by Garth Nix
Merlin frowned.
“There is that. But I’m thinking about the Cauldron-Born. If there is one, how was it made, and by whom?”
“Hmm,” said Vivien. She recited from memory: “The Stone Cauldron was broken by Corabec of the Folk of Ishur, the pieces given to the sea in the four quarters of Britain; the Copper Cauldron was lost, in the time of Antoninus Pius, and never seen again; the Bronze Cauldron was melted down as idolatrous in the first year of the Commonwealth of Cromwell; the Iron Cauldron is ours, and under the Grail-Keeper’s hand.”
She paused and added, “That’s what the standard history says, anyway.”
“The last Cauldron-Born came out of the Bronze Cauldron, in 1643, right?” asked Merlin.
“Yes,” agreed Vivien.
“But the Bronze Cauldron’s gone, melted down by Roundheads. The Stone Cauldron likewise gone. No one’s seen the Copper Cauldron since Hadrian built the wall. What does that leave?”
Vivien shook her head. “Ours. The Grail. But there’s no way—”
“Hang on!” interrupted Susan. “You have one of these cauldrons? You as in the booksellers?”
“Yes, the Iron Cauldron, but we call it a grail,” said Merlin. “Makes it sound more respectable.”
“And we don’t put dead people in it to reanimate them,” said Vivien.
“What do you do with it, then?” asked Susan.
Merlin and Vivien looked at each other.
“It’s a secret, of course,” said Merlin. “But you’d probably figure it out anyway.”
“The cauldrons aren’t simply for making monsters,” said Vivien. “In fact, that’s not what they were made for at all. It’s a perversion of their purpose. They are enormously powerful mythic relics that greatly amplify all kinds of magic, and they have many different uses. Each of the cauldrons has or had unique powers in addition to their usual properties—”
“Oh, tell her, Viv,” said Merlin impatiently.
“Our hands are dipped in it when we turn seven,” said Vivien. “It’s what makes us what we are, though no one can tell whether we’ll initially be left-handed or right-handed.”
“Why only your hands?”
“Because if a living person is entirely immersed in the cauldron, it will shatter, its power gone forever,” said Merlin. “Oh, and the person dies.”
“So someone could be using your cauldron, grail, or whatever you call it to make Cauldron-Born?”
“No,” said Vivien.
“It’s not impossible,” argued Merlin.
“It’s very, very unlikely,” said Vivien firmly. “The Grail-Keeper wouldn’t . . . no . . . it’s much more likely we’re mistaken and there is no Cauldron-Born. Some coincidence of scent; I mean you mentioned Aleppo soap, that has laurel oil in it, maybe I imagined the amaranth, someone’s bad BO—”
“I definitely felt a malign presence,” said Merlin. “It was like being hit by a sudden icy wind, deep inside. I had to stop myself shivering.”
“Maybe you’re getting a cold.”
“But what if there is one—” Susan started to say, but she stopped as there was a sharp knock at the door.
“Who is it?” called out Merlin.
“Room service bringing you a bloody bottle of champagne, who do you think!”
“Aunt Una,” said Merlin and Vivien together. Merlin opened the door.
A biker clad top to toe in black leather with a fluorescent vest emblazoned “Urgent Book Delivery” loosely worn over the jacket strode in like an avenging Valkyrie, shaking her long black hair loose, her helmet decorated with a fluoro skull and crossbones under her arm. She appeared to be in her thirties, was brown-skinned and very attractive. She looked like a West Indian model channeling Suzi Quatro in an advertisement for Harley-Davidson. Or very expensive rum. Or both. Except she wasn’t smiling; she looked quite cross.
She had biker’s gauntlets on both hands, but the one on the right was plain black leather, and the left was reinforced with bands of interlinked rings across the knuckles, like medieval mail.
“I expect you to waste my time, Merlin,” she said, ignoring Susan. “But I don’t expect it from you, Vivien.”
“We’re not wasting your time, Aunt Una,” said Vivien evenly.
A walkie-talkie at Una’s belt squawked. She grabbed it and held it some distance from her ear. A male voice crackled out.
“Yeah, can’t find what you said.”
