The Magician (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #2) (12 page)

“True”, Flamel agreed. “If you tell people everything, you take away their opportunity to learn.”

“He said you stole the Book of Abraham from the Louvre.”

Nicholas walked for half a dozen steps before nodding. “Well, I suppose that is true too”, he said, “though it’s not quite so straightforward as he would like to paint it. Certainly, in the seventeenth century, the book briefly fell into the hands of Cardinal Richelieu.”

Josh shook his head. “Who’s that?”

“Have you never read
The Three Musketeers
?” Flamel asked in astonishment.

“Nope. Didn’t even see the movie.”

Flamel shook his head. “I’ve got a copy in the shop”, he began, and then stopped. When he’d walked away from the bookshop on Thursday, it had been a trashed ruin. “Richelieu appears in the books and the movies, too. He was a real person and was known as the l Eminence Rouge the Red Eminence so named after his cardinal s red robes”, he explained. “He was King Louis XIII’s chief minister, but in reality he ruled the country. In 1632, Dee managed to trap Perenelle and me in a part of the old city. His inhuman agents had surrounded us; there were ghouls in the earth beneath our feet, Dire-Crows in the air, and Baobhan Sith were tracking us through the streets.” Nicholas shrugged uncomfortably at the memory and looked up and around, almost as if he expected to see the creatures appear again. “I was beginning to think that I was going to have to destroy the Codex rather than see it fall into Dee’s hands. Then Perenelle suggested one last option: we could hide the book in plain sight. It was simple and brilliant!”

“What did you do?” Josh asked, curious now.

Flamel’s teeth flashed in a quick smile. “I sought an audience with Cardinal Richelieu and presented him with the book.”

“You
gave
it to him? Did he know what it was?”

“Of course he did. The Book of Abraham is famous, Josh or maybe
infamous
might be a better word. Next time you go online, look it up.”

“Did the cardinal know who you were?” he asked. Listening to Flamel talk, it was easy so easy to believe everything he said. And then he remembered how believable Dee had been back in Ojai.

Flamel smiled, remembering. “Cardinal Richelieu believed I was one of the descendants of Nicholas Flamel. So we presented him with the Book of Abraham and he put it in his library.” Nicholas laughed softly as he shook his head. “The safest place in all of France.”

Josh frowned. “But surely when he looked at it, he saw that the text moved?”

“Perenelle put a glamour over the book. It’s a particular type of spell astonishingly simple, apparently, though I could never master it so when the cardinal looked at the book, he saw what he expected to see: pages of ornate Greek and Aramaic writing.”

“Did Dee catch you?”

“Almost. We escaped down the Seine on a barge. Dee himself stood on the Pont Neuf with a dozen musketeers and fired scores of shots at us. They all missed; despite the musketeers reputation, they were terrible shots”, he added. “And then, a couple of weeks later, Perenelle and I returned to Paris, broke into the library and stole our book back. So I suppose you could say that Dee is right”, he concluded. “I am a thief.”

Josh walked on in silence; he had no idea what to believe. He
wanted
to believe Flamel; working in the bookshop alongside the man, he’d grown to like and respect him. He
wanted
to trust him and yet he could never forgive him for putting Sophie in danger.

Flamel glanced up and down the street; then, putting his hand on Josh’s shoulder, he guided him through the stalled traffic and across the Rue de Dunkerque. “Just in case we’re being followed”, he said softly, his lips barely moving as they darted through the early-morning traffic.

Once they were across the road, Josh shrugged off Nicholas’s hand. “What Dee said made a lot of sense”, he continued.

“I’m sure it did”, Flamel said with a laugh. “Dr. John Dee has been many things in his long and colorful life, a magus and a mathematician, an alchemist and spy. But let me tell you, Josh, he was often a rogue and always a liar. He is a master of lies and half-truths, and he practiced and perfected his craft in that most dangerous of times, the Elizabethan Age. He knows that the best lie is one that is wrapped around a core of truth.” He paused, his eyes flickering over the crowd streaming past them. “What else did he tell you?”

Josh hesitated for a moment before replying. He was tempted not to reveal all of his conversation with Dee but then realized that he’d probably said too much already. “Dee said that you only used the spells in the Codex for your own good.”

Nicholas nodded. “It’s a fair point. I use the immortality spell to keep Perenelle and myself alive, that is true. And I use the philosopher’s stone formulation to turn ordinary metal into gold and coal into diamonds. There’s no money in bookselling, let me tell you. But we only make as much wealth as we need we’re not greedy.”

Josh hurried ahead of Flamel, then turned around to face him. “This isn’t about the money”, he snapped. “There is so much else you could be doing with what’s in that book. Dee said it could be used to turn this world into a paradise, that it could cure all disease, even repair the environment.” He found it incomprehensible that someone would
not
want to do that.

Flamel stopped in front of Josh. His eyes were almost on a level with the boy’s. “Yes, there are spells in the Book which would do all that and much, much more”, he said seriously. “I’ve glimpsed spells in the Book that could reduce this world to a cinder, others that would make the deserts bloom. But Josh, even if I could work those spells which I cannot the material in the Book is not mine to use.” Flamel’s pale eyes bored into Josh s, and Josh had no doubt now that the Alchemyst was telling the truth. “Perenelle and I are only the Guardians of the Book. We are simply holding it in trust until we can pass it on to its rightful owners. They will know how to use it.”

“But who are the rightful owners? Where are they?”

Nicholas Flamel put both hands on Josh’s shoulders and stared into his bright blue eyes. “Well, I was hoping”, he said very softly, “that it might be you and Sophie. In fact, I’m gambling everything my life, Perenelle’s life, the survival of the entire human race that you are.”

