The Book of Blood and Shadow
Page 39
Flames burst from within the stone walls. Flames that danced with a white heat like nothing I have ever known.
Behind them, from the men who had murdered Thomas, came howls of agony as the fire consumed them.
Václav released me and ran into the night, screaming that I was a sorceress, that I had destroyed his master and destroyed all. As I had. I could not run. I could do nothing but watch the fire and listen to the screams. I imagined, in that hellish chorus, I could hear Thomas’s voice, and when I close my eyes, that is how I cannot help but remember him. Bloody and tormented, as his body burned and the one he loved did nothing to save him.
The building burned through the night. Screams and panic coursed through the streets. Families fled, their belongings bundled in their arms, expecting the fire to burn through the district. But the flames never spread. Nor were they weakened by water, as a brigade of brave men dashed them with bucket after bucket. The fire was impervious, and soon even the most courageous had fled in the face of its might.
I stayed, waiting for it to consume me, waiting for something to which I could put no name, until the flames burned themselves out, and I faced the rubble. There were no corpses. Nothing recognizably human, nothing alive. Nothing but the Lumen Dei. It was intact. Waiting for me.
I could not rescue Thomas. I could only rescue the machine that killed him.
You see now, dearest brother, why I thought to dash it to pieces. Why I still long to do so.
Why I am afraid to try.
Only Václav survived that night. I know this because I have seen him, stalking me from dark corners and narrow alleys. Now he is the ghost, and I am the haunted. But I fear him not. What can he take from me? What remains?
Only you, and only this.
I bury its final remains here.
I confess, my brother, I have yet to decide whether I will ever guide you to this letter. It is our Father’s legacy, yes. But it is a legacy of death. Was that its ultimate purpose from the start? Perhaps my Father’s gift for Rudolf was not so different from the one I would have desired. Perhaps, had I trusted him, and followed his final wishes, Thomas would be with me now, and all would be different.
But the principles behind the device are sound, and I must believe that our Father, whatever his intentions toward the Emperor, pursued a higher purpose. The mind of God is knowable, and the Lumen Dei is the path to knowledge. So perhaps it was not the device. Perhaps it was the blood. Thomas’s blood, taken by force, taken with rage. I know of no God that would accept such an offering, and reward it with His grace. No God, that is, that I would choose to believe in.
I do not know what to believe.
I made my choice, and I chose poorly.
Now the choice will be yours, and I tell you my story so you understand what this Lumen Dei can do. Not just to stone walls, but to bodies, to minds, to loyalty, and to love. Today I lay the beast to rest, and I trust that you will resurrect it only if you can tame it, as I fear I cannot. I trust you more than I trust myself.
I have lost so much, and yet every day I draw breath. Every day I greet a new sunrise. I eat and speak and perhaps someday I will even laugh once again. I have lost so much, and still I live, because I have no other choice, and only because I know one thing to be true, and I cling to that truth with my life. This monster will never consume another soul. No other will lose what I have lost. The Lumen Dei has turned Thomas to ash. It has turned me to stone. But it will consume no more. I end it now.
I end it here.
15 November 1600.
If she had broken the machine, rather than preserving it as her brother’s birthright; if she had trusted her own choices, rather than leaving the choice to him; if she had understood that creating had given her the permission and responsibility to destroy; if she hadn’t believed the Lumen Dei was safely hidden underground; if she hadn’t left it there even when her brother was dead, even when there was no reason not to smash it to pieces, unless, secretly, she suspected one day she would want to try again; if she hadn’t screwed everything up so very badly; if we hadn’t; if I hadn’t.
These were things I didn’t let myself think about.
The Lumen Dei had survived one fire; I would not let myself think it might have survived another. I had seen the rubble myself; arson experts had been through it with shovels and magnifying glasses; there was nothing left.
Elizabeth had probably died believing she had ended it, believing it was over. She’d put the monster in the ground and told herself she was safe, to marry a man she didn’t love and pretend the life she still had left was enough. It was like she said, she did what she needed to survive, and maybe even forget. She had lied to herself.
This time, it was the truth. The fire had done its job. The monster had been vanquished, never to rise again.
We were safe, I told myself. This time, it really was over.
And I chose to believe it.
AFTERWORD
It’s said that Prague was founded by a witch—a fitting legend for a city that was, for decades, the center of Renaissance alchemy, astrology, mysticism, and natural magic. Sixteenth-century Prague was a strange and wondrous place, equal parts philosophical enlightenment and bloody destruction.
