The Reckoning

by Alma Katsu

  The physic had come to the conclusion that, far from being Adepts, the sect was nothing but a bunch of bumbling amateurs . . . until he came to the spell in question, the spell that would free him from his body. He read through the words twice, surprised by the spell’s elegance and simplicity. It was truly clever, and undoubtedly the best work the monks had ever done.

  Now that he had the means to effect the exchange with the peasant boy, the physic began to make plans. It would take place in his chambers and away from Marguerite, he decided; he wanted no witnesses to the transformation, wanted no one to even guess that he had taken over the peasant boy’s form. Transferring his fortune to Adair’s name would be easy because of the rule of the seal: as long as he carried the family seal back with him to the estate, he wouldn’t be challenged for ownership.

  Convincing the boy to come down to the chamber proved tricky, however. Now that his body was impervious to harm, he’d gotten cocky: the physic saw that he’d miscalculated when he’d decided to grant him immortality. He’d bestowed the gift too soon. He’d hoped that being the recipient of such a gift would make the boy loyal to him in gratitude, but instead, he acted above his station. The boy was testing him, forming plans in his head, and the time had come—none too soon—to put a stop to that.

  The physic waited at the foot of the stairs with a rope in hand. “Adair, come to me,” he called as he might call a dog. “I need your assistance.”

  The response was curt and impudent. “Why should I, old man?”

  But the physic was prepared. “I have something I must share with you. I want to show you where I keep the seal to my kingdom. If something should happen to me, I want you to have it.” The boy knew the rule of the seal from his time at the estate. The boy’s greed could be counted on: it had already proven to be his weakness. The peasant wasn’t clever: he might see one step ahead but not two or three, and when treasure or property was dangled before his eyes, all intelligence went out of his pretty head and he’d snap at it, like a chop on a string held out of reach.

  At the sound of the boy trotting down the steps, the physic readied the rope, and as soon as he came around a corner, the physic caught his wrist and reeled him in. The boy didn’t make it easy; he struggled as the physic completed the steps, anointing them both with the required oils while uttering the necessary words. He dug his hands into the peasant boy’s shoulders and held on for all he was worth, unsure of what would happen next.

  It was the single most extraordinary sensation he would ever experience. He felt as though he’d fallen into a million grains of dust, and a breeze cut through his essence and lifted him, carrying him on the air. At the same time, he felt—more than that, he knew—that the boy was experiencing the same thing, but through a prism of terror, because it was unexpected. They passed through each other—dust motes on the wind, fanning, spreading, thinning—and the physic became a part of the boy’s consciousness, and the boy part of his. In that instant he learned all of the boy’s life: his miserable father, the camaraderie of his brothers, his shame at being raped, and his terror of the physic’s furies. To the physic’s embarrassment, he knew the boy was being given every crumb and tidbit of his life, too, experiencing every failure and every slight. He knew everything the physic knew, down to each spell and recipe. He could be as powerful as the physic without the intelligence or temperament to control such power. As far as the physic was concerned, that sealed the boy’s fate; even with the boy trapped in an old man’s body, there was no way he could be allowed to live.

  The transference passed and the physic, keeping his wits, overpowered his adversary at once, manacling him to the wall. How strange to wrestle his former self to the ground, to fit the handcuffs to his ancient, bony wrists. Bewilderment stared back at him from that familiar face—and what an ugly face it was! He saw how his former self truly looked now as it cringed before him. His former face was a thick map of wrinkles. His eyes had narrowed to slits. Age spots dotted the waxy surface of his skin, and white hairs sprouted from the least appropriate places. His nails had become as yellow as the claws of an old dog. But the expression on his face had changed, and this was for certain: it was the peasant boy’s eyes staring back at him in disbelief.

  “What has happened?” his former self whispered.

