The Saffron Falcon (Transition Magic)

by Hopkins, J. E.

  Tareef stiffened when the man’s gaze fell on him before moving on to his father. “Why does an elder of the Kalash wish to avoid the Muslim religion?”

  Professor Rahman answered before his father could respond. “It’s not that the Kalash don’t respect the Muslim religion, Minister, but that they wish to preserve—”

  “Let Elder Khan speak for himself.” He continued to stare at Tareef’s father. “Well? Why do you wish to avoid the Muslim religion?”

  His father shrugged and responded in fluent Urdu. “It is not our faith. We worship as we have since the time of Alexander the Great. We do not interfere with others who follow the Prophet. We do not object if a Kalash wishes to convert. I myself converted so that I might better understand my neighbors. All we ask is that we not be compelled to abandon our ways.”

  The minister’s faced reddened. “Your people persist in the nonsense that you are descendants of Alexander the Great. Rubbish. So what if your skin and eyes are light? Time and marriage will solve that problem. Clinging to pagan faiths is an insult to the Prophet. As an elder, you should be leading the conversion of your people rather than trying to resist those who would help you with that transformation.”

  “With respect, Minister,” Professor Rahman said. “You are calling for the extinction of one of the world’s unique—”

  This time it was Tareef’s father who interrupted the professor. “Does not the Qur’an say that human dignity must be respected, regardless of religion? Does it not say that all peoples are created by God Almighty and that all must treat one another with honor and respect? That is all we seek.”

  The minister’s face became dark and twisted with anger. “Your words are proof that Satan may quote the Qur’an for his purposes. Your path is crooked and unrighteous and an offense to believers.”

  Tareef’s father gazed at the floor, frowning. “You defile Islam.” His voice was soft, burdened by sadness.

  The minister hissed. “Silence! I deny your petition. Further, I will encourage those tribes near the Kalash to redouble their efforts to bring you to the true faith. Now leave before I have you thrown in prison for blasphemy.”

  Tareef’s father stood quietly for a long moment, then said, “You have the honor of a dog,” and turned for the door. They left with the minister screaming “Get out!” behind them.

  Tareef snapped back to the silent boarding house. His father’s abduction had only taken a few minutes, but it had been loud. Yet no one came to see if they could help.

  No one dares.

  He dressed and sat in the middle of the room, waiting for sunrise. As the dark began to lift, he heard others stirring. He rose, searched through his father’s belongings and cried with relief when he found the piece of paper with Professor Rahman’s address. He wiped his face and walked down to the first floor, to the door of the old woman who ran the boarding house.

  He knocked softly and called, “Nani Afridi, will you help me? Please?” The woman had insisted that Tareef call her “grandmother.”

  The door swung open after a few moments. The woman gasped and covered her mouth. “Praise Allah, you’ve begun Transition, child.”

  Tareef instantly forgot why he’d come to her door. “I have? Do you have a mirror? Can I see?”

  Afridi stood still for a moment, then nodded and moved aside. She pointed Tareef to a mirror hanging from the wall next to the door. He rushed over and confirmed that his eyes had changed from hazel to the telltale iridescent lavender of Transition. He turned to the old woman. “Can you teach me the words, Nani Afridi?”

  Then I can use magic to free my father.

  Afridi frowned and shook her head. “Don’t be absurd. Those words would kill you.” She crossed her arms and leaned back, staring at his face. “Why do you disturb my morning?”

  “Some men came in the night and took my father, Nani. Can you help me get him back?”

  She scowled and raised her hands, as if warding off an evil spell. “I heard. Everyone heard. They were militia. I don’t know what your father has done, but you’ll not see him again. I can do nothing to help you. You must leave at once before you bring more trouble to my house.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Borghi, Province of Forlì-Cesena

  Republic of Italy

  A cloud of manure-flavored dust swallowed the dilapidated Fiat Panda as it clattered along the dirt road toward the abandoned abbey. Jessup Scholard spat out the driver’s window, attempting—failing—to clear the sour taste from his mouth. The filth clung to his sweat-slicked face. He shivered in revulsion. Not for the first time, he wondered why a mysophobe would select archaeology for a profession. His thoughts responded with a familiar answer: his passion to uncover Transition’s secrets trumped his OCD.

  “I’ll need a long shower after this is over,” he told the car. “Or two.” His was a lonely calling, and he compensated by talking to himself and to the inanimate objects around him.

  He steered the bouncing car up to the crumbling facade of the ancient structure and slammed on the brakes, skidding in the loose gravel. He twisted the key and shut off the engine; the Panda shuddered, as reluctant to stop as it had been to start.

  A black Range Rover parked in front of the abbey emerged from the dust fog. A balding, fat priest with a handkerchief over his mouth struggled from the driver’s seat. Scholard unfolded his six-foot-six frame from the confines of the Fiat and strode to meet the man.

  “Dr. Scholard?” The priest’s accented English wasn’t difficult to understand.

  He’s sweating more than I am.

  “Yes. And you’re Father Abandonato, correct? Thank you for coming.” They met before the structure’s two wide wooden doors and shook hands. Heavy chains secured with multiple padlocks were draped across the doors and anchored into the surrounding bricks.

