“Alas, I have not the ability.” He gave a rueful smile.
“It is not your fault, Brother Michael,” she assured him. An idea came to her. “But there is someone who could help us.” She tied the end of the string into a loop and held it up to the griffin. “Lift your foot, little one,” she told him. When he hesitated she added, “Please?”
The creature fluffed out his feathers but did as she asked. With great care, Hecate placed the loop of twine around the leg of the phantom beast. She knew the griffin to be one of the more substantial ghosts in her family. He had not real strength, but he had a certain resistance at the edges of his form. Just as she had hoped, the soft, light string was not too heavy for his particular ethereal construction. The loop held in place.
“Now,” she said, stepping back, “if you would be so good as to drop down just a little and hover in front of Saint Augustine…”
The griffin opened his wings and descended.
“That’s right, that’s far enough. Just there. Perfect!” she told him.
The mythical beast was not ideally designed for hovering, but, with a deal of flapping and squawking, he succeeded in keeping at least the relevant leg in place, his talons extended so that the loop could not slip off.
Quickly, Hecate unraveled the twine from the ball, following the line of sight. When she reached the shelves, she passed the string between the books and hurried around to pick it up on the other side.
“Is there anything of greater import there?” Brother Michael wanted to know.
“Nothing. I am going to continue until I reach something that suggests itself,” she told him. The second row of books was equally dull and unlikely to be of assistance. The angle of the line meant that after these shelves, the next point of contact came with the far wall. Or, more precisely, a cupboard attached to the far wall.
“Have you discovered something?” the monk asked as he drifted around the end of the shelving and came to stand beside her. When he saw what she was looking at, he gave a small but unmistakable gasp of shock.
Hecate looked at him. She, too, knew what the cupboard contained. “It makes complete sense,” she said.
“Yes but … the forbidden books!” Brother Michael took a step back as if the very proximity to the volumes he was speaking of might put him in peril.
“I cannot ignore the guidance of the map, I must act now. Do not be fearful, Brother Michael. They are, after all, simply books.”
For once the monk’s friendly, benevolent demeanor changed. When he spoke it was with true passion. “The texts housed in that case are locked not to protect them from people, but to protect people from them. This you already know.”
“This is a cathedral, a Christian building. I understand that some works of writing are not acceptable.…”
“Acceptable!” He raised his arms and then let them fall by his sides in a gesture of exasperation and frustration. Hecate had never seen him so animated. “You evidently have no conception of what it is we are discussing. This is not about matters of blasphemy or indecency or works that might move people to revolution. No. Within that cabinet are collected some of the oldest, most diabolical, most dangerous volumes in any collection anywhere in the world.”
“Be that as it may, my father and I believe it houses the text used to raise the Resurgent Spirits. If I had any doubt, the map has rid me of it. You can see where it is directing me. I have to follow where it leads. It is our only hope of stopping the work of the Essedenes.” When she saw that he remained unconvinced she went on. “I will be cautious, I give you my word, but I need to find what I can that could help us, wherever and whatever that is. Any dangers those books might contain cannot be greater than the one we face now. Remember the abbey in France. Remember your brethren,” she said, instinctively placing a hand on his arm, only for it to descend through his cowled sleeve.
The sound of the griffin complaining at being left in place interrupted them and the twine fell slack. Hecate reeled it in and the griffin flew to the top of the nearest shelf where it set to nibbling at its leg as if to scratch an itch left there by the unfamiliar contact of the string.
“Thank you, my little friend. You did very well indeed,” she said, watching it fluff up its feathers by way of response. She returned the string to its rightful place, Brother Michael drifting after her. She took the smallest keys from the opened bundle and walked quickly to the cabinet. The brass felt smooth after the rougher iron of the larger keys. It fitted the lock perfectly as she had known it would. The padlocks both opened with surprising ease, considering how rarely they might have been turned. But then again, she reminded herself, in recent times someone had been opening the cabinet. There was one final lock; the narrow central one, positioned in the middle of the gold plate. She carefully pushed the tiny gold key into position and turned it. There was a click, sharp and high, and then another, as the sophisticated lock yielded. She hesitated, as if expecting some powerful reaction to breaching these defenses. None came.
As she opened the cupboard door she detected the anxiety emanating from the monk behind her. If she had been asked at that precise moment how she felt she would have confessed to a small amount of trepidation, but a large amount of excitement. And hope. Hope that she could find a way to stop the Resurgent Spirits hurting anyone else. Hope that she would never again fear for the lives of the people she loved. The interior of the cabinet was lined with lustrous mother-of-pearl so that it gleamed as the light from the room fell upon it. There was a single shelf dividing the space. Hecate noticed a sweet smell, slightly heavy, reminding her of warm toffee. She counted only five books: one large, laid flat in the bottom of the cupboard; three slim, modest-sized and leather-bound stacked upon each other; and one tattered, green, its spine cracked, propped against the pile of smaller books. The griffin, its curiosity getting the better of it, flew down to perch on her shoulder and peer in. Hecate reached toward the green book. Nervousness made her movement clumsy, so that as she touched the scuffed cover she knocked the book from its upright position, causing it to fall flat on the shelf. As it did so, there came a faint but distinct sound, as if a string of a thousand tiny bells had been pulled. Hecate found herself waiting, though for what she could not have said. As the sound faded the silence that followed was unnerving. She took hold of the book and started to slide it off the shelf.
