Antigone glanced at her brother. Cyrus swallowed. His hand floated up toward his neck and stopped. He could feel Patricia, but the weight of the keys was gone. His hand dropped. He’d slept with them in his pocket, but he couldn’t feel them against his leg. Sterling’s eyes were on him. He couldn’t reach for his pocket now. Scooping up eggs, he loaded his cheeks.
“Mr. Cyrus,” said the cook. “Miss Antigone. You can trust Ben Sterling. I was a friend to your father and he to me. I even taught your mother a few of the kitchen’s ways, and that’s not something that’s happened for another. Time may come when you two need a friend who can keep a secret. If you do, Ben Sterling will be standing there, just like he always was for your father.”
Cyrus slid his hand down to his leg and looked at his sister. He could feel chilly sweat beading on his forehead. He groped his legs, but the only lump was a little square that he knew was holding a beetle. Antigone was staring at him, her eyes widening.
“Something wrong, Mr. Cyrus? Egg too slippy?”
“No.” Cyrus was forcing himself to breathe slowly. “No.”
Antigone spun back to the cook. “What is that thing, the tooth, even supposed to do?” Her voice was pitched too high. She knew something was wrong.
Cyrus shoved his hand into his pocket, but he already knew the keys were gone. The lightning bug glass buzzed his fingers as he searched around it.
Ben Sterling turned back to Antigone, scratching his beard. “I couldn’t say — not being a wizard, an angel, a demon, or a man of science. I’m just a cook missing his legs and making do with a pair of delicate ears.”
Hesitating, Sterling twisted around, scanning his kitchen. “Susanna!” he yelled. “Watch the line.”
Cyrus pulled a small piece of paper from his pocket where the keys had been. A short message had been written in hurried black letters.
Inflating his cheeks, Cyrus rolled the paper into a tight ball and dropped it back into his pocket. Trust Nolan? He’d been robbed. He felt insulted. Moronic. Was Nolan taunting him? He looked down at his breakfast, his appetite fading.
“The tooth,” Sterling said. “In tales older than the oceans, from when the moon was young and green, the tooth is always said to have the power of Death. But any sharp stick can kill you, I’m not meaning that. I mean Death’s own power. Death as men imagine him to be, carrying that long-bladed scythe, harvesting souls like corn. The tooth is like the Reaper’s Blade.”
Sterling breathed in deep. When he spoke again, his voice had found a different rhythm. The swirl and bustle of the kitchen was forgotten. His story had dropped into a rocking chair beside some quiet fire.
“When Man was first tilling ground and tending gardens, before he thought to wall his cities, Draco the Devourer came on down from his stars. He hated Man for his body and soul, joined together in one creature, and he meant to rip the two apart forever — Man would be mere flesh, or mere soul, but never both. Old Draco fashioned himself a monstrous scaly body and a set of charmed teeth with edges to them that could slice a soul’s hair sideways.
“But things just didn’t go as planned — they never do for dragons. Raging, Draco spread his wings and dropped through the sky’s floor. Cities burned, and everywhere he went, souls withered, sliced and uprooted from their flesh. But one boy picked up a stone, and while men fled screaming, he threw it into the demon’s mouth and knocked out just one tooth as long as the boy’s own arm. He picked it up by the root, and with it, he slew the dragon body. Draco retreated into the stars, but he left behind that tooth.”
The cook smiled. “And if you listen to an old cook, that’s where the tooth came from.”
“You’re joking, right?” Antigone asked.
“Am I?” asked Sterling.
Antigone ran her hands over her hair and looked at him sideways. “Well, you don’t believe that. A star dragon?”
Sterling straightened. “Come with me,” he said, and springs squealed in his steel legs as he strode away. Cyrus and Antigone followed him across the kitchen to a side door.
“I’ll tell you this much,” the cook said over his shoulder. “Jason used that tooth to fetch the Golden Fleece. Called up immortal warriors with it from sown Dragon’s Teeth, and it was the only blade he could use to cut them down. Cadmus used that blade to call warriors from bone when he founded Thebes. It can call the dead to life — though not as they were — and shatter the undying. Alexander used it to raze the world and only failed when it was stolen. Julius, Hannibal, Attila, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler — all of them sought it, and some of them found it. For a time.”
The cook lumbered down the corridor in front of them, bells jingling, flour drifting off him in slow curls. He was leading them back toward the Galleria, toward the leather boat on its pedestal. Before they reached it, he stopped and pointed up at the wall, where an enormous reptilian skin ran along above the floor.
“Is that real?” he asked.
Cyrus scanned it. “Is it from a huge snake?”
“Not a snake, lad. Follow it around the corner.” The cook turned down a side hall, and Cyrus and Antigone followed him. The skin ran with them. And then it splayed into the fingers of a claw — three forward and one back, each of them longer than Cyrus was tall.
“Not a snake, lad,” Sterling said again. He walked to the end of the hallway and turned into another passage. Cyrus, in a daze, staggered along beside his sister, not paying any attention to where they were going. Whatever the tooth did, it was gone now. Probably forever. He should be relieved. He tried to be. But all that he felt was lead-bellied failure.
Sterling stopped and gripped the handle of a black door.
“Well, it doesn’t have to be a star dragon,” Antigone said. “It could be a dinosaur.”
“Could be,” Sterling said. “But if I was eye to eye with a flying reptile the size of a house and with a mind to eat me, I wouldn’t use the word dinosaur.”
He forced the door open with a pop and stepped to the side. “After you, Miss Antigone.”
Antigone stepped into darkness. Cyrus followed her, dust and decay trickling into his lungs. He sneezed. The door boomed closed and they were left with only four senses — ears straining, skin tingling, the smell of fur and formaldehyde, the taste of old, undisturbed air.
The cook’s bells jingled. “This is one of six African collections, though Celtic and Asian is a bit mixed up in everything.”
He punched a switch and electricity crackled overhead. After a moment, an army of dangling lanterns fluttered to life beneath the high, beamed ceiling.
Row after row of shelves and collection cases, full to overflowing, teetered up beneath the lights. Tiny, cluttered spaces, no more than two feet wide, ran between each row. A backbone the size of a large tree hung above it all, dangling from anchor chains.
Cyrus’s eyes widened, his failure forgotten for the moment. “What is all this stuff?” he asked. “Why is it here?”
“These shelves hold the maps, journals, treasures, samples, and artifacts of every Journeyman, Explorer, Keeper, and Sage to have wandered the African continent on behalf of this Order.” The cook waved big arms at the shelves. “Most of this here is from Ashtown explorations, but some of the collections were brought over from the Order’s European Estates before the French Revolution.
“In here, if you know where to look, you’ll find pieces collected by old Marco Polo, including the rhinoceros horn that sent him into months of black dog funk.” Sterling laughed. “He thought the rhino was his long-sought unicorn, and sadly, it was nothing like he’d hoped a unicorn would be.