The Serpent's Curse

by Tony Abbott

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The thing over Wade’s mouth was cold, powerful, reptilian.

  Gollum?

  The dry flesh smelled of stone dust and coal and motor oil and something sharp, medicinal. Trying to turn, he imagined he saw a face—but it couldn’t have been a face, because not all its features were there. Lily said nothing, her hands over her mouth, her eyes aghast at what was dragging him backward into a long room lit by a single candle.

  Around them was a tortured mangle of metal furniture and the broken remains of the equipment of coal mining—drills, saws, picks, and axes—reminding him of a nineteenth-century machine factory.

  “Silence!” the voice hissed wetly in his ears. “I release you. Silence, yes?”

  Wade nodded. So did Lily, her eyes welling up now. The scaly fingers lifted off his mouth. Wiping his lips on his sleeve, Wade turned slowly.

  By the wavering flame he saw a shriveled wire of a man whose nose was mostly gone. It had rotted or burned away. An open hole gaped between his cheeks, giving him the look of a skeleton. The flesh on his forehead was mottled—red, black—and crosshatched with deep scars. His lower lip had been burned almost completely away. The gums that remained were gray. He had no teeth. His lidless, protruding, red-veined eyes appeared to be on fire.

  “Every time someone comes,” he slurred in a whisper that suggested he couldn’t speak any louder, “by plane, by truck, by any way, I come see who. I watch.”

  “Who are you?” Lily asked tentatively.

  “Four long years I watch and wait, knowing it is only matter of time before she come. Four years, I wait for Galina Krause. Finally, she has tracked me to my lair. The circle of horror is completed.”

  “You know Galina Krause? You know she’s here?” Wade asked. “Who are you?”

  “Me? I am no one. You are Enklish? Enklish are good people.”

  “American,” Lily said, looking at Wade for an answer he didn’t know the question to.

  The man turned his face away. “Ah, I thought Enklish. My brother he live London. Maybe you know. Boris his name. Big man. Scholar. They love him in London. But how could you know Boris? You are children; he is famous man. I wished Boris, not Galina. Brother Boris. I sent message for him to come. He has not come.”

  Lily’s knees gave out, and she fell into Wade to keep from collapsing on the filthy floor. After all that had happened since the Promenade room in London, after the countless miles they’d crossed to get here, they knew this burned wreck of a man?

  Russia felt suddenly as small as the inside of a box.

  “You are Aleksandr?” she said softly.

  Not that it was even remotely possible for his flesh to move or the muscles that had been destroyed by fire to alter his features, but something softened in his expression.

  “You . . . you . . . know Boris Rubashov? My brother, Boris?”

  “We met him in London,” Wade said, still holding her up. “He helped us to come to Russia. But he . . . he thought you were dead. He was convinced that Galina . . .” His hand moved to his pocket, then stopped.

  “He thought Galina had killed you,” Lily said.

  The man, whose brother had called him A, stared silently at them with bloodred eyes, eager for every syllable. “Tell me more,” he said. “More!” So they related the sad facts of his brother’s poisoning. How he had “told” them by video about the Teutonic Order’s theft of Serpens from Copernicus. How they had followed his opera ticket to Venice to retrieve what had turned out to be Aleksandr’s very own message to his brother.

  “Worokuta,” Wade said finally. “That was from you.”

  “I sent it to a colleague in Prague,” the man said. “I hoped it would get to Boris. So that I could see him one more time. To pass on to him my knowledge of Serpens.”

  “Without Boris we wouldn’t be here,” Lily said softly. “I didn’t realize until now how much he helped us. He hated the Order. He was coming back before they got to him. He loved you. He would have come here, if he had seen your message.”

  Aleksandr shuddered for minutes without cease. Lily guessed that his eyes were dry only because his tear ducts had been destroyed by fire. He was sobbing without tears.

  “Oh, Boris,” he said finally. “Boris—” He stiffened suddenly. He pushed a curled finger to his lips, then picked his way through the ruined machinery. He leaned against the door they had come through. He dragged a dented cabinet against it. “Galina Krause does not know the way to my little home,” he whispered, “but she will find it. She circles and circles the passages, looking for me.”

