The Master of Heathcrest Hall

by Galen Beckett

  “Yes, I suppose so, but I certainly couldn’t have done it without you. You taught me everything, and for that I owe you.”

  Perren suddenly sat up straight, blinking behind his spectacles. “You owe me?”

  Eldyn nodded. “More than I can express. I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to repay you for all that you’ve done for me, but I’ll try my best to find a way. Anything I can do for you, I will. Perhaps refilling these will be a good start.”

  He picked up their cups to take them to the bar, but Perren laid a hand on his arm, stopping him.

  “Yes,” Perren said, his voice going low. “You do owe me.”

  Eldyn smiled. “No need to worry. As I said, anything you want. Which means this round is on—”

  His words were cut short as Perren leaned across the table, still gripping his arm, and kissed him.

  The empty cups clattered to the table, and Eldyn felt a flicker of light passing between him and Perren, as always happened when two illusionists kissed. In that instant he understood why Perren had been so generous with his time in teaching him to make impressions. How had he not realized it before? He should have seen it months ago. Only he had been so caught up in being a student that he had failed to study the teacher.

  Gently, but with force enough that there could be no doubt that it was intentional, Eldyn pushed Perren’s hand from his arm. Knocked off balance, Perren fell back onto the bench. He fumbled with his spectacles, straightening them on his face. Behind the lenses, his eyes were bright with pain and confusion.

  “But I thought … you said that you owed me, that you’d do anything that I wanted.”

  Eldyn sighed, knowing he was in part to blame for what had happened. “I do owe you, Perren. And I would do anything to repay you—anything that a good friend would do.”

  “A friend?” Perren shook his head. “Is it because of how I look? I know you’re handsomer than me, Eldyn. But you’re more handsome than everyone. And I thought that, once you saw all that I could give you, you would have to give me something in kind.”

  Eldyn felt a pang in his chest. Even if he was looking for a companion of that sort, Perren would never have caught his eye. It wasn’t just that he was pasty and dressed poorly; rather, it was his self-consciousness and his awkward attempts at conversation that kept him from being noteworthy in that regard. Besides, Eldyn wasn’t looking for such a companion. How could he give his light to another man knowing that so much of it had been given to him by Dercy?

  He couldn’t.

  “It’s not how you look, Perren,” he said, his throat tight. “It’s because of me. I’m not … that is, I can’t give that to another right now.”

  “Oh, I see now,” Perren said, looking up. His round face, usually so soft, suddenly had a hardness to it, and his eyes had narrowed behind his crooked spectacles. “You can prevail upon another to teach you everything he knows. You can use him to get what you want, and you can take and take from him. But you can’t be bothered to give one whit back, can you?”

  The anger in these words astonished Eldyn. He had never heard Perren speak with such vehemence.

  “That’s not true, Perren,” he said, unable to keep the shock from his voice. “I do want to give something back to you. I want to repay you for what you’ve done.”

  “Don’t bother,” Perren snapped, rising to his feet. He tugged on his rumpled coat, though this only made it sit more unevenly on his round shoulders. “I don’t need your money. I can make plenty on my own. And don’t think you can use my contacts at The Swift Arrow to sell your impressions. I’ll tell them you can’t be trusted to offer exclusive rights. After all, you played me false, so why wouldn’t you sell your impressions to another broadsheet behind their backs?”

  Eldyn was so shocked by these statements that at first he was struck speechless. By the time he found his voice, and called out to Perren, the other young man was already at the tavern door. Then he was gone.

  “What was that all about, Eldyn?”

  He turned to see Riethe before him. The big illusionist had a quizzical look on his face.

  Eldyn drew a breath—then let it go. What use was there in explaining what had happened? It was done, and it could not be undone.

  “It was nothing,” he said.

  “Well, come on, then. We haven’t even spent half of the coin Madame Richelour gave us.”

  “Wait just a moment,” Eldyn said. He turned back and took up the broadsheet from the table where Perren had left it and tucked it inside his coat. “There, I’m ready.”

