Prospero in Hell (4 page)

“Yellowknife?”

“As best as I can tell, we’re in the Canadian Northern Territories, somewhere between Great Bear Lake and Great Slave Lake. Yellowknife should be the nearest airport.”

“As best as you can tell?” Mab scrunched up his cheek and scratched at his eternal stubble.

“I’ve never been here before. I had no idea Mephisto had a house in
Canada,” I said. “Heck, I didn’t know he had a house at all. Which is probably for the best, because if I had known, I would have just sent him a note telling him about Father’s letter, and we never would have gone looking for him.”

“Good point. If we had not located the Harebrain, we would never have found your brother, Mr. Theophrastus, or your sister.” Mab nodded. He added dubiously, “This Yellowknife airport. How are we going to get there?”

“We’ll have to borrow Pegasus, but since we have hours, we should give the beast a chance to rest first,” I concluded happily. “So, I’m off to read. Tootle-loo!”

“Whoa, Ma’am. Maybe we don’t have to leave right away, but we only have while your brother is otherwise occupied to investigate his house,” Mab countered. “Can’t whatever you’re planning to read wait? You’ll have plenty of time to read on the flight back to Oregon.”

The trip home seemed a long way off. For five hundred years, I had searched for the
Book of the Sibyl
. Theoretically, another few hours should not make much of a difference, but right now, with the little leather volume burning a proverbial hole in my pocket, even these few seconds of delay seemed an eternity.

This little book that Lord Astreus had copied for me in his own hand held the secrets of the Order of the Sibyl, the only rank of my Lady’s servants I had not yet achieved. Conceivably, this slender tome might hold all the answers I so longed for. It was even possible that, by the time I finished reading it, I would be a Sibyl!

And then… ah, then!

The rank of Handmaiden, my rank, came with the authority to travel to the Well at the World’s End—a journey of a year and a day—and bring back the Water of Life that allowed my family to be effectively immortal. The rank of Sibyl, however, came with six Gifts. The Gift of Absolving Oaths would allow me to free my favorite brother, Theophrastus, from the foolish vow he had taken to eschew the Water of Life, the vow that would soon bring about his death through illness and old age.

The Gift of Visions would allow me to request information directly from my Lady, perhaps offering answers to the many questions that plagued my family. The Gift of Opening Locks… well, I did not know how powerful it was, but it was at least conceivable that, with my Lady’s help, I could unlock the very gates to hell itself, where my father was being held captive, and force them to yield him up.

And then there was the Gift that would allow me to create Water of Life, so that I would never again have to take off a year and a day, abandoning all my other duties, in order to bring back only as much Water as I could carry.

Nor was it just that I wanted new honors and prerogatives. For five centuries, I had hungrily devoured every arcane manual and ancient tome that came my way, eager to discover more of the nature of my Lady and Her Divine Purpose. Long nights I had spent bent over musty pages, seeking the secrets that evaded me. After all this time, all this searching, I yearned to learn the answers to my questions.

I skirted around the pool. “I’m sure you’ll do fine on your own.”

“Okay, no skin off my back.” Mab shrugged. “I’m just your head detective. If you’re not interested in why Harebrain can turn into Big, Black, and Bat-Winged, I don’t need to know, either.”

I froze.

He had a point.

In a warehouse in Maryland, my brother had transformed into a sapphire-eyed bat-winged entity that looked sickeningly like a demon. It was our family’s policy not to traffic with Hell. At least, it had been in years past—though now it was beginning to seem as if half the family had violated this creed. If a search of Mephisto’s house could reveal clues as to whether he really was Mephistopheles, Prince of Hell, I owed it to Father to investigate.

An eight-foot-tall primate with thick, curly white fur came shuffling into the foyer carrying a mop and pail. When it saw us, it flinched back, hunching bashfully behind its great shoulder. Then, gathering its courage, it lunged at us, swinging its mop and baring its big yellow fangs.

“We better get a move on, Ma’am.” Mab retreated cautiously toward the nearest arch. “We’re making the help nervous.”

