The King's Gold (20 page)

I fell under the earth. Dropping free into a black chilly space, my hands breaking loose from the crumbling ladder, my eyes strained through the darkness as I turned through the rushing air. All at once I landed hard on a soft, quivering chest.

“Agh—”

“Erik— Erik!”

We rolled over on a cold, dusty floor, gripping each other and crying out assurances before falling apart.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Some sort of hallway—I could see a little bit before you closed the door. And—um—
why
the hell did you do that?”

“I don’t know. I lost my temper.”

“Because I nearly broke my neck?”

“Because I saw—
him
again. He was in the cathedral, right when you fell.”

“Him, meaning de la Rosa.”

“Yes. Didn’t you hear me talking to him?”

“I heard a whole lot of hollering, that’s about it.”

“That was us having a conversation.”

“I see. So, I am to assume that your argumentative dead father has somehow pulled a Lazarus and is even now shaking the tomb dust out of the creases of his trousers and the formaldehyde out of his hair—”

“He gave me a phone. Where is it—I dropped it—”

“
Even
assuming that to be true, you thought this was a good time to lock us down here?”

I blindly cuffed at the ground until I found the phone and stuck it in my pants’ pocket, blithering, “Well, also, these police showed up and they looked like they wanted to beat us to death.”

“Ah! I see! Excellently argued...So. Fantastic! I guess the only thing to do now is figure out where we are.” He grunted and shuffled around. “I still can’t make out anything—”

“Lord, it’s dark in here.”

“But there was something I saw, just before—”

“What?”

“A torch, maybe—on the wall. Can you get the matches from your purse?”

From somewhere in the blindness, I heard the sound of screeching metal. After a few moments of rustling, and Erik’s cursing, I saw a spark flare and die.

He began to softly murmur an encouragement to the fire.

“Light, light—
burn
.”

A spray of gold lit the leaden air.

Erik suddenly appeared above me, incomparably beautiful, with a stream of copper-colored fire streaming from his right hand and bathing him in its light. The torch he’d pulled from the wall was not made of iron, but of a roughly beaten red-gold, forged into the shape of a cone fitted with a bronze-banded bone handle so long and thick I might have taken it as the relic of a man’s arm. The cone had been filled with some sort of ancient, scentless tar, which could still take almost too readily to a flame.

Its increasingly violent light showed Erik’s delighted face jerking away from the fire.

“Oh, look where we
are,”
I said.

The torch burnished the nebulous floor beneath us. The ground billowed with centuries of pallid otherworldly dust. Up went the light, skimming the long black corridor. Furred creatures with fleshy pink tails slithered away from our legs. From the ceiling, the walls, streamed ragged white webs that looked like the shredded gowns of a lady wraith. In the air revolved the silver spirals of dust lifting up from the floor, disturbed by our feet.

Mine kicked up a fair amount also when I scampered away from the trembling haunches of a rat, who escaped with his brethren into the murk.

“Ooooo,
come on,”
Erik said.

Creeping forward in the fire’s advancing circle, we observed that the web-draped walls had once been brightly painted, and led into the blackness of the hallway’s vanishing point. Erik and I stared at each other with open mouths. I reached my hand out to the velvet layers of spider-floss and dust, peeling them back with the tips of my fingers. Behind this appalling caul glinted a damaged fresco. Half-erased nymphs worshipped an earth goddess with a fearsome, mingle-blooded face. Next came the lascivious, red-and-blue portrait of Cernunnus, the Celtic horned god, mythological precursor of Lucifer. Then we saw a fair, beautiful woman with a long curling dragon’s tail. Her consort—a smaller figure, a black wolf—lapped wine or water from a golden cup.

Erik moved past the fresco, his torch’s pitch burning with a curious green intensity. The images were revealed, then abandoned, by the progressing luminescence.

Then the light stopped.

The hairs on my arms spiked. Erik’s moving lips mutely spoke my name.

“It’s an entrance to—somewhere,” he whispered.

