Chapter 17
I woke up in the same chair, hours later, to sunlight streaming through the cracks in the window blinds. I looked around, momentarily disoriented. Seeing Roxana in the other chair and an empty Oban bottle on the floor near me, I realized I must have passed out in the reading nook sometime after my mother’s visit.
At least I didn’t have a hangover. Benefits of high-level sorcery: aging five or six times slower than the normal population, immunity to most diseases, and healing extremely quickly from anything short of death. No matter how drunk I got, I generally recovered from the hangover before I woke up.
That did not, however, protect me from being somewhat sore and creaky after sleeping in an awkward sitting position. I stood up and stretched with a groan, and slowly walked over to the counter. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but I was definitely late opening the shop. I dragged myself upstairs to brush my teeth and wipe the sleep gunk out of my eyes.
By the time I got back downstairs and opened the shop up for business, I was feeling mostly human again. Unsurprisingly no one had lined up outside waiting for me to open the doors, so I headed to the back office to begin puzzling over the Avartagh’s words.
I went through my bookshelves—both my personal collection and the rare tomes in the cage—and pulled out anything that might shed any light on the Avartagh, his reign of terror in Ireland, his blood rites in Brittany, or whatever the hell he meant about the cycles of the two worlds. I ended up with a stack of books about a foot and a half high, most leather-bound, all old. Then I sat down, poured myself a breakfast glass of Lagavulin, and opened the first one.
I couldn’t find much detail on the Avartagh or the blood rites beyond what we already knew. But after a great deal of skimming various books, interrupted a couple times by customers, I finally found something useful.
It was a three-hundred-year-old monograph on comparative metaphysics by an Italian sorcerer, Giuseppi Bertoni, which had been in my cage for a while, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to reading. Now that I did so, I realized it was precisely what I needed.
Bertoni analyzed more than a dozen different metaphysical theories from various religious and mystical traditions across the world and discovered some interesting commonalities. He postulated that each of these systems was a distorted view of a part of the whole, much like the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant. This alone wasn’t particularly groundbreaking, as plenty of magical scholars would agree with him. But where he went further was in his effort to put the parts together to develop a tentative metaphysics of the universe, based on a nested series of cycles.
Bertoni theorized that our world and the Otherworld were locked together in a metaphysical orbit, which he called Il Grande Ciclo—“the Great Cycle.” This resulted in the periodic patterns seen in things like magical fields and ley-lines. It also caused smaller nested cycles, such as the waxing and waning of the veil throughout the year, with the quarters and cross-quarters of the seasons being fixed points in the calendars of both worlds, and time in the Otherworld being more fluid in between.
There wasn’t anything terribly specific in Bertoni’s text, but that was enough to get me thinking. The old scholar had struggled to build his theory based on myths and legends from over a dozen different cultures across thousands of years of history, many passed down through oral tradition for generations. He freely admitted he had little more vision than the metaphorical blind men who’d first told the myths he used, and only had the advantage of being able to compare their various accounts and put them together like a puzzle, as well as some firsthand evidence about the relationship between our time and Otherworld time.
But the more I thought about it, the more his theory fit what I already knew about the interactions between our world and the Otherworld. This had to be the same Great Cycle to which the Avartagh had referenced, the cycles of the two worlds in which his patterns were hidden. And he’d mentioned that the rites he’d developed were aimed at some critical point in the cycle. But what that point was, how the Tamesis rites affected it, what would happen if it did, those were questions I couldn’t yet answer.
While I had a fairly impressive library of obscure esoterica, I didn’t have many books that delved into the nature of the veil or the relationship between the worlds on either side of it. Fortunately, I knew where to go to find more. And with Bertoni’s theory as a starting point, I had some idea of what I was looking for, a direction to explore.
I knocked back the rest of my Lagavulin and headed upstairs to pack an overnight bag. When I got back downstairs, I called the number on Detective Lajoie’s business card.
“Hello?”
“It’s Quinn,” I said gruffly.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve found something on the Avartagh’s comment about the cycles of the two worlds. It might be the key to figuring out the larger pattern of the ritual, and where the remaining sacrifices will occur.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’ coming,” he prompted.
“But,” I replied, “I don’t have enough information in my own books. I need to go to a library.”
“Okay, should Connors and I meet you there?” he asked.
“No, not the New York Public Library. It isn’t anywhere you can meet me. I’m just letting you know that I’m going to be out of town for a few days.”
“I see,” he said, then paused. “Can you at least tell me where it is you’ll be going?”
“Egypt,” I answered.
“Alexandria?”
“No, the Great Library of Alexandria is no more, in any form. This one is in the Sinai. In the meantime, you and Connors should continue investigating what you can. See if there’s some connection between the victims besides them both being sorcerers.”
