The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One

by James A. Owen

  “Where the devil are you leading us, Langbein?” Galen rasped.

  “Across here,” Michael said, pointing to the plaza ahead. “I have an idea.”

  Still running easily enough that the others appeared to be caught up in his wake, Michael recalled a cautionary tale an old Belgian had once told him: it takes both a carrot and a stick to move a mule with any haste, and you must use them both, because neither you nor the mule will ever know which one is making it move.

  He looked back at the young mathematician who was keeping pace with little effort, and the musician, who was straining not to fall behind, and wondered just what it was that made them run. Was it for the carrot—the enigmatic manuscript which Jude clutched tightly under his arm? Or was it the metaphoric stick which was roaring down the street behind them promising all kinds of harm to life and limb?

  Pushing past the rosebushes, the trio moved directly to Michael’s destination—the Hofburg complex, the former Imperial Palace of the Habsburgs. Galen shot a curious glance at Jude, who shrugged and kept his speed. They continued running past the soaring baroque buildings until they reached the entrance to the Nationalbibliothek—the National Library—where Michael fumbled around in his pockets for his keys.

  Wheezing, Galen leaned against the archway next to the door and looked on in astonishment. “You have a key to the National Library? How on earth did you manage that?”

  Michael grinned. “I have my sources,” he said, releasing the lock and opening the doors with a flourish.

  Together they bolted through and closed the doors, and just in time—seconds later several dozen trepanned students swarmed through the plaza. “Let’s move deeper while we can,” said Jude.

  Walking through the darkened rooms, Michael led them to the Augustine reading room and turned on a table lamp.

  “Well,” said Jude. “If you meant to impress me, I’d say you succeeded.”

  The Augustine reading room was opened in 1906, and the plan behind it was simple—to design and construct a reading room whose atmosphere could hold its own against the holdings of the library; and as the library contained imperial and scholarly collections from as early as 1368, including Egyptian papyrus, the famed Wenceslas’ Bible, and Maria of Burgundy’s personal Book of Hours, it was no small challenge.

  The Viennese, however, like a challenge, and the result was the single most wonkingly baroque reading room in all of Europe. All dark woods and flamboyant design, the scrollwork had scrollwork; the curves had curves; and the symmetries were infinite. It was quite possibly the only room in Austria where an illuminated manuscript from a Gutenberg Bible would look bland and colorless.

  Michael beamed at the looks on his companions’ faces. “I like to come in here and unwind,” he said smugly, “and now we’ve arrived, I suddenly can’t think of a more appropriate place to have the Edda.”

  “You’re very right,” said Jude, handing him the parcel. “This is a very apropos place—if we weren’t fleeing for our lives, that is.”

  “We ought to be all right for a little while,” said Michael as he sat the manuscript on one of the broad tables. “At least while we decide what to do.”

  Galen sagged into a chair and glared at Jude. “What was that about, Jude? That man in the street was the same man you … impaled, at your performance—now, suddenly, he’s howling like a banshee and a hundred students have joined him in the apparent quest to rend us limb from limb. Is there anything you’d like to tell us?”

  “Sure,” said Jude. “Guilty as charged.”

  Galen looked at Michael who looked back at Galen, and then both of them looked at Jude, who was examining an engraved wooden plaque which was set on another engraved wooden plaque. He felt their boggled stares and turned his head, eyebrows arched in surprise. “What? You’ve never done research outside your field?”

  “Research?” Galen sputtered. “You drilled holes into students heads! Is that even legal?”

  “Yes,” said Jude, “if I have consent, which they freely gave.”

  “Enter freely, and of your own will,” Michael quoted wryly.

  “What, you think I’m some sort of reverse vampire?” Jude asked, irritated. “It was legitimate research. I …”

  Before he could continue, the lights snapped out. From down the long hall, they could hear a pounding at the doors, and a moment later, a howl split the silence of the library.

  “I think our break is over, gentlemen,” said Jude. “Michael?”

