"The Magician" - читать интересную книгу автора (Scott Michael)

CHAPTER TWO

J osh Newman reached out and pressed the palm of his right hand against the cold stone wall to steady himself.

What had just happened?

One moment he’d been standing in the Witch of Endor’s shop in Ojai, California. His sister, Sophie, Scathach and the man he now knew to be Nicholas Flamel had been in the mirror looking out at him. And the next thing he knew, Sophie had stepped out of the glass, taken his hand and pulled him through it. He’d squeezed his eyes shut and felt something icy touch his skin and raise the small hairs on the back of his neck. When he’d opened his eyes again, he was standing in what looked like a tiny storage room. Pots of paint, stacked ladders, broken pieces of pottery and bundled paint-spattered cloths were piled around a large, rather ordinary-looking grimy mirror fixed to the stone wall. A single low-wattage lightbulb shed a dim yellow glow over the room. “What happened?” he asked, his voice cracking. He swallowed hard and tried again. “What happened? Where are we?”

“We’re in Paris,” Nicholas Flamel said delightedly, rubbing his dusty hands against his black jeans. “The city of my birth.”

“Paris?” Josh whispered. He was going to say “Impossible,” but he was beginning to understand that that word had no meaning anymore. “How?” he asked aloud. “Sophie?” He looked to his twin sister, but she had pressed her ear against the room’s only door and was listening intently. She waved him away. He turned to Scathach, but the red-haired warrior just shook her head, both hands covering her mouth. She looked as if she was about to throw up. Josh finally turned to the legendary Alchemyst, Nicholas Flamel. “How did we get here?” he asked.

“This planet is crisscrossed with invisible lines of power sometimes called ley lines or cursus,” Flamel explained. He crossed his index fingers. “Where two or more lines intersect a gateway exists. Gates are incredibly rare now, but in ancient times the Elder Race used them to travel from one side of the world to the other in an instant-just as we did. The Witch opened the leygate in Ojai and we ended up here, in Paris.” He made it sound so matter-of-fact.

“Leygates: I hate them,” Scatty mumbled. In the gloomy light, her pale, freckled skin looked green. “You ever been seasick?” she asked.

Josh shook his head. “Never.”

Sophie looked up from her spot leaning against the door. “Liar! He gets seasick in a swimming pool.” She grinned, then pressed the side of her face back against the cool wood.

“Seasick,” Scatty mumbled. “That’s exactly what it feels like. Only worse.”

Sophie turned her head again to look at the Alchemyst. “Do you have any idea where we are in Paris?”

“Someplace old, I’m guessing,” Flamel said, joining her at the door. He put the side of his head back against the door and listened.

Sophie stepped back. “I’m not so sure,” she said hesitantly.

“Why not?” Josh asked. He glanced around the small untidy room. It certainly looked as though it was part of an old building.

Sophie shook her head. “I don’t know…it just doesn’t feel that old.” She reached out and touched the wall with the palm of her hand, then immediately jerked it back again.

“What’s wrong?” Josh whispered.

Sophie placed her hand against the wall again. “I can hear voices, songs and what sounds like organ music.”

Josh shrugged. “I can’t hear anything.” He stopped, abruptly conscious of the huge difference between himself and his twin. Sophie’s magical potential had been Awakened by Hekate, and she was now hypersensitive to sights and sounds, smells, touch and taste.

“I can.” Sophie lifted her hand from the stone wall and the sounds in her head faded.

“You’re hearing ghost sounds,” Flamel explained. “They’re just noises absorbed by the building, recorded into the very structure itself.”

“This is a church,” Sophie said decisively, then frowned. “It’s a new church…modern, late nineteenth century, early twentieth. But it’s built on a much, much older site.”

Flamel paused at the wooden door and looked over his shoulder. In the dim overhead light, his features were suddenly sharp and angular, disturbingly skull-like, his eyes completely in shadow. “There are many churches in Paris,” he said, “though there is only one, I believe, which matches that description.” He reached for the door handle.

“Hang on a second,” Josh said quickly. “Don’t you think there’ll be some sort of alarm?”

“Oh, I doubt it,” Nicholas said confidently. “Who would put an alarm on a storeroom in a church?” he asked, jerking the door open.

Immediately an alarm pealed through the air, the sound echoing and reechoing off the flagstones and walls. Red security lights strobed and flashed.

Scatty sighed and muttered something in an ancient Celtic language. “Didn’t you tell me once to wait before moving, to look before stepping and to observe everything?” she demanded.

Nicholas shook his head and sighed at the stupid mistake. “Getting old, I guess,” he said in the same language. But there was no time for apologies. “Let’s go!” he shouted over the shrieking alarm, and darted down the corridor. Sophie and Josh followed close behind, while Scatty took up the rear, moving slowly and grumbling with every step.

