The Shadow Lamp

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  “Hi, yourself,” replied Kit. “Is it late? What time is it?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “How’s the pastry?”

  “Divine. Etzel is an angel in a baker’s hat.” Kit took a sip of coffee. “Am I the only slugabed? I haven’t seen Brother Lazarus—is he around?”

  “Been and gone,” Mina told him, swirling coffee in a small pewter pot before pouring it through a strainer into one of the Grand Imperial’s signature cups. Raising the cup, she inhaled and then took a sip—much as a wine steward sampling a newly opened bottle. “He said he had errands.”

  “Oh?” Kit forked in another mouthful of pastry and chewed thoughtfully, wondering what errands the priest could possibly have. “You’ve known him a long time, right?”

  “Long enough to know he can be trusted to the ends of the earth and back—if that’s what you mean. Don’t worry, he’ll return when he’s finished, whatever he’s doing.”

  In fact, Brother Lazarus was gone three days, returning on the morning of the fourth so changed that Kit hardly recognised him as the avuncular priest he had come to know. Gone were the ankle-length, heavy cassock and knotted cincture; in their place was a plain, well-cut black suit, worn with a black shirt and white priest’s collar; the sturdy sandals had been replaced with beautifully polished black brogues. His hair was cut very short, his beard trimmed to a stylish point, and his old steel-rimmed glasses had been exchanged for new ones of similar design, but in gold. A sleek leather satchel on a thin strap and an ebony walking stick with a silver top completed the ensemble.

  “Buongiorno! Buongiorno, everyone!” he called as he strode into the dining room of the Grand Imperial Kaffeehaus. He stood for a moment, searching among the tables.

  Kit, who was idling over a second cup of coffee while waiting for Wilhelmina to finish her duties so they could sit down together and discuss what to do about the missing priest, heard the familiar voice and glanced up. “What the . . . ? Brother Lazarus?” He stood abruptly, almost knocking over his chair.

  The nattily dressed priest made directly to the table nearest the kitchen where Kit was seated. “My errands are completed,” Brother Lazarus announced, “and I have returned—refreshed, renewed, and ready.”

  Mina emerged from the kitchen just then, saw him, and ran to greet him. “I was beginning to worry—” She stopped suddenly, taking in his dramatically altered appearance. “Look at you! What on earth have you been up to?”

  “Ah, Signora Mina.” He gave her a bow, kissed her hand, then held it while he spoke. “I have had the most wonderful time. I have been to Rome and enrolled in a language school.”

  “And learned English, I see.”

  “Certamente,” he said. “The Jesuit Language School is second to none. I have a facility with languages, as you know.” His smile grew wide with pleasure. “I was a star pupil.”

  “You don’t say.” Mina shook her head. “You’ve also been to see a tailor.”

  “A small indulgence.” He turned in a slow circle. “You like it?”

  “Very smart,” she replied approvingly. “Dashing, even.”

  “Excellent. I am content.”

  “You did all this in three days?” wondered Kit. “I am impressed.”

  “No, no, Mister Kit,” offered the priest with a cautionary wag of his finger. “Three days of your time in this place, perhaps—but almost four years for me.”

  “Of course,” mused Kit, appreciating the audacity and acumen displayed in such purposeful manipulation of ley travel. As Mina had demonstrated, by careful calibration of the jumping-off point, a traveller could return within a few days of leaving, no matter how long he or she had been away. So this, he thought, is where Mina learned it.

  “If we are going to be working together,” the priest continued, “it only makes sense that we should be able to speak to one another in a common tongue. It was most logical that I should learn English in the modern idiom. We have much work before us.”

  “Are you hungry?” asked Mina.

  “Famished!”

  “Come, sit down. I will have some food brought and you can tell us all about it.” She hurried off to the kitchen.

  “Such a delightful lady, no?” said Brother Lazarus, watching her bustle away.

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” said Kit. He led the way to the table and resumed his seat. “I can’t believe you did all this. I think I may have underestimated you, Brother Lazarus.”

