“But you didn’t know that,” Max said angrily. “It could have been important—private. And he’s a stranger. He’s nobody.”
“I know that, but I was desperate. And he was there.” There’d been no need to add the obvious corollary.
He took a deep breath and held it, like he was trying to keep in all the things he couldn’t or wouldn’t say. Then he ran his finger lightly across my back, swirling curves and lines that spelled out a message I would never get.
“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m just worried about you. And you’re not desperate anymore, right? I’m here now. You don’t need to trust a stranger. You can’t risk being naive.”
“I’m not being naive.”
“Then why is he here?” Max asked. “We could ditch him right now.”
“We can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Well … for one thing, we need his credit cards.” Eli had paid for the rooms, without hesitation. No ancient societies were tracking his credit-card payments, and no Interpol agents were watching for his ATM withdrawals; no one was hunting him.
“So we take them with us.”
“Max! We’re not stealing his money and leaving him alone in the middle of Prague.” It was funny how he and Adriane had had the same impulse. It might have been the first thing they’d ever had in common. No—the second, I reminded myself. The first was that night in Chris’s house. They would always share those scars.
“For all you know, he’s planning to do the same to us. Or worse.”
Maybe it didn’t qualify as a fight, not exactly. But it wasn’t the way I wanted to spend my first night with Max. It wasn’t right. Nothing was.
“I’m sorry,” I said, with nothing to apologize for. “He was there when we needed him. I know he’s not telling us everything. But I trust him.”
“That doesn’t seem contradictory to you?”
“I trust him,” I said, more firmly, not even sure if it was true. “I want him to stay.”
That’s when Max finally did let go, and sat up, with his back to me. “Fine. You trust him,” he said, voice tight. “What about me?”
“Of course I trust you.”
“Tell me there’s no part of you that believes what they said about me.”
“Of course I don’t.”
He turned and brought his face close enough to mine that I could see his eyes, even in the dark. And he could see mine. “There’s no part of you that thinks maybe I’m the one who—”
I pressed a hand to his mouth before he could say the words. “I trust you,” I said, my other hand on his, so he could feel that it was steady. “I never had any doubts. Not for a minute. I trust you.”
He lay down again. He held me again. He kissed me, and closed his eyes, and went to sleep.
Maybe it hadn’t always been true. But lying in bed, Max molded around me, our chests rising and falling in sync, his breath misting warm on my bare neck, there was no other truth. I trusted him. Those nights alone in the ominous quiet of my house, those nights I’d lain in bed holding a knife, waiting for someone to emerge from the shadows, those nights no longer counted. Those doubts were no longer real. Like all monsters, they disappeared in the morning light. They had disappeared as soon as Max was beside me.
But now he was gone again. Pacing the lobby, nursing secret wounds, hiding from his nightmares or his grief or from me. I sat up and turned on the light. I turned on all the lights.
The Elizabeth letter was folded up inside an empty Band-Aid box, which itself was tucked into a balled-up sock and stuffed into the sleeve of my Red Sox sweatshirt. After what had happened to our last room, I wasn’t taking any chances. We’d agreed to decipher Elizabeth’s code, if we could, first thing in the morning, but I was awake now, with no intention of closing my eyes until Max returned, safe and intact.
Three by three is where you’ll find me.
So I smoothed out the letter, found a pen and a fresh page in my notebook, and started to count.
19
SCIVNT BRVMAE VMBRAS IN ISTO VERBO.
NISI PETAT ET ATER PRAEDONEM
JVS EMATQVE VRBAM VESTRAM
EIS BONA EXTRA VERBUM.
INSCITE PER AEVUM, IMVM PROMERUIT
PRECEM INFERUS.
O GENIE
O VBI NECTAR MERVM INFIDELIVM APVD TE
COLVIT
LEX MEA EST NORMA TEPIDA
SIC CANEM TRADIDI ATRO EGO
RECREA ANIMAM APVD ME
SOL PRAEDICET TOTAS ITA RES.
