The Book of Blood and Shadow Read online

  The central public library was a depressingly austere block building bracketed by two baroque monstrosities, their elaborate columns, carvings, and pedestals making the “modern” architecture look less forward-thinking than apathetic. We found nothing in the catalog under Hledači or Lumen Dei, and no record of anyone named Ivan Glockner working in reference in this library or any other in the greater Prague library system. But the young librarian, who looked more like a college student and—with a skunk streak of neon pink in her hair and jagged gold piercings rimming her left ear—not the kind you’d expect to see in a library, directed us into a room in the basement where rare documents were kept, along with an archivist who supposedly knew “everything about everything.”

  The archivist—in all black, with a spiked collar, the perfect Sid to her Nancy—had never heard of Ivan Glockner either, and he came up empty on the Hledači and Lumen Dei. But when I asked if they had anything about Elizabeth Weston, he disappeared into the bowels of the stacks and reemerged several minutes later with a red folder, a tattered and faded page nestled carefully inside. “Don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but it’s indexed to her name,” he said, his English accented but fluid. “That’s all we’ve got. Try not to touch it.”

  He didn’t have to tell me; I knew how to handle rare documents.

  It was a large room, but the lack of windows and surplus of dark wood and musty bindings had a claustrophobic effect. The air was heavy and still, and smelled faintly of mold. At one of the three wooden tables, a hunchbacked man bent over a newspaper, his finger tracing the tiny print line by line.

  Prudens et innatus fuit tua sagacitas. The note was short and simple, easy to translate while Adriane stretched out her calves and Eli peered over my shoulder, eyes fixed on the page.

  Your instincts were well founded. We have much cause to worry. The daughter, known to us as Elizabeth Weston, has carried her father’s work to Prague. Alone she would be of little risk, but she has aligned herself with a mechanist, a favorite in the Emperor’s court. Rudolf himself is surely bringing all his demonic power to bear on its behalf.

  They are closing in on their dark goal. Weston’s house in Malá Strana is unguarded, and it will be nothing to gain access. I urge you against leniency on this matter. A mere warning will be ineffective against a girl raised by Kelley, filled with such hubris that she believes the Lord should supplicate Himself to her desires.

  Of course, if this be your decision, we will follow without challenge or hesitation. I have ultimate faith in your wisdom, and the wisdom of the Church.

  Yours in eternal fealty and defense of the faith.

  17 January 1599 Prague.

  The letter was signed with a symbol rather than a name—not the lightning-pierced eye, but two dark slashes of ink that looked more like a sword than a cross.

  “We’re wasting time.” Eli slammed the folder shut. “This is useless.”

  The archivist shushed him, his look suggesting he suspected we’d been handling his precious documents with ketchup-stained fingers, if not scissors.

  Adriane cleared her throat. “I hate to agree with the stalker, but—”

  “Fine.” But it didn’t feel useless. Maybe it was knowing Max was so close, that in a few hours I would have him back, that made me so certain we were in the right place, following the bread crumbs to wherever they would lead. Hadn’t they led me to Max?

  A voice stopped us on our way back to the main reading room, a hiss from the old man with the newspaper. He crooked his finger at me, bushy gray eyebrows waggling.

  “Slyšel jsem vás,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Nemluvím česky.” I recited from memory, cringing with each murdered syllable. I don’t speak Czech. (Obviously.)

  There was a gurgle at the base of his throat. Magician-like, he pulled a graying handkerchief from his sleeve and hocked a wad of something viscous and yellow into its center, then folded it neatly and slid it back in place. “I said I heard you. You look for Hledači. Search for searchers. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  His hand was a map of liver spots, but his grip was surprisingly firm. “Ivan Glockner,” he said. “You search for me.”

  “You work here?” Eli asked, looking dubious.

  “I am here,” the man, who might have been Ivan or might—and I could tell from the look on Adriane’s face that she was leaning in this direction—have been a lonely and half-drunk old man with excellent hearing and a proclivity to meddle. “This is enough.”

