The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #6) (22 page)

A rat-faced boy appeared out of the night, running at the Alchemyst, hands hooked into claws. Perenelle spun around and stamped on his tail as he passed her, bringing him to a squealing halt. He rounded on the Sorceress and she repeated
the spell she’d just used, turning him to stone. He was caught, one eye open, the other shut in a permanent wink.

Without turning around, Nicholas continued. “There must have been a plan in place to get the creatures ashore.”

“The only way on or off the island is by boat,” Perenelle said. “Perhaps the plan changed, or events moved too quickly for him to adjust to the new timescale. Remember, originally the Dark Elders were not due to come back to the Earth Shadowrealm until Litha. That’s still two weeks away.”

“Dee would have had contingency plans. He must have spent months getting the creatures here. But how? There are no ley lines on the island.”

Perenelle nodded. “And neither of us felt any tremendous use of power. It had to be by boat.”

“Which, as you said, is the only way off the island.” Nicholas thought for a moment. “He sent the Lotan ashore to rampage through the streets. While that had everyone’s attention, I’ll wager a boatload of creatures was scheduled to come over from Alcatraz and join in the fun.”

“And with Dee gone, that leaves the Feathered Serpent in charge?”

“Or Bastet,” Flamel suggested. “We know Dee’s worked with both.”

“I would imagine Dee worked with Quetzalcoatl. The Feathered Serpent lives here—well, close, at least,” Perenelle said. “And remember—when I was trapped on the island, Areop-Enap was attacked by flies. Quetzalcoatl must have sent them.”

“So Quetzalcoatl is sending a boat,” Nicholas began, “but we haven’t see anything at sea. Nothing passed us.”

“There is one other alternative,” Perenelle interjected

Nicholas looked at her and then slowly nodded. “Unless it is already here,” he breathed.

“But where could it be?” Perenelle asked, suddenly alarmed. “There cannot be that many places to land on Alcatraz.”

Catching his wife’s hand in his, Nicholas pulled Perenelle over to a stand before the bookshop showing a map of the island. The laminated surface was speckled with dew, and he ran his hands across it. A simplified map depicted the island, with all the buildings picked out in gray, then numbered in red. Above the graphic, in alternating strips of red and black, the numbers were explained.

“We are here at the wharf,” he said, touching the bottom right of the map. There was a number two alongside a red circle that read
YOU ARE HERE
.

Perenelle traced her finger up along the shore, past the guard tower and the guardhouse and the electric shop. “What’s number six?” she asked. “It looks like a substantial building.”

Nicholas checked the number. “Six is the North Road. It says
Prison Industries
.”

“Look at the Quartermaster Warehouse,” she said. “It’s big, close to the water, alongside the Powerhouse. You could bring a boat right up to the island, and in this fog no one would be the wiser.”

“How far away is it?”

“Nicholas, this is Alcatraz. It’s ten minutes away.”

“In this fog?” he asked dubiously.

“You’re right.” She rolled her eyes. “It might take us fifteen.”

T
hrough the enveloping fog, the sound of clanging metal rang across the Golden Gate Bridge. Niten folded into a sitting position in the center of the bridge. He could feel the commotion vibrating up through the ground. He smiled at the sudden image of Prometheus tossing cars from one side of the bridge to the other to build his barrier. He heard the tiny tinkle of glass and wondered if being tossed across the Golden Gate Bridge by an Elder was covered by insurance.

The small Japanese immortal sat cross-legged, his two swords resting flat on the ground before him. He folded his hands in his lap, closed his eyes and breathed through his nose, forcing the chill night air deep into his chest. He held it for a count of five, then shaped his lips into an O and blew it out again, puncturing a tiny hole in the swirling fog before his face.

Even though he would never admit it to anyone, Niten
loved this moment. He had no affection for what was to come, but this brief time, when all preparations for battle were made and there was nothing left to do but wait, when the entire world felt still, as if it was holding its breath, was special. This moment, when he was facing death, was when he felt completely, fully alive.

