by Nina Post
She braced herself. “If I helped you — and I’m not saying I will — but if I did, what would you want me to do?”
“It’s just one small thing.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“A few small things. Very straightforward.”
“Right.”
In a tone more appropriate for telling someone what chores to do around the house, he said, “I just need you to steal the first Zaanics book and the Middle English poem from Gaelen. Help me move all three books to different locations around the world. And work with someone in the Severn family to get the books translated. We need to know what Gaelen intends to do with the information, and so we need to know what’s in those books.”
Cate laughed. “Oh, is that all?”
“You need to get Noah to help you, because you cannot do this on your own. The Lyr family learned Zaanics, and the Severn family learned the Yesuþoh. The Lyrs have the poem, the Severns have the lists.” He said this in a fast, almost sing-song voice. “There’s a reason for that. I want you to work with him to translate the books.”
“Benjamin, that language has been the bane of my existence. Also, in case you haven’t noticed, I wasn’t trained in it — Gaelen was.”
“You know enough to get started. You’re smart and resourceful. You’re a good person. You should have been the steward.”
It was nice to hear, even though he was telling her that to get her to do something. Cate tried to toe the line between gaining wisdom from her painful experiences and being a cynic, but she didn’t know if she was a good person. It was a struggle to get past feeling unworthy.
“How did Gaelen even get the first book, anyway?”
Benjamin sighed. “She demanded it. All these years, I was the only person who knew the locations, with instructions to be opened only upon my death or the steward’s, or if there were another ceremony. I told her I could give her the first book, but that the others would take more time — and Gaelen is not a patient person.”
Cate thought about it. “What if she does sell the information in the first book, or any of books? Cats and dogs living together, et cetera?”
“The ramifications would be … calamitous. She already has the first book. And she will follow through. You know Gaelen.”
“She puts the stomach acid of vultures in her morning coffee, her heart is made of fingernail parings. I could go on.”
“So you see the urgency,” he said.
When she didn’t respond, he added, “I bought you a ticket for tomorrow. Ataturk to San Francisco, with a stop in Frankfurt. You leave at 2 p.m. and get in at 7:50 p.m. There will be a car waiting for you.”
“I’ll buy my own damn ticket, Benjamin.”
“Does that mean you’ll do it?”
Something on one of the screens caught her attention and she leaned in to figure out what was going wrong. One of her crew called her on the secure line. “Gotta go.”
“I’ll see you in a couple of days,” he said, and hung up.
Benjamin always needed to have the last word.
She picked up the other line.
“Vulcan’s boxed in and more guards are coming.” Argos. “We need to get out of here, now, but the path’s completely cut off.”
“Stand by. Let me find you another route.” Cate quickly brought up the blueprints and looked for an acceptable outcome. Right now, every move they could make damaged their position — a situation she was all too familiar with. One of the certitudes she took from her experience was to always have a fallback plan. Because if everything seemed safe, and if you trusted the people in your life, why would you need one?
She was prepared for this, and told her crew what to do and where to go.
Argos protested. “There’s no way that will work.”
“It’ll work.” She didn’t say trust me. It was bad luck, and either they trusted her or they didn’t. In this case, she used a reserve tempo, a move that any one of her crew could execute at any given time.
“Do it,” she said.
He did it, and dragged Vulcan and Mercury with him.
She paced in front of the desk, arms crossed, nails dragging across the skin of her upper arm.
Cate wanted two things with the jobs she planned. The first was money, though she lived frugally and hated to spend it. Her income was erratic and occasionally high, but it made her feel good to have money safely put away. She valued security.
The second thing she wanted was for her crew, for all of them, to express more of their potential. Some people were hamstrung by circumstances, or lacked the confidence. Her anxiety and fear kept her from taking risks she should have, and gave her a lot of regrets. Her crew was so skilled, so talented, that she wanted any given job to challenge them and give them a theater for reaching more of their potential. She chose and designed the jobs with an eye to that. But something always happened.
Argos ran into another roadblock — a person, of course, it was always a person. He went on a hunch and pulled it off.
And then the video showed that they were out.
“For the love of Paul Newman,” she whispered, relief flooding through her, palms on the desk, head down. Her crew was out. They were safe.
The call came in. “We’re good, Cate.”
Mercury broke in. “Yeah, we’re cloaked in the abronart. Vulcan, you assinego — we conveyers were two stots from acollez on the montjoye, gru, saying our audi nos.” He blew a raspberry. “I need an ochorboc.”
“What the hell are you saying, Merc?” Vulcan said.
“Eetswe anguaagela,” Merc said with a broad smile.
“What? I can’t understand a word he’s saying,” Vulcan muttered.
“All right, put the quietus on,” Argos said. “We’re not home free yet.”
After the sun rose, and her crew were on their way to wherever they were going, Cate had energy to burn. She put on gray chinos, tennis shoes, and a light jacket, locked the door, then went out into the humid, densely foggy morning, past the stores and suppliers of plumbing, mechanical, and electrical parts; past purveyors of lighting, springs, paint, and diving equipment. She took Bankalar Caddesi toward Galata Tower past ornately tiled buildings, most of them the former banks of the Ottoman Empire.
