Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  “All right. But what is the other tool we should be concerned about?” Magdalena asked.

  “The other is the staff of Rabbi Judah ben Loew, which would most likely still be in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue.”

  Magdalena was thunderstruck and her jaw fell open. “The rabbi’s staff? That he used to make the Golem? In the attic of the synagogue?” She wasn’t sure which was more unlikely or difficult to obtain: the sword from the bridge or the staff from the synagogue. “No one ever gets into the synagogue attic. They say the Golem itself might still be there!”

  “Yes, they do say that, don’t they?” George chuckled. “But the staff is there as well, waiting to be picked up and used again in works of great power, conjurations of incredible magnitude. We must be sure that it does not fall into the wrong hands. That is why I want you, my dear… that is why I trust you… to devise a plan to gain access to the synagogue attic and bring the staff out so that no one else does!”

  “Me?” exclaimed Magdalena. “How will I be able to gain access to such a carefully guarded attic? Even so, how could I ever carry something like the staff out of it?”

  “That I am not sure of,” George conceded. “But I trust you. You are clever. Intelligent. More than able to think of a way to do it. As I am researching and retrieving the sword, it will be your role to research and retrieve the staff of the rabbi.”

  “Really? Me?” Magdalena whispered in hushed tones. She was just as astonished by George’s confidence in her abilities as she had been at the news that he would retrieve the sword and that the staff was still in the attic, waiting to be gotten. “Wh-what about after I obtain the staff? What do I do with it then?”

  “Take it to your apartment,” George instructed her. “No one will come around your apartment again, trying to steal magical tools. Of that, I am sure. No one would dare. They know that we—you—will be watching for them this time.”

  Magdalena swallowed and nodded that she understood. But she was still curious about one thing. “What about Elizabeth?” Magdalena asked, looking at the Dearg-due across the table. “What will she be doing while you obtain the sword and I obtain the staff? Will she be collecting other tools?”

  George shook his head. “There are other tools, but none so important for our purposes,” George answered her. “What Elizabeth will be doing is investigating who else Peter might have been working with. Who else might still be interested in gathering and using these tools. Elizabeth will keep an eye on them and prevent them from getting in our way.”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  George spoke up again. “But it is important we do nothing to draw attention to ourselves or what we are doing. Until we know who is involved in this plot to prevent our winning justice for Fen’ka, we must say nothing to anyone else. Not to anyone,” he warned her. “Not even Professor Hron.”

  “You think he might be involved in this?” Magdalena asked, startled at the idea that Hron might realize that what he had spent his life studying might be real.

  “Take no chances,” George reiterated. “Do nothing that will attract his attention.”

  Magdalena thought. “It will be difficult, at least while the conferences are going on. He would notice if I were not at the registration desk or in the office.”

  “Really?” asked Elizabeth. “Do you not think you could slip away briefly without his noticing? If he doesn’t see you in one place, would not he think that you were involved with conference business somewhere else? Helping a lost participant?” she suggested.

  “Maybe so,” Magdalena agreed. “Perhaps you are right.”

  “Well, yes,” Sean agreed. “It does sounds difficult. Well-nigh impossible, perhaps. The cairn is, in fact, the only method we know of to drive the Dearg-due back into the earth and hold her there. She was said to come from Munster province, in the south of Ireland. The city of Waterford.”

  “Where the crystal comes from?” Sophia asked.

  “Yes. Waterford, where the crystal comes from,” Sean admitted the area’s more usual claim to fame. “The folktale explains that the landlord who killed her had her buried in a small cemetery under Strongbow’s Oak, a landmark associated with a twelfth-century hero. By now, of course, both the grave marker and the tree have disappeared, though some think they know which graveyard is the correct one.”

  “So, in order to defend ourselves against this… this thing!” burst out Sophia, “we have to get someone to a cemetery that may or may not be correct and locate a grave that may or may not be under a tree that is long since gone and deposit a handful of stones on top of the grave…” Her sentence sputtered to a stop. She looked at all the faces gathered around the table.

  There were mutters in response.

  “Hopeless.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  Sean looked down into his pint, a smirk playing across his face.

  When George, Elizabeth and Magdalena got back to the Angel House after lunch, Magdalena went back to her station at the registration desk, seeming preoccupied. Others were just beginning to come back from their lunches too, small groups of two or three people clustered over the remnants of conversations that had begun over pints of beer and bowls of stew. George suspected she was thinking of ways she could get into the attic of the Old-New Synagogue.

  George and Elizabeth stepped into one of the session rooms and sat down on the far side of the room, away from the door. George leaned over to her and whispered quietly, “We have other matters to discuss.”

  Alessandro spoke to Sean after an awkward pause. “But you have some kind of idea, don’t you?” the Australian asked. “You have some kind of plan that makes you the hero, right?”

  “Let’s just say that I might be in a unique position to rid us of this unique monster.” Sean looked up from his foamy pint and toward Sean.

  There was another pause.

  “Bloody hell! What is it then? Out with it, man!” Theo burst.

  “The trick, of course, is that it depends on convincing someone else to believe us,” Sean admitted with a shrug. “Which may or may not be easy. Or even possible.”

