The Alchemyst (5 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

D
r. John Dee crouched in the back of the car and attempted, not entirely successfully, to control his temper. The air was heavy with the odor of sulfur, and thin tendrils of yellow-white fire crackled around his fingertips and puddled on the floor. He had failed, and while his masters were particularly patient—they often instigated plans that took centuries to mature—their patience was now beginning to run out. And they were definitely not known for their compassion.

Unmoving, held by the warding spell, Perenelle Flamel watched him, eyes blazing with a combination of loathing and what might even have been fear.

“This is becoming complicated,” Dee muttered, “and I hate complications.”

Dee was holding a flat silver dish in his lap, into which he had poured a can of soda—the only liquid he had available. He always preferred to work with pure water, but technically any fluid would do. Crouched over the dish, he stared into the liquid and allowed a little of his own auric energy to trickle across the surface as he muttered the first words of the spell of scrying.

For a single moment there was just his own reflection in the dark liquid, then it shuddered and the soda began to bubble and boil furiously. When the liquid settled, the image in the bowl no longer reflected Dee’s face, but showed a curiously flat image, rendered in shades of purple-gray and greenish black. The viewpoint was close to the ground, shifting and moving with sickening rapidity.

“Rats,” Dee murmured, thin lips curling with distaste. He hated using rats as Eyes.

“I cannot believe you led them here,” Scatty said, shoving handfuls of clothes into a backpack.

Nicholas Flamel stood in the doorway of Scatty’s tiny bedroom, arms folded across his chest. “Everything happened so fast. It was bad enough when Dee got the Codex, but when I realized there were pages missing, I knew the twins would be in trouble.”

At the mention of the word
twins,
Scatty looked up from her packing. “They’re the real reason you’re here, aren’t they?”

Flamel suddenly found something very interesting to stare at on the wall.

Scatty strode across the small room, glanced out into the hall, to make sure Sophie and Josh were still in the kitchen, and then pulled Flamel into the room and pushed the door closed.

“You’re up to something, aren’t you?” she demanded. “This is about more than just the loss of the Codex. You could have taken Dee and his minions on your own.”

“Don’t be so sure. It’s been a long time since I fought, Scathach,” Flamel said gently. “The only alchemy I do now is to brew a little of the philosopher’s stone potion to keep Perenelle and myself young. Occasionally, I’ll make a little gold or the odd jewel when we need some money.”

Scatty coughed a short humorless laugh, and spun back to her packing. She had changed into a pair of black combat pants, steel-toed Magnum boots and a black T-shirt, over which she wore a black vest covered in pockets and zippers. She pushed a second pair of trousers into her backpack, found one sock and went looking for its match under her bed.

“Nicholas Flamel,” she said, her voice muffled by the blankets, “you are the most powerful alchemyst in the known world. Remember, I stood beside you when we fought the demon Fomor, and you were the one who rescued me from the dungeons of An Chaor-Thanach and not the other way around.” She came out from under the bed with the missing sock. “When the Rusalka were terrorizing St. Petersburg, you alone turned them back, and when Black Annis raged across Manitoba, I watched you defeat her. You alone faced down the Night Hag and her Undead army. You’ve spent more than half a millennium reading and studying the Codex, no one is more familiar with the stories and legends it holds—” Scatty stopped suddenly and gasped, green eyes widening. “That’s what this is about,” she said. “This is to do with the legend….”

Flamel reached out and pressed his forefinger to Scatty’s lips, preventing her from saying another word. His smile was enigmatic. “Do you trust me?” he asked her eventually.

Her response was immediate. “Without question.”

“Then trust me. I want you to protect the twins. And train them,” he added.

“Train them! Do you know what you’re asking?”

Flamel nodded. “I want you to prepare them for what is to come.”

“And what is that?” Scathach asked.

“I have no idea”—Flamel smiled—“except that it is going to be bad.”

