Angelopolis (19 page)

“Surely these seeds would have been completely destroyed if they were among the objects of the settlement,” Vera said. “Even anoxic water would damage them. You could not have found these in proximity to the tablets.”

Azov said, “The seeds were not recovered from the settlement. We found them inland, stored in a dry, cold space under the ground, a place that may have been built by Noah as a storage center for them but was later used as a Thracian burial mound. We found a map of the storage rooms among the tablets. After the water rose and Noah was forced to leave the first settlement, he traveled into what is now northern Greece but was once Thrace. By that time his sons had begun their migrations, founding the new civilizations of the world, and Noah was a tired old man nearing his thousandth year. Noah’s journey inland, meanwhile, had consecrated the land he’d moved through as sacred—priests, monks, and holy men walked that path for centuries after his death to pray and purify themselves. This island was used as the starting place of such pilgrimages. The bodies of saints have been transported and laid to rest on the island. In fact, Saint John the Baptist’s body was entombed here. His headless body lies in the sanctuary of the monastery.”

“But keeping the seeds safe has been our primary purpose,” Sveti said. She gestured toward the filing system. “Azov can pursue his study without threat of intrusion, and he has his work cut out for him: Many of these seeds remain unidentified.”

“Have you grown all of them?” Vera asked, trying to mask her almost childlike desire to see such an exotic garden.

“Some of them, yes; others, no,” Azov said, “The seeds are limited. I watch over their storage; I make sure they are not exposed to light or water; I keep potential thieves away—and that is all. There are many of us appointed as guardians of one kind or another. Our work is relegated to simply standing at the gate, keeping the Nephilim—and others who wish to do harm—away. I couldn’t bear the idea of inadvertently killing the seeds, or, worse, losing them to the enemy due to incompetence. Recovering and protecting them is one thing; growing them is another.”

“You’ve clearly succeeded in creating a working system to classify them,” Vera said. But is it really possible that the seeds could be viable after more than five thousand years?”

“In geological numbers, it isn’t such a long time,” Azov said. “It has been a mere seven thousand years since the Black Sea flooded. Any basic history of botany will show that prehistoric plant life flourished hundreds of millions of years before this, and these seeds were remarkably durable. The atmosphere we breathe developed because of the oxygen released by massive groupings of leaves. Many species of dinosaurs existed solely by eating plants, and so we must conclude that the majority of the planet was covered in vegetation. The cache of seeds we’ve recovered is surely only a tiny fraction of the actual pre-Deluge flora, most of which died. It is miraculous that these seeds remain, but when you think of the amount of plants that went extinct, you will see that these seeds are the exception. The seeds that remained viable were the strongest seeds, the most resistant to the elements.”

Vera followed Azov and Sveti into another cramped room. Azov’s laboratory was a mixture of modern equipment and an old-fashioned angelological research center—an antiquated computer sat among plants on a glass-topped desk, emitting a soft glow over a set of bronze scales. There was a statue of Mercury and a series of glass containers, a velvet divan stacked with papers, and a bookshelf stretched across an entire wall. Vera could see, at first glance, herbal encyclopedias; books of chemistry; French, German, Greek, Latin, and Arabic dictionaries; the collected works of Dioscorides. The hunch she’d had upon first walking into the room was confirmed: This was the home of a workaholic of the first order.

As if reminded of the task at hand, Azov said, “Vera, the album. Sveti, did you bring the seed list?”

Vera gave the album to Sveti, watching her reaction carefully, as if something in her expression might tell her the meaning of the Enochian symbols etched onto the page.

“You understand it?” Vera asked.

“I do, for the most part,” Sveti said. “Written around these flower specimens are ingredients and proportions varying in number and volume.” She stopped at something Vera had missed earlier, a mostly blank page with what appeared to be a heart drawn at its center.

Intrigued, Vera asked, “What is this symbol?”

Azov took a pen from his desk and drew a similar heart on a piece of paper. “This shape was derived from the shell of the silphium seed, which was tapered at one end and cleft at the other. It eventually became known as a symbol of love, a heart, one of our most powerful modern symbols. Indeed, the heart’s association with romantic love could be said to have stemmed from the use of silphium as an aphrodisiac in ancient Cyrene.” Azov glanced at the album, as if to verify the symbol, and continued. “When I was in contact with Angela Valko, there was one plant in particular she was looking for, but she was never able to name it. I wonder if this heart symbol was the element she was trying to decipher.”

“Surely she would have known that the heart symbol’s origin lies in silphium,” Sveti said.

“Angela was a skeptic,” Azov answered. “Silphium is one of the most intriguing plants of the ancient world. Many modern botanists refuse to verify it, claiming that there is no proof that it even existed.”

“I get the feeling that you don’t agree,” Vera said.

“The plant has been extinct for over one thousand years, but you are right, Vera. I have no doubt that silphium existed. Whether it was the cure-all it was purported to be in ancient Mediterranean cultures, I cannot say. Indigestion, asthma, cancer—silphium was allegedly used to treat all of these maladies. Perhaps most important, the plant was believed to both aid in contraception and, as I mentioned, act as an aphrodisiac. It was considered so precious that it formed an important part of trading between Cyrene, now Libya, and other coastal countries, so much so that glyphs and coins were created bearing its image.”

Sveti examined the album page once more. “It is intriguing in this context, because silphium appears to be the single nonfloral ingredient in the formula, and the only one that is extinct.” She flipped through the pages of rose petals. “For example, there are over one hundred varieties of roses in the book. Clearly the formula would have required a distillation of rose oil.”

“But rose oil is so common,” Vera said. “Roses can be found everywhere.”

