The Warlock (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #5) (18 page)

“Marethyu,” Tsagaglalal said, nodding. Tears rolled down her lined cheeks. “He had it.”

“How do you know?” Sophie whispered, though even as she was asking the question, the answer was forming.…

“Because I gave it to him,” Tsagaglalal said, and her aura flared briefly.

And the memory struck Sophie like a blow.

The skies erupting with lightning, the ground belching fire, huge slabs of the pyramid shaking themselves apart … and the gray-eyed young woman thrusting a metal-bound book at the one-handed man …

Sophie staggered away from the table and the images faded.

The room was icy cold and everything was beginning to take on the sparkling patina of frost. Some of Perenelle’s aura had now washed across the floor, billowing like mist, while the rest pulsed like enormous white wings over her shoulders. Some of the strands curled down her hands and wrapped around her fingers before crawling across Nicholas’s skull like wriggling worms.

“I was a child when Marethyu told me that my husband
and I would become the guardians of a metal-bound book. We would be the last in a long line of humans to protect this precious object. He said that the book contained the entire knowledge of the world … but when I first saw it, I knew that could not be the truth. There were so few pages in it. How could the entire knowledge of the world be contained in twenty-one pages? It was much later before Nicholas and I began to discover the secrets of the Codex and its ever-changing text.”

“You couldn’t read it?” Sophie asked, and was not even shocked when she realized she’d spoken in the same language Perenelle was using.

“No. That understanding came more than two decades later.” Perenelle’s skin was glowing with an ice-white light. A tracery of pink veins was visible on the back of her hands, and the light had gathered in her green eyes, robbing them of color, making her look blind. “Eventually, everything Marethyu had told us came true.…” Her breath plumed a huge white sigh in the icy air. “Finally, only one prophecy remained.”

“Tell us, Sorceress,” Tsagaglalal said. Her own aura now sheathed her body, wrapping it in a vaguely Egyptian-looking gown, and beneath her wrinkled skin, Sophie caught a glimpse of the beautiful young woman she had once been.

“Marethyu told me that there would come a day—in a distant future, in an as-yet-unnamed land—when both my husband and I would be close to death.” Perenelle’s voice was soft, and emotionless, but there were tears on her cheeks. “Nicholas would die first, and then, two days later, I too would die.”

Sophie blinked and silver tears ran down her cheeks. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with the knowledge of your own death. Would it be terrifying, or completely liberating?

“Marethyu asked me what I would do if I could keep my husband alive for one day more. And I told him.…”

“Anything. Everything,” Sophie whispered, unaware that she had spoken the words aloud.

“Anything. Everything,” Perenelle agreed. “Without the immortality potion, I have perhaps two days of life left.” Her aura grew brighter, the wings fuller, the tips brushing the ceiling. “Marethyu said that I could not save my dear Nicholas, but I could grant him one extra day of life if … I gave him one of mine.”

Sophie gasped.

“You would do the same for your twin,” Perenelle said without hesitation.

Sophie shivered as something cold slithered along the length of her spine. The price of love was anything … and everything.

The Sorceress looked from Sophie to Tsagaglalal and then back at the girl again. “I need you both to help me transfer a portion of my aura into Nicholas.”

“How?” Sophie breathed.

“I need you to give me your auras.”

ome of Scathach’s proudest boasts were that no prison could hold her and that no friend of hers would ever be imprisoned against their will. But she was beginning to discover that the Danu Talis prison was different. “I’m thinking,” Scatty said, “that we might be in trouble. Real trouble.”

The Warrior was standing at the entrance of a crude cave cut into the walls of the mouth of an active volcano. The cave was her cell.

Over the course of her long life, Scathach had been imprisoned dozens of times. But never like this. The Warrior had been hunted and trapped in lethal Shadowrealms, abandoned on desert islands and left to fend for herself in some of the most isolated and dangerous places on earth. She had broken out of the dreaded Elmina Castle in Ghana and had tricked her way off the Chateau d’If in the Mediterranean.

Scatty looked around. The towering walls of the volcano were dotted with hundreds of caves. More than half of them held captives, and others were filled with nothing but moldering bones and scraps of cloth.

She watched the vimana move upward, its metallic smell briefly dispelling the stink of sulfur. It stopped before another cave mouth and she watched Joan hop from the craft and into the cave. A second craft dropped down into the volcano’s mouth and came to a halt almost directly across from her. The top opened and Saint-Germain was pushed into a cave. The immortal dusted himself off, then spotted her and Joan. He waved and Scatty waved back. Saint-Germain cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, but the rumbling roar from below covered whatever he’d tried to say. He shrugged with an elegant roll of his shoulders and disappeared into his cave … reappearing a moment later, shaking his head.

