The Alchemyst (6 page)

CHAPTER TEN

“S
o let me get this straight,” Josh Newman said, trying to keep his voice perfectly level, “you don’t know how to drive? Neither of you?”

Josh and Sophie were sitting in the front seats of the SUV Scatty had borrowed from one of her martial arts students. Josh was driving, and his sister had a map on her lap. Nicholas Flamel and Scathach were sitting in the back.

“Never learned,” Nicholas Flamel said, with an expressive shrug.

“Never had the time,” Scatty said shortly.

“But Nicholas told us you’re more than two thousand years old,” Sophie said, looking at the girl.

“Two thousand five hundred and seventeen, as you humani measure time with your current calendar,” Scatty mumbled. She looked into Flamel’s clear eyes. “And how old do I look?”

“Not a day over seventeen,” he said quickly.

“Couldn’t you have found time to learn how to drive?” Sophie persisted. She’d wanted to learn how to drive since she was ten. One of the reasons the twins had taken summer jobs this year, rather than go on the dig with their parents, was to get the money for a car of their own.

Scathach shrugged, an irritated twitch of her shoulders. “I’ve been meaning to, but I’ve been busy,” she protested.

“You do know,” Josh said to no one in particular, “that I’m not supposed to be driving without a licensed driver with me.”

“We’re nearly fifteen and a half and we can both drive,” Sophie said. “Well, sort of,” she added.

“Can either of you ride a horse?” Flamel asked, “or drive a carriage, or a coach-and-four?”

“Well, no…,” Sophie began.

“Handle a war chariot while firing a bow or launching spears?” Scatty added. “Or fly a lizard-nathair while using a slingshot?”

“I have no idea what a lizard-nathair is…and I’m not sure I want to know either.”

“So you see, you are experienced in certain skills,” Flamel said, “whereas we have other, somewhat older, but equally useful skills.” He shot a sidelong glance at Scathach. “Though I’m not so sure about the nathair flying anymore.”

Josh pulled away from a stop sign and turned right, heading for the Golden Gate Bridge. “I just don’t know how you could have lived through the twentieth century without being able to drive. I mean, how did you get from place to place?”

“Public transportation,” Flamel said with a grim smile. “Trains and buses, mainly. They are a completely anonymous method of travel, unlike airplanes and boats. There is far too much paperwork involved in owning a car, paperwork that could be traced directly to us, no matter how many aliases we used.” He paused and added, “And besides, there are other, older methods of travel.”

There were a hundred questions Josh wanted to ask, but he was concentrating furiously on controlling the heavy car. Although he knew
how
to drive, the only vehicles he’d actually driven were battered Jeeps when they accompanied their parents on a dig. He’d never driven in traffic before, and he was terrified. Sophie had suggested that he pretend it was a computer game. That helped, but only a little. In a game, when you crashed, you simply started again. Here, a crash was for keeps.

Traffic was slow across the famous bridge. A long gray stretch limo had broken down in the inside lane, causing a bottleneck. As they approached, Sophie noticed that there were two dark-suited figures crouched under the hood on the passenger’s side. She realized she was holding her breath as they drew close, wondering if the figures were Golems. She heaved a sigh as they pulled alongside and discovered that the men looked like harassed accountants. Josh glanced at his sister and attempted a grin, and she knew he had been thinking the same thing.

Sophie twisted in her seat, and turned to look back at Flamel and Scatty. In the darkened, air-conditioned interior of the SUV, they seemed so ordinary: Flamel looked like a fading hippy, and Scatty, despite her rather military dress sense, wouldn’t have looked out of place behind the counter at The Coffee Cup. The red-haired girl had propped her chin on her fist and was staring through the darkened glass across the bay toward Alcatraz.

Nicholas Flamel dipped his head to follow the direction of her gaze. “Haven’t been there for a while,” he murmured.

“We did the tour,” Sophie said.

“I liked it,” Josh said quickly. “Sophie didn’t.”

“It was creepy.”

“And so it should be,” Flamel said quietly. “It is home to an extraordinary assortment of ghosts and unquiet spirits. Last time I was there, it was to put to rest an extremely ugly Snakeman.”

“I’m not sure I even want to know what a Snakeman is,” Sophie muttered, then paused. “You know, a couple of hours ago, I could never have imagined myself saying something like that?”

