City of Dark Magic (32 page)

FORTY-SEVEN

“H
ave you seen my fleece?”

The question made Sarah jump slightly, which wasn’t a good thing, since she had an early eighteenth-century violin by Johann Georg Helmer in her hands.

After standing outside Faust House for an hour, coming up with and then rejecting an increasingly ridiculous set of break-in plans, Max had taken her back to the palace and then left in search of Nico or any trace of the missing treasure.

“I had it at breakfast,” Suzi explained, coming forward into the exhibition room. “Now that we’ve got temperature control, my ass is freezing. I didn’t leave it in here, did I?”

Sarah shook her head.

“Very tasteful,” Suzi commented, pointing to the subtle light blue paint that Sarah had chosen for the walls of the Music Room.

“Thanks.” Sarah hung the violin carefully on a wall bracket and stepped back to scrutinize the effect.

“What time is it?” Sarah asked. “Noon already?”

“Girl, it’s four in the afternoon,” Suzi drawled. “You’ve been in the zone.”

The palace had been uncharacteristically quiet all morning. At breakfast, the assembled scholars had greeted one another with hangover-inflected monosyllables. With a faint air of contrition, they had all grabbed coffee, fruit, rolls, and then hustled off to their rooms. Sarah had, in fact, been priding herself that she had spent the morning carefully conducting her work and
not
obsessing over every detail of the past forty-eight hours.

The marchesa had jetted back to Italy for a couture fitting, or so she had told Max.
Work
, Sarah had told herself, before falling asleep.
Focus on your work.

Although truthfully, while she methodically cataloged, arranged, and organized, a second narrative had been running underneath her working thoughts as busily as the CNN news ticker.

Her primary concern was not the whereabouts of the Golden Fleece, nor the relative trustworthiness of Nicolas Pertusato. Neither was she, for the moment anyway, fretting over the arrival of Charlotte Yates or what new devious machinations Marchesa Elisa might be concocting. These things would be enough to thoroughly freak a person out for a lifetime, but Sarah wasn’t thinking about them.

Sarah was thinking about the letters from Beethoven she had found in the violin. She was thinking about the Immortal Beloved.

It would change the face of musical scholarship, certainly, if it were revealed that the Immortal Beloved was
not
Antonie Brentano nor any other woman, but a nickname for a
drug
that Ludwig and his patron, the eccentric Joseph Franz Maximilian, had been experimenting with. A drug that allowed a composer with rapidly degenerating hearing to move around in time so that he might hear his own music. A drug that was, in some way, derived or extracted from an alchemical secret that held unprecedented power.

Okay, fuck musical scholarship. These revelations would change . . . well, everything.

Was that a good thing?

Sarah was identifying very strongly with Beethoven today. Luigi had also been pulled into the path of alchemy by friendship with a Lobkowicz. Sarah looked around the room, which was slowly coming together to be recognizable as a
museum
room. It was elegant, it was serene, it was appropriate, but Sarah couldn’t help feeling that the display cases diminished the pulsing glory of what they contained. Tourists would pass these objects, perhaps lean in and read the explanatory notes, be guided by the inevitable audio recordings. But would they get a sense of the life they contained? These things were real, they were alive. They had been held, caressed, played by actual people. They had been tossed over shoulders, perhaps struck with impatience or irritation by their performers. From these fragile strings, soon to be protected under glass, had come heart-stopping music, passion, pain, envy, longing.

Sarah picked up a letter from LVB—an acknowledgment of the stipend he received from the Lobkowicz family, dated June 30, 1821. Even after the death of Beethoven’s friend and champion in 1816, the stipend had continued to be paid by the 7th prince’s son. There was no way this document could convey what she knew about the relationship between Beethoven and his patron. Important musicologists, composers, musicians of note would travel to look at these things. They would be given special access. A pair of white gloves so they could handle the papers. A photographer would take their picture, perhaps with Max standing by smiling. But they wouldn’t know . . .

“Girl,” Shuziko drawled. “You need a break, honey. You look fried. Come to the gun show.”

Sarah let herself be led. The horrible old flowered wallpaper had been stripped away, and now the armory rooms were fiery red, and Suzi had arranged the weapons with a dramatic flair. A huge pinwheel of rifles decorated one wall.

“Like a gun flower,” said Suzi proudly. “A goddammed gun daisy!”

A suit of armor stood in the middle of one room, surrounded by a gate of upright guns and flags. There were portraits of hunting Lobkowiczes on the walls. Suzi led Sarah around her domain, pointing out interesting features to Sarah.

“These aristocrats—” She shook her head. “Hunting was like an art for them. That’s what I was trying to convey. It was political, it was social, it was theatrical. It was in their blood. They knew that power was beautiful. They had respect for power. That’s why I wanted something sumptuous and sexy. Power is an aphrodisiac.”

“I think you’ve reallpower. Thy captured it,” Sarah commented, looking around. “It’s like if Ted Nugent had a
Masterpiece Theatre
porn fantasy.”

