The Book of Blood and Shadow (29 page)

Finding a shovel had proven more challenging, but thanks to Eli’s fluent Czech, we’d managed to track down a small gardening store on the outskirts of Malá Strana, where we’d picked up the trowels Adriane had stashed in her bag.

As we found the right spot, the northernmost point on the perimeter of the tower, I kept looking over my shoulder, unsure whom I was more afraid of finding: Czech security officers ready to throw us in tourist jail for digging holes in a national monument; Interpol agents with handcuffs, warrants, and a one-way ticket back to Chapman and the maximum-security prison fifty miles down the road;
Hledači
minions, knives in hand. But no one was there.

We took turns digging. In the centuries since Elizabeth’s time, the Mihulka had been used as a gunpowder storehouse, a religious dormitory, and a museum, undergoing various renovations, including one accidental remodeling courtesy of a seventeenth-century gunpowder explosion. There was no guarantee that whatever had been there still was; after an hour, an ever-widening hole, and a growing pile of dirt, there seemed little hope of it.

Then metal clanged against something hard.

I dumped the trowel and pawed furiously at the hard-packed dirt, scooping it out by the fistful, until I’d excavated a small black box. For a moment I forgot why we were there and everything that had happened, all of it washed away in the flood of childlike wonder. Buried treasure!

The box was a dark wood layered with elaborately engraved iron plates, about five inches square, its surface pitted by centuries of dirt and moisture. Someone had melted wax over the hinges to seal them from the elements, protecting whatever lay within. There was a small gold latch on the front. Eli stayed my hand. “Not here,” he said. “Not till we get back to the room and lock the door behind us.”

“I’ll carry it.” Max scooped up the box before I could argue and shoved it into his backpack.

I wanted to be the one to carry it. I wanted to run my hands over its surface, this box that had somehow survived four centuries underground, that held a secret worth killing for, a secret that Elizabeth thought could end the world. I wanted to know what was inside.

22

The sperm of Sol is to be cast into the matrix of Mercury, by bodily copulation or conjunction, and joining of them together
.

“This is how you build a telephone to God?” Adriane asked. “Looks more like porn for chemistry nerds.”

“It’s an alchemical formula,” Max said. He would know—he’d spent the majority of the year poring over similar gibberish. “The idea is that metals are alive and alchemists are mirroring the divine creation of life, so there’s a whole symbolic language of chemical processes as natural, often sexual and generative transformations. ‘The sperm of Sol’ is probably just sulfur, and ‘copulation’ is code for combining it with mercury.”

Adriane shook her head. “I rest my case.”

But she moved in for a closer look. No one but me knew that Adriane had placed second in the regional chemistry olympiad two years running—she’d sworn our chem teacher to secrecy, vowing that if he inflicted public recognition on her, she’d be more than happy to tell the authorities about how he’d “accidentally” given a bunch of sophomores the means to brew their own Ecstasy in the AP lab. She’d kept her secret well enough, but Adriane calling someone a chemistry nerd was the pot calling the kettle Fe
₄
CSi.

I was sure this alchemical formula was identical to the incomplete
one I’d found in Elizabeth’s volume of Petrarch, the one we’d celebrated as the key to translating Voynich. The one she’d called Thomas’s page, and claimed for her own. It seemed like forever ago. Beneath the formula was a letter, dated October 12, 1600. Two months earlier than the letter stained with Chris’s blood, the letter Elizabeth had finished even after learning that her brother was dead.

E. I. Westonia, Ioanni Francisco Westonio
, it began, as that one had, but the similarities ended there.

E. J. Weston, to John Francis Weston, the one who remains
.

Brother. Dearest brother. I once told you I was fearless before a blank page. This, like so much else, has been proven a lie. The pages taunt me, pleading to be filled with something other than tears. Again and yet again, I fail. Failure has become my most loyal friend
.

It is night, and I am alone with the corpse of the city. The candle has burned down. Darkness travels with me now, steady and reliable as Failure, my companions on an endless road. In the darkness, once, I slept. Now I lie awake, listening to the voices of the dead
.

Soon the stones will glow in dawn light, dearest brother. Soon the rivers of piss will harden to ice, another winter, another ugly thing costumed in beauty. Too soon. I have waited too long
.

I am ready to begin
.

“Why don’t we just pass it around?” I said, looking up from my translation. My hand was sore from the hours of transcribing, but it was my own fault that I hadn’t let anyone help. Eli and Adriane had both pointed out that the work would go faster if
we split it up. But: “It should be Nora,” Max had said, saving me from having to explain why I wanted to keep the letter to myself, why the work of transcribing Elizabeth’s words and turning them into my own was something concrete to hold on to, something sane and normal, why the weight of the pen and the scrape of the ink across the page and even the soreness in my wrist were things I needed to keep going. “This is too long to read out loud.”

“Keep reading,” Max said. “It’s nice, actually. In your voice. Keep going.”

I didn’t want to. Not for expediency’s sake, but because her words cut too close to my truth, and reading them out loud was like sharing a secret I’d never meant to tell. I knew what it was not to sleep, waiting for the dead to rise.

I cleared my throat.

It began in the tower, in the dark and cold. I have told you of our Father losing himself in the magnificent Book. I have yet to confide, because I could not, the secret those pages contained. The secret that our Father gleaned from Bacon’s tome. It was a promise, he said. A gift from his avenging angels. It was the
Lumen Dei.

The
Lumen Dei
was at first nothing to me but a pleasant dream in which our Father could live out his final days. Final days that I believed would never end. I was a child, filled with foolish hope. That child died the night the Emperor murdered our Father
.

