Sorcery of Thorns (30 page)

“What?”

“He stole a Class Six grimoire while the wardens were performing a transfer from the vault. They’ve been keeping it quiet, because they don’t want
to send the press into a frenzy. But I
thought you ought to be aware. For, you know”—he lowered his voice further—“your investigation.”

“Thank you, Parsifal,” she said. “Now, I should get back to—er—” She nodded toward the window, hoping Parsifal would use his imagination.

“Oh, yes, certainly! Is this a stakeout? Are you watching for someone? Right, you can’t tell me. I shouldn’t even be here.
I’ll just . . .” He inched toward the doorway. She nodded at him encouragingly and tapped the side of her nose. He hurried out of sight, looking thrilled.

Elisabeth blew out a breath and collapsed back into her chair. At least one good thing had come out of that. If the wardens believed the saboteur had stolen the Codex, they weren’t likely to cast their suspicions toward a lowly maidservant.
Perhaps after a few more days had passed, she could turn her full attention to Ashcroft without distractions. Now that the Chronicles of the Dead was on its way to Harrows, the need was more urgent than ever.

•  •  •

She barely recalled dragging herself home and up the stairs to her bedroom. The only detail that stood out to her was that she hadn’t seen Nathaniel since his nightmare. He had
remained shut inside his study all day yesterday, and judging by the emerald light that flickered beneath the door, he was still in there. She wondered if he had even left the room.

Upstairs, she lit a candle. She didn’t change out of her servant’s uniform, aware she might need the salt and iron on hand. Demonslayer went on the floor beside her, within reaching distance, but not close enough
to appear threatening. She didn’t want the Codex to perceive her as its enemy.

The grimoire waited under her bed, still inside the sack she
had used to smuggle it from the Royal Library. She drew it out and placed it on her lap, feeling the heavy chains clink through the fabric. Seated on the floor, with her back against the mattress, she folded aside the burlap and unraveled the chain onto the
carpet. The Codex lay inert and unresponsive. She drew in a fortifying breath, her hand suspended in the air.

“I’m a friend,” she said, willing her intentions to pass down her arm, through her skin, as she placed her palm against the grimoire.

For a moment, nothing happened. No voice howled at her in rage and betrayal. No ominous pressure filled the room. All was silent. Then its pages stirred
in an invisible breeze. Slowly, like an old man stretching and rising from sleep, the Codex unfolded itself into her hands.

Hope thrilled through her, followed by a quaver of apprehension. If Ashcroft had spent so much time studying this grimoire without success, why should she succeed where he had failed? Unlike him, she didn’t have the slightest idea what Prendergast’s secret might be about,
and she knew next to nothing about codes and ciphers, either. Reaching this step had consumed so much of her attention that she hadn’t had time to prepare for what came afterward.

She scanned the pages that had opened to her. The words swam in her vision, and she tried blinking away her exhaustion, only to discover that her eyes weren’t at fault. It was the words that were moving, the ink bleeding
in sluggish rivulets across the parchment. She flipped to a different section, past diagrams labeled with Enochian script, and found the same thing happening there, too. While the text itself was legible, the sentences had crawled completely out of order. Occasionally they aligned in such a way that a single paragraph became comprehensible:

The highborn demons hold their glittering court beneath a sunless sky. Once every fortnight they ride forth on horned white horses, clad in silks, to hunt beasts in the forests of the Otherworld with packs of baying fiends at their sides. The sound of a demonic hunting horn is not soon forgotten; for it is so beautiful, and so terrible, that it freezes the quarry of the hunt in place as if the prey has turned to stone. . . .

But the rest split apart
before she could finish, the sentences meandering across the page like lines of marching ants. Frustrated, she turned to the scrying mirror and called for Katrien. When her friend’s face appeared in the glass, she looked as tired as Elisabeth felt, ashen beneath the glass’s patina of frost. They didn’t have time to catch up. They raced through the likeliest possibilities as swiftly as they could,
barely pausing for breath.

“The sentences might only fully align at a specific date and time,” Elisabeth theorized, “like midnight on the winter solstice, or during certain conditions, like an eclipse.”

