The Cabinet of Wonders: The Kronos Chronicles: Book I (26 page)

P
ETRA SAT AT THE EDGE
of the wooden bench, gripping the towel around her and watching the young women climb out of the large bath. She listened to their laughter and the slap of wet feet on stone. None of the other girls waiting for their turn in the bath sat next to her. They crowded together at the other end of the bench like pigeons. Petra peered around the bathing room one more time for Susana. She was nowhere to be seen. Even Astrophil had abandoned her, asking to be left in a corner of the dormitory.
Spiders do not need baths,
he had said.

“Hey, Poxy!” Dana called. Sadie followed closely behind her. Their faces glowed from the bath. Dana gently tugged Petra’s ponytail. “Your hair has grown.”

“Poxy?” Petra was confused, and then remembered how she had explained away her unconventional short hair during her first week at Salamander Castle. She claimed to have had the pox. It seemed so long ago that she had told that lie. “Listen, Dana,” she began, choosing her words carefully. Dana was Sadie’s friend, and she was friendly to Petra. But that did not mean she was
Petra’s
friend. “I know that I’m overwhelmingly popular here, and that nothing can make a dent in the long line of people who want to be
my friend, but could you maybe not call me names like ‘Poxy’? Because somehow it’s not appealing to have a nickname that’s a disease.”

Dana giggled. “I’m sorry. But your hair
has
grown, and gotten darker, glossy. I was trying to pay you a compliment.”

“In her own illogical way,” Sadie added. She looked at the empty bench. While they were speaking, the other girls had plunged into the bath. “Where’s Susana?”

“I haven’t seen her all day,” Petra grumbled.

Dana had a stricken look on her face.

“What’s wrong, Dana?” Sadie asked.

“Don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“Susana’s village, Morado, was burned to the ground. I heard that … that there was a freak lightning storm. It was a nice day. Cold, windy, but nice. Then suddenly several buildings were struck by bolts of lightning. They caught fire, the fire spread, and … Morado’s small and, well, kind of poor. Everything was built with old wood and thatch. Everything burned. Susana’s family died in the fire.”

“All of them?” Petra was horrified.

“Her parents. Her brothers and sisters. Susana has a cousin, though, that lives in a village not too far from Morado. She sent for Susana. Master Listek said she packed up her things and left in the night. She was too upset to say goodbye to anybody.”

“I can’t believe it.” Sadie shook her head. “Who expects a lightning storm this late in the year? It’s such bad luck.”

No, Petra thought.
It is worse.

“NO! NO,
no, NO!”
the prince howled, sweeping pieces of metal to the floor. They glittered in the dark, torch-lit clock tower. The prince pressed his gloved hands to his head and listened to machinery
spinning around him, to the cogs of the Staro Clock fitting and turning together like something inevitable. He listened to the clanking, he saw the pendulums swinging, and he thought his head would explode from frustration.

The guards who flanked the entrance to the inner chamber of the clock tower gazed straight ahead. They kept their faces as blank as if their lives depended on it. And their lives did.

The woman at the prince’s side exchanged a glance with the wispy-haired, pointy-chinned man standing at the other end of the worktable.

“Your Highness,” the man began hesitantly. “I have a small gift for metal. If I might try —”

“I want to do it
myself,”
the prince snarled.

“Yes—of—I—course—”

The gloved hands dropped from the prince’s face. The fury of his expression smoothed away. His silken black fingers reached for a small scrap of metal that still rocked on the table. He approached the pointy-chinned man, who backed away, skirting the table’s corner. “Your Highness, I apolo—apologize …”

“Stop.”

The man stopped. He gazed into the marble features of the prince’s face and trembled.

“Open your mouth,” the prince said, his voice soft. “You will like this.” He offered the glittering metal. “It is sweet.”

“No!” the man cried. “Please! I’m so sorry! I’m so —”

“Your Highness.” The willowy woman approached. “It would be a shame to let Karel go to waste. May I have him? As it pleases Your Highness, of course. But I am working on an experiment for which he might be apt.”

“Ah, Fiala.” The prince gazed at her. “I always admire your flair for invention. Take him, then, if he is useful to you. Karel, you will go with Mistress Broshek to the Thinkers’ Wing.”

