فصل 01

PROLOGUE PART 1

THE SWORD

The Palatine Chapel, Aachen, Germany, A.D. 811

CHARLEMAGNE, CONQUEROR OF EUROPE, knelt before the stone altar. He was seventy, but with his reddish beard and full head of hair, he looked much younger. His lanky frame still held much of the strength that had made him a feared warrior.

Although usually surrounded by his knights, he chose to pray alone. He prayed for the peace to continue. And, as always, he prayed for forgiveness for his son, now forty, but still a boy in his father’s eyes—a foolish boy. He had killed the son of Ogier the Dane, who had been one of Charlemagne’s most trusted knights. Charlemagne regretted that any man should lose a son, but especially a man who had served him so well.

Charlemagne bowed his head, his lips moving as he recited the Scripture.

He sensed something behind him. Instantly, with an instinct honed in battle, he ducked his head and hurled himself sideways. A sword cleaved the air where his neck had been and struck an iron candle stand, slicing it cleanly in two as though it were a stick of kindling.

As Charlemagne scrambled to his feet, the burning candles fell onto the linen altar cloth, setting it ablaze. In the glare of the flames, Charlemagne recognized his attacker: it was Ogier the Dane, and the sword he held, known as Curtana, had been a gift from Charlemagne himself. Its blade—some said it had been forged from magical metal—had a distinctive notch six inches from the tip, a notch created forty years earlier, when Charlemagne and the Dane had been young men, and the best of friends. …

Charlemagne did not want this fight. If he could have stopped it with an apology, he would have done so. But the look in his former friend’s eyes told him that words would be useless. Ogier wanted blood. Blood for blood.

Charlemagne drew his sword, known as Joyeuse. Both men grunted as they swung their weapons, the blades glinting in the firelight, the clash of metal echoing off the chapel’s stone walls.

The two old knights, breathing heavily, circled each other warily in the swirling smoke, each looking for an opening. Ogier swung his sword, just missing Charlemagne’s jaw but slicing off a piece of the king’s beard.

Ogier swung again and Charlemagne jumped back, holding out Joyeuse to block the strike. The swords clanged together. Charlemagne stumbled backward, tripping on a prayer rug that had bunched beneath his feet. He fell to the stone floor, sprawled on his back, helpless. Ogier began to raise his sword, preparing to strike the fallen king. As he did, Charlemagne saw a brilliant light. He thought at first it was firelight reflecting from Ogier’s blade, but in the next instant, the light, dancing in the swirling smoke, seemed to form itself into…Could it be?

An angel.

Charlemagne stared, transfixed, at the face smiling at him, shimmering through the smoke with unearthly beauty. Charlemagne smiled back at the angel; if this was death, he welcomed it. Ogier, disconcerted by the man’s smile, paused. Then, with a grunt, he swung Curtana down toward the head of his former king. As he did, Charlemagne reached toward the angel, using the right hand in which he still held Joyeuse.

The two blades met. Charlemagne lost his grip. Joyeuse tumbled to the stone floor. The king was now unarmed; Ogier’s next blow would surely be fatal. Holding Curtana in both hands, the Dane raised it for a stabbing, downward thrust. And then he stopped, staring at its blade.

Curtana had lost its tip, broken off at the notch that Charlemagne had put into the blade all those years before.

The sword was blunt now, useless for stabbing. The tip, a piece six inches long, lay on the floor by Charlemagne’s shoulder.

Ogier, panting, stared at his sword—the sword that had served him faithfully for decades, in fight after fight. Then he looked at Charlemagne.

“It is not your day to die,” he said. “Curtana does not want to kill you.”

He laid the sword on the stone floor at Charlemagne’s feet.

“It was your sword at the start,” he said. “Now it is yours again.”

Charlemagne looked at the sword, then back at his old friend.

“You must go,” he said. “Before my knights pursue you. Go, and live in peace.”

Ogier nodded. “And you,” he said.

Charlemagne looked down at the sword’s broken tip. He picked it up, seeing light reflected in its smooth surface. He looked up, hoping to see the angel again, but saw only smoke drifting in the glow of the fire.

The angel was gone. So was Ogier.

Only Curtana remained. PROLOGUE PART 2

THE EYES

Osborne House, Isle of Wight, England, January 22, 1901

QUEEN VICTORIA LAY DYING.

At eighty-one years old, she had reigned over the vast British empire for sixty-three years and seven months, longer than any other British monarch. She had assumed the throne as a teenager, in an age of sailing ships and horse-drawn carriages; she was leaving a world that knew telephones, electric lights, and motorcars.

The queen lay on a large four-posted bed, her eyes closed, her face peaceful. Close by stood her physician, Sir James Reid, and the white-haired Bishop of Winchester, who murmured a prayer. Gathered around were members of the royal family, including the queen’s son, Crown Prince Albert Edward; upon her death, he would become king. The only sounds in the room, aside from the archbishop’s soft voice, were the ticking of a clock and the whispers of some of the smaller children, too young to feel the sorrow of the moment.

