It was very old. It had come into his possession from one of his sources in Turkey, who had discovered it in a dusty antiques shop in Tevfikiye, a crumbling stone village near the site of the ruins of Ilium—Homer’s Troy. But its true origins lay in ancient Persia. It was written in the Old Persian cuneiform of the Achaemenid dynasty, dating it to around 500 BC, long before the Muslim armies conquered the empire. The cuneiform also positioned the composition of the Peranomicon somewhere in Persis, in the southwest of the country, which was known for its magus’s pursuit of the more arcane aspects of the Zoroastrian religion. Possibly the Peranomicon was a part of a vastly powerful magus’s private library; it did not appear in any compendium of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian collection of sacred texts, that Hartwell had studied.

“It was this book that told us who and what Preach is,” White said, “though part of me still doesn’t believe it.”

“And yet it was through the Peranomicon that I was able to summon him.” Hartwell drummed his delicate fingertips in the complex rhythm prescribed in the text. For an instant, a shadow flickered midway between them and the kitchens building, then was gone.

“Crow,” Hartwell said. “We must be mindful of the bird’s shade at all times. It’s a good part of Preach’s power to divine the future, what he and the Peranomicon called Haxāmaniš, ‘to see a friend’s mind.’” Trey threw a sideways glance at White. He was intimately familiar with Haxāmaniš, if not in the actuality of Preach’s power, then in the theory, which he had put to good use ever since reading about it in researching the Peranomicon. “To see a friend’s mind,” though friend could mean many things, as the text had revealed to him. That was a revelation he had not shared with White, nor any other member of the Alchemists, for that matter. The theory had led him to a conversation with White in which he had maneuvered White into asking to make the summons himself. Trey had had a good laugh at that one. He had had no intention of summoning Preach himself—that would have placed him squarely in Preach’s crosshairs. Preach could not touch him, nor any of the Alchemists—passages in the Peranomicon had ensured that, making them invulnerable to retaliation for the ways in which they used Preach. The book ensured that he was in their power—enslaved, in the same way the genie was bound inside his brass lamp. However, Preach had a long memory. He was fiendishly clever, and Trey had no doubt that there surely would come a time of reckoning. He intended to be on the sidelines when that future was conjured out of thin air and shadows.

*   *   *