“We’re fine, Mom, honestly, we’re fine.” Sophie Newman tilted the cell phone slightly so that her brother could listen in. “Yes, Perry Fleming was feeling sick. Something she ate, probably. She’s fine now.” Sophie could feel the beads of sweat gathering in the small hairs at the back of her neck. She was uncomfortable lying to her mother—even though her mother was so wrapped up in her work that she never bothered to check.

Josh and Sophie’s parents were archaeologists. They were known worldwide for their discoveries, which had helped reshape modern archaeology. They were among the first in their field to discover the existence of the new species of small hominids that were now commonly called Hobbits in Indonesia. Josh always said that their parents lived five million years in the past and were only happy when they were up to their ankles in mud. The twins knew that they were loved unconditionally, but they also knew that their parents simply didn’t understand them…or much else about modern life.

“Mr. Fleming is taking Perry out to their house in the desert and they’ve asked us if we’d like to go with them for a little break. We said we had to ask you first, of course. Yes, we spoke to Aunt Agnes; she said so long as it was OK with you. Say yes, Mom, please.”

She turned to her brother and crossed her fingers. He crossed his too; they had talked long and hard about what to say to their aunt and their mother before they made the calls, but they weren’t entirely sure what they were going to do if their mother said they couldn’t go.

Sophie uncrossed her fingers and gave her brother a thumbs-up. “Yes, I’ve got time off from the coffee shop. No, we won’t be a bother. Yes, Mom. Yes. Love to you, and tell Dad we love him too.” Sophie listened, then moved the phone away from her mouth. “Dad found a dozen
Pseudo-arctolepis sharpi
in near-perfect condition,” she reported. Josh looked blank. “A very rare Cambrian crustacean,” she explained.

Her brother nodded. “Tell Dad that’s great. We’ll keep in touch,” he called out.

“Love you,” Sophie said, cutting the conversation short, then hung up. “I hate lying to her,” she said immediately.

“I know. But you couldn’t really tell her the truth, now, could you?”

Sophie shrugged. “I guess not.”

Josh turned back to the sink. His laptop was perched precariously on the draining board next to his cell phone. He was using the cell to go online because, shockingly, there was no phone line or Internet connection in the dojo.

Scatty lived above the dojo in a small two-room apartment with a kitchen at one end of the hall and a bedroom with a tiny bathroom at the other. A little balcony connected the two rooms and looked down directly onto the dojo below. The twins were standing in the kitchen while Flamel brought Scatty up to date on the events of the past hour in her bedroom at the other end of the hall.

“What do you think of her?” Josh asked casually, concentrating on his laptop. He’d managed to get online, but the connection speed was crawlingly slow. He called up Altavista and typed in a dozen versions of
Scathach
before he finally got a hit with the correct spelling. “Here she is: twenty-seven thousand hits for Scathach, the shadow or the shadowy one,” he said, then added offhandedly, “I think she’s cool.”

Sophie picked up on the too-casual tone immediately. She smiled broadly and her eyebrows shot up. “Who? Oh, you mean the two-thousand-year-old warrior maid. Don’t you think she might be a little too old for you?”

A wash of color rose from beneath the neck of Josh’s T-shirt, painting his cheeks bright red. “Let me try Google,” he muttered, fingers rattling across the keyboard. “Forty-six thousand hits for Scathach,” he said. “Looks like she’s real too. Let’s see what Wiki has to say about her,” he went on, and then realized that Sophie wasn’t even looking at him. He turned to her and discovered that she was staring fixedly through the window.

There was a rat standing on the rooftop of the building across the alley, staring at them. As they watched, it was joined by a second and then a third.

“They’re here,” Sophie whispered.

Dee concentrated on keeping his lunch down.

Looking through the rat’s eyes was a nauseating experience. Because of their tiny brain, it required a huge effort of will to keep the creature focused…which, in an alleyway filled with rotten food, was no easy task. Dee was momentarily grateful that he had not used the full force of the scrying spell, which would have allowed him to hear, to taste and—this was a terrifying thought—to smell everything the rat encountered.

