The Alchemyst (12 page)

And then Scathach slammed a double-edged dagger into the center of the table. The wood split in two with a thunderous snap that spewed splinters into the air, and the bowls of food shattered on the ground. The old woman reared back, the green light dribbling from her fingers like liquid. It ran hissing and spitting down the branch before sinking into the wood.

The four Torc Allta were immediately behind the old woman, curved, scythelike swords in their hands, and three more of the creatures in their boar shape burst through the undergrowth and raced up the branch to assume positions behind Flamel and Scatty.

The twins froze, terrified, unsure what had just happened. Nicholas Flamel hadn’t moved, he merely continued to cut and eat the apple. Scathach calmly sheathed her dagger and folded her arms. She spoke quickly to the old woman. Sophie and Josh could see Scathach’s lips moving, but all they could hear was a tinny, mosquito-like buzz.

The old woman didn’t respond. Her face was an expressionless mask as she stood and swept away from the table, surrounded by the Torc Allta guards. This time neither Flamel nor Scathach stood.

In the long silence that followed, Scathach stooped down to gather some of the fallen fruits and vegetables from the ground, dusted them off and popped them into the only remaining unbroken wooden bowl. She started to eat.

Josh was opening his mouth to ask the same question Sophie wanted an answer to, but she reached under the table and squeezed his arm, silencing him. She was aware that something terribly dangerous had just occurred, and that somehow Josh was involved.

“I think that went well, don’t you?” Scathach asked eventually.

Flamel finished the apple and cleaned the edge of the black arrowhead on a leaf. “It depends on how you define the word
well,
” he said.

Scathach munched on a raw carrot. “We’re still alive and we’re still in the Shadowrealm,” she said. “Could be worse. The sun is going down. Our hostess will need to sleep, and in the morning, she’ll be a different person. Probably won’t even remember what happened tonight.”

“What did you say to her?” Flamel asked. “I’ve never mastered the Elder Tongue.”

“I simply reminded her of the ancient duty of hospitality and assured her that the slight to her was unintentional and made through ignorance and was, therefore, no crime under the Elder Laws.”

“She is fearful…,” Flamel murmured, glancing toward the huge tree trunk. The Torc Allta guards could be seen moving inside, while the largest of the boars had remained outside, blocking the doorway.

“She is always fearful when the evening draws in. It is when she is at her most vulnerable,” Scathach said.

“It would be nice,” Sophie interrupted, “if someone told us exactly what just happened.” She hated it when adults talked among themselves and ignored any children present. And that was exactly what was happening now.

Scathach smiled, and suddenly, her vampire teeth looked very long in her mouth. “Your twin managed to insult one of the Elder Race and was very nearly turned into green slime for his crime.”

Josh shook his head. “But I didn’t say anything…,” he protested. He looked at his twin for support as he quickly thought over his conversation with the old woman. “All I said was that her daughter or granddaughter had promised to help us.”

Scathach laughed softly. “There is no daughter or granddaughter. The mature woman you saw this afternoon was Hekate. The old woman you saw this evening is also Hekate, and in the morning, you will meet a young girl who is Hekate as well.”

“The Goddess with Three Faces,” Flamel reminded them.

“Hekate is cursed to age with the day. Maiden in the morning, matron in the afternoon, crone in the evening. She is incredibly sensitive about her age.”

Josh swallowed hard. “I didn’t know….”

“No reason why you should have—except that your ignorance could have gotten you killed…or worse.”

“But what did you do to the table?” Sophie asked. She looked at the ruin of the circular table: it was split down the middle where Scatty had cut it with her knife. The wood on either side of the split looked dry and dusty.

“Iron,” Scatty said simply.

“One of the surprising side effects of the artificial metal,” Flamel said, “is its ability to nullify even the most powerful magics. The discovery of iron really signaled the end of the Elder Race’s power in this world.” He held up the black stone arrowhead. “That’s why I was using this. The Elders get nervous in the presence of iron.”

“But
you’re
carrying iron,” Sophie said to Scatty.

“I’m Next Generation—not pure Elder like Hekate. I can bear to be around iron.”

Josh licked his dry lips. He was still remembering the green light buzzing in Hekate’s palms. “When you said ‘turned into green slime,’ you didn’t really mean…”

Scathach nodded. “Sticky green slime. Quite disgusting. And I understand the victim retains some measure of consciousness for a while.” She glanced at Flamel. “I cannot remember the last person to cross one of the Elders and live, can you?”

Flamel stood. “Let’s hope she doesn’t remember in the morning. Get some rest,” he said to the twins. “Tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

“Why?” Sophie and Josh asked simultaneously.

“Because tomorrow, I’m hoping I can convince Hekate to Awaken your magical potential. If you are going to have any chance of surviving the days to come, I will have to train you to become magicians.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

N
icholas Flamel watched Sophie and Josh follow Scathach into the tree. Only when the door had closed behind them did his colorless eyes betray the worry he felt. That had been close: another heartbeat or two and Hekate would have reduced Josh to bubbling liquid. He wasn’t sure if she would have been able to reconstitute him in the morning when she had taken on her maiden form. He had to get the twins away from her before their ignorance got them into trouble.