  “You’d better be,” Riethe said with a grin.

  And he hooked his arm around Eldyn’s, hauling him back across the tavern to the other illusionists.

  IVY TOUCHED the Wyrdwood box, and the tendrils of wood on its lid uncoiled like a nest of tiny brown serpents wriggling away from one another. So often had she done this that she hardly thought anything of it, or stopped to consider how remarkable it was. Instead, she lifted the lid of the box and took out a book bound in black leather.

  Fondly, she brushed a hand across the cover of the book. Her father had used its pages to keep a journal, and in it he had written down various entries regarding his magickal research and the practices of the occult order to which he belonged. Such was the nature of the enchantment he had placed upon the journal that an entry appeared upon its pages only when certain celestial objects were arranged in the heavens as they had been at the time when her father penned the words; otherwise, the pages of the journal appeared blank.

  It was very much in keeping with her father’s character to make a mystery of it all. He had always liked to give her clever little ciphers and riddles when she was a girl, and she had liked equally to solve them. In this case, though, the purpose of the puzzle had been more than mere amusement. Rather, Mr. Lockwell had used the enchantment and the Wyrdwood box as safeguards to keep the thoughts and musings in the journal secret from the other magicians in the Vigilant Order of the Silver Eye.

  It was well that he had done so. As she had learned from some of her father’s later entries in the journal, one of his compatriots, Mr. Gambrel, had betrayed the order and stolen the key to the magickal door Tyberion in hopes of unlocking dread powers beyond. Ivy could only assume he had been helped in the matter by Mr. Bennick, who had previously demonstrated his own duplicitous nature.

  Years ago, Mr. Bennick and Ivy’s father, Mr. Lockwell, had both belonged to the Vigilant Order of the Silver Eye. Only then, driven by a desire for power, some of the magicians formulated a plan to seize the eponymous artifact which the order had been established to protect. At the last, Mr. Lockwell managed to cast a spell to shut the house on Durrow Street and safeguard the Eye of Ran-Yahgren. But so much of himself was expended in working the enchantment that his mind was shattered, and his sanity lost.

  That had occurred more than ten years ago. Then, just last year, magicians from the Vigilant Order of the Silver Eye once again sought to gain the artifact. Together, Ivy and Mr. Rafferdy had looked for a way to gain entry to the house, so they could renew the binding on the Eye before the magicians might seize it. Only, as it turned out, that had been Mr. Bennick’s plan all along. Ivy’s cousin Mr. Wyble unwittingly revealed how it was due to Mr. Bennick’s machinations that Ivy and Mr. Rafferdy had been introduced to each other. What was more, it was Mr. Bennick who had helped Ivy to solve her father’s riddles, and who had induced Mr. Rafferdy to learn magick. The former magician had been manipulating them both from the very start.

  As if all this was not damning enough, Mr. Bennick had confessed that day at Durrow Street. He had admitted to using Ivy and Rafferdy as a means to open the door to the house on Durrow Street. Which meant that Mr. Quent’s suspicions, expressed in a letter to Ivy, could only be correct—it was Mr. Bennick who had tried to take the Eye ten years ago. And he was helping the other magicians to make another attempt.

  Why he was doing it, Mr. Bennick did not say that day, for Ivy had not given
him the chance. But what other reason could there have been? He had lost his magickal ability, presumably when it was taken from him by the other magicians of the order after he failed to gain the Eye the first time. Obviously he had hoped he could win back their favor—and the return of his magickal powers—by helping them gain entry to the house.

  Fortunately, due to Mr. Rafferdy’s magick, and a bit of ingenuity (and witchcraft) on Ivy’s part, the magicians were thwarted, and the binding on the Eye was renewed. At present it remained locked in her father’s hidden study two floors above her, while Mr. Bennick had fled to Torland and had not been heard from since.

