City of Dark Magic (33 page)

FORTY-NINE

S
arah’s father had kept an old radio in the garage. He had taught her to spin the dial slowly to find the different radio stations. It was perhaps the first time that her keen aural perception had been noted. She had always been able to hear the music beyond the white fuzz. Tuning. That’s what she was doing. Tuning.

She could still see Max and Nico quite clearly. She could hear them asking her if she was okay. It was hard to answer them at first, because forming the words seemed to activate some part of her brain that felt numb, or sleepy, but she managed to say, “I’m okay.” She wasn’t entirely sure what language she was speaking. Words came more quickly if she didn’t worry about it. “I want to go outside,” she said.

It was raining when she stood in the courtyard of Nelahozeves, but she wasn’t getting wet, which was how she knew it was raining then, not now. Not now. Earlier. Raining. She heard the sound of horse’s feet upon gravel, and a carriage pulled up in front of her. No. Not the right one. Another time. Yes. She waited, trying to block out the strains of music coming at her from all sides, listening, reaching. New Year’s Eve 1806, she repeated to herself.

She had lied to Max and Nico. She would look for the Fleece. But first, she wanted to see Beethoven one last time. She wanted to know why Sherbatsky had left her the note marked 12/31/06. What had he seen? What did he want her to see? Whatever it was, it was here at Nela.

So she was standing outside, where she would see Beethoven come into the castle.

And then there he was, stocky form encased in a leather coat, mud-splattered knee breeches, waistcoat, disheveled hair, climbing out of a carriage in front of her. He was so small! She took a deep breath, memorizing his scent, and followed him inside.

“What do you see?” asked Max. His voice was far away.

“Nothing yet,” said Sarah. “Or rather lots, but nothing about the Fleece.”

Back inside Nela, it was more difficult. The castle was crowded, and she lost the scent.

Then somewhere, from another century, she heard the word “Fleece.” It was hazy, whispered, distant. She was trying to find it when she heard the notes of a pianoforte. The Fleece was gone. She moved toward the music.

A room, cold, with a fire flickering in the fireplace, and candles fighting off the December gloom. Luigi, seated at a small instrument. The 7th Prince Lobkowicz stretched out in a low armchair, two whippets at his feet. In his hands he held a small lute.

Beethoven stopped playing and said something to the prince in German. Sarah was startled at the loudness of his voice. It took her a moment to accustom her ear to the tenor and the German they were speaking.

“We are trying to keep the theater open, Luigi,” said Prince Lobkowicz. “You act as if we are stealing something from you.”

“It is absurd that I should have to beg,” said Beethoven. “I have been waiting now for three months to hear back from that pig-faced imbecile and you princely rabble.”

“You wouldn’t hear a thing, would you?” shouted the prince. “You’re deaf.”

Luigi laughed. “If you were a horse, you would have been shot at birth,” he hollered back.

This seemed to amuse the two men greatly.

“Have a drink, it’s a new year tomorrow,” said the prince, setting aside the lute and moving to a decanter and glasses upon a marble table. “Maybe something good will happen this yÀs aear.”

Nico and Max were trying to talk to her, but she tuned them out. Just a few more minutes, then she would look for the Fleece.

Sarah did the math. In 1807 Beethoven had petitioned for an annual fixed income from the Imperial Royal Court Theater, and threatened to leave Vienna if he didn’t get it. In 1808 he would not get it, but would stay in Vienna, finishing the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, as well as the Mass in C Major and Piano Concerto in G, to name just a few. A superhuman outpouring of brilliance without equal. His personal life in 1808 would be the usual train wreck. Antonie Brentano was still to come.

“Sarah?” said Max. “You just said the word ‘Beethoven.’”

With great effort, Sarah turned her head to look at Max.

“Yes,” she said. “You look just like him,” she said. “The 7th.”

“Sarah, no,” said Max. “You have to focus. We don’t have much time.”

Beethoven played a few notes, reached for a scrap of paper on top of the pianoforte, made a notation.

“Shall we?” the prince asked, coming forward with a small pillbox in his hands. Sarah leaned in to look. Inside were what looked like two communion wafers.

