The Alchemyst (4 page)

“We fled to Ireland, thinking he would never find us on that island at the edge of Europe. But he pursued us. He had managed to master the control of Wights then, and brought two over with him: the Disease Wight and the Hunger Wight, no doubt intending to set them on our trail. At some point he lost control of the creatures. Hunger and disease ravaged that poor land: a million people died in Ireland’s Great Famine in the 1840s.” Nicholas Flamel’s face hardened into a mask. “I doubt if Dee even paused to think about it. He always had nothing but contempt for humankind.”

Sophie glanced at her brother again. She could tell by the expression on his face that he was concentrating hard, trying to keep up with the deluge of information. She knew he would want to go online and check out some of the details. “But he never caught you,” she said to Flamel.

“Not until today.” He shrugged and smiled sadly. “It was inevitable, I suppose. Throughout the twentieth century, he kept getting closer. He was becoming more powerful, his organization was melding ancient magic and modern technology. Perry and I hid out in Newfoundland for a long time until he loosed Dire Wolves on us, and then we drifted from city to city, starting on the East Coast in New York in 1901 and gradually moving westward. I suppose it was only a matter of time before he caught up with us,” he added. “Cameras, videos, phones and the Internet make it so much harder to remain hidden nowadays.”

“This book…this Codex he was looking for…,” Josh began.

“The Book of Abraham the Mage,” Flamel clarified.

“What’s so special about it?”

Nicholas Flamel stopped in the middle of the sidewalk so suddenly that the twins walked right past him. They turned and looked back. The rather ordinary-looking man spread his arms wide, as if he were about to take a bow. “Look at me. Look at me! I am older than America.
That
is what is so special about the book.” Flamel lowered his voice and continued urgently. “But you know something—the secret of life eternal is probably the
least
of the secrets in the Codex.”

Sophie found herself slipping her hand into her brother’s. He squeezed lightly and she knew, without his saying a word, that he was as frightened as she was.

“With the Codex, Dee can set about changing the world.”

“Changing it?” Sophie’s voice was a raw whisper, and abruptly, the May air felt chilly.

“Changing it how?” Josh demanded.

“Remaking it,” Flamel said softly. “Dee and the Dark Elders he serves will remake this world as it was in the unimaginably ancient past. And the only place for humans in it will be as slaves. Or food.”

CHAPTER SIX

A
lthough there were other ways he could have used to communicate, Dr. John Dee preferred this century’s method of choice: the cell phone. Settling back into the cool leather interior of the limousine, he flipped open the phone, pointed it to where Perenelle Flamel was slumped unconscious between two dripping Golems and took a quick picture.

Madame Perenelle Flamel. His prisoner. Now,
that
was certainly something for the photo album.

Dee keyed in a number and hit Send, then he tilted his head, looking at the graceful woman across from him. Capturing Perenelle had been an extraordinary stroke of good fortune, but he knew he’d only managed it because she’d used up so much energy destroying his Golem. He stroked his small triangular beard. He was going to have to make more Golems soon. He looked at the two opposite: in the brief time they had been outside in the early-afternoon sun, they had started to crack and melt. The big one on Perenelle’s left was dripping black river mud across the leather seat.

Perhaps he would choose something other than Golems next time. The brutish creatures worked fine in damper climates, but were especially unsuited to a West Coast summer. He wondered if he still had the recipe to create a ghoul.

It was Perenelle who presented him with a problem, however—a serious problem: he simply wasn’t sure how powerful she was.

Dee had always been rather in awe of the tall, elegant Frenchwoman. When he’d first apprenticed himself to Nicholas Flamel, the Alchemyst, he’d made the mistake of underestimating her. He’d quickly found that Perenelle Flamel was at least as powerful as her husband—in fact, there were some areas in which she was even more powerful. Those traits that made Flamel such a brilliant alchemyst—his attention to detail, his knowledge of ancient languages, his infinite patience—made him a poor sorcerer and a terrible necromancer. He simply lacked the imaginative spark of pure visualization that was needed for that work. Perenelle, on the other hand, was one of the most powerful sorceresses he had ever encountered.

Dee pulled off one of his gray leather gloves and dropped it onto the seat beside him. Leaning toward Perenelle, he dipped his finger in the puddle of mud dripping from one of the Golems and traced a curling symbol on the back of the woman’s left hand. Then he painted a mirror image of the symbol on her right hand. He dipped his hand in the sticky black mud again and was inscribing three wavy lines on her forehead when she suddenly opened her bright green eyes. Dee abruptly sat back in his seat.