  “Follow me,” Michael said. “I think we can get out this way.”

  Feeling their way in the dark, the three moved quickly as a splintering sound announced the students’ entry into the complex. Finding an exit, Michael scanned the area for intruders, but finding it clear led the others out of the library and into the smaller cluster of buildings around the Burggarten.

  “What do you think?” he whispered. “I don’t know which way to go.”

  “In here,” said Jude, forcing a lock on a building surrounded by arching glass frames, “and quickly—I hear them coming.”

  Ignoring the minor vandalism, Galen and Michael stepped past Jude and into a large room filled with flora. There was a faint glow from the lights in the gardens around them coming through the glass, and there was an odd humming sound, like the subtle noises of a fluorescent lamp.

  “Where are we?” Galen asked.

  “Here,” said Michael, feeling around on the walls, “maybe this will help.”

  He flipped the switch, and a dozen globes blazed to life. Just as suddenly, the humming became a cacophony of wings as a thousand butterflies greeted the sudden electric dawn with a whirlwind of flight.

  They were in the famous Butterfly house of the Kaiser’s former private garden, and the sudden change from blackness to light and exploding color was staggering. Whorls of fluttering creatures no bigger than Michael’s thumb streamed past his face, and a massive moth lit on Jude’s head. A grouping of monarchs was threatening to envelop Galen, and all around them the plants were moving with a borrowed life of humming insects. It was an extraordinary sight.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Michael said, holding up his finger for a Costa Rican green. “Have you ever seen the like?”

  “Yes, yes it is beautiful,” said Jude, not impatiently, “but I’d really rather that you hadn’t turned on the lights.”

  In response, the lights suddenly cut out, and the butterflies’ vibrations fell to a hush. Michael bit his lip, thinking—was it darker that it had been when they entered?

  “Cursed, cursed luck,” said Galen. “Look up.”

  Where the soft glow of the garden lamps had come through the windows, there was a writhing blackness, cutting off the light.

  The student mob had scaled the walls and was covering the building. They were surrounded.

  * * *

  “Where are you going?” Galen said in disbelief. “Are you insane?”

  Jude had moved to a maintenance bay at the rear of the building and had begun scaling a ladder. He was heading for a trapdoor which led to the roof.

  “No,” Jude replied without turning. “I don’t think I am insane—but I do think we’ll have a better chance of escaping if we’re not surrounded on all sides.”

  Michael and Galen looked at each other and realized the young man may have a valid point—better to fight in open air than in a pressure cooker. Together, they made a dash for the ladder just as three burly students broke through the door and the sounds of a struggle echoed from above.

  When they pulled themselves onto the roof, they found Jude already climbing down the far side, and nearly two dozen unconscious men and women scattered between them.

  “What in Hades…?” Galen said.

  “You don’t think all I learned in Tibet was how to print books, do you?” Jude asked as he disappeared below the roofline.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Michael.

  * * *

  There were more scuffles with the howlers betw
een the Burggarten and the Ringstrasse, but Jude handily dispatched them with a minimum of fuss.

  “Gosh,” said Michael, running hard, “I hope I never tick him off.”

  “Same here,” said Galen.

  “Here, quickly!” said Jude, waving. It was one of the late running Night Buses just ahead, making its last circuit north to Kartnerstrasse. With a burst of speed, Michael dashed forward and caught the bus just as it was pulling into the street. Stopping, the driver waited until Jude, and finally Galen could catch up and climb aboard.

  “Good call,” Galen wheezed. “How did you get him to wait, Langbein?”

  “I told him you were the Rector of the University,” said Michael with a broad smile. “Sometimes it helps to have influential friends.”

  Galen looked at Michael in surprise, then at Jude, who was staring absently out the window. Was the mistake intentional? Had Jude said something about the address on his invitation, or was it just an exaggeration to nudge the driver?

  He decided that was it—there was no way for Michael to know of his plans, and, he admitted with an inward smile, Rector did sound more impressive than Vice-Rector.

