Circle of Shadows

III.6

Pegel stood in the room in which he had seen the gentleman writing, and thought. If he was correct in his assumptions — and he was sure he was — the message he had sent had travelled upwards and come to a rest in this place. Therefore here was the top of the tree, and it was very interesting Dunktal had not sent a message to some other town. Did he have any masters? That was just one of several rather pressing questions.

If there were crucial papers here, and that was what Pegel had come in to search for, Dunktal would not be so stupid as to leave them loose on his desk. He thought of Florian’s terrible sincerity, his idealism. Did that extend up the organisation too? If so, and given the apparent love of secrecy and symbols, all these codes and owls, it was possible the gentleman would leave the papers somewhere clever. Pegel had discovered that life was easier when people tried to be clever, since it often made them obvious. A clever code was far easier to break than a random one, a clever hiding-place much easier to find than an unlikely one. He would have to assume that this gentleman would want his putative papers to hand. That meant this room. Good. Now for the clever bit.

The walls were lined with books — Lord, these radicals loved to read. Pegel stood very still, letting the details of the room shift and settle in his mind as he panned his impressions for gold. There it was. On the bottom of the bookshelf, crushed into the corner by any number of volumes on law, was a large, elderly-looking Bible. If Florian was anything to go by, these people were not religious. Perhaps it was an heirloom of the family? Then surely it should be on display downstairs in the public rooms, not tucked up here. He teased it out of the shelf towards him and considered. It was certainly lighter than it should be. He picked it up and cradled it between his forearms.

‘Open Sesame!’ he said in a deep voice, then gave a soft whistle. It was hollowed out and a thick stack of letters and papers lay in the nest cut out for them. He grinned, considered, set the Bible down on the desk, then spent five minutes giving the room the look of a place speedily ransacked. He pulled out the desk drawers and scattered the papers, yanked out a random number of volumes from the upper shelves and dropped them all so their spines snapped. The pages that had been loose on the desktop when he entered, he threw over his shoulder.

His ransacking done, he sat down on the floor with the papers from the Bible and sorted through them. Some were letters in plain language. Of these he noted down an idea of the contents, and names used; these were mostly classical pseudonyms, but one never knew where these things might lead, and each one was addressed to Spartacus. So Spartacus is Dunktal, he thought. The signatures were similarly unlikely, though Pegel grinned, his eyebrows raised, to see letters apparently from some of the Muses of Antiquity. For Muses, he couldn’t help thinking, they wrote ugly sentences. Some pages seemed to be instructions on the recruitment and training of members; others some of the central tenets of the organisation. He whistled silently and made notes. Several sheets were in code and there were three longer documents that seemed to have been written by the same hand, and bearing the same date. They must be copied exactly and there was no way of knowing how much time he had. He set down his notebook, picked up the coal-scuttle and emptied its contents down the stairs then shut the door, wedged a chair under it and opened the hatchway into the attic.

Thus, as prepared as he could be, he settled down to his work.

‘An alchemist?’ Crowther said coldly.

‘Yes,’ Krall replied, and knocked again. ‘He is a good man. He was an apothecary.’

‘The drugs used on Clode are of a sophistication-’

‘Bugger off!’ The voice sounded from deep within.

Krall rattled the handle again. ‘Open up now, Adam, or I will break down the door.’

‘I said, bugger off!’

Crowther looked around the square while negotiations continued. So even in a city as new as Ulrichsberg there were places that could look neglected. The house at which Krall hammered so vigorously looked like a crabbed old woman surrounded by spring brides. Its windows were thick with filth, there were tiles loose and greenery sprouted from the gutters. The paint on the half-timbering was peeled. The houses on either side showed what it should have been and it seemed to hunker and slump between them, neglected and resentful. Above the door was a faded emblem of a unicorn.

Krall began to count slowly down from ten and a new storm of expletives erupted from behind the low door. Crowther was a little gratified to realise how many of them he understood. He had always thought German a pleasing language to swear in. It had the proper supply of consonants. The unseen owner of the house was proving himself to be an inventive user of the linguistic tools to hand.