  Abandonato’s eyes skipped from Scholard’s feet to his necktie, then snapped up to his face.

  Jessup smiled. He was dressed in the standard hot weather uniform of an archeologist—heavy work boots, khaki shorts and shirt, but with a couple of minor tweaks. His shirt was fastened at the neck and adorned by a lime green bow tie. He wore bow ties without fail; the brighter the color the better. With socks of matching colors. It was worth the inconvenience to assert a splash of personality against archaeology’s brown palette.

  “No thanks needed. Rome’s instructions were quite clear,” Abandonato said. “I’m to deliver the keys and leave you to your investigation. I’ll return day after tomorrow at this time to get them back and confirm you’ve not damaged the property.” He paused for a moment. “But if I may ask, why is the U.S. Department of Transition Security interested in Montessori? This ruin has been stripped for hundreds of years.”

  Scholard smiled. “All I can tell you is what I told your superiors.”

  The priest blotted his face and the top of his head with his handkerchief. “Which is?”

  “Pagan Roman leaders believed that children of Christian parents might use Transition magic to destroy the empire. Such children were persecuted. Beaten, sometimes killed. The nascent Church offered sanctuary within the walls of nearby abbeys to children of the faith during Transition. This practice continued until the Black Death swept Europe.”

  Abandonato nodded. The Church provided a limited education in the history of Transition as part of priestly education.

  “Well, the DTS is creating a comprehensive history of Transition, including a comprehensive photographic record of Church sanctuaries. Abbey Montessori was finished in the second century and remained an active place of worship and shelter until the late 1300s. My boss ordered me to come take some photos.”

  Abandonato shook his head, a frown twisting his round face. “You Americans have more money than sense. Your waste is criminal.” He handed Jessup the keys, tut-tutted back to his car, and drove away.

  Jessup waved at the retreating Rover.

  What I didn’t tell you is that this old building may be keeping secrets.
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br />   A year ago the DTS had received an anonymous call from a man who identified himself only as a priest and researcher in the Vatican archives. He claimed that he’d uncovered an obscure reference to an ancient artifact. One that altered the rules of Transition magic. He’d said it was in a long-abandoned rural monastery. Abbey Montessori, to be precise.

  Jessup turned and addressed the ruins, as if they’d seen through his facile explanation to Father Abandonato and demanded to hear the truth. “You’re very perceptive for such an old place, Abbie. But not to worry. I mean you and the Church no harm.”

  The building stared back as if unconvinced.

  You’re right to be skeptical, Abbie. When it comes to Transition artifacts, the Church is my enemy.

  Ever since St. Zephyrinus had published the Notre Domini in Transitu in 200 CE, the Catholic Church had treated Transition as the work of Satan on earth. The Church actively sought Transition artifacts and destroyed any that came into its possession. Or at least Church leaders said they were destroyed. Jessup didn’t much trust organized religions.

  Director Marva Bradley of the DTS had called Scholard to her office and ordered him to get into the abbey under the guise of the historical documentation project and see what he could find.

  Getting permission to enter took four months. Now Jessup had two days to make the effort pay off.

  He circled the monastery like a tourist, wondering about the dreams and aspirations of the men who’d built it. Several piles of rubble sprouting clumps of parched brown grass dotted the grounds around the building. The abbey hadn’t been fortified by a surrounding wall, so the heaps of stone were all that remained of its outbuildings.

  The monastery stood about twenty feet high, rectangular, with round towers at the corners extending ten feet above the roof of the main building. The crumbling, rough brick had aged to the color of red clay mixed with charcoal. Along the top of each wall were a series of closely spaced arched openings that must have served as windows. Similar openings spiraled up the sides of the towers. Jessup was surprised the windows hadn’t been bricked or boarded up.

  He returned to the front entrance and unloaded a pile of gear from the back of the Panda: a small generator, lights, digital cameras, the usual archaeology toolkit. Last out was an instrument that was anything but standard—a top secret barrier-penetrating radar that DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—had developed to peer through walls and below the ground.

  He strode to the entrance, removed the padlocks and chains, and swung the doors wide. He gazed inside. The roof had long since collapsed, leaving the building open to the sky.

  Jessup laughed. “Well, my ancient masonry friend, I don’t suppose the people who chained your doors appreciated the irony of their actions. Anyone with a ladder and rope could get in. Tell me, were the bureaucracies just as foolish when you were young?”

  The yawning entrance reminded Jessup of a big toothy grin.

  “Yeah, I expect they were,” he said, answering his own question. A fug of age, mold, and bird shit washed over him. “Well, let’s see what we have.” He slipped from the sun blistered pasture into the shadowed recesses of the forgotten abbey.

  • • • • •

  “Dammit!” It was mid-afternoon on the second day of Jessup’s investigation. He’d just tripped—again—over one of the numerous bricks strewn across the floor of the old abbey. Father Abandonato would be returning in an hour to collect his keys, and Jessup had thus far found nothing but dirt and frustration.

