All is Fair (36 page)

“Will a few days make a difference?”

“They could to the Sorcerer of Mercia! Hell, if we wait, Mercia might kill Ekstrand before he’s useful again.”

Max nodded and pushed the pin into the wall. He twisted the doorknob and the burning outline appeared of a Way being created.

“I’m scared,” the gargoyle whispered as the door appeared.

“It won’t serve us now,” Max replied. “Focus on the goal.”

He opened the door and a large hallway stretched ahead of them, containing an impressive staircase that split into two smaller ones halfway up to reach the upper floors. It looked like a wing of the house stretched to either side. It was a substantial property and far more extravagant than Ekstrand’s Georgian mansion.

Max pulled out the Opener, let the gargoyle go through and then went through himself, keeping the Opener in his hand in case they needed to leave in a hurry. He waited a moment, expecting an assistant or butler to challenge them, but no one came. He turned to see a normal front door now the Way had gone.

The gargoyle was sniffing again. “No one’s been here for a long time,” it said. “The air is too stale.”

“I doubt there have been any visitors since whatever happened to Dante happened,” Max said. “Let’s see if we can find a part of the house that’s still in use.”

“Maybe the dodgy apprentice doesn’t live here any more.” The gargoyle sounded hopeful.

They took a wing each, only Max’s shoes making a gentle clicking sound. The house was silent enough to suggest it was empty and they tried each door on the ground floor of both wings in turn. All were locked. The marble tiles were dulled by dust and, the further they went from the large windows in the central hallway, the darker it got. There were candles in the chandeliers, but they too were dusty.

Max went back to the staircase and the gargoyle reported the same as he had seen. They climbed the stairs together, the gargoyle’s ears twitching.

They split up again to search the upper floor of the two wings. Again, locked doors and dust. They regrouped and went back downstairs, Max keen to find the kitchen and see if there was any sign of servants. There was none.

“Bugger,” the gargoyle said as they went back to the entrance hall. “Of course this dodgy apprentice wouldn’t stay here, not when he could be found by the Chapter Master. This is all a bloody waste of time. I gave that bloke a concussion for nothing.”

They stood at the bottom of the staircase. Max wondered if it was safe to use his own Opener to go straight from the house to Aquae Sulis. If the culprit returned, would he be able to trace their destination? He wasn’t sure if it left a residue. He looked up the staircase and saw a large window they’d passed without even looking outside. It was a habit of living in the Nether; one got used to there being nothing to look out at. “There may be outbuildings,” he said. “I’ll go and–”

The gargoyle was already bounding up the stairs. “There’s a great big bloody tower!” It pointed out of the window with a claw. “And there’s a light on at the top!”

Max didn’t need to look out of the window to see the tower, seeing it through the gargoyle's gaze. It looked like a turret of a castle but was unattached to any other building or curtain wall. It was close enough to walk to without risking getting lost in the mists.

“This house must have been where the apprentices lived and had their lessons, and where Dante met with the Chapter Master,” he theorised. “That tower might be his private residence.”

“Do you think the other apprentices are dead?” The gargoyle was peeping over the sill more cautiously.

“Probably.”

“Are we going to risk going to the tower?”

“Yes,” Max replied. There was a direction they could approach from without being overlooked from one of the tower windows.

“But won’t it be warded to hell and locked and really dangerous?”

“Probably.”

The gargoyle padded down the stairs. “If I could, I’d be shitting pebbles.”

“Let’s go now, it won’t get any less risky.”

They broke out of the locked house and made their way to the tower, taking care to keep out of the line of sight of any of the arrow-slit windows on the top floor. It was four storeys high and the top floor’s narrow windows glowed with a pale light. It had a larger diameter than the average castle tower and Max wondered where its anchor was.

“I’ll try the door,” the gargoyle volunteered as they reached it. “You know, in case it’s designed to burn people who aren’t evil.”

“I’m not certain that would be one of the criteria written into the formulae,” Max said but let the gargoyle do as it had offered.

The door opened inwards. “Well, blow me down,” the gargoyle said. “It’s not even locked.”

