Darkest Misery (18 page)

“Given what happened in Boston, Claudius or the goblins strike me as most likely,” Devon said. “Let's get back to the hotel. I've got a couple things to do besides magically assault you tonight.”

I cringed at the choice of words. “We can skip that part. My brain is addled enough as it is. What do you need to do?”

“First, you're moving into my room. Don't argue. It didn't take me long to find you in this city. It won't take anyone else with half a brain either. Second, I've got to contact Dezzi. If it is the local satyrs, I want to find out. Dezzi should know more about their Dom. If I'm lucky, she'll actually know their Dom or know someone who does. Introductions always come in handy when you're trying to ruin someone's best laid plans for murder.”

Sighing, I clomped along next to him, and I didn't feel secure until we'd moved my belongings into his room. Putting an ocean between me and Boston was supposed to keep me safe. If I wasn't, how was I supposed to concentrate on research? Goodness knew I had a hard enough time as it was.

So far, nothing about this trip had gone as planned. Figured.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I debated for a while what to tell Tom about the men and ultimately decided to say nothing. My anxiety lessened overnight, right along with my blood alcohol level. In the bright glow of morning, it was harder to worry. Maybe that was foolish, but I didn't want to distract Tom, nor did I relish the thought of being stuck with Gryphon bodyguards. Bad enough that Lucen would find out, but at least I was separated from his overprotectiveness by several thousand miles.

I would simply take better precautions myself. I wouldn't stray far from World during the day, wouldn't get lunch or coffee alone and wouldn't drink outside the hotel room. When I did go out, I'd pay more attention to the people surrounding me than the sights. It was common sense.

I was following up on yesterday's lead about the key when Marie triumphantly set a polished wood box in front of me and Tom. “I believe this is what you wanted?”

My heart missed a beat as I gaped at the box. Could this truly be it? If Marie had found a Vessel, we could all let out a giant sigh of relief. There was no way the furies could break into these archives to steal it.

Then logic squashed my excitement like a bug. The box Marie had brought didn't possibly look big enough to hold a Vessel like they were described in the lore. Though large, the box was flat, no more than two inches thick.

Tom put on his gloves and released the latch. The lid swung open, and I held my breath—logic be damned—as he pulled something glassy out of it.

Tom's gleeful smile transformed his face into something even younger than usual. “Our piece of the puzzle. Marie, excellent work.”

Incased in glass was a familiar piece of paper or parchment. It was rougher than I'd have expected around the edges, but given how old Tom speculated it had to be, the ink was remarkably dark and clear. And there was a lot of it. Writing or drawings of some sort covered nearly every inch.

I pulled up the photo Devon had stolen to compare it. Although hard to say for sure, our piece must have been about the same size based on how much writing there was. The markings were comparable too, yet different. Same code hiding different words.

“We need to decipher it,” Tom said, glancing between my photo and the parchment.

“How do we do that? You have a codebreaker here?”

Tom lifted the glass and ran his finger over the seal. “In a manner of speaking. It's all about magic. These were written by magicians for magicians. That's the key to understanding how to unlock the meaning. We don't need a cryptologist in the traditional sense. We need the right counter-charm.”

That proved tricky enough. Concocting the right sort of anti-magic was a delicate skill in the best of situations, and it was made all the more challenging in this case because of the age of the parchment. First, we had to remove it from the glass without damaging it. Next, Tom had to defer to an expert charm maker to do the deed.

This process was further hampered by the need to construct the counter-charm in the air-quality-controlled archive as well as by the preservation charms on the parchment, of which we were informed there were many. The parchment's magic had been weakened over time. If it hadn't been so carefully preserved, both by mundane and magical means, I couldn't imagine the thing would still exist.

As for the preservation charms, they interfered with the Gryphon's reading of the spell he had to break, and there was a certain danger in trying too many times to do it. For all we knew, there could be layers upon layers of spells on the parchment, including one that initiated some sort of self-destruct if the wrong counter-charms were used.

Marie had found the parchment early in the morning, but the process to decode it dragged on well into the afternoon. At first, I'd watched expectantly, as had Tom and Marie, as if any moment our expert charm maker would succeed. When it became clear nothing was happening fast as usual, Tom sent me and Marie back to our research.