As Krall reached ‘Five’ there was a screech and a wrench and the door opened. The man who appeared behind it was an elderly, stooped creature whose eyes were made huge by a pair of smeared glasses. He peered at Krall over them and sneezed, then kicking the door open a little wider against some resistance, spoke.

‘Come in then.’ Noticing Crowther for the first time, he paused. ‘Who’s your pet?’ He spoke clearly enough, but under his words was a faint high wheeze; it was like a slow puncture in an organ bellows.

‘This man is Mr Crowther.’

‘Foreigner?’

‘English.’

‘Explains it,’ he said, then tramped off into the gloom of the house. Krall and Crowther followed.

The ground floor of the building was one low, continuous space but so cramped with old furniture and broken oddments that the man in the eyeglasses had to lead them down a narrow path between the tumbling piles. It was like a junk shop in a corner of the docks somewhere, a place where lost remnants of better places went to die. Crowther saw chairs, dressers, tables upended and balanced on half-opened packing cases; portraits thick with grime set at an angle and half-hidden by the skeletons of chandeliers. Their guide had now scurried ahead of them, more sure-footed and confident among the wreckage.

Krall said quietly, ‘Twenty years ago, Adam Kupfel — Whistler, as he is known now — was a rich enough man. He was an apothecary, and had a house outside Ulrichsberg worth envying. Now he lives in what used to be his shop, surrounded by the wreckage of his old home.’

‘What happened?’

Krall sighed. ‘He turned alchemist, and that turned him.’

‘How?’

‘He always had a liking for all old books, and he found a thing in one of the bookshops of Leuchtenstadt one day — an old volume full of woodcuts and patterns and spells. It took some sort of hold on him. He spent all his money on similar works and turned the apparatus of his trade into a means of searching for the Elixir of Life.’

‘I am still unclear, Krall, what you hope to achieve by questioning a delusional recluse. What can he know of this drug, or who might have made it? These are matters of the real world.’

Krall’s eyebrows drew together. ‘I am not the first person who thought a recluse with unusual interests might yet do some good.’ Crowther felt his meaning, and his lips thinned. ‘Thing is, Kupfel was a good friend to me before this madness took him. My father died when I was just starting off in life, and without Adam’s advice and guidance I’d have probably lost everything he left me. Many the evening I spent at his house while his son played on the hearth-rug. He had the sharpest mind, and such learning. We would have been in a better state in Maulberg if he had taken the seat where Swann now sits, but such opportunities are available only to those of noble blood.’

‘I see.’

‘I doubt that you do. As to what he can tell us now, for all his madness no man within a hundred miles is as skilled with the methods of distilling and preparing drugs.’

‘Stop dawdling! Think I have all day to wait while you pick apart my history?’

Kupfel had to turn sideways to lead them into his lair, so close did the piles of refuse tumble together, but in the narrow opening Crowther saw a steady glow. As he squeezed through after their host he found himself in a more open space. It was as if they entered a cave, carved from the walls of detritus around them. There was no dust here. Every surface was clean and bright. A fire burned evenly in a huge brick fireplace, and by its light Crowther saw the walls were lined with books. Desk and stool stood to the right, a pair of armchairs to the left, and behind them a door, part-open to show a wall of glass jars and distilling bottles. Kupfel saw where Crowther was looking and went to shut the door, frowning.

‘Sit down then, Benedict, you and your friend. Why do you disturb me? I was reading.’ He said the last with a vicious emphasis. Crowther noticed that Krall looked a little abashed.

‘You have heard of the murder?’ Krall asked.

‘At the Festennacht? A woman, slaughtered by some hot-blood.’

‘Mr Clode’s guilt is called into question.’

‘Hmm.’ Kupfel curled up in the armchair by the fire like an old dog and began to work his hands over each other. Crowther noticed they were covered in small scars and burns. There was a scar on his neck too which Crowther only noticed now as he twisted sideways in the light of the flames. It lapped his neck on the left side from collarbone to the underside of his chin, the flesh pink and puckered. Some sort of burn, certainly. Vitriol? Without willing it Crowther imagined a vessel exploding, the man turning away to shield his eyes and leaving the flesh of his neck exposed to the clawing liquid. The pain must have been indescribable, and the damage deep. No wonder his voice had that wheeze. How long had it been before Kupfel returned again to the fire? ‘How was she killed?’

