The Book of Blood and Shadow (30 page)

On his table, the mechanical man waited
.

The eyes sank into their holes with wet clicks, the sound of rotting limbs snapping off a corpse. They were only eyes in a cage of metal, but in that moment, I truly believed that my act had brought the man to life, and that the eyes would take their revenge
.

From the darkness came applause
.

Cornelius Groot stepped into the light
.

—I see your Father’s blood runs true
.

Forgive me, brother, but I nearly spoke the words I have long forsaken. I nearly declared to this man that our Father was not our Father, that our true Father was long dead and Edward Kelley wore his clothes and his wife but could not lay claim to my blood
.

I swallowed these words, not for love of our Father, but because I knew them to be a lie. Another man’s blood may run through my body, but Edward Kelley’s blood runs through my soul. He is my true Father, and Groot saw this, from the start
.

—For many years I have labored to create life, as your Father labored to surpass it
.

The two of us sat together before the first page of our Father’s translation
.

—Only God can grant the power to create life. Only God can know a man’s soul, as He can know the beginnings and the ends of the universe. Only God can truly understand, and only God can truly destroy. To know God is to know ultimate power. Such would be a miracle. The
Lumen Dei
is that miracle. Together, we will build it. Together, we will build a ladder to the divine
.

Blasphemy, I whispered
.

This angered him, and when he spoke, there was danger in his voice
.

—Blasphemy is a fiction of the Church, which proscribes our questioning and supplies answers of its own
.

Our Father had little love for the Church, which bore even less for him, but such talk was unwise. The Church believed the Emperor to be allied with the devil, and I dared not be his opportunity to prove them wrong
.

—It is the duty of natural philosophers to question. We seek the unification of man and machine, of material and spiritual, of the heavens and the earth. The
Lumen Dei,
too, is a question, one we must prove ourselves worthy enough to ask. The Lord reveals Himself to us in nature, in art, in geometry, you believe this, do you not?

I could not argue. He had shaped words around the truth at the center of my life
.

—Who else but God gave us the desire and the capability to know? We need only muster the will to ask. Will you join me, as your Father wished it?

I joined him, dearest brother. For our Father. But not only for our Father
.

So she believed in it. More than that: She
wanted
it. I could understand. She’d lost her father, lost her belongings, her home, her power, and now someone was offering her the control over life and death, over
everything
? Eli had been right: If the
Lumen Dei
was real, of course people would kill for it. Instead, they had died for it—for a comforting fiction. I almost wished it were as easy for me as it was for her. That I lived in a world where God
wasn’t a choice, wasn’t even a necessity, but was simply a fact of existence, obvious and present as the earth and sky. Because at least then they would have died for a reason. Everything would have happened for a reason. Wasn’t that the whole point of telling ourselves the nice stories about the old man with the beard and the lightning bolts?

I envied Elizabeth—but I
admired
Groot. Because if you truly believed in the lightning bolts, why not do everything in your power to take them for yourself?

The
Lumen Dei
would bring together the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. We would begin where our Father had, with the liquid of life itself, an elixir to coat and purify our fantastical device. It was a potion, Groot said, that would unite the humors of man with that of the heavens, and bring the microcosm and macrocosm together into one. He selected for us a young alchemical apprentice who, for a price, could be trusted to follow our Father’s formula and Groot’s command
.

And so, I found Thomas
.

I cannot yet speak of him, except to tell you of our first meeting, and how his corn-silk hair shined in the candlelight, and how his blue eyes were kind when they dared meet my gaze. You know how I have hated my name, but his voice gave new life to it. Elizabeth, he said, and it was like a song
.

If you have found this letter, as I know that you will, you now have possession of that formula which Thomas prepared. And with the formula, I leave you a choice. I cannot destroy the
Lumen Dei,
but as I once drew it together, I have now torn it asunder, and spread its limbs across this city I used to love
.

Follow me now, if you dare, from water to earth, that
element deep in the bones and marrow of life. Groot sent me in pursuit of the sacred earth that had once walked as a soulless man, a pursuit that began and ended with this beast’s creator, the holy man who in this way nearly became a god
.

If you remember what our Father taught us, about how words do not belong to those who speak them, you can follow me there. But if you love yourself as I love you, beyond measure, you will burn these words and, with them, our Father’s dream
.

