“About a day,” she said. “It’s Thursday.”
He felt the electric jolt of the lateness of the hour. “Thursday, God, we’re losing time. Where is everyone—I thought I saw…” He wasn’t sure how pathetic this would sound. “I could swear I saw my mother.”
Astrid nodded brightly. “Yes! She’s still here. Come on, we’re having a meeting, and we were hoping you’d be awake and able to join.” She gestured for him to follow, and as they stepped between the two trees from which she’d come, the scene changed.
They were walking down a corridor of marble tile with heavy wood-paneled walls. Alex looked back and saw that he’d just come through a simple wooden doorway, and beyond it he could still see the trees and the cot. “Was the room an illusion, like a hologram?”
“What?” Astrid stopped next to a painting on the wall, a portrait of a woman with a feathered hat and a blue blouse. Underneath it a plaque read m. brelaz, portugal.
“I mean it was a clearing in an orchard. No walls and no ceiling, and now we’re in a building,” Alex said, working out how he’d try to build such a thing. “So was it, like, a room with holographic walls, maybe a movie screen on the ceiling?”
“Maybe the hallway is the illusion,” Astrid said mysteriously as they walked farther, passing numerous doors, each wooden, each with a silver plate at the center that marked them with what Alex assumed to be numbers, probably in the Hexen language. Astrid stopped finally at a door and turned back. “I’m just teasing you,” she said, opening the door. “It’s all practical and physical, but there’s magic in the way it’s all connected.”
They stepped into an enormous den that reminded Alex of a ski lodge, with huge windows looking out on snowy mountains, large wooden chandeliers, and a massive fireplace. A round table sat on the stone tiles of the room, and Alex saw the white-haired woman he had met earlier sitting at one of a number of high-backed chairs. In front of her was a plate of fruit, and next to her was a large wheel with an enormous spool of thread perched on top—a spinning wheel.
Alex’s mother, Amanda, was standing at the table sliding her hand over a leather parchment, flicking her fingers the way you might flick the screen on an iPhone. “Look at that, he sleeps late even in the most hidden space in the world.”
“Mom.” Alex smiled at the sight of his mother, and ran and embraced her, and then pulled back and said, “Wait—the way it’s connected?”
Amanda turned to Astrid. “You were explaining the layout of Hexen?”
“I was trying,” Astrid said.
Amanda chewed her lip and turned back to Alex. “You want the spiritual answer or the practical one?”
“Would I understand the spiritual answer?”
“Well, it’s more true, but here’s the practical one,” Alex’s mom said. “The headquarters of Hexen are distributed throughout the world and stitched together through concentrated magical couplings.”
“Is there…a map?”
Mother Laura, the woman who had been there when Alex was writhing with pain, was jotting something in a notebook and lifted her pencil. “Since you ask, there is a map, but it’s complicated, and we’re a little behind in updating it.”
“Wasn’t the committee…,” Amanda started to ask.
“Oh, they forgot the Pentagon.” Laura waved a hand dismissively.
“That’s a broom closet in the 1940s,” Amanda scoffed.
“It anchors the whole northern edge,” Laura protested. “The map makes no sense without it. It has to be recast entirely.”
“I’ll pass on the map,” Alex said. “I’m sorry—I’m having a hard time understanding any of this. I didn’t even know there was a Hexen until Astrid showed up to help us with Claire. I didn’t know my mother was a part of it.” He looked at his mother. “Or—is a part of it. Are you still in this?”
“Sometimes.” Amanda bobbed her head. “I wasn’t born into it, though; I was recruited as a child in New York. But allow me to introduce Mother Laura, who currently leads the organization.”
Laura nodded to Alex. The white-haired woman was wearing a lavender blouse and a cameo like the one that Astrid carried. “Your mother is leaving out that when she came to us she was already one of the most gifted adepts we’d ever seen. I trust you’re doing better?”
Alex nodded. “Are there any others?”
“There are hundreds,” Laura responded. “All over the world, and just through that door.”