  “Please, call me Gianni,” replied the priest. “From now on, only Gianni.”

  “New clothes, new language, new name,” observed Kit. “That makes sense, I guess.”

  Presently Wilhelmina returned, followed by a green-liveried serving girl with a tray of coffee, cups, and a plate of little sausage-and-cheese sandwiches. “Tuck into these,” she said, taking her place. “I am thinking of offering savouries in the afternoons. Have some and tell me what you think.” She passed around the plates while the serving girl poured coffee. “Vielen Dank, Margareta,” she said, dismissing the girl to her duties. “Now then, Brother Lazarus, I want to hear all about your adventures in Rome.”

  “It is Gianni now,” Kit told her.

  “Is it? You don’t say.”

  “Please, it was my mother’s pet name for me,” the priest explained with a smile. “It is what my family and friends called me when I was a boy.”

  “Gianni it is,” Mina agreed. “I like it, but why the change? Why now?”

  The priest waved a hand airily. “Brother Lazarus had grown old and set in his ways. He had served his useful purpose and it was time to give him a well-deserved rest.” Gianni paused, becoming thoughtful. “Indeed, you dear people have rekindled my sense of adventure. You have renewed in me my vocation.”

  “As a priest?” mused Kit, wondering how they had managed to do that.

  “I have always been a priest, and a priest I will always be—that is my calling. But my vocation is to pursue knowledge of what some have quaintly called the hidden mechanisms of the universe. This, I believe, has been ordained by God. I have been hiding away on my mountaintop, and while it has been a time of fruitful enterprise, the world has turned. I was a man asleep, but I have awakened—and not a moment too soon.”

  “Gianni, old son, you are one amazing chap,” Kit told him.

  “No, my friend,” the priest countered, growing suddenly serious, “I am merely one to whom much has been given. See here, we have important work to do and nothing must be allowed to impede us. We must by all means return to the Spirit Well. I cannot say why at this moment, but this, I feel, is of utmost importance.”

  “Hear! Hear!” Kit thumped the table with his hand. “Let’s do it. First, we have to find a way back to the Bone House.”

  “Maybe easier said than done,” Mina pointed out. “There is that giant yew tree to get ’round, you know.”

  “Where there is a will, signorina, there is a way—this I know.” Gianni raised his coffee cup in triumph. “Bless you, dear friends, it has been a long time since I felt such excitement.”

  “Wait until you see the Spirit Well,” Kit told him. “Then you’ll have something to get excited about.”

  “Okay,” said Wilhelmina, “walk us through that. I want to understand it better.”

  “Well, first off, I think we have to find a way to get back to the time when River City Clan occupied the valley before the yew tree was there. That would make everything a whole lot simpler,” Kit suggested. “The ley line leading to the great gorge . . . there’s something fishy about it, and that’s a fact.”

  “I never had any trouble with it,” Mina pointed out.

  “Maybe, but I couldn’t get it to work at all. I never got so much as a quiver of static electricity from it in all the time I was there.” He sipped his coffee thoughtfully. “I had no difficulty getting to the valley—but once there, I just couldn’t get back. Until I stumbled over that ley line inside the cave, I was pretty much stuck in the Stone Age.”


  “Ah, my friends!” cried Gianni. “Speaking of the cave—I am reminded that I took photographs when we were there, si?” Reaching for his satchel, he put it on the table and, opening the flap, produced an ordinary manila envelope from which he withdrew a number of glossy black-and-white photos. “While in Rome I took the opportunity to have the film developed.” He began arranging the photos on the table. “These are the photographs I took inside the cave. As you see, the images are crisp and clear—very good representations, if I do say this myself.”

  “It worked! Amazing,” remarked Kit, leaning over the array of photos. In black-and-white, and flattened by the photographic process, the painted symbols took on a finer definition and contrast than could ever have been perceived in the dim light of a Stone Age lamp. “These are fantastic. You can see every little dot and squiggle.”