Nicholas Flamel sat back in the comfortable seats and folded his arms across his chest. “Your lives—yours and your brother’s—are now forever altered. You know that, don’t you?”

Sophie nodded. “That’s beginning to sink in now. It’s just that everything’s happening so fast that it’s hard to take it all in. Mud men, magic, books of spells, rats…” She looked at Scathach. “Ancient warriors…”

Scatty dipped her head in acknowledgment.

“And of course, a six-hundred-year-old alchemyst…” Sophie stopped, a sudden thought crossing her mind. She looked from Flamel to Scatty and back again. Then she took a moment to formulate her question. Staring hard at the man, she asked, “You
are
human, aren’t you?”

Nicholas Flamel grinned. “Yes. Perhaps a little more than human, but yes, I was born and will always be one of the human race.”

Sophie looked at Scathach. “But you’re…”

Scathach opened her green eyes wide, and for a single instant, something ancient was visible in the planes and angles of her face. “No,” she said very quietly. “I am not of the race of humani. My people were of different stock, the Elder Race. We ruled this earth before the creatures who became humani climbed down from the trees. Nowadays, we are remembered in the myths of just about every race. We are the creatures of legend, the Were clans, the Vampire, the Giants, the Dragons, the Monsters. In stories we are remembered as the Old Ones or the Elder Race. Some stories call us gods.”

“Were you ever a god?” Sophie whispered.

Scatty giggled. “No. I was never a god. But some of my people allowed themselves to be worshipped as gods. Others simply became gods as humani told tales of their adventures.” She shrugged. “We were just another race, an older race than man, with different gifts, different skills.”

“What happened?” Sophie asked.

“The Flood,” Scatty said very softly, “amongst other things.”

“The earth is a lot older than most people imagine,” Flamel said quietly. “Creatures and races that are now no more than myth once walked this world.”

Sophie nodded slowly. “Our parents are archaeologists. They’ve told us about some of the inexplicable things that archaeology sometimes reveals.”

“Remember that place we visited in Texas, Taylor something…,” Josh said, carefully easing the heavy SUV into the middle lane. He’d never driven anything so big before, and was terrified he was going to hit something. He’d had a couple of near misses and was convinced he’d actually clipped someone’s side mirror, but he’d kept going, saying nothing.

“The Taylor Trail,” Sophie said, “at the Paluxy River in Texas. There are what look like dinosaur footprints and human prints in the same fossilized piece of stone. And the stone is dated to one hundred million years old.”

“I have seen them,” Flamel replied, “and others like them all across the world. I have also examined the shoe print that was found in Antelope Springs in Utah…in rock about five hundred million years old.”

“My dad says things like that can be easily dismissed as either fakes or misinterpretation of the facts,” Josh said quickly. He wondered what his father would say about the things they had seen today.

Flamel shrugged. “Yes, that is true. But what science cannot understand, it dismisses. Not everything can be so easily brushed aside. Can you dismiss what you’ve seen and experienced today as some sort of misinterpretation of the facts?”

Sophie shook her head.

Beside her, Josh shrugged uncomfortably. He didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. Dinosaurs and humans living together at the same time was simply inconceivable. The very idea went against everything his parents had taught them, everything they believed. But somewhere at the back of his mind, a small voice kept reminding him that every year archaeologists—including his parents—kept making extraordinary discoveries. A couple of years earlier, it was
Homo floresiensis,
the tiny people in Indonesia, nicknamed Hobbits; then there was the species of dwarf dinosaur discovered in Germany, and the hundred-and-sixty-five-million-year-old dinosaur tracks found in Wyoming and, only recently, the eight new prehistoric species discovered in a cave in Israel. But what Flamel was suggesting was staggering in its implications. “You’re saying that humans and dinosaurs existed on the earth at the same time,” Josh said, surprised that he sounded so angry.

“I’m saying that humans have existed on the earth with creatures far stranger, and much older than the dinosaurs,” Flamel said seriously.

“How do you know?” Sophie demanded. He claimed to have been born in 1330, he couldn’t have seen dinosaurs…could he?

“It’s all written down in the Codex…and, in the course of my long life, I’ve seen beasts that are considered myths, I’ve fought beings from legend, I’ve faced down creatures that looked like they crawled from a nightmare.”

