Millie only snorted again.
They rode for what felt like an impossibly long time, and despite Dorrie’s constant checking on their direction, no crocodile-shaped cliff had yet come into view. Dazzled by the electric brightness of the stars and the sea of moon-brightened sand, Dorrie had never felt so thoroughly away from everything she knew. Soon though, the temperature began to drop, and Dorrie felt her fingers going numb. A cramping stiffness in her muscles made her feel like she was simply going to topple off the next time the camel swerved left or right.
At last, something changed on the horizon. Excitement and nervousness pricked Dorrie. Soon, the solid dark silhouette of a crocodile head could be seen against the star-spangled sky behind it.
They stopped in a hollow among the dunes to stretch their legs and drink water. Dorrie and Millie slid clumsily to the ground and landed in heaps. Rubbing her legs and saying “Ow, ow, ow, ow,” Dorrie struggled to her feet and took hold of Verity’s reins as Ebba slid down as well, managing to keep her feet.
“I sure hope the attack skeleton isn’t real,” Ebba said a few minutes later as she folded away an empty water skin. She fished some dates out of a pack and fed a few to Verity, which the camel seemed to relish. The wind, which had picked up, ruffled her scarf.
“C’mon, we’d better go,” said Dorrie. “We’ve got to leave just as much time to get back as it takes us to get the cave, and we want as much time as possible to look for those vials.” As they gathered their things, the wind began to gust more strongly, driving stinging sand before it.
Verity and Valiant didn’t seem to like the change. They simply refused to kneel. In desperation, Ebba poured the rest of the dates onto the ground in front of them. Just when it looked like they were going to fold their legs, a great cloud of fast-moving sand pricked them all over, and both camels bolted, reins streaming behind them.
“No!” shouted Ebba, trying to run after them, her feet churning inefficiently in the deep sand, Dorrie and Millie at her heels.
Within seconds, the two camels had disappeared over a dune into a cloud of swirling, airborne sand as neatly as if they had used a skipkey, taking all the girls’ supplies with them except for Dorrie’s compass and the weapons hanging from Millie’s belt.
Ebba stumbled to a stop. “Are they going to be okay?”
“They’re camels!” shouted Millie. “We’re the ones in trouble!”
Ebba raised her voice over the sound of the wind. “Do we have to head back?”
Dorrie glanced nervously in the direction of the cliffs, which were lost for the moment in the swirling sand. They hadn’t seemed too far off, but now…with no water… She glanced at Millie. Her lips were stubbornly set. Dorrie imagined Millie disappearing before their eyes. “I say we keep going.”
“Me too,” said Millie.
They trudged in silence, tucking their chins against the wild flying sand. At times, the clouds of sand obscured the cliffs completely, and Dorrie was afraid they’d miss them.
At last, the jutting spine of rock that now loomed above them.
Dorrie’s hands touched rough rock.
With no clue to guide her but desperate to get out of the driving, pitiless sand, Dorrie blindly chose to go right, the others hanging on to her. Wearily, her fingers sought a refuge in the cliff face. They had gone on like this for some time when without warning, the face of the cliff seemed to give way, and Dorrie found herself falling—Ebba and Millie with her. They landed in a tangle. Beneath them, a vast nest of bones and skulls clattered and slid.
Shrieking, Dorrie and Ebba scrambled out of it in different directions.
“They’re not going to hurt you,” said Millie, tossing her bangs and kicking at a bone that looked like a rib.
Dorrie tried to slow down her breathing. “Yeah, well, I’d rather not sit on them.” She looked around.
They stood in a small cave with rough walls. At the height of their heads, the small opening through which they had fallen showed flying sand bright like snow seen outside the window of a lit room.
“How are we seeing each other?” asked Millie. “It should be pitch-black in here. Where’s the light coming from?”
“The bones,” whispered Ebba.
Slowly, Dorrie looked down. They did seem to be exuding a ponderous, dark sort of light.
Millie put a hand on one of her daggers. “It feels like…like bad things have happened in here.”
