“Where is she now?” Percy asks.
“She’s buried . . . or entombed, rather. My father, before he was arrested—he knew they were coming for him and he wouldn’t be able to protect her any longer. So he had her locked up where no one could get to the heart. The key . . .” He picks up the puzzle box from the desk and shakes it. The sound of something fly-light rattling around inside it whispers through the room. “It opens her vault.”
This is, without question, the spookiest thing I’ve ever heard. It sounds like the sort of scary story Percy and I used to tell each other when we were lads, just to see who could get the other worked up first.
“And where’s the vault?” I ask. I’m ready to leap to my feet and sprint to some cemetery on the other side of the city as soon as he names the place, even though it’s the dead of night and we don’t actually have the key we need to open her tomb. I’d pry the damn thing open with nothing but my bare hands and sheer determination.
“Is it in Venice?” Percy asks. “There’s an island called Mary and Martha. Lazarus’s sisters in the Bible.”
Dante nods. “My father apprenticed with an alchemist there, as a boy. His teacher is long dead, but the men at the sanctuary . . . they still knew him. And they said they would hide her. That’s why he called it the Lazarus Key. It all seemed rather poetical at the time.”
“So his plan is to—what? Leave her there for the rest of time and waste his cure-all?” I ask. Felicity shoots me another think before you say inappropriate things look.
“Well, there’s a complication of late.” Dante reaches for his spectacles, remembers he’s not wearing them, and instead rubs his eyes. “The island is sinking.”
“It’s what?” Felicity and I say in unison.
“The tunnels under the sanctuary are collapsing. It’s all flooding. No one’s allowed there anymore. There isn’t much time left before the whole thing . . . it’s going to be at the bottom of the Lagoon.”
“So the one item on earth that can cure anything will be underwater in a few months if you don’t go fetch it?” I say. I want to smack my head against the hearth in frustration, because of course this couldn’t be as easy as it seemed for a brief, bright moment.
“That’s—that’s why the duke—why he came for us,” Dante says. “Collecting her has . . . it’s become more urgent.”
“So where does the duke come in, exactly?” Felicity asks. She’s taken one of his letters up from the desk and is examining it.
Dante rubs his hands together. “We had . . . When the experiment went wrong, my father destroyed his research before anyone could replicate it. But the duke—he wanted the panacea. He wanted the method more, but my father wouldn’t give it up—not any of it, not my mother or the work—so Bourbon had him locked up for his Hapsburg loyalty and came to Helena and me instead. So many people have come—come calling. Men who read my father’s book. They want the secrets to his work. That’s why—why we began to tell people he was dead and the work gone. Just so we’d be left alone.” He scrapes at his bottom lip with his teeth. “One Duke of Bourbon is—is bad enough.”
“Why didn’t your father destroy the heart, then?” Percy asks. “If he was so desperate to keep people from getting it.”
Dante shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Why does the duke need the panacea?” Felicity asks. “Is he ill?”
“The French king is,” I say, remembering suddenly a few scraps of information I was tossed at Versailles. They all look to me, and I scramble for more. “And the duke’s been dismissed as his prime minister.”
“Why would he want to give it to the king if they’ve parted ways?” Felicity asks.
I press at my temples with the tips of my fingers. “Maybe if he brought this cure-all to the king and kept him alive, he could get his position back. He could ask for anything he wanted, really.”
“Which secures the Bourbon family’s control of the French throne,” Percy finishes.
“And the Spanish,” Dante says.
“And Poland,” Felicity adds. “They’re everywhere.”
“So he’s going to blackmail the king in exchange for his health,” I say.
“Or, what if he took the heart and then found a way to duplicate it after a study?” Felicity says. “If the Bourbon family had that sort of knowledge—if anyone did . . .” She trails off, leaving each of us to spin his own end to that sentence.
Dante nods, looking suddenly miserable. “We know Bourbon has alchemists in the French court. They haven’t been able to copy my father’s work, but they’ve been trying, and if they had—had the heart to study . . .” He lapses into silence.
Felicity rounds on him, looking cross again. “So, why did you give him the box?”
“If he gets the heart, he’ll let our father out of prison. But it doesn’t matter.” He makes an attempt to laugh, but he’s so nervous it sounds a bit maniacal. “We don’t know the cipher. The duke took the box with him to Paris in hopes cryptographers in the court could crack it, but our father’s the only one who knows. And if he knew what we’d done . . .” He looks around at all of us, like he doesn’t quite know what the right course of action is and is hoping someone will offer it up for him. “He told us not to. Made us swear we wouldn’t hand her over.”
“And he won’t tell you the cipher?” I ask.
Dante shakes his head. “No, not Helena or me since she—she gave up the location of the tomb. To the duke. Father knows Helena would trade it for his freedom—I think that’s why he put the key in the box to begin with, to protect—to keep it from her. She’s devoted to—she and Mother fought, constantly, for . . . But Father was always her defender. And I think . . . now she wants to be his.” He rubs the back of his neck, then knits his fingers behind it, mouth pulling into a frown. “After our mother died, Father became obsessed—obsessed with trying to bring her back . . . or let her die. For good. Hence . . .” He waves a hand at the museum of funerary rites that decorates the walls. “Helena said . . . it was like losing both our parents to his obsession. And she—she blamed our mother for that . . . that too.”
“Well, if he won’t tell you,” I say, “do you think he’d tell me?”
Felicity actually laughs aloud at that pronouncement, which is rather hard not take personally. “Why would he tell you?”
“Because we could help him,” I say. “The island is sinking—if he doesn’t get her out soon, she’ll be gone forever, whether or not someone uses the panacea. If we can convince him of that, perhaps he’ll tell us the cipher and then you can fetch it.” It’s a great fight to keep my voice steady when all I’m spouting is rubbish—if we get the box open and get to that alchemical cure-all, there is only one thing I am going to do with it, but I can’t imagine Dante would be too keen if he knew our idea.
Or rather, my idea. Both Felicity and Percy are giving me a look that clearly conveys it is I alone taking a machete to this jungle.