The Book of Blood and Shadow (36 page)

When the hall grew quiet, we emerged, and before I could stay my hand, it flew to Don Giulio’s cheek, raking thin red
lines across his pitted flesh. Thomas flew at him, but I stopped him with a word:
remember.
Don Giulio could call the Emperor back, or drag us to his father’s feet and name us as thieves, for that we were
.

I tell you now, my brother, there are things I would have refused, had the bastard son dared ask, just as I tell myself, in the cradle of night, that I would have refused Don Giulio his desires even if it meant relinquishing the
Lumen Dei.
But for reasons I cannot fathom, he did not demand, and so I will never know what I might have done
.

He gave me the goblet, his fingers brushing mine, his lips twitching like one of his frightened squirrels
.

—No one can see us together. These stairs lead to the Bishop’s Tower. Wait there, until one bell has passed, then leave. We will meet again, my Elizabeth
.

He was gone before I could tell him I belonged to no one, least of all him
.

We waited atop the tower past the first bell, and past the second. I willed my hands to stop trembling, but they did so only when Thomas wrapped them in his and told me I was brave. The stars were bright, and I showed him Cassiopeia and Andromeda and told him of the Copernicans, who believed the earth moved beneath our feet. He told me of his mother and sister, who had died together, plague racking one body and then another, less than a week passing from first boil to fresh grave
.

I will not tell you where our words went then, or how we passed the seconds of still, cool night, until there was no choice but to descend, or lose ourselves
.

With that one goblet, or even a single one of the emeralds that encrusted its golden base, I could have changed our family’s destiny. Would there have been any greater sin in stealing the Emperor’s riches for myself than in stealing them for a holy man? Perhaps not. But the greatest sin of all would be to deny our Father his final wish, and perhaps, if Groot spoke true, to deny mankind its greatest discovery. And so I tucked my hair into its cap, bound my chest, slipped into my borrowed breeches, and returned to that strange sacred space
.

We were, on arrival, commanded to approach the altar, where the Rabbi handled the stolen goblet, a wild gleam in his eyes. Into my waiting hands he dropped a small leather pouch, the very pouch you, my brother, now behold, containing within it a pocket of earth that had been blessed by God, dirt and dust and clay that had once walked as a man
.

When the Rabbi turned his gaze to me, I was no longer afraid
.

He bared his teeth
.

—Next time you visit our quarter, I suggest you wear your lovely hair down. A lady need not cover her head before marriage
.

His eyes had seen all. But I found myself unafraid. We were united in our common fate, both thieves, both pilgrims, both servants of what I believe to be the same Lord
.

I slept soundly that night, dearest brother, believing the most difficult of hurdles had been overcome. Two days hence, Groot had determined, I was to depart with Thomas on a journey into Austrian lands, where we hoped the astronomer Kepler would supply the final piece of our fiendish puzzle
.
We had water and earth, soon we would have fire, and Groot himself was toiling day and night on his own contribution, air, the delicate, whirring machinery that would set the device in wondrous motion. It tempts me to end here, in comfort and hope, as it would be easier than recalling for you what happened that night, in the dark before the dawn, when an apparition appeared before my bed, one that I would prefer to remember as a nightmare but that I know was only too real. As was the blade it held to my throat
.

It was a man, and in the shadows he seemed to bear Don Giulio’s face, but this was an illusion borne of a dream. It was a stranger, his face hooded by a priestly robe. A man of God, yet what man of God would penetrate the chamber of a lady and hold a knife to her throat?

—To have faith in God is to have faith in the Church. To know God is to know Him through the Church. Your heresy will end. Now
.

I know not how I gained the courage to speak, but I was no longer the girl I had been before this journey began, and his was not the first blade to have kissed my throat
.

—How is it heresy to seek answers about God?

—Those answers you need have been supplied to you. Your Lord has commanded you to have faith in Him and faith in His Church. You show your strength by ceding your individual concerns to His institution. You show only weakness and avarice by questing for more
.

—If the Lord wants to stop me, let Him
.

—My child, who do you think sent me?

His voice was almost kind
.

—I am giving you an opportunity many feel you should be denied. Turn back. Repent. For if I am forced to return, I will not wake you before I do what needs to be done
.

“It must be the warning,” Adriane said suddenly. “Remember the letter we found in the library, the one about how they were going to warn Elizabeth to stop whatever she was doing?”

I did—and I remembered that whoever wrote the letter had wanted to do a lot more than warn.

At his command, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he was gone. And in the morning, sunshine warming my face and the promise of a journey awaiting me, can I be blamed for dismissing the warning as I would any other imagined creature of the night? Our task was noble, our questions just, and the Church merely clinging to power as changes loomed. The priests had proved themselves terrified by the Lutherans, who insisted on reading their own Bibles in their own vernacular and forging their own relationship with a God who had once been the sole province of the Church’s holy men. Was it any wonder that the
Lumen Dei
would fill them with fear? What need of the Church and its priesthood had we, when God Himself would soon be whispering in our ears?

