“And the horses,” said Lucy, knowingly.
“Yes, Miss Modest, the horses, too. It was easy for the boy to climb and he continued to hide from, and then scurry past, the outer defense guards, who did not anticipate such a small intruder. He climbed under the stone arch and down the stairs that led to side of the cliff and back through again to the entrance.
“As the wall of the hill arched over, he saw the gates and the true castle guard. He managed to get himself up the high wall. He simply walked along the top ledge, but it was too high to jump down on the other side. Because the wall curved in, the boy could not get his footing.
“The boy explained that he saw a man wearing a suit of fur and a large pair of black bunny ears. It was then the boy stood up and waved. He says the brother aimed an arrow at his heart, nodding. The brother, however, was not nodding at the boy, but at the guard behind the boy. The guard grabbed the boy from behind. And this is how the boy came to be among us. This, of course, is his story.”
“His story?” said Faye. “You don’t believe him?”
“It is the boy’s story, Miss Vigyanveta,” said Mr. Bell. “I shall come to believe the truth.”
“Why do you keep calling him ‘the boy,’ Mr. Bell?” asked Lucy.
“He has a name, doesn’t he?” asked Faye, seeing fear in the little boy’s face. Noah must have urged the boy to come here for safety, and here he was being treated like a nameless adversary.
“It is what he is called, Miss Vigyanveta,” Mr. Bell said. “Sabi means ‘boy.’”
“You mean he doesn’t have a proper name?” said Lucy, mortified.
“Ana Sabi,” said Sabi. “I am boy.”
“It is what he is and what he is called,” said Mr. Bell. “This is as it has been.”
“What does that mean, ‘as it has been’?” said Faye, frustrated with another mysterious comment. “He’s a boy who has clearly been mistreated and, from the look of things, still is.”
Faye pulled a kerchief from her pocket and handed it to Sabi, but he did not reach for it. “Here,” she offered, “take it. It’s okay.”
Sabi leaned forward but the brother next to him pulled him back with force.
“Stop that! Let him take the kerchief,” growled Faye.
“No, Miss Vigyanveta, we cannot,” said Mr. Bell. “Sabi is not here as our guest.”
Faye and Jasper quickly realized that the boy’s hands were tied behind his back.
“Untie him!” she shouted.
“But he was only trying to make contact.” Jasper looked at the boy, small and sad. The boy’s arms, in those big ragged sleeves, were fragile twigs in the hands of the formidable brother in black. “Noah probably sent him to us for safety.”
“Safety is our concern, Master Modest,” said Mr. Bell gravely.
“It was Noah who sent the little boy.” Faye approached the little boy, but a brother held her back. She looked daggers at the brother, then turned to the boy. “What did he say, little boy?”
The parents and Miss Brett entered without knocking.
“We came as soon as we were told,” said Dr. Tobias Modest.
“What were you told?” asked Jasper.
“Blech,” said Nikola Tesla, sweeping into the room and quickly covering his mouth with his kerchief. “We were not told that he had never been washed. Send word to let me know what you learn.” He swept out of the room and disappeared down the hallway.
“Has he said anything?” asked Dr. Banneker.
Sabi spoke quickly in Arabic.
“That Noah sent him with a note,” said Mr. Bell.
“I to here you this note,” said Sabi. “Noah send me you.” He indicated his pocket. Dr. Canto-Sagas moved forward and reached into the pocket, retrieving a folded note.
“Noah writes ‘he is the path,’” said Dr. Canto-Sagas, handing the note to Mr. Bell.
“What does that mean?” asked Faye.
“Noah is searching you of the map,” explained Sabi desperately, “and I, the map.”
“What do you mean?” Faye asked. “You are the map? What does any of this mean?”
The brother holding Sabi rolled up the boy’s sleeve to reveal his tattoo. The brother quickly tore open the little boy’s shirt.
“He’s covered in tattoos,” said Faye, unable to pull her eyes from the tiny sunken chest and the brutal tattoos covering the small child.
