“It landed on the floor!” Lukas breathed. “Lord, you’re right.”
Gwendolyn pointed overhead, to where several of the rotten beams spanned across the hall. “If I can get up there, I may be able to shoot Schönborn. Perhaps I’ll even manage to kill him.”
“And how are you going to do that?”
“Do you see that window?” Gwendolyn gestured up again, this time at a pair of openings scarcely wider than arrowslits. “There must be some way to get to the upper floors of the palace—probably back through the mirror maze. If I can get up there, we might have a chance! But you all will have to keep fighting the golem until then, or Schönborn may grow suspicious.”
“All right.” Lukas nodded. “We’ll try. It’s probably our only chance.”
The golem was in the middle of another attack, arcing its fists out silently again and again. Giovanni and Jerome barely managed to dodge its punches. With their rapiers in their hands, they looked like tiny mosquitos circling around a furious ox.
“Wish me luck,” Gwendolyn said quietly. Out of nowhere, she embraced Lukas and kissed him on the lips. Then she disappeared through one of the doors.
“Good . . . luck . . .”
Lukas was so dazed that he completely forgot about the fight for a moment. That girl was going to drive him out of his mind.
Reality caught up to him again when the golem stormed directly at him. He jumped to one side, and the colossus slammed into a wall. The building trembled violently once more, but the monster turned around as though nothing had happened. Now, for the first time, Lukas got a proper look at the creature’s eyes. They glowed red in its rough, loamy face like two tiny lumps of coal. There was no life in them, and no sympathy, either. The golem had no nose, and its mouth was more of a cracked line.
Lukas thought back to what the rabbi had told them about the note in the golem’s mouth, and how it was the key to summoning the creature. What exactly had Rabbi Bushevi said again?
Only when that note has been removed will the golem turn to clay again.
But how were they supposed to do that? How did one reach into a rampaging stone giant’s mouth? Lukas could only hope that Gwendolyn’s plan had a better chance of succeeding.
Schönborn and Elsa were still singing their sinister song; now and again, the inquisitor cast a suspicious glance at Lukas and his friends, but he didn’t seem to have noticed yet that one of them was missing.
Lukas gritted his teeth. Waldemar von Schönborn had said something about the invisible barrier having grown stronger. Perhaps it was impossible to penetrate from above now, too. Or it would be soon. Gwendolyn needed to move quickly.
“Oh, Lilith!” Schönborn droned. “First wife of Adam, mother of all devils and demons! Transform the materials of sword, crown, and scepter into deadly power! ABAJORETH, MALTATUM . . .” He sang along with Elsa in his deep voice.
“Where’s Gwendolyn?” Paulus wheezed, stepping next to Lukas. Blood was running from his forehead into his face, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “Did she leave or something?”
Lukas shook his head. “No, she’s going up to—”
That was as far as he got before the golem rushed at him and Paulus again, whirling through the hall like a clay tornado. Despite its size, it moved with astonishing grace.
The four of them gave up on attacking the golem, and focused on confusing it with sudden movements, so that it kept stomping back and forth, and occasionally even stumbled a little. They were hoping they could trip it up—dried clay could break, so maybe a golem would, too. At any rate, it seemed easier than reaching straight into the monster’s mouth and pulling out a note.
Despite all their efforts, however, the golem remained on its feet.
“We won’t be able to keep this up much longer,” Jerome whispered to Lukas, wiping the sweat from his brow with his free hand. “Whatever Gwendolyn is doing, she should be quick about it.”
Desperately, Lukas glanced up at the roof beams, but Gwendolyn was still nowhere to be seen. Perhaps there was no way upstairs after all.
A shadow approached from the right. Lukas ducked, but it was too late—the golem used his brief moment of inattention to smash him straight against the barrier. Lukas felt a stabbing pain in his back, like a sting from a giant hornet. He bounced off the invisible wall with a shriek and landed on the floor, where he remained, groaning. The golem stomped over to him and raised its fist once more.
At that moment, Lukas saw movement directly above the hexagram. It was Gwendolyn! She had climbed out through one of the tiny windows and was now crawling to the middle of the roof beam. Waldemar von Schönborn had not yet noticed her—his attention was completely focused on helping Elsa continue the invocation.
