“Very plausible,” said McGann.
“Where would such an adept get the information?” Shales inquired.
“Self-taught.”
“From what source? We’ve got every tome of any value buried in the ground beneath us.”
“Every one?” said Godolphin. “How can we be so sure?”
“Because there hasn’t been a significant act of magic performed on earth in two centuries,” was Shales’ reply. “The esoterics are powerless; lost. If there’d been the least sign of magical activity we’d know about it.”
“We didn’t know about Godolphin’s little friend,” Charlotte pointed out, denying Oscar the pleasure of that irony dropping from his own lips.
“Are we even sure the library’s intact?” Charlotte went on. “How do we know books haven’t been stolen?” “Who by?” said Bloxham.
“By Dowd, for one. They’ve never been properly catalogued. I know that Leash woman attempted it, but we all know what happened to her.”
The tale of the Leash woman, who had been a member of the Society, was one of its lesser shames: a catalogue of accidents that had ended in tragedy. In essence, the obsessive Clara Leash had taken it upon herself to make a full account of the volumes in the Society’s possession and had suffered a stroke while doing so. She’d lain for three days on the cellar floor. By the time she was discovered, she was barely alive and quite without her wits. She survived, however, and eleven years later was still a resident in a hospice in Sussex, witless as ever.
“It still shouldn’t be that difficult to find out if the place has been tampered with,” Charlotte said.
Bloxham agreed. “That should be looked into,” he said. “I take it you’re volunteering,” said McGann. “And if they didn’t get their information from downstairs,” Charlotte said, “there are other sources. We don’t believe we have every last book dealing with the Imajica in our hands, do we?”
“No, of course not,” said McGann. “But the Society’s broken the back of the tradition over the years. The cults in this country aren’t worth a damn, we all know that. They cobble workings together from whatever they can scrape up. It’s all piecemeal. Senseless, None of them have the wherewithal to conceive of a Reconciliation. Most of them don’t even know what the Imajica is. They’re putting hexes on their bosses at the bank.”
Godolphin had heard similar speeches for years. Talk of magic in the Western World as a spent force: self-congratulatory accounts of cults that had been infiltrated and discovered to be groups of pseudo-scientists exchanging arcane theories in a language no two of them agreed upon; or sexual obsessives using the excuse of workings to demand favors they couldn’t seduce from their partners; or, most often, crazies in search of some mythology, however ludicrous, to keep them from complete psychosis. But among the fakes, obsessives, and lunatics was there perhaps a man who instinctively knew the route to the Imajica? A natural Maestro, born with something in his genes that made him capable of reinventing the workings of the Reconciliation? Until now the possibility hadn’t occurred to Godolphin— he’d been too preoccupied by the secret that he’d lived with most of his adult life—but it was an intriguing, and disturbing, thought.
“I believe we should take the risk seriously,” he pronounced. “However unlikely we think it is.”
“What risk?” McGann said.
“That there is a Maestro out there. Somebody who understands our forefathers’ ambition and is going to find his own way of repeating the experiment. Maybe he doesn’t want the books. Maybe he doesn’t need the books. Maybe he’s sitting at home somewhere, even now, working out the problems for himself.”
“So what do we do?” said Charlotte.
“We purge,” said Shales. “It pains me to say it, but Godolphin’s right. We don’t know what’s going, on out there. We’ve kept an eye on things from a distance, and occasionally arranged to have somebody put under permanent sedation, but we haven’t purged. I think we’ve got to begin.”
“How do we go about that?” Bloxham wanted to know. He had a zealot’s gleam in his dishwater eyes.
“We’ve got our allies. We use them. We turn over every stone, and if we find anything we don’t like, we kill it.”