Why are you interested?” From the way she looked at me, it was like she’d asked a deeply incisive personal question. Which she had, but I wasn’t quite sure if she realised that or if she was just getting her flirt on.
“It’s complicated.” How the fuck was I going to answer this? There was no chance in hell I could sell oh I happen to have a well-developed academic interest in obscure occult texts. I was so clearly not the type. Maybe the truth was the best option. Or a variant of it, at least. “I had a friend who I lost. I was hoping that this would—that it would give me some answers.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re looking in strange places.”
“She was a strange person.” I fished out my copy—well, the copy that Hephaestion had stolen for me—of the Book of Living Fire, which I’d been keeping away from the cigarettes for reasons of antique. “So … here it is.”
Dr Bright picked it up with a tentative, academic curiosity and began leafing carefully through the pages. “It certainly seems authentic,” she said. “I’m a little confused, though, about what you want me to do with it. I’d be more than happy to take it off your hands, but your original advertisement suggested you wanted something more specific.”
I wished I’d thought this out ahead of time. Telling a perfectly respectable fellow of UCL that I wanted her help performing a magical ritual to reanimate my friend the statue was a lot harder now I found myself having to try it. “Well …” That’s it, Kate, stall for time, you’re being totally cool and not making anybody suspicious in any way. “The one I’m trying to—to connect with here. She was a … Hellenic neopagan.” Was that a thing? I thought that was a thing. Of course lying to a folklorist about her area of expertise was probably one of my least clever ideas. “There was a ... a”—don’t say ritual, don’t say ritual—“a sort of ritual that she wanted me to do. But it involved the book, and I can’t read it.”
To say that Nicola Bright looked suspicious was an insult to suspicious-looking people. Or maybe it was a compliment to them. She looked very suspicious, is what I mean. “Well,” she said. “I think I can help you.” I’m sure I imagined the gleam in her eyes.
“Oh good.”
She tucked the book into a technical-looking bag that was probably designed to protect it from dust mites or something, and slipped that into a briefcase. “A pleasure to meet you, Kate.” She held out her hand again.
“And you, Dr Bright.”
“Please, my friends call me Nick.” She seemed to think of something. “Oh, one of your texts mentioned the holy grail?”
I’d forgotten I asked her about that. “Yeah. Just because it overlaps a bit with what you do. So … umm … know anything about it?”
“Your friend again? Was she a pan Celtic Hellenist neopagan?”
“Something like that. Syncretic, y’know.”
“That’s quite common in NRMs.”
“NRMs?”
“New Religious Movements. It’s what we say instead of neopagans, it’s a bit less”—she waved a hand—“judgemental. Has less of a persecuted by the early church vibe to it.”
You learned something new every day. Usually it wasn’t anything at all useful, but still. “So, do you?”
“More than you can possibly imagine,” she smiled. “Most of it contradictory.”
“Anything would help.”
She leaned back in the chair. “Well it’s not strictly biblical. It’s first mentioned around 1190 where it’s linked to Percival. The connection to the last supper and the crucifixion comes only a few years later. Then of course it’s a recurring motif in all the later Arthurian canon: the vulgate cycle, the post-vulgate cycle, Malory. Of course in recent years—I say recent but perhaps I’m showing my age—there was rather renewed interest in the topic thanks to that Da Vinci book.”
“And you wouldn’t know”—this was going to turn out even more awkward than the ritually-re-awakening-a-statue question—“where one might hypothetically start looking for it?”
“Your friend…” The professor laughed, almost cruelly “…seems to have set you a number of very peculiar tasks.”
I didn’t answer that.
“I’m afraid your guess is as good as mine. You’re straying perilously close to the world of conspiracy theory—you may as well go chasing the Templars or the Order of St Agrippina.”
That was familiar. “Hold on, order of who?”
“St Agrippina? It’s an old bit of mytho-history. Supposedly there used to be an order of nuns working out of the Vatican, dedicated to the eradication of supernatural threats. It’s got