The Man of Bronze (9 page)

That’s
why the man with the knife had hesitated. And why Reuben, a not-very-athletic research assistant, had managed to escape from two rough-and-tumble hoodlums. And why the mercenaries I’d faced at Jacek’s had been so inept, none of them even carrying a pocket light.

It was all a setup. Reuben was
supposed
to get away intact and bring the bugged statuette here. A Trojan horse. Whoever was behind this must have expected Reuben would call me for help and that I’d successfully help Reuben escape the gunmen. Then we’d deliver Osiris here, and the unsuspecting Father Emil would let us bring the statue past the monastery’s big steel-vault doors.

It wouldn’t be hard to make a duplicate statue. Omónia published photos of the items for sale. It even allowed registered customers to examine pieces firsthand, weeks or months in advance of the actual auction. That gave plenty of time to create a convincing forgery and to package it in an Omónia box that could be switched for the real one in Reuben’s case.

The only question was why. Merely to plant a listening device in the Order of Bronze headquarters? Or was there more inside the statue than a simple radio transmitter?

The metal man was
very
heavy.

I spoke none of my suspicions aloud. The statuette might transmit every sound I made; and hidden somewhere outside the monastery walls, bad guys must be listening. If they suspected I’d seen through their deception . . .

Casually, I crossed the room, the statuette still in my hands. Father Emil said sharply, “Where are you going?”

“Over where the light is better,” I said. And where there was a heavy stone cistern containing several tons of rainwater.

One quick toss and the statuette splashed inside.

“What are you doing?” Father Emil cried.

“Everybody run,” I said. “Now.” I raced to Reuben’s side and tried to get him to sit up.

“But . . .”

“If I’m wrong,” I said, “I’ll fish the statue out again. It’s bronze—water won’t hurt it. But if I’m right . . .”

Wherever the bad guys were, they realized something was wrong. Either they heard Father Emil shout at me, or the bug in the statuette began to crackle from being underwater. I hoped the water would short out the electronics entirely, but no. In the darkness beyond the monastery walls, someone recognized the game was up and pushed a button.

The false statuette held more than a transmitting microphone. It held a radio-activated bomb.

The cistern exploded in a roar of water and stone. If I’d had another second, I would have thrown myself across Reuben on the table . . . but I was hurled off my feet by the blast, tossed helplessly backward amid torrents of drenched masonry. One fist-sized rock punched me in the stomach, knocking the breath out of me, while others pummeled my arms and legs. Sharp edges of stone gashed my skin; and when I hit the ground, I was barely conscious enough to cover my head with my arms. Smaller rocks clattered around me: pebbles that had been hurtled toward the rafters by the initial detonation and were now coming down like hail. The barrage lasted another long heartbeat. Then heavy silence descended, punctuated only by water pattering onto the cold hard floor.

I stood up slowly: bruised and soaked to the bone. Father Emil moaned on the ground, a wicked slice bleeding on his forehead. The twin doctors, Kaisho and Myoko, lay on the ground too, wrapped around each other in tight protective fetal positions—sisters returning to the womb. I couldn’t even tell if they were alive.

There was no such doubt about Reuben. The bronze head of Osiris, blown off the false statuette, had hammered through the top of his skull. Blood poured out of the wound, mixed with slimy dollops of Reuben’s gray matter. It oozed onto the table like rising bread dough. Here in an infirmary, with two doctors right at my feet, no miracle of surgery could save him.

I closed my eyes, feeling the sting of tears. Some idiotic voice in my mind said,
At least it was fast.
As if that was any consolation.

A different voice in my mind said,
Someone will pay.
That was no consolation either; but it was an ironclad promise.

5

ST. BERNWARD’S MONASTERY:
THE CHAPEL

Kaisho and Myoko were battered but alive. For the next few minutes, they tended their own injuries and Father Emil’s . . . but when they tried to do the same for me, I refused their coddling. I wasn’t badly hurt, and I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting still while someone painted my cuts with iodine.

