The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone (15 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

T
he truck was jammed with crates of what Darrell told them turned out to be a chief German export to Italy: soft drinks and mineral water.

“People,” he said, “we are now officially German cargo!”

“Hiding in a soda truck,” said Lily, grinning as the driver secured the flap and started up again. “This is so going into my blog.”

For the next three hours, the truck wove slowly down through the hills to the Austrian border checkpoint, where the driver was a twice-weekly visitor. When the guards lifted the flaps, they saw only crates of bottles and cans and quickly waved him on.

After that the truck made stops at markets and stores along the way. The final border crossing into Italy was swift and the route more or less direct to small shops and village markets until there were only a few crates left.

Judging by a dream about his ransacked room in Austin—from which he woke in a sweat—Wade realized he must have slept through at least part of the bumpy overnight ride. Sitting up, he found that his arm throbbed from the elbow down, but not into the wrist, which moved more or less easily. That meant a muscle injury and not any kind of bone fracture. Darrell was sound asleep, his mouth open. Becca was awake, her arms wrapped around her knees with Lily leaning on her shoulder. She didn’t look like she wanted to talk.

By late morning the truck was all but empty and parked at a depot with lots of other trucks. They thanked the driver again, he wished them luck, and they were soon out on the streets of Bologna.

As their first attempt to contact Isabella Mercanti, Lily dialed the University of Bologna, then handed the phone to Becca, who stuttered some halting Italian into it. She was put on hold several times, and finally connected to someone.

Becca asked for Dr. Mercanti, then listened, frowning, for several minutes, saying, “Ciao?” a few times, before shutting her eyes, saying, “Grazie,” and hanging up. She moved the phone from her ear and looked at it. “It was all crackly for a few minutes—Lily, I think your battery is going—but I got most of it.”

“What did they say? More bad news?” said Darrell.

“This is, what, Wednesday?” said Becca. “Isabella Mercanti missed her lecture two days ago. And the university hasn’t been able to get in touch with her since then.”

“Two days ago we were in Berlin,” said Wade.

Lily folded her arms around herself. “This can only mean one thing, right? We’re all thinking it. They kidnapped her. Or killed her—”

“No,” Becca said. “Not that.”

“Well, her husband was in Asterias, and he didn’t die in any accident. He was killed. And now they took care of her.”

Wade’s legs felt suddenly as weak as his forearm. He slumped down to the curb, stared at the cobblestones, then looked up at the others. “So we’re alone. We have no idea what’s going on with Dad, we’re alone, and we have no cash or friends. We have to do something.”

Becca held out the phone to Darrell. “Start by calling your mom again. Leave a message. Tell her we need help. But that’s all. She’ll call back when she can.”

Darrell took it and tapped in the number. He tapped it in a second time. “Uh . . . this isn’t working.”

Lily pulled it back. “Uh-oh. Becca, you were right. My battery’s dying. That’s what all that crackly business was.”

“Send Sara an email,” Wade said. “You can do that on a tablet, right?”

Lily threw her phone into the bottom of her bag. “She won’t get it until she’s out of the jungle, but yeah.”

Darrell tapped in a quick message and hit Send. “Let’s find what we came here for,” he said.

“The Sala d’Arme,” Becca said. “The fencing school.”

Swiping her tablet, Lily said, “Achille Marozzo’s school is on Via Cà Selvatica,” pronouncing the street name slowly and still apparently managing to mangle it enough to make Becca laugh.

“It’s their own fault for having so many letters in a word,” Lily said. “What’s wrong with ‘Main Street’? Anyway, according to Google maps, we can walk to it. Follow the guide . . .”

The route was not straight, but Wade couldn’t imagine that any route in what was essentially a medieval Italian city would be. After making their way along a couple of broad avenues, they entered an older, narrower series of streets that wandered and crossed and looped and sometimes ended in blind alleys.

An hour later, they were deep among ancient ways bordered by low stone buildings, all topped with red tile roofs. And there it was, the Via Cà Selvatica, a narrow flat street at the end of which stood a motley collection of school-like buildings clustered behind a high rough-stone wall. It took them a few minutes to find a door in the wall. It was locked.