It didn’t take long for Elizabeth’s real message to emerge.
SVB MVRIS VBI PATER DEVM QVAEREBAT VBI CERVI MORTEM FUGIVNT MVNDI AD CVLMEN MEDIAM AD TERRAM AD SPECTATE.
Beneath the walls where our Father searched for God where deer run from death look to the top of the world toward the center of the earth.
Whatever that meant.
20
“You’re the dead-girl-letter expert,” Adriane said the next morning as we gathered around the lobby’s ancient PC, keeping our voices low in case the clerk got bored enough to eavesdrop. Adriane was acting normal again, whatever normal meant under these circumstances. It wasn’t healthy to pretend this well, so I probably shouldn’t have been so relieved. “Illuminate us.”
I had nothing.
“The search for God,” Max said. “That’s got to be the Lumen Dei. Wherever Kelley built it.”
I shook my head. “He didn’t build it. She did. And she didn’t even start until he was dead.” I had filled them in on everything I’d learned from Elizabeth’s letters and the anonymous ones from Chris’s room. But Adriane was right, I was the expert. And, though I would have felt ridiculous admitting it out loud, I couldn’t help feeling like Elizabeth was speaking to me.
“Where was he before that?” Eli asked.
“Prison,” I said. “Somewhere in the country, I think.”
“That fits with the deer,” Max said.
“Doesn’t quite fit with my shoes,” Adriane put in, with a rueful look at her new suede mules. Then, at the expression on all our faces, “Obviously that’s not relevant under the current doomsday situation; I’m just offering an observation. Rule number one of brainstorming, remember? You can’t say the wrong thing.”
“And yet somehow you always manage to find a way,” Max said, but I could tell he was holding back a smile.
It was good to see.
“Who was her father?” Eli asked suddenly, his eyes still fixed on my translation of the letter. “What did he do? Before prison?”
“He was the court alchemist,” I said. “Tried to turn lead into gold, that kind of thing.”
Adriane sighed. “Of course. A magician. This just keeps getting better.”
“Alchemists weren’t magicians,” Max said. “They were the first chemists, the first pharmacists—even the ones who were trying to make gold weren’t doing it to get rich. They thought that by purifying metal, they could purify the soul. They were searching for the connections between the earth and the heavens, the world of man and the world of—”
“God,” Eli and I said together, and he was already typing Prague / history / alchemy / locations into the search field.
The first, second, and third entries were all for the Mihulka, a fifteenth-century tower that was part of the Hradčany fortifications and had been used as an alchemical laboratory by many of Rudolf II’s court alchemists. “Including Edward Kelley,” Eli read aloud. Elizabeth’s father.
But my eye had already skipped down to the next paragraph, describing the bucolic beauty of the tower, which formed a part of the old castle fortifications and was bounded on one side by the Royal Gardens—and something called the Deer Moat. Which had, during the reign of Rudolf II, been fenced in and used as a hunting ground for deer.
Where our Father searched for God.
Where deer run from death.
We had it.
21
It felt risky to leave the relative safety of
the Golden Lion, with its drawn blinds and locked doors—but riskier still to do nothing, and wait for them to find us. So we set out midmorning and—after Eli wove us through an elaborate pattern of concentric circles, sudden turns, and crowd crossings designed, he said, to ensure we wouldn’t be followed—joined the flow of tourists streaming toward Hradčany.
“Evasive maneuvers you picked up from a bad spy movie aren’t going to help us,” Max had said, an un-Max-like sneer twisting his face. “These are pros. There’s no middle ground. Either they’re nowhere near us, and we’re safe—or they spot us, and we’re done.”
But then he must have seen my expression, or felt my hand tense in his, because he cleared his throat and added, “But maybe this will help.”
Whether it did or not, we made it to the castle safely, and in the unseasonably bright sunshine, surrounded by bickering couples and rambunctious field trippers, it seemed unimaginable that there had been any other option, that the sea of sightseers could be hiding men and their knives. I knew it would be dangerous to stop believing in them just because the sun was out. But in my experience, bad things happened in the dark.
