It has to be pointed out, he used it very sparingly these days. When he first became deranged, you see, he’d tried to spread his newfound powers to the other people in this town. An act of charity, to his mind. Twelve had died as a result. Which was why he now lived where he did, completely on his own. He couldn’t bear to face the world beyond these walls. Guilt gnawed at him, every single day.
He finally peered at me with that unnervingly bright gaze of his.
“I know why you’re here,” he told me. “It’s about Lucas Tollburn, right?”
I looked him straight in the carmine-centered eye.
“Of course. Was it Hanlon who killed him?”
In addition to the red ones, Willets had a powerful inner eye that had a habit of fastening on anything remarkable that happened in the Landing. And he gave a cautious nod.
“I saw him approach Tollburn’s house, but not what happened after that. Circumstantial evidence, then. But this is not a court of law, so I’d suppose that it’ll do.”
I felt bemused. His gaze normally penetrated almost anywhere. Why hadn’t he seen more? But he seemed to understand what was concerning me.
“Ever since I first developed my powers, I’ve been aware of certain things regarding Tollburn. Firstly, he was a far more complexly talented adept than anyone ever suspected. His maternal grandmother was Erin Luce, one of the great dowager-witches of Victorian times, and he learned his magic at her knee. So I suppose that should have been predicted.”
He was right. I waited for him to go on.
“Secondly, for most of his life, he had not one but two Spells of Shielding set in place around him. One around his home, and the other around his actual person.”
“Stopping him from being watched?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
“Which is why you didn’t see the murder.”
Willets looked pensive and troubled.
“Tollburn was a mystery to me. Despite the fact I could not see him, I could sense him sometimes. And often, come nightfall, in places where he ought not be.”
Which was a completely new one to me. There had been no hint of that before. I felt my eyebrows rise.
“Other people’s homes, for instance,” he continued. “While they were asleep.”
But we were talking about a man in his eighties. What exactly was the doctor suggesting?
The pigeon on the rafter rustled its wings and then stopped again. Powder from them floated downward through the gloom, making it sparkle slightly.
“This was recently?” I asked.
He nodded. “Almost up until his death. I could feel him skulking around. But, no…”
He could see what was bothering me.
“Not physically, you understand.”
I didn’t. But I didn’t press him either. Willets took his time about explaining things, and it was usually worth the wait.
“More like his undiluted spirit. He went all over town that way, and stopped in certain places, just watching and listening.”
“But you said the people he visited were asleep.”
His head came up a few inches. “Watching and listening to their dreams, perhaps?”
And altering them to his benefit? A chill ran through me, at that thought. I had heard of some pretty weird power games being played by the Sycamore Hill set. Influence and status were like food and drink up there. But this capped almost everything. What exactly had the man been doing?
“You want to hear my theory?” the doctor asked, breaking across my train of thought. “I think Lucas Tollburn had some form of spell, maybe some kind of magic instrument, that rendered him invisible and let him move around that way. He always was near the top, hierarchy-wise. Maybe he used those powers to maintain his position.”
And we’d always had such a lofty opinion of him. I swore to God, when it came to the dealings of our upper echelons, it was like the court of Caligula sometimes. I struggled to make sense of what I’d just been told.
“So if Hanlon killed him, then he might have gotten hold of the instrument in question.”
Willets pursed his lips. “It’s more than likely.”
“And you’ve no idea what it might be?”
“None. But there’s one person who definitely will know.”
I got that one straightaway.
“Millicent?” The way she’d scrabbled through those desk drawers. “What can you tell me about her?”
“Again, Devries, practically nothing. She has the same two Shielding Spells in place. I’ve no idea what she’s been doing. I can feel something about her, though.”
His face became even unhappier than was usual. He drew in a breath and held it, and then let it out.
“Beneath that outward polish, she is very deeply twisted. There’s a blackness, like a canker, at the center of her soul. Someone hurt her, once upon a time. And all she’s dreamt of, ever since, is hurting someone back. Make sure it isn’t you.”
Cass had sensed pretty much the same, hadn’t she? The second warning on that subject, so I told him I’d bear it in mind.
“And that’s the entire sum of my knowledge on the matter,” Willets finished up. He brought his narrow hands together. “We won’t know how much danger we’re in till we find out what Hanlon stole.”
But I was already starting to get a clearer picture. That second set of murders, last night. Anderson butchering his family, then killing himself. Did this thing Hanlon had stolen merely make a person like a ghost? Or was there more to it, far worse than that? I didn’t feel too optimistic about the way that things were starting to unravel.
I reminded myself that it was still a bright day outside. This place was even worse than the basement, the unnatural darkness pressing in on me. The doctor was looking slightly impatient, which was odd for a man with so much time on his hands.
“You’ve something else to tell me?” I asked.
“Something I’ve noticed, yes.”
“About?”
“You, man. Usually, you’re straight out through the door once we’ve finished talking. Yet you’re still sitting here.”
My thoughts were half elsewhere.
“Excuse me?”