“You are the map?” Jasper looked at the tattoo. “I don’t understand. What is the map? Why did they do this to the boy? It can’t be what the old poem meant.”
“It is a means of protection,” said Mr. Bell. “A tradition.”
“A tradition? I still don’t understand. This is the map to the lair of Komar Romak?” asked Jasper.
Sabi looked directly at Faye, his lips quivering and tears staining his cheeks. He repeated what he had said: “I am the map.”
Mr. Bell stood up and, as the others moved aside, walked around his desk to examine the boy’s arm. He nodded and the brother unbound Sabi’s hands. Mr. Bell gently removed Sabi’s shirt and looked at the entire map. He nodded and mumbled. Because of his beard and glasses, his expression was almost unreadable, but it seemed grave and dark.
Finally, he nodded. “Yes, it is as we understood,” he said to the parents and brothers.
“So we know how to find Komar Romak?” Jasper could hardly believe what he was hearing.
“Prepare for a siege,” said Mr. Bell. Without another word, half the brothers moved swiftly from the room. Two guards grabbed Sabi by the arms and dragged him away.
“Stop!” cried Faye. “Where are you taking him?”
“The prisoner shall be taken to the dungeon,” said Mr. Bell.
“Prisoner?” Jasper gasped. “He brought the note from Noah. He’s here to help. He’s the map.”
“He is the trap,” said Mr. Bell, more worry than anger in his voice. “Created by Komar Romak.”
Faye turned towards Sabi, no longer feeling sympathy for this rat posing as a child. “You horrid thing, you traitor.”
But Mr. Bell shook his head. “The boy is not the map of free will, Miss Vigyanveta. He follows the tradition of master evil. The map leads to death. Komar Romak always creates a map for the enemy of evil. This boy is that map. He is a slave. He is sent to bring death to all of us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
VECTORS AND FLIGHT PATTERNS
OR
LUCY’S BUTTERFLY
HAS A TRUNK
“Mr. Bell is right. I don’t think the boy knows what any of this means,” said Faye. She was looking out the window of the laboratory. The children had retreated there, leaving the miserable details of Sabi’s presence to the adults.
“Sabi doesn’t know,” said Lucy, tearfully. “Poor Sabi.” She was bending the copper wire into creatures, wiping wet cheeks with the back of her hands. Instead of mere butterflies, there was now a menagerie of elephant butterflies, piglet butterflies, hippopotamus butterflies, and a giraffe butterfly.
“Poor Sabi. Poor us,” said Wallace quietly as his glasses slipped to the end of his nose. “All this and we still don’t have Noah or his mother.” Wallace found distraction in his magnifying glass and the tiny motors he was constructing. “And Noah’s father is still in a fever.”
“Does Sabi have a mummy and daddy?” asked Lucy, worry causing her voice to quaver. She looked up from her creatures. “We’re going to have to love him if no one else does.”
“We’ll figure things out.” Jasper tried to sound reassuring. “We’ll…we’ll find Noah. And his mum. And his father will be better any day now.”
“How?” asked Lucy, now wiping her wet eyes with the palms of her hands.
“We don’t even know if Noah is off doing something on his own or is in danger,” said Faye. “Noah left without us before. Maybe he’s off being a hero on his own now. He might have just forgotten to tell us, like he did when he left us at the Khan il Khalili in the hallway outside of the map maker�
�s place. He sent the boy. It must mean he’s off somewhere else.” She wanted to believe this. They all did.
“But what do we do?” asked Lucy. “We have to do something we’re not doing so we can help.”
Jasper looked at the army of tiny butterflies. If only these creatures could be built to find Noah and his mother, he thought. If only…“Wallace,” said Jasper, a dawning invention filling his thoughts. “What are you thinking to do with these creatures?”
“I figured that there might be a way to create a small group of flying creatures and…I know it sounds silly, but I want to figure out a way to somehow use them…as tracking devices…to locate Noah’s mother. I thought…perhaps a radar or something.” In truth, Wallace and Lucy’s project was a distraction. They were working together to keep from worrying, hoping something might come of it. “We don’t really have a clear picture of how we can use them. We just thought…somehow …”
But Jasper did have a clear picture.