  “You know Professor Anton Hoffpauer?” I asked.

  “I know many people.”

  “We’re going to be late for that, uh, thing,” Adriane said, giving me her best escape the crazy eyes. “We should go.”

  The man hocked another wad of phlegm, then slapped his hand against the edge of the table. So far Prague seemed full of the very young and the very old. I wondered what had happened to everyone in between. “Take my help or leave me be. Your choice.”

  “We want help,” I said quickly. “If you can.”

  Hair sprouted from his knuckles, significantly blacker than the thin gray tufts curling over his ears and out of his nose. His trembling pen wrote out the letters on the newspaper: Kostel sv Boethia, Betlémské náměstí. “You find Father Hájek. Priest. He tells what you want.”

  “Thank you,” I said as he tore off the corner of the page. The name of the church was written over the black-and-white photo of a young girl, cheerful, vacant eyes staring at the camera, like a face on a milk carton. “Děkuji.”

  “This is not right,” the man said, the absence of contractions giving him an oddly prissy air. “You will not thank me.” He turned back to his newspaper like we weren’t there, wrinkled finger tracing the lines—but his gaze wasn’t tracking, was fixed on what remained of the torn photo, the little girl’s hand, holding a sagging stuffed rabbit.

  “Probably just a lonely old man,” Eli said as we left the library. “City’s full of them. Wanted someone to talk to, pretended to know something.”

  “Or he did know something,” I said.

  The Kostel sv Boethia, Church of St. Boethius, wasn’t in my guidebook, but Betlémské náměstí, Bethlehem Square, was. And it was close.

  11

  The main artery of Staré Město, a diagonal slash across the quarter that efficiently funneled tourists from the Karlův most at one corner to the Powder Tower at the other, had—according to the tour guides we squeezed past, their orange umbrellas held high for the benefit of their obedient herds—once served as a processional path for emperors, kings, and popes, bejeweled eminences of all kinds marching proudly toward the royal palace, dignitaries carried through the streets, sometimes in carriages, sometimes in coffins. It was hard to picture, now that the noble path for heroes and conquerors had become a cobblestone-paved mall.

  There were stores selling colored crystal; stores selling knockoff watches, knockoff handbags, knockoff shoes; stores selling presumably bootleg CDs; stores selling matryoshka dolls painted with the faces of presidents, soccer players, movie stars, and, most prevalently, Michael Jackson; stores selling cheap jewelry; stores selling thick Bavarian pretzels and sugared dough roasting on a spit; and most of all, stores selling puppets, their blank wooden faces staring dully through the glass, their limbs contorted by tangled strings, their lips painted into smiles or roars, tears or freckles dotting their apple cheeks—rows and rows of puppet girls and puppet boys, menaced by puppet dragons, wooed by puppet princes, tempted by puppet devils.

  Many of these stores were fronted by beggars in ratty clothes, huddled under grimy blankets. Since elementary school I’d been taught to call them, with all due respect, homeless people, but these were undeniably beggars, as if out of a folktale, beggars bent forward on their knees, stretched prone with their faces in the dirt, arms extended and hands clenching a hat containing, in the best of cases, a few loose coins. I didn’t want to stare; I didn’t want to carefully not stare, like t
he packs of camera-clutching tourists who kept their gazes averted and stepped past them or over them like they were simply wider-than-usual cracks in the sidewalk.

  When the street spit us out into a wide square bordered by an ornate clock tower and a church whose spires made it resemble nothing so much as Disney World’s Cinderella Castle, I was glad for the excuse to look up.

  Most of the square was filled by an Easter market hawking produce, fried bread, and sausages of various size and color. Having eaten pretty much nothing since Paris but wilted Eurail sandwiches, we sampled all we could. Adriane couldn’t get enough of the rakvičky, a narrow, nutty-flavored cookie with a crème center, which soured in my mouth when Eli translated the name for us: little coffins.