“All the people who knew it’s here are probably dead,” Max said. “After you.”

The gargoyle went inside, paused to see if it collapsed into dust or spontaneously combusted, and, when neither happened, beckoned Max onwards. Max pulled out his penlight torch and switched it on. There was a staircase curving upwards and one that went down.

“Wait here,” the gargoyle whispered. It took the torch and went downstairs.

Max saw an image of a small kitchen, untidy and recently used. The gargoyle sniffed at a small puddle of milk on the table. It was fresh. No one else was there. Dante’s murderer was satisfied with fending for himself, it seemed.

Once the gargoyle was back with him, Max hooked his walking stick over his arm and climbed the stone steps until he reached a wooden door into the room on the next floor. It too was unlocked and there was a lantern hanging from a hook just inside the door. After a brief sweep over the room with the torch to check it really was empty, Max took a moment to light the candle inside.

The room contained a couple of armchairs, a single bookcase crafted to fit the curve of the wall, and a fireplace. There was a table, again curved, upon which were piled all manner of artefacts. Max recognised Peepers and Sniffers from his own Chapter, presumably looted from the cloister. They looked the same as the ones in his pockets and – something he hadn’t appreciated before – distinct in design from others on the table. They had the same function, but side by side it was clear that each Sorcerer had his own design.

There were several items the likes of which he’d never seen before, things he assumed weren’t tools used by Arbiters but personal artefacts made by and for the Sorcerers themselves. Max took care not to touch them; that lesson had been burned in deep by his training. One Opener had several interlocking circles embedded in the doorknob and upon inspection Max found they could be moved to spell out the principle cities of the Heptarchy: Bath, London, Oxford, York, Norwich, Colchester, Winchester and Canterbury. He’d only ever used an Opener that was keyed for a specific location, or could open a Way into the Nether version of the anchor property he was already at; not one that could open Ways to multiple locations. Useful. He wondered which Sorcerer it had belonged to.

“We shouldn’t get distracted,” the gargoyle said.

It climbed the next section of the stone staircase a few steps ahead of him, paused to listen at the next door and then looked through a keyhole. The room beyond was empty, so it opened the door and they crept inside.

The first thing Max noticed was the lack of any more steps. He looked at the ceiling, searching for a trapdoor and signs of a ladder, but there were neither, only thick wooden boards. Even though the floor above appeared to be lit and presumably occupied, there were no sounds of anyone’s footsteps, not even a creak. There was a lantern but he didn’t want to light it when they were so close to the room above.

“Shine the torch down again,” the gargoyle whispered and Max did so.

The circle of light picked out a wardrobe, a washstand, a mirror and a bed. On top of the bed’s rumpled sheets were several items of clothing.

Women’s clothing.

Max saw a bra, petticoat, skirt and blouse. He swept the room for any sign of male clothing but there was none. The gargoyle went silently to the wardrobe and opened it slowly, lest its door creak. Only women’s clothing hung inside.

“I don’t understand,” he said as the gargoyle closed the wardrobe again. “How could a woman be behind this?”

It was one of the fundamental rules of the sorcerous arts: never teach a woman the secrets of sorcery. He recalled people at the Cloister speculating about the reasons why, and the confusion caused by the fact Ekstrand had a female librarian. The distrust, the refusal to contemplate a woman being a Sorcerer – or an Arbiter for that matter – was universally accepted in his world and yet they were some of the best researchers he’d worked with.

“Perhaps Dante fell in love,” the gargoyle suggested. “With the wrong kind of woman.”

Max tried to reconcile what he knew. The perpetrator was a master of sorcery and Fae magic and female. Was she Fae-touched? It would explain how she knew of Lady Rose and how she would have the means to contact her and make the deal Thorn had told him about. Had one of them managed to infiltrate Dante’s household? It would explain the corruption – but then surely they would have engineered the protection of only their own family from the Arbiters in London, not many families over the years. Why favour the Irises now?