“Over the wall. Come on,” said Darrell. He and Wade hoisted the girls up and followed them inside the wall to a large paved courtyard. Among more modern school buildings, and not visible from the street, stood an old church-like structure with a set of wide stairs leading up to its main doors.

“The Sala d’Arme is still a fencing school,” Lily said, half looking at the building, half at her tablet. “It teaches the same technique that Achille Marozzo originated in the sixteenth century and that he probably taught Copernicus when he studied in Bologna in the early fifteen hundreds. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty cool,” said Becca, starting up the stairs with her.

The windows were dark. And they heard nothing. Neither the clash of blades nor the yelling, shouting, and taunting that might be expected from a school of swordsmanship.

Together Wade and Darrell pulled on the bronze handles on the doors. They wouldn’t budge.

“They’re closed,” Lily said. “We’ve had this problem before.”

On the wall next to the doors was a sleek alphanumeric keypad with a slot for a security card under it. Clearly it would take only the right combination of digits, and they had no card.

In addition to the keypad, there was on the right-hand door a small bronze plate with the entwined letters
AM
in the center.

Between the two letters was a keyhole, though it was unlike any keyhole they had seen before. The hole was not round but slot-like, narrow at either end and wider in the middle, with little dimples on each side.

Darrell pounded on the doors. They listened and waited. Becca stood away from the doors. “Hey! Anyone!
Apra la porta?
”

No response.

“Now what?” said Lily.

Wade couldn’t take his eyes from the keyhole on the door. He bent down to examine it more closely. There were no scratch marks directly around the keyhole, which he thought was odd for what looked like a very old lock. Instead, there was a perfect circle scratched into the plate at a radius of about two inches from the center of the lock, as if the key had something attached to it that scratched the plate when it was turned in the lock.

Lily pounded on the doors to no result. “Open up, AM! We hid in a soda truck to get here—”

“Hold on.” Wade unzipped his backpack and unwrapped the dagger from its velvet cover.

“You’re kidding, right?” said Darrell. “You’re going to stab your way in?”

“Not really,” Wade said. He studied the keyhole again to see if it was big enough, then he carefully slid the dagger’s blade into it.

“Okay, careful . . . ,” Lily said.

With each wave of the blade, the dagger shifted up and down. It stopped when the handle guard was up against the groove scratched into the plate. Once the dagger was all the way in, he turned it gently clockwise. It wouldn’t move. When he turned it the other way—counterclockwise—the lock mechanism clicked and shifted.

“Of course,” he whispered. “All the planets in our solar system revolve counterclockwise. Copernicus again.” He turned the dagger one complete revolution. A second. A third revolution started a soft pinging sound that lasted about ten seconds before there was a deep thunk, then silence.

“Whoa,” said Darrell.

“My thoughts exactly,” Becca added.

Wade knew he had a dumb grin on his face, but it was only partly because the dagger worked. He realized all at once in a strange, exhilarating rush that they had solved several codes, retrieved an ancient dagger from a crypt, eluded an army of killers, crossed half of Europe, found an old door to an old school, and were now unlocking it.

And this was just the beginning.

If Becca was right, there was more after this, and more and more—

“Are we ever going in, Smiley?” Darrell asked.

“Sorry, yeah.” He removed the dagger and pushed the door inward. As heavy as the old door was, it slid open soundlessly and with ease, like the door of the Kupfermann tomb. The air inside the building was cool. It smelled of old stone. They tiptoed into a long high-ceilinged hallway of arches and columns and stood silently, looking ahead into the dim empty distance, when a bright silver sword flashed down in front of them and a voice hissed from the shadows.

“Don’t move a centimeter!”

Chapter Thirty-Two

“W
ho invades our sacred precincts? Tell me instantly or die!”

The words had been said—in a kind of lilting English that somehow made Lily think of blue water and warm sand—by a young man in a tight-fitting white tunic and leggings. His face was chiseled and angular, and his brown hair, as wavy as the dagger’s blade, cascaded to his shoulders.

