There were three things in the box. One was a glass vial, empty. Its stopper was made of gold wrought into the delicate shape of a spider. The other two objects were books. One was small, its leather cover battered, its pages so dry they started to crumble when she tried to open the book. Hastily, she set it down.
The other book was larger. Its cover was smooth and new, and its pages white, cut into a clean, mass-manufactured edge. This was no antique book. It was a journal such as could be bought in any present-day stationery shop. Deirdre opened it to the first page.
A wave of dizziness came over her, forcing her to sit in the desk chair. In the dim light of the lantern, her eyes scanned the first lines.
You should not read this. Because if you do—if
you learn the secrets contained within this journal,
if you come to see the Philosophers for what they
truly are—then I will have doomed you just as surely
as I doomed her over three hundred years ago. They
will condemn you, they will hunt you with all their
powers, and they will destroy you.
Yet I beg of you, in the name of Hermes, keep
reading.
“Great Spirit,” Deirdre murmured, her hands shaking so badly she had to set the journal down.
It was not just the words themselves that stunned her. It was the smooth, elegant hand they were written in. She didn’t need to reach into her pocket, to pull out the handwritten note she had received from him yesterday, to know that the handwriting was identical. He had written this journal—and just recently, by the look of it—this nameless Philosopher who had been helping her.
Only he wasn’t nameless, not anymore. Because the moment she read those first lines, she had known at last who he was, who it was who had been guiding her all this time, advising her, leading her to this very place.
“You’re Marius,” she murmured to the shadows, as if he was listening. “You’re Marius Lucius Albrecht. Somehow you’re still alive. You didn’t die in 1684. You became a Philosopher. That was what was in that file; that was why the Philosophers deleted it. They didn’t want me to learn the truth.”
Only he did. But why?
Deirdre held the answer to that question here in her hands. The daylight was failing outside the high windows; a storm must be coming. She moved the lantern closer, adjusted the wick to brighten the gold light, then opened the journal and bent over it.
You should not read this. Because if you do—if you learn the secrets contained within this journal, if you come to see the Philosophers for what they truly are—then I will have doomed you just as surely as I doomed her over three hundred years ago. They will condemn you, they will hunt you with all their powers, and they will destroy you.
Yet I beg of you, in the name of Hermes, keep reading.
Forgive me the recklessness of these words, for I must write them in haste. It is ironic, for a being who is immortal, that I should have so little time in which to fill these pages, but they will soon turn their eyes in my direction. Unlike the ones they seek to understand, they do not sleep and have always kept watch on me. From the very beginning they have doubted my intentions, even as they transformed me into one of their own and brought me into their order.
But then, is it not safer to keep the wolf where you can see him? Except I know now it is the lamb I am to play in this bit of mummery, and for good or ill it is nearly at an end. Would that I could use a computer to set down these words more quickly, but they monitor all such devices, and perhaps it is just as well that I compose this on paper with an old-fashioned quill pen. It reminds me of a time long past. Of my time.
I did not seek to become immortal—that is the first thing you should know. On the contrary, when he first found me, life had no worth to me whatsoever, and at the ripe old age of fourteen I was doing everything I could to throw mine away. It was spring, in the year 1668, and Edinburgh was just beginning to stink.
In that era, Edinburgh was one of the most densely populated cities in all of Europe, for the entire citizenry—compelled by fear of the English—had crammed itself within the confines of the city’s stone walls. They had come seeking protection. What they found instead were filth and poverty, disease and death.
In Greyfriars graveyard, along the Cowgate below St. Giles, layers of corpses were stacked with barely a layer of soil between them, so that after a hard Scottish rain limbs would jut out of the ground like tree roots. The living fared little better. With no room to build out because of the constricting embrace of the city’s walls, the people of Edinburgh built up instead. Wooden tenements sprouted from the tops of stone buildings like fungi encouraged by the damp air. They were wretched structures, drafty in winter, stifling in summer, and rat-infested at all times, with narrow windows that opened only to allow the foul contents of a chamber pot to be thrown onto the street— and any unwary passersby—below.
