Michael Scott - The Magician

And as the last monstrous gargoyle exploded to dust and the twins’ auras faded away, the Alchemyst found himself wondering for the first time if Awakening them had been the correct decision.

On top of Notre Dame, Dee and Machiavelli watched as Flamel and the others picked their way through the smoking piles of masonry, heading in the direction of the bridge.

“We are in so much trouble,” Machiavelli said through gritted teeth. The arrow had disappeared from his thigh, but his leg was still numb.

“We?” Dee said lightly. “This, all this, is entirely your fault, Niccolo. Or at least, that’s what my report will say. And you know what will happen then, don’t you?”

Machiavelli straightened and stood, leaning against the stonework, favoring his injured leg. “My report will differ.”

“No one will believe you,” Dee said confidently, turning away. “Everyone knows you are the master of lies.”

Machiavelli reached into his pocket and pulled out a small digital tape recorder. “Well then, it’s lucky I have everything you said on tape.” He tapped the recorder. “Voice activated. It recorded every word you spoke to me.”

Dee stopped. He slowly turned to face the Italian and looked at the slender tape recorder. “Every word?” he asked.

“Every word.” Machiavelli said grimly. “I think the Elders will believe my report.”

Dee stared at the Italian for a heartbeat before nodding. “What do you want?”

Machiavelli nodded at the devastation below. His smile was terrifying. “Look at what the twins can do…and they’re barely Awakened, and not even fully trained.”

“What are you suggesting?” Dee asked.

“Between us, you and I have access to extraordinary resources. Working together-rather than against one another-we should be able to find the twins, capture them and train them.”

“Train them!”

Machiavelli’s eyes started to glitter. “They are the twins of legend. ‘The two that are one, the one that is all.’ Once they’ve mastered all the elemental magics, they will be unstoppable.” His smile turned feral. “Whoever controls them controls the world.”

The Magician turned to squint across the square to where Flamel was just visible through the pall of dust and grit. “You think the Alchemyst knows this?”

Machiavelli’s laugh was bitter. “Of course he knows. Why else do you think he’s training them!”

4th June

A t precisely 12:13, the Eurostar train pulled out of Gare du Nord station and began the two-hour-twenty-minute journey into London’s St. Pancras International Station.

Nicholas Flamel sat facing Sophie and Josh across a table in Business Premier Class. Saint-Germain had bought the tickets using an untraceable credit card and had supplied them with French passports that came complete with photographs that looked nothing like the twins, while Nicholas’s passport photograph was that of a young man with a full head of jet-black hair. “Tell them you’ve aged a lot in the past few years,” Saint-Germain said with a grin. Joan of Arc had spent the morning shopping and had presented Sophie and Josh each with a backpack filled with clothes and toiletries. When Josh had opened his, he’d discovered the small laptop Saint-Germain had given him the day before. Was it only yesterday? It seemed so long ago.

Nicholas spread out the newspapers as the train left the station and pulled on a pair of cheap reading glasses he’d bought at a drugstore. He held up Le Monde so that the twins could see the front page; it carried a picture of the devastation caused by Nidhogg.

“It says here,” Nicholas read slowly, “that a section of the catacombs collapsed.” He turned the page. There was a half-page picture of piles of shattered stone in the roped-off square before Notre Dame Cathedral. “‘Experts are claiming that the collapse and disintegration of some of Paris’s most famous gargoyles and grotesques was caused by acid rain that weakened the structures. The two events are unconnected,’” he read, and closed the paper.

“So you were right,” Sophie said, exhaustion etched onto her face even though she’d slept for nearly ten hours. “Dee and Machiavelli have managed to cover it up.” She looked out the window as the train click-clacked across a maze of interconnecting lines. “A monster walked through Paris yesterday, gargoyles climbed down off a building…and yet there’s nothing in the papers. It’s like it never happened.”

“But it did happen,” Flamel said seriously. “And you learned the Magic of Fire and Josh’s powers were Awakened. And yesterday you discovered just how powerful the two of you are together.”

“And Scathach died,” Josh said bitterly.

The blank look of surprise on Flamel’s face confused and annoyed Josh. He looked at his sister, then back at Nicholas. “Scatty,” he said angrily. “Remember her? She was drowned in the Seine.”

“Drowned?” Flamel smiled, and the new lines at the corners of his eyes and across his forehead deepened. “She’s a vampire, Josh,” he said gently. “She doesn’t need to breathe air. I’ll bet she was mad, though; she hates getting wet,” he added. “Poor Dagon: he didn’t stand a chance.” He sank back into the comfortable seat and closed his eyes. “We’ve one brief stop to make outside London, then we’ll use the map of the ley lines to get back to San Francisco, and Perenelle.”

“Why are we going to England?” Josh asked.

“We’re going to see the oldest immortal human in the world,” the Alchemyst said. “I’m going to try and persuade him to train you both in the Magic of Water.”

“Who is it?” Josh asked, reaching for his laptop. The first-class carriages had a wireless network.

“Gilgamesh the King.”

The Catacombs of Paris that Sophie and Josh explore really exist, as does the extraordinary sewer system, which comes, as Machiavelli observes, complete with street signs. Although Paris receives millions of visitors a year, many are unaware of the vast network of tunnels below the city.

Officially, they are called “les carrieres de Paris,” the quarries of Paris, but they are commonly called the catacombs, and they are one of the wonders of the city. The sights the twins encounter in the catacombs-the walls of bones, the spectacular arrangements of skulls-are open to the public. They date to the eighteenth century, when all the bodies and bones in the overflowing Cimetiere des Innocents were exhumed and transported to the limestone tunnels and caverns. More bodies from other cemeteries followed, and it is now estimated that there are as many as seven million bodies in this bizarre graveyard. No one knows who created the extraordinary and artistic arrangements of bones; perhaps a workman wanted to fashion a monument to the dead who would no longer have tombstones to mark their graves. The walls, made entirely of human bones, many inset with a pattern of skulls, are suitably eerie and, in some cases, have been lit for dramatic effect.

The Romans were probably the first to quarry limestone from the ground to build what would become Lutetia, the earliest Roman settlement on the Ile de la Cite. Where Notre Dame Cathedral now stands, there was once a monument to the Roman god Jupiter. From about the tenth century onward, limestone was extensively mined from the quarries to create the city walls and to build Notre Dame and the original Louvre palace. The catacombs have long been used for storage by smugglers and have provided shelter for many homeless. More recently, both the German army and the French Resistance had bases in the tunnels during World War II. In this century, illegal art galleries and even a movie theater have been found deep underground by the cataflics, the police unit who patrol underground.