and the monk said to me, "A great scholar," and I opened all the books and could read everything, Latin, Greek, French. The illuminated letters were indescribably beautiful, and I fumed around and faced the audience in Renaud's theater and saw all of them on their feet, and a woman moved the painted fan from in front of her face, and it was Marie Antoinette. She said "Wolfkiller," and Nicolas was running towards me, crying for me to come back. His face was full of anguish. His hair was loose and his eyes were rimmed with blood. He tried to catch me. I said, "Nicki, get away from me!" and I realized in agony, positive agony, that the sound of the gong was fading away.
I cried out, I begged. Don't stop it, please, please. I don't want to ... I don't ... please.
"Lelio, the Wolfkiller," said the thing, and it was holding me in its arms and I was crying because the spell was breaking.
"Don't, don't."
I was heavy all over, my body had come back to me with its aches and its pains and my own choking cries, and I was being lifted, thrown upwards, until I fell over the creature's shoulder and I felt its arm around my knees.
I wanted to say God protect me, I wanted to say it with every particle of me but I couldn't say it, and there was the alleyway below me again, that drop of hundreds of feet, and the whole of Paris tilted at an appalling angle, and there was the snow and the searing wind.
Part II The Legacy of Magnus Chapter 2
2
I was awake and I was very thirsty.
I wanted a great deal of very cold white wine, the way it is when you bring it up out of the cellar in autumn. I wanted something fresh and sweet to eat, like a ripe apple.
It did occur to me that I had lost my reason, though I couldn't have said why.
I opened my eyes and knew it was early evening. The light might have been morning light, but too much time had passed for that. It was evening.
And through a wide, heavily barred stone window I saw hills and woods, blanketed with snow, and the vast tiny collection of rooftops and towers that made up the city far away. I hadn't seen it like this since the day I came in the post carriage. I closed my eyes and the vision of it remained as if I'd never opened my eyes at all.
But it was no vision. It was there. And the room was warm in spite of the window. There had been a fire in the room, I could smell it, but the fire had gone out.
I tried to reason. But I couldn't stop thinking about cold white wine, and apples in the basket. I could see the apples. I felt myself drop down out of the branches of the tree, and I smelled all around me the freshly cut grass.
The sunlight was blinding on the green fields. It shone on Nicolas's brown hair, and on the deep lacquer of the violin. The music climbed up to the soft, rolling clouds. And against the sky I saw the battlements of my father's house.
Battlements.
I opened my eyes again.
And I knew I was lying in a high tower room several miles from Paris.
And just in front of me, on a crude little wooden table, was a bottle of cold white wine, precisely as I had dreamed it.
For a long time I looked at it, looked at the frost of droplets covering it, and I could not believe it possible to reach for it and drink.
Never had I known the thirst I was suffering now. My whole body thirsted. And I was so weak. And I was getting a little cold.
The room moved when I moved. The sky gleamed in the window.
And when at last I did reach for the bottle and pull the cork from it and smell the tart, delicious aroma, I drank and drank without stopping, not caring what would happen to me, or where I was, or why the bottle had been set here.
My head swung forward. The bottle was almost empty and the faraway city was vanishing in the black sky, leaving a little sea of lights behind it.
I put my hands to my head.
The bed on which I'd been sleeping was no more than stone with straw strewn upon it, and it was coming to me