The Sorceress (49 page)

His office door opened almost immediately, and a nervous-looking male secretary appeared and ushered a tall sharp-faced man into the room. “Mr. Hunter, sir.”

“Hold my calls,” Dee snapped. “I do not wish to be disturbed under any circumstances.”

“Yes, sir. Will that be all, sir?”

“That will be all. Tell the staff they can go home now.” Dee had insisted that everyone remain long after normal office hours.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Will you be here tomorrow?”

Dee’s look sent the secretary scurrying. The Magician knew the entire office were on tenterhooks because he had turned up unexpectedly. Rumors were flying around the building that he was going to close the London branch of Enoch Enterprises. Even though it was now ten o’clock in the evening, no one had complained about staying late.

“Take a seat, Mr. Hunter.” Dee indicated the low leather and metal chair before him. He remained seated behind his desk of polished black marble, watching the newcomer carefully. There was something
wrong
about him, the Magician decided. The planes and angles of his face were awry; his eyes were slightly too high, each one was a different color and his mouth a little too low and wide. It was almost as if he had been created by someone who had not seen a human for a long time. He was dressed in a pale blue pinstripe suit, but the trousers were just a little too short and showed a flash of white flesh just above his black socks, while the sleeves of his jacket ended below his knuckles. His shoes were filthy, thickly caked with mud.

Hunter folded himself into the seat, the movement awkward and stiff, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to with his arms and legs.

Dee allowed his fingers to brush against Excalibur, which was propped under his desk. He also knew half a dozen auric spells, any one of which was designed to overload an aura and bring it to blazing life. Then the only problem would be cleaning the dust out of the carpet. The chair would probably melt.

“How did you know I was here?” Dee asked suddenly. “I rarely visit this office. And it is a little late in the evening for a meeting.”

The tall pale-faced man tried to smile, but instead twisted his lips oddly. “My employer knew you were in the city. He presumed you would make your way to this office inasmuch as it gives you access to your communications network.” The man spoke English with clipped precision, but in a slightly high-pitched voice that made everything sound faintly ridiculous.

“Can you not speak plainly?” Dee snapped. He was tired and running out of time. Despite the hours of roadblocks and countless police checkpoints, there was still no sign of Flamel and the children. The British government was coming under pressure to remove the checkpoints. All roads leading in and out of the city were still gridlocked, and London itself was at a standstill.

“You had a meeting with my employer late last night,” the pale man said. “It was terminated before it had reached a satisfactory conclusion, due to circumstances entirely beyond your control.”

The Magician rose and walked around the desk. He was holding Excalibur in his right hand, tapping the stone blade gently against his left. The seated man showed no reaction. “What are you?” Dee asked, curious. He had come to the conclusion that the creature was not entirely natural and probably not even human. Going down on one knee, he stared into the man’s face, looking at the mismatched eyes. Green and gray. “Are you a tulpa, a Golem, simulacrum or homunculus?”

“I am a Thoughtform,” the figure said, and smiled. Its mouth was filled with stag’s teeth. “Created by Cernunnos.”

Dee was scrambling back even as the figure changed. The body remained that of a tall ill-dressed man, but the head altered, became beautiful and alien, even as great antlers sprouted. The Horned God’s mouth moved in the tiniest of smiles and its slit-pupiled eyes expanded and contracted. “Lock your door, Doctor; you would not want anyone to walk in now.”

Giving the creature a wide berth, keeping Excalibur between them, Dee moved around to snap the lock on the door. What Cernunnos had just done was remarkable. Using its imagination and the power of its will, the Archon had created a being entirely out of its aura. The creation wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. Dee knew that humani never really looked at one another anymore, and even if someone had noticed that something was wrong with the man’s appearance, they would have looked away, embarrassed.

“I’m impressed,” Dee said. “I take it that you are controlling the Thoughtform from a distance?”

“Farther than you can imagine,” Cernunnos said.

“I had come to the conclusion that you did not have any mastery of magic,” Dee admitted, returning to his desk. The fancy silver business card was slowly steaming, curls of off-white smoke drifting away to be absorbed by the stag-headed man sitting on the opposite side of the desk.

“Not magic, just Archon technology,” Cernunnos said simply. “You would find the two indistinguishable.”

“I assume you are here for a reason,” Dee said, “and not just to demonstrate this … this technology.”

The stag nodded, smiling brilliantly. “I know where Flamel, Gilgamesh, Palamedes and the twins are.”

