He looked again at the projection of the room. The two people inside seemed suddenly uneasy.
“What was that?” Rensat asked.
“I don’t know,” Pao said. “But we must go. It is time.”
Rensat shook her head and returned to her work. With a glance toward Mikel—and eyes that appeared to be searching, seeking—Pao sighed and then also resumed his studies.
What are you looking for . . . still, after all these eons? Mikel wondered.
He looked at the panel of tiles in his hands. They were pulsing and burning, not just with heat but with light. He had the sense that if he screamed at them, into them, the ghosts would hear. But Mikel was methodical. He was not there yet, not ready to act rashly . . . irrationally.
If any of this can be called rational, he thought.
Mikel set the tiles down and rooted his fingers into the empty slots where they had been fixed. The ghosts didn’t change, reinforcing the idea that they were present in the moment. But by accident, fumbling around in the opening and perhaps activating another tile, he revealed a map. Ancient, it seemed, with unfamiliar contours. It appeared like a scrim between himself and the specters, and then was gone.
“Damn it—I want that!”
He jabbed his fingers in all directions, but nothing. And then he hit a sweet spot. Images flashed this way and that like minnows. Airships with nets strung between them, plumes of lava shooting into the sky, crops growing in clouds, seagoing vessels, faces, pyres, alabaster buildings, plans for buildings and then—the map was back. Mikel froze his fingers. Relaxing his hand slightly without so much as moving his fingertips, he glided the map into a prominent place. Swelling—seeming to anticipate what he wanted before he struggled to achieve it—the map filled his vision, layering across the tunnel and glowing blue. It was beautiful. Its key elements were ten black dots or points grouped in one area—settlements, towns, cities, hunting grounds . . . he had no idea which. There were also orange dots clustered around one region. He memorized the pattern. If he could figure out where he was, he could find the others.
Mikel took a moment to regard the image in its entirety, continental contours familiar in some spots, utterly unrecognizable in others. Still, there was no doubt what he was looking at.
Galderkhaan, he thought. After all these years, after centuries, the Group would have it.
Mikel Jasso did not have an ego, not in the same way Flora did, but there was pride of accomplishment: he would be the one to bring it home.
The emotion of the moment was overwhelming but there was no time to savor it. Not far from the orange spots was a fine, fine series of lines in red, blue, and black. He concentrated on the network and it expanded.
So you can read my mind, he thought incredulously. The mechanism didn’t matter right now, but he couldn’t help but wonder what else the tiles could do. And how they did it. Clearly, the infinite possibilities in the arrangement of the stones brought up different information—an impossibly complex but brilliantly compact data storage system.
In one spot on the map he recognized the path he had taken. It was black. He pinpointed his location generally and mentally marked the spidery legs of the tunnels. He assumed that blue meant water, red—magma? He wondered if those substances still flowed there. Probably not; tens of thousands of years would have altered the pools or bodies of water from where they’d originated. Mikel let go of that spot on the wall and the map disappeared.
He carefully replaced the panel and positioned his hands in their previous place on the tiles. Pao and Rensat filled his vision as before, the room reappearing as if the tiles had gone transparent—or, more likely, were projecting data like the big TVs at sporting events, only at a far greater level of detail. He wondered if they were doing the same thing on the other side, feeding data to the Galderkhaani. The two were in slightly different positions; of course they were. The present day had unfolded while he studied the map.
Once more mentally present, Mikel was swept up in the shuddering feeling of unearthliness. The tiles also felt it, felt something, or maybe they were causing it: the glow intensified slightly.
What’s going on? Mikel thought uneasily.
He looked into the ghostly room. Rensat was closing a door in the glass panel behind her, having just come from the massive chamber.
“I do not understand,” she said. “You felt it, I felt it, yet the tiles tell me there is no one else out there.”
Are they feeling it too? Mikel wondered. Or are they somehow sensing me?
“Is it possible?” Pao asked, a trace of hope in his voice. “After so much time, their eternal silence—is it possible?”
“I would like to think that devotion is rewarded,” Rensat said with a bitter smile. “But why would the Candescents wait until now to reveal themselves? Now, when we are very nearly beaten.”
“Perhaps that is the reason,” Pao suggested. He raised his shoulders weakly. “Who can know the mind and will of the Candescents?”
Unlike Pao’s, the woman’s voice and expression seemed utterly without hope. “Everyone has been so elusive for so long. The traitor. Our dear Vol. This witch or ascended soul or demonic Technologist—whatever she was who tore the rest apart at the end.” She looked at Pao. “Maybe it is time to depart.”
Pao looked around. “Our existence mattered, though, Rensat. We have failed to save Galderkhaan but we proved the cazh, finally. We remained bonded.” His eyes sought hers lovingly. “That is not a small thing.”
“I still feel as though I have failed.” Rensat smiled thinly. “We are denied the higher planes. We are denied the fellowship and richness of others, of rising to the cosmic plane. That was the reason for the cazh. That was the reason you joined us that first time when we were much younger.”
