The Taker (62 page)

“Please, make yourself comfortable. Would you like to take a bath? Change into something more fitting? I’ll get whatever you need.” Jude stretched his arms wide. “My home is your home.”

“It certainly is,” Adair said as he began to climb the stairs.

An hour later, after a sublime washing up, and after combing the tangles out of his long hair and picking through Jude’s wardrobe until he found something he would deign to wear, Adair rejoined his host in a large parlor at the front of the house.

Jude smiled solicitously at him. “I always wondered what happened to you. We all did. You just dropped off the face of the earth—
poof
.” Jude made a gesture at the side of his head like the empty popping of a balloon.

“So you’ve seen some of the others?” Adair asked.

Jude shrugged noncommittally. He recognized the mistake right away. He’d as good as admitted that he and the others had discussed Adair when he wasn’t present, and
discussing
was a step away from
conspiring
, which was forbidden.

“You and the others discussed my disappearance, and yet you didn’t look for me?” Adair snarled.

“There was nothing to follow. I couldn’t feel your presence. None of us could. We didn’t know where to start,” Jude explained, but Adair could tell his concern was insincere. “I went to the last address I had for you, the mansion on the other side of the commons, but it was empty. It had been ransacked. Everyone had gone—no, not everyone. That little sackcloth-and-ashes man was there—”

“Alejandro?” That was an apt description, Adair thought: Alejandro carried the guilt of his misdeeds with him like a defrocked priest, even if he was a Jew.

“Yes, the Spaniard. He said you had left for Philadelphia with your latest companions, that woman from the forest and her good-looking friend. Alejandro thought you had tired of him and Tilde and the Italian, and deserted them without a penny.”

Adair squared his shoulders. “That man and woman were the ones who imprisoned me. Jonathan … and Lanore.” Adair watched Jude twitch as a recollection from long ago flitted through his head. “You remember her, don’t you? She insinuated herself into my graces, then tricked me. A most treacherous witch. And when I catch up to her …” He let his threat hang in the air. He’d thought of revenge on and off over the decades, stoking his anger steadily the way one strokes an old scar for the pleasure of revisiting the pain of its creation. But eventually, his desire for revenge became so overwhelming that he had to stop. Frustration nearly drove him insane, and teetering on the edge of that abyss had been so frightening that he’d had to back away.

He’d hurled his considerable anger at the wall, over and over, and it had stood, leading him to believe that there had been something supernatural about Lanore that enabled her to stop him. She
had
to be a witch; otherwise, how to explain his imprisonment? The wall had been nothing but a few layers of rock and brick. Slowly, he’d convinced himself that Lanore must have put a spell on it to be able to keep him trapped inside.

They’d tied his hands behind his back, Lanore and that peacock Jonathan, and Adair managed to get out by pulling against the rope, straining his arms in opposite directions for what seemed like weeks until the rope stretched enough to slip off. Undoing the gag was easy, then. He screamed and yelled and battered the wall with all his might, but no one heard him. No one came for him. No one knew he was there; or else no one cared to search for him.

Inside his tomb, he’d listened to the world go on around him. Families moved in and out of the house. He heard sounds of construction, foundations of the house shaking. These times he tried to will the wall to be taken down or the floor overhead to be torn up. But it never happened—until now.

“What year is it?” Adair asked.

“You’re not going to believe it.” Jude grinned insanely, like a Cheshire cat. “It’s 2011, my man. You’ve missed so much. The past two centuries have been amazing. Everything has changed. Everything. You have so much to catch up on; it’s going to blow your mind.” The Cheshire grin slipped into something more serious. “And you need me to show you what’s up because, believe me, you’re not going to know how to do
anything
. Finances? No one carries much money anymore. We use these.” Jude fished in his pocket and pulled out a small square of an unidentifiable hard substance, shiny and colorful. “Credit cards. A portable, personal system of letters of credit. Allows you to buy things anywhere in the world, immediately, no sending letters through banks and lawyers.” He handed it to Adair, who examined it closely. It felt strange to the touch, and insubstantial.

