City of Lost Dreams by Magnus Flyte Page B

naturally) had been a courageous soldier, but seemed ambivalent about his princely duties and a lot more interested in alchemy.
    There weren’t many people in the cathedral today, though it was an impressive place. Like much of Prague, it was steeped in a complicated history and awash with emotions great and terrible. It was here that the Czech patriots who had assassinated the Nazi
Reichsprotektor
Reinhard Heydrich had made their last stand on June 17, 1942. Despite a misfiring pistol, they had managed to wound the bloodthirsty and cruel Heydrich on May 27, and the squad, which had parachuted in from London, had evaded capture while he languished. But when Heydrich finally kicked the bucket, the Gestapo had gone into high gear, and tortured people until they got answers, including showing one child his mother’s head in a fish tank. Once the Nazis knew that this church was the hideout, they began to try to force out the squad with tear gas and bombs. You could still see the bullet holes in the walls and visit the crypt where the squad had committed suicide rather than be captured. All that had happened right here, where Max was sitting, not paying attention to the priest.
    You could say his life had really gotten weird when he had first taken the drug Westonia. After the drug, Max had never been able to see anything quite the same again. Walking around the palace (his palace) in Prague or the castle (his castle) in Nelahozeves, he knew he was surrounded by the energy of great lives, great passions. Like it wasn’t intimidating enough to be surrounded by portraits of your illustrious ancestors sporting the Order of the Golden Fleece on their fucking doublets.
    And then there was the knowledge that his ancestors had been part of some
secret
Order of the Golden Fleece, a book containing the mystical theory of everything, or spells of ultimate power, or maybe just a load of crap. None of his ancestors had bothered to leave Max any clear instructions about what it was. Or where it was. Or how he was supposed to protect it. Or if there were any other members to the secret order other than him. Or what the secret handshake was, or if there were annual meetings. If they had left instructions, they had been destroyed or misplaced. Or hidden. Or used to line pie tins by an illiterate housemaid, like some of John Dee’s papers had been.
    Every other day he got an invitation to join a secret order. It was part of who he was now, the thirteenth in a line of princes. He had been courted by the Knights of the Triangle. The Brotherhood of the Rooster. Gentlemen of the Bronzed Codpiece. Maybe the secret Order of the Golden Fleece was just another version of those. An excuse to dress up in costumes and try to pretend you were as cool as the people who founded your dynasty.
    Maybe one of those books in the basement would contain something helpful.
    Max looked at the little man seated next to him. Nico believed that the knowledge contained in the book of the Fleece was science, but an advanced science that, four centuries later, modern science was only beginning to catch up to. Like Westonia, which activated glial cells in the brain and allowed you to experience nonlinear time. Which turned out to be the real nature of time. Now it was understood that particles could be in more than one place at one time and that there were probably multiple universes. What else was spelled out in the Fleece? Did the knowledge go all the way back to the Greeks or further? Was it some kind of basic manual for use of the planet, like the unified field theory that Einstein had dreamed of? Had the alchemists, unfettered by the strictly labeled confines of modern science, students of physics, medicine, biology, chemistry, and astronomy, as well as philosophy and religion, discovered the basic laws that dictated the universe and the way to manipulate them?
    Nico had been helping him track down clues to the Fleece, but right now the only quest that mattered was