Fear shot through Sam’s belly. There were two of them. At least. It was more than she could take. Her legs started to go to jelly. Hel tried to line up a shot amidst the roiling smoke: “Go!”
And heaven help her, this time, Sam went. Howls chased her into the panicked crowd, their bodies surging and crushing, moving her against her will, as the hellhounds picked at their number from the sidelines. If felt like drowning, like it would never end?—until it did. Sam broke away, stumbling into a side passage. Sinking down the wall, pressing her knees to her chest, she struggled to slow her breathing. Safe. She was safe.
Except she wasn’t. For some reason, instead of escaping outside, Sam had listened to Hel and gone deeper in. She blamed shock. Now, she didn’t even know where she was. It was as if Ashdown Manor had been designed to confuse the mind, to unspool any sense of time and place. And this society?—it had secrets. It stank of them. The sidelong glances and strange silences, the startling lack of grief, the way they slipped like eels around her every question. And here Sam was trying to steal those secrets.
What was Sam thinking? She was barely a field agent! She’d never been one for breaking and entering, let alone done anything requiring a semblance of stealth. Hel herself had said it best:If he doesn’t see her coming, he’ll certainly hear her, and then she’ll be useless once he does.
Gradually, Sam became aware of a quiet but insistent squeaking, and a cold, tiny nose pressed against her chin.
“Heathcliff?” Sam asked. He was perched on her knees, blinking up at her with his odd-colored eyes. “When did you get here?”
He must have run from the fray as well. The black-and-white rat stood on his hind legs, sniffing the air, then darted down the corridor.
“Heathcliff!” Sam whispered sharply, picking up her skirts and rushing after him. What had gotten into him? She followed him around the bend, only to stumble when she realized that she could hear it.The song.
It was faint but heady, haunting yet sweet as honeyed wine?—not just one voice, butthree. She couldn’t quite make out the words but knew in the uncanny way of dreams that it wasn’t simply a song. It was more like... asynchronous poetry, each with its own meaning that when sung together became something new. Something only found between them.
A secret.
Understanding brought a hunger?—a need for it. Her eyes closed without her telling them to, and shelistenedas the song sank roots into her flesh, wrapping tendrils around her bones?—
A sharp pain spiked through the meat of her thumb. “Aaah!” Sam cried out. Blood illuminated the lines of her palm, a rat clutching the black silk of her sleeve with all four paws.
“Heathcliff!” Sam gasped breathlessly. “What was that for?”
The harlequin rat squeaked indignantly and jumped to the black-and-white checkerboard floor. Wait?—black and white? That... was new. Last she’d checked, the floor had been grey marble. Worse, she couldn’t seem to ger her wind back, her pulse tripping over itself, as if she’d beensprinting.
Horror poured through her: Sam had blacked out. She’d blacked out and had no idea what she’d done or where she was. Holding out trembling hands, she looked for signs of a struggle?—that she’d done, oh, she couldn’t even think it. Something monstrous. Something unforgivable.
But aside from the fact that her hands were bare, there was nothing. Just her spent breath, and the tremble in her legs. Sam knew at once she could never tell anyone what had happened to her. This was exactly what Van Helsing had been warning her about. There was no world in which blacking out while under the influence of the unnatural was a good thing. No world in which it didn’t mean a channel was breaking. But first things first, Sam had to determine where she was.
Sam reached into her pocket and thankfully found her iron-infused gloves there. She tugged them on.
The room was large, the walls papered a deep red and covered in oil paintings of fox hunts and stuck boars and deer, bent backed and bristling with arrows. The heads of hunted animals hung on the wall, their eyes seeming to follow Sam wherever she walked. Cigar smoke spiraled from a stub in a heavy brass ashtray on a table set for two, filling the room with its pungent sweetness, alongside a half-played game of chess.
The far end of the room was dominated by a desk that looked as if it were built to invade a small country, with an arsenal of drawers and the sense that it could survive a direct hit from a canon. Behind it were equally battle-ready mahogany bookcases, filled with leather-bound books. Unlike the uncut tomes bought to decorate wealthy people’s bookshelves, these looked worn, some of them barely holding themselves together.
Sam ran her fingers along the spines. For a moment, the walls juddered, the wallpaper peeling back, revealing rotting wood, earthworms squirming through the splinters, dirt clogging her lungs?—then it passed. Sam shuddered. A vision, and with her gloves on.
Right. No touching then. Her fingers curled into fists. The titles were a mix of the political and the occult. It seemed that Mr. Ashdown had an interest in alchemy and celestial mathematics. She was surprised the titles were out where anyone might find them, until she realized they might not be; she had no idea how she’d gotten there.
Working quickly, Sam riffled through the desk, opening one drawer after another, careful to put everything back exactly as she’d found it. There were receipts for rare salts and chemicals, and a pile of correspondence written in the swooping curlicues of shorthand, as unreadable to Sam as if they were in secret code.
There was little Sam could glean from such obtuseness, aside from that there were factions in this strange society. Mr. Keene was on one side and Mr. Ashdown on the other. Apparently, they strenuously disagreed with one another, though Sam couldn’t uncover about what. Nor could she parse where Mr. Bishop came in, if, indeed, he came in at all.
Anything more interesting, or explicit, it seemed, would be kept far from prying eyes. Recalling the way Hel had worked over the desk at Mr. Enfield’s apartments, Sam felt for buttons that might open hidden compartments. A side panel popped open, and a pile of what Sam took for more correspondence spilled out. Except when Sam bent to pick them up, the pages were all of them blank. Sam was about to dismiss them as letterhead?—albeit a strange place to keep it?—when she realized the paper had atexture. Not pressure sufficient to dimple the paper?—there was nothing she could trace. But a subtle wrinkling, as if it had once been wet in very particular patterns.
Sympathetic ink.
That was to say, an ink that was invisible until it had been activated. The only question was by what. It didn’t feel waxy, or smell particularly chemical... Praying she wasn’t about to regret it, Sam licked the paper. It tasted of dried citrus. A lemon extraction, as she recalled. Activated by iodine... or heat.
Sam was fresh out of iodine, but fortunately, where there were cigars, there would be matches. She found them and lit the stub of the cigar, coughing as she drew the flame to life. Holding it behind the paper, she watched as words ghosted onto the top of the page, in the color of burnt almonds?—The Vespertine?—and beneath it, that same selenic eye. So it was letterhead after all.
Vespertine.She knew the word?—like flowers that bloomed at twilight, or prayers said at dusk, it simply meant something that happened in the evening?—but she had never heard of an organization by that name.
It struck Sam then, the way the words had seemed burned into the paper she had pulled from Mr. Enfield’s hearth. They’d been fixed with that same strange eye. Mr. Enfield must have been Vespertine. But what was so important that Mr. Enfield had gone to such lengths to tell Lord Lusk, and so dangerous that someone had gone to such extents to stop him?
Painstakingly, Sam moved the cigar lower, uncovering not words but cramped formulas and a complex array of sigils and geometric figures arranged in a circle. Then, at the bottom, in a tight, angular script:See figure 2.A for detail on sigils.Alchemy, and a ritual of some sort.
