Bedtime Story (45 page)

There were only a couple of empty stools at the hotel bar when I sat down. The redheaded bartender smiled.

“The usual?” she asked.

“I find it disturbing that I’ve been in the city less than seventy-two hours and I’ve already got a usual,” I said.

“That’s never a good sign,” someone a couple of stools over said. Marci, a highball glass in front of her.

“Hey,” I said.

“Are you afraid I’m going to bite?” she asked, looking pointedly at the empty stool between us.

I slid over. “So how was your day?”

“Productive. Had a meeting this morning, then lunch with some Japanese investors. A very
long
lunch.” She stretched out the adjective. “They do like their Scotch, those Japanese investors. And their steaks.”

“There are probably worse ways to spend an afternoon.”

“I like my Kobe beef as much as the next girl,” she said. “What about you? How were your meetings?”

“All right,” I said. “Actually, I spent most of the day at a private library. I’m trying to find out more about the author of this book I’ve got. It’s my son’s …”

“How old’s your son?” she asked with a smile.

“He’s eleven.” It felt strange to mention David to her, and for a moment I couldn’t see his face in my mind.

“Eleven’s a good age.”

“Yeah, it is. Do you have kids?”

She shook her head. “No, not yet. Too much work, too much travel, not enough time at home.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” Sipping my drink.

“Why didn’t you just go online?” I must have seemed confused. “For your research, about this book.”

“I did,” I said. “I tried. There wasn’t a whole lot there. And then I heard about this library in New York that had bought all the author’s papers.” I shrugged. “I thought I’d check them out.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Her every sentence seemed flirtatious—genuinely interested, but playful. Teasing.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “There’s a lot of stuff there to go through.” I took another sip of my drink. “I’m going back tomorrow.”

“Oh, two days in a library—that sounds like a thrill.”

“Well, we can’t all spend the afternoon lunching with Japanese bankers.”

“Touché.”

The magus laid a hand—
the
hand—comfortingly on David’s shoulder. It was searingly hot. David jumped away from the touch.

“What did you do?” he asked, his voice breaking.

The magus withdrew his hand. “I did what I am here to do. I protected you.”

“But …” David closed his eyes. It was all too much, the bear, the magus. “That was magic.”

“I do have some skills in that regard.”

David couldn’t take his eyes off the old man. He could hear the terrified bear in the distance, stumbling away through the undergrowth.

The magus sighed. “It is something that the brethren are trained in. Ways of magnifying our natural strengths. Focusing our minds. When we go on our journey, before being accepted fully into the Order, we are alone with our wits and our … strengths, to keep ourselves safe.”

David thought of the kung fu movies he had watched on TV on Saturday afternoons, of the ability of those monks and peasants to break boards and bricks with their hands.

“That’s more than training,” David said.

The necklace
, Matt said. David had noticed it too, a glint within the folds of the old man’s robes.

“You did something with your necklace. You were holding it in your hand.”

The magus smiled a half-smile. “You’re very observant,” he said. “You might have been accepted readily into the Brotherhood.”

The magus reached into his robes and withdrew the silver amulet. It looked similar to the Sunstone, except the stone was not red but blue, a deep, rich blue that seemed to absorb even the scant light around it.

The silver mount for the stone was also different: rather than the sun image that Dafyd had seen his whole life, the magus’s stone was mounted on a quarter-moon, with bright sparks of stars behind it.

“How does it work?” David asked, still studying the necklace.

“We can discuss it as we walk,” the magus said. “The darkness is coming on quickly, and it would be wise to be back at the camp before Captain Bream notices we’re both missing.”

W
HEN
I
RANG THE BUZZER
at the library the next morning, the door unlocked without even a sound through the intercom. Ernest was sitting behind his desk in a different suit, but one just as sleek and stylish as what he’d worn the day before.

I, on the other hand, felt like I had been hit by a bus, and probably looked the same.

In spite of our early start, Marci and I had closed out the Hyatt bar. After a couple of hours, we had moved from our bar stools to a table and ordered some food. And wine. And more wine.

In retrospect, the second bottle of wine had probably been a mistake. Let alone the third.

“Good morning, sir,” Ernest said, stepping out from behind the desk. “And how are you this morning?”

I shook my head gingerly. “The less said about that the better.”

He nodded and started down the corridor. “I’ve kept the room locked since you left yesterday, so it’s as you left it.”

“Thank you,” I said, setting my coffee cup on a small table in the vestibule as I took off my jacket and hung it up with my bag. I picked up the coffee cup again and saw Ernest looking at it.

“Oh, right.” I swallowed the cool dregs as quickly as I could, then looked for a garbage can.

“I can take that for you, sir,” he said.

“Thanks.” Not the most auspicious of starts.

“My pleasure, sir.” It sounded like he almost meant it.

“Chris.”

“Of course. Chris.”

I nodded as he opened the study door.

“If you don’t mind my asking, Chris, about that book you have? I noticed it yesterday.”

After a moment’s hesitation, I passed him the novel. “It’s a children’s book. By Lazarus Took. His last book, I think. I haven’t been able to find out too much about it.”

