The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  The cave vanished.

  Salavert was in a place he knew well. Around him soared the elegant walls of the cathedral of Valencia. He stood in the nave, looking down the aisle toward the altar, a rich and glorious monument to the might of God. This was the place where he had been called to a life in Christ, where he had begun to believe that he, the third son of a butcher, might have a greater destiny than anyone suspected.

  The pews were deserted. Candles flickered along the aisle, but all the usual quiet activity—the muffled voices and reverent footsteps—were gone. Only silence remained.

  Silence, and a woman.

  The priestess stood at the altar, holding aloft the Santo Cáliz—the very chalice of Christ, believed by many to be the Holy Grail itself. Salavert had seen it before, during the grandest of church ceremonies he had attended as a child. The finely wrought gold, framing a bowl of bloodred agate, looked even grander now, clasped in the woman’s small, dark hands.

  Her heathen trappings had been replaced by the robes of a bishop, and her face was free of smallpox sores. She looked as she had when Salavert had first seen her at the temple, solemn and sad as the Holy Virgin.

  Some remote, near-forgotten part of his brain knew that he should find this the most profound blasphemy: a woman wearing the garb of a priest of the Holy Church. The thought was only an itch at the back of his mind, overwhelmed by the pensive silence that surrounded him.

  The light shifted, and his eye was drawn to the familiar frescoes that decorated the walls. But the images he remembered vividly, the lapis-toned scenes from the lives of Christ and the saints, were no longer there. In their place were scenes of horror like those he had left behind in the cave. He saw knights of the Crusade storming Jerusalem, their swords red with the blood of children. There were women tied to stakes and screaming as the flames licked at their feet, men twisted on the rack of the Inquisition. Massacre, torture, and slaughter surrounded him.

  “Where am I?” he demanded, his voice shaking with outrage and fear.

  “We are meeting in the heart of something very old and very dark. A place shaped by will and desire,” the priestess replied. There was no wonder in him that he could understand her words. He would not have wondered if the sky had turned around to lie under his feet.

  She lifted the cup once more, her eyes closed in fierce concentration, then set it down reverently on the altar.

  “It wants me to ask a different question. One that leads to great glory… and a greater feast of blood.” She seemed to be engaged in some immense effort, her hands clenched, sweat breaking out on her brow. “I will not ask it.”

  “Ask what? What’s happening? Why am I here?”

  “So much death.” Her face twisted with grief. “Centuries of death. It made us great, but what is greatness? It is a sport for men.” Her bitterness was palpable, and for the first time since the dream had begun, she looked to where Salavert stood, helpless and terrified, in the midst of the empty pews.

  “It would use you,” she accused. “It would make you the doorway to a greater world in which it could satisfy its thirst for blood.”

  “We are but feeble sinners.” His reply was instinctive, and even to himself, the words seemed lame.

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes slid closed again. She seemed to be gathering herself, concentrating both body and will.

  “I would know how to stop this,” she cried fiercely, her small frame trembling with power. The call echoed off the graceful arches of the cathedral, filling the silence and resonant with significance.

  It seemed to Salavert that something answered her. It came in an uncanny wind, stirring the folds of his tattered cassock and carrying with it the sense of a thousand voices whispering in concert from every corner of that vast and holy place.

  She listened, her body held in perfect stillness, her eyes closed. Then the wind moved through, and the silence that descended once more was broken by the harsh bark of a laugh that was very near a sob.

  “So that is to be the way of it.”

  Grief shuddered through her frame. She opened her eyes, her gaze locking onto Salavert once more, direct and forceful as a blow.

  “Wake up,” she ordered, and he did.

  He came to choking, lying on his side at the edge of the devilish mirror. The priestess was beside him, her arms shaking with the effort of holding herself up.

  She climbed painfully to her feet, giving a sharp command to the guards. They responded with a shocked exclamation, clearly doubting the evidence of their own ears, but the priestess’s look left no room for debate. Salavert was yanked away from the mirror, back the way he had come.

  Hurrying now, he was pushed through a tunnel carved into the rock, the priestess following at a stately pace. They emerged into a room full of wonders. Mysterious objects glittered from tables on every side. In the center of the room, a great gilded weight swung slowly and silently back and forth like the mechanism of some enormous clock. He realized that he had sensed the thing when he had passed through here before, blindfolded and disoriented. It had felt like a whispering, ghostly movement, some uncanny force flying through the darkness around him. He had been blind then, but sure of his martyrdom. That certainty had been whisked away from him, and the unknown that rose in its place disturbed him more than the promise of his own death.

  “What is happening?” he demanded.

  The priestess did not answer. Instead, she moved to the center of the room. As the great pendulum swung at her, she caught it, halting its regular progress.

  The silence that followed had weight, as though filling a space that had never been silent before. He saw one of the guards make a strange gesture and knew on instinct that it was a ward against evil.

  The woman approached Salavert and drew her knife once more. He felt a moment’s fear that he had escaped that hellish cavern and the hunger of its dark fetish only to die here instead, but once again the knife moved to her body, not his own. She severed a leather thong at her throat and caught the weight of the medallion in her hand. Seen up close, it looked as though it were made of the same dark stone as the mirror, carved with the image of one of their heathen gods.