The tenements were always catching fire, or falling down entirely, taking their unlucky occupants with them, and thereby contributing to the population of Greyfriars. However, unwholesome and unsafe as they were, the folk who dwelled in those structures were not the city’s poorest by any means. For there was one other direction in this crowded city in which to build—and that was down.
There is no telling when the excavations beneath Edinburgh began. Perhaps, in the gray time before the dawn of history, primitive men used crude tools to hew at the volcanic crag where the city would be built in a later age, carving out chambers in which to practice secret, blood-drenched rites. By the time I came to know them, the delvings were ancient and vast, and they were filled with a darkness that was far more than a mere absence of light. If fair maidens like Hope and Joy had ever stumbled into that place by mistake, then they had been ravaged and left for dead.
While the warrens beneath Edinburgh were the only home I knew as a child, I was not born in them. Nor would my mother ever tell me how she had come to that place.
“That’s a dark tale, James, and it’s already dark as Hell down here,” she would mutter. “Do not ask me of it again.”
However, even as a small boy, I had a way of getting others to tell me their secrets. Over the years I prodded and probed, and when she was tired or ill or drunk—all of which happened often enough—my mother would let things slip, so that in time I pieced together the story myself.
It was a simple enough tale. Throughout her youth she lived with her father: a former sailor who owned a shop on Candlemaker Row. Who her own mother was, she did not know. People along the Row claimed that, when her father returned from his last voyage at sea, he had carried a baby in his arms, swaddled in a fine silver cloth. He said the girl’s name was Rose, and that was all he ever said when anyone asked where the child had come from.
When Rose was seventeen, her father perished of the fever that had swept Edinburgh that winter. One of his cousins inherited the shop, and as the man was not inclined to charity, Rose was forced to manage for herself. Thinking herself fortunate, she took a position as maid in the house of a well-respected judge. However, neither her status as maid nor the judge’s respectability lasted long. Though I can recall her only as a hunched and withered thing, others told me that my mother was beautiful in her youth, with raven hair and sea-green eyes. Barely a year after her arrival at the judge’s household, she gave birth to a son with striking gold hair—a match to the master’s own glided locks.
His adultery revealed, the judge promptly repented his sins and proclaimed he had been placed under a spell by the lovely young maid. No one doubted him. Rather than find herself on Grassmarket Street hanging by her neck for witchcraft, Rose fled into the sewers with her infant son and found her way into the labyrinth beneath the city.
The warrens were populated by beggars, whores, thieves, and murderers who preyed as often upon those dwelling below as those living above. What Rose did to ensure the survival of her and her baby, I will never know. That knowledge even I could never pry from my mother. She would cackle with laughter when I asked her about her first days in the dark, then weep and pull at her snarled hair. I grew weary of her muttering and moaning, and as I grew older I ceased asking.
One morning—I was about ten, I suppose, though I did not know it at the time—I nudged her shoulder to wake her, and she did not move. This was in the cramped niche where we made our home: a hollow barely large enough for us both to curl up in, carved into the wall of a tunnel that, if you followed it upward, led all the way to a drain in Covenant Close.
I gave her a hard shove and yelled at her, but still she did not move, and I knew by her coldness that she was not simply in one of her drunken stupors. For a time I stared at her, listening to distant, wicked laughter echoing down the passage. Finally I rummaged in our niche and found the last bit of bread we possessed. I sat cross-legged and ate both my share and hers, and after that I looted the body.
There wasn’t much on her. A single halfpence, a small knife with a worn bone handle, and—tucked inside her filthy dress— a carefully folded piece of cloth. It was the size of a kerchief, and exceedingly fine, shimmering like silver in the gloom. The cloth was unsoiled, and even my dirty fingers left no mark on it.
The laughter drew closer. The sound was crude—a man’s laughter. Others joined in.