The man nodded, but was still shaking. He looked at Fiala. “An experiment? What kind of—?”

“Oh, don’t be such a baby, Karel,” she snapped. “Of course, if you prefer your other option”—she tilted her blond head toward the metal scrap in the prince’s hand—“just say so.”

Karel shook his head and backed away until he bumped into one of the guards.

The prince let the glittering fragment fall to the table. “I cannot assemble it properly,” he muttered to himself. “Nothing is working the way I wish. I cannot control the clock’s power if I cannot piece together the heart.”

“You will,” Fiala Broshek consoled. She pulled on an extra pair of silk gloves and gathered up the metal pieces, placing them in a silken bag that she slung over her shoulder.

They exited the inner chamber of the clock tower, the guards forming an armored shell around them. They didn’t notice that one of the guards had an unfamiliar face. Nor did Prince Rodolfo and Fiala Broshek notice, after they had mounted a carriage, crossed Karlov Bridge, and reached the castle, that the unknown guard did not follow the other soldiers to the barracks, but slipped away to meet his true master, the English ambassador.

T
HE ORANGE AND CLOVE SCENT
drifted from Petra’s pocket, making her feel drowsy. Nobles often carried such oranges in their pockets as perfume, but Petra began to hate the smell. One evening, when she finally dragged herself into the sleeping hall, she barely murmured a greeting to Sadie before she tumbled down onto her pallet and fell asleep.

At first, she slept soundly. But in the middle of the night she began to twitch and turn.

She dreamed of John Dee. He was dressed in robes the color of
the night sky. Stars glimmered.
You must not waste any time,
he said.

She turned onto her side and tried to dream of something else.
The snow is falling. The snow will hamper your escape—if, indeed, you hope to escape. Go away,
Petra thought.

The day after tomorrow,
he insisted,
would be the perfect time to strike. Do it during the prince’s dinnertime. He will be dining with several European ambassadors, including myself.

She tried to wake herself up. When Dee continued to hover before her in his night-colored robes, she frowned in her sleep.
You just want the perfect alibi, don’t you?

Naturally. But breaking into the Cabinet of Wonders then will also suit you. I doubt the prince will wear your father’s eyes to a meeting where he must concentrate carefully, when he must try to persuade all of us to lend Bohemia our support, without admitting that he plans to defy his brothers if his father chooses one of them to become the next emperor. The meeting will also take place when it is just dark enough outside for you to try to escape after breaking the clock’s heart. You must destroy or steal it.

What do you mean, the clock’s heart?

But his face faded, and if he replied, Petra didn’t hear it. She was waking up. She caught his last words:
Don’t fail me, Petra Kronos.

She opened her eyes.

P
ETRA FLUNG THE ORANGE
into the woodpile. It sat there, prickly, squat, and reproachful.

“Good throw,” Neel commented. The belladonna had worn off, and today he looked more like himself and less like some odd offspring of a bumblebee.

She told him what had occurred over the past several days, of the prince’s letter, his private chambers, and the door that she was sure led to the Cabinet of Wonders.

“Tell me about that door again.”

“Well, it’s plain—”

“No, the one with the lion and the lizard.”

She described it, and Neel’s face grew grim. “And the window ain’t a window?”

Petra nodded.

“Then there’s no way I can help you. Danior’s Fingers won’t trick a lion and a lizard like that. There’s no keyhole?” She had to admit that there was not.

Neel shook his head. “Even if there was, I guess the lion would just roar like anything while we tried to bust in. It won’t work.”

“I already thought of that,” she said excitedly, and produced a sheet of paper stamped with the prince’s coat of arms. “It’s your documentation.” She explained her plan.

“All right. When are we going to do this, then?”

His question raised a subject that she was reluctant to discuss, but did anyway: her troubling dream the night before. “Dee said we should do it the day after tomorrow. That is, tomorrow.”

“You dreamed this?”

“Look, I’m not the type to go around believing in dreams either, but—”

“That’s
what he did!” Neel slammed his fist into his palm. “It was no dream, Petali!”

“Come on,” Petra scoffed. “What else would it be? I don’t have the Second Sight or anything.” But she was uneasy.