“Uh . . .” Darrell mumbled. “We’re . . . tourists?”

“This is an extremely
private
private school,” the young man said, not dropping his sword or his Rs. “And very securely locked.”

Lily felt Becca’s eyes on her.
Why? Why is she looking at me when this guy’s face is standing in front of us?
Then she realized that her mouth was hanging open. She closed it quietly, but not before she found herself saying, “Your accent . . .”

The young man seemed about to speak when he glanced down at Wade’s hand. That old dagger was still out. The young man immediately dropped his sword to his side and bent slightly at the waist. “My deepest apologies,” he said. “That is . . . a rare dagger. Very rare.” His brow furrowed. “You found it in . . . Berlin?”

They shared a look. “How did you know that?” Becca asked.

The young man looked at her for a second, then back at the dagger. “There were very few ever made, nearly all of them accounted for. Early sixteenth century. But you no doubt know this already.” He bowed again. “My sincere apologies. I was expecting . . . not you. May I examine it?”

“Yes,” Lily replied, as if he was speaking directly to her.

Wade held out the dagger and the young man took it carefully. “Yes. This is one of Achille’s blades. Excuse me, Achille Marozzo, the sword master who started our school. He founded it in this very building and had many illustrious students. But, again, you must already know this, or you would not be here. Like others who have found their way to us from time to time, you have come to visit our library, the earliest room of our school, yes?”

Books? Really? Are the relics just books?

Without waiting for them to respond, the man said “Yes, of course you have.” His expression changed as he handed the dagger back. “You were not directly followed?”

“Followed?” said Becca, her first word for some time. “How did you . . . I mean, why did you think that?”

The young man narrowed his eyes. “Your visit . . . but there will be time later. Come. Quickly. As you might guess, we are in lockdown.”

Why would we guess that? Who does he think we are?

He spun on his heels—quite elegantly, Lily thought—and pressed a button on the wall next to the door.

There followed the sound of bolts shifting and moving that ended with a sharp echo. “Secure once more.” Then he stared at their faces as if taking notes for a portrait and swung his sword in a wide arc in front of him.

“My name is Carlo Nuovenuto. I shall escort you to the library myself. Follow me. Hurry.”

And hurriedly they went, as Carlo led them down the corridor, their footsteps reverberating against the bare stone.

“Why is the school in lockdown?” asked Wade.

“I’ll explain later.” Without another word, he turned left into a high-walled room whose ceiling was painted with fat naked babies and clouds. From there they passed through a vaulted archway into a long red-windowed hallway. One room after another, passage by passage, Carlo Nuovenuto led them deeper and deeper to what appeared to be the very rear of the old building.

“Carlo,” said Lily, smiling. “You must be Italian, right?”

“
Sì.
Half,” he said. “The other half . . . many things.”

Darrell made a barely audible sound in his throat. She turned to see him share a look with Wade, who rolled his eyes.

Uh-huh. You wish you looked like this guy,
she thought. She was sure Darrell and Wade wondered whether Carlo could even be trusted and were hanging back, ready to leap into action if he tried anything.
Guys
, she wanted to say,
Carlo sword fights for a living!

“By the way,” he said as he paused at a small closet stuffed with fencing stuff. He reached into it. “Here’s a carrier for the dagger . . . eh . . . your names?”

“Oh, right,” said Wade. “I’m Wade Kaplan. This is my stepbrother, Darrell, our friend, Becca, and—”

“Lily!” she said.

Carlo nodded to each of them. “You’ll want to protect the edges of the dagger, Wade. You may need it later. This sheath is made of a synthetic material that will keep the blade sharp, and, not incidentally, hide it from scanners and other detection equipment.”

“Really?” said Darrell. “You mean at airports and stuff?”

“Just so. The sheath’s strap hangs over the shoulder and conceals the weapon under your shirt.”

Wade took the lightweight scabbard. “Thanks.”

