The Left-Handed Booksellers of London

by Garth Nix

  Merlin’s voice trailed off as Vivien gave him a scathing look.

  “I’m still not sure I understand how finding who my father is will help,” said Susan. “I mean, if he’s one of the bad ones, that’ll make matters worse, won’t it?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Vivien. “Knowledge is power, as they say. And we generally prefer to come to agreements with mythic entities, rather than taking harsher action.”

  “Besides,” added Merlin. “It’s not only about your father. I’m sure he . . . and you . . . are somehow connected to the people who murdered our mother.”

  “Merlin—” Vivien started to say, but Susan forestalled her.

  “You might be right. I’ve been thinking about those trips to London. That one in 1977, when I was twelve, it was different. Mother was excited about meeting someone—I’m pretty sure not a man, because she would have behaved differently—and then she was sad when it didn’t happen. And . . . I’d forgotten till you talked about the florist . . . we got a truly amazing bunch of flowers at the hotel that afternoon, and the desk clerk was impressed it came from such a famous florist in Kensington, one that was all the rage back then. I never knew who sent them, but I guess . . . I guess it could have been from your mum.”

  “What!” exclaimed Merlin. “But there was nothing in the police report . . .”

  “She was coming out of the florist’s,” said Vivien, her eyes fixed on the far wall, avoiding Susan’s. “But she wasn’t carrying flowers. She must have ordered them to be delivered to someone else.”

  “Those incompetent flatfoots,” said Merlin savagely. “They never investigated it properly as a murder, right from the start.”

  “Six years ago,” said Vivien. “I doubt the florist would have any records now. But I’ll check with them. I don’t suppose your mother would remember?”

  “Probably not,” said Susan. “But it’s impossible to know what she will or won’t recall. I’ll call her tonight or tomorrow, and ask.”

  “The question is, why would your mum be meeting ours?” asked Merlin.

  “Was she left-handed or right-handed?” asked Susan.

  “Both,” said Vivien. “Yes, it’s possible. Unusual. Mum was one of the even-handed, but at that time she mostly worked with the right-handed, not out in the field.”

  “Do you know what she was working on, or interested in?”

  “We were at school,” replied Vivien. “So no.”

  “When I started to look into everything last year, I asked around,” said Merlin. “But no one wanted to talk about it. I mean, the Greats thought I was wasting my time, and everyone took their lead from that. But Cousin Onyeka did say that mum liked to work alone; she enjoyed ‘teasing out mysteries.’”

  “We all like to ‘tease out mysteries,’” scoffed Vivien. “That’s practically a definition of being one of the right-handed.”

  “Not alone, though,” said Merlin. “I mean, you all love your intellectual one-upmanship, destroying each other’s theories. Not to mention all the actual collaborations. Is there anyone right-handed in either bookshop now or any of the out-stations who’s doing anything someone else doesn’t know about, is involved in, or wants to interfere with?”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said Vivien. “No one works entirely solo. I hadn’t really thought about it. Mum never talked that much, though. She was a very reserved person.”

  “So say she found evidence of a child of an Ancient Sovereign, born at dawn on May Day, near Glastonbury,” said Susan. “She’d want to follow that up, wouldn’t she?”

  “Absolutely. But what evidence?” asked Vivien. “What could have led her to learn about your existence, Susan, and who your mother was?”

  Susan couldn’t answer.

  “If we can find out exactly who Susan’s father is, that might tell us,” replied Merlin. “And then we might also be able to work out who in the crime world—or from the Old World but who is working with criminals—wants Susan out of the picture.”

  “Out of the picture?” asked Susan.

  “I didn’t want to say dead,” said Merlin, with a bright smile. “Besides, I don’t think whoever it is does want you dead, or they’d have shot you from a distance or something like that. Those two thugs, the van, that was an attempted kidnapping. And the goblins . . . maybe that was to put you on ice, or it might have been a temporary prison, before they handed you on.”

  “What about the Raud Alfar you say was shooting at me? That was to kill.”

