by Greg Cox
“Crap,” Baird said.
Snatching a Bronze Age spear from its mount upon a wall, she positioned herself between the chest and King Midas, who was first in line to be devoured. The legendary king may have been famously greedy, but Baird figured he deserved better than to be gobbled up by a glorified foot locker. And then there was the whole unique historical being thing.…
Shredded iron screeched in protest as the chest made it through the gate into Antiquities and made a beeline for King Midas, despite the determined Guardian barring the way.
“Not so fast, buster!”
She poked at the chest with the spear, frustrated by her adversary’s lack of any obvious vital spots. Maybe she couldn’t destroy the chest without releasing those fifteen evil spirits, or so Jenkins said, but perhaps she could discourage it from eating the relics?
“Back off, chesty! Go suck another golden egg.”
She had underestimated the chest’s stubbornness, however. Springing forward on its peg legs, it caught the point of the spear in its jaws and bit it clean off, leaving Baird holding on to a truncated metal shaft that was steadily being whittled down by the hungry pirate chest. Bronze shavings sprayed onto the floor as the chest advanced on Baird, devouring the remainder of the spear inch by inch.
“Okay, time for Plan B,” she muttered. “Which would be…?”
Letting go of what was left of the spear, which she hoped hadn’t been too valuable, she scanned Antiquities for another option. Clearly, she needed some sort of weapon or defense that operated at a distance, out of reach of the chest’s clacking jaws, but what?
Jupiter’s thunderbolt? No, that was too destructive. Chances were, she’d blow the chest to pieces or else set it on fire. Vulcan’s golden net, the one he’d once used to snare his cheating wife and her lover, the God of War? No, that would be nothing but a heap of tasty pasta to the gold-hungry treasure chest. Pluto’s helmet? No, invisibility was not going to help her in this crisis. Cupid’s arrows? Nope, not going there. Neptune’s trident?
A grin broke out on her face.
That I can work with!
While the chest was finishing off the last of the spear, Baird plucked the forged metal trident from its pedestal. It was cold and wet to the touch, as though dredged from the bottom of the sea. The sound of ancient waves crashed in her ears. Getting between the chest and Midas, she aimed the barbed tines of the trident at the chest just as it charged at the golden king and his throne again.
“Cool it,” Baird said.
Responding to her will, three high-pressure streams of seawater shot from the trident, converging into a single blast that smashed into the treasure chest, driving it back. The salty smell of the brine filled Baird’s nostrils as she kept up the barrage. Water flooded the floor of the section, but that was a small price to pay to keep Midas and the surrounding relics safe from the rampaging chest.
But would the firehose treatment be enough?
The chest didn’t seem to think so. Despite the punishing salt spray, it pushed forward against the power of the trident. Nothing, it seemed, could douse its appetite, not even the wrath of the Seven Seas. The force of the spray was such that Baird had to hold on to the trident’s handle with both hands to keep it under control, but the chest kept advancing, slowly but inexorably, toward the delectable golden figure. King Midas was about to become an entrée, followed by who knew how many other courses and desserts.
“Paging Colonel Baird.” Jenkins’s voice emerged from a nearby lyre, which he was somehow employing as an intercom. The strings of the lyre gave his voice a peculiar twang. “Have you managed to secure the Dead Man’s Chest yet?”
“Still working on that,” she shouted back. “How about that goose?”
“Elusive,” he confessed, “but I am taking measures to remedy the situation. I simply wanted to stress once again how imperative it is that you do not damage the structural integrity of that chest.…”
“Doing my best,” she said tersely.
“I’ll leave you to it then, Colonel.” A goose honked noisily in the background. “Over and out.”
Baird grunted in exasperation; she was all for the left hand knowing what the right hand was doing, strategically, but not while she was trying to fend off a ravenous treasure chest with a divine trident that was already starting to lose its punch.
To her dismay, the water pressure began to slacken. Gritting her teeth, she tried to will the trident to keep spraying, but she was only a mortal Guardian, not a sea god. There was a limit to how much water she could summon through the trident and apparently she was nearing it, while the chest was still as hungry and persistent as ever. It seemed you couldn’t drown a treasure chest, so how in the name of Robert Louis Stevenson were you supposed to—
The answer struck her like a broadside from a pirate ship.