“And you can go anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. You’ll fly there in a contraption called an airplane, and it’s as big as a trading ship.”

“How can anything as big as a two-masted sailing ship fly?” Adair scoffed, sure Jude was making fun of him; the crazy Dutchman had to know that was dangerous entertainment, to be sure.

“With big enough wings, anything can fly. But that’s not the most astounding thing.” Jude jumped up and walked over to an object on his table that Adair had mistaken for a pane of glass propped against an unusual easel. “Everything that was done before with paper and sent by courier or pigeon is now sent through the air, almost instantly, as if by magic. It’s called a computer.” He gestured grandly at the rather plain sheet of black glass, framed with dull silver metal. Adair looked at it skeptically.

“Magic? So everything nowadays is done with magic?” Had magic become commonplace?

“No, no—it
seems
like magic because it’s so easy. But it’s all grounded in the physical world, I assure you. Sent around on waves of energy, directed by code.” Jude waved his hands over the computer like a magician, as though he would conjure a dove out of thin air.

Adair was unimpressed. “It sounds very much like alchemy. Using knowledge to control the forces contained within common elements.” From what Jude had said, it seemed the same as knowing the right spells, the right way to reduce a thing to its most elemental state, how much energy to channel. It was the same magic, packaged differently for men who would not accept the existence of things that could not be quantified and captured in algorithms. But what was an algorithm but a recipe, a formula dictating the way to combine certain elements to get a particular outcome? Science was often indistinguishable from magic to the simpleminded. Did it matter what you called it? In the end, in its most basic state, it all came down to energy.

Jude shook his head, dismissing Adair’s comparison of computers to alchemy with a brush of a hand. “Don’t try to fit the new world into your old way of thinking. It won’t work. You’ll be better off if you just accept the new for what it is and say goodbye to the past.”

But Adair couldn’t accept what Jude was saying, perhaps because he had difficulty accepting that Jude could be more knowledgeable than him about anything, least of all magic. What else besides magic could make money irrelevant and enable men to fly?

“Then use your magic to bring that witch Lanore to me. Now,” Adair demanded.

Jude settled back in his chair, casting a conciliatory look at Adair. “We will, we’ll get to her. But … there are more pressing things that need to be settled first.”

“Nothing is more important than finding her.”

“In good time. Look, I don’t want to rush you into dealing with this, but it must’ve crossed your mind… . Have you given much thought to your holdings? Everything you had at the time you … you were …”

“Imprisoned?” Adair finished the sentence for him, increasingly impatient with Jude—irritated by his hesitancy to take orders and by his smugness.

“Yes… . We can look into the, uh, specifics once you’ve had time to recuperate, but I have to think that you lost everything.” After the rush of words came out, Jude paused, blinking.

Everything lost … Adair recalled that he’d had quite a lot to his name: the large old estate in Romania and another in the Black Forest. A house in London. Fortunes held in accounts in venerable old banks across Europe. He’d buried chests with treasure and left vital instruments with a trusted individual, one of his creations, for safekeeping. In all likelihood, those chests had long been discovered, and who knew what had happened to the trusted friend? Could it be true that his fortune was gone, that he was penniless and homeless?

“I’m sure that after all this time, the properties and bank accounts were forfeited,” Jude explained, as gently as he could. “Write down the locations, as best you can remember, and we’ll investigate, but brace yourself for the inevitability that …”

That it would be gone, of course. Bitterness flooded through Adair again, along with anger at Lanore; that treacherous woman had stolen everything from him… . Of course, the others, realizing he was gone, might’ve been emboldened to try to find his fortune and claim it for their own as well. That might be why Jude thought it would be a waste of time to search for Adair’s assets; perhaps he’d already tried to locate them and failed. Jude, as wily and greedy as a half-starved fox …

And then it occurred to him that the
contents
of the house had been lost too, and among the contents were his books of recipes and spells. Panic stabbed his stomach and heart, tightened his throat. Land and money he could lose and suffer little, but if he lost the source of his power, the two books of spells, then he was helpless.