  “What is it?” a chorus of voices assailed his ears.

  “It just so happens,” Sean finally got to the point, “that my family comes from County Waterford, one of the last areas of Ireland where native Gaelic speakers still live. I grew up there. That’s what made me want to study native Irish folklore and culture. It was my first love, especially since I didn’t have to study it as a foreign language, like so many other people, even though they grew up in other regions of Ireland.” He saw people becoming more frustrated and ill-tempered with him. “But, more to the point for our purposes, I have a cousin who lives not far from Waterford. A cousin with two teenage sons. Two teenage sons who might be convinced to put a pile of stones on the supposed-grave of a would-be vampire.”

  Elizabeth smiled at George as others filtered into the room and took their seats.

  “I suspected as much,” she whispered. “Do you really trust Magdalena to get into the attic of the synagogue and retrieve the staff of the rabbi?”

  “Actually, she might be able to do it.” George surprised Elizabeth by his confidence in the university secretary. “It will also keep her busy while we have other matters to tend to. Too many questions still need answering. Answers that I think would be best given if she were not to hear them. There is also some small assistance that I will need in order to seize Bruncvík’s sword. Meet me in my hotel room after dinner.”

  “Certainly,” Elizabeth answered as she scanned the room to see who was coming into the session. Would Alessandro be there? She wasn’t even certain which session she had followed George into. What was the theme of this panel? She took her conference program out of her shoulder bag and flipped through the pages.

  “One other thing about tonight,” George instructed her. “Bring an egg with you.”

  Everyone sitting around Sean burst out talking at once.

  “What do you mean, yo
u have family there?”

  “Bloody hell! Why didn’t you just say so in the beginning?”

  “Can they put the stones on her grave?”

  “When can you contact them? Are you sure they would be willing to do this?”

  “Can you convince them how important this is?”

  “Will they believe you?”

  Sean had not been expecting an outburst of quite such ferocity. “Yes, yes,” he hastened to reassure them all. “I am sure that I will be able to convince them. They will be glad to help us. I am sure of it. The only question,” he concluded, “is how long it will take.”

  “Well then, get on with it!” exclaimed Theo. “The sooner you do this, the better!”

  At that moment, the great clock in the tower opposite them began to rumble and chime. The skeleton-man shook his bell. The doors above the clock face opened and the apostles began their hourly march to show themselves to the crowds in the square below.

  “Oh, no!” Fr. Dmitri gasped. “I totally lost track of the time! I’m giving my paper in this session. I need to get back to the conference!” There was a flurry of activity as they all stood, grabbing shoulder bags and briefcases. As they hurried back down the side streets to the Angel House, Sean promised Theo that he would e-mail his cousin and the teenage boys that night.

  Elizabeth had looked for Alessandro during the usual afternoon tea break but he seemed nowhere to be found. What was more unusual was that when she found him as the sessions broke up for the day and people were making dinner plans, he was hurrying out of a session and acted almost as if he were trying to avoid her. He insisted he would not be able to join her as he had last-minute work to do on his paper, which he was scheduled to present the next morning. A handful of people she had spoken with during the discussion of the last session happened to be walking past them at that point and invited Elizabeth to join them. She was happy to accept their invitation and they agreed to meet in a hotel lobby in about an hour.

  As she started back to the hotel, she turned a corner and saw a small grocery store. The owner was out front, bustling about as he pulled in a newspaper display stand. A metal gate had already been rolled partway down the display window. He was clearly about to close the store and lock the door for the night when she stepped in and asked for an egg, in English.

  He gruffly answered, “No sell one egg. Half-dozen.” He pointed to a case against the wall. She pulled the carton of six eggs from a shelf in the refrigerator case and dropped a few coins near the register.

  “Why does George need an egg?” she wondered. “And why couldn’t he get it himself?” she fumed.

  Dinner that night ran late for Elizabeth. After meeting in the agreed-upon lobby, the group of academics she’d joined set out for a Tudor-style restaurant near the St. Nicholas Church in the Old Town Square, one of the few in Prague that openly advertised a vegetarian menu. Several of the people in the group were vegetarian and welcomed a chance to maintain their discipline while traveling. The food was delicious and the wine flowed freely. The handful of academics with whom she ate laughed and talked, several conversations going on at once, the various threads flowing in and out and over one another. By the time she made it back to the hotel and picked up the carton of eggs she had left in her room, it was nearly eleven when she knocked quietly on the door to George’s room.

  He opened it at once and gestured for her to come in. There was a small table across the room, where she saw a green candle fixed upright in an ashtray and a box of matches next to it. A card and some shards of leaves or stems were also on the table, along with a small leather pouch such as many men used to carry toiletries in their suitcases.

  “I’ve just gotten back from Magdalena’s apartment,” he explained. “I had to hold her hand, as it were, for a bit. She needed some, shall we say, personal attention?” The disdain in his voice struggled with the leer in his expression and neither quite triumphed.

  “You must be exhausted!” Elizabeth sympathized.

