The Alchemyst (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

D
r. John Dee was becoming frantic. Everything was falling apart, and now there was every possibility that he was going to have to take an active part in the battle.

Flamel, Scatty and the twins had managed to escape from the interior of the Yggdrasill and were now fighting on the opposite side of the field, no more than two hundred yards away, but he couldn’t get to them—it would mean crossing a battlefield. The last of the Torc Allta, both in their human and boar form, fought running battles with the cat-and birdmen. The nathair had already been defeated. Initially, the winged serpents had brought chaos and confusion to the cats and birds, but they were lumbering and awkward on the ground, and most had been killed once they’d landed. The massive army of Torc Allta had thinned considerably, and he guessed that within the hour, there would be no more wereboars left in North America.

But he could not afford to wait that long. He had to get to Flamel now. He had to retrieve the pages of the Codex as soon as possible.

From his hiding place behind a clump of bushes, Dee watched the Elders. Hekate was standing in the doorway to her tree home, surrounded by the last of her personal Torc Allta guard. While the boars fought the cats and birds, Hekate alone faced down the combined forces of the Morrigan and Bastet.

The three ignored the half-human animals fighting around them. To the casual observer it would have seemed as if the three Elders were simply staring at one another. Dee, however, noted the purple-gray clouds that gathered only above the Yggdrasill; he saw how the delicate white and gold flowers strewn around the huge tree withered and died, turning to black paste in an instant; he had seen the unsightly sheen of fungus that appeared on the smoothly polished stone path. Dee smiled; surely it would not be long now. How much longer could Hekate stand against the two Elders, aunt and niece?

But the goddess showed no sign of weakening.

And then she struck back.

Although the air, now stinking from the burning tree, was still, Dee watched as an invisible, unfelt breeze whipped the Morrigan’s cloak about her shoulders and buffeted the huge Bastet, making her tilt her head and lean forward into the wind. The patterns on Hekate’s metallic dress whirled with blinding rapidity, the colors blurred and distorted.

With growing alarm, he saw a dark shadow flowing across the withering grass and then watched as a swarm of tiny black flies settled on Bastet’s fur, crawling into her ears and up her nose. The Cat Goddess howled and staggered back, rubbing furiously at her face. She fell to the ground, rolling over and over in the long grass, attempting to free herself from the insects. More and more kept coming, and they were joined by fire ants and recluse spiders, which crawled out of the grass and swarmed over her body. Crouched on all fours, she threw back her head and screamed in agony, then turned and ran across the field, rolling and crawling in the grass, splashing through a little pool, trying to clean the insects from her body. She was more than halfway across the field before the thick, swirling cloud left her. She rubbed furiously at her face and arms, leaving long scratches on her skin, before climbing to her feet and striding back toward the Yggdrasill. And then the swarm of flies, thicker now, re-formed in the air before her.

In that moment, Dee considered that perhaps—just perhaps—Hekate could win. Splitting Bastet and the Morrigan had been a master stroke; ensuring that Bastet could not get back was simply genius.

Realizing that she could not return to the Yggdrasill, Bastet hissed her rage, then turned and raced over to where Flamel, Scatty and the twins were trying to defend themselves. Dee saw her leap an incredible distance and bring the Alchemyst to the ground. That gave him some satisfaction, at least, and he allowed himself a slight smile, which quickly faded—he was still trapped on this side of the field. How was he going to get past Hekate?

Even though the Yggdrasill was burning furiously, with whole sections blazing, burning leaves and blackened strips of branches spiraling down, sticky streamers of sap exploding from collapsing branches, Hekate’s powers seemed undiminished. Dee ground his teeth in frustration; all his research indicated that Hekate had brought the tree to life by imbuing it with a little of her own life force. In turn, as it grew, it renewed and replenished her powers. Burning the tree had been his idea. He had imagined that as it burned, she would weaken. But on the contrary: setting the tree alight had only served to enrage the goddess, and her anger had made her all the more deadly. When Dee saw Hekate’s lips twitch in what might have been a smile and the Morrigan stagger and then step back, he began to realize that here, in her own Shadowrealm, the Goddess with Three Faces was simply too strong for them.

Dee knew then that he would have to act.

Keeping to the shadows of the trees and tall grasses, he moved around the trunk of the enormous Yggdrasill. He was forced to crouch down and hide as a Torc Allta in its boar shape crashed through the undergrowth directly in front of him with at least a dozen cat-people and twice that number of birdmen clinging to him.