The door opened onto a short narrow stone corridor that led to another wooden door. Without pausing, Flamel pushed through the second door-and immediately a new alarm began to shriek. He turned left into a huge open space that smelled of old incense, floor polish and wax. Banks of lit candles shed a golden yellow light over walls and floor and, combined with the security lights, revealed a pair of enormous doors with the word EXIT above them. Flamel raced toward it, his footsteps echoing.

“Don’t touch-” Josh began, but Nicholas Flamel grasped the door handles and pulled hard.

A third alarm-much louder than the others-went off, and a red light above the door began to wink on and off.

“Told you not to touch,” Josh muttered.

“I can’t understand it-why is it not open?” Flamel asked, shouting to be heard above the din. “This church is always open.” He turned and looked around. “Where is everyone? What time is it?” he asked, as a thought struck him.

“How long does it take to travel from one place to another through the leygate?” Sophie asked.

“It’s instantaneous.”

“And you’re sure we’re in Paris, France?”

“Positive.”

Sophie looked at her watch and did a quick calculation. “Paris is nine hours ahead of Ojai?” she asked.

Flamel nodded, suddenly understanding.

“It’s about four o’clock in the morning; that’s why the church is closed,” Sophie said.

“The police will be on their way,” Scatty said glumly. She reached for her nunchaku. “I hate fighting when I’m not feeling well,” she muttered.

“What do we do now?” Josh demanded, panic rising in his voice.

“I could try and blast the doors apart with wind,” Sophie suggested hesitantly. She wasn’t sure she had the energy to raise the wind again so soon. She had used her new magical powers to battle the undead in Ojai, but the effort had completely exhausted her.

“I forbid it,” Flamel shouted, his face painted in shades of crimson and shadow. He turned and pointed across rows of wooden pews toward an ornate altar picked out in a tracery of white marble. Candlelight hinted at an intricate mosaic in glittering blues and golds in the dome over the altar. “This is a national monument; I’ll not let you destroy it.”

“Where are we?” the twins asked together, looking around the building. Now that their eyes had adjusted to the gloom, they realized that the building was huge. They could distinguish columns soaring high into the shadows overhead and were able to make out the shapes of small side altars, statues in nooks and countless banks of candles.

“This,” Flamel announced proudly, “is the church of Sacre-Coeur.”

Sitting in the back of his limousine, Niccolo Machiavelli tapped coordinates into his laptop and watched a high-resolution map of Paris wink into existence on the screen. Paris was an incredibly ancient city. The first settlement went back more than two thousand years, though there had been humans living on the island in the Seine for generations before that. And like many of the earth’s oldest cities, it had been sited where groups of ley lines met.

Machiavelli hit a keystroke, which laid down a complicated pattern of ley lines over the map of the city. He was looking for a line that connected with the United States. He finally managed to reduce the number of possibilities to six. With a perfectly manicured fingernail, he traced two lines that directly linked the West Coast of America to Paris. One finished at the great cathedral of Notre Dame, the other in the more modern but equally famous Sacre-Coeur basilica in Montmartre.

But which one?

Suddenly, the Parisian night was broken by a series of howling alarms. Machiavelli hit the control for the electric window and the darkened glass whispered down. Cool night air swirled into the car. In the distance, rising high above the rooftops on the opposite side of the Place du Tertre, was Sacre-Coeur. The imposing domed building was always lit up at night in stark white light. Tonight, however, red alarm lights pulsed around the building

That one. Machiavelli’s smile was terrifying. He called up a program on the laptop and waited while the hard drive spun.

Enter password.

His fingers flew over the keyboard as he typed: Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. No one was going to break that password. It wasn’t one of his better-known books.

A rather ordinary-looking text document appeared, written in a combination of Latin, Greek and Italian. Once, magicians had had to keep their spells and incantations in handwritten books called grimoires, but Machiavelli had always used the latest technology. He preferred to keep his spells on his hard drive. Now he just needed a little something to keep Flamel and his friends busy while he gathered his forces.

Josh’s head snapped up. “I hear police sirens.”

“There are twelve police cars headed this way,” Sophie said, her head tilted to one side, eyes closed as she listened intently.

“Twelve? How can you tell?”

Sophie looked at her twin. “I can distinguish the different locations of the sirens.”

“You can tell them apart?” he asked. He found himself wondering, yet again, at the full extent of his sister’s senses.

“Each one,” she said.

“We must not be captured by the police,” Flamel interjected sharply. “We’ve neither passports nor alibis. We’ve got to get out of here!”

“How?” the twins asked simultaneously.

Flamel shook his head. “There has to be another entrance…,” he began, and then stopped, nostrils flaring.

Josh watched uneasily as both Sophie and Scatty suddenly reacted to something he could not smell. “What…what is it?” he demanded, and then he suddenly caught the faintest whiff of something musky and rank. It was the sort of smell he’d come to associate with a zoo.

“Trouble,” Scathach said grimly, putting away her nunchaku and drawing her swords. “Big trouble.”