The Last Magician

“We should be ready for anything,” he said, but when he glanced over, Viola already had her knives out.

When the elevator finally rattled to a stop at the bottom, Harte could hear water running nearby. The air was cool and damp. No one was waiting for them as they exited the elevator, but when they stepped out, they found another set of double doors, this time cast in iron and carved with mirror images of the Philosopher’s Hand.

The closer they got to the doors, though, the more he could feel the cold energy that permeated them. ?Jack hadn’t mentioned anything about protection on the Mysterium itself, but now that they were faced with entering it, Harte wasn’t sure if they could.

“There’s no way through that,” he told Viola, feeling the sudden overwhelming reality that every risk he’d taken that night had been for nothing. “This isn’t going to work. I need to get back onstage before—”

But Viola didn’t seem bothered. She took a small item from an inner pocket and gestured toward the doors. “Dolph had a feeling we would find something like this.”

“What is that?” he asked, eyeing the piece of pinkish stone she was holding. There was something carved on its surface, writing he couldn’t make out.

“It’s what we took from the museum—an amulet in the form of a seal. If Dolph’s right, the inscription should break whatever protection this is.”

As he motioned her forward, he wondered if it was the same piece Jack had been interested in. She held the object loosely between her index finger and thumb, and then she began rolling it over the door.

“To break false magic,” Viola said, “you need to use false magic.” She drew an intricate design of circles and concentric shapes onto the door, and as she worked, the seal left a glowing imprint of the markings from its surface. The markings began to swell and bleed over, until the entire door was alight with energy. All at once, the light broke, and the cold drained away from the space, until only the door was left.

Harte found himself immediately grateful that he hadn’t turned Dolph over to the police as he’d considered after the Metropolitan burglary. Without the seal, they never would have gotten past those doors.

He gave a silent jerk of his head, and together he and Viola slipped cautiously into the Mysterium. On the other side of the doors, they found themselves in a cathedral-like chamber with a huge dome. The whole space was lit by the same otherworldly flames as the hallway above. A chemical reaction of some sort, he supposed.

The stepped farther into the room, toward a tall, square table in the middle. Its four legs stood atop round silver discs. On the center of it, a low golden bowl held a crystalline substance that looked neither liquid nor solid but seemed to glow from within. Next to the bowl lay a necklace with an enormous turquoise gem and a silver cuff he’d seen before—in the images Esta had given to him just minutes ago when she’d kissed him onstage.

It was yet another sign that he couldn’t simply dismiss what she’d shown him. She couldn’t have known what the cuff looked like unless everything she’d shown him was true.

Around the circumference of the room, five greenish lamps threw their eerie light up the curved stone walls, and three of the lamps had bodies lying in the pallid beam of their light, suspended in air as though on an invisible table.

“Madonna,” Viola whispered, crossing herself. “I know these.” She walked toward the nearest body, a man with graying hair and a thick beard. He was dressed in a white robe, his hands were crossed over his chest, and on his left index finger was a ring with a huge stone so clear it looked almost liquid. “This is Krzysztof Zeranski. He went missing a few weeks ago.” She walked to the next body, a woman with light hair capped by a golden crown. She too was dressed in a white robe, and she too was unconscious. “Frieda Weber.”

The final body was on the other side of the room, but even in the dim light, even from that distance, they could make out the vivid copper of Bridget Malone’s curling hair. Viola walked over, her hand extended as though she could stop what had already happened. “No,” she whispered, glancing back at Harte. “She disappeared the night of the Haymarket raid.”

Bridget wasn’t wearing a jewel, as the other two were. The blade of a dagger was plunged into her middle. “She’s still breathing,” Harte said, even as he knew that such a thing couldn’t be. Not skewered by the knife as she was.

“But not bleeding.”

“Should we help them?” Harte wondered out loud.

Viola shook her head. “I don’t think there’s anything to be done. We need to find the Book and get out of here.” She walked over and examined the table. “I’ve seen these signs before,” she said, pointing to the four discs the legs of the table rested on.

Harte frowned as he studied them. They were complex geometric designs—a pentagram inside of other shapes, all ringed by concentric circles. “I haven’t.”

“Dolph has a painting, one he took from the museum. This symbol is depicted there.” She glanced up at him, her expression determined. “This is it.”

As he looked around for some sign of the Book, he noticed that the entire floor of the chamber was a dazzlingly vivid mosaic of the tree of life made from precious stones. The branches sprouted from the central trunk, and at the end of each of the five limbs were five empty indentations in the floor. It was something of a puzzle, he realized—an enormous lock with a five-part key.

“I think we need to unlock it,” he told her.

“Unlock what?”

“This image. The tree of life is an alchemical recipe. In alchemy, the pictures are symbols of elements or chemical reactions. I think the floor is a larger version of one. If we want to find the Book, I think we have to complete the formula.” He looked around the room for some answer, and then he realized. “The cuff and the necklace—bring them over here.”

He tried to fit the necklace and then the cuff into one of the indentations, but neither fit, so he moved on to the next and then the next, until he found the one that worked for the necklace. As the turquoise stone slid into place, its entire branch began to glow, as if the gemstones that formed it were lit from within. Then he repeated the process to find the spot for the cuff.

When the stone in the cuff clicked into place, he turned to Viola, who had been watching with a wary crease between her brows. “We need to get those as well,” he said, meaning the jewels on the bodies at the edge of the room.

She frowned, but gave him a nod.

They approached Krzysztof first, but when Viola reached for the ring, she drew her hand back. “It feels like death. How are we supposed to get them?”

“As quickly as we can,” he told her. “You still have that seal?”

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