“We did Shakespeare in school last term…. There’s a line from
Hamlet.
” Sophie frowned, trying to remember. “There are more things in heaven and earth…”

Nicholas Flamel nodded delightedly. “…than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he finished the quotation. “
Hamlet,
act one, scene five. I knew Will Shakespeare, of course. Now, Will could have been an alchemist of extraordinary talent…but then he fell into Dee’s clutches. Poor Will; do you know that he based the character of Prospero in
The Tempest
on Dee?”

“I never liked Shakespeare,” Scatty muttered. “He smelled.”

“You knew Shakespeare?” Josh was unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

“He was my student briefly, very briefly,” Flamel said. “I’ve lived a long time; I’ve had a lot of students—some made famous by history, most forgotten. I’ve met a lot of people, human and unhuman, mortal and immortal. People like Scathach,” Flamel finished.

“There are more like you…more of the Elder Race?” Sophie asked, looking at the red-haired girl.

“More than you might think, though I try not to associate with them,” Scatty said uneasily. “There are those amongst the Elders who cannot accept that our time is past, that this age belongs to the humani. They want to see a return to the old ways, and they believe that their puppet Dee and others like him are in a position to bring that about. They are called the Dark Elders.”

“I don’t know if anyone has noticed,” Josh interrupted suddenly, “but would you say there are a lot of birds gathering?”

Sophie turned to stare through the windshield, while Flamel and Scatty peered through the back window.

The spars and pylons, the braces, ropes and wires of the Golden Gate Bridge were slowly filling with birds: thousands of them. Mainly blackbirds and crows, they covered all available surfaces, with more arriving every moment.

“They’re coming from Alcatraz,” Josh said, dipping his head to look across the choppy waters toward the island.

A dark cloud had gathered above Alcatraz. It rose out of the abandoned prison in a dark curl and hung in the air looking like smoke, but this smoke didn’t dissipate: it moved and circled in a solid mass.

“Birds.” Josh swallowed hard. “There must be thousands of them.”

“Tens of thousands,” Sophie corrected him. She turned to look at Flamel. “What are they?”

“The Morrigan’s children,” he said enigmatically.

“Trouble,” Scatty added. “Big trouble.”

Then, as if driven by a single command, the huge flock of birds moved away from the island and headed across the bay, directly toward the bridge.

Josh hit his window button and the tinted glass hummed down. The noise of the birds was audible now, a raucous cawing, almost like high-pitched laugher. Traffic was slowing, some people even stopping to get out of their cars to take photographs with digital cameras and cell phones.

Nicholas Flamel leaned forward and placed his left hand on Josh’s shoulder. “You should drive,” he said seriously. “Do not stop…whatever happens, even if you hit something. Just drive. As fast as you can. Get us off this bridge.”

There was something in Flamel’s unnaturally controlled voice that frightened Sophie even more than if he had shouted. She glanced sidelong at Scatty, but the young woman was rummaging through her backpack. The warrior pulled out a short bow and a handful of arrows and placed them on the seat beside her. “Roll up your window, Josh,” she said calmly. “We don’t want anything getting in.”

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” Sophie whispered, looking at the Alchemyst.

“Only if the crows catch us,” Flamel said with a tight smile. “Could I borrow your cell phone?”

Sophie pulled her cell out of her pocket and flipped it open. “Aren’t you going to work some magic?” she asked hopefully.

“No, I’m going to make a call. Let’s hope we don’t get an answering service.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

S
ecurity gates opened, and Dee’s black limousine swerved into the driveway, the Golem chauffeur expertly maneuvering the car through barred gates into an underground parking garage. Perenelle Flamel lurched sideways and fell against the sodden Golem sitting on her right-hand side. Its body squelched with the blow, and spatters of foul-smelling mud squirted everywhere.

Dr. John Dee, sitting directly opposite, grimaced in disgust and scooted as far away from the creature as he could. He was on his cell phone, talking urgently in a language that had not been used on earth in more than three thousand years.

A drop of Golem mud splashed onto Perenelle’s right hand. The sticky liquid ran across her flesh…and erased the curling symbol Dee had drawn on her skin.