“I sensed things about the Tollburns, and I sense them about you as well. You’ve another question, haven’t you? On a completely unrelated subject?”
There was a scrabbling noise from the corner of the room, but it didn’t bring my head around. There wasn’t much that I could hide from him. I’d resigned myself to that a long while ago. And so, my mind went back to the vision that I’d had last night.
I remembered what I’d been told by Amashta. So I asked him, exactly as she’d advised, “What does the word ‘T’choulon’ mean to you?”
He looked utterly dumbstruck. His eyelids narrowed, making the pupils burn even fiercer. And the permanent furrows on his brow grew more pronounced.
His head gave a shake, like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard.
Then he said, “It’s not a word, Devries. It’s a name.”
He peered at me gravely.
“Where exactly did you hear it?”
A squirrel had snuck in and joined the pigeon on the rafter by the time I’d told him everything I knew…which wasn’t much. The two creatures took no notice of each other. They merely perched there, side by side, gazing down at Lehman Willets. I was staring at him too.
The bright red in his pupils seemed to dance and flicker slightly.
“It came to you in a dream?”
“Maybe something more than that,” I said. “A vision.”
“You’re a visionary now?”
I didn’t particularly care for the hint of dark sarcasm in his tone.
“Who or what exactly is T’choulon?”
See, I hadn’t mentioned Amashta yet. And he seemed to understand that I was holding something back from him. I’m not sure that he liked that very much. But this seemed to be a matter of importance, and excited him. His fingers wrapped th
emselves around each other nervously for a few seconds. And his head went down and swayed from side to side a little. He looked utterly consumed in thought.
Then, at last, he got himself calmed down. He put his palms on his thighs, and then straightened on his camp bed.
“Early on in my researching days,” he told me, “I got a notion that was unusual at the time. That if I tried to plan everything, do everything to schedule, then I wouldn’t get as far as I might, simply because the supernatural doesn’t work that way. Better, I decided, to surrender myself to the vagaries of tide and time, and let them deposit me on whatever shores they chose.”
I thought I could see what he was getting at. He’d had a whole wide world to choose from, after all.
“So I allowed myself to drift around a couple of years. Hitched rides on a whim, took random buses. Walked down certain streets because I felt I ought to. Got on trains because it just felt right. And it worked, to an extent. You’d be surprised how much you can find out, that way, about the world we live in and the other ones we barely know.”
I was trying to be patient. Willets, as I’ve mentioned, took his own sweet time getting to any given point, and it was no use trying to hurry him. He had become even more intense and serious than usual, his face a heavily lined mask of concentration in the gloom.
He wet his lips before continuing.
“One time, I wound up in Nebraska. I was walking on my own, near dusk, cornfields all around me. And I thought at first I was alone…until I came across a very old medicine man, settling down by the roadside for the night. He invited me to join him. A peculiar-looking fellow.”
Willets paused yet again, digging back into his memory. It seemed to be very important to him that he got the details right.
“It was difficult to tell his age precisely, but…he was very old. Very skinny. Hooked nose, slightly bulging forehead. Eyes as dark as any I had ever seen. Whitish hair, like straw. And he had this—”
One of the man’s hands came up.
“This scar cut into the side of his neck, just under the left ear. Like a hash mark.”
Which made my mouth go dry. The rest of the room seemed to fade away. The only time I’d seen Amashta, there had been a scar carved into the exact same spot. In her case it had been two parallel lines, like an equals sign. But I was pretty sure that it was no coincidence.
“He wouldn’t tell me his name,” the doctor continued, “or even what his tribe was. Told me stuff like that had no importance in the true order of existence, which was odd. But he let me share his campfire for the evening, and we talked. He told me stuff. He claimed to belong to a family that went back almost to the last ice age.”
I sat up a little straighter myself. That couldn’t be true, could it? Someone claiming lineage the whole way back to times like those? I kept on listening anyway, holding my tongue and nodding.
“According to him, they’d passed on tales, purely by word of mouth, relating to that era. Stories six thousand years old and more. An astounding claim, and quite absurd sounding, I’d suppose. Except—you had to have been there—he was utterly convincing. And in several of the stories, that same name cropped up.”
He looked straight into my face.
“T’choulon. A city. The world’s first, older even than Eridu in Sumeria. He referred to it as a ‘city in the rocks,’ so I’d imagine it was based on caves.”
His pupils fastened on my own.
“But many shamans gathered there. And then, there was a war between them.”
CHAPTER 13
Millicent Tollburn’s residence—she’d had it built to her own design with part of the settlement from her divorce, and called it Millwood House—was square and largely featureless on the outside, with a flat roof. The place was built of pale brick and was ostentatiously large, with fourteen bedrooms. Odd, for somebody who had few visitors, no live-in staff. It looked out onto Plymouth Drive, about halfway up the gradient. The grounds behind it descended the slope for more than half a mile before they gave way to a tree line. There was a pond halfway down, overgrown with algae. And stables too—she kept four horses And a wall around the entire place, some ten feet high, with iron spikes at the top.