  “Don’t be so sensitive,” Adriane said, mouth full, her no-carb policy apparently on a spring break of its own. She said it again when we paused beneath the clock tower to get our bearings and overheard yet another tour guide—this one in Renaissance drag, though still holding the telltale umbrella—pointing out the twenty-seven white crosses inscribed in the stone pavement, testament to the twenty-seven Protestants who’d been beheaded on a single seventeenth-century afternoon while the Catholic crowds cheered. Presumably they cheered even louder when, according to the perky guide, the executioners started getting creative, slicing off and nailing unfortunate tongues to the gallows, louder still when the severed heads were carried in buckets down the noble Royal Way and impaled on a tower overlooking the Karlův most, where they watched sightlessly over the city for ten years.

  Maybe that was why I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching us. Maybe it wasn’t a shadowy killer with a knife and a mission, but simply the careful scrutiny of a skyline of stone saints and the ghosts of heretics past.

  I didn’t believe in ghosts.

  We ventured into a narrow alley, completely empty and, except for the distant rumble of the abandoned crowd, silent. I kept checking over my shoulder, convinced, still, that someone was there—and if a dark figure was going to attack, what better place for him to strike than this shaded alley, isolated and crumbling around us. But nothing happened, and again, I told myself that what sounded like scuffling footsteps was only branches scraping stone or feral cats tussling for scraps, the flickers of movement only shadows, the prickling sensation on the back of my neck only fear.

  Bethlehem Square was only a few turns away. The church lodged in its northwest corner had no fairy-tale spires or mobs of tourists snapping pictures, just a crumbling Renaissance edifice and a weather-beaten plastic sign announcing times for mass. Inside it was cavelike, dark and cool and damp. Stone walls, stained-glass windows, flickering candles, two beggars asleep beneath a pew, and, emerging from one of the confessional booths, an old priest with the long black robe and stiff white collar I’d only seen in movies and the occasional headline news exposé.

  He came to us—to Eli, rather—and started speaking in rapid-fire Czech before we could say anything. Eli interrupted, and for a few moments they talked over each other, the priest’s cratered face an angry red, his flabby arms flapping, Eli speaking slowly and firmly, occasionally stumbling over a word, but refusing to give, until finally the priest crossed his arms and nodded, and there was quiet.

  “What did he say?” I asked. “What did you tell him?”

  “It’s fine,” Eli said, sounding far from it. “The church isn’t open to tourists, and he says you’re not dressed appropriately for a holy place.”

  “Apparently,” Adriane said, shooting a look at the homeless guys.

  That didn’t explain why the argument had gone on for so long, or why the priest had been so angry. “Did you tell him we just want to ask a question? Is this even him?” I turned to the priest. “Are you Father Hájek?”

  “It’s him,” Eli said. “But he won’t help us. He says he doesn’t know anything.”

  “Did you even tell him what we’re looking for?” I asked. Eli was clearly lying. It was pathetic to just stand there and accept it, like we were blind and he was our guide, assuring us the path was safe and clear when, for all we knew, it ran straight into a dead end. Or off a cliff.

  “Ask him about the Hledači,” I insisted. “Ask him about the Lumen Dei.”

  “I told you, he doesn’t want to talk to us,” Eli said. “So can we go?”

  “Right. We’re just going to take your word for it,” Adriane said.

  I opened my guidebook to the section of simple Czech phrases, determined to find a way to ask my own questions, even if I had to use pictures.

  But I didn’t.

  “Lumen Dei. Hledači. Yes. You must hear.” The priest’s voice seemed scratchier in his halting English. He was even older than the man in the library. The church smelled faintly musty, but the damp scent of mold and decay intensified near him, as if he were its source. “Hledači, seekers, yes? You understand this?”

  “I guess, but that was four hundred years ago. We need to figure out—”

  “Yes, then. But also, now. Many, many generations. They will seek until they find. They are sworn, forever.”

  “Seek what?”

  “You know this. You say it yourself.”

  “The Lumen Dei.”

  He nodded.

  “But I don’t know that,” I said. “I don’t know anything. Just tell me what it is—what do they want?”