Dorrie tried not to let Millie’s words unnerve her. “Better start looking for the vials.”
“If they’re here, I bet they’re near that folded-up bat picture,” said Ebba.
Each taking a section of the cave, the apprentices set to work searching for it on the chamber’s walls.
Just when Dorrie felt she had nowhere left to search, Millie called out. “Look at this.”
Dorrie and Ebba hurried to her. In a fold in the cave’s wall, Millie pointed out a narrow opening in the shape of a peapod. Peering into the space beyond it, Dorrie made out a narrow passage. Its walls were the same rough stone as those of the cave. It was filled with an even heavier version of the unsettling light.
Millie stepped through the opening and turned back to them. “Are you coming?”
Dorrie said a silent good-bye to her hopes that if the vials were there, the vials would be easy to find, possibly already packed in a convenient carrying case. She forced herself to follow, Ebba close behind. The passage narrowed further, its walls converging at what looked like a mere crooked crack.
“Look!” shouted Ebba.
High above the crack, the figure of the folded bat lady had been scratched into the rock.
“Just like on the envelope,” whispered Ebba. “And in the book.”
Beyond the crack, the light dimly showed another rock wall less than a foot away. Hope burning in her eyes, Millie thrust her arm through and reached in all directions.
“Nothing,” said Millie angrily.
Dorrie squeezed by her and maneuvered her head through the widest part of the crack. Her palms broke out in a sweat. She was looking down a cleft in the rock so narrow that Dorrie could barely fit her whole head into it. Far, far away, the cleft seemed to widen. The thought of squeezing her whole body into that crevice and then traveling its length was terrifically unpleasant. She forced herself to speak. “I think we have to go farther.”
Dorrie led the way. Twisting and turning like a corkscrew, she managed to claw her way into the cleft.
She began to shuffle sideways, trying not to think about getting stuck, scraping a new bit of skin off with every step. Behind her, she could hear Ebba struggling her way through the crack and then, with many curses, Millie.
After far too many steps taken, the cleft finally widened. With great relief, Dorrie tumbled into a chamber, Ebba close behind.
“Are they there?” Millie called, a note of raw desperation in her voice as she struggled to reach them. For all her brave talk, she sounded deeply afraid.
Dorrie’s eyes swept the chamber, trying to make sense of its contents.
The floor was littered here and there with scraps of papyrus, parchment, and paper. In the cavern’s center stood a great flat-topped block of stone, covered in black stains and what looked like dried pools of red and yellow wax. Someone had affixed five enormous metal plates to the wall. The figure of the bat had been etched into the top of each one. They were covered with lines of writing in dozens of languages.
Millie appeared beside Dorrie, her cheek freely bleeding.
“What’s all this?” said Ebba dropping onto the floor to sift through the scraps.
Dorrie and Millie examined the plates.
“They’re covered with names and addresses,” said Dorrie as the lines of writing shifted into readability.
“And dates,” said Millie. “Each name has a date next to it.”
Dorrie gave a cry and pointed. “There’s Lady Whitcomb’s name!”
“And look at this,” said Ebba, standing with a rough-edged piece of parchment.
Dorrie and Millie leaned close, and Dorrie’s breath caught. Though most of the page was blank, someone had begun to write a letter upon it. A letter dated the fifth of March 1077 began:
“Dear Count Sieciech,
Long have you patiently waited, outnumbered by the ignorant, for the glorious return of the Foundation. Long have you kept—”
It ended in a blot of ink, as though an accident had made the writer give up, perhaps to start the letter over fresh on another sheet of parchment. The apprentices stared at one another.
“The Foundation is using this place,” said Dorrie.
With great energy and hope, they darted around the room, searching it for the vials as they had the first chamber with increasing franticness, but again with no luck. Millie finally turned and slapped the wall hard, breathing roughly, her head bowed. “They’re not here.”
Dorrie glanced at Ebba, feeling helpless, as Millie’s breaths echoed in the silence.
When Millie at last turned back, her face was stiff. “We’d better get back and tell the Lybrariad what we found.”
