Roanoke: The Price of Power

The Truth

"Tell me," said Arnold, and the Doc began:

I came here to Roanoke for one reason. To seek out the man you call Richard Shaberdge. He was a distant cohort of sorts, but not in medicine. He is . . . was a member of the same Order as I. A brotherhood of men and women who study and research and seek to understand.

Among the secrets we study are those that most would call magic or dark arts or a dozen other names. My true colleague, the author of the journal in your pocket, specialized in a certain rare practice. He called it the sanguine opera. Loosely translated, as such, it sounds poetic. Essentially, it is a practice of astrological and alchemical magic in which a warlock consumes human blood to prolong his own life.

My Order frowns upon this practice, not only does such a proclivity condone murder, but it also creates the awful problem of giving a great deal of power to a small number of men. If you can extend your life to many lifetimes, it makes things quite unfair for the rest of us. To maintain balance, we keep the knowledge very secret and levy strict penalties on anyone who uses it.

The man who called himself Shaberdge stole the secrets of the sanguine opera and fled from Europe. It took a good bit of time to track him down but we eventually learned, quite incidentally, from John White that he had located himself here.

The Order dispatched me to Roanoke by under sail. The supplies and food that I brought with me was merely a gift, or more precisely, a cover.

"Why send you?" Arnold asked. "If your Dutchman colleague was the expert, why not him?"

"Ah!" Doc smiled, "I'm more suited for this kind of field work. I'm part of a sect within the order that handles affairs of . . . confrontation. A sort of knight, if you'll think of it that way."

"So you were supposed to kill him."

"I was, if necessary. I only regret that I didn't cut him down the moment I saw him. It shames me to admit this, but he caught me a bit off my guard. Shaberdge must have known that we would find him eventually, and so he was waiting for me on the gangway of the ship the moment I arrived.

"He simply tossed me his Order signet ring and told me that as long as I remained in Roanoke the colonists would not be safe. He would return, kill them all. Leaving me for last. After telling me this, he disappeared."

"So Shaberdge is the one behind this? Behind everything?"

"Yes. And I'm likely to be the only one who has a chance of stopping him. So if you're ready to give me your leave, I'll do what I can. That is to say, do what I've been trained to do."

Arnold had no intention of holding the Doc any longer, but an echoing scream from beyond the threshold of the inner door put the final stroke on his designs.

"Let's go," he said, "and tell me what I can do to help."