A palimpsest–I had heard of such things. They were twice‑written books, created when a monk or scribe took an old book, rubbed its pages clean with sand, and cut and sewed them anew to make a fresh book to write in. However, sometimes, in the right light, the old words might yet be seen, bleeding through behind the new.
The journal was like a palimpsest. Only it was the old words that had been easily read, and the newer words that could only be seen in the right conditions. However, it was not light that showed these other words, but rather new, golden eyes. The writing seemed to dance upon the page, bright and shining, as if written with molten metal.
As I have begun a new life, so I begin this journal anew. We are di ferent now. The Philosophers, we call ourselves, as though all mysteries are ours to understand. But I know, as perhaps the others do not, that there is far more for us yet to learn, that this is only the beginning. . . .
I clutched the journal and read. The house was silent; no servants disturbed me. At last the light outside the windows failed. I shut the little book and buried my face in my hands. What a fool I was. I had been wrong about everything.
“It wasn’t you, Alis,” I murmured. Anguish burned in me, hotter than the blood I had consumed. “It wasn’t you at all. It was I.”
“What are you talking about, Marius?”
I looked up. In my despair, I had not heard her footsteps on the carpet. She stood in the door of library, dressed in red, a smirk on her lips.
“Rebecca,” I croaked. “What are you doing here?”
She sauntered in. “I might ask the same of you. This is hardly a cave in the Highlands. I had a feeling you might be up to something, Marius. You had a secretive air about you when you left, so I decided I would follow you and see what you were up to. I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in, but there’s no sign of your servants anywhere, so I–”
A gasp escaped her. She had moved farther into the room and was staring at me.
“Gods, Marius, your eyes. What’s happened to you?”
Despite my fear, I smiled. “I think you know now why the servants fled.”
She only shook her head, taking a step back. I rose.
“I’m like them now, Rebecca.”
“Like who?” she said, shaking her head, only then a moment later she said, “The Philosophers.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes went wide. “Oh, Marius,” she breathed, reaching a hand toward me. I thought perhaps it was a gesture of supplication, of forgiveness. There was a softness on her face I had not seen since we were lovers.
Rebecca’s eyes rolled up, her arm went limp, and she slumped to the floor. The hilt of a dagger jutted from her back. Even as I stared, trying to comprehend, three figures clad in black drifted into the room.
“Why?” I choked on the word.
The two men pushed back the hoods of their cloaks, and the woman lifted the veil from her face. They gazed at me with serene gold eyes.
“Our kind must never be seen,” the woman said.
I knelt beside Rebecca, feeling for the beat of her heart, but there was none. I looked up at them. “But she didn’t see you.”
“No,” the woman said. “She saw you, Marius.” She glanced at the men. “Leave me, Gabriel, Arthur–I would do this, if I may.”
The men nodded and left. She approached the desk, brushing the journal with a gloved hand.
“Ah,” she said. “Albrecht’s journal.”
I stood and turned away from Rebecca’s body. I wanted to weep for her but could not. “You sent them here to fetch it all those years ago, didn’t you? Rebecca and Byron. Only I hid it from them.”
“No, we sent them here to fetch you.” She laughed at my shocked expression. “Do not be so surprised, Marius. There is nothing you have read in this journal that we do not already know. As he grew weak, Adalbrecht confided everything to us. Much as he wished to betray us, in the end he could not. We are bound to one another by the blood we have drunk. It sees itself in each of us, and knows its kind, and prevents us from doing harm to any other in whose veins it flows. So you see, much as I’ve been tempted to throttle one of the others from time to time, I cannot.”
Her words horrified me, for I sensed they were true. “But what are you really?”
Her eyes fixed on me. “Do you not know what we are? And what you are, Marius?” She tapped the journal. “I believe you do.”
I thought of the headaches that had afflicted me with growing frequency over the years. From my coat I pulled out the silver cloth I had carried with me for so many years. It glimmered softly in the gray light. “I’m like them. The folk of the tavern. I’m like Thomas Atwater. Like Alis.”
“You were.” She picked up the empty vial. “You are like us now.”
I shut my eyes, thinking of all I had read in my master’s journal, trying to understand. He had described his journey to Crete with the others, how they had found the forgotten passage leading beneath the ruins of Knossos, and there had stumbled upon a tomb containing seven stone sarcophagi. They opened the sarcophagi and found within seven figures masked in gold, jewels of lapis and jade adorning their burnished skin.
Impossibly, the beings seemed alive, for they were warm to the touch, and their bodies were not corrupt. However, if they were alive, then they slept, for nothing could cause them to stir, not even when one of the alchemists cut them.
It was she who had done it–the one woman among them. Her name was Phoebe. What instinct had caused her to bend her head, to drink the blood that flowed forth, my master did not know, but they had watched the transformation come upon her. Then they had all drunk of the blood of the Sleeping Ones.
All but one, that was. Eight alchemists had gone to Crete, but when one of them tried to flee, afraid to drink the blood, Phoebe had murdered him with a knife to the heart. For no one who was not one of their own must ever be allowed to know their secret.
With one dead, the alchemists were seven in number just like the sarcophagi, and so each drank from a different being– though Adalbrecht was the last. And all of them were transformed.
The Philosophers had found other things in the tomb besides the Sleeping Ones. They had found tablets with writing they could not fathom, and the remains of a stone doorway, now fallen to ruin. Some of these things they brought with them back to London, though the Sleeping Ones they left beneath Knossos, and they concealed the passage so that no one else might ever find it.
After that, the journal told of my master’s years as a Philosopher. He had not taken part in the attempts to restore the doorway, to open it. Instead he had sought to decipher the writings from the tomb. After many years he had made little progress, but he had learned enough to know that the Sleeping Ones came from another world, that they had come to escape some great conflagration, and that they were waiting for something–some ultimate act of transmutation. As always, transformation required the proper catalyst. Only what that catalyst might be, he did not know, though he had suspicions. Nor did he know the nature of the transformation the Sleeping Ones sought–only that it would come when their world drew closer to this one.
In time, Adalbrecht grew weary–weary of enduring, weary of making the trek to Knossos once every decade to drink another sip of their blood. He had begun to fade. The other Philosophers had known it, and they did not protest when he retired to Scotland. Then, one night in Edinburgh, he saw a boy on the street. He had known the folk of the tavern, and in an instant he knew this boy was like them. The silver cloth could only have been made by one of their kind. And it shone in the boy’s eyes.