  “Yes, but she is more easily satisfied than many,” he said. “Which is a good thing, as I need my energy and concentration to get the answers that we need.” He led Elizabeth to the table and took the carton of eggs from her. He pulled the chair from the desk and indicated that she should bring the footstool from the room’s easy chair to the table. She did so, and perched on it beside him as he sat and drew himself to the table so as to be able to reach everything he had laid out.

  “What do we do first?” Elizabeth asked, her eyes dancing over all the implements spread out. She picked up the card and turned it over, recognizing the Six of Swords from a tarot deck. Curious, she looked at George.

  “For another meeting, later tonight,” George said. “That is part of the invitation.”

  “Oh?” Elizabeth was intrigued. “Who are we inviting?”

  George took the box of matches, extracted a match, and struck it against the side of the box. The flame rose and flickered, and he touched it to the candle’s wick, which also blossomed into flaming life. He dropped the match into the ashtray and it curled up like a blackened snake. He then reached over and took the card from Elizabeth.

  “I don’t expect you to know much about the summoning of others from their resting places,” George explained, winking. Despite his playful gesture, she wasn’t sure she appreciated his tone of voice. Was he including her in a secret or slighting her experience and hinting that she would always be a servant of others?

  George took up the shards of leaves and stems and held them with the card. “These are dandelions,” he announced, as if that explained everything. He held the card out flat, between his thumb and forefinger, the image facing up and supporting the dandelion greens.

  “What do the dandelions accomplish?” Elizabeth couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice.

  George glanced at her and then extended his arm, holding the card and greens in the candle flame. The fire burned steadily a moment, and then a dark smudge appeared in the middle of the image. “Burning dandelions summon spirits,” George said quietly, never taking his eyes off the card in the flames. The dark spot on the card grew darker and then pulled away from itself, creating a small hole edged with glowing red in the center of the dark spot, the hole quickly growing bigger. The greens that lay across the hole smoldered and hazy smoke hovered in the air. The bitter scent of scorched greens fluttered in Elizabeth’s nostrils. There was a flicker as the tip of the flame darted up through the expanding hole in the card, eating away the image of the woman in the boat surrounded by swords. Then the flames washed across the face of the card and along the dandelion greens. George dropped the card and greens into the ashtray, where the card curled up and in on itself, blackened and reduced to little more than crumpled ash. The greens flared and burnt for another few minutes before they too curled up like ashen snakes. There was one brief flicker of fire more in the midst of the ash and then it was gone. George gently waved his hand over the ashes, dispersing the smoke towards the window, which Elizabeth now saw was ajar. The scent of the burnt greens faded quickly, as did the smoke. She looked back to George.

  “It may take a little while for the message to arrive and the invited parties to respond,” George told her. “We have other work to do in the meantime.” He moved the still-burning candle to one side of the table before reaching into the toiletry bag and removing a sewing kit. He extracted a needle and took an egg into his other hand, gently inserting the needle into the top of the egg, making a series of small pinpricks in the shell in the form of a circle.

  Elizabeth was fascinated and forgot to be irritated with George. “And this will accomplish…?” she asked quietly.

  George was intently proceeding to pierce the egg and then gently break away the chip of shell he had outlined with the needle pricks. He gave the egg to Elizabeth to hold while he put away the needle and sewing kit. He then extracted four bottles from the toiletry kit. They looked like medicine bottles, amber-hued and opaque with white caps. The original
labels had been worn away or removed and new labels affixed. Elizabeth saw writing on the labels but couldn’t make it out.

  “The magic of the bridge was reinforced during its construction by the use of eggs in the mortar,” George explained as he opened the pill bottles and also set out a small, delicate spoon on the table. “There is, as Magdalena pointed out to me, the story that one town—having received the royal order to send a cartful of eggs to Prague to be used in the construction of the bridge—was afraid their cartload would be broken by the rumble of the cart on the country roads, and so hard-boiled all their eggs first!” He chuckled. “Which, of course, rendered them impossible to correctly mix with the mortar!”

  “Why would eggs reinforce the magic of the bridge?” Elizabeth wanted to know.

  “Eggs are one of the most perfect objects for alchemy,” George went on. “Each egg contains within itself symbolic associations with each of the four elements. The shell corresponds with earth, the white with water, the yolk with fire, and the membrane with air.” He took the egg from Elizabeth and scooped a bit of dried, dark powder from one of the pill bottles with the spoon, which he then gently put into the egg through the hole he had chipped away.

  “So, what is it that you are adding to this egg?” she asked curiously.

  “In order to neutralize the power of the bridge, the first step is to negate the magic of the eggs in the mortar,” George went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “In order to do that, an egg containing within itself four baneful herbs—one for each of the four elements—must be introduced into the fabric of the bridge.” He tapped the pill bottle with the spoon. “This is black hellebore. It is associated with water.” He gently touched each bottle in turn. “This is oleander, for earth. This is pennyroyal oil, for fire. This is agaric, for air.” He glanced at Elizabeth. “So elegant. So simple. But no one has ever thought to do it before now. The thickheadedness of all those who have attempted to overcome the bridge these past hundreds of years, and no one has thought to first poison the mortar!”