“Madame Perenelle, I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to see you again.”

Perry opened her mouth to speak, but no words would form. She tried to move, but not only were the Golems gripping her arms tightly, her muscles refused to obey.

“Ah, you must excuse me, but I’ve taken the liberty of placing you under a warding spell. A simple spell, but it will suffice until I can organize something more permanent.” Dee smiled, but there was nothing humorous in his expression. His cell phone trilled, playing the theme from
The X-Files,
and he flipped it open. “Excuse me,” he said to Perenelle.

“You got the photo?” Dee asked. “Yes, I thought that would amuse you: the legendary Perenelle Flamel in our hands. Oh, I’m quite sure Nicholas will come after her. And we’ll be ready. This time he will not escape.”

Perenelle could clearly hear the cackle of laughter on the other end.

“Yes, of course.” Dee reached into an inside pocket and took out the copper-bound book. “We have the Codex. Finally.” He began to turn the thick rough-edged pages as he spoke. His voice fell, and it was unclear whether he was talking to the caller or to himself. “Ten thousand years of arcane knowledge in one place…”

Then his voice trailed away. The phone dropped from his hand and bounced across the floor of the car.

At the back of the book, two pages were missing, roughly torn out.

Dee closed his eyes and then licked his lips with a quick flicking movement of his tiny tongue. “The boy,” he rasped, “the boy, when I pulled it from his hand.” He opened his eyes and began to scan the preceding pages carefully. “Maybe they’re not important…,” he murmured, lips moving as he followed the shifting, moving words. He concentrated on the bright illuminated letters at the top of every page, which gave a clue to what followed. Then he stopped abruptly, clutching the book in trembling fingers. When he raised his head, his eyes were blazing. “I’m missing the Final Summoning!” he howled. Yellow sparks danced around his head, and the rear window behind him bloomed a spiderweb of white cracks. Tendrils of yellow-white power dripped from his teeth like saliva. “Go back!” he roared to the driver. “Go back now. No, stop, cancel that order. Flamel’s no fool. They’ll be long gone.” He snatched the phone off the floor and, avoiding Perenelle’s eyes, took a moment to compose himself. He drew in a deep shuddering breath and visibly calmed himself, then dialed. “We have a slight problem,” he said crisply into the phone, voice calm and unemotional. “We seem to be missing a couple of pages from the back of the book. Nothing important, I’m sure. Perhaps you would do me a courtesy,” he said very casually. “You might convey to the Morrigan that I am in need of her services.”

Dee noticed that Perenelle’s eyes had widened in shock at the mention of the name. He grinned in delight. “Tell her I need her special talents and particular skills.” Then he snapped the phone shut and looked over at Perenelle Flamel. “It would have been so much easier if they had just given me the Codex. Now the Morrigan is coming. And you know what that means.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
ophie spotted the rat first.

The twins had grown up in New York and had spent most of their summers in California, so encountering a rat was nothing new. Living in San Francisco, a port city, one quickly got used to seeing the creatures, especially early in the morning and late at night, when they came out of the shadows and sewers. Sophie wasn’t especially frightened of them, though like everyone else she had heard the horror stories, urban legends and FOAF—friend of a friend—stories about the scavengers. She knew they were mostly harmless unless cornered; she thought she remembered reading somewhere that they could jump to great heights. She’d also read an article in the
New York Times
Sunday magazine that said that there were as many rats in the United States as there were people.

But this rat was different.

Sleek and black, rather than the usual filthy brown, it crouched, unmoving, at the mouth of the alleyway, and Sophie could have sworn that its eyes were bright red. And watching them.

Maybe it was an escaped pet?

“Ah, you’ve noticed,” Flamel murmured, catching her arm, urging her forward. “We’re being watched.”

“Who?” Josh asked, confused, turning quickly, expecting to see Dee’s long black car cruising down the street. But there was no sign of any car, and no one seemed to be paying them any special attention. “Where?”

“The rat. In the alleyway,” Nicholas Flamel said quickly. “Don’t look.”

But it was too late. Josh had already turned and looked. “By a rat? A rat is watching us: you cannot be serious.” He stared hard at the rat, expecting it to turn and scuttle away. It just raised its head and looked at him, its mouth opening to reveal pointed teeth. Josh shuddered. Snakes and rats: he hated them equally…though not as much as he hated spiders. And scorpions.

“Rats don’t have red eyes, do they?” he asked, looking at his sister, who, as far as he knew, was afraid of nothing.

“Not usually,” she said.