“There’s something over here.” The gargoyle was on the far side of the room and Max sought it out with the torchlight. It was standing beside a painting, one of a man and a woman sitting close together, looking at each other lovingly. Max recognised the man from the body he saw after the Moot: Dante. The woman had the same colour hair and too similar a mouth for her to be anything but his sister. They appeared to be very close in age.

The frame had something embedded in the centre below the painting and Max went closer to inspect it. A small dome of glass enclosed two locks of hair twisted around each other. He went to the bed and scoured the pillows until he found a long strand the same dark blond as the subjects of the painting. He didn’t need to hold the strand next to the locks to see they were the same.

“Dante’s sister,” he said, and then gave the torch to the gargoyle to hold whilst he put the strand in an evidence bag pulled from his pocket and then tucked both away.

“She murdered her own brother?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps he died of natural causes.”

“And she preserved his body for later use?” The gargoyle shook its head. “No way.”

Max gave the room another sweep with the torchlight but still couldn’t find any way out other than the staircase they’d climbed up.

“So…” The gargoyle came to his side. “Now we know who’s been causing all the trouble, we can report back to Ekstrand, right?”

“Wrong,” Max replied, examining the ceiling again. “We know who but we don’t know why.”

“That’s obvious: to be the last Sorcerer.”

“But why?”

“To be the most powerful.”

“But what for?”

“Umm… isn’t that enough?”

Max looked at the gargoyle, giving up on finding a secret ceiling hatch. “People want power for a reason. What does she want to do with it? What’s the point of being the only Sorcerer unless you want to do something that the other Sorcerers would prevent?”

“Isn’t being a female Sorcerer exactly that? If they found out about her, they’d kill her. There you go: perfect motive. Now let’s get out of here.”

“Not until I know what’s going on up there.”

The gargoyle’s eyes followed Max’s finger upwards. “Bollocks.”

“There has to be a way to get to that floor. Have a look around.”

As the gargoyle sniffed, Max looked at the painting again, examining the details of their clothing and the room in the background. It looked like it had been painted a long time ago, but he couldn’t put a date to it, not being an expert on such things.

“Look, even if we do find a way up there,” the gargoyle whispered in his ear, “look at the size of this place. No way we can walk in without being seen or heard.”

“I’d rather peep than walk in,” Max said. “I just need something to use the Peeper on.”

“I reckon it’s that.” The gargoyle jabbed a claw at the painting and Max nodded.

Carefully he swung the frame to one side and then the other. The wall was intact behind it. He ran his fingers around its edge, feeling for a button or depression of some kind that could trigger something. He found nothing and took a step back, shaking his head.

The gargoyle went close up to it, sniffing it like a dog would a table of food, and then pressed the dome containing the locks of hair.

The painting, and the entire section of wall it hung upon, shimmered and, before Max realised what was happening, he and the gargoyle were looking through a Way into another circular room. Dante’s sister was standing in front of a huge pane of glass, thankfully with her back to them.

She didn’t react, absorbed in painting something onto the glass which seemed to be scrolling sideways by arcane means. She didn’t have to move as she painted on symbols and strings of formulae; they just appeared to float away to her left, as if the glass itself was a moving portal onto another surface. She was wearing a loose white dress and was barefoot, her dark blond hair so long it reached the floor.

The scent of flowers tickled Max’s nose. It was such an intense mixture he couldn’t single out one in particular.

Either side of her, two large lenses were held in ornate brass stands and seemed to be focusing light reflecting from the pane of glass to such an intensity that Max could see the light passing through them, creating the pale glow they’d seen from outside the tower. Each of the focused beams was striking the back of what looked like some sort of scrying glass, also held in their own frames a few feet above the ground. Each scrying glass then had a modern digital camera on a tripod pointed at it, and, judging from the small viewscreen on each one, they were filming what was being displayed on the scrying glasses.

At first Max thought the scrying glasses were simply displaying a copy of what she was painting onto the glass, but then he realised the background was different in each one.

The mirror on the left showed the outside of Ekstrand’s anchor property in Bath, while the one on the right showed the exterior of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Sorcerer of Mercia’s anchor property. In both images, the formulae were appearing on the walls of the buildings, a couple of feet above the ground, just for a second or so before fading from sight.