Crowther spoke. ‘Drowned. Drowned without sign of restraint or resistance.’

Kupfel bent over the fire and gently shifted one of the logs so it would burn more evenly, then, still stooped, he looked at Crowther. His glasses reflected the flames.

‘Where did you learn your German?’

‘Wittenberg University, largely.’

‘A man of the nobility then. A man of money, to study there. No wonder you talk my language as if you had that stick up your arse.’

Crowther did not react, and remained looking into the flames reflected on the smeared glasses. The Alchemist put his head on one side, then the other. Once Crowther had seen a Persian tempt a snake from the basket with his pipe at a London fair. As he had watched the animal and the man, he had wondered who was influencing whom. The movement of Kupfel’s head made him think of that snake again. There was a tang of sulphur in the air.

‘I had heard in the chop-shop that an Englishman and a widow had come here to declare the hot-head innocent. You’re no widow, so that makes you the anatomist then, I suppose. A man of science.’

‘I am. My name is Gabriel Crowther.’

The reflection of the flames in the Alchemist’s eyeglasses hid his pupils, making him seem slightly inhuman. He bared his black teeth. It seemed he had no interest in Crowther’s name. ‘Pah. Science. Progress! Man can be perfected, but by mystery. By the transformation of the stars he can live through time, raise the dead, become a god, know God.’ He leaned forward, and as he did so, the wheeze in his voice began to sound more like a hiss. His voice was not loud, but so insidious and intense it felt like a finger pressing on Crowther’s eyeballs. He wondered, trying not to listen, what fumes hung around this place. The air was thick, the fire hot. ‘That is wisdom and it comes with sacrifice. Knowledge! Big word for little minds. In your cutting about of the flesh, have you ever found a soul? Found a thought, a dream? Found love?’ He turned away again. ‘Of course not. You’re merely picking through what you can see. You’re like a man dabbling in a pool of ditchwater thinking he examines the moon he saw reflected there. Look up, Mr Crowther, look up!’

‘I do look, Mr Kupfel,’ Crowther said. ‘I look and observe, and I endeavour to understand. But I work with observable fact, not the babble of fantasy and imagination.’

Kupfel waved a hand at him dismissively. ‘How can you understand anything without imagination? Your mind is too small for the Great Work. Too timid and wheedling. You seek little truths. An understanding. Which shows how little you comprehend.’

He sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his coat-sleeve. ‘Why have you brought this man here, Benedict?’

‘Mr Clode — the man we all thought guilty: it seems some preparation was smeared on his mask. Confused his mind, made him see things. There is a suggestion it might contain datura.’

‘Have you brought it?’

‘Yes.’

Kupfel snapped his fingers and Krall produced the mask, carefully wrapped, from his bag and handed it to him. Kupfel sniffed it, and his face changed, stiffened. He looked between his visitors like a rabbit looking between dogs and deciding which way to run.

‘You recognise it,’ Crowther said.

‘Yes, Science Man. Did you say she went quietly …?’

‘She did, but this mask-’ Krall said.

‘Shush, Benedict. It’s all one. No signs of drink? Laudanum? No bruising on the wrists?’

‘No indication in the reports of anything of the sort. But you recognise the smell in the mask, do you not, Herr Kupfel?’

‘I do. And I know the book where the instructions for making it are writ down. It is datura and some other odds and ends, not sure what works and what’s there for the fun. Complicated. Very. Never managed to pick it apart entirely. One stitch wrong and the whole thing unravels. In the same book there’s another receipt, one for a drug that can render people passive. Like dead, but not dead. It lasts some hours, perhaps a day then they wake up again, wander about, think it all a bad dream maybe. Unless you kill them for real. It’s clever. Breathing is suppressed, heart hardly to be felt, the limbs stiffen. They look dead enough to bury. But they live. Poor bastards.’

‘What book, Adam?’ Krall said, leaning forward. ‘In what book are these things writ down?’

Kupfel looked up. ‘Mine. In my book.’