Even in early spring, the Deer Moat was so dense with overgrowth that the stone towers of the castle fortifications disappeared almost entirely behind a wall of sallow green. As we plunged deeper into the grounds, the crowds of tourists dropped away—they had come to Prague for history and photo opportunities, not this bald pocket of dirt. By the time we reached the weedy base of the bridge adjacent to the tower, the Prašný most, we were nearly alone, and it was easy to slip off the path and into the trees that dotted the steep slope leading up to the Mihulka.
Max held the compass, which we’d picked up for fifty crowns at a souvenir stand just within the castle gates. It was gilded with fake gold and had a saint on the back.
The top of the world, we’d decided, could only mean true north.
Finding a shovel had proven more challenging, but thanks to Eli’s fluent Czech, we’d managed to track down a small gardening store on the outskirts of Malá Strana, where we’d picked up the trowels Adriane had stashed in her bag.
As we found the right spot, the northernmost point on the perimeter of the tower, I kept looking over my shoulder, unsure whom I was more afraid of finding: Czech security officers ready to throw us in tourist jail for digging holes in a national monument; Interpol agents with handcuffs, warrants, and a one-way ticket back to Chapman and the maximum-security prison fifty miles down the road; Hledači minions, knives in hand. But no one was there.
We took turns digging. In the centuries since Elizabeth’s time, the Mihulka had been used as a gunpowder storehouse, a religious dormitory, and a museum, undergoing various renovations, including one accidental remodeling courtesy of a seventeenth-century gunpowder explosion. There was no guarantee that whatever had been there still was; after an hour, an ever-widening hole, and a growing pile of dirt, there seemed little hope of it.
Then metal clanged against something hard.
I dumped the trowel and pawed furiously at the hard-packed dirt, scooping it out by the fistful, until I’d excavated a small black box. For a moment I forgot why we were there and everything that had happened, all of it washed away in the flood of childlike wonder. Buried treasure!
The box was a dark wood layered with elaborately engraved iron plates, about five inches square, its surface pitted by centuries of dirt and moisture. Someone had melted wax over the hinges to seal them from the elements, protecting whatever lay within. There was a small gold latch on the front. Eli stayed my hand. “Not here,” he said. “Not till we get back to the room and lock the door behind us.”
“I’ll carry it.” Max scooped up the box before I could argue and shoved it into his backpack.
I wanted to be the one to carry it. I wanted to run my hands over its surface, this box that had somehow survived four centuries underground, that held a secret worth killing for, a secret that Elizabeth thought could end the world. I wanted to know what was inside.
22
The sperm of Sol is to be cast into the matrix of Mercury, by bodily copulation or conjunction, and joining of them together.
“This is how you build a telephone to God?” Adriane asked. “Looks more like porn for chemistry nerds.”
“It’s an alchemical formula,” Max said. He would know—he’d spent the majority of the year poring over similar gibberish. “The idea is that metals are alive and alchemists are mirroring the divine creation of life, so there’s a whole symbolic language of chemical processes as natural, often sexual and generative transformations. ‘The sperm of Sol’ is probably just sulfur, and ‘copulation’ is code for combining it with mercury.”
Adriane shook her head. “I rest my case.”
But she moved in for a closer look. No one but me knew that Adriane had placed second in the regional chemistry olympiad two years running—she’d sworn our chem teacher to secrecy, vowing that if he inflicted public recognition on her, she’d be more than happy to tell the authorities about how he’d “accidentally” given a bunch of sophomores the means to brew their own Ecstasy in the AP lab. She’d kept her secret well enough, but Adriane calling someone a chemistry nerd was the pot calling the kettle Fe4CSi.
I was sure this alchemical formula was identical to the incomplete one I’d found in Elizabeth’s volume of Petrarch, the one we’d celebrated as the key to translating Voynich. The one she’d called Thomas’s page, and claimed for her own. It seemed like forever ago. Beneath the formula was a letter, dated October 12, 1600. Two months earlier than the letter stained with Chris’s blood, the letter Elizabeth had finished even after learning that her brother was dead.
