At the far end of the table sat Rudolph II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

There was nothing remarkable about the emperor. Short, slightly pudgy, bland eyes. He sat with his shirt open, doublet unbuttoned, listening intently to an old, old man in monk’s robes and a skullcap discuss the problems involved in removing tons of rock and dirt. Two men at the other end of the table, close to where Dee and Kelley stood in the open doorway, debated the best way to feed and house the hundreds of laborers who had descended upon the castle. There were other conversations that Kelley couldn’t follow.

Rudolph spotted Dee and raised a hand. The din ceased abruptly.

“Gentlemen, I’m afraid I need the room,” the emperor said. “If you could excuse us.”

They stood, gathering parchments as they went.

“Stay just a moment, Hans,” the emperor said.

A gaunt, pale man in his fifties nodded and resumed his seat.

Kelley followed Dee into the room after the others departed.

“Your Highness.” Dee bowed slightly.

Kelley hastened to mimic the gesture.

“Gentlemen, be seated,” Rudolph said. “Dr. Dee, I want you and your associate to make the acquaintance of Hans Vredeman de Vries.”

The men nodded to one another.

“Hans has been designing fountains for the palace grounds,” Rudolph explained. “He can work miracles with water flow and drainage. We’ve recently put him on to something a little more ambitious. Some of my scientists have suggested a new way of generating power, something that might aid your own research. I simply wanted you to meet. I think in the future you might be working closely together. Hans, excuse us, won’t you?”

Hans stood, nodded again, and left.

The emperor turned to Dee. “Progress remains slow?”

Dee’s smile was painful, embarrassed. “Highness, considering the difficulty of the task, a slow approach is certainly to be expected.”

The emperor pursed his lips, nodded. Kelley detected no signs of emotion either way. Had Dee and Kelley been summoned to a dressing down? Were they to be chastised for slow progress, or was Rudolph simply after a routine progress report? Kelley had been relegated to cleaning beakers and checking measurements, but it was his firm opinion they would never turn lead into gold. Not if they kept at it for a thousand years.

Sicily. Definitely Sicily.

“What do you see as the key to success?” Rudolph asked. “On a fundamental level.”

“It concerns the manipulation of matter on a level of pure essence, Highness,” Dee said. “I’ve tried a number of chemical compounds in an attempt to sunder the cosmic energies that hold an essence in place.”

A brief pause.

Then Rudolph said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Neither did Kelley.

Dee cleared his throat, squirmed in his seat. “It is a difficult concept to communicate clearly, Highness.”

“Try.”

That nervous laugh again. Dee wiped his brow with a handkerchief. Kelley had to admit he enjoyed Dee’s discomfort. On the other hand, anything that happened to Dee would surely also affect Kelley. Like it or not, he and Dee were a team. Come on, Dr. Dee. Let’s see some smooth talk, and make it fast.

Dee grabbed a silver cup from across the table, set it in front of him. “Consider this silver goblet, Highness.”

Rudolph leaned forward, looked at the cup.

“If you broke it in half, each piece would be smaller,” Dee said. “But both pieces would still be silver.”

“Obviously,” Rudolph said.

“Uh… yes. And if you kept breaking the goblet into smaller and smaller pieces, each piece would still be silver. Now imagine you break it into a thousand pieces. Ten thousand pieces. Ten thousand times ten thousand individual pieces.”

“That would be impossible.”

“In theory, Highness.”

Rudolph shrugged. “In theory then.”

“Your Highness is most patient,” Dee said. “Imagine you’ve somehow broken the goblet into as many pieces as you can possibly break it. Pieces so small they cannot even be seen. Now take one of these pieces-a piece that cannot be broken any further-and break it again. You are now breaking it past the point where it continues to be silver. Break it any more, and it will no longer be silver.”

Rudolph considered a moment, then asked, “Then, if not silver, what is it?”

“Ah.” Dee thrust a finger in the air. “Therein lies the mystery, Highness. What, indeed? But a more pertinent question, I would contend, is, once having deprived this infinitely small piece of matter of its innate… silverness, what then can be done to change it, manipulate it into something else? Could we not build it back as something different? What I am attempting to do with our experiments is to attack the very force that holds the silver together.”

The pause this time was much longer. Kelley would not ask Dee to come to Sicily with him. The deranged alchemist was on his own.

“I do not fully understand what you say,” Rudolph admitted. “But I sense you have an understanding of this matter that is simply beyond me, and I am intrigued. The lodestones you asked for. I take it they are another attempt to manipulate these energies you speak of?”

“Your Highness is most insightful,” Dee said.

Rudolph said, “What if I were to tell you that my astrologers might have discovered another possible way for you to address these energies?”

Dee spread his hands. “I would naturally be most grateful for any additional tools that would aid in the pursuit of Your Highness’s ultimate goal.”

Rudolph nodded. “Stand ready, then. It could happen at any time. Thank you, gentlemen, that will be all.”

They stood, bowed, and left. On the way out, Kelley became determined to make Dee talk. What in blazes was this ultimate goal? No, Kelley was tired of being in the dark. He’d need to figure some way to loosen Dee’s tongue.

He put his hand on Dee’s back, an uncharacteristically friendly gesture. “Well done, Dr. Dee. I think the emperor was impressed with your explanation. How about a quick drink to celebrate?”

Dr. Dee might have been a gigantic prick, but I had to give him credit. I’d had no idea at the time that he’d been speculating about the nature of matter on an atomic level. Nobody had had the vocabulary. Protons and electrons and so forth had been centuries away.

And then there had been the darker forces, which science has yet to explain.

I should have gone to Sicily.

It’s true that I have a facility for languages. In the hundreds of years I’ve haunted Prague Castle and its environs, I’ve become more fluent in Czech than any Czech. I’ve learned German and Russian. Even a smattering of Japanese. The castle draws tourists from all four corners of the globe. My French is good, but even now, my Spanish is still weak.

There is a room behind one of the gift shops where the cleaning staff can lounge and have a smoke. They have a TV in the lounge. I’ve seen every episode of Hogan’s Heroes dubbed into German. Prague gets German TV. It’s easier to spy on TV than it is to read a book over somebody’s shoulder, but I’ve done that too.

The problem is that I can’t touch anything, so it’s hard to turn pages. I can float through walls and doors, drift the night gardens, haunt the tombs beneath St. Vitus Cathedral. There is no nook or cranny of this place I haven’t seen a hundred times. But I can’t turn pages. I still haven’t made it through all the Harry Potter books. For the first three volumes, I stood over the shoulder of this nice woman who worked in the kitchens. She’d take her break on a bench outside and read while taking a quick lunch. She was a slow reader. But she got married and moved away, so I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to read the rest. I think Harry and Hermione will get together. I just have a feeling.