Pegel was on the last page of code, and thought he might actually make it. He had started to sweat and he had to concentrate hard to make sure he made no mistakes in the transcription of the code, but he was close. There was a very soft crunch of footstep on coal on the stair. He thought for a moment of risking it and finishing, but with a wrench he placed the letters back into the Bible and slid it back into its dark corner. The steps on the stairs were getting closer. Fools — they must realise they were making a noise, why not charge at the door? He reached for the hatch to the roof and hauled himself up, then dropped it behind him and looked about the narrow loft. He had been hoping for something bulky to hold the hatch shut. Quickly now. There, a trunk. Lighter than he would have liked, but needs must. He dragged it over just as the door went below. There was a shout of rage. He saw the trap door onto the roof and stepped from beam to beam to reach it, used the crow bar to snap the lock, pushed it open and clambered out.

‘He’s on the roof!’

Damn. They had someone on the street below. He looked back into the attic and almost at once the trunk jumped and bucked as the people in the room below tried to force their way up. He clambered up and swung himself over the apex of the roof so he would be hidden from the street. His feet slipped and scrabbled for purchase. Downwards was no escape. He headed to his left, flattened against the roof and holding onto the overlapping slates with his fingertips. He had waited too long, but his foolishness might also be his rescue, for it was getting dark now.

‘Thief! Thief! On the roof!’ More than one voice now on the street below. He had to move a lot faster. Be bold, Pegel, he told himself. Just let go with your right hand. Speed, momentum. You know about these things, they might help you fight gravity long enough. With a roar he pulled his hand free and began to run like a man crossing a scree slope, throwing each foot forward and on as it started to slip. The gap between this roof and that of the neighbouring house was small, hardly a stride. He hoped mathematics was as solid as he believed and leaped, then kept on running. His pursuers were on the street.

‘There, there! He’s jumped to the next.’

As long as he kept on the back side there was still a chance. Another leap, another life lost on his score. He glanced right. A veranda leading backwards along a larger courtyard. Could he make the jump down? Only one way to find out. He landed awkwardly. Physics was one thing. Biology another. His ankle twisted and he gasped, and slipped; the flesh on his palm tore, but he found a hold, drew himself into a crouch and keeping low, stumbled north. The voices of his pursuers were fading, but they’d work it out soon enough. The veranda ended and he clambered up the guttering and round the edge of the next roof. Thank God town-dwellers never look up. He couldn’t put any weight on that right ankle without wanting to scream. Well, you wanted excitement, he thought, and paused. The gutter-pipe looked sturdy, and between these two houses was a narrow passage. It was too dark to see what lay below him, but he guessed he’d find out soon enough. He lowered himself down and with his left foot managed to find a foothold on the sill of an upstairs window. Now the right only had to hold him for a second while he moved his hands. Letting go with his right hand was the hardest thing he had ever done; the gutter wanted to hold him away from the wall and tip him downward. For a second it seemed all was lost, but his poor torn fingers managed it and he found himself clinging to the wall and gasping in air like a fish on a slab. He slithered a little further down but instinct made him scramble for a hold with his right foot, and it buckled. Gravity grew bored with the game, and flung him into the darkness below.

The Alchemist wrapped his arms around himself.

‘Adam, you know of these drugs?’ Krall asked. ‘How?’

‘Old memories, old methods. The time before I started on the Great Work. I travelled in my youth, Benedict. You know that. You knew me then. You probably thought me happier then than now, poor fool. I sought truth and understanding, like that man there.’ He nodded at Crowther. ‘Thought I’d find it by wandering about asking impertinent questions. It was a shaman I met in Marseilles. He’d traded his way out of slavery and made a fortune on the Dominican Islands. He sold the drug to whores who worked the docks. It would leave their client without movement or speech, then they would rob them. They would wake confused.’ Kupfel stood and stirred the fire again. ‘I thought it might be of use when people needed to be cut for the stone. He gave me his supplies and promised he could arrange more if I wished.’

‘And?’ Krall asked.