“I stayed because I loved you as I loved Vol,” Pao said, gently correcting her.
Rensat hugged herself. “I am afraid to leave, Pao. I am afraid to face an eternity in this way.”
“At least we are transcended, not merely ascended,” Pao pointed out. “We are not in silent isolation.”
Mikel recognized the words from the library. Ascendant . . . transcendent . . . Candescent. Was there a hierarchy, like angels? Was this the root of all faith? There was still so much he did not understand in just the few things they had said. A witch—what kind of aberration was that?
Without realizing it, Mikel’s hands had moved, like they were resting on the planchette of a Ouija board. Suddenly another image, this one clearly a window into the past, swept across his field of view. Momentarily disoriented, then horrified, he was looking at a courtyard, hearing human screams. The floor of the courtyard was full of carvings—and stones. Olivine tiles. All around him people in yellow and white robes were engulfed in walls of fire. They were shrieking in anguish as they died a torturous death. Feeling sick, Mikel forced himself to keep looking, to see the volcano erupting in the distance.
A caldera filled with lava, he thought. One of the orange spots on the map?
As he let his mind absorb the spectacle of people burning, their souls clinging to their tortured, disintegrating bodies, their hands linked and their melting tongues trying hard to utter words, he experienced some of the fury of the volcano. But this was not just a window to a disaster. It showed more: bodies falling from ethereal shapes—souls? Some were only there for a moment before blinking out. Others rose away in pairs.
He looked desperately through the image for the Galderkhaani Pao and Rensat had been discussing: the witch, the demonized figure, the one who would not seem to belong. His eyes were drawn to a dim figure above the flames, above the city, hovering in the sky like a banshee of Irish lore. He tried to bring her into focus but lost the image when his fingers returned to their previous position.
Pao and Rensat returned, standing still and silent like clothes stored for the winter. Is this how they had spent part of their endless time as earthbound spirits? In some kind of contemplative stasis? Did time even have a
ny meaning for them? Without periods of sleep to measure the hours, did the destruction of Galderkhaan seem no more than a few decades distant?
Mikel began to search through the images again, posing himself a scientific question: here on this side of Antarctica there were no volcanoes. The bedrock had long since been mapped. Yet if he was here watching history, there had been a volcano, at the very least the remnants of a caldera somewhere. Unless—
Absolute devastation, he answered himself. The mountain must have been leveled, then swallowed by the sea, then ice.
Rensat and Pao began to move again. They were still very silent. Suddenly, Mikel felt a very low, slow vibration pass through the room. The walls themselves were vibrating. The tiles were becoming almost blindingly luminous. The sound was deeper, much more internally loud than the erupting volcano had been. Amazingly, as Mikel’s body wavered under its force, he watched Pao and Rensat tremble in exactly the same manner and motion. Mikel felt terror return, stronger than before.
“What was that?” he said to himself.
Rensat asked the same thing, a moment behind him.
“I don’t know,” Pao admitted.
Behind Mikel, the tunnel began to glow with a dull orange. He heard a distant cry from the direction in which he’d encountered Jina.
Something was coming. Something—tracking him or the other two? Was that what Rensat and Pao had felt, what she went in the other room to find?
Rensat looked in Mikel’s direction. “There is another . . . no, several others,” she said.
Pao studied his companion. “Rensat, is it possible that it is Enzo?”
“How?” Rensat asked. “She was lost, her mission unfinished. And the ascended cannot communicate with anyone, not in her plane, not in ours.”
“What if she has found another voice?” Pao asked with rising enthusiasm. “What if she has found a body?”
“But how? I don’t understand.”
“You remember Sogera, his experiments with braziers,” Pao said. “Enzo was there, I remember her clearly. She saw how the flaming sunbird continued to hiss as her flesh was consumed.”
“But not her soul,” the woman said. “Blessed Enzo, if it is so!”
Rensat began to share Pao’s renewed—fervor was the word that came to Mikel’s mind. It was as if they were born again, their eyes and expressions almost manic.
The rumbling remained constant, the glow grew brighter, and now the heat began to rise. Mikel began to feel like he imagined the poor figures in the vision had felt . . . only in slow motion. Helpless as the fire neared, with nowhere to turn, except to each other. He wondered if the tiles had somehow anticipated his future, showed him something he needed to know, to experience by proxy—death throes by fire—in order to escape his own possible fate.
Dear god, he thought. To die without sharing what I’ve discovered—
That mustn’t be, it would not be. If it were true that the stones had some kind of access to his mind, they might also save him. He looked at the ghostly couple and placed his hands in the widely splayed position he had in the previous chamber.
Do something! he yelled in his mind.
But he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, except escape, and, obviously, the tiles could not teleport him free.
Looking into the room Mikel realized, suddenly, that the material Pao and Rensat had been studying was an instruction manual for the tiles. His eyes scanned them desperately for guidance. He saw one figure walking—and a wall opening.
Right, he thought. The tiles can be removed. He looked them over from bottom to top, side to side. Which one is the key?
