Revenant Eve (56 page)

“We have to be still in the Nasdrafus,” I muttered, eyeing a couple of guys riding by, their hats low, swords at their sides. Both turned in their saddles to stare at us. Mord gazed back with his best mad-prophet expression.

From a side street came a foursome of swaggering tough guys in musketeer bucket boots, billowing trousers, and swashbuckling wide-skirted coats decorated with yards of ribbon, their hair (or wigs) long and curly.

The pair Mord was busy glaring at leaped off their horses and attacked the four bigwigs. We backed away except for Mord, who assessed rapidly and decided to fight in aid of the outnumbered two, though they’d started the brawl. Swords flashed, and all four swashbucklers fell groaning in the street. The two winners rammed their swords back in their sheaths with the
hoo, lookit me!
manner of a high five, failed to acknowledge Mord with so much as a nod, then mounted up and rode on.

From buildings all around servants emerged, moving with the same odd, drifting slowness of the seraphs. But these had no wings. They bent over the fallen, shrouding them. Was there a kind of shadowy mist blurring
the air between the crouched and the recumbent figures? I took a step nearer in an effort to see, though my nerves tingled with warning.

But then the servants, or helpers, straightened and backed away, and the four rose, straightened themselves out, picked up their weapons, and moved somewhat aimlessly down a narrow side street. They shook their heads as they went, and swung their arms.

So we couldn’t be killed as long as we were in the Nasdrafus, was that it? Awesome! No wonder there were no after-effects from my being gone so long.

“Elisheva must be alive,” I said, looking at the others. From their expressions, it was clear that the same idea had occurred to all of us.

“Legation is this way,” Jaska said.

He’d lost the sheath to his cane back in the von Mecklundburg castle. He leaned on the point as he began to walk, probably from habit as his limp was completely gone. Aurélie paced at his side, but Mord lingered, his head up.

“What’s that music?” he murmured.

I didn’t hear anything but street noise. Jaska, Aurélie, and I looked around. No music. That was odd. Well, everything was odd.

The New Market district wasn’t far from the narrow street off which the legation was located. People came and went into the building, which was typically baroque, above the door a winsome gargoyle staring at us.

As I looked up at that stone face, the deep-carved eyes sparked, and a forked tongue flickered out from between the sharp teeth.

I jumped back, and when everyone stared at me, I pointed up with my sword. “Did you see that?”

Of course
the gargoyle was now totally still.

“Wait below,” Jaska said. “It will be easier than having to explain.” He shot a covert glance at Aurélie’s gown and my outfit, and ran upstairs.

We stepped inside the building, standing to either side of the door. The floor was a pattern of mosaic tiles, the walls supplied with homely pegs for coats. In the future, those would be mail slots.

I looked out into the street, wary of uglies or other nasties. All the passersby were slightly odd in one way or another; that is, they looked
like highwaymen from some romance, like soldiers of the late 1700s. Some of the women tripped along in full ball gowns, others in more ordinary clothes, but I spotted one woman wearing a brace of pistols, high boots, and a frilly shirt, her hair tumbled down her back. Her hat reminded me of musketeer hats, and at her side, on a baldric, she wore a bell-hilted rapier. She swaggered along, definitely looking for a fight.

Mord stood with his eyes shut, his head slightly tilted. “That music,” he murmured.

Jaska ran downstairs. “I was not visible to them. Nobody in the legation office could see me,” Jaska reported. “And they…” He paused. “The edges of their clothing shone with a faint light.”

“They shimmered,” I said. “Like the people dressed in—” I was about to say
early nineteenth century clothing
, but altered that to “—everyday clothing. I think they are the ghosts, here in the Nasdrafus, unlike the rest of us.”

“Yes! And so, in the world on the other side of the portal, we would be ghosts to them,” Aurélie said. “If they can see ghosts,” she added as an old woman carrying a basket of market goods under a checkered cloth passed within a pace of us. Her edges shimmered. Surely she would have noticed someone in a ball gown, but she walked along, her gaze passing right through us.

Mord said, “Hippolyte would see you, surely. He saw ghosts, remember? That was why he joined the Freemasons.”

