Three Emperors (9780062194138) Read Online Free PDF

How?
    Boots pounded on the parquet below.
    Richter yanked off his mask to take better aim, and it was then that I truly started. No wonder he made love in disguise! Beneath the covering was one of the most hideous faces I’d ever seen.
    Someone had melted it. His cheeks and lips were a mass of scars, as if ravaged by acid, a hole in one spot giving a glimpse of a tooth. The color was an angry red, and one eye squinted against the pull of scar tissue.
    â€œI think you will share everything you know,” he said, face muscles straining to enunciate past the damage. The man was a monster, and had set a trap.
    But so had I.

Chapter 4
    Astiza
    T he language of angels is Enochian, and the language of gods is the stars. I cannot see the sky’s fire from my alchemical laboratory, its vaulted stone ceiling the weight of divine silence. I’ve heard nothing from Ethan in nearly a year. Our son, Horus, is pale and withdrawn, his hands pitifully wrapped in rags. We are prisoners, and Harry’s unhappiness is my greatest torture. I keep us alive by agreeing to do Satan’s work, mixing brews that promise gold and immortality for my captors. Penelope held off her suitors until her husband Odysseus’s return by asking them to wait until she completed her weaving, and then unspooled her progress each evening. I delay by skittering globules of silver mercury and glints of copper to conjure a miracle, and then concoct slag at midnight to convince them of another failure. They cannot kill me until I succeed. Yet each experimental mistake makes them surly. Our cell stinks of fumes, our eyes strain from inadequate candlelight, and our joints ache from damp.
    Alchemists John Dee and Edward Kelley received revelation from the angels in the language of the patriarch Enoch, great-grandfather of Noah. Enoch learned it when he was lifted up to tour heaven. There are books in my prison written with the angelic script, such as Mystic Sevenfold Rulership, The 48 Angelic Keys, and the Book of Earthly Knowledge, Help and Victory. Their meaning, alas, remains a riddle to all but the angels. I’m ensnared in webs of mystery, my only hope that pursuit of the rose will lead me through its labyrinth of petals to truth at the bud. I’m devising an escape but need the help of my husband. Ethan, where are you?
    Has my quest for understanding led me to earthly damnation? Or was it merely my impatience to flee Napoleon’s coronation at Notre Dame without waiting for my mate, thinking I could discover a bargaining chip that would protect us all? He doesn’t know that when searching the bedroom of Catherine Marceau in Paris, I found a cache of her romance novels, that I brought three of them in my bag to the coronation at Notre Dame, and that they made a fine weapon to sling against the head of the giant policeman Pasques in order to escape. It was the first useful service Catherine did for my family. The blow gave Horus and me time to run from the cathedral with the letters of recommendation that Talleyrand had given me. The French minister wanted us to search for the fabled Brazen Head.
    Now I kneel on flagstones, palms on the rock, to feel the Goddess mother. But the womb of the earth is only half of what sustains us. I’m buried from the sky, and thus robbed of male power. All things are dual, and burial keeps me half a priestess.
    My jailers know this. I beg for a tower. They fear me too much to allow one. If I don’t cooperate, I’ll be tied to a stake and burned. Or so they threaten. And then the dwarf eyes my son . . .
    My name is Astiza of Alexandria, priestess of Isis and Athena, devotee of the white Madonna and the black, seeker of Astarte, Artemis, Cybele, Ishtar, Mary, Sophia, and Freya. My husband is Pan and Vulcan, Mercury and Mars, as dissatisfied as Siddhartha and as redeemable as Augustine. I despair for his soul and yet miss him desperately. I’m the white rose, he the red. All these