Eye of the Oracle (43 page)

Now accustomed to the once forbidden path to the mobility room, Sapphira took little notice of the empty growth chambers lining the final corridor that led to the massive vault-like room. Even the bones of dead giants were easy to skip around. The stench of their rotting flesh had long since diminished, so they were just a morbid collection of stones the girls could easily dodge.

Now, marching right into the room seemed easy, almost too easy. The once prohibited journey had become like a stroll to the library, a way to pass the time. Sapphira raised her cross near Yereq’s growth chamber, illuminating the ten-foot-tall giant floating within the recess of the stony wall. “Hello, Yereq,” Sapphira sang. “It’s me.”

The sleeping giant’s face remained stony at first, but slowly, ever so slowly, a weak smile appeared.

“Someday I’m going to wake you up,” she continued, “but I can’t yet, not until I figure out the code in Mardon’s journal.” She turned to Acacia and let out a heavy sigh. “Do you ever get tired of hearing me say that?”

“I got tired of it after the tenth time.” Acacia nodded at the chamber. “But Yereq seems to enjoy it.”

Sapphira lifted the cross higher, sending the light over Yereq again. His smile spread across his face. She lowered the cross and gazed at her twin but didn’t want to ask her burning question for the hundredth time. Though it remained unspoken today, Acacia answered it anyway with her usual gracious tone. “Don’t worry. If we ever wake him, he’ll love you.”

Sapphira knelt at the base of the growth chamber. The counter now read “8550,” just a few ticks lower than the previous reading. She tapped the counter with her finger. “I think it’s still dropping at the same rate.”

“It’s moving so slowly,” Acacia said, “we’ll have to wait till the twenty-first century to see it hit zero.”

After rising to her feet, Sapphira waved the burning cross at the seven or eight chambers within reach of her light. “Maybe, but if Yereq and these giants wake up in a foul mood, I don’t want to be around.”

Acacia raised her finger. “If we take a meter, we won’t have to be anywhere near them. We’ll know when they’re about to hatch.”

Sapphira knelt in front of the chamber’s hearth again and pried the meter loose. “That’s strange.” She turned it over and examined the back. “No connection wires.”

Acacia crouched low. “So it doesn’t do anything?”

Sapphira flipped it to its digital side. “Maybe it’s just a visible timer that matches controlling timers embedded in the magneto bricks themselves.”

“How do you know so much about magneto bricks?”

Sapphira slid the meter into her pocket. “I helped Mardon with his experiments a lot more than I care to talk about.”

Devin stooped next to the stream and pinched a clump of blood-stained mud. “Only one set of tracks follows the trail.”

Palin guided his horse into the stream. “The other two might have stayed in the water. The bed is solid enough.”

Rising to his full height, Devin shook his head. “If they wanted to throw us off that way, all three would have stayed in the creek. The blood trail was meant to steer us away from the demon witch.”

“Shall we separate, then?” Palin pointed upstream. “The boy is wounded. It won’t be hard to catch him.”

“He is of no consequence, and I will need your help until my next infusion of power.” Devin limped toward his horse, a muscular roan gelding with a cropped mane.

Palin jumped down and gave Devin a boost onto its back. “When will you perform the next infusion?” Palin asked. “Your limp is getting worse every day.”

“Do you think I haven’t noticed?” Devin pulled out the candlestone’s chain and dangled the gem at his chest. “The blood we have is getting old. I want to wait until we can use Thigocia’s blood.”

“I see. New life from new blood.”

Devin guided his horse into the water and pointed downstream. “The witch will probably head for the River Clyde. She’s a crafty devil, so we’d better hurry or we’ll lose the trail.”

“Any more ideas about the man who came out of that egg?” Palin asked.

“No, but if he tries to stop us” Devin wrapped his fingers around Excalibur’s hilt “his head will be looking up at his body from a pool of blood.”

Chapter 3

Gabriel’s Gift

January, 1949

Elam fastened a pin on the diaper and poked the baby’s fat little belly. “Feel better now?” The baby made a splurting sound from underneath his diaper and giggled.

“Rupert!” Elam moaned. “Not again!”

A woman’s voice sang from across the room. “I’ll do it, Elam.”

