Cassandra's Lantern

Chapter 4: Rare Spirits

Perhaps it was simply luck that the cobbled street was as deserted as they found it, or else it would have been almost a certainty that Cassandra could not have avoided colliding with every second person who happened to have been walking in the opposite direction to herself and Talmidge. The night was one of the coldest that she had experienced in the short time she had been living in the coastal town of Whitby, and she hoped that the fact she was wrapped up with every piece of warm clothing she could find would serve to disguise the way in which she could not help herself staring at the sorcerer's groin.

She had never been one to think of a flame as anything other than what it seemed to be in the most honest of terms, the visible manifestation of fire, a point of guttering light or simply a pinprick of heat alone and isolated until it either spread or else exhausted its supply of fuel. The idea of becoming obsessed by a singular flame would have sounded absurd, a thought that had no basis in reality or made any kind of sense, as she had always passed each individual one by as mundane and quite ordinary. So it was a feeling that she found exceptionally unnerving to realise that she now wanted nothing more than to wrestle just such a thing from the hands of another and claim it as her own.

It did not help that Cassandra had been forbidden – on pain of just what she had not actually been made aware of – to even touch the lantern in which the flame itself was contained. Instead she was forced to steal furtive glances at the thing, watching the red flame as it flickered behind the thick glass, swaying back and forth in time with the steps of the man from whose belt it always hung.

Talmidge had assured her that there was no danger of either the flame being extinguished or the lamp being dashed against a hard surface and so broken, mistaking her feverish attention for concern. He most likely had no idea that she had laid awake for a number of nights now, able to think of nothing save for the lamp and what it meant in terms of her own life. But then who could fail to become fixated upon an object which they had been told was fundamental to their continued existence in much the same way as the air that they breathed or the water they drank.

Cassandra knew full well that this was no cheap charlatan's trick on the part of the dour sorcerer, having been treated to a demonstration of just how immediate the power that the person who bore the lamp was. Taken alongside the so very recent revelation that Talmidge claimed one of the parents she had never even met had been an inhuman creature he had named a djinn, there was a battle being fought inside of her mind as to just which was the more terrifying and idea and which was most likely to push her over the edge and finally make her lose her marbles.

But such thoughts would not help her as far as more practical matters were concerned and she managed, with all the strength of will that she could scrape together, to drag her eyes away from the thing and instead stare forwards, resolutely focusing on the task at hand.

This was the first time she had left the shop on anything other than a simple errand, the first time that Talmidge had allowed her to accompany him on what for him amounted to a business matter. Cassandra was conflicted in terms of the role that she was supposed to play, at the same time still chafing more than a little at the way in which she had been packaged off by Mosca, the man who had raised her in her home of Venice and she was not happy to be where she had ended up. But there was also a sense in which she was determined to prove herself capable in the eyes of the man to whom he had sent her as well as to rekindle her own self-worth.

But even that was not the whole and simple truth of the matter.

Mosca had sent her supposedly into the care and protection of a man named Nathaniel Withers, whom Cassandra now knew was a good few years dead. Talmidge had explained the situation to her and rather grudgingly accepted that as the older man’s apprentice and apparent heir; he was obliged to shoulder the commitments that would have fallen to the deceased himself.