by F. G. Cottam
‘He’s being well paid for compiling it too. From Keller’s perspective, what’s not to like?’
May 15, 1528
I am to travel south to meet the Spanish sorceress Cordelia Cortez. She has agreed to give a demonstration of her powers, her worthiness, if you will, to qualify as a contributor to the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom. Her skills are predominantly aquatic, or in her own phraseology, oceanic. Or so she claims. We shall see.
My new English patron employs a network of agents, emissaries, couriers and mercenary men-at-arms throughout Europe. Thus have I been able to communicate efficiently with the woman. She is a great beauty, by common account, which will impress me not in the slightest since I have never been remotely moved by the pleasures of the flesh. More impressive is her claim that if I wear the amulet she has sent me, my voyage across the seas to Spain will be entirely without hazard. Since she resides on the Atlantic coast, this is a comfort to me. The Atlantic is a treacherous wilderness of water to a non-sailor such as I.
Cortez is of noble birth, a countess who lives in a marble palace built on a high promontory where she can entertain herself with the endless briny vistas to be seen from its balconies. Her powers, however authentic, are a well-kept secret, of course. Spain is a papist country and her title would not protect her were it to be whispered in Church circles that she is an occult practitioner. She would be put to the torture. At the conclusion of that ordeal, once a confession had been extracted from her by her expert interrogators, she would hang, or more likely burn.
Even a few weeks ago a journey such as I am about to undertake would have been inconceivable to me. I would not have had the means to charter a craft. I would have been too ashamed of my mean and shabby attire. I would have possessed no motive to forge an alliance with someone else with esoteric skills. Probably I would have seen them as a rival or a threat. But the Almanac can only be realized to its fullest potential if the most powerful practitioners in Europe unite in order to achieve it.
The amulet is gold and exquisitely engraved with an image of a sea serpent coiled around the hull and rigging of a warship. This symbolic beast is gigantic. Its scales do not look as though cannon fire would penetrate. I believe the vessel in the engraving to be doomed. It is an odd sort of charm, perhaps an ironic pun, but I am inclined to believe the claim made by the countess that it will keep me safe. Why otherwise would she risk its loss at sea? It is heavy and ornate and unique. It must be very valuable.
June 16, 1528
I am newly returned from my journey to Spain. I was the guest of the countess for three eventful days. She was a gracious hostess. We communicated in Latin. She was better read than I imagine most women are and better informed about events internationally. She was bold for her sex in the sense that she was more forthright in expressing opinions than any other woman I have met. Not that I have known, or cared to know, very many.
She exercised the necessary discretion when her staff were present. In my presence alone, she performed a spell in which the flow from the spout of a pump drawing well water in her palace grounds became a solid pillar of ice. On a sweltering summer day, this was an impressive trick.
She told me that she could drown a man on dry land, achieving this as he lay in his bed by inflicting a dream upon his sleeping mind in which the victim is engulfed in water. She told me a priest who’d accused her of witchcraft had died this way before having the opportunity of making the accusation public. But of course, I saw no proof that she could genuinely do what she claimed in this regard.
I saw her reverse the flow of a stream. I saw her step across a deep drainage ditch as though its surface were as solid as glass. She explained to me that this was possible because she was practised at levitation. So, on the second evening, I challenged her to step off the exterior balcony on the uppermost floor of her palace, which she did without hesitation or mishap, hovering, suspended, supported by nothing more solid than the air invisible in the void beneath her expensively shod feet.
She saved the best until last, and the final evening of my stay, when she invited me to take a walk with her on the clifftop not far from her home. I anticipated more of the levitation, but was mistaken in this assumption.
The sun was setting out over the sea. The orb was crimson and the water like fire or blood, reflecting it. The surface was calm, cleaved only by a single vessel perhaps half a mile distant from the spot at which we stood. My nautical knowledge is scant, my maritime ignorance almost total, but this boat or ship may have been a privateer, because I was sufficiently keen-eyed to see that it was armed with cannon.