“But he’s not here. We can try at his lodging or push on to the Piarists.”

“They might not see us, either,” Aurélie said.

“How about the one the prioress mentioned? The sacristan who had visions in her dreams?” I asked.

Mord was now staring at the mosaic, which was laid out in squares about a yard wide and long, the tiles six-pointed, fitted in patterns of threes, their colors a soft golden, cream, and sky blue. He turned to Jaska. “Is that the same pattern that was here when we visited this place, before I left for Eisenstadt?”

Jaska looked down. “How strange.” He glanced around. “Everything
else is the same, but the floor should be the check pattern, white and black marble squares alternating. Not this mosaic. What can that mean?”

“Is it Freemason work?” Mord asked.

Jaska looked surprised, then shook his head. “Weren’t they outlawed when Franz came to the throne as emperor the year before last?”

“Perhaps marble slabs were laid over the mosaic,” I suggested, “but we don’t know what it means, to be seeing this instead of the marble.”

Jaska looked up. “It reminds us that we must not expect things here to be the way we have experienced them. We’d better get to the Piarists.”

We all agreed. “Should we hire a coach to get there faster?” Aurélie asked.

“We have no funds,” Jaska reminded her. “And I have misgivings about drawing any more notice than we can help. Slow as it is, I suggest we walk.”

We kept up a brisk pace, Jaska striding along freely. When we reached the bridge, we looked around in all directions. No uglies.

We started over the bridge. Seen from this vantage, the city looked subtly different. I tried a slower scan. The palace was the same, except for some of the side buildings that seemed to have an after-image, or a shadow twin. I made out ghostly forms—the famous dancing white horses called Lipizzaners. Real or not, they pranced proudly, silky manes drifting, tails flashing, their riders dressed in Imperial uniform.

I turned toward where the Rathaus tower should stick up, knowing that it was gothic-Victorian and had been built in the 1880s. A faint shadow bisected the horizon, perceptible if I gazed straight at it, but invisible if I shifted my attention away a fraction.

Okay, that made (sort of) sense. People and buildings existed in different states, different times.

We descended the bridge on the other side and were surrounded by buildings again. Here and there echoed the clashes and shouts of fighting, but suppressing that noise was music, coming from various sides. The sky had darkened overhead, but golden light poured out from windows and doors. In and out through those doors, couples and groups
strolled. In the more shadowy darkness, silent individuals lurked about or darted here and there.

We reached the quiet alley that ended at the Piarist convent. Knocking got no response. We looked at one another, then I figured, Why not? And tried the door.

It opened to my touch.

Aurélie and I walked in. Even in the Nasdrafus, the guys were not about to enter a nunnery. They stayed outside.

The place was quiet, light gleaming here and there in lamps. Nobody was awake. I walked right up to a sleeping nun in her little cell. Touching her made my hand feel numb, and all she did was stir in her sleep.

“There’s a ghost,” Aurélie whispered—though we could have danced the Funky Chicken while whooping like banshees for all the notice the nuns would have given us.

I turned around, and there in the doorway to the cell stood an elderly nun in her habit. We could see the lintel through her.

“I am dream-walking,” she said in German, her tone declarative. I suspected the statement was more for her than for us.

“I was here a fortnight or so ago,” Aurélie said. “I asked about magic. For Madame Bonaparte. But now we need to ask on our own behalf.”

“We will not disturb the rest of Sister Bernard,” the ghostly nun whispered, finger to her lips, as behind me the sleeping nun stirred restlessly.

Aurélie and I followed the ghost from the cells to an inner chamber with a single candle flickering.

“What do you seek?” the nun asked.

“Demons took away one of us,” Aurélie said. The nun had crossed herself at the word
demon
. “Her name is Elisheva Barta, and it happened in Dobrenica a short time ago.”

“Time is not reliable in the realm of dreams,” the nun murmured.

“It was a short time ago for us,” Aurélie said politely. “We want to find her as quick as we can. They said something about putting her in a garden in Lutetium.”

The nun said, “Do you have any connection with her?”

“Connection?” I asked.

“Any connection. It could be by blood, by bond, by a personal object of significance.”

