The King's Gold (22 page)

Wheezing, I pointed to the first chest, its burned Satan-like mark. “That’s Mercury—which makes this—poison—a gas—if you expose it to fire.”

“Any mercury—would have evaporated by now.”

“But these other two”—I pointed to the second, square-headed mark—“that’s sulfur.”

He edged away from the trunks. “Sulfur’s no joke—it explodes.”

“Salt!” I ripped at the rope knots on the chest bearing the mark of a circle cut through with a bar. The loops loosened until I was able to slide the fetters off the box.

But I had made a perilous error in my detection. This was not because I had falsely remembered the alchemical signs.

I had not considered the possibility that Antonio would lie.

I tore off the rope on the salt-marked chest. The air-tight cover lifted after I ripped at its hinge, but I found no salt: instead, a drift of pure, deadly, marigold-bright sulfur appeared beneath the lid. A beautiful haze of this powder floated easily from its surface, spreading like oxygen or light in the air.

“Dammit,”
Erik roared.

“Close it!”

Together we slammed down the lid, hard. Too hard.

Air had gathered in a pocket in the long-locked chest, and when we smashed it back shut, the air rushed out, carrying with it a thick breath of brimstone. Around us sparkled a thick mist of fairy particles, sizzling like stars. They landed on our faces and arms, singeing the skin.

We were burning, shrieking. The fire rose, a hellish gold wall. Circling our faces were deadly gold-red flowers of erupting flame.

Erik grabbed the water bottle, soaking us. “Water puts out sulfur fire!”

I was half-blind as I flung open the lid of the first chest, but inside I could make out a white crystal bank. And something else: Half-buried in its center like a vivid fossil was
another letter
, this one also Wolf-sealed, but in a blood-red envelope.

Stuffing this message into my shirt, I clawed my hands into the salt and flung a white storm of it into the air.

We hurled the bitter crystals on the barricade of flame that had eaten half a wall of books. I hurled bowlfuls of it on the bronze pillar, which still bled the diabolical amber wax. It was a hard war against the strength of the fire. The blaze shrank slowly, then finally snuffed under the white mineral. Salt spread over the lake of fire that had been the floor. A pale sheet covered the scorched Aztec skull, the blackened tomes on alchemy, the charred
Hypatia’s Oracle,
and the gold-bound Gospels. Before we smothered all the light in the room, I ripped off a shred of my sweater, using it to hold the bone handle of the torch Erik had thrown to the floor.

“Is there any more salt?” He was breathing heavily.

“No. I think we’ve done it.”

We looked around. The room gleamed white and black now, lit with a few dying spits of white-gold kindling. I snatched up my purse that I could barely see for the smoke. The filthy clouds had only grown thicker.

“The air—” I said.

He had his arm over his mouth. “Not—enough—in here.”

“The door. The mirrored door.”

“Can you find it?”

“Can’t see–”

“Oh, the
books, Erik,
they’re burned!”

“Better them than us.”

We pushed through the smoke clouds, stumbling over furniture until my hand touched the glass. The torchlight parted the black. The mirror doubled our wretched, gap-mouthed expressions.

Erik wrapped his shirt around his hand and turned the whitehot handle of the door.

It barely budged. Centuries of dust had lodged in its lock.

We pressed and threw our bodies onto it, cracking the mirror.

It gave. Clear, cold oxygen rushed back in, onto our faces.

I drank that air like holy water as we stumbled out of that poisoned tomb. Most of all I felt sick over those horrible, dead books, the sight of which could make a girl like me go numb.

But I didn’t have time to react to everything that had happened yet, stranded as Erik and I were in that dismal hell beneath the Duomo.

We still had to get out of there.

“Erik, can you walk?”

“I can run.” He gripped the torch. “
Really
far from here—wherever that is.”

The torchlight revealed only a glimpse of another corridor extending before us.

“Let’s move.”

Despite our burning lungs, we raced through a surreal kaleidoscope, as the torch’s red and green flashes battered against the walls. The corridor led us into an ascending spiral that drew us stumbling into a series of stone switchbacks. The ceiling dropped suddenly; we had to scuttle like crabs until we hit a thick stone wall, and a narrow upward passage composed of small stone steps.