Standing on the Rue de Dunkerque, looking into the Alchemyst’s eyes, reading the truth in them, Josh felt the people fade away until it was as if they were standing alone on the street. He swallowed hard. “And you believe that?”

“With all my heart”, Flamel said simply. “And everything I have done, I’ve done to protect you and Sophie and to prepare you for what is to come. You have to believe me, Josh. You must. I know you’re angry because of what has happened with Sophie, but I would never let her come to harm.”

“She could have died or fallen into a coma”, Josh muttered.

Flamel shook his head. “If she were an ordinary human, then yes, that could have happened. But I know she isn’t ordinary. Nor are you”, he added.

“Because of our auras?” Josh asked, digging for as much information as he could get.

“Because you are the twins of legend.”

“And if you’re wrong? Have you thought about that: what happens if you’re wrong?”

“Then the Dark Elders return.”

“Would that be so bad?” Josh wondered aloud.

Nicholas opened his mouth to reply and quickly pressed his lips tightly together, biting back whatever he had been about to say, but not before Josh saw the quick flash of anger that darted across his face. Finally, Nicholas forced his lips into a smile. Gently, he turned Josh around so that he was facing the street. “What do you see?” he asked.

Josh shook his head and shrugged. “Nothing just a bunch of people heading off to work. And the police looking for us”, he added.

Nicholas caught Josh’s shoulder and urged him down the street. “Don’t think of them as a bunch of people”, Flamel admonished sharply. “That’s how Dee and his kind see humankind: what they call the humani. I see individuals, with worries and cares, with family and loved ones, with friends and colleagues. I see people.”

Josh shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Dee and the Elders he serves look at these people and see only slaves.” He paused, then quietly added, “Or food.”

L
ying flat on her back, Perenelle Flamel stared at the stained stone ceiling directly above her head and wondered how many other prisoners incarcerated on Alcatraz had done the same. How many others had traced the lines and cracks in the stonework, seen shapes in the black water marks, imagined pictures in the brown damp? Almost all of them, she guessed.

And how many had heard voices? she wondered. She was sure that many of the prisoners had imagined they heard sounds in the dark whispered words, hushed phrases but unless they possessed Perenelle’s special gift, what they were hearing did not exist outside their imaginations.

Perenelle heard the voices of the ghosts of Alcatraz.

Listening intently, she could distinguish hundreds of voices, maybe even thousands. Men and women children, too clamoring and shouting, muttering and crying, calling out for lost loved ones, repeating their own names again and again, proclaiming their innocence, cursing their jailers. She frowned; they weren’t what she was looking for.

Allowing the voices to wash over her, she sorted through the sounds until she picked up one voice louder than all the rest: strong and confident, it cut through the babble, and Perenelle found herself concentrating on it, focusing on the words, identifying the language.

This is my island.

It was a man, speaking Spanish in an old, very formal accent. Concentrating on the ceiling, Perenelle tuned out the other voices. “Who are you?” In the chill damp of the cell, her words puffed from her mouth like smoke and the myriad ghosts fell silent.

There was a long pause, as if the ghost was surprised to be spoken to; then he said proudly,
“I was the first European to sail into this bay, the first to see this island.”

A shape began to form on the roof directly over her head, the crude outline of a face appearing in the cracks and spiderwebs, the black damp and the green moss lending it shape and definition.

“I called this place la Isla de los Alcatraces.”

“The Isle of the Pelicans”, Perenelle said, her words the merest whispered breath.

The face in the ceiling solidified briefly. It was that of a handsome man with a long, narrow face and dark eyes. Water droplets formed and the eyes blinked tears.

“Who are you?” Perenelle asked again.

“I am Juan Manuel de Ayala. I discovered Alcatraz.”

Claws click-clacked on the stones outside the cell, and the smell of snake and rancid meat wafted down the corridor. Perenelle remained silent until the scent and the footsteps retreated, and when she looked at the ceiling again, the face had taken on more detail, the cracks in the stonework creating the deep wrinkles on the man’s forehead and around his eyes. A sailor’s face, she realized, the wrinkles caused by squinting toward distant horizons.

“Why are you here?” she wondered aloud. “Did you die here?”

“No. Not here.”
Narrow lips curled in a smile.
“I returned because I fell in love with this place from the very first moment I set eyes on it. It was in the year of Our Lord 1775, and I was on the good ship
San Carlos.
I even remember the month, August, and the date, the fifth.”

Perenelle nodded. She had come across ghosts like de Ayala’s before. Men and women who had been so influenced or affected by a place that they returned to it again and again in their dreams, and eventually, when they died, their spirit returned to the same location to become a Guardian ghost.

“I have watched over this island for generations. I will always watch over it.”

Perenelle stared up at the face. “It must have saddened you to see your beautiful island become a place of pain and suffering”, she probed.

Something twisted in the shape’s mouth, and a single drop of water fell from its eye to spatter on Perenelle’s cheek.

“Dark days, sad days, but gone now thankfully, gone.”
The ghost’s lips moved and the words whispered in Perenelle’s head.
“There has not been a human prisoner on Alcatraz since 1963, and the island has been peaceful since1971.”

“But now there is a new prisoner on your beloved island”, Perenelle said evenly. “A prisoner guarded by a warden more terrible than any this island has ever seen before.”

The face in the ceiling altered, watery eyes narrowing, blinking.
“Who? You?”

“I am held here against my will”, Perenelle said. “I am Alcatraz’s last prisoner, and I am guarded by no human jailor, but by a sphinx.”

“No!”

“See for yourself!”

The plaster crackled and damp dust rained down on Perenelle’s face. When she opened her eyes again, the face in the ceiling had gone, leaving nothing more than a stain in its wake.

Perenelle allowed herself a smile.

“What amuses you, humani?” The voice was a slithering hiss, and the language predated the human race.