I stopped reading.

“Well?” Max prodded. “Follow her where?”

“That may be a problem,” I said, and showed them the chunk of text at the bottom of the page.

“Anyone speak ancient Greek?”

Eli sighed, Max grimaced, but Adriane, after furrowing her brow in what I took to be mock concentration, shook her head.

“Problem solved,” she said. “That’s not Greek.”

“I know you suck at languages,” I said. “But trust me, that’s Greek.”

Adriane grinned. “Didn’t you tell me once that Elizabeth Weston was born in England?”

“Didn’t you tell me, more than once, you weren’t listening?”

“Surprise!” she said brightly. “You also told me she considered English her native language and only wrote in Latin because she was an uppity bitch.”

“I’m pretty sure those weren’t my exact words.”

“Words do not belong to those who speak them,” she said.

“I can read that part, too. That part’s not our problem.”

“I’m telling you, there is no problem. Give me the pen.”

She wrote:

“Words do not belong to those who speak them,” Adriane said again, tapping the page. “Think about it.”

It was like staring at one of those paintings filled with dots—staring and staring until finally, through sheer exhaustion, your gaze relaxes, and the boat or unicorn or tree or whatever you’ve been trying too hard to see suddenly emerges from the chaos.

She was right, it wasn’t Greek. Chapman Prep taught the Greek alphabet as a novelty act in ninth grade, somewhere between square dancing and the prologue to the
Canterbury Tales
. So it was no trouble to sound the letters out in my head. Iota. Mu. Phi Upsilon Lambda Lambda—
I’m full …

“ ‘I’m full of surprises,’ ” I read. “Cute.”

She smiled. “Try brilliant.”

None of us could argue with that.

23

The sacred earth lies by the greatest rabbi’s greatest creation
.

Prague, it turned out, had only one “greatest rabbi”: Judah Loew ben Bezalel, aka the Maharal of Prague, aka chief rabbi of Prague, born 1520, died 1609, buried beneath the most visited tombstone in Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, famous the world over, according to the guidebook, for sculpting a living creature from the mud of the Vltava River. A brainless lump of clay
clumsily molded into the shape of a man, a divine blessing that allowed a man-made impossibility. Or, as Elizabeth had put it, “sacred earth that had once walked as a soulless man,” created by “the holy man who in this way nearly became a god.” A creature with no heart, no brain, no breath, no soul; dead matter animated by a spark of impossible life. A golem.

Every week, the rabbi endowed his monstrous creation with the breath of life by inscribing a slip of paper with the
Shem ha-Mephorash
, the true name of God, and slipping it beneath the golem’s tongue. Day in and day out the witless creature lumbered obediently through the Jewish ghetto, mopping floors and kneading challah and punishing any drunken goyish thugs who, sodden with liquid courage, decided they were owed a tribute of Jewish wealth or Jewish women. Every Sabbath, the rabbi withdrew the slip of paper from his creature’s mouth, and so withdrew the blessing. The breath of life, the
spiritus
, the
nefesh
, whatever animating force divine forbearance had leased to the lump of clay disappeared, and clay was, once again, nothing but clay. Dust returned to dust. Until the Sabbath the rabbi forgot his sacred task, and, deprived of its weekly nap, his Frankenstein monster ran rampant through the ghetto, nearly burning it to the ground. After that, the blessing was withdrawn permanently and the mud retired. There was no doubt this was the sacred earth we’d been charged with retrieving. There was just one problem. The golem was pure legend. Elizabeth had sent us in search of a fairy tale.

Another one.

Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, lay at the heart of the city. Supposedly settled in the tenth century, then settled all over again a century later after a gang of twenty thousand crusaders marched through and killed or converted everyone in the name of God. Inhabited by ten thousand people during its Renaissance golden era, when Emperor Rudolf smiled upon its people and at least
mildly discouraged his other subjects from plundering or marauding through the quarter on a regular basis. Razed to the ground in 1895, by which point it had decayed into a slum and only those unfortunates too poor to spread into the rest of the city were still squatting in its urine-spattered streets. Rebuilt shortly after, but even then, despite Prague’s one-hundred-thousand-plus Jewish population, there weren’t many Jews left in the Jewish part of town; then came the Holocaust, and there weren’t many Jews left anywhere.