City of Lost Dreams

Early Praise for
City of Lost Dreams

“A magical mystery tour that picks you up and takes you where you’ve never been before but is exactly where you want to be. Sexy, suspenseful, historical—an absolute page-turner.”

—M. J. Rose, international bestselling author of
Seduction

Praise for
City of Dark Magic

A
New York Times
Bestseller

A
USA Today
“New and Noteworthy” Pick

“This deliciously madcap novel has it all: murder in Prague, time travel, a misanthropic Beethoven, tantric sex, and a dwarf with attitude. I salute you, Magnus Flyte!”

—Conan O’Brien

“A comical, rollicking and sexy thriller.”

—
Huffington Post

“An entertaining mix of magic, mystery, and romance, it’s one of the most original novels released this year.”

—CNN.com

“Never fails to shimmer exotically, erotically, on the page.”

—
Slate

“The most wickedly enchanting novel I’ve ever read and also the funniest. A Champagne magnum of intrigue and wit, this book sparkles from beginning to end.”

—Anne Fortier, bestselling author of
Juliet

“I was sold on newcomer Magnus Flyte’s recent novel when I looked at the clock and realized that I’d been reading for four hours without pause. . . . Smart, sexy, and self-aware.”

—Tor.com

“The riddle of Beethoven’s ‘Immortal Beloved,’ alchemy, and clandestine love fuse in this fast-paced, funny, romantic mystery. . . . An exuberant, surprising gem.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Sometimes you want a book that simply entertains, and
City of Dark Magic
does just that. There’s a bit of everything, and when one scene seems impossible, know that the next will top it. Go with it. It’s a good ride and a great way to escape reality for a bit.”

—Bookreporter.com

“The darkly charming and twisted streets of Prague provide the deliciously dramatic backdrop for this paranormal romp that fires on all cylinders, masquerading by turns as a romance, a time-travel thriller, and a tongue-in-cheek mystery.”

—
Booklist

“A story that abounds in mysterious portents, wild coincidences, violent death, and furtive but lusty sex . . . [this novel] cleverly combines time travel, murder, history, and musical lore.”

—
Publishers Weekly

PENGUIN BOOKS

CITY of LOST DREAMS

After the uproar over the publication of his first novel,
City of Dark Magic
, Magnus Flyte retreated to his dacha in the Urals, where he enjoys exploring underground tributaries of the Ufa, observing the mating habits of the spotted nutcracker, and smelting.

Mr. Flyte is currently at work on a half-hour television comedy about sixteenth-century ethnographer Sigismund von Herberstein, entitled
Ural I Love
.

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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A Penguin Random House Company

First published in Penguin Books 2013

Copyright © 2013 by Christina Lynch and Meg Howrey

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Flyte, Magnus.

City of lost dreams : a novel / Magnus Flyte.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-14-312327-9

ISBN 978-1-101-60996-5 (eBook)

I. Title.

PS3606.L98C58 2013

813'.6—dc23

2013031311

Endpaper Illustration by Rodica Prato

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

History allows us to realize the tragedy of human existence in its entirety. Knowing the truth means exiting space and time. All movement is searching. The essence of art lies in thinking and giving shape to visions. This is what changes the world.

—
RUDOLF LEITNER-GRÜNDBERG

That’s a nice girl, that. But she ought to go careful in Vienna. Everybody ought to go careful in a city like this.

—
GRAHAM GREENE
,
The Third Man

PROLOGUE

E
ven the local tourism board had to admit the church attracted a rather unusual crop of visitors. Some came for the novelty, others out of a hazy respect for their fellow man, and some came for more sinister reasons. The last group often turned up after hours, when the gates were locked, the laminated information cards in six languages neatly replaced in their color-coded folders, and the ticket takers safely home in their beds.

