I meant to go then. My head, though in pain, was clear of the haze of whiskey for the first time in weeks, and at last I apprehended in full the knowledge I had been masking with drink all this time.
It was my fault Alis had died.
“Is that so?” spoke a soft voice behind me. “Is it truly your fault?”
Had I spoken my anguish aloud? I turned and saw a woman standing above me. She was clad in the flowing black gown of a mourner. Though her lithe figure lent her an air of youth, she leaned upon a cane, and a veil concealed her face.
“Did you know her?” I said, though it was hard to speak.
“Not as you knew her, Marius.”
She lifted her veil. Her face was as pale and luminous as it had been that night at the tavern, though the shadows that gathered in her cheeks were darker than before.
“Why do you blame yourself, Marius?” the fairy-woman said.
I turned away. “I did not tell her.” Grief tore the words out of me in hoarse sobs. “I did not tell her who she really was. My mission was to watch her, to see if she learned of her true nature on her own. Only she didn’t, and now she’s gone.”
A rustling of cloth behind me. “We all must pass in time, Marius. Her kind, our kind. You could not have changed that.”
“But it did not need to be so soon! I might have taken her to the tavern. You could have helped her. She could have endured for many years.”
The woman sighed. “Perhaps she could have endured. Endured in suffering, and in sorrow. For she had thought herself a child of Lord and Lady Faraday, not something other—a changeling, a thing of legend. Perhaps knowing what she truly was would have given her woe rather than comfort. And even if not, why do you place all this blame upon yourself. Did not those you serve know of her true nature before you did?”
A sliver of ice seemed to pierce my heart. Yes, they had known all along what she was, but they had only wanted to watch her as she failed, not to help her. The Philosophers. And how was it they had known Alis was a changeling in the first place?
But there were . . . others, from outside, who convinced them
to try. . . .
I hardly saw as something soft was pressed into my hands. “Dry your tears, Marius.” The woman’s voice was hard and clear as glass now. “It will do Alis no honor to cast away your life. If you would serve her now, then do not forget the gift we gave you. . . .”
Her gown fluttered. Like a passing shadow she was gone, and I knew that I would never see her again. I looked down. In my hands was the silver cloth I had taken from my mother, and which I had given to Alis at St. Paul’s. As always, it was unmarked with stain or rent. With it, I brushed the dust from her tomb. Then I stood and ran through the cathedral.
I reached my house an hour later, breathless, and it took me some time to find it amid the chaos and squalor, for the servants had abandoned me weeks ago for want of their wages. At last I found it beneath a table: a small book, bound in frayed leather. In my grief I had forgotten it. I took it now and sat at the table. My hands trembled, and a strong temptation for a drink came upon me—it would have steadied me—but I dismissed it and opened the book.
It was a journal.
The author’s name was one Thomas Atwater, according to the title page, and the journal was begun in the year 1619.
I begin this record even as I begin a new life
, the author wrote.
For on this day I have joined a newly established order of
men and women who call themselves Seekers. Clever, they are,
and curious and bold. They were alchemists once, but have
since put such frivolous pursuits behind them, and instead
search out the source of deeper and truer magicks. I am of great
cheer as I write this, for at last I have found a hope of helping
myself and those who are like me. . . .
A thrill came over me as I read these words, for the slanted hand in which they were written was entirely familiar to me. There could be no doubt: The author of this journal was one and the same with the writer of the letters I had found in the vaults beneath the Charterhouse. Thomas Atwater had been one of the tavern folk.
And he had been a Seeker as well.
I read on, page after page, eschewing drink or food, only stopping to light several candles as night stole over the city outside. The journal seemed to contain more pages than possible given its size, recording the events of several years, and it was only as the light of dawn touched the windows that I finally reached the end. I set down the book, staring out the window at the new day beginning, and I knew that, once again in my life, I was just beginning as well. For what I had read in the journal had changed me completely and forever.
Atwater’s writings had contained many revelations, but one above all others burned in my brain. And it was simply this: Everything which the Seekers stood for was a lie.
I thumbed again through the journal, trying to absorb all the knowledge contained within its pages. The author of those first happy lines had been utterly different than the sober and vengeful man who wrote the last pages. Atwater had joined the Seekers, as he had said, out of hope—a hope that their investigation into otherworldly magicks might reveal a way to help his kindred at the tavern, the folk of fairy descent, to ease their suffering at dwelling on this world.
It did not end that way.
Thomas was born to a maid who worked at the tavern, a woman who was badly used by a mortal man—a young lord who promised to give her a new life, then cast her into the gutter once he successfully deflowered her. She died, crushed by the weight of this world as the tavern folk often were, and Atwater was raised by the tavern’s owner, Quincy Greenfellow, father to Sadie and her brothers.
Quincy Greenfellow’s father had founded the tavern, in the village of Brixistane, south of London, as a haven and refuge for those who were like him—those who found the burden of this world heavy to bear. Over time, through whisper and rumor, folk similar to Greenfellow heard of the tavern, and as they came together there, they began to piece together just why it was they were different. They did not know their full history, but they knew they were descended from beings who were something other than human—beings other people called fairies.
In its early days, there were others who were attracted to the tavern besides those of more than mortal extraction. It became a favored haunt for would-be wizards as well, for those who trod down the dark, secret, and smoky paths of alchemy.
Chief among these alchemists who frequented the tavern was John Dee. At the time, Dee was widely known as Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer, though he had long researched in secret the art of alchemy. In time, Dee’s work led him into disfavor, poverty, and madness. But before the end, he made a discovery that greatly animated him, and which he brought to the tavern to show Greenfellow. It was an ancient scroll that Dee claimed was written by the legendary alchemist Hermes Trismegistus himself, and which he said contained writings about a tomb lost beneath the ruined palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete—a tomb that held the answer to the greatest mystery of magic the alchemists sought to unlock: the mystery of transmutation.
