The Warlock (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #5) (35 page)

have always known about this place,” Tsagaglalal said to Sophie. She waved her hand. “Come, sit, join me.”

Sophie started to shake her head.

“Please,” Tsagaglalal said gently. “I created this space for you and your brother. Why do you think I never allowed the gardeners to tend to it?”

Sophie moved around the clearing, then sank to the ground with her back against the trunk of a gnarled apple tree, legs stretched straight out in front of her. “I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said truthfully.

Tsagaglalal remained still, gaze fixed on the girl’s face. The only noise was the droning of bees and distant traffic sounds.

“I was just thinking,” Sophie said, “a week ago today I was serving coffee at the Coffee Cup and looking forward to
the weekend. Josh had come over to the shop for lunch, and we shared a sandwich and a slice of cherry pie. I’d just talked to my friend Elle, in New York, on the phone, and I was excited because there was the possibility that she was going to come out to San Francisco. My biggest worry was that I wouldn’t be able to get time off from the coffee shop to spend with her.” The girl looked at Tsagaglalal. “Just another day. Just an ordinary Thursday.”

“And now?” Tsagaglalal whispered.

“And now, a week later, I’ve been Awakened, learned magic, been to France and England and back again without flying; my brother is gone; and I’m worrying about the end of the world.” She tried a laugh, but it came out high-pitched and a little hysterical.

Tsagaglalal nodded slowly. “A week ago, Sophie, you were a girl. You have lived a lifetime in the past seven days. You have seen so much and done so much more.”

“More than I wanted to,” Sophie muttered.

“You have grown and matured,” Tsagaglalal said, ignoring the interruption. “You are an extraordinary young woman, Sophie Newman. You are strong, knowledgeable and powerful—so very, very powerful.”

“I wish I weren’t,” Sophie said sadly. She looked down at her hands in her lap. They were resting on her legs, palms facing up, right hand on top of left. Unbidden, threads of silver aura gathered in the creases in her palm, then flowed to form a small pool of shining liquid. The liquid aura sank back into her flesh, and silver gloves, at first like delicate smooth silk, then stitched leather, and finally studded metal appeared
around her hands, encasing them. She flexed her fingers; the gloves disappeared and her flesh reappeared. Her fingernails briefly remained silver polished mirrors before they too returned to normal.

“You cannot escape what you are, Sophie. You are Silver. And that means you have a responsibility … and a destiny. Your fate was decided millennia ago,” Tsagaglalal said, almost sympathetically. “I watched my husband, Abraham, work with Chronos. Chronos spent his entire life mastering Time. It was a task that utterly destroyed him, warping and twisting his flesh into a hundred different forms. It made him one of the most repulsive creatures you have ever seen … and yet my husband called him friend, and I have no doubt that Chronos had the welfare of the humani and the survival of this Shadowrealm at heart.”

“The Witch didn’t like him …,” Sophie said, shuddering as a hint of Chronos’s true form gathered at the edges of her memory.

Tsagaglalal nodded. “And he despised her for what she did.”

“What did she do?” Sophie began, but the memories came so quickly that they physically shook her body.

… a war hammer crushing a crystal skull to shards of broken glass, and then smashing a second and then a third …

… metal books running molten liquid off collapsing library shelves as smoking acid ate into them …

… extraordinary glass and ceramic aircraft, delicate, beautiful and intricate, circular, oblong and triangular, being pitched off cliffs to sink into the sea …

Tsagaglalal leaned forward. “The Witch destroyed millennia of Earthlord, Ancient and Archon artifacts: what my husband called the eldritch lore.”

“It was too dangerous,” Sophie said immediately, parroting the Witch’s point of view.

“That was the Witch’s opinion.” Tsagaglalal’s expression turned indescribably sad. “Your friend, the immortal William Shakespeare, once wrote that ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ ”

“That’s from
Hamlet
. We did the play in school last year.”

