The Triumph of Death (14 page)

A bird-like chirp drew Alex’s glance to a paneled wall opposite the large windows. The wooden slats there spun around slowly and clicked back into place, forming a wall-sized flat panel of gray. The gray panel flickered, and Alex looked through the wall and saw the Polidorium boardroom.

Sangster and Armstrong were in the boardroom looking at them, and on the screen at the end of their table, Alex could see they were again looking at the painting,
The Triumph of Death
.

“Mother Laura?” Sangster said, standing up. “Thank you for answering. I don’t think we’ve formally met.”

“Well, there’s no time like the present,” Mother Laura replied.

Alex looked at Astrid. “Wait, how did they—” Alex
shook his head. “Is this magic, too?”

“It’s Cisco Telepresence.” Laura smiled and looked back at Sangster. That was sophisticated teleconferencing software. So that meant that when they preferred it, Hexen had any kind of tech it wanted in the Orchard. Nice. “You’ve found something?”

“Maybe,” Sangster said. “Alex, how are you feeling?”

“I…I guess I’m glad to be here,” he said.

Now Sangster smiled, genuinely. “Not many people can survive an attack from a vampire as powerful as Byron. It was a close call.”

Alex swallowed and tried to decide what to say. “It shouldn’t have happened. I let him get to me.”

“That’s all the more reason to count your blessings.”

Alex nodded several times, but he was uncomfortable with the attention. Icemaker would kill thousands in the years to come, he was sure of it. Even if they stopped the Triumph of Death. Alex had committed an atrocity by being the vehicle for Byron’s escape. He was caught for a minute in a loop of self-disgust.

“Alex?” Sangster said.

“Sir?”

“Set it aside.”

Alex ran his hand through his hair and nodded again.

“While you were out, we got more from Madrid.”
Sangster indicated the image of the painting on the screen. “Remember how the painting was tampered with? There were at least two other places in the painting where colors had been changed. One in the bottom corner—the blue skirts of the lover. And two more—a red cloak made blue around the center, and another cloak made blue in the upper right.”

“So a lot of cloaks altered to be blue,” Alex said.

“Exactly.” Sangster looked at Alex, watching him. He hit a button on the table and said, “I’m sharing an image with you guys.” At once a quarter of the screen filled with another painting, this one a strange, colorful image of countless figures in a medieval courtyard. Alex read the caption underneath. “
Netherlandish Proverbs
.”

“Same painter as
The Triumph of Death
: Pieter Bruegel, 1562. But this painting has another name besides
Netherlandish Proverbs
.”

Alex read the smaller text underneath the name. “
The Blue Cloak
.” Alex searched the painting. There had to be thirty or forty characters, walking, trading, talking, taking care of animals. It was a busy street scene. “Why is it called
The Blue Cloak
?”

Amanda, who had taught art history as recently as last year, spoke up from her side of the room. “The painting is a visual collection of famous sayings. For
instance there’s a guy petting a chicken, and that stands for ‘being a hen feeler,’ which was another phrase for ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.’”

“There’s your cloak,” Alex said, finding the image of a woman standing behind a man, putting a blue cloak over his head.

“To put the cloak over someone was to deceive them, to pull the wool over their eyes,” said Amanda.

“Okay.” Alex had given up trying to argue that their faith in the riddle-makers might be misplaced. It was all they had for now. “So the alterations the Strangers made to
The Triumph of Death
lead us to
The Blue Cloak
. Is this clue telling us something about deception?”

“Well,
The Blue Cloak
is about deception.” Sangster swiped his hand and brought up
The Blue Cloak
, aka
Netherlandish Proverbs
on the main screen. “But that’s not the mystery.”

“And there
is
a mystery?”

“There is indeed. Art historians have identified no fewer than forty different sayings in the painting. Every detail—every animal and every prop
means
something in this painting. Except that there is one strange item that doesn’t seem to fit. This
hoe.
” Sangster zoomed the image to the center right area, until an image of a garden hoe without a handle lying on a table came into view.

Alex mused. “What good is a hoe without a handle? Isn’t that what it means?”

“Sure, if you want to guess, but the rest of these are all extremely deliberate. There isn’t any Netherlandish proverb about a hoe without a handle.”

“And there’s more,” Armstrong offered.

“What is it?” Alex asked. “I mean, forty actual sayings and you’re focusing on the non-saying?”

Mother Laura nodded. “What did Byron tell you about the curse?”

Alex searched through what they had learned from Byron before he got Alex’s goat and managed to escape. He closed his eyes, shifting everything back, bringing the problem to the front. “‘Only love can conquer death.’ He said if I were casting the spell he could stop me because he knew who I loved.”

Laura said, “The one the user loves best is the best weapon against him.”

“Well,” Alex said, “Claire loved Byron. And she’s going to get him back, because we just set him free.”

“And of course”—Laura nodded toward the image of the child—“there is another, greater love.”

“When Claire traveled to Russia and secretly joined Hexen,” Astrid said, “she remained convinced that her daughter could be restored to her. She was obsessed
with the idea that Byron had maybe even secreted away the little girl.”