“What’s this?” Erik asked, coughing hard.

Rats scattered in our wake, scampering up the ancient, half-pulverized staircase.

“It’s a way
out
.”

At the top of the steps glinted a long stone-paved landing. Its low ceiling had been fitted with a large wooden trap door, from which dangled a massive pull handle forged of iron.

Erik beamed at me. With his shock of hair and his soot-streaked face he had turned into a savage Pict.

“I think the old Sanchez luck just kicked in.”

“Let’s hope.”

He took hold of the iron ring, grunting as he pulled. The door budged and creaked. It swung down.

We stared up in mute horror at what had been revealed: a slab of marble lodged into the space over the escape door, entombing us.

“Tell me again about that Sanchez luck?” I croaked.

“It works like a charm, Lola,” he said, in a graveled voice.

“Right—
no problem.
So we’re going to have to...let’s see here...just try to
move
this stone. Get up through the door.”

“That’s it.”

We shoved our hands against the white stone blocking the door. We pushed. We
smashed
our weight against that square of solid rock. But it remained fast. Neither of us said a word. We were too frightened even to look at each other. The other access out was smog-choked
and
locked from the outside. We began to wildly thrash ourselves against the barricade, leaving blood on the pale rock from our shredding hands.

“Okay, I’m starting to have a heart attack now,” Erik yelled.

“No, no—hold on—don’t you feel it?”

Here came a screeching sound, the grinding of stone against stone.

It moved. We heaved it, slowly, off.

I buckled over with insane, hacking laughter. Erik was crying. A wedge of black air became visible, as the rock barrier shifted away from the door.

“It goes through.”

Hauling away the rock, bleeding and sweating, we cleared the large hatch. I crawled through first, hoisting myself onto a floor as cold as lead. Next came the bright fingers of the torch through the portal. Erik heaved himself up, landing with a thud.

“Where are we?”

“It’s attached to the church. Hold the light higher.”

The torchlight wavered over a tall vaulted ceiling. Above us radiated frescoes of Christ on the cross, and placid-faced angels who celebrated a Christian version of the pagan saturnalia painted along the hidden corridor beneath the cathedral—later, Erik and I would learn that we had been in Siena’s Battistero di San Giovanni. Below us spread a network of graves. These were the tombs of Siena’s royalty, marked with Latin crosses. One stone had been carved with the bereavement
Patris est filius
below a beautiful etching of a beardless knight holding his sword.

“We came out of a coffin,” said Erik.

The stone we had knocked aside was the cover of a false tomb, designed to look like the others, with the etchings of a cross and a fish. Yet when we inspected it closer, we saw it bore the name
Antonio Beato Cagliostro Medici.

I put my purse down. “He had an evil sense of humor.”

“Well, whatever message he was trying to send with this treasure hunt, I think I’m getting it. And it’s not very friendly. God, did he
hate
Cosimo.”

I kneeled on the floor, ignoring the false grave. I hovered over the tombstone etched with the smooth-cheeked knight. The Latin inscription
Patris est filius
unfurled beneath his feet.

“Lola?”

I did not answer him.

Patris est filius
means “Like father, like son.” My fingers glided over the engraved words.

“Look at this,” I finally said, staring at the carvings with a kind of fish-eyed intensity.

“What?”

“Erik, I just remembered my
dad
.”

Patris est filia.
I, too, had a father whom I took after, though one whom I had not thought of much in the tumult of the last days. He is a small, skinny, book-mad, and
very
sensitive curator, my adopted pop, Manuel Alvarez. Suddenly missing him terribly, I recalled Manuel’s bulging eyes, his faint wisps of hair, his chattering and kisses. Then I saw again the other man’s face in the Duomo; I remembered his leaf-shaped eyes and the Chagall colors of his tattoos.

“Your dad. Who, Tomas?”

“No, Manuel. I don’t want him to know about de la Rosa, Erik. He
hates
him—and he’s worried that my mom still loves him.

Even though Tomas is supposedly—”

“Pushing up the daisies, as it were—”

“And he
won’t
like the idea of Tomas following me around—”

“Yes, if you tell him a dead de la Rosa is trying to meet you for drinks, he’ll certainly freak, but not
as much as I am now.
So, come on, honey. Let’s go. We’ll talk about this later.”