“Awesome,” said Shuziko. “That’s kind of what I was going for. Class with ass.”

•   •   •

T
he two wandered into other rooms. Moses Kaufmann was working with two local Czech researchers at arranging a sort of all-purpose Decorative Arts collection. Moses chatted with Suzi while Sarah leaned over cabinets filled with jewelry boxes, caskets, miniature flasks, tankards, shagreen notebooks, bells, locks, keys, model figurines of animals, reliquaries. It was baffling to think that although these things were being housed in this newly created museum, they were all essentially personal property. If Max wanted to, he could probably shut the doors and spend all day playing with his things by himself. Pour Diet Coke in Meissen teacups. Pluck out “Smoke on the Water” on an eighteenth-century viola.

“Nicolas brought me this from Nelahozeves,” said Moses, pointing to a large cabinet in the corner. “Lovely. Augsburg, late seventeenth century. It’s a traveling medicine and toilet chest. See this copper panel? It depicts an apothecary’s shop.”

“Nicolas?” Sarah asked, trying not to sound too eager. “When? Is he around? I needed to ask him something.”

“Haven’t seen him in a few days,” Moses said absently, lost in admiration of the chest. “But I think he called Daphne earlier.”

As she dashed through Fiona’s room, shining with the immense collection of Delft china, Fiona herself, clad in a spotless apron and bent over a cabinet, called out, “Is there a glare? The Golden Fleece is terribly tricky to light properly.”

Sarah stopped in her tracks, looked over the plates, jars, and flasks. “The 1556 dinner service,” Fiona said, in her high, fluting voice. “Commissioned to celebrate Polyxena’s father being awarded the Order of the Golden Fleece.” They were emblazoned with Polyxena’s family’s crest: a black bull, his nose pierced with a golden ring, and a badly painted yellow lamb tied to, or suspended from, some heraldic trim, almost like a pendant on a necklace.

Sarah made her excuses and hurried into the portrait rooms, where she found Daphne in front of a large oil painting.

“De frame is very correct,” Daphne said, in her usual crisp and humorless way. “Do you not agree?”

Sarah looked up at the portrait of handsome Ladislav, brother of the 1st Prince Lobkowicz, in his nifty white-and-gold outfit, with the large key tucked into his pants. She remembered that Daphne had told them that Ladislav had plotted against Rudolf II, and had been sent into exile. “A traitor,” Daphne had called him. And yet the family had kept his portrait.

“It looks great,” said Sarah. “Hey, have you heard from Nicolas?”

“Miles,” said Daphne, as Miles came in, “I vould like to display that key Moses found, here vith the portrait.”

Sarah remembered how Nico had been fixated on the key when Moses first produced it. “What does it open?” she asked.

“No one knows,
said Miles. “It’s very mysterious, because Rudolf made a big deal out of it. I mean, a key in a box was their whole wedding present from the emperor. Little bit like getting a car key for graduation, no? You kind of expect there to be a car outside. But in this case, where’s the car?”

Sarah’s phone beeped. It was a text from Max.
Meet me outside. Now.
“I need your sign-off on the final catalog copy,” said Miles to Sarah.

“Absolutely,” said Sarah. “But you know I was hoping to get over to the library at some point today. To find some household receipts there from the dates that concern Beethoven. I thought it might be nice to have a few more things to round out the general picture of the patronage of the 7th to Ludwig. Fees to the musicians that were hired for the private performances. That kind of thing.”

“Okay, but by tomorrow at the latest.”

Sarah came bounding out of the palace to find Max, resplendent in a perfectly pressed Brooks Brothers suit and gray fedora, revving his red 1930 Alfa convertible. Moritz sat in the back, lacking only a pair of goggles to complete the picture.

“You know where Nico is?” asked Sarah, jumping in.

“Someone at Nela just ordered a pizza with my credit card,” said Max as the little car sailed through the castle gate.

FORTY-EIGHT

“F
riends don’t let friends do drugs,” said Max as they strode into the Knight’s Hall. “Not by themselves, anyway.”

They hadn’t needed Moritz’s help to follow the trail of pizza boxes up the stairs to the second floor of Nelahozeves Castle. It seemed the Knight’s Hall had become Nico’s improvised laboratory. He was cooking something over a Bunsen burner placed in the enormous stone Renaissance fireplace. In front of this was a modern foldout table (horribly incongruous with the larger-than-life frescoes in delicate tints on the walls) covered in vials, boxes, and scribbled-on pieces of paper.

“Hej god dag,”
said Nico in what sounded like Danish, barely glancing up at them. “I think there are a couple of slices of pepperoni left. But the Czechs really don’t do a great pizza.”

Sarah grabbed the little man by his shirt and lifted him off the ground. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“Don’t give me that. Is it in Faust House or not?”