  “Hold that thought,” said Wilhelmina, rising and hurrying from the room. She returned a few minutes later with a flat, linen-wrapped package bound with a scarlet ribbon. “Let’s compare, shall we?” She handed the parcel to Gianni and said, “Be my guest.”

  Placing the package on the table, he pulled on the strip of cloth that served as a ribbon to close the bundle and then carefully, fold by fold, unwrapped the object within to reveal a papery scrap of parchment so thin as to be almost translucent. The smooth surface of the parchment was embossed with a spray of bright blue pictograms—squiggles, lines, spirals, and dots—each about the size of an egg or walnut.

  “Madre di Dio!” cried Gianni, rising to his feet so fast his chair rocked backwards. Leaning forward on his hands, he stared at the ragged portion of the Skin Map before him. He snatched up a photograph and held it against the original, discarded it, and picked up another and another in swift succession—matching each to the parchment before setting it aside. With the fourth photo he stopped. “Voilà!”

  Kit and Mina drew close to examine the match. “Spectacular,” Kit said, his voice hushed as if in the presence of a great mystery. “They’re the same—exactly the same.”

  It was true. Not only were the symbols from the walls of the cave the identical style and description, but, as rendered in the photos, they were the same size in relation to each other. Many of them appeared to be an exact match down to the precise sworl, zigzag, squiggle, and dot.

  “This is significant,” concluded Wilhelmina. “Whoever made those marks in the cave must have seen the original and copied them exactly.”

  “We must also consider the possibility,” suggested Gianni, “that both sets of symbols were made by the same hand—so to speak.”

  “Arthur Flinders-Petrie, you mean.” Kit regarded the Skin Map and then the photos. The correspondent similarities between the two were staggering. “You are suggesting he was there?”

  “How else?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Kit. “Let’s check them against the ones in Sir Henry’s green book. It’s up in the chest—I’ll go get it.”

  He disappeared up the stairs and came running back a few moments later with the small, handwritten book bound in green leather. The slender volume contained various jots and musings of its owner, Sir Henry Fayth, on the nature and meaning of ley travel. Most of what was written was opaque philosophy to Kit, but in the margins and on a few random pages, Sir Henry had drawn diagrams and symbols, meaningless to Kit until he saw the Skin Map.

  He flipped through the book to a certain page, then put the book flat on the table for the others to see. The tiny diagram Sir Henry had drawn in sepia ink was very like one of the symbols in the photographs. “Almost, but not quite,” said Kit.

  They tried a few more, but found no direct match among the few scattered marks Sir Henry had recorded. “Maybe the marks in the book relate to a different portion of the map,” suggested Wilhelmina. “One that we haven’t seen yet.”

  “Or perhaps,” suggested Gianni, “they serve some other purpose. We shall put our minds to work on this.”

  “Well, however those marks came to be painted in that cave, our man Flinders-Petrie was there,” declared Mina. “I’d bet the store on it. Whether he painted them himself or not, he was in that valley among those people.”

  “May I propose an experiment?” said Gianni. “It is that inasmuch as is possible we re-create the conditions of that first ley journey—retrace your route step for step as precisely as we can. Perhaps this will give us insight into what happened the first time.”

  “What if the same thing happens again and we can’t get back?” wondered Kit.

  “Then we can use the ley inside the cave,” replied Mina. “That one that leads to Spain, right?” She spread her hands on the tabletop. “Whatever else happens, we can always get back to the abbey. What do you say?”

  It took Kit all of three seconds to pass judgement on the plan. “Fantastic,” he agreed. “When do we leave?”

  They fell to discussing preparations for a return trip to the Stone Age—what they would bring and what to expect when they got there. Kit was a fair way into describing life with River City Clan when he noticed Wilhelmina had stopped listening. “Am I boring you with this?” he asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re miles away. What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing, really. I just realised we’re proposing to do all this without our shadow lamps. I think that’s a problem.”

  “Not a huge problem.” Kit glanced from her to Gianni and back. “Is it? I mean, we know the locations of all the relevant ley lines. We’ll be fine.”