In need of coffee, I popped back into the room later where Tom was hovering over the charm maker as he prepared for another go. “I'm very glad you guys don't use the same sorts of magic on your top-secret belongings these days.”

“What do you mean?” Tom asked.

I thought of the time I'd had to break a magical lock on the server room door in Boston. I thought it had been challenging, but I was beginning to see how wrong I'd been. “You're happier not knowing.”

Jacques Maurice, our Gryphon magical expert, gestured wildly to us. “Silence!
Je suis prêt.
”

I wasn't sure why exactly we needed to be quiet given the hard part of what he had to do was already over, but I clamped my lips together and tiptoed closer.

Rather than spray a counter-charm over the fragile parchment, Jacques Maurice had to create a kind of wand he used to brush it. It made me think of an eraser, something to wipe across the parchment and clean it like an old-fashioned blackboard. Each wand was made after he studied the magical energies on the parchment, and each was his best attempt to negate them. Running the wand over the parchment was merely the showy half of the attempt.

Except none of the attempts so far had much to show for themselves. The parchment had remained unchanged and unwilling to divulge its secrets.

But this time was different. I could sense something new was happening immediately, and I was back to holding my breath as I'd done this morning. The hairs on my arms bristled. There was a charge in the air, like static electricity, as powerful spells collided with other powerful spells. My skin tingled with the magic.

Slowly, as Jacques Maurice drew the wand across the ancient document, the writing began to change. The ink became liquid once more, melting into the parchment in places. In others, it slithered like black snakes around itself, joining other trails, loops and straight lines, and reforming into new glyphs. The more of the parchment the wand touched, the darker it turned as the ink spread. By the time he reached the bottom, the top of the page was starting to settle. The squirming symbols stuck where they were, shortening lines in some places and lengthening ones in others until they fell still.

I might have sworn. Even Tom's jaw hung open, and Jacques Maurice rubbed his eyes in plain astonishment.

“Is that what you want it to do?” he asked, switching to English.

Tom raised an eyebrow. “I hope so. Time to bring Olga back to translate.”

I insisted we get afternoon coffee while we let Olga work, and a couple hours later we were hunched around a table in the research room once more. The parchment was resealed and tucked safely away in the archive, and Olga had a large photo of the counter-charmed version on her laptop for us to look at.

She pointed to a scrawling set of glyphs in the corner. “This is like the other two you gave me. It says this is the property of someone named Daniel. The rest of this writing resembles a journal entry. Essentially, it explains how five unnamed groups split up some magical objects so they could never be united again. Each group was meant to hide whatever the objects were so they would never be found. It says Daniel wrapped his object in spells to conceal it, then he gave it to someone named Narah to keep.”

As the weird symbols on Olga's screen meant nothing to me, I watched Tom's face as she spoke, searching for signs that he understood more than I did. His emotions raced, giving me the sense of being caught in a windstorm, but I couldn't discern much else from probing him with my gift. His excitement must outweigh anything else. Either that or everything was making perfect sense to him so he had no reason to be confused.

I hoped to hell it was that.

“The spell to unwrap the object is here.” Olga pointed to a new set of glyphs, these in the bottom right corner. “I translated the spell, along with the full text, but it is different than any I have seen before. Daniel apparently held on to the parchment, or he planned to do so. There is nothing else.”

“What's that?” Careful not to touch her screen, I gestured to a blob of ink beneath the spell.

“Ah, that.” Olga smiled. “Thank you for reminding me. That…” She zoomed in on the errant blob, and it became clear instantly. It was a crudely stylized drawing of a gryphon. “Interesting, I think.”

Tom thanked Olga and brought up the word-for-word translation file she'd given us to study. I read it with him, but I couldn't not feel disappointed. Though interesting, the information didn't seem to help much. And as for where the Vessel might be, we remained lost in the archival swamps.

Tom acknowledged as much when I pointed it out. “It's not as illuminating as I'd have hoped, but it gives us a new area to consider. The gryphon drawing ties this Daniel person to us, even if the Gryphons themselves hadn't formed yet. It might actually be the first reference we have to our origins. We also know from Daniel's writing that the Vessel was wrapped in some very strong magic, making it appear not to be magical at all. That's impressive.”