Flamel walked away from the ruined table and followed the slope of the tree limb down to the pool. He stepped off the branch and onto a narrow unpaved path. There were a multitude of marks in the mud—some were boar tracks, others looked more like human feet…and some were a curious mixture of both. He knew he was being followed, that his every movement was being tracked by creatures he couldn’t see, and he guessed that the Torc Allta were probably the least of Hekate’s guards.

Crouching by the water’s edge, he took a deep breath and allowed himself a moment to relax. It would be true to say that this had been one of the more eventful days in his long life, and he was exhausted.

From the moment Dee had snatched Perry and the Codex and the twins had appeared, Flamel knew that one of the first prophecies he had read in the Book half a millennium previously was beginning to come true.

“The two that are one, the one that is all.”

The Codex was full of cryptic phrases and incomprehensible sayings. Most of them were concerned with the annihilation of Danu Talis, the ancient homeland of the Elder Race, but there was also a series of prophecies that had to do with the return of the Dark Elders and the destruction and enslavement of the humani.

“There will come a time when the Book is taken…”

Well, that was fairly self-explanatory.

“…And the Queen’s man is allied with the Crow….”

That had to refer to Dr. John Dee. He had been Queen Elizabeth’s personal magician. And the Crow was clearly the Crow Goddess.

“Then the Elder will step out of the Shadows…”

Flamel knew that Dee had been working for centuries with the Dark Elders to bring about their return. He had heard unconfirmed reports that more and more of the Dark Elders had left their Shadowrealms and begun to explore the world of the humani again.

“…And the immortal must train the mortal. The two that are one must become the one that is all.”

Nicholas Flamel was the immortal of the prophecy. He was sure of it. The twins—“the two that are one”—must be the mortal who needed to be trained. But he had no idea what the last phrase referred to: “the one that is all.”

Circumstances had placed the twins in his care, and he was determined that no harm should come to them, especially now that he believed they were destined to play a critical role in the war against the Dark Elders. Nicholas knew that bringing Josh and Sophie to the Goddess with Three Faces had been an incredible risk—especially in the company of Scathach. The Warrior’s feud with the goddess was older than most civilizations. Hekate was one of the most dangerous of the Elders. Immensely powerful, one of her many skills enabled her to Awaken the magical powers that existed in every sentient creature. However, like many of the Elders, her metabolism was linked to a solar or lunar cycle. She aged during the day, and effectively died when the sun went down, but was then reborn with the sunrise as a young woman. This peculiar trait clouded and colored her thinking, and sometimes, as had happened earlier, the older Hekate forgot the promises her younger selves had made. Flamel was hoping he would be able to reason with the maiden Hekate in the morning and convince her to Awaken the twins’ extraordinary potential.

The Alchemyst knew that everyone had the possibility for magic within them. Once it had been sparked into life, it tended to become increasingly powerful of its own accord. Sometimes—very rarely—children suddenly exhibited extraordinary powers, usually either telepathy or telekinesis or a combination of both. Some children realized what was happening and managed to control their growing powers, while others never fully understood it. Left untrained and unchecked, magical energy radiated off the children in waves, moving furniture around, knocking people to the ground, gouging marks in walls and ceilings. This was often reported as poltergeist activity. He knew that if Hekate Awakened the twins’ dormant magical powers, then he could use what he had learned over six hundred years of study to increase their skills. Not only would he give them the means of protecting themselves, but he would also be able to begin preparing them for whatever lay ahead.

Still crouching by the pool, he stared into the green-tinged water. Red and white koi moved just below the surface, while deeper down, humanlike faces peered up, eyes huge and blank, mouths filled with needle-pointed teeth. He decided against dipping his fingers into the water.

It was commonly held in all the ancient magical books that there were four elements of magic: Air and Water, Earth and Fire. But centuries of study had revealed to Nicholas that there were, in fact, five elemental forces of magic. The fifth force was the magic of Time, the greatest of all magics. The Elders could control all the other elements, but the secret of the fifth was contained only in the Codex…and that was one of the many reasons why Dee, and the Dark Elders he sided with, wanted the Codex. With it in their possession, they would be able to control time itself.

Along with Perenelle, Nicholas Flamel had spent most of his long life studying the elemental forces. While Perry had trained herself in different styles of magic, he had concentrated on the formulae and theorems from the Codex. These formed the basis of the study of alchemy, which was a type of science. Using the formulae, he had learned how to turn base metal into gold and coal into diamonds, but there was very little magic involved. True, it was a remarkably complex formula and required months of preparation, but the process itself was almost ridiculously simple. One day he had been poor, the next wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Taking Perry’s advice, he had founded hospitals, established orphanages and funded schools in his native Paris. Those had been good times…no, more than that—they had been great times. Life had been so much simpler then. They had not known about the Elder Race, had not begun to suspect even the tiniest portion of dark knowledge the Codex contained.

