From the very beginning, I allowed my attention to follow the spider’s vast web. At first, it was no web at all. Only a scattering of points, cases of interest, people I couldn’t let go. Slowly, as the letters of a gravestone would emerge into legibility with the brightening light of the moon, the contours of the web began to show themselves: the enchanter in the forest connected by the stubborn, sticky strand to the jeweler in reduced circumstances, who in turn led me to the thief in the tavern, who led to the banker in the city, who led to the mistress in high society, who led to the maid in wait of revenge, who led to the villain in need ofsecrets, who led again to the enchanter in the forest. And that was only one circle among many.
I could see that Quinn was caught in the web, but I couldn’t yet see how. The nasty message scored upon his back had confirmed it, and it seemed to me he didn’t have the wherewithal—nor, perhaps, the necessary vindictiveness—to seek the culprit.
Well, I had the necessary vindictiveness. I remember how my mother tried to teach me the grace of forgiveness. She certainly had enough practice of her own, and she had the ability to forgive quickly after a burst of rapid rage. Oh, she could sometimes be furious! But it never lasted long. In comparison, I hid my anger and forgave reluctantly. “Are you still angry with me?” she once said, laughing, because she had refused to allow me to accompany my brother to Boston. I stared at her mulishly. “You’re ridiculous!” she said, trying to embrace me. But I pulled away. “Come, Sam,” she said, growing serious. “You can’t cling to your resentment in this way. It becomes a poison, and it does much more harm to you than it does to others. Look at me! I’ve already forgotten it.”
“Because you are not the one who was wronged!” I exclaimed.
“Wronged?” My mother shook her head. “Look at the matter clearly, Sam. Your brother is older, and you can’t yet manage the world as he does.”
“I’m still angry.”
My mother sighed. “Sam, you imagine insult and injury everywhere, but sometimes it isn’t there. It isn’t an insult to say that you are young. You can’t go through life imagining yourself to be the world’s victim. That’s a recipe for bitterness.”
She was right. I did perceive insult and injury everywhere. And it did lead to bitterness. But not without reason, I would have said, if I’d been better equipped to answer her then. The person who forgives every injury will never be the one to seek justice.
On Saddle Street in Salem, I looked in through the window of Cristóbal’s Clockworks to see the proprietor, Cristóbal, hunched over his worktable, his dexterous hands maneuvering the diminutive parts of a pocket watch. His table stood under a south-facing window to take full advantage of the daylight, and on the walls around him timepieces quietly ticked and tocked, a battery of watchful automata. The wheeled chair that he sat in was expertly made, and as I watched he put down his tools, wheeled quickly backward to make a neat turn, retrieved a spare part from the large cabinet of drawers behind him, and swiveled back to the worktable. On the other side of the shop, where the black window lettering announced “Camille’s Fine Needlecraft,” the seamstress sat with a pile of white satin, the needle in her hand forgotten, her dark eyes staring off into the distance. A patched dress form stood bare beside her, and an array of pins, spools, scissors, and scraps littered the sewing table. I sent the seamstress a nudge of reassurance and she blinked, looking around her as if surprised at her surroundings. “Cris?” she asked, a faint note of alarm in her voice.
“Here, Mamá,” the clockmaker replied. He didn’t look up from his work, but his voice was gentle. “Do you need me?”
“No, dear.” She looked down at the needlework and found her place, continuing the padded satin stitch of a white rose.
I pulled away. On Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, a gentleman on the second floor of a stone mansion stood half dressed, paused in his preparations to visit the club. His valet stood to the side, gloved hands clasped, eyes pinned to the floor, while the gentleman pursued a vigorous argument with his wife. “I don’t care what she says,” the woman insisted, her voice rising. “I placed the handkerchiefs there last night, and today they’re gone.”
“They are only handkerchiefs,” the man said. His bald head gleamed with sweat.
“They are very fine silk handkerchiefs, embroidered with my name, but thecost,” she hissed, “is immaterial. Stealing sugar from the kitchen would be equally egregious. We can’t permit a thief to live under our roof. She will only grow bolder.” The woman’s sharp nose flared with anger.
It intrigued me to see the young maid in question crying in her fourth-floor room, a very plain, rather scratchy handkerchief inadequately gathering her tears, while the cook stood in the back garden, hand on hip, sharing a thin cigar with the driver. Between them, silence reigned. I left them to their laborious schemes and concealments.
Back in Salem, a young nanny sang to a fussy child, cooling the infant with a paper fan, and Constable Roy Maxwell worked through a pile of paperwork and correspondence. Each time he finished a form or letter, he gave himself three minutes’ rest, which he spent drawing. He was composing a detailed illustration of a yarrow plant.
At the center of the Commonwealth campus, on the second floor of the Cabot Camera, Orin Hornsby and his thew watched over the university’s reliquary: a glass vessel containing seven ancient bones. The bones, white and faintly luminous in the blazing light of the reliquary room, shuddered slightly now and then, their power drifting unseen through all the halls and corridors of the university. Hornsby sometimes talked to the bones, but tonight he was silent, staring at them thoughtfully.
I traveled last to Lynn Woods, to the Manse, the very center of the spider’s web. I found the Embalmer in his study, a room that would have seemed beautiful to anyone unfamiliar with its usage. Two enormous windows, some fifteen feet high,looked out onto the woods. Bookshelves filled with scrolls and bound books occupied the other walls. A massive table stood at the center of the room. Its surface, a burgundy suede, showed signs of wear and tear. Chalk lines, stones, and pins dotted its surface. The Embalmer was in the act of adding a fresh pin. He smoothed out the slim curl of paper attached to the pin, reviewed the words, and nodded with satisfaction. Then he plunged the pin into the wine-colored suede, just beside a white stone with the words “Washington Square” painted onto its smooth surface. He chuckled a little and straightened up to survey the table. To any idle observer, the designs wrought upon the suede would have been an inscrutable tangle, but I’d been studying this plan for some time, looking over the shoulder of its maker, and I understood the meaning of every stone, line, and pin. My movements mirrored theirs.