In the halo of light towered an impenetrable-looking oaken door, perhaps ten feet high and six feet wide. At the center of its enormous breadth faintly glowed a round bronze instrument obscured behind a veil of webs. Sweeping these away, we saw that the bronze fixture was massive, about twice the circumference and weight of an iron manhole cover. Within its center were three thick dials. Crusted with the detritus of an age, each wheel bore multiple carved images of medieval people and mystical wildlife running up and down its face.

“A combination lock,” I said.

“With images from the tarot.”

The fire reflected hotly off the bronze as Erik and I rubbed grime off the metal. We pushed these wheels hard enough to make them slowly, and very stiffly, rotate, so as get a plainer view of the glyphs.

“Here’s the Fool,” Erik said, “the Queen of Cups, the Wheel of Fortune.”

“A horned moon.”

Next came a delicate image of a plumed serpent breathing fumes of curling, nearly floral-looking fire. “Lola—a
dragon
.”

“Yes. Yes—the Riddle—what can I remember:

‘IN A SHRINE AT CITY TWO

A SHE-WOLF TELLS MORE THAN I

FOUR DRAGONS GUARD THE NEXT CUE...’”

I nudged the first dial all the way up, revealing the complete image of a serpent-dragon. “This could be it!” I nudged the second dial, calling up the Worm’s twin. “But it says
four
dragons guard the second clue—this would be only three.”

“Try it anyway.”

The third dial budged into place. A trio of dragons blew flame in a line.

Nothing happened. All was gloom and silence, except for the
tick-tack
of the grisly rats tangling themselves outside the perimeter of the firelight.

“Lola—”

From behind the door now came a slow, grinding noise of metal gnashing on metal.

With a heavy creak, the immense door opened onto a thin ebony slit.

We breathlessly pressed our faces together to peer within. A frigid breeze curled out from the black room beyond, bringing with it the remnants of dead perfumes, a memory of mortal flesh, the ancient spirits of rot and decay.

“I guess the fourth dragon’s waiting for us in there.”

Erik’s hot and shining eyes made him look half-wild when he said that.

“Let’s go meet her,” I said, kissing him before I grabbed his arm and we plunged inside.

The creaking door was so heavy we could barely push it open. We crept into the stifling, hidden room, as the door swiftly and shockingly banged shut behind us. Erik and I ran back, tried to force our way out.

“It’s locked from the outside!”

“And there’s no handle.”

We pounded and scratched at the thing, yelling, but it was no use.

“God, we’re going to have to find another way,” I said.

“There’d better be one.”

We turned around, our panic first ebbing, then slowly shifting into a spellbound calm as we saw the lair that had been disclosed by the torch.

Erik moved forward alongside me. “What is this place?”

His flame burnished a long table set with an astrolabe and crystal bottles that dimly glittered among contorted iron implements. Our eyes blurred, adjusted. A fireplace yawned at the far end of the room. In front of its gigantic iron firedogs sat a graceful reading table, paired with a disintegrating leather chair. A book in a gold clamshell cover rested in the place where the seated reader would turn its pages. In the left corner, standing before a thin mirrored door, towered a mammoth candle on a bronze pedestal. An iron furnace presided to the right of the fireplace. Before it had been deposited three tremendous leather chests tooled or burned with shamanic designs.

Erik sputtered, “It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here—”

“For centuries. How come no one’s found it?”

“It actually happens all the time—control-freak restorers don’t want the site disturbed; digs aren’t permitted—in ninety-three a German found a hidden door in the Giza pyramid, and we don’t even know what’s behind it yet.
Agh!
”

While chattering, Erik had moved the torch directly to our left, and both of us gasped: The fire glow washed clear over a white, once-polished skull, with eyes made of carved rubies and a grinning, emerald-studded maw that laughed crazily at us from a low shelf.

“That used to be a person’s head,” I gabbled.

“Now it’s a—book end.”

From the left side of the room shone the spines of rat-chewed books: St. Augustine’s
City of God,
a much-worn copy of Copernicus’s
Means of Transmuting the Human Form Through Use of Starlight
.

Propping up these occult and holy tomes, as a kind of ethnographic
memento mori,
were carved human femurs inlaid with ebony and silver. These, along with the ornamental skull, we recognized immediately as examples of the ancient Aztec art.

