Thus the Tabula Rasa flourished in its peculiar, purposeless way, gathering to talk about the secrets it kept, as Roxborough had decreed, and enjoying the sight of the city from its place on Highgate Hill.
Kuttner Dowd had been here several times, though never when the Society was assembled, as it was tonight. His employer, Oscar Godolphin, was one of the eleven to. whom the flame of Roxborough’s intent had been passed, though of all of them surely none was so perfect a hypocrite as Godolphin, who was both a member of a Society committed to the repression of all magical activity, and the employer (Godolphin would have said owner) of a creature summoned by magic in the very year of the tragedy that had brought the Society into being.
That creature was of course Dowd, whose existence was known to the Society’s members but whose origins were not. If it had been, they would never have summoned him here and allowed him access to the hallowed tower. Rather, they would have been bound by Roxborough’s edict to destroy him at whatever cost to their bodies, souls, or sanity that might entail. Certainly they had the expertise, or at least the means to gain it. The tower reputedly housed a library of treatises, grimoires, cyclopedias, and symposia second to none, collected by Roxborough and the group of Fifth Dominion magi who’d first supported the attempt at the Reconciliation. One of those men had been Joshua Godolphin, Earl of Bellingham. He and Rox-borough had survived the calamitous events of that midsummer almost two hundred years ago, but most of their dearest friends had not. The story went that after the tragedy Godolphin had retired to his country estate and never again ventured beyond its perimeters. Roxborough, on the other hand, ever the most pragmatic of the group, had within days of the cataclysm secured the occult libraries of his dead colleagues, hiding the thousands of volumes in the cellar of his house where they could, in the words of a letter to the Earl, no longer taint with un-Christian ambition the minds of good men like our dear friends. We must hereafter keep the doing of this damnable magic from our shores. That he had not destroyed the books, but merely locked them away, was testament to some ambiguity in him, however. Despite the horrors he’d seen, and the fierceness of his revulsion, some small part of him retained the fascination that had drawn him, Godolphin, and their fellow experimenters together in the first place.
Dowd shivered with unease as he stood in the plain hallway of the tower, knowing that somewhere nearby was the largest collection of magical writings gathered in one place outside the Vatican, and that among them would be many rituals for the raising and dispatching of creatures like himself. He was not the conventional stuff of which familiars were made, of course. Most were simpering, mindless functionaries, plucked by then- summoners from the In Ovo— the space between the Fifth and the Reconciled Dominions—like lobsters from a restaurant tank. He, on the other hand, had been a professional actor in his time, and fgted for it. It wasn’t congenital stupidity that had made him susceptible to human jurisdiction, it was anguish. He’d seen the face of Hapexamendios Himself and, half-crazed by the sight, had been unable to resist the summons, and the binding, when it came. His invoker had of course been Joshua Godolphin, and he’d commanded Dowd to serve his line until the end of time. In fact, Joshua’s retirement to the safety of his estate had freed Dowd to wander until the old man’s demise, when he was drawn back to offer his services to Joshua’s son Nathaniel, only revealing his true nature once he’d made himself indispensable, for fear he was trapped between his bounden duty and the zeal of a Christian.
In fact, Nathaniel had grown into a dissolute of considerable proportions by the time Dowd entered his employ, and could not have cared less what kind of creature Dowd was as long as he procured the right kind of company. And so it had gone on, generation after generation, Dowd changing his face on occasion (a simple trick, or feit) so as to conceal his longevity from the withering human world. But the possibility that one day his double-dealing would be discovered by the Tabula Rasa, and they would search through their library and find some vicious sway to destroy him, never entirely left his calculations: especially now, waiting for the call into their presence.