“We have letters,” Sangster went on, “from the embalmer to Byron, demanding to be paid. He thought Byron was a complete jackass who wasn’t even willing to come visit his daughter. The body was sent back without Byron even looking at it.”

“So the Triumph is really Claire’s way to raise her daughter from the dead,” Alex said.

Sangster countered, “And it also means her daughter is the best weapon against her.”

“So we can stop Claire by using someone who Claire loves—we can make a weapon, maybe. Maybe with DNA,” Alex said excitedly. “From the bones of Allegra.”

“You mean a weapon like this?” Armstrong set down something on the table that looked like a starter gun with a large section of its barrel hollowed out. She held up a glass vial next to the weapon. “You’re right, Alex, the weapon will be DNA, shot straight into the heart of Claire. To do that, this is what we would use: It’s a vial gun—you load it with vials that hold a compartment of holy water and a compartment of whatever you want to mix the water with.” She tilted it sideways. “There’s a hammer in here that breaks the vials, mixing them and then pressurizing the mixture for firing.”

Alex nodded.

“We would like to see this body of Allegra as well,” Mother Laura said, nodding to Astrid. “We might learn things from it.”

“Okay, so you have your reasons, and we have something to shoot—we just need to find Allegra,” Alex said. “And we have—
ugh
—three days. Where was the body sent?”

“To the churchyard of Byron’s school in England, a place called Harrow,” Sangster said.

Alex had heard of Harrow. That was a boys’ school in England, one of the very best. He didn’t know much else.

Sangster nodded. “And there’s another word for
Harrow
.”

“Let me guess,” Alex said. “The one thing the painting points to: a hoe.”

Alex and Astrid’s trip back to the Polidorium took no time. One minute, they were saying good-bye to Amanda and hurrying back to the Orchard, and the next minute, they stepped through a pair of trees and emerged near the public library in Secheron village.

“It’s useful to have a drop-off point here,” Astrid said.

“Conveniently near school but not so close as to be suspicious. It’s like a bus stop. When you brought me to the Orchard before, did we come through here?” He was so out of it when his blood was draining away after Icemaker’s attack that he had no memory of the trip.

“No,” Astrid said. “I used a more powerful and tiring spell, a direct jump to the Orchard. It takes a lot out of you. This is easier.”

Astrid summoned her motorcycle near their drop-off point and they rode from the village back to the farmhouse. Alex felt a throb of guilt as they headed into the woods, leaving the road that he would have used on a normal day to go back to school. He needed to call Paul, Sid, and Minhi. But there wasn’t time. From conference table to conference table, from the world of magic to the world of spies, the trip took twenty-six minutes.

It was then another three hours flying from the airfield near the farmhouse before they reached the final resting place of Allegra Byron. With a cold gray wind sweeping off the Thames, Alex rested his hand on a low stone wall and took in the trees that curled over the graveyard like arthritic fingers.

In the months that Alex had been chasing vampires, he had rarely had occasion to visit that eternal vestige of vampire films and books—the churchyard. Now, as he, Sangster, Armstrong, and Astrid got out of the Polidorium van, he found himself in the kind of churchyard seen in movies—tombstones hundreds of years old and creeping with moss, scattered shade from London ash trees, and a massive, crawling, weeping elm that threatened to swallow the graveyard whole. Alex shivered and brought his jacket closer against the wind that snapped over the crumbling walls around St. Mary’s Churchyard at Harrow in northwest London. Not counting wherever
the Orchard was, this was the fourth country he had visited in under a week.

His mother had left the Orchard the same way Alex and Astrid had, and he assumed she had stepped out in either Wyoming or a broom closet in the Pentagon in the 1940s; at this point, he had no way of knowing. But it was no wonder to him that Hexen didn’t let the Polidorium come visit. That place could have dangerous uses.

“Over here,” Sangster called. Alex followed Sangster’s voice and found the agent standing next to a low-slung tombstone erected against a wall. Astrid and Armstrong followed, and Alex dropped down to read the inscription on the stone:

Alex sighed.

“That was put up in 1980 by the Byron Society,” Sangster said.

“Nineteen eighty? So what was here before?” Alex asked.

Astrid cut in. “Nothing. There was no marker for Allegra’s grave because Lord Byron refused to pay for one, and Claire had no money. Claire complained about this, though she never visited the grave.”

Alex rubbed his forehead, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know.”

“What?”

“What we’re gonna do. I mean, you’re talking about desecrating a grave here.”

As if reminded by Sangster, Armstrong began unfolding a tripod of sorts that she drew from a bag. Within moments, she was clicking buttons and aiming a camera that hung from the bottom of the tripod at the grass.

Sangster sighed. “We worked all morning, we pulled every string, and we have the permits to exhume this body and take a sample for study purposes.”

“But that’s not what we’re doing,” Alex whispered, suddenly hoping no officials from the nearby church were listening. In the distance he heard singing, Anglican hymns at a late-morning service. “We’re talking about using the body of a woman’s dead child against her. This is just…it’s too much.”