“This way.” Carlo led them into a room that was completely unfurnished. There was a single narrow door in one wall. He approached the door. There was a sudden humming, and he stopped, producing a phone from his tunic pocket.

“Sì?”
he answered. A voice chirped excitedly on the other end.
“Sì. Pronto.”
He closed the phone. “You must excuse me. You will be safe in the library.”

“Safe?” said Becca. “It’s a library . . .”

Carlo turned his eyes on Wade. “Hold tightly on to that,” he said, pointing to the dagger. With a twirl of his heels and hair, he was gone.

“He’s telling us we’ll be safe?” whispered Darrell. “Lockdown? Did those creeps track us here? How did they find the fencing school so fast?
How are they doing that?
”

“I don’t know, but we’d better hurry,” said Lily. “The door looks similar to the one on the front of the building. Dagger time.”

Wade inserted the blade as before, turned it counterclockwise three times, and the door opened. In semidarkness beyond the door stood a narrow corridor barely two feet wide from wall to wall. It looked ancient, but the air was dry, and there was a faint hum coming from somewhere high in the ceiling.

Air-conditioning?
Lily wondered. A security camera was positioned at the end of the corridor by the other door. The red light pulsing next to the lens told them it was filming.

“Someone’s watching us,” Darrell whispered.

“Carlo, probably, but he seems okay,” said Lily, though
okay
wasn’t the word in her head. “And it sounds like he knows what he’s doing. Anyway, it’s too late to turn back now.”

Wade slowed in the passage. “All right, but look. Carlo knows the dagger is valuable. And it’s like a sign that we’re good. We can be trusted. He didn’t ask a lot of questions, just brought us here, so he must know what we’re looking for. Why the library? Maybe the relics are books.”

“Please keep moving,” said Becca. “I really can’t stand the dark.”

By the end of the passage, they were in almost total darkness. Lily vainly tried to remember the sequence of rooms and how far from the street entrance they might be, when Wade unlocked a third door with the dagger. They descended a set of stairs into a chamber more opulent than any she had ever seen. Gold threaded tapestries of mythological scenes hung heavily from three walls. On its ceiling was a painting of the sun in brilliant yellow and crimson, with gold rays splaying out from the center to each corner.

Antique bladed weapons were arranged elaborately on the fourth wall. None were identical to their dagger, though some looked pretty close. Others were even more fanciful, including some swords that looked like desert weapons, with long curved blades and a vaguely Arabic feel to them. Lily was going to say they looked like movie props when she realized that the props were likely made to look like them.

“So Achille Marozzo made all these things?” she asked.

The room was airy despite its being underground, and there was something vaguely futuristic about it, as if the past and the future came together there.

“Probably,” said Darrell. “Man, I wish we could borrow some of them. We should all have weapons. Swords would be so cool.”

“And impossible to hide,” said Becca. “A dagger is dangerous enough to be carrying around.”

“There’s only one book in the ‘library’?” said Wade.

In the center of the room was a long, wide table made from a single, thick slab of oak. It was surrounded by a half dozen oak chairs.

There were two antique oil lamps at the head of the table and between them a small stand on which sat a compact, leather-bound book. It was deep red with faded brass guards to protect each corner and a pair of similarly faded clasps to keep it closed.

The brass guards were engraved with daggers like the one Wade set on the table in front of him.

Imprinted in gold across a flat panel on the cover was a title in what Lily knew now were Gothic German letters similar to those on the Kupfermann tomb. She watched Becca’s face as she read the title. She seemed to stop breathing.

“Bec, are you okay—”

“What is it? What does it say?” asked Wade.

Becca slumped into the nearest chair, ran her fingers lightly over the gold letters, then translated them aloud.

† † †

T
HE
D
AY
B
OOK OF

N
ICOLAUS
C
OPERNICUS

H
IS
S
ECRET
V
OYAGES IN
E
ARTH AND
H
EAVEN

F
AITHFULLY
R
ECORDED

BY
H
IS
A
SSISTANT

H
ANS
N
OVAK

B
EGUN
A.D.
1514

†††