Instead, Arthur imagined Josephine, lost in theirs. A horrible thought.

Good shot, Atwood mumbled, well done, still, what a waste.

"It was dying anyway, Atwood. I think it-it started to fall before I shot it. It was..."

Could it breathe on Earth? Could it fly? He tried to take into account the atmosphere of Mars, surely thinner than Earth's, its gravity, the physical difficulties a native of Mars might experience here. He was too tired. Besides, was it from Mars? Or Venus? Or the Moon? Or none of those places, but from some other realm separated from London by more than mere distance? He didn't know. He knew nothing, and understood nothing.

"It looked wild," he said.

Atwood had found a little folding hand mirror, and was examining the gash on his cheek. He was mumbling still, swearing and venting his frustrations. Arthur didn't give a d.a.m.n. The wound in his side had started to hurt again. He supposed he'd probably torn something.

He went to the desk and put the rifle back on its hooks.

"I'm going to bed," he said. "We can plan tomorrow. But I will not have Josephine spend another night in this G.o.d-forsaken house; do you hear?"

Chapter Seventeen.

The Company maintained their learning in a dozen or more hand-written journals, which Arthur was permitted, under an oath of utter secrecy, to study. Jupiter referred to them as the notes, and Atwood called them the Liber Ad Astra, or A.A. for short, or the Book.

It was a hodge-podge of Masonry, Greek myth, Egyptian fantasy, debased Christianity, third-hand Hinduism, and modern and ancient astronomy, promiscuously and nonsensically mixed. Some of it was in Atwood's handwriting, some of it in Jupiter's. Parts of it were in Latin. SAPERE AUDE was written on the frontispiece: DARE TO KNOW. Atwood's notes hinted that the parts of the Book that had been entrusted to Arthur were merely the outer learning, and that certain other books might contain higher and deeper and more exclusive principles, and the ident.i.ties of the Hidden Masters from whom those principles derived. Arthur took that to be a sort of bluff. Josephine had told him the way this sort of odd little occult fraternity generally operated: the esoteric knowledge that was not shared with initiates and therefore could not be questioned; the rumour of hidden sages in Tibet or Russia or Paris or other places more interesting and romantic than the Edgware Road, or Bromley, or Surbiton, where the ancient knowledge had almost certainly been cobbled together last Tuesday.

The Book was riddled throughout with paradox, and absurdity, and contradiction. Thinking too long or too hard on it caused something like vertigo; it was as bad in its way as Gracewell's Work. But after a week or two of study, Arthur began to enjoy it. He felt guilty about enjoying it, but he did. There was some satisfaction to be had in learning the secret rules that governed the universe. It was like being in a rather important and exclusive sort of club. He even developed a sneaking suspicion that he was rather good at it, despite what Atwood said. He supposed there were worse things to be good at.

I: SUN.

First: the Company imagined a sort of Copernican cosmos of invisible concentric spheres, which carried the visible planets in their rotations through the heavens. Of course these spheres were not mechanical things-nothing so crude-but nor were they mere metaphors. They were made of something that was not quite like earthly matter, but not quite nothing either: aether. They were best understood as states of energy, or consciousness, or vibration, or perhaps spirit, whatever spirit meant. Atwood was fond of quoting Corinthians: Not all flesh is alike ... There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies, but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial another. It was in their nature to move in endless, perfect circles.

The Sphere of the Sun stood at the centre and apex of Creation. It turned endlessly, and each atom of it was like a rose of ten thousand angels endlessly revolving-and yet it was unchanging. In the lesser spheres, Atwood believed, time was circular; the centre of things was timeless, or alternatively time moved so rapidly there that it might as well be timeless. If the Sun had an inhabitant it was G.o.d: singular, and self-sufficient, like the G.o.d of the Jews.