I half expected then to see the great leviathan engraved on her amulet rise in life from the depths and embrace this vessel in destruction. But that did not happen. I was, I confess, profoundly unprepared for what did.
The countess stood close to the cliff edge and brought out her hands stretched to either side of her like a bird about to take wing. She choked out sounds in a voice I would not have recognized as hers. Then she raised, or rather jerked both arms upward with a speed which suggested that the movement was less willed by her than compelled by some exterior force.
A grey cloud in the sky above the boat shaped a pointed finger of vapour which reached downward towards the sea. And the sea rose to greet it in a glittering, gaseous pillar till the elements met and merged in a great, spinning waterspout that shrieked aloud as its base hit the boat and the boat was plucked upward, perhaps a hundred feet, before crashing back down and disappearing beneath a litter of debris made by its own shattered timbers.
I turned to my hostess, who looked exultant at what she had accomplished.
‘You have impressive powers, my lady,’ I felt obliged to remark.
‘They come only at a price,’ she told me.
And I believe that price was paid two days later, when it was reported that a coastal village only a league or so away from the spot at which we stood was overwhelmed by a tidal wave. The destruction wrought was complete. Not a man, woman or child survived the deluge. Ninety innocent souls. But true magic always takes its toll and it was proof that I wasn’t charmed or hypnotized by a guileful fraud. I witnessed what I did in Spain only because it really occurred.
Before we parted I asked her why a woman with her worldly riches wished to participate in our joint quest. I knew it could not be for mere money.
She looked at me, pale-skinned, obsidian-eyed, cold under the straight black helm of her hair, a slender and imperious woman exuding a powerful sense of wilful cruelty. Not barbaric, this, but quite the opposite. Cultured and refined.
She said, ‘I want to put my tilt upon the world, Herr Keller.’ She smiled then and glanced beyond me, seeing the future. ‘I suspect I wish to achieve the same consequence you do.’
I merely nodded in reply. Words were unnecessary. The accord was quite plain, our ambition entirely shared.
SIXTEEN
July 30, 1528
My travels have taken me recently to the Tyrol, where the demonstration I witnessed was organized in circumstances of needful secrecy by the black magician Lorenz Hood. Hood lives in thrall to Lucifer, from whom he gains those baleful insights that enable him to formulate his potent spells. The spells themselves have a solid methodology which means that, in theory, they can be practised by anyone literate and disciplined enough to enact their rituals and recite their liturgy.
But this is never the story in its entirety. Experience has taught me that in the same way some religious preachers have great power, so do some practitioners have more capacity for magic than others. There is no word for this talent in any language I have come across. It is the occult equivalent of divinity. Hood has it, the price he might yet pay for it eternal damnation. But the man I met in the village where he lives in happy anonymity seemed in no mood for repentance.
He is aged about forty, broad-shouldered and well over six feet tall, and resembles a man-at-arms more than he does a spell-master. He is taciturn and a dour demeanour masks a mordant wit expressed
in exaggeratedly pessimistic remarks.
I arrived at his door late, well after darkness had fallen. We supped at his generous enough table and he asked me questions about the commission, which evidently intrigued him. Mulling over my answers he fell silent. With strong fingers he tore a chunk from the loaf of black bread on its platter between us and chewed thoughtfully.
Eventually he said, ‘Are you as fit and agile as you look, Keller?’
Only for a few recent weeks had I been able to eat and drink on the basis of choice, rather than necessity. But I am not by nature an indulgent man physically.
‘I’m fit enough,’ I answered.
‘Have you a head for heights?’
‘I’m an alchemist, Hood, not a steeplejack.’
‘We need to reach the snowline.’
‘The snowline’s high at this time of year.’
He made a face at that. ‘More of a scramble than a climb,’ he said. ‘And Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants.’
‘I’ve always had trouble believing that.’
‘Tread carefully tomorrow, Keller.’
