by Aaron Gansky
It took her a few moments to shake the fog of sleep. When she did, Erica stood next to her, bending over, her legs as straight and thin as Oliver’s two pipe-thick prayer staffs. Her palms halted halfway to the floor.
When Lauren bent over, her legs tightened. Her back hitched and she had to right herself and stretch up. Her back popped from tail bone to shoulder blades.
The pops echoed, and Oliver arched an eyebrow. “Sounds like you slept as comfortably as I did.” He reached his hands high over his head.
Back cracked, she tried again to put palms on floor. She didn’t make it, but she got close. At least her fingers still reached her toes.
Aiden and Ullwen continued the stretching trend. While not as flexible as Erica or Lauren, the two took their time. They stretched like athletes before a big game, focusing on each muscle group. She remembered Friday nights in North Chester, attending a game or two with Oliver. He hadn’t wanted to go, but she’d made him. She didn’t care much for the sport, but she loved to watch Aiden play.
Now, watching Aiden with one leg crooked over the other, used as a pivot to twist his back, she thought of pre-game warm-ups—him in his pads, helmet on, eyes blazing through the facemask. She’d memorized every lump of pads, every fold of fabric. He moved in Alrujah the way he moved in North Chester—fast and fluid, no matter how much heavy armor he wore.
“Are we ready?” Ullwen asked.
Aiden tilted his head to either side. His neck popped as loudly as Lauren’s back. He slipped his steel helmet on and smacked it like it was a football helmet. “Let’s do this.”
* * *
In Bailey Renee’s dream, she had wings. The tips of the feathered appendages stretched out beyond her peripheral vision. She felt the joints where they connected to her back, felt every muscle contract when they whipped down. The air pressed against her face, the currents rushed under her wings, lifted her higher. A sword, heavy and thick, sat in a holster on her hip, and the tip extended down past her knee.
She flew on some strange instinct. Experimentally, she shifted her body a bit and dove down to the left. She brought her wings down hard, then opened them wide. She flapped them up and down diagonally, holding herself upright, perpendicular to the ground. Like treading water, she thought. She moved herself forward, to the left and right.
She’d never smiled so broadly.
She worked her wings hard, catching the currents and using them to aid her lift. How high could she go? Flap after flap, she ascended in the strange two-sun sky. Beneath her, a massive medieval city spread out over hundreds of square miles. The more she ascended, the smaller it got, until, at last, it shrank to the size of a Lego brick. The thin air made breathing hard. Her back started to burn with the effort of flying. She’d not expected to feel fatigue in a dream.
Beneath the warm suns, hanging in the still cold air, Bailey folded her white-feathered wings around her and marveled at their warmth. Tilting forward, she fell, headlong, toward the ground. She freefell for nearly a minute, then snapped her wings open. Her descent slowed so rapidly she thought a bungee cord jerked her up. She tilted slightly, folded one wing, and barrel-rolled to her right. Finally, she flapped her wings twice and latched onto the golden spire atop the tallest tower of the castle of the city spread out under her.
Goose bumps tickled her skin. Aside from several well-worn paths, snow covered the ground. Several people gaped up at her. She smiled at them like a celebrity in a parade.
But terror marred their faces. They scurried indoors as several soldiers rushed out of the castle. Their steel helmets gleamed in the light of the setting suns. The sky turned the color of an Orange Julius—light orange and frothy with clouds.
Weirdest.
Dream.
Ever.
Soldiers in leather tunics pulled arrows from their backs and set them on the strings of their bows.
Bailey didn’t have to stick around to figure out what they had in mind. She leapt off the spire, set her sights skyward, and flapped her wings furiously. Six arrows shot past her, but none touched her.
Time to find out how fast she could fly.
* * *
Oliver side-stepped the lunging nar’esh, bringing his rognak staff down across its outstretched arms. They snapped near the elbows, and he pivoted, brought the staff back up fast, catching the beast under the chin. Its neck snapped, and it crashed to the floor like a crushed aluminum can.