“Right now?”

“Right now,” the creature agreed. “They are an hour from here.”

“Tell me,” Dee demanded, then added, “please.”

The Archon held up its right hand. Dee noticed that it had one too many fingers. “My terms remain the same, Magician. I want Flamel, Gilgamesh and Palamedes alive. And I want Clarent.”

“Agreed,” Dee said without hesitation. “All yours. Just tell me where they are.”

“And I want Excalibur.”

At that moment the Magician would have promised the creature anything. “Done. I will put it in your hands myself, the moment Flamel is dead. How many others are with him?” he asked eagerly.

“None.”

“None? What about the Gabriel Hounds?”

“The Ratchets and their master, the Bard, have vanished. The Alchemyst, the knight and the king are with the twins.”

“How did you find them?” Dee asked. He had to admit he was impressed. “I’ve looked everywhere.”

The creature was changing again as it stood, horns retracting back into its skull. A head and face that was subtly, disturbingly different from its previous head appeared. “I went back to their metal fortress, and then I simply followed their scent.”

“You tracked them across this city by smell?” Dee found that an even more astonishing feat than controlling the Thoughtform. He bit back a smile at the sudden image of the Horned God on all fours running through traffic, sniffing after a car.

“Archon technology. It was simplicity itself,” the Thoughtform said. “Now, if you will just accompany me, I will endeavor to arrange for you to be transported ….”

“The Thoughtform is impressive,” the Magician said sincerely, “but if you intend to pass among the humani, you really need to work on the voice. And the clothes.”

“It is of little consequence,” the creature said. “Soon the humani will be no more.”

erenelle Flamel was disappointed.

Huddled in the watchtower where she had spent the night, the Sorceress had been hoping against hope that any one of the small sailing boats scattered across the bay would suddenly veer toward the island, and Scatty and Joan would come ashore.

But as the day wore on, she’d realized that they were not coming.

She had no doubts that they had tried, and she knew that only something terrible could have kept them away. But she was also a little annoyed with herself for getting her hopes up.

“Boat coming!”
de Ayala’s voice whispered behind her left ear, startling her.

“Juan!” she snapped. “You’re going to be the death of me!” She pushed to the edge of the watchtower, feeling a
wave of relief wash over her, along with the tiniest twinge of guilt that she had ever doubted her friends. The Sorceress’s face broke into a cruel smile; with Joan of Arc and Scathach the Shadow by her side, nothing—not even the sphinx and the Old Man of the Sea—would be able to stand against her.

Huge black wings flapped and snapped, and she watched the Crow Goddess come spiraling down off the top of the lighthouse and float gently to the wharf almost directly below her. Perenelle frowned; what was the creature thinking? Scathach would probably feed her to the Nereids, who were none too fussy about what they ate.

She was just about to stand up and climb out of the tower when de Ayala’s face partially materialized in front of her. The ghost’s eyes were wide with alarm.
“Down. Stay down.”

Perenelle flattened herself against the floor. She heard the bubbling of an outboard motor and the scrape of wood against wood as the boat bumped up against the dock. And then a voice spoke. A male voice.

“Madam, it is an honor to find you are here.”

There was something about the voice, something dreadfully familiar …. Perenelle crept over to the edge of the watchtower and peered down. Almost directly below her, the Italian immortal Niccolò Machiavelli was bowing deeply to the Crow Goddess. The Sorceress recognized the young man who climbed out of the boat as the immortal she’d caught spying on her the previous day.

Machiavelli straightened and held up an envelope. “I have instructions from our Elder master. We are to awaken the sleeping army and kill the Sorceress. Where is she?” he demanded.

The Crow Goddess’s smile was savage. “Let me show you.”

he twins slept, and their dreams were identical.

They dreamt of rain and pounding water, towering waterfalls, vast curling waves and a flood that had once almost destroyed the earth.

The dreams left them twitching and mumbling in their sleep, muttering in a variety of languages, and once, Sophie and Josh simultaneously called out for their mother in a tongue Gilgamesh recognized as Old Egyptian, a language first spoken more than five thousand years ago.

A dozen times during the course of the long day, Nicholas Flamel had been tempted to wake the twins, but Gilgamesh and Palamedes stood guard over them. The king had pulled a barrel alongside Josh; the knight had squatted down on a broken box beside Sophie. The two men scratched out a square board in the dirt and played endless games of checkers
with stones and seeds, rarely speaking except to keep score with scraps of broken twig.