The Shape Stealer (8 page)

But Will could see that Lol still had a ways to go even on the first link. Then, for a thrilling millisecond that lit him up like lightning, Will recognized the approaching woman’s voice. It sounded like that of Garet James. Could it be?

“Gaaaaret,” Will called out, thrusting Kepler’s cautionary words aside. There was no immediate response, but the pace of the speakers seemed to quicken as they neared him and Kepler, their voices to each other louder and more excited-sounding. “Gaaaaret,” Will repeated.

“Who is that?” Kepler asked.

“Garet James is the Watchtower I spoke to you of. And here she comes now,” he added triumphantly. “She must have been watching over us!”

“Is that you, Will Hughes?” Garet asked, seemingly only a few feet away now. Will felt a burst of energy so intense he thought he could rip his chains right out of the wall. But he remained levelheaded enough not to try that.

“Yes, yes it’s me. Imprisoned, all chained up. And none other than the famed Johannes Kepler is imprisoned right alongside me.”

“Kepler? The astronomer?” Garet asked. Will heard a murmured colloquy between Garet and an unknown male’s voice; the only word of it Will could make out was “hallucination.” Will bristled at the thought of Garet discussing his sanity with another man.

“I assure you I am
not
mad!” Will yelled.

“Don’t worry,” Garet said in a soothing voice. “I’ve got others with me—two sturdy men,
chronologistes
—we’ll have you out in no time.”

Then Will heard her shriek, and another loud cry from her unseen companions. There were some guttural noises, all male, like those in a struggle, the sound of something crashing, then a long, penetrating scream, also male. Silence. Then a fresh voice.

“Don’t you fuss, Will Hughes. You’ll be reunited with your love in no time.”

Marduk. As bone-chilling a voice as Will could imagine. He felt as if the temperature in their miserable cell had plunged to absolute zero.

The voice was like a serrated blade of steel, tickling his throat in the candlelit gloom.

9

Unexpected Blood

Will beheld the awful spectacle of Garet being thrust through a new opening in the corridor wall, arms pinned behind her back in Marduk’s crushing left-handed grip. She seemed to be trying to shout, perhaps to him, but Marduk’s other massive hand—Will wondered why he hadn’t noted their bestial contours before, huge, hairy and unnaturally muscular—was clamped over her mouth. Kepler hadn’t told him exactly how he’d lost his fingers, but Marduk’s looked like hands brutish enough to have ripped them off; Will sickened a little at their appearance.

Out of the corner of his eye, Will observed Lol cease and desist from her link sawing and flit unobtrusively to the darkest corner of the chamber, where she made herself as inconspicuous as possible.

Will was even more enraged by the second pair of people to come into view. He did not know the young fair-haired man bound up in spirals of what seemed to be gossamer thread. But he knew the sorcerer behind him, prodding him along with a wand, from the silver bulletlike tip of which thread continued to unspool, all too well. Prodded by the wizard John Dee, the captive fell to the floor.

“Jules!” Garet exclaimed with a concern that would have piqued Will’s jealousy if he hadn’t been more preoccupied with glaring at Dee.

Dee was the cause of all Will’s misfortunes, as Will saw it, having seduced him in 1602 with the promise of immortality so he could be with Marguerite as her peer, and having delivered it in the noxious form of turning him into a vampire. Were he not restrained by the chains, he would have been rushing to choke Dee, or do something worse to him, he told himself. Meanwhile, Dee was shoving his new captive up against a wall slot and making him fast with the chains and padlocks hanging there, even as Marduk was similarly imprisoning Garet. Dee so far had not given Will a glance. But Will gazed relentlessly at him like a leopard eyeing prey, not allowing himself to be distracted by Garet’s duress.

Marduk introduced Will to Dee.

“Sir Dee, you recall the Will Hughes creature,” he said in a jovial voice, “that we vampired in 1602. He stands right here against the wall, poor thing, cowering.”

Dee, who was busying himself affixing Jules’s chains just right, did not turn his head in Will’s direction but he did nod. Will didn’t mind Marduk’s reference to him as a creature—coming from that beast it was a compliment—but Dee’s mere presence continued to infuriate him. He was searching his thoughts for the right cutting thing to say when Kepler spoke to Dee.