Erica ducked, grabbed both wrists of a nar’esh, and with a savage slash, cut both its hands off. It reeled back, holding its two bloody stumps to its tarantulan eyes. Erica took a few steps toward it and dropped both her daggers in its chest.
Even covered in rank nar’esh blood, she was beautiful. Lovely. Graceful in her savagery.
Lauren stretched out her hands and torched a nar’esh on either side of her. They lit up in flames, shriveled to the floor like slugs covered in salt.
“There are no more,” Ullwen said. He almost sounded sad, bored.
The cloud of bats Erica summoned dispersed down the hallways, tiny shrieks bouncing off the rock walls. “Yup. All passages clear.” She turned to the massive doors before them. “I’m guessing we made it to Margwar?”
With a snap of her finger, Lauren lit two torches on either side of the massive gold-gilded doors.
Oliver put his hands on the cold stone, traced the lines of gold with his fingers. “Very few people know this entrance to Margwar exists. They believe it to be destroyed or assume it never existed to begin with.”
“Thank you, Professor Oliver,” Erica said. She craned her neck back, taking in the twelve-foot high doors. “Aren’t dwarves supposed to be small?”
Lauren nodded. “They liked to show off their masonry and smithing skills. They built things big because they could. It impressed visitors and earned the respect of foreign dignitaries.”
“So they were compensating.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Lauren said.
Aiden said, “But Erica would.”
Ullwen examined the door. “They do not appear easy to force open.”
Aiden pushed the doors with a grunt. “Got to be a million pounds. What’s the plan, bro? Secret knock?”
Oliver turned his new staff around in his hand. Several carved dwarvish characters ran up and down its length. “Secret knocks only help if someone opens it from the other side.”
Erica said, “It’d be pretty bomb if we had some dynamite.”
The worse the pun, the more Oliver loved Erica. “I think it has something to do with my staff, if I remember correctly. These runes are dwarvish. They must tell us how to get in.”
“So get reading,” Erica said.
“I can’t.”
“Excuse me?” Erica said.
Oliver tapped the point of the stick on the ground. “I can’t read it.”
Erica furrowed her brow. “Hold on a minute super genius. You can’t read a language you put in the game?”
“I didn’t bother memorizing the phonetic rules of every language I coded. I built in a translator from English to elvish or dwarvish. I’d type in what I wanted it to say in English, and it would come out in dwarvish.”
“You’re so weird,” she said, but it sounded like a compliment.
“You don’t remember what it said?” Lauren asked.
He frowned. “Kinda forgot about this place when I scrapped it from the main quest.”
“I didn’t think you forgot anything,” Lauren said.
“You gotta think, bro. Our way home’s on the other side of that door.”
The books from the monastery. He dropped his staffs and rummaged through the saddlebags they’d brought along. Inside, he grabbed The Language of Adonai. He flipped through it for a bit until he found the section on running the translation subset concurrently with the physics engine. It didn’t tell him exactly what he’d hoped it would, but it did give an example of a translation from English to dwarvish, which might be enough to extrapolate the phonetic rel
ationship between the two languages.
Ullwen knelt next to Oliver. “What book do you read?”
“It’s the instruction manual for the coding software I used to create Alrujah.”
Ullwen stood up and took two steps back. “The Language of Adonai”?
“Yes.”
“That is a holy book,” he said in awe.
Oliver shook his head. “I appreciate your reverence, but I think we’re a little past that.” He flipped through the pages quickly until he found a spot near the middle of the book. As he hoped, he found the instructions and an example translation. But it did little to help. Primarily a fast substitution of letters and letter sounds, it would take too long to decode. But halfway down the second page, the manual showed the transcription of numbers. He recognized two of them: 3 and 20.
Revelation 3:20.
Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
Unbelievable. Aiden was right. A secret knock.
He knocked twice and recited the verse. A latch unhinged on the opposite side, and the two massive gold-gilded doors swung open.
