The Crown of Fire

by Tony Abbott

  They were back on the island of Crete.

  They were back in the present.

  And it was worse than anyone could possibly imagine.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The sky overhead was black with smoke.

  Sporadic gunfire popped here and there across the expanse of the palace ruins, while the center of the maze sat oddly deserted. Something had happened; the air seemed different, but it wasn’t clear what had changed.

  Surely we returned only seconds after we left for Guam, Wade thought. It couldn’t have been any longer, could it?

  Wade powered down the machine. The instant the engines eased, he felt the earth and sea grinding strangely around them. Suddenly the sky brightened and light burst out of the rolling clouds. But it wasn’t the light of the sun. They saw a blossom of yellow cloud rising straight up on the horizon. A series of terrific cracks tore through the air, and a deep underwater rumbling began and wouldn’t stop. It shuddered the stars above them and the stones under their feet, and the yellow cloud rose and grew and spread across the sky like a horrible opening wound.

  Wade knew what Galina had done. Galina, the destroyer of worlds.

  “She detonated the Cyprus tanker!”

  Lily began shaking. “No, no, tell me no.”

  “It’s the end of the end,” Wade said. “The bombs set off shock waves that will change the Mediterranean in a way you can’t take back.”

  “The Deluge,” Becca whispered. “The Guardians knew this would come.”

  “It’s the Last Judgment, too,” said Darrell.

  Lily stumbled out of the machine. “Where is everybody?” She pushed her way into the nearest passage of the labyrinth with Darrell. “Hello? Anyone! Sara? Uncle Roald? Hello?”

  Wade saw a field computer, abandoned among the rubble. Its screen flickered. He and Becca went to it. Satellite feeds from across the Mediterranean were streaming in a four-way split screen.

  “No . . . ,” Becca said hoarsely. “It’s horrible. . . .”

  The images were grainy and distorted by giant plumes of smoke, but the devastation was plain enough. Where tiny islands had been were now mere digital outlines where open sea boiled. Enormous tankers and cruise ships lay overturned or nearly vertical, sinking under violent waves. Some shoreline—was it Turkey?—was simply gone. So were parts of Syria, Tunisia, Egypt.

  “Why did Galina do this? She must have known it would happen this way?” Wade nearly sobbed. He thought he would lose it—faint, vomit, scream, something—but all he could do was stare at the screen.

  Of the image labeled Cyprus, all he saw was a single peak, black water sloshing over it, sometimes revealing a terrain washed of life, sometimes devouring the peak itself.

  That’s when Wade saw the triangular marks on the floor of the pit. “Oh, no, no . . .”

  “Guys! Guys!” Darrell shouted from inside a passage. “We went up to the surface. It’s insane. Galina’s gone! Ebner’s gone. The colonel is nowhere in sight. The troops are running around leaderless.”

  “Wade, we can’t find your folks anywhere,” Lily said. “Silva is . . . I think he’s dead. Simon Tingle is holed up in the remains of the east courtyard. I saw Julian tending to his father, who was shot.”

  Staring at the triangular marks on the ground, Wade felt himself sinking away when he realized what they were. “Kronos was here. Galina took Kronos. She detonated the tanker to create the hole and she used her six relics to take Kronos back. . . .”

  “She’s desperate to get to the cargo,” Becca said, her voice hoarse with emotion. “There’s only one chance to reverse this. Do what you did for me. But this time we need to fly the astrolabe after Galina to get the relics. That’s the Protocol, right? Turn back the flood? Make this—all of this—not happen?”

  She slid into the astrolabe.

  “But look at this destruction,” Lily said. “How can we alter this? Is it even possible?”

  “If it’s impossible,” Becca said, “then everything we see, all this destruction and death, this is how things are now. I won’t believe I came back to life only for this. No, the only way to destroy the relics and have any possibility of protecting the future . . . is to destroy the astrolabe before it goes on its maiden voyage. Make it not be. Destroy it before.”

  Becca was startlingly logical, thought Wade. “You’re right. Yes. Yes.”

  “But how do we take the machine back to before it was around?” Darrell asked.

