The Last Magician Page 41

  “It’s only slowed, not stopped completely. I won’t be able to hold it indefinitely.” She shook him a little. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I could ask the same of you,” he said coldly. “But I already know.”

  Her stomach sank at the memory of  his touch in the carriage. “I’m not the one switching the act up.” But the words sounded weak, even to her.

  “No?” he asked. “You weren’t planning to take everything and leave us all holding the bag?

  “You don’t understand—”

  “You told me the old man—your father—was dead, but that’s not true, is it?  You were going to take him the Book,” he said, confirming her worst fears. “I’d started to trust you. Everyone trusted you.”

  “Maybe they shouldn’t have.” Her voice came out so much flatter, so much less confident than she’d intended.

  Suddenly, she was painfully aware of the way the light slanted, the way the motes of dust hung suspended and unmoving around them in the beams of the footlights, like stars come to earth. She wanted to explain everything, tell him exactly why she needed the Book, but he was right. She’d take the Book back to Professor Lachlan like she was supposed to, but she couldn’t lie to herself about what it meant for the people here.

  “Nothing’s more important than the job I have to do,” she whispered, willing him to understand.

  “I sure hope that’s true.” Harte’s expression shuttered. “Because they’ll go after Dolph, you know. They’ll go after all those friends of yours.”

  “They’ll go after them anyway. I have to take the Book. To protect it. To protect them. If I don’t do this, they’re dead—Dolph, Nibsy.  Who knows who else.”

  His eyes went cold. “Is that all Nibsy gets out of your duplicity?”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with him.”

  Harte laughed, a derisive huff of air that sounded as cracked and broken as the trust between them. “This has everything to do with him.”

  He wasn’t making any sense, but she had to make him understand. She had to convince him. “If you take the Book now, every Mageus in this city will be lost.”

  “They’re lost if I don’t take the Book,” he said, and he told her about the machine that Jack had built.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that morning?”

  “Probably for the same reason you didn’t you tell me the truth about the old man you called your father. You’ve never trusted me.”

  “And for good reason. Look at what you are doing! You’re leaving me at the Order’s mercy while you make off with the Book.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? Nothing about this is meant to hurt you,” he said, regret thick in his voice. “This was all just supposed to be misdirection, to take the suspicion away from you. I was going to come back for you. We were going to get out of the city together. Destroy the Book together. . . . Before I saw what I saw. Before I understood what you’re planning.”

  Her chest tightened. “That’s easy for you to say now.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s the hardest thing in the world to admit to what you gave up.” He leaned his head toward her until their foreheads touched. “Unless you’ve changed your mind? Come with me. Help me destroy the Book. It’s the only way to ensure the Mageus are safe from Jack and all those like him.”

  “I can’t,” she said, hating herself a little for how much she wanted to say yes. “Even if I wanted to, it would never work.”

  He pulled away from her, his expression stony from her rejection.

  She ignored the hurt in his eyes, the anger in his expression. “This isn’t about me,” she whispered to him. “This is so much bigger than the two of us.  Your life won’t mean anything if you go through with this. If you take the Book, maybe you will keep Jack away from it, but you’ll also condemn all of our kind to another century of the Order’s control.  You will condemn magic—and all Mageus with it—to a weakened half-life of existence. And it will never recover,” she told him. “We will never recover. There is no walking away from this.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “I do. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. I know firsthand what the effect of your choices will do to our kind and to our world if you go through with this. But if you stop this now, maybe we can still fix things. Maybe we can change everything.”

  He looked at her, his stormy eyes testing her for the truth in her words. She knew they were unbelievable, but this was her only chance to finish what she’d started by coming here.

  “You have to believe me.” Esta took his face in her hands, feeling the cleanly shaven cheeks and the warmth of his skin beneath her fingers. “And you know how to see if I’m telling you the truth.”

  Someday, maybe she would share a kiss that was more than deception and manipulation. Someday, maybe she would press her lips against someone else’s for no other reason than desire or aching want. Maybe.

  But today was not that day.

  She closed the distance between them, and at the very moment she pressed her lips against his, she let go of her hold on time. As the world spun back into motion, she put every piece of herself into the kiss, pulling him toward her, tangling her mouth against his, willing him to take what he would as she opened her mind to him. Because if he got the stone, if he took the Book and destroyed it, she would be lost. Everything would be lost.

  His lips were impassive at first, and her stomach twisted with the understanding that he wouldn’t take what she was offering. But then she felt the pulse of his magic, warm and now more familiar than it should have been. She didn’t pull back or flinch away this time. Instead she bade him take all he would. His magic wrapped around her as his lips opened against hers, and she allowed herself to be laid bare, to risk everything for the chance that he wouldn’t pursue this course he had set them on.

  It was only when a smattering of applause came from the audience that she remembered where she was and what they were doing. She stepped back from him, her cheeks hot, but Harte’s expression was impassive. Unreadable.

  It doesn’t matter if he believes me, she told herself. All I have to do is slow time and I can get away—

  “Why don’t you come stand with me, sweetheart?” Sam Watson said, taking her by the arm and pulling her away from the safe before she could do anything. He didn’t release her arm, but he gave her a wink. “Best to make sure there’s no question that your Mr. Darrigan doesn’t have any assistance.”