He turned the book over in his hands, examining it carefully. “To
the Four Directions,”
he read slowly. “I’m not familiar with this one.”

“That’s part of what brought me here.”

“It’s really quite lovely,” he said, holding the book up to the light. “The symbols on the cover—is this a magical book?”

I started to say yes reflexively, thinking of David, but then I realized what he was asking. “No, it’s just a novel.”

“Ah,” he said, looking at it even more closely.

“Do you recognize the symbols?” I asked, clutching at the faintest of hopes.

“I’m not sure,” he said thoughtfully. “Are they important?”

I shook my head. “No, I was just curious.”

“This really is quite lovely. I don’t suppose—” He looked at me. “This would make a splendid addition to the library,” he said. His expression, the sheer covetousness that came over his face, left me feeling uneasy. It was the same look that Tony Markus had had in the restaurant. “Once you’re finished with it, of course. I’m sure that the trustees would make a very good offer. If you were inclined to part with it.”

The thought of the book being in this library, open to study by anyone with even a passing interest in its powers, filled me with horror. I had seen what Lazarus Took had done with this spell—the thought of someone else getting their hands on it was too much to bear.

“I’ll certainly consider it,” I said placatingly. “But it actually belongs to my son, and I don’t think he’d part with it.” Hoping that enough of a sense of “if it were up to me” came across to soothe any ruffled feathers.

“Of course, sir,” Ernest said, nodding. “But if I might give you a card … In case anything changes.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” I was unaccountably relieved when he handed the book back to me.

Turning again to the boxes and the desk, I deflated. How could I expect to get through nine more boxes in the hours left to me? Especially not knowing what I was looking for.

Especially feeling as crappy as I did.

The key, I figured, was to not allow myself to get distracted. No matter how fascinating the papers, I needed to focus on finding the lexicon.

Rather than continuing to work backwards, I started with the earliest box, marked “Juvenalia.” There wasn’t much there beyond some old stories, some letters, most of them between him and Cora, some clippings of newspaper columns that he had written as a young man, and a battered notebook in which he had written his thoughts on books he had read.

“Everybody’s a critic,” I muttered, dropping the book back into the box and pushing the lid down.

One down. I glanced at my watch—less than fifteen minutes.

The next few boxes were much the same. As documented in a succession of notebooks, Took’s reading became decidedly more esoteric, with responses to Yeats’s magical writings, to Madame Blavartsky and the Spiritualists. There was an exchange of letters between Took and William Thorne, regarding the young man’s admission to the Order of the Golden Sunset. A yellow slip of paper with the library’s letterhead gave notice that the first letter of that exchange—from Thorne—had been removed from the archive and was on display in the gallery upstairs.

By noon I was pleased with the progress I had made: four boxes in a little more than two hours.

I was also starting to sweat out the booze, and the room was growing warmer. I needed a break. A walk outside. A cigarette. A coffee.

On my return I attacked the boxes with a renewed vigour. I wished I could take more time—there was a wealth of fascinating material, from a journal documenting Took’s involvement with Thorne to the letters chronicling the schism that had led to the formation of the Brotherhood of the Stone. Took’s growing interest in magic was captured in a series of notebooks, all of them so densely written the pages were nearly black. But nothing that resembled a guide to ritual. Nothing that looked like a lexicon.

I put the books back into the box. Less than three hours left.

A knock at the door, and a key in the lock.

“Chris,” Ernest said, and I was surprised by the sound of my first name in his voice. “I know that you’re quite busy, and that your time is limited, but I thought this might be of interest.”

He was carrying a brown leather book, which he passed to me.

It was smaller than a paperback, the leather soft and flexible. There was no writing on the spine, nothing on the front cover save a single symbol: the magical eight-pointed star that appeared on the cover of
To the Four Directions
, nestled within the outline of the sun, rendered in a Renaissance style.

“What is this?” I asked, flipping through the pages. The book was full of drawings—symbols and sketches—and handwritten text, mostly English, but with words and phrases thrown in, in Latin and other languages I didn’t recognize.

I tried to hold my hands steady.

“It’s called
The Language of Sighs,”
Ernest said. “It’s the … handbook, I suppose, of the Brotherhood of the Stone, the group that Lazarus Took formed after leaving the Golden Sunset. That,” he said, gesturing at the cover, “is their symbol.”

“Where did you get it?” I asked, turning to the title page. “The Language of Sighs” was written in a florid copperplate hand, with the line “as annotated by the Exulted Master of the Stone” below in smaller, slightly less ornate writing. A hand-drawn rendition of the crest from the front cover occupied the bottom third of the page. Everything on the title page—I flipped through the book again—no, everything in the book was written in a deep brown ink, all by hand.

“It was in one of the displays upstairs,” Ernest said carefully. “Documenting the splintering of the Golden Dawn and tracing some of the later groups and movements that grew out of it. That”—he pointed at the “as annotated by” line—“is the name that’s on all of the material from the Brotherhood of the Stone. It’s probably what Lazarus Took called himself during his rituals.

“It’s all handwritten,” I said, turning to the first page of text.

“Most of the handbooks were,” Ernest said. “Especially for the smaller orders. The Brotherhood and groups like it were very private.