About fifty miles east of Prague, the town of Kutná Hora was best reached by a series of country highways pleasantly dotted with fruit stands and artisans selling a patriotic symbol that had been banned under communism: the garden gnome. And in case the Czech place-names with their tongue-twisting traffic jams of consonants proved difficult to decipher for nervous travelers in rental cars, handmade signs in English announcing
Bone Church
at every intersection provided easy clues for navigation.

Kutná Hora was just another parish in Bohemia until it got the ultimate status bump when a local abbot returned from the Holy Land and sprinkled authentic Golgothan dirt in the abbey’s cemetery. Word got out that being buried in such sacred ground was a shortcut to Heaven. A chapel was constructed on the site, and those who felt death’s cold embrace traveled from far and wide to get last rites and be buried in the cemetery. By the mid-1400s, Kutná Hora was
the
place to die.

It didn’t take long for the gravediggers to be overwhelmed, their real estate being, as is true of tony enclaves everywhere, in limited supply. Graves were dug deep into the hallowed ground, coffins stacked up like shoe boxes in a fetishist’s closet, but still they ran out of room. Soon it was time to put out the No Vacancy sign and hang up their shovels.

But, since people paid good money to be buried at Kutná Hora and no one in the hardscrabble area wanted to lose a revenue stream, a solution was quickly found. Older bodies, those from centuries past whose families were no longer around to protest, were exhumed. Treated with the utmost respect, of course, the skeletons were rehoused downstairs in a specially dug crypt, dubbed the Sedlec Ossuary.

As one might expect, eventually the crypt, too, filled up, and due to some annoying geological restrictions it wasn’t safe to tunnel farther. And still people showed up and died. The piles of bones became quite large and prone to toppling over. For a holy place, it became something of an unholy mess.

But eventually the vogue of being buried at Kutná Hora passed. Though the bones remained, they were out of sight and out of mind, and Kutná Hora was once again just a nice little place to stop and have a beer and a plate of
palachinki
on the way to market.

In the late nineteenth century a local woodsman was hired to be the caretaker of the church. The woodsman pondered the rather spare main rooms of his beloved little house of God. He had heard of cathedrals in far-off cities bedecked with statues and cornices and sculpted arabesques. It saddened him that his parish of simple farmers and miners wouldn’t spring for a little sprucing up, a little face-lift for their place of worship. And the woodsman was horrified by the chaos he found in the basement. So he immediately began to neaten and tidy what he found there. Like the trees he hewed and chopped into manageable lengths, skeletons were untangled and bones were separated by size and shape. Soon there were pyramids of skulls, towers of tibias, and hives of hips. There was symmetry, there was order, and there was beauty. It was a shame, really, that the fruits of his slightly OCD labor were hidden in the basement, while the austere church upstairs was such a poor reflection of the glory of God in the highest.

The woodsman got to work. He created a chandelier composed of every single bone in the human body. He strung phalanges into strings and then threaded them with popcorn garlands of skulls that gracefully arched from nave to apse. He fanned out scapulae like decks of cards to make the bases of monstrous monstrances topped with more skulls. Skulls and crossbones snaked up from floor to ceiling, delineating archways and barrel vaults.

Perhaps the crowning achievement was the holy cross itself, crafted out of skulls and leg bones, with slender arm bones representing the gentle rays of celestial glory. Beneath it the woodsman signed his name. In bones, naturally.

At first the inhabitants, though awestruck by his initiative and undeniable creativity, were wary of having somehow offended God or their fellow man. These were, they reminded each other,
actual
bones of actual
people
. Long dead, yes, but still children of the same Lord and due a certain respect. And yet . . . were not the woodsman’s displays a form of veneration? Had he not given forebears and strangers alike a sort of eternal, beautiful life for their remains, while their souls safely resided with the angels in Heaven?

Also, people came from far and wide and paid good money to see the thing.

And so the church of bones became one of the Czech nation’s most visited destinations.

And if, now and then, a car arrived with a rather serious, scholarly woman at the wheel, and a new skull, or set of ribs, or pair of tibias were discreetly, after hours, added to the neatly arranged piles, who noticed?

No one.