The Mortality Principle. Alex Archer

       3

      Annja was itching to get out and about, to do something, see something, anything that would take her mind off the nagging guilt.

      She picked up the research on the golem, skimming it without finding any inspiration in the dry text.

      She needed an angle.

      That was what made stories work.

      A human element. Something…different. Fresh. Something that would make the whole thing a little more interesting. If she couldn’t do that, maybe there was a second story from Prague she could stitch together to make something that might work.

      The rack at the back of the desk held a well-thumbed collection of tourist brochures with dull photographs of landmarks and sites to visit in and around the city. Some of those brochures probably dated back to the Charter 77 revolution. A few of the landmarks were too obvious. They offered the shots of buildings that appeared in every holiday brochure and website about the city. They offered little of real interest to her. She didn’t want to simply retread the footsteps of well-known history, especially with the added pressure on this segment from the suits. To be perfectly honest, it was bad enough that the golem was so ingrained in the psyche of the city that she couldn’t find anything to say that hadn’t already been said. It was the kind of myth that pushed all the other folk tales to one side. There was only room for one fantastic beast here. But surely that in itself should have helped her? It made the less well-known legends more appealing, didn’t it?

      Maybe.

      If she could find one worth telling.

      And with that thought it was as if something had clicked inside her head.

      She had found something to search for even if she had no idea what it was.

      This might be the golem’s city, but there had to be a more fascinating story beneath it, something better, in a city as old as Prague. She’d come across an epigram in her notes: Your problem, city, is that you have no soul. She couldn’t recall where she’d come across it, but she liked it.

      Annja pondered the notion of going out to Sedlec, in the Kutná Hora suburb, to check out the ossuary. There was a building with a story to tell—a church dating back eight hundred years, with upward of seventy thousand corpses exhumed, their bones used to decorate the chapels. Chandeliers of bones, garlands of skulls, an altar consisting of every single bone from the human body, monstrances fashioned from childlike skeletons and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms, also executed in bone. It was like nowhere else on Earth. That a half-blind monk had done the exhumation five hundred years ago was the stuff of macabre fairy tale, rather like the bone sculptures of the carpenter František Rint, who was behind the decor. Could she somehow marry that in with the stories of the golem? A made man against a backdrop of a quite literally man-made chapel? It would provide an incredible visual for the live broadcast, she realized. It was a possibility.

      She stuffed a handful of the leaflets into her bag and headed out with a little more of a spring in her step than when she’d come back into the room.

      Even without consulting the street map she’d picked up from reception, she knew that there were any number of places she could start looking for her story that didn’t involve heading out to the ossuary. The most obvious was the city’s Old Town.

      A convenient signpost only a few yards from her hotel pointed her in the right direction. The streets were considerably more alive if not teeming with tourists. Give it another hour, though, and that would be an entirely different matter. She walked on, looking at the endless matryoshka dolls on display in the shop windows around her.

      The traffic had started to build up toward the morning rush hour, but the way the city was constructed, most of it never entered the more pedestrianized center. Some of the wider boulevards with expensive designer-brand stores were lined with lush trees and lusher price tags while the narrower streets were snarled up with people trying to take shortcuts. That was another legacy of cities first built before the invention of the internal combustion engines; some survived by keeping the traffic out of town as much as possible while others allowed developers to gradually change the landscape. Prague, it seemed, wanted to be the best of both worlds, but just might be the worst.

      She turned onto Karlova Street and kept walking.

      A delivery bicycle hopped onto the curb to pass a stationery van delivering parcels. Annja had to step out of the way, ducking into the deep doorway of a building. There was no point in yelling at the cyclist’s back; he was already half a street away. No one was hurt, nothing was broken. An impatient car—a big black shiny SUV—behind the van sounded its horn. The van driver showed no sign of moving for the time being. He climbed out of the cab and gave a wave that, while it was meant to say Bear with me, I’ll only be a moment, came across more like Screw you, I was here first.

      Annja realized he was heading straight toward her, package in hand.

      She stepped aside to let him get to the door, catching sight of the confused expression on the man’s face, and guessed he’d thought she’d come down to take the delivery from him.

      “Sorry,” she said as she let him ring the bell.

      He just nodded, obviously uncomfortable with the foreign language.

      It was an unassuming little archway that promised the internet, a hair salon and a tobacco shop farther inside. There was a face carved into the keystone above the arch. As she stood on the sidewalk, she read the sign on the door. Kepler Museum.

      She’d heard of Kepler, of course. He’d been a key figure in the seventeenth century scientific revolution, with his breakthroughs in the understanding of planetary motion providing the groundwork for Isaac Newton’s gravitational theory.

      She was still trying to trawl her memory for anything she could remember about Kepler when the door opened. A middle-aged woman appeared on the doorstep to take the parcel. She signed his clipboard, then looked up at Annja, obviously unsure what she was doing loitering in the museum’s doorway.

      She was still looking at her when the man slammed the door on his cab and gunned the engine, much to the relief of the waiting line of vehicles that snaked down the length of Karlova Street.

      “Hello,” Annja said.

      “Ah, hello,” the woman replied. “I’m sorry, but we do not open for another hour.”

      She took a step out from under the archway to look up and down the street, rather like some wartime spy looking for a tail. Annja couldn’t help but smile to herself at the image. Maybe being in Eastern Europe was beginning to rub off on her way of thinking.

      The traffic began to move again, following the van down Karlova Street toward the wider roads that waited beyond.

      There