by Magnus Flyte
Sarah began carefully testing the strength of the metal and wood that held her fast. It was five hundred years old, this chair—it must have a weak point.
“He does not remember what happens during the attacks. So I have to tell him. Sadly, he is often violent. He will awaken to discover that he has hurt you, I’m afraid.”
Heinrich slipped a noose over Sarah’s head. A noose made of piano wire.
“Like the cat?” she asked quickly. “Did you make him think that he had shot the cat with the crossbow?”
Heinrich paused, staring at her, frowning. “How do you know that?” he asked. “Gottfried would not have told you.”
“I know you killed Herr Dorfmeister, too,” said Sarah, trying to twist around. She had to keep him talking until she found a weakness in the chair. “How did you pull that one off?”
“Gottfried went to see if he had missed anything in the apartment. He had a seizure. The old man called me. Gottfried wears a bracelet with my number on it. I took care of Herr Dorfmeister. But don’t worry. For him, a nice old Austrian gentleman, I used a drug that causes a painless death. But I’m afraid you have no one but yourself to blame for Nina.”
Sarah froze. “You killed Nina? And Gerhard Schmitt?”
“How pleasant it is to speak of such things openly. I could not share this even with my brother, you see, because he thinks I am weak, and it is better that way. It was only supposed to be her. I saw you together, going into the lab. I followed her, only to ask what you had talked about. She grew suspicious of my questions, began to accuse me of things, and that was when that blond fop showed up.”
“Gerhard?”
“The little witch would sleep with him, but not with me? They accused me of spying, threatened to go to the police. I had no choice, you see.”
It was no use. The chair was solid.
“My brother suspected, I think,” Heinrich continued. “That’s why he warned me to stay away from you. He is loyal, but I fear that eventually he would have cracked. His strange ideas about honor have become inconvenient. Perhaps it was fate that saved you both in the stables. If you had died then, I would never have gotten the rat.”
“You set the fire in the stable,” said Sarah. “You tried to kill us both.”
Heinrich shrugged. “Among other things, I hate horses.”
He began to tighten the garrote, then leaned over and whispered, “The tourists come to Vienna, and they enjoy the opera, and the Sacher torte, and they buy a souvenir hat and they think what a lovely civilized place Austria is. A little fussy, perhaps, but safe as houses. They forget the past. They forget what is in our stars.” Sarah could feel the wire cutting into her throat. The room began to go black. The wire was cutting off the flow of blood to her brain.
“I will kill him, too. I will be the heir. My sons will be the sons to inherit. Gottfried cannot be trusted. If he told some American bitch he barely knows about Herr Dorfmeister . . .”
“No. I saw,” Sarah whispered. “You won the chess game. In the garden. You beat Gottfried. It was the shower of gold. It was your move.”
Heinrich stopped tightening the noose. “How did you know that?” The garrote loosened slightly.
“I saw you.”
“That is a lie.”
She had seen them. She had seen. The garden. The game. The chair. She had seen the chair she was sitting in before. In the garden. Philippine. Ferdinand. A riddle. What can’t the blind man do? The blind man can’t see.
You have to break the glass, Philippine said. But the glass is inside the locks. What can the blind man not do?
“You must be a witch,” said Heinrich, tightening the noose again. “We burn witches here at the Schloss. You wouldn’t be the first.”
The blind man can’t see. C. A note. A musical note.
As Heinrich’s noose started to cut off her air again, Sarah began to scream. She wasn’t normally the screaming type. But this was a very particular scream.
A scream in C. Every piece of glass has a natural resonance. Every material on earth has it. A frequency. Match the pitch and the molecules will vibrate. Do it loud enough . . . Sarah did not attempt a high C, but her pitch was perfect, and she could sing very loud.
As she did, she felt something vibrate and then shatter inside the metal locks as they released. Sarah’s now free hands shot up and she lurched forward, grabbing Heinrich’s throat and kneeing him in the balls as hard as she could.
Heinrich’s scream came pretty close to a high C. Sarah shoved him roughly and he stumbled backward into a glass case, which shattered. A solid alabaster skull with ruby eyes rolled off one of the shelves and hit Heinrich on the head. He fell to the floor.
Sarah removed the piano wire from her throat, choking still. She could feel blood, but the cut wasn’t deep enough, thank God.
Thank the past.
Gottfried was coming to. She sank to the floor next to him.
“Gottfried,” she croaked through the burning in her throat.
“Heinrich,” he whispered. “Heinrich, what have I done now?”
“Gottfried, it’s not you. It’s your brother. It’s Heinrich who does these terrible things. It’s not you. Heinrich is the murderer.”
From the private diary of Elizabeth Weston Notes for the conclusion of my story
DAY 6,868
The road has been long. Very long. I have made mistakes. Harriet has not been the finest of necromancers. Her mind is marred by the drug.
St. Vitus is not the best portal. It has been corrupted.
The Charles Bridge portal isn’t perfect, either. Too weak. Or maybe it was Harriet who was too weak. She overshot wildly. John of Nepomuk came out in the Vltava. He didn’t last long, fortunately.