“See here, man, you can’t just run all over the streets and through the tunnels of Paris absconding with young people like this. Your luck will run out and the authorities will bring you to justice.”

Dee laughed. Marduk took a step toward Kepler and slapped his face. “Silence your wickedness, mathematician,” he said.

Kepler fell silent.

Dee stepped back from Jules with the final clang of a padlock and clapped his hands together, as if in admiration of his jailer’s handiwork. “Now, as to what to do with these whelps,” he muttered. “It would seem a pity to ever let them go, so well chained as they are.”

“Shouldn’t their corpses just rot here?” Marduk asked. “This is, after all, the catacombs.”

“Corpses? You are being a bit hasty, my good wolf. Have you lost track of their possible future uses, of our possible needs?”

Just then Lol fluttered upward out of her dank and murky corner, like a miniature dervish, to and through the broad opening Marduk and Dee had made before reentering. And just beyond a savage leap Marduk made at her. He howled with disappointment, seeing the impossibility of pursuing her in her speedy flight down the corridor.

“Never mind, my heathen,” Dee consoled him. “We will deal with the fey soon enough. After all, even they need food to eat, and a collapse of the global commodities market may well leave them as impoverished and starving as all the other Parisians. As all the other Frenchmen. And as all of humanity worldwide, for that matter.” He laughed. The sound resembled a cackle.

“I say, out of breath, out of pulse, out of mind,” Marduk grumbled. “Let’s take care of them now and not give their fates a second thought during our meeting with Vice Chairman Renoir. I can feel eternity in this place, a black and cold one, licking its lips for them. So hungry to feed on such vermin, Kepler not included.”

Will was trying to stay calm, but he couldn’t help shuddering upon hearing these words. Nor could he bear to glance at Garet and observe what she might be feeling. They were now so desperate that they were reduced to relying on
Dee
as their savior!

“I say leave them!” Dee exclaimed with some anger, wheeling on Marduk. This seemed incongruous to Will, the frail wizard menacing the hulking manbeast, but Marduk took a timid step back, leaving little doubt as to who had a hold over whom. At least, for the moment.

“In any event, my good heathen”—Dee’s tone softened slightly—“aren’t you forgetting something pertinent?” He nodded at Will. “Isn’t Renoir expecting to meet in secret with hedge fund manager Will Hughes, whose Green Hills Partners fund has earned him deserved preeminence? Hasn’t that been our passport to meeting Renoir?”

In his overwrought state, one that made careful consideration of facts difficult, these words flowed like honey into Will’s ears. The reprieve that Dee seemed to hint at for him, to attend a financial meeting with these two monsters, would be like visiting heaven compared to staying locked up in this hell. And it might afford, as a practical matter, opportunities to escape. He was startled that Dee thought he could arrange Will’s attendance in a secure manner, given all Will had endured and learned. But such obliviousness was something for him to take pleasure in.

Mention of a financial meeting brought to mind his flirtations with finance before leaving London in 1602: Guy Liverpool’s seductive talk of a new era in which alchemy occurred with stocks instead of lead. Will was a novice, really, and would have to be a silent observer for much of the upcoming meeting lest he reveal the gulf between himself and his four-hundred-year-old namesake. Who, Will realized, must have had quite the career with money to be a tool for engendering financial mayhem worldwide. He wondered—

Marduk was upon him then, fangs in his neck, inflicting a piercing pain. Will fainted with the shock and blood loss, and it was only when he woke back up to a rebricked cell empty of their captors a few minutes later that he groggily realized it was going to be Marduk who would be Will Hughes, hedge fund manager, at the meeting. Marduk had assumed Will’s appearance by drinking his blood, pseudo-Kepler melting into pseudo-Will as the blood change suffused throughout his vile cells and organs. Pseudo-Kepler lay with the ashes of time now.

But the real Kepler survived, Will reassured himself with a sideways glance, as did his beloved, and the man who’d come with her, subsequent glances told him. So hope did too.

And then he heard a scraping sound he’d heard once before, from the other side of the bricked-over aperture.

Lol. She’d returned.