  “That’s separate, but it makes sense. The Raud Alfar are fiercely independent. They would fear the child of an Ancient Sovereign—you might claim their allegiance and make them serve you. So the opportunity to kill you before you came into your powers—and that’s another interesting question, the nature and extent of whatever your potential powers are—would be welcome to them.”

  “So the Raud Alfar of Highgate Wood must know who you are, and thus who your father is,” said Vivien thoughtfully. “I wonder how?”

  “You could go ask them,” suggested Merlin.

  “I value my life too much, brother,” said Vivien. “You know Midsummer Eve is the only day we’d not be met by arrows, and that’s too far away.”

  “So we’re back where we were before,” said Susan. “We need to find out who my father is. The only thing that’s changed is that now you might have to kill me once we do.”

  As she spoke, she felt a realization crystallize in her head. She needed to not only find out who her father was, she needed to find him. Whether the booksellers wanted her to meet him or not.

  “That’s about it,” said Merlin cheerfully. “Let’s go and have lunch and we can work out how to identify your father and not have to kill you. Oh, and I found this so you won’t even have to pay.”

  He reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a crumpled twenty-pound note with a flourish, waving it in front of Susan and Vivien.

  “After you,” said Vivien. She leaned back to whisper to Susan. “Told you. He always has money squirreled away somewhere. Never pay for him. He’ll get used to it.”

  “I heard you, dear sister,” caroled Merlin. He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor but then immediately leaped back inside and slammed the door shut.

  “What?” asked Vivien.

  “I don’t know,” said Merlin woodenly. His left hand was inside his tie-dyed bag. “Something’s not right.”

  Vivien approached the door, wrinkling her nose. Susan sniffed the air, too. There was a faint hint of something she couldn’t identify.

  “Scent of laurel,” said Vivien sharply.

  “Maybe someone’s keen on Aleppo soap,” suggested Merlin weakly.

  “And a hint of amaranth,” added Vivien. “It’s not some vigorous over-soaper. Overlaying a faint but definite whiff of putrescent flesh.”

  “But there aren’t any of them anymore. There hasn’t been for over three hundred years!” exclaimed Merlin. “And if there were, how would one get past the wards?”

  “I don’t know,” said Vivien. “But the smell, that’s textbook. . . .”

  “I should take a look,” said Merlin, but he didn’t open the door again. Instead, he took his hand out of his bag and reached between two Burberry trench coats on the closest clothes rack to draw out a sword, an old light cavalry saber with a curved gilt-bronze guard, sharkskin grip, and bronze lion head pommel. “You’d better call downstairs, Viv.”

  Vivien nodded and looked around.

  “Behind the PVC raincoat,” said Merlin.

  Vivien shifted a rack aside and lifted a bright pink raincoat, revealing a telephone on a bedside table some distance from the bed. She lifted the handset and dialed “0,” the familiar click-click-click-click of the dial returning to its position somehow now strange and ominous to Susan.

  “What is it?” she asked. Merlin had not seemed so apprehensive before, not even in the fog, with the Shuck stalking them. And Vivien was clearly rattled.

  “
From the scent, a Cauldron-Born,” said Merlin. “They smell of funerary flowers and death . . . and I felt a peculiar kind of wrongness, nothing I’ve ever sensed before.”

  “Um, what is a Cauldron-Born?” asked Susan.

  “Someone dead who’s been reanimated by sticking them in a magic cauldron,” said Merlin very matter-of-factly, clearly keeping a lid on his own reaction. “Incidentally causing them to be very, very hard to make dead again. They have to be hacked into little pieces, and the pieces burned. So guns aren’t much use. Oh, and they’re completely under the control of the master or mistress of the cauldron, in fact becoming a kind of puppet, an extension of the Cauldron-Keeper’s mind.”

  “Uh . . . a magic cauldron?”

  “Yes,” said Merlin. “You know, a giant pot. Big enough to stand up in. You saw one, in the painting on the door at the New Bookshop.”

  “And they can make dead people alive again? Like zombies or something?”

  “Considerably worse than the classical zombie of fiction,” said Merlin. “Because like I said, they are controlled by the Cauldron-Keeper. So they’re smart. And if the corpse is fresh enough when they go in, they don’t even look dead.”

