“I heard you, dear sister,” caroled Merlin. He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor but then immediately leaped back inside and slammed the door shut.
“What?” asked Vivien.
“I don’t know,” said Merlin woodenly. His left hand was inside his tie-dyed bag. “Something’s not right.”
Vivien approached the door, wrinkling her nose. Susan sniffed the air, too. There was a faint hint of something she couldn’t identify.
“Scent of laurel,” said Vivien sharply.
“Maybe someone’s keen on Aleppo soap,” suggested Merlin weakly.
“And a hint of amaranth,” added Vivien. “It’s not some vigorous over-soaper. Overlaying a faint but definite whiff of putrescent flesh.”
“But there aren’t any of them anymore. There hasn’t been for over three hundred years!” exclaimed Merlin. “And if there were, how would one get past the wards?”
“I don’t know,” said Vivien. “But the smell, that’s textbook. . . .”
“I should take a look,” said Merlin, but he didn’t open the door again. Instead, he took his hand out of his bag and reached between two Burberry trench coats on the closest clothes rack to draw out a sword, an old light cavalry saber with a curved gilt-bronze guard, sharkskin grip, and bronze lion head pommel. “You’d better call downstairs, Viv.”
Vivien nodded and looked around.
“Behind the PVC raincoat,” said Merlin.
Vivien shifted a rack aside and lifted a bright pink raincoat, revealing a telephone on a bedside table some distance from the bed. She lifted the handset and dialed “0,” the familiar click-click-click-click of the dial returning to its position somehow now strange and ominous to Susan.
“What is it?” she asked. Merlin had not seemed so apprehensive before, not even in the fog, with the Shuck stalking them. And Vivien was clearly rattled.
“From the scent, a Cauldron-Born,” said Merlin. “They smell of funerary flowers and death . . . and I felt a peculiar kind of wrongness, nothing I’ve ever sensed before.”
“Um, what is a Cauldron-Born?” asked Susan.
“Someone dead who’s been reanimated by sticking them in a magic cauldron,” said Merlin very matter-of-factly, clearly keeping a lid on his own reaction. “Incidentally causing them to be very, very hard to make dead again. They have to be hacked into little pieces, and the pieces burned. So guns aren’t much use. Oh, and they’re completely under the control of the master or mistress of the cauldron, in fact becoming a kind of puppet, an extension of the Cauldron-Keeper’s mind.”
“Uh . . . a magic cauldron?”
“Yes,” said Merlin. “You know, a giant pot. Big enough to stand up in. You saw one, in the painting on the door at the New Bookshop.”
“And they can make dead people alive again? Like zombies or something?”
“Considerably worse than the classical zombie of fiction,” said Merlin. “Because like I said, they are controlled by the Cauldron-Keeper. So they’re smart. And if the corpse is fresh enough when they go in, they don’t even look dead.”
Susan thought about this for a few seconds. “Have you got another sword?”
Behind Susan, Vivien was speaking urgently to the front desk.
“There’s one under the bed,” said Merlin. “Do you know how to use a blade?”
“I fenced for four years in the lower school,” said Susan. “Saber and foil. So I can hack at . . . things . . . at least.”
“Okay,” said Merlin. “Saber? You take this one, then.”
He handed her his saber, hilt first, and rummaged under the bed, pulling out a much older, straight-bladed sword. Its narrow, flattened oval guard was solid bronze, the grip inlaid with ivory strips, and there was a rough emerald in the pommel.
“Does anyone know you have that?” asked Vivien, hanging up the phone.
“I signed it out,” said Merlin. There was something slightly evasive in his tone that Susan noticed but Vivien didn’t.
“Okay, I don’t think Cousin Armand believed there’s anything to be concerned about based on the smell alone,” said Vivien. “But he’s playing it by the book. There’s only three left-handed here right now but they’ll cover the fire stairs, Armand the foyer, and the response team is on its way from the Old Bookshop, led by . . . Aunt Una.”
Merlin made a face.
“What’s the problem with Aunt Una?” asked Susan.
“Generational difficulties,” said Vivien. “She doesn’t think any of the left-handed under sixty are any good, or have a clue. Merlin, being one of the youngest left-handed, gets an extra serving of that attitude. I guess to be fair she also thinks Merrihew’s past it and should let her take over.”
“We’d better have a look in the corridor,” said Merlin. He spoke as if he had to talk himself into it. Susan suppressed her own shiver. If Merlin was scared . . .
“On the bright side, if it is a Cauldron-Born, it must be under control or it could never have got up here,” said Vivien.
“You mean they can get out of control?” asked Susan.
“I only know what I learned at school; I haven’t done any advanced reading on the subject. But I understand the more Cauldron-Born you control, the more difficult it is, because you have all their senses and perception coming in at once, as well as your own. Historically, that was often how they were dealt with, when an overambitious Cauldron-Keeper tried to command too many and lost control.”
“What happens then?” asked Susan. “Do they freeze up or flop down dead again or anything useful like that?”
She settled her feet into the proper pose and flexed her knees before testing the weight of the cavalry saber with some slight cuts and a stop thrust in slow motion. It was considerably heavier than a fencing saber and balanced differently. There was something written on the blade in a curlicue script about it having been used at Waterloo by Cornet someone someone, of the something or other regiment of hussars. The names were so worn and the script so ornate it was indecipherable.
“We wish,” said Vivien. “They lose the guiding intelligence of the controller, to become—”
“Mindless, ravening beasts,” said Merlin. “Who hate, hate, hate everyone and everything else, so they turn on whoever or whatever is closest. Including each other, which is a small blessing. Ready?”
Vivien nodded.
“Don’t you want a sword?” asked Susan, thinking three swords would be better than two when dealing with undying monsters that needed to be hacked into many pieces. “I bet Merlin’s got another half dozen squirreled away here.”
“The right-handed don’t fight with physical weapons,” said Vivien. “We have the left-handed for all that.”
“Stay a bit behind me,” Merlin instructed Susan. “If there is a Cauldron-Born, chop at its left side and I’ll hack at the right. Go for the knees, get it down on the ground first. And don’t hit me.”
“Okay,” said Susan.
“Viv, you pop its eyeballs or do whatever you can do,” said Merlin.
“I’ll try,” said Vivien. “Depends who’s inside its head, doesn’t it?”