“What will you do?” asked Ludwig. “Will you go hunting now, your nose as keen as your dogs? Will you go looking for your lost
Fleece
with your sharp eyes?”

Max and Nico were fighting with each other about how to focus her.

“They’re talking about the Fleece,” said Sarah. “Shut up.”

“Stop bellowing,” said the prince. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No? Perhaps not,” said Luigi. “But I think you should stop looking.”

“I will never stop looking,” said the prince.

“No,” said Beethoven, more softly now. “I suppose you will not. Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you.”

“I cannot hear you, my friend. I am reading your lips. Today, I hear nothing.”

Mutely, the 7th held out the pillbox and the two men swallowed the wafers.

Ludwig went back to the pianoforte. Prince Lobkowicz poured himself a glass of claret and, calling to his dogs, left the room.

Sarah and Beethoven were alone together. She could hear Max and now Nico, faintly calling to her, but she ignored them, moving toward the piano.

Ludwig began playing softly, the Piano Trio in D.
He will finish this next year,
she thought, as Beethoven began to hum the part for cello.

Sarah swallowed and hummed the violin for him.
Largo assai ed espressivo.
Not in Beethoven’s time, but later, this would come to be known as the “Ghost” trio. Sarah reached out a hand to place it on Ludwig’s shoulder. Her hand did not move through his body though, as she expected. Indeed she felt cloth beneath her fingers, and, under that, muscle and bone. She snatcheÀig’sd her hand back. No, she had imagined it. She hadn’t actual
ly touched him, had she? Her hand felt like it was in flames.

Beethoven turned and looked straight at her.

“Wie viel Zeit habe ich?”
he whispered.
How much time do I have?

Sarah shook her head. Somewhere she could feel Max’s hands on her wrists. She could hear Max’s voice, coaxing her back into some form of the twenty-first century.

“Wie viel Zeit habe ich?”
Beethoven shouted. He pointed to his ears.
“Wird es noch schlimmer werden?”
Will it get worse?
There were tears in his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” Sarah shouted. “The music will get better! You are immortal!”

“Play for her,” said a voice beside her. “Luigi, play for her.”

Sherbatsky. He was standing right beside her, faintly outlined, snapping with energy.

And now it all made sense. Sherbatsky had known she would come to Prague, he had known she would find the note with this date. He had known because he had visited this time and he had
seen
her here. Had he also known that he was going to die? Sarah felt tears come to her eyes. Sherbatsky, too, she saw, was weeping. But with joy, with awe and wonder.

And Beethoven played.

FIFTY

S
arah felt something cool against her forehead. A cloth? Ice? She brushed it away impatiently. When she straightened, the scene in the room had shifted somehow, and Beethoven and Sherbatsky were gone. How long had she stood there listening? Hours? A few seconds? There was something she was supposed to be looking for. What was it?

Sarah flicked away Max’s hands. She could hear music. She wanted to get back to Ludwig. She squinted, brushing aside mothlike ghosts battering at her peripheral vision. She felt a hand tugging hers back, clamped tight across her wrist.

“The Fleece,” said Nico. “Focus, Sarah. Find the Golden Fleece.”

Sarah closed her eyes, trying to breathe into it, but suddenly she felt as if she were falling, not just down but sideways, diagonally, up, back. She was being shoved and jerked through time. Not Alice falling down a hole. Alice in the Hadron collider. Sarah opened her eyes.

A young woman was staring straight at her. Someone she knew she should recognize. She was so familiar, but somehow different. . . . The eyes were filled with such naked greed and desire, such venomous passion that Sarah took a step backward. But the woman wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at the object she held in her hands. A golden key.

“And where is the door that this unlocks?” the woman was asking. Her voice, despite the intensity of her eyes, sounded curiously light and casual, but her fingers worked the ridges of the key greedily. Sarah caught the blurred image of a man beyond the woman’s shoulder. There was no longer a piano in the room. It was almost bare: a few pieces of furniture shrouded in sheets, packing crates, plastic sheeting. ƀuch vePlastic. So it must be nearly the present then. Yes, the clothes and hairstyle of the woman were contemporary, the seventies maybe.