As the truth of his situation became real to him, Adair felt as though he were being pulled down to the ocean floor by an anchor tied to his waist. The collection of knowledge he’d amassed, from the best practitioners of the dark arts, painstakingly gathered over lifetimes,
lost
… . To say nothing of the blood he’d spilled to acquire such knowledge and power, all for naught. He had once been the most powerful man on earth, with abilities comparable to those of a god; and now—unless he could recall those spells from memory—he had to begin his quest all over again.

Then another thought occurred to him, one that made him sick to his stomach. Perhaps Lanore had figured out the books’ value and kept them for herself. Perhaps that was how she’d been able to cast a spell on the wretched wall that had held him. If so, she might be a formidable opponent. He’d do well not to underestimate her.

“This is much worse than I thought,” Adair said at last, struggling to
not
rail against this latest development, to not howl at the cruelty of fate, to not smash everything in his reach out of sheer black frustration and helplessness.

Jude put a hand on Adair’s shoulder, the first sympathetic touch Adair had felt in a great long time. “I’m afraid so.”

Adair let despair pass through him like a savage but swift illness; in truth, he was too tired to do much of anything with his anger. Better to husband that rage, remember the galling impotence he felt, and save his anger for the day when he was face-to-face with Lanore again. This rage would fuel him on the difficult road that lay ahead—more difficult than he’d imagined, if what Jude said was accurate.

Jude patted Adair’s shoulder again, more stiffly this time, and Adair couldn’t tell if his awkwardness was due to nerves or insincerity. “Two hundred years alone … my God, it must have been hell. What was it like?”

To be shut up in a space no larger than a child’s closet? How do you think it would be?
Adair wanted to shout at him. Eventually, the world he knew faded away, the world of sun and plants and earth, replaced by an endless black horizon. Sometimes, in the blackness, he knew where he was: trapped in a dank space deep in the ground, with only spiders for company. Other times, however, he felt transported to another place, a complete and utter void where he sometimes heard snatches of conversations in voices he recognized but could not place. And in those moments, he was seized with indescribable feelings that he knew he’d felt before. It had been far more scary for him than he thought possible, a man born with ice in his veins, though he’d sooner be tortured by a league of Inquisitors than admit it. Especially to Jude.

“Your ordeal is over now and somehow you survived,” Jude said, continuing to pat Adair’s arm. “I don’t know how in hell you did it, but you did, and that’s saying a lot. A lesser man would’ve lost his mind.”

Madness had been closer than Adair wanted to admit. There had been tricks he’d used to keep himself occupied: Mentally, he traveled through his castle in Romania, pacing off the rooms, recalling his favorite appointments (the Flemish tapestry in the front hall, the heavy chest that had been carved in Bavaria and was used to hold the silverplate) and the views from certain windows. When he tired of that, he tried to recall the names and particulars of all his sexual conquests—the ones whose names he’d known—and then, exhausting that list, the names of all his horses. He picked through the rows of minerals and metals, the botanicals and organic matter stored in jars and bottles on the shelves of his laboratory, naming each in turn, forward and backward, the use and application of each. But eventually he ran out of diversions—he could think of only so many memory games, and not enough to last two hundred years.

And when his mind was unoccupied, when the wellspring of his fury subsided and he gave in to exhaustion … he shivered to recall what happened after that. The terrible visions that came out of the darkness to plague him, nightmares that needled him like aggrieved spirits.

Meanwhile, Jude was patting his shoulder, as he might do to cheer an old man. “I know it might seem impossible right now, but you’ll get back on top. It’ll just take time.”

Is that what he had come to, Adair wondered, a man pitied by Jude? He rose from the chair, feeling strength rise in him at the same time. “Yes, I will gain back what I’ve lost, and it will happen more swiftly than you can imagine. In this, I have no doubt. And then we’ll turn our attention to Lanore, and find her, and visit upon her the punishment she deserves.”

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