“Thank you, Judge Richardson,” Clementine said with a wry smile, “for paving the way. I stand before you now with the spirit thew I bound in the realm of the dead. You are all witnesses to both Judge Richardson’s terms and my having met those terms.” The sounds of appreciation had grown, and there was even a smattering of applause from the balcony. I hadn’t anticipated this. But perhaps I should have. The public is fickle, and what is reviled one day will be championed the next, given the right circumstances. On either side of Richardson, the enchanters were clapping with benign condescension. Everyone loves a winner.
Clem grinned broadly, but I could see, close as I was to her, that she took no pleasure in the adulation. It was a fierce grin, tinged with something bitter. She knew the cheering wouldn’t last.
Clementine pivoted and came to stand behind my chair. She placed her hands gently on my shoulders. The audience,by unspoken agreement and in deference to its newest favorite, gradually hushed in anticipation. I allowed my eyes to close. We had perfected the summoning over the last several days, and Clementine’s strength had grown apace. I found the way open before me at once, and I reached with my consciousness into the mist, plunging forward with the knowledge that I was expected on the other side.
Corbin, I thought. The mist cleared, and I found myself plummeting through the higher reaches of the spirit realm, plunging toward an assembly of spirits who had gathered there to await my arrival. Corbin looked up as he felt my approach, and he gave me the familiar smile that had been so reassuring on that first visit to the spirit realm as a living man. I took him in, and using the full breadth of the power Clementine had imbued me with, I widened my embrace to take them all in: all seventeen ropers who yet remained in the vicinity of the first isle.
I could see nothing of the Lyceum, but I knew that the spirits were visible because of Clementine’s words, sounding just behind me, almost in my ear. “Welcome, spirits,” she said. “There are many of you here.”
Corbin gave a small bow. “Greetings.”
“Spirit,” Clementine requested in a low voice, “tell us who you are.”
“My name is Corbin. Ernest Corbin.”
The spirits of the men around him began, in careful and efficient succession, to state names: Simon Everett, Isiah Saunders, Robert Prescott, Percy Dawes, and on and on. Any viewer would assume, upon hearing them, that the men were stating their own names. But when all sixteen men around Corbin had spoken, the first man began again with a new name, and the litany continued.
As we had rehearsed, Clementine asked a question, allowingthe recitation of names to proceed in the background. “Can you tell us who you were in your lifetime, Mr. Corbin?”
Corbin gave a small nod. “Certainly. I was born in 1847. Son of Teresa and Benjamin Corbin, husband to Betty Corbin, father of Sarah and Susan Corbin. I lived in Boston, and I was a wheelwright before I became a roper.”
“Thank you. What is a roper, Mr. Corbin?”
Corbin gestured to the men around him. “All of us here were ropers. A roper is a person who gets a spirit from the spirit realm to serve as a thew.”
Clem allowed a small pause. “Is that not what an enchanter does?”
Corbin gave a slight smile. “That’s the tradition, but this way there’s no danger to the enchanter. Ropers are the ones who travel to the realm, find a thew, and bring her back. Only at the portal do they hand over the spirit for binding. It’s a dangerous thing, the journey into the realm, and much easier to have a hired hand for the task.”
For a moment there was silence from Clementine, and the names being spoken by the spirits, which had continued without interruption, filled the silence. “Do all enchanters use ropers?” she asked.
“Most enchanters in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts belong to the Cisneros Society. And the Society only uses ropers.” He smiled. “But you don’t belong to the Society. And you didn’t use a roper.”
“Could you tell us the names of the enchanters for whom you procured thews, Mr. Corbin?”
“Of course. We already have.” He opened his arms again, and it would have been clear to every member of the audience that the recitation of names did not identify the spirits who stoodsummoned before them but the enchanters who had used ropers to procure thews.
I sensed a disturbance in the hall, the clamor of voices, the agitation of the spectators shifting from surprise to something else. With all my will, I stayed close to Corbin, refusing to break our connection. Clementine had one more question. I heard her ask it now, with a raised voice so that it would carry over the commotion. “Do you have anything else to tell us, Mr. Corbin?”
“I do,” Corbin said with a grave bow. “I wish the people of Salem to know that in the last several months, five women have been murdered so that five enchanters could take them as thews.”
“Which enchanters?”
Rapidly, the spirits around him called out five names: “Henry Lyman, Theodore Paine, Edward Morton, Philip Knowles, John Perkins.”
I felt myself yanked upward, away from Corbin and the other spirits, who diminished into mere specks and then disappeared entirely. Something had happened; my connection to the realm had been broken. The fog around me darkened to black, and then I found myself pressed up against a wall. Light came from the edges of my vision. What had happened? The sounds of people shouting and a constant ringing were muted, as if I were underwater. Then, the pressure of a hand on my head. “Sam. Sam, are you all right?”
I was slumped over the table that stood on the stage at the Lyceum. All the auditorium lights had been lit. I blinked and raised my head with effort. Clementine crouched beside me. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine,” I said.
There was no time to take in the consternation of the crowd, for at that moment a deafening gong sounded from somewhere above us. The audience abruptly fell silent, and along witheveryone else I watched a procession of twelve spirit thews floating toward us, onto the stage.
This we hadnotplanned.
I glanced at Clem, prepared to assist her in some response, but she made no move. Her hand still rested on my shoulder, and she watched the thews with calm attention. I recognized Cassandra, Principa, and Juno among them, and I felt glad for my concealment in the sheath of the demure Samantha. The twelve thews made a semicircle around me and Clementine, hemming us in toward the audience. They raised their arms to link hands. Then they spoke together in a slow, measured chant: “The prophecy of Reynaldo Murcia de Quintanilla is fulfilled: the destruction wrought by a woman enchanter. She has unleashed the five terrors: the Urco, the Rabeno, the Carpia, the En Micó, the Drago. Who will defend you from them?” They threw their hands upward, and the gong that had sounded once before rang again. I could see the force of compulsion upon Cassandra; her face was creased with repressed pain. The other thews looked avidly upward, as if expecting something wonderful to drop from above.
For the space of several seconds, nothing happened. The audience members stared, unsure of what they had just witnessed, unsure of what they should do. I could see the confusion on their faces. Perhaps not everyone could quickly call to mind the legends surrounding Reynaldo Murcia de Quintanilla, the great crusading enchanter of the thirteenth century, whose bones resided at Commonwealth. But I remembered vividly the five creatures Murcia had defeated, for they were depicted on the walls of the Camera: the horned wolf from the sea wrapped in chains, the pale giant, the ghostly birds of bad luck, the creature of brine whose touch turned everything to salt, and the insatiable snake with the head and arms of a man. Fortunately, those creatures of legendwere just that—legend. If they ever reallyhadexisted, they were long gone now, vanished more than five hundred years ago.
Then, with a sense of horror, I understood. It was just as Draken had boasted at the Cygnets gathering. The Cisneros Steel: the shining scale armor engraved with swans, the moths turned into fairies, the fish turned into mermaids. Creatures of the imagination could, regrettably, be all too real. Of course.Of coursethey could be created. But not by Clementine. Surely no one would believe that Clementine had brought them into being? I looked anxiously at Clem and discovered that she was staring pensively down at her shoes.