I can hear you object, dearest brother. But I have been silent for too long. This letter is our secret, brother, and I ink these words as if I whisper them at your ear
.

Rudolf II, Duke of Austria, King of Bohemia, secular leader of the Catholic Church, Holy Roman Emperor
,
slaughtered our Father. Perhaps it was not his hand that delivered the poison, but it was his dark work. Our fate is his legacy
.

As our Father knew it would be
.

His final request was simple. I was to take the pages to the one man who could be trusted to complete his vision. Together, we would construct the
Lumen Dei,
and together we would present it to the Emperor, a gift in the name of Edward Kelley. I was to relinquish the pages one by one, to ensure this man would not claim the ultimate prize for himself. He is to be trusted, our Father told me. But concerning the
Lumen Dei,
no one is to be trusted
.

The man was Cornelius Groot
.

You have heard the stories. Whispers of a laboratory in a hidden corner of Malá Strana, guarded by a stone lion known to wake in the moonlight, of a chamber of monsters beholden to his command, of the demons he calls from beneath the earth, of iron beasts that clang and squeal, their gears forged in the fires of hell. The stories were no worse than those told of our Father, and I knew better than to believe them. Yet I hesitated before the stone lion, a letter from our Father clasped in a trembling hand. My breath and courage fled. I admit, only to you, my brother, that I might have turned back, no, would have turned back, had the door not swung open before me. A hunched man whose beady eyes glowed yellow in the darkness asked no questions, only beckoned me inside
.

I watched carefully, but no one flinched at “stone lion”—no one but me, apparently, foolish enough to read into the coincidence, the stone beast pacing the doorframe a few feet below
our window. Sometimes a lion is just a lion, I told myself. Sometimes … but not lately.

Wait here, croaked the stooped servant, who seemed more beast than man, and limped into the shadows from which he had emerged
.

I was left alone in Groot’s chamber of horrors. Shelves lined the wall nearest me, shelves crammed with jars containing a milky fluid. Within them floated Death. Dead pigs, dead mice, dead hands with perfectly preserved fingernails. At the center of the room, a corpse lay across a marble table, its chest split open, its eye sockets hollow, its lips peeled back in a gruesome smile. A menagerie of clockwork creatures clicked and wheezed inside their cages, watching me with sightless eyes
.

—A
Kunstkammer
of my own, fine as the Emperor’s, I like to say. Though not to the Emperor, of course
.

Groot’s voice was velvet, rich and smooth. He spoke not in German or Czech or his native Dutch, but Latin, as if knowing it would please me. A candle flickered to life and uncloaked his caped figure, on the far side of the laboratory. It was the eyes I saw first. Not his eyes, those narrow pools of darkness I quickly learned to avoid. The eyes that lined the wall behind him, dead eyes floating behind mottled glass, stark white bulbs laced with spiny red veins. Would you believe, dear brother, that no scream escaped me?

—Your Father recognized greatness when it crossed his path
.

This, before I could introduce myself
.

—The world has suffered a great loss. As have you
.

I could not speak
.

—You were a beautiful child. But the result is no surprise. Tragedy is never kind to beauty, is it?

As if by magical incantation, this broke the spell. I assure you, brother, it was not vanity that unstuck my tongue. My crooked nose is what it is, my curls do what they will, and the wistfulness in our Mother’s voice when she speaks of my younger self as if it were another, golden Elizabeth is more telling than any reflection. I have always known what I am. But to know that Groot had watched me as a child, to imagine that his spindly fingers had stroked my once obedient hair or his voice had crooned rhymes in my ear, that was intolerable
.

You know I have never had much affection to spare for the mass of mankind, brother, but never had I met someone so easy to despise on first sight. Yet our Father trusted him. I gave him the letter and watched his long, pale face transform as he read, filling with surprise, wonder, and, finally, desire. When he met my gaze again, his smile matched that of the corpse
.

—The end of all true philosophy is to arrive at a knowledge of the Creator through knowledge of the created world
.

Bacon, I said, recognizing one of our Father’s favorite pieces of wisdom. He nodded. Though I did not understand it at the time, that was the first test
.

—Do you understand what I pursue here? My struggle?

His arm swept across the laboratory, its mechanical and organic death. No, I told him, and did not want to
.

—We know the world only by acting upon it. We know the Creator only by creating. Paracelsus understands this. Also Agrippa and Porta. Ultimate knowledge derives from ultimate
creation. The alchemists pursue their philosopher’s stone, purifying the soul as they purify their metal, readying them for the divine. The astronomers seek our Creator in the heavens; the mechanists seek Him in the workings of earth. They speak of reading the Book of Nature. But there are those few of us who seek to write a new Book. Bacon. Your Father
.

You, I guessed
.

—You want to know about the
Lumen Dei,
what it promises us. I want to know your promise. A fair trade, I believe
.

Another test. At dawn the following day I returned to his laboratory, which was shaded in perpetual night. This time, his hobbled servant spoke
.

—It is in need of eyes. You are to choose, and then to supply
.

Where the corpse had been, a mechanical man lay, an armless and legless torso with a head of iron. And gaping cavities where, if I wanted to prove myself, there soon would be eyes
.

They watched me from their jars. Brown, blue, green, black, all with the same dead stare
.

I chose a pair with large pupils, rimmed with bottomless black, the pair most closely resembling Groot’s inky gaze. I plunged my hands into the cold water that was not water and smelled of sickness, and cupped my fingers around two eggs that were not eggs and felt to be pulsing with life. I once, in the shadow of Most Castle, held a newly hatched chick in my palm, its feathers sticky and slick, its heart fluttering warm and afraid against my flesh. This was the same
.