The King's Gold (21 page)

“Oh—that’s hot. Watch out—hold on, there were pincers on the table.”

Erik ran back to retrieve the iron tongs, then extracted the drenched, red-gold coin. I covered my hand with my sweater to grasp it, but in a few moments I could touch it with my bare skin.

The wax felt strange on my fingers—thin and almost antiseptic. I wiped it off with my shirt, quickly, before raising the second clue to the firelight.

“It’s a—let’s see—a
P
!”

“First
L,
then
P. L
—
P,”
I stuttered. “We’re probably looking for four characters. What would that spell?”

“Pole. Lope. Opal. Liposuction. Opaque.”

“No, not in English.”

“
Pala,
which is the Italian for ‘blade.’”

“I can’t think. Palazzo.”

“Polenta. Lapse. Lapsed Catholic. Lapland.”

“Are any of those Italian?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re fantastic!” I laughed, my excitement apparently giving me some sort of hot flash, so that suddenly even my fingers felt very warm. “I just love you.”

“Jesus, after all this, you’d better.”

“Is it hot in here?”

He smiled. “Are you suggesting something—
Wah!!!
”

All at once he ripped the torch out of my hand. He threw his torso onto mine and smothered me with his arms.

“Help me put it out!” he yelled.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re on fire, Lola!”

I screamed to see my waxy fingers ablaze like candles on a cannibal’s cake. A swift, hot ring of white flame rapidly expanded on the sweater I had borrowed/stolen from Adriana. I swatted at myself with a terror of fire, and so savagely that I would find bruises on my chest later. My fingers were blackened. My sweater had been eaten through.

“The wax...?” I said, questioning.

I should have known, but still did not realize what kind of beast I had just touched. I looked up to see a strange bloodpink corona fringing Erik’s head. The torch that burned on the ground next to us dimmed now in comparison to the volcanic light streaming from the amber puddle of the candle.

I took a step back. “That fire’s getting out of control.”

“I’ll put it out. Snuff it with my jacket.”

Both of us talked in rapid panicked breaths.

“No, just hold on—we’ll douse it,” I said. “The water in my bag.” I threw it to him.

“Good thinking—”

He ripped off the little plastic cap on the bottle with his teeth. A fast nozzle of water hit the blazing tongues.

The incandescence crouched down, nodding. But in the next second, it shot a hot wild tentacle of flame to the ceiling.

“Lola.”

“This couldn’t be—”

“No—”

“God—”

“The fourth dragon?”

“I summoned the Candle-crafting Power of the Sorceress,”
Sofia had written in her diary, of how she had torched the mob that attacked her and her husband. “
I remembered to carry along one of the Tapers that Antonio and I have crafted in our laboratory. A torrent of flame rushed toward the horde. Six men fell at my feet, their faces bubbling, their eyes smoking coals.”

The candle’s wick sparkled, as it would on a stick of dynamite. The amber substance melting off the bronze pillar in a thick gold spiral had become agitated by the water. The fire reared up its snaky green-eyed head, breathing fire.

Then it burst into flame like a bomb.

The water from Erik’s bottle had glazed the pale points of fire, but instead of weakening their force, the tendrils shot out and wrapped around our feet and legs before condensing into the darkest gold. An oily smoke detonated. The flames ran fast across the floor, up the walls, eating the books, crawling up the long mirrored door in a deadly barrier. The fire blocked any possible way out through that passage.

I just killed us,
I thought.

“Lola, get down!”

We fell to our knees. A tower of scorching heat flared before us, radiating off in silver spikes and stars to the place where we crouched.

Erik and I shielded our heads as we ran toward the now-locked front door we’d come in through. My hands tore on the wood, my fingers scraped and bleeding. But it still wouldn’t open.

Hunkering, we covered our heads with our arms, trying to suck in the air close to the ground. A malignant whirlpool of black smoke coiled toward the ceiling. The room was still so bright I could see every corner of the room, every object in it.

Erik shielded his eyes. “Let’s just make a run through that door, the mirrored one—”

“No, it’s already covered by fire!”

“There’s no other way out!”

I was gasping. “The riddle—the riddle, what’s in it? Repeat it to me.”

“You said,
‘In a Shrine at City Two—’”

“Not that part!”

“‘
A She-Wolf tells more than I / Four Dragons guard the next Cue...’”

“‘
Four Dragons guard the next cue,’”
I repeated. “...‘
Read’
...something...‘
Matthew
...
or die
.’ Matthew—Matthew.”

He grabbed my arm. “You were talking about that book—the Gospels.”

“Yes!” I launched forward toward the desk and knocked the Bible off onto the ground.

