The Thirteenth Gate Page 6

  Alec’s stomach cringed at the sight of the murky green bottle in her hand, but Vivienne enthusiastically accepted a glass. Technically, pálinka was fruit brandy. The stuff Cassandane brewed down in the Abbey’s cellars, however, was more accurately described as Hungarian moonshine. Alec had gone blind for a few brief, terrifying seconds the only time he’d tried it.

  He opened his case and took out the Sotheby’s catalogue, handing it to Cyrus. “What do you make of this?”

  Cyrus put on his spectacles. “I was invited, you know,” he said. “But I already own half of these books. And Cassandane refused to attend as my proxy.”

  “You want something, you go get it yourself,” she said. “Otherwise you sit here all day. It’s not good.”

  Vivienne hovered behind Cyrus’s armchair, trying to read over his shoulder. She had the glass of pálinka in one hand, cigarette in the other. Alec wondered how flammable the fumes were.

  “We believe Dr. Clarence, or whoever summoned him, wants one or more of these books,” he said. “The question is which one, and why?”

  Cyrus quickly scanned through the pages. “Well, several of them are grimoires. Essentially instruction booklets for the invocation of spirits, as you already know.” He tapped the catalogue. “The ones listed here are especially valuable because so many were burned by the Catholic Church during the medieval era.”

  Vivienne’s face darkened. Alec knew how much she despised the Church. They’d all had more than one encounter with the Inquisition. In most measurable ways, it was worse than the ghouls.

  “Of course, the printing press wasn’t invented until 1440. Prior to that, all books were copied by hand. Very few from that period survived.” Cyrus pushed himself out of the armchair and slid a rolling ladder along its track until he found the shelf he wanted. He removed a slim volume and handed it to Alec.

  “Here’s one in the catalogue. The Heptameron.”

  “Seven Days,” Alec murmured.

  Cyrus nodded. “Attributed to the 13th-century philosopher Petre D’Abano. It’s an astrological treatise claiming to give precise instructions for summoning angels, one for each day of the week. The Heptameron is the source of many later European grimoires. First known edition is Venice, 1496. The one you’re looking at is an English translation by Robert Turner dating to 1655.”

  “There was a grimoire in the Hyde case too. The Black Pullet.”

  “I’m familiar with that one, of course. They all share similarities. The Heptameron. The Magical Treatise of Solomon. Le Dragon Rouge. Et cetera. I could go on for hours, but suffice it to say they’re simply texts in the art of invocation.”

  Alec leafed through the yellowing pages. They were covered in arcane symbols and geometrical figures he found unintelligible.

  “Could a necromancer be using this thing to hunt for a text? Perhaps to summon others?”

  Cyrus removed his spectacles and gave him a pitying look. “None of the grimoires actually work, Alec.”

  He smiled. “Right.”

  “Words and rituals alone are useless, which you of all people ought to know. A talisman is needed to open a gate to the Dominion.”

  “Or blood price.”

  “Yes, or blood price—but again, one must have the spark, which is extremely rare.”

  “What about this?” Vivienne asked. She’d taken over Cyrus’s chair and was flipping through the catalogue. “Discours et Histoires des Spectres, 1605 edition.”

  “Ah, yes. Pierre Le Loyer.” Cyrus shuffled off to the dim recesses of the library and returned with a thick tome bound in cracked red leather. “This is my English edition, also published in 1605. Loyer was a true daemonologist, devoting a significant portion of his life to the study of undead spirits. He calls them spectres and phantasms. A classic work of its time, but nothing earthshaking. You already know ten times as much as Loyer did.”

  Alec’s eyes roamed over the dusty shelves. They had to be missing something. He felt certain that whatever Clarence sought, it was in the catalogue.

  “May I?” he asked Vivienne.

  She handed it over, eyebrow raised.

  “So we have useless books for summoning spirits. How about the ones for banishing them?” Alec said. “I see a copy of Manuale Exorcismorum. And a 1587 edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum.”

  “Eymerich,” Vivienne snarled.

  They had all known Nicholas Eymerich. He was a Dominican friar who had been appointed Inquisitor General of Aragon in 1357. The book he wrote was used as a manual for witch-hunters. An untold number of innocents had suffered brutality and death at Eymerich’s hands.

