A Calculus of Angels (37 page)

The real solution was so simple that he felt stupid for not seeing it immediately; the matching needle was somewhere in the laboratory. Once he had that thought in mind, it was easy enough to locate using the compass. The

“needle”—a bar of metal about three inches long—was in a desk drawer. After a bit of thought, he hid the bar in a crack in the stone of the tower, scratched

“Prague” onto the brass casing of the compass, and placed it in the boat.

His gaze then crossed to the talos, and he shuddered. Was the spirit of the Golem really captured in it? It had not moved or otherwise given any outward sign, but somehow he did not doubt what Newton had said. What he did doubt was that the murderous thing was really tame. He made a point of staying as A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

far from it as possible.

As three o’clock neared, he went to the window facing into the castle.

“What are you watching for?” Lenka asked.

“The archduchess and her dwarves. I’m going to join them. If she fails to do what she should with the potion, I will empty my own.”

“That is, I think, a very bad idea,” Lenka opined. “Why lay such an elaborate plan and then not trust it?”

“You’ve answered your own question,” Ben said. “Elaborate plans are most prone to failure. In the best of worlds, all will go as I hope, and the archduchess will empty her potion bottle onto the ground. However, as a Frenchman I once knew was prone to argue, this is
not
the best of all possible worlds. I owe both Robert and Frisk my life. Besides, we need Frisk, if we plan to find the army of Sweden. I don’t know where it is.” He smiled and winked at her. “But I’m pleased you are concerned for me.”

She frowned. “If you are captured, Sir Isaac will discover me, and without your persuasion, will leave me here. That is tthe nature of my concern.” “Oh, I see,”

he said, with an exaggerated air of disappointment. “Well, let me show you something.” He beckoned her over to the craft. “Did you notice this?” he asked, rapping a board on the small deck.

“What?”

“It’s very cunning. You see?” He depressed one of the ornamental crenelations on the side of the boat, and with a small click, a section of the deck popped up a bit. With his fingernails, he lifted a hidden hatch. Beneath was a space; cramped, but easily large enough for a person Lenka’s size.

“I found this when you were hunting for food,” he explained. “I put a few things in here I didn’t want Sir Isaac to know about.”

“What sort of things?”

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“A
kraftpistole
from my quarters—”

“You went to your rooms?”

“Yes. Also my water-walking shoes, a musket, powder, and shot. But I left most of the space empty—for you.”

“Me? In there?” She regarded the tiny space dubiously.

“He won’t let you on the boat, Lenka. I’ve thought about it, but he won’t, not with Frisk and Robert, too. Best wait until we are aloft to reveal you. If anything happens to me—or if Newton should return early—you hide there.”

“For how long?”

“Not long. Newton will not throw you out: I know him that well, at least.”

“I hope so.”

From the window drifted the sounds of drums, cymbals, and hautbois.

“There they are. A kiss for good luck?”

“You don’t need luck; you need some sense.”

“Well, a kiss for good sense then.”

“I’ve never noticed nor even heard it rumored that a kiss gave a man sense.

Quite the contrary.”

“Hmm. You need less theory and more experimentation,” he observed.

She folded her arms and smiled her daunting little smile, at which he shrugged his shoulders and started down the stairs, activating the aegis as he went.

The archduchess’ entourage was just coming around the corner from Golden Lane, and as Ben had anticipated, in full regalia. The guard was nowhere to be seen, and so it was an easy matter to slip in behind that last dwarf, one of five A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

in the parade wearing luminescent golden lanthorn armor. Ahead, the sedan chair of the archduchess was surmounted by gently bobbing metal birds, the chair itself bedecked with glowing jewels. In such a procession, his own ghostly form was likely to be unnoticed or ignored as more magical frippery.

And in their train, a light mist arose, at which Ben smiled hopefully.

The procession marched on until it came to the gates, where the guards hastened to perform the Spanish genuflection to Her Royal Highness. Ben, meantime, searched across the great square and its border of ornate palaces, looking for ghosts like himself.