Scathach ducked into her own cave to examine it. Her cell—and she was guessing the others would be identical—was more an alcove than a cave. It was barely high enough to stand up in and was narrow enough that she could touch both walls at the same time. She almost laughed at the thought of Palamedes in such a cell. Unless the cells came in a bigger size, he was going to be very uncomfortable. There was no door, nor was there any need for one: directly below the cave entrance—a long way down—was the bubbling red-black lava, and from the back wall of the cave to the sheer drop into the pit was about three short steps. Only Joan, the smallest
of the group, would be able to lie down. What little light there was came from the flickering reflections from below. The smell and the heat were indescribable.

The Shadow folded her arms across her chest and looked around. There were no stairs, ladders or bridges; the only way to access the caves was to use the vimanas. And she’d just watched the last of the silver crafts spiral up and out of the volcano.

She looked over at Saint-Germain and then to where William Shakespeare leaned almost casually against the wall of his cell, looking down at her. Directly across from him she spotted Palamedes sitting in a cave mouth, feet dangling over the edge, and when she glanced up, Joan was leaning over the edge of her cave mouth looking down at her. She waved and the Shadow waved back. They were all looking at her. And Scathach knew why.

Whenever her friends had been in trouble, Scathach had freed them. She’d rescued Nicholas from Lubyanka prison in Moscow hours before his execution, and had liberated Saint-Germain—even though she didn’t really like him—from the notorious Devil’s Island prison. When Perenelle had been locked up in the Tower of London, Scathach had fought her way through a hundred heavily armed guards and mercenaries who’d been lying in wait, expecting her. It had taken the Warrior Maid less than thirty minutes to free the Sorceress. And of course, she had ridden into the heart of Rouen to free Joan from certain death at the stake.

Lying flat on her stomach, Scathach examined the rock
walls, looking for footholds or handholds, but they were glass-smooth. Rolling over on her back, she examined the rock above her head. It too looked as if it had been polished. Sitting up, she folded her legs into a lotus position and rested her hands in her lap. “This could be tricky,” she muttered.

Often, even the threat of the Shadow was enough to secure the release of a prisoner. When Hel had captured Joan and dragged her into her Shadowrealm, Scathach had let it be known that she would be standing on The Bridge of Gjallarbrú at the entrance to Hel’s kingdom at exactly midnight. If Joan was not released unharmed, Scathach promised that she would continue over the golden bridge into the Shadowrealm. When she was finished, she vowed, the entire world would be nothing more than dust. At exactly one minute to midnight, Hel herself had escorted Joan to the bridge to hand her over into the Warrior’s care.

A pebble dropped on her head and she looked up. Joan was peering over the edge of a cave about ten feet over her head. “So, on a scale of one to ten,” the French immortal shouted down, “how much trouble are we in
now
?”

We’re off the scale, Scatty thought, but all she said was “We’ve gone beyond twelve, heading to thirteen.” She saw the Frenchwoman’s narrow eyebrows rise disbelievingly. “Okay, maybe fourteen,” Scatty amended.

“Well then, we are lucky that there’s not a prison in the world that can hold you,” Joan said, without a trace of sarcasm in her voice.

Except maybe this one, Scathach thought.

osh eased the motorboat up against the wooden dock on Alcatraz, trying to get as close as possible to the gangplank where tourists used to disembark. The engine coughed, then died with a sputter. He turned the key in the ignition and attempted to restart the motor. There was a click, but nothing happened. Leaning forward, he tapped the circular gas gauge. “We’re out of gas,” he called back over his shoulder, to where Dee was once again slumped over the side of the scarred boat. As soon as the danger of the Nereids had passed, his seasickness had returned. “Did you hear me?” Josh raised his voice to get the Magician’s attention. He took a certain amount of pleasure in the English immortal’s discomfort.

“I heard you,” Dee mumbled. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“It means we’re trapped here,” Josh said. “How are we going to get off the island if …,” he began, and then stopped.

Virginia Dare was sitting on the gangplank, leaning back on one arm, dirty bare feet stretched straight out in front of her. Her wooden flute was in her left hand. She had it pressed lightly against her lips, but if she was making any sounds, Josh didn’t hear them over the slapping of the waves against the wooden pilings. The immortal was soaked through and had strands of seaweed wrapped around her waist. And with her long damp hair swept back off her face, she appeared extraordinarily young. She looked down at Josh and smiled. Then she pointed out across the bay with the wooden flute. “Nicely done, by the way. Very nicely done.”