25
Bones glowed white in the candlelight. Curtains of leg bones swaying in a chill breeze, finger bones and vertebrae ribbing a vaulted ceiling, four pyramidal pillars of skulls, each with a stout white candle lodged in its jaw, dull yellow light flickering in its hollow eye sockets. Bones, jumbled, jagged, stacked from floor to ceiling, a wall of bones, the cracked shards serving as mortar, layers and layers of skulls as bricks. A candelabra of bones dangling above me. A mosaic of bones at my head, an altar of bones at my feet. A church of death, and surrounding me, at five points, death’s harbingers, one at each outstretched arm and leg, and—though I couldn’t see him with my neck strapped down, I could feel his cold hand on my cheek—one at my head. Their hoods were drawn back to reveal faces with hollow eyes and flesh pulled taut over their skulls, as if they were dead, too, as if they were no more than blood and bones.
My head hurt.
Leather straps bound my ankles, wrists, and neck, pinning me flat to a hard wooden board, suspended a few feet above the ground. I could hear my heart beat. The straps had little give, but I could twist my head to the left and right, make out the men who surrounded me and the gathered crowd just beyond them, Max and Adriane at the fore. Two robed men held her in place; it took me a second to remember where I’d seen her frozen expression before, and then I got it: the night of the murder. And afterward. In the mental institution. A column of bones stood on either side of me. The one on the left towered over a strange contraption of wood and gold, with gears like clockwork, circled by golden orbs like planetary epicycles. Around them wound tubes of spiraling waterwheels, awaiting the fluid that would give them life. It was larger than I’d imagined, with space for a man to slip his head between the orbs and carefully align his gaze with the transparent central sphere, which held a pocket of sacred earth. So this was it, the Lumen Dei, paid for in Chris’s blood. And that was by design, wasn’t it? The machine bound together the four elements: It took blood to make it run. Which explained the small card table on my right, bearing two far simpler objects. A glass vial, and a knife.
A voice by my head spoke in Czech. I caught only one word: vyvolená.
The man at my feet responded sharply. His robe was white and banded at the waist by a gold braid. I’d seen him before, on an altar; up close, his eyes were even emptier.
“No!” Max cried, alarmed. Then he said something in Czech, and though it made perfect sense that this was yet another secret he’d been keeping, the smallest and least harmful of all, I started in surprise to hear the familiar voice curl itself clumsily around the foreign words. Somehow, it meant this was all real; Max was a stranger.
“Your Czech hurts my ears,” the Hledači leader complained, in mellifluous English. “Your mother taught you poorly.”
Max bared his teeth, then visibly caught himself. He bobbed at the knee, a ludicrous curtsy-like gesture. “Má slova neumí vyjádřit moji věrnost.”
“Ne! English!”
“Apologies, my master. She trained me as well as she could. If my language is weak, my loyalties are strong.”
Max had never told me much about his mother. I wondered if he’d grown up like Eli, raised in a house of traditions and secrets, bred for lies.
“It is not the strength of your loyalty that concerns me, but its subject.” He flicked a hand, lazily, at the men beside Max. “Zabij ji.”
“You swore you’d spare her,” Max said in alarm, and it took me a moment to realize it wasn’t my life he was defending. Adriane didn’t react. The man beside her slipped a hand into the recesses of his robe and drew out a gun.
“Only you are to blame for setting these events in motion.”
“I was doing what I was told!” His whine made him sound like a terrified child, but not the kind you feel sorry for—the kind who sets his sister’s hair on fire, again, then feigns tears when the punishment gets handed down.
“You were told to retrieve the map. Not to kill the boy—”
At this, Adriane wheeled on Max, her eyes wide. A hand clamped down on her arm, but she seemed not to notice. “You said you didn’t.” It was a church voice, hushed and afraid.
“I swear, I didn’t.…” Max hesitated, eyes bouncing back and forth between his mistress and his master. “I didn’t mean to. It was all an accident. I couldn’t help it!”
“Yet you left this one alive,” the leader said.
“I made sure she wouldn’t remember what happened.”
“You? It was you!” Adriane screamed. “Nora, I didn’t know, I promise, he lied to me, he told me he didn’t—and I didn’t know they were going to do this to you, I’m sorry!” She lunged toward me, but they held her back, kicking and struggling—and it was ugly, as Adriane was never ugly, ungraceful and clumsy and brutal. “Please!” she screamed as a hand clamped over her mouth and a gun dug into her side. And then there were only soft whimpers and tears.
The leader continued as if nothing had happened. “The toxin is unreliable. You know this. And yet.” He shook his head. “You have brought us what you promised, and I am truly sorry you will not witness our final glory. Zabij je oba.”
As robed figures moved in on both sides of Max, the meaning of the command was unmistakable.
“Stop!” I shouted.
The slap came so hard I nearly blacked out again. There was an iron tang of blood on my lips. The room went absolutely still. A sharp report cut through the silence, and behind me, a groan and a thud. The Hledači leader slipped a small revolver back into his robe. “You are vyvolená,” he said. “You are not to be touched.” He turned to face the small crowd assembled for the ceremony. “Je to jasný?”
