The window is leaded, with a cast-iron frame. There are no security contacts on the glass or its surround; who would break into a castle from the rooftop? Persephone peers inside, sees no telltale shimmer of infrared LEDs. The castle security is tightly focused on the lower windows and outer approaches, and the display cabinets and paintings. Up here there’s nothing to worry about but the fire alarm. And the watchers.
A minute later, she lowers her kit bag and then herself to the parquet floor of the Hall of the Singers.
A shadow moves swiftly in the end gallery: “What kept you?”
“Bad positioning. Help me with this.” She kneels and begins to unpack components from the bag while Johnny assembles them. He’s still tightening bolts as Persephone removes her helmet, unfastens her harness, then unzips her coveralls. Beneath them she wears leggings and a black leotard; her dark hair is knotted in a tight chignon. She has a dancer’s physique—but a dancer would not be wearing the equipment webbing and pouches, or the mummified monkey’s hand strung on a leather cord around her neck. She puts her climbing harness back on over the leotard, dons the night vision goggles, then pulls a shoulder bag from the sack and stuffs her discarded overalls and helmet inside it.
“Okay, I think I’m ready, Duchess.”
Persephone checks her watch, a Seiko chronometer, synchronized to a broadcast time signal. “We are running late—ninety-six minutes to the conjunction.”
“Shit. Well, I suppose I’d better get moving, then.”
Johnny pulls out a pair of bent wires from his pocket and walks to the end wall. Whistling tunelessly he paces backwards, holding them before him; then, having found his distance, he switches direction and moves towards the middle of the floor. “Let’s see…just about here, I think.”
Persephone, who is watching from the gallery, narrows her eyes. “Fifty centimeters closer to the window.”
“If you say so, Duchess.” Johnny squats and begins to work at the parquet tiles. They form a beautifully polished herringbone pattern in rich mahogany, glued to the floorboards below with hot bitumen. With less than two hours to do the job, there’s no time for subtlety: Johnny systematically vandalizes them with the aid of a battery-powered jigsaw. First, he uses a cord to draw a circle a meter in diameter around his measurement point. Next, he carefully cuts a groove in the flooring.
Persephone, meanwhile, rolls the metal framework close to him. Then she pulls out a compact caulking gun, inserts a cylinder, and begins to draw a much larger circle on the floor around them. The oozing paste is silvery in the diffuse moonlight, gravid with metallic particles. She periodically pauses to draw arcane symbols around the outer perimeter. Once the circle is closed she retreats inside and then removes a ruggedized tablet computer from one of her pockets. It sports an expansion port, and this she attaches to the circle by a short cable.
“We’re locked in,” she announces calmly as Johnny pauses to empty the saw’s dust bag again. The inner circle is two-thirds cut through.
“This will take another five minutes.” He reaches into a pocket, pulls out a compact power screwdriver and a couple of attachment points, and screws them into the cut-out circle. Without looking up he threads a wire through the hook-and-eye attachments and fastens it to the metal frame. Then he picks up the saw and cuts out the rest of the circle. Another minute with a pry bar and then the hand-crank on the portable crane, and the disk of flooring is dangling on a wire.
“Allow me.” Persephone leans forward and shines a penlight into the dark recesses below the floorboards. Thick timber joists as strong as a ship’s yardarm run from side to side of the dusty under-floor space, half a meter apart; it stinks of mouse droppings and ancient history. About forty centimeters below the floor there is another surface—the ceiling of the Arbeitszimmer, the royal study.
She winces slightly at the thought of what she’s about to do to the gloriously paneled and painted interior of the royal suite. Mad King Ludwig bankrupted Bavaria building this castle; he spent over six million marks on it—close to half a billion euros in twenty-first-century currency. But there’s a job to be done, and the price of failure is even higher.
She reaches into the pouch on her left hip with one gloved hand and pulls forth a velvet bag. Opening it, she teases out a chain of bright-polished white gold, each link of which is encrusted with glistening emeralds. She lowers the bag by its chain over the dust-strewn roof below. It stirs slowly, dangling away from the vertical. “The amulet points to the warded containment,” she says quietly. “We are out of position—at least two meters, perhaps three. Pass me the hand drill.”
“Are you sure? It’s no bother to raise another lid—”
“It may not bother you, Johnny, but I don’t like desecrating a work of art. Pass me the hand drill and hook me up.”
“It’s your funeral.” Johnny passes her the drill, then ropes her harness to the crane. Persephone takes a deep breath, then worms her way underneath the floor boards.
THEY HAVE BEEN ON, IN, AND UNDER THE HALL OF THE SINGERS in the Palas of the Neuschwanstein castle for nearly an hour at this point. There are no burglar alarms on this upper story.
That does not mean, however, that there are no guards.
PERSEPHONE HAZARD IS AT PEACE AMONG THE DUST BUNNIES of the under-floor spaces, mentally and physically in the zone as she worms her way towards the ceiling directly above the amulet’s indicated spot. Every fifty centimeters she stops and uses the drill to tap a hole in the floorboards above her, then screws another anchor into the woodwork, and walks one of her load-bearing cables forward. It’s slow, laborious work, and the palace is not cold—with the central heating running, so too is the sweat.
The amulet is dangling straight down now, and Persephone has begun to orient herself, rolling over to face the floor below, when the hair on the back of her neck begins to tingle. She reaches her left hand up to grasp the monkey’s fist at the base of her throat. A thrill of terror washes through her for a moment before she forces herself to stillness. Whatever is happening overhead, she can’t crawl backwards fast enough to be out of the hole in time to help Johnny deal with it. But there are other options. She rolls onto her back, raises the hand drill, swaps out the bit for a thirteen-centimeter-hole saw, and applies it to the boards above her.
Meanwhile, Johnny—Jonathan McTavish, accomplice and loyal lieutenant and sometime adjutant in the 2ème Régiment Étranger de Parachutistes—has become aware that he is no longer alone in the ballroom.
No door has opened, nor window slid ajar. No human lungs breathe the still, nighttime air with him. Nevertheless, he is not alone. He knows this by a prickling in the tattoo on the biceps of his left arm, by the warming of the warding amulet on the chain around his neck, by the goose bumps in the small of his back, by the strange blood running in his veins. And he knows it by the faint luminous glow coming from the warding circle that Persephone inscribed around him before embarking on her dive beneath the floorboards.
Johnny slowly scans the room, looking for traces. His nostrils flare. This is not strictly a visual talent, nor does he expect his night vision gear to spot the heat trace of a living body in the gloom. He and the Duchess are here tonight to lay something to rest; there are beings that will not appreciate this work. Entities that will go unfed if the amulet is restored to its rightful place in the display cabinet of King Ludwig’s study, replacing the artful forgery that a long-dead cat burglar replaced it with decades ago. Things that do not appreciate the way the amulet’s power is blocked while it is confined in this place.