It wasn't a particularly loud gathering, but there were enough people engaging in polite conversation—and a select few who, under the influence of passion and a moderate helping of alcohol, had begun academic debates of dubious relevance, sense, and morality—but the low clamour was such that the phone in the hall rang itself hoarse for a consecutive three minutes before anyone took note of it. When it was finally noticed, the company was rather reluctant to interrupt their evening to do anything about it, and so it was quite some time before the call reached its intended recipients.
Professor Hershel Layton stood a little apart from the milling assembly, silently admiring the exquisite detail in the architecture of the hall they had found to house the aftermath of the graduation ceremony. Formal dress had overtaken his customary attire and, while the immaculate outfit helped him blend with his fellow professors, he nevertheless felt uncomfortable in it, ill at ease, despite the suit differing in no way from any other. In one hand, he held an untouched flute of champagne, the other his hat, as though he were afraid the iconic article would manage to slip from his head and vanish. Only one person paid him any mind, the man at his side, who was also unmoving, also silent. Together they watched the world, not a word exchanged over what they saw.
They looked like prices from a chess set, but it was difficult to say who was black and who was white, or who would move first. Fundamentally, they were very different men. One was distant but patient, mistrustful but kind, ruthless but not without compassion. The other was gentle but firm, immovable but warm, compassionate and resolute. But perhaps the greatest distinction between them lay in their observation.
Layton was, primarily, a man of the past, and saw the history of each object as it trailed its years in a fine down of dust. Everything had an origin, everything had a purpose for the slot it occupied in the present. The ring on the finger of Professor Tallow was old, but polished and maintained so that its gleam matched that of her brighter, newer jewellery , and she fiddled with it whenever one of her students made a speech, pride warring with some sad reminiscence in her eyes. Sometimes, when not conversationally engaged, she would pause and stare wistfully down at it and rub ruefully at an empty slot where a jewel should sit. The finger she wore it on was noted next; it bulged oddly around the confines of something too small for it. A woman of her means could have had it seamlessly altered, but she hadn't, and bore the discomfort with a martyr's pride. It's something she obtained in her own days at university, Layton presumed, something precious to her. She keeps it as a token.
Beside him, Professor Desmond Sycamore observed the same scene, and, unknowingly, finalised his brother's summary. He was a mathematician, an engineer; he saw patterns, links between happenstances, and slotted them together until the sequencing of events ran like clockwork. Professor Tallow favoured the extravagant and the costly; the ring she wore that night was earnestly plain, but of quality material. An outlier. She always buys the most expensive thing she can afford; at one time, that ring likely cost her all she had. She never wore it, aside from this night, each year, consistently for the ten year period he had know her. Always that ring, always this night, always that finger. Her left ring finger, left stridently bare at all other times. Lastly, Tallow favoured silver; the broken little ring was gold, dull and blackening with age. An aberrancy. It's not to your taste, so someone likely bought it for you. Whoever it was, you loved them, and you lost them, either tonight or shortly after you graduated...
You wear it because you miss them.
Completely unaware of her observers, Professor Tallow gave the ring a final, fond adjustment, and swept back in to the crowd. She vanished like a penny in the lining of a suit jacket and took whatever past she harboured with her. Neither Professor moved.
Time had passed since the two ran from London, although both men would be hard pressed to tell you precisely how much time had passed; days melded seamlessly into weeks, and the regulated ticking of clocks had been replaced by the soft slurry of hourglass sand. In any case, they had reached Today unscathed, and were likely to see Tomorrow; for men who had, at one point, expected to do neither, that was enough. Life in the turbulent capital loomed, like fire on the horizon, and was coming for them as surely as dawn, but they didn't have to face it yet.
So as long as you kept your eyes dead ahead and ignored the shadows, the lives of the two brothers were as easy as they had ever been.
"Professor Sycamore sir? There's a call for you—line six. They're quite insistent, sir." Maisie Hunt, top of Sycamore's advanced engineering class and prettily resplendent in a silver dress, left so shortly after this announcement that it rather felt as though the words had sprung into existence of their own accord and without the interference of a human throat and tongue. She obviously gave the occurrence no thought, which was made up for by the number of times Layton would remember it and shiver; it felt far too much like fate—like it had been some prophetic force, not a student he knew well—but some malignant, ephemeral, entity that had summoned Desmond to take the call on line six. It felt portent. It felt intentional.
The man in question glanced up from his Chardonnay with a vague sort of smile, before the thoughts swimming liquidly behind his eyes unruffled themselves and were sat back in their neat and orderly queues. He gave the space where Maisie had briefly resided a brisk nod, then turned to his brother with a grinning expression that somehow managed to maintain a veneer of serious professionalism and upmost sincerity. Layton marvelled quietly at the enormous breadth of Sycamore's expressions.
"If you'll excuse me, there is, apparently, a rather insistent telephone that requires my immediate attention." With a flourish, he presented his glass. "Be a good sport and guard this, won't you? I have a feeling I'll want it later." Amenably, Layton took the glass and, after a brief assurance that he would ignore the engineering students' questions regarding the physics involved in planes made from barrels, watched his brother depart back through the crowd in the direction of the hallway. More alert now, he returned to his contemplation of the academic miasma, with distinctly more pattern to the weave of his thoughts.