Instead, I went outside to steady myself in the cold night air . . . and to listen for any sound from whoever triggered the bomb. The murderer couldn’t be far off—radio detonators seldom have much range—but I heard nothing: just the wind. I pictured the killers sitting in a car in the nearby forest. The instant the bomb was set off, they must have raced away into the blackness.

Cowards.

I stood there for several more minutes. Just breathing. Looking at the stars. Making no noise. Thinking of a time when Reuben and I got kicked out of the National Diet Library in Tokyo for laughing too loudly at an inept translation of the Pnakotic Manuscripts. And another time we were trying to decipher a set of Mayan inscriptions, when Reuben—the idiot!—read them aloud and summoned a swarm of locusts into my study. And another time he tried to make beer from an ancient Babylonian recipe but didn’t bother sanctifying the brew kiln first, so anyone who drank any began speaking in Enochian . . .

When I finished thinking of all those things, I dried my eyes and went back inside.

“Tell me everything,” I said.

Father Emil looked up. He was sitting at the table where we’d had our earlier chat. A bandage wrapped whitely around his forehead; the doctors were dabbing antibiotics on a long gash up his arm. His robe was spattered with blood. I didn’t know if it was his or Reuben’s. Reuben’s body was now covered with a sheet. Father Emil had already promised to transport it back to Reuben’s family. I would make sure he kept that promise.

“Tell me everything,” I said again. “What does your Order do? Why would someone want to blow you up? Who killed Reuben and where do I find the person responsible?”

Father Emil glanced at Kaisho and Myoko. They both shrugged, as if to say
do what you think best.

“All right, Ms. Croft,” Father Emil said. His gaze flicked to Reuben’s shrouded corpse . . . then he closed his eyes and turned away. “I’ll tell you what I can,” he said. “But in exchange—”

I cut him off. “No exchange. Just tell me who killed Reuben. Otherwise, I take it out on you.”

“Ms. Croft,” the monk said, “you aren’t the only one here who was Reuben’s friend. I’ve known him for years; he’s helped our Order many times. Reuben will be in my prayers every day for the rest of my life.

“But,” Father Emil went on, “the Order of Bronze has been attacked. As chief administrator, I must put the Order’s safety ahead of personal grief. Don’t think I’ll jeopardize our secrets for the sake of vengeance.” He locked gazes with me a moment. Then he lowered his eyes. “There’s so much at stake, Ms. Croft. Do you know what that statuette was?”

“A fake,” I said. “The original was stolen from Reuben at the rent-a-car agency.”

“I believe you’re right,” Father Emil replied. “Which means some enemy has the real Osiris. That’s a fearsome blow to the Order.”

“Why?”

“The statuette is a map. The hieroglyphics engraved on Osiris’s body—the
real
Osiris—are coded directions toward the location of . . . certain items.”

“What kind of items?”

“Powerful artifacts: dangerous in the wrong hands. Now that the killers have the statuette, they can find those artifacts before we do. Unless . . .”

He let his voice trail off. I asked the obvious question, though I guessed the answer. “Unless what?”

“Unless,” Father Emil said, “you can retrieve the items first, Ms. Croft.”

I came close to punching Father Emil in the face. I’d been in this position many times: a map stolen, a treasure to be found before the Forces of Evil got hold of the Mystic MacGuffin.

Please, Ms. Croft, sign up with us and save the world.

I didn’t want to save the world. I just wanted to do something for Reuben. But after the urge to lash out subsided, I realized I shouldn’t pass up this opportunity. If the real statuette was a map . . . if Reuben’s killers would follow the map in search of the mysterious “items” . . . if Father Emil could help me reach the target destination before the killers . . . then I could catch the murderers when they showed up. And that was something I dearly wanted to do.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll listen to your pitch. No promises, but I’ll listen.”

Father Emil gave me a sour look—he was good at sour looks. But he was astute enough to realize I wouldn’t commit myself further until he’d told me the truth.

He pulled his arm away from the doctors and stood up. “Follow me, Ms. Croft. I’ll take you to the head of our Order.”

We went back into the night. The temperature was falling . . . or perhaps I was just more sensitive to the cold.

Reuben was dead. I felt tired.