“We followed the clues, Alex. This is where they lead. If you can think of a better way to stop the Triumph I’d
love to hear it, but we are absolutely, genuinely running out of time.”

Alex stamped his feet lightly, pulling his coat closer against the biting wind. Allegra Byron, five years old, had been kept from an obsessed mother and left by an uncaring father to die in a convent. And now they were going to use that tragedy, take a scrape of tissue, and build a weapon. He wished he could stop and bring Paul, Sid, and Minhi here. Something told him they wouldn’t like this plan, either. It was darker than they would associate with him. It was darker than he liked to associate with himself.

But the alternative was worse: a
world
plunged into darkness. They would take a scrape of the dead in order to stave off death. It was necessary, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

“How are we going to do it?” Alex asked.

Armstrong was peering into a small device with what looked like a GPS screen on it. “I see the coffin. We’re looking at a depth of about seven feet, no surprise. The dense shadow inside, I’m assuming that’s the body, which would have been wrapped head to toe in bandages.”

“Okay, let us know when you’re near.” Sangster turned to answer Alex. “We’ll do it the way we always do. We’re
bringing in a backhoe and we’re tearing the place up.”

“A backhoe?” Alex was incredulous. “Isn’t that a little…”

“Low tech?” Sangster said.

“Yeah, I mean, everything else we do is on hyperdrive; even our motorcycle rearview mirrors are special.”

“Hm.” Sangster squinted. “You know, a few years ago I had my wisdom teeth extracted? So, the dentist has all kinds of crazy stuff. Lasers for oral surgery, and a million kinds of anesthetic. Music piping into your headset, and a chair that should have been designed by NASA. But you wanna know what it takes to actually take out the tooth?”

Alex shrugged.

“A hammer and a chisel,” Sangster said. “Some things just don’t change very fast. Anyway, it’s not like we can beam the body out.”

Alex nodded and began to wander away, looking up at the church, with its spire threatening to slice through the gray blanket of sky. He couldn’t stay here for this. “Astrid, you want to have a look at the church with me?”

She bobbed her head yes, and they followed a mossy path up to the entrance of the church. A pair of red doors set inside a stone archway flapped open as parishioners began to stream out.

Alex thrust his hands into his coat pockets as he and Astrid stepped into the church itself, taking in the long central nave and transepts, with columns from front to back. The parishioners were chattering all around Alex and Astrid in accents that reminded Alex of Paul, who seemed even farther away than he was.

As they walked along the back of the last pew, Alex slid his hand along the soft, carved wood and whispered, “I wanted to ask you a question.”

“Oh?” Astrid shrugged, following him. She had been curiously quiet lately, since his bite. The chatty front she put up had slid away, or at least seemed to be put away, waiting for a safer, happier time to come out.

“Whose idea was it to
not
tell me that you were a friend of my mother’s?” Quickly, flatly; he wanted to get the words out.

“Alex…”

“When we met, you said you were here because of Claire. Because Hexen wanted to keep track of one of their fallen witches.”

“That’s true.”

“But don’t you think you could have told me from the start, ‘Hey, Alex, get this, I know your mom, she’s my mentor! She thought I’d be perfect for this gig!’”

“It wasn’t like that….”

“Wasn’t it? You saved my life; that was the first thing you did. I thought maybe you were being nice. But you’re on an assignment, and your assignment was to spy on me.” He looked up at the ceiling, finding carvings so intricate he could barely comprehend them.

“Not to spy on you,” she corrected. “To partner with you. And anyway, isn’t it enough that I
did
save your life?”

“For my mom and her pals, no less, which is all kinds of troubling,” Alex said. “I mean, when you think of it this way, why not tell the truth up front? Because you wanted to get close to me. Isn’t that it? You wanted me to like you, to feel like I was, I was…special, that we were on this adventure. Together.”

“You are special.”

“Not. Like.
That
,” Alex spat. Some parishioners looked at him. He lowered his voice. “Do you know what I was before I came to Switzerland, to Glenarvon? I was a stupid kid. I hiked and climbed mountains and my dad told me that the world was one way and all these other things were not a part of it. And then I come here, and suddenly, you know what I am? Special.
Very
special. I’m a tool, Astrid. A pawn. And you dragged me away from my friends, who
like
me for being…something else. Something not so special.”

“I don’t think you could avoid being special.”

“Ugh, that’s…” Alex blinked, trying not to look in her eyes. He stood up straight then, and after a moment spoke again. “Look, Astrid. I get that this is your job, even more than the Polidorium is mine. I think maybe that shows me a way that—don’t take this the wrong way—that I don’t want to go. Sangster calls the shots and I don’t—so we’re here, and we’re gonna desecrate a grave, and then we’re gonna stop the bad guys. And after that, I don’t think your assignment of spying on me is gonna be very interesting, because I can’t do this anymore. I’m out.”

He turned around, about to walk dramatically away, but suddenly the church and the lamps and the light outside all went out at once.