A stocky man named Gudrun Gray, who wore charcoal slacks and a cerulean blue sweater, watched the leader of thieves with a practiced sense of distance. He had a compact physique and an athletic grace that he often put to good use. He continuously checked the area around her and noted every face he saw. Gudrun had a talent for picking out members of the other factions, and a balding man was of particular interest to him. Was the man one of that brood of vipers, which were poised to kill the woman at any time? Gudrun curled his lip contemptuously when he thought of the others, particularly Dregutchoh Niijevec, those savages who didn’t believe in the immortal soul. Hævli Hætrisi would preserve the one true book, and they would be proved triumphant. Gudrun devoted himself to HH entirely. He was not married and never would be, and the leader had provided him with just enough money to live modestly.
When Cate reached the Kamondo staircase, she ran up the stairs toward the Banker Sokak, back down, then walked it up and down again, trying to burn off some of her tension. Then she went back to her original path toward the Tower and, hungry, bought two fragrant simits from a wiry seller with a bright, ready smile who was balancing a stack of the bagels atop the cushion on the crown of his head.
Another man, Dominic Kazakov, who was nearly bald and wearing a tweed jacket with jeans, passed Cate in the same direction as she took a bite of a simit. He strolled ahead of her while keeping careful track of her every move. He was unaware of the first man watching her, but knew full well that one of the others, who didn’t believe in the little book, could also be watching. Though Dregutchoh Niijevec did not believe in fate, they did believe that the woman with the green-gold eyes would bring these events to bear. To let her walk free as long as they had was madness. Better to have killed her years
ago, when she was a child, and prevent any of this from happening in the first place. He was not concerned about heaven or hell, if they decided the time was right to strike. There was no afterlife, and no penalties or rewards after death. But the leader wanted them to wait.
Walking behind the harbor, Cate passed the Ottoman Banking Museum, the location of the first bank in Istanbul, and pictured harem eunuchs walking in to complete a transaction on their account.
Gudrun waited out of sight by a corner of the museum, and when the bald man got close enough, he snaked a wire around his throat. The brief struggle reminded him of fishing for graylings in the Traun. The bald man eventually fell limp against Gudrun, who cracked his neck to the side then called Erin to keep her updated.
On her way back toward the house, Cate stopped in her favorite esnaf lokantasi, one of the few exceptions to her rule of avoiding family-run businesses. She greeted the owners then took a table for a small breakfast of kaymak, fresh figs, olives, and tea. As she ate, she thought about the money her crew would receive for this job, and considered the list of tasks involved with transferring the diamonds to their fence. She usually funneled some of her share through a shell company, but also liked to keep it in readily available cash. She didn’t do stocks and she didn’t do bonds, because the return never justified the risk. Better to keep it in her mattress or gold blocks or mint condition collectibles than in a managed fund.
A third man, named Xavier Bone, small in stature with a crisp, almost jaunty step, bought a newspaper then followed her into the cafe. He was thinking of God’s foreknowledge of human destiny and wondering, without concern, what his path was to be with Gochu Cherdaþi. They would all be resurrected in a future age, but he wanted this life to have purpose and honor.
A woman in her sixties, with a face and figure and demeanor that turned heads of men and women half her age, watched Cate eat her breakfast from a window table across the street. She tamed a stray hair in her thick gray-blonde pageboy with a slim, manicured finger and slid her eyes every so often to Cate as she nursed her tea, which came in a little glass cup on a patterned plate with sugar cubes. She was thinking about death, and if Cate would ever have children, and if those children would have children, and if the world would be safe for them.
Xavier Bone had noticed the older woman before he went into the esnaf lokantasi, first because she was strikingly attractive and took his attention right away — but then because he realized she was also watching the younger woman. She was certainly not obvious, but he was very, very good at watching the leader of thieves and spotting anyone else who was. This made the woman exceptionally interesting to him. He wondered who else was there. They were good, whoever they were. He bought one portion of çiğ börek for take-out, then tossed it in the trash outside and called Michael to give him an update.
Cate took a last sip of her fiendishly strong coffee and left the restaurant. When she got back to the house, she saw an envelope taped to the door. Cate opened the envelope to find a business class plane ticket to SFO.
She was going home.
What an idiot.
Chapter 2
Paris — Winter 1348
Bernard Severn made a delicate adjustment to the machinery while Thomas Lyr paced grooves in the floor and muttered to himself. It was just after vespers, and Bernard was grateful they could all work on something to distract from the horrible sights just outside the windows. Their Left Bank attic apartment was cold, but had a good amount of room, enough for their laboratory.
They needed all of that space, because they were building an oracle.
Their desperate hope was that the oracle could tell them if the pestilence could be cured — or if it was truly God’s wrath at his creatures.
Either way, the end seemed imminent.
If it didn’t work, Bernard feared they would all lose what little hope they had left. He went to look out the window, a morbid compulsion. He touched the fingertips of one hand to the cold surface and watched humanity’s end. “Timor mortis conturbat me,” he murmured. But what was the point of watching the pit rise with corpses like stacked wood?