“Impressive, and it might only make our task harder.”

Someone cleared their throat nearby, and I glanced up. Umut was wheeling his chair over, his expression sheepish. “I don't know exactly what you are searching for or why, but I couldn't help overhear you talking these past few days. I have a suggestion.”

“We'll take it,” I said before Tom might grumble about Umut's lack of clearance.

Umut tapped his fingers together. “You're familiar with the story of Daniel the Dragon-slayer?”

I'd heard the name, but was unable to recall anything, so Tom explained. “He's one of the people credited with forming the temple that would later become the church that would later become the Angelic Order of the Knights of the Gryphon that would later become—”

“You. Us. I get it. I remember from school.” I gestured for Umut to continue.

“Finally the historian gets to be useful.” Umut grinned. “Daniel was known to have an apprentice, a woman. This was before the days when women were excluded from formal magical learning. Her name was Narah, though it's been butchered in many texts to Nora.”

“So that could be who these people are.”

Umut held up a hand. “There is more to Narah. She was an excellent magical healer, and later became known as Saint Nora when religious fervor attached itself to the magical orders. In all the drawings of her, you'll see she has a cup tied about her waist. It's called Narah's Cup, or Nora's Cup, and no one knows what it was for. But it was considered important enough to be treasured as a relic after her death.”

“Worthy of being preserved?”

“For its historical value, not any magical value, yes.” Umut returned to his desk against the far wall. “Daniel had begun organizing his small group of magicians by then, and though he had died, the organization kept his treasures. They still have it—meaning we have it. It's in our archives somewhere. I've seen reference to it.”

I gawked at Umut, adrenaline seeping into my veins. This day had been filled with too many ups and downs. I refused to let my hopes rise, but my heart didn't seem to care.

Tom was already on the case, bringing up the archive's database. “Umut, you're a genius.”

“Yeah, I know.”

I laughed, but my giddiness faded as the search result for Narah's Cup popped up on the screen. “What does that mean?”

The result showed no storage number and listed the item as not catalogued.

Tom pushed his chair back from the table with a sigh. “That means exactly what it says. It's not in the proper archives.”

Marie, who'd been silent for a while, got up from her chair and clapped her hands together. “It means we are going to Paris.”

There was no rest for the weary, not with an apocalypse breathing down our backs and the means to prevent it so close at hand.

Against my arguments about a possible leak, Tom insisted on assembling a team. After much heated discussion, I gave up and we compromised by him agreeing to share as little information with the others as he could get away with.

He also explained the Paris situation to me. The Gryphons' original World Headquarters had been located in Paris and badly damaged during WWII. Once the war ended, rather than rebuild, the Gryphons moved their headquarters to Grenoble where they were better situated to keep expanding their worldwide operations. Most of the contents of their archives had moved with it.

Priority for the move had been given to their most valuable items, usually so designated because of their magical properties or the knowledge they contained. But over a thousand years of collected books and manuscripts, weapons, art and more had to be accounted for. At the same time, the Gryphons, always reluctant to hire non-Gryphon help for mundane tasks, had to get on with rebuilding and returning to regular work. Some objects, therefore, had been purposely left behind.

Many of those items were of no magical value, but of artistic or historical interest, and they'd been permanently donated to museums. The rest had been gathered into a secure warehouse facility for later cataloguing and organization. But life happened and priority for taking care of those items was never high on anyone's to-do list. Couple that with the lack of Gryphons willing to forgo their primary
raison d'être
and become researchers or librarians, and the warehouse's contents remained largely untouched over the decades.

It was to that warehouse we had to travel, and it amused me that the most powerfully magical item in the Gryphons' possession had been left behind with what sounded like much of their junk.

I should say it
would have
amused me because this was going to be a long trip. Tom didn't want to wait, and neither did I, but eventually good sense won out. By the time Tom prepped a team for leaving, it was approaching six o'clock. The round trip alone would take about eleven hours, never mind needing to search a warehouse that was—by all accounts—not the best organized.