Of course, she thought. That has to be it.
She had a plan. Now she just had to implement it. Still holding the chest at bay with the trident, she swept her gaze over the artifacts at hand, searching for a suitable lure. The Golden Fleece, once stolen by Jason and his Argonauts, glittered a few yards away, occupying a place of honor on the wall. The mythical ram’s skin had famously enticed the Argonauts to cross the Black Sea in quest of it; with any luck, the Dead Man’s Chest would find it equally irresistible.
Time to play matador again, she thought. Olé.
Had it really only been a day or so since she had resorted to the same stunt to distract the Calydonian Boar? She was going to need a long nap, and maybe even a stiff drink, when this Goose business was over, assuming that the universe was still around.
One last blast of pressurized ocean sent the treasure chest tumbling backward. The effort drained the trident, reducing the spray from the tines to a trickle, but it bought Baird a few precious moments. Discarding the dripping trident, she took advantage of those moments to hurtle over a pedestal and yank the Golden Fleece off the pegs supporting it. The wooly golden sheepskin, shorn from a sacred ram thousands of years ago, was just as heavy as one might expect, but Baird had once carried a wounded comrade across miles of rugged mountainside in Afghanistan after a raid on a terrorist training camp had gone south; she figured she could transport a sparkly gold fleece from one end of the Library to another. The trick was going to be not getting eaten by the chest first.
“Yo!” she shouted at the chest. “Ho, ho!”
The treasure chest had landed on its back after being knocked over by the trident’s final blast. Its peg legs failed uselessly in the air and, for a moment, Baird dared to hope that maybe it was stuck like an upside-down tortoise, but then it righted itself by using its hinged jaws to flip itself back onto its legs again. Baird flapped the fleece to get the chest’s attention.
“You want this? Sure you do!” She waved the fleece enticingly. “Come and get it!”
The chest vacillated, torn between Midas and the fleece, but, as Baird had hoped, the glittering skin proved too tempting to ignore. Rum trickled like drool from its jaws. Abandoning Midas and the other treasures for the moment, the chest charged at Baird, who draped the fleece over her shoulder and took off running, with the chest in hot pursuit. Peg legs splashed through large puddles of brine.
“That’s it!” she shouted back at the chest, urging it on. “Catch us if you can, you greedy safe-deposit box!”
She liked to think she could outrun a treasure chest, even carrying a heavy fleece, but, as it happened, this was not something she had ever really attempted before. History, she suspected, was full of doomed merchant vessels, laden with precious cargo, that had thought they could outpace a relentless pirate ship, only to lose their treasure to greedy buccaneers.
Baird hoped she wouldn’t be sunk like those ships. Jenkins was counting on her.
And so was the Library.
16
Ohio
Ezekiel was mildly surprised to find an actual book hidden in the antique carousel, as opposed to a stack of loose pages. Guess the family must hav
e rebound their third of the original volume to help preserve it. He couldn’t complain. Makes life easier for me.
“Oh my Lord.” Mary appeared behind him, looking over his shoulder. “That’s really it? This isn’t some sort of complicated scam?”
“Nope. Just another lost relic liberated by Ezekiel Jones … with, okay, a little bit of help,” he conceded.
He started to reach for the book but was interrupted by the operator, who chose that moment to check on Ezekiel. The teen gaped at the confusing tableau before him.
“Wait just one minute,” he protested. “What’s going on here? What’s with that book?”
“The inspector has accidentally stumbled onto a bit of town history.” Mary shoved past Ezekiel to claim the book. “Which I’m taking custody of on behalf of the Banbury Public Library.”
Ezekiel opened his mouth to protest, then realized that now was not the time. He could use the local librarian’s clout to walk the book right out of the fair without too many questions asked. “Naturally,” he agreed. “A find of this nature needs to be handled by someone who knows what they’re doing. Good thing you just happened to be on hand.”