  “The mine entrances are guarded except the one we came through,” said Wade.

  “Galina must find me,” Aleksandr said, selecting something from the junk on the floor. It was a scalpel. “I will not leave before she does.”

  “You treated Galina four years ago?” Lily said. “She wouldn’t have been much older than we are now. What was wrong with her?”

  Aleksandr shook his head. “You have heard of Greywolf? Greywolf harbored a secret experimental clinic for KGB. I was forced. Then, after KGB, the Order. Hideous place. The machine—”

  Wade shot Lily a look. “The machine? You know about it? My stepmother is trapped at Greywolf, inside the machine. What is it?”

  “Kronos is the Order’s experimental time-traveling device!” he said. “They were building it even as I performed the surgery. I know little of physics, but Galina Krause is mad! Time travel simply cannot be done without the relics of Copernicus. Ptolemy knew what he was doing. He lacked only the final brilliance of the Magister. This is the greatness of Copernicus. His wondrous astrolabe!”

  Lily tugged Wade to her. “That’s what the midnight deadline is. Galina’s going to use Kronos on Sara. But my Lord, to do what—”

  There were noises echoing into the room from the passages outside.

  “Galina’s getting closer,” Wade said. “We should get out of here.”

  “She believes I will tell her where the relic is!” he said.

  Lily shivered. “Then it’s true. You’re a Guardian like Boris.”

  His eyes fixed on her, then on Wade, then on her again. “As our father was before us. As all good people must be. All people who fight the Order . . .”

  With that, Aleksandr went into a kind of trance, speaking much as his brother had in the London breakfast room, drawing them far from the mine and down the long passages of history.

  “Behold,” he said, “behold the snowbound streets of Kraków, Poland, on the night of February thirteen, in the year 1568 . . .”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Wade remembered 1568. He had scratched the number on the wall of his Lubyanka cell. It was the year Albrecht von Hohenzollern died.

  By this sad time, Copernicus is dead. Albrecht von Hohenzollern is an old man, and yet we see him, struggling through the storm to a small abode on Gołębia Street, in the shadow of the great university, the university that Copernicus himself attended.

  Albrecht’s spies have told him that a man, one Georg Joachim Rheticus, lives in an upper room. Also in that room is one half of a jeweled serpent, given to Rheticus by Maxim Grek. It is the fragment Albrecht has sought for fifty long years.

  It is now within his grasp.

  “Wait,” Lily interrupted. “Albrecht had the head, and Rheticus had the body. Are you saying . . . they met?”

  “Met, knew each other, and on this night saw each other for the very last time. . . .”

  Albrecht is accompanied by a handful of men.

  One of them is his sole surviving nephew. It is from him we have this story. The men break down the door, mount the stairs. All this happens in moments!

  In pain, near death, Albrecht coveted the relic. It is the curse of Serpens, the bloodlust of the relic, which makes all who know of it covet it beyond all things!

  Rheticus rises from his lamp-lit desk. He is a younger man by years, but his burdens have reduced his health. The door swings wide. A
lbrecht enters. Rheticus takes up his rusted sword. They fight. One a Guardian, the other the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order!

  Such a battle would be monumental, but they are two old men! They hack away at each other with swords far too heavy for their weak arms. The knights with Albrecht do not intervene. His one surviving nephew watches, catalogs, remembers.

  And then the blow. Albrecht’s blade across Rheticus’s face. The Guardian is blinded, falls. Albrecht grovels on his knees, tears the room apart until he finds the Serpens relic.

  He seizes upon it.

  He takes it.

  Wade couldn’t help himself. “So Albrecht had it all.”

  “Yes!” Alek said. “The Demon Master brings it back to Königsberg. There he connects the two pieces, head and body. The relic moves . . .”

  It breathes! Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . It is said that Serpens stings him. Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way, within a few short months, Albrecht himself is dead.

  “What happens to Serpens?” asked Lily. “Is it still at Königsberg?”