Now a tile just to the right of his face began to glow brighter. Without hesitation he placed both hands on it, just as the figure in the drawing did. One hand above, one below, fingers spread. Nothing happened. He moved his fingers slightly. Then again. Then again.
Come on, Mikel!
All the while the heat grew against his back with a predatory ferocity: this wasn’t a fireball spit up by the earth. Something was coming toward him and bringing with it a shrieking victim. Perhaps, as Rensat had said, it was Enzo—with her newfound and unwilling voice, Jina Park.
Another minute shift of his fingers and, almost at once, the tiles opened like the door to the cave of the forty thieves. He surged through like a bull, the tiles snapping shut behind him, locking him in and blocking the fury on the other side. The heat was gone.
Mikel came to a skidding halt, standing upright in a moldering room with dry powdered bones beneath his feet and the living tiles bright before him. The smell of something akin to gunpowder hung in the air like incense, tart and inexplicable.
And there was something else: he was not alone. Before him stood the two spirits of the dead Galderkhaani.
Spirits who were seeing him.
CHAPTER 14
It was dark in Caitlin’s apartment but even darker inside her head. She refused to allow her fears to drag her into despair, which meant doing what she always did: fighting back. As much as she wanted to be alone, watching over her son, she knew she shouldn’t be. Which was why she let Ben stay.
Caitlin kept Jacob home from school, something she didn’t like to do, but after his experience the day before, she thought it prudent. The vice principal concurred. Ben called in sick.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor while Jacob read in his room, they had spent the morning and early afternoon reviewing everything they knew of Galderkhaan, trying to figure out the meaning of what Jacob had said: “en dovi.”
“Those letter combinations don’t appear in any of the language we’ve encountered so far,” Ben said conclusively. “Which leaves us two possibilities. First: they aren’t Galderkhaani. Jacob might have been speaking English. Or maybe phonetic French. That novel he’s reading, by Jules Verne, is in both languages.”
“What’s the second possibility?” Caitlin asked.
“The second possibility,” Ben said, “is that they are proper nouns. The names of places or people.”
Caitlin considered that. “I wish I’d paid more attention to names when I was back there,” she said. “Then I could be of some freaking use here.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Ben cautioned. “Beating yourself up: not gonna help.”
Caitlin nodded. “Maybe I should go back and steal a goddamn telephone directory and a dictionary.”
“Not the worst idea I’ve heard,” Ben told her. “I wonder if they had something other than scrolls and tablets to write on. Just because they were pre-everything, doesn’t mean they were as relatively primitive as the ancient civilizations we know.”
While they spoke, Ben had been passing a large, green glass orb back and forth between his hands nonstop. The piece was beautiful, with an almost spectral aura created by the way the lines caught the light and shone white within the green. An artisan acquaintance of Caitlin’s had crafted it years before, using a kiln to bake the glass sphere and then submerging the orb in ice water.
Caitlin finally stopped him with a gentle hand.
“Sorry—making you nervous?” he asked.
“No, nothing like that,” she said. “But you keep doing it, you may induce a trance.”
He stopped at once but he didn’t put the orb aside. They just stared at each other.
“Well, hell,” Ben said after a moment.
“I know,” Caitlin agreed. “When all else fails, do what’s left.”
Ben couldn’t know how real Caitlin’s experiences were but they both knew, in that moment, they weren’t going to make any further progress unless he erred on the side of taking it very seriously. Though Ben couldn’t deny that he’d walked the rim of some of those experiences, he had said repeatedly through the afternoon that he preferred to seek a more logical, analytical approach to the questions they had to answer.
“I don’t know, Cai,” he said.
“I do,” she said. “When it’s the only proactive option on the table, you take it.”
Ben agree
d that he would help to re-create an environment similar to what Caitlin had experienced before at the UN and see where it took her as long as she didn’t use the cazh.
“But you keep your hands away from me,” he said. “You can try any of the other techniques you know—hypnosis, energy direction, astrally projecting above the city—anything, but not that.”
“Why? You afraid it might work and you’ll be stuck with me for eternity?”
“You know I’d sign on for that,” he said, correcting her. “But right now we’re exploring, trying to help you and Jacob. That doesn’t include buying a one-way ticket to Neverland. Isn’t that exclusively what the cazh was designed for? Knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door?”
“We don’t exactly know, do we?” she asked. “That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said. “We’re trying to find out who may—may—have their hooks in Jacob and why. That’s it for now. Are we on the same page?”
“Don’t be dumb,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Of course this is primarily about Jacob but if I see something interesting, I’m going to check it out!”
“No! Caitlin, I am not going to try to explain to a 911 dispatcher that my friend has fallen into the past and can’t get up. If you can’t agree to that, then get yourself another playmate.”
Caitlin sighed hard. She could not help thinking that all the information about Galderkhaan was holistic: if she unraveled the riddle of their belief system she could understand everything about them and help Jacob at the same time.
But Caitlin put a hand on top of his. “All right. I mean it. You’re absolutely right. The chant isn’t appropriate for this situation. I have to get back to Galderkhaan and have a look around, that’s all.”
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