I wadded up the cloth and shoved it inside my shirt, then tucked the knife and halfpence into the pocket of my breeches. Often men would poke their heads into our little niche while we were there, looking to steal from us, or worse. My mother would brandish the knife, driving them back. Except it was the light in her eyes that kept them at bay more than the blade. They would spark green in the blackness, and even I would be afraid of her. The men would snarl and curse.
Witch
, they’d call her, and
Jezebel
. But they would leave us alone.
A woman’s scream echoed up the tunnel, drowned out by the sound of rude jeers. That would keep them occupied, at least for a short while. I crawled through the niche’s opening and lowered myself down to the floor of the tunnel, making no noise. Red light flickered from down the passage, and shadows writhed there. I turned and ran up the tunnel as fast as my short legs would take me.
“Hey, there!” a rough voice shouted behind me. “I see you, little rat. Come back here!”
The heavy sound of boots thumped behind me, and I heard the grunting of breath, but I didn’t look back. I kept my head down, pumping my arms, and rounded a bend in the tunnel. Just ahead was a crack in the wall. It was barely more than two hands wide, but I was such a skinny little thing that I slithered through, quick as a snake.
A hand shot in after me, clamping around my ankle.
“Now I got you,” said a man’s voice, thick and slurred from whiskey. “No need to wait my turn. There’s nothing they can do with a lady I can’t do with you. Now come back here, little rat.”
Another hand pawed up my leg. I kicked back with my bare foot, contacting something soft and fleshy, mashing it beneath my heel. By the wet cry of pain I guessed it was his nose. The hands let go.
Free of his grasp, I wriggled up the passage, which had been carved into the stone not by human hands but by the action of flowing water long ago. There were many such ways, connecting with the crypts and passages that had been hewn beneath the foundations of the city, and like all the children who dwelled down there—the ones who survived, at any rate—I had explored many of them. I knew that crack connected to a drain that spilled out on Grassmarket Street, in the shadow of the castle.
However, it had been at least a year since I had last used that particular passage, and I had grown. Bony as I was, I came to a bend where my chest became wedged. Panic gripped me, and I feared I would have to shimmy back down. Or worse yet, that I was stuck, and that some smaller child in years to come would find my bones and take the knife and coin and silver cloth even as I had taken them from the corpse of my mother.
I strained with all the might in my skinny limbs, bracing my feet against either side of the crack. Stone sliced though my shirt and bit into my chest, drawing blood, and the fluid acted as a lubricant. My body popped through the narrows and tumbled down the crack into a larger way—a clay pipe slicked with water and mold. Out of control, I slid down the pipe toward a circle of gray light that rapidly dilated before me. I shot through the hole, landing on hard stones, wet with slime like a newborn baby. Air rushed into my lungs, hard and shuddering, as if they had never drawn a breath before.
I looked up, squinting against the sullen daylight, which seemed inordinately bright to my dark-adjusted eyes. When was the last time my mother had brought me up to the surface? I could not remember. People walked by, but no one paid me more heed than they would a rat that had just crawled from the sewer. I touched my chest, wincing, and my hand came away red with blood. It hurt, but I had suffered worse. I was alive, and indeed I was like an infant again, wet with ichor, birthed from the canal of the drain, with an entire new life before me.
It was not, as I would come to learn, the last time in my existence I would be reborn.
I spent that first morning on the surface lurking in the stairs and walled closes along the Grassmarket. Horses trotted down the muddy street, pulling glossy carriages; trinkets of gold and silver shone behind shop windows. Though tempted to venture closer, I kept to the shadows, watching as folk in fine clothes passed by, conscious of the soiled rags that clad my own raw-boned form. This world was strange to me, and though it seemed fair compared to the labyrinth below, I sensed it was every bit as perilous.
As the day wore on I grew bolder and crept up the steep curve of Candlemaker Row, passing—unbeknownst to me at the time—the shop where my mother had spent her childhood. It was the rich smells of roasted meat and tobacco, drifting from the pubs that lined High Street, which lured me upwards.