“Zephaniah believed that the eldritch lore was dangerous and that therefore she was justified in destroying it. But what you must remember is that knowledge itself is never dangerous,” Tsagaglalal insisted. “It is how that knowledge is used that is dangerous. The Witch’s arrogance destroyed incalculable millennia of knowledge, so when she needed a favor, Chronos made her pay dearly. Perhaps he was also trying to prevent her from destroying anything else, although by then it was probably too late. I sometimes wonder whether if we had access to that knowledge now, humani would not be where we are today.”

Sophie had brief glimpses of ancient technology, flickering sights of soaring cities of glass, vast fleets of metal boats, crystal craft streaking through the skies. And then the images turned dark and she watched a delicate gemlike city turn to molten liquid as the appalling shape of a deathly mushroom cloud bloomed in its center. She shook her head and sucked in a deep shuddering breath, blinking back to the present, trying to dispel the images. The sounds of an everyday San
Francisco afternoon—a distant ship’s horn, a car alarm, the wail of an ambulance siren—came rushing back. “No, we would have destroyed everything,” she murmured.

“Perhaps …,” Tsagaglalal said quietly. “The destruction of the earth and every living creature on its surface was a possibility that my husband and Chronos considered on a daily basis. I sat and watched them search through the myriad strands of time looking for those lines that kept the humani and this Shadowrealm alive for as long as possible. They called them the Auspicious Threads. Once they had isolated an Auspicious Thread, they did everything in their power to ensure that it was given every opportunity to prosper.”

A cool salt-and-exhaust-scented breeze whispered through the trees and surrounding bushes. Leaves hissed softly together, and Sophie suddenly shivered. “And Josh and I were in one of those Auspicious Threads?”

“There were a boy and a girl, yes. Twins. Gold and Silver.” Tsagaglalal looked at the girl. “My husband even knew your names.”

Sophie touched the emerald tablet tucked into the waistband of her jeans. It was addressed to her by name.

Tsagaglalal nodded. “He knew a lot about you, though not everything. The strands of time are not always precise. But Abraham and Chronos knew without question that the twins were critical to the survival of the humani race and the world. And they knew for certain that they had to protect a perfect set of twins, a Gold and a Silver.”

“Josh and I aren’t perfect,” Sophie said quickly.

“No one is. But your auras are pure. We knew the twins
would need knowledge, so Abraham created the Codex, the Book of the Mage, which held the entire world’s knowledge in its few pages.” The old woman’s face creased in pain. “He was Changing then. Do you know what the Change is?”

Sophie started to shake her head, then nodded as the Witch of Endor’s knowledge meshed with hers. “A transformation. Most of the very oldest Elders morph into …” She stopped, blinking hard at the images. “… into monsters.”

“Not all, but most. Some of the transformations are beautiful. My husband thought the Change might be a mutation caused by solar radiation acting upon incredibly aged cells.”

“But you haven’t Changed.…”

“I’m not an Elder,” Tsagaglalal said simply. “And when Abraham created the Codex, he manipulated its essence so that only the humani would be able to handle it. Its very touch is poisonous to the Elders. A series of humani guardians were chosen to keep the Book safe through the ages.”

“And that was your role?” Sophie asked.

“No,” Tsagaglalal said, surprising her. “Others were chosen to guard the Book. My jobs were to protect the emerald tablets and to watch over the Golds and Silvers and be there at the end when they needed me.”

“Tsagaglalal,” Sophie whispered. “She Who Watches.”

The old woman nodded. “I am She Who Watches. Using forbidden Archon lore, Abraham made me immortal. I was to watch over the twins, to guard and protect them. And to watch over me, to guard and protect me, my husband granted my younger brother the same gift of immortality.”

“Your brother …,” Sophie breathed.

Tsagaglalal nodded. Her eyes were fixed on the sky. “Together, we have lived upon this earth for more than ten thousand years and watched over generations of the Newman family. And what a family tree it has been. My brother and I have guarded princes and paupers, masters and servants. We’ve lived in just about every country on this planet, waiting, waiting, always waiting.…” Her eyes grew large behind sudden tears. “There were occasional Golds in your family line, some Silvers, too, even a couple of sets of twins, but the prophesied twins never materialized, and my brother’s mind began to collapse with the weight of years.”