“Lukas, look out!” Jerome cried.
The golem’s fist passed just inches from Lukas’s head. Jerome had thrown himself onto the monster. Although it didn’t move away, Jerome had at least managed to distract it for a moment. He was clinging to the golem’s back, and the creature was shaking him around wildly, like a horse trying to buck a rider.
Now Paulus and Giovanni noticed Gwendolyn up on the roof beam as well. Immediately they glanced away, not wanting to make Waldemar von Schönborn suspicious. “Hey, magician!” Giovanni called to Schönborn. “Look what Jerome’s doing with your stupid block of clay. He’s teaching it manners!”
“You won’t be laughing for much longer!” the inquisitor screeched, visibly enraged. “You could have fled, but now it’s too late for that!” He made a motion with his hand, and all the doors slammed shut and locked.
“You’re not getting out of here,” Schönborn said in a taunting voice. “Eventually, your strength will give out, and then the golem will smash you like annoying insects.”
Sure enough, the golem was moving backward now, hoping to crush Jerome against the wall. At the last moment, Jerome leapt off its back.
My God, Gwendolyn, hurry! Lukas thought. Before it’s too late for all of us!
Gwendolyn was in the center of the beam. Cautiously, she rose to her feet until she was standing, broad-legged, bow in hand. She slowly drew the next-to-last arrow from her quiver, nocked it, aimed carefully . . .
. . . and fired.
XXIX
The arrow hit Waldemar von Schönborn directly in the chest. More confused than frightened, the inquisitor stopped singing and regarded the feathered shaft protruding from between the folds of his frock. Only then did his gaze shift upward to Gwendolyn.
“How dare you,” he barked. “You’re nothing! Nobody!” His face turned red with fury. He reached out and balled his hand into a fist, as though trying to crush Gwendolyn from a distance. For a moment, it seemed like the arrow hadn’t done a thing to him, but then his expression changed. Clutching the shaft in his chest, he gasped, stumbled, and finally toppled forward like a tree.
Elsa stopped singing. The horror shimmering in her eyes pained Lukas more than all of the golem’s blows put together. Elsa was afraid for Schönborn—that monster was the one she was worried about.
“Father!” she cried, hurrying over to the inquisitor, who lay twitching on the floor. Lukas recalled that Schönborn had once given the order to have his father, Count von Lohenfels, shot. Now he himself lay in the dust with an arrow in his chest—proper retribution for his malicious murder of Friedrich von Lohenfels. But Elsa didn’t seem to care about that. Weeping, she shook her father. A large bloodstain was spreading across Schönborn’s frock, turning the cloth even redder than it already was. He looked dead.
“Father, you can’t go!” she shrieked hysterically. “The power, you hear me? The power! Damn it, you’re my mentor! What will I do without you?”
All at once, Elsa stopped crying. She turned and looked up at Gwendolyn, who was still standing on the beam. The red-haired girl now had the last of her arrows nocked and ready. “You killed him!” Elsa hissed. “Murderer! You will suffer a thousand times over for that. FULGUR IGNIFAXIO!”
; She raised her hand and clenched it into a fist, the way Schönborn had done before. As she did, some invisible power seemed to grab Gwendolyn by the throat. She was choking and turning red. Even so, she still managed to aim her arrow at Elsa. She drew back the bowstring . . .
The last arrow, Lukas thought. Gwendolyn is going to kill my sister with her last arrow!
“Don’t!” he shouted.
Then several things happened at once. Lukas ran at the invisible wall. He didn’t know whether it was still there, now that the ritual had ended. All he knew was that there were two girls he wanted to protect at the same time, and those two girls were facing off in a battle to the death.
Gwendolyn and Elsa.
In a fraction of a second, it became clear that he loved them both, his sister and Gwendolyn, each in her own way. What was he supposed to do?
Lukas ran toward the invisible wall, expecting to bounce off. But this time there was no humming sound, and nothing blocked his path.
The spell was broken.
