Episode 7: The Worst Version of Himself, Chapter 3
"This is ridiculous!" Ezekiel Jones spat out, storming around the edges of the room. "How can it be a locked room if there are no locks!"
"It's a trap, Ezekiel," Cassandra sighed. "There don't have to be locks on the inside, just the outside."
"It's your friend's shop! Didn't she consider that you might pay her a visit sometime in the future? You know: after she went and booby trapped her previous workplace?"
"We don't know that she did 'booby trap' it," Cassandra pointed out. "Maybe one of the giants who were hunting her did it. Maybe they caught up with her and captured her. She could be in real danger."
"And they just left their magical trap here?" Ezekiel queried. "After they caught her?"
"Maybe they set it up to catch her and she escaped," Cassandra countered.
"But didn't think to warn her friends in this dimension who deal with this stuff every day that there was a trap waiting to catch whoever walked in, disguised as her bridal dress shop?"
"Not everyone," Cassandra frowned. "This place wasn't busy any time we were here, but it wasn't always empty either. And Trudi did say she made enough from the shop to live on. Unless this has just happened, somebody else would have walked in to this place already."
"They'd see the same glamour we did?" Jones asked, his mind turning over the fragments of information: building a picture.
"Yes," his companion answered with a nod. "They'd see exactly what we did."
"How do we know this isn't the glamour?"
"From what Flora and Flynn have taught me, a glamour is like a band aid, a sticking plaster," she explained. "It covers the surface of something, not its interior. We're right inside the shop. There's no way this is a glamour: it's all around us."
"Yeah, but couldn't you band aid the inside of a box just as easily as the outside?" Jones pointed out.
"True, but not all of the contents," Cassandra shook her head. "At least not without me knowing: there'd be too much magic."
"Okay, no contents," the World Class Thief considered. A sly grin spread across his face. "But locks don't count as contents, right? A glamour could cover them."
Cassandra pulled a puzzled face. Trust Ezekiel Jones to think neither inside nor outside the proverbial box, but actually on the sides. "I guess so," she admitted.
"Think you can find them," her kleptomaniac colleague coaxed, flashing her an angelic smile.
She narrowed her eyes at him. "What am I? Some portable magic detector that goes ding when there's stuff?"
Ezekiel considered this with a shrug and a grin. "Exactly!"
Cassandra rolled her eyes and held out a hand. Jones took it and helped her up from her dusty seat on the floor. He waved an arm expansively in front of him, bowing slightly and his friend took centre stage, and a deep breath. As the air left her lungs in a gentle sigh, he could tell that the world around her had changed. She was no longer looking at the same view as he. Her world had become filled with the waves and lines and shimmering opalescence of magic. For a moment, a mild thread of envy ran through him, wondering what the world looked like with such abilities, but even before she had turned back to him, the moment had passed and he was watching her with a fond smile.
"Well?" Jones prompted. "What news from the witchy world?"
"Okay, I'm just gonna remind you here who you're dating," Cassandra retorted, holding up a warning finger. When the everyday mask on Jones' face froze for an instant, then grew even more annoyingly impervious, she took a breath and recounted her findings. "You're right, there is a glamour on each of the locks, but there's more than that too. And they're not normal glamours, either. Something is locking them in place. A spell, or spells. When I noticed it wasn't just the locks, I looked at all of the room. There are glamours all over the place. All around the walls. And they're all locked in place."
"So we can't remove any of them?" Jones groaned.
"No," Cassandra agreed, raising a hand to prevent interruption, "but I don't think we need to. Look at that wall there." The synaesthete pointed at the long wall between, but furthest from, the two doors. "Does anything stand out?"
Jones shook his head. "Nope. Not a jot."
"But if you look at it with eyes that can see magic..." Cassandra trailed off, waving a hand, palm forward, Jedi style, at the wall. Light bloomed from her palm and settled on the bricks of the wall.
Only some bricks, Jones noted.
"I am assuming that means more to you than it does to me," he wondered aloud.
Beside him, Cassandra grinned. "It's Braille," she explained. "It says one word: Librarians!"
With a red flash, a rectangular patch of glamour on the back wall disappeared, revealing a safe.
"Finally!" Ezekiel crowed triumphantly. "Now it's my turn."
