‘I have a proposition for you, Sir Alric.’
‘Ah. You do?’
‘Yes. But first, you’re going to need to explain something to me.’
He laughed out loud. ‘Cassie, I should have known when I saw you at my office door that I was in trouble. You had that look in your eye. What is it I have to explain? You seem to know such a tremendous amount already.’
She ignored his slightly waspish tone. ‘I know how I found out about the artefacts. I want to know how you did. Is it common knowledge in the Council of Elders or something?’
‘Yes and no.’ He stood up, placed his hands on his desk with his back to her and gazed at the palms beyond the window. ‘I lived in ignorance for quite a while myself.’
Clearly it pained him to make such an admission, she was glad to notice. ‘Then you know what it feels like.’ Cassie sat back and folded her arms.
He rubbed his forehead, clearly a little irritated. ‘All right. I discovered the second half of the Few manuscript from which you so accurately just quoted some years ago. You know, of course, it was deliberately split into two halves by the ancient Elders?’
‘Yes. That much I gathered.’
‘I took it to the Council. We agonised over its rediscovery, we argued amongst ourselves, but we debated too long. We were too afraid of what the artefacts might do if they were discovered. Too willing to hope that if they remained unsought, they would remain unfound. Let sleeping demons lie, in other words.’ He blew out a sigh. ‘Probably our biggest mistake. Looking back, we were extremely short-sighted, and the rest of the Council regret that as much as I do.’
‘Well, the first half of the manuscript told of exactly where the Knife and Urn could be found …’
Sir Alric shook his head. ‘By the time I found the first half, it was too late anyway, the damage was done. Earlier, with the second half, we were all too afraid, and paralysed by indecision. We gambled that if we kept the existence of the manuscript and the artefacts to ourselves, the secrets would remain hidden. Perhaps we were too arrogant.’
Cassie rolled her eyes. ‘You don’t say.’
His wry half-smile told her he accepted that rebuke. ‘Or, more accurately, we were too trusting. We – I – misjudged Brigitte Svensson, and underestimated her propensity for evil. A few months later I heard she was hunting for the artefacts, hoping to secure them and keep them safe; she’d used her Council influence to access and decode the half-manuscript. That news set my alarm bells ringing. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know how long she’d been searching, but it suddenly seemed tremendously important to get to them first. I started to do the research I should have done before – to search for the second half of the manuscript, and through it to locate the Knife and the Urn.’
‘But you didn’t find them, did you?’
‘Not all of them. I didn’t discover the location of the Knife and the Pendant for many years, but by a stroke of luck as much as hard graft, I worked out where the Urn was. It seemed as if the Fates favoured me, because the Academy was moving to Mexico City the following term – and I hadn’t even planned that, believe it or not. So I decided to wait. I had no reason to believe Brigitte had found out what I had, and it seemed sensible to arouse no suspicion. It was sensible, but it was next to impossible.’
Cassie could imagine that. If it had been her, she was pretty sure she couldn’t have waited so long once she knew where the Urn was.
‘I arranged a research sabbatical for myself early in the new term. I knew I’d need an assistant, so as soon as everyone had settled in, I offered to take a particularly gifted Few student with me on the trip.’
‘Erik Ragnarsson,’ said Cassie flatly.
He raised his eyebrows, surprised, then nodded. ‘But of course. His roommate was Patrick Malone, your guardian. So you know what happened?’
‘The basics.’ Cassie leaned forward expectantly.
‘I trusted Erik with my life and all my knowledge. I had no intention of keeping the real purpose of our trip from him, so I explained, and he understood.’ Sir Alric rubbed his face tiredly. ‘He was such a promising student.’
‘But he died. He died because you found the Urn.’
‘Yes.’ He gave her a direct, sober stare. ‘I never intended him to touch the thing, but I should have anticipated how the Urn would work. He was first to lay eyes on it, and I still remember his extraordinary elation. As I considered how to approach it, and retreated to consult the manuscript, he disobeyed me, and retrieved it himself.’
Cassie bit her lip. ‘Why didn’t he wait?’
He shrugged. ‘Who knows? It was so uncharacteristic of Erik, I can only assume that something besides the Curse that was cast on each of the artefacts was at play. Perhaps if I’d been the one to spot the Urn first, I could have resisted its spell far better than poor Erik.’
‘Or maybe not,’ said Cassie dryly. ‘And if you’d touched the Urn first, the Curse would have struck you. And I hate to think where that would have led, with a spirit as powerful as yours.’ She shuddered, remembering the look in Ranjit’s eyes when he was under the Pendant’s curse at the Hagia Sophia.
‘That’s true,’ Sir Alric said. ‘And I dread to think of it too. If you’d known Erik, you’d understand what a shock it was. To see him go in an instant from a gentle, intelligent boy to a murderous, brutal … monster, is the only word. There was almost nothing of Erik left.’