10

A Rose’s Dream

I was astonished, then relieved, to see Lol in the dim candlelight, flitting from the corridor into the chamber. I recalled her well from New York City the previous winter—especially the time she had saved my life from a paralysis spell that her master Oberon had placed on me—and I shouted hello to her now. She seemed to nod at me in midflight with the hint of a smile, then flew to the slender, older man chained up next to Will.

The tiny file she pulled from her backpack did not inspire confidence, but as she set to work I could see that she started out on a link already partly cut. So she was perhaps returning to a job she or someone else had started. I was relieved by that thought, but not nearly as relieved as when I saw a kind of green and yellow mass fluttering in the vicinity of the aperture Lol had come through, as if a storm of butterflies had materialized from the subterranean clouds, a late-night thunderstorm of color. Dozens if not hundreds of Lol’s close friends and relatives, all barely distinct from her in appearance, were fanning out now in the chamber to attack chain links with files. There was a high-pitched screeching noise the likes of which I’d never heard before for a minute or two, and then we all found ourselves free of our chains. Then the horde turned its attention to widening the aperture, so we’d be able to make our escape to freedom. That work proceeded swiftly as well.

The minute the opening was wide enough, Jules edged through it. I imagined he was going to check on the welfare of Annick, whom we’d left on guard at the entrance to the catacombs. He would have to break it to her that their colleague Jean-Luc was dead, his neck broken by the savage Marduk. Even though I’d only known Jules for a few hours I guessed that he would take full responsibility for Jean-Luc’s fate, even though there had been nothing either of us could have done to save him. Jules hadn’t seemed to want help searching for Annick, so I turned my attention to Will and the older man with him, who I assumed must be the man Will had referred to as Kepler.

I was so happy to see Will still robustly alive after being in Marduk’s clutches that I could have hugged him with relief, but I retained a concern about not encouraging him romantically. So I turned instead to the older man. He bowed to me. Then Will said, “As horrified as I was to behold you imprisoned by those monsters, dear Garet, it is with much greater solace that I behold you free before me now!”

This might have been quaint, affected speech to me, but for him it was (Elizabethan) reality. Certainly I could see relief shining in his eyes. I stepped forward and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Then he went on, “It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you, Garet James, none other than the esteemed mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler. Johannes Kepler, please greet the unutterably lovely Garet James.”

The man with him bowed to me again with much grace, his gesture describing one of the parabolas or ellipses—I couldn’t recall which—from my high school science class. Will’s bow had been authentic, but this man’s bow was elegant. Still, could it really be Kepler? I didn’t want to embarrass either one of them by questioning it: after all, I currently lived in a world in which John Dee could be my contemporary, my enemy, and a historical figure all at the same time. But it was daunting to believe that Kepler—who, if my high school memory served me correctly, ranked with Galileo and Copernicus—stood in this dingy cavern with us. What was he doing in 2009, and how on earth had he gotten mixed up with the awful likes of Marduk? NASA had recently named a US space program after him, for goodness sake! And I had no idea what the real Kepler looked like, which put strict limits on my ability to identify him.

As if responding to my uncertainty, Will elaborated, “Mr. Kepler, like myself, is a refugee in time, a colleague in wandering. Also like myself, he’s the victim of a misunderstanding, or, in his case, something worse: of greed, of trusting the wrong person—”

“Of being naive,” Kepler interjected. “I was always more sophisticated about the planets than about their inhabitants—Earth’s, at least. Witness aspects of my marriages, or at least my first one, if I may so mention.” He smiled in turn at both of us, and we both smiled back uneasily, startled by such a forward comment. I knew nothing about his marriages, that was for sure.

I did, however, know that Will was truly four hundred years out of his time. Hesitantly, I decided to go along with the premise that Will could have met Kepler, fellow time traveler, in contemporary Paris. The man certainly had old-fashioned mannerisms. He bowed to me again and said, in a soft voice, “If I might, my lady.” And then he recited:

“My lady’s face is like a rose’s dream

“Of beauty greater than itself. The sun

“Itself cannot shine brighter than your eyes;

“Yes, Will has lauded you, but my surprise

“At your perfection is beyond all words.