* * *
Bailey remembered little of her dream when she woke up at 4:30 the next morning, only the sensation of flying, the fatigue in her back, the pressing of wind and pull of gravity as she barrel-rolled toward the earth. She spent the next thirty minutes staring at the ceiling trying to recapture the sensation of freedom and strength.
At 5:00, Bailey rolled out of Lauren’s bed, grabbed the journal, stepped over the pile of clothes and books and walked to her room. She put the journal in her backpack—something for study hall if she lasted that long—and readied herself for the day.
While she showered, while she ate breakfast, while she should have been thinking about getting back into a routine and balancing her school work and sports schedule, thoughts of Sarah Skeleton distracted her. Bailey and Sarah had chemistry together third period, as did Oliver and Lauren. Two classes her first day back would be plenty.
Once she saw Sarah, she would go up to her and punch her straight in her too-pretty-for-you face.
Her heart twitched a bit with the thought. She shouldn’t be this angry at someone who had no logical connection to Lauren’s disappearance, but Bailey had read enough articles on cyber-bullying to understand its drastic effects. In all reality, hitting her wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t help find Lauren. Bailey would be suspended or kicked off the basketball team, or both.
But it would feel good. If nothing else, the punch would be a well-needed lesson in manners for Sarah.
She pulled her parka on, zipped it up, put the fur-lined hood over her head, and walked down to the bus stop.
* * *
Shortly after stepping into the ancient city of Margwar, Lauren and the rest of the group stopped. Her eyes widened to suns. Aiden whispered, “Whoa.” Ullwen whispered something about clever dwarves. Even Erica stood silent, her head turning side to side, up and down, contemplating the immensity of the metropolis, the intricacies of the masonry and blacksmithing, the sheer complexity of an underground city.
Lauren breathed stale air and immediately recognized the smell. Old, dusty pages with a twist of citrus. She folded her arms for warmth and stepped closer to Aiden.
Oliver used the torch to light a trough of kerosene. Immediately, flames raced along the outlying walls of the city. Easily the size of North Chester, Margwar spread out before them like an unrolling map.
Arranged like a stadium, the city was tiered with the higher levels outside. Each inner level descended several feet. Buildings stretched out of the ground, complete with carved windows. Bridges sprang up from the upper levels like freeway off-ramps and ran down to the more central, lower levels. Black rock columns stretched up from the floor, thick as elephants. On the bottom level, constructed of equal parts gold and stone, stood a building of immense size.
Apparently unaffected, Oliver said, “Sure wish we knew where to find this book.”
Aiden rested his hand on the hilt of his sword. “You don’t know where to go?”
“We go here. But I don’t know where in here exactly.”
Erica said, “If I were a book of great power and importance, where would I hide?”
“A library,” Ullwen said.
Oliver studied the carvings on his rognak prayer staff again. “No libraries to speak of, except in the palace. Dwarves aren’t exactly big readers.”
Lauren surveyed the city. The flickering light of the kerosene trench bathed Margwar, a city as large as any downtown in America, in a sheen of amber, illuminating its ornate carvings and gold work. Not content to simply make functional buildings, the dwarves had taken the time to decorate each window, each door, each wall with intricate designs—lines and curves flowing into and out of each other at impossible angles. The designs and uniformity of the structures impressed her.
Oliver squinted at his stick, running his fingers over the smooth grooves. Erica stood next to him, spinning her Ma’att’tal bracelets around her left arm. Aiden swished his sword through the air, apparently trying to become comfortable with the weight and length of the new blade. It glowed blue with electricity. Ullwen sheathed Aiden’s old sword in an over-the-shoulder belt. The hilt of it tipped to the left of his neck.
Lauren had tucked her scrolls in the saddlebags. She didn’t need them to use the spells. Once Oliver had helped her read them, they stayed with her. They remained in her, a source of power radiating an undulating energy.