“Yeah, we’re already going through all the physical evidence from both apartments looking for connections or anything else that might be useful. Hurry up and get back as soon as you can. And let’s hope we don’t have another murder before then.”
On that gentle reminder of the ticking clock, I made sure Roxana had enough food and water for a few days, then locked up and caught a cab to Philadelphia International Airport.
One might assume that travel in the magical world is simple—just open a gate to the Otherworld, make your way to a point corresponding with where you want to go in the physical world, and open a gate back, nice and easy. But it isn’t like that.
For starters, you have to know where the corresponding points are. The Fae can tell to where any point in one realm connects in the other as a matter of course, but the rest of us have to look it up or find out for ourselves. Then you have to consider the political realities of the parts of the Otherworld you need to cross—not everywhere in the Otherworld is quite so hospitable to sorcerers as Sidhe. And even if you know where you’re going and a safe route to get there, odds are there isn’t a direct gate between your entry and exit points, so you’re still going to have to do a lot of walking.
Rachel had managed so easily the night before because she’d had an escort, courtesy of being summoned by Aengus for a treaty matter. I wouldn’t have any such advantage in making my way to the Sinai, so the Otherworld route was a tricky option. It might save some time, but it wouldn’t be worth the extra effort required.
Instead, I used a reloadable prepaid Visa card to purchase an extremely expensive first-class ticket to Egypt. Fifteen hours and a brief layover in Cairo later, I was in Sharm El-Sheikh, a coastal city on the Red Sea and the capital of Egypt’s South Sinai Governorate. I even managed to sleep on the flight, after enough “free” drinks. It wasn’t high-quality sleep, and I still had nightmares, but it was better than what I’d gotten the night prior.
Sometimes the easiest answer is to forego magical means entirely. Well, not quite entirely—I’d used a concealing spell on my Glock and knife to get them through airport security. I’d be damned if I were going anywhere without ready protection after that attack at the Market.
I found a taxi at the Sharm El-Sheikh airport to take me up into the mountains. A three-hour drive later, I was standing in front of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, an ancient Greek Orthodox complex built around what is purported to be the very bush which burned without being consumed when Moses first spoke to his God. It’s nestled in a small valley at the foot of the Mount of the Decalogue, the summit of which is believed to be where Moses later received the Ten Commandments. The monastery is one of the holiest sites in Christian tradition, a sacred pilgrimage destination for almost two millennia. It also happens to be home to one of the world’s most ancient libraries, known to scholars and historians for its importance in Christian scholarship—only the Vatican has a more extensive collection of ancient codices and manuscripts, and some of the oldest handwritten copies of the Bible ever found were discovered in the Saint Catherine archives. But my visit had nothing to do with the library known to the public.
The taxi driver dropped me off outside the thick fortress wall of the monastery proper, protesting in Arabic that the monks wouldn’t grant me entrance this late in the evening, that I should find a guesthouse for the night in the nearby village and return in the morning. I told him not to worry about me and paid him, and he sped off back onto the road.
After I brushed the dust his tires kicked up off my coat, I walked up to the steel-coated door in the north side of the monastery’s curtain wall and knocked loudly. The inner doors creaked as someone passed through them, then the outer door cracked open and a black-robed monk with a long beard split into two forks, wearing the black flat-topped hat of an Orthodox clergyman, peered out at me in the twilight gloom.
“I’m sorry, my son, but the monastery is closed to visitors for the night. Please come back in the morning if you wish to enter,” he said in Greek.
“I am not a tourist,” I replied in the same tongue. “Fetch Father Andreas. I have urgent business that cannot wait until the morning.”
“Very well. Wait here, please.” He stepped back and the door creaked shut.
The Arcanum had no central headquarters, and thus no equivalent to the Library of Congress or the Vatican Archives. Instead, there were a handful of archives hidden throughout the world, generally attached to a university or other scholarly collections. Oxford University in England, the University of Salamanca in Spain, al-Qarawiyyin University in Morocco, and Yuelu Academy in China, along with several other venerable institutions, all had such secret athenaeums nested within their libraries, only accessible to those who knew the right spells to unlock their secret gates. But the first was right here, hidden within the walls of the Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai, more commonly known as Saint Catherine’s.
I knew from my own studies many years before that this particular athenaeum was home to the most extensive collection of works on Hermes Trismegistus, the greatest sorcerer of the ancient world, books that could be found nowhere else. They even had a copy of what was reported to be Hermes’s own grimoire, though to my knowledge no one had delved into its mysteries in the entire existence of the Arcanum, and likely many centuries before. Few sorcerers spoke Middle Egyptian or could read the hieratic script in which Hermes and his contemporaries had written.