She smirked at him. “Yes. I’d call that a fortuitous coincidence, wouldn’t you, Mr. Jones?” Clutching the book to her chest, she strode past Jimmy toward the ride’s exit. “If you’ll excuse me, I should get this historically valuable document safely tucked away in the library where it belongs.”
Hey, I thought that was my job, Ezekiel thought. He kept a close watch on the departing volume as he hustled after her, leaving Jimmy and the breached whale chariot behind.
“Hey,” the confused operator called out. “What about the inspection? You didn’t even look at the motor.”
“Not my department, mate. Get yourself a good mechanic.”
“But—”
Jimmy’s befuddled queries were swallowed up by the general clamor of the fair as Ezekiel caught up with Mary, who was striding decisively back the way they’d come. He eyed the Mother Goose book greedily, while wondering if he was the first Librarian to recover one of the hidden volumes. He hadn’t heard anything about Stone or Cassandra finding their targets yet.
“Good work back there,” he complimented Mary. The leather-bound tome looked distinctly out of place on the midway, where everyone else was carrying popcorn and sodas and plush cartoon characters. Jubilant throngs pushed past them, heading deeper into the fair; Ezekiel stuck close to Mary to avoid losing her in the crowd. “But you can let me have the book now.”
He reached for the slender volume.
“Nothing doing.” She clutched the book more tightly to her chest. “I certainly hope you don’t think that you’re just going to gallivant out of here with my family’s legacy.”
“But you didn’t even know it was real until a few hours ago! You thought it was just a bedtime story!”
“Well, now I know better, don’t I?” She quickened her pace. “And I’m not about to hand over this book to a shady, fast-talking hustler who lies as easily as he breathes.”
“But I told you, I’m a Librarian. This is what I do.” His fingers itched to snatch the book from Mary’s grasp, but that wasn’t his style; he was a thief, not a thug. “Trust me, that book is too dangerous to be loose in the world.”
“Trust you?” Mary scoffed. “You’re shifty to the core. You think I can’t tell that? You’re as much a librarian as I’m the Loch Ness Monster.”
“Actually, the Loch Ness Monster is much more cooperative, at least when it’s not spawning season, but that’s another story.” He shoved some very scaly memories out of his mind to stay focused on the task at hand. “I promise, I’ll see to it that book ends up in the right hands.”
“Yours?” She paused in front of the pie pavilion, the better to give him a piece of her mind. “Don’t make me—”
A wild cackle coming from somewhere above interrupted their squabble. Glancing up in surprise, Ezekiel was dismayed to see Mother Goose herself, looking like something right out of a kids’ book, perched atop the log roof of the pie pavilion. Her appearance drew startled gasps and laughter from the crowd, most of whom seemed to assume that the black-hatted crone was performing for the fairgoers. Parents held up toddlers to get a better look. Scattered applause greeted her arrival. A few scared children hid behind their guardians.
Mary’s eyes bulged. “Is that—?”
“Yep!” He figured this had to be the same Mother Goose that Baird had run across earlier. She had made good time getting from New Jersey to Ohio, making him wonder just how fast a magic gander could fly, or if perhaps she had some kind of Magic Door or teleportation spells of her own. He glanced up at the sky but didn’t spy any departing wings. “Give me the book … now!”
Mary still refused to surrender the volume. “I … I don’t understand. What’s happening?”
“Don’t quarrel, children,” said Mother Goose, gazing down on them. She beckoned for the collection of nursery rhymes while leaning on a gnarled wooden cane. “I’ll be taking my book back now, if you don’t mind.”
Ezekiel shook his head. “Not happening.” He nudged Mary. “We need to get out of here. Who knows what that Mother Goose wannabe is capable of.”
This was easier said than done, however, with the crowd hemming them in and yet more fairgoers flocking to take in the “show” atop the pavilion. “Excuse me,” Mary murmured as she and Ezekiel tried to push through the packed men, women, and children. “Excuse me.”
“Coming through!” Ezekiel said, much less politely.
