The Cabinet of Wonders: The Kronos Chronicles: Book I (19 page)

“Well, zero comes before one.”

That had to be wrong. “Nothing comes before one.”

“That’s kind of the point.”

He ruffled his hair and turned a page. Petra balled her fists in frustration.

Astrophil spoke up, addressing Neel. “Are you trying to say that zero operates as a placeholder for calculations? That it represents nothingness?”

Neel nodded. “But the
gadje
don’t use it. It’s stupid that you don’t. You can’t do knotty math without it.”

“Do you understand what the equations mean?” Astrophil asked.

“No, but I can guess that Petra’s da was trying to measure energy, not blocks of wood.”

Petra was speechless. It was a good thing Astrophil wanted to do all of the talking.

“How do you know this?” the spider asked Neel.

He shrugged. “Zero comes from the same place as my people. Even if it hadn’t, we would have picked it up along the way. It’s a neat idea. The best thing about wandering everywhere is that you can choose what you like of a place and take it with you, like almonds off the tree.”

“How is it possible that the Roma are interested in complex mathematics and yet your people cannot read?”

“It’s not that we
can’t.
Why should we read?”

“Well, to pass along information. To record your history.”

“Information should be shared by people, not things. These pages are just dead trees.” He frowned at the spider. “Any history worth having should be alive.”

Petra held up an irritable hand. “Are you two talking philosophy? Because if I wanted to listen to that I would be sitting on a splintery bench in the Okno schoolhouse. Neel, will you hide my father’s book or not?”

The boy weighed the book in his hand. Then he put it under his shirt. “Yeah, sure. I’ll hang on to it for you.” Then he seemed to guess her wish to change the subject. “You seen the menagerie?”

“No. What’s that?”

“The prince’s animal collection. Come on, Petali.” He tugged at her sleeve. They walked across the grounds until they reached a locked door. Neel held his hand a few inches from the keyhole and twisted his fingers. The door clicked, and he pushed it open.

The garden was a paradise of green geometric shapes. There was an elaborate maze and enormous flowers that Petra had never before seen in her life. Some of the blossoms were as large as her head. She was astonished that so many flowers were growing. It was, after all, already October. Butterflies fluttered like scraps of colored paper. A tiny, needle-beaked bird with wings that were a constant blur ducked in and out of the flowers.

“That’s a hummingbird,” said Neel. “Looks like a flying blue-green jewel, doesn’t it? Hummingbirds don’t live in Bohemia. And you’d never see all these flowers blooming about in one spot at the same time. Guess the prince had em magicked.”

He led her to a series of large cages. Monkeys screeched and clambered upside down at the top of one cage, swinging themselves
back and forth. In another cage, they saw a bewildering creature with shiny fur, webbed feet, and a duck’s bill. “It lays eggs, just like a spider,” Astrophil informed them. This just made the animal seem even more bizarre.

They saw a tall, spotted animal with long legs, an impossibly long neck, and two short antlers on its head. It was busy chomping leaves hanging from the trees above.

“Look” —Neel pointed to another cage —“it’s an elephant.”

The gray creature had huge curved tusks. Its eyes were tiny beads surrounded by a mass of wrinkles. The black eyes fixed on Petra and Neel. Then the animal ignored them. It wrapped its powerful trunk around some leaves, ripped them away, and then stuffed them in its mouth.

“Ain’t she pretty?”

Pretty
was not the first word that sprang to Petra’s mind as she gazed at the animal. But she had to admit that it had a hefty kind of grace. It looked noble. Petra looked at the bars of the elephant’s cage with sympathy. She, too, felt trapped.

Petra told Neel everything that had happened since she began working in the Thinkers’ Wing. She explained how she had tried to explore other levels of the castle but was stopped by guards. She described Iris and her acid condition. She told him about the prince’s birthday. “Someone like him
would
have his birthday on Halloween. Think he’ll come to his party dressed as a devil?”

“You’re supposed to dress like something you’re not, so I wager you a krona he’ll come as a normal person.” Neel looked thoughtfully at the gray animal. “What you need to do, Pet, is make Iris give you the nod to go anywhere in the castle. She can’t be walking pell-mell down every hall, can she? She could have one of those—what do you call em—acid attacks. If she’s so set on inventing a new color, well, you just tell her that you need to get something for her that’s in a different part of the castle. She’s some
sort of lady, right? She can give you a pass or a seal or something so you can go past the guards. It won’t be easy for me to snoop around the place, though I got my ways. The best thing for you to do is figure out where the prince stashes his goods. Then we break in the night of the party.”

Neel’s plan was good. It was artful. It was downright devious. But it also presented Petra with a challenge. Could she think of a way to contribute to his idea? To match its cleverness? Even as part of her wondered why she needed the respect of a thief, she searched for a way to gain it. A thought struck her. “The castle must be huge. I can’t look into every single room and cupboard for my father’s eyes. So you know what we need to do? We need to find someone
who feels guilty.”

Neel gave her a confused stare, so she explained what she had in mind.

After he had heard her plan, he nodded. “That’ll do. That’ll do all right. But you’re not going to break into a room alone. There’s no point using your boot to crush a snake’s tail when my bare foot’ll stamp out its head just fine.”

She looked at him.

“That is: leave breaking and entering to the experts.”

They turned to leave the garden. The iron door swung behind them and locked in place.

A tall man stepped from behind a row of trees several feet away from the cages. He walked out onto the path and stared at the shut door. He recognized the boy: he was one of the Gypsies working in the stables. As for the girl: she looked like every other servant girl in her gray-blue dress, though her hair was shorter than usual. He hadn’t had a good view of her face. But something told him that he
should
know who she was.

