The stairs ended in another door—thick, iron-bound wooden planks carved around the edges with symbols that gleamed black to my Grey sight. I moved my hand toward the twisted bronze handle and the ward stretched toward me, rising into a tangled web, twisted with sharp black barbs dripping a shining illusion of blood. I pulled back, feeling queasy and weak even without having touched the door. I took the ring of keys Gonçalo had given me out of my shallow skirt pocket and flicked through until I found the largest of them. It was almost hot to the touch and impossible to miss even in the gloom of the unlighted staircase. I held up the key and pushed it toward the lock.
“No. Don’t touch it,” Carlos said from below us, his unexpected voice making me jump.
The ward pulled back, sinking into the wood. The door swung open and illumination by fire and candle flooded out of the room beyond, drowning the thin light in the staircase behind us.
I whirled on the landing and looked back down the stairs to where Carlos stood at the bottom. “My apologies,” he said, walking up to meet us. “I had forgotten about the ward. The key alone won’t open the door safely, though I’m surprised to find my safeguard intact after so much time and change.”
“What would have happened if I’d touched it?” I asked.
Carlos brushed past both of us to enter the room. “To you? Probably only passing illness and incapacity. To our friend, here . . . ? Something unpleasant and debilitating, but not fatal. Come in and sit. We have much to discuss.”
ELEVEN
Carlos looked his usual self—no sign of the disordered and hungry state I’d found him in less than an hour ago. He strode to the window and glanced down, then turned aside and found a bit of naked stone wall to lean against. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared around the room in annoyance. “A shambles,” he muttered. “What a state my house has fallen into.”
The tower room wasn’t round, but rectangular, narrower at the front and rear where the windows broke the wall with tiny mullions of thick, wavy glass in lead and iron frames. A tiled mantelpiece took up the center of the left wall and surrounded a deep fireplace that currently flickered with an eerie yellow light that gave off no heat. A large map of Lisbon as it had been before the earthquake hung above the mantel. Candles in sconces and many-armed candelabra added a more-normal firelight to the room. The flames swayed in the currents of air we made as we moved to a long wooden bench set in front of a table opposite the fire. There were two heavy chairs next to the hearth, but I had no desire to sit in either of them, tangled as they were with remnant threads of red and black energy. There was not a single ghost to be seen and the temporaclines lay in cold, compacted strata against the floor, shimmering like ice, shot through by a hot pillar of dark red energy that rose straight from the floor and spread a network of smaller lines like blood vessels across the ceiling and walls.
The fireplace was large and had a pot hook, but no pot, hanging over it, though there were several dusty, cobwebbed iron vessels piled near it on one side. Half of the walls were covered in bookshelves laden with moldering books, their leather spines cracked with age or eaten away by beetles. A carved, dark wood desk stood among the shelves, also scattered with tomes, dust, and spiderwebs. Old, dark stains the color of dried blood marred the pages of one open book. Stains of a similar color crossed the floor and vanished under the moth-eaten carpet. I closed my eyes a moment and concentrated, feeling the slightest tremor of lingering magic and death beneath my feet. A row of skulls occupied the top of one of the bookshelves, their empty eye sockets and grinning teeth unpleasantly white and gleaming, as if the former residents still hovered near their bones in forms of transient light. The right side of the room was mostly occupied with worktables, cabinets, and equipment I couldn’t—and didn’t want to—name. An odor hung in the air, a blend of melting beeswax, crumbling books, and dire experiments.
Beside me on the bench, Quinton hunched his shoulders and leaned a bit forward, unconsciously keeping his back from touching the worktable behind us.
“I hadn’t thought I’d be gone so long,” Carlos said, “or I would have worked a different ward over this place. It kept people out, perhaps too well, but had no effect on filth or vermin. I had expected the house to have changed in two hundred and fifty years, but I foolishly left this room exactly as it was. And thus . . . it is exactly as it is.” He made a sound of disgust and gestured at the hearth, wiping out the illusion of a fire and dimming the room enough to induce shadows in the corners and under the tables. He plucked a bit of blackness from a shadow and whispered to it, “Venhais, minhas sombras,” spinning it between his fingers and then crushing it into his fist, which he then flicked open underhand, scattering the glittering dust of shadow into the murk beneath the chairs and tables. Something black crept there, where there had been nothing before.
I had rarely seen him work magic so casually and I wondered if it was the place—in spite of his discontent with it—that made it easy, or something else. I thought the creeping thing beneath the table was one of the nevoacria I’d seen at Carlos’s Seattle house—shadow creatures that skulked along the ground of the former graveyard. I knew that calling them any great distance would have been wasteful and difficult, so I assumed this one was created on the spot, as easily as most men button their cuffs. Neither summoning nor creating is a simple cantrip, so I was impressed and a little disturbed by his trick. As I stared at it, the nevoacria seemed to grow, like the darkness of rising night, deepening until there was no light to show any feature, only the strange, slithering movement of the shadow-thing as it multiplied and spread in the gloom.
Carlos turned his gaze back to us and leaned against the wall. “What developed while I slept?”
I started with, “James Purlis has kidnapped his granddaughter—Quinton’s niece—and I believe I saw some kind of drachen today. Quinton saw one of them as well, just down the hill from here.”
“In the daylight?” Carlos asked, scowling.
“Yes, though it was sunset. Others saw it, too. It didn’t last long or seem to do anything but fall apart, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we saw something like this at Purlis’s Seattle lab more than a year ago and again here when he’s obviously in town and up to no good.”
“Hmm,” Carlos rumbled, the resonance of his voice making the old house shiver. “It’s unlikely to be coincidence and it could be a different creature entirely, but it may mean more once I’ve heard the rest. Go on.”
Between us, Quinton and I told him about Soraia’s abduction by her grandfather and those who’d been with him. When I told him I suspected she had a touch of Grey to her, Carlos stopped me with an upraised hand.
“How old is this child?”
“Six.”
“That is quite young to display a talent.”
“I don’t think she’s manifested a particular talent yet—she might not ever. But she sees ghosts, claims to see fairies in the garden, knows the answers to questions she has no reason to know, experiences strange events without any idea that they’re unusual, and charms birds. There is also the rather odd collection of presents Purlis and his two companions left for her.”