The Company had also discovered (or hallucinated) a complicated system of occult correspondences between the heavenly spheres and the things of the Earth. Among other things, the Sun corresponded to the colours gold and white; to fire, diamonds, musk, and the lion; and to the Ouroboros and Kether, the Crown of the Sephiroth. The manipulation of these signs and correspondences was at the heart of the Company's magic.

The man who occupied the role of Sun refused to give Arthur any other name. One was enough, he liked to say. The Company sometimes called him Mr Sun, as if it were the name he'd been born with. He was stocky, white-haired and bearded, with dark intelligent eyes. He dressed in the English manner, in dark suits, but always with a touch of vivid aestheticism: a bright tie, a golden tie-stud, some fine fur. The golden ring on his index finger depicted the Ouroboros. He clearly knew some doctoring. He carried himself like a man with important business interests. He was muscular despite his age: wrists thick and powerful, hands callused and square. Atwood said that Sun was an importer of antiquities-he made it sound shady. At the Company's meetings Sun spoke little, listening thoughtfully while Atwood and Jupiter argued and paced and argued again, and Therese Didot made sarcastic interjections. When he spoke, his deep voice startled everyone, and demanded attention.

He counselled patience. In matters of magic, your enemies will destroy themselves, he said, and storms will exhaust themselves on a strong roof, and if you wait long enough by a river the bodies of your enemies will float past you. Shorn of poetry, Arthur understood that to mean that Sun thought the Company should dig in, defend, and wait for its enemies to overreach themselves. Well, Arthur thought, that was all very well for Mr Sun. He didn't have to feed and wash Josephine every night. He didn't have to listen to her every heartbeat and breath, afraid that it might be her last.

II. MERCURY.

As the nearest world to the Sun, Mercury was also the fastest-moving; for each second on Earth, a thousand years flashed past on that blazing star. If it boasted civilization, and it likely did, then it could be home only to the golden cities of angels. An Italian astronomer had discovered in recent years that one side of the world was always turned towards the Sun, and was always in light; what better home, Atwood argued, for angels? It was doubtful that any human spirit could survive there. If the heat and the light didn't drive one mad, then surely the wit and beauty and insight of its inhabitants soon would.

Mercury corresponded to Hermes and to Nishubur, to the Archangel Gabriel, to elephant-headed Ganesh, to the eagle, to topaz, to the bow and arrow; to wit and laughter and pure reason. The hours governed by Mercury were favourable to rites of projection, seeking, and clairvoyance. Its symbol was "," which Arthur recognised from his time in Gracewell's Engine. It stood for an open and a closed circle: receiving energy from above, ordering it for the benefit of the spheres below.

Martin Atwood held the t.i.tle of Mercury. The scar the creature had given him healed quickly, and within a week he seemed rather proud of it, as if he'd won it in a duel. At the meetings of the Company he counselled investigation, exploration, a.n.a.lysis.

He owned properties all over London, each of them handsomely furnished, empty, and rather lonely. After Arthur left his house, taking Josephine with him, Atwood graciously put them up in his flat off Piccadilly. He promised that the place was warded against evil influences, which was more than could be said for Rugby Street. He lent Arthur the services of the maid, Abby. Arthur shook his hand and said thank you; but he was still not inclined to trust or forgive him.

III. VENUS.

The Company had made a few tentative explorations in the direction of Venus, but had found the experience terrifying. In that direction the astral s.p.a.ce became rapidly hotter and faster and brighter until one's thoughts began to burn.

If Venus had inhabitants, they might resemble Adam and Eve in the Garden; they were likely hermaphrodites, or shape-changers. Their homes would resemble forests in their elegance and complexity and vibrant living energy. Among the symbols of Venus were ivy, ambergris, and tin, and the fifty-forth and fifty-eighth Hexagrams of the I Ching. Its hours were favourable for the learning of secrets and the resolution of mysteries-and for love, of course, though "love" as the Company's philosophy conceived of it was a rather severe and mathematical thing, involving combinations of certain psychic energies.