It was like looking at a badly tuned black-and-white television. The image shifted, pitched and lurched with the rat’s every movement. The rat could go from running horizontally on the ground, to running vertically up a wall, then upside-down across a rope, all within a matter of seconds.

Then the image stabilized.

Directly in front of Dee, outlined in purple-tinged gray and glowing in grayish black, were the two humans he had seen in the bookshop. A boy and a girl—in their midteens, perhaps—and similar enough in appearance for them to be related. A sudden thought struck him hard enough to break his concentration: brother and sister, possibly…or could they be something else? Surely not!

He looked back into the scrying dish and concentrated with his full will, forcing the rat he was controlling to stand absolutely still. Dee focused on the young man and woman, trying to decide if one was older than the other, but the rat’s vision was too clouded and distorted for him to be sure.

But if they
were
the same age…that meant they were twins. That was curious. He looked at them again and then shook his head: they were humans. Dismissing the thought, he unleashed a single command that rippled through every rat within a half-mile radius of the twins’ position. “Destroy them. Destroy them utterly.”

The gathering crows took to the air, cawing raucously, as if applauding.

Josh watched openmouthed as the huge rat leapt from the roof opposite, effortlessly bridging the six-foot space. Its mouth was wide and its teeth were wickedly pointed. He managed a brief “Hey!” and jerked away from the window…just as the rat hit the glass with a furry, wet thump. It slid down to the alley one floor below, where it staggered around in stunned surprise.

Josh grabbed Sophie’s hand, and dragged her out of the kitchen and onto the balcony. “We’ve got a problem,” he shouted. And stopped.

Below them, three huge Golems, trailing flaking dried mud, were pushing their way through the wide-open alley door. And behind them, in a long sinuous line, came the rats.

CHAPTER NINE

T
he three Golems moved stiffly into the corridor, spotted the open door at the far end of the hallway and moved toward it. The finger-length metal darts hissed from the walls and stuck deeply into their hardened mud skin, but didn’t even slow the creatures down.

The half-moon blades close to the floor were a different matter altogether. The blades clicked out of their concealed sheaths in the walls and sliced into the ankles of the clay men. The first creature crashed to the floor, hitting it with the sound of wet mud. The second tottered on one foot before it slowly toppled forward, hit the wall and slid down, leaving a muddy smear in its wake. The semicircular blades click-clacked again, slicing the creatures completely in two, and then the Golems abruptly reverted to their muddy origin. Thick globules of mud spattered everywhere.

The third Golem, the largest of the creatures, stopped. Its black stone eyes moved dully over the remains of its two companions, and then it turned and punched a huge fist directly into the wall, first to the right, then to the left. A whole section of the wall on the left-hand side gave way, revealing the space beyond. The Golem stepped into the dojo and looked around, black eyes still and unmoving.

The rats meanwhile raced toward the open door at the end of the corridor. Most of them survived the scything blades….

In the speeding limousine, Dr. John Dee released his control of the rats, and now concentrated his attention on the surviving Golem. Controlling the artificial creature was much easier. Golems were mindless beings, created of mud mixed with stones or gravel to give their flesh consistency, and brought to life by a simple spell written on a square of parchment and pressed into their mouths. Sorcerers had been building Golems of all shapes and sizes for thousands of years: they were the source of every zombie and walking-dead story ever created. Dee himself had told the story of the greatest of all the Golems, the Red Golem of Prague, to Mary Shelley one cold winter’s evening when she, Lord Byron, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the mysterious Dr. Polidori were visiting his castle in Switzerland in 1816. Less than six months later, Mary created the story of
The Modern Prometheus,
the book that became more commonly known as
Frankenstein.
The monster in her book was just like a Golem: created of spare parts and brought to life by magical science. Golems were impervious to most weapons, though a sudden fall or blow could shatter their mud skin, especially if it was dry and hardening. In a damp climate, their skins rarely dried out and could absorb incredible punishment, but this warm climate made them brittle—which was why they had fallen so easily to the concealed blades. Some sorcerers used glass or mirrors for their eyes, but Dee preferred highly polished black stones. They enabled him to see with almost razor-sharp clarity, albeit in monochrome.

