City of Dark Magic

by Magnus Flyte

  Max sighed. “It will sound kind of stupid,” he said.

  “Try me.”

  “Okay.” Max looked her dead in the eye. “I’m looking for the Golden Fleece.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Sarah tried not to laugh, although she felt pretty close to it.

  “What are we talking about here?” she said. “The Golden Fleece like: Jason and the Argonauts?” She thought about a Japanese cartoon she saw as a kid that followed Jason’s many adventures aboard the Argo as he traveled the Aegean looking for the Golden Fleece. There were sea monsters, and skeleton soldiers that sprang up from the ground. She remembered equally well or better the Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula commercials that punctuated the cartoon. Wait, there had been a theme song.

  “Go, go Jason, now don’t be scared! You gotta keep looking for that ram of gold!” Sarah started to sing.

  “Sarah, I’m being serious.”

  “This is real?” Sarah felt like she had swallowed a lot of tales since coming to Prague, but this seemed excessive.

  “To be honest, I don’t know what it is,” Max said. “Who knows if there ever was a Golden Fleece, or an Ark of the Covenant, or a Holy Grail? I only know that the Secret Order of the Golden Fleece was set up in Rudolf II’s time to protect something very specific. And I’m supposed to be the head of the Secret Order now, and I have no idea what I’m guarding, or where it is.”

  “Well, if there’s an Order, then there must be other members?” asked Sarah. Although she could see how it might be embarrassing for Max at the meetings, especially if he was supposed to be the head guy. “Hey, so, like, our Order? Like, what’s our secret again?”

  “There is an Order of the Golden Fleece, but it’s just an honorary title,” Max explained. “There’s a Spanish branch and an Austrian one. There aren’t any meetings or anything. And some people think the Spanish branch was discredited because Juan Carlos made King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia a member and the origins of the whole deal are all about saving Christendom from the Muslims. I think it’s a totally bogus operation, although they give you a nice necklace when you’re in it. I’m supposed to be officially inducted next month. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the Secret Order of the Golden Fleece.”

  Sarah waited.

  “This.” Max pulled out his cigarette case and handed it to her. She ran her fingers over the symbol inscribed on the front.

  “It’s the symbol Nico—at least I think it was Nico—left on my ceiling in Cambridge,” said Sarah.

  “It’s an alchemical symbol,” Max said. “Made by John Dee when he was court alchemist to Rudolf II. It’s meant to stand for the unity of everything . . . knowledge, all material things, you name it. The circle with the dot is the sun and the earth, and that’s the crescent moon crowning it. Then coming down from the sun: the cross, which rests upon the zodiacal sign of Aries. Aries, the ram. The golden ram is a symbol of the sun, of the way the sun illuminates all, which is knowledge.”

  “Max.” Sarah’s mind was whirling. “What did Professor Sherbatsky know about this? He sent me a letter, before he died, with just the symbol on it.”

  “Sherbatsky was taking the drug to look for Beethoven,” Max said. “At that point all either of us knew was that the drug was some chemical that Ludwig had taken. Something that the 7th had given him. I was looking for my ancestors, trying to tie together all these clues that kept popping up. References in letters to something secret, something that had been lost and must be found, something that must be found before others found it. The Golden Fleece. Puzzles, codes, and over and over again, this symbol. One night I was stumbling around in Golden Lane—you know that row of little houses in the castle built in the sixteenth century—when I saw something really strange.” Max bit his lip.

  “I saw . . . Nico.”

  “Nico.”

  “I wasn’t entirely sure about the date,” Max said. “Because I was never good at controlling the drug and I skipped around in time a lot, but it was definitely Nico and it seemed to be early seventeenth century. He was with a man. The man had a piece of copper across the bridge of his nose.”

  “Tycho Brahe,” Sarah said. “Nico called him Master. And he said that Tycho had given him something, a potion of some kind . . .” Sarah realized what Nico had told her was true. He hadn’t just been relating historical anecdotes.

  Nico was Jepp.