“Not so fast, kiddies!” Mother Goose raised her voice to be heard above the hubbub, like someone accustomed to regaling listeners with stories and rhymes. She shook her cane at the fleeing librarians. “You’ll not be getting away with my book, not if I have anything to say about it.”
Here it comes, Ezekiel thought, knowing too well how these things almost always went. The freaky magic part.
“Sing a song of sixpence,” the crone recited. “A pocket full of rye. Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie…!”
Ezekiel sighed knowingly as, sure enough, flocks of blackbirds burst from the dozens of pies on the display in a flurry of flapping wings and feathers. The shrill keening of the birds competed with screams and gasps from shocked onlookers as the agitated birds flew out of the pavilion into the crowd, which instantly turned into a panicked mob. Ezekiel was buffeted by the shrieking fairgoers shoving past him. It was like Mother Goose meets Alfred Hitchcock.…
“Watch out for your nose!” he shouted at Mary, remembering what happened to a certain unlucky maid in the rhyme. Throwing craft and subtlety to the wind, he grabbed for the book, even as a furious cloud of birds enveloped them both, forcing him to throw up his hands to protect what he had always considered to be an exceptionally handsome face. Oodles of small, feathered bodies smacked against him, while the flapping and keening created a deafening racket. Twenty-four birds per pie times a few dozen pies equaled a quantity that Cassandra could have surely calculated by now; all Ezekiel knew was that there were way too many of the bloody birds flapping in his face!
This is stupid, he thought. Who bakes birds into a pie anyway?
The storm of birds dispersed as swiftly as it arrived, taking the precious book with them. One minute Ezekiel was being suffocated beneath the avian onslaught, the next he was standing amidst a frightened mob, checking to make sure his nose was still all there and watching helplessly as the blackbirds latched on to Mother Goose’s outdated garments with their beaks and lifted her up into the sky. The crone cackled merrily, brandishing the stolen book, as she ascended. Her triumphant voice taunted Ezekiel from on high.
“Better luck next time, Librarian!”
Ezekiel watched her vanish into the clouds before lowering his gaze to survey the disorderly scene around him. Ruptured pies had sprayed their fruity guts all over the pavilion, creating a sticky mess, even as freaked-out fairgoers fled from the vicinity in droves. As nearly as he
could tell nobody’s noses had been pecked off; he guessed that he and Mary had been the flock’s sole targets. Visibly shaken and shaking, the gray-haired librarian had managed to hang on to her nose as well, although her hair was mussed and tiny black feathers clung to her rumpled attire. She stared in shock at her empty hands.
“The book,” she whispered. “The blackbirds took the book.”
“No kidding.” He was not looking forward to informing Baird and Jenkins that he had lost the prize to the competition. “This is so not the way this was supposed to go.”
He hoped that Stone and Cassandra were having better luck than he was.
17
Northumberland
Working together, Stone and Gillian assembled a crude seesaw out of the wooden beam and a convenient pile of rubble. “Good thing for us that this fallen beam happened to be here,” she observed.
“That might not be by accident.” Stone adjusted the position of the beam to compensate for Gillian’s lighter weight. “Now that I think of it, any of the original timbers from the Roman era would have long since rotted away, especially in this damp environment. Somebody has replaced and waterproofed the original woodwork, probably in the last century or so.”
“Perhaps sometime after 1918, when you say those Mother Goose pages were supposed to be hidden?” Gillian clearly saw where he was going with this. “You’re thinking that my ancestor left this beam for us to find?”
“Could be,” Stone said. “I’ve seen even more elaborate puzzles left for future generations, some dating as far back as Atlantis.”
“Atlantis?” she echoed. “Now I know you’re pulling my leg. Atlantis is just a fable.”
You wouldn’t say that if you’d been on the business end of Neptune’s trident, Stone thought, but he didn’t press the point. He was still reluctant to push all the heavy-duty magic stuff on Gillian, for fear of sounding like a nutcase. “Let’s just say that there may be more to that ‘fable’ than you think.”
He sat down at one end of the seesaw, facing the wall where the moon mosaic was. Gillian clambered onto the other end and, sure enough, he was lifted up toward the waiting mosaic.