Dee came out of the undergrowth on the opposite side of the tree from where Hekate and the Morrigan fought. To his right, he could see that something was happening with Flamel’s group; birds and cats were scattering in every direction…and then he realized that he was seeing
ordinary
birds and
everyday
cats fleeing, not the half-human creatures. The Morrigan’s and Bastet’s transformation spells were failing: was Hekate that powerful? He had to end this now.

Dr. John Dee lifted the short-bladed sword in his hand. Dirty blue light coiled down its length, and for an instant the ancient stone blade hummed as an invisible breeze moved across the edge. The twisting snakes carved into its hilt came to twisting, hissing life.

Gripping the hilt tightly, Dee pressed the point of the blade against the gnarled bark of the ancient tree…and pushed.

Excalibur slid smoothly into the wood, sinking right up to the hilt without resistance. For a long moment nothing happened, and then Yggdrasill began to moan. The sound was like that of an animal in pain: beginning as a deep grumbling, it quickly rose to a high-pitched whimpering. Where the hilt of the sword protruded from the tree, a blue stain appeared. Like dripping ink, it flowed down the tree and seeped into the ground, then the oily blue light ran along the veins and seams of wood. Yggdrasill’s cries grew higher and higher, until they were almost beyond human hearing. The surviving Torc Allta fell to the ground, writhing in pain, clutching at their ears; birdmen whirled in confusion and the cat-people began to hiss and howl in unison.

The blue stain raced around the tree, coating everything in a thin veneer of glittering ice crystals that reflected the light. Blue-black and purple-green rainbows shimmered in the air.

The oily stain shot up the length of the tree and out along the branches, turning everything it touched to faceted crystals. Even the fire was not immune to it. Flames froze, fire caught in ornate and intricate patterns, then spiderwebbed, like ice on the surface of a pond, and dissolved to sparkling dust. Where the blue stain touched the leaves, they hardened and broke away from the branches. They did not spiral to the ground: they fell and shattered with tiny tinkling sounds, while the branches, now solid pieces of ice, ripped away from the trunk of the tree and crashed to the earth. Dee threw himself to one side to avoid being impaled by a three-foot length of frozen branch. Catching hold of Excalibur’s hilt, he dragged the stone blade free of the ancient tree and ran for cover.

The Yggdrasill was dying. Huge slabs of bark sheared off, like icebergs breaking away from an ice cap, and crashed to the ground, littering the beautiful Shadowrealm landscape with shards of razor-sharp ice.

Keeping his distance and watching for falling branches, Dee raced around the tree; he needed to see Hekate.

The Goddess with Three Faces was dying.

Standing quite still before the crumbling Yggdrasill, Hekate was flickering through her three faces—young, mature and old—in heartbeats. The change was happening so fast that her flesh had no time to adapt and she was caught between phases: young eyes in an old face, a girl’s head on a woman’s body, a woman’s body with a child’s arms. Her ever-changing dress had lost all color and was the same solid black as her skin.

Dee stood beside the Morrigan and they watched in silence. Bastet rejoined them, and together the three observed Hekate and Yggdrasill’s last moments.

The World Tree was now almost entirely blue, covered with a sheath of ice. Frozen roots had burst through the ground, destroying the perfect symmetry of the earth, cutting thick gouges in the soil. Huge holes had appeared in the massive trunk, revealing the circular rooms within, which were warped and stained with the blue ice.

Hekate’s transformations slowed. The changes were taking longer to materialize because now the blue stain was slowly creeping up her body, hardening her skin, turning it to ice crystals.

The Morrigan glanced at the blade in Dee’s hand, then quickly looked away. “Even after all these years in our employ, Dr. Dee, you can still surprise us,” she said quietly. “I was not aware that you possessed the Sword of Ice.”

“I’m glad I brought it,” Dee said, not directly answering her. “It seems Hekate’s powers were stronger than we suspected. At least my guess—that her strength was connected to the tree—was correct.”

What remained of the Yggdrasill was now a solid block of ice. Hekate, too, was completely covered beneath a frozen sheet, though behind the blue crystals, her butter-colored eyes were bright and alive. The top of the tree began to melt, dirty water running down the length of the bark, cutting deep grooves into it.

“When I realized that she had the power to nullify your spells, I knew I had to do something,” Dee said. “I saw how the cats and birds were reverting to their natural shapes.”

“That was not Hekate’s doing,” Bastet growled suddenly, her accent thick, her voice beastlike.

