The Sinister Booksellers of Bath

Table of Contents COVER PAGE PRAISE TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT PAGE DEDICATION NOTE CONTENTS PROLOGUE CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO EPILOGUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ALSO BY THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE AUTHOR Guide Cover Page Title Page Table of Contents Start Acknowledgments List of Pages i ii iii iv v vii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 327 328 329 330 333 334 335 337 339 341 343 CONTENTS PROLOGUE CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO EPILOGUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER ONE Bath, Saturday, 10th December 1983 Bees. With the Romans a flight of bees was considered a bad omen. THE SMALL BOOKSHOP in Bath was not, in fact, small. It appeared to be no more than a cramped and narrow shop occupying half the ground floor of a three-storey Georgian terrace house, the other half given over to an equally cramped tobacconist who sold dubious pipe mixtures of her own devising and cigarettes from ‘East of Istanbul’. But the Small Bookshop was actually an outpost of the St Jacques clan, so there was more to it than could be seen from outside, both above and below. Even the tobacconist half was a front, inhabited by a right-handed bookseller whose awful offerings were a ploy to limit customers and allow her to get on with her researches into the works of Izaak Walton and obscure enchantments involving fish. The other fifteen booksellers on the permanent staff of the Small Bookshop included a dozen of the left-handed variety: field agents, enforcers and occasional executioners. They were primarily there to keep an eye on human interactions with the entity the Romans called Sulis Minerva. She inhabited the ever-popular Roman Baths, and when given the correct gifts, properly inscribed, would grant boons of power, particularly to people seeking revenge or retribution. The Baths were visited by tens of thousands of people every year, so it was hard work for the booksellers who monitored the queue going in, keeping watch for Death Cultists and others of that ilk who came to ask Sulis Minerva for the causation of a fatal accident or an astonishingly swift mortal illness. A less careful watch was maintained outside the Baths’ opening hours, the constant surveillance replaced by occasional random patrols through the evening and night. The bookshop was often used as a temporary repository for bulk purchases of second-hand books made in the West Country. ‘An Auction of the Library of a Distinguished Lady’ or ‘Sale of the Property of a Gentleman, being mostly books’ and the like. The books were sorted and catalogued there before being dispatched to the New Bookshop in London, the Mews Bookshop in York, or if they were too arcane to be sold, sent to the Crawley Tunnel Library in Edinburgh, the Salinae mine in Cheshire, or to other secretive St Jacques establishments. When a shipment came in from one of these purchases, more right-handed booksellers were drafted into the Small Bookshop to help triage the books before cataloguing. The right-handed, while not fighters like the left-handed, were proficient in various arcane arts, including one often mistaken as purely mundane: extensive knowledge of printing, paper, bookbinding and bookselling through the ages. A book of sorcerous interest might escape magical detection by various means, such as being bound in rune-etched bone disguised under buckram; or encased in a field of lunar misdirection by exposure to seventeen new moons in a silver bowl upon one of three particular hills in England (a procedure often spoiled by rain). These methods worked well against general spells of discovery but were of no use if a right-handed bookseller found some incongruous detail of binding, type, title, content or