“But what about the Flamels? Why have they been looking for twins?”

“A mistake, Sophie. A misinterpretation. Perhaps even a little arrogance. Their role was simply to guard the Book. But at some point the Flamels began to believe that their task was to find the twins of legend.”

Sophie felt as if all the breath had been sucked from her body. “So everything they did … was worthless.”

Tsagaglalal smiled kindly. “No, not worthless. Everything they did brought them closer and closer to this city, in this time, and ultimately, to you. Their role was not to find the twins—it was prophesied that the twins would find them. It was their role to protect the twins and bring them to be Awakened.”

Sophie thought her head might explode. It was terrifying to think that everything about her life from the moment of
her birth had been foreseen ten thousand years previously. A sudden thought struck her. “Your brother,” Sophie said quickly. “Where is he now?”

“We first went to England when we learned that Scathach had helped put a young man named Arthur on the throne. My brother grew close to the boy; Arthur became like a son to him. When the boy died … well, my brother was devastated. His mind started to fragment, and he found it hard to tell past from present, reality from fantasy. He believed that Arthur would come again and would need him. He never left England. He said he would die there.”

“Gilgamesh,” Sophie breathed.

“Gilgamesh the King,” Tsagaglalal whispered, “though in England they knew him by a different name.” Tears crawled down her lined face and the garden filled with the scent of jasmine. “Lost to me now, long lost.”

“We met him,” Sophie said urgently, leaning forward to touch Tsagaglalal’s arm. Her aura cracked. “He’s alive! In London.” She blinked away her own tears, remembering the ragged and filthy-looking old homeless man with the shockingly blue eyes whom she had first met in the back of a taxicab.

The jasmine soured. Tsagaglalal’s voice was bitter. “Oh, Sophie, I know he is still alive and in London. I have friends there who keep an eye on him for me, who ensure that he is never short of money and he never goes hungry.” She was crying now, huge tears that dripped from her chin to spatter onto the grass. Tiny white jasmine flowers unfurled, blossomed and curled up in the space of a single heartbeat. “He does not remember me,” Tsagaglalal whispered. “No, that
is not true: he does remember me, but as I was, ten thousand years ago, young and beautiful. He does not recognize me now.”

“He said he wrote everything down,” Sophie said. She brushed silver tears from her face. “He said he would write about me, to remember me.” She remembered the old man who had shown her a thick sheaf of paper held together with string. There were scraps from notebooks, covers torn from paperbacks, bits of newspapers, restaurant menus and napkins, thick parchment, even pieces of hide and wafer-thin sheets of copper and bark. They had all been cut and torn to roughly the same size, and they were covered in minuscule scrawl.

“This immortality is a curse,” Tsagaglalal said suddenly, angrily. “I loved my husband, but there are times—far too many times—when I hated him for what he did to me and my brother and I cursed his name.”

“Abraham wrote that I would curse his name now and forevermore,” Sophie said.

“If my husband had a flaw, it was that he always told the truth. And sometimes the truth is hard.”

Sophie’s breath caught in her chest. Some of the Witch’s memories were trickling into her thoughts, and they were about something important. She concentrated to make sense of them. “The process that made Gilgamesh immortal was flawed. But if his immortality is removed—” She stopped.

“What are you remembering, child—something else the Witch knew?”

“No, something Gilgamesh asked Josh to do.”

“What was that?”

“He made my brother promise that when this was all over—if we survived—we would return to London with the Codex.”

The old woman frowned, creases deepening to line her forehead. “Why?”

“Gilgamesh said that there was a spell on the first page of the Codex.” She wracked her brain, trying to remember the King’s exact words. “He said … he said that he stood by Abraham’s shoulder and watched him transcribe it.”