“I had no idea you figured out so much!” Rachel exclaimed, impressed.
She did not add that it stung to learn they had figured out so much and not shared it with her. Of course, she had not shared her suspicions with them either. But then, the matter had not concerned either Gaius’s or Dread’s grandfather.
“What happened?” Gaius urged.
“I pointed the wand at my family, looked the demon in the eyes, and pronounced the masterword.” Rachel could not help feeling rather smug.
“Good for you!”
“Grandfather’s binding spell then activated,” said Rachel. She continued describing, to Gaius amazement, the appearance of the ghost of her young uncle and the phantom horse, Thunderfrost. Finally, she finished, “The demon Azrael is now bound tight inside the clerk Mortimer Egg again.”
“Excellent!” Gaius laughed out loud.
“Then, Finn MacDannan arrived and captured him. Everyone thinks I was geased, and Finn saved us all.”
“Wait! You knew the masterword?” Gaius gawked. “Did you have it the whole time?”
“I figured it out yesterday, from a clue given me by my Art tutor, Mrs. Heelis.”
“You figured out the masterword?”
She nodded.
“You are truly amazing, Lady Rachel Griffin.” Gaius gazed at her raptly.
Ah. This was what she had been longing for. This.
Right now.
His admiration went to her head like wine.
It was like being drunk on secrets.
Chapter Twelve:
Ancient Echoes of Sardonic Laughter
“You do realize how amazing your group is?” Gaius leaned forward, smiling at her very nicely. “By now? One month in? Most freshman can’t pull off a single spell. Sigfried Smith and the Princess of Magical Australia are the most powerful sorcerers—other than Vlad—anyone’s seen in a generation. Possibly two. Even the big names of the previous generation—Scarlett Mallory MacDannan, Finn MacDannan, James Darling—weren’t like them.
“And Joy O’Keefe and Wulfgang Starkadder aren’t far behind. They are both the seventh child of a seventh child. Traditionally, that makes a child powerful or lucky.”
“Then there’s me.” Rachel looked sheepish, tracing a spiral on the misty window.
“You should not put yourself down. Look what you just did for my wand! And your family is very powerful. Your sister Sandra achieved five rings of mastery! There’s no way they would have let her become an undercover Agent so quickly, if she weren’t supremely talented.”
“I’m not like Sandra,” explained Rachel, chagrined. “She’s good at everything. That paralysis spell is practically the only thing I can do properly. Apart from the wind blast and the lifting spell you taught me. But to do the little that I can with those, I had to practice for days. Literally. I’ve added up the hours I’ve spent practicing. It comes to over forty-eight, gaining on seventy-two, in fact.” Recalling a comment made by her boss, the P.E. instructor, Rachel added, “Though, apparently, I’m unusually good at flying.”
“I say!” Gaius grinned at her. “Have you considered going out for Track and Broom?”
Rachel hated sports. Gazing off into the fog, she blew out of the side of her mouth, sending a stray lock of hair soaring.
“Okay. Never mind that.” Gaius’s voice held an odd note of tension.
Rachel’s eyes darted to his face. His hand rested casually in front of his mouth, blocking his expression; however, the corners of his eyes crinkled with humor. When he saw her looking, he murmured something. Rachel could not quite make out his words. After recalling the memory three or four times, she thought he might have said: Sorry. Too cute.
Three loud peals of thunder came from the north. The two of them moved closer together. They sat quietly side by side, watching the swirling mist, occasionally glimpsing graceful spires and domed belfries. Gaius drew a cylindrical mundane device, like a cigar with fins, in the condensation on the window.
“You know, your grandfather was an extremely clever man.” Gaius turned toward her, brushing a hair from her cheek. “I hope if a demon ever comes to kill me, I can outwit it.”
“He did outwit it. But at a terrible cost.” Unexpectedly, Rachel’s eyes filled with tears. She jerked her head to one side to hide them. “Oh, Gaius! He lost his entire first family—a baby boy, three girls and a young heir. Aunts and uncles I had never heard of! And his wife! All slaughtered by the demon Azrael!”