“This is a Renaissance alchemy lab,” Erik croaked. “We’ve got a still, beakers— Look at these reference books.”

“I know—here’s
The Occult Teachings of Hypatia
—”

“The bones are from the Americas.” Erik anxiously inspected his white-handled torch. “I’m starting to get a very bad feeling this thing has been
recycled
—”

“Antonio was an alchemist, so what would he be doing here—”

“
Ai
, trying to transform gold into the Universal Medicine, and transmute lead into gold.”

We began to make our way carefully to the long table set in the center of the room, which was laden with dusty red-crystal crucibles and a bowl of crushed pearls. A mummified lizard with sapphires for eyes stared out next to a pair of lead scorifiers and thick iron pincers. Within the vessels, melted gold had hardened like gilt wax.

“Supposedly he was looking for some kind of cure,” I said. “To the Condition.”

“He would have been using the three primal elements: sulfur, salt, and—mercury.”

“What is that?”

I made toward the reading table at the room’s end. Brushing away the silt, I saw its massive bible. The book’s gold cover was worked with the jeweled image of a Byzantine Mary, and cinched with a crimson ribbon that shivered into powder at my touch.

Inside, the book’s text block was made of large pages of foxed parchment tattooed with Gothic print describing the ancient genealogy of holy men:
Liber generationist Iesu Christi filii David filii Abraham, Abraham genuit Isaac Isaac autem genuit Iacob...

“It’s a copy of the Gospels,” I said. In the Vulgate, the Latin. It’s so
beautiful
.”

Erik stepped back from the desk. “What are we looking for here—another dragon? And then—
what is that last line
of the riddle?”

I gripped my forehead. “Okay, hold on, hold on:
‘In a shrine at City Two
/
A She-Wolf tells more than I
/
Four Dragons guard the next
Cue...Read’...
something, something that rhymes with I...Erik— It’s ‘
Matthew or die’!
‘
A She-Wolf tells more than I...Read...Matthew or die
.‘ I’m missing a word or two, but I think that’s the gist of it.”

Still guided by his torch, Erik moved to the room’s left corner, with its bronze pillar, candle, and looking-glass door.

“
Read...Matthew or die.
” I repeated the words as an idea formed in my mind. “Erik—wait a second. Look at this Bible again.”

But he did not seem to have heard me.

“Lola.”

“Do you think maybe the riddle’s talking about the Gospels? The book of Matthew—”

“Lola!”

I jerked away from the book. “What?”

“I’ve got it.”

“What—you remembered the line?”

“No,
I think I found the second clue.
”

He had been drawn to the massive candle before the tall mirrored door. The lit mirror reflected back our bloodless faces and the huge, web-shrouded taper. Erik had already scraped off a portion of the spider fluff, and I peered close as he peeled back the rest.

An object had been suspended deep inside the tawny wax. It had a round, metallic shape made plainly visible by the torchlight. It also appeared to bear occult carved markings.

“Erik— Erik!”

“I know—it
looks
like the other medal—”

“Can you read it?”

“No, not in there.”

“We’ve got to get it out.”

“Take the light.”

Erik found a dull, short knife on a table, and the next few minutes were spent trying to hack away at the candle, which had petrified into the hardness and clarity of amber.

His face dripped sweat. “What is this stuff?”

“I don’t know—it’s just old.”

His arm dropped. “I can’t get it out of there.”

The longer I held the torch close to the taper, the more its paraffin or tallow began to glisten. The gold coin locked within absorbed the firelight. Through the amber medium I could just spy an etched line here, a curling swash there.

“Erik, I’ll just light the candle. It’ll soften the wax—”

“I know, so that we can
see
.”

After a weirdly long time, we heard the hissing of centuries of webs and their imprisoned tiny skeletons. The amber mass was less wax than some sort of crystalline resin that proved resistant to heat. But as I pressed the fire close to it, inflaming the wick, I heard the dripping sound of resin sliding, melting. There was a bubbling, something dribbling.

A hot red flash curled up instantly toward the ceiling, nearly knocking us backward. “It’s eating the wax—the tallow—”

“Whatever it is.”

The candle burned down remarkably fast.

In mere seconds, it melted to the metal circle inside the wax.