Elam smiled at Mrs. Nathanson as she crossed the enormous nursery, sidestepping coloring books, a plastic baseball bat, and three toddlers snuggling blankets on the soft carpet. He nodded at the snoozing children. “Except for Rupert and those three, all the under-twos are changed and in their cribs.”

“You really are a gentleman!” Mrs. Nathanson said, taking Rupert from Elam. “Just like” she suddenly turned her head “just like always.”

Elam wondered about the strange hesitation but chalked it up to her frequent state of emotional upheaval, the longing for a child that she and her husband had never been able to have. He watched her loving hands as they laid the six-month-old boy down her fingers tender as she caressed the wiggling body, deft as she kept the pins from sticking soft flesh, and playful as she tapped Rupert’s nose and cooed at him.

He let out a quiet sigh. Had his own mother been so loving? Had she protected him from pain and exposure? How many years did she weep for her lost son? Did she die in grief, never able to break free from the pain of a mother’s empty arms?

After four thousand years, only a shadow of his mother’s image remained. Still, this childless woman’s care for orphaned babies brought a familiar warmth, something he longed for that had gone wanting for too many centuries. Even her eyes somehow seemed familiar, like those of a friendly stranger who had smiled for no reason and then walked away, disappearing into the passage of time.

Mrs. Nathanson patted his hand. “Don’t worry about checking the escape tunnels tonight. I don’t think it will rain, so they should stay dry.”

“I’ll check them anyway. I’m trying to memorize all the paths in the maze.”

She gazed toward the ceiling, and her voice changed to a dreamy whisper. “I memorized them a long time ago. It’s fun to explore.”

“You memorized
all
of them? Why? They’re only for emergencies.”

“I sort of feel at home down there. It’s so peaceful.” She shook her head as if casting off her dream, but she kept her smile. “You’d better hurry to the meeting now. Patrick will want to begin on time.”

“Oh, yeah. Right!” Elam bolted toward the door. “Thank you!”

“Dress warm!”

“I will!” He grabbed a sweater from the back of a chair and rocketed from the room, sprinting down a long, high corridor as he slid his arms into the sweater’s sleeves. Although the mansion seemed designed by a stuffy aristocrat, with marble floors, brass doorknobs, and sculpted columns, neither the master of the house nor his wife would ever scold him for his mad dash down a hallway. After all, with about sixty orphans of various ages, shapes, and sizes living in a human beehive, the house always seemed abuzz with activity. No one would take notice of a multi-thousand-year-old teenager breezing by.

Elam slowed and turned down another corridor, a narrower one with a low ceiling and rough walls. Grabbing a lantern and a matchbook from a shelf along the way, he stopped at an entry to a dark hall. A heavy oak door, usually closed and locked, stood open, probably in anticipation of his arrival.

Striking a match, he touched the flame to the lantern’s wick. The fire crawled across the braided cotton and leaped upward into the glass chimney, giving rise to a beautiful image in his mind Sapphira Adi, her white hair igniting and the flames spreading down her lithe body just before she brought Acacia back to life. Though tears filled his eyes, he smiled. He would find her again someday . . . somehow.

He stepped through the doorway into another corridor. Its ceiling was so low, he instinctively ducked, though he knew he could stand erect without scraping his scalp. A few of the ceiling’s ancient, wooden beams bent toward the floor, and a musty odor hung in the dank air.

The corridor ended at another open doorway that led to a much larger room. He soft-stepped in and found Patrick seated where he expected him to be, in one of seven chairs at a round table set precisely over a circular compass etched into the floor. Two lanterns sat on the table, their wicks burning brightly.

As Patrick tapped his finger on a scroll he had rolled out in front of him, a cold pocket of air filtered through a ragged-edged rectangle in the stone ceiling high above. Several large ravens fluttered from one side of the opening to the other, apparently longing for the relative warmth of the humans’ abode.

Bathed in the eerie glow of moonlight, Patrick buttoned his thick gray sweater, then brushed his hand through his short reddish brown hair. A shadow, stenciled on a green curtain covering a ten-foot-by-ten-foot section of the wall, mimicked his actions.