When he turned back, he discovered that there were now two jet-black rats standing still in the alleyway. A third scuttled out of the gloom and settled down to watch them.

“OK,” Josh said evenly, “I’ve seen men made of mud, I guess I can accept spying rats. Do they talk?” he wondered aloud.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Flamel snapped. “They’re rats.”

Josh really didn’t think it was such a ridiculous suggestion.

“Has Dee sent them?” Sophie asked.

“He’s tracking us. The rats have followed our scent from the shop. A simple scrying spell allows him to see what they see. They are a crude but effective tool, and once they have our scent they can follow us until we cross water. But I’m more concerned about those.” He tilted his chin upward.

Sophie and Josh looked up. Gathering on the rooftops of the surrounding buildings were an extraordinary number of black-feathered birds.

“Crows,” Flamel said shortly.

“That’s bad?” Sophie guessed. From the moment Dee had stepped into the shop, there hadn’t been a whole lot of good news.

“It could be very bad. But I think we’ll be OK. We’re nearly there.” He turned to the left and led the twins into the heart of San Francisco’s exotic Chinatown. They passed the Sam Wong Hotel, then turned right into a cramped back street, then immediately left into an even narrower alleyway. Off the relatively clean main streets, the alleyways were piled high with boxes and open bins that stank with that peculiarly sweet-sour odor of rotten food. The narrow alley they had turned into was especially foul-smelling, the air practically solid with flies, and the buildings on either side rose so high that the passage was in gloomy shadow.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Sophie muttered. Only the day before, she’d said to her twin that the weeks working in the coffee shop had really heightened her sense of smell. She’d boasted that she was able to distinguish odors she’d never smelled before. Now she was regretting it: the air was rancid with the stink of rotten fruit and fish.

Josh just nodded. He was concentrating on breathing through his mouth, though he imagined that every foul breath was coating his tongue.

“Nearly there,” Flamel said. He seemed unaffected by the rank odors whirling about them.

The twins heard a rasping, skittering sound and turned in time to see five jet-black rats scramble across the tops of the open bins behind them. A huge black crow settled on one of the wires that crisscrossed the alleyway.

Nicholas Flamel suddenly stopped outside a plain, unmarked wooden door so encrusted with grime that it was virtually indistinguishable from the wall. There was no handle or keyhole. Spreading his right hand wide, Flamel placed his fingertips at specific locations and
pressed.
The door clicked open. Grabbing Sophie and Josh, he pulled them into the shadow and eased the door shut behind them.

After the bitter stench of the alleyways, the hallway smelled wonderful: sweet with jasmine and other subtle exotic odors. The twins breathed deeply. “Bergamot,” Sophie announced, identifying the orange odor, “and Ylang-Ylang and patchouli, I think.”

“I’m impressed,” Flamel said.

“I got used to the herbs in the tea shop. I loved the odors of the exotic teas.” She stopped, suddenly realizing that she was talking as if she would never go back to the shop and smell its gorgeous odors again. Right about now, the first of the early-afternoon crowd would be coming in, ordering cappuccinos and lattes, iced tea and herbal infusions. She blinked away the sudden tears that prickled at her eyes. She missed The Coffee Cup because it was ordinary and normal and
real.

“Where are we?” Josh asked, looking around now that his eyes had become accustomed to the dim light. They were standing in a long, narrow, spotlessly clean hallway. The walls were covered in smooth blond wood, and there were intricately woven white reed mats on the floor. A simple doorway covered in what looked like paper stood at the opposite end of the corridor. Josh was about to take a step toward the door when Flamel’s iron hand clamped onto his shoulder.

“Don’t move,” he murmured. “Wait. Look. Notice. If you keep those three words in mind, you just might survive the next few days.” Digging into his pocket, he picked out a quarter. Positioning it on his thumb, he flicked it into the air. It spun over and over and began to fall toward the middle of the hallway….

There was a barely perceptible hiss—and a needle-tipped dart punched right through the metal coin, impaling it in midair and pinning it to the opposite wall.

“You’ve left the safe and mundane world you once knew,” Nicholas Flamel said seriously, looking at each twin in turn. “Nothing is as it seems. You must learn to question everything. To wait before moving, to look before stepping and to observe everything. I learned these lessons in alchemy, but you will find them invaluable in this new world you’ve unwittingly wandered into.” He pointed down the corridor. “Look and observe. Tell me: what do you see?”

Josh spotted the first tiny hole in the wall. It was camouflaged to look like a knot in the wood. Once he found the first one, he realized that there were dozens of holes in the walls. He wondered if each hole held a tiny dart that was powerful enough to punch through metal.