Only now did she come to understand the nature of what she was dealing with.
The book resisted her attempt to move it, pulling against her at first and then wrenching itself free of her grasp. It opened of its own accord, emitting a shrill scream as it did so, turning and twisting upon the shelf, its pages a blur of movement, flicking this way and that. Hecate flinched as the shrieking became louder. She snatched at the book, trying to grab hold, to force it to be still and quiet, but it moved with astonishing speed. At last she grasped a corner of the front cover and held on for all she was worth, trying to clutch it with her other hand.
But the book had other defenses.
In an instant it had opened itself flat and a scaly clawlike hand burst forth from its center. Before Hecate had a chance to react, the hand had grasped her wrist, closing its long talons against her flesh.
She cried out, beating at the terrifying thing with her other fist, desperately trying to pull free.
Brother Michael started to pray. She was aware of frantic activity and noise from the Mappa Mundi. The griffin, determined to defend her, swooped into the cabinet and launched an assault on the claw, scratching with its own spectral talons. Despite their insubstantial nature they appeared to inflict some pain on the guardian of the book, perhaps because of its own magical composition. It let go of Hecate and instead snatched at the griffin, taking a fierce hold of its leg. The mythical beast squawked and flapped as the book slammed shut against it, unable to close completely, but trapping the griffin even more firmly.
“Oh, no!” She grabbed the book again and wrenched it from the cabinet, falling to the floor and kneeling upon it as she wrestled the covers open. The griffin tried to fly free but the gnarled claws still had hold of his leg.
“Let him go!” she shouted, struggling to maintain her grip on the book as it bucked and leaped. She saw that the little griffin was tiring, shedding phantom feathers as it beat its wings in a futile effort to break away from the claw that now began to drag it down into the book. “No!” Already she felt the cover slipping from her fingers. In a moment the griffin would be lost. He was being pulled deeper and deeper into the book. She knew then that she could not save him using strength alone. Forcing herself to think, to find another way, she stopped struggling. She allowed her mind to expand, to open itself to see other possibilities, and as she did so she heard a low, steady hissing sound. Detecting a movement at her breast, she glanced down to see the tiny golden snake on her cameo brooch was moving. It wriggled free of its gold link, doubling then trebling inside, its forked tongue flicking as it detected its prey. As she watched, the tiny serpent coiled and then struck, sinking its fangs into the wrinkled skin of the clawed hand. The guardian of the book released its catch in a spasm of pain and the griffin flew free. The book set up its shrieking again, but the defender was defeated, victim to the snake’s venom, inert and harmless now. The book itself put up a further fight, snapping shut its covers, but Hecate wrestled it back onto the shelf, the loyal serpent shrinking down to size and slithering back to its place on her brooch as she did so. She slammed shut the door of the cabinet, leaning heavily against it. Her heart rate had not slowed to its normal rhythm before she heard footsteps on the turret stairs. Her hands still shaking, she locked the cabinet, replaced and closed the padlocks, and hurried back to stand at her desk, just as Reverend Thomas entered the room.
Hecate scooped the keys into their bundle and slid the cloth into her pocket, greeting the librarian with a bright smile.
“Ah, Reverend Thomas. A productive meeting, I trust?”
He gave a harrumph which might have been a yes or a no, evidently too out of breath to form a proper answer as he lowered himself heavily into his chair. He took a handkerchief from his cassock pocket and polished his spectacles, narrowing his eyes at his assistant.
“Have there been any interruptions to your work?” he asked at last.
“Oh no. None at all. All quiet here,” she assured him before taking her seat and continuing with her task, aware of the griffin settling, trembling, on the highest bookshelf it could find. She turned her head away from the continuing frenetic activity of the ancient map, doing her best to appear calm and focused, while all the time her mind was filled with thoughts of how close she had come to losing her little friend, and of how she might never succeed in tackling the contents of the locked cabinet.
23
Hecate fought the urge to run down the stairs from the library. The shocking behavior of the banned book had raised many questions in her mind, and there was one person in particular she believed might furnish her with the answers. Without stopping to speak to anyone, she fetched her bicycle from the cloisters and pedalled at speed across the Cathedral Green and along East Street. In moments, she was at the key cutter’s shop. The sign declared it to be open, but there were no other customers. It struck her that she had never seen anyone else so much as enter or leave the place. The interior was shrouded in its customary gloom, so that her eyes had to adjust to the low level of light. When they did so, she was startled to see the proprietor already standing behind the counter, watching her, almost as if he had been waiting for her. Almost as if he had been expecting her.
Hecate strode across the shop floor, unpinned her cameo, and placed it on the counter.
Mr. Sadiki did not react.
“The time for hiding secrets behind caution and formalities is past,” she said, sliding the brooch across the worn wood toward him. “Tell me what you know.”
“The brooch has revealed something of its strengths to you?” he asked in his thin remnant of a voice.
