The Serpent's Curse Read online

  Even in its unique protective holster, one that had fooled various airport security scanners, Wade’s antique dagger now set off the Morgan’s sensors. “It’s the first time that’s happened,” he said. “You have the best security I’ve seen.”

  “About the dagger,” Julian said. “Your dad wanted it in the vault, too, didn’t he?”

  Wade nodded reluctantly. “He told me this morning. He’s right, I guess.” He slipped off the holster with Copernicus’s dagger housed invisibly inside and handed it to the curator.

  Lily hated weapons of any kind, but Wade giving up the dagger? Wouldn’t they need it? He’d carried it since Berlin last week, and the Magellan dagger had saved her life just yesterday. They were, after all, at war with the Teutonic Knights. On the other hand, Copernicus’s own private weapon was far too precious—and, she supposed, too dangerous—to carry around. So, yeah. Good idea.

  The large steel door opened on a staggeringly wide, deep, and high-ceilinged room.

  Becca started to wheeze.

  “Indeed,” said the curator, grinning for the first time since they’d met him.

  One side of the room was lined with numerous three-tiered display compartments and multishelf bookcases. On the far end was a honeycomb of hundreds of narrow slots built up to the ceiling. Paintings were shelved upright in these spaces. Classical sculptures of people and animals—some realistic, some fantastical—were clustered here and there the entire length of the vault.

  The curator set the dagger and its holster reverently on a worktable, then stepped over to a portion of the wall containing built-in safe-deposit-type boxes.

  “What is your birth date, Wade?” he asked.

  “Me?”

  Lily remembered how the deciphering of Uncle Henry’s original coded message had involved a reference to Wade’s birthday. That was what had started their quest.

  “October sixth.”

  “So . . .” The curator selected and removed one of the boxes, which he said was “made of a titanium alloy,” and brought it to the table. He placed the holster and dagger inside the box, sealed it, tapped in a key-code combination, and returned the box to its slot in the wall. He then withdrew the box directly below it. “The, ah, object you wish to store here?”

  Darrell drew Vela from an inside pocket.

  Raising his eyebrows very high, the curator took the heavy blue stone—the relic with something buried in its interior—and swaddled it carefully in new velvet.

  “It’s priceless,” Lily said.

  “I believe it,” the curator responded. He set the velvet-wrapped stone in a wooden box. Then he placed that box inside a second titanium container, which he inserted below the one with the dagger inside. When he pushed it all the way in, there was a low whump followed by the clicking and rolling of tumblers that stopped with a hush.

  “Now you’ll want to see our head of antiquities,” the curator said, leading them all briskly out of the vault and security corridor. “I’ll ask her to meet you upstairs in the atrium. If anyone can help you decode your message, she’s the one.”

  Taking one last look at the sealed vault door, Lily breathed easily. Vela, the first of the Copernicus relics, was now hidden safely underneath New York City.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The curator led them back up to the atrium.

  As Wade watched the man disappear, Darrell’s hip pocket began to ring. “It’s Dad,” he said, and stepped away, listening, Lily along with him. Becca turned to follow them when Wade stopped her.

  “How’s your arm?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Okay. Better all the time.”

  “Good.” He was still deciding if he should tell Becca about the dream. The one he’d had leaving Guam in which Becca had seemed to be, well, dead. He’d so far been unable to say it out loud. It was too upsetting, even for him. Naturally, he worried that his dream had something to do with Markus Wolff’s intense look at her in the Mission in San Francisco, although that was clearly impossible, since his dream had been earlier.

  “What about the Mission?” Becca asked.

  “What?”

  “You said Mission, just now.”

  His face went hot. “I did? Well . . . it’s just . . . I wonder what Markus Wolff meant about the twelfth relic. That we should ask ourselves what it was.”

  “Me, too. Strange, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  That went nowhere.

  Darrell was off the phone now. “Good news. Investigators are spreading across Europe.”

  “He said we have to be prepared that they won’t find your mom today or probably tomorrow,” Lily added. “That it’ll take some time, but everybody feels good about it.”