  Susan thought about this for a few seconds. “Have you got another sword?”

  Behind Susan, Vivien was speaking urgently to the front desk.

  “There’s one under the bed,” said Merlin. “Do you know how to use a blade?”

  “I fenced for four years in the lower school,” said Susan. “Saber and foil. So I can hack at . . . things . . . at least.”

  “Okay,” said Merlin. “Saber? You take this one, then.”

  He handed her his saber, hilt first, and rummaged under the bed, pulling out a much older, straight-bladed sword. Its narrow, flattened oval guard was solid bronze, the grip inlaid with ivory strips, and there was a rough emerald in the pommel.

  “Does anyone know you have that?” asked Vivien, hanging up the phone.

  “I signed it out,” said Merlin. There was something slightly evasive in his tone that Susan noticed but Vivien didn’t.

  “Okay, I don’t think Cousin Armand believed there’s anything to be concerned about based on the smell alone,” said Vivien. “But he’s playing it by the book. There’s only three left-handed here right now but they’ll cover the fire stairs, Armand the foyer, and the response team is on its way from the Old Bookshop, led by . . . Aunt Una.”

  Merlin made a face.

  “What’s the problem with Aunt Una?” asked Susan.

  “Generational difficulties,” said Vivien. “She doesn’t think any of the left-handed under sixty are any good, or have a clue. Merlin, being one of the youngest left-handed, gets an extra serving of that attitude. I guess to be fair she also thinks Merrihew’s past it and should let her take over.”

  “We’d better have a look in the corridor,” said Merlin. He spoke as if he had to talk himself into it. Susan suppressed her own shiver. If Merlin was scared . . .

  “On the bright side, if it is a Cauldron-Born, it must be under control or it could never have got up here,” said Vivien.

  “You mean they can get out of control?” asked Susan.

  “I only know what I learned at school; I haven’t done any advanced reading on the subject. But I understand the more Cauldron-Born you control, the more difficult it is, because you have all their senses and perception coming in at once, as well as your own. Historically, that was often how they were dealt with, when an overambitious Cauldron-Keeper tried to command too many and lost control.”

  “What happens then?” asked Susan. “Do they freeze up or flop down dead again or anything useful like that?”

  She settled her feet into the proper pose and flexed her knees before testing the weight of the cavalry saber with some slight cuts and a stop thrust in slow motion. It was considerably heavier than a fencing saber and balanced differently. There was something written on the blade in a curlicue script about it having been used at Waterloo by Cornet someone someone, of the something or other regiment of hussars. The names were so worn and the script so ornate it was indecipherable.

  “We wish,” said Vivien. “They lose the guiding intelligence of the controller, to become—”

  “Mindless, ravening beasts,” said Merlin. “Who hate, hate, hate everyone and everything else, so they turn on whoever or whatever is closest. Including each other, which is a small blessing. Ready?”

  Vivien nodded.

  “Don’t you want a sword?” asked Susan, thinking three swords would be better than two when dealing with undying monsters that needed to be hacked into many pieces. “I bet Merlin’s got another half dozen squirreled away here.”

  “The right-handed don’t fight with physical weapons,” said Vivien. “We have the left-handed for all that.”

  “Stay a bit behind me,” Merlin instructed Susan. “If there is a Cauldron-Born, chop at its left side and I’ll hack at the right. Go for the knees, get it down on the ground first. And don’t hit me.”

  “Okay,” said Susan.

  “Viv, you pop its eyeballs or do whatever you can do,” said Merlin.

  “I’ll try,” said Vivien. “Depends who’s inside its head, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s what’s worrying me,” said Merlin quietly. He hefted the old sword in his left hand and pushed down the door handle with his right, easing the door open.

  The hotel corridor looked no different from how it had on the way up, emanating a sad and faded grandeur with its oft-patched-up wallpaper of bluish lilies and pinkish crowns on beige, and a once royal-blue carpet faded to commoner status, so worn in the middle there was almost no pile left, with the warp beneath showing through. It was in the kind of perpetual twilight that is the default of a class of hotels that only ever replaces half the light bulbs in the public areas.

