The Serpent's Curse by Lisa Maxwell (read an ebook week .TXT) 📕

He unlocked the door of the warehouse and let himself inside its dark, musty interior. Lighting a lamp, he made quick work of securing the door to ensure he wouldn’t be disturbed, then lit the other lamps he’d stationed at various points around the large room. The entire room smelled of axle grease and dust, and in the softly glowing light, he took account of his progress so far. A new machine was rising from the bits of bent metal and broken glass. Without an assistant, progress had been slower than Jack might have liked, but he had time. The Conclave was still months away.

On the far side of the room, a long table held his plans. After the mess at Khafre Hall, he’d found the entire warehouse ransacked. The table had been overturned, and little had been left of the blueprints and models but ash and dust. He’d managed to reproduce what had been lost, just as he would reproduce his machine. Jack smoothed out one of the few documents that had survived the carnage, a half-burned scrap of an illustration depicting the Philosopher’s Hand. In the palm, a fish lay burning in mercurial flames, uniting the elements. It was the symbol for quintessence. Great alchemists understood the importance of this most powerful of all elements. Aether, it was often called, the substance that aligned all other elements. With quintessence, one could turn iron into gold. With quintessence, one could transmute matter—or magic.

Quintessence was the ingredient Jack had been missing before, when his first attempt at building the machine had failed so completely. His desperate desire to solve that problem had blinded him to Esta’s and Darrigan’s treachery, but in the end he’d discovered the solution despite them. Thanks to the Book of Mysteries, Jack now understood exactly what he needed to complete his machine—he needed an object infused with feral energy. As above, so below. Like to like. Not even the purest uncut diamond was durable enough to contain the dangerous power his machine would collect. He needed feral magic to capture feral magic, and he would have exactly what he needed once he obtained the ring he’d been so close to retrieving at the gala.

Jack took the Book from its place near his heart and set it on the table next to the Philosopher’s Hand. With the morphine thick in his blood, he allowed his mind to wander free as he turned the pages. Sometime later, he realized he was staring at a page he’d never seen before, one written in English rather than the strange, unknown languages that filled so many of the other pages.

This wasn’t a new experience. In the weeks since Jack had taken possession of the Ars Arcana, he’d discovered that it was rarely the same book twice. He had not yet come to understand how or why it revealed certain things to him but was grateful that it continued to do so. It had to be a signal of his continued worthiness, a sign that he was destined to prevail.

The writing on these new pages had been done in a cramped, sloping hand. The varying weight of the ink and the discoloration of the thick vellum told Jack that the page had likely been created long ago, before the smooth consistency of fountain pens was even an idea. He flipped through the next few pages, all in the same matching hand. His excitement only grew when he noticed a small notation at the bottom of one of the pages—Is. Newton had been inscribed there, in the same cramped style as the rest. With only a cursory glance, Jack understood immediately what this was. There on those pages, Newton had detailed his creation of the artifacts.

Righting a stool that had been knocked over in the destruction, Jack took another cube of morphine between his teeth and settled himself to read. On those pages, Newton had inscribed detailed illustrations of five precious gemstones, and alongside each drawing were notes about the gemstone’s origin and the properties of the stone itself. Apparently, the old alchemist had carefully selected only the most perfect of materials, gemstones prized for their purity and historical importance. The individual stones had been drawn from the five ancient mystical dynasties, and each was famed for the power that it held. Then Newton had used a ritual involving the Ars Arcana itself to imbue the stones with the feral magic of the most powerful Mageus he could find—each aligning with one of the five elements.

But something had changed. As the notes continued, Newton’s hand grew more erratic and uneven. Later illustrations had been hastily scribbled onto the parchment, and still others had been blotted out. The content of the words matched their appearance. The clear English notes shifted into a confusing and often unintelligible series of arcane phrases. They were most likely coded alchemical recipes, metaphor layered upon metaphor, but Jack couldn’t be sure of the meaning other than to understand that something had scared the old magician. Something had brought Newton to the brink of sanity before he’d managed to pull himself back.

Jack turned another page and found a diagram that looked very much like a copy of the symbol that was carved into the front of the Ars Arcana. The writing here was still erratic and clouded in metaphor, but the illustrations were clearer. The series of diagrams in the following pages seemed to depict the creation of what looked to be silver discs, each inscribed with the same strange design that graced the cover of the Ars Arcana, but when Jack turned the page, the information ceased. The next page was completely blank, as though the Book had decided to withhold its secrets. He couldn’t tell what the purpose of the discs had been, or why Newton seemed so keen to create them.

Jack flipped back through the pages and examined Newton’s notes once more, marveling at how close Newton