The Crown of Fire

by Tony Abbott

  “Here it be!” he said. “The Historia ductu astrolabio! This Latin pamphlet was published in Germany. It means ‘history of the leadership of the astrolabe.’ I could produce no happy thoughts of it by me myself alone. For why? It is mad! A fable tale. But now, I see it are a history of them Guardians. Sit while I peruse the pages of it, will you ever?”

  It was a long peruse. Becca studied Henri Fortier closely. He wore two sets of antique reading glasses, sometimes squinting through them both, sometimes flipping one set up, shifting the other down, sometimes scanning the document through a great heavy magnifying lens on a metal frame that hung over his desk like a robotic arm. Meanwhile, his wife seemed to have softened toward them and was scurrying around to locate a dozen or so original newspapers, ledgers, and letters from the end of April 1794.

  Finally, Mr. Fortier sighed. “Well, then. Well, then.”

  “What does it say?” Becca asked.

  “What does it say! What does it say!” the man exclaimed. “Just you hear this! Floréal Muguet—twenty-sixth April, seventeen ninety-four—is the date these Guardians of yours are murdered. Thousands! Swish-swish, all on a single day! Those that remain not dead go deep underground to hide away from this Order of yours. Thousands of victims die dead all across globe!”

  The room went silent for minutes as they absorbed the terrible news.

  “So,” Lily said finally, “the Kupfermann crypt in Berlin was just one repository of the dead. The Order purged thousands of Guardians. Just like Galina’s doing now.”

  Sara nodded thoughtfully. “But apparently the Order didn’t find any of the twelve relics then, or we’d know about it. So the Order must have faded, too. Until four years ago, when Galina took over and resurrected them. She’s always hated Guardians but is murdering them now because time’s running out, and she has to narrow the field to just us.”

  “I might have something here.” Becca held up one of the documents Mrs. Fortier had found. “It’s the first ‘clock’ reference I could find in the Floréal Muguet stuff. It’s not about the mass murder, but it’s still pretty grim.”

  “We can deal,” said Lily. “Go.”

  “Well, basically, the letter says that among the multitude of horrors on that fateful day of April twenty-sixth, seventeen ninety-four, a famous clockmaker and midlevel Guardian named Étienne Boucher was guillotined, and his shop was torched and burned to the ground. His entire collection of clocks was believed to have been destroyed. Including one very special clock in the shape of the constellation Lyra.”

  “One of the Ptolemy constellations!” said Lily. “The Floréal Muguet relic is Lyra!”

  Mr. Fortier suddenly smacked his forehead. “Of course, clocks! I have the single most good book about clocks of the late-eighteenth century. Sheesh! Darling—”

  “I have it,” Mrs. Fortier said, tugging an enormous hunk of old book from a shelf and laying it heavily on the worktable. “Here you is!”

  Mr. Fortier buzzed over the work, then laughed. “So. So. So! Étienne Boucher invented a special clock for a personal friend. It has the design of a lyre on it, and it is said that when the clock’s fingers—”

  “Hands,” his wife said.

  “Just so. When the hands are placed at the completely correct hour, the clock opens a secret chamber inside the interior of itself.”

  “Where is the clock now?” Sara asked.

  “Obviously, he took it there.”

  “Who took it where?” asked Wade.

  “He. To his tomb.”

  “Whose tomb?” asked Lily.

  “His! Voltaire’s! The personal friend of the clockmaker was none other but the big writer Voltaire. His tomb is in the Panthéon!”

  Becca gasped. “The Panthéon? That’s the picture on the Victor Hugo money!” She dug in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the bill and unfolded it. “Whoever sent me the money knew about the Panthéon!”

  She studied the numbers and symbols on the side with the Panthéon.

  24@7@5

  “Mr. Fortier, do these numbers mean anything to you?” She showed him.

  “Yes, they do not! But I am assured that Panthéon is where you must be.”

  “It’s not very far from here, is it?” Sara said.

  “As far as only a walk by foot!” Fortier said. He bolted to his feet. “My buddies, you have your answer questioned! Not this only. But I shall transport you there to retrieve your relic item. I would not neglect to have this in my memory for tout le monde!”