  “It’s gone,” said Merlin.

  “Where? Into a room?” asked Vivien. She sniffed the air. “The scent has almost faded.”

  “Maybe it went back to the lifts,” said Merlin. “If it was dressed up properly it wouldn’t be too noticeable, at least to ordinary—”

  A door suddenly opened three rooms along the corridor behind them, and the trio spun around, but it was only an elderly couple who shuffled out, shrugging on raincoats and hefting umbrellas.

  Susan looked at the sword in her hand and held it close against her body. She glanced at Merlin, who didn’t bother, slanting his weapon back so the blade rested on his shoulder, making it very obvious indeed.

  “Won’t they see the swords?” hissed Susan.

  “That’s what Vivien’s for,” said Merlin. “She’ll cloud their minds.”

  “Stand against the wall and be quiet,” instructed Vivien.

  Merlin and Susan obeyed, backing up against the wall. The old couple were coming closer, weaving slightly and muttering to each other about the kettle in their room, which wasn’t big enough to fill a proper teapot. They had brought their own with them, and the last time they’d stayed, for the Queen’s coronation thirty years ago, the kettles had been bigger, the room cleaner and brighter, and everything had been better.

  “Quiet,” whispered Vivien. She took in a deep breath and held it as the duo came up to them. They walked past without even glancing at Merlin and Susan or their swords. They got to the lifts and the man slowly and regularly pressed the call button three times, neither of them looking back along the corridor.

  Vivien exhaled and shook her head, as if to clear it.

  “I’m going to call Armand. Warn him the Cauldron-Born might have gone back down in the lift.”

  “We’d better go back and wait for Aunt Una’s team anyway,” said Merlin. He touched his upper lip. “And I think perhaps this moustache is a little too . . . too vigorous. It has to go.”

  They retreated to Merlin’s room, where he immediately sidled into his bathroom, but he left that door partly open.

  Susan did not relinquish the saber. She felt better with its heavy we
ight in her hand. Vivien picked up the phone and dialed the front desk.

  “Armand? Merlin thinks it may have gone into the lift. No sign of anything? What about the wards being compromised? A side door, something like that?”

  She listened to the response, then hung up. Merlin came out of the bathroom, minus the moustache.

  “Armand hasn’t seen anything,” said Vivien, frowning. “And no one’s come down the stairs. Maybe it was someone binging on an unusual perfume.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Merlin grimly. “I felt a presence. Something indefinably wrong.”

  “Then how did it get past the wards?”

  “Do the Cauldron-Born have to be invited in, like vampires?” asked Susan.

  “There are no vampires,” said Merlin and Vivien together.

  “Sippers don’t count,” added Merlin.

  “This hotel . . . all our buildings . . . are warded against inimical creatures, and that would definitely include the Cauldron-Born. The boundaries are traced and the wards renewed twice a year, May Day and All Hallow’s Eve. I suppose one could have miscast, or even broken with fresh blood and mercury, but surely someone would have noticed—”

  The phone rang. Vivien picked it up before it got to the second ring.

  “Yes. It’s Vivien. Merlin felt it first, then I caught the scent. Definitely laurel and amaranth, over rot. We think it went into the lift. I’ve asked Armand to check the wards . . . yes . . . yes . . . the one taken by the Mayfair goblins . . . yes . . . she is . . . no, we’ll stay put.”

  Vivien put the phone down.

  “Aunt Una wants us to stay here. They’re going to quarter each floor. She’s called it in to Thurston but Merrihew is still on the train.”

  “Do you think Una believes us?” asked Merlin.

  Vivien thought for a moment, and shook her head. “No, but she’s a stickler for doing things right.”

  Merlin sat down on his bed, rested his sword point-first on the floor, where it tore the already threadbare carpet, and rested his hands on the pommel and his chin on his hands.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t wait around,” he said slowly.

  “What?” asked Vivien. “Aunt Una was very specific. A direct order.”