They caught the early morning train from Charing Cross to Greenhithe, a tiny, bucolic village in Dartford. Cassandane, Cyrus’s daēva, met them at the station. A tall, strapping woman, she disdained all forms of frippery, preferring grey flannel trousers and a man’s hunting jacket.
She shook hands with Alec and grinned as Vivienne planted a warm kiss on her cheek. Despite their superficial differences, Vivienne and Cassandane had always been close. They were both warriors at heart. Foot soldiers against the darkness that bled through from the shadowlands.
Cyrus was the scholar. Their collective memory. In many ways, he was the most human of them all. Brilliant, complex, acerbic—and prone to black melancholies that might last for days or years. It couldn’t be easy to be bonded to such a man, but Cassandane managed it. They were so different, Alec always wondered what held them together. Not sex. Their relationship was platonic. It was something else. An extraordinary kind of love that made no sense to anyone outside of it.
“It’s good you come,” Cassandane said, tossing their bags into the open carriage. She jumped into the driver’s seat and urged the matched pair of chestnuts to an easy trot. “He’s in one of his moods. Barely leave the library.”
Before coming to England, she and Cyrus had spent many years in Buda-Pesth, and Cassandane still had a thick Hungarian accent. She kept her brown hair just long enough to cover a missing left ear that was also partially deaf. It was the only concession to vanity Alec had ever seen.
“We have an escalating situation,” Vivienne said as the carriage bounced through the cobblestoned streets of Greenhithe. “Something’s come through, maybe been summoned, we don’t know yet. But it’s on a bloody rampage.”
“Yeah, I hear about this from Cyrus.”
“It can burn things with its hands, Cass.”
“Fasz.” Shit.
“We need Cyrus’s help,” Alec said. “Yours too.”
“Sure. I could use some excitement.”
“Has it been quiet?”
“Only one ghoul in six months. Terrorized a bunch of nuns in Norfolk. I take care of it.”
“This one won’t be easy,” Vivienne said. “It got away. Could be anywhere by now.”
“Or anyone,” Alec added.
“Igen.” Understood.
“How bad is Cyrus? Will he pull himself together?”
Alec knew about the melancholies. Vivienne had them too sometimes. Her solution wasn’t to shut herself away as Cyrus did, but to throw herself into a frenetic schedule of charity work and social events. She fought the darkness tooth and nail.
“He seems better already,” Cassandane conceded. “Sidgwick’s cable cheered him. You know Cyrus. He needs a cause. Then he’s happy again.”
Ingress Abbey lay about three-quarters of a mile from the village, set on a vast estate of rolling lawns and wooded parkland. It had been built and re-built many times. The latest incarnation was a neo-Gothic heap with towering gables of grey stone—some of it supposedly pilfered from the Old London Bridge—and a central tower facing the Thames.
The Abbey had a colorful history, first as a 14th-century convent and later as a country retreat for King Henry VIII, who confiscated it from the nuns to pay for his invasion of France. Cyrus had bought the estate from a London solicitor and filled it with all the rare and wondrous objects he’d collected over the centuries. Visitors could sip tea from cups made during the Qin Dynasty, the glaze as fresh as the day they were fired, while admiring the skeletons of strange animals long vanished from the face of the earth.
Open a drawer and one might find cringe-inducing Egyptian medical instruments, or yellowed scrolls casting the horoscopes of people long ago turned to dust. There were iron-nickel meteorites and dory spears from ancient Sparta and bags of coins minted with the faces of forgotten kings. The flotsam of a thousand shipwrecked cultures.
Alec always enjoyed his visits to Ingress Abbey. It was the closest thing he had to coming home.
Rain began to fall as they turned up the drive to the house. It was lined with ancient, grey-barked elms, their naked branches dark against the sky. Cassandane stopped the carriage at the bottom of a long flight of weathered stone steps carved into the hillside leading up to the front door.
“You know where to find him,” she said. “I go to the stables and meet you inside.”
Alec got out and started up the stairs, ignoring the dull ache in his knee. Halfway to the top, he paused, leaning on his cane. He pretended to admire a sailboat cutting through the muddy waters of the Thames, but Vivienne wasn’t fooled.
“Take my arm,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Take my arm.”
Alec sighed and let her support him for the last three flights. She smelled of tobacco and the scented oil Claudine combed into her hair at night. Something with jessamine.
“It’s the weather,” he said.
Vivienne looked away. He knew she felt responsible, even though he had chosen the bond, not her.
“Or maybe I’m just getting old.”
She barked a laugh, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “You’re a terrible liar.”
The massive front door had been left unlocked. Vivienne pushed it open and gave a theatrical shiver.
“Goddess, how the hell do they live like this?”
Ingress Abbey was impossible to heat, and their breath steamed in the stark, gloomy entrance hall. White sheets draped a dozen marble statues, like an assembly of ghosts. Alec followed Vivienne through a labyrinth of hallways paneled in mahogany carvings of birds and fish and stranger creatures from medieval bestiaries. Another flight of stairs, more corridors, and they reached a heavy door with lamplight spilling through the crack.
Alec opened it, grateful for the rush of warmer air. Cyrus hoarded almost anything that caught his fancy, but books held pride of place. The library at Ingress Abbey contained thousands of volumes, many of them rare first and second editions bound in calfskin with gold leaf lettering on their spines. A treasured few were believed to be forever lost, like Plato’s Hermocrates and Livy’s complete history of Rome in one hundred and forty-two volumes.
Cyrus Ashdown sat ensconced in a large leather armchair, an afghan across his knees. His skin bore the livid sheen of a man who hadn’t seen daylight in months, but his predatory black eyes burned as bright as ever.
“My dears!” Cyrus gestured at two chairs barely visible beneath tottering heaps of books. “Sit down, sit down.”
Cyrus had aged more than Vivienne, but he still appeared no older than his early fifties, with silver-streaked hair, thin lips and a patrician nose. Beard stubble roughened his jaw. He wore a tatty dressing gown and fur slippers that looked like something Alec’s cat might cough up.
“Magus,” Vivienne murmured, kissing his cheek.
Alec cleared the chairs and took the one farthest from the coal fire that burned in an enclosed iron stove. Vivienne immediately lit a cigarette.
“Holy Father, must you?” Cyrus grumbled. He clutched a book in his lap, one finger holding his place on the page.
Vivienne exhaled a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “I won’t burn anything up, I promise.”
“Do you have any idea what the contents of this room are worth?”
“Roughly.” She looked around for an ashtray. “What are you reading?”
Cyrus pursed his lips but let it drop.
“William Blake. Of course. I find his gloriously mad visions to be quite stimulating, not to mention relevant to our purpose.”
Alec suppressed a smile.
Cyrus opened the book. “In the universe,” he quoted, “there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”
“Indeed there are,” Vivienne said, pouncing on an ashtray that appeared to be made from the skull of a small hominid.
Or, Alec thought, it simply was the skull of a small hominid.
“Perhaps you should tell me what’s come through one of those doors,” Cyrus said quietly.
“You’ve read Blackwood’s cable?” Alec asked.
“Yes.”
“This began in New York, there’s no doubt of that. But now it’s here.”
Cyrus raised a bushy eyebrow. “It.”
“Yes, it. Most definitely not a ghoul. Far more sophisticated.”
“How many known victims?”
“Eleven. Twelve counting the clerk at Sotheby’s. And I fear it’s only the beginning.”
The door opened and Cass stomped in. “I hate this English weather,” she announced. “Wet all the time. Who wants some pálinka?”
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.”