The Shape Stealer (6 page)

Kepler walked up to the door and rattled its knob to no avail. Will observed him gaze disappointedly at the knob, but what else could the man have expected? Though Marduk might well be hiding down there, the place was also a tourist attraction, and Will had noted all evening that the city’s many attractions seemed to be gradually shutting down for the night.

“I guess Marduk will have to wait for daylight…,” Will said tentatively. He would not admit to himself that he might be feeling any sense of relief. Then Kepler’s defeated expression relaxed, became almost cheerful.

“Mathematics can do many things, even this late at night,” Kepler told Will wryly. “Opening a locked door not the least of them. But a wizard cannot reveal his tricks. Please turn away from me for the moment…”

Will did not grasp the need for physical secrecy with a mental process like math, so he didn’t move at first.

“Turn away lad!” Kepler boomed.

The volume of his voice took Will aback; it was almost as if a different person had spoken. Someone with a hoarser, deeper voice than the man he had just met. A whiff of the rancid odor from inside the cab drifted across the breezy air to him. He turned away. The next thing he knew, there was a loud crunching sound, as if a rough piece of metal were being flattened. Then Will saw a brilliant flash of light from the corner of his eye. Startled, he could not help but turn back to Kepler immediately. What sort of math made this kind of noise? he wondered.

Where the doorknob had been, there was a jagged, smoldering hole, a trail of white smoke rising from it. Kepler grinned at the hole, beaming as if proud of his handiwork, and then began to push the door open. This was a conjurer’s math, a sorcerer’s, Will told himself. But he followed Kepler through the doorway. He wanted Marduk badly, and he did not want to appear ignorant of the powers of “math” before Kepler. And if Kepler found him querulous … no doubt flesh could be flattened and made to smolder just like this metal had been! Let that be a problem for Marduk, not him.

They took the elevator from the aboveground lobby straight down to its only other floor, “C.” That was a long ride, and Will thought he detected the air getting chillier and damper as they descended. They emerged into a subterranean lobby with fluorescent lighting and an array of photographs with descriptive French captions in white ink on glossy black plaques next to them. The lobby narrowed in one corner into the entrance to a dimly lit tunnel. Will did not linger before any of the photographs, but he could see at a glance that most of them were of excavation sites or grim piles of skulls and bones. An inner voice whimpered to him for a moment at these ghastly vistas, and he wondered if he was made of sufficiently tough stuff to grapple with the likes of Marduk in such an environ. But, on the other hand … he had Kepler to assist him.

Kepler walked into the narrow tunnel as blithely as if he strolled along the Seine on a sunny morning in May. Will followed him, his heart beating a little louder. They walked for quite a while down a gloomy corridor, the tunnel walls varying between grime-encrusted bricks and densely packed black earth; the air, though, seemed oddly antiseptic and free of odors of decay, as if filtered through a powerful ventilating system. Then they came to the first burial pit.

Will had tried to steel himself preemptively for this sight, but when he saw such an ample compilation of bones, with skulls placed here and there like grinning sentinels, his breath caught in his throat and his knees weakened. Dizzily he planted his feet as far apart as possible to keep from falling. He knew rationally that this was simply an underground graveyard, where many of the citizens of Paris had once been buried, but the visceral impact of so many full and partial skeletons was still overwhelming. How much death there must be in this world, he reflected, gloomily. And then Kepler interrupted Will’s thoughts with his own.

“You seem stunned, my boy,” he said, coming close to Will and facing him. “But what you see here is a tiny fraction of a day’s work for Death. For true perspective, think of all the millions of beings who have come and gone, vanished, during all prehistory while the human race was evolving. A process I hadn’t dreamed of in 1602, until I came forward into the future and learned of it. Evolution! Those millions of human and near human and prehuman beings: all we have of them now are a few slivers of fossilized bone. The rest are grass and dust, and yet they were far more numerous than what you behold in this revolting pit. Darwin, though he found the truth, failed to mention that this truth adores death: the individual means nothing to it, the species everything. And yet life is entirely experienced by individuals. What a sadistic conflict! We don’t even know what our own ancestors and their thoughts were like—countless millions—let alone have their bones. That’s sobering, not this! Buck up, lad! Death, sadly, rules.”