Dorrie took a last look at the metal plates. For the first time, she noticed one of them was different from the others. Rather than being arranged in a list of names and addresses, the words on it were laid out in the shape of a letter, complete with a salutation, a close, and a signature. She peered more closely at it. “I don’t believe it,” she shot out. She touched a line of the writing. “Those are symbols from Petrarch’s alphabet!”
“Are you sure?” Millie asked.
Dorrie nodded vigorously. “The Archivist has them painted on his wall. I stare at them every morning!”
“We really have to go,” said Ebba. “We’re on foot, and once the sun hits the desert…”
A thought struck Dorrie as Ebba and Millie began to ease themselves back through the crevice. A thought she didn’t dare explain now in case she were wrong. Heart racing, she snatched up the letter to the count from the stone block where Ebba had laid it and tucked it inside her clothes.
The second struggle through the cleft reopened old scrapes and created new ones. They had just stumbled out of the middle passage and into the cavern of bones when a monstrous shape thrust itself through the cave mouth above their heads, making them all shriek.
Millie pulled out a sword and a dagger. Dorrie, unable to afford the luxury of squeamishness, dove for a leg bone.
“Verity!” shrieked Ebba.
The shape pulled back her rubbery lips to display an impressive set of yellow-brown teeth, set off nicely against a blue scarf.
Chapter 24
An Unexpected Meeting
During the journey back across the desert, the implications of their failure to find the vials worked their way more deeply into Dorrie’s heart. Millie hardly spoke at all, and Dorrie couldn’t bring herself to talk with Ebba about anything else while the specter of losing Millie rode along with them. A glance at her thumbnail added to Dorrie’s anxiety. There was hardly anything left of the black stain. She wondered for a very uncomfortable moment if she’d be able to get them back into Petrarch’s Library.
On the edge of Timbuktu, which they almost missed entirely, Ebba pushed the camels’ reins into the surprised hands of a man at the head of a long caravan of camels loaded down with slabs of salt, and they hurried on by foot.
Two hours before breakfast would be served at the Sharpened Quill, Dorrie, Ebba, and Millie sprinted into the Celsus, hoping Hypatia was up and at work. When they reached her office, they could hear the low murmur of a conversation on the other side of the door.
Dorrie knocked firmly. There was a pause in the talk, and then the door was thrown open by Mistress Wu, who blinked at them in great surprise.
“We need to talk to Hypatia,” Dorrie said.
“Yes, well, now’s not really a—” she broke off, seemingly just having eyed the gash on Millie’s cheek and the general worn and worse-for-wear look of all of them. She stood aside.
A few feet into the room, Dorrie stopped short, causing Millie and Ebba to plow into her from behind. “Savi!” she said, shocked somehow to see him standing beside Francesco.
“What the devil happened to you?” asked Francesco, striding toward Millie to get a better view of the gash.
She batted his hand away. “It doesn’t matter.”
“We’ve found something,” Dorrie said breathlessly. “It has to do with the Foundation.” Hoping the lybrarians wouldn’t react too badly to the news that she and Millie and Ebba had been in Timbuktu, Dorrie told them how the apprentices had come to suspect that Lady Whitcomb might be in touch with the Foundation and how they’d come to believe that the Vox Mortis vials might be in the Cave of the Black-Fingered Skeleton and how they’d gone there hoping to find them before Mr. Biggs got to them.
Francesco’s eyes had grown wild with hope at this but then dimmed when Millie explained that the Vox Mortis vials hadn’t been in the cave. He strode away to the window, his hands knotted behind his back.
Hypatia watched him solemnly, Savi looked down, and Mistress Wu’s eyes dampened. Millie went to stand beside him, her shoulder barely brushing his arm, and after a moment, they turned back to face the room together, Francesco’s hand on her shoulder.
Dorrie told the lybrarians about the room with the ink- and wax-covered stone block and the strange metal plate that showed Lady Whitcomb’s name, along with those of hundreds of other people. She laid the letter addressed to the count on Hypatia’s desk. “And Ebba found this.”
