On the way down the narrow stair to the building proper, Merlin went ahead and Vivien behind.
“Is your life always like this?” Susan asked, while Merlin opened the lower door. “I mean, are there constant problems with Sippers and Shucks and goblins and all that?”
“Oh no!” laughed Vivien. “Gods! That would be unbearable. No, the Old World is mostly dormant these days; we’ve been in a very quiet period since the early sixties. Every now and then something happens to stir things up, everyone has to rush about doing stuff, and then it’s quiet again and we can get on with our everyday work. Very peaceable. Like the rest of today will be, I hope.”
“So what do you do when you’re not . . . um . . . involved with the weird shit, as Inspector Greene calls it?”
“Me? I work at the Old Bookshop three days a week,” replied Vivien as they filed out and spread into a line to go down the main stairs together. “And I’m halfway through my second degree, at London Business School.”
“You’re studying business?” asked Susan doubtfully.
“I’m doing a new thing,” replied Vivien. “Called a Master’s in Business Administration, part-time.”
“Plutocrat,” said Merlin, semi-affectionally.
“What about you?” Susan asked Merlin. “You seem to do more ‘rushing about.’”
“It’s my dynamic personality,” said Merlin. “The left-handed do more of our visible work, as it were, since we’re the field agents. And there’s training, too. But like Viv, at least half the time I work in the bookshops. Generally moving things around, I hate to say. No one seems prepared to let me deal with customers, despite the fact that I would undoubtedly double sales.”
“You had a tryout,” said Vivien. “You doubled the amount of time spent talking to attractive customers without selling them anything.”
“I sold that copy of The Ashley Book of Knots no one else could sell,” protested Merlin. “A fifty-quid hardcover!”
“Selling a single fifty-pound book in two weeks is far less use than selling two or three hundred two- or three-pound books in the same period,” replied Vivien. “And I heard you didn’t manage to sell anything when they tried you out front here, and given the bibliophiles who frequent the place, that’s quite a non-achievement.”
“All the customers were old,” said Merlin. “And Eric or Alison always took the good ones.”
“The prosecution rests,” said Vivien.
“Maybe they can put me in special orders,” said Merlin. “That would be better than the stockroom.”
“You would get cross checking Books in Print and destroy the microfiche reader,” said Vivien. “Which is why it’s a right-handed job.”
“Are all your staff, um, special-handed booksellers?” asked Susan. They were back at ground level now, but they kept going. The stair became darker, as there were no lights, only the spill from those higher up.
“Not all, but most,” said Vivien. “Wait a tick.”
They stopped, two levels below the ground, though the stair continued down. Vivien ran her hand along the wall, found an industrial-sized light switch, and rotated it to the on position. A faint light flickered above them, barely bright enough to show the faded letters painted in stark white on a rusting steel door: “Air Raid Shelter, Cap. 39 persons.”
It also lit up a wooden fruit crate on the floor. Vivien knelt and rummaged in the box, removing three candle stubs melted onto chipped china saucers. She handed one each to Merlin and Susan.
“Hold it out,” she instructed Susan, and blew on it, with a faint whistle. A spark left her mouth and the candle flared into life and almost went out again as Susan dropped and caught it in one motion. She held it steady and the flame strengthened.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
“It’s easy here,” said Vivien. She lit her own candle with another pursed-lips exhalation, and then Merlin’s. “There’s a lot of mythic power, more and more as we get closer to the old temple. And Grandmother.”
“And other things,” said Merlin.
“What other things?” asked Susan. She found herself whispering, though she wasn’t sure why.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he answered. “Grandmother keeps them in order. Not far now.”
It grew colder as they descended, and the walls were no longer plaster or worked stone but rough-hewn, pale gray rock, with rivulets of water winding their way down and drips coming from the ceiling. After what seemed to Susan rather farther than it should have been to go down only two floors, they reached a large cavern, most of it impossible to see in the candlelight, save for the massive marble gateway on the other side, the stones pale in the darkness and the open gateway seeming to be even darker than the edges of the cavern. The marble was carved with what Susan thought were battle scenes, but it was hard to tell.
“We mustn’t take more than three steps beyond the gate,” whispered Vivien. She moved up close to Susan on her right side, and Merlin shuffled in from the left. “Stay in line. Don’t move ahead of us.”
They moved together through the gate, candles flickering, and stopped. Susan had no sense of what they’d entered. She could see nothing beyond the narrow pool of light around them, and their footsteps had echoed on the imperfectly smoothed stone, as if they were in some much larger cavern or chamber. It was much colder again, and her breath fogged out, making her notice that she was breathing too quickly. She forced herself to hold a breath in, and exhaled very slowly, counting to six. She didn’t want Merlin or Vivien to think she was afraid, even though she was.
“Gods,” muttered Merlin. “It is Nebrophonus.”
A huge, gaunt, ice-white wolfhound came slowly stalking out of the darkness ahead, stiff-legged and growling.
“Don’t move,” whispered Vivien. She shifted even closer to Susan, their shoulders touching, as Merlin slid his right hand around her elbow.
The wolfhound edged closer, sniffing, lifting his huge, shaggy head, lip curled to show massive teeth.
He didn’t look like a ghost, or a spiritual remnant, or whatever Vivien had said. He looked very real. Susan had been entirely accurate about being good with dogs; they nearly always obeyed her. But part of being good with dogs was knowing when to leave the clearly dangerous ones alone.
“We brought a friend, Grandmother,” called out Vivien. “A friend with a gift for you. It’s me, Vivien, and my brother, Merlin.”
“Antigone’s children,” added Merlin. “Daughter of the fourth Henry, and him the son of Theresa, the one nicknamed Mintie, and her the daughter of Serena.”
“And Serena the daughter of Claude, the second of his name, and him the son of Sophia and her the daughter of the fifth Guinevere, the first to use the name St. Jacques, in the true line all back to the beginning,” added Vivien.
There was a whistle in the darkness. Nebrophonus turned his head and then ever so slowly, like an ocean liner turning, curved away in front of them, retreating once more into the dark from whence he came.
A moment later, a woman appeared in front of the apprehensive trio. A short, businesslike old woman in an unadorned pale gray high-waisted dress, a snow-white fichu pinned at the neck, a faded blue bonnet over her silver hair, and one white glove, on her right hand. She had deep-set dark eyes that were immediately troubling. She looked to Susan very much like a well-known slightly mad old man in Bath, who wandered the streets dressed as Jane Austen whenever he could escape from his family.