We crossed the courtyard toward the darkened entrance of the chapel. Father Emil stopped at the door. “Before we go in,” he said, “let me ask you, Ms. Croft, have you heard of Roger Bacon?”

“An English scholar,” I said. “One of the early lecturers at Oxford, back in the twelve hundreds. Some people consider him the first true scientist. He insisted you shouldn’t believe anything till you tested it experimentally.”

“He was also a Franciscan monk,” Father Emil said. “And a member of the Order of Bronze.”

“Really,” I said, “how interesting.” But in my head, I muttered,
Dear, oh dear, oh dear.
If Father Emil was telling the truth, his precious Order dated back to the Middle Ages . . . and my past dealings with medieval secret societies had never turned out well. Then again, the good father might simply be wrong. The Order of Bronze wouldn’t be the first quasireligious organization to claim deep historic roots when it was actually whipped together by poseurs pretending to represent ancient mystic traditions.

“And have you heard,” Father Emil continued, “about Roger Bacon’s bronze head?”

I nodded. “Supposedly, Bacon built a man’s head of bronze. Stories claim it could talk and predict the future.”

“And what do you think of that?”

I hesitated. In a profession like mine, one can never be sure when odd tales are mere empty folklore or the gospel truth. As it happens, however, I’d done a little research into Bacon and his bronze head. With a start, I realized I’d done so after a conversation with Reuben several months earlier. He’d casually mentioned the head, and I’d been interested enough to look it up in a few reference books.

Father Emil was still waiting for an answer. I decided to be wary. “Bacon might have made a simple clockwork,” I said. “A windup head that could open and close its mouth . . . maybe blink its eyes. More likely, it’s just an old wives’ tale. Talking bronze heads were common in medieval superstitions—like UFOs and scrawny gray aliens are today. Pope Sylvester II reportedly kept a bronze head in a back room of his basilica. So did St. Thomas Aquinas. Further back, bronze heads were associated with the Greek philosopher Agrippa, the Roman poet Virgil . . .”

“You don’t believe such stories?” Father Emil asked.

“Considering all the bizarre things I’ve seen in my life, I never rule anything out. But when bronze heads show up all over, one suspects they’re just a standard fictional motif—as if medieval historians felt they had to invent stories about bronze heads whenever they were writing about clever men.
He was a bright fellow, so of course he must have owned a talking bronze head.
”

“It never occurred to you that all those people might have owned the same head?”

My mouth opened for a sarcastic retort . . . but a dire suspicion struck me and I stopped myself. Father Emil waited for me to speak; when I didn’t, he nodded to himself and opened the chapel door.

Lights blazed into life a moment after the door opened. The sanctuary was full, not with religious paraphernalia but with electronic equipment: computers, printers, big-screen monitors showing everything from satellite photos to fingerprints, and dozens of humming black boxes whose purpose I couldn’t identify.

In the middle of this high-tech array sat a single manlike figure on a chair that looked like a steel throne. The man himself was also metal: a gleaming figure of rich copper-bronze.

For a moment, I thought the figure was just a statue—a brazen idol the Order worshipped. Then the bronze man shifted to face me and said in a grating voice, “Lara Croft.” He stared for a full ten seconds . . . then blinked and turned away.

I’d faced the impossible many times: living dinosaurs, shambling mummies, giant insects, ancient gods. I was long past the point where I could be shocked by the uncanny. My response to this living metal man was more like . . . acute disappointment.

It’s hard to explain. I wished the universe were better behaved. I don’t mean I wanted my life more tame or predictable—heaven forbid. But I felt as if the world had gotten drunk and vomited on the dinner table. Violations of science didn’t shake me, but they left me wishing for better. Why did the world keep breaking its own rules? Couldn’t it show better manners?

I suddenly felt bone tired.

Father Emil placed his hand on my shoulder and eased me across the threshold. I let myself be led inside. The bronze man took no notice. Colored pixels from monitor screens reflected distortedly on his polished metal skin.

