The Clockwork Dragon Page 5

  Jack knew Herr Arnulf was talking about his clothes, but he could not help noticing the tailor had gestured to his general person.

  “Perhaps I should explain. We are not talking about the usual fabrics.” Herr Arnulf took Jack’s elbow and steered him along the racks. “Our shirts turn your kinetic energy into heat to keep you warm. Our suits are lined with Kevlar to protect you from falls and . . . other threats.”

  They came to a selection of boots and wingtips. “The soles of our shoes are covered in carbon nano-spikes to keep you upright on the most slippery ice.”

  Stepping close, Herr Arnulf gave a subtle tilt of his head toward Gwen, who was trying on a purple stocking cap a few feet away. “And in an Arnulf und Söhne suit, you will look sharper than any man she has ever seen.”

  “Any man?” Jack pictured Will in his three-piece suit, making mugs slide around the table—Gwen’s cheeks flushing when he winked. “Okay. Do your worst.”

  Twenty minutes later, Jack came out of the dressing area. Herr Arnulf had put together a full ensemble—a rugged three-piece suit and overcoat, complete with a Homburg hat. Jack gave Gwen a nervous shrug. “Whaddaya think?”

  Gwen’s jaw went slack, if only for a moment. “I . . .” She recovered quickly. “It’ll do.” She rose on her tiptoes, pulled the Homburg from his head, and tossed it aside, giving him the slightest smile. “Yes. It’ll do nicely.”

  The others got new threads as well. Shaw could not stop looking at himself in the three-way mirror.

  “That suit is tweed,” said Jack, standing behind him, “exactly like all your other suits.”

  “Yeah, but this’n’s a full shade lighter, innit? Complements my complexion. That’s wot ’err Arnulf says.”

  Gwen picked out a beige cable-knit sweater—Kevlar impregnated—and the purple hat she’d been admiring, along with a willow walking stick with a bluish cobalt owl for a handle.

  “Herr Arnulf,” said Jack as the tailor walked them all to the door. “Did my grandfather say anything else about his mission, anything at all?”

  “Let me see . . .” The tailor removed the measuring tape from around his neck and laid it on the counter. “He did ask me for directions to the White Horse Inn. I expect he had a room there.”

  The White Horse Inn. Why did Jack recognize that name? He patted his pockets, looking for the page from his grandfather’s journal.

  “Jack?” asked Gwen.

  “Hang on.” Jack unfolded the page, and there, in the margin, he saw it. “The White Horse Inn. That’s the inn where the ledger came from—the inn where Paracelsus died.”

  The square outside had gone dark, lit only by a spotlight shining on the statue of Mozart. Gwen checked her watch. “It’s getting late. We need to find rooms for the night, and now we know the perfect place.”

  Chapter Eleven

  JACK, GWEN, AND SHAW took a bus from the city center to the White Horse Inn.

  Gwen spent most of the ride nose down, buried in her phone. “The inn has existed in one form or another for a thousand years,” she said, reading from a web page, “as a common stop on the Catholic pilgrimage trail through Bavaria.”

  Jack pulled himself up from his seat to look over her shoulder. “Is that Wikipedia?”

  “Archivipedia.” Gwen glanced up at him. “Maintained by the Archivist. Far more accurate, if you ask me.”

  A touristy hotel came into view, and Jack sat down again. “I’m not so sure.”

  The White Horse Inn did not look a thousand years old. Sure, it had an old-school German facade with dark timbers and white plaster, but it also had balconies with plastic lawn furniture and an asphalt parking lot.

  “So yer sayin’ Paracelsus might a’ used that Jacuzzi over there?” asked Shaw, pointing a fat finger at the pool.

  The trio checked into separate rooms and spent several fruitless hours exploring the grounds. There were no clues to the fate of the Mind, and Jack’s sparks proved pointless. Every stone, brick, and timber had been replaced since Paracelsus’s day, likely ten or twenty times over.

  Shaw gave up and went to bed, while Jack and Gwen collapsed onto a couch near the great room fireplace to take a breather.

  “We’ll never find Grandpa’s trail in time,” said Jack, laying his head back and closing his eyes.

  “That’s the spirit, Jack. Well done.” Gwen wasn’t listening. She used his shoulder to push herself up, staring at the opposite wall. “Be right back.”

  Jack lifted his head to see what had stolen her attention.