Then the incident at SS. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral. Too much pain there. And again, Harriet failed.
Harriet is quiet now. She was very upset that the little Lobkowicz princeling caught her spying. One would almost believe she had feelings for him. But she got just enough information to be helpful. First, when under the influence of the drug she saw Sarah Weston (no relation, since, as you know, dear reader, I have no descendants) open the portal in St. Vitus with a key. Apparently this happened a while back. That was very interesting to me, though Harriet could provide very few details. And second, she reported that there is a map of the Star Summer Palace in the Lobkowicz library. This confirmed my suspicions.
And so I have decided to give young Harriet the ultimate gift. She has graciously agreed, although possibly she does not quite understand as to what. I have given her a full dose, and I believe she is currently watching the Swedes loot Prague in 1648. Perhaps she will see me being raped. If she does, she may stop wondering why I became so cruel, how I could hurt so many people along the way in order to learn what I needed to know. Why my ambition is not tempered with compassion.
But no more mistakes.
If you want to make sure something is done correctly, you must do it yourself.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again.
A stitch in time saves nine.
Twinkle, twinkle little star.
Life is but a dream!
Truly, this is the Golden Age.
I am the Redeemer of the Alchemists. I am the Alchemist’s Revenge.
I do not need Harriet.
I have found another.
I have sent the message to Max, and soon all the players will assemble to play my tune.
This is the greatest age of them all. I do not even need to hide so often. I am no longer the only woman who appears to be frozen at thirty years old! I can look thirty for decades. O brave new world, indeed.
And now I know where it is to be done.
I should have known.
I should have remembered.
But four hundred years is a long time.
I have known so many over the centuries—the wise, the illustrious, the terrible. The unkind. The merciless. The diseased. Much harm could be done, you
know.
But what I do next, I do for love.
THIRTY-FOUR
Boris was dead.
Pollina was aware that she had been dreaming. Boris had been dead in her dream, or was he actually dead? Dead in life?
Dead in life. That could be the title of an aria, for Nico, for her opera. He was a character in it, too. A character who wanted to die.
Then it occurred to her that she herself might actually be dead.
She was awake.
She had died in her dream.
No, the first part of her dream had really been a memory. She had remembered walking to the Lobkowicz Palace with Nico. Right before Sarah had come back to Prague.
She had never walked up the Old Castle Stairs. She was surprised when Nico suggested they try this together one morning. Nico did not particularly enjoy steps any more than she did, and there were one hundred and twenty-one of them on the route. Nor did he like crowds, and the route drew crowds, because the views from it were said to be spectacular. But the stairs were lined with walls, and many of them were too high for Nicholas to see over. Between counting the steps, and managing her cane, and being around so many people, and hearing them talk, and trying to ignore the pain in her chest, and the fear, it had not been pleasant.
But Nico had said that there were too many unpleasant things in the world to escape them. He had said that she needed to find a way to manage stress, not avoid it. He had said that the world was cruel, and that nothing could change the world from being cruel. He had been angry, and she could feel his anger through his arm, which was laced through hers.
“You would feel differently if you believed in God,” Pols told him.
“Who says I don’t believe in God?” he answered. “Once I believed that God was the great power of our universe and that God had created our world and everything in it and that God watched over all of us. Later it occurred to me that I had made a very naive assumption: that God had done any of that in a spirit of benevolence. So then when I prayed to God, I prayed that He would be less cruel, less vicious.”
“So you hate God.”
“I hate God with the same amount of passion that I love God,” Nicolas answered. “Which is to say a very small amount. I cannot . . . care . . . anymore.”
“You still have God’s love,” she said.
“And God’s hate.”
“You don’t think God hates you because He made you smaller than other people, do you?” she asked indignantly.
“Whether He hates me or loves me He has left me here all alone,” Nico said. “For eternity. Alone. Like our lonely planet. As above, so below.”
She had pulled on his arm until they were against the wall. And she had felt his face with her hands. She wasn’t sure why she had done that. She had never wanted to before. She had never deliberately touched a man’s face before. She had felt Nico’s jaw, and his lips and his cheeks and his nose and his forehead up to where his hair began. His skin was very smooth, so she knew he was very beautiful.
And they had not said anything more.
But that hadn’t been in her dream. Or had it? Her mind was confused. Was she dead? Was this what being dead was like? But where was Heaven? Pollina was starting to panic.
She must not panic.
Her dream. Yes, she had been thinking about Nico as she was getting ready for bed, and remembering that conversation and thinking about how it could be translated, musically, and then something had happened and she had fallen asleep. In her dream she had been walking down a smooth gravel path. The sun had been shining; she could feel it on her skin. But her chest was hurting and she was afraid. And sad. Because in her dream she had realized that Boris was dead, and would never run beside her again, and he would have liked this path, which was so straight and smooth, and therefore beautiful.