“Okay,” said Una. “What about you, Darren?”
Another, softer voice answered in the negative.
“Diarmuid?” asked Una.
“Nah, nothing of note. We’re going up on the roof.”
“Sabah?”
“Nothing here.”
Una clipped the walkie-talkie back on her belt.
“And you’re sure you’re not wasting my time?”
“I smelled laurel and amaranth, over decaying flesh,” said Vivien. In the face of Una’s disbelief, she didn’t sound quite as confident. “And Merlin felt a presence. Who have you got checking the wards? That’s a right-handed job.”
“Uncle Jake,” said Una. “What? He was available.”
“It’s not his area of expertise,” said Vivien.
“Does he even have an area of expertise?” muttered Merlin.
“Yes, he does,” replied Vivien. “An encyclopedic knowledge of novelists in the period 1920 to 1950, English and in translation.”
“I meant . . . oh, never mind,” said Merlin.
“Uncle Jake is perfectly capable of gauging whether a ward is compromised or not,” snapped Una. “So you smelled something, Merlin felt something, and you leap to the conclusion that it is a Cauldron-Born, when there haven’t been any for more than three hundred years. Now why would a Cauldron-Born even be here? And who would have made it and been directing it?”
Merlin shrugged. Vivien frowned.
“It’s been a very unusual day,” she said. “The goblins danced Merlin and Susan into the mythic May Fair. And before that, two ordinary mortal thugs, but whose minds had been adjusted, tried to abduct her. So if there was a Cauldron-Born, it was probably here for Susan.”
“Why?” asked Una. She gave Susan the kind of suspicious glance a chef might give a butcher about to hand over a piece of rabbit masquerading as chicken.
“We don’t really know yet,” said Merlin hurriedly. “Susan’s father is a person of interest. The Greats have told us to find out who he is.”
“Then you should get on with it,” said Una. Her walkie-talkie screeched; she lifted it and said, “What?”
“Nothing found. We’re all back in the lobby, zero on any floor. Uncle Jake says all is copacetic. Which I guess means okay.”
“Back to the shop, then,” said Una. “And Jake is not riding pillion with me; you take him, Diarmuid.”
“Why me?”
“Because I said so. Out.”
“I’m going to take a look at the wards myself,” said Vivien. “Jake can’t have checked all the entrances. What about the kitchen?”
“Good idea. You waste your time instead of mine. See you later.”
She spun on her heel and stalked out, like a cyclone reversing direction after the passage of the eye.
“I guess it wasn’t a Cauldron-Born,” said Vivien. “We’re . . . jumpy.”
Merlin didn’t answer. Then he spoke, slowly and thoughtfully.
“I can’t exactly remember the lesson on this, but wasn’t there something about Cauldron-Keepers using dead rats or birds sometimes? What happened with them?”
“Same as a human,” said Vivien. “Birds were used, more than rats, though both were apparently harder to control than humans. Different senses. And flying.”
“The thresholds of the doors and windows in this building are warded,” said Merlin. “But what about sewer pipes and so on? Rats can swim up those.”
“The water mains are, and I suppose any big pipes,” said Vivien. “But some could have been missed.”
“A Cauldron-Born rat would be a perfect spy. Sent out to track someone down, for instance.”
“We still come back to who, why, and with what cauldron,” said Vivien. “Look, I think we are simply getting jumpy. Let’s have lunch, then go to the Old Bookshop and get the aunts to look at Susan’s library card. If they can identify it, we follow that up. All right?”
“I guess so,” said Merlin. He looked at Susan.
“Can we take the swords?” asked Susan.
“I’ll find a bag,” said Merlin immediately, as Vivien started to say, “No,” but then thought better of it.
“I can’t cloud lots of people’s minds at once,” she warned. “So don’t go waving those pigstickers around unnecessarily.”
Merlin produced a vintage leather cricket bag adorned with the cryptic gold monogram “PDBW,” unstrapped it, and opened it up to receive the swords, replacing them in their scabbards before he put them carefully inside. Susan was interested to see her saber went into an entirely iron scabbard, lined with wood, whereas Merlin’s was heavy, ancient leather, banded and tipped in greenish bronze. It looked like it had been preserved in a peat bog for a thousand years.
