Arcanum (6 page)

Her mouth was dry, though, and there was nothing she could do about that. “Master Eckhardt?” She didn’t know which of them was Eckhardt. He had come down to the adepts’ house, fully veiled.

“Adept Agana.” A man taller and straighter than the others moved through the crowd. He was still old: the skin on his round head was heading towards his feet, and his owlish eyebrows were pure white. “What did the prince say?”

She closed her eyes to remember, and was suddenly aware of the pawing, the dry brushing of withered fingers against her robes, tracing the outline of her breasts, her belly, the hollow of her back.

Block it out, block it out. “Hoson zês, phainou, mêden holôs su lupou.”

“The prince, Adept?” The mood of the master was plain. Eckhardt was quick to anger, slow to forgive.

“Gerhard is going to press the Teuton leader and send the body back to his men. He believes this will be sufficient warning to stop the Teutons crossing into Carinthia.”

The touching didn’t stop. If anything, it grew more intimate.

“Where are they now?”

“They are camped by the river at Simbach. If they cross, Gerhard means to call on you to kill them.” Nikoleta shivered. The butterfly caresses fluttered away for a brief moment.

“This Teuton: what was he like?”

“Coarse. Rude. Tall. Strong. Smelt of horse.” She wanted to leave, and knew she mustn’t. “Brave. Unschooled. Cunning. Proud. Mortal.”

Eckhardt grunted at her description. The light was blinding her, and it hurt to look at him. What little hair remained on his head shone like a halo.

“And Gerhard: what about him?”

He was their prince. Surely they’d know everything there was to know, even things that Gerhard himself had forgotten?

“I …” She found herself completely disorientated. It was the glowing, dream-like air, the inconstant, intrusive touching, the vibrations in her skull from being surrounded by so much magic.

“It matters not. All such men are the same, whether they rule few or many.” Eckhardt reached out and took hold of her chin. He turned her head to the left, then to the right, not gently either. His fingers dug into her flesh. “Go. We might need you again. Wait at the adepts’ house.”

That was her dismissal; she knew better than to argue at her treatment or linger for an answer, and she didn’t want to do either; she needed to obey. She turned, and the frail figures, hunched over their sticks, slowly, reluctantly, stood aside for her.

She took a step away from the masters, and another to get completely out of range of their hands. A smudge of darkness presented itself ahead and to her right. She walked towards it with the same steady gait that had brought her there.

The darkness expanded, swallowed her whole, and vomited her outside. She was shaking, retching, scrubbing her body through her clothes with her nails. She needed to lean against something to stop herself from falling. Not the glassy wall of the tower though, and not one of the nearby trees, which were tainted and untrustworthy. Nothing for it then but to stumble down the path towards the base of the hill, which led to the adepts’ house and the novices’ house beyond it.

The sun, clean and warm, filtered through the leaves. Its light was nothing like the syrupy, cloying incandescence of the White Tower. It was the same sun that had beaten down on her uncovered head as a child. She’d been barefooted then, her clothes nothing more than holes stitched together with remnants of weave; a wild, feral child, tormented and shunned.

She’d gone far enough from Byzantium to be safe then, and she’d gone far enough from the tower now. She slumped forward against the trunk of a chestnut and hugged its rough bark like it was her …

No, not that. Her mother feared her and hated her. If she was still alive.

The tree beat with rising sap, a slow, steady pulse. She could feel it if she concentrated on it, and it was so much easier to do that than consider her first, and only, meeting with the leaders of her Order.

After a while, when she thought she could stand again unaided, she let go and put her back to the tree, sliding down the trunk in a way that made her robes rise up and expose her legs, and the black ink under her olive skin. The palms of her hands were marked with ridges where she’d pressed them into the bark. But they soon faded. Her knuckles were smooth, her fingers straight. She was young.

In a hundred years’ time, she would be like them, patting and stroking firm flesh when she could, because it was the one thing she’d never have again.

Or she might be dead. Broken, mad, immolated, disintegrated. Nothing was certain. And certainly not now.