  “Of course,” she murmured, eyeing his hold on her arm. As long as he was touching her, she couldn’t use her affinity, not without bringing him with her. She couldn’t do anything about Harte or what he might have planned for the Book.  All she could do was watch as they locked him into the safe and wait. And hope that what she’d told him had been enough.

  THE MYSTERIUM

  Still stunned by what Esta had shown him, Harte moved by instinct, pushing against the back of the vault to loosen the bolts there, adjusting his arms to slip free from the chains, all the while struggling to understand what he’d just seen.

  What he’d found when he pushed into her mind was too unbelievable. Like something out of H. G. Wells. She had to be lying.

  But he knew he would have been able to see the lie in her intentions, and no matter how he searched, there hadn’t been one there. His head swirled with the strange images as he let himself out of the back of the safe, where Jianyu was already waiting, obscuring the view of anyone who might be watching. Together they moved to the back of the stage. When Harte saw the coast was clear for him to slip out into the hallway beyond, he gave Jianyu a nod to let him know he was good.

  What he’d seen in Esta’s mind changed nothing.

  It changed everything.

  As he came around the corner, he almost ran directly into Viola, who was hiding in the shadows. She was now dressed in black, looking every inch the assassin.

  “Where’s Esta?”

  “On the stage, where she’s supposed to b
e.”

  “This was not the plan.”

  He felt the searing energy of her magic a second before his head felt like it was being pressed in a vise. His vision started to blur, and he had the sense that at any moment everything could go black. “Dolph didn’t tell you the whole plan,” Harte said, fighting past the urge to scream from the pressure behind his eyes.

  Viola raised a single arched brow in his direction, and a spike of pain shot through his chest. “Dolph trusts me.”

  “Dolph doesn’t trust anyone right now,” he gasped. “No one had the entire plan except me and him.” Another bolt of pain rocketed through his chest, nearly making his legs give out. “It’s better this way. They won’t be able to accuse her of anything as long as she’s standing on the stage with them. If they can’t accuse her, they won’t be able to trace it back to Dolph,” he said, and the pressure eased a little. “Besides, she’s not alone. Jianyu is there, isn’t he? He’ll make sure she gets out.”

  She lifted one of her knives to his throat. “I don’t like this.”

  He met her glare head-on, fighting past the remaining pain. “We can argue about this, or we can finish what we came to do and get out of here.”

  Viola glared at him a moment longer, and then the pressure in his head eased completely, and he almost collapsed from the relief of it. “If you’re lying to me, you won’t make it out of this place alive.”

  She gave him a jerk of her head, and he followed her silently back through the Egyptian room. They stayed to the edges of the chamber, using the shadows of the great Egyptian gods to conceal themselves, until they came to the other side.

  Gilded double doors carved with elaborate renderings of the tree of life marked the entrance to the Mysterium. If Jack had been correct, the passage behind those doors was available only to the Inner Circle, the highest and most exclusive members of the Order. Jack himself had never seen what lay beyond those doors, and if Harte had any say in it, he never would.

  Viola dispatched the guard on the other side of the door before he could so much as lift a finger to sound an alarm. Once they were through, they found a wide hall that slanted downward, like a ramp. The floor was made of a polished black granite that reflected the light of the greenish lamps that hung from the walls, which were carved with gilded alchemical symbols. From where they were standing, they couldn’t see the end of the hall. It passed downward, into the earth, and then cut to the right around a sharp corner.

  Harte and Viola moved quickly, following the passage until it ended at a brass cage.

  “Come on,” Harte said, pulling the grated door of the elevator aside.

  Viola hesitated. “You want me to get into that?”

  “Unless you’d rather wait here.” He climbed into the elevator’s cage, and Viola, scowling at him, stepped warily into the small boxlike room.

  Once she was in, he secured the gate and pressed the lever to make the elevator start its slow descent. The smooth granite turned to concrete and then bedrock as they continued down, rumbling into the depths of the building—into the very heart of the island itself.

  “We should be ready for anything,” he said, but when he glanced over, Viola already had her knives out.

  When the elevator finally rattled to a stop at the bottom, Harte could hear water running nearby. The air was cool and damp. No one was waiting for them as they exited the elevator, but when they stepped out, they found another set of double doors, this time cast in iron and carved with mirror images of the Philosopher’s Hand.

  The closer they got to the doors, though, the more he could feel the cold energy that permeated them.  Jack hadn’t mentioned anything about protection on the Mysterium itself, but now that they were faced with entering it, Harte wasn’t sure if they could.

  “There’s no way through that,” he told Viola, feeling the sudden overwhelming reality that every risk he’d taken that night had been for nothing. “This isn’t going to work. I need to get back onstage before—”

  But Viola didn’t seem bothered. She took a small item from an inner pocket and gestured toward the doors. “Dolph had a feeling we would find something like this.”

  “What is that?” he asked, eyeing the piece of pinkish stone she was holding. There was something carved on its surface, writing he couldn’t make out.