“We were founded by Mad Meg,” Astrid said.
“Mad Meg?”
“You know the story of Gretel, like in Hansel and Gretel? Gretel was the one who didn’t give up when she faced the witch. She was the one who figured out how to defeat the witch and finally did the work of kicking her into the furnace. Gretel, the one who decided to use everything she’d learned and form a house of witches who would fight for good. That childhood story, that wasn’t the end of it, you know. When she was an adult she was the one to raise an army of women in Germany to open the gates of hell and win back her loved ones. She had a different name at that time—Mad Gretel. Mad Meg, some called her.”
Alex thought of Astrid’s name. “You’re Astrid Gretelian. So you’re related to Gretel?”
“Yes, my family are direct descendants of Mad Meg, the first Gretel.” She smiled, sipping her tea. “Somewhere back there, anyway.”
“Astrid’s one of those born into Hexen,” Amanda said. “Powerful adeptness just flows right down her bloodline.”
“Wait,” Alex said. “When you were here last month, you said you knew I was in trouble because you were meditating with another witch and she called your attention to the danger.”
“That’s right,” his mom answered.
“So you literally could be having a…session with a protégé from anywhere in the world.”
“Right!” Amanda said. “That’s why it’s not so bad living in the middle of nowhere.”
Alex became aware of Astrid smiling next to him and he pointed to her. “And you’re the protégé.” Astrid simply waved.
Alex shook his head. “Oh, come on, Mom! Seriously? You set me up? With a witch?”
“No, Alex,” Amanda said. “It’s not a setup. There was no better person to send to work with you. And only you merited a partner from the Orchard.”
Alex still wasn’t used to the idea that his mom was not just a witch but part of a community, an active part the way his father had been active with the Polidorium. As Alex considered this, he felt once more the mix of anger and betrayal and pride that he’d felt when he first saw pictures of his father fighting vampires before Alex was born. Anger and betrayal because both Amanda and Charles had insisted while Alex was growing up that there were no such things as vampires, werewolves, witches, or anything of that nature. But, in fact, Talia sunt, there are such things. They had decided to protect him by keeping the truth from him, even as Amanda allowed Charles to train Alex in every skill he would need when the time came to join the war.
That whole jumble of emotion, the anger and betrayal and pride, mixed in a kind of jagged, giddy excitement now. He was too happy to see her to be angry, too proud to be part of them to feel betrayed.
“Only me…because of my power, the static thing I have?”
“Give me some credit, Alex,” Amanda said. “I was also calling in a favor for my son, because the Polidorium was about to go up against Claire Clairmont.”
“You were…worried about me?”
Amanda scoffed. “Oh, come on. Of course I was worried. Just last month I almost forced you to come home. Yes. I was worried.”
“What about Dad…does he know about this whole thing?”
“He knows I’m here, and he knows I’m helping you.”
“He really is serious about staying out,” Alex said. “So you coming here didn’t merit him strapping on the old Polibow?”
“He never had a Polibow, but he’s not strapping anything on as long as we have children at home. That’s the deal.”
Alex was struck by the fact that his father might not have wanted to retire; this had never occurred to him. “What about you?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Well.” Alex looked around at the room. “I mean, the décor is different, but don’t you think it kind of seems the same?”
“It’s not,” Amanda said. “I promise.”
“Shall we get started?” Mother Laura cleared her throat and bade Alex and Astrid sit.
“Lights,” said Laura, and the windows darkened and lights dimmed as she picked up one of the pieces of parti-colored fruit. She turned to her spinning wheel and stabbed the fruit onto a spike above the wheel, and he heard wooden pedals begin to move at her feet.
For a moment the fruit dripped as the wheel spun, and then a line of thread shot through the air and began to mound upon itself at the center of the table.
“What’s this?” Alex whispered to Astrid.
“I said earlier that we store our knowledge in the fruit,” Astrid said. “We read the fruit by extracting the juice onto thread from the wheel.”