“Sobering, yes,” Will mumbled in agreement, rolling the strange term “evolution” over in his thoughts and wondering who this fellow Darwin might be. But he didn’t find Kepler’s expression to be sober during his dark speech. No, there seemed to be a glint of … almost … triumph—or maybe even amusement—in his eyes. Such dissonance added further unease to the turmoil in Will’s gut. Had time travel made the man a little odd—or mad? Distracted by this concern, he shuffled forward again, following Kepler’s unaccountably brisk, even bouncing strides.

They passed other pits in silence. And it struck Will that there was no conclusion to their path in sight, no circular or other logic apparent to the catacombs’ meanderings. He stopped and asked Kepler in a loud voice, “See here, man! Do you have any idea where we are going? We don’t exactly seem to be creeping up on Marduk in a stealthy way!”

“I know exactly where we are going,” Kepler responded coldly. “I know these paths like I know the paths of the planets. It won’t be long now, and stealth will not be a requirement. You’ll see.”

Will wondered how that could be so, but followed meekly. This was Kepler, savant of the ages.

A whiff of that bad odor from the inside of the cab came to him again. But he shrugged it away and plodded on. A moment or two later, he heard the faintest of cries, a thin and pleading moan, possibly human, and low-pitched enough to probably be from a man. It chilled him. It might have come from the pits of bones to either side at that moment, but Will suspected it came from a little farther ahead in the tunnel. For all his trepidation, he knew right away it was from a living being, not from another world. Frail—as if its source had been weakened—but very much alive. He could feel that in his own bones.

Kepler suddenly stopped a few paces beyond him and tapped a bricked-up section of the passageway to their right with his balled right fist. Will caught up to him and observed that Kepler seemed to have stopped near the source of the cries, which were continuing. He was gazing through an opening in the center of the bricks, one where a few had been removed. Kepler took a step back and gestured at it to indicate that Will should look through it. Indeed, the sound of whimpering, plaintive as a fawn’s, was coming straight through the opening. A human fawn.

The aperture opened on a small room about six foot square, eight feet in height, lit by a flickering candle on a plate set in one corner. The brick walls were grimed over everywhere, remarkably dingy, as if charcoal fires had burned here for decades. A man in a dirt-streaked gray shirt, black pants, and black shoes was chained to the wall near the candle. His head was tilted down so that his chin touched his chest, obscuring his features from Will’s view. He was the source of the moans. Blood dripped from his mouth, and one arm hung at an angle, as if it had been broken. When he picked his head up with a great effort, as if he sensed someone at the aperture, or maybe heard Will’s breathing, Will gasped.

This man was Kepler too, identical twin to the man he had met by the Seine.

Will’s knees buckled again, and he did the best he could to stay upright by flattening the palms of his hands against the bricks and clinging to them. He heard a low, menacing chuckle behind him. Before he realized what was happening, powerful hands jerked his wrists away from the wall and pinned them together behind his back; cold metal curves like those of manacles were slipped around his wrists and put them in a vise.

“Fool!” the first Kepler said to Will in an excited whisper. “You won’t be bringing news of Marduk’s demise to Garet. Marduk will be bringing Garet’s severed head to you! No one should ever trifle with Lord Marduk. The time it will take me to leave you here and kill her will also give me sufficient time for planning infernal ends for you and your mathematician friend. Kepler, traitor to John Dee!” He spat out the words. He proceeded to remove bricks with superhuman strength and speed and then to manhandle the manacled Will through the larger opening as though he were moving an unruly child. He chained Will to the wall, which Will could now see crawled with vile-looking insects, next to the real Johannes Kepler. Marduk moaned, but with an otherworldly pleasure, as he chained Will up.

Then he departed without another word, bricking the chamber back up.

7

Knights Temporal

“I should never have let him out of my sight,” I said. “I’ll have to go get him.”

“You’ll be blundering into a trap,” Jules said. “That’s what Marduk and Ruggieri want. In all likelihood, they’ve set one.”