  “I still regret not killing him in Valencia,” Cassandane remarked, tossing back the last of her pálinka. “The man couldn’t tell ghouls from his own bony fenék.”

  “No, he couldn’t,” Cyrus agreed. “Those books are simply rants on the evils of sorcery and how to torture a confession out of heretics. In all honesty, I can’t see what Clarence might want with any of them.”

  Alec flipped to the end and tapped a page. “What about this?”

  Cyrus replaced his spectacles, peering over Alec’s shoulder at the small print. He frowned. “Now that is odd,” he murmured. “I wonder what this was doing at auction.”

  “What?” Vivienne demanded.

  “It lists seven pages from a 1480 edition of Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia Cosmographia.”

  “Isn’t that some kind of atlas?”

  “It’s much more than that. The 1478 edition of the Geographia is one of the rarest books in the world. Priceless, really. There are only four known copies. But I’ve never even heard of a 1480 edition.”

  “Four copies,” Vivienne said. “And I’ll bet you own one of them, you old goat.”

  Cyrus smiled. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  He unlocked a glass-fronted cabinet and removed a cloth-bound parcel. Alec hastily made space on one of the tables. With exquisite care, Cyrus undid the wrappings. The book was large, roughly the size of a modern atlas. Alec and Vivienne leaned over his shoulder as he laid open the cover.

  “There are four important early printed versions,” Cyrus explained in his lecturing tone. “Three originated in Italy, one in Germany. They appeared nearly simultaneously, although uncertainty persists about the dates of the Florence and Bologna editions. But the Rome edition is easily the finest, in terms of quality and fidelity to Ptolemy’s original texts.”

  The first pages were all text, two columns written in Latin, with sketches of Ptolemy’s projections. This was followed by a lengthy index of places with cryptic numbers after each entry that seemed to be his own system of latitude and longitude coordinates. At the end came the maps themselves.

  The first was titled Prima Europe Tabula. It showed the British Isles along with six bodies of water—Oceanus Germanicus (the North Sea), Oceanus Hibernicus (the Irish Sea), Oceanus Vergivius (the Saint George Channel and Celtic Sea), Oceanus Britannicus (the English Channel), Oceanus Hyperboreus (Ocean beyond the north) and Oceanus Deucalidonius (the sea north of Scotland). It all looked fairly accurate except for the fact that Ptolemy had decided to throw in the mythical Island of Thule at the top corner, somewhere near Norway.

  “Ptolemy’s maps were cartographical gospel for more than thirteen hundred years,” Cyrus explained. “Columbus consulted this particular edition in preparation for his voyage across the Atlantic. Of course, they were mostly wrong, at least concerning places beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. Ptolemy vastly underestimated the earth’s circumference, leading poor Columbus to believe it would be a relatively easy voyage to the East Indies. But that hardly matters. This book still represents the first serious attempt to accurately depict the world as a sphere.”

  His fingertips lightly traced the sketches. “Besides its historical significance, the 1478 edition is probably the first example of copperplate engraving. All the world maps that preceded it were crude woodcuts, like cave drawings next to the Sistine Chapel.”


  Cyrus pointed to the corner of the page. “Do you see the crossbow within a circle watermark? The 1478 folio was printed in Rome by Arnold Buckinck, and remains the only known work bearing his imprint. His partner, Conrad Sweynheym, set up the very first printing press in Italy in 1464 but died a year before the Geographia plates were completed. It’s the first edition with maps, twenty-seven to be exact.”

  Vivienne yawned behind her hand. “That’s all fascinating, magus, but is there any connection to the occult?”

  “None whatsoever. Not in this edition, at least.”

  “Then I don’t see how this fits with the other books.”

  “Nor do I,” Cyrus agreed. “You should speak to the buyers who attended the auction. They might have an idea.”

  “That’s what we intend,” Alec said. “Blackwood gave us a list of names. One lives not far from here. Lady Frances Hake-Dibbler of Hauxwell Castle. She bought the collected works of the alchemist Alexander Seton.”