Fortunately, thanks to my affinity for learning esoteric languages, I was likely the only human alive with the knowledge to read both his original writings and the commentaries of his followers. If any human sorcerer had ever unlocked the mysteries of the veil, had ever achieved any level of understanding of a purported Great Cycle, it had been Hermes Trismegistus. I needed to know what he had learned.
The door creaked back open and I saw the face of a wizened old man, his snowy beard forked like that of his fellow monk.
“Father Andreas?” I asked, still speaking Greek. I had never met the man before; I knew who he was through reputation alone.
“Yes,” he answered. His eyes ran me up and down, then he met my gaze. “A Sorcerer of the Arcanum, I see.”
The Athenaeum at Saint Catherine’s dated from long before the establishment of the Arcanum. Local sorcerers had spirited the writings of Hermes and his followers from the Great Library of Alexandria before its final destruction and they had ended up in the monks’ hands over the ensuing centuries. Sorcerers had come to the Sinai to study Hermetic magic for generations before the Arcanum was formed a thousand years ago; they had formed a partnership with the monks in residence. By ancient tradition, one of the monks was always appointed as Caretaker of the Sinai Athenaeum, and he was trained in the basic magical skills necessary for the task, including recognizing the signs of a sorcerer’s robe. In exchange for this continuing service, the sorcerers had crafted powerful, complex spells of protection over the monastery, which had helped it survive the many centuries of conquests, despots, and wars which had destroyed most other Christian houses of worship in the region.
The previous caretaker chose his own successor, as it had to be someone with enough latent magical talent to meet the requirements of the position—on many occasions, there was no one suitable within the brothers of the monastery, and someone had to be sent from other monasteries in Greece. Father Andreas had been the Caretaker of the Sinai Athenaeum for over fifty years. From the looks of it, if he weren’t already training a successor, he should probably start soon.
I nodded. “I need to access the Athenaeum. Time is of the essence.”
“Very well, Sorcerer. You may follow me.”
He opened the door wide enough for me to pass through, then securely closed it behind me. He led the way in silence through the two inner doors in the curtain wall, the third at a right angle to the others. We emerged into a small courtyard, facing the side of the Catholicon of the Transfiguration, the main church within the walls. Behind its bell tower peeked the minaret of a medieval mosque. All Abrahamic faiths were welcome here.
I didn’t have much opportunity to look around, however, as Father Andreas led me to the left around the Catholicon toward the southeast courtyard. I knew from my last visit here, almost two hundred years ago, that the library was located against the curtain wall on the far side from the entrance, just past the monks’ dormitory.
He opened the door and gestured for me to enter, then followed me in and hit a light switch. Electrical lighting was a pleasant upgrade from my last visit, but otherwise little had changed. It was a long room with bookshelves along both walls, metal staircases leading up to a gallery lined with yet more books. But we ignored all that as Father Andreas led me down the central aisle, then stopped at a pillar in the center of the room. Wordlessly, he reached out and touched the pillar and closed his eyes.
A second later, a section of the floor beside the pillar faded away to reveal a hidden staircase down into the ground below us, disappearing into darkness. The stairs and the walls around them were rough-hewn stone, the same as the walls of the monastery itself.
“Come, Sorcerer,” Father Andreas said quietly, leading the way into the blackness below. As his feet reached the sharp line where the light from above seemed simply to cut off and give way to dark, he touched a small bronze fixture on the wall next to him, and the space below filled with a glow which seemed to come from the stone itself.
Below us I could now see a long room, its outline the mirror of the one above it. Here, however, the bookshelves were cut into the rocky walls themselves, and the books were all chained to their shelves. I knew the chains were reinforced with magic, to ensure no one could steal the tomes they secured. The circumference of the room was lined with a waist-high reading table, with a handful of chairs along its length, to allow scholars to read the books by the shelves to which they were locked.
“Welcome to the Athenaeum of Sinai, Sorcerer. Have you been here before?” Father Andreas asked.
“Many years ago. Long before your time.” I nodded as I walked over to the shelves and began looking through books.
“Is there anything I can help you to find?” the Caretaker asked.
“I seek information about the veil, and the cycles between the two worlds. Where might I find the works of Hermes Trismegistus?”
He nodded and headed to the other end of the room. “I believe these shelves here will contain most of what you seek. Do you need anything else?”
“You don’t happen to have any whisky on hand, do you?” One could hope.
He shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Sorcerer. We have wine, if that will suffice.”
I shrugged. “It will do, I suppose.”
It had been a while since I’d had wine, but anything was better than nothing.
“I will fetch you some wine from the rectory, and then leave you to your work. When you are finished, or if you need anything else before you are finished—food, drink, sleep—simply ring the bell beside the stairs.”
With that, he climbed the stairs and sealed the floor again behind him, closing me in to the secret library. I started pulling books down off the shelf he’d indicated and got to work.