He’d still been called Miyamoto Musashi and had been a teenager when he’d first discovered the genuine beauty of the quiet moment before a fight. Every breath suddenly tasted like the finest food, every sound was distinct and divine, and even on the foulest of battlefields, his eyes would be drawn to something simple and elegant: a flower, the shape of a branch, the curl of a cloud.

A hundred years ago, Aoife had given him a book as a birthday present. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she’d missed his birthday by a month, but he had treasured the book, a first edition of
The Professor
by Charlotte Brontë. It included a line he had never forgotten:
In the midst of life we are in death.
Years later, he’d heard Gandhi take the same words and shift them around to create something that resonated deeply within him:
In the midst of death life persists
.

Niten had long since fallen out of love with battle.

There was no honor in war, less in killing and none in dying. But there was true dignity in how men comported themselves in battle. And there was always honor to be found in standing for a just cause and defending the defenseless.

Cupping his hands in his lap, Niten called up a little of his aura. It puddled in his palms, a rich royal blue liquid trembling against his dark flesh, the skin seamed and calloused
from centuries of holding a sword. He blew on it and the liquid thickened. Niten rolled it like dough between the palms of his hands, creating a tiny blue sphere, before flattening it to an irregular rectangle of what looked like stiff blue paper. With infinite care, the immortal carefully creased the edges of the paper, folding and refolding to create a delicate origami
kame
, a turtle.

Placing the blue turtle on the bridge before him, Niten picked up his swords and faded into the gloom just as the first of the Spartoi appeared out of the fog.

“Minikui,”
Niten breathed. “Ugly.”

The immortal had fought monsters before and had learned a long time ago never to judge by appearances. Concepts of beauty changed from country to country and even generation to generation, but he doubted anyone would ever find the Spartoi pretty. Not even another Spartoi.

Short and squat, it looked like a crocodile walking on two legs. It was five feet tall and thick-bodied, its skin gnarled and scaled, with the flat wedge-shaped head of a crocodile. Enormous, slit-pupiled bronze and gold eyes set wide apart on the top of its head penetrated the gloom. When it opened its mouth, it revealed rows of ragged teeth and a thick unmoving white tongue.

Niten had seen serpent folk before: they turned up in the legends of just about every country on earth, and many of the nearby Shadowrealms were populated by lizard creatures. Almost without exception, the lizards despised the mammals and the mammals feared the lizards.

Bareheaded, this creature was covered in a long knee-length
poncho that looked like it was made from its own skin. It carried a small circular shield covered in the same material, and its almost humanlike hands clutched a massive studded war club.

Niten assessed the creature with a warrior’s eye.

The Spartoi was lightly armored; its head was vulnerable. It was armed only with the club, which was not as long as Niten’s short sword, so he would have the advantage of being able to attack without getting too close. The immortal was vaguely disappointed: he’d been expecting something a little more formidable. Maybe Quetzalcoatl thought the sight of the Spartoi would terrify the humans into submission. But then, in Niten’s experience, the Elders were often remarkably ill-informed about the race they wanted to rule and the world they needed to control.

Niten watched the creature approach the blue origami turtle. If it was intelligent—well, if it were intelligent, it would never have come near the turtle in the first place—but if it was intelligent, it would fade back into the night and wait for reinforcements. Head swiveling from side to side, the Spartoi crept closer to the blue turtle. If it was really stupid, Niten predicted, it would probably fall on all fours to sniff at the object. The immortal’s grip tightened on his sword as he assessed the creature’s weaknesses: he would take it under the arms, perhaps, or through the mouth.

The Spartoi dropped to all fours and moved its head over the origami.

Stupid, then.

Fog swirling around him like a cloak, Niten raced out of the night, katana raised, then lowering in a deadly whistle.

And the Spartoi moved.

Lightning fast, the lizard’s shield came up and Niten’s sword screamed off it in a blaze of sparks. The creature’s blunt club struck the immortal hard in the center of the chest, and Niten knew instantly that ribs had cracked. The force of the blow sent him spinning, and he tumbled to the ground on the far side of the bridge.

