City of Lost Dreams

THIRTY-SIX

During the drive from Innsbruck to Prague Sarah had tried to work through the possibilities of what she was about to face, and to make sense of what she had seen and experienced at the Schloss. She had told Gottfried about what Heinrich had confessed. He had called an ambulance for his brother—and the police. But she couldn’t think about them now.

She had tried to keep the image of Pollina clear in her head, to let the girl know she was coming, that it would be all right.

Bettina Müller was not the answer. There was another answer. She would find it. She was not afraid.

Now, Sarah looked over her shoulder at Nico, in the backseat of the Mini Countryman Gottfried had not objected to her commandeering. Nico was dressed to the nines in a custom cream silk Armani suit with Bettina’s rat in his lap. A rat that had been made immortal by twenty-first-century alchemy sitting in the lap of a man made immortal by the careless machinations of an astronomer in the first year of the seventeenth century.

Anything was possible, it seemed.

“Did you find anything out about the galleon at the castle?” asked Nico.

“I found something,” Sarah said. “But not that.”

She had the cure for immortality in her pocket. It was what Nico wanted, more than anything else. Had it been for Nico that Philippine had given it to her? Sarah loved Nico, but she hadn’t been thinking of him when she asked Philippine for help. And Philippine would have known that, because for that moment they had been one. The ultimate desire of alchemy. Two into one.

Sarah looked at Max, driving with his usual breakneck speed westward across Prague.

“I love you,” she said.

The car swerved, then straightened.

“I love you, too,” he said.

The Star Summer Palace was not visible from the entrance of the park, which had been a hunting preserve in Ferdinand’s time. Max parked the car on Libocká. It was freezing cold. They all pulled out flashlights, though the moon was full and luminous. Sarah knew that Max was carrying a gun. Nico slipped into the darkness and she began to run, Max keeping pace beside her, but stopped when they turned into the long avenue that led to the palace.

The building shone white and stark in the darkness. Max had told her in the car that the roof had been rebuilt several times over the years, but the original structure as Ferdinand had designed and built it was intact. A star disguised as a palace. A secret disguised as a star. She told him what she had seen at the von Hohenlohe Schloss in Innsbruck.

The gravel crunched under their feet.

She knew that in the past this place had been the scene of much violence. The Battle of White Mountain had been fought near here in 1620 and—Sarah paused as a horse, screaming and wild-eyed, and dragging a bloody rider behind it, his stomach pierced by a broken stave, thundered past her.

“What?” Max whispered, grabbing her arm. His touch restored her vision. The avenue was once again silent and peaceful. Sarah shook her head. The Westonia should have worn off hours before.

“I think the past here might be stronger than the present,” she said.

She stared at the building before her. The foundation, Nico had told them, was a circle with a radius of sixty feet. From that rose six peaks of the star formation, each set precisely sixty feet from one another. The original height had been sixty feet from bottom to top. The interior was a series of circles and hexagons.

“We’ll have to break in,” Max said. “There’s probably an alarm system, too. Although maybe . . .” He stopped talking.

A figure stood at the entrance to the building. A small figure, in a heavy long black cloak. A figure who now raised an arm in a bizarrely cheerful wave. Nico appeared beside Sarah, squinting.

“Who is that?” he asked sharply.

They drew closer. It was now clear that the figure was a woman, slim, with large eyes set in a pale oval face. Her features were very delicate. Her short hair was almost white.

“You?” said Nico.

The woman narrowed her eyes at Nicolas. “You were a foul abortion in 1601,” she said. “And I see that time has not improved you.”

“Elizabeth Weston,” said Nico. “No.”

“No,” said Sarah. “That’s Bettina Müller.”

They looked at each other, then back at the woman.

“I am Westonia,” she said with a smile. “The Tenth Muse. The greatest poet of her age. And I am Bettina Müller, the greatest scientist of this one. And a great many other names along the way.”

“Okay, fine,” said Sarah. “But right now I don’t care what you call yourself. Because unless you hand over Pollina in about five seconds”—she gripped the bars—“you’re just another cunt I’m sending to Hell.”