  “You are now in my place, and I in yours.” It delighted him to hear that he spoke with the boy’s voice. Everything about the boy’s body pleased him. As good as he’d felt when he first experienced the immortality spell in St. Petersburg, he felt a hundred times better now. Naturally, this was due to the fact that the boy was younger and spry, but having been a field hand, he was more robust, too. He felt strong as a titan, as though he could knock down the stone walls of the keep with the push of a hand. He was sure that he could run for hours and never tire, that he’d never need sleep again. The tug of sex was stronger, too, and he saw how frustrated the boy must’ve been, forced to satisfy an old man’s needs and make do with an ugly servant girl when he wanted to swive every woman in the village.

  His former self lifted his chained hands, imploring. “What do you plan to do with me?”

  “For now, I plan to keep you here. Go ahead and scream all you want. You know Marguerite won’t hear you.” He double-checked the locks on the manacles before climbing out of the cellar, and standing on the upper floor as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, his gaze fell upon Marguerite’s sleeping form. His lust was such that it needed immediate appeasement, and the housekeeper would do.

  In the morning, he told her that the old physic had decided to leave the count’s service and that she should leave, too. But she saw that the shelves and desktop still held the physic’s books and supplies and seemed not to believe him, so he pressed a small purse of gold in her hand and threw her out, ordering her to return to the village. Once she was gone, he brought his captive up from the cellar with his hands still bound, though it seemed an unnecessary precaution, for the man’s expression was vacant and he probably was near madness. The physic saddled the horses and then went back for his prisoner.

  By chance, his eye fell on the books of alchemical secrets that stood on the table, his Venetian manuscript and the old monks’ book of spells, and he decided quite suddenly to take them with him. Of all the things in the keep, the books were the only ones that were irreplaceable, and even though he intended to return, he could easily imagine the risks in leaving them behind. There was a chance that Marguerite might come back, perhaps even bringing the count’s men with her. So he wrapped the books in a cloth and tied the package across his back, then dragged his captive outside behind him.

  They rode for over an hour to the west, then followed trails up the foothills of the great mountain range. He knew the mountains were like honeycombs seeded with caverns and chambers, so many that no one person knew of them all. He’d heard that Gypsies or brigands sometimes used the caves to hide from pursuit, knowing they would be safe there, as the villagers believed ghosts and demons took up residence in their deep recesses and wouldn’t go near them if they could help it. He’d once run across a cavern that was very deep, like a tunnel falling straight down. He’d thrown a rock into it, and never heard the rock hit bottom. This cave was their destination.

  He brought his captive to the edge of the drop. “Take a good look; this is to be your new home, and I think it will be your home for a very long time. For you see, the body you inhabit is immortal, just like the one you’ve given me, so even though you’ll be at the bottom of this pit, bones broken from the fall, you won’t die. Your bones will knit and heal. And even though you’ll not have food or drink, you’ll neither starve nor perish of thirst. No, you’ll live on in this hole in the earth for eternity if no one finds you and pulls you out, and I very much doubt that will happen. So take your last glimpse of sunlight, and say good-bye to all that you know.” Before his prisoner could utter a word, to either beg for mercy or damn him to hell, Adair pushed him over the edge and watched his former self crumple a
nd fall from view. The boy cried very little, the weak old voice dying away quickly, and just as before, there was no report of an impact at the bottom of his fall or anything that could be seen in the darkness. Satisfied, the physic climbed on his horse, set the other one free, and rode back to the keep.

  To think back on it now, Adair was struck by the irony that Lanore had chosen to bottle him up in nearly the same way that he’d imprisoned the peasant boy. It had to be a coincidence, he thought, for he’d told no one his true story, not one person in his hundreds of years of existence. It sent a shiver through him to recall his time in that dark, narrow space, and how he’d nearly gone mad. . . . But to think of the peasant boy enduring this torture for three times as long! He had to have lost his mind, for sure. Or, if God had taken pity on him, he might be in a state of suspension, slumbering like a bear in winter, but in his case slumbering without interruption. Sleeping for eternity.