  “Ah, no. Because, you see, fortune turns. The history of the relic is as twisted and cursed as the serpent itself. The journey to the finding of it is long, as long as . . . But now we must travel forward in time . . . to April 1945. . . .”

  My father, Sergei Rubashov, is a private in the Soviet army. He is a weary foot soldier, harnessed to the great engine of Mother Russia.

  By April 1945, you see, the Great Patriotic War against Germany is nearly over. My father is sent with his company to take the castle at Königsberg. To search for Russian art treasures the Germans have stolen since the war began.

  Bullets and flames fly on the battlefield, but my father makes it to the castle. What Private Rubashov discovers, however, is no mere Russian treasure. It is a discovery beyond belief. Half of a jeweled serpent, a winged body crafted of silver and diamonds beyond worth. It is the Serpens relic. Incomplete. The body only, headless, unnatural. He does not find the head. But this fragment alone is priceless beyond comprehension.

  My father is overtaken by its beauty and power.

  He cannot control the greed of his eyes, his heart, his hands. He hides the relic in his rucksack. He says nothing to anyone. He brings it home with him, after the war ends.

  Father learns soon that the serpent is cursed. He uncovers its terrifying history. Not only its origin with Copernicus, but how it imprisoned Maxim. How it blinded Rheticus. How it killed Albrecht himself.

  To save his soul, my father becomes a Guardian.

  The Teutonic Order, high in the Soviet government after the war, learns of his theft. They try to force him to reveal where the serpent is. But he is now a Guardian and will not speak.

  He never reveals its hiding place. He is sent to Lubyanka prison, then to Vorkuta. Two years later, he marries an inmate, has two sons. Aleksandr and Boris. Mother dies. Father labors for decades in the mines. He never reveals his secret. For more than fifty years, he never gives it up. Boris becomes a Guardian. I become a Guardian. Still, Father never gives it up. Until his deathbed . . .

  He took a breath, listened at the door, and went on.

  On his deathbed, father gives me the body of Serpens.

  He says, “Keep it safe.”

  I say, “Upon my life I will.”

  Yet with Father’s last breath, already I cannot control my heart and my hands. Even as a fragment, Serpens is magnificent beyond belief. I take it. I hide it. Boris leaves Russia, goes to the West. He is a dissident and must leave to be free. Me, I am already under the yoke of the government. My clinic at Greywolf is my prison. I am forced to stay in the east wing, the surgery. I develop serums, medicines. They work. They cure.

  Then, four years ago, a bent little man comes to Greywolf. With him is a girl, young, frail, dying. The man brandishes a pistol. “I am from the Teutonic Order. We have friends in Russia. Many friends. You will cure this girl,” he says to me.

  “Ebner von Braun,” said Wade.

  Lily shot a look at Wade. “Galina was dying? Of what?”

  “Cancer,” Alek said, rubbing his fingertips as if to clean something invisible from them. “But a very rare and almost unknown modality of cancer. I had never seen its like, not until my microscope identified it without question.”

  Here I am, a Guardian face-to-face with the Order. I am fearful. Yet I cannot refuse to do the operation. I do not want to reject a child of the Order.

  The operation is a success. I beg to leave Greywolf, to join my brother in London. The German man refuses, keeps me under lock and key. “Ensure her recovery. We need this girl!” Then, one night the girl rants in her delirium. Tortured words about a jeweled object in her possession. An object she foraged from Königsberg.

  This is both honey and poison to me!

  In this way, I become aware that this young girl possesses the legendary head of the very same serpent! Its double eyes are said to be as large as human eyes, blue diamonds of exquisite cut and quality.

  “How did Galina get the head?” Lily asked.

  Aleksandr paused again to listen at the door. “How does Galina Krause do many things?”

  “But you knew what it was?” Wade said.

  “Of course I knew!” Aleksandr said sharply. “The serpent my father brought home from Königsberg had already devoured me with its beauty!”

  “Why didn’t your father find it when he was there in 1945?” Wade asked.