“But Ashcroft’s certain that he can crack it soon, isn’t he? So if that’s the case, either the phenomenon is due to happen sometime within the next two weeks, or—”

“Or the cipher has a different
solution entirely,” Elisabeth finished, glum.

“Take a second look at your research,” Katrien urged. “There might be a clue that didn’t seem relevant before. Do we even know for sure that Prendergast hid his secret as a cipher, or is that just an assumption people made without evidence? In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find anything on my end.”

As their time ran out, Elisabeth swallowed back
the pitiful urge to beg Katrien not to go, watching her disappear beneath the ice. Loneliness pressed in, made worse by her fuzzy-headed exhaustion. She knew she should go to bed, but she was too
tired to get up from the floor and wrap the Codex in its chain.

Instead she found herself idly turning pages, hypnotized by the crawling text. As the sentences strung themselves together, she read lavish,
unsettling descriptions of what the demons ate at their feasts, or what they wore to their nocturnal, weeklong balls. Though the fragmented descriptions left her feeling more and more disturbed, she was unable to tear her eyes away.

Swans poisoned to death with nightshade are considered a particular delicacy at banquets. . . .

The most fashionable garment that evening was a gown made of silver moths, pinned alive to the fabric to preserve their luster. . . .

The candle burned lower on the nightstand. Her head nodded. Disjointed images swirled behind her eyelids: demons dancing in elaborate costumes, grinning as they feasted, tearing into flesh. The nightmarish fancies seemed to take hold of her and drag her downward, like the hands of sirens gripping a shipwrecked sailor, towing him
into the deep and silent dark.

Abruptly, she woke up.

Or, she didn’t wake up—for this had to be a dream.

She stood in some kind of old-fashioned workshop. Unfamiliar herbs hung in bundles from the rafters. Tallow candles flickered on every surface, spattering the stained floorboards with oily yellow wax. Bizarre items cluttered the shelves and the table in the center of the room: bird feathers,
animal skulls, jars containing murky globs floating in vinegar. But that wasn’t the part that convinced her she was dreaming. The room hung suspended in a void. The broken edges of its floorboards jutted out into a black abyss, and chunks of the ceiling had fallen inward, showing the same dark nothingness above.

No—not nothingness. The shining black substance reminded
her of something familiar.
A rich, telltale scent of pigments filled the air. Ink.

“Who are you?” said a man’s voice behind her, harsh with anger. “What are you doing here?”

Elisabeth spun around, her heart slamming against her ribs.

The man who stood there matched how she had always imagined a sorcerer would look before meeting Nathaniel and Ashcroft. Tall, gaunt, and sallow, with glittering obsidian eyes and a closely
trimmed black beard that ended in a point at his chin. He wore flowing robes, and rings adorned each of his fingers, set with differently colored gems.

“Whoever you are, I refuse to tell you anything,” he snapped. “I haven’t spent hundreds of years trapped in this place for nothing.”

Hundreds of years
. He sounded serious. Now that she took in his expression, she saw that he wasn’t angry, not
entirely. Underneath the anger, he looked afraid, as though she had come to take something from him by force. His robes appeared old-fashioned, and so did everything else in the workshop, untouched by time for centuries.

Whatever this place was, it wasn’t a dream. And neither was this man—this sorcerer. She glanced again at the inky void that surrounded them, her eyes widening as possibility
dawned. Prendergast had hidden his secret
inside
the Codex.

She turned back to the sorcerer. “Are you Aldous Prendergast?”

That wasn’t the right thing to say. His face darkened, and he crossed the distance between them in several quick strides. “How did you get here?” he demanded, seizing her shoulders. He shook her until her teeth rattled. “Answer me, girl!”

“I don’t know! I was reading the
Codex. I fell asleep.”

“That is impossible,” he snarled.

“A strange thing to say,” she blurted out, “for someone who’s over three hundred years old. That doesn’t seem possible to me, either.”

Prendergast’s shoulders slumped. He let go of her shoulders and gripped the edge of the table, glaring. She found to her surprise that she wasn’t the least bit afraid of him. He was so thin, she could
easily push him off the end of the floor if he tried to harm her.

“What year is it?” he asked finally, directing his glare at a bottle filled with what appeared to be preserved rat tails.

