The Cabinet of Wonders: The Kronos Chronicles: Book I (28 page)

“Got it,” Neel said. He pushed open the door.

Petra kneeled and held out the spoon. Astrophil eagerly sucked at the green oil.

“Better?” Petra asked.

“Much!”

“You were very brave, Astro.”

“Oh”—he tried to speak with nonchalance —“I did what any self-respecting spider would do.”

Petra smiled. “Now, where are they?”

She followed Astrophil deeper into the Cabinet of Wonders. Odd and beautiful objects lined their path, such as a small potted tree whose leaves were curled-up paper scrolls. Petra glanced at a paper leaf that had unfurled and saw a three-line poem written in sappy ink. Some things in the Cabinet were magnificent without being unusual, such as a blue and green life-sized statue of a peacock. Others were bizarre and unsettling, like a six-foot-tall skeleton of a mermaid strung from a pole and hanger.

Neel pulled down a box, looked inside, and made a face. Petra glanced at the box’s label. “It says ‘Dragon’s Teeth.’”

“What am I going to do with dragon’s teeth?”

“If you plant them in the earth, they sprout soldiers,” Astrophil said. “Or so I have read.”

“Well, maybe they’ll come in handy,” Neel said doubtfully. He pulled his purse from his waist and poured in the teeth.

“Try this.” Petra opened a box labeled “Phoenician Coins.”

Neel’s eyes lit up when he saw the heap of gold. But then he noticed the designs marking the coins. His face fell. “Those aren’t Bohemian. Or Spanish. Or anything. I can’t use those.”

“You can if you melt them down.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right.” He began stuffing his purse.

Meanwhile, Astrophil had scrambled on top of a small box. Burned into its wood was one word: “Kronos.”

With trembling fingers, Petra opened the lid. There were her father’s eyes, silver and familiar.

She hesitated to touch them. When she finally picked them up, she was surprised to find that they were smooth and hard like round pebbles. She carefully put them in her pocket.

She heard Neel make a delighted noise. She turned around. He had discovered a hoard of jewels carved into the shapes of various animals. There was a ruby pelican, an emerald turtle, a sapphire wolf, and a diamond dove. “Shame I’ll have to bust these into pieces.” He put them in his purse. “But I can live with that.”

Petra made a quick tour of the Cabinet, looking for something, anything, that might help her fulfill her promise to John Dee. She found powdered unicorn horn, yes. She saw a cocoon the size of her arm. But she came across nothing that resembled a piece of an enormous clock. Or a heart.

She decided that she would have to let Dee solve his own problems. He could make whatever threats he wanted. Her family would deal with him when they had to. Her father might know somebody who could sever the connection Dee had made with her mind, or perhaps Drabardi could do it. In any event, she knew that she, Neel, and Astrophil couldn’t linger in the Cabinet much longer. She had what she had come for: the only thing that really mattered. “I’m ready to go,” she told Neel. “Are you?”

He patted his purse. “Yeah.”

Petra strode toward the door but then halted. She thought of Susana. She remembered her father’s words: “The clock is no longer our concern.” But it did concern other people. Her shoulders sagged, as if in defeat, as if weighed down, and she said reluctantly, “Neel. Let’s look one more time for the clock’s heart.”

They paced up and down, inspecting the stacks of objects. Precious time slipped by and Petra grew nervous in the silence. She was about to give up yet again when Neel stopped and raised a hand. “Wait.” He stared over Petra’s shoulder. “That thing …”

Petra looked behind her.
“What
thing? There are
thousands
of things.”

Neel pushed past her and pointed at a small table holding several scraps of metal.
“That.
It looks like something from your da’s
book. I studied it a bit after you told me what the clock could do. Of course, I couldn’t read any of it, but I looked at the pictures. And those metal pieces remind me of something.”