With Sycamore's recommendations, it had been appallingly easy to secure the teaching position he held. Avenguard university was a massively prestigious establishment and staff there usually had to sport the highest credentials available; Layton did not posses a doctorate, but held something arguably more valuable—the testimony of the elusive and eternally wary Desmond. Layton had been welcomed with open arms into a world he almost didn't recognise.
Avenguard was nothing like Gressenheller had been. It was a sprawling, ancient thing that reeked of importance and history. Magnitude was imbibed in every grey brick, greatness etched into every shingle, and the mullioned windows glared out over the heaths of the purple wracked moors with such a singular massiveness that even Layton's steadfast reason was thrown momentarily off guard. Superstition was almost religion, in some quarters, and places such as Avenguard were both alters and churches to those ghostly beliefs.
The people that resided within the building were similarly odd. Each of the Professors was of a silky, shimmery strangeness, cut from mysterious cloth that united them with one another but firmly rejected the world; the sense of distance he had noted on first meeting Sycamore was magnified tenfold as, on that first day, fifty fish-scaled gazes swept eagerly over him. The students were strange too. At Gressenheller, the keenness of learning had been a dull roar, a tame fire curled neatly in its grate, mitigated significantly by the appeals of independent city life. Here, there was a feverish fervour to the students; they learnt swiftly and unremittingly, with determination and dedication that was almost angry.
Desmond had obtained his graduate degree, his bachelors, and his doctorate at Avenguard; Layton thought it showed.
When he had brought these observations up to Desmond, his brother had offered a brittle smile that was calm, gentle, and faintly bitter, a worried crease brushing the skin between his brows.
"It was said by a great man that intellect was the light of our world. Dark times are coming, Layton; can you blame us for lighting our candles?" Layton considered that for a long second, feeling as though he had blundered into something in the dark and was attempting to make out whether it was a wardrobe or a door.
"Do you think it's the right thing to do?" He asked at last. His brother's eyes were ruthlessly calm, his irises tinted red.
"It's the smart thing to do," he retorted, and the pair sat for the longest time, grimly aware that those two things were not mutually exclusive concepts.
They didn't speak of it after that, the discussion locked in a box with many other things that did not need to be said, or could not safely be discussed; a box filled with Targent, and betrayals, and miracles, and a thousand broken things. What was one more secret, one more omission, in that family of lies?
Luke wrote regularly, as did Flora, and Layton exercised great restraint regarding what he told them. Yes; he had a job. Yes; he had an apartment. No; it was not possible for him to fly out to America, but he was more than happy to offer epistolary assistance. He didn't mention Desmond, or the satin strangeness of his fellows, or the amassing army of young scientists, and archaeologists, and engineers with brains made of fire. It took a week for the letters to arrive in their respective places, and each one was torn open with a brief flash of joy followed swiftly by hollow loss as the empty envelope was discarded and the missive's contents devoured. Each letter penned back was a paper tongue feeling out over the absence of where a tooth should be.
So yes; things were better—infinitely better—but, even out of London, there was a dry-weather crackle of suspicion, a staticky something waiting to happen, and at that time Layton could only guess at what form it would take.
"That was odd," Sycamore called through the crowd, carefully elbowing his way through the milling masses with the tact, dignity, and long-suffering air of someone who has had to do so many times before. Layton tilted his head in query, and returned the Chardonnay to its owner. "Do you know the La Pièce museum?" Layton affirmed that he did. "There has been some sort of theft—they were calling to let me, and the other professors with items interred in the museum, that nothing of ours was affected. Everything's on lockdown."
"What was stolen?" Layton asked, taking a small sip of champagne, more out of idleness than an actual desire for the drink. Sycamore treated him to another of his brief, genuine smiles.
"Some artwork has been...misplaced. I took the opportunity to offer what assistance I could," Sycamore said, with uncustomary innocence that was more damning than any of Descole's maniacal laughs. Layton raise a nonplussed eyebrow and his brother elaborated. "They are apparently under the delusion that we are amateur detectives, and have requested that we look over the disturbance. I said we would be there tomorrow."
Layton considered this, preferring to watch the gold in his glass swirl than risk another sip; pearls of it bubbled and frothed as he thought. It had been a while since he took an investigative commission...a chaste smirk worked its way over his lips in a way that those unaccustomed to the subtleties of the Professor would miss entirely.
"Well, I suppose a look wouldn't hurt," he offered as nonchalantly as he could manage, his blood suddenly fizzing like the champagne. A mystery, they had a mystery. "An art theft to pass the time...we have no other engagements."
"Forgive me Hershel—I neglected to make myself clear. This is much more than a simple art theft." Sycamore's eyes glinted, and in that moment you could see down to the core of him; cunning, clever, and cynical. "You see, it's not the pictures that have vanished...it's the occupants."