“Why can’t you just read the fruit?”
“Can you read fruit?” she asked with an arched eyebrow. “It’s easier with the thread.”
“So…what do you do with the thread?” Alex was wondering if Mother Laura was going to knit them a readable sweater.
“Alex, just watch,” Amanda whispered. Then she patted Astrid’s knee as if she felt sorry for her.
The thread stacked, and flowed, and soon formed into an image about three feet high. Washed-out color came into the image, spotted with fluid and bits of wool. It was a three-dimensional model of a woman with curly brown hair, about forty years old. The woman looked like a Russian countess, with a long white coat and white muff.
“Claire Clairmont during her Russia years.” Mother Laura kept pedaling, the thread looping around her, lying in wait. “This is the woman who is currently threatening the world.”
Amanda went on. “Claire came to Hexen in 1827 while she worked in Russia as a governess. She possessed great powers of suggestion and seduction and was trained by the organization to be placed in the Russian court as a spy. But of course she had no intention of continuing with us. What she really wanted was to find Lord Byron, her lover, who by that time was an active vampire with the Scholomance, and reunite her family. Most of all, she wanted Allegra.”
Another image appeared next to Claire’s, coming to about her waist, a little girl with lush blond curls: Allegra Byron.
Laura picked up the story. “Allegra Byron was born in 1817 and was immediately taken in by Lord Byron, her father, who proceeded to deny Claire any access. He was willing to have Allegra in his life, but he was irritated by Claire and found sadistic pleasure in keeping them apart. But Byron soon tired of Allegra and had the little girl placed in a convent in Italy, where she died at the age of five, of typhus.”
Another image grew, a tall and sneering image Alex knew well. “And this is Lord Byron, the vampire you call Icemaker. We think that sometime in the 1830s, Byron and Claire reconciled. These two people, Byron and the little Allegra, are the most important people in Claire’s life.”
Another image grew, a man with a beard in a simple shirt and floppy hat. “This is Pieter Bruegel, the painter.”
Astrid cut in. “I learned in Madrid that Pieter Bruegel was paid to create a painting to commemorate the actual effects of the spell known as the Triumph of Death. The people who hired him were located in a castle of huge black towers. The painting contains clues as to how to stop the curse.”
“Yes,” Mother Laura said. “Blacktowers, that’s a group as old as Hexen.”
Alex’s head was spinning with the idea that the Polidorium, whose roots he always regarded as ancient, was actually quite young compared to some of these older players in the game. “We’ve been calling them the Strangers,” Alex said. “And they’re still active. Updating the painting as they go. Even leading us to the clues in case we missed them.”
A bird-like chirp drew Alex’s glance to a paneled wall opposite the large windows. The wooden slats there spun around slowly and clicked back into place, forming a wall-sized flat panel of gray. The gray panel flickered, and Alex looked through the wall and saw the Polidorium boardroom.
Sangster and Armstrong were in the boardroom looking at them, and on the screen at the end of their table, Alex could see they were again looking at the painting, The Triumph of Death.
“Mother Laura?” Sangster said, standing up. “Thank you for answering. I don’t think we’ve formally met.”
“Well, there’s no time like the present,” Mother Laura replied.
Alex looked at Astrid. “Wait, how did they—” Alex shook his head. “Is this magic, too?”
“It’s Cisco Telepresence.” Laura smiled and looked back at Sangster. That was sophisticated teleconferencing software. So that meant that when they preferred it, Hexen had any kind of tech it wanted in the Orchard. Nice. “You’ve found something?”
“Maybe,” Sangster said. “Alex, how are you feeling?”
“I…I guess I’m glad to be here,” he said.
Now Sangster smiled, genuinely. “Not many people can survive an attack from a vampire as powerful as Byron. It was a close call.”
Alex swallowed and tried to decide what to say. “It shouldn’t have happened. I let him get to me.”
“That’s all the more reason to count your blessings.”
