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Authors: Lee Carroll

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BOOK: The Shape Stealer
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“With
my
Will?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Yes,” I said, without hesitation. I looked away and busied myself putting on black jeans and turtleneck, glad to get out of the antiquated dress I’d been wearing. I removed from its bodice, though, the swan-shaped brooch I had inherited from Marguerite and had used to blind Marduk when he was attacking Will on the beach at Paimpont. I hadn’t hesitated to protect Will then, but I wasn’t sure how I’d react if young Will were in danger. I pinned the brooch to my turtleneck. “But I wouldn’t have stayed in 1602 for
this
Will.”

“Are they really so different?” Annick asked.

“Completely,” I replied, pulling on the black boots Annick gave me. “This Will is a silly boy—selfish, vain, and foolish.”

“But also innocent, yes? His illusions have not been shattered.”

“I’d rather be with a man who has faced the worst in the world and still has the courage to believe in doing good.”

“Ah,” Annick sighed, “but how many accomplish that? Too many lose their optimism through the experience of evil.”

“Like Jules?” I asked.

Annick blushed and turned to the mirror to adjust a black beret on her head, tucking her springy curls beneath it. “Yes, like Jules. We grew up together. His family, too, have been in the Knights Temporal for centuries. We used to play at dragon hunting and time questing together. He quoted Malory and Sir Walter Scott to me.” She smiled at herself in the mirror. “But then…” Her smile faded and she shoved an errant curl beneath the brim of her beret. “He went on his first mission. He came back … changed. He will tell no one what happened.” She turned to me and adjusted the beret I’d put on. “If I could have back the boy I grew up with—with all his innocence and illusions intact—I would take
him
.”

“Perhaps that boy will come back to you,” I said. “Remember, it took Will Hughes four hundred years to become the man I fell in love with. Give Jules some time.”

*   *   *

By the time we left the institute the one thing I was not inclined to give Jules more of was time. I wanted to get to the catacombs as quickly as possible to keep young Will from falling into a trap, but Jules had been named leader of the catacombs mission—even though Jean-Luc was also accompanying us and was older—and he took his role very,
very
seriously. He had us check our equipment three times (in addition to the daggers we were each given a rope, compass, water bottle, flashlight, and map) and went over the “safety protocols” four times. He made Jean-Luc take off his bow tie and fussed over Annick’s hair. He paid particular attention to making us swear to never let each other out of sight. I began to suspect that whatever had gone wrong on Jules’s first mission, he held himself accountable and was determined not to make the same mistake again.

Before we left, one of the
chronologistes
made another discovery. One of the late-edition newspapers had a story in it about rumors of an as-yet-unnamed hedge fund manager setting up a new fund that would “sell overly leveraged currencies like the euro short, and try to trade gold at its ‘true intrinsic value,’” whatever that meant.

“This might be why Marduk wants to do away with the young Will Hughes,” Monsieur Durant said speculatively, looking up from the paper with a somewhat impish smile, but one belied by a worried look in his eyes. “He might be planning to use Will Hughes’s identity to complete some nefarious scheme, and he can’t risk having another Will Hughes on the loose. Please, stop him.”

“Je suis prest,”
Jules said, repeating a motto I recognized from heraldry as “I am ready.” He strode out the door of the institute without a backward glance. Annick rolled her eyes and paused on the threshold to kiss her grandfather’s cheek and assure him that we would all be fine and back before breakfast. Monsieur Durant’s eyes were gleaming in the dark alleyway. Claudine, who had accompanied us to the doorway, put her arm around his shoulders and drew him back inside, “out of the drafts of time,” she said. “I’m already forgetting that I’ve discovered a new Shakespeare sonnet. Come, let us read it and others together while we wait for the young people to return.”

It was comforting, somehow, to think of Claudine and Monsieur Durant reading poetry together in the Hall of Time while we ventured forth to the catacombs. Whatever happened to us they would bear witness—and if we failed, there would be someone left behind to pursue Marduk.

 

8

Beast Without a Soul

The desolation Will felt when he heard Marduk slam the last brick into place was unlike any sensation he had ever felt before. He was still breathing, and he could hear himself thinking, but he felt as if he were otherwise dead. A clammy dread penetrated him as if his flesh had turned to sodden clay.