  Aleksandr brushed his burned fingers across his forehead. “One legend says that Albrecht hid the two parts separately. The real reason is lost in the past. But do you understand the gift given to me at that moment? If I let my hands do the bidding of my soul, I could possess the entire Serpens relic, as no one has since Copernicus himself!

  “I begin to think, with one relic I can find another. And another. I knew how Serpens was said to move in the palm of your hand as if it were alive. Tick . . . tick . . . And how it points its head to the south, and its blue eyes begin to glow, and it moves across your palm as if to join with another. Already it is seeking the next relic!”

  Aleksandr paused, falling inside himself for an instant before he went on. “I stole the head of Serpens from her. Even from her recovery bed, the girl ordered that they force me to tell where I put it. They set fire to the clinic. . . . Did you know there existed a morgue at Greywolf? Below the surgery, a small room where the bodies of those who perished were taken. My colleagues and I made errors, you know. Experimental surgery . . .”

  Wade tried to follow this new idea. “Yes, I understand. But did you escape with Serpens?” He knew how blunt the question was, but he had no time, and the man was beginning to ramble.

  “I escaped! Yes, I did. But the head of Serpens? After so many victims over so many years, Serpens is bathed in the blood of the dead,” he said.

  “What? Where?” Lily looked ready to jump out of her skin. “Where, Alek?”

  “Still this is but half of the story,” Alek said. “Fleeing Greywolf, I stole across Russia to Vorkuta, where my father died. I returned to his mine, where I had hidden the beast. I retrieved the body of Serpens. Realizing that I had sinned with greed, I entrusted the Serpens body to a Guardian far nobler than myself. I bid him hide it away. Since then I live in this mine, the mine that killed my father, and I wait. I knew one day she would find me. She has. Now . . . I will kill her.” He raised the scalpel in his hand.

  “Alek, no,” said Lily. “Let’s just escape, get out of here.”

  “Never!” he said.

  “Alek, the Protocol has begun,” said Wade. “The relics need to return to Frombork. We have one already. Vela. It pointed to Serpens, as Serpens will point to the next one. Aleksandr, can you help us find both halves?”

  “I am the only one who can, but . . .” Aleksandr’s breath was like the sound of a car wheezing its last. His lungs were damaged, that was plain. “I am at the end now. I will not come with you. But I will tell you. . . . Did you know that below the surgery was
a morgue?”

  It was maddening, and Wade turned away. “You told us already, Aleksandr. Where are the two parts of the relic? You had them both. We’ve traveled half the world to find them. Can you just tell us where they are?”

  The man drifted off for a moment, as if falling once more into a trance. Then, stirring, he studied their faces closely and said, “Bathed in blood—”

  Three shots exploded suddenly in the passage outside. The door bolts flew across the room like shrapnel. The cabinet toppled away. The iron door to Aleksandr Rubashov’s lair crashed open.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Minutes earlier, Galina stalked through the dusty tunnels like a panther on the hunt. Her scar stung as if it were a raw incision. Her memories cut just as raw. She recalled every moment of the operation Aleksandr Rubashov had performed on her at Greywolf. A hundred thousand precise moments of agony.

  “We must be near,” Ebner whispered.

  “We are,” she said. “I sense him.”

  Now, after four years of her thinking him dead, could the good doctor actually be hiding here? In this . . . tomb?

  The servers in the Copernicus Room had cross-referenced thousands of fragments of data about the Rubashov brothers, reducing them to a list of thirty-eight possible origins for the encrypted message meant for Boris. The moment one of those fragments—the name Vorkuta—had been identified as the mine where the Rubashovs’ father had died, Galina had been certain. No doubt her failed episode in Venice had given the same information to the Kaplans, if they knew enough to decipher whatever code Aleksandr had used.

  “How ironic life and death are,” Ebner mused. “A man we believed to be dead sends a message to a man he believes to be alive. Curiously, we were both wrong.”

  She slowed and turned to him. “Ironic, Dr. von Braun? We have been wrong far too many times for it to be ironic. We are in Russia, where I nearly perished four years ago. Is that ironic?”