Almost everyone stood near the queen’s bed. The lone exception was a tall, extraordinarily thin man, standing alone in a gloomy corner of the room. The man’s gaze appeared to be focused on the crown prince. There was no way to know for certain, because the man wore eyeglasses with wire rims and lenses tinted a dark shade, almost black. He always wore these glasses, even at night. This was one of a number of strange things about him.

People avoided the tall man.

The archbishop finished his prayer. Sir James stepped forward and bent over his patient. The room went utterly silent now, save for the ticking of the clock.

At exactly 6:30 in the evening, Sir James stood and solemnly raised his hand. The onlookers immediately understood the meaning of this gesture.

Queen Victoria was dead.

Some gasped; some moaned; others simply bowed their heads. The archbishop began the benediction.

From inside the cluster of mourners, one of the younger children, a girl of five, peered around her mother’s dress at the tall man in the corner. She had been keeping an eye on him. Like most children who found themselves in his presence, she felt afraid of him, though if pressed she could not have said why.

As the little girl watched, the tall man beckoned toward the open doorway. A second man entered: short, bald, and stocky. The girl could tell by the hesitant way in which the shorter man approached that he, too, was wary of the tall man.

The man with the dark glasses leaned over and said something quietly to the short man, who then nodded and quickly left the room. Still bending over, the tall man turned toward the mourners, and as he did, his dark eyeglasses slid about an inch down the bridge of his long, thin nose. Immediately, he pushed them back up.

But for a half-second, the little girl caught a glimpse of what lay behind the tinted lenses.

She let out a scream.

Her mother, embarrassed, quickly swept up her daughter and carried her, still screaming, from the room. The rest of the mourners assumed that the child had been overcome by grief.

Later, when the girl had calmed down, she told her mother what she had seen. The mother dismissed it. A trick of the light, she said; an overactive imagination. No, insisted the girl. It was true. She had seen it! Finally the mother, embarrassed by her daughter’s outburst, ordered the girl to speak of it no more.

And so the girl spoke of it no more. But she could not rid herself of the memory of the tall man’s eyes. It came back to her over and over. It would come back to her for years, in her nightmares. CHAPTER 1

DISAPPEARANCE

London, 1902

JAMES SMITH, SURROUNDED BY A THRONG of home-bound commuters, climbed the steep stairs leading out of the South Kensington Underground station. Reaching the top, he felt the chill of the night air and pulled his overcoat tighter around him. He got his bearings and started toward Harrington Road. As he passed a newsstand, his eyes fell on a blaring black headline in one of the evening papers:

FOURTH DISAPPEARANCE LINKED TO UNDERGROUND

James stopped and examined the illustration accompanying the story. It was a drawing of a middle-aged businessman in suit and tie, a man who looked like many in the crowd flowing past James now. James already knew the details of the story. Two nights earlier, the man had stayed late at his job at a bank on Surrey Street. He left the bank at 8:30 and was last seen by a coworker descending the steps to the Temple Underground station. The banker’s usual route home was to ride the train to Westminster, where he would leave the Underground and board one of the new motorized omnibuses for the rest of his journey.

But he never reached his home. As far as the police could determine, he never emerged from the Underground. He was the fourth passenger to vanish this way in the past two weeks.

All four of the missing had been on the District Line—the same line James had just ridden. And while Londoners were generally a stoic lot, James had sensed an unusual level of tension in his fellow passengers—wary glances, an uneasiness as the train rocked its way through the dark tunnel, a general eagerness to get back up to the street.

James was not a fearful person. By the time he was twelve years old, he had survived ordeals more deadly and frightening than most people, of any age, could ever imagine. In his current job he was routinely exposed to London’s dark and violent underworld. He remained calm in the face of danger; he was viewed by his coworkers as an exceptionally levelheaded man.

But even James had felt something in the tunnel. He wouldn’t call it fear, exactly. But there had been a feeling at the back of his neck as the train rumbled along a particularly dark stretch of track, and a jerk of his head when he thought he’d seen, out of the corner of his eye, something through the window: a quick and fluid movement; a shifting shadow.

It was nothing, he’d told himself. A trick of the light. But the image had stayed in his mind—the flicker of shadow. It awakened memories he did not welcome, memories that had slept for more than twenty years—memories of other shadows, in another place. …

James shook his head as if to fling these thoughts away. He had urgent business to attend to. This was no time to wallow in unpleasant memories, or in the mysterious Underground disappearances. Whatever unfortunate fate had befallen the banker and the other three, it could not possibly have anything to do with the purpose of James’s trip to South Kensington tonight.

He turned away from the newsstand, pulled his coat around him tighter still, and set off along Harrington Road.