I let Erik take my hand and we moved through the baptistery, under the angels, above the long-dead Tuscan soldiers. Our footsteps rang out on the stone. Moving over to the modern front door, we slammed down its metal push-down bar, instantly ducking at the sight of four police officers quarreling so violently about a soccer match we were able to creep away.

The air that met our faces and ruptured lungs was fresh, cool, and free. The onyx and silver Sienese night shimmered in front of us like benediction, or like a fantasy covering up the horrid truth beneath the ground.

Into it, we fled.

“You know, if Antonio Medici were suffering from a disease he probably would turn to alchemy,” Erik said between bites of a near-midnight snack, three hours after our flight from the cathedral. He and I were repairing the evening’s damages in our pension’s suite, on a large oak tester bed draped with a red silk canopy. “Particularly if he were under some kind of delusion that he was a werewolf —a
Versipellis
—because the alchemists were completely obsessed with the idea of transmutation, transformations of any kind, and particularly those from the supposedly baser to higher levels. See what I mean? Lead to gold, old age to youth, sickness to health—”

“Moody werewolves into well-adjusted Italians.” I held a letter opener and slipped it under the wolf-shaped seal of the red letter I’d retrieved from the laboratory’s salt chest.

“Precisely. And mortality into immortality. Which, quite possibly, may explain the reason that, despite the fact that two years ago Colonel Moreno had his militia bump off Tomas de la Rosa for the murder of Serjei Moreno and then buried his poor old carcass in Central American swamps—you saw him prancing around a Sienese caffè tonight.”

I broke into a brief asthmatic fit from smoke inhalation. “You know what? You were right before about dropping the dad subject. Though I’m sure that I’m going to be able to find a
very good explanation
for—for—”

He gently whopped my back. “The reason Tomas de la Rosa escaped from Hades? Apparently with the sole aim of driving you crazy and making Manuel’s life miserable?”

“Yes.”

He rolled over, looking intently at what I was doing.

“So, if we’re not going to talk about that, then
let’s read this letter
.”

“The seal, I’m just trying to be careful.”

“I’m very itchy to see it.”

“I know, I want to tear it open with my teeth. But just
wait—
”

“Fine. Tell me if you want some more ravioli.”

I sat cross-legged next to him on the bed, scraping at the wax signet. During the last hours, I had been waiting for us to return to some level of lucidity before I opened this epistle, since we hadn’t arrived at this pension in very good shape. Despite the fact that Officer Gnoli could at any moment send out a Mediterranean APB on our hides, and police were probably dragnetting for two suspicious mestizos, our escape-from-Siena plan had consisted of little more than limping to this little hotel sited on the outskirts of the city. Checking in around eleven p.m., we had just stood in the lobby, coughing like Keats and throwing cash at the manager, a small, wizened creature with extremely furry earlobes. Erik did not look quite as shaken as he had in the crypt, but like me he was afflicted with a ghostly pallor and generally incapable of linear thought.

Even so, our evening had improved.

The manager, for one, needed no instruction in how to receive payment. Better yet, he cooked like a warlock and possessed a wine cellar full of amber-red vin santo. Escorted up the stairs, supplied with the first of many glasses, Erik and I had bathed together in the iron tub four doors down from our room, in between scrubbings accomplishing a delicious inventory of our various scrapes, stings, cuts, burns, and bruises. Once back in our room we both arrived wordlessly at the same conclusion—that we had better make love immediately. This we accomplished, sweetly but also carefully, like porcupines. It
greatly
restored our moods. Now resting on the bed’s crimson blanket, nude but for thick white towels, we dipped into dishes of butter-dripping polenta with meat sauce and
ravioli en brodo,
which tasted of sage, salt, and wine. And as I worked on the gold seal of Antonio’s letter, my lover had begun talking again.

The knife slowly slid under the gold wax wolf, snapping it off. “I’ve got it.”

“He was a weird old bird, wasn’t he? Antonio. I mean, leaving that letter in that chest.”

“Among other reasons.”