  “It is machine,” he said. “It is miracle and it is curse. It is bridge from human to divine. It is knowledge and power of God in the hands of man. It is abomination. They are abomination.”

  “This guy is crazy,” Adriane muttered.

  “World is crazy,” the priest said, glaring at her. “Hledači, crazy, yes. Machine is real. And dangerous. You want to live? You choose not to know.”

  “That’s really helpful, thanks,” Adriane said. “So now that you’ve told us everything, we’re supposed to forget it or die? Excellent.”

  The priest ignored her. “This church honors St. Boethius. You know the story of this man?”

  We dutifully shook our heads, obedient honor students to the bitter end.

  “Brilliant man, Boethius. Philosopher. Scholar. Bright light in a dark age. He finds an ancient masterpiece. Aristotle. Translates it for his people. You know how they thank him for this gift?” This time, he barely paused to confirm our ignorance. His English was improving by the second. “The king wraps cord around his neck. Pulls it tighter, tighter, until his eyes pop out. Then his people beat him to death. You know why? He asks too many questions. They do not like his answers. He pays price.”

  “Very subtle,” Adriane said.

  It was remarkable how many creatively gruesome ways of killing people there turned out to be. I wondered, on average, how many corpses needed to pile up before executioners got bored enough to invent new methods. “How do we find this machine?” I said. This wasn’t curiosity; it was need. “How do we find the Hledači?”

  How had they found us?

  He didn’t answer.

  “Are we in danger? Is that what you’re saying? From them? From you?”

  “ ‘Est autem fides sperandorum substantia rerum argumentum non parentum.’ ”

  I translated on the fly. “ ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ ”

  The priest offered an approving nod. “Hebrews 11:1.”

  “And is that supposed to mean something?”

  He turned away, muttering something in Czech.

  “Answer me!”

  Without facing us, he spoke. “Nemluvím anglicky.” Sounding it out slowly and clearly so that even we idiot Americans could understand.

  “He said he doesn’t speak English,” Eli said sourly.

  “Got that much, thanks.”

  The priest hobbled down the central aisle of the church, turning only when he reached the altar. He barked out something short and angry in Czech, then swatted his hand through the air. We were dismissed.

  “What did he say th
at time?” I asked as we stepped out of the church, squinting in the sudden sunlight.

  Eli looked faintly sick, like he knew I knew he was about to lie, but there was nothing either of us could do about it. “He wanted to make sure you try svičková before you leave town; he claims it’s some kind of once-in-a-lifetime culinary experience.” He shoved his clenched fists into his coat pockets. “But I’ve had it. Tastes like chicken. Trust me.”

  12

  Adriane’s take, as we returned to the hostel: This was crazy, this was stupid, this was a waste of our time, if we thought Chris was dead because of some hypothetical ancient machine that was basically a telephone to God and a bunch of four-hundred-year-old nutcases who wanted to hook it up again, then she knew of a nice, cozy mental institution where we could recuperate until common sense and sanity returned, if we believed a crazy priest and some old letter, she had a pile of magic beans for sale and a pouch of pixie dust, surely we now realized that any further inquiries in this direction would be a ridiculous waste of time, as perhaps this entire trip had been a ridiculous waste of time, and by the way, had she mentioned that somewhere out there was a real killer with a real knife, and maybe we should stop chasing shadows and start protecting ourselves?

  We crossed the bridge, we pushed our way through the throngs of people, we hiked the Malá Strana hill, and I let Adriane talk, knowing that everything she said made sense—but that none of it explained why a twenty-first-century priest was telling horror stories about a four-hundred-year-old secret kept by a dead girl whose bloody letter I had read and stolen and stolen again. And if Adriane had known about the letter, maybe she would have agreed. But I hadn’t told her; I couldn’t. It was one thing to hold myself responsible for what had happened to Chris. It would be another to see my guilt reflected in her eyes. That would make it too real.

  Eli was silent, too, until we reached the lobby and collected our room keys from the front desk. Then he interrupted her litany to say, quietly, “If a machine like that really existed, people would be willing to kill for it. Lots of people.”