Deirdre swallowed hard. “I don’t know . . .”
Beltan made a growling sound low in his throat. “You have to help me get that gate. I will not lose Travis. I will not!” His hands twitched, and he started for the Grecian urn.
Deirdre jumped up and stepped in front of the big man. For a moment she wasn’t so certain that was a good idea. No doubt, when tossed against a wall, she would make every bit as satisfying a smashing sound as the urn. He reached for her.
She grabbed his hand, holding it. “I promise, Beltan. On the Book, I swear it. Anders and I will help you find a way to get to Travis if it’s the last thing we do.”
And it very well might be. However, the words seemed to calm him. He returned to the table, and Deirdre let out a breath. Had she really just offered up her life to save an old vase? But she hadn’t promised they would try to take the arch back from the Scirathi, only that they would help Beltan find Travis.
Is there really a di ference between the two, Deirdre? You know there’s no other way to Eldh besides the archway.
“I don’t want to be the cloud that rains on the parade,” Anders said, taking a sip of his coffee, “but even assuming the Scirathi hand over the arch when we politely ask for it, and even assuming that keystone fits, how are we supposed to activate the gate? In case you’ve forgotten, that takes some extra special blood, which we just happen to be fresh out of.”
“Oh, that’s not a problem,” Beltan said. “I kept this.”
He pulled a dark, wadded‑up piece of cloth from his pocket. It was the sleeve of Anders’s suit coat, which Vani had used last night as a makeshift bandage. It was crusted with dried blood– Travis’s blood.
Anders let out a low whistle. “Warriors can have brains indeed.”
“Is anyone going to eat that last sandwich?” Beltan said, and reached for the plate before either of them could answer.
21.
An hour later, Deirdre sat at her desk in the basement office she shared with Anders. Beltan was all for making a raid on the Scirathi right away, but Anders had managed to convince the blond man to get some rest first. Besides, they had no idea where the Scirathi had taken the arch after they stole it from the site on Crete. It could be anywhere in the world.
Deirdre supposed she should rest, too. She hadn’t gotten a wink in twenty‑four hours, and sleep deprivation wasn’t generally part of the formula for successful research. However, she felt jittery and strangely alert. As foolish as her promise to Beltan was, she didn’t regret it; she wanted to help him find Travis. After all, Hadrian Farr had managed to find a way to Eldh. Why couldn’t she?
Is that what this is, Deirdre?asked a detached aspect of herself–the wise voice she didn’t always listen to but should, the shaman in her. Is it all just some competition with Hadrian Farr? He got to Eldh, so now you have to as well?
Before she could answer that, Anders set a steaming mug of coffee amid the stacks of papers on her desk.
“Nice way to include me in that little vow of yours, mate. How did it go?” He raised his husky voice into a falsetto. “ ‘Anders and I will help you find a way to get to Travis if it’s the last thing we do.’ ”
Deirdre winced. “Sorry about that. I didn’t have much time to think. I was protecting a very important urn.”
“It’s all right,” he said, sitting on the corner of her desk. “I want to help. Bloody hell, what red‑blooded Seeker wouldn’t want to? Opening up doors to other worlds . . . that’s what we’re all about. It’s what I signed on for. So let me know what I can do.”
Deirdre felt her dread recede. Even when things looked hopeless, Anders was incessantly cheery. Only it wasn’t annoying, now that she thought about it. Instead, it was heartening. . . .
“What is it, mate?”
She shook her head. “What is what?”
“Do I have a bit of sandwich on my face or something? You were looking at me funny just now.”
Horror flooded Deirdre. She must have been doing it again. Glowing. Quickly, she grabbed a random folder, opened it, and bent her head over the papers inside.
“There’s one thing that would be a big help,” she said. “See if you can get any images of the arch from newspaper and television sources. Our first step is to learn everything we can about the arch. If we do, we may find a clue that will tell us where the Scirathi have taken it.”
“Now that’s thinking like a Seeker, partner. I’ll get right on it.”
After Anders left, Deirdre cleared everything off her desk, then spent the next several hours welded to her notebook computer, typing and clicking as she called up every document related to the keystone, the Thomas Atwater case, Greenfellow’s Tavern, Surrender Dorothy, and Glinda. Once she had gathered all the printouts and photos, she shuffled them on her desk, moving them around like the pieces of a puzzle, trying to see if they fit together in a way she hadn’t seen before.
The DNA sequence of Glinda’s blood had been the clue that first led Deirdre to the keystone. A sample of dried blood had been collected from the keystone centuries ago, and it had just recently been sequenced in part of an ongoing effort to analyze all organic samples in the Seeker vaults before they deteriorated. The sequence from the blood on the keystone had been incomplete, but it had been enough to know it was statistically similar to the sequence of Glinda’s blood.
Knowing what Deirdre did now, that made sense. The keystone had been collected at a location that in modern times corresponded to the nightclub Surrender Dorothy with its half‑fairy denizens, like Glinda. And which, in the seventeenth century, had housed Greenfellow’s Tavern.
Only what was the link between Glinda and Thomas Atwater? That was a question Deirdre still couldn’t answer.
Atwater joined the Seekers as a young man in the year 1619, shortly after the order was founded. As a condition for acceptance to the Seekers, the Philosophers forbade him ever to return to Greenfellow’s Tavern, where he had worked before joining the Seekers. However, some years later, it was discovered that Atwater had returned to the tavern, though the Philosophers had never punished him for this clear violation of the Seventh Desideratum. Not long after that, Atwater died at the age of twenty‑nine, no doubt of one of the many diseases prevalent in that era. But what did he, and Greenfellow’s Tavern, have to do with the keystone?
Forget not the Sleeping Ones. In their blood lies the key.The words were inscribed on Glinda’s ring as well as on the keystone–although the keystone was so worn no one had ever been able to decipher the symbols. Deirdre only recognized them because she had studied the ring so closely. And even if the symbols hadn’t been worn with time, they still wouldn’t have been decipherable, because they weren’t written in any language known on Earth. After what they had seen on the television last night, she knew now that the symbols were written in an ancient language indigenous to the southern continent of the world Eldh.
The language of sorcerers.
Except the languageis known here, Deirdre. At least by one person.
She picked up the photograph the mysterious Philosopher had sent her: the photo of the clay tablet, which showed the inscription written in the same language as on the keystone as well as in Linear A. All of her searches for the tablet in the archives of the Seekers had come up empty. That meant this tablet had to be in hisprivate collection. Three years ago, Deirdre had given a copy of the photo to Paul Jacoby over in linguistics, and he had been able to translate the portion written in Linear A.