Petra stared at the table. At first it seemed as if the curved metal pieces were carelessly arranged. But as she looked more closely, she realized the pieces that were roughly of the same size and shape lay next to one another. It looked like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle someone couldn’t quite put together. Petra tried to imagine what the bronze-colored metal scraps would make if they fit together. Then she suddenly understood. “It’s the clock’s heart,” she whispered. She remembered the sketch in her father’s notebook of something that looked like a human heart cut into fragments.

Neel reached out to touch a piece of the heart, but Petra grabbed his hand. She had seen a red glitter in the bronze-colored metal. “The pieces are made of banium,” she warned. “Human skin can’t touch it. It will kill you. It will send shock waves into your body. You’ll die slowly, and very painfully. Banium pulses … like a heartbeat …”

Neel shook off Petra’s grip and picked up a piece of banium with his ghostly fingers. “So this one’s supposed to fit with another? But it’s not easy to tell which goes with which.”

“Try that one.” She pointed.

A second curve of banium lifted in the air. Neel clinked the two pieces against each other. He tried a few different combinations of fitting them together, but they did not match up.

“Neel, you’re doing it wrong.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Can’t you
see?
Look at the jagged teeth along the edges of each piece. Each piece is a cog, and if you fit them together, the cogs will turn.” She tried to imagine the sort of energy the clock’s heart would produce when fully assembled, how each cog of the heart would turn, how the banium would make the heart pulse.

“What’re you talking about? There are no teeth.”

Petra shot him a frustrated look. The uneven edges of each cog were as clear as day, and they obviously were meant to match up with other cogs. “You really don’t see it?”

“Yeah, Pet, of
course
I do,” he replied sarcastically. “And I’m just saying otherwise cause I like to waste time when my life’s at stake.”

Then Petra realized that the prince could see the cogs clearly with the stolen eyes. And
she
could see them because of who she was.

“Turn your wrist like
that,”
she said, and tilted Neel’s right hand. “Now push them together.” He did, and the two cogs united.

“Have you both lost your minds?” Astrophil cried. “Do not
assemble
the heart! You are supposed to do the very opposite!”

Neel and Petra looked at the spider guiltily.

“Silk neutralizes banium. Find some, split the cogs between you, and wrap each one in silk so they do not shock you. Then we will get rid of them once we are outside the castle. And I highly recommend that you move quickly! How long could it possibly take for the prince to eat dinner?”

Petra found a silk kimono embroidered with cranes. She borrowed Neel’s knife and began hacking the kimono into pieces. Then she paused, thinking. She spoke: “But what are we going to do with the cogs, toss them in the river? That’s not going to be enough. The prince would just fish them out. If we bury the pieces, he’ll find them and dig them up. Your idea won’t work,

Astro.”

“Can we not fight?” Neel pleaded. “Because picking apart each other’s plans at the moment we’re supposed to be getting our sweet selves out of here seems to me like a
bad plan.
Let’s just break the blasted heart.”

“It is already broken.” Astrophil gestured at the metal pieces.

“No, it isn’t,” Petra stated. As she looked at the banium, the entire pattern of the puzzle suddenly made perfect sense. “Not really. Not yet.” Wrapping her hands with the silk rags, she told Neel to cut the kimono belt. “Use each half of the belt to tie the rags over my hands,” she instructed. “Just like mittens. Knot the belt halves over my wrists. Good.”

With her silk-covered hands, she picked up another cog and fitted it to the ones she and Neel had already connected.

“Petra!” Astrophil was shocked.

“I know what I’m doing, Astrophil.” Petra rapidly began to attach the cogs. “Listen, I have some magic over metal. Some. But I’m not sure how much and I haven’t exactly been trying to find out. I’ve been too busy.”
Or too lazy?
she asked herself.
Too afraid?
“If I can smash those little teeth along the edges of the cogs, they won’t fit together anymore. But I don’t think I have that kind of power. Luckily, the banium does. Once the heart is assembled I can use its own energy to help me.”