“‘Read the’...
something...
‘Matthew or die.’”
I repeated the line while crawling with the tome across the floor.

I turned to the first book, the Book of Matthew.

My eyes jolted over the story of the birth of Jesus, of Herod, of John the Baptist, the Fast. But the fire crawled up the bookshelves, whipping out long deadly tails on the ground.

“Matthew...Matthew,” I murmured.

“We have to get out of here.” Erik yelled at me over the roaring sound of the flames. “We’re going to run through that fire—I don’t care!”

“Okay—okay...” He was right—even though I didn’t think we’d make it alive through the door. Still, better to try that than just roasting here while I nattered away at a text!

But it was just then that terror of hot death was answered by my mind with an almost mystical surge of memory. I touched the pages of the glimmering book, the Roman numerals that made up each of the chapters. I, II, III, IV...Instantly, it came it me:

“‘IN A SHRINE AT CITY TWO

A SHE-WOLF TELLS MORE THAN I

FOUR DRAGONS GUARD THE NEXT CUE

READ THE FIFTH MATTHEW OR DIE.’”

“The Fifth Matthew. ‘
Read the Fifth Matthew or die.’
Matthew Five!” I cuffed the leaves until I reached the chapter reciting the Sermon on the Mount. I raked my eyes down the page. Then I saw something I recognized, in Matthew 5:13:

Vos estis sal terrae quod si sal evanuerit in quo sallietur ad nihilum valet ultra nisi ut mittatur foras et conculcetur ab hominibus.

I bellowed out the translation: “‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.’

“Sofia wrote about this quote—in her diary,” I yelled. “Antonio used the diary as a blueprint for the trap.

“‘We are the salt of the earth, the Banshee cried...they hurled at me handfuls of that white stinging stuff...They believe pure salt repels devils—or Dragons—such as me.’”

Erik nodded, spraying sweat. “When those women threw salt at her—salt is what you throw at demons—at witches”—his eyes flashed—“and certain kinds of
fire
—”

I was already crawling over the floor, coughing under the blanket of smoke, searching the room for the substance I knew would save us. Trivia flooded my mind: of Alexander the Great, who’d vanquished the Persians with an unstoppable holocaust of Greek fire, which was inflamed by water; of the oozing incendiary weapon of the ancient Indians, which had to be smothered by earth or salt; of the modern sodium used by firefighters. I half-recalled Antonio’s letter to Giovanni de’ Medici that we’d read at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi. In that missive, Antonio had recounted his invasion of Timbuktu, his raid of the Africans’ alchemy lab. The resisting Moors set him on fire with some sort of potion. He had killed the old wizard who assailed him, but was saved by his son, the future slave-Fool:

…the Savage’s potion was not doused by water, but instead incensed. I tore off my clothes, rolling on the floor, as the Wizard’s son hurried to sprinkle upon me a thick layer of salt. It was only by the Charity of that Moor that I did not die a Martyr’s death...

“This isn’t regular fire, Erik. This is
naphtha
. Coal-tar fuel.”

“That’s why water inflames it—”

“But dirt or
salt
snuffs it out. So that quote, the bible—”

“It means that salt is somewhere in this room. ‘
But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.’
And we’re supposed to throw it to the ground, stamp it with our feet—” Erik bugged his eyes at the lab, its three leather boxes. “The
chests
—”

We jolted toward the three gargantuan trunks. Their owner meant them to be opened by whoever found them, for he had not padlocked them, instead wrapping them with crumbling knotted rope. The leather covering the lids of the trunks had been burned with those mysterious designs; I cuffed the dust off the third.

“Hold on, stop.”

He was already grappling with the first. “We don’t have
time
!”

“We don’t know what’s in here.”

“Salt and—who
cares
?”

“They’re marked—branded.” I knew these signs, even as I drowned on the foul black fog. “I think they’re—warnings.”

Erik scraped off the dust on the trunks’ humped covers.

These were their marks:

“They’re alchemical symbols,” I said. “Of the alchemist’s elements.”

Erik’s eyes were running with water and blood-red. “Oh, hell—”

“We have to be careful.”

“The elements—salt puts out fire, but mercury and sulfur can kill you.” His throat made a rattling sound. “Lola—get down. You’re inhaling too much smoke.”

Erik tried to shield me from the blaze with his body, and my mind was shuddering to retrieve the rest of the contents of Antonio’s letter to Giovanni de’ Medici describing his attack of the alchemists in Timbuktu:

I set light to the Quicksilver...sixty souls fell dead, quivering, green-faced from their own infernal Poison. Close by, there were two additional barrels, each marked with different signs. One was for sulfur...

The other was for the salt that the Moor had used to save me...