CHAPTER 2
Of Gottfried Jenk, his History, and the Temptation
he was subjected to that same night.
Jenk's bookshop was located at one end of an ill-lit cobblestone street, in a decrepit building with a high peaked roof and a gabled front. The shop occupied the lower floors, while the bookseller lived in a tiny suite of rooms under the eaves.
When the moon-faced grandfather clock down in the bookshop struck the hour of midnight, Jenk had still not retired. These nights when Iune was full, strange fancies plagued him, making sleep impossible. He sat at a queer little desk in his bedchamber, reading by the light of a single candle: a high-shouldered old man in a snuff-colored coat and a powdered wig, bent over an ancient Chalézian manuscript he was attempting to translate. Every now and then, he passed a pale, trembling hand over his forehead.
His head grew heavier and heavier; his eyes watered and burned. The characters he was trying to decipher began to move, to hump and crawl upon the page, to slide off the edges . . . With a cry, he pushed the manuscript away. He rose and began to pace the floor.
A hollow-eyed figure in a tattered frock coat sprang up to block his path; Jenk threw out a hand to fend it off. The wraith rolled a bloodshot wolfish eye, tossed back its head, and howled at him, pawing its narrow chest as if in mortal agony. Jenk gasped; for the pain was in his own breast, a devouring heat that ate through flesh and muscle and bone, leaving a dark, burnt-out cavity in the place where his heart had been.
"Naught but a shadow and a mockery," Jenk whispered to himself. With quaking limbs, he returned to his chair and collapsed. "A shadow and a mockery, which I may banish and be whole." At his words, the apparition faded and was gone, and beneath his clutching hands the old man felt solid flesh and bone, the pounding of his heart—indeed, it leapt about and banged against his ribs so frantically that, for a moment, he feared it must burst.
"I am whole," the old man repeated, not to himself this time but to the room at large. In all the dark corners, hobgoblin shapes groped and squirmed, struggling to acquire tangible form. Even when he buried his face in his hands, he could not block them out: visions of his past . . . old hopes, old fears, old loves, old hates, all of them grotesquely changed, grown strange and terrible in their altered shapes.
He shook his head, as if by doing so he might clear his mind. He knew he must remember—must remember who he was and what he had been—must separate the true memories from the false. In that way only could he hope to move beyond the tangle of dreams and visions.
He had been . . . a young man of good family, the youngest son of a jarl, with a modest fortune of his own. A brilliant, bookish youth, his name recognized far beyond his native Marstadtt, beyond the principality of Waldermark, known in all the capitals of Euterpe—a man admired, courted—his only liabilities (or so he thought them then) a pretty, spoiled wife and an infant daughter. Through a series of startling philosophical essays which he wrote and saw published, he gained the interest of an aged scholar who bequeathed to him certain rare books on alchemy and magic.
In those books, he discovered spells and formulas, diagrams, scales, magic squares: the tenets of a secret doctrine going back more than eighteen hundred years to the days of Panterra and Evanthum. Not all that he read there was new to him; he had some prior acquaintance with natural philosophy and knew of the Spagyrics, who claimed the pure, unblemished tradition, and of the Scolectics, who sought knowledge as power, often to their own destruction. He knew the dangers, but he had not been warned. Because those books promised him . . . ah, to be sure! What did those books not promise him? Wealth, fame, even immortality could be his, but most of all the higher knowledge, knowledge of the universe in its innermost, intimate workings. He sought that knowledge and lusted after that knowledge as ardently as ever man desired woman. And what was the price of this thing he craved with almost a physical longing? A few short years of study and various expenditures—laboratory equipment bought, salts and acids and metallic compounds purchased—the fire in his athenor consuming, consuming fuel day and night—and the expenses mounting until, his substance gone, he applied to moneylenders, ran up an enormous debt—and ruined himself in a fruitless quest for the Elixir of Life, the secret of transmutation, and the mystical stone Seramarias.
A distant kinsman in trade had provided the money for him to open this bookshop, and here he still lived and did business nearly a half a century later. He led a quiet, orderly, scholarly existence, punctuated the last five years by these periodic fits of disorientation and confusion, when the teeming products of his troubled brain threatened to overwhelm him.