He wore no clothes but was smooth and sexless . . . like the Oscar figurines given out as Academy Awards. Unlike Oscar, however, the bronze man’s head had the conventional elements of human features: eyes, nose, ears, mouth. Not that any of these were entirely normal. The eyes, for example, were unmarked orbs of metal with no pupils or corneas. The mouth had mobile lips capable of forming expressions, but inside there were no teeth or tongue. The nose looked standard enough at first, until I noticed that the nostril openings were covered with a fine wire mesh. As for the ears, they had no openings at all—they seemed to be present for the sake of appearance, aimed at giving a vestige of humanity to a creature who had little else in common with
Homo sapiens.

Had Roger Bacon once looked upon this inhuman face? Was the metal man old enough to have known Thomas Aquinas and Virgil? But the stories only talked about a bronze
head,
not a full bronze body . . .

Wait. I hadn’t noticed at first, but the bronze man was missing his left leg. The “flesh” of his left hip was black where the leg should have been attached—an ugly puckered black, unlike the mirror finish of the rest of his body.

Unbidden, the name “Osiris” rose in my mind . . . particularly the legends that some of the god’s dissected body parts had never been found.

“Are you the god Osiris?” I asked the metal man.

He said nothing; he didn’t even look in my direction. Eventually, it was Father Emil who answered my question.

“Bronze is the source of the Osiris legend; but of course, he’s not a god.”

“What is he?”

“We don’t know.” Father Emil gazed at the man of bronze, the monk’s expression unreadable. “Members of our Order have proposed many theories about Bronze’s origin. Virgil thought he might have been built by the Roman god Vulcan. Agrippa suggested Bronze was a demon summoned by Atlantean sorcerers. Thomas Aquinas thought Bronze was a golem made to work on the Tower of Babel. More recently, we’ve considered he might be from outer space or perhaps an android transported back through time from our own future.” Father Emil gave a rueful smile. “Feel free to offer your own guess. Every generation invents new paradigms. Do you think Bronze is a collective hallucination made tangible by human belief? Or perhaps we’re all living inside a computer simulation, and Bronze is a glitch in the operating system.”

“What does Bronze say he is?” I asked.

“He won’t answer. Those who believe he’s a robot think he’s been programmed not to give out information on his background. Those who believe he’s magical say he won’t talk about himself for fear someone learns his true name.” Father Emil shrugged. “I don’t think Bronze himself knows where he came from. He’s . . . well, he’s not all there, is he?”

“You’re referring to his missing leg? What happened to it?”

“A lot of Bronze’s backstory is sketchy,” Father Emil said. “I can tell you what little we know . . .”

According to Father Emil, the metal man called Bronze dated back long before the start of recorded history. No one knew where he came from, but in 8000
B.C.
—give or take a few centuries—Bronze was attacked by an unknown assailant and chopped into pieces . . . just as Egyptian myth said Osiris had been. The resulting bits of bronze anatomy were scattered around the globe by someone the myths referred to as Set.

That should have ended Bronze’s mysterious existence. It didn’t. The bronze body parts remained “alive” and indestructible. Even when thrown into volcanoes, the pieces refused to melt. Father Emil believed the original Bronze was an assemblage of distinct components that could be separated but not destroyed. The ears, for example, could be severed from the rest of the body using an ordinary knife. However, no known force could reduce the ears further—like atomic particles that might be disconnected from other particles but couldn’t themselves be split.

The body parts couldn’t even be lost. Throw them into the deepest ocean, and somehow they’d make their way back to land. They might be swallowed by some bottom-feeding eel who’d then be swallowed by a squid who’d then be swallowed by a whale who’d then wash ashore with bronze fragments in its belly. The process might take decades, but always the body parts resurfaced.

It was part of their magic . . . or if you preferred scientific explanations, it was a programmed function of the nanotech—or whatever—that made up the metal man. Even in pieces, the high-tech/sorcerous components displayed an ability to make astonishing comebacks.

They also displayed raw power. Wherever the body parts came to people’s attention, shamans and priests, magi and monarchs recognized the pieces as potent talismans. High priestesses wore them as amulets; chieftains carried the bronze fragments into battle or placed them in shrines where blood was spilled in sacrifice. Wizards found ways to draw energy from the metal chunks—prodigious amounts of energy, used in arcane rituals that could make humans immortal or twist humble animals into monsters.