“Kepler!” Will shouted at the chained man next to him, so loudly he hoped he loosened the mortar between the bricks. Marduk had pretended to be Kepler, and this man appeared to be Marduk’s twin, thus he had to be Kepler. Logic had its place, even in this mirebound world lit only by a candle on a plate in one corner.

But the man did not stir. Had he died? Will thought he could make out the faintest signs of shallow breathing in the man’s throat. Maybe another shout could revive him. But several failed to. Then Will looked around himself uneasily, trying not to panic, trying to formulate some sort of escape plan he could carry out before that awful man—that thing—returned.

He could barely see in the thick gloom, and from the glimpses he managed of crawling insect motion on the bricks, he was glad of it. But that made planning for an escape nearly impossible. Even if he could get his chains off—and Kepler, a genius, hadn’t been able to—where was he going to go? But he needed to keep his thoughts steady and calm. Instead of formulating a plan, he found himself composing a poem. A despondent plea of a poem, but a better use of his time, he thought, than breathing madly or panicking his own heart into stopping. Will had neither paper nor free hands, but he came up with a sonnet anyway and memorized it with an ease that surprised him, reciting it softly to himself at first, and then to the seemingly unconscious Kepler.

“Kepler!” he shouted after each recitation. “Johannes Kepler!” As if the man might respond better to this poetic oration than his earlier shouts:

The dank and murk of these four walls appall,

No matter if a jail, or woe-soaked tomb:

Time’s dreadful to me as it slowly crawls,

Just like the mites on blackened walls. This womb

Belongs to Satan’s corpus; we must flee

Or we’ll be born again as something foul,

And Garet, suffer Marduk. I can see

In mind’s eye how that beast without a soul

Craves vipering her blood to make him whole.

A thing of such malevolence that Dee,

Though sinister himself, will shriek and flee.

Yet now, if only Kepler might awake,

And use his genius for poor mankind’s sake,

We might be saved. And Marduk take a Fall.

There was still no response. But then Will heard a rustling sound, very near the aperture Marduk had bricked over, as if a moth were fluttering out in the hallway, loudly enough for Will to hear. (Or as if he were in woods instead of this makeshift morgue, and a breeze was moving leaves.) The rustling was followed by a high-pitched whistling sound. Shadows were gloomy, and despite how intently Will peered through the meager candlelight he could see very little, but then he thought he could detect one of the bricks moving slightly. Suddenly dust seemed to billow everywhere, and there was a harsh screeching noise of brick and cement being separated. Then a loud clattering sound, of several bricks falling heavily to the floor.

When the dust started to clear, Will was startled to see a tiny, winged, green creature with a recognizably human face come flying through the revived aperture with a whoosh. She was no more than eight or nine inches from head to toe, longish golden hair suggesting a female; she wore a tiny blue satchel on her back, in between where her wings sprouted. Without a glance at Will, the creature hovered in the air near Kepler’s face, gossamer wings beating so fast they were a blur.

She gazed with concern at Kepler’s bedraggled features, took what looked to Will like a miniature cylinder from her satchel, and, as she continued to hover, deftly sprayed a fine mist onto Kepler’s eyelids (pressing her finger to the cylinder), then onto his parched lips. Kepler’s eyelids immediately began to flutter, and he seemed to be regaining consciousness. He licked his lips eagerly, as if thirsty for more spray.

“Who are you?” Will asked the creature, but she ignored him.

“This is Lol, a fire sprite, distant cousin of the lumignon,” the man said to him in an audible, though feeble, voice. “An old friend, who has most fortuitously had the good grace to show up.” With each successive word of his statement, his strength seemed to acquire momentum. Lol chirped delightedly at his comment, though she ignored Will.

“Are you Johannes Kepler?” Will asked the man.

“That I am, lad. The one and only.”

“And how have you stumbled into this grotesqueness?”

