Goblin Moon (3 page)

As his eyes adjusted, Jenk made out the familiar
figure of Caleb Braun, hopping about with uncharacteristic energy
and doing a kind of impatient dance before the bookshop door. At
his side, young Jedidiah held the lanthorn in one unsteady hand,
while be attempted, with the other, to restrain Caleb’s impatience.
Farther down the street, two burly constables pulled a spindly cart
loaded with a huge black casket up the hill.

For a confused moment, Jenk thought the coffin had
come for him, and that Caleb and Jed constituted his funeral
party.

Then his mind cleared. Perhaps it was the damp weedy
air rising up from the river, perhaps the sight of his old friend
helped to restore him. Jenk clutched the windowsill to steady
himself and called out softly, just as Caleb raised his fist to
knock again, “I am here, Caleb. I will come down and let you
in.”

The stairs leading from Jenk’s attic rooms to the
ground floor were so narrow and steep that he had to descend
sideways like a crab, with the candle in one hand and his back
against the wall. The bookshop smelled of dust and mice and
decaying scholarship. From the foot of the stairs, a narrow
passageway led between high shelves crowded with old books and
manuscripts. Jenk had acquired a notable collection of rare and
valuable volumes, though many were there on consignment:
The Mirror of Philosophy
with its bizarre tinted
woodcuts; Tassio’s
Reflections
; one of
five known copies of
The Correction of the
Ignorant
; and (the pride of the collection) Antony’s
Fool’s Paradise
bound in crumbling indigo
leather with leaves edged in dull antique gold and but three minor
errors in transcription.

At the front of the shop, the hands on the moon-faced
clock marked the hour of three. Jenk balanced his candlestick on
the top of the clock-case and crept to the door. With trembling
hands he unfastened the latches, lifted the bar, turned the handle,
and peered out around the edge of the half-open door.

As the cart pulled up in front, Jenk eyed the coffin
mistrustfully. “Why do you bring me this? I’ve had no dealings with
the dead these five and forty years. And why do you disturb me at
this unconscionable hour?”

“It’s books, Gottfried . . . books with the mark of
the Scolos on ‘em,” Caleb whispered hoarsely. “Books and sommat
else. You’ll understand what it means better’n me, I reckon. But
let us come in, Gottfried. You’d not want the neighbors to see what
we’ve brought, or talk of it later?”

Reluctantly, Jenk moved aside and allowed the others
to wrestle the coffin off the cart, maneuver it through the door,
and set it down in one of the narrow aisles between the shelves.
Caleb lifted the lid of the casket, and Jenk brought his candle
over, the better to view the contents.

There was a serenity, a sort of blissful, dreaming
peacefulness, on the face of the corpse that Jenk could not but
envy. And he felt a curious sensation of familiarity, a sense of
inevitability to this moment, that sent a cold chill creeping down
his spine. “You found this in the river?” he asked, struggling to
maintain his composure.

“Aye . . . floating on the river, just after the turn
of the tide.”

Despite Jenk’s best efforts, the hand holding the
candle began to shake; a splash of hot wax fell on the rim of the
coffin. “This may be a gift of the sea, then, and not of the
river.”

Caleb lowered his voice again. “Could be, but it
weren’t in the water long; you can see by the condition of the
wood. And however it come to us, it weren’t no accident.”

Matthias cleared his throat uneasily. “Young Jed,
here, reckons ‘tis one of them wax figures the gentry set up in
their parlors. But the eyes, now, that’s an uncommon touch. Morbid,
I call it if it
is
a wax doll.

Jenk forced himself to smile benignly. “The
gentry—and more particularly, the nobility—are addicted to morbid
conceits. There is a fashion for mock funerals—all the rage, so
young Sera informs me—whereby women whose husbands are still quite
hale and whole don widow’s weeds and stage elaborate demonstrations
of grief, declaring it were better to mourn their menfolk, if only
symbolically, in advance, than to risk being overtaken by their own
mortality, and not live to do the thing at all. I believe,” he
said, more to himself than to the others, “that these reminders of
the fragility of human life and the wanton caprice of the Fates add
a certain piquancy to present good fortune. And a ‘corpse’ in the
parlor, as I take it, may be the newest fad.”