  As for Mr. Gambrel—or Lord Crayford, as he had been more recently known—Ivy had seen to it he could cause no more mischief. After he passed through the door Tyberion to the ancient way station on the moon of the same name, she had locked it behind him and removed the key. Shortly after, she had commanded the door to be plastered over. Because Mr. Rafferdy had ruined the only other working gate that led from the way station on Tyberion, Mr. Gambrel was trapped in that distant and desolate place—forever, she supposed, if he even still lived. Sometimes, as she passed through the gallery on the second floor of the house, she would go to the southern wall and lay an ear against the smooth, painted plaster.

  But she never heard anything save for the sound of her own breath.

  Now, in the library on the first floor of the house, Ivy opened her father’s journal on the reading table before her, and just as she had every lumenal and umbral since first discovering the journal’s secret, she carefully turned its pages one by one.

  All of them were blank.

  Ivy sighed and shut the journal again. Though she had continued her habit of checking the book once each day and night, it had been many months since she had found an entry on one of its pages. The last time had been the night of the party for her sisters, presenting them to society. Just before the party, Ivy had discovered the entry in which her father wrote how it was Gambrel who had stolen the key to Tyberion, and that he must never be allowed to pass through the door.

  Since then, though Ivy diligently maintained her practice of examining the journal, she had never found any more of Mr. Lockwell’s distinctive, spindly script. She supposed it was possible that her father had never written anything else after that last entry. Yet, as the lengths of the umbrals and lumenals became increasingly unpredictable, Ivy began to suspect there was a different reason why she had not discovered anything more.

  It was the nature of the journal’s magick that an entry appeared only when particular stars and planets were aligned as they were when her father had penned it. Now the movements of the celestial spheres had been drastically altered by the appearance of the red planet, Cerephus. As a result, the heavens could never be arranged as they had been when her father had filled the journal’s pages some ten years ago.

  Which meant that the trick that had once protected the book’s secrets now made it impossible that they would ever appear again.

  Ivy placed the journal back in the Wyrdwood box, nestling it carefully alongside two small pieces of wood. One was carved like a faceted gem, the other in the shape of a leaf: the keys to the doors Tyberion and Arantus.

  “If only I knew the key to unlock your words from these pages, Father,” she said softly. “There has to be a way to undo the enchantment you placed on the journal.”

  Discovering it, though, was another matter. On one of the rare occasions when Mr. Rafferdy had been able to take time from his duties in Assembly to pay Ivy a visit, she had shown him the journal. He had examined the book for a long while, from time to time speaking words of magick over it, but in the end he had been confounded.

  “It’s not any usual incantation of concealment that your father bound this with,” Mr. Rafferdy had said, handing the journal back to her. “Rather, I would say it was something very unusual and clever. Unfortunately, if we do not know what spell was used, there is no way to reverse it.”

  As Ivy knew few other magicians, that was that.

  She shut the lid of the Wyrdwood box, and the tendrils of wood braided themselves together, locking it again. As they did, a feeling of heaviness came over her.

  Not that this was unexpected; Dr. Lawrent had warned her that she would likely experience some degree of melancholia over these next days as she continued her recovery. Only it was not just her recent ordeal—or her dread of telling Mr. Quent about it when he returned from the country—that had made her spirits so low.

  The lumenal prior, she had gone to the Madderly-Stoneworth Hostel for the Deranged to visit her father, as she did every quarter month. The wardens at Madstone’s had continued to treat her father’s illness using an electrical condenser. Every few days, a metal band was placed upon his forehead and attached to the device to apply a series of mild electrical shocks in hopes of stimulating the functioning of his brain.

  At first Ivy had been horrified to learn what was being done to her father. However, soon after the treatment was begun, her father’s condition had started to improve. He was calmer, his eyes were clearer, and he could more ably feed and dress himself. What was more, for the first time since Mr. Wyble had committed him to Madstone’s, her father had begun to speak. Of course it was only a few words, or more rarely an entire sentence, but all the same this had given Ivy great hope.

  Then, as the months passed, that hope began to diminish. On her visits to the hostel, Mr. Lockwell continued to speak intelligible words with regularity, and sometimes his eyes seemed to focus on her, as if he recognized her, but never anything more.