The Morrigan and Dee turned to look at the Cat Goddess. The creature raised a furry claw and pointed across the field. “It was the girl. Someone spoke through her, someone who knew my true names, someone who used the girl’s aura to wield a whip of pure energy: that’s what reversed our spells.”

Dee looked across the field where he had seen Flamel, Scatty and the twins gathered around the oak tree. But there was no sign of them. He was turning to order the surviving cats and birds to find them when he spotted Senuhet staggering up. The old man was spattered with mud and blood—though none of the blood seemed to be his—and he had lost one of his curved bronze swords. The second had snapped in half.

“Flamel and the others have escaped,” he gasped. “I followed them out of the Shadowrealm. They’re stealing our car,” he added indignantly.

Howling his rage, Dr. John Dee spun around and flung Excalibur at the Yggdrasill. The stone blade struck the ancient World Tree, which tolled with the solemn sound of a great bell. The single note, high-pitched and serene, hung vibrating on the air…and then the Yggdrasill began to crack. Long fractures and tears ran the height of the tree. They started small, but widened as they raced upward in ragged patterns. Within moments the entire tree was covered in the crazed zigzagging. Then the Yggdrasill shattered and came crashing down on the ice statue of Hekate, crushing it to dust.

CHAPTER THIRTY

J
osh Newman jerked open the door of the black SUV and felt a wave of relief wash over him. The keys were in the ignition. He pulled open the rear door and held it while Nicholas Flamel hurried toward the car, carrying Sophie in his arms. He reached in and gently stretched her out on the backseat. Scatty burst through the barrier of leaves and came hurtling down the path, a broad smile on her face.

“Now, that,” she said as she launched herself into the back of the SUV, “was the most fun I’ve had in a millennium.”

Josh climbed into the driver’s seat, adjusted it and turned the key in the ignition. The big V6 engine growled to life.

Flamel hopped into the passenger’s seat and slammed the door. “Get us out of here!”

Josh pushed the gearshift into drive, gripped the leather steering wheel in both hands and pressed the accelerator flat to the floor. The big Hummer lurched forward, kicking up stones and dirt as he spun it in a circle and then set off down the narrow path, rocking and bouncing over the ruts, tree branches and bushes scraping its sides, scoring lines along its pristine paintwork.

Although the sun had risen in both the Shadowrealm and the real world, the road was still in deep shadow, and no matter where Josh looked, he still couldn’t find the controls for the lights. He kept glancing in the side and rearview mirrors, expecting at any moment to see the Morrigan or the Cat Goddess step through the wall of vegetation behind them. It was only when the path ended in a burst of sunshine and he wrenched the steering wheel to the right, turning the heavy SUV onto the narrow, winding blacktop, that he eased off the gas. The Hummer immediately lost speed.

“Everyone OK?” he asked shakily.

He tilted the rearview mirror down so that he could see into the back. His twin lay stretched across the wide leather seats, her head on Scatty’s lap. The Warrior was using a scrap of cloth torn from her T-shirt to wipe the girl’s forehead. Sophie’s skin was deathly white, and although her eyes were closed, her eyeballs moved erratically beneath her lids, and she twitched as if she was having a nightmare. Scatty caught Josh looking at them in the glass and she smiled in encouragement. “She’s going to be OK,” she said.

“Is there anything you can do?” Josh demanded, glancing at Flamel sitting next to him. His feelings for the Alchemyst were completely confused now. On the one hand, he had placed them in terrible danger, and yet Josh had seen how savagely Flamel had fought in their defense.

“There is nothing I can do,” Flamel said tiredly. “She is simply exhausted; nothing more.” Nicholas also looked worn out. His clothes were streaked with mud and what might have been blood. Bird feathers stuck in his hair, and both hands were scratched from his encounters with the cats. “Let her sleep, and when she awakens in a few hours’ time, she will be fine. I promise you.”

Josh nodded. He concentrated on the road ahead of him, unwilling to continue the conversation with the Alchemyst. He doubted that his sister would ever be
fine
again. He’d seen how she looked at him, her eyes blank and staring: she hadn’t recognized him. He’d listened to the voice that had come out of her mouth: it wasn’t a voice he’d known. His sister, his twin, had been utterly changed.

They came up on a sign for Mill Valley, and he turned left. He had no idea where they were going; he just wanted to get away from the Shadowrealm. More than that: he wanted to go home, wanted to go back to a normal life, he wanted to forget that he’d ever come across that ad in the university newspaper his father had brought home.

Assistant Wanted, Bookshop. We don’t want readers, we want workers.