  Across the room, a bellhop pushed a luggage cart away, revealing an oil painting, lit by a dim overhead lamp. An exhausted Gwen staggered toward it like a zombie.

  Jack followed. In the painting, a man in a red tunic leaned on a sword, standing before a fountain. His face flashed in Jack’s brain, superimposed over a bust he had seen on Gwen’s Archivipedia page. “That’s him,” said Jack, coming up beside her. “That’s Paracelsus.”

  Gwen looked over at him with red, squinty eyes. “I know.” She threw out an arm, pointing at a brass plaque, printed in three languages. “It’s labeled.”

  PHILIPPUS THEOPHRASTUS PARACELSUS.

  ALCHEMIST AND DOCTOR OF GREAT RENOWN.

  A BAND OF LOCAL APOTHECARIES, SHAMED BY HIS SUCCESS TREATING PATIENTS AT

  ST. WOLFGANG’S CHURCH, BEAT PARACELSUS TO DEATH IN THIS VERY ROOM.

  Jack studied the alchemist’s face, repeating the first line of his final words. “ ‘Once I held a treasure worth the fortunes of pope and king.’ ”

  “Perhaps he meant the sword,” mused Gwen. “A treasure can be anything. If I was getting beaten to death by an angry mob, I’d wish for my sword too.”

  Her theory drew Jack’s attention to the sword, and a pit opened in his stomach. The weapon indeed looked like a treasure, with an ornate silver blade and a golden hilt. But it was the pommel that caught his eye, partially visible beneath the alchemist’s hand. “It can’t be.”

  “Can’t be what?” asked Gwen.

  A suspicion had been growing in Jack’s mind since their meeting in the Cellar. According to Sir Drake, his grandfather had died to keep the Mind of Paracelsus out of Gall’s hands. During the fight over Genghis Khan’s rubies, Tanner had said the same thing about the zed.

  And then there was the tailor’s story.

  “Herr Arnulf told me a messenger boy brought him a package from Grandpa, and asked him to send it to John Buckles.”

  Gwen scrunched up her nose. “Your grandfather sent a package to himself?”

  “That’s what I thought. But all the trackers in my line share that name, right?”

  She had the answer before Jack could spit it out. “John Buckles the Eleventh didn’t send the package to himself; he sent it to his son, John Buckles the Twelfth—your dad.”

  “Exactly. And inside that package was a sphere.” Jack shifted his gaze back to the painting, nodding. “The treasure isn’t the sword, Gwen. It’s on the sword.”

  She studied the weapon for several seconds, then smacked Jack’s arm with the back of her hand. “The pommel is a red sphere. That’s the zed, Jack! The zed is the Mind of Paracelsus.”

  Chapter Twelve

  THEY ATE BREAKFAST IN the hotel sunroom—cheese, cold cuts, and boiled eggs with hard rolls. Shaw ate three times as much as Jack and Gwen, but only twice as fast, forcing them to wait.

  A muted newscast played on a TV hanging in the corner. Something had blown a hole through a museum wall in China. Men and women in hardhats picked through smoldering rubble under the harsh glare of mobile floodlights.

  Shaw lifted a pretzel made of salami from his plate.

  Gwen scrunched up her face. “Whoa. Is that a meat pretzel?”

  “Yes it is.” The warden moved the plate out of her reach and popped the treat into his mouth. “And it’s a fing of beauty, innit?” He polished off two more and pushed back from the table, belly threatening to burst through his waistcoat. “So the ’otel’s a bust, eh?”


  “Yes,” said Jack.

  “Not at all,” said Gwen at the same time.

  Jack shot her a look. They hadn’t told Shaw about the painting. If he found out Jack’s family had the Mind-slash-zed, he would immediately call Mrs. Hudson to declare victory. She would make them come home and fork over the artifact, and Jack would never find the evidence he needed to put Gall away.

  Shaw’s eyes narrowed, nearly disappearing behind his plump cheeks.

  Gwen recovered nicely. “We found a plaque that told us Paracelsus treated patients at Saint Wolfgang’s Church.” She leaned forward to flick a speck of salami off Shaw’s sleeve and looked toward a church bell tower across the street. “That’s where we’re headed next.”

