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of Saint John of Nepomuk in Prague had been intriguing. The whole episode did have the ring of the kinds of practical jokes Nico and his friends used to play in the past. Except someone had shot at Sarah. That was simply not cricket.
    “I only sell you one bottle and yet you have three empties.” The depressingly mannish Czech airline . . . person . . . pointed to the row of vodka bottles on his seat tray. Nico sighed. Why would you
not
take something that rolled past you at hand height?
    He was drinking a bit much these days, and he had seen Sarah notice it, but he had a lot on his mind. He really did want to find the ingredients for Philippine Welser’s medicine. It would be nice to do something for Pollina. Sarah was skeptical about the old herbal remedies, but Nico had seen the miracles those healing women had worked. Certainly antibiotics and anesthesia were major improvements over biting a strap while someone sawed your leg off, but modern medicine had its blind spots.
    What would modern medicine have to say about himself, for instance? Nico knew that somewhere the cure for his condition must exist. Tycho Brahe had made him immortal from a formula he had stolen from one of Emperor Rudolf’s books. The book of the Golden Fleece. Sarah had seen the book—under the influence of Westonia—but then had lost the trail. Nico and Max had spent the better part of the past two years trying to pick up the trail on their own, with no luck. Sarah had reported seeing Tycho Brahe discussing the Fleece with the old mathematician and alchemist Dr. John Dee, and Nico had been all over Europe hunting through Dee’s old diaries and artifacts. There was plenty to be found—the Bodleian Library at Oxford had a trove of Dee’s diaries, but nothing even remotely Fleece-y.
    The thought of blowing the one solid chance he had at shucking off the old immortal coil had thoroughly depressed him.
Carpe diem
was fun only as long as you had a
diem
to
carpe
.
Carpe eternum
was a drag. If he was hitting the bottle a little harder lately, who could blame him?
    Nico took a train from Heathrow to Paddington, deciding to detour for a pint at a favorite haunt from the old days. It might cheer him up a little.
    The Windsor Castle pub in Kensington loomed up before him. Oh, the divertissements he’d enjoyed with his friends here! Like the time he had dispatched town criers to stand under the Duchess of Kent’s window and announce her beheading. Nobody knew how to punk properly anymore. Or spy! Computer hacking had brought all kinds of boring people into the trade, and the market was flooded, which drove down prices. Barely enough to keep a man out of the circus. Not that he had to worry so much about money anymore. Nico ordered a tankard of pear cider and considered the Barbour-clad Sloane Rangers on their cell phones around him. These days he only picked pockets if he was in a good mood. He watched a couple of lawyers in Zegna suits bend themselves in half to try to squeeze through the door to the back room, which was only four feet, six inches high, then strode through himself, head held high.
    “Looks like it was made for you, mate,” remarked the ironically muttonchopped barkeep.
    “It was,” said Nico and headed for the loo, recalling—just in time—that it was no longer acceptable to urinate out the front window onto the street. Sometimes when he got drinking, his chronology became a trifle confused.
    Several pints of cider and a shot of Irish whiskey sloshed gently in his stomach as he walked down Piccadilly, ignoring the curious—then deliberately uncurious—reactions of passersby to his unusual person. Only very small children were honest about staring, the little cretins. Gods, London had really lost its stink and become incredibly clean. So depressing.
    The British Museum was famously enormous, a receptacle for all the loot the Brits had managed to impolitely carry off while visiting any number of foreign countries (and