The Blackthorn Key

Isaac touched one of the polished brass handles. “If I may borrow your youth, Thomas?”


Tom stepped forward obligingly and put a shoulder to the door. Then, eyes wide, he froze. “How did you know my name?”

“Benedict once mentioned his apprentice had a friend so loyal that no matter what ludicrous scheme the boy concocted, Thomas Bailey would be there, right beside him. Christopher is wanted for murder. His head is worth twenty pounds. And the King’s Men are not the only predators hunting it. Yet here you are. So who else could you be?”

I flushed. Tom turned to me, triumphant. “I told you they were schemes.”

? ? ?

The giant door creaked open, swinging on inch-thick hinges. What lay beyond nearly made me drop to my knees.

We were in a cavern. It stretched so far that the light from our lantern couldn’t reach the end. Everywhere there were shelves, scores of them, rows upon rows, built to fit the titans of ancient Greece. They went all the way to the ceiling, fifty feet above, so far you’d need ladders as high as a house to reach them. And the ladders were there, sturdy beams with wheels at the bottom, set in rails on the floor.

I’d never seen so many books. The shelves groaned with them, threatening to split and bring a hail of paper from the heavens. There was much more than just the tomes, too. Scrolls lay stacked in pyramids on one shelf, yellowed and brittle with age. Stone slabs leaned on another shelf, strange glyphs carved into their surfaces. In one row, dusky red tablets were marked with arcane lines and arrows, hardened into the clay thousands of years ago.

Tom backed toward me until his arm pressed into my shoulder. “Where are we?”

“Deep under the city, in a vault built by the Knights Templar,” Isaac said. “Here they stored their plundered treasures, until Pope Clement disbanded their order and burned them all at the stake. The vault was bequeathed, in secret, to the Mortimer family, three hundred and fifty years ago. Before you ask, I don’t know what happened to the Templars’ gold. It doesn’t matter. We’ve filled it with something much more valuable.

“What you see is the full collection of works that I and my brothers before me have acquired. It is centuries of knowledge, from every civilization, from every corner of the world. It is available to all who seek genuine truth. Sadly, of those, there are precious few.”

“You keep saying ‘we,’?” I said. “Was Master Benedict one of you?”

“He was. There were seven of us. All are dead, or fled the city, except me.”

“But who are you?”

“We are alchemists,” Isaac said.

“The people who turn lead into gold?”

“I thought they were all frauds,” Tom blurted, before realizing that insulting a man when you were deep in his secret underground vault was not a good idea.

But Isaac wasn’t offended. “Most are. And yes, Christopher, the transmutation of lead into gold is one of the secrets alchemists seek. But centuries of deceit have obscured why.”

Isaac walked forward. We followed him, the clicks of our heels on the stone echoing throughout the cavern. When we reached the ladder beside a shelf eight rows down, Isaac pushed it, sliding it across the floor on squeaking wheels.

“The purification of base metals—turning lead into gold—is but a means to an end,” he said. “What we really search for is the blessed knowledge of God Himself. We seek to discover the Prima Materia, the First Matter, the raw energy from which Our Lord created the universe. In this way, we hope to truly understand our mortal world.”

The ladder rattled to a stop a third of the way down the shelf. Isaac traced his fingers along the spines of the books in the second row from the bottom, searching more from feel than from sight. He pulled out a volume bound in dark leather and held it out to me.