E. I. Westonia, Ioanni Francisco Westonio, it began, as that one had, but the similarities ended there.
E. J. Weston, to John Francis Weston, the one who remains.
Brother. Dearest brother. I once told you I was fearless before a blank page. This, like so much else, has been proven a lie. The pages taunt me, pleading to be filled with something other than tears. Again and yet again, I fail. Failure has become my most loyal friend.
It is night, and I am alone with the corpse of the city. The candle has burned down. Darkness travels with me now, steady and reliable as Failure, my companions on an endless road. In the darkness, once, I slept. Now I lie awake, listening to the voices of the dead.
Soon the stones will glow in dawn light, dearest brother. Soon the rivers of piss will harden to ice, another winter, another ugly thing costumed in beauty. Too soon. I have waited too long.
I am ready to begin.
“Why don’t we just pass it around?” I said, looking up from my translation. My hand was sore from the hours of transcribing, but it was my own fault that I hadn’t let anyone help. Eli and Adriane had both pointed out that the work would go faster if we split it up. But: “It should be Nora,” Max had said, saving me from having to explain why I wanted to keep the letter to myself, why the work of transcribing Elizabeth’s words and turning them into my own was something concrete to hold on to, something sane and normal, why the weight of the pen and the scrape of the ink across the page and even the soreness in my wrist were things I needed to keep going. “This is too long to read out loud.”
“Keep reading,” Max said. “It’s nice, actually. In your voice. Keep going.”
I didn’t want to. Not for expediency’s sake, but because her words cut too close to my truth, and reading them out loud was like sharing a secret I’d never meant to tell. I knew what it was not to sleep, waiting for the dead to rise.
I cleared my throat.
It began in the tower, in the dark and cold. I have told you of our Father losing himself in the magnificent Book. I have yet to confide, because I could not, the secret those pages contained. The secret that our Father gleaned from Bacon’s tome. It was a promise, he said. A gift from his avenging angels. It was the Lumen Dei.
The Lumen Dei was at first nothing to me but a pleasant dream
in which our Father could live out his final days. Final days that I believed would never end. I was a child, filled with foolish hope. That child died the night the Emperor murdered our Father.
I can hear you object, dearest brother. But I have been silent for too long. This letter is our secret, brother, and I ink these words as if I whisper them at your ear.
Rudolf II, Duke of Austria, King of Bohemia, secular leader of the Catholic Church, Holy Roman Emperor, slaughtered our Father. Perhaps it was not his hand that delivered the poison, but it was his dark work. Our fate is his legacy.
As our Father knew it would be.
His final request was simple. I was to take the pages to the one man who could be trusted to complete his vision. Together, we would construct the Lumen Dei, and together we would present it to the Emperor, a gift in the name of Edward Kelley. I was to relinquish the pages one by one, to ensure this man would not claim the ultimate prize for himself. He is to be trusted, our Father told me. But concerning the Lumen Dei, no one is to be trusted.
The man was Cornelius Groot.
You have heard the stories. Whispers of a laboratory in a hidden corner of Malá Strana, guarded by a stone lion known to wake in the moonlight, of a chamber of monsters beholden to his command, of the demons he calls from beneath the earth, of iron beasts that clang and squeal, their gears forged in the fires of hell. The stories were no worse than those told of our Father, and I knew better than to believe them. Yet I hesitated before the stone lion, a letter from our Father clasped in a trembling hand. My breath and courage fled. I admit, only to you, my brother, that I might have turned back, no, would have turned back, had the door not swung open before me. A hunched man whose beady eyes glowed yellow in the darkness asked no questions, only beckoned me inside.
I watched carefully, but no one flinched at “stone lion”—no one but me, apparently, foolish enough to read into the coincidence, the stone beast pacing the doorframe a few feet below our window. Sometimes a lion is just a lion, I told myself. Sometimes … but not lately.