The Glamourist (The Vine Witch #2)(23)
The next morning a motorized taxi dropped the couple off in the section of the city long termed the Latin Quarter due to the prevalence of the dead language at the core of scholarly pursuits (and the creation of dusty old spells that withered on the tongue like brittle paper) when the original university was founded seven hundred years earlier. Academia was not then sympathetic to the idea of preternatural beings peacefully coexisting in the world. Quite the contrary. The school was established, in part, to disavow the existence of magic and to put it on par with evil—a contradiction in itself, but it was the Dark Ages, after all. It took several hundred years, and not a little bloodshed on both sides, for the scholarly elite to finally come to terms with the prevalence and legitimacy of others among them. One outcome from the truce, in addition to the 1745 Covenants, were the co-efforts of witch and mortal in the construction of an eighteenth-century church turned crypt in the heart of the city’s center of learning. With its neoclassical dome and pillars, the structure loomed over the heads of the other buildings, a tribute to the changing of hearts and opening of minds. Few mortal citizens who walked in its shadow knew the truth of its origins. The builders, having the forethought to recognize the potential for misuse and exploitation, restricted the true history of the crypt to those mortals with a need to know, leaving the information as a footnote at the base of the tomb of the famous philosopher and poet Vérité.
Today, Jean-Paul needed to know.
“I thought we were headed to the witch’s library,” he said as Elena led them toward the neoclassical colonnade fronting the domed building.
“Just through here,” she said, smoothing the front of her burgundy travel jacket as she waited for him to open the door for her. By now he’d learned to trust, and so he followed her without further protest.
Inside, Elena strode past the murals, the grand columns, and the center circle under the dome where she remembered a decorative pendulum once hung from the ceiling to demonstrate to the masses how the earth turned. Such elementary stuff, but education of both witch and mortal was the main thrust of the building, after all. The heels of her lace-up boots clicked against the marble floors as she continued on to where a fair number of tourists had gathered around the sculpture of a great hulking man who appeared to be lost in deep thought, chin in hand. He’d not been there the last time she’d visited the city, but she thought him a worthy ambassador as she took the stairs down to the crypt.
“Are you sure you’re going the right way?” Jean-Paul cast a last curious look at the statue before descending into a tunnel with numerous alcoves and side hallways veering off. “I’ve been through here many times and I’ve noted no books, only bodies encased in oversized marble tombs.”
“As the library is only open to witches and their guests,” she whispered over her shoulder, “it would hardly be practical to make the entrance obvious to the general public, would it?”
Jean-Paul nodded to a mustached man who looked up from reading about a long-dead general. “Pardon my ignorance,” he said to her, then nodded again to the man as if to apologize for their intrusion.
“You’re forgiven.” Elena stopped beside the mustached man and said, “Bonjour, après vous,” and by the time Jean-Paul looked again in the man’s direction, he was gone.
“Where . . . what just happened?” He walked to where the man had been standing and then raised his hand up as if feeling the air. “Ah, spiderwebs, which means there’s a spell.”
“You’re catching on.” She took her fiancé’s arm and they walked forward past the marble edifice, taking a left into what probably appeared to Jean-Paul as a stone wall. But in truth they were standing before an arched metalwork door composed of gears and pulleys, which the mustached man held open for them.
“Merci.” Elena smiled at the gentleman, and the door closed behind them. The gears turned, their teeth engaging with cogwheels and spokes, until a secure locking noise sounded behind them, not unlike the click of a cell door, as she uncomfortably recalled.
Jean-Paul whistled softly, suggesting his first impression fell somewhere between fear and awe. She couldn’t help but take a little pride in his reaction.
“Psyché Iatreion?” he asked, staring up at the inscription carved into the header at the entrance.
“It means apothecary of the soul.”
He nodded as if he understood as she led him inside. Mahogany shelves, many with leaded glass doors, lined both sides of the room. Above, a hand-carved banister ran along a second story that was supported, at least aesthetically, by gold-topped pillars, all of which led the eye to the ceiling. There, a constant illumination spell was kept in place to replicate the cycle of sunny day to starry sky.
She’d always found the stacks remarkable, but from a mortal’s point of view they must have appeared utterly mesmerizing. Naturally there were books, thousands on everything from spellcasting and transmogrification to love potions and wart removal. Some of the original grimoires kept behind glass were a thousand years old. Held together by catgut and vellum, their pages were still fragrant with the scents of spells calling for dried hellebore, ground burdock, and oil of toadflax. A few of the medieval spell books still radiated soft halos of light from the strong magic bound inside the heartwood of their spines. There were scrolls, too, from other nations, whose foreign letters glowed with pigments too rich to possibly come from local earth.