  “Because we’re rewriting history with every move we make,” Wade said, looking up through the drifting layers of smoke. “Becca’s right. Going back is the only thing that will change this. Besides, the hole is closing. The aurora will fade. It’s now or never.”

  Black clouds rolled over the hole in the ceiling, over the entire island. There wasn’t time to argue.

  “Right. Right,” Lily said. “But once we’re in the past, it’ll be like crashing the car we came in. We’ll be trapped back then. You get that, right?”

  “We have no choice,” Becca said. “Wade, throw the switch.”

  Becca’s blood rushed through her veins as if she were getting a nonstop transfusion. She helped Wade set the destination dials to before September 22, 1516, the day of the autumnal equinox for that year, the year Albrecht’s cargo was transported to the future. She pushed the main lever as Wade told her. The relics flashed one by one, connecting in a ring of light. The astrolabe sent out a blast of black fire, then the lights appeared above them, and they shuddered into the depths of time.

  “I’m making a video of everything,” said Lily. “In case someone someday wants to know what we did.”

  Darrell snickered. “Lily, that’s so brilliant.”

  “And useless,” she said. “But it’ll be some kind of movie. We can watch it over and over in the sixteenth century until the battery dies.”

  “Or we do,” Darrell said.

  “Together.”

  The astrolabe catapulted through time. The dials whirred backward swiftly: 1986, 1911, 1738, 1609, 1577. They roared past the fateful year 1535. The machine began to slow, to 1520, to 1517.

  Looking out, staring into the near distance as they passed, they saw the indescribable. It was the simultaneous recoiling of time and place. Forests ungrew themselves, and shadows fled across the land accompanied by strange pops of light. They were the migrations of people, or the movement of armies. Several towns that were black and charred burst into the flame that burned them, then the flame vanished as buildings were restored to their earlier state.

  The flickering of day and night was constant, even as the process slowed. There came the momentary wetness of storms, the blazing sun, racing backward across the sky from west to east. Becca was astonished. The world was creating and uncreating itself with every instant—and for her, it was almost a reward for having been brought back to life.

  “Königsberg!” Darrell shouted. “Albrecht’s palace. There it is! Pull it back a notch!”

  Becca and Wade drew back the main lever together, and the machine’s spinning lessened. The rambling castle now appeared more clearly in the flickering light. It was upright, a walled city, in the midst of huts that, as the years lingered more and more, grew backward from larger to smaller. Some structures vanished into forests and fields.

  More sluggishly still, time rewound. First months, then weeks, then days ticked by. The flickering of day and night grew languid. They saw fields of curled brown leaves turn red and yellow and flutter and coil up toward the bare trees and reattach themselves, clothing the branches before finally turning green. Königsberg was now in high summer in 1516.

  Then they saw a monstrous metal machine with a three-side base—Kronos III—shuddering on the periphery of the courtyard as a long train of mounted knights rode backward out of the main gate.

  “Kronos!” said Lily. “Galina’s come here. She’s here and now. We found her!”

  Wade pulled the main lever nearly all the way back. “I can’t believe t
he relics actually made Kronos work. Is this where the cargo is?”

  The fortress walls closed around them. Though the machine didn’t stop humming and vibrating, time slowed its reverse action to nothing.

  “Do you think Galina can see us?” Lily whispered.

  “Maybe not,” Wade said. “Kronos is still vibrating. It hasn’t quite arrived. I think we’re here, but she isn’t. Not yet.”

  “The knights can’t see us, either,” Darrell said as the mounted soldiers now entered through Albrecht Gate, oblivious of the astrolabe.

  “Look!” Becca pointed. “They have Nicolaus.”

  Nicolaus Copernicus rode cuffed and chained to his saddle. Next to him, chained and cuffed the same way, rode Hans Novak. Behind them, as if herding them forward, rode Albrecht. After dismounting, Albrecht led the two prisoners through an arched opening and into the castle.

  “They’re going for the cargo that Albrecht forced Nicolaus to take,” said Lily. “It is why Galina’s here. We have to see what it was. Maybe it’ll tell us what we need to know to reverse the future.”