Dee caused the Golem to tilt his head upward. Directly above him, on a narrow balcony overlooking the dojo, were the pale and terrified faces of the teens. Dee smiled and the Golem’s lips mimicked the movement. He’d deal with Flamel first; then he’d take care of the witnesses.

Suddenly, Nicholas Flamel’s head appeared, followed, a moment later, by the distinctive spiky hair of the Warrior Maid, Scathach.

Dee’s smile faded and he could feel his heart sink. Why did it have to be Scathach? He’d had no idea that the red-haired warrior was in this city, or even on this continent, for that matter. Last he’d heard of her, she was singing in an all-girl band in Berlin.

Through the Golem’s eyes, Dee watched both Flamel and Scathach leap over the railing and float down to stand directly in front of the mud man. Scathach spoke directly to Dee—but this particular Golem had no ears and couldn’t hear, so he had no idea what she had just said. A threat probably, a promise certainly.

Flamel drifted away, moving toward the door, which was now dark and heaving with rats, leaving Scatty to face him and the Golem alone.

Maybe she wasn’t as good as she’d once been, he thought desperately, maybe time had dulled her powers.

“We should help,” Josh said.

“And do what?” Sophie asked, without a trace of sarcasm. They were both standing on the balcony, looking down into the dojo. They had watched openmouthed as Flamel and Scatty leaped over the edge and drifted far too slowly to the ground. The red-haired girl faced the huge Golem, while Flamel hurried to the door where the rats were gathering. The vermin seemed reluctant to enter the room.

Without warning, the Golem swung a huge fist, then followed it up with a massive kick.

Josh opened his mouth to shout a warning, but he didn’t get a chance to say anything before Scatty moved. One moment she was standing directly in front of the creature, then she was throwing herself forward, moving under the blows, closing right in on it. Her hand moved, blurringly fast, and she delivered a flat open-handed blow to the point of the Golem’s jaw. There was a liquid squelch, and then its jaw unhinged and its mouth gaped open. In the blackness of its maw, the twins could clearly see a yellow rectangle of paper.

The creature struck out wildly and Scatty danced back out of range. It lashed out a kick, which missed and struck the polished floorboards, shattering them to splinters.

“We’ve got to help!” Sophie said.

“How?” Josh shouted, but his twin had run into the kitchen, desperately looking for a weapon. She emerged a moment later carrying a small microwave oven. “Sophie,” Josh murmured, “what are you going to do with…?”

Sophie heaved the microwave over the edge of the railing. It struck the Golem full in the chest—and stuck, globules of mud spattering everywhere. The Golem stopped, confused and disorientated. Scatty took advantage of its disorientation and moved in again, feet and hands striking blows from all angles, further confusing the creature. Another blow from the Golem came close enough to ruffle Scatty’s spiky red hair, but she caught its arm and used it as leverage to spin the creature to the floor. Floorboards cracked and snapped as it hit them. Then her hand shot out…and almost delicately plucked the paper square from the Golem’s mouth.

Instantly, the Golem returned to its muddy origins, splashing foul, stinking water and dirt across the once-pristine dojo floor. The microwave rattled to the ground.

“I guess no one’s cooking anything in that,” Josh murmured.

Scatty waved the square of paper at the twins. “Every magical creature is kept animated by a spell that is either in or on its body. All you have to do is remove it to break the spell. Remember that.”

Josh glanced quickly at his sister. He knew she was thinking the same thing he was: if they ever came up against a Golem again, there was no way they were getting close enough to stick their hands in its mouth.

Nicholas Flamel approached the rats warily. Underestimating them would be deadly indeed, but while he had no difficulty fighting and destroying magical creatures, which were never properly alive in the first place, he was reluctant to destroy living creatures. Even if they were rats. Perry would have no such compunction, he knew, but he had been an alchemyst for far too long: he was dedicated to preserving life, not destroying it. The rats were under Dee’s control. The poor creatures were probably terrified…though that would not stop them from eating him.