Questions crowded against the back of her tongue, but she suspected he wouldn’t bother answering any of them until she answered his first. “Eighteen twenty-four.”

He digested her answer. “I’m not alive,” he
said after a long, fatalistic pause. “Not in any real sense.”

Elisabeth recoiled. “Necromancy,” she gasped, seeing his hollow cheeks and cadaverous figure anew.

“No, not necromancy, you idiot child,” he snapped. “I am not a corpse. I left my physical body behind in the mortal realm, and anchored my mind to this—this—well, I don’t imagine you would understand. You are no sorcerer, clearly, unless
the standards have deteriorated significantly since my time. All you need to know is that I am trapped here by my own design. I cannot leave this place. And you should not have been able to visit me through the Codex—not without my permission.”

She looked around. “Are we inside the Codex? An alternate dimension of some kind?”

His eyes narrowed. “So you do know your thaumaturgical theory.”

Elisabeth decided not to tell him that she simply read a lot of novels.

“This is an artificial plane of existence,” he went on grudgingly, “anchored to my grimoire, no bigger than the room surrounding us. To attempt to create a larger one would risk destabilizing the border between the mortal realm and the Otherworld.”

“You truly have been there, then,” she said. “To the Otherworld.”

His eyes
narrowed further. “Most people didn’t believe me. They accused me of fabricating my studies.”

“Aside from one man.” She watched his expression closely. “A man who called himself your friend.”

His face convulsed. “Who are you?” he rasped.

“My name is Elisabeth Scrivener. I am—I was—an apprentice librarian. But that isn’t important. There is no cipher hidden inside the Codex, is there?
You
are
the cipher. You hid yourself here to escape from Cornelius Ashcroft.”

The color bled from Prendergast’s fingers, still gripping the table.

“If you hadn’t,” she continued, the truth dawning on her as she spoke, “he would have used magic to read your memories, and whatever secret you’re guarding, he would have taken it from you by force.” Seeing his widened eyes, she explained, “His descendant
tried to do the same thing to me.”

Prendergast stared at her a moment longer, and then began to laugh. There was a high-pitched nervousness to his laughter that alarmed Elisabeth. She reminded herself that he had been trapped here for hundreds of years, alone, and she hadn’t reacted so differently after being taken in by Nathaniel.

“You’re lying,” he said, once he had caught his breath. “I see
it now. You are in league with the Ashcrofts. There is no other way you could know . . . that you would guess . . .”

“I’m not! I swear it.”

“I know one thing for certain: Ashcrofts do not leave their victims intact.” A feverish sheen glazed his eyes. “Can you even begin to imagine what drove me to choose an eternity of isolation over the attentions of my dear old friend? I left
everything
behind.
My real body became a mindless, drooling husk. But that is what Cornelius would have done to me anyway when he finished tearing my mind apart. At least this way I was able to thwart him, the devil.” Prendergast spoke with sudden ferocity. “He will never have it. And neither will you.”

“Have
what
?”

Prendergast didn’t answer. He spun and began to walk away, his robes billowing out around him,
though there was nowhere he could go except deeper into the workshop, among the cluttered, sagging shelves.

“You may have outsmarted Cornelius,” Elisabeth cried, hurrying after him, “but his descendant is after your secret now. He knows you’re here, and he’ll stop at nothing to find you.”

Prendergast waved a thin hand, the gems on his fingers winking in the candlelight. “It doesn’t matter. He
will not be able to—”

“Get here, like I just did?”

He went still. “You’re wasting your time.”

“Listen to me,” she urged. “I sought out your grimoire because he’s been releasing Maleficts from the Great Libraries. Dozens of people have died. I need to find out why he’s doing it, so I can bring proof to the Collegium. Otherwise, he’ll never face justice.”

Silence reigned. “So he’s begun, has
he,” said Prendergast finally, weary. “He’s trying to finish what Cornelius started.”

“If you would only tell me what he’s planning. I know that whatever it is, it hinges upon the Great Library of Harrows—”

Prendergast’s voice lashed out like a whip. “Enough! Leave me be. It doesn’t matter what he’s planning, because”—he bent over, bracing his hands on his knees, and forced out the rest—“without
me—he cannot succeed.”