In Josephine's absence, the role of Venus fell to Arthur. He thought that it was hard to imagine a less likely Venus. But Atwood a.s.sured him, smiling, that in magic the union of male and female was a very powerful principle.

IV: TERRA MATER.

The t.i.tle of Terra Mater belonged to a man called Samuel Jessop, who in everyday life was a Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police. He was solid and square and bowler-hatted. Once a month he went by train to the seaside, where he tested his strength against the ocean by swimming out as far as he could until he could swim no more. "A little farther each time, Shaw. One day, who knows?" Apart from that, and of course his membership in the Company of the Spheres, he appeared to have no obvious eccentricities, and struck Arthur as surprisingly level-headed. He was a Methodist. Arthur liked him.

It was Sergeant Jessop who conducted Arthur's initiation into the inner circle of the Company, such as it was. A tap on the shoulder, hood on the head, and turned thrice around; afterwards, whisky and a cigar.

"In deference to your wound, Shaw, incurred in the line of duty, we'll excuse you the ordeals."

"Decent of you, Jessop."

"Don't tell Atwood. Something of a stickler, that one."

Sergeant Jessop gave Arthur a gift: a book, John George Hoffman's Pow-Wows, or Long Lost Friend, which he said was a very old American book, full of honest and old-fashioned Christian magic.

"Charms for healing the sick, and driving out evil spirits, and finding lost sheep. That sort of thing."

"I don't know what to say, Jessop."

"Atwood says it's a mean little thing, a waste of paper. But I've found it worth the study. Atwood's a clever chap, but there are things His Lordship doesn't know; up there and down here."

"Not so long ago, I thought I knew down here well enough. Now I wonder. Thank you, Jessop."

"I know that feeling, old chap. I know it well."

V: MARS.

Mars, Atwood explained, had been selected as the Company's first destination not because of any particularly appealing feature of the planet itself, but because every journey had to start somewhere, and it was easier by far to go down than up. Nevertheless, Atwood was an attentive student of all the latest scientific discoveries regarding the red planet. He and Jupiter subscribed to Nature and to Astronomer, and collected sketches and photographs of the planet's surface. They considered their own methods of investigation to be very superior to mucking about with telescopes, but they were not too proud to borrow.

"Take Flammarion," Atwood said. "Do you know him?"

"The French astronomer?"

"None other. Flammarion holds now that the waters of Mars-he thinks he can see them-might be a different sort of thing from our water. A sixth state, he calls it, a dense vapour, viscous, sombre, and dark."

"And?"

"So you see, the conditions, Shaw, may be very different. It's a different sphere of being."

"I know Flammarion. He says there's ca.n.a.ls on Mars. Civilization. Is that true?"

"I doubt it. Remember, Mars is beneath us in the ordering of things; if it has inhabitants, they will be slower than us. Simpler, colder, stupider, and less energetic. Their recreations are likely primitive."

"So Josephine may be-"

"The Martian year," Jupiter interrupted, "is six hundred and eighty-seven days; astronomers have calculated it. So we may take that as a sign that the Sphere of Mars experiences time at roughly half the Earth's rate."

"A sign?"

"A sign."

They were like Humpty-Dumpty, Arthur thought. Words meant what they said they meant.

Therese Didot held the position of Mars. She was middle-aged, pet.i.te, pretty, and French. She appeared one sunny afternoon at the flat off Piccadilly, breezed past Arthur with a smile into the hallway, and told him that she had decided to make it her business to teach him a thing or two. In return she said that she wanted to know all about Josephine, and their engagement, and their plans for their wedding, and their hopes for their children. She said she was very fond of children.

"I'm afraid I'm not in a mood for conversation, Miss Didot."

Therese sat daintily on the sofa. "Then perhaps I will talk and you will listen."

Miss Didot smiled and looked around the flat. Her eye landed on the little shaving-mirror on the mantelpiece, which Arthur had purchased after discovering, to his irritation, that Atwood's flat had no mirrors. She tsk-tsked.