  He shuffled around his papers until he found a schematic of the Panthéon. “From the building plans of seventeen ninety. You see, all the dates fit!”

  He bolted across the room and tugged a heavy cloak off a coatrack along with a slouchy black hat. Putting them on, he looked like some kind of magician. Then he drew a silver-handled walking stick from an urn by the door and checked the spring-loaded blade at the tip.

  “I make one call. A friend at the Panthéon.” He dialed an old phone, whispered into it, then hung up. “And now, is perfect.”

  “Not perfect!” said his wife, blocking the door.

  “Not?”

  “Not,” she said. “Go only when dark is. To hide the eyes of others from your footsteps.”

  “Ah! The brilliant wife of me. Everyone, sit on yourselves!”

  And so they sat. Not so much on themselves, but on stools, chairs, the steps of a shelf ladder. For nearly six hours. Darrell and Wade curled up on the floor. Becca slept on a tiny sofa in the back room, which she actually didn’t mind. She was tired, a little weak, and hungry. When Henri sent out for food, they had a little feast in the back room of the shop: bread, cheese, sliced ham, mineral water, fruit, and olives, which Darrell tried to eat but Lily wouldn’t let him. Becca herself ate quite a bit and hoped she’d be strong enough for what she suspected was coming.

  Finally, the clock on the wall dinged.

  “Ten p.m. o’clock,” Fortier said. “Now is exactly when dark is. Let us depart!”

  His wife, who had stood blocking the door for all that time, stepped aside. She removed two small pistols from a case on one of the low bookshelves, sniffed each barrel, and stuffed them in the pockets of her husband’s cloak. He gave her a quick kiss, then a longer one, and whirled around to them, smiling.

  “Let’s leave hurry!”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Tock . . . tock . . .

  The antiquarian’s walking stick irritated Darrell slightly, but only because Darrell wanted one, and two walking sticks would just be weird.

  First thing when I get home, he thought.

  Fortier was five long paces ahead of him, Lily and his mother were ranged behind, with Wade and Becca pulling up the distant rear, whispering to each other, which wasn’t good spy craft; but they’d been whispering a lot lately, and he sure understood whispering between friends and wasn’t going to break it up.

  Besides, they were all so strung out emotionally, the quest was wearing them down like overused pencils; the situation concerning his stepfather and Terence was grinding them to dust. It was a pretty raw time. So, yeah. Whisper all you want.

  They hadn’t gone two blocks—from the corner of the rue Bonaparte, then fanning out down the long rue Jacob—before a dull-red sedan drove past slowly. Darrell had seen the car the night they came to Paris, when Marceline Dufort first picked them up. This time, there was a passenger sitting next to her.

  “Mom, it’s you!”

  A manikin in a short brown wig and tinted glasses sat peering out the side window.

  “My body double,” his mother said. “Good. The Order knows the car. If they see it, they’ll follow it and stay away from us.”

  “For a while,” Lily said. “Not forever.”

  Marceline lowered the passenger window slightly and tossed out what appeared to be a gum wrapper.

  “That’s not litter,” Becca said. “It’s a message.” She scooped it quickly off the sidewalk, unfolded it, and read it aloud. “‘G
alina’s in Paris. Ebner and Wolff, too.’”

  “Great,” said Wade. “We needed that.”

  Darrell gave a little wave to Marceline, who nodded and sped away. They knew she would drive around the city hoping to attract the attention of the Order’s agents, ready to lead them on a chase if she had to.

  “Leave us now from here!” said Fortier. “Quickably!”

  They wove along rue Jacob and up through the quiet, leafy square of Place de Furstenberg, where Darrell decided he wanted to live, then to the rue de l’Abbaye. He whispered each street name to himself, though he wasn’t sure why—except maybe to remember it for when he was home and could imagine tapping along those streets with his new walking stick.

  Fortier doglegged it quickly over Boulevard Saint-Germain, zagged back to rue de l’Odéon, and took a more or less straight hike on rues Vaugirard and Cujas. On rue Soufflet, however, he began to slow. When the antiquarian reached the south corner of rue Saint-Jacques, he swished his cape once and stopped on the sidewalk outside a small bank office.

