half-lich 02 - void weaver (6 page)

“Do you?”

“Of course not. I don’t know anything about that camera besides what I already told the court. The camera belonged to a photographer who attended my museum event the other night. Seeing as though you’re here, however, I think you wish I
had
known the photographer. Why is that?”

Jim pushed his spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose. “Did you see the sigils?” he asked.

“I got a glimpse, but it wasn’t enough for me to identify them.”

The librarian reached into his jacket pocket and produced a piece of paper. He handed it over to Isaac. On it, there were exact copies of the runes and sigils Isaac had seen on the inside of Alice’s broken camera, as well as sigils which hadn’t been on the camera itself, but that Isaac had seen on the inside of the trapdoor at the Cinema Royale, and again in Alice’s apartment.

“What are they?” Isaac asked—a genuine question.

“Magic,” Jim said. “More specifically, they’re a magic alphabet.”

“An alphabet?”

“Of sorts, yes. Hieroglyphics designed not by human hands, but by
mages
.”

“Do you know who they belong to?”

“That’s the tricky thing. I do, but I don’t see how these markings exist. Here. Now.”

“I don’t follow.”

Jim sat on the chair Isaac had a moment ago been sitting on. He glanced at the Mountain of Madness paperback on the table and then looked up at Isaac again. “Have you ever heard of an ancient, secret sect of mages called… the Void Weavers?”

“I can’t say I have, though I do recognize the Void.”

“What do you know of it?”

“If I’m not mistaken, there are other worlds—other planes of existence—beyond that blasted place we call the Reflection. I have heard of those worlds, collectively, being referred to as the Void, a place where no one goes and nothing lives.”

“Wrong and
so
wrong. I thought you were supposed to be smart, Moreau.”

“My field of expertise is in
human
anthropology, Jim. Mine is the gift to detect traces of the mystic woven into the fabric of the mundane, not the secrets within the magical. Those require more effort. I have studied our culture greatly, but there are still gray areas in which I am not as well versed as I would like to be. The Void is one of them.”

“You’re not special in that regard. Many mages know nothing of the Void, only what they know from stories passed down orally or in books. The Void is a well-kept secret, and the weavers are responsible for that.”

Isaac walked over to the window where the crows still stood, perched, watching carefully. Cars hissed along below on wet streets. Thunder rumbled somewhere in the sickly yellow clouds above.

“So these Void Weavers,” Isaac said, “They hold the keys to the secrets of the Void?”

“According to what little information is available on them, that is the general consensus. They were an order of mages who dedicated themselves to the study of the Void, learning its secrets, harnessing its power, and bringing it to bear on humanities enemies, but they’re gone—and no one knows why.” Jim pressed his glasses back into place. “You understand, then, why this is such a magnificent find. I feel like an archaeologist discovering the remnants of a long lost civilization.”

“Not quite an archaeologist, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the Void Weavers aren’t extinct.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. The Void Weavers are gone, Isaac. Every last one of them. No one knows where they’ve gone, or when the last one walked on this side of the reality spectrum.”

“And yet one of them made that camera. It would seem like we have, or recently
had
, Void Weavers in Ashwood.”

“The camera, as far as I could tell, could be thirty years old. That’s hardly recent,” Jim said, but Isaac knew better. Someone had left the camera, and the Chest of Haunts, on Alice’s doorstep less than two years ago. He was willing to bet the same person who built Trapper built the Chest of Haunts, which right now sat in Alice’s closet. He, or she, may also have been responsible for the markings at the Cinema Royale, but of this Isaac had no proof.

Jim stood and paced around to the center of the room. “You’re sure you don’t know anything else about this camera? Where it came from, who may have made it, or who was using it?”

Isaac turned to face him. “No,” he lied. “I have no idea. But I want to find out, only I can’t do it from in here.”

“With that I cannot help.”

“Jim,” Isaac said, putting on his winning smile. “There has to be something you can do. I’ve been here all week, I’ve answered questions. I’m hardly a criminal.”