Dee never journeyed to Crete, for he fell ill and perished soon after this. But the scroll fell into the hands of some of the other alchemists who frequented the tavern, lesser magicians who had hoped to learn secrets of the craft from Dee. They vanished from the tavern and were not seen again for some years.
Then, one day, several of these alchemists did return to the tavern, and they were much changed. They were clad all in black, and their eyes were gold, and an aura of power cloaked them, as tangible to the folk of the tavern as the dark garments they wore. They called themselves Philosophers now, for they claimed to have learned the ultimate secret of the alchemists: the magic of transmutation and perfection.
These Philosophers, as they styled themselves, did not speak of what they had found on Crete, or what had changed them, but they brought several artifacts with them. Chief among these was a keystone taken from a doorway. They claimed there was a magic in the keystone, one that if they could fathom how to work it would open a door to another world—a world in which the folk of the tavern, those with the blood of fairykind in their veins, would know no pain, no suffering.
Greenfellow gave the Philosophers his blessing to erect a stone arch inside the tavern, and the keystone was set into it. The Philosophers worked many experiments on the stone, and often these involved blood taken from the folk of the tavern. More blood the Philosophers asked for, and more, and always it was given freely, for the folk would do anything if it might mean opening a doorway to a place they could belong, if it meant the end of their pain. For as the world grew more crowded with people and buildings and things wrought of iron, their suffering grew as well.
However, no matter how much blood they received, the Philosophers could not make the stone work. “The worlds must draw closer together first,” they said. And finally they withdrew from the tavern, and did not come back, and for all their help the folk of the tavern were rewarded with nothing.
Years passed, and the tavern folk waited. Surely the worlds would draw closer soon, and the Philosophers would return. Only they did not. Some heard whispers that the Philosophers had begun a new organization, and finally one young man of the tavern grew bold enough to seek out this new order in hopes of finding a way to convince the Philosophers to return to Greenfellow’s and help its denizens.
And that was how Thomas Atwater joined the Seekers.
The Seekers were reluctant to let him join the order at first. They weren’t certain he had the proper background, and they intended to research his origins more fully, only before they could do so word came down from the Philosophers themselves, and so he was admitted to the order—but on one condition. While he was a Seeker, he must never return to Greenfellow’s Tavern. Such was his desire to help his kindred that Atwater readily acquiesced to this request, and he thought nothing of it.
Atwater’s first two years in the Seekers were ones of wonder and constant discovery. He learned quickly, and seemed to have an uncanny knack for finding meanings and connections where others could not. Soon he was promoted from apprentice to journeyman, and his future in the Seekers looked bright.
However, Atwater never forgot his true purpose in joining the order. Always he sought to learn more about Knossos, and the archway, and why the Philosophers believed it might open a doorway to another world. He kept his research in this regard to himself, doing it in secret at night, apart from his other work, for the Philosophers had commanded him not to speak of his true origins to the other Seekers, and he feared if the others knew what he was doing, he would be forced to tell them of the tavern.
His secrecy proved both boon and bane. Such was his skill and cleverness that he was soon left to his own devices, and was allowed access to all the same vaults of books that the masters themselves used. And in his night work, he finally learned the truth—or at least something of the truth—about the Philosophers.
He found it in a box of papers—records set down by the Philosophers themselves, and which surely had been meant for their private library, but which had, by some mistake, been forgotten in a corner of the vaults. A corner in which Atwater would one day hide some of his own writings.
The papers were fragmentary; they did not tell Atwater everything, but they told him enough.
The Philosophers had indeed sought to open a doorway using the keystone in the tavern. However, the keystone was not the only discovery they made beneath the ruined palace at Knossos. They had found other things as well—things that changed them, and convinced them there was another world they might journey to, a world other than this Earth, where the true secret of transmutation would be revealed.
The Sleeping Ones have shown us that a state of true perfection is possible. But their blood, while a powerful catalyst for
transmutation itself, is not by itself enough. It provides life, but
not immortality, and must be drunk again and again for the effects to be maintained. Surely the Sleeping Ones knew of this
true catalyst, what we would call the Philosopher’s Stone, for
their golden bodies do not age. And if the gate could be made to
open, we might travel to their world and find it there. . . .
Their words had been lies. The Philosophers had not found the true secret of perfection, of transmutation, on Crete. They sought it still, and they had used those with fairy blood to try to gain it. Only when they failed, they had abandoned the tavern folk to poverty and suffering.
Rage filled Atwater at this betrayal, and despair. The last hastily written pages of the journal told how Atwater had hidden some of his papers in the vaults, hoping to retrieve them later. Then he intended to defy the order of the Philosophers and return to Greenfellow’s, to take the journal to his people, that they might know the truth.
They did not wish for their own Seekers to know about us
, Atwater wrote on the final page.
They feared the Seekers might
learn too much about their true nature. That was why the
Philosophers forbade me to return to the tavern. They did not
want me to lead the Seekers there.
That they will destroy me for what I intend to do, I have no
doubt. It will not come at once—they will not wish to call attention to my defiance of their order, for fear it will lead the Seekers to the tavern—but it will come. And one day it will be my
blood that will stain the keystone. That is why I leave this journal, as a record of the truth, of the cruelty and lies of the
Philosophers. May it one day come into the hands of one who
can seek vengeance for all of us.
There the journal ended. I closed the book, gripping it to keep my hands from trembling.