  On returning from his journey to the cave, Adair had learned how little the villagers cared for his former self, for the keep had been ransacked and burned as completely as a stone building can be. Marguerite must’ve communicated to the villagers that the hated old physic was gone, and so they came to take their fury out on his possessions. They despised and feared him so much that they hadn’t stolen anything from the keep but let it all burn. The physic stepped through the smoldering heaps of still-hot ash, overturned furniture now broken into bits, all his supplies either burned or tossed and trampled. He went into the cellar to find that his bed had been made into a pyre. There was nothing to be done but unearth the seal and the last of his money from its hiding place behind a stone in the wall before bidding adieu to his life as a physic and venturing out in search of his new life as Adair.

  EIGHTEEN

  BARCELONA

  Before I left Casablanca, Savva gave me a gift: a list of Adair’s other companions. “There may be others I don’t know about, ones that came long before me, but not many, I’d wager.” He furrowed his brow as he looked over the names a second time. He’d put them in a rough chronological order. A few were known to me—Alejandro, Tilde, Dona, for instance, and Jude—but most were not.

  “So many,” I murmured, glancing down the list. Though I’d learned from Dona that there were more like us in the world, it had never occurred to me to seek out any of them—except for Savva, of course. I thought they would all be mean and deceitful like Tilde and Dona; even Savva could be trying at times. My world had shrunk over the years—when you need to keep the facts of your life a secret, it’s easier to withdraw from society than to keep track of the lies you must tell—but I was never tempted to seek their company.

  Of the dozen people on the list, Savva knew the whereabouts of only three. He pointed to the name Cristobal Ramirez, an alias that was immediately followed by Alejandro Pinheiro in parentheses. “I would talk to him first: he’s probably in touch with a few of the others. You could track down all of them that way, and now that Adair is free, there might be some benefit to doing so.”

  It seemed that Alejandro, the deferential, watchful man I had known in Adair’s household, was now Cristobal Ramirez, a photographer with an address on the Ciutat Vella, which a guidebook said was in a fashionable part of the city. It wasn’t surprising that Alejandro had taken up photography: he’d always been observant, and the occupation sounded like a good fit for him. There was a degree of exploitation involved, a willingness to stare hard and not look away, to use what you see through the lens. Among Adair’s minions, Alejandro’s job had always been informant, the one who quietly took in everything and reported it back to Adair, and the recollection of his hidden cold-bloodedness sent a chill down my spine.

  He had been one of the sadder members of our group. He’d been born into a wealthy Jewish household in Toledo, Spain, at an unfortunate time, at the height of the Inquisition. Imprisoned and tortured, he implicated his sister for witchcraft to secure his own release, and was paying for that act of betrayal for eternity. He hated himself. He renounced his religion, even pretending for a time to be a defrocked priest and a Papist sympathizer. His battered psyche didn’t stand a chance against his tormentors—not the inquisitors, not Adair.

  The address for Alejandro’s studio led to a row of low buildings along a well-kept street, with stores and a chic bar on the ground level designed to appeal to fetishists and sex fiends. The door I was looking for was next to the bar and labeled “Cristobal Ramirez Photography.” Behind the door were stairs leading to another door at the top, which opened into a small waiting area with high white walls and a white counter without a receptionist behind the desk. The room functioned as a gallery and displayed nothing but oversize photographs of men: some full-body portraits, some close-ups. The subjects were young, old, handsome, quirky; each image captured some secret truth about the individual, revealing almost to the point of being exploitive.

  These photographs were so strong that it was nearly impossible to look away, and as I stepped from one image to the next, I marveled at Alejandro’s mastery of the ability to look unerringly into people’s souls, a skill that had no doubt taken lifetimes to attain. Just then a door opened behind me, hushed, followed by the soft padding of feet. “Can I help you?” asked a familiar voice.

  I turned, smiling despite my anxiety about seeing him again. “Alejandro!”