  “On the night that I saw them,” Max said, “Tycho was telling Nico, whom he called Jepp, that he was supposed to steal something from Rudolf II. ‘You will know it when you see it,’ he kept saying. And Jepp was scared out of his mind, that’s the emotion I was following, I think. Nico’s fear. He kept saying, ‘No, Master, I cannot touch the Fleece. I am unworthy.’ But in the end he promised to try.”

  “And you think he succeeded?” Sarah said. “That Jepp—Nico—stole it?”

  “He bribed Rudolf’s lover and says he was too frightened to even look in the bag he got from him. Just handed the thing over to his master—Brahe. Nico says he doesn’t know if what he got was the Golden Fleece, or what the Golden Fleece really was. They had it—whatever it was—for one night, then gave it back. Rudolf never knew. But according to Nico, Rudolf was obsessed with keeping the object secret, not letting it fall into the wrong hands. His brother’s hands in particular.”

  What did Rudolf bring the alchemists to court for? Gold. Immortality. Knowledge. Sarah blinked. History had said they failed. But history was wrong. Whatever the Fleece was—ng a book, a crystal ball, a philosopher’s stone, a golden ram’s hide?—one night with it had led Tycho to some breathtaking pharmaceutical discoveries . . .

  “And you think your family . . .”

  “I think my family has been looking for whatever the Fleece is for all these years. That’s what the Secret Order is all about. But I’m just guessing. I don’t really know. Tycho made the drug from it, or because of it, and the formula he wrote down has been in my family. But there’s more than one version. Sounds like that cloak you found in the library is one of his mistakes. The original thing .

  . . it would be hugely powerful. Maybe a way to move not just backward in time but forward as well. To see everything, understand everything. The unity of all things. All the clues I’ve found so far seem to point to the Fleece being hidden somewhere on the castle grounds. Nico thinks so, too, but I can’t tell if he’s trying to help me or not. He said that some things were better left hidden. And if he is Jepp . . .”

  Sarah and Max stared at each other.

  Sarah thought about Nico frantically riffling through Tycho Brahe’s book of formulas. Crawling under the table.

  “Only one who knows longing knows what I suffer,” she quoted.

  “Wait, you said that’s from a poem by Goethe?” Max asked, his tone sharpening. “The same Goethe that wrote Faust, right? Not some other musical poet Goethe that I’ve never heard of?”

  “No, the Faust Goethe. Why?”

  “Maybe Nico was leaving us a clue,” Max said. “There’s a Faust House here in Prague. Faustuv dum. It’s under construction right now. Might be a good place to hide the contents of a secret library.”

  “Faust,” said Sarah. “The original Man Who Knew Too Much.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Charles Square was too far to walk. They jumped in a taxi, which promptly got stuck in traffic.

  “Traffic at two a.m.?” asked Max in annoyance.

  The driver was talking on his cell phone in rapid Czech.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Sarah. “I shouldn’t have gone to look for the library without you.”

  Max took her hand.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s my responsibility and I’m going to take care of it.”

  “Nice,” said Sarah. “That’s the kind of Sworn Protector of the Realm talk we like to hear.”

  The driver got off the cell phone. “Where you go again?” he asked.

  “We’re meeting some friends near Faust House,” Sarah s
aid. “You know where that is?”

  “You American tourists? Charles Square not safe at night,” he said.

  “We’ll be okay,” sa" fid Sarah.

  “Faust House closed till December. No tourists now.”

  “We’ll definitely visit it next trip,” Sarah assured him.

  “In 1300s house owned by Vaclav of Opava. Alchemist. You know alchemist?”

  “Yes, alchemist,” said Sarah, feeling ridiculous. Max spoke perfect Czech but he seemed content to let Sarah do the pidgin English thing.

  “Yah. Then Rudolf II, you know Rudolf II?”

  “Yes,” said Sarah. “Uh-huh. Rudolf II.”

  “His astrologer Jakub Krucinek live there. Younger son kill older son for treasure. Very famous Prague murder.”

  “Treasure?” Sarah almost shouted. Max grabbed her hand.