Hypatia looked the bit of letter over. “Now that is interesting.” She passed it to Savi. “Savi has been looking for signs of Foundation activity in 1647 all quarter. He’s become aware of one Baron Flageletti in Italy who not only has a black nail but has been awaiting the appearance of a set of bottles for some weeks now. A delivery that is very late and very important to him.”
“Just like Lady Whitcomb,” said Ebba.
“The bottles are to appear beneath the seventh flagstone from the foot of the stairs in his wine cellar,” said Savi.
“How does he know?” asked Dorrie.
Savi and Hypatia exchanged glances.
“He received a letter,” said Savi.
“So did Lady Whitcomb!” said Dorrie. “With a little bat thing on it.”
“Addressed in that room beneath the Crocodile Cliffs, it would seem,” said Savi. “And then sent on their way.”
“But four hundred years apart,” said Francesco.
Hypatia turned to Dorrie. “You’re certain Mr. Biggs said he was the only one who knew where the Vox Mortis vials were hidden?”
Dorrie nodded.
“And he intended to send them to the Foundation’s new allies?”
Dorrie nodded again. “He was angry the Lybrariad had delayed him.”
“We’d been assuming the allies were all in 399 BCE,” said Savi. “But it would seem that they’re all over time. In centuries to which the Stronghold doesn’t even connect. Lady Whitcomb in twentieth century London, Baron Flageletti’s in seventeenth-century Italy, not to mention this Count Sieciech, wherever he resides,” said Savi.
Hypatia took back the count’s letter. “Perhaps for Mr. Biggs, ‘sending’ the Vox Mortis vials means simply leaving them in one or more safe, out-of-the-way places where they can lie undisturbed until unearthed by one of the Foundation’s allies in a later century.”
“But what about that Baron,” asked Dorrie. “His wine cellar didn’t exist thousands of years ago, did it? It’s not like Mr. Biggs could slip it under the seventh flagstone in 399 BCE.”
“No,” said Savi, “but Mr. Biggs could hide the vials in a place that does still exist in later centurie
s. Perhaps some Foundation agent is poised to find them and distribute them, and so make it look to the Lady Whitcomb’s of the world as if some impressive ‘magic’ has happened indeed.”
Hypatia turned to Mistress Wu. “Dispatch a few lybrarians to the wherens of the three new Foundation allies,” said Hypatia. “See if they’ll let anything slip. Also, please ask Keyhand Obaji to lead a party out to the Crocodile Cliffs as soon as the circulation desk can have one outfitted.”
“I’ll go too,” Francesco and Savi said at the same time.
“There’s one more thing,” said Dorrie. “There was a fifth plate we couldn’t read. It was written with symbols from Petrarch’s alphabet.”
Hypatia’s eyebrows rose.
“It was laid out like a letter,” said Dorrie. “Is there any chance the bit of letter to the count says the same thing as the beginning of the letter engraved on the metal plate?”
All eyes in the room turned to the scrap of parchment in Hypatia’s hands.
“And if it does, would it give the Archivist a kind of Rosetta stone?”
Hypatia’s eyebrows rose further. “Mistress Wu, please fetch the Archivist and ask him to join the Timbuktu team.”
Many other orders were given. Lybrarians came and went. There was much conferring and squashing against one another in the crowded room. When Francesco took Millie aside to talk privately, Ebba elbowed Dorrie.
“Let’s get out of here,” she whispered, “before they remember to punish us for going out to Timbuktu by ourselves.”
In the empty attics, Dorrie and Ebba changed out of their desert robes. Outside the den windows, Roger bellowed mournfully. Dorrie agreed to hurry to the Sharpened Quill before breakfast ended to get them food while Ebba took care of Roger’s dining needs.
However, halfway there, as Dorrie passed the Pyonyang archway, its calendar caught Dorrie’s eye, and she jammed on the brakes. This was the day of Timotheus’s trial, but the Archivist was likely long gone to Timbuktu by now. Marcus was probably waiting for him at the Tyre archway.
The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks Page 23