Magnus Flyte - City of Lost Dreams

“The armonica,” Sarah whispered. “You said you could use it to cure your daughter.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Portia’s illness could have been cured with antibiotics. Simple antibiotics. The armonica would only help the healing process. That is all. Your Pollina is going to die.”

Tears of rage and despair filled Sarah’s eyes. Science had failed her. Alchemy had failed her.

She forced herself to stand and look down at Elizabeth.

Why had Philippine given her the vial? Would it be helping Pols in some way, to let this suffering end?

She had no reason to show this freak, this monster, this sadist any mercy.

Pollina had talked to her once, about how Mozart’s early operas had shown ambition but not compassion. Pols believed in compassion.

Sarah would not comfort this woman, but she would help her find peace at last. She looked at Nico.

“The vial?” Nico asked. “There is enough, maybe, for the both of us? I am . . . I am a small man.”

Sarah looked at him. She was, she realized, crying.

How would it help Pollina, to give Nico the means to kill himself?

How could she lose him?

Nico had seen her strength, before she had seen it herself. Two summers ago he had saved her life in the tunnels under Prague Castle. He had shown her history all around her. Given her the gift of the past. He was a giant.

And now in return she was giving him what he had always sought. Death. A bitter gift. But, she knew, a welcome one. For him as for Elizabeth. As it would be for her when her time came. We live, we love, we die. Like the distant suns whose explosions sent the elements to the earth that form our bodies, we blaze and then fade, our energy repurposed to other forms. As above, so below.

“I think there is enough,” she said.

Elizabeth looked up. She looked at the vial. She looked at Nico.

“Do it,” said the little man. “There is nothing left for you here.”

“No. There is nothing left for us here.”

Elizabeth crossed herself and opened the vial. She swallowed, then handed it to Nicolas.

“Portia,” she said.

And then she fell forward. Nico swiftly moved to her side and took the vial from her hand. He held fingers to her neck, then her wrist. Hermes chittered loudly.

“Gone,” said Nico.

Sarah looked at him.

“Give me a kiss,” said the little man. “I want to go out with the taste of a beautiful woman on my lips. Then go quickly. Don’t say good-bye. No last words. Put it in your kiss.”

Sarah kissed him with everything she had. Then she ran up the stairs.

Max had found Pols in a small storeroom, curled up among stacks of boxes and tools. He wrapped her in his coat and was carrying her down the stairs. Pols was humming a tune under her breath. Max shook his head at Sarah. Tears were streaming down his face.

Pollina began coughing.

“It’s okay,” Sarah whispered. “Pols, it’s okay. It’s over. We’ll take you home now.”

“I’m sorry,” Pollina whispered. “But I’m just too tired. It will be soon, I think.”

Sarah looked into the girl’s face. She saw it written there, what Pols had said on the phone. Pols was ready to let go. She began coughing again.

“I want to be buried with Boris,” said Pols when she got her breath back. “And I’ve written a requiem mass. Don’t let the musicians play it too slowly. And I intended the Lachrymosa to be humorous.”

“Elizabeth?” Max asked Sarah.

“She’s dead. I gave her the antidote.”

“And . . . Nico?”

Sarah looked at Pols, who had her head buried in Max’s chest.

“There was enough for two.”

When they got to the ground floor, Sarah looked at the stairs leading down to the round room and the portal. The day crew was going to get a hell of a surprise. They could not leave Nico here. Alone. With a woman he hated.

“Stay here,” she said to Max. She ran down the staircase.

Nico was lying on the ground, eyes closed. The vial was next to him. Hermes, the rat, sat on Nico’s chest.

Max appeared, still carrying Pols.

“We wanted to say good-bye.”

“I think we should bring him with us.”

“Can you carry him?”

“I think so.”

Sarah tried to scoop up Nico’s small body.

“You got him?” Max asked.

“Yes. It’s just . . . it’s just he’s actually very heavy.”

“You take Pols.”

“No, I’ve got him.” Sarah tried a sort of fireman’s rescue posture. Nico’s pants slipped down.

“Got him?”

“Sort of. Crap. Wait.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Nico straightened up. “This is so undignified!”

Sarah dropped him.

Hermes the rat scampered up Nico’s leg and torso to his shoulder and stared at them, nose twitching. The rat appeared to be laughing.

“You’re . . .” Max said.

“Still here,” said Nico, standing up and brushing off his suit. “Yes. Don’t read too much into it. I prepaid for a year of Pilates.” He scooped the vial off the floor and put it in his pocket, then walked forward and held out his arms. Max leaned down and gave him Pols. The little girl looked big in the little man’s arms.

“I’m maybe not quite done,” Nico whispered into her ear. “And maybe neither are you. There is still music to be played. The opera isn’t finished.”

And that’s when Sarah heard it. She heard it in her mind the way she sometimes heard Beethoven’s voice. The way she had heard Philippine speak to her. The way—ever so faintly—she could sometimes remember the sound of her father calling her name, asking her to play him something.

She heard the five notes of Pollina’s opera.

“Pols,” said Sarah, “I want to try something. Will you trust me?”

Sarah looked at all of them. Pollina, her thin shoulders hunched forward, her fair hair falling in strands about her face. Max, whitely tense and still beside her, expectant. Nicolas, with the rat Hermes scrabbling to stay on his shoulder, nodding at her. They had covered Elizabeth Weston’s body with her cloak.

Sarah had never really believed in Max’s Golden Fleece with its wonderfull and awfull truth. The wisdom and magic of the alchemists. Edward Kelley’s potions. Tycho Brahe’s meddling and the resulting immortality of Nicolas Pertusato. She couldn’t believe what she had seen tonight. Chalk symbols on the floor of a star-shaped palace in the Czech Republic. Powders and potions and chanted Latin. Hell portal doors. You strung a bunch of big-sounding words together and drew some nifty pictures and dressed up in robes and expected . . . what? God? Your dead daughter? Dracula? The white rabbit? The cure to everything? Keanu Reeves in The Matrix ?

You could swallow a drug that allowed you to expand your brain’s narrow perceptions of time and see the past by following the emotional energy people left behind them.

Or you could merely think that you had. And maybe that was enough.

Dreams? Chanting? Drumming? Prayer? Visions?

Using belief to affect the body.

Using music.

Sarah could feel it within her, a kind of shuddering warmth, a loss of gravity in her bones, a humming in her blood. Everything in her life had led her to this point. Everything she had seen was just preparation for what was to come.

“Max,” Sarah said, “You’re going to have to help me. You too, Nico.”

She must not hold back. She must not hold on. She could only go further and further. Perhaps for one time only in her life would she have—not the courage to fight—but the will to surrender.

She moved to the armonica.

“Watch,” she said. “It’s five notes. E, B, C, A, G. I’ll show you.” She pressed the treadle of the instrument and the glasses began spinning. She showed Max how to touch the rims, and which ones he should use to get the proper notes. Nico joined them.