Up ahead, he heard Maria Theresa shout, “Show yourself, villain!” In a short time, the soldiers began shouting as well, as a thick cloud appeared and rapidly expanded to fill the yard. At the same moment, across the square, the geometrical black-and-white facade of the Toscana Palace seemed to waver, and Ben clenched his fists in jubilation.

A few moments later, he thought he heard his friends run by, and turned to race into the less misty precincts of the third courtyard, and then, for certain, he made out two optical distortions moving down Saint George Street toward the Black Tower. The strident shouts of the archduchess and bellows of the guards faded behind.

Even in his triumph, he began having second thoughts. The guards at the gate would not dare to question the archduchess about her strange behavior, but they would report it, and then someone would question her. How long before—advertently or inadvertently—she gave an answer that led them to the Black Tower?

He hoped a few hours, at least.

In the distance, a titan stuttered and then moaned, a long, drawn-out shuddering of the air almost below the level of hearing. Stone quaked beneath his feet. Puzzled, Ben looked up, but the sky was still blue, nowhere grayed or blackened by storm clouds. He stared, frowning, and suddenly was surrounded by blinding light.

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He screamed and shut his eyes, but it filled his head, pulsing, and his belly seemed to open. On that dazzling backdrop his panicked brain painted an image: a black-tailed comet, its nucleus the mocking red eye of a malakus.

Newton had been wrong, or lied, and in an instant or two now it would all be over, when the thing struck them with hideous speed, scattering the very atoms of the castle.

And yet, a moment passed and he was still alive, though his eyes burned, and some rational part of him fumbled for the aegis key and removed it.

He was a few steps from the basilica, spots before his eyes still blackening the largest part of his vision. A group of black-clad nuns began pointing at him, shouting. That cured his paralysis, and he started to run again. Not far ahead, Robert and Frisk staggered like drunks.

“This way,” he shouted.

“Ben?” Robert gasped.

“Hurry!” The explosions in the distance were as steady as heartbeats, and as his vision was restored, he saw with dull understanding that the sky still carried a rainbow patina. Not because the colors of the aegis had been burned into his corneas, but because the city shield was on.

Prague was under attack.

“What in hell happened?” Robert snarled as the three of them ran up Saint George Street. Crowds were darting into the narrow lane, but none were paying attention to the three men, pointing instead to the sky and shouting.

“The city shield is on. It is a sort of aegis built large, and so when it went on while we wore ours—” He didn’t have the breath to explain: two lenses, separate, were magnifying glasses. Placed in line they were exponentially more powerful. Something like that had happened with their “garments of Adam.”

“Never mind,” Robert shouted. “Wait till we reach safety.”

A throng coursed out of the Lobkovic Palace, just next to the tower, and in the A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

press, the guard nearly missed them. At the last moment, when they began shouldering past him, the guardsman shouted and raised his halberd. Frisk broke his nose with the hilt of his saber, and the soldier fell groaning to the flagstones.

Ben led the way up the winding stairs, at the end of his wind, carried along by sheer purpose. It was as if the world had suddenly begun tearing apart around him, like the time he had come back to the print shop to find James murdered, the shop in flames, and a devil after him. He had a sudden, clear understanding that this was how life really was: insanely chaotic and unplanned. Men constructed fantasies, explanations to try to make reality seem coherent, but it wasn’t, any more than a crazy dream was because you spent an hour discussing it.

That hung in him, a crystal caught in his throat, as he reached the door and battered into it, found it locked.

“Lenka!” he howled, pounding on the heavy door. “Lenka, open the door!”

Only then did he realize that he had the key.

He gaped for an instant at what he saw when he opened the door. Or rather, what he didn’t see. The glowing globe, the wooden boat, all the things he had packed up—all were gone. Of Lenka there was no sign.

One section of the roof stood open to the shimmering sky. Outlined against that was the moon ship, red light winking above, and standing in the prow the unmistakable figure of Newton, vermilion coat as clear as a distant cardinal on a winter landscape.

And farther away, across the expanse of golden Prague, a fleet of black ships sailed the winds, suspended from points of sanguine light, raining fire.