  She grabbed his wrist and forced the cursed thing into his hand, closing his fingers over it.

  He glanced down at it and shuddered. The stone gleamed in the torchlight, undoubtedly the devil’s own icon. It felt cool against his palm, uncannily so, given that it had just been worn against the skin of a woman flushed with fever.

  He knew that he should toss it aside. He was a man of God, prepared for his own martyrdom. He should not suffer such a fetish to contaminate his holy person.

  But he did not. Instead, he clasped it tightly.

  The priestess saw his movement and something gave way in her as though a great burden had been set down. She seemed to age before him, the exhaustion concealed by her regal bearing at last plainly apparent.

  She looked at him once more, her eyes full of unspeakable sorrow, and uttered a single word. Though he did not know the tongue, he could not mistake its meaning.

  Go.

  He offered no resistance as the guards hauled him toward a narrow doorway on the far side of the room. Only as he was about to pass out of that strange, secret chamber did he stop and look back.

  A grinding echoed through the room. Behind the priestess, the opening in the floor that led back into the nightmarish caves below slid closed. The woman knelt before it, the obsidian knife in her hand. As Salavert watched, she lifted the blade over her head, then plunged it deep into her own chest. She fell to the ground, her blood seeping out across the stones.

  After that, Vincente Salavert began to run.

  1

  London, April 18, 1898

  ELEANORA MALLORY SAT IN the office of Mr. Henbury, assistant keeper of the rolls, waiting to be fired. It was morning, and the narrow, high-ceilinged room was silent save for the drumming of the rain against the tall, thin windowpanes. The shelves that lined the walls wer
e covered in disorganized piles of books and papers. Mr. Henbury’s desk was even worse, a mountain of documents where sixteenth-century court proceedings cozied up against bundles of eighteenth-century receipts in a chaos that made Ellie’s fingers twitch. Henbury was constantly finding fault with her work but let his own responsibilities sink into shocking disarray. It was high on the rather long list of things about him that infuriated her.

  His tardiness was another. She had been summoned here from her desk almost as soon as she’d arrived, but that had been more than twenty minutes ago, and Henbury still hadn’t bothered to make his appearance.

  She’d been so unsure of how briefly she would be allowed to remain in the building, she hadn’t bothered to remove her coat. Of course, the place was also freezing. The Public Record Office was never heated. It was too much of a risk to the precious documents housed within. And on an April morning that felt far more like February, a coat was close to a necessity.

  Ellie knew perfectly well that Mr. Henbury had never liked having a woman working in his section—particularly not a young, unmarried woman with a university degree. It was undoubtedly the degree that had gotten her in the door. That and the near-perfect score she had earned on her civil service exams. The degree also meant that she was technically as well educated as Mr. Henbury himself, and more so than the vast majority of her fellow archivists. Mr. Henbury did not like that at all.

  She looked around the gray, gloomy office and tried to decide how upset she would be if Henbury did indeed enter gleefully wielding the ax of dismissal. After all, the prisonlike building on Chancery Lane was hardly what she had dreamed of while she’d worked for her degree at the University of London. She had wanted what her cousin Neil—now Dr. Fairfax, she reminded herself—had practically been handed: a position as a field archaeologist. At this very moment, as she sat watching the rain streak dully down the windowpane, Neil was off in the deserts of Egypt excavating ruins and uncovering knowledge lost for millennia. She closed her eyes and imagined the hot sun on her skin, sand sticking to sweat as she worked with a brush in her hand, dusting away the debris of centuries from ancient stones.

  Since she was a girl, she’d dreamed of working to recover the past, reading every book and journal on the subject she could get hold of. She had been only nine years old when she decided to conduct her first excavation, digging up the garden in front of their home on Golden Square. She could still remember Aunt Florence’s histrionics about her dahlias, which had not been abated by Ellie’s assurance that she would put them back once she had determined nothing of importance was concealed beneath them. At that tender age, it had never occurred to her that the life she dreamed of was an impossibility—that no amount of intelligence and determination would overcome the handicap of her sex.

  It could have been worse, of course. At least her position as an archivist had enabled her to get her hands on history, if not quite in the way she’d expected. And the money had been very good, or would have been if she had spent any of it. Uncle David had begrudgingly agreed to her taking a job, but the suggestion that she let a room of her own had thrown Aunt Florence into hysterics.

  “You’ll never find a husband living on your own!” Aunt Florence had wailed. The horror of it had driven her to fan herself vigorously, declaring she was feeling faint. In the end, Ellie had capitulated. She had done it for the sake of maintaining peace with the beloved relatives who had raised her—certainly not because she had any desire for a husband. Marriage would mean the end of any work for her besides “managing the household,” which sounded to Ellie like a slow-burning hell.

  It might be all that was left to her now. Dismissal from her position would mean the gates of the civil service would be closed to her. What other options were there? Teaching—the last resort of all women unfortunate enough to be educated. The thought was more depressing than the weather.

