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The fight froze. Mircea looked up with a hand locked around Pritkin’s neck, while the mage halted the knife that had been heading for Mircea’s chest. “I already did!” Pritkin spat, face livid even in the almost nonexistent light. “There is no chance, none at all, that the counterspell would not have been sufficient, were you not opposing it!”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“You lie! What was your plan? For your vampire to find the Codex while you distracted me?” I stared at him, speechless. I hadn’t been the one doing the distracting! “Your intent all along was to find the Codex at any cost!”
I felt my chest heave with something similar to the expression on Pritkin’s face. “Well, if not, it pretty much is now,” I said furiously.
“It won’t do you any good!” He wat
ched with a panicked expression as a tiny flame started eating away at the corner of the map. “It doesn’t contain a starting point—that was to be given verbally to the winner of the sale.”
“Then I’ll look up the auctioneer. I’m sure he can be reasonable.”
“Perhaps he would be, if he lived!”
Mircea opened his hand and got to his feet. “We appear to be at an impasse,” he told Pritkin. “You have the starting point, but not the map. We have the map, but not the starting point. We can achieve our goal only by cooperation.” It was a good speech, but he followed it with a smile that made the mage drop a hand to his belt, which contained its usual row of deadly little vials.
I ignored them and watched the flame grow, consuming the artwork that someone had painstakingly painted at the bottom of the page. Considering how sloppy the rest of the map was, it stood out. Particularly because it hadn’t been included on the version I would one day be given by a kindly-looking old man in a pretty French garden. It was a perfectly rendered, golden ouroboros, its tiny scales glinting in the candlelight.
“What are you doing?” Pritkin demanded, as the hungry flames leapt higher. “If you burn it, you will never find it. Even if the vampire made a copy, it won’t contain the starting point! And I won’t help you!”
“I guess I’ll have to take my chances,” I said, watching the bright yellow flame leap higher.
“You cannot be serious!” Pritkin made a move toward me, but Mircea knocked him back with a casual blow that staggered him. The mage struggled to his feet, staring at me with anger and confusion on his face.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been more serious in my life,” I said honestly.
He helplessly watched the paper turn brown and crisp up, and I saw it the moment realization hit his eyes. If no one found the Codex, it would slowly unwrite itself, tucked away in whatever burrow the mages had found for it. And if anyone ever did come across it, it would be useless to them—as much so as if he had retrieved and destroyed it himself.
The three of us watched the paper burn to a cinder. Pritkin looked at me, an unreadable expression on his face, as he carefully ground it to powder under his heel. Then he simply turned around and left. A moment later, a flash of blue lit the front of the house like a strobe light, and he was gone.
“I did not make a copy,” Mircea told me quietly. “I can attempt to reproduce it from memory if you like, but it was quite complex.”
“No.” I stared down at the map, my head reeling. “It really wasn’t.”
“Do you know, dulceata?, most of my dates have involved rather less dirt.”
“Don’t complain. You should see this place in two hundred years,” I said, thrusting the relit candelabra at him.
Mircea gingerly took the rack of candles while I got his knife under the gold ouroboros set into the line of skulls. It came out easily; the plaster had barely had time to set. Behind it was a small leather tube embedded in solid rock. With a little work, I got an edge up, and a second later it slid out into my hands. I stared at the limestone-dusted cylinder and could have cried.
Whatever starting point the auctioneer—Manassier’s grandfather, I assumed—had told Pritkin had been a fake. And the copies of the map that were floating around, say with his grandson, were useless to anyone who might stumble across them. Unless you knew the secret, they would just send would-be treasure hunters on a wild-goose chase. Like one of them would me, two hundred years from now.
No wonder Manassier hadn’t minded giving me the map; he’d known it was useless. The real clue had been the drawing at the bottom of the page, a drawing the copies hadn’t had. A drawing the Pritkin of this era had never had time to notice.
I fumbled getting the tube open, my hands numb with equal parts cold and excitement. I finally took the candles back from Mircea and let him do it. A sheaf of parchment emerged a moment later, golden with age but still perfectly legible. “I don’t believe it,” I whispered. All that time, it had been right here. I’d even touched the tiny symbol marking the spot. Touched it, and then run right on by. “I can’t believe it’s over.”
“It isn’t,” Mircea said, scanning a page. He flipped through several others, and his frown grew deeper. “Unless you perhaps read Welsh?”
“Welsh?” I snatched the sheaf from him and a brittle edge flaked off and fell to the ground. The thing was practically disintegrating just from being held. I was more careful after that, but it was easy to see that Mircea was right: the pages were all covered in the same sort of gibberish Pritkin used for taking his notes. I couldn’t read a word of it. “Damn it!”
“It is not one of my languages,” Mircea said before I could ask. “However, there are mages in this period who would be able to translate it, and possibly cast the spell for you.”
I watched as a small curl at the end of a letter slowly disappeared. It had been attached to the final word on the last page—a word that was already unwriting itself. Relax, I told myself sternly. What are the odds that it’s part of the spell I need? I sighed. With my luck, they were actually pretty good.
“We have to hurry,” I said, carefully rolling the brittle pages back together.
“That would not be wise. Engaging the help of mages is always dangerous. I will have to do some checking, to be certain that we contact someone who will not immediately betray us.”
