Deirdre moved to the desk, then drew in a breath. Ink stained the felt blotter–the ghosts of letters written long ago. Something near one corner of the blotter attracted her eye: a symbol drawn in dark lines.
It was a hand holding three flames.
Gripping the lantern to keep from dropping it, Deirdre circled around the desk. Unlike the faded ink stains, the symbol was crisp and black; it had been made recently. But by whom? By Eleanor? She didn’t seem the type to go about the manor idly doodling on furniture. And what would she know about the Seekers?
Deirdre bent down. On the right side of the desk, just beneath the sigil, was a drawer. She reached out, then hesitated. She wasn’t supposed to disturb anything. Or was she? Maybe it was precisely to disturb things that she had been brought there. She opened the drawer.
It was empty. At least she thought so. She couldn’t see the back of it; there wasn’t enough light. She stuck a hand in the drawer, groping toward the back.
Her fingers closed around something hard and cool. She pulled her hand out. On her palm was a silver key, blackened by tarnish.
Deirdre’s neck tingled. She walked around the library, searching. It didn’t take long. Tucked in a corner near the globe was a small cabinet of dark wood. The cabinet had two doors. One bore a keyhole. Deirdre set down the lantern. Her hand was trembling so hard it took her several tries to fit the key in the lock. She turned it, expecting it not to work. But there was a click, and the cabinet door swung open.
She crouched. In the cabinet were two shelves. One was lined with books. Deirdre ran a finger over their well‑worn spines, certain it would be fascinating to read them, but also certain that was not why she was there. On the other shelf was a wooden box. She took it, carried it to the desk, and set it down. Dust swirled up. She held her breath a moment, letting the dust settle, then opened the lid.
There were three things in the box. One was a glass vial, empty. Its stopper was made of gold wrought into the delicate shape of a spider. The other two objects were books. One was small, its leather cover battered, its pages so dry they started to crumble when she tried to open the book. Hastily, she set it down.
The other book was larger. Its cover was smooth and new, and its pages white, cut into a clean, mass‑manufactured edge. This was no antique book. It was a journal such as could be bought in any present‑day stationery shop. Deirdre opened it to the first page.
A wave of dizziness came over her, forcing her to sit in the desk chair. In the dim light of the lantern, her eyes scanned the first lines.
You should not read this. Because if you do–if you learn the secrets contained within this journal, if you come to see the Philosophers for what they truly are–then I will have doomed you just as surely as I doomed her over three hundred years ago. They will condemn you, they will hunt you with all their powers, and they will destroy you.
Yet I beg of you, in the name of Hermes, keep reading.
“Great Spirit,” Deirdre murmured, her hands shaking so badly she had to set the journal down.
It was not just the words themselves that stunned her. It was the smooth, elegant hand they were written in. She didn’t need to reach into her pocket, to pull out the handwritten note she had received from him yesterday, to know that the handwriting was identical. He had written this journal–and just recently, by the look of it–this nameless Philosopher who had been helping her.
Only he wasn’t nameless, not anymore. Because the moment she read those first lines, she had known at last who he was, who it was who had been guiding her all this time, advising her, leading her to this very place.
“You’re Marius,” she murmured to the shadows, as if he was listening. “You’re Marius Lucius Albrecht. Somehow you’re still alive. You didn’t die in 1684. You became a Philosopher. That was what was in that file; that was why the Philosophers deleted it. They didn’t want me to learn the truth.”
Only he did. But why?
Deirdre held the answer to that question here in her hands. The daylight was failing outside the high windows; a storm must be coming. She moved the lantern closer, adjusted the wick to brighten the gold light, then opened the journal and bent over it.
You should not read this. Because if you do–if you learn the secrets contained within this journal, if you come to see the Philosophers for what they truly are–then I will have doomed you just as surely as I doomed her over three hundred years ago. They will condemn you, they will hunt you with all their powers, and they will destroy you.
Yet I beg of you, in the name of Hermes, keep reading.
Forgive me the recklessness of these words, for I must write them in haste. It is ironic, for a being who is immortal, that I should have so little time in which to fill these pages, but they will soon turn their eyes in my direction. Unlike the ones they seek to understand, they do not sleep and have always kept watch on me. From the very beginning they have doubted my intentions, even as they transformed me into one of their own and brought me into their order.
But then, is it not safer to keep the wolf where you can see him? Except I know now it is the lamb I am to play in this bit of mummery, and for good or ill it is nearly at an end. Would that I could use a computer to set down these words more quickly, but they monitor all such devices, and perhaps it is just as well that I compose this on paper with an old‑fashioned quill pen. It reminds me of a time long past. Of my time.
I did not seek to become immortal–that is the first thing you should know. On the contrary, when he first found me, life had no worth to me whatsoever, and at the ripe old age of fourteen I was doing everything I could to throw mine away. It was spring, in the year 1668, and Edinburgh was just beginning to stink.
In that era, Edinburgh was one of the most densely populated cities in all of Europe, for the entire citizenry–compelled by fear of the English–had crammed itself within the confines of the city’s stone walls. They had come seeking protection. What they found instead were filth and poverty, disease and death.
In Greyfriars graveyard, along the Cowgate below St. Giles, layers of corpses were stacked with barely a layer of soil between them, so that after a hard Scottish rain limbs would jut out of the ground like tree roots. The living fared little better. With no room to build out because of the constricting embrace of the city’s walls, the people of Edinburgh built up instead. Wooden tenements sprouted from the tops of stone buildings like fungi encouraged by the damp air. They were wretched structures, drafty in winter, stifling in summer, and rat‑infested at all times, with narrow windows that opened only to allow the foul contents of a chamber pot to be thrown onto the street– and any unwary passersby–below.
The tenements were always catching fire, or falling down entirely, taking their unlucky occupants with them, and thereby contributing to the population of Greyfriars. However, unwholesome and unsafe as they were, the folk who dwelled in those structures were not the city’s poorest by any means. For there was one other direction in this crowded city in which to build–and that was down.
There is no telling when the excavations beneath Edinburgh began. Perhaps, in the gray time before the dawn of history, primitive men used crude tools to hew at the volcanic crag where the city would be built in a later age, carving out chambers in which to practice secret, blood‑drenched rites. By the time I came to know them, the delvings were ancient and vast, and they were filled with a darkness that was far more than a mere absence of light. If fair maidens like Hope and Joy had ever stumbled into that place by mistake, then they had been ravaged and left for dead.