"I've brought the book," Corso said, showing Borja The Nine Doors.
Borja nodded vaguely and took the book, barely glancing at it. He had his head slightly turned to the side, as if listening for a sound behind him, inside the house. After a moment he noticed Corso again and blinked, surprised that he was still there.
"You've given me the book. What else do you want?"
"To be paid for the job."
Borja stared at him uncomprehendingly. It was obvious that his thoughts were miles away. At last he shrugged, as if to say that it had nothing to do with him. He went back into the house, leaving it up to Corso whether to shut the door, stay where he was, or leave the way he'd come.
Corso followed him through another door into a room off the corridor and vestibule. The shutters were closed so no light could enter, and the furniture had been pushed to the far end, leaving the black marble floor empty. Some of the glass bookcases were open. The room was lit by dozens of candles that had almost burned down. Wax was dripping everywhere: on the mantelpiece above the empty fireplace, on the floor, on the furniture and objects in the room. The candles gave off a tremulous, reddish light that danced at the least draft or movement. The room smelled like a church, or a crypt.
Still taking no notice of Corso, Borja stopped in the middle of the room. There, at his feet, a circle approximately three feet in diameter was marked out in chalk, containing a square divided into nine boxes. The circle was surrounded by Roman numerals and strange objects: a piece of string, a water clock, a rusty knife, a dragon-shaped silver bracelet, a gold ring, a metal brazier full of burning charcoal, a glass vial, a small mound of earth, a stone. But Corso winced when he saw the other things strewn on the floor. Many of the books he'd admired, books lined up on shelves a few days earlier, now lay ruined, dirty, with pages torn out. The pages were covered with drawings and underlinings and full of strange marks. Candles burned on top of several of the books, and thick drops of wax dripped onto their covers or open pages. Some candles, guttering, had signed the paper. Among this wreckage Corso recognized the engravings from the copies of The Nine Doors belonging to Victor Fargas and Baroness Ungern. They were mixed up with the others on the floor and also covered with wax drips and mysterious annotations.
He bent to look more closely at the remains, not quite able to believe the magnitude of the disaster. One engraving from The Nine Doors, number VI, the man hanging by his right foot instead of his left, had been half burned away by the flickering flame of a candle. Two copies of engraving VII, one with a white chessboard and the other with a black one, lay beside a 1512 Theatrum diabolicum torn from its binding. Another engraving, I, protruded from the pages of a De imperfectaque opera by Valerio Lorena, an extremely rare incunabulum that Borja had shown Corso not long ago, barely allowing him to touch it. It was now on the floor, battered and torn.
"Don't touch anything," he heard Varo Borja say. Borja was standing before the circle, leafing through his copy of The Nine Doors, engrossed. He seemed to see not the pages themselves but something beyond them, something inside the square and circle on the floor, or even farther away: in the depths of the earth.
Corso looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. He stood up slowly. As he did so, the flames around him flickered.
"It makes no difference if I touch anything," he said, gesturing at the books and papers that lay scattered over the floor. "After what you've done."
"You don't know anything, Corso. You think you do, but you don't. You're ignorant and very stupid. The kind who believes chaos is random and ignores the existence of a hidden order."
"Don't talk rubbish. You've destroyed everything, and you had no right to. Nobody has."
"You're wrong. In the first place they're my books. And what's more important, their purpose is to be used. They had practical rather than artistic or aesthetic value. As one travels along the path, one must make sure that no one else can follow. These books have now served their purpose."
"Madman. You deceived me from the start."
Borja didn't seem to be listening. He stood motionless, holding the remaining copy of The Nine Doors, scrutinizing engraving I.
"Deceived?" He kept his eyes fixed on the book as he spoke, which underlined his contempt for Corso. "You do yourself too much honor. I hired you without telling you my reasons or my intentions. A servant does not participate in the decisions of whoever is paying him. You were to steal the items I wanted and at the same time incur the technical consequences of certain unavoidable actions. I should imagine that as we speak, the police in both Portugal and France are closing in on you."
"What about you?"
"I'm far removed from all of that, and quite safe. In a little while nothing will matter."
Then, to Corso's horror, he tore the page with the engraving from The Nine Doors.
"What are you doing?"
Varo Borja was calmly tearing out more pages.
"I'm burning my boats, my bridges behind me. And moving into terra incognita." One by one, he tore the engravings from the book, until he had all nine. He looked at them closely. "It's a pity you can't follow me where I'm going. As the fourth engraving states, fate is not the same for all."
"Where do you believe you're going?"
Borja dropped the mutilated book on the floor with the others. He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle, checking strange correspondences between them.
"To meet someone" was his enigmatic answer. "To search for the stone that the Great Architect rejected, the philosopher's stone, the basis of the philosophical work. The stone of power. The devil likes metamorphoses, Corso. From Faust's black dog to the false angel of light who tried to break down Saint Anthony's resistance. But most of all, stupidity bores him, and he hates monotony.... If I had the time and inclination, I'd invite you to take a look at some of the books at your feet. Several of them mention an ancient tradition: the advent of the Antichrist will occur in the Iberian peninsula, in a city with three superimposed cultures, on the banks of a river as deep as an ax cut, the Tagus."