And then she had known that a creature was in her path, a creature that was not her dog, though it had four legs. It was a lamb. A golden lamb. But it was not beautiful. It was terrible, and it had jumped at her, and wrapped itself across her shoulders, and she had fallen to the ground and then she had rolled over on her back and she had felt as if she were broken and then she had thought, It has killed me.
Then she had woken up. Yes. She was awake now.
She was lying on her side, but not on gravel. It was hard, whatever it was, and it was moving, vibrating and jolting. Pollina decided she would try moving her fingers and toes. They responded. Her tongue felt very thick in her mouth. She moved a little more. Her back was not broken. Her legs and arms could move, but not very far before they hit things that were hard. Metal. Rubber. She was in a moving box made of metal and rubber. She listened.
Her head hurt. Her chest hurt.
She began to cry. This surprised her. She had not cried in a very long time. When she was younger she had cried a lot, in frustration, because her hands were too small to play what she wanted to. She had met Sarah then. Sarah had played for her, until she had grown.
Nico would not grow.
Nico was lonely.
Boris was dead. She had gone to the bathroom the night before and brushed her teeth and she had been thinking of the opera she was writing, of Ferdinand and Philippine overcoming the obstacles to their love, but also of Nico’s theme, of the bassoons. She would need to hear the woodwinds, to make sure they were all right. She thought they would be, but she would need to hear them played, with the strings, to make sure she had gotten it right. Max would have to arrange for the musicians to come and play it. Then she had drunk the glass of water by her bedside and gotten into bed. She had called Boris’s name, to say good night to him, and he had not come. And she had kept calling for a while but in her heart she had known that he was gone. He was gone forever. She had gotten out of bed and she had found him, as she had known she would, stretched out in front of her door. Until the end, he had been her guard. He had kept her safe.
And then . . .
And then she had realized that something was wrong, inside her. Different from the other thing that was wrong. This was new. Because she always felt tired now, but this was not tired. This was . . .
And then she had a thought: the water. The water had not tasted right. She had noticed, and not noticed, because she had been thinking of the bassoons.
Cars. She could hear cars.
She was in a box in a car. She was probably in the trunk of a car.
Pollina began to pray.
THIRTY-FIVE
A woman loves or hates; there is nothing in between. So now, the dilemma is a binary question for you. Yes: you will come at midnight to the Star Summer Palace with the folio and Sarah Weston. Or, no: you will not do these things and I will kill the girl.
Max read through the message for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time looked at the clock in his office. Nico was standing on the window seat, staring out. Sarah would be getting to Prague soon. She had actually been on her way, when he had called her.
Of course Sarah would be bound up in this latest edition of Hell Portals for Dummies. Sarah had the key that Nico had given her. Once before when their lives were threatened, it had opened a door and they had watched evil fall into its fathomless depths. He hadn’t told Harriet about the key or what it had done, but had she found out somehow?
He had hurt more than just himself when he had fallen for Harriet. Now Pols was in danger. They were all in danger.
“Max?”
It was Jose, standing at the doorway. Max turned to him.
“Pollina’s parents. They are coming. They will be at the airport tomorrow morning.” Jose held up his phone. He was trembling. “I tell them nothing. I say she is in hospital and situation is serious. I no tell them you let her be stolen when she is dying.”
“We will have her back,” said Nico. “Before her parents return.” Max watched as the little man jumped down and crossed to Jose.
“Is it money?” Jose’s voice was hoarse. “They want money? Because parents pay money. They want these things?�
� He waved a hand around at the library vaguely. “You give them every fucking thing in this palace.” His nostrils flared. “Every stupid butter knife and old painting of ugly lady in bad dress. They want blood?” He thumped his chest. “I cut out my heart. I . . . I . . .” His eyes filled with tears.
“You must have faith.” Nico spoke with great firmness and solemnity. “I would not say this of everyone, but in your case faith is a good thing. Because you are a good man. Your actions are good. Whatever your sins are, they are not against love. So I believe your life will be a happy one.” To Max’s surprise, Jose knelt down next to Nico, who gave him a kiss on the forehead and whispered something in Spanish. Jose embraced him for a long moment and then rose. He looked at Max expectantly.
“Jose is a knight. He wants you to give him a task,” said Nico, as if he were translating. “Be a prince, Max. Delegate.”
Max kept himself from ordering Jose to bop Nico in the nose.
“There are some airtight containers in the supply room,” Max said. “Find one big enough for Boris and put him in the wine cellar. Pollina will want to give him a proper burial. Then call Oksana. If for any reason we are delayed, Oksana can help you stall the parents until we get Pollina back here. Keep your phone charged.” Jose bowed and left.
Nicolas returned to the library table, where he had spread out the pages of the folio and where he had installed a rat in a cage that for some reason he had brought with him from Vienna.
“Okey-doke,” Nicolas sang out, cheerfully. “I could really use an astronomical sextant for some of these instructions, but I think I have the basic idea of what’s what. And now I would like to shower and shave and pick out something snazzy to wear. Be a dear and open up a bottle of Château d’Yquem.”