“If you wouldn’t mind carrying this,” he said, giving the bag to Susan. “I think I should keep my hands free.”
“Happy to,” said Susan. She stuffed her bundle of clothes into the bag as well, and swung it experimentally. The bag would make a reasonable weapon in itself, even without getting the swords out in the first place. A violent swing from the heavy bag could easily knock someone down.
“At least a Cauldron-Born rat would be easier to hack apart,” said Merlin. He opened the door and added, “Harder to spot, though. And if it tried a surprise attack . . .”
He hesitated, then said, “You know what? Though their lunchroom is as awfully provisioned as the New Bookshop’s, why don’t we go straight to the Old Bookshop and eat something there? Skip the pub. If we hurry, we can probably cadge motorbike rides with Una’s lot. Always fun. Provided you don’t fall off the back.”
“And strength in numbers,” said Vivien. “You really do think a Cauldron-Born of some kind was here, don’t you?”
Merlin didn’t answer, instead hurrying to the lift. Susan and Vivien hadn’t waited for his reply, and all three moved swiftly down the hallway. When they got a few paces away, they all rushed to press the call button, Merlin’s left forefinger getting there first.
Chapter Eleven
Be a writer, if you will
Or don’t, no one will care
Order your shelves, or not
Kill or kiss your darlings
Simply write
RIDING PILLION ON A HONDA CB400N SUPERDREAM BEHIND AN evidently deranged left-handed bookseller-cum-courier—whose idea of getting through traffic owed a lot to embroidery, threading in and out and around slower or stopped vehicles, always at high speed—was fun, as Merlin had promised. Made slightly scarier because it was still drizzling and the road was wet, and Susan found falling off the back rather more likely than expected, since she was holding the cricket bag under her left arm and so could only hold on with her right.
Susan, Merlin, and Vivien made it to the Old Bookshop in a three-minute sprint up Charing Cross Road. Sabah chirped “Off you get” to Susan at the curb out the front, allowing about five seconds for her to dismount before roaring away with Una and the others down a side alley to some unseen garage or loading dock around the back of the building.
The Old Bookshop was another six-story Georgian edifice, with the addition of what looked to be a Victorian-era turret on one end, but it was entirely different from the New Bookshop in Mayfair. The ground floor facing the street was all floor-to-ceiling high windows, with a wonderful display of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose complete with a cardboard castle to the left of the central revolving door, and a selection of new release thrillers and mysteries built up in series of pyramids in the window to the right, including John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals, and Ken Follett’s On Wings of Eagles. Smaller displays at the far end of each window showcased some nonfiction, as if to ballast the made-up stuff in-between, including A. N. Wilson’s The Life of John Milton, a biography of Frida Kahlo, and Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman, which caught Susan’s eye because as far as she could tell she was one of the few people in the world to have read The Princess Bride. No one she talked to had ever heard of it. Her mother had bought the book because William Goldman had written her favorite film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Unlike the New Bookshop’s discreet brass plate, the Old Bookshop sported a three-foot-high green neon sign proclaiming “The Old Bookshop, All New Books Today” and beneath that a smaller neon sign that announced in brilliant orange “Complete Penguin Bookshop.”
Also unlike the other bookshop, it was busy with customers, and there was a steady column of people moving in and out through the central revolving door and the smaller door to its side, both watched over by two small, middle-aged women who had to be twins. They were cheerfully checking bags and casting the eye of disapproving shame on a student in an enormous greatcoat stuffed with stolen books who’d made the mistake of thinking he was in Foyles and was now suddenly intent on returning all the books to their correct shelves without a word spoken, somehow sensing the inherent threat in the twins’ single- gloved left hands and their smiling good humor.
Susan, Merlin, and Vivien got nods and smiles from the twins—Aunts Kristen and Kersten, Vivien muttered—as they were flung out of the revolving door into a large, brightly lit acme of bookshops, with well-ordered and well-labeled shelves in all directions, pleasant staff asking “Can I help you?” and comfortable chairs in strategic corners, all occupied by readers.