The binding spell was partially broken. Perenelle Flamel dipped her head slightly. This was her chance. To properly channel her auric powers she really needed both hands, and unfortunately, the ward Dee had drawn on her forehead prevented her from speaking.

Still…

Perenelle Delamere had always been interested in magic, even before she met the poor bookseller who later became her husband. She was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and in the tiny village of Quimper in the northwest corner of France, where she had grown up, she was considered special. Her touch could heal—not only humans, but animals, too—she could talk to the shades of the dead and she could sometimes see a little of the future. But growing up in an age when such skills were regarded with deep suspicion, she had learned to keep her abilities to herself. When she first moved to Paris, she saw how the fortune-tellers working in the markets that backed onto the great Notre Dame Cathedral made a good and easy living. Adopting the name Chatte Noire—Black Cat—because of her jet-black hair, she set herself up in a little booth in sight of the cathedral. Within a matter of weeks she built a reputation for being genuinely talented. Her clients changed: no longer were they just the tradespeople and stall holders, now they were also drawn from the merchants and even the nobility.

Close to where she had her little covered stall sat the scriveners and copiers, men who made their living writing letters for those who could neither read nor write. Some of them, like the slender, dark-haired man with startling pale eyes, occasionally sold books from their tables. And from the first moment she saw that man, Perenelle Delamere knew that she would marry him and that they would live a long and happy life together. She just never realized quite how long.

They were married less than six months after they first met. They’d been together now for over six hundred years.

Like most educated men of his time, Nicholas Flamel was fascinated with alchemy—a combination of science and magic. His interest was sparked because he was occasionally offered alchemical books or charts for sale or asked to copy some of the rarer works. Unlike many other women of her time, Perenelle could read and knew several languages—her Greek was better than her husband’s—and he would often ask her to read to him. Perenelle quickly became familiar with the ancient systems of magic and began to practice in small ways, developing her skills, concentrating on how to channel and focus the energy of her aura.

By the time the Codex came into their possession, Perenelle was a sorceress, though she had little patience for the mathematics and calculations of alchemy. However, it was Perenelle who recognized that the book written in the strange, ever-changing language was not just a history of the world that had never been, but a collection of lore, of science, of spells and incantations. She had been poring over the pages one bitter winter’s night, watching the words crawl on the page, when the letters formed and re-formed, and for a heartbeat she had seen the initial formula for the philosopher’s stone, and realized instantly that here was the secret to life eternal.

The couple spent the next twenty years traveling to every country in Europe, heading east into the land of the Rus, south to North Africa, even into Araby in an attempt to decipher and translate the curious manuscript. They came into contact with magicians and sorcerers of many lands, and studied many different types of magic. Nicholas was only vaguely interested in magic; he was more interested in the science of alchemy. The Codex, and other books like it, hinted that there were very precise formulas for creating gold out of stone and diamonds out of coal. Perenelle, on the other hand, learned as much as she could about all the magical arts. But it had been a long time since she had seriously practiced them.

Now, trapped in the limo, she recalled a trick she had learned from a strega—a witch—in the mountains of Sicily. It was designed for dealing with knights in armor, but with a little adjustment…

Closing her eyes and concentrating, Perenelle rubbed her little finger in a circle against the car seat. Dee was absorbed in his phone call and didn’t see the tiny ice white spark that snapped from her fingertip into the fine-grained leather. The spark ran through the leather and coiled around the springs beneath. It shot, fizzing and hissing, along the springs and into the metal body of the car. It curled into the engine, buzzing over the cylinders, circled the wheels, spitting and snapping. A hubcap popped off and bounced away…and then abruptly, the car’s electrics went haywire. The windows started opening and closing of their own accord; the sunroof hummed open, then slammed shut; the wipers scraped across the dry windshield, then beat so fast they snapped off; the horn began to sound out an irregular beat. Interior lights flickered on and off. The small TV unit in the left-hand wall popped on and cycled dizzyingly through all its channels.

The air tasted metallic. Tendrils of static electricity now danced around the interior of the car. Dee flung his cell phone away, nursing suddenly numb fingers. The phone hit the carpeted floor and exploded into shards of melted plastic and hot metal.