‘What do you intend to do?’
‘I intend to revive a corpse.’ He grinned. ‘Take care on the mountain. I don’t want it to be yours.’
‘Your concern for me is touching,’ I said.
‘My concern is for the Almanac and your Englishman’s purse,’ he said.
We set off at first light the following morning. Hood believes that magic is always more potent practised in darkness and I think that true enough. But making this attempt without daylight would have been self-murder. The route was difficult, hazardous and in some places dizzying. And the little I knew about mountains included the advice that coming down is more dangerous than going up. By then you are both fatigued and confident, a sometimes disastrous combination.
We had the higher slopes entirely to ourselves and climbed towards the snowline wordlessly in solitude. As we ascended in altitude and the air thinned I needed all my energy just to breathe.
It was obvious to me that my companion was familiar with the route we travelled. He was completely sure-footed and unhesitating. He did not look for handholds where we needed them; he knew from experience and habit where they were.
The first snow we encountered was in truth slush, heated by the rays of the summer sun and hard going in the boots Hood had lent me, which were of heavy leather and hobnailed and only slightly too big. Then we came to proper snow and the going became easier, the surface more solid underfoot, though dazzlingly white when I looked up from under the brim of my hat.
We reached a shallow dip or gully, the snow deeper here, and something about his posture told me we had arrived at where Hood had wanted to get to. He sat astride a boulder and wiped sweat from his brow with his sleeve. Then he took out a flask and wrenched out the cork stopper with his teeth and offered it to me. It was cognac. I took a swallow and then scooped snow up from the ground to slake my thirst.
Hood nodded towards an arrangement of stones that looked composed by man rather than by nature. They would have attracted the attention of a curious soul, but none ascended this high. This was Lorenz Hood’s private place of mischief. It was his desolate domain. What he did here had gone unwitnessed, I was sure, until now.
The previous evening, I had told him about my own efforts at the revival of the dead and he had grunted, unimpressed.
‘Haphazard,’ he’d said. ‘Much can go wrong with such an approach.’
‘Much did,’ I confessed.
Now he shaped the stone markers into a small cairn a few feet from where they’d lain and then reached around in the snow that had been beneath them, scooping until he revealed a pair of feet shod in clogs. Small feet; those of either a woman or a child.
Hood grabbed the ankles and simultaneously grunted and hauled. And a woman was revealed, snow powdering her clothing and making rigid her blond hair. She was slender and comely and emphatically dead and, though bare-headed, was clothed in the black and white habit of a nun.
Three things had made themselves immediately apparent to me. The first was that the snow had preserved the inanimate corpse. The second was that this young woman had died, abducted from her priory, at Lorenz Hood’s hands. The third was that he came up here to pleasure himself physically at her expense.
He sat her up to work his spell. She was long past rigor, but the cold to which her body was subjected kept her torso rigid. She was warming quickly, though, the snow in her lashes and her hair crystalline and prismatic with vibrant colour in the high sunlight.
Hood sprinkled his victim with a small quantity of light powder from a drawstring purse he produced with the rapid sleight-of-hand skill I would more usually associate with an illusionist. He recited his spell.
The young nun’s eyes snapped open. Comprehension dawned in her expression, which then registered dismay that was transformed into dawning horror. She choked out a sob and whispered, ‘God help me.’
‘Too late for that,’ Hood said, laughing. He quickly reversed his spell and the corpse, warm now, slumped sideways. He buried her again and put back the stones that signalled the spot.
‘Is there any point,’ I said, ‘in returning someone to life so reluctant to live?’
‘It might seem a contradiction,’ Hood admitted. ‘But it’s an art that requires a degree of practice and the sister provides that. And coming up here once a week in the summer months conditions me. I enjoy the solitude on the route.’
‘And the reverberations?’
‘That’s why I can’t do it in the winter, Keller. The risk that doing it will trigger an avalanche and kill me.’
‘And the summer reverberations?’