"I advise you to dispose of that, Arthur. All sorts of wickedness may be done by means of mirrors."

"Mirrors?"

"Please. Sit. I would like to help you, Arthur. It's been too long since I had the pleasure of teaching the young."

Arthur sat down on a chair by the table, in somewhat ungracious silence.

"How do you suppose I come to know Lord Atwood?"

"I have no idea, Miss Didot."

"I was his governess, when he was just a tiny thing. His mother was dead, poor creature."

"Hmm. I wouldn't have guessed. Hard to imagine him as a child."

"He was a very sweet boy."

"I don't see that this is any of my business."

"So, you see, I am a teacher. I am not the greatest or wisest of teachers. I cannot teach you enlightenment. I do not have it, and I do not know if you want it. But I can teach you some things that will be helpful in this world. May I tell you a story? It concerns mirrors."

"I suppose so."

"It also concerns a young man-no older than you are today. And I suppose this was not very long ago-not quite ten years, which does not seem so very long at my age. This young man was a talented magician-but then, his father was a talented magician, too; in fact, he was one of the stately old magicians of England. This young man's father lived in a big house in the country, which was very old, and had belonged to his father, and his father before him, and he knew every stone, and he knew every tree in the woods, and he knew every man and woman in the village of which he was the lord; and he believed in fairies in the woods, and devils abroad at night, and was very old-fashioned, in the way of English magicians."

She paused to smooth down her skirts. Then she glanced over Arthur's shoulder at the mirror behind him and tidied away some stray hairs. Then she smiled.

"And so the young man learned magic the way other boys might learn the alphabet, or playing with a ball. And because he was proud, and his father was proud, they struggled, and they grew to hate each other. And when he was a young man he fled; to London first, then to Paris. But Paris was not far enough to escape from his father's shadow. Because the young man wanted to be a magician, and in that world his father's shadow was very great, and very wide. Other young men in a similar predicament might have struck their fathers, or shot them. But that was not how this young man had been raised."

"You refer to Atwood, I take it."

"I am telling you a story, Arthur. He sent letters. From Paris, first, then from Berlin, then from Morocco. At first those letters were quite ordinary; he sent stories of his travels, just as any loving son might; stories of his studies, the libraries that he visited. He wrote that he had visited Rome, and that he thought he might become a Catholic, and sought his father's blessing-which was denied-and so on. Then the young man began to write of nightmares. He wrote that he had contracted a fever, and that ever since, he had been followed on his travels by nightmares. In those nightmares he woke under a night sky-no stars, moon-lit-and all around him were black men: a crowd of them, black as ebony, and black-eyed, and silent as statues, and the moon also was black. The old man, as it happened, had a peculiar horror of Africans; he did not like those stories at all!"

She glanced at the mirror over Arthur's shoulder, smiled, and adjusted her hair.

"Still the letters came. This young man was on the Grand Tour: they came from Madrid, from Switzerland, from Jerusalem and Istanbul. He wrote of his visits to the old libraries, the bath-houses, the mountains-and he wrote of his dreams. Each time a new detail added to the dream: a crow, a black lion, a crack across the moon, a man who held a horn in his hand. And the old man was no fool; of course he understood by now that magic was being worked against him, but it was too late, you see. Once you see, it is too late; because then if you were to stop reading, and the words kept coming, you would not know what was in them, and wouldn't that be worse? You would have no defence against them. They would continue in your dreams.