“Rachel, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Neither did I.”
Gaius pulled her close, hugging her again. She rested against him, drinking in his warmth. She wanted to break down and weep for the relatives she had lost, but she desperately did not want her boyfriend to think poorly of her. If she cried, he would know she was weak. He had not been exactly comforting the time she had wailed in front of him in the infirmary, after she found Valerie Hunt bleeding in the girl’s bathroom. Instead of crying, she shoved her grief and sorrow behind a mask of calm.
This gift comes with a price.
Her mother’s voice rang in her memory, warning her that the emotions she chose not to experience using the dissembling technique did not disappear. They remained inside, becoming stronger. On the surface, Rachel felt calm and collected. Underneath, the jumble of rejected emotions was growing wilder. What if they grew so strong that she could no longer control them? Would they all come tumbling out?
If she did not find a way to deal with them, something bad was going to happen.
But not today.
Not now.
Right now, she had this chance to spend long awaited time with Gaius. She did not want to mess it up by crying like a ninny. She lifted her head and smiled at her boyfriend. Leaning forward, he brushed his nose against hers. A sense of peace settled over her.
“We’ve been trying to figure out where you get your information,” Gaius said, breaking the silence. He ran two fingers up and down her back. “Vlad has concluded from what you shared with us that you have a contact in the Wisecraft, but we can’t figure out who. You could be getting info from your father. But from what we know of him, we figure probably not.”
Rachel shook her head, smiling mysteriously. “I’ll never tell.”
Of course, she did not actually have a Wisecraft connection. It was Siggy’s all-seeing amulet that had allowed her to learn the secrets that Gaius and his friends thought came from the Agents. Rachel did not mind keeping Sigfried’s secret. She understood intrinsically that the more Gaius knew about her sources, the less amazed he would be by her information. She would rather he not know how she figured things out. Otherwise, her reports might become predictable, dull.
This led to a problem.
She could not tell Gaius about the Raven—and why he had spared her—without also explaining about her perfect memory. But to do so would reveal one of her main sources of info. Gaius clearly liked the fact that she regularly wowed him with her revelations. If she failed to continue to impress him, might he lose interest in a too young girlfriend who did not yet even have a figure?
Moistening her suddenly dry, sore lips, Rachel considered what she could tell him without revealing her secret. She was dying to tell him about meeting the otherworldly Illondria, but she dare not do that, as it would endanger the Elf’s life. The Raven had said clearly that the more people knew about the Elf, the less likely that she would survive. She also wanted very much to tell him about the previous night’s occurrences and their trip to Beaumont. True, Nastasia had asked her not to tell, but Rachel had not agreed to keep the secret.
After all, didn’t Nastasia plan to tell the dean? Also, the events were no longer an Inner Circle secret. Other people knew as well: Xandra Black, Mrs. March, and, by now, probably Detective Hunt. Plus, there was the fact that Bavaria was relatively close to Transylvania and might be harboring members of Veltdammerung—who might be serving that demon.
“Never mind the princess, I shall tel
l you about last night. In fact, I really should tell you!” she declared. “It might turn out to be terribly important to Vladimir’s father.”
She repeated the entire adventure, from their trip into the dreamlands to arriving back at Dare Hall with the goose. The only thing she left out was their original plan to go to Magical Australia. Nastasia had requested that they not tell anyone about her travel power. Remembering Mrs. March’s warning, she wrote down the demon’s name on a piece of paper from her pocket, rather than pronounce it aloud.
“Wow. That’s…” Gaius sat quietly for a few seconds. “Wow. Was the goose really Valerie’s father?”
“Rather!”
“That’s both creepy and very good. I’m pleased for her.” Gaius tapped his fingernails against the marble stair. “This demon—when he said his brother would evict him—did he mean the Raven?”
“I…” she paused, “don’t know. Maybe. I think so. I heard a caw.”