  * * *

  If Saint Wolfgang’s interior designer was aiming for creepy, he or she had scored big-time. Icons sculpted from dark wood stood on black marble stands, wearing sad expressions. Gilded angels, stern and peeling, glared down from the rafters. And every memorial seemed unnecessarily macabre—dozens of them, hammering Jack’s overactive vision.

  Skull.

  Pile of skulls.

  Skull with bat wings.

  Skull with a snake coming out of its eye.

  Life-size zombie holding an hourglass, standing on skulls with snakes slithering out of their eyes and climbing up its legs. “Oh, come on!” Jack said out loud.

  Gwen turned to scowl at him. “Shhh!”

  He shrugged. “These people had a messed-up way of comforting the living.”

  Gwen gave him a frown and followed Shaw up the center aisle. “Remember the clue, Jack. ‘It rests on high beneath the seasick saint.’ Look for boats among the sculptures and paintings.”

  “How can anything rest on high and still be beneath a saint?”

  A priest walked down the aisle to meet them, spreading his hands. “Guten Morgen. Did you say you are looking for a saint?”

  Shaw folded his arms. “Yeah. One that’d toss his chips on the barmy sea.”

  The priest looked perplexed, if not a little scared. “I am sorry. Mein English ist not especially good.”

  “Neither is his.” Gwen shouldered her way past the warden and shook the priest’s hand. “What my apelike colleague means is we are looking for a saint related to ships or sailing.”

  “Ah. Sailing.” The priest’s confusion melted. “You seek Saint Bartholomew, patron saint of fishermen.” He thought for a moment and added, “Und farmers, und hospitals, und shoe makers.” He bobbled his head. “Und also milkmaids.”

  “So . . . Saint Bart is pretty popular,” said Jack, squeezing past Shaw as well.

  “Oh yes.”

  “And do you have any statues or paintings of him?”

  “Sadly, no. There is, however, a Saint Bartholomew’s Church not far from here. For centuries it was one of the primary hospitals in all Bavaria.”

  “A hospital?” Gwen slapped Jack’s arm, right in the spot where she had backhanded him the night before. “We’re in the wrong church.”

  * * *

  Not far was a relative term. Jack had pictured something a few streets over. But, as the priest had admitted, his English was not especially good. Getting to Saint Bart’s required a train ride.

  And a passport.

  The clickety-clack of rails pulsed beneath their feet as the train steamed through snow-white hills, heading into the mountains. Saint Bartholomew’s lay twenty miles away on a large alpine lake known for its fishing industry. To get there, they had to cross into Germany.

  “A fishermen’s hospital.” Gwen pounded the faux-wood table between their seats, upsetting a stack of Jaffa cakes that Shaw had procured from the dining car. “Saint Bart is the saint for the sick of the sea, not a seasick saint. It’s a case of lost in translation.”

  As the warden finished off his cakes, the train plunged into a tunnel, emerging moments later on the northern rim of the lake valley. Jack pressed his forehead to the glass, trying to see what lay ahead. Ice extended far to the south—a frozen fjord slicing between rocky peaks, with villages on both shores.

  The station was small, hardly more than a timber platform. As the train pulled away, Jack raised a hand to shield his eyes from the glare coming off the frozen lake. He could see the church a good mile or more away.

  On the other side.

  “This can’t be right.” Jack tugged at the sleeve of a passing gentleman. “Excuse me. How do we get to Saint Bartholomew’s?”

  “In ze sommer you would take ze boats.” The man thrust an elbow at a stack of rowboats on the shore, strung with icicles. “In ze winter”—he snorted, nodding toward the vast white expanse—“you walk.”

  * * *

  Clouds of snow swept across the lake from north to south, at times reducing the visibility to zero. By the time Jack and the others climbed the rocky shore on the far side, they looked like a polar expedition team—faces, coats, and spiked walking sticks frosted on one side.

  None of the townspeople gave them a second look.

  Moments later, they stood melting inside the empty cathedral. Sculpted angels smiled down from alabaster domes, looking far more welcoming than those in Saint Wolfgang’s.

  Gwen, however, did not like them. “Those angels are baroque,” she said, chewing her lip. “Same with the paintings. It’s all seventeenth-century artwork, a hundred years after Paracelsus.” She lowered her voice, whispering to Jack without moving her lips. “I might actually have been . . .”

  “Been what?” asked Jack, knowing what was coming and dying to hear her say it.

  Gwen turned her back to Shaw. “Wrong, okay? I might have been wrong.”