"The old man could not sleep. He paced. He wrote back, and his letters were full of hate and spite and the blackest curses. Because he was old-fashioned, he invoked the names of devils and angels; there was magic in them to singe a postman's fingertips! But not this young man, who put them directly into the fireplace, and then wrote of his travels in Italy. He left Rome-he wrote-and he went up into the mountains. On a path across a stream one evening he saw a man who was as black as a crow and had but one eye in his head. He fled. On the train that took him away from Turin, he saw the man again, from the window, at a station. Please, Father, please help me. Mockery! The old man went red in the face with fury, and clutched his heart. Mockery! The young man wrote of his dreams: a black eye, a veiled face, the sky itself like a black veil being pulled aside, to reveal the true stars beyond! He wrote that he was consumed with fever, and that he was writing from a hospital bed. He wrote in such a trembling hand that the old man had to get out his spectacles and pore over the pages to read them, as if he were reading the oldest of grimoires, made of ancient parchment that might crumble to dust if he breathed on it. The old man held his breath. Father, help me, please, he read. A voice spoke to me in the mountains, and it will not stop whispering. It will not stop. Its voice is as black as the night. And then one night the old man cried out, and when the servants came running they found him dead, stretched out on the floor, lying in a corridor beneath a black mirror."

She seemed to be waiting for Arthur to say something. He wasn't sure what to say. Her story struck him as revolting.

"But of course it was black," she laughed. "Do you see? It was night!"

She stood, looking pleased with herself, and straightened her skirts.

"Atwood killed his father; is that what you're saying?"

"That is one version of the story. There are others. I want you to understand what a magical war is-what it can be."

"That didn't sound terribly magical, Miss Didot. It sounded like an unpleasant trick to play on a confused old man."

She sighed.

Arthur stood to see her out, and observed to his shock that the shaving-mirror had fallen from the mantelpiece, and now lay shattered at the foot of the fireplace.

"Every mirror is an eye, Arthur; every eye is a door. Please do not replace it."

"Miss Didot," he said. "How did you do that?"

"Gla.s.s wants to shatter! The things of this world tend towards decay; the trick is keeping them whole. But since you ask, perhaps I will teach you a thing or two-since we must go to war together. Abby! Abby, my darling, will you fetch us some wine-gla.s.ses? Not good ones! Now, Arthur, sit, sit."

She reclined smugly on the sofa. "The shattered mirror, as it happens, is one of the symbols of Mars; so too are blood, and sand, and rust, and the sword. By these signs, Mars makes itself known in our sphere."

VI: JUPITER.

The Company had never explored as far as Jupiter, and it was likely that no human consciousness could survive at those depths. Imagine a vastness of ice and storms, Atwood said. Something like a polar wasteland, something like an ocean, formless and always night. The waters, before G.o.d moved upon them and gave them life. Probably only very simple creatures lived in those vast ink-blue depths. They would be slow and ugly giants, like the dinosaurs, built to endure terrible cold and endless pressure.

The symbols of Jupiter included the whale, Behemoth, and Jormungandr; the anchor, the empty throne, the barren womb. The hours of Jupiter were suitable for necromancy. The woman who went by that name was as secretive as a spy, and Arthur never learned a thing about her.

VII: SATURN.

To imagine what it would be like to walk in the Sphere of Saturn, Atwood said, imagine a flat and endless plain of lead, beneath a sunless sky of lead. Nothing could live beneath that terrible grinding pressure; if there were inhabitants of Saturn they could be made of nothing but shadow, and their movements would be so slow as to seem almost timeless.

Arthur said that he didn't see why G.o.d should make such a dreadful place.

"Well," Sergeant Jessop said, after sucking thoughtfully on his pipe for a while, "he made h.e.l.l, didn't he?"

Saturn's hour was favourable to rituals pertaining to gross physical motion and the opening of doors. The role of Saturn was occupied by a young actress named Caroline Arnold, who liked to dress in what she thought of as Indian attire, and who believed that she could see ghosts and fairies. For all Arthur knew, perhaps she could. The experiment into which he'd blundered was the first time she'd joined one of the Company's rituals. She didn't attend the war councils of the Company, and so far as Arthur could tell she had no idea of the danger that they were all in. He advised her to quit the Company, for her own safety. She didn't listen.