  “Let us live here awhile,” he said to Darrell when he pulled up. “We await for moments. Plus, do not say things. Noises should be nowhere in sight.”

  Decoding Fortier’s English was taxing Darrell’s brain, but because his and the others’ whole lives were codes and riddles, he understood enough to be quiet and wait. The others hung casually nearby, close enough to talk to, although no one talked.

  He did watch as Becca tugged the five-franc note from her jeans pocket and held it up. He meandered over to her like a stranger and peered over her shoulder. The image on the bill was a good rendering of the Panthéon. The numbers scribbled on it were still a mystery, but something told him they’d decode the marks before the night was over.

  Nearly one hour of nothing much happened. It was almost midnight when an elderly woman in a red hat strode by and saluted Fortier. Fortier responded by elaborately tapping his cane five times on the ground. “Voilà! And so! Aha!”

  “Was that a signal?” Wade whispered.

  “From a French Resistance pal,” Fortier said. “All is ready for us to enter the house of great French dead people. Come on you!” He stepped off the sidewalk toward the giant columned structure towering over the open square.

  Darrell looked back at Lily. “Let’s leave hurry.”

  “Ditto from myself,” she said.

  The Panthéon was daunting, topped by a vast gray dome that loomed overhead like the Death Star. The whole structure was illuminated by spotlights from below. There were hundreds of people hanging out around it, even in the middle of the night, “because when you’re in Paris, you’re always out in it,” Darrell’s mother had told them, sounding a little like what he or Mr. Fortier might say.

  They followed Fortier’s lead and kept close to the surrounding buildings. Luckily, the spotlights created deep shadows on the rear side of the building, where a long black construction curtain hung down from the dome. This would be the way inside.

  “Wait yourselves here,” Fortier whispered. He darted across the stones and disappeared behind the curtain. Seconds later, his graceful hand appeared, beckoning them. One by one, they crossed the open square and slipped behind the curtain. Inside they found a narrow scaffold leading up to the outside edge of the dome.

  “We climb scaffold,” Fortier said. “Then we sliding down inside on ropes! Signal before tells me that person or persons leave ropes for we, and for our use and comfort.”

  “Sliding down on ropes?” said Sara skeptically. “Where does the comfort come in?”

  “Without ropes we fall uncomfortably to floor and die.”

  Darrell watched as Fortier grabbed hold of the scaffold’s side ladder and pulled himself up. He proved a fast climber. The others followed to the outside rim of the dome.

  “There is a hatch somewhere,” Fortier said. “To allow repairs to dome.”

  After a search, Wade located the hatch, and he and Lily pried it open. Fortier peered inside, then slid through. The guy was amazingly nimble for his age, Darrell thought. They crawled through after him onto a narrow ledge and inside the great dome.

  “We sliding down now,” Fortier said. “See! Rope! With feet for knots. Who’s first?”

  When Wade and Darrell shared a look, Lily groaned. “I’ll go first.”

  She took the rope in both hands and yanked it instinctively to test its holding power. Locking her legs around the rope, she placed her feet on the first knot and lowered herself. At the next knot, she did the same, straining her arms but moving swiftly down.

  Those muscles again.

  Fortier went next, though far more slowly. Then Darrell himself. Before he got to the bottom, Wade came, with Becca right behind him. Darrell could see even at that distance that her left arm wasn’t as strong as her right. Despite the antibiotics, her crossbow wound was obviously still hurting her, and she was still tired. He could tell by the way she moved—slowly, and with purpose. Finally, his mother shinnied down, nearly as quickly as Lily.

  They had all made it.

  This far anyway.

  The dim security lights—the Panthéon was, of course, closed to the public at night—made the giant interior a somber and heavy place. Darrell hoped the distant clicks and taps were nothing but the normal noises of an empty building of that size, so he tried to ignore them. The enormous space, cool and blue and vaulting up to the inside summit of the big dome, was otherwise hushed.

  Probably because the only people who lived there were dead.