  Michael touched him on the shoulder. “Hey—are you okay?”

  “He may be having trouble breathing,” Jude said neutrally, and Galen suddenly realized he’d absentmindedly been fingering the scar on his throat.

  Dropping his hand, he shook his head. “No—I’ll be fine. It’s not the run. It’s more the absinthe.”

  “Yeah,” said Michael rubbing his temples. “If I’d have had any idea we’d be jogging across the city, I’d have stuck to the creme soda.”

  Galen turned to Jude, his arms crossed authoritatively. “I think we’ve evaded our pursuers—we have a few minutes, and I want to know exactly what has happened here, or I’m going to summon the authorities as soon as the bus stops.”

  Completely untroubled by the request, Jude relaxed in the seat across from the academics and crossed his legs. “What would you like to know?”

  “The trepanning,” said Galen. “Start there.”

  “Yeah,” said Michael, hoping his bulk made him as imposing as the image Galen seemed to project so easily. “Start there.”

  “Fine,” said Jude. “Have either of you ever heard of a man named Phineas Gage?”

  Blank looks from both men. They didn’t know the name.

  “One morning in September, in the year 1843, Gage, who was a construction foreman for a railroad, was preparing a powder charge to blast away bedrock when it accidentally exploded, sending a three-and-a-half foot iron tamping bar straight through the front of his skull.

  “Rather than be instantly killed, as a couple of thousand years of Barbarian research has demonstrated is the usual result of driving a steel implement through one’s skull, Gage survived, and lived for more than a decade longer. But, he was not the man he was—his personality had been irrevocably changed.

  “Prior to the accident, he had been a respected, trusted, friendly, and capable man; afterwards, he became crass, antisocial, mean-tempered, filthy, and a terrible liar.”

  “Not to question the comparison,” said Michael, “but if I’d had an accident like that, I rather think I’d be a little out of sorts myself.”

  “Out of sorts was to be expected,” Jude replied, “but in Gage’s case, it seemed to be a complete severing of the parts of his brain which controlled morals and ethics.”

  “I’m starting to grow familiar with conditions of that sort,” Galen said harshly. “What does that have to do with trepanning?”

  “Well, trepanning is just a more precise form of what happened to Gage,” Jude explained. “Generally, trepanning stops before the brain is penetrated, but I’ve always thought that’s a little flaky, and not as effective as actually entering a lobe.”

  “Where did you learn the practice?” Michael asked. “At Meru?”

  “Yes—the U’s were particularly adept at it. Melvin let them practice on him all the time.”

  “And your point in doing this to a group of your own students?” Galen fumed. “Were you trying to turn them into bad-tempered liars?”

  Ignoring the barbed remark, Jude continued. “There was another aspect to Gage’s transformation that was largely unknown. About three years after the accident, Gage disappeared for several days. He was found about six miles outside of Moab, Utah, where he had been digging a great pit. When he was eventually questioned several weeks later, he claimed that he was digging to China.”

  “Why did it take several weeks to question him?” Michael asked.

  “Because,” said Jude, “when he was found, he was speaking a language no one understood, and it took the good fortune of encountering a passing Hopi Indian to even begin a translation.”

  “He was speaking Hopi?”

  “No—he was speaking Anasazi,” said Jude. “A language no longer spoken because the last peoples who spoke it disappeared more than six hundred years ago.”

  “Anasazi?” Galen asked, confused. “I’m afraid I don’t know the tribe.”

  “No surprise there,” said Jude. “Don’t take offense,” he added quickly as a scowl crossed Galen’s features. “Not many would know of them. ‘Anasazi’ is actually a Navajo word meaning ‘Ancient Ones’. They supposedly came into their own as a culture around 6000 B.C., and were pretty stable as far as Indian cultures go. They fished, farmed, invented canal systems, painted pictures on rocks, and built fairly civilized settlements. Then, around 1300 A.D., they disappeared. Just vanished off the face of the earth.”