He pointed down to the village where he lived, impossibly distant and small from this ghoulish eyrie of his. He said, ‘Reviving her is less costly than reviving and then taking her. But one or two newborns will die in their cots tonight.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s always a price.’
‘Always,’ I said.
I knew that this was a man with whom I could work. He effected his magic with no pomp and little fuss. And there was no question his ability was considerable in its potency. His ruthlessness was total, but I liked his honesty and thought he would be a dependable ally in framing the Almanac. I knew he had once been a priest. Probably that perverse fact enhanced his powers.
But I wasn’t, by that moment, really thinking about Lorenz Hood’s qualities. I was thinking instead about our descent. The sun was at its zenith by then and the steep white world glittering all around me was treacherous. I survived it though without mishap, these words the proof.
SEVENTEEN
Handy Andy Baxter didn’t feel as he’d hoped he would after delivering his get-well card to Sneaky Pete Jackson’s grandfather’s door. He felt fobbed off by Pete’s weirdo sister. He wasn’t even convinced that she’d delivered Pete the card. Unless Pete was at death’s door, he would have at least texted a smile emoji in acknowledgement.
Andy had been doing a bit of reading on the internet about meningitis. It was a pretty serious illness in all its forms, but if it was going to kill you, that usually happened sooner rather than later. And if it had happened, they would have announced it at the school assembly straight away, which they hadn’t, at least prior to the plague outbreak’s closing all the schools for a week.
Andy couldn’t shake the suspicion that something fishy was going on here. And not just with that smelly and oddly vacant fish tank in Pete’s grandpa’s kitchen. The more he thought about it, the odder and less convincing he thought Dawn Jackson had seemed.
And there’d been that banging noise, that piledriver rhythm from below. Not work of any kind being done next door, as Dawn had claimed, but actually underneath their feet, like someone was tunnelling or something.
Andy was thinking all this at home. School wasn’t back yet, it was pissing down with rain outside and he was bored. They were saying on the news that London was at its greatest risk of floodi
ng for almost a century. The graphics were good the first time you saw them, the CGI really giving a vivid picture of the scale and scope of this possible catastrophe, but the bulletins were repetitious, just the flood risk and the diplomatic crisis. The major nations involved were having ‘talks about talks about talks, through intermediaries’. That sounded like a long-winded process to him.
Andy’s dad was at work. Andy’s mum was out. She was a volunteer librarian and today she had a shift. She’d explained when she’d started doing this that without a volunteer workforce the library would close as a consequence of council cuts caused in turn by the government’s programme of austerity. Andy figured that the austerity had been going on for as long as he personally was able to remember.
But it meant that he was free to do as he pleased. And he knew where sneaky Pete kept his front door key, under a painted pebble in his grandfather’s front garden. Dawn might be in. Pete might have taken his key with him to the hospital. But Andy was becoming less and less convinced that Pete was in hospital at all. And Dawn might not be in, she might be out.
Pete had told him she spent a lot of time on academic work for this Special Study Group she belonged to on account of being so weirdly bright. With their school still closed, Dawn could revise at home. Or she could revise in the library, where his mum had mentioned seeing her poring over her textbooks on her last shift. His mum hadn’t known Dawn. But she’d known Pete was a twin and had spotted the resemblance, and she’d approached Dawn and asked.
‘Such a polite, studious girl,’ his mum had said; she’d asked after Pete and been treated to the in-hospital-on-the-mend line.
Andy would walk to Pete’s grandfather’s house, he decided. It was just too wet to ride his bike. His paper round had taught him that you got much wetter riding a bike in the rain than you ever did walking. Setting off, with the hood up on his cagoule, he thought the streets unusually quiet. The plague had panicked a lot of people who lived there into getting out and had put the tourists off completely. The flood risk had made even more people leave. Andy thought the only people enjoying any of it were the burglars. Break-ins would be off the scale and the police couldn’t cope because there weren’t enough of them. Austerity again, his dad had told him.