Lukas stumbled into the center of the hexagram, where Elsa was still standing over her father with her fist raised. At the same moment, Lukas heard the arrow whizzing overhead.
I’m too late! he thought.
But her arrow missed Elsa by a wide margin.
It was the first time he’d ever seen Gwendolyn miss her mark. Lukas threw himself at Elsa. She still had one of her hands balled into a fist and thrashed around wildly. She managed to free herself for a moment and stretched her fist out overhead once more. Lukas heard a choking gasp, and then out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gwendolyn flailing up on the balcony. She staggered, slipped, and finally plummeted nearly five paces straight down to the floor, where she lay motionless.
“What have you done, Elsa?” Lukas gasped. “Get ahold of yourself! You’re not a murderer. You’re my little sister.”
“Kill her, kill the girl!” Elsa screeched at the golem, ignoring Lukas’s words as she struggled to control her hand movements.
The colossus immediately stopped fighting Lukas’s three friends and started toward the lifeless Gwendolyn.
Lukas hesitated. If he let go of Elsa now, she would surely use her powers again. She might very well kill him, destroy every one of them. But if he didn’t help Gwendolyn, the golem would dash her to pieces.
He hoped desperately that he would hear his mother’s voice. But this time, everything remained silent inside him. He would have to fight this battle alone.
The golem raised its fist.
Lukas released Elsa and ran toward Gwendolyn and the golem. A second later, the golem’s fist came hurtling down.
“Nooooooooo!” Lukas shouted. He threw himself between Gwendolyn and the golem, who was just about to crush the body beneath him. Lukas shut his eyes tightly, waiting for the pain, the blackness, the inevitable end. He knew he was going to die. He’d given his life for the redheaded Welsh girl he loved.
But nothing happened.
There was only a soft ringing sound.
Lukas lay motionless, still shielding Gwendolyn, feeling her heart beating against his chest.
Still, no deathblow came.
“Ah, I think the golem is broken,” Jerome reported. “It’s stopped moving.”
Cautiously, Lukas rolled over to see. When he looked up, he saw that the clay giant’s fist had stopped only a hand’s width away from his head. The colossus seemed frozen, as though something had ensnared it midstrike. Its frightening mouth was open in a silent scream.
Giovanni stepped up beside the golem. “That’s not all,” he said. “Turn around.”
Lukas turned toward the hexagram.
It was empty.
The three pieces of Imperial Regalia were still sitting between the smoking sulfur pots, but both Elsa and Waldemar von Schönborn had disappeared.
“Where are they?” Lukas whispered softly. Leaden exhaustion was spreading through him—he was more tired than he’d been in as long as he could remember.
Paulus shrugged. “No idea. When you threw yourself on top of Gwendolyn, there was a bright flash and a thunderclap, and all of a sudden the two of them were gone.”
Lukas shook his head. “I don’t understand. Where could they have gone?”
Gwendolyn moaned next to him. She was pale and bleeding from the mouth, but at least she was alive. Lukas bent down to her and slid her out from under the golem’s fist.
“She needs a doctor,” he murmured, wiping the blood from Gwendolyn’s cheek. He was crying silently, though he wasn’t sure whether it was out of relief that Gwendolyn was still alive, or grief that Elsa had disappeared. “I really thought my sister had killed her,” he blurted out. “If I had only known how much the Grimorium would change Elsa . . .” He sobbed. “Damn it, we should never have let her have that accursed book!”
“Speaking of books,” Giovanni said, laying a hand on Lukas’s shoulder. “If you mean the Grimorium, Elsa left it here.”
“What?” Lukas straightened up and wiped the tears from his face. It was true—the book was lying there on the floor, near the Imperial Regalia. The open pages were even more singed than before, and one bottom corner was burned, but otherwise, the Grimorium looked as harmless and innocent as some cheap little prayer book. Looking at it, nobody would ever suspect that it had probably caused many, many deaths.
“I doubt Elsa left the Grimorium here deliberately,” Giovanni remarked. “She may very well return from wherever she’s gone and try to retrieve it. We should leave this place as soon as possible.”
“There’s another reason we should hurry out of here.” Jerome pointed. “I think the clay beast here may not be completely broken.”