  “Yah. Never find treasure. Then Edward Kelley live there. Also alchemist. He kill a man. Also famous Prague murder.”

  Kelley. Those alchemists were truly ubiquitous. And deadly.

  “Then the wizard Mladota. He blow big hole in roof. His son make crazy mechanicals, like flying staircase and electric doorknobs. Then later student find alchemy book. They say devil take him up through hole in ceiling. Why through ceiling I don’t know, because everyone know there is hell portal in the basement. Much easier for devil to use, no? Then Karl Jaenig, crazy guy who paint walls with requiems, sleep in coffin.”

  “Is there a faster way to get there?” asked Max.

  “You know a lot about Faustuv dum,” said Sarah to the driver.

  “I am tour guide, too. Famous Prague murders. Now there’s new one. You hear? Lobkowicz Palace? Lady kill herself in cage. Very bloody.”

  He handed Sarah a business card. “Night tours of Prague’s most famous murder scenes.”

  They jumped out in front of the baroque salmon-and-white façade of Faust House, and Sarah paid the driver, who sped off, and turned to Max. “The place has quite a history,” she said. “Mladota the wizard? And its own hell portal.”

  “I guess it’s a pharmacy now,” said Max, waving at the green cross near the door.

  The building, it turned out, was currently owned by the medical school of Charles University. Everything was shut and locked up for the night.

  “Hey, Jepp!” Max called up at the dark building. “Open up, you crazy dwarf bastard!”

  “Shhh . . .” Sarah clamped a hand over his mouth.

  Max looked up at the building in front of them.

  “Something is here,” Max said, more soberly now. “I can feel it, can’t you?”

  Sarah was about to argue when she realized she could feel . . . something.

  “We need to find Nico,” she said. “He has Tycho’s diary, and I think the formula for the drug is in there. If he can make some . . .”

  “What do you want to see?” Max asked her.

  Everything, she thought. She wanted to see history unfold around her. Beethoven. She could watch him compose every day. She looked at Max. “What do you want to see?”

  “Where the Fleece is hidden. What the hell it is. What’s in Tycho’s book would be a purer form of the drug than LVB’s toenails. It might be the ride of our lives. If Nico can make it.”

  “Do you trust Nico?” Sarah asked. “I mean, what does he really want? Wealth? Art? Women?”

  “Oh, Nico?” Max said. “He just wants to find a way to die.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  “Have you seen my fleece?”

  The question made Sarah jump slightly, which wasn’t a good thing, since she had an early eighteenth-century violin by Johann Georg Helmer in her hands.

  After standing outside Faust House for an hour, coming up with and then rejecting an increasingly ridiculous set of break-in plans, Max had taken her back to the palace and then left in search of Nico or any trace of the missing treasure.

  “I had it at breakfast,” Suzi explained, coming forward into the exhibition room. “Now that we’ve got temperature control, my ass is freezing. I didn’t leave it in here, did I?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Very tasteful,” Suzi commented, pointing to the subtle light blue paint that Sarah had chosen for the walls of the Music Room.

  “Thanks.” Sarah hung the violin carefully on a wall bracket and stepped back to scrutinize the effect.

  “What time is it?” Sarah asked. “Noon already?”

  “Girl, it’s four in the afternoon,” Suzi drawled. “You’ve been in the zone.”

  The palace had been uncharacteristically quiet all morning. At breakfast, the assembled scholars had greeted one another with hangover-inflected monosyllables. With a faint air of contrition, they had all grabbed coffee, fruit, rolls, and then hustled off to their rooms. Sarah had, in fact, been priding herself that she had spent the morning carefully conducting her work and not obsessing over every detail of the past forty-eight hours.

  The marchesa had jetted back to Italy for a couture fitting, or so she had told Max. Work, Sarah had told herself, before falling asleep. Focus on your work.

  Although truthfully, while she methodically cataloged, arranged, and organized, a second narrative had been running underneath her working thoughts as busily as the CNN news ticker.