Mephisto’s mansion was like no house I had ever seen. Rooms spilled one into the next in no discernible order. Some overflowed with chairs that faced no particular direction. Others were nearly empty except for piles of junk. Still others could have been chambers in a museum, with priceless statues and artifacts arranged in an eye-catching manner, each with its own brass plaque.

Nearly every room on the first floor had a pool. Underwater tunnels, similar to the passage Morveren had taken to fetch the yeti, led from one to
another giving the mermaid the run of the house. There were other passages as well, doors that opened into narrow hallways, or crawl spaces that led from one room to the next. And everything, everywhere, was plastered with Post-It notes.

“ ‘Remember to water the asphodel,’ ” Mab read aloud. He looked left and right but saw no sign of a plant. Looking up, he paused, squinting at the ceiling. “Guess he wasn’t kidding about uncovering the will-o-wisps. Do you think he really keeps a salamander in his furnace?”

I followed his gaze and saw that the illumination came from glass globes holding balls of brightly glowing flickers of light. “Very likely. How else would he heat this enormous place? He certainly could not afford to heat it with oil.”

Mab performed several thaumaturgic experiments involving sextants, brown rice, peony seeds, rose petals and a slide rule. Eventually, however, he threw down his tools in disgust.

“It’s no good, Ma’am.” He shook his head glumly. “The place stinks so of magic, I can’t tell anything. The inhabitants are magical. Half the objects are enchanted. Heck, the place has probably even got dimensional gateways similar to those in Prospero’s Mansion, leading to only Setabos knows where.” He gestured off toward the distance. “Maybe if I had access to some of the specially calibrated equipment from Mr. Prospero’s study… but, as it is, this line of thaumaturgic investigation is useless. Might as well press on.”

The next chamber might have been a drawing room, had it not been so crowded with statuary and stacked furniture. Mab paused and scratched at his eternal stubble. “Have you noticed all the wooden surfaces have been carved?”

Throughout the house, cabinets, doors, wainscoting, tabletops, and even chair legs bore signs of my brother’s handiwork. Bas-reliefs of famous people, pastoral scenes of shepherdesses and their sheep, funny little faces that peered out from door lintels, carved doodles of ketchup bottles and Campbell’s soup ads: every place we looked, another wooden surface had been transformed into three-dimensional art.

“Does any of this mean anything? Or is it just artistic babble?” he muttered, adding under his breath, “By Setebos and Titania, I wish I’d thought to bring a camera!”

“Some of both, I suspect,” I replied. “Some of it probably has meaning—mnemonic images he still remembers from the period when he studied the
Ancient Art of Memory with our brother Cornelius. Some of it is probably just the product of his madness.”

“You mean he just carves on things because he’s cuckoo?”

“He likes to carve. Sometimes, he does it without thinking.”

Mab scowled. “Like on the boat, when he tried to carve a figurine that would force me to let him summon me? Sure, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Suuure.”

Mab examined the fairyscape at length, writing copious notes. Then, he peered at a cluttered table stuffed in between two china cabinets. A golf bag embroidered with the letters
T.A.P.
leaned against one leg, tilted at an extravagant angle, as if it were about to tumble to its doom. The yellow note stuck to its tan leather read:
NEVER STOP LOOKING!!!

“This mean anything to you, Ma’am?”

“No, though T.A.P. are our brother Titus’s initials,” I said. “He’s the golf fanatic in the family. Perhaps that’s his bag.”

“So, why is it here? And what’s this message mean? That Harebrain wants to beat his brother at golf? Is that why Mr. Titus disappeared? Your brother took him out to ax the golf competition?”

“I hardly think so,” I chuckled.

“Snicker if you like, Ma’am,” growled Mab as he stalked over to a red trunk. “But I say something’s fishy about Mr. Titus’s disappearance.”

Mab turned back to the table and picked up a plastic pillbox that lay amid dozens of other knickknacks.