“Does that mean that the Raven is a demon, too?”
“I think he’s…something else.”
Rachel could not explain that the Elf had said that the Raven was the brother of her mother—who was the guardian of the World Tree—or that the Elf had called him a god. So she said nothing at all. Rachel also had her own opinion about the Raven. They involved a statue that had once had wings and a page in a book that had been hidden from her memory, an entry in an old bestiary for something called an angel.
“Um…I hate to ask. It sounds so callous,” said Gaius, “but I think you’d rather I do: If Azrael sacrificed your grandfather’s family, was he casting his spell? The one that kills a family in front of one surviving member and sucks something from another world.”
Rachel sat up straight. “Possibly.”
“Did the spell summon someone?”
“Who do you think it could have brought?”
“The other four members of the Terrible Five, didn’t they…” Gaius paused as if searching for the right word. “Couldn’t they do things no one else has ever done?”
“I say!” cried Rachel. “You jolly well may be onto something!”
“Maybe they were…what is it your group calls them, Metacrutons?”
Rachel’s lips twitched. “Metaplutonian.”
“As in Beyond Pluto? Got it.” Gaius nodded. “Are the other four Metaplutonians?”
“Are you thinking some of the people Azrael’s spell brought were so wickedly evil that the Raven turned them to stone and made us all think it had happened long ago?”
“Could be.” Gaius nodded. “The demon those guys were trying to summon the first time—I keep thinking I’ve heard his name before. I could swear it came up in class. Either in True Hiss or in Thaumaturgical Rites.”
“We should go to the library and see what else we can find.”
Gaius leaned toward her, smiling. “It’s a date.”
She nodded with a sweet, calm smile, but inside, she had lit up like a bonfire. She wanted so much to tell him that she loved him, but he was the boy. He had to speak such words first. Her grandmother had regaled her again and again with the unhappy fate of girls who were too forward.
“Let’s go to the library right now.” Gaius rose to his feet. “I can show you the painting of my family’s farm on the way.”
• • •
They flew down from the roof, Gaius seated behind Rachel, his arms tight about her waist, and landed by the west entrance of Roanoke Hall. Walking down the hallway toward the dining hall, they stopped in front of a painting. Rachel recognized it immediately. It was the one Gaius and Tess Dauntless had been looking at the time she had run by covered in orange juice.
The landscape showed a picturesque Cornish farmhouse with old-fashioned windmills in the distance. There was a crest above the barn doors, but it was too small to make out clearly. Rachel stood on her tiptoes scrutinizing it and memorizing the whole picture.
“When you graduate, do you intend to go back to your farm to live?” She kept her eyes on the house and spoke lightly, as if she were not asking about something that might affect the rest of her life.
“No, I am a sorcerer,” Gaius said firmly. “Unlike my distant grandparent, I am not going to hide on my farm, away from this world. Before I came here, I was thinking I would be a scientist. Now I think I will be something else. Plenty of places to do research on magic and magical creatures and the like, right? That’s where I’ll be. Perhaps I will go work for Locke’s company. They have both sorcerers and mundane folk working for them.”
Rachel, who loved farms and knew a good deal about them, hid her disappointment.
“William worked on a really interesting project this summer. It’s based on what could be salvaged of your second cousin’s research, from before his accident. It’s still secret, so I can’t tell you much about it, but if they can get it to work, it might turn out to be very useful in times to come. Could have been useful to you last night. I would love to work on a project like that.”
“Interesting,” Rachel smiled. “I must admit to being curious now. So you could join him. Or I suppose you could go to Bavaria and work for Vlad. I bet he’s going to want sorcerers doing research, too.”
“Considering that, too.”
Rachel gazed at the painting and imagined the two of them as a married couple, standing in front of that farmhouse as they told their children about this day.
What a wonderful life they would have together.
• • •
The library took up three stories in the eastern leg of the hollow square that was Roanoke Hall. It was a place of enormous stacks and narrow spiral staircases. Rachel and Gaius breathed in the pleasantly musty smell of books and exchanged smiles. If there was anything more wonderful than an enormous collection of wisdom, it was someone with whom to share it.