Flamel crouched on the floor, turned his right hand palm up and curled the fingers inward. He blew gently into his hand, and a tiny ball of green mist immediately formed. Then he suddenly turned his hand and plunged it straight into the polished floorboards, his fingers actually penetrating the wood. The tiny ball of green energy splashed across the room like a stain. Then the Alchemyst closed his eyes and his aura flared around his body. Concentrating, he directed his auric energy to flow through his fingers into the floor.

The wood started to glow.

Still watching from the landing, the twins were unsure what Flamel was doing. They could see the faint green glow around his body, rising off his flesh like mist, but they couldn’t work out why the furry mass of rats gathered in the doorway had not burst into the room.

“Maybe there’s some sort of spell keeping them from coming in,” Sophie said, knowing instinctively that her twin was thinking the same thing.

Scatty heard her. She was systematically shredding the yellow square of paper she’d taken from the Golem’s mouth to tiny pieces. “It’s just a simple warding spell,” she called up, “designed to keep bugs and vermin off the floor. I used to come in here every morning and find bug droppings and moths all over the place; it took ages to sweep it clean. The warding spell is keeping the rats at bay…but all it takes is one to break through and the spell will be broken. Then they’ll all come.”

Nicholas Flamel was fully aware that John Dee could probably see him though the eyes of the rats. He picked out the largest, a cat-sized creature that remained unmoving while the rest of the vermin scuttled and heaved about it. With his right hand still buried in the floorboard, Flamel pointed his left hand directly at the rat. The creature twitched and, for a single instant, its eyes blazed with sickly yellow light.

“Dr. John Dee, you have made the biggest mistake of your long life. I will be coming for you,” Flamel promised aloud.

Dee glanced up from his scrying bowl to see that Perenelle Flamel was wide awake and watching him intently. “Ah, Madame, you are just in time to see my creatures overpower your husband. Plus, I’ll finally have an opportunity to deal with that pest Scathach,
and
I’ll have the pages of the book.” Dee didn’t notice that Perenelle’s eyes had widened at the mention of Scathach’s name. “All in all, a good day’s work, I think.” He focused his full attention on the biggest rat and issued two simple commands: “Attack. Kill.”

Dee closed his eyes as the rat uncoiled and launched itself into the room.

The green light flowed out from Flamel’s fingers and ran along the floorboards, outlining the planks in green light. Abruptly, the wooden floor sprouted twigs, branches, leaves and then a tree trunk…then another…and a third. Within a dozen heartbeats a thicket of trees sprouted out of the floor and were visibly climbing toward the ceiling. Some of the trunks were no thicker than a finger, others were wrist thick and one, close to the door, was so wide it almost filled the opening.

The rats turned and scattered, squealing as they raced down the corridor, desperately attempting to leap over the click-clacking blades.

Flamel scrambled back and climbed to his feet, brushing off his hands. “One of the oldest secrets of alchemy,” he announced to the wide-eyed twins and Scatty, “is that every living thing, from the most complex creatures right down to the simplest leaf, carries the seeds of its creation within itself.”

“DNA,” Josh murmured, staring at the forest sprouting and growing behind Flamel.

Sophie looked around the once-spotless dojo. It was now filthy, spattered and splashed with muddy water, the smoothly polished floorboards broken and cracked with the trees growing from them, more foul-smelling mud in the hallway. “Are you saying that alchemists knew about DNA?” she asked. The Alchemyst nodded delightedly. “Exactly. When Watson and Crick announced that they had discovered what they called ‘the secret of life’ in 1953, they were merely rediscovering something alchemists have always known.”

“You’re telling me that you somehow woke the DNA in those floorboards and forced trees to grow,” Josh said, choosing his words carefully. “How?”

Flamel turned to look at the forest that was now taking over the entire dojo. “It’s called magic,” he said delightedly, “and I wasn’t sure I could do it anymore…until Scatty reminded me,” he added.