‘And I tried it, of course. It can be taken in a liquid. Colourless, a little bitter but not foul. I paid a servant to cut me when the drug had been taken to see if it stopped pain along with the ability to move or speak.’ He shuddered and his voice grew lower. ‘It was hell. I lost my understanding, but not my sense of fear or pain. It was as if all the demons of the night had been released against me as a punishment for my arrogance. My memory was weak afterwards, but I was for some hours convinced I had died and been damned. I thought the flames were about me and a cut made along my arm was one of a million made by the hot knives of Satanic slaves. Better by far to face the blade with a clear mind than in that condition. The supplies and the notes for the method of preparation I shut away.’ He looked into the flames. ‘The angel drug is a preparation from the same shaman.’

‘Angel drug?’

‘The one smeared on that mask.’ It still lay in front of the fire, grinning up at them with empty eyes. ‘He used it in his ceremonies to let him see his gods. Taking it was like communion to him. He left me a rich and happy man.’

‘You have not prepared these compounds recently then?’ Crowther asked.

‘Not for twenty years.’

‘Where are your notes then, and the supplies?’

Kupfel wrapped his arms around himself more firmly. ‘Stolen.’

‘By whom?’

‘I do not know. The children here tell each other stories about me and from time to time the braver ones have broken in to search for my stores of gold. I noticed they were gone this winter, along with some books, and bought better locks with my son’s charity.’

‘You were not concerned that such dangerous items had been taken?’

‘No. How could the thief have known what he was taking? And in any case, my notes are always coded. Only someone who knew my ways of working could make any sense of them.’

‘And who knows your ways of working?’

‘No one. I wish for no disciple.’

Crowther sighed and sat back in his chair. ‘Yet it seems you have one.’

Kupfel waved his hand at Crowther as if he were a figment in the air he could disperse. ‘Someone else has met my gentleman from Marseilles, or one of his followers.’

‘Indulge us, Herr Kupfel. Could you write a list of what was taken?’

The Alchemist looked at Krall, and on his nod hunched his shoulder and made his way to the writing desk. As he wrote he murmured, ‘I still dream about that night and its horrors. Better to be poisoned, hanged, broken on the wheel than that. If this drug was used, that girl died surrounded by her worst imaginings, convinced that God had forgotten her.’ He put his palms together. ‘He had not, child, He had not.’

Darkness. Darkness and filth. Darkness, filth, pain and oh, by all that was holy, the stench! Pegel managed to open his eyes. He could see by the stars glimmering between the gutters above him that it was full night. He tried to raise himself, but his hand slithered and a wave of sickness washed over him. He lay back again for a moment and groaned as quietly as he could. He must have been unconscious for an hour at least. Perhaps the smell had finished what the fall had started. Still, he had been lucky. The gap between the houses where he had fallen was obviously a dumping ground. Shit-covered straw. Food scraps, broken rubbish, potato peelings. Didn’t these people have pigs to feed? The students must be keeping them all in ready money if they could throw away food. Still, it had broken his fall and he had avoided landing on anything that might impale him. He thought. At this exact moment it was difficult to tell just what his injuries were.

He tried to raise himself again, and this time managed to lift his head and struggle to a sitting position. Every bone in his body ached, but none seemed to be broken. Something stirred in the darkness and a rat ran over his right leg. He drew it back with a hiss, then had to bite his forearm to prevent himself from yelling out loud. The spasm dulled, and breathing heavily, he slithered through the mulch until he could find ground firm enough to stand on, then pulled himself upright on the broken edge of a barrel. He hobbled to the end of the alley and peered out. Everything quiet. A candle or two in the windows, but shadows enough. He brushed off his coat and breeches as best he could. He would get to his attic. He would have to pick up help on the way; he could not possibly haul water up the staircase with his ankle ballooning. Still. That was for later. First he had to get home, shadow to shadow, darkness to darkness, and have a look at what he had found.

Crowther had returned to his room from the Alchemist’s cave in a thoughtful state of mind. He had developed a habit of writing out his thoughts as they occurred to him when considering complexity, and he turned to his pen now. The time it took to form the words on a page slowed his thinking just enough to stop his mind skittering off into speculation. One word at a time, one sentence, to form a thought and follow it. This was how he built his arguments. The visit to Kupfel had not humbled him as such, since he saw Kupfel in some ways as a relic of a previous age, but his simple question, if Crowther had in the many human bodies he had dissected ever found a soul, was a serious one. It had hovered around the edges of Crowther’s study from the first time he took a knife in his hand and began to use it as a tool of investigation. He normally tried to ignore it.

