Bacon raised a hand and Talos fell silent.

  In the middle of the street, the three huge stone gargoyles had stopped outside a small, slightly squalid building. The largest of the gargoyles, the three-headed dog, reached out and almost delicately scratched at the wooden door. Its lion’s paws shaved thick curls of wood off the door, leaving long white scars on the dark panels.

  Bacon shook his head, confused. “I was convinced our chase would lead us to someplace more…” He paused, hunting for the correct word.

  “Grand?” Talos suggested.

  “Yes. More grand. This is a shabby house, in a shabby part of town. Hardly the sort of place in which to find a magical book.”

  “Or the perfect place,” Talos said. “The last place you would think of looking.”

  “There is that,” Bacon agreed.

  One of the gargoyles, the squat, muscular creature that most resembled a man, turned to look at Bacon, awaiting direction.

  Bacon pointed at the door with his sword. Immediately, the beast charged straight toward the narrow doorway, stone claws spattering mud and half-frozen filth in every direction.

  The door opened, light flooding out, throwing the long shadow of a hooded man through the doorway.

  The gargoyle lowered its head, aiming its wickedly pointed stone horn at the figure’s chest.

  There was a flash of metal, a half circle of orange light, and the gargoyle exploded into a thick cloud of crystalline dust. The icy Parisian night was abruptly heavy with the scent of oranges.

  “This must be Marethyu.” Talos’s attempt at a whisper echoed down the street.

  The figure standing in the doorway raised his head. Blue eyes blazed in the shadow of his face, and both Bacon and Talos clearly heard him speak. “Ah, the legendary Dr. Mirabilis and his mechanical man.” There was a distinct note of disappointment in his voice. “I thought the Dark Elders would send someone more interesting.” Then he slammed the door shut.

  “I think Death has just insulted us,” Talos muttered.

  * * *

  —

  “Is there a back door?” Fearnua demanded.

  Perenelle turned and led the way down a narrow corridor to the kitchen. She was about to pull open the back door when the hooded man placed his hook against the handle.

  “Where does this open onto?”

  “The backyard,” Nicholas said, “and there is a gate there that leads to a lane.”

  “Will there be someone—something—there?” Perenelle asked.

  Fearnua shook his head. “I am sensing nothing.”

  “What was out there?” Nicholas demanded. “I saw…something. A man, a demon, with a horn in the center of its forehead. It charged at you, and then you hit it. I watched it explode into dust. There were two more behind it. Monsters.”

  “Gargoyles,” Fearnua said, “or, to be precise, chimera. Gargoyles are the water spouts.”

  “From Notre-Dame,” Flamel guessed.

  “I would imagine so. Our adversaries have a taste for the dramatic. However, the two figures at the end of the street are far more dangerous,” Fearnua said. “The legendary Dr. Mirabilis, Roger Bacon, has come to claim the book, and he has brought his mechanical man with him.”

  “Roger Bacon is dead,” Nicholas said.

  Fearnua’s bright blue eyes crinkled in amusement. “Death is not always the end, nor it is always permanent. Right now, the doctor is striding down the street, carrying…” He paused, throwing his head back, nostrils flaring. “…carrying a weapon older than most civilizations.” He turned to Nicholas and Perenelle. “When I open the door, I want you to run. Stop for nothing. Make your way to the Tour de Nesle. A carriage and driver are waiting there. They will carry you south and protect you if…” He paused.

  “If what?” Nicholas asked.

  “If Fearnua fails here tonight,” Perenelle said.

  Fearnua nodded. “Stop for nothing,” he said. “Go now.”

  “Will we ever see you again?” Nicholas asked.

  “If we three survive this night, then yes, our paths will cross through the centuries. I have viewed the twisting strands of time, and our destinies are woven with the Codex. Guard it well. In time to come, we will need it to destroy and create the world.”

