“I thought each of the four families had their own astrolabe?” Nicholas said. The Lindens, then, had held the master copy in their family for generations.
“Perhaps they possessed them for a time, but all were stolen back. The eldest son has quite the force behind him—travelers taken from their families, who have had their lives stolen and shaped to serve only him. For lack of a better, proper term, they were noted only as Shadows in our histories.” Nicholas’s mouth tightened at that, a small flinch that Remus caught. The old man chuckled before he continued. “I can sense the disbelief in you both. I realize how it all sounds, of course.”
“Like bullshit you’re trying to sell us,” Sophia snarled.
“There are things in our forgotten history that are so ancient, one must search for the few clues embedded in our lore, our shared nightmares. Generations ago, the old records vault was burned in what was said to be the fault of a single candle, and now, so little proof remains of the alchemist and the Shadows that many travelers simply refuse to believe in their existence. Missing children are explained away as having been orphaned by the timeline, or that they simply wandered off into passages, never to be seen again. The mind can dream up any number of explanations for dark things, of course.”
Nicholas shook his head, rubbing at his eyes once more. “What is the role these Shadows play, then?”
“It is said they work on behalf of the alchemist’s surviving son, carrying out his wishes and stealing traveler children to continue a cycle of service to him and his mission to find the master astrolabe,” Remus said, as if this were not absurd. “Though their story itself has been lost, and fewer and fewer children are lost, the fear is still taught to traveler children to this very day, however unwittingly. Tell me, girl, that you don’t recall the old song: From the shadows they come, to give you a fright…”
Sophia surprised Nicholas by easily finishing the rhyme. “From the shadows they come, to steal you this night.” She looked unimpressed, to say the least. “You don’t need to shill bad poetry.”
“Finish it, girl,” Remus said. “How does the rhyme end?”
She gazed at the man in defiance, but softly sang, “Mind the hour, mind the date…and find that path which does not run straight.”
“These Shadows are the ones who hunt you now,” Remus said. “The shadows of his glorious sun. They will stop at nothing to prevent you from taking possession of the astrolabe, should you find it. Your paths have crossed, unfortunately, and now there is no way to disentangle them.”
“Is there really nothing to be done about it?” Nicholas asked. “You read nothing else about their methods in your time as a record-keeper?”
The old man shrugged the question away as he stood and went back to the hearth, this time for his own meal. In the silence that followed, he was absorbed in the simple, hypnotic task of stirring, and stirring, and stirring. A spark of instinct began to tug at Nicholas’s ear, begging an audience.
Sophia, in deep contemplation of this information, pressed her face into her hands, breathing deeply. But Nicholas felt too anxious to remain seated, too full of absurd stories to sit idly by. He began to do laps around the cramped room, stopping occasionally to study a small piece of decorative tile, a bust, small wooden boxes. One of which yielded a solid, rectangular object wrapped in burlap: a harmonica.
It was one of those painful moments when need was at odds with morality. His fingers ran over the cool, shining surface, and he leaned over, far enough to see the reflection of his haggard face. He’d stolen as a child—scraps of food, affection, his own freedom for a time—and the thought of doing so now stirred a poisonous self-loathing inside of him. Nicholas shut the box and turned to the spot where Fitzhugh Jacaranda ground his medicines and did whatever it was physicians or ship surgeons or healers did when they weren’t pulling rotten teeth or sawing off limbs.
Below the wooden bench, tucked nearly out of sight, was a stiff, cylindrical leather bag with a long strap, its drawstring opening just wide enough to look into. Glancing back to ensure the man was busy with the pot on the hearth, he nudged it open the rest of the way with his toe. It was filled to the brim, nearly spilling over with sachets, neatly wound bandages, and those same small vials he saw on the table. Beneath that was a layer of tools, primed and ready for use.
That nagging feeling was back, until realization lit Nicholas’s mind like a blast of gunpowder, blowing him back off his feet. Studying the man out of the corner of his eye, he forced his voice to remain even, and took a deep breath before asking, “Why, if Fitzhugh is making his rounds as a healer, has he left his bag here?”
Remus stopped stirring, his shoulders bunching up as he froze in place. Nicholas’s heart made the dive from his chest to the very pit of his stomach, and his hand came to rest on the hilt of his sword.
In the breath of silence that passed between them, Remus reached for one of the nearby knives, his hand shaking as it closed around the hilt and he brandished it.
“Don’t run. You’ll only make it worse for yourself,” Remus said. “And you won’t get far at all.”
ETTA WAS MISTAKEN IN ASSUMING the “Small Dining Room” would bear some sort of resemblance to the simple dining room you’d find in any house—slightly worn furniture, a floor scuffed by chairs and feet, a few personal touches here and there. Instead, it was a miniature version of the grander rooms they’d passed on the way in, with one chandelier instead of five, six, or seven.