Aurélie looked nonplussed, so I said, “She dropped an amulet. One of us has it.”

“Then you will be able to use that to find her,” the nun said. “Follow the connection.”

“How?”

“The same way you brought yourselves here,” she replied.

It can’t be that easy
, I thought.

The nun was thinking along a parallel path, or else ghosts could hear others’ thoughts, because she said, “The demons will try to hide her. But faith and love will always defeat them.”

“How?” I asked, remembering far too many historical instances where faith and love had not defeated evil.

The nun turned my way. “You walk in the dream realm, where strength is measured differently, as is time.”

“How do we get to Paris, Sister?” Aurélie asked.

“You must use the portal.” She began to fade.

“Which portal? We only know of the two that brought us here.”

“The oldest,” the nun said, looking surprised. “In the bell tower at Nôtre Dame de Paris, on Île de la Cité,” she said in the
but everybody knows that
tone.

“I’ve been there,” Aurélie and I said at the same time. I laughed and said, “I remember when Hortense took you there.”

The nun vanished, so we left.

Out in the alley, we found the guys waiting. “Back to the portal,” I said. “We’re on our way to Paris. The portal we need is at Nôtre Dame. But how we’re going to find this garden of theirs is anyone’s guess.”

“We must search where the demons are thickest,” said Mord.

Oh, great.

Well, at least the uglies went
pop
and not
squish
, I thought as I swung my sword.

As we passed an inn, music came from its open doors and windows.
Visible in the huge windows were silhouettes of couples hopping and twirling as they wove the geometric patterns of the dance.

“I hear it again,” Mord said, and then in a different voice, “That is Mozart.” It was clear from his distant gaze that he didn’t mean the mazurka being played in the tavern we were passing.

“Which composition?”

“None that I know.”

That got three variations on “Huh?” which Mord ignored. As we crossed the bridge, he walked faster. From all around came at least five separate kinds of music, punctuated by the occasion snap of a pistol report, or the clang of steel. Shouts and bellows. Closer, in the dark-shrouded corners, intimate laughter from couples.

But I heard no Mozart, or anything close.

Mord made a beeline for St. Stephen’s cathedral. Light poured from the open doors and the clerestory windows, the stained glass luminous with color. Inside, a thirty-something guy in a 1780s powder-dusted wig conducted an enormous orchestra, spread in both directions through both transepts. Blocking the view of the church altar was a choir that looked five hundred strong, singing at tremendous volume, complicated melodic lines.

Mord stopped in the middle of the nave. “That
is
Mozart,” he said. “And he is conducting.”

Jaska stared, then looked back. “How do you know? Mozart died when we were boys.”

Mord said, “I tell you, that’s Mozart.” He listened raptly.

All around us the audience listened raptly.

The music reminded me a little of
The Magic Flute
, which was Mozart’s last opera, but it also carried the gravitas of his unfinished Requiem.

For a time we stood while the music built, weaving complicated chains of melody around us. That’s the only way I can describe it, not being a musician. Back in college, I’d taken music appreciation. The professor had talked about how Mozart had worked secret Freemason symbols into his music. I couldn’t hear them, but the idea had stayed with
me, because the memory was back, and there I was in class, sitting at my desk, pencil tapping in time as I listened for something I wasn’t sophisticated enough to discern.

The memories came, vivid and nearly real: college, music, dance. I was so absorbed that Aurélie’s touch made me jump. “We’re forgetting Elisheva,” she said.

“Elisheva,” Mord repeated, and horror constricted his features.

He whirled and plunged out, but he could not help a longing glance back.

“This way,” Jaska said, leading us into the New Market sections again.

Aurélie walked next to me, holding up her skirts with both hands. “It was like the fae,” she said. “You all were…”

“Enchanted?” I said, chill tightening my neck. “Did you hear her?” I spoke up. “That was some kind of enchantment, back there.”

“If so, it must be an advantageous one,” Mord stated. “I intend to return, if I can. But you are right to remind us of Elisheva.”

Aurélie seemed uneasy as we walked faster, again Mord in the lead, as if he had to escape the music’s spell. Maybe he did.