  The hook-handed man gently eased the door open and ushered Nicholas and Perenelle out into the frigid night. As Nicholas passed, Fearnua leaned forward and put his mouth close to his ear. “Promise me this: you will destroy the Codex before it falls into the hands of Bacon and his like. They would use it to return the world to Chaos and Old Night. And in that new world, humans are little more than slaves or food.”

  “D-destroy it!” Nicholas stammered. “But—”

  “Destroy it, or it will destroy the world. The choice is yours.”

  3

  Talos knew he was unique.

  Oh, there had been other metal and mechanical men before him, going back to the time of the Greeks. His own namesake, Talos the metal statue, appeared in the tales of Jason and the Argonauts and down through the centuries; Bacon’s predecessors had used the ancient Arabic manuscripts to fashion talking metal heads.

  But Talos was different.

  Perhaps the formula Bacon had used to animate him was flawed: a missing mineral or too much of an essential salt, an incorrect incantation, a mispronounced word. Shortly after Talos had been brought to flicking life, he’d realized just how extraordinary he was. While Bacon thought he was nothing more than a scientific curiosity, able to calculate formulas, predict the weather, and speak in a dozen languages, he had no idea that Talos had developed not only a self-awareness but that uniquely human skill: he had discovered how to lie.

  And Talos had ambitions.

  As Bacon and Talos moved cautiously down the narrow street, the mechanical man suddenly pointed to a narrow laneway, almost invisible in the night. “There is a high degree of probability that this lane leads to an alley at the back the house.”

  Bacon nodded. “Well spotted.”

  “I will find that alley and secure it. If Marethyu was bringing this magical book to Paris, then he undoubtedly intended to give it to someone.”

  “The owners of the house.” Bacon nodded in agreement.

  “If we try to attack through the front door again, I predict that Marethyu will challenge you and attempt to delay while this person or persons makes good their escape through the rear entrance,” Talos said. “I will ensure that they flee directly into my arms.”

  “That is an excellent plan. Do you want to take one of the gargoyles with you?”

  “My appearance should be enough to frighten them into submission. Also, there is little they can do to harm me, is there?”

  “Nothing,” Bacon answered. “You are practically invincible.”

  “Given how quickly Marethyu dispatched the gargoyle, I think you should concentrate your forces,” Talos continued. “I am confident that nothing can stand against you, Excalibur, and two animated gargoyles. Though, to be precise, they are chimeras,” he added.

  “Find the alley,” Bacon directed. “Let nothing escape. If they have the book, bring it to me.”

  “Do you not want them alive?”

  Bacon shook his head. “My masters just want the book.”

  Trailing the scent of rotten eggs, Talos slipped into the alleyway. The walls were so narrow that his jutting metal shoulders scraped sparks off the stones. He had no idea what was in the book. But if the creatures who called themselves after ancient Aegyptian Gods, and who had the power to grant immortality, wanted it, then the tome must be valuable. Maybe he would find what he was looking for in the book, or he might be able to trade with the Aegyptians. They had made Roger Bacon immortal; perhaps they would be able to make him human.

  * * *

  —

  Marethyu carefully gathered Flamel’s precious few books, stacked them in the corner, and then moved the table to cover them. He took a last look around before blowing out the candle, plunging the room into darkness. Not that it made much difference to him; his enhanced senses allowed him to see wavelengths of light invisible to humans.

  Marethyu knew that Roger Bacon was a dangerous adversary: cunning, intelligent, ambitious, a man whose search for knowledge and learning had brought him down some very dark paths. Over the long years of his life, Marethyu had come to realize that knowledge was the ultimate power. The wisdom of the ancients could be used for good or ill. Knowledge was impartial, but humans were not. Bacon had come to believe that his knowledge made him superior to ordinary men, and that arrogance colored all his actions. Everything he did now was simply to advance his own knowledge, rather than to benefit his fellow man. He could have focused his vast intellect on eradicating diseases or famine; instead, he had copied the Chinese formula for gunpowder.

