matched how she had always imagined a sorcerer would look before meeting Nathaniel and Ashcroft. Tall, gaunt, and sallow, with glittering obsidian eyes and a closely trimmed black beard that ended in a point at his chin. He wore flowing robes, and rings adorned each of his fingers, set with differently colored gems.
“Whoever you are, I refuse to tell you anything,” he snapped. “I haven’t spent hundreds of years trapped in this place for nothing.”
Hundreds of years. He sounded serious. Now that she took in his expression, she saw that he wasn’t angry, not entirely. Underneath the anger, he looked afraid, as though she had come to take something from him by force. His robes appeared old-fashioned, and so did everything else in the workshop, untouched by time for centuries.
Whatever this place was, it wasn’t a dream. And neither was this man—this sorcerer. She glanced again at the inky void that surrounded them, her eyes widening as possibility dawned. Prendergast had hidden his secret inside the Codex.
She turned back to the sorcerer. “Are you Aldous Prendergast?”
That wasn’t the right thing to say. His face darkened, and he crossed the distance between them in several quick strides. “How did you get here?” he demanded, seizing her shoulders. He shook her until her teeth rattled. “Answer me, girl!”
“I don’t know! I was reading the Codex. I fell asleep.”
“That is impossible,” he snarled.
“A strange thing to say,” she blurted out, “for someone who’s over three hundred years old. That doesn’t seem possible to me, either.”
Prendergast’s shoulders slumped. He let go of her shoulders and gripped the edge of the table, glaring. She found to her surprise that she wasn’t the least bit afraid of him. He was so thin, she could easily push him off the end of the floor if he tried to harm her.
“What year is it?” he asked finally, directing his glare at a bottle filled with what appeared to be preserved rat tails.
Questions crowded against the back of her tongue, but she suspected he wouldn’t bother answering any of them until she answered his first. “Eighteen twenty-four.”
He digested her answer. “I’m not alive,” he said after a long, fatalistic pause. “Not in any real sense.”
Elisabeth recoiled. “Necromancy,” she gasped, seeing his hollow cheeks and cadaverous figure anew.
“No, not necromancy, you idiot child,” he snapped. “I am not a corpse. I left my physical body behind in the mortal realm, and anchored my mind to this—this—well, I don’t imagine you would understand. You are no sorcerer, clearly, unless the standards have deteriorated significantly since my time. All you need to know is that I am trapped here by my own design. I cannot leave this place. And you should not have been able to visit me through the Codex—not without my permission.”
She looked around. “Are we inside the Codex? An alternate dimension of some kind?”
His eyes narrowed. “So you do know your thaumaturgical theory.”
Elisabeth decided not to tell him that she simply read a lot of novels.
“This is an artificial plane of existence,” he went on grudgingly, “anchored to my grimoire, no bigger than the room surrounding us. To attempt to create a larger one would risk destabilizing the border between the mortal realm and the Otherworld.”
“You truly have been there, then,” she said. “To the Otherworld.”
His eyes narrowed further. “Most people didn’t believe me. They accused me of fabricating my studies.”
“Aside from one man.” She watched his expression closely. “A man who called himself your friend.”
His face convulsed. “Who are you?” he rasped.
“My name is Elisabeth Scrivener. I am—I was—an apprentice librarian. But that isn’t important. There is no cipher hidden inside the Codex, is there? You are the cipher. You hid yourself here to escape from Cornelius Ashcroft.”
The color bled from Prendergast’s fingers, still gripping the table.
“If you hadn’t,” she continued, the truth dawning on her as she spoke, “he would have used magic to read your memories, and whatever secret you’re guarding, he would have taken it from you by force.” Seeing his widened eyes, she explained, “His descendant tried to do the same thing to me.”
Prendergast stared at her a moment longer, and then began to laugh. There was a high-pitched nervousness to his laughter that alarmed Elisabeth. She reminded herself that he had been trapped here for hundreds of years, alone, and she hadn’t reacted so differently after being taken in by Nathaniel.
“You’re lying,” he said, once he had caught his breath. “I see it now. You are in league with the Ashcrofts. There is