Chapter 38
The chamber below the Roman Praetorium's deepest undercroft was vast. Dario had expected something claustrophobic, a cellar or a crypt. Instead, there was a great hall of Roman construction with columns of basalt rising to a vaulted ceiling.
The stonework was first century and older than almost anything still standing in Cologne.
The columns bore carvings that pre-dated Christianity, figures and symbols worn smooth with two millennia of damp but still recognizable as the Lares, the household gods, the protective spirits of the threshold.
The lararium was painted plaster in its niche, still showing traces of ochre and deep red.
The floor of the chamber was inlaid with precious stones, gold, and copper wire set in precise lines matching the planetary diagram Serapis had shown them on the screen in the Venice library.
Five planets were arranged in the shape of a human figure, arms outstretched, head tilted.
Saturn at the crown. The others marked the hands and feet.
The closed circle of five hundred years of waiting for the sky to align correctly.
Dario counted the people in the room with a quick glance.
Seventeen. They were arranged in a rough arc before the far wall.
Women, most of them, in clothes that ranged from the ordinary to the ceremonial, their eyes open but unfocused.
Among them, two of the gūl stood at the perimeter, motionless but ready.
Despina was in the middle of the crowd. She was bound at the wrists with red cords and seated on a Roman wood throne that had no business being in such good condition. Her dark hair was loose, her face pale, and a controlled fury ran beneath her expression.
Oh, Dario recognized that look, all right. She was waiting for the right moment to go nuclear on everyone around her. Her eyes moved about the room, finding them with uncanny speed, as if she could sense that Frederica was close.
Despina locked eyes with her daughter, and for a second, the cold blankness from her face vanished. She winked, and the blank mask slid back into place.
Dario bit down a laugh. Frederica nudged him with her elbow and pointed.
Agrippa stood at the far end of the chamber, before the obsidian mirror. It hung between two columns, its surface the same impossible darkness that creeped them out at the auction.
Agrippa had his back to the room, facing it, both hands raised. Dario's stomach clenched. They were late, and the ritual had already begun. The mirror's surface moved, and slowly, the dark swirling in a tight spiral that had nothing to do with the air in the chamber.
Agrippa lowered his hands and turned around. In this light, he didn't look like the well-groomed man in the good suit from Vienna, but something older. He was dressed in a red-and-gold toga with a laurel wreath on his head. His pale eyes scanned the room and fell on them.
"Ah, I thought I felt rats in my burrow," he said, and Dario and Frederica raised their guns. Agrippa's gaze moved to Dario's chest, and Altun's pendant burned.
"What little trinkets would you be carrying into my sacred space?" Agrippa asked, his voice slightly amused. "I suppose Foscari is lurking about somewhere, too? Or did he send you to die in his place?"
Aprippa wasn't even a little surprised they had come for him. His eyes moved to Frederica.
"And you," he said, smile turning vicious. "Lisette's blood. Your mother will open the door, but you…" He studied her, unhurried, as if they weren't standing in a chamber that was already beginning to respond to the convergence overhead. "You are going to make an exquisite disciple."
Frederica's knives flew from her hands. Agrippa moved out of the way of one and raised two fingers, stopping the other knife in the air between them, before it dropped to the floor.
"Crude," he said, with the tone of a teacher correcting something minor. "But I admire the spirit. Lisette had the same fire before I broke her."
"You didn't break her," Frederica spat, voice full of disdain.
"She escaped you. She walked out of Cologne on her own feet, and her line continued for five hundred years.
You were dumb enough to come looking for us.
Attacking me? That I could forgive, but you really fucked up when you hurt my father and laid hands on my mother. "
Something moved in Agrippa's pale eyes. It wasn't fear, more like a confusion that he hadn't fully anticipated.
Behind him, Despina placed her bound hands over Frederica's blade. It was embedded in the chair's wooden arm, and she began cutting away her bonds.
Agrippa had forgotten all about Despina with Frederica's arrival, just like they wanted him to. He was an idiot to think that her first knife was aimed at him.
Dario opened the velvet pouch he had taken from his neck while Agrippa had been distracted with Frederica and tipped the Thriae Bee onto his palm. The carved wings caught the light from the chamber's old iron lamps as it heated in his hand.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's face changed as his attention snapped to the bee. The cultured patience fell away, and beneath it was something very old, very hungry, and suddenly very angry. He ran toward Dario, a snarl twisting his face.
Dario raised the bee and commanded in Ancient Greek, "Idete tēn alētheian!"