  “Excellent,” said Julian. “It may not be long now before we know what the ribbon says and where it points.”

  “Find the relic, find Sara,” Becca said.

  “That’s the idea,” said Wade.

  There was a slow click of heels on tile, and a tiny, very old woman hobbled into the open atrium as if wandering in from the long past. She wore a dark beige pantsuit with a bright pink scarf flowing up out of her vest like a fountain. Her eyes flickered like a pair of tiny flashlights low on battery, and she bleated, “I’m . . . ancient . . .”

  Wade glanced at the others, then back to the woman. “Oh, not so much—”

  “. . . curator here at the . . . Morgan,” she said, scowling at him. She huffed several more breaths as if each could be her last. “Dr. Rosemary Billing . . .”

  “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Billing,” Becca said.

  “Ham,” the woman said.

  “Excuse me?” said Lily.

  “Ham,” the woman repeated. “Billingham. My name is Bill . . . ingham. Why won’t you let me . . .” Three, four breaths. “. . . finish? Now . . . who are . . . you all . . . and how . . . may I help you?”

  One by one they told her their names. She frowned severely at each one until Julian’s. “Julian?” she gasped, adjusting her glasses. “There you are! Well, if you’re . . . here then it’s quite all right. Fol . . . low me.”

  Stopping and starting several times, like a car backing up in a tight space, Dr. Billingham turned around and toddled down the hallway she had just come from, wheezing the whole time. What seemed a day and a half later, they arrived at a small, windowless room. Rosemary flicked on the lights and, after much finger motion, unlocked a glass-topped display case.

  “Despite these . . . scytale staffs being, in many cases, also used as . . . weapons, they’re old, and . . . we must consider them extremely fragile. Rather . . . like me . . .”

  Wade didn’t know whether to laugh or not, but he knew to wait.

  Five breaths later, she added, “. . . dieval manuscripts.”

  Then Rosemary waved her hand over the contents of the case like a game-show hostess. She was right to do so. As Julian had promised, the library’s collection of scytale staffs was special. They were obviously ancient, and all were roughly between five and ten inches long. Two were carved in thick ebony, one appeared to be cast in bronze, and the others were shaped of ivory or wood. Each was nestled in its own formfitting compartment and labeled by date. The earliest was from the sixth century BCE—“Before the Common . . . Era,” Rosemary explained—the most recent from Germany in the eleventh century. The smallest staff was little bigger around than a pencil, while the largest bore a circumference similar to the handle on a tennis racket.

  “Now show me your rib . . . ,” Rosemary asked Becca alarmingly, then finished with “. . . bon.”

  Becca removed the ribbon carefully from her pocket, unrolled it, and laid it flat on the table.

  The curator frowned through her spectacles as she examined the ribbon. “About a . . . hundred letters?”

  “Ninety,” Becca said, glancing at Julian, who nodded.

  “Ah, just . . . like . . . me . . .”

  Wade waited six, seven breaths, but that turned out to be the end of her sentence.

 
Rosemary tugged either end of the ribbon lightly. “The fabric is silk. Without . . . running tests, I would guess it was woven sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.”

  “That fits our date,” Darrell said.

  The curator raised a finger as if to shush him. “Also, it doesn’t . . . stretch very much. This is good. It means we’ll have better luck finding an exact fit. Let’s start small . . . and go up from there.” Then, chuckling to herself, she added, “The narrower the staff, the larger the mess . . .”

  Two breaths.

  “. . . age.”

  Rosemary took up the narrowest of the staffs, more of a dowel than anything else, with five equal sides. Pinching the top end of the ribbon against one of the sides, she gently spiraled it around the dowel like the stripe of a candy cane, making sure that the letters sat next to one another. The first line of the message read:

  TGOSNOTSTPHID

  Which, because of the peculiar wiring of his brain, Darrell said aloud before anyone could stop him. “‘To go snot stupid.’ No, wait. ‘Togo’s not stupid.’ Is that the dog from The Wizard of Oz? Who’s Togo?”