“Is that what I really want?” she said out loud.

It always used to be. It wasn’t just
her
goal, but every adept’s, to be called to the White Tower and meet with the Master of the Order of the White Robe, to undergo whatever ritual was required of them, to be marked with the tattoos that would confer on them the power they craved.

In the three years since she’d been moved to the adepts’ house, she’d known of two men who’d received that call. There had surely been others before then, and it was her turn next.

So where were the younger masters? They’d been conspicuously missing from the meeting she’d just had. Eckhardt had been the youngest one there, and no one would ever call him young again.

There was something else, too, undefinable and possibly unknowable: a niggling feeling that she was being built up, not for greatness, but for destruction. Eckhardt wasn’t the Master of the Order, and yet he seemed to have assumed that position. The others, on paper just as powerful as him, appeared to take a subordinate role.

Nikoleta remembered their pawing hands, and swallowed bile. She picked up a shrivelled brown chestnut case from the ground by her side. The spines were brittle with age, sharp but easily broken. She shifted the ink on her exposed forearms, threw the seed pod lazily into the air and set it alight with a tiny fireball before it hit the ground.

It sizzled and crisped, a thread of black smoke lifted into the branches above her.

For the first time since she’d turned up at the novices’ house – cold, all but naked, hammering on the door because, of all the places in the world, that place was the one where they understood people like her – she felt ambivalent.

The Order had recognised her abilities, taught her how to use them, scraped symbols on her skin and shown her power beyond reckoning. None of that came for free. She had paid, and paid dearly.

She dragged herself up and carried on down the path. Back in Byzantium, she knew she hadn’t belonged. Here in Carinthia, she’d never felt that old unease until now.

Thaler sat at his desk in the library, the satchel burning a hole in the floor between his feet. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t even string one thought after the other. He fidgeted and moved scraps of paper around, and stared off into the distance across the cold, empty space between the balconies to the far side of the reading room.

He was surrounded on three sides by shelves, giving him a little alcove to work in, and a view of the rest of the library. Such were the privileges granted to an under-librarian. He had his own room in the dormitory, an allowance of a few shillings a week, and all the books he could want.

Lights – burnished globes of brass, glowing like suns – hung from the distant ceiling on great chains. He could read all day and all night under their perpetual light if he wanted, and he sometimes did. He was, he considered, the most fortunate of men.

To risk throwing such a life away was not a trifling matter. He hoped one day to contend for the position of master librarian, when the old master died. There would be fierce, but coolly polite, competition for that honour. And if he was caught abusing his position to secretly help a friend – against the hexmasters, no less – he could kiss that hope goodbye. Probably along with his flabby arse.

Even now they were preparing the pressing pit in the main square: not for him, nor Büber, but for some barbarian lord who’d stupidly threatened the prince. He’d rather avoid that fate.

He looked out to the opposite balcony, where one of the other under-librarians had their desk. Thomm wasn’t there. In fact, Thomm was rarely there, and that merely added to the general malaise that had descended over the library of late. The last decade at least.

As far as he knew, the master librarian was in his eyrie, on the balcony one floor up that sat directly beneath the library’s dome, while the apprentice master was one floor down with his half-dozen inky-fingered pupils. He’d counted seven other librarians moving listlessly between the shelves in the reading room. He pursed his lips, bent down to collect the satchel, and tucked it inside his black librarian’s gown.

He listened. Nothing but the slight moan of a draught and the creak of a chain. He pushed his chair back, deliberately making its legs rasp against the dark oak planks. He listened again. No footsteps, no coughs, no squeak of a trolley.

Thaler moved into the next bay, and bent on aching knees to the very bottom shelf where the folio- and larger-sized books were kept. He dragged three of them out, piling them on the floor beside him, then eased a fourth a little way from the back of the shelf. He looked around again, making absolutely sure he couldn’t be spotted by anyone, anyone except the master librarian, and he was always asleep until lunch.

