“Well … as for that …” he answered darkly. “I know only as much as I’m told.”

“And you’re told that an eighteenth-century religious triptych contains the secret of the Holy Grail? Really,” Harper said again.

“All right. All right. Don’t believe me, then. But if you only used your head for two minutes you’d see the sense of it. Do you think Sotheby’s puts stolen pictures up on auction? You talked to the Register. They must’ve run a check on the thing.”

Harper gave one of her Zeus-like nods. “They did. The painting had no listed owner. It vanished long before the war.”

The warlock clenched his hoary fists at her. “Not vanished, Harper. The coven had it. The Nazi coven.”

“Haushofer, you mean? That lot?”

“Yes, yes. Haushofer, of course. But witchcraft ran deep in the Third Reich. High and deep. Right to the top. Don’t forget that Haushofer taught Hess. And Hess was imprisoned with Hitler. And Haushofer visited the two men in Lansberg every day they were there.” He announced all this proudly. “Haushofer—he knew about the triptych, all right. They all knew there was power in it, anyway. But what? That was the thing. What power? They couldn’t crack the code because they didn’t know what they were looking for. And then, when the war ended, when the bombers came and the Allied armies and it all came tumbling down around them, Haushofer committed hara-kiri …” He opened his hands, spread them. “The triptych was lost.”

They were on opposite sides of the fire now. On opposite sides of the stone circle, the light and shadow falling on them from above, racing over them. Harper stood still, frowning, prodigious, the eight maiden, a boulder of disdain as hushed and hard as the others.

“And you’re saying that Iago knows what the Nazis didn’t,” she said. “He knows what the secret of the triptych is.”

“Has done for twenty years,” growled Dr. Mormo.

“Then why now? Why has he only come after them now?”

He rolled his eyes at her obtuseness. “Well, he came after them then, of course!” he cried. “He came to me even then. But they were lost behind the Iron Curtain, you see. If any of it had come over on the black market, who would have known it if not me? No, try as he might, he couldn’t find them then. It wasn’t until the Curtain came down that The Magi finally came to light.”

“The Magi,” Harper echoed him. “And the others?”