“Stop looking out the window, Bernard!” Thomas called out in French.
“Yes, come get some food!” Isabelle called from the straw bed, where she was reading Ovid, when Bernard last checked. “We may as well eat in these last days of the world. There’s salted pork and a little cotignac.”
Thomas’s wife, Isabelle, had a quick, lively mind, and was adept at languages, medicine, cooking, and anything else she took on. If you asked her a question on any topic, it was likely she had the answer. Though she had her own books, Isabelle had also read all of their textbooks. Thomas came from a prosperous family who sent ships laden with goods from port to port, and his marriage with Isabelle was a political arrangement, though they were amiable together.
Thomas and Bernard were clerics, studying the quadrivials, and considered themselves scientists. They studied at the College of Navarre of the University of Paris, at least until the pestilence swept through the city in chiri-tyme, when flowers displayed their color and the chirm of birds woke them shortly after lauds.
This time in the year, they would otherwise be sitting on hard stools in lecture halls warmed and lit by two or three candles. But the university was shut down along with the law courts and most other places, and they confined themselves to their apartment, in part because they were working so hard on the oracle, but also because they were afraid. They wanted to isolate themselves from the stench, from the corpses that piled up higher by the hour. Either the street cleaners were isolating themselves, too, or they were dead.
The Left Bank was heavy with a chilling silence, like a fog of death, unsettlingly empty of the usual noises: the men who hawked everything from chestnuts from Lombardy, the garlic sauce called aillée, and salted herrings from Normandy as they yelled “Sor et blanc harene frès pouldré!” They hadn’t seen the wafrestre, the girl who sold wafer cakes, in three days. But one or two of the criers’ assistants still trudged through the swelth to announce the more notable deaths at a nearby crossroad.
If they opened the windows, which they rarely did — it was cold enough as it was — they could hear the skittering of the rats, perhaps following the Wild Huntsman, and, at times, the lashings and mad muttering patter of the flagellants. Bernard even saw a chien-gris, one of the royal pack of scent hounds, wandering the street. If even the royal dogs were having a tough time, what chance did any of them have?
They devoted nearly all of their time to the oracle, staying awake until lauds or even prime, determined to get it done, stopping only briefly to eat enough cheese, manchet bread, and flour broth to keep going. It was never quite warm enough. Over their stockings and breaches, Thomas wore a surcoat of reddish-brown cloth under his surcoat, and Bernard wore a coat of linsey-woolsey. Isabelle wore grys fur, and there was a fur coverlet for the bed, a gift from Thomas’s family. Thomas lived the life of a scholar, like Bernard, but he could afford to supply them with hot spiced wine, which helped take the chill off.
Isabelle read most of the time, from the Romance of Reynard the Fox to Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia. She called out excerpts from Chanson de Roland that involved bears, “Because bern-hard means bear-hardy, or brave as a bear!” she said in French, and giggled, and read him something about an evil bear gnawing off an arm.
“You think I am an evil bear?” Bernard replied.
“No, you’re a good bear, Bernard,” she said.
Wandering preachers gave word the infection had reached England, though they didn’t know what to believe. Thomas said his four siblings, his English father, and his French mother had likely fled to their country estate. Both he and Isabelle had thick books that traced their genealogies, but Bernard had just a tree on parchment. His father and brother were in England, and he prayed they were unscathed, but if it were God’s intention to clean the earth of his creation, no one would survive.
Thomas kept reminding hi
m that the Lyr family had means, and encouraged Bernard to accept his help. Thomas offered to send a knave from his family’s estate in England to see if Bernard’s family was well, but Bernard declined. He did not want to put anyone in danger. People often thought Thomas was overbearing, but Bernard knew he was generous and honorable, though somewhat too demanding and short of patience, not to mention beset by dread at the best of times. Tales of kin abandoning one another horrified them all, but Bernard could see no good reason to put others at risk.
Along with the three of them, there was also Jean Dumont, Thomas’s knave. Jean had his own apartment on the Left Bank, and occasionally worked as a scribe. Thomas was sharp when giving orders to Jean, who scrambled from one thing to another per Thomas’s instructions. Bernard knew Thomas was frightened to the bone with the horrible mystery of the pestilence, and fearful for Isabelle’s well being. The tracts that the medical faculty at their own university published the month before were useless, and the physicians, even the best ones from the university, could not slow the river of death.
As fascinated as they were by the other world, they believed something that humankind should strive for a life of integrity in this lifetime, and not wait for the afterworld. They were Christians — ones who were well aware of the hypocrisies they espied — but held views that were at odds with many. Even so, Bernard worried that building something like an oracle would put their souls in danger. What if it connected them to something evil? But he thought it was worth the risk.
They worked for many days, stopping only for prayers, food, and necessary functions until the oracle was nearly done. It towered over them on a base of a revolving platform until it reached the very top of the slanted roof. Jean lit candles and they kept working past lauds.
Thomas jolted at the crack of thunder. They went to the window, arms folded against their chests, until rain lashed the window.
“This is an omen,” Thomas said.