Her Jaguar was sitting, with its top still down, on the sprawling gravel drive, where it had been most of the night.
Millicent was standing by a window at the rear, gazing out across the town. The embroidered silk drapes that she was leaning against were just a façade to show the outside world. The interior of her place was minimalistically furnished. Very modern, exactly the way she liked it. Nothing cluttered. Nothing a mess. She even emptied her ashtray every time she smoked a cigarette.
She’d gotten no sleep last night, but was not in the least bit bothered about that. Too much occupied her mind. Somewhere out there in that seething anthill of a town was the most valuable part of her inheritance. Her blue-green gaze narrowed with anger at the very thought.
She’d earned it, in the hardest way you could imagine. She deserved it. Damn, the Wand of Dantiere was hers!
She watched as a tiny-looking green bus rumbled to a halt on Brent Street. The passengers started getting out. They looked like bugs from up here, but it wasn’t just the distance. She’d despised the people of this town ever since…
She shuddered, then tried to close her mind to the memories. No.
She was clutching something in her right hand. Woodard Raine had given it to her last night. He knew about the wand, how Lucas had used its power to spy on his peers, even influence their minds. Most people would have been shocked. But Raine was different—a moral law unto himself. He lived so distantly from the real world, stuff like that amused him. To his mind, it was a merry game. And he’d offered his help—enthusiastically, in fact—as soon as she had told him it was gone.
She opened her hand a little wider, and the object she’d been given glittered in the filtered sunlight. It was called a Thieftaker, a very rare and special magical device. There’d been one in the Raine family for generations, or so she’d been assured. At first glance, it looked like a solid jewel, roughly the size of a hen’s egg. But when you took a closer look, you could see that it was more than that.
There were gaps between the facets. And the entire thing was hollow. It was made up, in fact, of hundreds of much smaller jewels, all linked together in continuous strands, crisscrossing each other in the most intricate fashion. When her palm quivered slightly, they shifted a touch, a motion like tiny cogs in the belly of a pocket watch.
Raine had told her which words to use, and the ones to emphasize. The spell was in Latin. And, like the device itself, was a complicated thing. But if anyone had stolen something from you, this would get the object back. And—so she had been promised—it would bring the perpetrator along for the ride. Revenge, you see, was part of its purpose.
It could not be used in daylight. She would have to wait until nightfall came slipping down again. But, simply holding it, she felt its influence reach out. She got a definite sense of the man who had killed Poppy and taken the wand. He was not from around here—that was the biggest surprise. And his thoughts seemed to go flying off at tangents even more bizarre than Raine’s.
The dirty piece of thieving scum was extremely pleased with himself, right now. For the moment, he was laying low. She wasn’t sure quite where, but it seemed to be a very dark place. Murky. Fetid. Not in the least bit pleasant. But that didn’t seem to bother him. He was chortling quietly to himself.
“Shadow Man” were two words she got off him. And then “special fun.”
And that word—‘special’—brought the memories tumbling back. She could not stop them this time.
“This will make you special, Milly. This will make you strong.”
Her grandfather’s face, both eyes clear back then, loomed up in front of hers. The most venerated adept in the Landing, yes. Except that was not the entire truth. When she’d been a little child, he had insisted on spending time alone with her. Hours
alone.
She clenched her teeth, trying to fight against the images flooding through her head. It did no good. She couldn’t stop them.
He’d use his magic on her, doing dreadful things. Turning her into awful creatures. Sending her under the ground.
“But I don’t want to!”
“How do you expect to be a powerful magician if you don’t understand all the darkness in the world?”
And if she kept protesting, he’d cast spells on her that made her hurt.
“I’ll tell Mom and Pop!”
“You can tell them anything you want. I’ll sneak into their thoughts and change them. It will make no difference. This remains our special secret. You will thank me later on.”
The scene suddenly changed. She was at a garden party at the Vernon house. The occasion…her grandfather’s sixty-fifth birthday.
The broad, sprawling mansion with its Grecian pillars lay off in the distance. She was standing on a perfectly clipped lawn, surrounded by topiary cut in the shape of mythic beasts. A huge satyr crouched like it was stalking her. A Minotaur stretched out its arm. She knew that they were only plants, but they frightened her, and she was trying not to show it.
There were hundreds of people around her. Everybody who was anybody in the town was here. And it was not just adepts. There was the mayor, Edgar Aldernay. There were men from the police department, and the fire chief and his assistant. There were representatives from the Board of Commerce, ministers, folk from the PTA.
It was a brilliantly sunny day, the sky a startling shade of blue. A constant thrum of chatter rose toward it. Folk were getting to know each other, and old acquaintances were being renewed.
Waiting staff carrying large salvers were circulating. A string quartet was playing nearby. Millicent stood frozen on the edge of all of that activity and sound.
At the direct center of it was her grandad. Everyone seemed drawn to him. Everybody smiled. His hand was being shaken constantly. And people were respectful, deferential to him. When he spoke, they hung on his every word, and smiled, and even laughed.
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