He pressed the satchel into the gap, pinned it close with the book, then reshelved the heavy folios. He shuffled back to inspect his handiwork, and was satisfied. Those particular titles probably hadn’t been moved for the better part of a century, and it was unlikely they’d be disturbed for another hundred years. All he had to do was remember where he’d put it.

He went back to his desk, but still clarity eluded him. He’d hidden the unicorn’s horn. Now he had to discover why Büber had found two of them, without their attendant unicorns.

He needed fresh air. The library was windowless, and, with only the one main door that stayed mostly closed, was still and quiet and musty. Even the walls of the building were powdery with age: the Romans had worshipped their gods here, in their pantheon. That hadn’t suited German ways; they instead raised great pillars of wood in forest clearings and on rock outcrops under the open sky. The statues of Jupiter and Mercury had been turned out and cast into the river, but the space had remained, unused and unloved until one of Gerhard’s ancestors decided on a whim that he wanted a library.

Gods bless him for doing so.

Thaler got up from his desk again, and carried his outdoor shoes down the creaking staircase to the ground floor. From there, he made his way to the entrance hall, passing the huge desk that blocked the way to visitors – not that there were ever many, or even a few – and the dozing form of Glockner, the head usher, as crumpled and dusty as the books he supposedly guarded.

He kicked off his library slippers, nudging them back to a pair against the stonework of the hall, and eased on his shoes. As he fumbled his fat fingers into the heels, he looked up at the vast dome, the encircling galleries, the heavy lights on their solid chains, the stadia of shelves beneath. His lip trembled for a moment, before he stiffened it.

It could be brilliant, with a little more care, a few more librarians, a touch more of the prince’s money. They could do only so much with the meagre resources they had, and that grieved him. When he was the Master, he’d go to Gerhard and tell him so.

The front doors were heavy, studded with iron, dark with pitch. It took genuine effort to lift the latch and pull the ring. The outside poured in through the crack, and Thaler had to keep the door moving until it was wide enough to get his bulk across the threshold. He turned, and strained again until the door banged shut.

There, that should wake Glockner.

He was under the colonnaded portico of the pantheon, in shadow and cold. Out in Library Square, a fountain played with the spring breezes, and over in the corner, a sausage seller was setting out his stall. In comparison to the inside, the square was teeming with activity. Carts, more or less steered by their drivers, rumbled across the cobbles, and busy people with baskets and sacks crossed from one street to another, disappearing up narrow alleys and emerging from doors.

Distraction and familiarity, that was what he needed.

He turned left, down the hill. The cobbles were still glistening with melting frost, and it was chilly enough in between the tall town houses to make him wrap himself tightly in his black librarian’s gown.

Sunlight was striking the eaves of the east-facing roofs, so he chose to walk down to the quay. There was little heat in the spring sun, but it would be something, and the river didn’t trap the air like the narrow alleyways of the Old Town.

He threaded his way by the most direct route, which is to say not direct at all, and suddenly popped out between two high walls onto the quayside. Two long barges were being loaded, bundles and crates passed up from carts and onto the flat-bottomed boats by a chain of shirt-sleeved men. A third was undergoing the reverse process, and when a cart was full, it was pushed off its chocks so that it wheeled itself across the wide quay, mostly in the direction of the waiting warehouses.

Across the river, beside the new town, were another two barges. One was casting off, orders shouted in the river-workers’ cant ringing clear across the fast-flowing water. Its pointed bow aimed upstream, and for a moment the barge drifted backwards, its front threatening to turn across the current.

Then the heavily tattooed bargemaster put his hand to the tiller, his inked arms flashing darkly. The boat steadied and held its position. With seemingly no effort, and with the barge-hands busy with securing the ropes on deck, the vessel started to make headway. Little waves broke against its wooden sides as it pushed forward against the mountain meltwater.

Thaler walked upstream too, but the barge crept ahead of his pace. It threaded through the central arch of the bridge and he lost sight of it. His eyes were drawn instead to the forested flanks of the ridge that ran east to west across the valley, neatly bisected by the river.