As Jenk moaned and writhed in his chair, the sound of creaking cartwheels and scuffling feet down in the street attracted his attention. It seemed to him that there was something . . . something enormously portentous in those sounds. With an effort, he rose and crossed to a window. He was just unfastening the casement when someone knocked on the door below.
Jenk opened the window and stuck out his head. The moon had set behind Cathedral Hill; the lane was lit only by dim, flickering street lamps set at uneven intervals all down the street, and by a lanthorn which some demented person seemed to be waving about under his window.
As his eyes adjusted, Jenk made out the familiar figure of Caleb Braun, hopping about with uncharacteristic energy and doing a kind of impatient dance before the bookshop door. At his side, young Jedidiah held the lanthorn in one unsteady hand, while be attempted, with the other, to restrain Caleb's impatience. Farther down the street, two burly constables pulled a spindly cart loaded with a huge black casket up the hill.
For a confused moment, Jenk thought the coffin had come for him, and that Caleb and Jed constituted his funeral party.
Then his mind cleared. Perhaps it was the damp weedy air rising up from the river, perhaps the sight of his old friend helped to restore him. Jenk clutched the windowsill to steady himself and called out softly, just as Caleb raised his fist to knock again, "I am here, Caleb. I will come down and let you in."
The stairs leading from Jenk's attic rooms to the ground floor were so narrow and steep that he had to descend sideways like a crab, with the candle in one hand and his back against the wall. The bookshop smelled of dust and mice and decaying scholarship. From the foot of the stairs, a narrow passageway led between high shelves crowded with old books and manuscripts. Jenk had acquired a notable collection of rare and valuable volumes, though many were there on consignment: The Mirror of Philosophy with its bizarre tinted woodcuts; Tassio's Reflections; one of five known copies of The Correction of the Ignorant; and (the pride of the collection) Antony's Fool's Paradise bound in crumbling indigo leather with leaves edged in dull antique gold and but three minor errors in transcription.
At the front of the shop, the hands on the moon-faced clock marked the hour of three. Jenk balanced his candlestick on the top of the clock-case and crept to the door. With trembling hands he unfastened the latches, lifted the bar, turned the handle, and peered out around the edge of the half-open door.
As the cart pulled up in front, Jenk eyed the coffin mistrustfully. "Why do you bring me this? I've had no dealings with the dead these five and forty years. And why do you disturb me at this unconscionable hour?"
"It's books, Gottfried . . . books with the mark of the Scolos on 'em," Caleb whispered hoarsely. "Books and sommat else. You'll understand what it means better'n me, I reckon. But let us come in, Gottfried. You'd not want the neighbors to see what we've brought, or talk of it later?"
Reluctantly, Jenk moved aside and allowed the others to wrestle the coffin off the cart, maneuver it through the door, and set it down in one of the narrow aisles between the shelves. Caleb lifted the lid of the casket, and Jenk brought his candle over, the better to view the contents.
There was a serenity, a sort of blissful, dreaming peacefulness, on the face of the corpse that Jenk could not but envy. And he felt a curious sensation of familiarity, a sense of inevitability to this moment
, that sent a cold chill creeping down his spine. "You found this in the river?" he asked, struggling to maintain his composure.
"Aye . . . floating on the river, just after the turn of the tide."
Despite Jenk's best efforts, the hand holding the candle began to shake; a splash of hot wax fell on the rim of the coffin. "This may be a gift of the sea, then, and not of the river."
Caleb lowered his voice again. "Could be, but it weren't in the water long; you can see by the condition of the wood. And however it come to us, it weren't no accident."
Matthias cleared his throat uneasily. "Young Jed, here, reckons 'tis one of them wax figures the gentry set up in their parlors. But the eyes, now, that's an uncommon touch. Morbid, I call it if it is a wax doll.
Jenk forced himself to smile benignly. "The gentry—and more particularly, the nobility—are addicted to morbid conceits. There is a fashion for mock funerals—all the rage, so young Sera informs me—whereby women whose husbands are still quite hale and whole don widow's weeds and stage elaborate demonstrations of grief, declaring it were better to mourn their menfolk, if only symbolically, in advance, than to risk being overtaken by their own mortality, and not live to do the thing at all. I believe," he said, more to himself than to the others, "that these reminders of the fragility of human life and the wanton caprice of the Fates add a certain piquancy to present good fortune. And a `corpse' in the parlor, as I take it, may be the newest fad."