  Cyrus made a face. “Lady Frances is not, in my opinion, a serious bibliophile. She only likes to acquire scandalous texts to show off to her friends at parties.” He waved a hand. “But by all means, go see her. The woman’s an inveterate gossip. At the least, she can tell you if anything unusual occurred at the auction.” He glanced at Vivienne. “You may wish to send Alec on his own for this one. She has a notorious fondness for attractive young men.”

  “Too bad he’s not young.”

  “Hake-Dibbler won’t know that.”

  Alec sighed and eased himself into a chair. “If I’m being used as bait, can I get a cup of tea first?”

  “I make you some,” Cassandane offered. “Special Hungarian recipe.”

  He stood as hastily as his bad leg permitted. “I hate to trouble you, really. I can make it myself.”

  Halfway to the door, he heard Cyrus emit a bellow of outrage.

  “Holy Father, Vivienne, have you been using that for an ashtray?”

  “What? This skull?”

  “It’s nearly two million years old!”

  “Sorry. I thought it was an ashtray.”

  Cyrus blew into the skull. A cloud of grey flakes erupted from the left eye socket, followed by the smoldering butt of an Oxford Oval. Vivienne looked at Alec and mimed an oops face.

  “It’s okay. Nothing lasts,” Cassandane said. She shrugged her broad shoulders. “But eventually, everything comes again.”

  Chapter 6

  Monday, December 17

  Cassandane drove Alec the five miles to Hauxwell Castle the next morning. He’d spent the night in one of the Abbey’s frigid bedrooms, with dusty tapestries of medieval hunts looming over him, and was glad to be outside in the fresh air. It was a rare sunny morning for late December. Fallow fields stretched between lines of hedgerows. They passed two villages even smaller than Greenhithe and a dairy farm with black and white cows standing sentry at the fence.

  “I’m not blaming, but I still don’t understand why you don’t kill this Dr. Clarence when you first find him,” Cassandane said.

  Alec sat next to her on the driver’s bench. He wore a new morning jacket Vivienne had bought for him and a top hat with a red silk lining that she said was all the rage in Paris.

  “We weren’t sure about him until it was too late.”

  Cassandane glanced at him. “You weren’t sure.”

  “All right,” Alec conceded. “I wasn’t. Not entirely.”

  “Why you don’t believe Vivienne? She’s always right.”

  Alec looked out at the rolling uplands of the Kent countryside.

  “Not always.”

  “Something happen?”

  “You and Cyrus were away at the time. There was a series of child killings in the area around Victoria Park Cemetery. The murderer emptied their bodies of blood. It seemed clear that we were dealing with a ghoul. Inspector Blackwood asked for our help.”

  “You find this monster?”

  “Yes. We caught him with the last victim. A boy of nine. He was bending over the child’s body. Vivienne ran ahead of me. You know how she gets. I couldn’t stop her. She took his head clean off.”

  The daēva shrugged. “I don’t see problem.”

  “No gate opened, Cass. The man was mortal. A brick-layer named Harper Dods.”

  “Still a monster.”

  “Without doubt. But there are rules now. It wasn’t self-defense. He’d backed away from the boy and put his hands up. When he saw Viv with her sword, he started begging for his life. We’re supposed to do an iron test before any summary executions.”

  Cassandane said nothing. She didn’t seem to feel sorry for Harper Dods. Neither did Alec, but that wasn’t the point.

  “Blackwood and Sidgwick hushed it up, but Sidgwick especially didn’t trust Vivienne after that.”

  “He still needs us.”

  “Yes. It’s the only reason we weren’t asked to leave London.”

  “Vivienne okay about it?”

  He smiled. “I don’t think she understood what all the fuss was about. Man or ghoul, Dods got what he deserved. Full stop.”

  “Fasz. Those men haven’t seen the things we have. They don’t know.”

  Alec was quiet for a minute. “Sometimes it seems it’ll never stop.”

  “What, ghouls?”

  “Them, yes. This war we’ve been fighting. It’s like bailing a leaky boat. We should be hunting necromancers.”

  “You hear anything from Anne?”

  Anne was Alec’s half-sister. A daēva, but never bonded to a mortal. She’d gotten wind that there might be a nest of necromancers in Translithuania and gone haring off to investigate.