“ ‘Check on this once a week,’ ” Mab read the pink note on the plastic pillbox. After dutifully recording this message in his notebook, he opened the pillbox and peered inside. “Check on what? The thing is empty. And… oh, this is precious!”

He pointed at a faint blue Post-It that read:
THIS IS A MNEMONIC. DO NOT MOVE
. An arrow had been drawn next to the words. The place the arrow pointed to was empty.

“Pour sucker.” Mab chuckled, shaking his head. He moved along, reading other messages as he copied them down.

This is a ring from the high wire of the Greatest Show on Earth! I gave Barnum my tiger.

Stirrup from the Steppe. Check monthly.

This is to remind me to catch the Thunderbird.

Wind this bandana in January, May, and September.

This is a hairbrush. I use it to brush my hair.

Mab ran a hand over his face. “Boy, Ma’am, your brother is a certified loony. We’re not going to get anything out of this.”

“You can say that again,” I murmured, my fingers drumming impatiently against the cover of the
Book of the Sibyl
. As Mab’s pencil still scratched away, recording my brother’s babblings, I added, “Mab, there’s no point in copying it all down.”

“A detective is nothing if he is not meticulous, Ma’am. One never knows what’s going to turn out to be important.”

“Nothing here is important, Mab. It’s just nonsense, babble!” I gestured briskly, knocking over a silver flute that had been leaning against the wall. I propped it up again and pushed the attached note back onto the mouthpiece. It read:
BONEHEAD, MONTHLY.

Beneath the flute, a photograph lay on its face. Righting it, I discovered it was a silvery daguerreotype of my family, taken back in England before the days of proper photography. A pale green sticky note pasted to the glass read:
THIS IS MY FAMILY, EVEN THE DORKY ONES.

The note made me smile. I looked at the picture and felt an unexpected fondness for my siblings. I could not help smirking at their muttonchop sideburns, which had been all the rage in that day. They made my brothers look so serious and so ridiculous at the same time.

Mab leaned over, peering at our faces. “I recognize most of them, Ma’am. You, Harebrain, the Perp… er, Mr. Ulysses—hard to miss him. He’s the one wearing the domino mask around his eyes. That’s Mr. Theophrastus when he was a young man, isn’t it?” Mab tapped on the picture above Theo’s face. “Even back then, he looked like a decent fellow.”

“Yes. That’s him,” I said softly, blinking tears from my eyes.

“And Madam Logistilla,” Mab continued, unaware of my sudden sentimentality. “I recognize her. She looks exactly the same as she did when we met her a couple of weeks ago. This big one must be Mr. Titus. Oh, and that’s dead one, Mr. Gregor. Your father showed me a picture of him once. Who are the rest of these guys?”

“That’s Cornelius.” I pointed at one of the shorter figures. “This is actually a rare shot of Cornelius’s face. Usually, he covers his unseeing eyes with a blindfold.”

“So, that’s Mr. Cornelius.” Mab squinted at the picture and then picked up the blue and white bandana to which the note about winding in January was attached. He sniffed it carefully, frowning thoughtfully. “He’s the one your sister thinks put the whammy on Mr. Theophrastus, right?”

“Right.” I shivered, though the chamber was not particularly cold, and I was still wearing my cashmere cloak. “Logistilla claims she saw Cornelius use his staff, the
Staff of Persuasion,
to make Theo keep his vow to give up magic. Retiring from the family work was bad enough, but Theo had come to the bizarre conclusion that the Water of Life that keeps us young counts as magic.”

“Which is why he stopped taking it and began aging.” Mab patted his notebook. “I got that down.”

I nodded glumly and thought about Logistilla’s accusation. Ironically, the thought that someone had forced Theo to keep his vow cheered me. Then, his decline became someone else’s fault, someone who might be capable of fixing the problem. I just did not want the responsible party to turn out to be a family member. I hated the idea that any member of our family would do such a thing to one another.

I glanced at the picture again. It was so nice to see us all together. What a team we used to make! Nothing could withstand us when we worked together.