“This way,” said Vivien, heading past the central payment desk, where a trio of right-handed cotton-gloved assistants were selling books to a steady line of customers queuing with innate British ease alongside a rack of current magazines and newspapers. The afternoon papers were being put out, all with similar headlines, again catching Susan’s eye.
The Sun said “Gangsters Gunning to Kill!”; the Daily Mirror “Gangland Death Spree!”; The Times “Organised Crime Violence Peaks”; and the Guardian “Several Underworld Murders.”
None of the staff spoke to them, but Susan noted Merlin got smiles from everyone, and Vivien serious head inclinations that could not be described as simply nodding. Susan thought some glances of curiosity were directed her way as well, but that was all. Being with Vivien and Merlin and clearly on a mission from their rapid movement, no one paid her any other attention.
Vivien turned left at the “New Fiction” shelves, along an aisle for “New Nonfiction,” and continued towards the rear of the ground floor, where a broad fake marble staircase with bronze banister rails was visible going up and down, and an old wooden-stepped escalator clanked up next to it, beside a sign pointing right “To the Lifts.”
An illuminated sign with the Penguin logo in black and a red arrow pointing down flickered above the stairs. Vivien and Merlin followed this direction, clattering down the stairs for a few steps before, as if by second nature, they both sat up on the smooth bronze banister and slid down.
Susan had paused momentarily to look at the directory board by the escalator, noting there were three floors above, including a children’s department, Maps & Atlases, and Technical Books. There were two floors below, first the Complete Penguin Bookshop on Lower Ground One and then Bargains, Remainders & Records on Lower Ground Two.
When Susan looked away from the board, Merlin and Vivien were sliding down the banister, already going faster than she could take the steps, so she followed suit. But she had to hold the cricket bag across her body, which made it much harder to balance, and she almost fell twice as she wobbled down to the next floor and sprang off the end to land with a stagger in a large, extremely orange room, narrowly avoiding a collision with an oversized cutout penguin o
f the bird variety, which was holding a sign proclaiming “The Complete Penguin Bookshop Stocks All Penguins in Print.”
Even though many Penguin books now had pictorial covers, their spines were still mostly orange, and the sheer quantity of books on the shelves here meant few were face out, explaining the extraordinarily dominant color, though there were also a few sections of green-spined mysteries, blue-spined nonfiction, and so on.
This part of the bookshop was busy, too, though the active shoppers were outnumbered by browsers and a few dedicated readers who were obviously intent on reading entire books in the shop. The right-handed bookseller here raised his eyebrows and mouthed something to Vivien that Susan couldn’t catch as they breezed past, towards a door at the rear of the shop marked “Strictly Staff Only.”
“My favorite part of the store,” said Vivien with satisfaction. “Very advanced. Every night we ring the Penguin warehouse in Harmondsworth with a list of the ISBNs of the books sold that day and we get replacement stock within two or three days, instead of the paper order forms and the weeks the other publishers take. Very efficient.”
“Unpacking new releases is the best,” said Merlin. “Particularly when you don’t know what’s been ordered, so it’s a surprise what’s in the box.”
“It is very therapeutic,” agreed Vivien.
Merlin looked at Susan. “That’s one of the other reasons the St. Jacques are booksellers. Or mostly booksellers. Books help us anchor our souls. Or re-anchor them. Particularly for us, the left-handed, given the things we have to do.”
“Writing helps, too,” said Vivien. “Poetry in particular. We are all poets, after a fashion.”
She knocked on the door at the back with her right hand. It opened without apparent human intervention, revealing a long, dimly lit corridor that was half closed off with stacked cardboard book boxes emblazoned with the logos and names of various publishers: Penguin, William Collins, Hodder & Stoughton, Pan Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Victor Gollancz Ltd, and others.
Vivien led them along the corridor to a steel door that had an additional “Strictly Staff Only!” sign. She knocked again. A judas window slid open so an unseen viewer could check who it was, followed a moment later by the sound of a heavy bolt being withdrawn, and the door was swung open by Darren, one of the left-handed bikers who’d been with Una’s response team.