“You don’t need to have the Second Sight! It was the scrying that did it!”

“What do you mean?”

“When you met with Dee, he asked you to scry. You didn’t see
anything, right? That’s because what he wanted was to make a link between your mind and his.”

Disgust oozed all over her flesh. “He can read my mind?”

Neel shook his head. “I don’t think so. But I’ve heard of this sort of thing before. It’s been used in war, to make it easy for generals to send messages. The Roma use it sometimes for tricksy things. The Company of Rogues, they do it, too, if they can lay their hands on someone able to do the scrying. But it’s risky. It can wreck the mind of the magician and whoever’s doing the scrying. It can scramble your brain like an egg.”

“But … but what does this mean? Am I going to dream of”—she shuddered—“Dee all my life?”

“It means that he can talk to you when he feels like it. It’ll be easier for Dee when you’re sleeping, because your mind will be relaxed. It means you weren’t dreaming, and we should listen to him.”

“We should
not!
It could be a trap!”

“Just find out if the prince really is eating with those foreigners. If so, Dee’s idea is probably right on the money. Plus”—he gri-maced—“I got my own reasons for wanting to move fast.”

“The snow?”

“There’s that, too. But I was thinking about Sadie. You see, she spotted me lurking in the castle cellar today. Tabor’s kept quiet about my working here, like I asked, but I guess it was only a matter of time before she saw me. She’s no fool. If she catches hold of me, she won’t let go until she shakes the story out of me.”

Petra looked at him with scorn. “Just don’t
tell
her, Neel.”

He spread his hands. “I can swear up and down and on the grave that I won’t tell her a word, but the fact of the matter is that she’s been waiting for this ever since you talked to her and Ma in the
vurdon.
She was always worrying that I’d want a piece of your scheme. If she corners me, I can lie my head off, but she won’t believe
a word I say. If I say nothing, she’ll know I’m stirring up trouble. Either way, she’ll figure out that what she
thinks
is going on
is
going on.”

“So what’re you going to do?”

“Avoid her. You should, too, cause I don’t suppose she’s thinking of you as one of her best pals now.”

Petra winced. She wanted to explain everything to Sadie, but the plan was moving much too quickly now, like one of her father’s music boxes when the wind-up key was cranked too tightly. Would she have time to ask Sadie to forgive her, to make her understand her feelings, and Neel’s? She pushed aside these thoughts, for they reminded her of something she and Neel had to discuss: time.

“When we get past the lion and the salamander—”

“If.”

“Trust me, we will! Now, when we get into the Cabinet of Wonders, we’ll have to move fast.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” he said coolly.

“The Cabinet of Wonders is a collection. The prince is rich. He probably has mountains of things in there.”

“I’m still waiting to hear something I don’t know.”

“We have to move quickly to find the eyes.”

“And stuff to steal,” he reminded.

“And stuff to steal. So the question is: how are we going to be able to get in and out with what we need in a short amount of time? We can’t count on the prince being occupied by his dinner forever.”

Astrophil cleared his throat. “I believe I can help,” he said proudly.

A
S PETRA NEARED
Iris’s laboratory, she heard a great crash of glass against the door, which flung open. A wild-eyed boy darted out. As
some sort of lumpy blue slime trickled down the door, the boy stared at Petra. “Run!” he shouted. Taking his own advice, he sprinted down the hall.

Petra stepped into the room warily, but Iris looked normal. That is to say, she looked highly vexed, but at least her clothes were still on and she wasn’t making the floor melt beneath her.

“What did he do?” asked Petra, relieved to see that Iris wasn’t in the middle of a full-blown emotional disaster.

“Do? Do? He
existed,
that’s what he did! And you”—she narrowed her eyes—“what are you doing here, Viera, Sweeper of the Prince’s Study? Don’t you have some royal feet to kiss?”

“Um, actually, I wondered if I might sleep on the floor of the

Dye Works?”

“What’s the matter with the servants’ sleeping hall?”

Aside from the fact that it houses someone who would like my head on a platter, nothing at all,
Petra thought. But she said out loud (and somewhat truthfully), “The girls there don’t like me.”