“I don’t know,” Serrin said a little testily, “Perhaps he will. Later.” To his relief, they’d reached the front entrance, without any need to knock for admittance since Merlin already stood just inside the door, which opened at their approach.

“He will see you now. Just go up the stairs,” Merlin said pleasantly. “As to us”-he turned to Kristen-“I think he’ll call if he needs us. Can I offer you some tea?”

“Oh, um, yes, thank you,” she said, a little taken aback and giving her husband a nervous glance. Serrin had not been able to hide from her that this was a spirit taking human form. Streak had joked about it back at the pub, and Serrin had tried to explain exactly what Merlin was. Kristen had seen only one spirit in her life, a city spirit conjured by an angry Xhosa shaman, and it hadn’t looked much like Merlin. This one looked deceptively mundane-mundane in the sense of flesh and blood-but his slightly crooked smile was open and friendly and she liked him.

“Tell me about the Rain Queen,” Serrin heard Merlin say as he guided the young woman into the small kitchen, from whence issued the scent of toasting muffins and tea. He grinned, ducking his head as he climbed the tiny wooden stairs up to the landing.

The old elf stood waiting, framed in a doorway by afternoon light streaming through the windows. His appearance was in no way imposing; he was neither exceptionally tall for an elf, nor short of stature, and while lean, he wasn’t thin. His silvery hair was long, but not unkempt. and his eyes were gentle, not piercing or sharp. He gripped a hazel stick in a way that said he needed its support, and not just as an affectation, and his clothes were plain and dark blue without any ornate decoration. Had he been seen in a photograph, the most perceptive of viewers would not likely have considered him anything out of the ordinary.

Standing a meter away from him and meeting his gaze was different.

Serrin remembered an old man, a human, he’d known as a child. The man had studied what had been known as psychic phenomena in the years before the Awakening, and he’d been the first to see that the young elf was no mundane. It was due to him that Serrin had been selected for hermetic studies at a young age. Serrin remembered this man telling him of his own youth, over a century before the current age, when he’d sat on his grandfather’s knee and been told of his travels in the British merchant navy to lands unimagined: India, Africa, China.

“Hard to imagine, lad, but there wasn’t any trid then. There wasn’t even television-well, not in the homes of ordinary working people. So, I’d never seen a lion, or a tiger, or an elephant. And my grandpa told me such stories about them, and the places and sounds and sights, and the way the women bore baskets and water urns on their heads across the deserts, and the way the people dressed and how the stars were different in the southern skies. And I used to sit there speechless, not wanting him to ever stop telling me. I loved the old man in a different way to anyone else I ever knew, or ever could have known. These days, I see wonders around me that make me feel like I did when I was a child on his knee. And they’re going to be your wonders in this new world.”

Serrin remembered that old man, his grandfather’s close friend, and how he had been enthralled by the man’s firm sense of awe and wonder even in his late eighties. When he looked at the old elf, it all came back to him.

It was not the first time Serrin had been in the presence of someone imbued with unusual, or exceptional, power before. It wasn’t usually a comfortable experience. In his limited experience, such individuals were usually aloof and arrogant, or simply withdrawn, not people to make others feel at ease in their presence. The old elf, who was peering at him intently, was none of these things. Shaking. Serrin realized with a sense of profound shock that what he felt in the other elf’s presence was deep and intense love, a yearning realization of the goodness of this person that he’d never even seen until now. He felt faint, and when the old elf turned and took a shuffling step into his study, it was all Serrin could do to take a couple of faltering steps after him.

The room was too large, of course; that was obvious as soon as Serrin entered it. Every last centimeter of wall space was covered in hardwood shelving, crammed with grimoires and books of all kinds. There had to be thousands of them. From outside, it was obvious the room couldn’t possibly hold so many.

Hessler smiled at his wondering look. “Oh, that. It’s nothing. I just like this little old place and I had to get them all in here somehow. Takes Merlin an age to find things from storage and sometimes he’s busy. Won’t you sit down?”

It was a relief not to have to remain standing any longer. Serrin almost fell into the hard-backed chair across the desk from the gently smiling elf.

“There is a powerful mark on her,” Hessler said in his drowsy, gentle, delicately accented voice. It was obvious who he was talking about.

“Yes,” was all Serrin could think of to say.

“She could be killed at any time,” Hessler continued, even-voiced still.

“I imagine so,” Serrin said weakly, still trying to orient himself. Hessler’s presence was so powerful that it rendered him utterly passive, almost unable to speak.

“However, you did not come for my help with that, at least not initially,” Hessler observed. He took up an old-fashioned quill pen from his teak desk and toyed idly with it.

“That is so,” Serrin said, at last beginning to gather his with about him. “Though now that I know how serious that is, it’s the most important thing to me.”

“I think we can deal with it,” Hessler said pleasantly. “So, now, why don’t you tell me why you came in the first place?”

He knows, Serrin thought, but for once, he was wrong. The old elf did not know in every respect, but by the time Serrin had finished, he certainly did.

“So you came to ask me about the Priory of Sion,” Hessler said thoughtfully, turning the quill over in his fingers as Serrin’s story trailed off. “That’s a very large question, Serrin. We could be here for a week and, from what you’ve told me, you don’t have a week to stay and listen to the answer.”

True. “We wondered why they’d be interested in what we were doing, why they’d have sent the spirit to warn us off.”

“Go on.”

“I can’t believe that a hermetic organization can have any direct interest in Matrix activities and computer-system sabotage,” Senmn said slowly. “Perhaps some individual member or members might. But not the organization. At least, I can’t see how they could.”

Hessler’s eyes were glinting slightly. “That seems reasonable.”

“So I thought,” Serrin said tentatively, the pieces beginning to fit together even as he spoke them, “that they must be taking an interest on one of two counts. One, they know the decker who’s threatening to bring down the house of cards. Or two, the icon he left is some kind of danger to them. Perhaps it threatens to implicate them. I can’t really understand the logic there, but that’s because I don’t know exactly what this organization does. There’s a hell of a lot of books, a huge mass of data! but there are a dozen different stories, and without detailed knowledge we can’t know which is true.”

“So you come to me,” Hessler said, and waited. “Yes,” Serrin said simply and, in return, waited. “Well, then, I can tell you that the Priory wouldn’t care a damn if every computer system in the world disappeared into thin air overnight,” Hessler told him. “Completely irrelevant to them.”

“Then it’s the decker,” Serrin said at once. “They know…” He stopped. “What do they know? Do they want him? Are they afraid of him? They must know who he is.”

“Logical,” Hess!er said with the hint of a smile.

“Then why are they afraid that we might find him? They must be, surely, to have warned us off.”