  Leaving their machine humming in the shadows, the four children darted unseen across the courtyard and into the castle. Wade and Becca were first inside. Lily knew the two were inseparable now, as maybe she and Darrell were. What of it? You don’t nearly die a thousand times—or in Becca’s case once for real—without getting closer to people.

  It was dark inside the thick walls, much darker than she’d imagined it would be. It smelled of dank, stuffy air and human waste.

  Together, their movements were as quick as anything, moving—flashing—through the inside spaces, leaving tiny afterglows of dancing light, almost like miniature auroras.

  A strange wail erupted far away among the rooms.

  It was an infant’s cry echoing through the thick stonework of the castle. Albrecht, saying nothing, slowly followed the sound, and Nicolaus went with him, a few steps behind.

  Lily took a breath. I’m going to film this, too. We need to see the cargo!

  She set her camera to video, and they trod down the hall invisibly after the Grand Master and the astronomer. They climbed two long staircases, then hurried along a gallery to another set of stairs. The child’s cry grew louder with each step.

  “It’s little Joan Aleyn crying,” Becca whispered. “The baby Albrecht sent to England who became the woman I rescued from drowning in the Thames. Her mother is dying.”

  They arrived finally on a wide landing. Albrecht turned left. With ever-slowing steps he approached a black door made of wood and studded with black bolts. It was open a crack. Candlelight shone weakly out. A shape moved inside the room.

  Albrecht turned his face to Nicolaus, his expression furrowed in pain and grief.

  “You will take her,” he said in words so soft Lily wasn’t certain she heard him right.

  “Take her?” Nicolaus said, also gently. “This is the cargo you spoke of? The child?”

  Wade put his hand on Becca’s arm. They were both shaking.

  Albrecht shook his head. “Not my daughter. My wife.”

  He then tapped nearly soundlessly on the door and pushed it inward.

  When the two men entered, candlelight fell over the children.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Becca’s blood turned to ice when she saw the bed.

  It was nearly flat.

  The wrinkle of bedclothes down the center was Albrecht’s wife.

  His wife? It was impossible to see her face, but she was obviously a child, a girl shockingly young to be a mother. She was, what, fourteen? Fifteen at most?

  Even under the flat sheet and the thick curtains darkening the room, and the inability to see the girl’s shaded face, Becca observed that her body was barely formed. Without strength, her bone-like fingers couldn’t stroke the infant wailing in the sheets beside her.

  Becca knew those movements, that posture. Not just from visiting her sister, Maggie, in her hospital bed, but because she knew death from the inside, and this girl would soon be dead. With the face turned away, all that was visible was hair, long raven braids half undone and soaking wet from fever and from damp compresses that a plump nurse was applying and reapplying to her forehead and cheeks.

  Beyond the bed stood a row of glass windows. Each was stained with red and gold emblems marking the ownership of the castle: a large Gothic A, inside of which were a small v and a large H.

  Albrecht von Hohenzollern.

  A grizzled man in a long gown and soft shoes hovered nervously by the bed. He squinted at the girl through thick spectacles, then traced a finger across a large chart he held. He nodded his head, muttered to himself. An astrologer, Becca guessed.

  A second man, middle-aged, sat in the shadows, half hidden by an intricate screen. A candle flickered through the open scrollwork of the screen, and she saw him working on something. His cloak and the soft hat on the floor next to his feet suggested he wasn’t a doctor. His right hand moved over a panel or board. Was he drawing? Then she knew.

  It’s Raphael!

  The sketches Rosemary Billingham showed us at the Morgan are of Albrecht’s wife!

  “What does she suffer from?” Nicolaus asked.

  “A sickness ravages her organs. There is an insidious growth in her throat. She has nearly lost her power to speak. My foolish doctors cannot cure her. No one can cure her . . . no one in this time. That is why you will take her with you. Does my holy Teutonic Order still thrive in the future?”

