Without another word, the guard pulled open the heavy door to the Camera. It was solid oak, studded with brass medallions the size of my palm. The handle was a long, polished bar of brass. Inside the Camera was the ground-floor classroom used for medical enchantment. To the right, a curving set of stairs led to the second floor. The guard began climbing these at once, and I followed. We had circled half the building before we reached the second floor. The air was saturated with the heavy smell of incense. The only windows were in the domed ceiling: triangular wedges of glass that allowed shafts of sunlight into the room. They pierced the wafting smoke of the incense that burned in the censers. In the center of the room was a stone table, low to the ground. Its contents were protected by a brass-edged glass box that resembled a coffin. Inside were the bones: a skull, part of an arm, several ribs, and a pelvis.
Sitting beside the glass box was a man with his back to us. “Juno?” he said as he turned in his chair, and then he saw me. He stood up slowly, his mouth frowning behind a graying beard, his deep-set eyes scrutinizing me. “Who is this?”
The guard, who I took to be named Juno, gave a small bow and did not answer the man’s question. Instead, he said to me, “This is Professor Orin Hornsby.”
“Hello,” I said uncertainly. “I just…”
“I invited him up,” Juno said to Hornsby.
Something unspoken passed between Juno and Hornsby, and suddenly the older man’s distrust seemed to vanish. He smiled broadly. “I’m so glad you did,” he said keenly. “Please,” he said to me. “Come in.”
Although I found their behavior extremely odd, I took another step forward. Hornsby was a professor, after all, and I still imagined that this distinction ensured some degree of respectability. He looked a fine man. He wore fine clothes and a pair of rings that seemed both ancient and costly. His piercing stare and slightly hunched posture gave him the aspect of a bird of prey.
“Come see the relics,” Hornsby encouraged me again, gesturing toward the glass box. I followed him across the floor, overcoming my hesitation. “These are the bones of Reynaldo Murcia de Quintanilla,” he said in a practiced voice, gesturing toward the reliquary, “a crusader-turned-enchanter who lived in Toledo in the thirteenth century. Son of Hernán Murcia and Juana Quintanilla Romero. He is known as El Relámpago, for how he brought lightning storms to battle. His bones were housed in the chapel of his estate until they were acquired by Commonwealth in 1802. They were transported here by ship, and they have been preserved here since then.” As he spoke, he studied me with a sharp, penetrating curiosity.
But I was too distracted by the horrible bones to make much of this unwanted scrutiny. Juno asked, “You find the bones disturbing?”
“I do. I understand they are essential for the university, but I mistrust their influence.”
Juno gave a thin smile.
Hornsby had stepped around to the other side of the reliquary. I noticed then that the stone walls behind him were plastered and painted with murals. A series of panels depicted a narrative: a soldier on an open plain, a man on a pallet surrounded by spirits, a robed enchanter accompanied by a thew, a host of demonic figures, a sky filled with lightning over an ancient city, and a funeral procession with a profusion of flowers. “It is Murcia’s life story,” Juno said, following my gaze. “Murcia fell very ill as a young man, and he accused a woman he had once loved of using enchantment illicitly to sicken him. She was executed for the crime. Afterward he joined a military brotherhood and dedicated his life to the Crusades. Murcia declared that his monsters would return if ever another woman used enchantment against men.”
“What are the monsters?”
Hornsby answered me eagerly, walking to the mural and gesturing to each figure in turn. “Five creatures of Iberian legend that Murcia created to lead the Crusades. The Urco, a horned wolf covered in chains that emerges from the sea; the Rabeno, a pale giant; the Carpia, ghostly birds that bring bad luck; the En Micó, a creature made of brine that turns everything to salt; and the Drago, the giant snake with the head and arms of a man, a creature of insatiable hunger that eats entire cities.” In the mural, the creatures were depicted facing the viewer, as if they would jump out of the wall and into the Camera itself. Murciaand his thew, diminutive in the open window of a stone tower, observed them gravely.
Juno smiled. “I’ve always rather liked the Urco.” He turned back to the glass case. “Would you like to see the bones without the impediment of glass?”
I didn’t know what this might add to the experience, but I nodded willingly. Juno undid a catch that had been hidden in the brasswork, and the glass pane nearest to the skull opened like a lid. “Go ahead, lean forward,” Juno said.
I bent over the opening. Suddenly I was assailed by a pressure of sensations and sentiments that took my breath away; an unrelenting and vengeful fury; the aching burn of persistent pain; a steely force of will, steady and unyielding. They were as overpowering and inescapable as a vile smell. I gasped and stood back. “What—what is that?”
Juno smiled as he closed the compartment. “Those are the bones.”
Hornsby spoke from the shadows. “The enchantment that converts these bones into relics brings them alive with the animating force of the living being who possessed them. That’s Murcia’s soul you just felt, or at least a faint echo of it.” He spoke with relish, as if he took some sort of pride in the shocking effect of the bones.
I shook my head, still reeling from the strength of those sensations. “He wasn’t a happy man.”
Juno chuckled quietly.
“He was a tormented man,” Hornsby said, and his voice had an edge to it. “Great enchanters are never truly appreciated in their time. They are besieged by the envy of their enemies, the ingratitude of the masses, and the betrayal of their associates. It’s not an easy path.”
I had nothing to offer on these musings, and I was still attempting to clear my mind of Murcia’s influence. “I didn’t know that relics carried such sentiments.”
Hornsby pulled away from the wall, and he moved toward the entrance. My visit was coming to an end.
“Come back anytime, Byron,” Juno said cheerfully, accompanying me down the stairs.
“Thank you, although I have no wish to feel the bones again anytime soon.”
Juno laughed again and ushered me out through the door.
I realized as I walked away from the Camera that Juno had known my name, and yet I could not remember having given it.
The strangeness of the encounter should have served as a warning, but I was too self-involved to see it. It shames me to recall the confidence I felt, the sense I had of being touched by good fortune, and of it being due in no small part to my own abilities.
On one unseasonably warm afternoon in December, I passed by the Camera and saw Juno on the steps. Hornsby wasn’t there, and once again Juno pulled me into conversation with his light, easy manner. As we were talking, I suddenly saw Hornsby approaching the Camera in the company of another man—Professor Selwyn Mead—and I considered it fortunate that he wasn’t accompanied by his spirit thew. I was always careful to guard my thoughts around any thew on campus so that they wouldn’t perceive my deceit.