After blowing out his lantern, Elam approached the table. “I am here, as you requested.”

Patrick rolled up his scroll and motioned toward the chair next to him. “Please sit. We have a lot to talk about.”

Elam slid into the chair and set the lantern at his feet. “Your wife told me you had news from other dragons.”

“I do.” Patrick opened a folded note. His thick eyebrows angled downward as he scanned it. “This is a translation. The original was written in a mixture of Hebrew and an old English dialect. Unfortunately, I have forgotten much of both languages, so I took it to Charles, who translated it for me.”

“Charles? Who’s he?”

“You met him a couple of years ago at an archery tournament. We congratulated him for winning his division. He was a high school senior then, and now he is an extraordinary linguist studying at Oxford, but even he had to dust off some old books to complete the translation.”

Elam leaned closer and tried to read the note, but the handwriting was too scribbly. “Can you trust him?”

“I trust him as far as I need to at the moment. If my investigation of his character proves him worthy, I hope someday to invite him to join my circle of knights at this very table.”

“So, does Charles know about the dragons now?”

“No. The message was in symbolic language, so he wasn’t able to interpret the meaning of the English words, but the project made him extremely curious. I am tempted to explain it to him, but he is young and inexperienced, so I have decided to wait a while.” Patrick flattened the note on the table and pointed at the first line. “Let me read it to you. I had to embellish it a bit to fill in the gaps.”

As Elam leaned back in his chair, Patrick cleared his throat. “The king and queen are still in play, though the two dark knights have lurked through a fortnight. A pawn emerged from the queen’s skirts, enraging the evil pursuers. When the knights finally found the king and queen, the royal pair flew to a new world to mark a trail, leaving the pawn to hide under the shelter of the white knight’s home.”

Elam blurted out his interpretation. “So Hannah and Timothy are alive! And Devin and Palin have been chasing them for fourteen years.”

“Exactly.” Patrick gestured for Elam to continue. “And . . .”

“And they had a baby, so, in order to protect him, they flew to the States, hoping Devin would follow him, and they left their baby here with you.”

Patrick clapped his hands. “Very good! Charles was completely baffled.”

“Well, it’s not so hard when you know the history.” Elam glanced toward the hallway that led back to the main house. “So, does your wife have the baby?”

“Oh,” Patrick said, chuckling, “he’s hardly a baby.”

Elam pointed at him. “Right. Hannah could’ve had the baby years ago.”

“Timothy told me earlier that even though they believed they were already husband and wife because of their dragon ritual, he and Hannah decided to have a legal human wedding before reuniting. As I understand it, the baby was born almost exactly nine months later.”

Elam counted on his fingers. “So if he was born in January of 1936, now he would be . . .” He rolled his eyes upward. “Thirteen?”

“Precisely! Timothy’s and Hannah’s getaway to the States occurred only very recently, so one of my colleagues fled with the child from Glasgow and brought him here.” Patrick slid out his chair and turned toward the green curtain. “Gabriel, you may come out now.”

The curtain moved, parting in the middle. A boy peeked through the gap. “Did you tell him about the” he gestured with his head as though someone were behind him “you know what?”

“Oh.” Patrick winced. “How could I forget?” He turned back to Elam. “Gabriel doesn’t want to frighten you. He has a unique gift passed down to him by his mother, so be prepared for a shock.”

“Uh . . . okay.” Elam folded his hands on the table. “I’m ready.”

Gabriel stepped out from behind the curtain. As he strode toward Patrick, a set of wings unfurled behind him, huge reddish brown canopies that stretched out to each side farther than the boy was tall.

Elam leaned back. He wanted to yell “Dragon wings!” but that seemed too awkward. Instead, he just crossed his arms and nodded. “Those are amazing! Can you fly?”

Gabriel pulled a wingtip forward. “Since I was ten, but I only fly at night when nobody can see me.”

Elam forced himself to maintain a cool aspect, in spite of the strange sight a teenager, half human and half dragon. He pointed at one of the wings. “I’ll bet you have a lot of fun zipping around the sky, right?”

Flexing his lean muscles, Gabriel shrugged. “It’s fun hopping from roof to roof and bombing cats with water balloons, but it gets pretty boring when you can’t show anyone your flying acrobatics.”