“That’s exactly it, Wallace,” he said. “We can use your butterflies as aerial spies and try to hunt down the place where Ariana is being kept. Perhaps Noah is there, too.”
Wallace looked from Jasper to Faye to Lucy. “What do you mean? How—”
“We have to reduce the size of our cameras,” said Jasper. “We can do it. We just need to make them small enough. We can secure the cameras to the butterflies—”
“Or wee elephants,” Lucy interjected.
“Or wee elephants,” Jasper continued. “We could time the photographs to be taken once they reach the correct distance.”
“They have to be the right weight and balance,” said Wallace, though he was now considering it possible.
“We’d have to be sure we had the correct distance,” said Faye, already working out the equation.
“But we don’t know where to send the cameras,” said Wallace. “Just knowing the distance isn’t enough.”
“But we do,” said Jasper. “The photograph of Ariana arrived when? Six hours after we did. Given the time it takes to drive a carriage from the opera house to the destination, we can calculate how far away she is. Then we map the distance, the circumference around the opera house, adjust the center point to where we are now, and send the little cameras out from here.”
Finding a blank spot, Jasper drew on the blackboard already covered with Faye’s tidy list. He drew an X. “This is us,” he explained. Around the X, he drew a wide circle. Then he drew vectors fanning out from the X to the perimeter. Next to it, he wrote: 6h at 18.5 km (or 11.5 miles) per h (in a carriage at a good speed)=111 km (or 69 miles). r=111k. Circumference=2πr=2π (111).
So, if we consider the speed it would take the carriage to take Noah’s mother approximately 11.5 miles per hour or 18.5 kilometres per hour,” Wallace said, reading from the board, “which is a good pace since they would surely be driving rather swiftly, that would make the circumference—”
“697.43 kilometres or about 433.36 miles,” said Faye.
“Well, consider that we can get an aerial photo of approximately 100 metres squared,” said Jasper. “We’d need 10 creatures for every kilometer of the circumference.”
Wallace shook his head. “It’s impossible, Jasper. As you said, the vectors would be 100 meters apart. Therefore we would need 6,974.3 creatures.”
Jasper stopped scribbling on the blackboard. He looked up. “Wallace is right. That means we’d need 6,974.3 little mechanical butterflies.”
Jasper erased his notes and tried again. Unfortunately, he came to the same answer.
“That’s a lot of butterflies, Jasper,” said Lucy. “I think we have twenty-seven now.”
Jasper looked at the others, undaunted. “Well, I think we need to have a wider scope for the camera.”
“The aerial photos I took over the pyramids were a much wider range than 100 meters,” said Faye. “Perhaps we need the creatures to fly higher.”
“It would be rather difficult,” said Wallace. “As it is, getting them above ten feet is a challenge. Higher than that and we risk never being able to retrieve them.”
“What if we didn’t need to retrieve them,” said Jasper. “We need only the images and, if we are able to send the images back to us using our machine, the butterflies can just land when they run out of power.”
“But how would we be able to do that from such a distance?” asked Wallace. “It’s one thing to do it from a few feet away. How can we do it from miles away?”
“We have Tesla’s tower,” said Jasper. “We have the capacity to transmit at a great distance.”
“He can explain anything we might need to know,” said Wallace. “I’m sure it would be compatible with whatever technology we might implement.”
“Using the same technology that we use for telegraph. Why not?” Faye looked from one member of the Young Inventors Guild to another. “Why not?”
Wallace looked through his notes again. “She’s right,” he said. “With 100 butterflies, we’d cover less than a kilometer per butterfly.”
“And with the vast amount of desert, we’d be able to easily see that dove house, that pigeon hotel, or whatever it is,” said Jasper, “and that broken minaret.”
Wallace said, “Either one alone would be useless because minarets and dove houses are everywhere. But together, they will tell us that we are near.”