Whoever she was, she and the Gypsy had no right to be in the garden. When he was watching them from behind the trees, their
low-voiced conversation struck him as suspicious. But he hadn’t been able to make out what they were saying.

He approached the cage.
What were they talking about?
he asked the elephant.

Well, I suppose I could tell you.
The gray beast munched its leaves and swung its trunk up to snare another mouthful.
But I don’t think I will.

Jarek sighed with exasperation. Elephants are such difficult creatures.

P
ETRA AND IRIS
were behind the black curtain, working in almost total darkness. This was where they handled lightsensitive materials or conducted experiments with colors that you can see only in the dark. Shelves were stacked with bottles of delicate dyes. Some of them glowed. On the other side of the table where Petra and Iris worked, their backs to the curtain, was a door. Once, Petra had tried to open it and Iris snapped, “Who magically transformed you into
me,
that you think you can sashay your way anywhere you please in
my
laboratory?”

The Countess of Krumlov was now seated in her adamantine chair, watching Petra mix powders and set flames under various brass bowls.

Petra said casually, as if she were just making conversation, “I noticed that we don’t have any heliodor on the shelves.”

“What the devil would we do with heliodor?”

Petra’s father worked mainly with silver, copper, tin, iron, and sometimes gold. These are most commonly thought of as kinds of metals, and indeed they are. But they are also part of a vast system of minerals that include jewels and semiprecious stones, like amethysts, jade, diamonds, and other kinds of crystal and rock. Minerals can be decorative, or they can be made into useful
things, even dangerous things. Arsenic, for example, is a mineral as well as a poison. Mikal Krono used to quiz his daughter about the many different kinds of minerals, not just common metals. Petra decided to put this knowledge to good use.

“Well,” she said offhandedly, stirring a maroon mixture, “I’ve heard that heliodor can make liquids sparkle if added in the right way.”

Iris was silent.

“We don’t have a lot of minerals on hand,” Petra continued. “I haven’t seen any jordanite in our stores, or hematite, dravite, xenotine—”

“We can’t have every chunk of rock that’s been scratched out of the earth! Some of these things are quite difficult to come by. And their usefulness is by no means proven.”

Petra lit a fire under the bowl of reddish-brown dye. She stirred quietly. Then she said, “Well, if you don’t want to try …”

“I don’t want to waste my time!”

The brick-colored liquid thickened. Iris peered into the bowl and said, “Add some chalk.”

Petra tipped in a spoonful of the white powder and said, “We could do some research beforehand, couldn’t we? Isn’t there a library in the castle?”

Ah, the library!
Astrophil sighed dreamily in Petra’s mind.

Iris pursed her lips. “Well, I suppose you could fetch me a few books on the properties of minerals. After we’re done with this batch of Mayan red.”

After they were finished, Petra left the Dye Works and waited outside the closed door. She did not want to arouse Iris’s suspicion in any way, so she thought she would make it seem as if a pass to enter another level of the castle was the furthest thing from her mind. After a good few minutes in the dark corridor, she opened the door and complained, “The guards won’t let me pass.”

“Oh, bother.” Iris grabbed a sheet of parchment and a pot of ink. She wrote, “Third Floor Clearance.” Then she signed it and stamped it with the Krumlov seal. A design of a white ermine now marked the paper.

“Will the library let me take books out?”

“Bother!” Iris scribbled a postscript.

Petra strolled toward the door with the note, as if she were not interested in the slightest in going to the library.

“Well, hurry along, won’t you? You’re not made of molasses!” Iris called as Petra shut the door behind her.

T
HINGS WERE VERY DIFFERENT
on the third floor. The hallway ceiling was golden pink and the blue carpet was plush. It took Petra a moment to realize that the carpet was rippling under her feet in gentle waves. The wallpaper on either side seemed plain blue, but as Petra walked farther she could see a many-sailed ship floating off to her right. She heard a gull screech. She stroked the marble that bordered the doors. The stone was riddled with holes. Some of them were tiny bubbles. Others were deep enough for Petra’s finger to wiggle inside.

That is travertine marble,
Astrophil informed her.
The fissures were made by water.

Many of the doors that appeared in the stretch of sky-colored wallpaper were shut, but as Petra passed she peered into rooms where the doors stood ajar. She saw a salon with long, silk-colored divans. She gazed into an immense ballroom with cathedral windows. Many servants fluttered around the ballroom, and several gray-blue men and women were crouched on its wooden floor, polishing it until it gleamed.

Soon she reached a large double door made from oak. The word
Bibliotheca
was carved above the doors in blocky Gothic letters.

There it is!
cried Astrophil. He bounced up and down on her ear.

Calm down, will you?

Across the doors was a large carving, showing an old man sitting in the dirt with a stick in his hand, drawing something. Far behind him, soldiers were crashing into one another with swords and shields. And right behind the man was a muscular soldier with a raised sword.

What’s that all about?
Petra was curious. The scene had nothing to do with books.

That is Archimedes. He was a Greek scientist and mathematician. See: he is so preoccupied with his idea that he is writing notes in the dirt while the Greeks and Romans war behind him. He was so dedicated to his work that he did not even notice that a Roman had come to kill him. He died for his idea.

Was the scene supposed to be a warning? Or was Archimedes supposed to be some kind of role model? Whatever the case may be, Petra did not like the carving. She pushed open one door. It swung widely.

She stood in a room the size of a large closet. Directly in front of her sat a man in a high-backed, stuffed brocade chair. His desk was short, small, and bare aside from a long bar that read,
SIR HUMFREY VITEK, ESQ
. The man was heavyset, and about her father’s age. He wore a wig, spectacles, and a black robe trimmed with scarlet piping. He hadn’t noticed Petra, but was staring into space, his eyes flicking left, then right, then left, then right.