  And now, accompanied by his fabled metal man, alongside two animated stone statues, he was also in possession of Excalibur, which he thought made him unbeatable.

  Almost unconsciously, Marethyu traced the curl of metal that took the place of his left hand. A lattice of runes etched into the flat metal flickered to life. In the Once and Future Time, the boy who would become Marethyu would hold not only Excalibur, the Sword of Ice, but the other swords of power: Clarent, Joyeuse, and Durendal. In that moment, he had learned the secret at the heart of the four swords of power: they were only as powerful as the intent of the user. And that made Bacon, one of the most intelligent and learned men of the time, an incredibly dangerous enemy.

  Marethyu had been planning his visit with Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel for centuries. Working closely with Chronos, the infinitely dangerous and increasingly insane Master of Time, he had picked through the endless time streams to choose the most promising. The real problem was that this moment was a crux. This was a point in time when the entire history of the world had the potential to change. Thousands of time lines flowed to this moment—the moment where he offered the Flamels the Codex—and ten times that number flowed out. And every single one was different, and not all of them were pleasant.

  In many time lines, Nicholas and Perenelle refused the Codex. They died a few years later, impoverished and forgotten, in the slums of Paris.

  In others, they took it, but were hunted down the very next day by Bacon’s creatures.

  Or they took it, studied the ever-changing pages and used it for themselves, becoming corrupted by its dark knowledge. Together, the Flamels—now a Warlock and an Enchantress—ruled a vast Alchemycal Empire that stretched from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.

  There were time streams in which the Flamels, lost and starving in southern Spain, sold the book for a loaf of bread….

  Marethyu had watched the Flamels drown when one of the Spanish Armada ships, the San Marcos, sank off the Irish coast….

  He saw the Codex burn in the Great Fire which engulfed London….

  He watched the Flamels, pursued by dragons, fall into the gaping mouth of Krakatoa volcano, taking the book with them, sacrificing themselves to protect it….

  Saw it destroyed in the earthquake that ripped San Francisco apart…

  He saw the book, abandoned and forlorn on a forgotten library shelf, nibbled apart by a nest of rats…then watched those same rats mutate and morph into sentient monsters who gathered the black and brown rats into an army numbering in the billions and unleashed them across Europe. Within a decade, all life—animal and human—had been wiped out. Then the Kingdom of the Rats began its expansion into Asia and down through Africa.

  There were ten thousand and more alternative futures from this night, and Marethyu had lived every one.

  But there were some—a very few—in which the Flamels escaped Paris with the Codex; traveled south to Spain, where they began the task of translating the book; and brewed the immortality potion.

  In this time line, Marethyu watched as they experimented with one of the great secrets of alchemy and turned a lump of iron into an ingot of gold. He saw them return to Paris and use their extraordinary wealth to found churches, hospitals, and schools.

  He followed them across continents, down through the centuries, as they gradually unraveled the secrets of the Codex and finally began the hunt for the twins who were spoken about in the myths and legends of every race. He was there the day Nicholas and Perenelle finally found the twins in a city on the edge of the world, half a millennium and more into the future.

  That was the time line Marethyu needed the Flamels to follow. He was hoping he’d chosen the correct one.

  His enhanced senses caught the sound of sticky footsteps, and then the entire front of the Flamels’ house folded in as two stone gargoyles—dragon and three-headed dog—crashed into it. Behind them, Bacon’s sword came to blue glowing life.

  “I have come for the book,” the man bellowed.

  * * *

  —

  Hand in hand, the Flamels moved as quickly as they could. But it was slow going. The alley behind the house was in almost total darkness and littered with all manner of waste. The ground was frozen solid, but their footsteps broke the thin sheen of ice, releasing the stink of rotting food, rancid fish, and other, less pleasant odors. Either side of the alley was piled high with filth, and some of the cloth-wrapped bundles in the shadows wore human shapes. They stirred as the Flamels hurried past.

  “Will he be all right?” Nicholas asked.

  “Who?”