  “Sure, what could possibly go wrong?” She flashed him a sarcastic smile.

  “We’ll be fine,” Kit insisted. “And another thing—why do you call them shadow lamps anyway?”

  “Because of the shadow. Why else?”

  “Not following you . . . What shadow?”

  “The new model ley lamp—the upgraded one I was using—has a few significant improvements, along with some slight differences,” Mina explained. “For one, there is a distinct dimming of the surrounding light when you interact with a ley line. Just before you make the leap, everything goes a little dark—like when the sun goes behind a cloud or when you step into a shady place. Everything gets all shadowy.”

  “And then?”

  “Then it brightens up again and—voilà! You’re there.” Wilhelmina’s smooth brow furrowed as her eyebrows knit together in a look of concern. “I hate to say it, but I don’t think we should make another assault on the Stone Age or the Spirit Well without a lamp to guide us.”

  “You really think it’s that important?”

  She nodded and Gianni spoke up. “I will trust Signorina Wilhelmina’s heart in this. Obtaining a replacement will delay our journey only a little, and it may save us much difficulty in the end.”

  Now it was Kit’s turn to frown.

  “It would be better to have them and not need them, rather than the other way ’round,” Mina pointed out. “Gianni’s right, it will only delay things a little while, and it could make the difference between success and disaster.”

  “All right,” conceded Kit. The urge to return to his River City friends was so strong he could feel it like a blade between his ribs. But clear-headed, ever-practical Mina was right: they were about to venture into the unknown and would likely need all the help they could get. “It’s a fair point. We don’t want to go charging off half-cocked. Do whatever you have to do to get us a replacement shadow lamp. But do it quick, okay?”

  “We’ll be on our way before you know it,” Wilhelmina told him. “I’ll get on to Gustavus up at the palace and tell him we want to see him right away.”

  “And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?”

  “Relax,” Mina advised. “Rest up for the adventure ahead and eat plenty of Etzel’s extraordinary strudel.”

  “Now that,” said Kit, cheering slightly, “I can live with.”

  CHAPTER 7

  In Which Official Doors Swing Wide

  There were nine of them: each one a criminal cond
emned to the hulks or destined for transportation to Van Deimen’s Land. In the words of the 1776 Criminal Prosecution Act, these prisoners were the more “atrocious and daring offenders” and so were to be subjected to a more “severe and effectual punishment” than otherwise afforded by His Majesty’s legal system. Whether Tasmania-bound or relegated to a mouldering prison hulk, these nine desperados were going to be spending a lot of time in the belly of a filthy, stinking ship.

  Burleigh had for several months availed himself of the court records known as The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, searching for just those cases that might provide him with suitable candidates. Once he found a likely suspect, he studied the individual case, ever narrowing his search from scores to a handful, then winnowing that lot further until he had just nine. These men he wanted to interview in person.

  Extraordinary though the arrangement may have been, and it was that if nothing else, it nevertheless took surprisingly little effort to effect, requiring only the liberal application of spendable money. Wealth in the form of silver, gold, diamonds, or any other convertible commodity was something Burleigh now possessed in virtually unlimited supply. It never ceased to impress the self-made earl how even the most “impossible” things could so easily be accomplished with a little common bribery. The more generous the contribution to the unofficial coffers, the wider official doors swung open. And where the prison system was concerned, its agents and employees seemed to regard under-the-table payments as a regular, expected, and necessary component of their meagre wages.

  In his pursuit of a few useful men, his lordship was given to reflect on how very thin was the line separating the gaoler from the gaoled: in many cases, that stripe was so slender as to be well nigh invisible. Save for the fact that one fellow stood in chains, the end of which the other fellow held in his fist, a casual observer would have been hard-pressed to tell the difference. With a regularity that was both remarkable and depressing, Burleigh noted that the wretch being packed off to an Australian penal colony had been convicted of a crime far less serious than the official accepting the bribe.