“We can’t just let Marduk kill him!” Annick objected. “Besides, it’s our best opportunity to catch Marduk.”

“Annick is right,” Monsieur Durant said, smiling proudly at his granddaughter. “Of course, we won’t let Garet go alone. We’ll mount an offensive team.”

“I know the catacombs,” Jules said with a quick glance at Annick. I had the feeling he was trying to impress her, but then he ruined the effect by adding, “I’ll take two armed men with me. You’d better wait here with Annick, Miss James; a battle in the catacombs is no place for a woman.”

Annick stamped her shoe with annoyance. “We have no time for your male-chauvinist posturing, Jules! I am just as well trained in armed combat as you. In fact, I believe I beat you in our last fencing competition.”

“And I’m certainly going,” I said, forestalling Jules’s stuttering objections to Annick’s statement. “If Marduk still looks like Will, then someone will have to ask the right questions to determine who is the real Will.”

“Don’t assume Marduk will be in Will’s shape,” Claudine said. She was still sitting in front of the grimoire. “I’ve been reading the section on shape stealers. They need to maintain the shape of their most recent victim for thirty-six hours before drinking blood directly from another victim. But once they have, they can revert to that earlier shape whenever they choose. Who knows how many other victims Marduk has drunk from since he arrived in Paris? He could look like anyone. Nor should you trust Will’s—or anybody else’s—ability to answer questions or engage in conversations. According to this, a shape stealer absorbs many of the memories of his victims along with their blood, enough to impersonate them. You must not let each other out of your sight once you are in the catacombs, and trust no one but each other.”

“I never do,” Jules said, giving Annick a meaningful glance. Then switching his gaze to me he asked, “How do we know
she’s
not Marduk?”

All the
chronologistes
looked at me. I started to sputter out a defense, but Monsieur Durant forestalled me by grasping my hand in his. “This is how you unmask a shape stealer,” he said in a loud booming voice. Moving more quickly than I would have thought possible for a man his age, he withdrew a dagger from a sheath at his waist and drew it across the palm of my hand. I gasped at the pain.

“My apologies, dear, but it is necessary that they trust you.” He held up my hand for all to see. “Notice that the blood is red. If this were Marduk, it would be black. If you have any doubt, this is how you can unmask the monster.”

“Good to know,” Jules said, fingering a sheath at his waist. Looking around, I noticed that all the
chronologistes
wore long leather sheaths at their waists.

“You’re not just archivists,” I said.

Monsieur Durant smiled as he resheathed his dagger. “No, my dear. We are the Knights Temporal. Sworn enemies of the Malefactors, and grand protectors of time.”

*   *   *

“What
are
the Knights Temporal?” I asked Annick as we repaired to a dressing room to bandage my hand and “gear up” for our raid on the catacombs. I didn’t know who the Malefactors were, either, but I figured I’d take them up one term at a time.

“We’re an ancient order pledged to preserve the integrity of time.” She withdrew the blade from her own leather sheath and showed me its hilt. Etched into the metal was the same symbol I’d seen above the door—a snake eating its own tail. Inscribed within the circle were the words
Tempus fugit, sed manemus
.

“I know what
Tempus fugit
means, but
sed manemus
?”

“But we remain,” Annick said with a small, proud smile. “Our family has belonged to the order for hundreds of years. Here…” She removed a bundle of clothing from a cabinet and handed it to me. On top was a sheath like hers. “These belonged to one of our knights, Lea. I think you’re about her size, and I’m sure she would want you to have her dagger.”

“What happened to her?” I asked, taking the clothes and the knife.

“We don’t really know,” Annick said, turning away from me to take off her smart suit and pull on slim black pants. “She went on a mission to the thirteenth century and never came back. She is probably dead, but I like to think she met someone she liked and stayed behind. We call it ‘going temporal.’ It happens sometimes. No one likes to talk about it, because we are sworn to preserve the time line and falling in love with a ‘local’ might change the course of history, but if one is in love…” She shrugged and pulled on a black turtleneck, shaking her curls out when the top was over her head. “Would you have stayed in 1602 with Will if that was the only way you could be together?”