Astrophil dragged his gaze from Petra’s quick hands. He looked at her. “It might work,” he said grudgingly.

“Is this an idea you got from your da?” Neel asked Petra. He reached out his ghostly fingers to help her balance the growing ball of metal. It was now thrumming with energy.

“No,” she admitted. “But will you trust me?” she begged, even though she didn’t totally trust herself.

He lifted the last cog. “Let’s see what happens.”

Petra took the last piece. It almost pulled itself into place. The heart began to beat loudly.

“Somebody might hear that,” Astrophil said in a tiny voice.

“Be quick, Pet!” Neel urged.

Petra stared at the thumping heart in her silken hands. She tried to focus on the banium, to invite it inside her mind the same
way she did Astrophil and the Lovari dagger. Then she paused, afraid. If the touch of banium could kill a person, what would this magic do to her?
If my father built the heart and survived,
she told herself,
I can break it and do the same.
Tomik would have recognized this attitude in Petra, because it was the same steely stubbornness that had brought her to Prague in the first place.

The banium heartbeat began to thud inside Petra’s mind. Quietly, at first. Then it swelled and pressed against her skull. A whimper escaped her.

“What’s wrong?” Neel cried.

Astrophil jumped up and clung to her shoulder. “Petra?”

She ignored them, trying to cope with the throbbing in her brain. It was worse than any headache. It was beyond painful. Just when she thought her head would split apart from the force of the magical connection between her and the banium, Petra focused on the seams in the clock’s heart, the places where the cogs met.
Split THERE,
she willed.

There was a sound like ice cracking. As the throbbing in her head drained away, Petra watched the teeth of the cogs shatter along the lines that held them together. The heart still held its shape somehow, like the fractured shell of a hard-boiled egg. But the teeth were gone.

“Have you done it?” Astrophil asked. “Is it finished? Petra, are you all right?”

“Yes,” she whispered. Then she let her hands fall away from the heart. She leaned over and vomited.

Surprised, Neel fumbled with the heart. It dropped to the ground and broke open with an earsplitting
BOOM.

The three of them looked at one another.

“Now, I
know,”
Astrophil said shakily, “that someone heard
that.”

N
EEL SWORE SWIFTLY
in Romany. He was still cursing in what Petra assumed was a colorful way as he pulled her out of the Cabinet of Wonders. Astrophil leaped to her ear. Petra and Neel ran toward the double doors and shoved them open. Ignoring the roar of the lion and the squeaky bark of the salamander, they pelted down the hallway.

There was a sour taste in Petra’s mouth. But the sick mind-ache of the banium was gone, and relief from the pain made her feel a little giddy. She almost forgot she was in danger. Blood sang in her ears, and she was running too quickly to be really afraid.

Then, just before Petra and Neel were going to do their best to race past the guards blocking the stairs to the third floor, she saw a small group of soldiers bearing down on them from another hallway. Following right behind them, his face rigid with fury, was Prince Rodolfo. A quaking fear seized Petra. She skidded to a halt and froze.

“Pet!” Neel had spun around, staring at her.
“Petra!”

His voice shook her out of her panicky trance. She tore off the silk mittens and flung them to the ground. She reached for the hem of her skirt and ripped at an uneven set of stitches. Then she squeezed Tomik’s Marvels into her left hand. “Close your eyes!”
she called to Neel and the spider. She snatched the Marvel she had named Firefly. The lightning in the sphere flickered. Aiming for the space on the floor just ahead of the advancing soldiers’ feet, Petra threw the marble and screwed her eyes shut.

BANG!
Red light flared behind her closed eyelids. When she opened them, a scene of destruction spread before her. The stone floor was blackened, broken, and heaved up in angular chunks. Some of the men sprawled on the ground. Those who were on their feet staggered, covering their faces with their hands and moaning. A scorched piece of the ceiling fell down with a large thud on a man’s foot. He screamed. Thunder rumbled down the hall.