“John Dee is the greatest scoundrel in history,” Kepler explained. “I thought he was my business partner, and my friend. But it was all his ruse to obtain profits from a book about my work that has turned out to be an exercise in thievery. Even after I confronted him about that, and taken the necessary legal action, he has still tried to elicit more services from me, ones that no human being can provide—for example, stable rules predicting stock market performance similar to those that govern the movements of celestial bodies. When he was disappointed recently in this foolish request, he delivered me to a blood-gorging fiend in retaliation. Ugh!” Kepler paused to spit on the ground before him. “And how about you, lad? Who are you, and how do you find yourself in this dungeon?”

“I am Will Hughes of Somerset, England, more lately of London,” Will replied formally. “I am the suitor of a Watchtower, and apparently that has ensnared me in this malevolence. As you can see.” Will made as if to extend his right hand to Kepler, then demonstrated how it was restricted by his chains. He wasn’t sure if he’d given an accurate reason for his captivity, but it seemed as good a guess as any.

“See here, my lady,” Kepler said, turning his attention to the still-hovering Lol, “you’ve been astonishingly helpful already, but can’t you assist us with our chains?”

Lol retrieved a tiny file from her satchel, one that gleamed in the morbid air like a sliver of silver. She set to work sawing away at the first of Kepler’s links. She made quite the high-pitched scraping sound with her implement, but it appeared her work would be slow going. Kepler fixed his gaze on Will again and rolled his eyes with impatience.

“If you don’t mind my offering a suggestion, sir,” Will said hesitantly.

“Go ahead.”

“I know he’s the darkest of counterparts, so to speak, a trick of evil flesh made up to look like you in surface only. But Lord Marduk did make mention, when we first entered the catacombs, of the power of math to perform miracles. He seemed to blow open a lock with mental powers. I know you are a great genius; might you not have some explosive skill like that in your repertoire?”

“Ah, you are so very young, lad, so I forgive you your little venture into insane thinking. Lord Marduk was babbling. Assuming he opened a lock in the nonmaterial manner you mention, he did it with the wickedest act of sorcery. True mathematics is a gentle art only. It is suitable for comprehending the planets and the stars, not for implementing mayhem!”

Lol’s scraping seemed to have achieved a greater intensity now, so she was making progress, if at a still sluggish pace. She was more than halfway through the first chain link. Several would have to be severed to even partially free Kepler.

“I understand, sir. Marduk is a complete deceiver, then.”

“Right you are. Indeed, he’s far worse than that.” Slowly, Kepler removed his clenched left hand from his left side, where it had been hidden from Will’s view, and extended it to the limit his chains allowed. The links clanked drearily as he moved. Even more slowly, having attracted Will’s gaze, he unclenched his hand.

Will gasped. The middle and ring fingers were blackened stumps, the blackness redly tinged as if from dried blood. “What happened?” He could see tears glimmering in Kepler’s eyes.

“Marduk toyed with me first, saying he had a voracious pet who liked fingers. ‘Fingers of the famous.’ He warned me that he’d provide him—it—with a further meal the next time he saw me, stuffing my fingers meanwhile in his pocket as if they were a couple of used napkins. And then he emitted an awful cackling laugh, one that sounded like hell with a personality.

“But”—Kepler’s features brightened—“if I can get back to the lost time portal and travel to a happier moment, before this encounter, my anatomy will be restored. Something that sadist may not have reckoned with. I am not a violent man, lad. But I can’t deny reflecting, in this last hideous hour or so, just how my fully fingered hand might feel sliding around a lethal weapon, the handle of a knife, the trigger of a revolver for two examples.”

“I do admire your pluck, sir. And in the meantime, sorry about your loss.”

Then Will thought he heard a murmur of voices in the hallway, through the aperture Lol had reopened, faint but seeming closer with each passing moment. He was tempted to shout out but decided to wait. As the voices drew closer, he could distinguish three, a woman’s and two men’s, though they were still too distant to be identified other than by gender. Finally they were close enough that Will had to presume that, if he could hear them, they would hear him. “Helloooooo,” he called out. “Heeeeelp!”

“What are you doing?” Kepler asked.

“I hear voices outside. Don’t you?”

“Maybe. But I don’t know if they would be friend’s or foe’s. Marduk could have sent spies around in his absence. Best not to call attention to the progress Lol is making. Patience, lad. Our little helper may get us out of here before you know it.”

BOOK: The Shape Stealer
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