Sophie noticed that the floor did not join neatly with the wall. In three separate places—on both the left-and right-hand sides, close to the skirting—there was a definite gap.

Flamel nodded. “Well done. Now watch. We’ve seen what the darts can do, but there is another defense….” He took a tissue out of his pocket and tossed it onto the floor, close to one of the narrow openings. There was a single metallic clink—and then a huge half-moon-shaped blade popped out from the wall, sliced the tissue into confetti and slid back into hiding.

“So if the darts don’t get you…,” Josh began.

“The blades will,” Sophie finished. “Well, how do we get to the door?”

“We don’t,” Flamel said, and turned to push on the wall to the left. An entire section clicked open and swung back, allowing the trio to step into a huge, airy room.

The twins recognized the room immediately: it was a dojo, a martial arts school. Since they were little, they had studied tae kwon do in dojang like this across the United States as they traveled with their parents from university to university. Many schools had martial arts clubs on campus, and their parents always enrolled them in the best dojo they could find. Both Sophie and Josh were red belts, one rank below a black belt.

Unlike other dojos, however, this one was plain and unadorned, decorated in shades of white and cream, with white walls and black mats dotted across the floor. But what immediately caught their attention was the single figure dressed in a white T-shirt and white jeans sitting with its back to them in the center of the room. The figure’s spiky bright red hair was the only spot of color in the entire dojo.

“We’ve got a problem,” Nicholas Flamel said simply, addressing the figure.

“
You’ve
got a problem; that’s nothing to do with me.” The figure didn’t turn, but the voice was surprisingly both female and young, the accent soft and vaguely Celtic: Irish or Scottish, Sophie thought.

“Dee found me today.”

“It was only a matter of time.”

“He came after me with Golems.”

There was a pause. Still the figure didn’t turn. “He always was a fool. You don’t use Golems in a dry climate. That’s his arrogance.”

“He has taken Perenelle prisoner.”

“Ah. That’s tough. He’ll not harm her, though.”

“And he has the Codex.”

The figure moved, coming slowly to her feet and turning to face them. The twins were shocked to discover that they were looking at a girl not much older than themselves. Her skin was pale, dappled with freckles, and her round face was dominated by grass green eyes. Her red hair was so vibrant that Sophie wondered if she had dyed it that color.

“The Codex?” The accent was definitely Irish, Sophie decided. “The Book of Abraham the Mage?”

Nicholas Flamel nodded.

“Then you’re right, we do have a problem.”

Flamel reached into his pocket and pulled out the two pages Josh had torn from it. “Well, nearly all of the book. He’s missing the Final Summoning.”

The young woman hissed, the sound like that of water boiling, and a quick smile flickered across her face. “Which he will want, of course.”

“Of course.”

Josh was watching the red-haired young woman intently, noting how she stood perfectly still, like most of the martial arts teachers he knew. He glanced sidelong at his sister and raised his eyebrows in a silent question as he inclined his chin slightly toward the girl. Sophie shook her head. They were curious why Nicholas Flamel treated her with such obvious respect. Sophie had also come to the conclusion that there was something
wrong
about the girl’s expression, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. It was an ordinary face—perhaps the cheekbones were a little too prominent, the chin a little too pointed—but the emerald-colored eyes caught and held one’s attention…and then Sophie realized with a start that the irl didn’t blink.

The young woman suddenly threw back her head and breathed deeply, her nostrils flaring. “Is that why I can smell Eyes?”

Flamel nodded. “Rats and crows everywhere.”

“And you brought them here?” There was a note of accusation in her voice. “I’ve spent years building this place.”

“If Dee has the Codex, then you know what he will do with it.”

The young woman nodded. She turned her wide green eyes on the twins. “And these two?” she asked, finally acknowledging their presence.

“They were there when Dee attacked. They fought for me, and this young man managed to tear the pages from the book. This is Sophie and this is her twin, Josh.”

“Twins?” The young woman stepped forward, and looked at each of them in turn. “Not identical, but I can see the resemblance now.” She turned to Flamel. “You’re not thinking…?”

“I’m thinking it’s an interesting turn of events,” Flamel said mysteriously. He looked at the twins. “I would like to introduce you to Scathach. She’ll probably not tell you much about herself, so I’ll tell you that she is of the Elder Race and has trained every warrior and hero of legend for the past two thousand years. In mythology she is known as the Warrior Maid, the Shadow, the Daemon Slayer, the King Maker, the—”

“Oh, just call me Scatty,” the young woman said, her cheeks turning the same color as her hair.