As her younger colleague began to put his own unusual skill set to good use, Cassandra settled back against the wall and let her magically altered synaesthesia roam around the room. She heard a clatter and looked to see Ezekiel picking up a dropped tool. Cassandra frowned. Ezekiel Jones did not drop things. Not thief things anyway. Ten minutes, and two more dropped items, later, when the safe was still safely and stubbornly locked, Cassandra began to think that maybe there was something on her usually imperturbably pet criminal's mind. Unhurriedly, like the farmer who sidles nonchalantly up to the aged hen, warily avoiding spooking her prey, she spoke. "How's Seonaidh?"
Ezekiel froze, then continued his task, focussing very minutely, Cassandra noticed, on the complex mechanisms of the safe. He was silent for approximately two and a half minutes by the synaesthete's count.
"I have to break it off with her," he admitted, so quietly that Cassandra wasn't entirely sure her own brain hadn't supplied the sound.
"Say what now?"
"I'm going to break it off with her," he repeated, louder now and pausing in his work. "I have to."
"I thought you were in love with her?" Cassandra frowned. While Jenkins and Charlene and so many of the others had argued so much against the thief's budding relationship, Cassandra herself had never taken a side. No more than to tease her surrogate baby brother about his newest crush, at least.
"I am," replied said thief simply. "That's why I have to let her go. She's the Cailleach now, and she's part fae. And I'm..."
"What?" Cassandra frowned sympathetically, watching Ezekiel's face for clues.
"I'm a Librarian," he affirmed, still not looking at the woman who had become his most treasured friend. "I have a duty to the Library, and that sends me all over the world then keeps me here the rest of the time. She has a duty to Dunvegan. She can't leave. Ever. Not now."
"You're not the only Librarian, though," she pointed out, taking both his hands away from the task they were utterly failing to do and holding them in her own. "There's Jacob and I, and Flynn. Flynn did this job alone for years. Now he has Eve to watch his back and Jacob and I to cover the other stuff that comes up. I know it's busy right now, but..."
"What?" Ezekiel looked up, and caught Cassandra frowning down at his hands. "What is it?"
"What did you do to your right hand?" Cassandra held up his grazed and bruised hand in evidence.
Ezekiel looked away with an apologetic grimace. "I might have, you know, punched a bookcase or wall or, well, something... It was in the office. I wasn't really paying attention."
"You don't do punchy," she reminded him, trying to catch his eye.
"And apparently that there proves why," Jones chuckled, pulling away from her and turning back to the safe.
XXXX
Flynn and Eve stumbled through the back door just as Jacob Stone was gearing up to leave through it. The greeting froze on the art historian's lips with one look at their faces.
"What's wrong?" Stone asked instead. "Somethin's happened."
"Hervor's dead," replied Eve, brushing the snow off her husband's coat to hide the tremor in her usual militarily brusque tone.
"Where's Cassandra and Ezekiel?" Flynn demanded, looking round the office for traces of the other Librarians.
"Still in New York," called a stentorian voice from the mezzanine. Charlene's face appeared and the most recent veteran of the Library hurried down the stairs. "Da Vinci's back in his work room, going over the lists Jenkins and he made. He has a theory."
"Hervor's dead," Flynn repeated, looking to his old friend for guidance. "She was killed. Probably tortured first too."
"Well, I guess we know how the Serpent Brotherhood got their information," sighed Charlene.
"And made sure we couldn't get it," added Eve. She straightened and looked over to the retired receptionist. "When was the last time Jones and Cassandra checked in?"
"When they reached the shop," Charlene reported. "The thief called in to say they were there and everything looked quiet. That was three hours ago."
"Where were you going?" Flynn frowned, nodding at the bag in Stone's hands.
Stone looked down at the bag, momentarily forgotten in the face of this new blow. "Huh? Oh. Clippings book glowed. Some farmer in Germany dug up a gold drinking horn. The press are claiming it's another of the Gallehus horns."
"Galeas horns?" Eve frowned, her head snapping round from Flynn to Stone. "As in our Galeas?"
"Gallehus," repeated Stone. "It's a place in Germany where these two golden horns were dug up, one about a century after the other but only about twenty meters apart. They're incomplete and nobody's really managed to work out what they would look like if they were, plus anyone studying them has been focussed on the reliefs and carvings on the gold. Some of it's in the Elder Futhark, but most is a series of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures thought to be some kind of weird cipher. There are various translations of it, but they're all irrelevant."
"How so?" Eve queried, picking up the words 'cipher' and 'translations' and 'irrelevant', and going with that.