They nodded quickly. Understood. So I had more value to him than his own people. That had to be worth something.
“You can’t kill them,” I said.
He moved toward me with a liquid grace, his face looming over mine, every wart and wrinkle cast in sharp relief by the candles that ringed my body. He had shot one of his own men for striking me, but I couldn’t forget the knife. Or the straps that would hold me in place if he chose to slide its blade across my throat. “You are vyvolená, but I am the master. You do not give me orders.”
“Yes. I am vyvolená,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t shake. “Elizabeth Weston’s blood runs through my veins. Which means the Lumen Dei is part of me. That’s what you believe, isn’t it?”
The leader’s face betrayed no surprise at my words. It betrayed nothing.
“Something went wrong, the first time they tried to use it, right?” I was talking fast, thinking faster, but it was a race to nowhere, because all I could see at the end was death. “The blood sacrifice wasn’t given willingly.”
“A willing sacrifice is not required.”
Steady. “Are you sure? Because Elizabeth Weston herself says differently. That’s the secret of her father’s creation—only one with a spiritual connection to the machine can judge one worthy to use it.”
“These are lies.” But he didn’t look certain.
“Without spiritual purification, there can be no ascendance. God has his standards.”
“What would you know of God?”
“You know I stole the map—didn’t it occur to you there were more letters? Maybe some that I didn’t tell your little lackey about? You said yourself, he’s incompetent. He missed some things. Big things.” It was a lie; it was also, somehow, the truth. I knew more than I should have, more than he did—because I knew Elizabeth. And they were right about one thing. The Lumen Dei was a part of her.
The leader shook his head. But: “What do you propose?”
“I’m willing,” I said. “I’m honored to take on my birthright. You think you were playing me—but don’t you think this is exactly where I want to be? This place, this moment, with the Lumen Dei.” He would want to believe it, I hoped, because surely he would prefer a vyvolená who accepted the mantle with pride. “And we will face eternity together, but only if she lives.”
“
What the hell are you doing?” Adriane screamed.
“Shut up, Adriane.” But it was unnecessary. They’d already muzzled her again.
This was crazy; this was right. My words felt true. I was strapped to a table in a church of bones. He held the knife. But—I could feel it—I held the power.
“Your friend.” The leader nodded. “The girl, yes? And what of the boy?”
I twisted my head toward Max. Max, who had brought me to this place, and watched them tie me down. Who had kissed me softly under starlight, my face cradled in his hands, bathed in his whispered promises. Who had slid a blade into Chris’s chest and torn what couldn’t be fixed.
“Him too,” I said. Not for him, for me. “He lives.”
26
It didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected. And then, as the knife cut deeper, it hurt more. The leader held my right arm in a gentle grip, and I didn’t struggle. Together, we watched the blood from the shallow cut drip, drip, drip into the glass vial. He frowned, and carved a deeper slash. The drip turned to a flow. I should have eaten more today, I thought, with only a tinge of hysteria. This didn’t seem like the kind of blood donation that would be rewarded by a sugar cookie.
The glass filled with red. “Enough,” he said, and tied a dirty rag around my arm. Good thing long-term risks of infection seemed like something else I probably didn’t need to worry about anymore. He turned to the Hledači and said something in Czech. They dropped to their knees, heads lowered. Then he, too, knelt before the Lumen Dei, the vial of my blood in his hand.
“Děkuji, vyvolená. We and our ancestors have waited centuries for this day. We have fought many battles. Weathered many storms.”
Slaughtered many innocents.
“And now it is time.”
It was, and I was ready. “I have given you my blood willingly,” I said. “Now I give you my judgment. And I judge you … not worthy.”
There was a chill gust of air, as if the room itself had gasped.
“I am vyvolená,” I said. “And I cannot lie. You are not worthy of the Lumen Dei.”
“Only the Lord can judge me.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But who knows, one of your friends might be worthier.…”
“Ne!” he snapped, as I knew he would. “It will be me. And it will be now.”
He tipped the vial of blood into the funnel-shaped opening at the top of the device. It trickled through the tube, setting the wheels in motion.
It wouldn’t work, I told myself. Of course it wouldn’t. And when it failed, they would believe it was because of me. They would believe my will had been made manifest.
It wasn’t much of a plan.
The Hledači leader wrapped his hand around a small lever on the side of the machine, and drew in a deep breath. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua.”
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done.
He pulled the lever.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the gears ground to life, and the golden orbs began to spin. Slowly, at first, then with breathtaking speed. I couldn’t understand what was powering the device—there was no battery, no engine, nothing but the gears, the alchemical liquid that coated them, the dust at its center, the blood. It was impossible. And suddenly, I was afraid. Not of the knife, not of the crazed cultists, not of what would happen when the Hledači discovered the machine didn’t work.
I was afraid of what would happen if it did.
The Lumen Dei began to glow. The Hledači murmured softly, as one, their raised faces reflecting the eerie light, “Fiat volunta tua, fiat volunta tua.”
Their leader unleashed an orgasmic groan, and suddenly the machine went dark and he was the one glowing, as if he’d sucked the light into his body. It shined through every orifice, his face a sun, lit nearly translucent from within.