  Copernicus shut his eyes. “Thrive, no. Some few are left. Weak and powerless and scattered. I will not pretend. It is good that your horrific Order is near its demise—”

  “You will take her to them. They will find someone to cure her. Medicine must improve. You know this filth we live in. She will pass within weeks. Days perhaps. You will take her away, and I will lose her. But she will live. My queen. My Cassiopeia.”

  Becca shivered when she heard the name.

  Albrecht shook so violently then, he had to grab hold of a bedpost with both hands to remain standing. He wept openly. The painter bowed his head. The nurse looked away. The astrologer huddling in the corner cleared his throat nervously.

  “I have been studying my chart, Grand Master, and I believe that a mere two years from now we will see such advances. Your wife will still be in the bloom of youth—”

  “Fool! Leave this room or lose your head!”

  “Pardon, my lord!” the man squeaked. He swept past the children, trailing his chart.

  “Magister Copernicus,” Albrecht said, “you will locate the Order in the time that will cure her.”

  Nicolaus frowned. “I know the time and place. I have seen it. You, Albrecht, are an evil soul, but because you have promised to spare Hans’s life, we will take her. It is the right thing to do. Prepare her. We leave within a week. But our flight must remain a secret, or we’ll not do this. You shall not follow us, or we’ll not go.”

  Albrecht stared at Nicolaus with eyes of fire. Finally, he nodded. “Agreed.”

  “This is the reason for Nicolaus’s third journey,” Darrell whispered. “The cargo is Cassiopiea, Albrecht’s wife.”

  To Becca, it was all so impossible and yet all so obvious. The tumor in the girl’s throat. Skin as transparent as clear light. Hair the color of a crow’s wing.

  The cure in the future.

  The future of four years ago.

  Becca stepped invisibly into the room, moved to the foot of Cassiopiea’s bed. So young and still a mother, the mother of Joan Aleyn?

  Becca finally saw her face and knew her.

  “Galina.”

  No one spoke. Neither Wade, nor Darrell, nor Lily. They knew it as she did.

  All the stories tumbled into place in Becca’s mind and formed a single timeline.

  “Albrecht heard of the astrolabe. He forced Copernicus to take his dying wife to a future that could cure her. Four years ago, Nicolaus arrived and dropped her at the doorstep of the foundering Teutonic Ord
er.”

  “Where she met Ebner von Braun,” Lily said. “He brought her to Greywolf in Russia, where she was cured by the experimental surgery of Aleksander Rubashov.”

  “All of it makes sense,” Wade said. “Galina was what Albrecht wanted Nicolaus to take to the future. It works. It fits together.”

  “Except for one thing,” Becca whispered. “Why does Galina need to come back to this? Why did she want the Eternity Machine to come here and now, to relive this sadness over again?”

  The question burned in the small room, unanswered.

  The nurse removed the infant Joan from young Galina and sat with her on a stool by the window. There was a frail movement from the bed. Galina turned her face toward Albrecht. One eye silver-gray, one blue, both gleamed with tears. She gazed into her husband’s face. There was barely a sound in the room. Everything quieted. Galina raised a finger but couldn’t reach his cheek, so he took her fingers between his massive hands and pressed them to his lips. His tears dripped onto her coverlet.

  “I cannot go, my love,” he said. “I must stay to lead my people. But I love you. I love you. I love you!”

  Becca felt her breath leave her.

  No matter what evils Albrecht had done, no matter what horrors he had committed, no matter what darkness he had cast upon the world, this was love.

  Becca knew it because she felt it. The emotion blossomed and swelled in the chamber. It could fill the whole world, she thought, and conquer evil, destroy death, bring joy, if anyone let it. She felt herself more alive than she’d ever been before, and despite what she knew of both Albrecht and Galina, her own tears began to flow.

  “Take the Magister below,” Albrecht said. “Outfit him and his assistant for their journey.”

  It was then that Becca heard why Galina needed the time machine.

  Struggling to speak, her breath as frail as a whisper, Galina opened her lips.

  “If I live,” she said, “if I survive in some era beyond this, I will be your queen again. I will come for you, Albrecht.” She glanced at her daughter. “For both of you. You will return with me, and we will be together again.”