My fingers traced the lines of text. My touch unmade the words, transforming them into a face, a silhouette, a name. It was as though the text were trying to tell a story involving thousands of creatures.
“I would have given you anything you asked for,” Rudolf said, his breath hot against my cheek. Once again I smelled onions and wine. It was so unlike Matthew’s clean, spicy scent. And Rudolf’s warmth was off-putting now that I was used to a vampire’s cool temperature. “Why did you choose this? It cannot be understood, though Edward believes it contains a great secret.”
A long arm reached between us and gently touched the page. “Why, this is as meaningless as the manuscript you foisted off on poor Dr. Dee.” Matthew’s face belied his words. Rudolf might not have seen the muscle ticking in Matthew’s jaw or known how the fine lines around his eyes deepened when he concentrated.
“Not necessarily,” I said hastily. “Alchemical texts require study and contemplation if you wish to understand them fully. Perhaps if I spent more time with it . . .”
“Even then one must have God’s special blessing,” Rudolf said, scowling at Matthew. “Edward is touched by God in ways you are not, Herr Roydon.”
“Oh, he’s touched all right,” Matthew said, looking over at Kelley. The English alchemist was acting strange now that the book was not in his possession. There were threads connecting him and the book. But why was Kelley bound to Ashmole 782?
As the question went through my mind, the fine yellow and white threads tying Kelley to Ashmole 782 took on a new appearance. Instead of the normal tight twist of two colors or a weave of horizontal and vertical threads, these spooled loosely around an invisible center, like the curling ribbons on a birthday present. Short, horizontal threads kept the curls from touching. It looked like—
A double helix. My hand rose to my mouth, and I stared down at the manuscript. Now that I’d touched the book, its musty smell was on my fingers. It was strong, gamy, like—
Flesh and blood. I looked to Matthew, knowing that the expression on my face mirrored the shocked look I had seen on his.
“You don’t look well, mon coeur,” he said solicitously, helping me to my feet. “Let me take you home.” Edward Kelley chose this moment to lose control.
“I hear their voices. They speak in languages I cannot understand. Can you hear them?”
He moaned in distress, his hands clapped over his ears.
“What are you chattering about?” Rudolf said. “Dr. Hájek, something is wrong with Edward.”
“You will find your name in it, too,” Edward told me, his voice getting louder, as if he were trying to drown out some other sound. “I knew it the moment I saw you.”
I looked down. Curling threads bound me to the book, too—only mine were white and lavender. Matthew was bound to it by curling strands of red and white.
Gallowglass appeared, unannounced and uninvited. A burly guard followed him, clutching at his own limp arm.
“The horses are ready,” Gallowglass informed us, gesturing toward the exit.
“You do not have permission to be here!” Rudolf shouted, his fury mounting as his careful arrangements disintegrated. “And you, La Diosa, do not have permission to leave.”
Matthew paid absolutely no attention to Rudolf. He simply took my arm and strode in the direction of the door. I could feel the manuscript pulling on me, the threads stretching to bring me back to its side.
“We can’t leave the book. It’s—”
“I know what it is,” Matthew said grimly.
“Stop them!” Rudolf screamed.
But the guard with the broken arm had already tangled with one angry vampire tonight. He wasn’t going to tempt fate by interfering with Matthew. Instead his eyes rolled up into his head and he dropped to the floor in a faint.
Gallowglass threw my cloak over my shoulders as we pelted down the stairs. Two more guards— both unconscious—lay at the bottom.
“Go back and get the book!” I said to Gallowglass, breathless from my constrictive corset and the speed at which we were moving across the courtyard. “We can’t let Rudolf have it now that we know what it is.”
Matthew stopped, his fingers digging into my arm. “We won’t leave Prague without the manuscript. I’ll go back and get it, I promise. But first we are going home. You must have the children ready to leave the moment I get back.”
“We’ve burned our bridges, Auntie,” Gallowglass said grimly. “Pistorius is locked up in the White Tower. I killed one guard and injured three more. Rudolf touched you most improperly, and I have a strong desire to see him dead, too.”
“You don’t understand, Gallowglass. That book may be the answer to everything,” I managed to squeak out before Matthew had me in motion again.
“Oh, I understand more than you think I do.” Gallowglass’s voice floated in the breeze next to me. “I picked up the scent of it downstairs when I knocked out the guards. There are dead wearhs in that book. Witches and daemons, too, I warrant. Whoever could have imagined that the lost Book of Life would stink to high heaven of death?”
32
“Who would make such a thing?” Twenty minutes later I was shivering by the fireplace in our main first-floor room, clutching a beaker of herbal tea. “It’s gruesome.”
Like most manuscripts, Ashmole 782 was made of vellum—specially prepared skin that had been soaked in lime to remove the hair, scraped to take away the subcutaneous layers of flesh and fat, then soaked again before being stretched on a frame and scraped some more.
The difference here was that the creatures used to make the vellum were not sheep, calves, or goats but daemons, vampires, and witches.
“It must have been kept as a record.” Matthew was still trying to come to terms with what we had seen.
“But it has hundreds of pages,” I said in disbelief. The thought of someone flaying so many daemons, vampires, and witches and making vellum from their skins was incomprehensible. I wasn’t sure I would ever sleep through the night again.
“Which means the book contains hundreds of distinct pieces of DNA.” Matthew had run his fingers through his hair so many times he was starting to resemble a porcupine.
“The threads twisting between us and Ashmole 782 looked like double helices,” I said. We’d had to explain modern genetics to Gallowglass, who, without the intervening four and a half centuries of biology and chemistry, was doing his best to follow it.
“So D-N-A is like a family tree, but its branches cover more than just one family?” Gallowglass sounded out “DNA” slowly, with a break between each letter.
“Yes,” Matthew said. “That’s about it.”
“Did you see the tree on the first page?” I asked Matthew. “The trunk was made of bodies, and the tree was flowering, fruiting, and leafing out just like the arbor Dianæ we made in Mary’s laboratory.”
“No, but I saw the creature with its tail in its mouth,” Matthew said.
I tried feverishly to recall what I’d seen, but my photographic memory failed me when I needed it most. There was too much new information to absorb.
“The picture showed two creatures fighting—or embracing, I couldn’t tell which. I didn’t have a chance to count their legs. Their falling blood was generating hundreds of creatures. Although if one of them was not a four-legged dragon but a snake . . .”
“And one was a two-legged firedrake, then those alchemical dragons could symbolize you and me.” Matthew swore, briefly but with feeling.
Gallowglass listened patiently until we were through, then went back to his original topic. “And this D-N-A, it lives in our skin?”