The scrolls made her wonder. She’d read those, eventually, and they’d been written in dwarvish. She held her hand out to Oliver. “Let me try reading that thing.”
He handed the staff to her. She didn’t remember any sounds for the familiar characters. Some resembled inverted English characters, some upside down Spanish letters. The longer she stared at them, the more they flipped around and traded places.
Her eyes must be playing tricks on her. The characters jumped and spun, performing a dictionary circus. She rubbed her eyes to no effect. She held the staff toward Oliver. “Does this look the same to you?”
He tilted his head to one side like a curious mutt. “Yeah. Why?”
Sparky barked and rubbed against Erica’s leg. “Hang on,” she said and put her hand on his head.
“The words, I mean. Not the staff. Are they the same words?”
He held the staff up to the trench of kerosene and inspected it closely. “Think so. Why?”
Lauren shook her head. She took the staff back, squinted, and focused on the stick, but the harder she stared, the more the characters moved.
“Something wrong?” Oliver asked.
“The words,” she said. They slowed, eventually stopped moving, reassembled themselves into something recognizable.
English.
She shouldn’t be able to read it. Indigo never spoke dwarvish. But the words assembled themselves into English. The Lauren part of her twinkled inside. “I remember the language now. I can read it,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Belphegor took for himself an abominable body, a twisting of bull and of man. Unto his likeness, the dwarves fashioned golden idols and stone idols. They honored him with wicked prayers and sacrifices which angered almighty Adonai.
—The Book of the Ancients
WHEN MR. COOPERSON, BAILEY Renee’s English teacher, gave the class the last ten minutes to free-read, she pulled out the worn leather journal she’d taken from Lauren’s room. She’d not remembered it being inscribed with The Book of Things to Come, but she never paid much attention to Lauren’s and Oliver’s game. Nothing more immature or childish than video games.
The scripting language Oliver designed interested her, though. He’d shown it to her once, and it made her head spin. She had no idea how he handled so many variables simultaneously, and how they worked together to solve minor bug issues. A self-correcting scripting language s
eemed like something more out of science-fiction than reality.
Bailey paid only enough attention to the story, the part Lauren made, to ridicule it. Now, she wanted to flip through the yellowing pages and find out what fantasies played through her sister’s mind. With a little luck, she might even stumble across some clue, some small revelatory detail to balance the equation, to find out what happened to the missing kids—some thread to tie the game to the disappearances. Of course, that’d be about as likely as her winning the lottery. But if such a thread existed, she would find it.
She opened the journal, skimmed through the first few pages. Only a few pages had been written in. Not like Lauren at all. Lauren filled entire journals in a matter of weeks. In fact, over the years she’d been working on the game with Oliver, she’d filled forty-two journals with information and sketches about the game. They all sat on shelves in her room, conveniently numbered for easy reference.
So this must be the most recent. But why did it look so old? The thin, yellow pages crinkled under the slightest touch. Thick ink formed words on pages like dried leaves. She handled the journal with the utmost care and respect, terrified it might crumble to ash in her hands.
Too many words she didn’t understand made the text hard to follow—Vicmorn, Indigo, Lakia, Jaurru, Ullwen. They all sounded like names, and all were capitalized, so she assumed they were characters. Context demystified other strange words. Fangands fit the description of werewolves. Ogres became beresus. And she understood what “abomination” meant, but the usage of it differed here. Instead of something hated, Lauren used it as a description of a race of monsters, super beings, or evil gods. Hard to say which one for sure.
The bell rang, and the class picked up their belongings. Bailey Renee slipped the journal carefully into her bag. She replaced her textbook and notebook on the shelf in their proper places, then headed to the stairs on the other side of the hall, toward the chemistry lab.
Sarah Skeleton would be upstairs.
Premature guilt twinged in her stomach. Bailey almost pitied prissy little Sarah. The prim little model wouldn’t stand a chance against Bailey Renee. One punch, she told herself. Make it quick. In and out.