They all leaned over to look, again, at the photograph that had come from Komar Romak. Using a magnifying glass, they looked closely at the scene out of the window.
“We can find that,” said Faye.
“We need to be able to secure a tracking device,” said Jasper. “We need to be able to know where each butterfly is headed.”
“We can make a picture on the photographing celluloid roll,” said Lucy.
“What?” Wallace looked at Jasper.
“Yes!” said Jasper. “We can mark each celluloid roll with the coordinates so we know where each photograph came from.”
“We can put a direction on each one,” said Lucy, “and set a little sextant to be sure it goes in the right direction and doesn’t get lost.”
“Yes,” said Jasper, smiling at his sister, “and we’ll be able to follow it back to where it went, if we set coordinates for each butterfly. We’ll make a map that shows each one.”
“Yes, we can map out the direction and calculate and etch exact coordinates for each,” said Wallace. “If the butterflies fly straight, or even fairly straight, we will be able to get a very close reading using the map to guide us. We’ll know where they’ve been.”
“We just need to find that field,” said Faye.
“We will,” said Jasper. “We will.”
Layers of complication faced the Young Inventors Guild building their fleet of butterfly photographers. They decided that each of them would focus on a different challenge. First, Wallace would be in charge of the camera project. Tiny cameras were the big problem there. Having to work quickly with tweezers through a magnifying glass would not be easy.
As the cameras were being completed by Wallace, Lucy designed a secure basket of wire to hold each camera in place and attach it to its butterfly, so that the motion was somewhat stabilized.
“They’re lovely,” said Miss Brett, observing the children. “What is happening with those little boxes?”
Wallace pointed to the delicate work in front of Lucy. “Each tiny camera lens must not be obstructed by the wire. As you see, the kinetic energy generated by the recharging magnetic sphere will roll back and forth through the body of the butterfly as the wings flutter, and will, in turn, be charged by the battery it was recharging.”
By now, Miss Brett knew to smile and nod, not having a clue what had been said.
The battery itself was the second big challenge. Jasper led the battery project. He was able to assess the initial charge capacity by sending out a butterfly geared to fly in a circle. At first, it did a nose dive onto the floor. To keep the butterfly afloat, the placement of the battery was vita
l, as was the speed of the wings.
Finally, Jasper was able to assess the strength of the magnet and the amount of copper coil, as well as the position of the battery and speed of the wings. Weight and size, as with the camera, was an issue. He had to make this recharging battery as tiny as possible, and perfectly balanced, so it didn’t affect the flight pattern. Tricky business, but Jasper was up to the task.
Then there was the challenge of creating a butterfly that would fly the 111 kilometres. To test this, they made a butterfly that would fly in a circular holding pattern around the circumference of the castle’s largest turret. The turret measured 628.31852 meters, so, to have the flight distance equal 111,000 meters, the butterfly would have to fly around it 176.66199 times.
Faye led this experiment since flying was her passion. They all stood and watched as the butterfly, holding the camera and the battery, flew around and around the turret. Needless to say, adjustments had to be made. The experiment did not work perfectly the first sixteen tries, and Lucy was thrilled to chase the butterfly down with a butterfly net.
But on the seventeenth try, the butterfly made it and the five photographs set to click at three-minute intervals over the last kilometer rolled out of the printing machine, showing four children’s faces filled with satisfaction.
The final challenge, however, required outright invention and a need to return to the drawing board.
“We need to be able to set the coordinates and have the butterfly stick to them,” said Jasper. “We need to use a sextant that adjusts the lever to stay on the coordinate, like a rudder on a ship. We need to set a steering course and have the butterfly stick to it.”
“Des ailerons,” said Lucy. “In French, the little wings, like those we used to guide our aeroplane. It’s the little feather bits on birds or the little wings on a butterfly. Like little rudders, aren’t they?”
“Lucy, you are amazing!” Faye kissed Lucy on the head.
“I love you too, Faye,” said Lucy, hugging her back.
The Strange Round Bird: Or the Poet, the King, and the Mysterious Men in Black Page 23