  “Now, mes amis, to locate Monsieur Voltaire,” said Fortier. Holding his Revolution-era blueprint up to the dim light, he pointed. “The crypts!”

  They moved among the grid of columns supporting the dome until they reached a broad staircase leading down below the main level.

  Lily spoke. “Do you think any of these people were Guardians?”

  “There are so many names I’ve heard of,” Becca said, massaging her left arm. “Writers. Scientists. Victor Hugo, the guy on the money. Also Marie Curie, Alexandre Dumas. They could all have been members of the GAC.”

  “Good thing they died before Galina got around to killing them,” said Darrell.

  “Which is such a weird thing to say,” Wade said.

  “It’s this place. It’s got death written all over it.”

  “This way to the tomb place!” Fortier led them down a series of ever-narrowing staircases into the lower precincts, a tunnel-like corridor lined with bronze plaques. Continuing down the corridor to the end, they entered an open area surrounded by statues, tombs, and elaborately figured urns fitted into niches in the walls.

  “The great crypt,” Fortier whispered.

  Among the statues was one in white marble of a thin elderly man dressed in a toga and heavy scarf. The pediment identified the figure as the writer Voltaire. He held a feather quill in his right hand and a sheaf of papers in his left. The pose was strange, as if he’d been caught at the moment of trying to step right off the pediment; and his face, gaunt and hollow-cheeked, was smiling at some faraway great light.

  “Ah! Voltaire, whose writing was heavy but also lighter than air,” said Fortier.

  Sara nodded. “Beautifully said.”

  “Of course. English from my lips is magnifulous.”

  “Where do you think the clock is?” Darrell asked. “Not inside his . . . you know? With him?”

  “Maybe, or maybe not,” said Wade. “Look at this.”

  Behind the statue stood an imposing block of dark marble. Gold lettering revealed that it held the writer’s remains. A shiny black orb the size of a bowling ball sat on top. Its ringlike base was etched with numbers like the face of a clock.

  “The hours,” Darrell’s mother said, examining the ring. “Some of the numbers are worn, as if people had touched them over the years. One, two, three, four, five, seven, nine.”

  “Copernicus’s numbers,” said Lily, moving up next to them. “His birthday, February nineteenth, fourteen sevent
y-three, and his death day, May twenty-fourth, fifteen forty-three.”

  Becca took out the five-franc note again. “No. These aren’t the same numbers.”

  “What happens if we touch the ring?” Darrell asked.

  “Try it,” Fortier said.

  Taking a breath, Darrell pushed the numbers in European order. One, nine, two, one, four, seven, three—for 19 February 1473—then two, four, five, one, five, four, three—for 24 May 1543. The moment Darrell lifted his finger from the final 3, the ring began to turn, grinding around until a rear panel on the tomb shifted aside and light shone out, illuminating the walls, the statue, and their faces in a bright-green glow.

  “Whoa . . . ,” he breathed. “Another one.”

  Becca felt blinded by the sudden brilliance, and heavy, as if the light itself were hot lead seeping into her. Her legs turned to stone and seemed frozen to the floor beneath her feet. Wade moved past her, almost brushing her, maybe expecting her to move. Then Lily and Sara went by. Becca couldn’t draw in a breath. Her lungs ached. She felt so weak. . . .

  Is this the way it’ll be? My long search for the relics will end, and my friends will take over? Maybe it’s already happening. I nearly lost the diary. I’m falling apart. Maybe it’s over for me. Maybe it’s time to go home.

  She thought about her sister, Maggie, and how long it had been since she’d seen her.

  Wade glanced back at her. He’d been good about not letting on how badly she felt. But how long could he keep his promise? How long could she keep going?

  “Is it the clock of Floréal Muguet?” Lily breathed, her words almost too soft to hear.

  Becca struggled to move, and was there with the others, looking down behind the panel and inside Voltaire’s tomb—at a large, heavily ornamented clock.

  “Whoa,” Darrell said. “And just . . . whoa . . .”

  “Yes, whoa, as you say,” said Fortier. “Carefully out lift it.”

  Wade knelt to the floor and took the clock gently into his hands. “It’s heavy.”