He finally reached the room he had been searching for. Calendar’s map was precise to the last detail. There, on the other side, was the crypt. He approached it warily, trying to extinguish the ridiculous notions in his head. The quiet of the cathedral. The staleness of the air. The creepy, Gothic touches that filled every nook and corner. It all made for a nightmare, especially when combined with the sight before him: the grave of the Black Queen.

She was known in her lifetime by a different name: Cillei Borbála, or, more commonly, Barbara of Cejle. The daughter of Count Herman II, she came from a long line of nobles, a commanding dynasty that continued for centuries after her departure from this life, her very blood running in the veins of Nicholas II of Russia hundreds of years later.

Her rise to prominence came with her marriage to the Holy Roman emperor Sigismund, a ruthless man who would stop at nothing to preserve his own crown, even going so far as to have his first wife and her mother kidnapped and then brutally killed. Sigismund met Barbara after her father saved Sigismund’s life during a battle against the warring Turks. Barbara recognized him as the type of man she would need to collect the great forces of the land under a new banner of her own design—the Order of the Dragon.

August put his hand on the crypt. It was cold. He read an inscription carved into the stone: Crna Kraljica. The Black Queen. The name referred to a dark myth that had surrounded Barbara since her second death.

Yes, her second.

The story told of a powerful magician named Abra-Melin, also known as Abraham the Jew, a practitioner of magic based on his kabbalistic belief that the world was formed by the demons under the direction of angels. Sigismund knew of Abra-Melin’s abilities— his creation of a spirit army to help Fredrick of Saxony, his supernatural aid in freeing the Earl of Warwick from prison, his saving of the antipope John XXIII from the Council of Constance —and employed the magus to advise him on a variety of matters, both public and private. Abra-Melin was said to have provided many extraordinary services for the emperor and his queen, but none so well known as Sigismund’s final request: to raise Barbara from the dead.

It was just a legend. A gruesome fairy tale. But August found, as he prepared to remove the lid of her sarcophagus, that he couldn’t dodge the image of Barbara sitting upright in her deathbed and grabbing him by the throat.

He inspected his work, the crank connected to the jack that would force the crypt open. “This is wrong on so many levels,” he said aloud, his voice acting as a whistle in the dark.