  She checked her pocket watch. She had thought he would have been eager for this particular meeting, given that he’d undoubtedly been looking forward to it for a long time.

  Ellie rose and strode over to Henbury’s chair, plopping down into it with a happy little sigh of rebellion. This should have been her chair, really. She was cleverer than Henbury, and both of them knew it. And she certainly never would have let the assistant keeper’s desk become such a muddle. Documents that defied simple categorization often found their way to this disorganized mountain. Not from Ellie, of course, who trusted her own faculties far more than those of Mr. Henbury. Still, the mess did occasionally make for interesting browsing.

  She turned idly through the piles of papers, searching for anything intriguing. It seemed that Henbury had a dull to-do list this week, she thought, frowning at what looked like a mess of dry court proceedings. She lifted them up to peek at a pair of ledgers, but the maneuver upset a precariously balanced stack of papers. They spilled to the floor, along with something that landed with a more substantial thud.

  Ellie hurried to tidy the mess, all too aware of what it would look like should Mr. Henbury arrive to find her riffling through his papers on her hands and knees. She gathered up the pages, which looked like an assortment of shipping logs, and revealed something wholly unexpected lying beneath them.

  It was a psalter—a very old psalter, wrapped in a faded black ribbon. The spine was embossed with gold lettering. Though it had faded with time, Ellie could see that what remained was in Latin. The leather cover was deeply worn, indicating that the book must have been well used before it became part of the records. But that, of course, was the puzzle: Why on earth would someone have included a psalter in the archives?

  Altogether, the book posed an enticing mystery. Most of the mysteries Ellie encountered in the records office were far from enticing, like wondering why some long-dead clerk had decided to drop half the vowels from all of his nouns, or why another had chosen to file a count of the royal herds alongside a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

  Intrigued, Ellie slipped the book out from under the stack of papers. It was printed in octavo, making it roughly the size of a novel, and felt heavy for its size.

  Footsteps sounded, and Mr. Henbury’s voice echoed down the hall.

  “Tell Edwards that there will be no extension. The calendar will be done by next Friday or I will find someone else to enjoy his position.”

  There was a mumbled reply. Ellie scooped up the tumbled papers, depositing them on Henbury’s desk and hoping he wouldn’t notice a change in the clutter.

  Her hand paused on the psalter. It seemed to itch under her fingers, begging to be explored. Before Ellie could think further about it, the book had slipped into the pocket of her skirt. She dashed to her seat and quickly arranged herself as the latch clicked and Mr. Henbury entered the room.

  He was a shorter man, bald but fighting it desperately by way of a swatch of thin gray hair combed pathetically across his scalp and plastered there with a generous palmful of pomade. It gave the skin between the strands a special gleam, which was particularly noticeable when Henbury stood, as he did now, under an electric light.

  “Miss Mallory,” he said, then hesitated as he looked toward his chair. He adjusted its angle and dropped himself into it, assuming, to the best of his admittedly meager ability, the mantle of authority. “I imagine it is not a mystery to you why you have been called here today.”

  Ellie smiled back at him blandly. Henbury frowned in response, which gave his face an even more puggish look.

  “It has come to our attention that you were arrested over the course of this weekend,” he continued.

  “That’s correct,” Ellie replied. Her calm tone perceptibly deepened Henbury’s frown, but now that the storm was upon her, she found herself surprisingly at ease in it.

  “To be more precise,” he intoned grandly, “you were jailed after chaining yourself to the gates of the Houses of Parliament.”

  This was the moment. If she chose, she could throw herself on Henbury’s mercy, weep and plead for her position
, claim a hysterical turn of the brain, and promise nothing like it would ever happen again. He would certainly enjoy that, a display of thoroughly feminine weakness from the implacable Miss Mallory. The thought turned her stomach and steeled her resolve.

  “Correct,” she confirmed flatly.

  Henbury stared at her. She knew he was feeling both bewilderment and irritation at her lack of horror in the face of her circumstances. The thought almost made her smile. She suppressed it with no small effort.

  “This is a tolerant organization, Miss Mallory, even of those with obviously misguided opinions. Mr. Barker, as I imagine you are aware, is a socialist. But he is a law-abiding socialist. While the Public Record Office can tolerate even a suffragette”—Henbury made the word sound like something very unpleasant and possibly infectious—“it cannot house within its hallowed halls a militant agitator.”

  “I would say I inconvenienced more than agitated,” Ellie countered.

  “Your opinions have, I’m afraid, been demonstrably proven unreliable.” Henbury huffed. “Our course of action under the circumstances is clear.” He shuffled some papers importantly. The self-inflating little gesture struck a nerve, and she felt her temper begin to flare.

  “It was only for a night,” Ellie interrupted.

  “What?”

  “My time in jail. It was only a night. And they aren’t pressing charges. It in no way impinges upon my ability to perform my duties.”

  “You chained yourself to Parliament!” Henbury spluttered. “Such behavior is completely unacceptable for a member of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office.”

  Ellie raised her chin defiantly.

  “I have a bachelor of arts from the University of London. I am a ranking member of this nation’s civil service. And I am not permitted by its government to cast a vote.”