As only Caleb stood in a position to see what he did,
Jenk reached down and gently lifted one of the hands. The texture
of the skin and the flexibility of the joints convinced him that he
was not holding the hand of a wax figure. Though the flesh was as
cold and as lifeless as clay, this thing had once been a man.

He felt the smile stiffen on his face as he
continued: “And yet . . . perhaps not. The guilds use effigies in
some of their more obscure ceremonies. I observed one such ritual
myself, when I was a young man—though that figure was made of cloth
and straw. “

He set down the hand and picked up one of the books;
a section of the leather cover crumbled and fell as a fine dust
into the coffin. He wondered if the continued preservation of the
ancient volumes might not depend on their proximity to the
corpse.

Jenk carefully returned the book to its place in the
bottom of the casket. He turned toward Jed and the two constables.
“But whoever is responsible for this curiosity . . . I am grateful,
yes, most particularly grateful that you thought to bring it to my
attention. For I am, as you must know, quite fond of
curiosities.”

Walther and Matthias bobbed their heads vigorously
and grinned at him—no doubt expecting more than his thanks in
recompense. And Caleb sidled closer to whisper in his ear. “Don’t
worry about Jed—he’ll keep quiet for my sake. But pay the others
well. We don’t want them spreading no tales.”

“Indeed yes,” Jenk agreed loudly, for the benefit of
the others. “The Guild—if it was one of the guilds—might resent any
inquiry into their mysteries . . . purely scholastic on my part, I
do assure you, but perhaps to be taken amiss. We had best keep the
matter quiet, for all our sakes. If guildsmen put the effigy in the
river, no doubt they expected it to stay in the river and might
conceive some lasting resentment against those who brought it
here.

Crab-wise, Jenk ascended the stairs to the second
floor. In a dark corner near the back of the building stood a dusty
oak cabinet once used as a wardrobe. Now it was stuffed with old
letters, with ancient deeds and legal documents decorated with wax
seals and faded ribbons. Placing his candle atop the wardrobe, Jenk
removed a ring of heavy iron keys from a pocket in his breeches,
unlocked the cabinet, and removed a little wooden box stowed away
at the back behind a pile of yellowing papers.

The box contained a scattering of gold and silver
coin, a handful of wrinkled bank notes: the savings of many years,
intended as a dowry for his granddaughter, Seramarias. If he meant
to make use of the books, Jenk knew, his expenses would not end
with bribes to the Watch.

And yet he was convinced that Caleb had spoken truly,
that the books and the body had not come into their hands by
accident. Of all the men who worked on the river—ignorant,
illiterate men most of them, who knew nothing beyond their daily
struggle for existence—that the casket had come to Caleb Braun, who
alone among the scavengers would recognize the symbols on the
books, who alone would realize the other implications of the
discovery as well . . . no, it was too great a coincidence. Caleb
had been fated to make the discovery, just as he was fated to bring
it to the attention of Jenk himself.

“And yet . . . to what end?” Jenk wondered aloud. “It
may be that the books were sent for our consolation, that we may
gain back all that we have lost.”

He thought of the long years of poverty and struggle,
of the wife who deserted him, and of the daughter he had hardly
known until, disowned by her mother’s kin, betrayed and abandoned
by the man she married against their wishes, she came to the
bookshop to live for a short space, to bear a daughter of her own,
and die. The child she bore, at first an intrusion on his solitary
existence, the bookseller grew to love—and suffered his poverty
doubly through all young Sera was denied.

Sera was eighteen now, a handsome, spirited girl.
Five years ago, he had reluctantly sent her to live with her
wealthy relations. Oh, yes, he knew full well how her pride must
suffer as the recipient of Clothilde Vorder’s condescending favors.
But it was of Sera’s future he had been thinking, and of the
wealthy men she would meet in the Vorders’ house—one of whom might
have the wisdom to recognize the value of her beauty and
intelligence, to ignore the paltry size of her dowry, and ask for
her hand in marriage. Now it came to him that the hope was a vain
one, and that his beautiful and accomplished Sera was doomed to
dwindle into a dreary old maid, little better than a servant in the
Vorder household . . . unless he could find a way to mend his
fortunes.

“But how if the books were not meant for our worldly
benefit, but for our spiritual redemption?” Jenk moaned softly to
himself. “Caleb and I know the danger in possessing such volumes.
It may be that we were meant to destroy them, to save some other
poor fool from ruin. A final expiation for past sins, here at the
end of our lives.”