"Because the real horns were stolen in eighteen hundred and two. All they have are copies based on drawings," shrugged the cowboy. "And the drawings ain't exactly accurate."
"And you know that because..." Eve began.
"Because we have the originals," finished her husband for her. "They've been in the Library since the Librarian of the time stole them and brought them here."
"Believe it or not," Charlene chipped in, "Mr Jones is not the first thief the Library has employed. Judson used to make sure he practised all the little tricks they taught him. Just in case."
It was Stone's turn to look puzzled. "So the thief who stole the horns was working for the Library?"
"Not the one they caught," Charlene clarified, shaking her head and staring thoughtfully at the card catalogue beside her. "He just happened to be breaking in to the place on the same night. Judson did tell me once, but..."
"Either way, a third one has turned up," shrugged Stone. I gotta go grab it before somebody works out the fakes are more fake than they think."
"We'll take it," decided Flynn, who had headed for the clippings book as soon as his wife had finished brushing ice out of his hair. "You go catch up with Cassandra and Ezekiel. I would have thought they'd be back before us. I don't like it when I'm wrong."
"They're going to a wedding dress shop in New York," Stone deadpanned. "You expecting ninjas there too now?"
"It's not exactly your average dress shop," Eve admitted, switching her thick, thermal, mountain jacket for her usual one. "Or your average dressmaker."
"So what?" Stone groaned. "Labyrinths, dragons, magic houses?"
"Eh," Eve tipped her head to the side with a grin, "more like giants, dwarves, magic portals. And that's just the good guys. The Serpent Brotherhood found Hervor. How, I don't know, but they did. If they can find her, they might be able to find Trudi and Snorri too. Just, watch your back."
XXXX
Stone found his way to the dress shop, following Eve's directions when it became apparent that neither Cassandra nor Ezekiel could be reached by phone, and stood looking up at the quiet shop front. There was no movement within but, if Cassie and Jones had moved through to the back, through the portal, then there wouldn't be, would there. He shook his head and headed for the stairs, taking them two steps at a time and bursting through the door.
Cassie turned at the familiar sound of the shop bell over the door. She spotted Jacob and opened her mouth to call to him. The breath caught in her throat as the door fell back behind him and she realised she would be too late. Moments later, he jumped and his eyes flicked around the room, settling on her.
"What the hell just happened?" Jacob swore, turning circles as he staggered over to her, taking in all the changes.
"There's a glamour, a magical disguise, over the interior, the first layer of which breaks when the door closes behind you," Cassie explained, resting patient hands on her partner's forearms, stilling him. "We used my synaesthesia to break through one layer. Ezekiel's working on getting into the safe we found and maybe that will help us break through the next."
XXXX
Seonaidh crept through the empty, echoing corridors. The Chief of the clan, along with his wife, were enjoying the extended holiday she and her 'Grandfather' had persuaded them to take after Flora's funeral. The house and grounds had been closed to the public following the family bereavement, and the staff had been reduced to minimal. There were none in the house at present. Certainly not this part of it. She remembered the stories her 'Grandmother' had told her of her third and final husband. They were great stories. Stories that were so swept up in myth and folklore she did not know where one ended and the other began. Who was the man behind the myth? The only side she had ever been told of had been the hero. The perfect knight. The finder and guardian of the San Graal. Sometimes, she thought, she caught a glimpse of the husband, the lover, the soul mate, the friend of her Grandmother, but it was more in the way a story was told than in any one thing said. She had never heard tell of this side. The hunter, the captor, the mage, the vengeful one... The villain. She was afraid of him. No. Not of him. She was afraid for him.
She reached a door in the depths of the castle behind which a low murmuring could be heard. The door was old and would surely betray her with creaking hinges as it opened, but she opened her mind to it, as he himself had been teaching her to do, and let it swing silently ajar. The low murmuring grew to a deep chanting. The words were unfamiliar to her, yet they resonated with the fae magic in her blood. They were a spell then. A spell to do what? She cast an eye to the gap between the cut stone wall and the ancient oaken door. Her so-called Grandfather stood before a charcoal grey shape she could only just see the edges of. It was angular, like a series of lines and smaller shapes within. At the apex of the lines, a shining purple-blue figure rotated. If it had a face or form within, Seonaidh could not tell, but its outer form was one she could never now fail to recognise. It was that of the armour that had so treacherously struck down her Grandmother.