Then he began to melt.
At first, I thought it was a trick of the light. But he staggered backward and grabbed my wrist, his fingers warm and sticky. In a sudden spurt, blood gushed from his eyes and ears and nose, a fountain of red that spattered against me like a warm rain. Screams filled the chamber, then footsteps and the rattling of bones as the Hledači dissolved into panic. But I was trapped beneath his looming body, its limbs flailing as if detached from his nervous system and eager to make a break for it. His face had gone hollow, cheeks and nose and forehead collapsing in on themselves, and for a moment, his mouth a perfect O of horror, his face unnaturally long, flesh stretching like taffy over his bones, he looked like a work of gruesome art, the inhuman embodiment of fear in shapes and colors that could only exist in a nightmare imagination—and then the mouth caved in, and with it, the rest of him. There wasn’t even a thud as he dropped to the floor, more like a liquid thump, like a pile of sodden rags.
“He wasn’t worthy,” I said loudly. “Who’s next?”
There was an explosion. I craned my head back as far as it would go. The door to the church had been blown off its hinges. The Fidei Defensor surged into the chamber, Eli at their fore. The Hledači swarmed. Shouts echoed as they raged at each other, the Hledači massing before the Lumen Dei, a united front to keep the Fidei from poaching their treasure. Gunshots rang out. Candles toppled. Flames licked bones. Robes billowed, tore; holy men wrestled one another to the floor, and somehow, over the din, Max’s voice. “Run!”
His fingers fought with the leather straps, struggling to unbind them as his brothers-in-lunacy were preoccupied. The restraint at my neck, first, then my arms, so I could hoist myself up and free my own legs, hardly able to believe that, whatever happened next, I wasn’t going to die on that table, by that knife.
“I said run!” Max shouted angrily, but his grip on my arm was suddenly painful, and he had a gun in his hand, digging into my stomach. Adriane stood before us, tears streaking her cheeks, arms out, palms up in supplication, head shaking back and forth in a fierce and persistent no. And I understood: He wasn’t shouting at me.
“Follow us and I’ll kill her,” he told Adriane. “Get out of here.”
She didn’t run. She didn’t follow.
Max scooped up the Lumen Dei and jammed the gun into the small of my back. “There’s a door to the left of the entrance,” he growled, his lips at my ear. “We’ll stay along the wall. Be smart.”
No sudden moves, he meant. Don’t do anything stupid, he meant. This isn’t an action movie, he meant, and I shouldn’t make the mistake of believing that I had it in me to save the day. We moved quickly, crablike, our backs to the wall, the gun never straying from its target, any Hledači that spotted us taken down by the Fidei, and vice versa. I saw Eli, standing over a toppled pillar of bones, fending off a Hledači knife. I saw him see me, and the understanding that passed over his face when he realized that wherever Max was taking me, he couldn’t follow.
“Don’t do this,” I said, over and over again. “It’s me, Max. Please.”
He pushed me through a low door behind the nave, then up a narrow stairwell into another chapel, where we didn’t even pause. “There,” he said, shoving me toward a dingy door that creaked open to reveal a ladder.
“Max, come on, you’re not going to shoot me.” But it wasn’t Max behind me. It was Chris’s murderer, the person who’d stabbed him six times and left him to die in a pool of congealing blood. I climbed.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” he said from behind me. It was the whine of a child who hadn’t gotten his way. “He just had to give me the letter. But he wouldn’t. If he’d just done what I told him to do, everything would be different. We would’ve done this the right way. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be beautiful.”
We reached a crumbling turret, its uneven parapet like a mouthful of broken teeth. A sparse graveyard spread across the church grounds, several stories beneath us. Dawn was breaking over brown countryside that stretched to the horizon. Small towns crawled up r
olling hills, and in the distance, Gothic spires poked through the fog. “Down,” Max said, and, in case I didn’t get it, shoved me to the ground, kicking the wooden door shut behind us. It was a tight space, room for little more than him, me, the Lumen Dei, and the gun. The latter of which I could have lunged for and, with luck, capitalized on the element of surprise to turn it on him and pull the trigger without hesitation or ricochet. But the flip side of that bright idea was a bullet in my head, or a long, fast trip down.
I couldn’t shoot him.
“I gave up everything for this. I did everything they told me to do. I found the vyvolená! Don’t I deserve this?”
“Max, listen to me. There is no ‘this.’ You saw what happened down there. The Lumen Dei is a joke. Or a weapon. Whatever. It’s not what you think it is.”
He raised the gun to my temple. “Tell me I’m worthy,” he said.
Why couldn’t I just let him die?
“He didn’t use enough,” Max said. “That was his mistake.”
“Enough what?”
In response, Max yanked me toward the Lumen Dei and, producing a knife out of nowhere, slashed my wrist, a single, deep cut running lengthwise up my forearm. Somewhere far away, there was pain. But I was transfixed by the blood seeping from the wound, a river of it, pouring out of me and into the machine.
The door thudded and shook with the force of pummeled fists.
Behind it, Eli shouted my name.
Adriane screamed.