In recent years, Nicholas would sometimes awaken at the quietest hour of night with a single thought spinning round and round in his head: if he had known then what he knew now about the Codex, would he have continued his research into the philosopher’s stone? That path had ultimately brought him into contact with the Elder Race—notably the Dark Elders—and had brought Dr. John Dee into his life. It had forced Perry and him to fake their own deaths and flee Paris and ultimately to spend the next half millennium in hiding. But the study of the Codex had also made them both immortal. Most nights he answered yes: even knowing all he knew now, he would still have continued his studies and become the Alchemyst.

But there were rare occasions, like today, when the answer was no. Now he stood to lose Perenelle, probably the lives of the innocent twins and the not-so-innocent Scathach—though she would not be so easy to kill—and there was also a chance that he had doomed the world.

Nicholas felt himself grow cold at the thought. The Book of Abraham was full of what he had first assumed to be stories, legends, myths and tales. Over the centuries, his research had revealed that all the stories were true, all the tales were based on fact, and what he believed to be legends and myths were simply reports of real beings and actual events.

The Elder Race existed.

They were creatures that looked human—sometimes—but had the powers of gods. They had ruled for tens of thousands of years before the creatures they called the humani—humankind—appeared on the earth. The first primitive humani worshipped the Elder Race as gods and demons and over generations had constructed whole mythologies and belief systems based around an individual or a collection of Elders. The gods and goddesses of Greece and Egypt, of Sumeria and the Indus Valley, of the Toltec and the Celt, existed. They weren’t different gods, however; they were simply the same Elders called by different names.

The Elder Race divided into two groups: those who worked with the humani and those who regarded them as little better than slaves—and, in some cases, food. The Elders warred against one another in battles that took centuries to complete. Occasionally humani would fight on one side, and their exploits were recalled in great legends like those of Gilgamesh and Cuchulain, Atlas and Hippolytus, Beowulf and Ilya of Murom.

Finally, when it became clear that these wars might destroy the planet, the mysterious Abraham, using a powerful collection of spells, forced all of the Elder Race—even those who supported the humani—to retreat from the earth. Most were like Hekate and went willingly, settling into a Shadowrealm of their own creation, and afterward had little or no contact with the humani. Others, like the Morrigan, though she was greatly weakened, continued to venture out into the humani world and worked to restore the old ways. Others still, like Scathach, lived anonymously among humankind. Flamel eventually came to understand that the Codex, which contained the spells that had driven the Elder Race from this world and into their Shadowrealms, also contained the spells that would allow them to return.

And if the Dark Elders returned, then the civilization of the twenty-first century would be wiped away in a matter of hours as the godlike creatures warred among themselves. It had happened before; mythology and history recorded the event as the Flood.

Now Dee had the Book. All he needed were the two pages Flamel could feel pressed against his flesh. And Nicholas Flamel knew that Dee and the Morrigan would stop at nothing to get those pages.

Flamel hung his head and wished he knew what to do. He wished Perenelle were with him; she would surely have a plan.

A bubble burst on the surface of the water.
“The lady asks me to tell you…”
Another bubble popped and burst.
“…that she is unharmed.”

Flamel scrambled back from the pool’s edge. Tendrils of mist were rising from the surface of the water, tiny bubbles popping and snapping. A shape began to form out of the mist cloud—a surprising shape: that of an elderly man in a security guard’s uniform. The shape hovered, twisting and curling over the pond. The late-evening sunshine shone through the water drops, turning each one into a brilliant rainbow of light. “You are a ghost?” Nicholas asked.

“Yes, sir, I am. Or I was until Mrs. Flamel freed me.”

“Do you know me?” Nicholas Flamel asked. He wondered quickly if this might be a trick of Dee’s, but then he dismissed the idea: the sorcerer was powerful, but there was no way he could penetrate Hekate’s defenses.

The mist shifted and thickened. “Yes, sir, I believe I do: you are Nicholas Flamel, the Alchemyst. Mrs. Flamel asked me to go in search of you. She suggested that I would find you here, in this particular Shadowrealm. She overheard Dee mention that you were here.”

“She is unharmed?” Flamel asked eagerly.

“She is. The small man they call John Dee is terrified of her, though the other woman is not.”

“What woman?”

“A tall woman, wearing a cloak of black feathers.”

“The Morrigan,” Flamel said grimly.

“Aye, and that’s the message…” A fish leapt out of the pond and the figure dissolved into a thousand water droplets that hung frozen in the air, each one a tiny portion of a jigsaw that made up the ghost. “Mrs. Flamel says you have to leave…and leave now. The Crow Goddess is gathering her forces to invade the Shadowrealm.”

“She’ll not succeed. She is Next Generation; she has not the power.”

The fish leapt again, scattering the water droplets, and the ghost’s voice drifted and whispered away, dying with each bursting bubble. “Mrs. Flamel instructed me to tell you that the Crow Goddess intends to awaken Bastet.”