The workings of a living being were both miraculous and coarse: the speed and accuracy with which humans saw, moved, reacted compared with the weight of flesh slippery and dead. What was it that created life in matter? Kupfel was right in his suggestion that Crowther’s studies had given him no answer to that. The difference between the living human and the corpse seemed initially so small, unless great violence had been done. It was no different than his pocket-watch wound and ticking, and his watch stopped. The cogs and wheels were all still present, and ready, it appeared, to function as they always had. Yet there was no key to turn, no way to make the heart move again once it had ceased. Did life come into being as a result of motion? As the sense of wind on his face came to him when he rode on a still day, did thought — life — form through some effect of the movement of blood? Was that life? Was the soul a smoke generated by a body moving in the world; rubbing up against it? If that were true then must animals, having blood and brains, also have souls? Did Mr Al-Said’s creations, which had so impressed Harriet, having movement, have life?

He looked down; he had ceased to write. The quill remained between his fingertips, waiting for him. There were mysteries enough in the pattern of muscles that controlled the movement of his hand over the page to employ his mind. Let alchemists, philosophers and mechanics experiment with the rest. He sensed he was being watched and turned to see Mrs Westerman in the doorway, smiling at him.

‘You haven’t moved in some time, Crowther. I feared you had wound down.’

‘Good evening, Mrs Westerman. How is Clode?’

‘Confused, and he has been very afraid, I think, that he might have had some hand in the killing of Miss Martesen under the influence of that drug. Graves did something to convince him it could not be so, and got him to eat. Then they spent two hours attempting to discover who might have tried to kill him. I have never seen Graves so covered in ink.’

He smiled. ‘Did they reach any conclusion?’

‘There was nothing obvious, of course. No business dealings he thought crooked, nor did he call unexpectedly on any gentleman to find a knife in his hand.’

She came into the room and took a seat in one of the armchairs by the fire. He watched her move, easy and unselfconscious where he felt so often stiff, unsure. ‘Rachel and Graves will go out to the castle again tomorrow.’

‘And you, madam?’

‘I have not decided yet; they certainly need no assistance to spill ink. Crowther, is it very wrong of me to occasionally find our friends who are in the first flush of youth a little exhausting?’

He picked up the pages and began to read what he had written. ‘You are almost twenty years younger than I am, Mrs Westerman. For the sake of our friendship, perhaps I should leave that question unanswered.’

He glanced at her sideways; she laughed softly, then began to pull at one of her red curls. ‘I have just had an interesting visit from Colonel Padfield,’ she said.

‘Indeed? Did he supply you with any further suspects?’

‘That would have been good of him, but no. He asked me if he and his wife might have our blessing to employ Michaels in some quest of their own.’

‘Michaels? How did you answer him?’

‘That Michaels was his own master and might do as he wished, naturally. It seems the Colonel learned that Michaels is fluent in the local tongue, and Rachel has spoken highly of him.’

‘But he gave you no clue as to the mission?’

‘None. But I rather suspect it is to do with his wife. Something mysterious in her past. But I must save my imagination for our own concerns.’

Crowther sat back in his chair and lowered his chin. ‘Curious.’

‘Indeed. Michaels has agreed to call on Mrs Padfield in town tomorrow. But for now come and have supper with us, Crowther, and tell us what you have learned.’

Pegel did not find help. He clambered up to his rooms slowly and in pain and instead of the blessing of warm water he had to rely on the curative powers of the remains of a bottle of red and clean clothes. The ankle was sprained, not broken. If Florian came tomorrow would he have the sense to connect the man running over the rooftops with his injured friend? Best take that one head on. He removed his notebook from his filthy coat and hid it behind a piece of loose skirting board. Not the best of hiding-places but all he could do at the moment. He managed to light the fire then lay in front of it like an old gun dog, his arm a pillow and the rough woollen blanket Florian had slept under the night before, his only covering.