Its secretive leader, Emperor Rudolf II, collected paintings, relics, freaks, curiosities—but most of all, people. The alchemist Edward Kelley and his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Jane Weston, were among them. When Kelley landed in prison, where he died under mysterious circumstances, Elizabeth and her mother were thrown into poverty. Little is known about Elizabeth’s youth, or how she surmounted her circumstances to become one of the most famous female poets of her age—I hope she wouldn’t mind me using my imagination to fill in some of the blanks.
The letters and events in this book are wholly imagined, but informed as much as possible by the real people, places, and ideas that shaped Elizabeth’s world. Rudolf’s Kunstkammer was infamous, his illegitimate and sociopathic son, Don Giulio, equally so. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel’s golem is apocryphal, but his stewardship of Prague’s Jewish community through a golden age is very real. Cornelius Groot, though fictional, is based on Cornelius Drebbel, an eccentric Dutch inventor who became Renaissance Prague’s master of mechanical and clockwork curiosities.
The Voynich manuscript, too, is real, its code still waiting to be cracked. Many have called it the most mysterious book in the world, and while decades of historians, cryptographers, and amateur enthusiasts have taken it on, the book guards its secrets to this day.
Only the Lumen Dei and its allies and enemies—the Hledači and Fidei Defensor—are pure fiction. But I’d like to think that in this age—with its golems and its magicians, its wild-eyed alchemists chasing the philosopher’s stone, its scientists and philosophers reshaping human knowledge, its religious fundamentalists throwing one another out of windows and slaughtering heretics in the streets, its conquest of the New World and recovery of antiquity, its unicorns and dragons, its angels and demons—there might have been those who sought to combine nature and artifice in pursuit of an ultimate goal, and those willing to do anything to stop them.
Find out more about the people behind the characters and the truth behind the story at bookofbloodandshadow.com.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I couldn’t have written this book without my well-worn library card and the towering stacks of books it allowed me to cram into my apartment, including the particularly helpful Elizabeth Jane Weston: Collected Writings (edited by Donald Cheney and Brenda Hosington), Prague in Black and Gold (Peter Demetz), The Magic Circle of Rudolf II (Peter Marshall), The Code Book (Simon Singh), Codebreaker (Stephen Pincock), The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (Lucien Febvre), Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City (Eliška Fučiková et al.), Rudolf II and His World (R. J. W. Evans), The Alchemy Reader (Stanton Linden), Alchemy Tried in the Fire (William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe), and The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Richard Popkin).
Unlike Elizabeth, I am not a poet, or anything close, and the Latin poem-cum-treasure map in Elizabeth’s letter was written by Robert Groves. The fragment of an alchemical formula that Elizabeth buried was drawn from a real seventeenth-century text, The Booke of John Sawtre a Monke; the part titles are of more recent vintage, each borrowed from William Butler Yeats.
I’m also indebted to Marta Bartoskova and Jacob Collins for their respective translations of Czech and German, and again to Rob Groves, who supplied all the Latin and patiently answered my many annoying questions about the logistics of translation.
A huge thank-you to my editor, Erin Clarke, whose fierce belief in this book forced me to believe in it, too, and to Nancy Hinkel, Kate Gartner, and the rest of the team at Knopf. I also owe plenty of gratitude, and certainly a few cupcakes, to Holly Black, Libba Bray, Sarah Rees Brennan, Cassandra Clare, Erin Downing, Maureen Johnson, Jo Knowles, and Justine Larbalestier for reading early drafts of the book, and to my agent, Barry Goldblatt, for convincing me I could write it.
Finally, and most of all, I want to thank my history teachers, especially Steve Stewart, Jim Gavaghan, Joan Gallagher, Owen Gingerich, David Kaiser, Margaret Jacob, and Norton Wise—and all the others, from the high school teachers who put up with me when I found the whole endeavor to be a waste of time (and explained this loudly, at every opportunity) to the college professors who showed me my mistake and the graduate school mentors who taught me what really happened and indulged my tendency to wonder, But what if?
Most of them, I’m sure, don’t remember me. But I remember everything.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Wasserman is the author of the Cold Awakening trilogy, the Chasing Yesterday trilogy, and Hacking Harvard. She once studied to be a historian of science and, like her characters, is still reaching for answers in the past. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Visit her at robinwasserman.com.