“You aren’t. I know that.”

“So why am I really still here? You can’t honestly expect me to believe it’s because of what happened at the museum.”

Jim looked away. Isaac’s heart sped up until he could feel it beating in the palms of his hands. “Jim,” he said, “You have as much authority as the praetors. Tell me why I’m still here.”

“I can’t, Isaac. You know I can’t.”

“You can, and you should. I am a tribune. I have a duty to my people and to my museum, and as long as I am a captive here I cannot perform that duty. Keeping me locked in here is only hurting the magistrate. I have nothing to hide.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I’m not sure I understand your meaning.”

“I shouldn’t be telling you this…” Jim said, glancing left and right as if there were spies waiting on either side of the room, waiting to hear what he was about to say next—and maybe there were—but the precursor had been laid. There was no going back. “But they know, Isaac. They know someone else was there that night. They know you’re lying.”

Isaac’s eyes narrowed into thin slits. “How could they know there was someone else?”

“Was there?”

Isaac hesitated. For the briefest of instants, his calm demeanor cracked like dry earth in the sun. Jim’s illicit visit had already put Isaac’s defense in danger, and if the apartment was bugged, anyone listening could have been given enough in the last five minutes to send Isaac in front of the praetors again, only this time he would be brought up on criminal charges instead of just brought in for questioning.

What did the magistrate know? How could they know? Isaac entertained the idea there may have been another mage in the crowd of attendees that night, but then dismissed it. Powerful wards designed by Isaac’s complex mind were in place around the museum, and any mage foolish enough to cross the threshold would have triggered those wards. Even if they did manage to somehow break through them, Isaac would at the very least have been alerted to their presence.

Unless someone snuck past
.

No. This was also impossible. Or, at least, it was improbable. Only a mage of great skill could have fooled Isaac’s carefully constructed magical fortifications, and such a mage would likely have involved themselves in what happened with Nyx. He didn’t think a simple fire alarm would have sent such a mage fleeing with the rest of the plebeians in the room.

So what did they know, and how did they know it?

“That I am aware of, I was the only mage there,” Isaac said, choosing to again avoid the question while at the same time answering it. This dodging of questions couldn’t last, but he would dodge them for as long as he could.

“Then I shouldn’t say anything else,” Jim said, staring at Isaac from behind a set of wary—and maybe even
disappointed
—eyes. “I’ve already said too much, not to mention that I’m in breach of more than a handful of laws by just being here.”

“You’d best get going then. We don’t want to upset the magistrate.”

“No,” Jim said. “We don’t.”

He turned around and started toward the front door, but Isaac called to him and stopped him just as he was about to leave.

“You forgot your umbrella,” Isaac said.

“Keep it,” Jim said, “I won’t need it.”

The librarian left Isaac alone in the apartment once more. He could hear the rain hitting the windows—it had picked up—and a car horn blaring on street level. Curious, Isaac approached the umbrella, pulled it out of the sink, and took it to the bathroom. Most of the water had come off by now, but Isaac needed the sink more than he did the bath, so relocating it seemed like the sensible thing to do.

It wasn’t until Isaac was about to drop the umbrella into the bathtub that he felt the sudden rush of magic race up his arm and into his chest. The sensation, one he hadn’t felt in almost a week, was so foreign it caused him to shake and drop to one knee. He held onto the rim of the bathtub for support and allowed himself a moment to recover, breathing deeply through the nose and out through the mouth, until the wave had completely washed through his system and he had resurfaced.

That was when he noticed his magic bangle had started glowing blue for the first time in days, but this wasn’t the strangest thing—neither was the simple fact that, somehow, magic was allowed to operate within these walls. The strange thing here was that the light from the bangle was causing odd writing on the surface of the umbrella to reveal itself. They were scribbles and lines, mostly illegible while the umbrella was still shut, but when he opened it the writing started to make sense.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, smiling.