  Her primary concern was not the whereabouts of the Golden Fleece, nor the relative trustworthiness of Nicolas Pertusato. Neither was she, for the moment anyway, fretting over the arrival of Charlotte Yates or what new devious machinations Marchesa Elisa might be concocting. These things would be enough to thoroughly freak a person out for a lifetime, but Sarah wasn’t thinking about them.

  Sarah was thinking about the letters from Beethoven she had found in the violin. She was thinking about the Immortal Beloved.

  It would change the face of musical scholarship, certainly, if it were revealed that the Immortal Beloved was not Antonie Brentano nor any other woman, but a nickname for a drug that Ludwig and his patron, the eccentric Joseph Franz Maximilian, had been experimenting with. A drug that allowed a composer with rapidly degenerating hearing to move around in time so that he might hear his own music. A drug that was, in some way, derived or extracted from an alchemical secret that held unprecedented power.

  Okay, fuck musical scholarship. These revelations would change . . . well, everything.

  Was that a good thing?

  Sarah was identifying very strongly with Beethoven today. Luigi had also been pulled into the path of alchemy by friendship with a Lobkowicz. Sarah looked around the room, which was slowly coming together to be recognizable as a museum room. It was elegant, it was serene, it was appropriate, but Sarah couldn’t help feeling that the display cases diminished the pulsing glory of what they contained. Tourists would pass these objects, perhaps lean in and read the explanatory notes, be guided by the inevitable audio recordings. But would they get a sense of the life they contained? These things were real, they were alive. They had been held, caressed, played by actual people. They had been tossed over shoulders, perhaps struck with impatience or irritation by their performers. From these fragile strings, soon to be protected under glass, had come heart-stopping music, passion, pain, envy, longing.

  Sarah picked up a letter from LVB—an acknowledgment of the stipend he received from the Lobkowicz family, dated June 30, 1821. Even after the death of Beethoven’s friend and champion in 1816, the stipend had continued to be paid by the 7th prince’s son. There was no way this document could convey what she knew about the relationship between Beethoven and his patron. Important musicologists, composers, musicians of note would travel to look at these things. They would be given special access. A pair of white gloves so they could handle the papers. A photographer would take their picture, perhaps with Max standing by smiling. But they wouldn’t know . . .

  “Girl,” Shuziko drawled. “You need a break, honey. You look fried. Come to the gun show.”

  Sarah let herself be led. The horrible old flowered wallpaper had been stripped away, and now the
armory rooms were fiery red, and Suzi had arranged the weapons with a dramatic flair. A huge pinwheel of rifles decorated one wall.

  “Like a gun flower,” said Suzi proudly. “A goddammed gun daisy!”

  A suit of armor stood in the middle of one room, surrounded by a gate of upright guns and flags. There were portraits of hunting Lobkowiczes on the walls. Suzi led Sarah around her domain, pointing out interesting features to Sarah.

  “These aristocrats—” She shook her head. “Hunting was like an art for them. That’s what I was trying to convey. It was political, it was social, it was theatrical. It was in their blood. They knew that power was beautiful. They had respect for power. That’s why I wanted something sumptuous and sexy. Power is an aphrodisiac.”

  “I think you’ve reallpower. Thy captured it,” Sarah commented, looking around. “It’s like if Ted Nugent had a Masterpiece Theatre porn fantasy.”

  “Awesome,” said Shuziko. “That’s kind of what I was going for. Class with ass.”

  • • •

  The two wandered into other rooms. Moses Kaufmann was working with two local Czech researchers at arranging a sort of all-purpose Decorative Arts collection. Moses chatted with Suzi while Sarah leaned over cabinets filled with jewelry boxes, caskets, miniature flasks, tankards, shagreen notebooks, bells, locks, keys, model figurines of animals, reliquaries. It was baffling to think that although these things were being housed in this newly created museum, they were all essentially personal property. If Max wanted to, he could probably shut the doors and spend all day playing with his things by himself. Pour Diet Coke in Meissen teacups. Pluck out “Smoke on the Water” on an eighteenth-century viola.