  “Maybe.” Jack strolled past her, heading for a low-hanging balcony carved from blue marble, the largest piece of solid stone in the church. “And maybe not.”

  Gwen caught up to him, reading his intentions. “A spark won’t help us, Jack. Even if Paracelsus came here, the current building is too new.”

  “Yeah. I get that.” Jack pulled off a glove. “But we’re not really looking for Paracelsus, are we?”

  He laid his hand on the pillar and dropped into a shadowed memory of the cathedral. Swirls of gray whooshed away as he landed. Jack watched dusty striations of color drift past him in the gray, catching the light from the windows. There must have been some copper in the marble.

  He heard the distorted warble of explosions. Silhouettes in shadowy helmets ran up the aisle. Jack had dropped into World War II. Stone always took a tracker straight to its most terrible memory. And on the train ride to the valley, Gwen had told him that Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest was close by—a prime target for the Allies. He pushed with his mind, rolling the years forward.

  Priests came and went. Congregations filled the pews and vanished in an instant. Ghostly Christmas trees rose, fell, and rose again until finally one lonely silhouette stood still amid the roiling shadows, flashing in and out.

  Jack slowed the vision. The silhouette stared up through a high window, one hand resting on a cane, the other holding a trilby hat. After what seemed like an age, it turned, looked Jack’s way, and gave a single nod.

  Grandpa.

  Jack backed out of the spark and speed-walked between the pews, heading for the same window. “I saw him. I saw my grandfather.”

  “You couldn’t have.” Gwen was right on his heels. “Do you know the odds?”

  “He must have stood there for hours, Gwen, day after day, to mark the spot—like dog-earing a page in time. He left a breadcrumb for another tracker to find.”

  The window framed a mountain, all ice, snow, and jagged rock. A bronze plaque with multiple translations hung below the sill.

  ST. BARTHOLOMEW AND THE ICE CHAPEL

  FOR MORE THAN A MILLENNIUM, PILGRIMS CLIMBED MOUNT WATZMANN TO VISIT ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S SHRINE, SET ON AN OUTCROPPING ABOVE A COLLECTION OF ICE CAVES KNOWN AS THE ICE CHAPEL. THE SHRINE IS LOST TO TIME, BUT THE CAVES REMAIN AS A TESTIMONY TO THE INTRICACY OF THE CREATOR’S HANDIWORK.


  “The treasure rests on high,” muttered Jack, “beneath the seasick saint. Paracelsus kept a stash above the church but below the shrine, somewhere in those ice caves. That’s the answer to the riddle.” He stared out through the window, studying the mountain for a long time.

  Gwen leaned close and whispered, “What are you doing now?”

  “Memorizing the terrain. We have to get up to those ice caves.”

  “Or we could do this.” She snapped a picture with her smartphone and started for the door. “Think outside the box, Jack.”

  The trailhead lay a few hundred meters up the road. A steel gate barred the path, secured with a heavy chain and a sign that read LEBENSGEFAHR: LAWINE / DANGER: AVALANCHE. Jack and Gwen stomped through the drifts on either side and continued on.

  “Oi,” said Shaw, staring at the sign. “Where’re you two goin’?”

  “Outside the box,” Gwen called over her shoulder.

  “Yeah.” Shaw pushed into the drifts to follow, grumbling so that Jack could barely hear him. “But sometimes the box is there for a reason, innit?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE SNOW HUNG HEAVY in the pine boughs, falling in clumps whenever Shaw’s big shoulders brushed their lower branches. But the pines, at least, made the trail obvious. That bit of help ended soon enough as the three breached the tree line. Jack’s world became a steep, sloping uniformity of deep snow and rocky crags.

  Gwen used her photo and a compass hidden beneath one wing of her cobalt owl to pick the most likely path to the ice caves. They were looking for a shallow valley that ran up the mountainside.

  Zzap.

  The noise was so faint that Jack might have imagined it. He had heard it before, and seen the tiny yellow-orange lightning bolt it caused in the corner of his mind. He had seen it every time the thief who had framed him for the theft of the Crown Jewels used a phase-jumping device.

  A patch of darkness shifted at the edge of the pines. Jack paused his march, waiting for another glimpse. Nothing. “Shaw,” he said, slogging through the drifts to catch up to the warden. “Hang back and keep an eye out, will you? We don’t want any trouble with the locals.”