Alma Katsu - The Taker

I inhaled deeply: the room held close myriad smells, spices and forest and dust, and others I couldn’t identify. I stood in the center of the space and looked around, slowly. I think I knew immediately what the room was and what its existence meant, but I didn’t want to admit it.

I took one of the books down from its shelf. The cover was stretched blue linen embellished with handwritten letters and intricate diagrams of symbols within symbols. Turning the heavy pages, I saw there wasn’t a printed page in the entire book: every bit was done in a careful script, annotated with formulas and illustrations-the proper bit of a plant to keep, for instance, or an ornate dissection of a man’s internal workings-but all in a language I didn’t recognize. The drawings were more telling, for I recognized some of the symbols from childhood as well as from the books in Adair’s libraries-pentagrams, the all-seeing eye, that sort of thing. The book was a wondrous piece of work, the product of hundreds of hours of labor, and it reeked of years spent hidden, of secrets and intrigue, and had undoubtedly been coveted by other men, but its contents were a mystery to me.

The second book was older still, with wooden slabs for covers, laced together with a leather thong. Inside, the pages were loose, not stitched together, and by the variety of the papers it seemed to be a collection of notes rather than a tome. The writing appeared to be in Adair’s hand, but again in a language I didn’t know.

Uzra shifted, restless, shaking the tiny bells on the chain around her ankle. She didn’t like being in this room and I didn’t blame her. Adair had locked it from the outside for a reason: he didn’t want anyone to stumble across it. But as I reached up to return the second book to its place, Uzra stepped forward and grabbed my wrist. She held the lantern close to my arm and when she saw the tattoo-that I’d long since forgotten-she let out a moan like a dying cat.

She thrust her arm under my nose, palm turned up. She bore the same tattoo on the identical place, a slightly larger version but executed more crudely, as though the artist’s hand was not as sure as Tilde’s. Her look was accusatory, as though I had done this to myself, and yet there was no mistaking her meaning. Adair had chosen to brand us in the same way. His intentions for me could not be far from his treatment of her.

Holding the lantern high, I took in the contents of the room one more time. A description I had heard from Adair’s own lips came back to me-that of the room within the physic’s keep that had been the prison of his youth. There was only one reason he would need a room like this and hide it away in the farthermost corner of the house. I understood what this place was and why he kept it, and a chilly wave passed through me. The woeful tale Adair had spun of his capture and indentured servitude to the evil physic came rushing back to me. Only… now I wondered which of the two men I had been with, these many months; who was the man whose bed I had taken and, indeed, to whom I had given the life of the man who meant most to me in the world? Adair wanted his followers to believe that he was a wronged peasant boy who had vindicated himself and was merely enjoying the reward of having deposed a cruel and inhuman tyrant. When in fact, inside that handsome youth was the monster from the story, the collector of power and the despoiler of lives, able to move from body to body. He’d left his own decrepit husk behind, sacrificed it to the villagers-no doubt-with the peasant boy trapped inside, as he spent his last minutes in terror, paying for the physic’s cruelties. This lie worked well with his monstrous design and appeared to have hidden him for hundreds of years. Now that the truth was known to me, the question was, what would I do?

It was well and good to suspect Adair’s deceit, but I needed proof: to drive home the horrible truth to myself if to no one else. With Uzra tugging at my sleeve to leave, I snatched a page out of one of the ancient books and took a handful of some botanical from one of the dusty jars standing on the table. There could be a terrible penance to pay for stealing these things-I had heard the story from Adair’s own lips, hadn’t I, the one that ended with a poker wrapped in a blanket and a shower of blows-but I had to know.

I started with a trip to visit a professor at Harvard College who I had met at one of Adair’s parties. Not just any afternoon tea party or salon to fete intellectuals; no, I’d met this man at one of Adair’s parties of a special variety. I tracked down his office in Wheydon Hall, but he was with a student. When he saw I was waiting in the hall, he dismissed the young man and came out to fetch me, the most charming smile on his devilish old face. Perhaps he was half afraid I’d come to blackmail him, since the last time I’d seen him, he was astride a rent boy even younger than his students and crowing proudly. Or perhaps he was hoping I was delivering an invitation to another party.

“My dear, what brings you here today?” he said, patting my hand as he led me into his office. “I am so seldom blessed with visits from fair young ladies. And how is our mutual friend, the count? I trust he is in good health?”

“As fine as ever,” I said truthfully.

“And to what do I owe this happy visit? Perhaps word of another soirée…?” His eyes glinted with the sharpest of hungers, his appetite whetted from too many afternoons gazing over fields of fresh young boys.

“I was hoping I might impose on you for a favor,” I said, reaching into my drawstring purse for the page I’d stolen. The paper itself was unlike any other I’d seen, thick and coarse and nearly as brown as butcher’s wrap, and now that it was freed from the press of its wooden cover, had begun to curl into a scroll.

“Hmm?” he said, clearly surprised. But he accepted the paper from my hand and brought it close to his face, lifting his eyeglasses to inspect it. “Where did you get this, my dear?”

“From a bookseller,” I lied. “A private bookseller who claims to have a trove of ancient books on a subject dear to Adair’s heart. I thought I might purchase the books as a present for Adair, but the language is unreadable to me. I wished to verify that the book is as the dealer claims. You can never be too careful.”

“No, you cannot,” he muttered as he examined the page. “Well, the paper is not of local manufacture. Not bleached. Possibly made by an individual for his own use, as it were. But it is the language you came to me about, isn’t it?” He smiled modestly over his spectacles; he was a professor of ancient languages, that much I’d remembered from our fleeting introduction at that party. Exactly what languages, I couldn’t recall.

“Prussian, I would think. Similar, at least. Very odd, possibly an archaic form of the language. I’ve not seen the likes of it before.” He reached back to a shelf and pulled down a fat, heavy book and began flipping through its onionskin pages.

“Can you tell me what is being talked about? The subject?”

“What do you expect it to be about?” he asked curiously, still flipping pages.

I cleared my throat. “Magic. Of some kind.”

He stopped what he was doing and stared at me.

“Alchemy?” I said, more weakly this time. “Something to do with transforming one thing into another?”

“Oh, my dear, it is most certainly about something magical, possibly a spell or incantation of some sort. Exactly what, I can’t tell you. Maybe if you left this with me for a few days…?” His smile was coy. I knew enough of the work of scholars to suspect what he might do with this paper left in his care: he might try to stake a career on it, using it as the basis for this or that study, and I’d never see it again. Or, worse yet, if Adair were to find out that it was missing, given over to our randy professor friend, well… to say it would go badly for me was an understatement. He lifted an eyebrow in expectation, but I leaned over his desk and snatched the paper back.