As only Caleb stood in a position to see what he did, Jenk reached down and gently lifted one of the hands. The texture of the skin and the flexibility of the joints convinced him that he was not holding the hand of a wax figure. Though the flesh was as cold and as lifeless as clay, this thing had once been a man.
He felt the smile stiffen on his face as he continued: "And yet . . . perhaps not. The guilds use effigies in some of their more obscure ceremonies. I observed one such ritual myself, when I was a young man—though that figure was made of cloth and straw. "
He set down the hand and picked up one of the books; a section of the leather cover crumbled and fell as a fine dust into the coffin. He wondered if the continued preservation of the ancient volumes might not depend on their proximity to the corpse.
Jenk carefully returned the book to its place in the bottom of the casket. He turned toward Jed and the two constables. "But whoever is responsible for this curiosity . . . I am grateful, yes, most particularly grateful that you thought to bring it to my attention. For I am, as you must know, quite fond of curiosities."
Walther and Matthias bobbed their heads vigorously and grinned at him—no doubt expecting more than his thanks in recompense. And Caleb sidled closer to whisper in his ear. "Don't worry about Jed—he'll keep quiet for my sake. But pay the others well. We don't want them spreading no tales."
"Indeed yes," Jenk agreed loudly, for the benefit of the others. "The Guild—if it was one of the guilds—might resent any inquiry into their mysteries . . . purely scholastic on my part, I do assure you, but perhaps to be taken amiss. We had best keep the matter quiet, for all our sakes. If guildsmen put the effigy in the river, no doubt they expected it to stay in the river and might conceive some lasting resentment against those who brought it here.
Crab-wise, Jenk ascended the stairs to the second floor. In a dark corner near the back of the building stood a dusty oak cabinet once used as a wardrobe. Now it was stuffed with old letters, with ancient deeds and legal documents decorated with wax seals and faded ribbons. Placing his candle atop the wardrobe, Jenk removed a ring of heavy iron keys from a pocket in his breeches, unlocked the cabinet, and removed a little wooden box stowed away at the back behind a pile of yellowing papers.
The box contained a scattering of gold and silver coin, a handful of wrinkled bank notes: the savings of many years, intended as a dowry for his granddaughter, Seramarias. If he meant to make use of the books, Jenk knew, his expenses would not end with bribes to the Watch.
And yet he was convinced that Caleb had spoken truly, that the books and the body had not come into their hands by accident. Of all the men who worked on the river—ignorant, illiterate men most of them, who knew nothing beyond their daily struggle for existence—that the casket had come to Caleb Braun, who alone among the scavengers would recognize the symbols on the books, who alone would realize the other implications of the discovery as well . . . no, it was too great a coincidence. Caleb had been fated to make the discovery, just as he was fated to bring it to the attention of Jenk himself.
"And yet . . . to what end?" Jenk wondered aloud. "It may be that the books were sent for our consolation, that we may gain back all that we have lost."
He thought of the long years of poverty and struggle, of the wife who deserted him, and of the daughter he had hardly known until, disowned by her mother's kin, betrayed and abandoned by the man she married against their wishes, she came to the bookshop to live for a short space, to bear a daughter of her own, and die. The child she bore, at first an intrusion on his solitary existence, the bookseller grew to love—and suffered his poverty doubly through all young Sera was denied.
Sera was eighteen now, a handsome, spirited girl. Five years ago, he had reluctantly sent her to live with her wealthy relations. Oh, yes, he knew full well how her pride must suffer as the recipient of Clothilde Vorder's condescending favors. But it was of Sera's future he had been thinking, and of the wealthy men she would meet in the Vorders' house—one of whom might have the wisdom to recognize the value of her beauty and intelligence, to ignore the paltry size of her dowry, and ask for her hand in marriage. Now it came to him that the hope was a vain one, and that his beautiful and accomplished Sera was doomed to dwindle into a dreary old maid, little better than a servant in the Vorder household . . . unless he could find a way to mend his fortunes.