There was a creaking, cracking sound. Lukas turned his head and saw that the golem was slowly reawakening. “My God!” he exclaimed. “I nearly forgot the monster. Cross your fingers that Rabbi Bushevi was right.” In one fluid motion, Lukas leapt up and reached into the golem’s loamy mouth. Between its crannied cheeks, he felt a tiny piece of paper, which he grabbed with his fingers. When he withdrew his hand, he was holding a folded note.
Without hesitating, he tore it into pieces.
“Hey!” Jerome protested. “Now we’ll never know how to bring a golem to life.”
“I don’t want to know, either,” Lukas replied. “I only want to see whether we can destroy that thing. It was created to protect humans, not to kill them. Schönborn misused the creature for his evil purposes. Just like he used my sister,” he added bitterly.
He opened his hand, and the last few scraps fluttered to the floor like snowflakes.
There was another cracking sound. Lukas looked back at the golem and saw several fissures in its earthen skin. More and more spread across the creature; its right arm fell off, and then its left; its feet broke out from under it with a crash, and the giant tipped over to the side. The entire colossus was crumbling before their eyes, like a sandcastle in the sun.
Finally, all that was left of the massive golem was a large pile of clay.
“Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt,” Paulus murmured. “Or however that’s supposed to go.” He winced in pain. “Let’s take the genuine Regalia and get back to Prague as quickly as possible. Gwendolyn isn’t the only one here who needs a doctor.”
Lukas’s eyes drifted from the unconscious Gwendolyn back to the hexagram, where his sister had been. The smudged letters spelling out LILITH were still visible. He’d lost Elsa once again. Where might she be? Was she still alive?
The loss pained him like a dagger twisting into his heart. Tears sprang to his eyes again, but he wiped them away.
Unlike his friends, Lukas didn’t think that Elsa would ever return to this sinister place. She would surely want the Grimorium back, though. The book was his collateral, the guarantee that he would see Elsa again someday.
If she was still alive.
I’ll find Elsa again, he told himself. Someday.
Lukas bent down to retrieve the book, and tucked it away without look
ing at it. Then he turned back to his friends. “Let’s go,” he said. “It’s a long way back to Prague.”
When they stepped out of the castle, the sun was just coming up. The treetops were bathed in a soft pink glow, and the birds chirped happily as though nothing was wrong. There was no sign of the bat-cats, nor of any of the other horrible hybrid creatures from Polonius’s laboratory. Only the dead wolf-buck was still lying on the bridge.
When they reached the other side of the pond, they stopped in the woods to build a stretcher out of branches for Gwendolyn. Paulus carried the Imperial Regalia in a sack on his back. Although he was injured himself, he insisted on helping carry the stretcher, as well. “I didn’t think much of that big-mouthed beast at first,” he grunted. “Thought girls would never amount to anything as fighters. But by God, I’d consider this girl fit to be a Black Musketeer.”
Lukas washed the dirt and blood from his face in the brook flowing through the woods. He still felt strangely wrung out and exhausted, but the cold water did him good and brought back at least a little of his spirit, though his thoughts were still with Elsa.
And Gwendolyn.
As they walked through the woods, Lukas kept casting worried looks at the redheaded girl on the stretcher. Gwendolyn’s breathing was even; her eyelids fluttered occasionally, but her eyes remained closed. Lukas recalled how Gwendolyn’s arrow had missed Elsa from that short distance. And suddenly it hit him: she wanted to miss. She would rather have died than shoot Elsa.
Even if Elsa had turned into an evil witch.
The many stunted oaks, which had seemed so sinister and confused them so much the night before, now seemed peaceful and innocent in the morning light. Rabbits were scampering around near the crumbling pavilion beside the path.
Just as they reached the edge of the park, they saw a solitary figure approaching from White Mountain, hurrying straight toward them. For a moment, Lukas was afraid it might be Schönborn returning. Lukas reached for the Grimorium underneath his doublet, as though the magic book might give him some sort of protection. But as the man came closer, his fear turned to astonishment, and finally to joy.
Sword of Power (The Black Musketeers Book 2) Page 23