The barge drew level with them. The river was so narrow here that the boat’s hull almost touched the embankment, its deck only a foot or so below Nick’s feet. Floodlights bathed the park in light, blinding Nick. In that moment, the Italian jumped. He heaved himself over the railing and dropped like a stone onto the barge. Nick ran to the rail, but all he saw was a wall of dazzling light blazing back at him.
Footsteps crunched behind him; he swung around. Emily was running across the park, her breath fogging the night.
‘Where is he?’
Nick pointed to the barge, now disappearing around a bend in the river. ‘He got away.’
He walked over to where the bag lay and scanned the ground. As his eyes readjusted to the darkness he found he could pick out a few of the scraps of paper lying limp in the snow. He picked one up. It seemed to be normal office paper, with a fragment of a word on it.
‘What’s that?’
‘Something important. When I had the guy cornered, the one thing he cared about was destroying it.’
They knelt together in the snow, sweeping the ground and gathering the fragments in shivering hands. Nick thanked God there was no wind. When they had collected as many as they could find, they shook the snow off them and bagged them in a pocket of Nick’s backpack. Emily looked doubtfully at the pile of sodden scraps, not much bigger than confetti.
‘Do you think we’ll make any sense of that?’
Nick grimaced. The city glow reflected off the snow and gave his face a ghoulish cast. I piece things together.
‘We have the technology. We can fix it.’
LVI
We would tear it up and piece it back together.
By liberating the beasts from the flat cage of their copper plates, Drach could make any card he wanted. Even if only one animal remained, he could print and reprint it as often as he wanted onto the same card. The system was not only perfect, it was infinitely variable.
It was not a new idea. We had started down this road when we divided the indulgence plate into four paragraphs. But we had not gone nearly far enough. One afternoon I counted three thousand and seventy-four individual characters in the indulgence. We would cast each one individually and bring them together to form a single page, as thousand of souls form a single Church.
Hans Dunne disliked the plan. ‘Each time you encounter a problem, you find an answer that creates ten new problems and does not solve the first,’ he warned me. But he had earned more than a hundred gulden from me for creating the copper plates which had proved so troublesome, so I ignored him.
Kaspar did not like it either. ‘You are turning in on yourself. You are trying to climb a mountain by counting pebbles. You will spend the rest of your life making this art so intricate that nothing can be done with it.’
We were journeying through a forest in late October. It was like walking through fire: all around us the leaves burned vivid shades of scarlet, ochre, yellow and orange, shimmering in the breeze. It was a dangerous time to be abroad.
‘And even if you succeed, it will just turn out like the mirrors,’ Kaspar prodded me.
Much had happened since the night Andreas Dritzehn died. His brother Jörg had sued me to be admitted to our partnership – and lost. The judge awarded him fifteen gulden. The Aachen pilgrimage had come and gone, the relics put away for another seven years. Some of the mirrors waved aloft to capture the holy rays had been mine, but not many. First, a good portion of our metals had been sold to pay the interest on my debts. Then we had been swindled by our barge captain and decimated by tolls along the river, before being opposed at every turn by the Aachen guilds. By the time we were finished, the torrent of tin and lead I had prepared to pour down the Rhine had dwindled to a trickle. The torrent of gold I had hoped would flow back to me suffered a similar fate. Once I had paid our costs, paid the investors, paid my debts, including the fifteen gulden to Jörg Dritzehn, only the thinnest residue remained.
Kaspar hated it when his comments drew no reaction. He tried a third time. ‘And it is madness to be on the road now. I heard that a week ago Breisgau was razed to the ground. They made a bonfire of the village and roasted its livestock on the coals. Some say they also roasted the inhabitants and ate them too.’
I shuddered. For months now the country around Strassburg had been infested with a plague of wild men, the Armagnaken or ‘poor fools’, the remnants of a great army which had been marauding around Europe in the service of one duke or another for years. An unholy cabal of the French king, the German emperor and the Italian pope had schemed to send them to Switzerland to sack Basle: the king because he wanted them out of France, the emperor because he aimed to annex Switzerland to the empire; the pope because he wanted to put a stop once and for all to the council which Aeneas and his friends had conducted now for over ten years. The Swiss had defied the Armagnaken and defeated them at terrible cost. The survivors had fled, rampaging down the Rhine in a storm of fire and blood that – men said – only the Apocalypse would equal. They had arrived near Strassburg in the spring. Many thousands had died.
The forest was no longer beautiful. I peered into its depths, trying to see what lurked behind the blaze of foliage.
‘Nick? What the hell happened to you? I’ve been hearing some bad things.’
Urthred the Necromancer paced his chamber in front of a roaring fire. A unicorn stood tethered obediently in the corner.
‘Long story. I need some help.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Strasbourg.’
‘Is that Kentucky?’
‘France.’
‘Right.’ A waxwork scowl was fixed on Urthred’s face. ‘Um, I’m kind of a long way from France right now.’
‘I need a high-res scanner and a fat data pipe. As fast as possible. I thought you might know someone.’
Urthred tapped his staff on the stone floor. Blue sparks fizzed from its tip. ‘Sheesh, Nick, you don’t make it easy. What time is it with you?’
Nick checked his watch. ‘Nine at night.’
‘You know, this is not cool Nick.’ A pause, then a grumpy sigh. ‘OK. I’ll check my contacts for insomniac French data-centre managers with a hard-on for fugitives from justice. Stick around.’
Urthred disappeared in a puff of smoke. Nick unhooked the headset from his ear and looked up from the laptop. The cobwebbed walls and swirling mists of the Necromancer’s tower were replaced with thick red paint and cigarette smoke, an underground bar off the Quai Saint Jean. To Nick, the other customers seemed as outlandish as anything in Gothic Lair: piercings through every permeable patch of skin, hair dyed red or purple or green, steel chains around their necks and waists. None of them looked as if they’d come to take advantage of the free wireless Internet.
‘Are you sure this is the time to be playing computer games?’ asked Emily. She sat next to him on the threadbare banquette, sipping a Jack Daniel’s and Coke.
‘You know the slogan, “The network is the computer”?’ She shook her head. ‘Well, in human terms the network is Randall. Urthred. If there’s anyone who can help us, Randall probably knows him somehow.’
‘I don’t understand. We’ve got an Internet connection here.’
‘Nowhere near fast enough. And we need to scan the pictures. You can’t do that with a mobile-phone camera.’
On the laptop screen, Urthred reappeared out of nowhere. Nick put the headset back on and tried to ignore the sneering looks he drew.
‘I got it,’ Urthred bragged. ‘You heard of a place called Karlsruhe?’
‘No.’
‘It’s in Germany – about an hour away from you, according to the Interweb. Hochschule für Gestaltung. It’s some kind of technical college. There’s a chick in the computer science department there, Sabine Friman. She can hook you up.’