CHAPTER 5

Messy Business

Cameron’s Harley purred smoothly as it hugged the asphalt of I-95, a chrome ball running along a half-pipe. The moon was full and high tonight, and it bathed the dark countryside in a soft silver glow. With the wind in her hair, the rumbling bike beneath her, and the leathery smell coming off the back of Cameron’s jacket, Alice found herself lost in mundane thoughts; thinking about books she hadn’t been reading, music she hadn’t been listening to, and wondering why she hadn’t bought a bike instead of a car.

A bike would be much more practical in her line of work. Besides, it wasn’t as if she didn’t have the money for one. She had simply not considered getting one until now. How was that possible? Hadn’t she spent the majority of her 20’s wanting a bike? Craving the freedom? Had she really forgotten one of the biggest wants she had ever dreamed up?

Nyx did this
, she thought
,
and she wondered what else she had forgotten.

Trees became low-rise apartment buildings, and the highway shrank to a narrow corridor of cars as they rode deeper into the city. Almost immediately, the fresh, grassy, rural air was choked out by the putrid stench of car exhaust, dirty, wet streets, and human life. But at least there were coffee shops, restaurants, and places to shop.

Cameron rode into the Victoria district and took her right up to the front door of her office. There were many obvious reasons as to why she hadn’t allowed Dustin to visit this place in the entire week she had spent locked up at the safe house. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust
him, but her office was her place of business; the place where she kept her secrets, her safe, and her files.

“Wait here,” she said to Cameron as she strolled up to the front door, retrieving her keys from her back pocket.

“Out here? Why?”

“You don’t get to come in here unless you’re a client.”

Cameron turned the ignition off, slipped off his bike, and came up to the door of WERNER INVESTIGATIONS. “You’re right,” he said, “I’m not a client, but I’m technically your partner.”

Alice rolled her eyes and unlocked the door. There, at her feet, was a week’s worth of newspapers and fliers—more menus, more coupons, and more
junk
. She rifled through the pile and tossed the junk in the trash, and then she took the newspapers to her desk and laid them there. There were seven.

“I don’t like this place,” Cameron said. “It’s too quiet, it’s too cramped, too safe.”

“At least the bulbs have shades on them,” Alice said, “Why didn’t they buy shades for the safe house?”

“Beats me, but I don’t think anyone was meant to live there for a whole week—not unless they were being kept prisoner or were happy to live in poor conditions.”

“Whatever. I’m just glad to be out.”

Alice sat at her desk, swung her hair over her shoulder, and got to work reading the last couple of editions of the Ashwood Standard while Cameron watched, arms folded, with his back against one of the walls. There was plenty to catch up on, but Alice’s attention was immediately pulled by a coded headline outlining a disturbance at a diner. The coded message accompanied a mundane sub-headline which read
“WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN LOCAL EATERY”.
Alice’s eyebrows pinched together. She looked at Cameron, then went back to the paper and read the column.

“Citizens of Lower Lexington Street were shocked when the body of a woman was discovered in Kasey’s Diner earlier this morning. The victim—31-year-old Helena Metaxas, a Greek National—had been in Ashwood yesterday evening to witness the unveiling of the new Greek exhibit at the Ashwood Imperial Museum. Due to technical difficulties, however, the unveiling had to be postponed for a date to be decided by the museum director, Linda Perkins.

Metaxas was found at approximately six o’clock this morning when Kasey’s Diner owner Belinda Thompson arrived to open the diner for the morning crowd. According to Thompson, Metaxas’ body was lying on the floor of the already unlocked diner when she arrived. In an official statement, Deputy Commissioner Christine Nolan of the Ashwood Police Department has confirmed that the diner had also been burglarized, but whether the two incidents are related is still unknown.

Deputy Commissioner Nolan has made assurances that all available lines of investigation are being followed. We will have more on this story as it develops.”

“That’s her,” Alice said.

“Her?” Cameron asked. He pushed himself off the wall and circled around her desk to read the same headline. “Helena is dead… I can’t believe no one has said anything about this.”

“You think Isaac told the magistrate enough for them to have recognized this for what it is?”