Alex nodded several times, but he was uncomfortable with the attention. Icemaker would kill thousands in the years to come, he was sure of it. Even if they stopped the Triumph of Death. Alex had committed an atrocity by being the vehicle for Byron’s escape. He was caught for a minute in a loop of self-disgust.
“Alex?” Sangster said.
“Sir?”
“Set it aside.”
Alex ran his hand through his hair and nodded again.
“While you were out, we got more from Madrid.” Sangster indicated the image of the painting on the screen. “Remember how the painting was tampered with? There were at least two other places in the painting where colors had been changed. One in the bottom corner—the blue skirts of the lover. And two more—a red cloak made blue around the center, and another cloak made blue in the upper right.”
“So a lot of cloaks altered to be blue,” Alex said.
“Exactly.” Sangster looked at Alex, watching him. He hit a button on the table and said, “I’m sharing an image with you guys.” At once a quarter of the screen filled with another painting, this one a strange, colorful image of countless figures in a medieval courtyard. Alex read the caption underneath. “Netherlandish Proverbs.”
“Same painter as The Triumph of Death: Pieter Bruegel, 1562. But this painting has another name besides Netherlandish Proverbs.”
Alex read the smaller text underneath the name. “The Blue Cloak.” Alex searched the painting. There had to be thirty or forty characters, walking, trading, talking, taking care of animals. It was a busy street scene. “Why is it called The Blue Cloak?”
Amanda, who had taught art history as recently as last year, spoke up from her side of the room. “The painting is a visual collection of famous sayings. For instance there’s a guy petting a chicken, and that stands for ‘being a hen feeler,’ which was another phrase for ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.’”
“There’s your cloak,” Alex said, finding the image of a woman standing behind a man, putting a blue cloak over his head.
“To put the cloak over someone was to deceive them, to pull the wool over their eyes,” said Amanda.
“Okay.” Alex had given up trying to argue that their faith in the riddle-makers might be misplaced. It was all they had for now. “So the alterations the Strangers made to The Triumph of Death lead us to The Blue Cloak. Is this clue telling us something about deception?”
“Well, The Blue Cloak is about deception.” Sangster swiped his hand and brought up The Blu
e Cloak, aka Netherlandish Proverbs on the main screen. “But that’s not the mystery.”
“And there is a mystery?”
“There is indeed. Art historians have identified no fewer than forty different sayings in the painting. Every detail—every animal and every prop means something in this painting. Except that there is one strange item that doesn’t seem to fit. This hoe.” Sangster zoomed the image to the center right area, until an image of a garden hoe without a handle lying on a table came into view.
Alex mused. “What good is a hoe without a handle? Isn’t that what it means?”
“Sure, if you want to guess, but the rest of these are all extremely deliberate. There isn’t any Netherlandish proverb about a hoe without a handle.”
“And there’s more,” Armstrong offered.
“What is it?” Alex asked. “I mean, forty actual sayings and you’re focusing on the non-saying?”
Mother Laura nodded. “What did Byron tell you about the curse?”
Alex searched through what they had learned from Byron before he got Alex’s goat and managed to escape. He closed his eyes, shifting everything back, bringing the problem to the front. “‘Only love can conquer death.’ He said if I were casting the spell he could stop me because he knew who I loved.”
Laura said, “The one the user loves best is the best weapon against him.”
“Well,” Alex said, “Claire loved Byron. And she’s going to get him back, because we just set him free.”
“And of course”—Laura nodded toward the image of the child—“there is another, greater love.”
“When Claire traveled to Russia and secretly joined Hexen,” Astrid said, “she remained convinced that her daughter could be restored to her. She was obsessed with the idea that Byron had maybe even secreted away the little girl.”
“We have letters,” Sangster went on, “from the embalmer to Byron, demanding to be paid. He thought Byron was a complete jackass who wasn’t even willing to come visit his daughter. The body was sent back without Byron even looking at it.”
“So the Triumph is really Claire’s way to raise her daughter from the dead,” Alex said.
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