Nico smiled in an aggrieved way. “Your tone—why, you didn’t suspect that I would— Sarah. Really.” Nico sounded terribly disappointed, and Sarah felt ashamed for half a second. Then, less so.

“You disappeared. And so did everything else. What was I supposed to think?”

Max stepped forward and Nico gave him a courtly bow.

“It is all safe and sound in Faust House. Where Marchesa Elisa will not think to prowl and where the conditions are . . . sympathetic.” He brushed himself off and turned ba">

“We?”

“Tycho called it ‘Westonia,’ after Edward Kelley’s stepdaughter, Elizabeth Weston. I find that very appropriate, Miss Sarah Weston. I don’t know if I’ve got the formula correct. There may be . . . impurities.”

Sarah could already feel her heart pounding in anticipation.

“Remember, it is not really about moving through time,” Nicolas instructed her. “It is about
perception
. And about releasing the notion of linear time, which turns out to be a very difficult task for most people. Impossible, really. Like contemplating infinity. You really need to be on drugs to do it. LSD works fairly well. Psychotropic mushrooms. Which are child’s play to what we have here.”

“What
do
we have here, Nico?” Max sounded concerned.

“The master’s journal is a palimpsest,” the little man explained. “There are markings that have been erased and written over. It’s difficult for me to know exactly what does what. I did not often assist in the laboratory, although I collected many of the materials.”

“You mean stole.” Max arched an eyebrow. “I bet you did.”

“And toward the end,” Nicolas continued smoothly, “the master became very secretive. Dee left Prague, he was frightened of what was happening. Kelley, in his foolishness, tried to warn the emperor against Tycho and nearly lost his life for it, too.”

“But this Westonia,” Sarah insisted, struggling with the odd fact of sharing her name not just with a long-dead poet, but also . . . “This is really the drug?”

“Yes, I believe it is. Unfortunately, making just the small amount I did completely exhausted our supply of several key ingredients. I have used up the last measure of golem’s dust, for instance. Which is not an easy thing to replace.”

Sarah watched him work, the reality sinking in that the person she was looking at was over four hundred years old. Nico appeared to be in his forties, with a slight salt-and-pepper effect in his hair. What must it be like, to be alive for so long, to have seen so much?

The little man picked up the iron tongs and reached into the pan over the Bunsen burner, extracting a small square, about the size of a sugar cube. He placed it on a tiny plate.

“Is that it?” Sarah sniffed. Musky, resinous. Amber. Her body began trembling.
God,
she thought,
I’m like an addict
.

“This is it,” Nico agreed. “But it’s only enough for one person.”

Sarah looked at Max.

“If it’s not safe, then it should be me,” he said.

“Your life is more valuable,” she said. “You have a lot of stuff to look after. I don’t even have a cat.”

“Your lives are equally valuable, and equally insignificant,” Nicolas interjected, fussily. “This is merely a matter of maximizing our potential. Sarah is particularln Pro">“y suited for the drug, and I believe it was Professor Sherbatsky’s wish that she follow in his footsteps.”

Max shot the little man a dark look.

“Oh, you know what I mean.” Nico stamped his small foot. “Sarah, I believe you are better at navigating on the drug than Max, and we might only have this one chance until I am able to locate a corrupt rabbi in Josefov who can get his hands on some more
pulvis golem
and I manage to track down sixteenth-century elk bones, etcetera. You can’t just order these things on Amazon, children. And yes, to be frank, Sarah, if
you
die your death will be much easier to clean up than Max’s, so there you have it.”

“What we need to discuss next,” Max said, “is focus. The Golden Fleece.”

“I haven’t heard it spoken of since Tycho’s time,” said Nico.

“If we can find it, then we don’t have to worry about Tycho’s formulas. If we can find that Fleece . . .”

“We’ll know everything,” said Sarah. “But it’s like a needle in a haystack. We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

“You’ll feel it when you’re close,” said Nico. “The energy of it. For the few moments I carried the bag it was in . . .” He shook his head, still shaken by the memory
, four centuries later. “Think of what you’ll experience today as an enormous orchestra score,” Nico continued. “You are listening in for one instrument among thousands. Well, tens of millions really.”

“Golden Fleece,” Max said. “That’s the instrument we’re looking for. We’ll start here, and then if nothing turns up, and you’re . . . okay . . . we’ll head back to Prague Castle.”

“Okay,” Sarah said.

“There isn’t much time,” said Max. “So you can’t let yourself get distracted. You’re only looking for the Fleece.”

Sarah nodded.

“It will not have a pleasant taste.” The little man indicated the sugar cube. “I could add a little vanilla extract maybe.”

Sarah picked up the cube.

“If I die, look after Pols,” she said to Max. “And give her my backpack.”

Pollina should have the Immortal Beloved letters. She should know that Ludwig van Beethoven had heard her play and had been moved.

“I will,” said Max. “You’re not going to die.”

“A toast to Brahe,” Sarah said, and swallowed the drug.