  He had changed so much that I wouldn’t have recognized him on the street. The locks that I remembered as glorious and glossy black were gone and his head was shaved bald, leaving a blue-black cast to the scalp where his hair was beginning to reassert itself. He wore tiny round spectacles with yellow lenses over his beautiful deep-brown eyes, an odd affectation. The priestly black cassock was gone, of course, replaced by twenty-first-century equivalents: a black cashmere sweater and loose gray pants. A loop of prayer beads circled one wrist.

  “Good God! It really is you—Lanny!” I took my cues from him then: he held open his arms so we hugged—but not too warmly—and he placed an air kiss on each of my cheeks. “I was just thinking of you the other day and then, out of the blue, I hear from Savva, telling me you want to pay me a visit. A remarkable coincidence, wouldn’t you say? It is as though fate were trying to tell me something.”

  He led the way into his studio. We sat at the far end from where he did his shoots, the back wall festooned with long, seamless backdrops hoisted on heavy rolls overhead. Otherwise the space was empty. I took a seat at a café table tucked against a wall while Alejandro fiddled with an espresso machine.

  “I should’ve tried to contact you earlier. I’m sorry it’s been so long.” Why hadn’t I sought him out? I wondered. He hadn’t been so terrible to me in Boston, had he? In that den of wolves, he had been the only one to treat me kindly, aside from Uzra. He’d taken care of me when I’d fallen afoul of Adair. True, he’d had a part in bringing me to Adair in the first place and sometimes wheedled and cajoled me into doing Adair’s bidding, but I wanted to believe that had been beyond his control, that all those things had been done under duress. In his heart, I knew the Spaniard was gentle and kind. And I wanted to trust him. I needed him.

  “How have you been?” I asked. “You seem to be doing well.”

  “Do I?” He peered at me playfully over the top of his eyeglasses. “The photography, you mean? We must have our hobbies to keep us occupied, don’t you find? And what about you? What do you do to keep busy these days?”

  “Not much of anything, if I’m being honest,” I reported drily.

  Alejandro continued. “I already know that you are no longer with Jonathan. Savva told me some time ago, and I must say it came as a complete surprise. It didn’t seem as though you two could live apart from one another.” A lie told out of kindness. “So tell me that you and Jonathan are together again. That would make me happy.”

  I tried not to flinch, though the question hurt terribly. “Jonathan is gone. He wanted to be released, so I . . . helped him.”

  Alejandro regarded me with cool curiosity, seeing
a side to me that he hadn’t known existed. “I never would have thought you capable of such an act. Even Adair would consider it very carefully before taking the life of one of his companions, you know.”

  “In my case, it was completely out of compassion.”

  “But to kill a man you loved! It is a very difficult kind of compassion, no? How many people could do such a thing to their lovers? One in a hundred thousand, a million?” The way he said this, there was no question that he thought there was something wrong with me. Again Alejandro regarded me stiffly. “What a terrible thing to have on your conscience. I’m sorry, my dear, for your loss.”

  My skin crawled uncomfortably; I had to change the subject. “Tell me about the others—are you in contact with any of them? Do you talk to Dona or Tilde?”

  “Yes, I’ve been in touch with them, but . . . why do you ask? Do you really care to hear how they are? You didn’t seem to like either of them before.”

  “It’s hard to like someone who doesn’t like you,” I replied.

  “That’s true.” He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “Yes, I know where they both are. We became close after you left. We had no choice: we had to pull together. That useless lawyer told us that Adair’s money had been transferred to Jonathan, but you all had disappeared, you, Jonathan, Adair. None of you came back. We were left penniless. Shall I tell you what we went through—selling possessions, depending on the mercy of those heartless Bostonians—when it became clear that Adair wasn’t going to return?”

  There was a tremor of fear and anger in his voice for everything that had happened back then, even now, two hundred years later. “It sounds as though you had a terrible time of it.”