The Spartoi ignored the fallen immortal. He scooped up the blue turtle and popped it into his mouth. “Green tea,” he said in a raspy whisper. “My favorite.”

Niten rolled to his feet, wincing at the pain in his chest. He breathed deeply, evaluating his wounds. Two ribs, maybe three, were broken, maybe the same number cracked. He dropped into a defensive pose and moved back toward the creature.

“You insult me, immortal,” the Spartoi said. “You look at me and see a brute creature and assume that your crude trap will ensnare me.”

Niten was suddenly conscious that there were other shapes in the gloom. The Spartoi had crept up on him and were standing, watching. He knew then that he had made a critical mistake: he had underestimated the enemy.

The Spartoi stood on its hind legs and moved toward Niten, shield and club weaving together in a mesmerizing pattern. The rest of the creatures closed in to form a circle around them. “In this world, are you honored as a great warrior?”

“I am Miyamoto Musashi. In these times I am called Niten and am unknown, but the man I once was is still honored.”

“You must consider yourself a brave warrior to stand here alone against us.”

“I consider this necessary.”

“You will die,” the creature croaked.

“Everyone—everything—dies,” Niten said as he edged closer to the Spartoi. “And when I am gone there will be many more to stand against you.”

“Many will fall.”

Niten attacked as the creature was speaking. Ignoring the pain in his chest, he cut and slashed. The first move was a feint to draw the creature’s shield up; the second was designed to take its head off.

The Spartoi blocked the blow with its club, and upon impact, Niten’s unbreakable katana broke. Three-quarters of the blade went pinging off into the night. The edge of the Spartoi’s round shield swung around to catch the immortal on the left arm. It went completely numb from shoulder to fingertip, and his short sword clattered to the ground.

“We are the Spartoi. Thirty-two in number. Always thirty-two. And we have fought better men than you, immortal. We are infinitely faster than you. I look at you and it is as if you are moving like a snail. I can see your muscles tense long before they move into action. You think you are silent, but your every breath is a rasping roar and you stomp around like an elephant in grass.”

Niten’s hand moved and the ragged end of the broken katana caught the crocodile in the center of the chest. Eyes wide, mouth gaping in surprise, it staggered back into the fog. “You talk too much,” Niten whispered.

V
irginia Dare moved down the darkened alley away from Dee, shredding the palm-leaf wrapping as she walked. Nestling in her hands was a flat rectangle of emerald stone. She felt a raw energy trembling through the green slab and recognized the feeling instantly: her flute exuded the same shivering when she used it.

The emerald tablet was about four inches across and eight inches long. She turned it over in her hands: both sides were covered in etchings, pictographs that vaguely resembled some of the ancient human writings from the Indus Valley. Wisps of Virginia’s pale green aura leaked from her fingers across the tablet, and the scent of sage filled the shadowed alleyway. Virginia caught her breath, watching as the writing flowed over the stone, forming and re-forming, the pictures coming briefly alive: tiny ants crawling, fish swimming, birds flapping, sun wheels spinning.

She had not seen writing like this in a very long time.

The pictographs shivered, then faded to nothing, leaving just a single string of arcane symbols in the center of the tablet. Then they shifted, crawled and formed a single word in English:
CROATOAN.

Virginia Dare collapsed against the wall as if she had been struck. Then she slowly slid to the ground.

CROATOAN.

She had been a child, no more than twenty-four or thirty months old, when she had watched her father carve that word into a wooden fence post outside their home in Roanoke.

CROATOAN.

Silently, her lips formed the word. Those letters, that single word, were the first she had ever seen. That word was the first she’d known. It was the secret she carried deep in her heart. A secret only she knew. Pale green tears ran down her cheeks.

The letters shivered and broke apart. Tiny scratchlike representations appeared on the stone: turtles and clouds, a whale, the moon in all its phases and a sun wheel flowed across the emerald tablet in narrow horizontal lines. Virginia pressed her index finger to the bottom left-hand corner and moved it slowly to the right, her lips moving as she remembered a language she had long thought she’d forgotten.