The Cisneros Society had many objectives, some more mundane and petty than others, but all were in the greater service of strengthening the Society’s hold upon the world around them, and the single most imperative goal toward that end was monopolizing portals. To all outward appearances, the Cisneros Society used its power for material achievements—the railway line to Chicago, the land bridge to Nova Scotia, the discovery of rare gems in remote mines, or the seamless conveyance of sugar from the islands. But these material achievements, all accomplished with the aid of spirit thews, drew their power from exclusivity. Cisneros would have been happiest—and wealthiest—ifonlySociety men had thews. And so controlling the portals, keeping them secret, and using them to procure thews lay at the heart of the Society’s mission; they were the core of the Embalmer’s chalk-and-pin plans.
The Embalmer left the study and paced the dark hallways,the walls loaded with paintings and artwork acquired from the dead, all the way down to his cellar, where his other work waited. The cellar had no windows, and he lit the lamps one by one with indulgent ceremony. As the room brightened, its contents came into view. A sheeted shape lay on a marble slab in the center of the room. On a broad wooden table, beneath the brightest lights, lay the Cisneros Steel. The Embalmer carefully removed his rings and placed them in a silver bowl. His aspect didn’t change at all; he didn’t squander tokens on his appearance. Then he opened the armor, which fastened up the sides, and unfolded it outward like the covers of a book. Now the inside of the armor lay face up on the table, and the Embalmer could see the small, ingenious clips that secured pieces of bone to each scale of the armor. The enchantments conducted on the night of the party had been enough to exhaust the bones of the Cisneros Steel, and now only small fragments remained here and there. Patiently, sometimes using his hands and sometimes using tweezers, the Embalmer removed the few pieces left.
Now he was ready to supply the Cisneros Steel with new bone. Straightening up, he walked over to the marble slab. There he pulled aside the sheet, exposing a pale human figure. He selected instruments from a drawer beneath the marble slab. Then the Embalmer rolled up his sleeves and began his work.
I didn’t stay to watch.
I drifted slowly through the woods, letting my eyes and attention wander, comforted by the innocent activities of the forest’s inhuman creatures: a squirrel bounding across the oaks, a pair of ravens cawing irritably, a deer raising its beautiful neck to stare straight at me. They restored my humor, and I moved more quickly through the woods and north, to Commonwealth. By the time I returned to the Brig that evening, Quinn was sittingat his desk, wearing a fresh shirt and the absurd helmet, readingIntroduction to Medical Enchantmentwith his usual unbending diligence, as if nothing had happened.
The following morning Quinn’s humor was not in the least bit dampened by the inconvenience of an injured back. He attended Access to the Spirit Realm and Advanced Appraisal with his customary keenness. The former was taught by the rather flighty Professor Mosser, who was given to long tangents about his travels around the globe. And the latter was taught by the mirthless Professor Pound, a man who rarely practiced any actual enchantment but calculated dead worth a dozen times a day just for the pleasure of it. Quinn left the class elated, and he then spent the rest of the day working on the sheaf of papers given to him by Professor Throckmorton: a bundle of notes, written in a tiny hand, apparently exalting the use of brass hinges in the lead cases used for spirit bindings.
He stayed up late, hunched over his work—to the great detriment of his back, which at one point began, revoltingly, to bleed through his shirt. I sent him a gentle admonition, and then a stronger one when he ignored me. He put down his pen. “I’m busy,” he said aloud, in a tone edged with annoyance. I was surprised that he had spoken to me, but I did not stop pestering. I could not tell him in so many words that his back was bleeding, but I could push a sense of disquiet upon him. He got up impatiently, and as he did so, he must have felt the shirt sticking to his back. Looking in the mirror, he frowned. “Oh,” he acknowledged. “It can’t be helped. I’ll change the bandages tomorrow.” He sat back down at the desk and kept working—until four in the morning, when he finished the document. Without even bothering to remove the shirt, he fell asleep face down on the bed.
On Wednesday he arrived at Throckmorton’s office at ten, well before his afternoon class and apparently rebandaged. Throckmorton sat at his desk, wearing the same beret and the same tweed jacket; it was as though he hadn’t moved since Monday. The spirit thew, however, had been busy. She had cleared a space before the desk, managing to tidy the labyrinth of armor and books into something more resembling a storeroom than a scrap heap, and she had conjured a fully serviceable stool from deep in the pile. As Quinn entered the room, Livia gestured at the stool. “Please,” she said quietly, “have a seat.”
“Thank you,” Quinn replied, nodding.
Hearing their exchange, Throckmorton looked up from his desk and removed his spectacles. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “Olney proved too much for you, has he?”
“Oh, not at all!” Quinn smiled as he sat on the stool. “I quite enjoyed it. I’ve finished the transcription, and I hope you will let me know if my handwriting is legible enough. I do, of course, have many questions!” Livia had come close to him, and Quinn now handed her two bundles of paper. “Here’s the original and here’s the transcription.” Livia held the former to her chest and gave the latter to Throckmorton. She drifted back behind the professor’s chair.
“Good, very good,” Throckmorton muttered, clearly surprised, looking over the pages. “This is quite legible indeed. Brass, eh? I’ve not been much inclined to brass, but perhaps Olney will change my mind.”