  “You are,” said Wade, glaring at his stepbrother. “And we’re not sure what language it’s in, remember that. Copernicus knew several. Either way, that’s obviously not the right staff. Can we try a bigger one, to spread out the letters—”

  “Keep your pant . . . s on, young man,” Rosemary growled at Wade, who she suddenly seemed to like less than she liked Darrell. “I shall choo . . . se what we do next. And I choose . . . a bigger one, to spread out the letters more.” She returned the first dowel to the case, then selected a thicker one and carefully wrapped the ribbon around it. It produced the following sequence of letters:

  TOSMNHTTHLDE

  “That’s not a word,” said Lily. “Another one?”

  The curator’s wobbly cheeks turned red, and Wade wondered if she would explode and what that might look like. He stepped back. Rose . . . mary waved a hand in front of her face as if to cool off, then pulled out a staff with ten sides and a diameter of about one and a half inches. Wrapping the ribbon around it produced the following first three lines in English:

  TOTHELAND

  OFENDLESS

  SNOWTOBEG

  “To the land of endless snow . . .” Becca gasped. “That’s it! Yay, we found it!”

  Rosemary’s face was purple when she whirled it around to Becca’s. “Who found it, dear? Did we . . . find it? Because I rather th . . . ink I found it.”

  “You did, Rosemary,” said Julian. “As usual, you are being tremendously awesome. My friends here, as grateful as they are, are simply super anxious to know what the rest of the message says. Forgive them, please.”

  “Dear . . . boy!” Rosemary said, pausing to pinch Julian’s cheeks a few times. “Here then . . . is the whole th . . . ing.”

  TOTHELAND

  OFENDLESS

  SNOWTOBEG

  THEATHOSG

  REEKCONCE

  ALTHEUNBO

  UNDDOUBLE

  EYEDBEAST

  FROMDEMON

  MASTERAVH

  Wade drew out the notebook containing the major clues they’d discovered so far and, after much scribbling, broke down the text into individual words.

  TO THE LAND OF ENDLESS SNOW TO BEG THE ATHOS GREEK CONCEAL THE UNBOUND DOUBLE EYED BEAST FROM DEMON MASTER AVH

  And there it was, a riddle to the location of the second Guardian and the second relic.

  “We’re all thinking it, right?” said Becca. “‘Demon Master AVH’?”

  “Albrecht von Hohenzollern, Grand Master of the Teutonic Order in the fifteen hundreds,” said Darrell. “I like that Copernicus finally called him what he was.”

  Wade set his father’s college notebook on the table, closed his eyes, and tried to think. Land of endless snow, Athos Greek, conceal the unbound . . . double-eyed beast . . . double-eyed . . .

  “If I close my eyes . . . for that long . . . people think I’m dead!” Rosemary cackled.

  “No, no,” Wade said, opening his eyes. “It’s just that . . . double-eyed beast describes the object we’re looking for, and it’s based on a constellation.” From his backpack, he took out and unfolded the celestial map his uncle Henry had given him.

  “Oh, there are several star charts in our collection,” Rosemary said, “but that’s a very nice one.”

  “Thanks.” Carefully running his fingers over the constellations, Wade searched the chart’s colorful illustrations, hoping something would pop out at him. His mind flashed with the idea of the twelfth relic, but he waved it away. Right now there were at least a dozen candidates for double-eyed beast—constellations named for dogs, wolves, dragons, monsters—but not one of them suggested that it and it alone was the one Copernicus referred to on the ribbon. “If I study this long enough, I bet I can figure it out.”

  “Then my work here is done,” Dr. Billingham said. She slid the ribbon from the staff, pressed it into Becca’s palm, replaced the staff in the display case, snapped the case shut, and locked it away. “For the further meaning of your message, I suggest you all trot off to Hell . . .”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “. . . Enistic archives,” Rosemary finished. “The phrase the Athos Greek undoubtedly points to Hellenistic culture. You should start with section five in the reading room. Good-bye.”

  The curator brusquely shooed them from the room by flicking her fingers toward the door, and they headed back to the atrium.

  “That took a week,” Lily said, blinking her eyes as if coming out of a cave.