  For so long, Ivy had sought a way to return her father to his senses. She had reasoned that if it was magick that caused his illness, then it was magick that would cure it. But women could not work magick, no matter how much they wanted to, and she had never found a magician who could help him. Then the wardens at Madstone’s began the treatments, and she had started to let herself believe that it was another sort of power—the forces of electricity and science—which would restore her father’s mind.

  Only months of the treatments had not cured him, and now Ivy doubted they ever would. She had read of experiments in which electrical charges were applied to the limbs of dead creatures, and their muscles were made to flex and move as if alive. But they weren’t alive, not really. And while the electrical treatments caused her father to speak and to look at her with what seemed awareness, Ivy was convinced now that these were merely thoughtless reflexes—trace impulses of what had once resided within him, jolted into being by the shocks. When he uttered words, Mr. Lockwell was no more speaking to her than the cadaver of a frog, connected to wires, was jumping to catch a fly when it twitched on a laboratory table.

  Just as no electrical charge could bring life to a dead creature, it could not restore to her father the thing that was missing from him—that peculiar, rational essence that had once made him himself. In the end, Mr. Lockwell’s mind no more resided in his body than it did in the journal in the Wyrdwood box. Both might offer fond echoes of the man he had once been. But they were neither of them him.

  Ivy sighed and returned the Wyrdwood box to the drawer in the writing table. She rose, thinking she might go outside. Dr. Lawrent had said it was acceptable for her to venture on brief walks; and being among the small chestnuts and hawthorns in the garden always lifted her spirits.

  As she started from the library, the old rosewood clock on the mantel let out a chime. Ivy paused to look at the clock. It was a beautiful device, its glossy wood inlaid with darker pieces shaped like moons and planets. The clock had three large faces, and on the rightmost of these a black disk moved a fraction so that it now covered exactly half of the gold disk below.

  Ivy glanced out the library window and inferred from the short length of the shadows that the sun was directly overhead. The timetables in the almanac were no longer any use in predicting the lengths of lumenals and umbrals. Yet somehow, despite the disruption in the heavens, her father’s old clock alw
ays predicted the start and end of each lumenal, and the timing of the four farthings of the day, with infallible precision.

  By what inner workings this was achieved, Ivy could not say. All the same, somehow the clock was able to account for the changes Cerephus had wrought on the workings of the celestial spheres. It was a feat the members of the Royal Society of Astrographers had yet to duplicate themselves.

  Despite her low spirits, Ivy could not help a smile as the clock let out a final chime, marking the start of the third farthing of the day.

  Suddenly another chime seemed to sound in her ears, though this one was not emitted by the rosewood clock. Instead, it was the tone of a realization. Just like the clock’s unknown maker, who had designed its workings to account for the effects of Cerephus, Ivy’s father had been aware of the crimson planet long before it appeared in the sky. Which meant he had to have known that, one day, the movements of the heavens would become severely disrupted by the planet’s approach.

  So then why had he based the journal’s enchantment on the workings of the celestial spheres?

  LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, Ivy retreated back into the coolness of the house. It had been too hot for a walk in the garden. Everything withered in the white light, and the chestnuts and hawthorns had been able to do little to thwart the rays of the sun that beat down from overhead.

  Despite the heat of the lumenal, it was not overly warm in the house. Whether it was due to the peculiar nature of the stones from which the house had been built—some of which she knew to have magickal properties—or if it was simply that the walls were so thick, Ivy did not know. All the same, the house always seemed to retain some of the coolness of night, even on the longest days.

  Feeling less torpid now that she was indoors, Ivy passed through the large front hall to the parlor where she and her sisters liked to sit on warm afternoons. A wisteria grew over the north-facing window, and the room was filled with a gentle green light.

  As Ivy entered, a wooden eye that was set into the mantelpiece above the fireplace blinked open. It rolled around to gaze at her for a moment, then the lid closed with a faint click. Neither of her sisters seemed to take notice of this activity. They were all of them well used to the arcane eyes which kept watch throughout their father’s house.