He put a hand to his forehead. His brow burned as
with a fever, but the palm of his hand was cold and clammy. Yet his
mind remained clear, remarkably clear—indeed, he was impressed by
the coherency and logic of his own arguments. “It may be that the
Fates cast them carelessly our way, merely to see what we would
make of them. Or it may be that the Intelligence which ordained our
ruin so many years ago has not finished tormenting us yet.”

Were he to beggar himself a second time, Jenk told
himself, Sera would not be materially affected; but the public
disapprobation, if the nature of some of the activities he
contemplated became known—that she must feel keenly.

And yet, was he strong enough to resist the sheer
entrancing
mystery
of the thing, the
allure of forbidden knowledge? If he and Caleb were to discover the
secret that maintained the body of the sorcerer, entirely
uncorrupted, these hundred years and more, that discovery might
lead to other, even greater secrets as well. At the thought, Jenk
felt a cold thrill pass over him, the first stirrings of an old
excitement, far beyond any pleasure the flesh had ever offered
him.

“May the Father of All forgive me,” he whispered. “I
believed myself cured, but the old passion, the old hunger,
returns, even stronger than before.”

With shaking hands, Jenk unlocked and opened the box.
If Sera would suffer his disgrace only obliquely, he told himself,
she would enjoy the full benefit of his success. Fine silken gowns
he would bestow on her, velvet slippers and ruby bracelets,
pageboys and serving maids to wait on her every whim, and a dowry
sufficient to ensure a brilliant marriage.

With his head full of these and other pleasant
fancies, ]enk counted six silver coins into his hand. Then he
replaced the box, locked the cabinet, picked up his candle, and
descended the stairs.

Chapter
3

Concerning the Morbid pleasures of the Wealthy. The
Reader is introduced to Miss Seramarias Vorder.

Thornburg-on-the-Lunn was a sprawling sort of town, a
great, irregular, many-limbed town, shaped rather like a starfish,
spraddled out on either side of the river. Indeed, it might be said
that the Lunn gave Thornburg its character, for it was a capricious
town, a town of many contrasts, ancient and young, rollicking and
cruel.

River port and market town combined, that was
Thornburg, where pink-cheeked farmers and their daughters sold
their fruits and vegetables side by side with hoarse-voiced
fishmongers crying their wares and dark-skinned foreign peddlers
hawking painted fans, cockatoos, and “diamond” necklaces made of
pinchbeck and paste. It was a cosmopolitan place where men and
dwarves and gnomes lived amicably side by side; a shabby-genteel
sort of town, where taverns and warehouses and tiny crowded shops,
crumbling old churches with belltowers and medieval guildhalls with
clocktowers, were all tumbled together with parks and public
gardens and elegant neo-classical villas.

At the center of town was Cathedral Hill, where the
streets were narrow and steep, and crowded at most hours of the day
with a constant traffic of foot travelers, carriages, carts, and
sedan chairs. But behind the cathedral existed an unexpected haven
of peace, a quiet old graveyard hidden behind iron gates, where the
grass grew long and green among crumbling marble monuments and
mossy gravestones, and dandelions and daisies sprouted in the
cracked flagstone pathways.

Twenty years and more had passed since the last
bodies were buried there. The elegant mausoleums were falling into
disrepair; statues and gravestones had tilted or tumbled and not
been put aright. So it came as some surprise to the shopkeepers who
did business on Church Street, one bright afternoon in the season
of Leaves, to see a fashionably dressed funeral party trudging up
the hill. At a stately pace the procession came, and not only the
shopkeepers took note. The busy wives of the town, the gentleman
loungers, and the country girls in bright calico gowns who came
into Thornburg at this season of the year to sell tame rabbits in
wicker cages and baskets of painted eggs—all stopped what they had
been doing to stare and to wonder. For the procession was
remarkable for two very curious facts: the absence of a corpse, a
coffin, or a bier; and a group of white-stockinged serving men who
stalked on ahead of the sable-clad mourners, bearing hampers and
baskets bulging with foods and wines, linen cloths and fine
crystal. The servants entered by the imposing iron gates, and
proceeded to lay out an elegant picnic repast among the
gravestones.