“Can’t show anyone?” Elam repeated. “Why not? Do you keep your wings a secret?”

Sadness clouded Gabriel’s face, belying his painted-on smile. He pointed with his thumb. “I stuff them in a hiking backpack like a pair of huge socks. My mother cut holes in the panel that goes next to my back to let my wings fit through, but they’re always trying to escape.”

Elam rose to the balls of his feet, stretching to get a look at Gabriel’s back. “So do you have holes in your shirts, too?”

“Yeah, but it’s a real pain. I have to ”

“Gentlemen.” Patrick gestured toward the table. “Please sit. We can talk about dragon-wing accessories another time, but right now we have more important matters to discuss.”

Elam and Gabriel took seats across from each other. Patrick withdrew a velvet jewelry box from his pocket and opened it as he set it on the table. Inside, a red gem sparkled at the center of an octagonal pendant. “The gem,” he said, lifting it by its chain, “is a rubellite. And not just any rubellite; it belongs to Timothy, Gabriel’s father.”

Elam reached over and tapped the swaying pendant, making it twirl. “But since Timothy is Makaidos, isn’t he your father, too? And wouldn’t that make Gabriel your brother?”

Patrick nodded. “Makaidos was my father, but whether or not Gabriel could be called my true brother, I cannot say for sure. You see, I was born to dragons, and he was born to humans, one of whom was transformed under Merlin’s prophecy and one who was apparently generated, if you will, from scratch. Although the transformed dragons never intramarried, knowing they could not procreate with each other, Makaidos was exempt from that incapacity since he was not part of Merlin’s prophetic group.” He let out a long sigh. “So, as you can see, Gabriel and I have extremely peculiar genealogies, and our relationship is uncertain.”

Elam nodded toward Gabriel. “You said he inherited the wings from his mother. How do you know that? Both his parents had wings.”

“From blood tests. Timothy has no traces of dragon blood in him, while Hannah and I show some unique cellular structures that I don’t yet understand.”

“Why is Timothy different?” Elam asked, but when he saw Gabriel’s gaze tip downward, he regretted his question.

“I wish I knew,” Patrick replied. “I can only deduce that God removed his dragon nature and gave him a human soul.”

Gabriel’s head perked up. “Don’t you have a soul?” he asked Patrick.

“I do, but not a human one. At least that’s what Merlin told me.”

“Merlin told me the same thing about the transformed dragons,” Elam said, glad to turn the examination toward Patrick. “You’re somehow both dragon and human, but without a human soul.”

“Merlin told you?” Gabriel asked, swinging his head toward Elam. “He lived over a thousand years ago, and you can’t be older than a couple of hundred.”

Patrick raised his hands, laughing. “As you both can see, there are many questions to answer, and I will allow the two of you to converse at length some other time. For now, however, we must plan our strategy.” He reached under his chair, pulled out a briefcase, and withdrew a ragged scroll of yellowed parchment. Carefully unwinding it, he laid it across the breadth of the table, giving Elam one of the rollers and Gabriel the other.

Patrick ran his finger along the text. “This is a missive from Merlin to Morgan that I . . . well . . . intercepted from Devin. As you can see, through about two-thirds of the scroll, the lettering is in the old style, but from there until the end, it is written in modern English.”

Elam leaned forward and gawked at the parchment. “Did you write the new stuff?”

“No. When I first read this letter centuries ago, Merlin had not used the entire scroll. I would guess about one foot of parchment was blank. I only discovered this new entry a week ago while I was deciding what I could show to Charles to help him translate the letter from Timothy and Hannah.”

Patrick tapped his finger on the first line. “If you please, Elam.”

Elam nodded and read the new text out loud.

A spawn conceives to bring new birth;

Then lays her hybrid down to rest.

The king’s own son must sacrifice

To purge the dragon in your breast.

Beware of Morgan’s hidden plot

To find an heir to Arthur’s throne.

She lusts to dwell within the veil

And reap the harvest you have sown.

For as Hartanna’s age-old twin,

The seed you sow implants an heir.

A daughter sprouts in walls of flesh