Azov said, “Now, yes. But after the Flood there would have been only a few seeds keeping the plant from complete extinction. Humanity has—over the millennia—cultivated and revived the rose. If we hadn’t, we would be living in a world without roses. The same can be said for all of the flowers listed in Noah’s catalog of seeds. It is through the human preference for flowers that many of these remain with us. It is a wonder that silphium, which was once so important, nearly died out.”

“Nearly?” Vera said. “I thought it was extinct?”

Azov smiled. “It is extinct,” he said. “Except for one or two remaining seeds.”

Vera stared at Azov, taking in the meaning of what he had said. If they had this plant, it would be possible to create the formula—whatever it was. “Is the silphium among your seed collection?”

“It’s here,” Azov said. He opened a tiny drawer and removed a metal box. He unfastened the catch and lifted a silk pouch. It was ominously airy, as if nothing at all were stored inside. He upended the pouch and a single seed—yellowish brown with specks of green—rolled onto the table. “There is only one left in my care,” Azov said. “The other seed was given to Dr. Raphael Valko in 1985.”

“Do you think he knew about this album, and about this formula in particular?” Sveti asked.

“It’s hard to say,” Azov muttered, as he paged through the book. “The scope of Angela’s work was no secret to him, and he certainly knew that she and I were in close contact before her death. But Raphael never mentioned her when I delivered the seed to him.”

“I fail to see what Raphael Valko has to do with any of this,” Vera said. “Though I have to confess, I am dying to meet him. Especially if he has some connection to this elixir.”

“The real question is: Can we mix this potion?” Sveti asked.

“And if such a potion will do anything at all to the Nephilim,” Azov said, returning his gaze to the album. “If we take the flower petals from behind the wax paper and grind them together in the correct proportions, and in the order designated in Rasputin’s equations, we would have the base for a chemical reaction. That leaves silphium, which we might be able to grow, although in minute quantities.”

“More difficult is the last ingredient,” Sveti said, pointing to a page in the album. “This calls for a metal that was not even verified to exist during Rasputin’s lifetime.”

“I know what it is that you’re going to say,” Vera said. “It is a metal that was used in great quantities before the Flood but had virtually disappeared after the death of Noah. It was given various names by Enoch, Noah, and others in the ancient world who had contact with it. It was rediscovered and classified by Raphael Valko, who renamed it Valkine.” Vera thought this over for a moment and said, “There hasn’t been a piece of Valkine available for more than sixty years.”

“If you exclude the Valkine lyre that was recovered in New York in 1999, then you’re right. The last person to have even a tiny amount was Raphael Valko himself. He came across significant quantities of the substance at the beginning of the twentieth century, when he took possession of one of the celestial instruments, a beautiful lyre that was believed to have been the very instrument Orpheus played. Before he found the lyre there were speculations about the substance that made up the instruments. Some angelologists believed they were made of gold, others of copper. No one knew for certain. And so Valko took a file and scraped shavings from the base of the lyre, analyzed the metal, and came to understand that it was an entirely unique material, one that had never been studied or classified. He named it Valkine. While the lyre itself was packed up and sent to America for safekeeping during the war, the shavings were his. He kept them for some years, and then, the story goes, he melted them down and made three lyre pendants.”

“Dr. Raphael Valko fashioned the pendants. He must have more of the metal, even if it is just a trace amount,” Vera said.

Azov stood and slid on a brown leather jacket. “There’s only one way to find out for sure,” he said, putting his hand on Vera’s shoulder and leading her from the room.

The Fifth Circle

FURY

Trans-Siberian Railway

V
erlaine’s ears rang with a steady, grating buzz. He opened his eyes and saw an indistinct space, foggy and insubstantial, its gray walls bleeding into a gray ceiling, giving him the impression that he’d awoken in a cave. His whole body was consumed in heat, so much so that even the crisp cotton sheets under his shoulders burned his skin. He couldn’t figure out where he was, how he had ended up on such a hard mattress, why his whole body throbbed with pain. Then it all came back: St. Petersburg, the black-winged angel, the electricity moving through his body.

The outline of a woman appeared at his side, a shadowy presence that seemed both comforting and menacing at once. He blinked, trying to make out her features. For a second he was in his recurring dream with Evangeline. He felt the icy coolness of her kiss, the electric attraction as he touched her, the strength of her wings as they wrapped around his body. He was disoriented by her presence, confused about whether he had seen her at all, afraid that—when he awoke completely—she would be lost to him again. But his eyes were open and she was at his side. The beautiful creature he had been longing for had come back to him.

Verlaine blinked again, trying to focus on his surroundings. “You might want these,” a voice said, and Verlaine felt the metal of his wire-rimmed glasses against his skin. Instantly the world contracted into focus, and he caught sight of the Russian angel hunter he’d seen just before he lost consciousness. Without her helmet she looked softer than he remembered—less the professional killing machine and more a regular person. The woman had long blond hair and an expression of concern on her face. Bruno stood nearby, looking almost as bad as Verlaine felt. His hair was matted and his cheek had been scraped raw. Seeing Bruno’s injuries brought Verlaine back to his own. Every breath hurt. He remembered the chase through St. Petersburg, he remembered Eno and the wretched Nephilim twins. He swallowed hard, the pain going down with it. He wanted to say something but couldn’t find his voice.

“Welcome back,” Bruno said, moving close to squeeze Verlaine’s shoulder.

While Verlaine had discerned that he was in some kind of medical facility, he had no idea if he was in Russia or France. “Where am I?”

“Somewhere between Moscow and Yaroslavl, I’d guess,” Bruno said, checking his watch.

Bruno’s face was encrusted with dried blood, his clothes streaked with dirt. Verlaine gave Bruno a questioning look, trying to understand what was happening.