  “It’s what we took from the museum—an amulet in the form of a seal. If Dolph’s right, the inscription should break whatever protection this is.”

  As he motioned her forward, he wondered if it was the same piece Jack had been interested in. She held the object loosely between her index finger and thumb, and then she began rolling it over the door.

  “To break false magic,” Viola said, “you need to use false magic.” She drew an intricate design of circles and concentric shapes onto the door, and as she worked, the seal left a glowing imprint of the markings from its surface. The markings began to swell and bleed over, until the entire door was alight with energy. All at once, the light broke, and the cold drained away from the space, until only the door was left.

  Harte found himself immediately grateful that he hadn’t turned Dolph over to the police as he’d considered after the Metropolitan burglary. Without the seal, they never would have gotten past those doors.

  He gave a silent jerk of his head, and together he and Viola slipped cautiously into the Mysterium. On the other side of the doors, they found themselves in a cathedral-like chamber with a huge dome. The whole space was lit by the same otherworldly flames as the hallway above. A chemical reaction of some sort, he supposed.

  The stepped farther into the room, toward a tall, square table in the middle. Its four legs stood atop round silver discs. On the center of it, a low golden bowl held a crystalline substance that looked neither liquid nor solid but seemed to glow from within. Next to the bowl lay a necklace with an enormous turquoise gem and a silver cuff he’d seen before—in the images Esta had given to him just minutes ago when she’d kissed him onstage.

  It was yet another sign that he couldn’t simply dismiss what she’d shown him. She couldn’t have known what the cuff looked like unless everything she’d shown him was true.

  Around the circumference of the room, five greenish lamps threw their eerie light up the curved stone walls, and three of the lamps had bodies lying in the pallid beam of their light, suspended in air as though on an invisible table.

  “Madonna,” Viola whispered, crossing herself. “I know these.” She walked toward the nearest body, a man with graying hair and a thick beard. He was dressed in a white robe, his hands were crossed over his chest, and on his left index finger was a ring with a huge stone so clear it looked almost liquid. “This is Krzysztof Zeranski. He went missing a few weeks ago.” She walked to the next body, a woman with light hair capped by a golden crown. She too was dressed in a white robe, and she too was unconscious. “Frieda Weber.”

  The final body was on the other side of the room, but even in the dim light, even from that distance, they could make out the vivid copper of Bridget Malone’s curling hair. Viola walked over, her hand extended as though she could stop what had already happened. “No,” she whispered, glancing back at Harte. “She disappeared the night of the Haymarket raid.”

  Bridget wasn’t wearing a jewel, as the other two were. The blade of a dagger was plunged into her middle. “She’s still breathing,” Harte said, even as he knew that such a thing couldn’t be. Not skewered by the knife as she was.

  “But not bleeding.”

  “Should we help them?” Harte wondered out loud.

  Viola shook her head. “I don’t think there’s anything to be done. We need to find the Book and get out of here.” She walked over and examined the table. “I’ve seen these signs before,” she said, pointing to the four discs the legs of the table rested on.

  Harte frowned as he studied them. They were complex geometric designs—a pentagram inside of other shapes, all ringed by concentric circles. “I haven’t.”

 
“Dolph has a painting, one he took from the museum. This symbol is depicted there.” She glanced up at him, her expression determined. “This is it.”

  As he looked around for some sign of the Book, he noticed that the entire floor of the chamber was a dazzlingly vivid mosaic of the tree of life made from precious stones. The branches sprouted from the central trunk, and at the end of each of the five limbs were five empty indentations in the floor. It was something of a puzzle, he realized—an enormous lock with a five-part key.

  “I think we need to unlock it,” he told her.

  “Unlock what?”

  “This image. The tree of life is an alchemical recipe. In alchemy, the pictures are symbols of elements or chemical reactions. I think the floor is a larger version of one. If we want to find the Book, I think we have to complete the formula.” He looked around the room for some answer, and then he realized. “The cuff and the necklace—bring them over here.”

  He tried to fit the necklace and then the cuff into one of the indentations, but neither fit, so he moved on to the next and then the next, until he found the one that worked for the necklace. As the turquoise stone slid into place, its entire branch began to glow, as if the gemstones that formed it were lit from within. Then he repeated the process to find the spot for the cuff.

  When the stone in the cuff clicked into place, he turned to Viola, who had been watching with a wary crease between her brows. “We need to get those as well,” he said, meaning the jewels on the bodies at the edge of the room.

  She frowned, but gave him a nod.

  They approached Krzysztof first, but when Viola reached for the ring, she drew her hand back. “It feels like death. How are we supposed to get them?”

  “As quickly as we can,” he told her. “You still have that seal?”

  She nodded and, understanding, traced it over Krzysztof’s fingers and the ring.

  “Let’s give it a try,” he said when the entire hand was aglow with the imprints from the seal. His fingers twitched as he readied himself. He could have used Esta right then, with her ability to lift any object in a blink, and for a heartbeat he regretted leaving her behind on that stage. But then he steadied himself and focused on what he needed to do.