He’d sent in a résumé and a few days later he’d been called for an interview. Sophie had had nothing else to do that day and had come along for company. While she’d been waiting, she’d gone to the shop across the road for a chai latte. When Josh had come out of The Small Book Shop, beaming delightedly because he’d been offered the job, he’d discovered that Sophie had found a job as well in The Coffee Cup. They would be working right across the street from each other—it was perfect! And it
had
been perfect—until yesterday, when this madness had begun. He had trouble believing it had only been yesterday. He looked in the mirror at Sophie again. She was resting quietly now, completely still, but he was relieved to see that a little color had come back into her cheeks.

What had Hekate done? No—what had
Flamel
done? It all came back to the Alchemyst. This was all his fault. The goddess hadn’t wanted to Awaken the twins—she knew the dangers. But Flamel had pushed, and now, because of the Alchemyst, Hekate’s Shadowrealm paradise was under attack, and his sister had become a stranger to him.

When Josh had started working in the bookshop for the man he knew then as Nick Fleming, he’d thought he was a little strange, eccentric, maybe even a little weird. But as he’d gotten to know him, he’d come to genuinely like the man, and to admire him. Fleming was everything Josh’s father wasn’t. He was funny, and interested in just about everything Josh did, and his knowledge of trivia was incredible. Josh knew that his father, Richard, was really only happy and comfortable when he was standing before a lecture hall full of students or buried up to his knees in dirt.

Fleming was different. When Josh quoted Bart Simpson to him, Fleming countered with Groucho Marx and then went further and introduced Josh to the movies of the Marx Brothers. They shared a love of music—even though their tastes were widely different; Josh introduced Nick to Green Day, Lamb and Dido. Fleming recommended Peter Gabriel, Genesis and Pink Floyd. When Josh let Fleming listen to some ambient and trance on his iPod, Fleming loaned him CDs of Mike Oldfield and Brian Eno. Josh introduced Nick to the world of blogging and showed him his and Sophie’s blog, and they had even started talking about putting the entire shop’s stock online.

In time Josh had come to think of Fleming as the older brother he’d always wished he had. And now that man had betrayed him.

In fact, he’d been lying to Josh from the very beginning. He hadn’t even been Nick Fleming. And somewhere at the back of Josh’s mind, an ugly question was beginning to form. Keeping his voice low and his eyes on the road ahead, he asked, “Did you know all this would happen?”

Flamel sat back into the deep leather seat and turned to look at Josh. The Alchemyst was partially in shadow and he clutched the seat belt across his chest with both hands. “What would happen?” he asked carefully.

“You know, I’m not a kid,” Josh said, his voice rising, “so don’t talk to me like one.” In the rear seat, Sophie muttered a little in her sleep, and he forced himself to lower his voice. “Did your precious Book predict all this?” He caught a glimpse of Scatty moving in the backseat and realized she had eased forward to hear the Alchemyst’s answer.

Flamel took a long time before replying. Finally, he said. “There are some things you must know first about the Book of Abraham the Mage.” He saw Josh open his mouth and he pressed on quickly. “Let me finish. I always knew the Codex was old,” he began, “though I never knew just how old. Yesterday Hekate said she was there when Abraham created it…and that would have been at least ten thousand years ago. The world was a very different place then. The commonly held view is that mankind appeared in the middle of the Stone Age. But the truth is very, very different. The Elder Race ruled the earth. We have scraps of the truth in our mythology and legends. If you believe the stories,” he continued, “they possessed the power of flight, they had vessels that could cross the oceans, they could control the weather and had even perfected what we would call cloning. In other words, they had access to a science that was so advanced, we would call it magic.”

Josh started to shake his head. This was too much to take in.

“And before you say this is all far-fetched, just think how far the human race has come in the past ten years. If someone had told your parents, for example, that they would be able to carry their entire music library in their pocket, would they have believed it? Now we have phones that have more computing power than was used to send the first rockets into space. We have electron microscopes that can see individual atoms. We routinely cure diseases that only fifty years ago were fatal. And the rate of change is increasing. Today we are able to do what your parents would have dismissed as impossible and your grandparents as nothing short of magical.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Josh said. He was watching his speed carefully; they couldn’t afford to be pulled over.

“What I’m saying to you is that I do not know what the Elder Race was able to do. Was Abraham making predictions in the Codex, or was he simply writing down what he had somehow seen? Was he aware of the future,
could
he actually see it?” He swiveled around in the seat to look at Scatty. “Do you know?”