“I cannot say,” said a low voice, thickly accented. Russian. “Exactly. Maybe I find out. Maybe we search together.”

“That would be fun,” the woman purred softly, while her eyes blazed. The intensity of the woman made her energy surreally vivid.

“Superstition,” the man’s voice grumbled. “Religious mania and fantasy. You should forget I told you this silly fairy tale.”

The woman began unbuttoning her blouse. Her eyes narrowed.

“I don’t believe you,” she murmured. “I think you know more secrets. Why don’t you whisper them in my ear?”

Suddenly the man’s face loomed up beside hers. It was the man Sarah had seen in the hidden library, the one who had left the briefcase and taken the amulet. Yuri Bespalov. He pressed his lips against the woman’s ear.

“Charlotte, Charlotte,” he murmured. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Holy shit,” Sarah said, so loudly that she clamped a hand over her mouth. But neither one of the couple seemed to hear her. The couple. Charlotte Yates and Yuri Bespalov.

“It all sounds so romantic.” Charlotte shrugged off her blouse and offered her neck to Yuri’s mouth. “The Order of the Golden Fleece. A special gold key that unlocks the Door That Must Never Be Opened. What’s behind the door, I wonder? The Fleece itself? If it’s as powerful as you say—”

Yuri laughed. “There is no such thing,” he scoffed. “We think maybe treasure of some kind. But is just a key, maybe. Just old key and old story.”

“But the Order has been looking for
something
all this time.” Charlotte laced her fingers in Bespalov’s hair. “Something big. You know how I hate mysteries.” Charlotte guided the Russian down into her cleavage.

“You know what I am going to do?” Charlotte smiled, stepping back and unzipping her skirt. Sarah scurried out of the way as the future senator crossed to a chair and sank into it, caressing her own legs as she pulled off her skirt and kicked it playfully into the air like a chorus girl. She brought her knees together and smiled up at Yuri, who sank with a groan to his knees in front of her.

“I’m going to keep this key,” purred Charlotte, leaning forward and unzipping the Russian’s pants. “Until I know exactly what it opens.” She leaned back in the chair and slid her knees apart. But Sarah saw that Yuri deliberately took the golden key out of Charlotte’s hands, even as he buried his face between her legs. And she saw the look of lust and rage on the woman’s face.

“Sarah!” Max shouted.

Sarah blinked and yes, there was Max, gripping her wrists. And behind him, Nicolas Pertusato, wearing an incongruously large pair of spectacles and clutching Tycho’s journal.

“Charlotte Yates,” Sarah spluttered. “Max, Charlotte Yates knows about the Golden Fleece.”

“Knows what?” Max was pressing something cool against her forehead. “You saw her? In the past, I mean? She wˀth="2as here?”

Sarah nodded. She found if she focused on discreet physical sensations—the feel of Max’s hands, the callus of his thumb, the slight ache in her left calf muscle, the trickle of cold water on her forehead, a mote of dust in her eye—that
she could stay more or less in the present. It was a monumental effort, though, and not one she was sure she could sustain.

“The key that unlocks the Door. The Door that must not be opened. Does that make sense? It’s connected to the Fleece. The Fleece is behind the Door, I think.”

“Nico?” Max snapped. “What is she talking about?”

“Yes, the key,” the little man said. “Tycho made it for the emperor. Tell Sarah to find Tycho. I think the key might lead us to the location of the Fleece.”

“The key,” mumbled Sarah, trying to stay upright. She was slipping through time again. There was something on the floor. Blood? Someone was crying, a child. When? Where?

“Take me to Prague,” said Sarah. “Hurry!”

“I will get the car,” said Nicolas. “Max, keep her calm. Physical stimulation seems to work best.”

Max propped her up against a wall and pulled one of her legs up and around his waist. With his other hand he reached under her shirt.

“Well,” she heard the little man say, “that seems to be . . . helpful. Although crude in execution. Max, there are a number of books I could lend you that would—”

“Get the car!” Max shouted.