  “Nothing. She left for the Carpathians two months ago. I’m starting to worry.”

  “She take care of herself. Anne isn’t much for writing letters.”

  Alec smiled. “No, she isn’t. But Vivienne’s worried too. Anne’s like a daughter to her.”

  Cassandane turned to him, the reins dangling loose in her strong hands. “Does she ever get sad like Cyrus?”

  “Vivienne? Sometimes. But this is a good age for her. She likes the noise, the crowds.” He laughed. “The parties. She has her theater friends. And she uses her money to help people.”

  “Cyrus thinks their kind isn’t built to live so long, even with the bond. Not their bodies. Their minds.”

  “Time passes differently for us,” Alec agreed. “As for Vivienne, she never looks back. Only forward. It spares her the misery of regret.”

  “Cyrus has his books. But it’s the hunt that keeps him going, I think. He needs the darkness.”

  Alec rubbed his knee. “Maybe we all do.”

  Inspector Blackwood hadn’t been idle. Two of his officers stood watch near the front door of Hauxwell Castle. They watched Alec approach with stony faces until one recognized him. His name was Marsten and he’d been called to Buckingham Palace when the ghoul got loose inside, first in the form of a chambermaid, then a second footman. Alec had arrived just as the ghoul was unsteadily carrying a tea tray toward the Queen’s chambers. It had achieved a very close facsimile of the footman except for the hair, which was a long and lustrous red.

  “Mr. Lawrence,” Marsten said, a smile creasing his broad, sunburnt farmer’s face. “What are you doing here?”

  “Thought I’d have a chat with her ladyship.”

  The men exchanged a look. “Have fun.”

  “What have you told her?”

  “That the murderer could be a deranged collector and we’re taking every precaution to ensure the safety of all parties who attended the auction.”

  “Did she believe it?”

  “Seemed to. I think she’s enjoying the excitement.”

  “Any news from London?”

  Marsten shook his head. “We have men watching everyone on that auction list. He’ll have to show himself eventually.” He paused. “Is it a ghoul, Mr. Lawrence?” His hand unconsciously moved to the pommel of a short iron blade, halfway between a dagger and a sw
ord in size. All members of the Dominion Branch carried one since Buckingham Palace.

  “I don’t think so,” Alec replied. “We’re working on it now,” he added lamely.

  “You believe her ladyship knows something?”

  Alec shrugged. “She might. It’s worth finding out.”

  “Godspeed to you then.” The men laughed.

  Alec lifted the front door knocker—a hideous imp’s head with a ring through the mouth—and let it fall. The summons was answered by a gaunt butler who gave Alec a long-suffering look when he presented his card, as if he were a traveling salesman or religious zealot.

  “I’m an acquaintance of Mr. Ashdown,” Alec said.

  “Very good. I shall inform her ladyship. If you’d come this way, Mr. Lawrence.”

  The butler showed Alec to a large drawing room with French doors overlooking the gardens and retreated upstairs. Hauxwell Castle was better maintained than Ingress Abbey, if not much warmer. Oil portraits of Hake-Dibbler ancestors sporting stiff Elizabethan collars lined the walls. The furniture was a bit fussy and overstuffed for Alec’s taste. He sat with his legs crossed and passed the time making up names for the numerous Hake-Dibbler dogs gazing adoringly at their masters.

  Twenty minutes later, the lady of the house sailed into the room like a luxury liner plowing through rough seas. She wore a cream-colored silk gown with tight sleeves and an even tighter corset that elevated her ample bosom to dizzying heights. Alec guessed her age at about fifty. A very well-kept fifty. Her hair was a towering confection of frosted curls that gave him a toothache just looking at it.

  Alec rose and offered her a graceful bow. “Lady Hake-Dibbler. I apologize for the intrusion. It’s very crass not to have written ahead.”

  “Not in the least, Mr. Lawrence. I’m always delighted to have unexpected company,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice. “Would you care for tea?” Lady Hake-Dibbler bestowed a sly smile. “Or perhaps something a bit stronger?”

  Alec looked longingly at the tea service but decided that he ought to take the hint.