Michael Scott - The Alchemyst

Where was Nicholas?

What was happening?

Perenelle was afraid, but not for herself. The fact that she was alive meantthat Dee needed her for something, and that sooner or later she would comeface to face with him. And if Dee had a failing, it was arrogance. He wouldunderestimate her and then she would strike! There was a particularly nastylittle spell she had learned in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains inTransylvania that she was saving just for him.

Where was Nicholas?

She was afraid for Nicholas and the children. It was difficult for her to judge just how much time has passed, but by examining the wrinkles forming onthe backs of her hands, she guessed she d aged at least two years, so twodays had passed. Without the immortality elixir, she and Nicholas would ageat the rate of a year a day. They had less than a month left before theysuccumbed to old very old age.

And with no one to stand against them, Dee and the others like him wouldloose the Dark Elders into the world again. It would be chaos; civilizationwould fall.

Where was Nicholas?

Perenelle blinked away tears. She wasn t going to give the sphinx thesatisfaction of seeing her weep. The Elders had nothing but contempt forhuman emotion; they considered it their biggest weakness. Perenelle knew itwas humankind s great strength.

She blinked again, and it took her a moment to realize what she was seeing.

The foul dripping water running down the walls had briefly curled and formedinto a pattern. She focused, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

The liquid twisted and coiled into a face: Jefferson Miller, the ghost of thesecurity guard. The dribbling water bent into letters on the moss-streakedwalls.

Flamel. Children.

The words lasted less than a heartbeat before they flowed away.

Safe.

Now Perenelle had to blink hard to clear her eyes. Flamel and the childrenwere safe!

Ojai. Leygate. Paris.

Thank you, Perenelle mouthed silently as Jefferson Miller s face dissolvedand ran liquid down the wall. She had so many questions but at least now shehad some answers: Nicholas and the children were safe. They had obviouslyreached Ojai and met the Witch of Endor. She must have opened the leygate totake them to Paris, and that suggested that the Witch had helped them and hadmost likely instructed Sophie in the Magic of Air.

Perenelle knew that the Witch would not have been able to Awaken Josh s powers but in Paris and across Europe there were Elders and immortal humanswho would be able to help, who could Awaken Josh and train both twins in thefive elemental magics.

She rolled over on her back and looked at the sphinx, which was now crouchedoutside her cell, human head resting on enormous lion s paws, wings foldedacross its back. The creature smiled lazily, long black forked tongueflickering.

It is ending, Immortal, the sphinx whispered.

Perenelle s smile was terrifying. On the contrary, she replied. It is now only just beginning.

End of Book One AUTHOR S NOTE

Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel were real people. So was Dr. John Dee. Indeed,all the characters in The Alchemyst, with the exception of the twins, arebased on real historical characters or mythological beings.

When I originally conceived the idea for The Alchemyst, I thought the herowould be Dr. John Dee.

John Dee has always fascinated me. In the Elizabethan Age, the age of theextraordinary, he was exceptional. He was one of the most brilliant men ofhis time, and all the details about his life in The Alchemyst are true: he was an alchemist, a mathematician, a geographer, an astronomer and anastrologer. He did choose the date for Queen Elizabeth I s coronation, andwhen he was part of her network of spies, he signed his coded messages 007. The two 0 s represented the eyes of the Queen, and the symbol that lookedlike a 7 was Dee s personal mark. There is evidence to suggest that whenShakespeare created the character of Prospero for The Tempest, he modeled him on Dee.

The series of books based on an alchemist had been growing in my head and inpiles of notebooks for some years, and it seemed perfectly natural that itshould be Dee s series. As I wrote other books, I kept coming back to theidea, adding more material, weaving together all the world mythologies andcreating the huge and intricate background for the stories. I continued toresearch the settings, visiting, revisiting and photographing every locationI intended to use in the series.

Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move that ideaforward. The characters of the twins came to me first. My story was alwaysabout a brother and sister, and in mythological terms, twins are veryspecial. Just about every race and mythology has a twin story. As my storyprogressed, the secondary characters, such as Scathach and the Morrigan, andthen later, Hekate and the Witch of Endor, appeared. But somehow I stillhadn t quite gotten the hero, the mentor, the teacher for the twins. Dr. JohnDee, despite being a wonderful character, was simply not the right character.

Then, one day in the late fall of 2000, I was in Paris on business. It isdifficult to get lost in Paris, so long as you know where the river Seineis you can usually see one or more of the great landmarks, such as the EiffelTower, Sacr -Coeur or Notre Dame but somehow I d managed to do it. I had leftNotre Dame earlier, crossed the Seine on the Pont d Arcole, heading towardthe Centre Pompidou, and somewhere between the Boulevard de Sebastopol andthe Rue Beaubourg, I got lost. Not entirely lost; I knew vaguely where I was,but night was beginning to fall. I turned off the Rue Beaubourg into thenarrow Rue du Montmorency and found myself looking up at a sign that saidAUBERGE NICOLAS FLAMEL: the Nicholas Flamel Hostel. And in front of the building was a sign that said the house, where Flamel and his wife had oncelived, dated from 1407, which meant that this had to be one of the oldesthouses in Paris.

I went inside and found a charming restaurant, where I had a meal that night.It was a strange experience, eating in the same room where the legendaryNicholas Flamel would have lived and worked. The exposed beams in the ceilinglooked original, which meant they would have been the beams Nicholas Flamelhimself would have seen. In the cellar below my feet, Nicholas and Perenelle would have stored their food and wine, and their bedchamber would have beenin the small room directly over my head.

I knew quite a bit about the famous Nicholas Flamel. Dee, who had one of thelargest libraries in England, had Flamel s books and would have studied hisworks.

Nicholas Flamel was one of the most famous alchemists of his day. Alchemy isa peculiar combination of chemistry, botany, medicine, astronomy andastrology. It has a long and distinguished history and was studied in ancientGreece and China, and there is an argument that it forms the basis for modernchemistry. As with Dee, all of the details in The Alchemyst about Nicholas Flamel are true. We know quite a bit about him because not only do his ownwritings exist, but also many people wrote about him during his own lifetime.

He was born in 1330 and scraped by on a living as a bookseller and ascrivener, writing letters and copying books for clients. One day he bought avery special book: the Book of Abraham. It, too, really existed, and NicholasFlamel left us with a very detailed description of the copper-bound book,which was written on what looked like bark.

Accompanied by Perenelle, he spent more than twenty years traveling all overEurope, trying to translate the strange language the book was written in.

No one knows what happened to Nicholas Flamel on that journey. What isauthenticated is that when he returned to Paris in the late fourteenth century, he was extraordinarily wealthy. The rumor quickly went around thathe had discovered the two great secrets of alchemy in the Book of Abraham:how to create a philosopher s stone, which changed ordinary metal into gold,and how to achieve immortality. Neither Nicholas nor Perenelle would everconfirm the rumors, and they never explained how they had become so rich.