The Serpent’s Curse

“Omigod!” Lily shrieked. “They’re murdering us—”

As the limo careened toward the inner lane, the Hummer roared past and clipped the limo hard, ramming it into the inside wall. The limo spun back across the road, then flew up the concrete road partition. Its undercarriage shrieked as it slid onto the railing and then stopped sharply, pivoting across the barrier and the outside railing like a seesaw.

The driver slammed forward into the exploding air bag. Lily, Becca, Wade, and Roald were thrown to the floor. Darrell bounced to the ceiling and was back down on the seat, clutching his head with both hands.

Then there was silence. A different kind of silence from before. The quiet you hear before the world goes dark.

Looking out the front, Wade saw a field of black water and glittering lights beyond.

The limo was dangling on the bridge railing, inches from plunging into the East River.

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“Is everyone …,” somebody was saying when Wade lifted his throbbing head. The Hummer had spun around fifty yards up the bridge, pulled into the outside lane, and was now aimed at the damaged limo, revving its engine.

Wade yanked up on the door handle. “Get out of the car!” The door wouldn’t open. He kicked it. Pain spiked his leg. “Darrell—”

A thin stream of blood trickling down his cheek, Darrell kicked too. The door squealed open a crack. Lily and Becca threw themselves at it. The hinges groaned and the door fell to the roadway. The sudden loss of weight in the back sent the limo teetering forward. There was a moan from behind the wheel.

“The driver!” Wade’s father said. He shattered the divider to the front compartment, then grabbed the man’s shoulder and squirmed carefully over the seat to him. First puncturing the air bag, he jerked open the passenger door to his right and dragged the driver through it onto the pavement, just as the Hummer pulled up. Four black doors flew open and four oak-sized men emerged.

One of the men walked out into the road and gestured for the oncoming cars to go past. Was he smiling?

Yes, he was.

Wade’s frantic thoughts drew to a point: stay close, physically close, to Darrell and the girls. He huddled them together, himself in front. His father staggered over with the driver leaning on his shoulder.

One thick-necked thug, somewhere between seven and ten feet tall, glared down at them with eyes the color of iron. His face was dented and garbage-can ugly.

“Make no movements,” he said in a voice like a truck shifting gears. Then he must have thought better of his words, because he added, “One movement. Give us relic and daggers.”

Seriously? Wade thought. He’s clarifying his threat? Who does that?

But there was nothing funny in the guy’s features. There were lumps all over his face as if he’d been the one in the accident, but they were neither recent nor red. He’d grown up a monstrosity, Wade guessed, so what choice did he have but to become a thug?

No, that wasn’t right. Everyone had a choice.

“Now,” the man grunted, drawing an automatic weapon from inside his tight-fitting jacket. He stood with his big boots planted flat on the pavement like one of the bridge girders.

Sirens sounded from the streets they had just come from.

“Or we could wait for the cops,” Wade said, stepping forward as if his new toughness meant being aggressive and blurting stuff at bad guys. His father, still holding up the driver, yanked him back.

In a move Wade didn’t quite understand, one of the thugs splayed his thick fingers and grabbed Lily by the arm. Then he lifted her off the ground like a rag doll—probably because she was the smallest—and strode with her to the railing. “She goes over.”

Before Wade could react, before he could think of moving, his father slid the driver onto him and jumped at the thug, wrenching his arm to let Lily go, which the man didn’t—until there was a sudden flash of silver, and the goon screamed.

Shouting incomprehensibly, Becca had thrust Magellan’s priceless dagger into the man’s arm. Its ivory hilt cracked off in her hand, while the blade stayed in him. She pulled Lily from him and staggered back, stunned at what she had done.

Wade whipped out his own dagger, ready to fight, when a sleek white town car raced up the bridge from the Manhattan side, a blue light flashing from its dashboard.

The other goons dragged their wounded comrade into the Hummer, Becca’s hiltless blade still in his arm.

“Ve get you all, dead and dead—” one goon was muttering idiotically.

Not this time, Wade thought, staring at Becca. Because of you …

The town car shrieked to a stop, and the passenger door flew open. “I’m Terence Ackroyd,” the driver said. “Everybody in!” Then he helped Wade’s father slide the limo driver inside. As the Hummer tore back to Brooklyn, the others piled into the town car, and they roared away, shaken but alive and mostly unhurt.

Wade couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. Becca was amazing, he thought. She saved us. She … He quaked like an old man, his hands trembling uncontrollably as they sped across the bridge into the winding streets of lower Manhattan.

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Madrid, Spain

March 18

2:06 a.m.

Thin, pale, and slightly bent, the brilliant physicist Ebner von Braun stepped wearily inside a nondescript building buried in a warren of backstreets off the Plaza Conde de Barajas in old Madrid.

Madrid may well be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Ebner thought, but that entry hall was disgusting. It was dismal and dark, its floor was uneven, and its grotesquely peeling walls were sodden with the odor of rancid olive oil, scorched garlic, and, surprisingly, turpentine.

Breathing through a handkerchief, he pressed a button on the wall. The elevator doors jerked noisily aside. He stepped in, and the racket of the ancient cables began. A long minute and several subbasements later, he found himself strolling the length of a bank of large, high-definition computer monitors.

Here, the smell was of nothing at all, the pristine, climate-controlled cleanliness of modern science. Ebner gazed over the backs of three hundred men and women, their fingers clacking endlessly on multiple keyboards, text scrolling up and down, screen images shifting and alive with video, and he smiled.

Such busy little bees they are!

Except they are not little bees, are they? he thought. They are devils. Demons—Orcs!—all recruited, mostly by me, for the vast army of Galina Krause and the Knights of the Teutonic Order.

The round chamber, one hundred forty feet side to side, with multiple tiers of bookcases rising to a star-painted ceiling, reminded him of the main reading room in the British Museum.

Except ours is better.

In addition to the NSA-level computing resources collected here, the bookshelves and glass-fronted cases alone were laden with over seven million reference books in every conceivable language, hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, many more thousands of early printed works, geographical and topographical maps, marine charts, celestial diagrams, paintings, drawings, engravings, ledgers, letters, tracts, notebooks, and assorted rare or secret documents, all collected from the last five and a half centuries of human history for one purpose: to document every single event in the life of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Behold, the Copernicus Room.

After four years, the massive servers had at last come online, and this army of frowning scientists, burrowing historians, scurrying archivists, and bleary-eyed programmers was now assembled to collect, collate, and cross-reference every conceivable atom of available knowledge to track Copernicus’s slightest movement from the day of his birth, on 19 February 1473, to his fateful journey from Frombork, Poland, in 1514, with his assistant, Hans Novak, to his discovery of the time-traveling, relic-bejeweled astrolabe in a location still unknown, and every moment else, all the way to his death in Frombork Castle, on 24 May 1543.

All to determine the identity of the twelve first Guardians.

Now that the modern-day Guardians had invoked the infamous Frombork Protocol, which decreed that the relics be gathered from their hiding places around the world to be destroyed, Ebner found himself wondering for the millionth time: Who were these original protectors, the good men and women whom Copernicus asked to guard his precious relics? One was Magellan, yes. They knew how his relic was secreted in a cave on the island of Guam. Another was the Portuguese trader Tomé Pires, who brought the poisonous Scorpio relic to China, a relic nearly recovered in San Francisco two days ago. But who were the other ten? And what of the mysterious twelfth relic?

If it was possible to know, the Copernicus Room would tell them.

And yet, Ebner mused as he strolled among the Orcs, at such a cost.