That was confirmed when he sent a message, asking me to dinner at his home. I accepted, but I went armed, as I always did in those days. No Pinkerton agent ever went out and about unarmed—to be fair, most people in the West at that time wouldn’t be caught without some means of protecting themselves, lawman or no. But in addition to the standard arsenal, no one investigating the supernatural, such as I was, ever went out without a collection of more arcane weapons: a silver dagger, a pocketful of rock salt, and a bottle of powdered sulfur. I did not carry holy water or other such nonsense. I had seen it work in the hands of capable priests and nuns, but my belief in a good and just God was not strong enough to support its use. Instead, I limited myself to less temperamental tools, those weapons that could be relied upon without reference to the mental state or delusions of the user.
Thus armed, I made my way to Lascaris’s home. It was close enough to the main street to walk there without hiring a carriage. It was a pleasant evening, and I enjoyed strolling down the street and the dirt road to his home, over a mile beyond the town proper.
From the edge of town, I could see light burning in the windows. It was the finest house in the area—even I could see that much from a distance. A stable and other outbuildings surrounding a house that was two stories tall, shingled in whitewashed cedar and roofed with slate. Roses had been imported to grow around the foundations of the house, an outrageous and thirsty luxury in the West. For a second I puzzled over how they would survive outside of a hothouse here, but then I took in the mansion as a whole, and it made more sense.
Though it was a fine house, there was definitely something amiss beyond the roses—though there was more to that as well, such as the fact that the clusters of rosebushes stood in the cardinal directions, too thorny and lush-growing for autumn. Balanced with that, the house itself had been strictly situated according to the compass directions: the front door faced east, and the back of the house west. Then there was the low fence surrounding the courtyard, made entirely of iron, a powerful material in the alchemical world. If that wasn’t evidence enough, the stone path leading to the house was pockmarked with salt, and I also found bits of salt stuck between the floorboards of the front porch. The crystals had blackened, as if they had absorbed something terrible. Obsidian stones sat unobtrusively above each window and door lintel, like warding black eyes. Protective symbols were hidden in the elaborate decorative carvings supporting the porch. All of it said clearly to someone used to such things:
The owner of this house knows magic, and he has designed this place to be a fortress against eldritch intrusion.
I noted, too, that the house had been dug out with a basement, which was very unusual for the hasty architecture of the West. Most houses were put up quickly and not subject to this degree of care. Here, though, the foundations were made of stone, and there were small, shuttered windows reaching below-ground level. As I approached, I spied a salamander slipping out from behind one of those shutters and scuttling into the night. The fire elemental was quick and stealthy, but I knew that they only gathered in places of magic.
I was something of a quiet expert in these things, you see. I had been fascinated by the supernatural since an unfortunate childhood incident that claimed the life of my brother. Though I had spent much of my time in libraries, researching the supernatural, I had made a better career of quietly debunking false prophets and sorcerers for Alan Pinkerton. There was no shortage of so-called magic in this age of science and industry. Men—myself included—still wanted to believe in the strange and unnatural. Most of what I investigated, from Europe through the Americas, was sheer fraud. I was sent to rescue rich men and women who were spending their fortunes to peer into the crystal balls of charlatans.
But sometimes, just sometimes, something would happen that I could not explain. These events were rare. Yet, when they occurred, they added to my world view that there was more going on underneath the surface of everyday life than we could know or understand.
Lascaris, I knew, was a powerful magician of some stripe, though I didn’t know where he drew his power from. Most magicians were limited by their available funds or were slaves to their lusts. The former group were too weak to manifest the monies they desired to do great works, and the latter were forever funneling their energy to bottomless pits of obsession. I did not have a sense if Lascaris was subject to that weakness. And he certainly had plenty of money. But every man had a chink in his armor. It was my duty to find and exploit his.
I screwed up my courage and rapped at the door.
A servant appeared and let me in. I was led to a sitting room illuminated by candles and oil lamps. I seated myself on a velvet couch to await the master’s arrival.
I glanced over Lascaris’s
belongings in this room. Some expensive art, portraits of young women. Perhaps they were his weakness or he was showing off his virility. There was a standard assortment of globes and other knickknacks that men often furnished their rooms with to demonstrate status: leather-bound books, maps, spyglasses. The books were old classics, nothing interesting. And the maps were outdated drawings of far-off oceans. Nothing he’d bothered to keep current, and there wasn’t enough of any given category to hint to true scholarship.
Window dressing, all of it. So what lay beneath?
The walls were freshly plastered, which was unheard-of in this part of the country. Bits of horsehair even still protruded at a corner. I leaned back and fingered it. It was too fine to be horsehair. I frowned.
In the corners of the room lay precise pinches of salt, turning grey. A teacup of salt sat on a fireplace mantel. It hadn’t been there long enough to accumulate dust, but it, too, was greying. I glanced at the fireplace. A fire danced in the grate. When I looked away from it, bits in the depths would flicker green. The fire seemed to hiss more than it popped. I wondered if there were other salamanders in the house looking to escape.
The place had an oppressive air, as if the windows had never been opened. I looked forward to buying a hot bath at the inn later tonight. If I got through the evening, that is.
“Mr. Manget?”
I stood immediately. I had not heard footsteps.
A man stood in the doorway. He was impeccably dressed, about fifty years old. His hair was greying, but shiny as silver. His eyes were dark and glittering, but he wore an affable smile as he extended his hand.
“Mr. Lascaris.” I shook his hand, noting that it was stained black and green in places. He’d been fiddling with powders and potions. Maybe lead and copper. “Thank you for the kind invitation.”