  “No wonder you’re interested,” said Galen. “You seem to have some experience with vanishing.”

  “Some,” Jude admitted.

  “What does this have to do with trepanning?” Michael pressed.

  “It’s just a theory, mostly,” said Jude, “but the effects deep trepanning had on Melvin was to facilitate his ability to mimic letterforms of various rare languages—all of which he retained.”

  “Okay,” said Michael, looking to the front of the bus as it pulled alongside the stop at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, “but that could just as easily be explained as his having an exceptional visual memory.”

  “Perhaps,” said Jude, rising to exit the bus, “but then that wouldn’t explain how Melvin managed to acquire a facility for certain letterforms before he ever saw a manuscript in the language.”

  * * *

  “So,” Michael began as they crossed the avenue to the cathedral, “you were trying to bring out of the students a subconscious facility for language?”

  “Something like that,” Jude said, nodding. “Based on Gage, someone who had never learned anything other than English, I concluded that the ability had to be genetic—something akin to racial memory. I also concluded that Melvin’s abilities and Gage’s sudden aptitude for Anasazi were connected by the sole commonality of having had a hole drilled into their heads. So, the next step was to try it out myself. Fortunately,” he finished, grinning, “there are very few things a college student will not do for money.”

  “And the man at Obscuro’s show?” Galen said. “What about him?”

  “Oh, Bertram? He works for me,” said Jude, grinning broadly at the looks on their faces. “What surprises you? Every good magician worth his hat has a plant in the audience, in the event he gets a tough room. It’s all part of the show, really.”

  Michael dropped back as they neared the cathedral and nudged Galen. “Geez,” Michael whispered, “I really, really hope he offers his employees medical coverage.”

  “Dental covers it,” Jude said over his shoulder. “It’s really just a matter of how deep you drill.”

  * * *

  Vienna’s most famous landmark, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, was begun in Romanesque style in 1147 and reconstructed in Gothic style between 1304 and 1450. The church’s southern tower is 450 feet high and dominates the city’s skyline; the more ambitious northern tower, however, was never completed, but was topped off with a dome
when a builder working on the tower fell to his death. The prevailing (and more romantic) rumor was that the builder, a young man by the name of Hans, made a pact with the Devil. The arrangement was that if Hans could build the tower on his own within a single year, he would win the hand of his master’s daughter in marriage, and when the task grew difficult and he despaired of prevailing, a stranger offered to help him finish on the condition that he never utter a holy name for the rest of the year. Hans agreed, and things progressed well until the lady who inspired the deal visited the site. Hans called her by name—Maria—which, as the name of the Mother of God, violated his pact. The scaffolding fell, and Hans was killed. The tower stayed as it was, unfinished.

  The lesser-known rumor involved the whereabouts of Hans’ master on the day in question, a hammer, and three pins from the scaffold—but it was never verified as fact.

  As Michael, Jude, and Galen walked around the cathedral, Michael began to feel as if he were on that scaffolding, and worse, that he himself had pulled the pins. He shook it off and tuned in to Galen and Jude’s conversation.

  “What good is it to stop here?” Galen was saying. “Shouldn’t we be going to the police?”

  “I thought we could double back to Langbein’s, or perhaps to the University. And as to the police—think about it,” said Jude. “Other than making lots of noise, and illegal entry of Professor Langbein’s residence, they haven’t actually done anything.”

  “But, won’t the fact they’ve all had holes drilled in their heads at least cause some suspicion?”

  “Why? You tried to suspend them last week, and that got put down in a hurry—and besides, I’m the one who started the whole thing, so we’re not likely to get any sympathy.”

  As if to punctuate the statement, a loud howling erupted into the air—and it was coming from the street behind them.

  Tires squealing, another of the Nightline busses pulled up to the curb they had just left, and sixty students dropped off of the roof and poured out of the doors. Spotting their elusive prey, the howling began anew and they began crossing the street at great speed.