They spread out, gathered books, and met at a table hidden between two semi-circular stacks. Together, they pored over the various volumes they had discovered. Gaius muttered under his breath about the inefficiency of not using mundane computing devices.
“Found it!” Gaius cried suddenly, poking a spot on the page of the huge thaumaturgical volume he was skimming. “I haven’t found your human-headed bull guy. But that first name? His boss?” He wrote Moloch on a scrap of paper. “It’s an alternate name for Kronos.”
“The Titan?” She tipped her head back, thinking. A reference came to her from an encyclopedia she had once read. “The Titans were worshipped by the Phoenicians, right?”
“Phoenicians, as in Carthage and Hannibal?” Gaius asked as he searched for a page number referred to in his book’s index.
“Exactly.”
“Do you think he rides elephants?”
“The demon or Hannibal?”
“The demon,” drawled Gaius. “I already know about Hannibal’s thing for elephants.”
Rachel ducked her head but could not quite restrain her giggling. She clapped her hand over her mouth, so as not to disturb her fellow patrons.
“The Romans hated the Carthaginians,” Gaius continued. “They hated them so much that they completely destroyed the city, ploughed the entire country under, and salted the lands.”
“That’s where the phrase delenda est comes from,” said Rachel, “as in ‘Cathago delenda est.’ ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’”
“Found something. This is from Alexander the Great’s historian, Cleitarchus.” Gaius peered at the text and made a noise of dismay. “‘There stood in their midst a bronze statue of Kronos. Its hands were extended over a copper brazier. The flames from the brazier surrounded the child. When the flames burnt the body, the limbs seized up and the mouth opened, so that, until the body was engulfed in flames, it almost seemed to be laughing. This “grin” is known as “sardonic laughter,” as they died “laughing.”’”
The two of them sat quietly, wordlessly staring at each other. Gaius reached out and squeezed her hand. He gazed at her face, his dark eyes filled with concern.
“I
’m really sorry, Rachel, that you have to face all this. Attacks. People killing children. Murdering whole families. What happened to Valerie. I wish I could protect you from them.”
Rachel looked down, absently rearranging her reading material. “I want to know everything, Gaius. But some things are hard to know.” She looked up, as if pleading, “I would rather know painful things than be ignorant. I just wish they were not there to know. That nothing so painful existed.”
“I wish that, too. Unfortunately, the real world is not like that.”
Rachel nodded wordlessly.
They read a bit longer. There was a horrible picture of the statue of Kronos, like a giant, bull-headed furnace with its arms extended over a blazing fire. And another picture of the Tophet of Carthage, a graveyard filled with urns containing the charred remains of burnt children, along with a few animals. After seeing those, Rachel began merely glancing at the pages, to read them later. While she could recall the words by glancing at them, she still had to read them to know the information. Otherwise, it was like recalling a picture formed from letters but without meaning. While her memorization speed was nigh instant, her reading speed was no faster than any other good reader.
“Gaius,” Rachel looked up suddenly. “Um…I hope this question doesn’t offend you.”
“Go ahead. You can ask anything. I might not answer, but I won’t be offended.”
“How does what this monster does differ from what you do?”
“What I do?” He looked puzzled.
“As a thaumaturge.”
“Oh!” Gaius tipped back his chair and blew out his cheeks. “First of all, I don’t sacrifice human beings. At all. Ever. That’s black magic. I don’t do black magic. Second, I’m more of a duelist. The only sacrifices I have been involved in personally have been things like feeding rabbits to chimera we’ve summoned. Not that different from feeding one’s pet tiger. But you mean thaumaturgy in general.” He considered, absently running his thumb across his lip. “Well, how does, say, sacrificing a goat to some chthonic entity to convince it to give you ten charges of, say, the power to see in the dark, differ from what priests do? They perform sacrifices, right?”
Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland (The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 3) Page 15