  “Fearnua,” Nicholas said.

  “You saw him destroy the gargoyle,” Perenelle reminded him. “He is not human. Well, not entirely human. Human once, but now, more than human. I think he can take care of himself. I’ve just realized what his name means,” she said, her voice puffing the words into white clouds. “It’s Celtic….Fearnua…fear nua. New man. His name is Newman.”

  “Is that a name or a title?”

  “Both, possibly.”

  “When I awoke this morning, I never thought I’d end the day running from my own house,” Nicholas grumbled. “Perhaps we should have taken a little more time to think it through. Everything happened so fast.”

  “I believe that from the moment we decided to take the book, events started to run away from us,” Perenelle said. She hopped over a puddle. Nicholas walked right through it, sinking up to his ankles in filth.

  “I hope we’ve not made a terrible mistake,” he muttered, lifting the hems of his trousers and jiggling his feet, trying to shake off the clots of gooey liquid on his shoes. “Tell me you packed a spare pair of shoes? I’m going to have to burn these.” He sniffed cautiously. “They smell of…” He sniffed again. “Rotten eggs.”

  And then the alley blossomed in a sickly yellow light as a terrifying metal man stepped out of a side lane. It looked as if scraps of a suit of armor had been animated. The Flamels shrank back, horrified, as the monster stretched out a three-fingered metal gauntlet and a wave of glittering sparks ran over the chain mail that was both covering and skin. Deep in the metal helmet, yellow eyes bled foul smoke, and there was the sound of gears clicking and settling into place. The voice was a peculiar rasp, a rattle, echoing and magnified from within the helmet.

  “I have come for the book.”

  * * *

  —

  “You are too late, Dr. Mirabilis,” Marethyu said. “I do not have it.”

  The three-headed dog and the dragon gargoyle stepped into the shattered room, fixing their stony gaze on the hook-handed man.

  Bacon pushed through the rubble, brushing dust off his shoulders. “Where is it? Tell me now. I have never been known for my patience.”

  “I was unaware that your hearing was failing.”

  “What?”

  Marethyu raised his voice. “I said that I was—”

  Bacon raised the blue-bladed sword. “Enough. Where is the book?” He stopped, suddenly aware of the wispy blue smoke curling off the sword.

  Marethyu raised his hook, and it too trailed the same sapphire-colored mist. “Interesting,” he said. “Never seen it do that before.”

  “Have you any idea who I am?” Bacon demanded.

  “Of course,” Marethyu answered. “It is an honor to meet you, Dr. Mirabilis. “I have read everything you’ve written, and there is a very fine copy of your Opus Majus in my personal library.”

  “So you are a learned man…or are you even a man?” Bacon asked. He used Excalibur to point toward the hook. A crackling blue spark snapped between the two metals.

  Marethyu jerked his hook back and held it to his face, bright blue eyes reflecting the shivering coils of light that twisted around the metal. Tiny pictographs and runes etched into the flat hook shifted, forming new patterns. “Yes, I am human,” he said absently. “Perhaps a little bit less than I used to be.” He dropped his left arm and looked at Bacon. “I believe it would be a mistake to bring Excalibur close to my hook.”

  “Why?” Bacon demanded.

  “The sudden release of energies would probably flatten this entire street and punch a hole through to a Shadowrealm,” Marethyu predicted. “Who knows what might crawl through.”

  Bacon lifted the sword. “This is Excalibur, the greatest of the swords of power—”

  “No, not the greatest, and not even the most powerful,” Marethyu interrupted. “Clarent, the twin blade, is arguably far more powerful.”

  Bacon stopped, clearly surprised. “Oh, I did not know there was a twin blade.”

  “Carried by Arthur himself alongside Excalibur. I watched the king stride into battle wielding one in each hand. It was a sight to behold.”

  “You saw Arthur?” There was no disbelief, only envy in Bacon’s voice.

  “Many times. And I was there when Mordred used Clarent to kill his father, Arthur.”

 

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