“You…,” Dee began, turning to Perenelle, but the car lurched to a halt, completely dead. Flames leapt from the engine, filling the back of the car with noxious fumes. Dee pushed the door, but the electric locks had engaged. With a savage howl, he closed his hand into a fist and allowed his rage to boil through him. The stench of smoke, burning plastic and melting rubber was abruptly concealed beneath the stink of sulfur, and his hand took on the appearance of a golden metal glove. Dee punched straight through the door, practically ripping it off its hinges, and flung himself out onto the cement floor.

He was standing in the underground car park of Enoch Enterprises, the huge entertainment company he owned and ran in San Francisco. He scrambled back as his hundred-and fifty-thousand-dollar custom-made car was quickly consumed by fire. Intense heat fused the front of the car into irregular clumps of metal, while the windshield flowed like candle wax. The Golem driver was still sitting at the wheel, unaffected by the intense heat, which did nothing but bake its skin to iron hardness.

Then the garage’s overhead sprinkler system came on, and bitterly cold water sprayed down onto the fire.

Perenelle!

Soaked through, doubled over and coughing, Dee wiped tears from his eyes, straightened and used both hands to douse the flames with a single movement. He called up a tiny breeze to clear the smoke, then ducked his head to peer into the blackened interior of the car, almost afraid of what he would find.

The two Golems that had been sitting on either side of Perenelle were now nothing more than ash. But there was no sign of the woman—except for the rent in the opposite door that looked as if it had been hacked by an axe.

Dee folded to the ground with his back to the ruined car and beat both hands into the filthy mixture of mud, oil, melted plastic and burnt rubber. He hadn’t secured the entire Codex, and now Perenelle had escaped. Could this day get any worse?

Footsteps tip-tapped.

From the corner of his eye, Dr. John Dee watched as pointy-toed, stiletto-heeled black boots came into view. And he knew then the answer to his question. The day was about to get worse: much worse. Fixing a smile on his lips, he rose stiffly to his feet and turned to face one of the few of the Dark Elders who genuinely terrified him.

“Morrigan.”

The ancient Irish had called her the Crow Goddess, and she was worshipped and feared throughout the Celtic kingdoms as the Goddess of Death and Destruction. Once there had been three sisters: Badb, Macha and the Morrigan, but the others had disappeared over the years—Dee had his own suspicions about what had happened to them—and the Morrigan now reigned supreme.

She stood taller than Dee, though most people stood taller than the doctor, and was dressed from head to foot in black leather. Her jerkin was studded with shining silver bolts, giving it the appearance of a medieval breastplate, and her leather gloves had rectangular silver studs sewn onto the back of the fingers. The gloves had no fingertips, allowing the Morrigan’s long, spearlike black nails to show. She wore a heavy leather belt studded with small circular shields around her waist. Draped over her shoulders, with its full hood pulled around her face and sweeping to the ground behind her, was a cloak made entirely of ravens’ feathers.

In the shadow of the hood, the Morrigan’s face seemed even paler than usual. Her eyes were jet-black, with no white showing; even her lips were black. The tips of her overlong incisors were just visible against her lower lip.

“This is yours, I believe.” The Morrigan’s voice was a harsh whisper, her voice ragged and torn, like a bird’s caw.

Perenelle Flamel came forward, moving slowly and carefully. Two enormous ravens were perched on her shoulders, and both held their razor-sharp beaks dangerously close to her eyes. She had barely scrambled out of the burning car, desperately weakened by her use of magic, when she’d been attacked by the birds.

“Let me see it,” the Morrigan commanded eagerly.

Dee reached into his coat and produced the metal-bound Codex. Surprisingly, the Crow Goddess did not reach for it.

“Open it,” she said.

Puzzled, Dee held the book in front of the Morrigan and turned the pages, handling the ancient object with obvious reverence.

“The Book of Abraham the Mage,” she whispered, leaning forward, but not approaching the book. “Let me see the back.”

Reluctantly, Dee turned to the back of the book. When the Morrigan saw the damaged pages, she hissed with disgust. “Sacrilege. It has survived ten thousand years without suffering any damage.”

“The boy tore it,” Dee explained, closing the Codex gently.

“I’ll make sure he suffers for this.” The Crow Goddess closed her eyes and cocked her head to one side, as if listening. Her black eyes glittered and then her lips moved in a rare smile, exposing the rest of her pointed teeth. “He will suffer soon; my children are almost upon them. They will all suffer,” she promised.