It was curiosity that propelled me, brother, and dedication to our Father. But it was also hubris. Warnings are easier to ignore than follow, as you well know, for by reading this you have ignored so many of mine. And so we continued. And so shall you
.

11 November 1600
.

31

“The
Fidei Defensor
,” I said, pacing the cramped room. “It has to be.” I’d worked on the translation straight through till dawn, and past it, while Max lay in bed pretending to sleep. I needed to know what had happened. Why, if she was so in love with Thomas, she had married another man. Who was secretly watching her, and how she had escaped from all the men who came for her with knives. I even, though I would admit it only to myself, wanted to know about the
Lumen Dei
. The machine was a joke, a story, but Elizabeth had believed in it—was terrified and, I suspected, tempted by it—and
something
had happened that convinced her the machine was too dangerous to exist and perhaps too dangerous to destroy. I accused her of trusting too easily, but for whatever reason, I trusted her. I wanted to know if I should.

She had laid this trail for her brother, but I couldn’t help feeling that it had also been laid for me.

“We don’t know that it was the
Fidei Defensor
,” Eli said. “For all we know, the only connections between them and the
Lumen Dei
are a crazy old lady and a dead language.”

“But remember how the letter ended?” said Adriane, who remembered everything. “ ‘Yours in eternal fealty and
defense of the faith.’
No way is that a coincidence.”

“No, I bet you’re right,” Max said. We had filled him and Adriane in on Janika’s cryptic warnings and the potential existence of a new player in this surreal game. “That’s what fundamentalists do, right? Slit your throat as soon as you start asking the wrong questions.”

“Fundamentalism has nothing to do with what the
Fidei
were about,” Eli said.

“A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what
he believes for what you believe,” Max said. “And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else. If the cassock fits …”

Adriane cleared her throat. “Before you two reenact the Clash of Civilizations, maybe someone can tell me what this means?” She tapped the strange word, written in letters three lines high, at the bottom of the page. Her usually perfect nails were ragged, the manicured red paint scratched and peeled, so on first glance it appeared her cuticles were oozing blood. “It’s not Greek.”

“It’s Hebrew.” That much I could tell from those long-ago sleepy holiday mornings at my grandmother’s synagogue, but no more. Several lines followed the word:

GSV ULIVRTMVI SLOWH GSV PVB.
NZHGVI LU GSV HGZIH, SRH GIRFNKS
DROO GLDVI LEVI GSV VNKRIV.

URMW SRN RM GSV KOZXV GSZG
UVVOH ORPV SLNV.

DSVIV DV SZEV MVEVI YVVM
GLTVGSVI, YFG DSVM R ZN GSVIV, BLF
ZIV DRGS NV.

It had to be another code, and
was the key.

“Atbash,” Max said.

“Gesundheit.” Adriane smiled.

Max didn’t. “Atbash,” he said again. “That’s what it says.”

“
You
read Hebrew?” I asked. “You’re a Methodist.”

“Episcopalian, actually. But I told you my parents were religious. Hebrew was the first language of God, so …”

“So you know Hebrew because of
God
?” Adriane said. I caught her eyeing the exit.

“When you move around a lot, it makes sense that going to church would be the only thing that feels like home,” I said quickly. “It’s not like he still wants to be a priest or something.”

Eli raised his eyebrows. “ ‘Still’?”

Max didn’t have to say anything. I could tell, from his wounded expression, that I’d done wrong. Again.

“No one told me we had a man of God among us,” Eli said. “Potential MOG, at least. What changed your mind?”

“Leave him alone,” I said.

Max cleared his throat. “You can stop answering for me,” he said.

“I was just trying to help—”

“Please, don’t.” It was the
please
that hurt. So polite, like I was anybody. Nobody. “Nothing changed my mind. I was a kid, and then I grew up. Figured out that the world doesn’t need more people to just sit around and pray.”

“Ah, so you decided you were going to change the world.
Save
the world.” I didn’t know why Eli kept pushing.

“So what if I did?”

“Totally explains why you’re majoring in … history. Am I to assume this world-changing plan of yours includes a time machine?”

“Shut up, Eli,” Adriane said. “You’re being a dick.”

I noticed Max didn’t tell
her
to stop helping.

“No, I want to know. What does our resident holy man think of our current endeavor? You don’t think your God might have a problem with you tracking down his private number?”

Max had to know Eli was mocking him. I suspected he didn’t care. Unlike almost every other guy I knew, he’d never been afraid of his own sincerity, no matter how ridiculous it occasionally made him look.

“I think the
Lumen Dei
, if it existed, would be a miracle,” Max said. “War. Hunger. Poverty. You could end them all.”