"But how if the books were not meant for our worldly benefit, but for our spiritual redemption?" Jenk moaned softly to himself. "Caleb and I know the danger in possessing such volumes. It may be that we were meant to destroy them, to save some other poor fool from ruin. A final expiation for past sins, here at the end of our lives."
He put a hand to his forehead. His brow burned as with a fever, but the palm of his hand was cold and clammy. Yet his mind remained clear, remarkably clear—indeed, he was impressed by the coherency and logic of his own arguments. "It may be that the Fates cast them carelessly our way, merely to see what we would make of them. Or it may be that the Intelligence which ordained our ruin so many years ago has not finished tormenting us yet."
Were he to beggar himself a second time, Jenk told himself, Sera would not be materially affected; but the public disapprobation, if the nature of some of the activities he contemplated became known—that she must feel keenly.
And yet, was he strong enough to resist the sheer entrancing mystery of the thing, the allure of forbidden knowledge? If he and Caleb were to discover the secret that maintained the body of the sorcerer, entirely uncorrupted, these hundred years and more, that discovery might lead to other, even greater secrets as well. At the thought, Jenk felt a cold thrill pass over him, the first stirrings of an old excitement, far beyond any pleasure the flesh had ever offered him.
"May the Father of All forgive me," he whispered. "I believed myself cured, but the old passion, the old hunger, returns, even stronger than before."
With shaking hands, Jenk unlocked and opened the box. If Sera would suffer his disgrace only obliquely, he told himself, she would enjoy the full benefit of his success. Fine silken gowns he would bestow on her, velvet slippers and ruby bracelets, pageboys and serving maids to wait on her every whim, and a dowry sufficient to ensure a brilliant marriage.
With his head full of these and other pleasant fancies, ]enk counted six silver coins into his hand. Then he replaced the box, locked the cabinet, picked up his candle, and descended the stairs.
CHAPTER 3
Concerning the Morbid pleasures of the Wealthy.
The Reader is introduced to Miss Ser
amarias Vorder.
Thornburg-on-the-Lunn was a sprawling sort of town, a great, irregular, many-limbed town, shaped rather like a starfish, spraddled out on either side of the river. Indeed, it might be said that the Lunn gave Thornburg its character, for it was a capricious town, a town of many contrasts, ancient and young, rollicking and cruel.
River port and market town combined, that was Thornburg, where pink-cheeked farmers and their daughters sold their fruits and vegetables side by side with hoarse-voiced fishmongers crying their wares and dark-skinned foreign peddlers hawking painted fans, cockatoos, and "diamond" necklaces made of pinchbeck and paste. It was a cosmopolitan place where men and dwarves and gnomes lived amicably side by side; a shabby-genteel sort of town, where taverns and warehouses and tiny crowded shops, crumbling old churches with belltowers and medieval guildhalls with clocktowers, were all tumbled together with parks and public gardens and elegant neo-classical villas.
At the center of town was Cathedral Hill, where the streets were narrow and steep, and crowded at most hours of the day with a constant traffic of foot travelers, carriages, carts, and sedan chairs. But behind the cathedral existed an unexpected haven of peace, a quiet old graveyard hidden behind iron gates, where the grass grew long and green among crumbling marble monuments and mossy gravestones, and dandelions and daisies sprouted in the cracked flagstone pathways.
Twenty years and more had passed since the last bodies were buried there. The elegant mausoleums were falling into disrepair; statues and gravestones had tilted or tumbled and not been put aright. So it came as some surprise to the shopkeepers who did business on Church Street, one bright afternoon in the season of Leaves, to see a fashionably dressed funeral party trudging up the hill. At a stately pace the procession came, and not only the shopkeepers took note. The busy wives of the town, the gentleman loungers, and the country girls in bright calico gowns who came into Thornburg at this season of the year to sell tame rabbits in wicker cages and baskets of painted eggs—all stopped what they had been doing to stare and to wonder. For the procession was remarkable for two very curious facts: the absence of a corpse, a coffin, or a bier; and a group of white-stockinged serving men who stalked on ahead of the sable-clad mourners, bearing hampers and baskets bulging with foods and wines, linen cloths and fine crystal. The servants entered by the imposing iron gates, and proceeded to lay out an elegant picnic repast among the gravestones.
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