She shrugged, lips curling into a little smile. “I’m Next Generation; much of the Elder World had vanished before I was even born, and Danu Talis was long sunk beneath the waves. I’ve no idea what they could do. Could they see through time?” She paused, thinking. “I’ve known Elders who seemed to have that gift: Sibyl certainly could, and so could Themis and Melampus, of course. But they were wrong more often than they were right. If my travels have taught me anything, it is that we create our own future. I’ve watched world-shaking events come and go without anyone making predictions about them, and I’ve also seen prophecies—usually to do with the end of the world—that also failed to happen.”

A car overtook them on the narrow country road, the first they had seen so far that morning.

“I’m going to ask you the question one more time,” Josh said, struggling to keep his voice even. “And this time, just give me a straight yes-or-no answer: was everything that just happened predicted in the Codex?”

“No,” Flamel said quickly.

“I hear a
but
in there somewhere,” Scatty said.

The Alchemyst nodded. “There is a little
but.
There is nothing in the book about Hekate or the Shadowrealm, nothing about Dee or Bastet or the Morrigan. But…” He sighed. “There are several prophecies about twins.”

“Twins,” Josh said tightly. “You mean twins in general or specifically to do with Sophie and me?”

“The Codex speaks of silver and gold twins, ‘the two that are one, the one that is all.’ It is no coincidence that your auras are pure gold and silver. So yes, I am convinced the Codex is referring to you and your sister.” He leaned forward to look at Josh. “And if you are asking me how long I’ve known that, then the answer is this: I began to suspect only yesterday, when you and Sophie came to my aid in the shop. Hekate confirmed my suspicions a few hours later when she made your auras visible. I give you my word that everything I’ve done has been for your protection.”

Josh started to shake his head; he wasn’t sure he believed Flamel. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but Scatty put her hand on his shoulder before he could speak. “Let me just say this,” she said, her voice low and serious, her Celtic accent suddenly pronounced. “I’ve known Nicholas Flamel for a very long time. America was barely even colonized when we first met. He is many things—dangerous and devious, cunning and deadly, a good friend and an implacable enemy—but he comes from an age when a man’s word was indeed precious. If he gives you his word that he’s done all this for your protection, then I am suggesting that you believe him.”

Josh eased on the brake and the car slowed as it rounded a corner. Finally, he nodded and let out his breath in a deep sigh. “I believe you,” he said aloud. But somewhere in the back of his mind, he kept hearing Hekate’s last words to him—“Nicholas Flamel never tells anyone everything”—and he had the distinct impression that the Alchemyst still wasn’t telling everything he knew.

Suddenly, Nicholas tapped Josh’s arm. “Here—stop here.”

“Why, what’s wrong?” Scatty demanded, reaching for her swords.

Josh signaled and pulled the Hummer off the road to where a roadside diner sign had flickered into life.

“Nothing’s wrong.” Flamel grinned. “Just time for some breakfast.”

“Great. I’m famished,” Scatty said. “I could eat a horse. If I weren’t a vegetarian…and liked horse, of course.”

And you weren’t a vampire, Josh thought, but kept his mouth shut.

Sophie woke up while Scatty and Flamel were in the diner ordering breakfast to go. One moment she was asleep, the next she sat bolt upright in the backseat. Josh jumped and was unable to prevent a little startled cry from escaping his lips.

He swiveled around in the driver’s seat, kneeling up to lean over the back. “Sophie?” he asked cautiously. He was terrified that something strange and ancient would look through his sister’s eyes again.

“You don’t want to know what I was dreaming about,” Sophie said, stretching her arms wide and arching her back. Her neck cracked as she rotated it. “Ow. I ache everywhere.”

“How do you feel?” Well, it sounded like his sister.

“Like I’m coming down with flu.” She looked around. “Where are we? Whose car is this?”

Josh grinned, teeth white in the shadows. “We stole it from Dee. We’re somewhere on the road out of Mill Valley, heading back into San Francisco, I think.”

“What happened…what happened back there?” Sophie asked.

Josh’s smile broadened into a wide grin. “You saved us, with your newly Awakened powers. You were incredible: you had a silver whip energy thing, and every time it touched one of the cats or birds, it changed them back into their real forms.” He trailed off as she started to shake her head. “You don’t remember anything?”

“A little. I could hear Perenelle talking to me, telling me what to do. I could actually feel her pouring her aura into me,” she said in awe. “I could hear her. I could even see her, sort of.” She suddenly drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “Then they came for her. That’s all I can remember.”

“Who did?”

“The faceless men. Lots of faceless men. I watched them drag her away.”