Rose of Fire Read Free

at last found him and that his death was a very small price to pay to purify the black soul of the beast, which was none other than the soul of all men. Raising the fist that held the tear of Christ, Edmond closed his eyes and offered himself up. In a flash, the jaws swallowed him and the dragon rose high above the clouds. Those who remember that day say that the heavens split in two and a great brightness lit up the firmament. The beast was enveloped in the flames that poured out through its teeth and as it flapped its wings it formed a huge rose of fire that covered the entire city. Silence ensued and when they opened their eyes again, the sky was shrouded as in the darkest of nights and a gentle rain of bright ash flakes was falling from on high, covering the streets, the burned ruins and the entire city of tombs, churches and palaces with a white mantle that melted when one touched it and smelled of fire and damnation.
    7
    That night Raimundo de Sempere managed to escape from his cell and return to his home to discover that his family and his book-printing workshop had survived the catastrophe. At dawn, the printer approached the Sea Wall. Debris from the shipwreck that had brought Edmond de Luna to Barcelona swayed on the water. The sea had begun to break up the hull and Sempere was able to enter it, as one would enter a house with a wall removed. Walking through the bowels of the ship in the ghostly light of dawn, the printer at last found what he was looking for. Saltpetre had partly erased the outlines, but the plans for the great labyrinth of books were still intact, just as Edmund de Luna had conceived it. Sempere sat on the sand and unfolded the plans. His mind could not encompass the complexity and the arithmetic that held that marvel together, but he told himself that there would be other illustrious minds capable of understanding its secrets. Until then, until the time when other men wiser than him found the means of saving the labyrinth and recalling the price exacted by the beast, he would keep the plans in the family chest where some day, he had no doubt, it would find the maker of labyrinths worthy of such a challenge.

An excerpt from
    The Prisoner of Heaven
    A novel by
    C ARLOS R UIZ Z AFÓN
    Translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves
    On sale July 10, 2012, from

    1
    Barcelona, December 1957
    That year at Christmas time, every morning dawned laced with frost under leaden skies. A bluish hue tinged the city and people walked by, wrapped up to their ears and drawing lines of vapour with their breath in the cold air. Very few stopped to gaze at the shop window of Sempere & Sons; fewer still ventured inside to ask for that lost book that had been waiting for them all their lives and whose sale, poetic fancies aside, would have contributed to shoring up the bookshop’s ailing finances.
    ‘I think today will be the day. Today our luck will change,’ I proclaimed on the wings of the first coffee of the day, pure optimism in a liquid state.
    My father, who had been battling with the ledger since eight o’ clock that morning, twiddling his pencil and rubber, looked up from the counter and eyed the procession of elusive clients disappearing down the street.
    ‘May heaven hear you, Daniel, because at this rate, if we don’t make up our losses over the Christmas season, we won’t even be able to pay the electricity bill in January. We’re going to have to do something.’
    ‘Fermín had an idea yesterday,’ I offered. ‘He thinks it’s a brilliant plan that’ll save the bookshop from imminent bankruptcy.’
    ‘Lord help us.’
    I quoted Fermín, word for word:
    ‘ Perhaps if by chance I was seen arranging the shop window in my underpants, some lady in need of strong literary emotions would be drawn in and inspired to part with a bit of hard cash. According to expert opinion, the future of literature depends on women and as God is my witness the female is yet to be born who can resist the primal allure