The Dark Aer

At our service are very wise spirits who detest the bright light of the other
lands and their noisy people. They long for our shadows, and they talk to us
intimately.
Fiolxhilde to her son, Duracotus.

—Johannes Kepler,
Somnium
, 1634

1.

Vasilisa

Adrienne rested her cheek against Hercule’s chest, imagining it a universe: the hard muscle and skin its outer boundaries; the dark hollow within swirling with jeweled, mysterious planets; the thumping of his heart the tempo to which they danced, the single, simple rhythm behind the music of the spheres.

In the universe of Hercule, his heart was God; without it all of his orbs would become still, the stars of his eyes dim, the warmth of his lips cool forever.

“Thinking again?” Hercule whispered, stroking her head.

“Yes.”

“May I ask of what?”

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“Why, of you, my dear.”

He grunted in satisfaction, and afterward seemed content, gently dropping off to sleep, the meter of his solar system diminishing.

The real universe must have such a heart, she insisted to herself. Must have.

And yet, though she could see the tracery of a thousand forces, watch the djinni burrow through the aether like worms through rotten meat, she could not perceive the beating heart behind it all. She could not, in short, see God.

Could it be that the Korai were right after all? That their superstition of a world damned to exist without God was true? And if that were so, how could one achieve grace, forgiveness, salvation?

For certainly she needed all three.

And yet, she almost had to smile at this thought, for it was not one she would have had, traveling with Le Loup, not one she could have tolerated. Then she could not feel, or think, or speculate. Now she could, though once again she rode with orphans of civilization. Now she could, because though she sat a wild horse, she had at least one hand on the reins.

Hercule was warm, and in her drowsy mind her own body became a planet, lazily spinning about the axis of her brain, even more sedately falling along an elliptical orbit, so that, year after year, she moved through the same places: now near the sun and its bright warmth; now, at aphelion, farther from the life-giving rays. In that moment of near dream, she experienced a hard kind of comfort: that her life was not an ascending or descending arc, but like this, a repeated path. And yet, even the orbit of a planet was not fixed. The gentle tug of other bodies created subtle harmonies, never the same; and so, as her life repeated itself, it did so always with variations, like a fugue. In time, the sum of these would ruin her orbit and send her to dwell forever with the sun or in the dark regions beyond.

Thus, for a moment, though harried and pursued through an unfriendly land, Adrienne de Mornay de Montchevreuil knew a moment of peace, knowing also that it was transitory but that it would come again. In that pax between sleep and dream, a voice spoke to her. It was the voice of one of her djinni—and thus her own voice—and yet the cadence of the words was not at all like anything A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

she had heard before from her aethereal servants.

“Mademoiselle, how fortunate that I have found you,” the voice said.

“Who has found me?” she asked.

“One who has long searched for you.”

Adrienne felt a faint tingle of worry. This was something new. Cautiously, she called her djinni to stand near her. Was this one of the
malfaiteurs,
the murderous faction of which Crecy had warned her?

“Reveal yourself, then. Are you human or djinn?”

A suggestion of a chuckle. “I am no malakus, if that is what you ask. I am human, Mademoiselle, as human as you. I am your sister.”

“Sister? What nonsense.”

“Not nonsense at all.
Chairete, Komi, Athenes thempainai
.”

A shock ran through Adrienne, as almost reflexively, she answered “
Chairete
.”

“
Enthade euthetoumen temeron
,” the voice chanted.

“He glaux, ho drakon, he parthenos,”
Adrienne finished, and then—forcefully,

“Enough of this. Who are you?”

“One of the Korai.”

“You only tell me what is obvious. Tell me your
name
.”

“That is hardly fair,” the voice said. “For I do not know yours. Still, it is my wish for you to trust me. My name is Vasilisa Karevna.”

“A Muscovite name,” Adrienne guessed.

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“Yes, Mademoiselle, a Russian name.”

“You are among my enemies, then.”

“Were I your enemy, I would have given you a false name, with no hint of Muscovy in it. Were I your enemy, I would command the troops surrounding your company to slay you all—”