  “But we have the message,” said Becca. “Now we just need to know what it means.” The truth was, the instant Becca had heard the words reading room, her pulse had sped up. As always, she had the Copernicus diary in her bag and knew it was as precious as just about any rare book anywhere. But the Morgan’s collection was world famous for a reason. Gutenberg Bibles, Dickens manuscripts, diaries, biographies, histories, artwork, political documents. The Morgan had them all.

  “The Athos Greek,” she said. “Land of endless snow. Those are awesomely definite clues to who the Guardian might be. Greece is in the south of Europe, but endless snow sounds like the north. I’m sure the diary will tell us even more.”

  “And I can’t stop thinking about the double-eyed beast,” Wade added, looking back at her as he had so many times since San Francisco. What that was all about, Becca didn’t know. “If I keep studying the star map, I might be able to narrow it down.” Then he started chewing his lip, that little thing he did when he was thinking.

  Before entering the Morgan’s upstairs reading room, they were asked to stow their belongings—except for notebooks and computers—in special lockers outside the room and, interestingly, to wash their hands.

  “Because of the oils,” Darrell said, wiggling his fingers. “The oils in our skin can damage original materials. Mom knows stuff like that.”

  “And now so do you,” said Lily.

  After they explained the basic reason for their visit—“Greek monasteries and monks of the early sixteenth century”—the young man who’d let them in gave them a brief tour of the holdings, and they each decided to take on a different aspect of the research. Wade unfolded his celestial map and sat his notebook by its side. Julian pulled down from the shelves a large photographic book on Mediterranean monasteries as well as several maps of the world and Greece for the exact location of Athos. Lily gave herself the task of scanning the five Copernicus biographies loaded on the new tablet, while Darrell hunted down a handful of books on sixteenth-century Greek history.

  As they got to work, Becca stood staring at the filled bookshelves and glass bookcases, at the dozens of reference stacks, and at the lone, lucky, lucky librarian behind the counter, and she wondered how in the world she could ever get his job.

  Imagine being the master of this room! I would totally live here.

  “Becca, are you with us?” asked Lily. “Or lost in your own he
ad?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “I mean, no. I’m fine.”

  She set down on the table in front of her a book disguised in a wrinkled copy of the London Times, knowing that the librarian would envy her if he only knew that, ten feet away, was the five-hundred-year-old diary of Copernicus.

  Before running for their lives in San Francisco, Becca had discovered in the diary’s final pages a sequence of heavily coded passages along with a tabula recta, a square block of letters. When she’d discovered the right key word, the square had allowed her to decode a particularly difficult passage. That passage, among other things, had confirmed that the original Guardian of the Scorpio relic was a Portuguese trader named Tomé Pires. The clue had eventually led to them locating not the original relic, but a centuries-old decoy.

  Then, just this morning, when the pain in her arm had woken her, she’d distracted herself by studying the other coded pages. As in San Francisco, where she’d come across a tiny sketch of a scorpion in the margin of a page, Becca had discovered a date written in tiny letters—xiii February 1517—and another drawing. It was so faint as to be nearly invisible.

  At first, she’d thought the image—almost certainly sketched by Copernicus himself—was meant to be two diamonds touching end to end. But now the “double-eyed beast” of the scytale message suggested that the drawing was really of two eyes, and that the passage next to the drawing might tell the story of the Guardian whose name they were searching for. Either way, the first line of the double-eyed passage was impenetrable.

  Ourn ao froa lfa atsiu vlali am sa tlrlau dsa . . .

  Without the right key word, it might prove fruitless to try to decode it, but maybe she had to try anyway. Still, where to start? Ourn ao froa . . . ?

  “Becca, can you read Greek?” asked Darrell, holding an old volume bound in red leather. “This one’s about the lives of monks in the time period we want.”

  “Sorry,” she grumbled. “I feel like I’m doing it now.”

  “I can help,” the librarian whispered at the counter. He then showed Darrell to a scanner whose output was linked to a translation program. “I suggest you scan the book’s table of contents first, find the pages you think you want, then scan them. The translation will appear on this computer.”