  The interior walls of the abbey were in various stages of collapse, but the layout of the place was reasonably apparent—one large space, likely the sanctuary, and a multitude of smaller celles, a half dozen of which were larger than the others. One of the large celles would have been for the abbot, the others used as workrooms. He believed an item of value would have been concealed in the abbot’s quarters, but the rooms were indistinguishable. So he’d used the radar to probe the walls of all the larger chambers, working through the night, stopping for only a few hours to pitch a tent, eat a meal of jerky and fruit, and sleep.

  Scrambling against the clock and with a rising sense of desperation, he’d moved to the sanctuary and positioned the instrument in the center of the eastern wall at the long end of the room. Altars in early Catholic churches faced the rising sun, like Christ, rising in the early morning of the first Easter Sunday.

  And behold, the glory of the God of Israel came in by the way of the East. Let’s see if Ezekiel was on to something.

  In Montessori’s case, Rome actually lay to the south and west. But if he only had time for a couple more tests, this was his best bet. He flipped a switch, and the radar hummed to life. The machine required fifteen minutes to probe the brick against which it was placed and calibrate itself. Jessup could manually override the process but decided to let the machine choose its own best settings.

  He chewed his nails for an agonizing quarter hour, then flicked sweat from his eyebrows, plugged the signal feed into his laptop, and launched the imaging software. The hardware was an evolved version of ground penetrating radar that had been around for more than a decade. But the genius was in the software. The early models required a Ph.D. in squiggly lines in order to understand the output. This baby presented simple pictures in shades of grey.

  “Okay, WALL-E, find something.”

  The screen presented the same gray rectangle he’d seen in his other probes. All the device saw was masonry; nothing beyond.

  Junk. WALL-E indeed.

  “For such a smart machine, you’re a major disappointment.”

  He sighed, punched Ctrl+Z on his laptop to magnify the image, and panned across the screen to confirm his failure. He was reaching for the power toggle when a thin, indistinct smudge swung into view along the right edge of the screen.

  “Oh, great. So now your vision is blurred?” He adjusted the software to sharpen the view and was surprised when the offending shadow persisted. His heart jerked and kicked into overdrive.

  “Hang on, my friend, hang on.”

  Jessup moved the sensor a foot to his right and waited for the machine to reconfigure. Fifteen minutes later, the computer image settled and revealed the clear outline of a chamber behind the wall. Stone forming the left edge of the chamber had produced the shadow. A gray smudge teased him from the center of the hidden space.

  He poked the computer screen. “You’ve just redeemed yourself, WALL-E. Remind me to give you some extra electrons for dinner. Now, get out of the way and let me do a little excavation.”

  He marked the bricks with a chalk outline, shuttled the instrument to the side, and checked his watch.

  Abandonato’s late. He’ll be here any minute.

  He grabbed a chisel and hammer and began chipping away at the mortar. One brick free. Then another. Once he got his hands in the hole he grabbed a brick from the next layer down and rocked it free, taking care to keep debris from falling into the chamber.

  The distant sound of a car engine drifted into the sanctuary. “Dammit! No time!”

  Jessup reached in with both hands and jerked the rest of the bricks to the floor. He prayed the priest wouldn’t be able to tell the new debris from the old.

  A thin book, perhaps a foot square and wrapped in disintegrating cloth, rested on a stone plinth in the center of the alcove. It appeared to be a single quire of two pages, sandwiched between animal skin covers. The sound of the approaching Rover grew louder.

  Jessup lifted the aluminum case that had housed the imager, yanked the sculpted foam out of it, and tore it into shreds. He lined the bottom of the case with the improvised packing material. Sucking in a deep breath, he lifted the codex from its ancient resting place and positioned it on the foam. For a few precious seconds, he stared in wonder at the front cover. A small cross had been burned into the surface below the top edge. A single word—TRANSIRE—was centered below the cross.

  He covered the book with the remaining foam and pressed th
e lid closed. He stood, picked up his precious cargo, and ran to the Panda, concealing the instrument case under an old blanket. The familiar taste of the manure-laden dust preceded the Rover, now a quarter mile away and bouncing slowly over the rutted road.

  Jessup scurried back inside, hoisted the imager and his tools, and bolted back to the car.

  “Quiet, WALL-E. We don’t want the good Father to know you are in the neighborhood.” He stuffed the gear under the blanket and grabbed the strap of a medium-format camera, hanging it around his neck.

  He adjusted his green bow tie and strode toward the Rover with a hand up in greeting as Father Abandonato’s car rolled to a stop.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Islamabad

  Islamic Republic of Pakistan

  The old woman’s refusal to help didn’t surprise Tareef. She was like the city around her: harsh and interested only in herself. The opposite of his life among the Kalash. Even when she’d told him to call her Nani Afrida, her words had been cold, designed to cajole money from his father rather than offer true friendship.

  She grabbed his shoulders and pushed him into the hall, toward the door of the house.

  “You must go. The militia may be back at any time. There can be no trace of you or your father. I do not want to join him in prison for sheltering a foreign criminal.”

  She fears the police, so she fears me.

  Tareef twisted free of her feeble grip and screamed. “You said you were my Nani. How can my Nani throw me onto the street? My father paid for our room. It’s mine now.”

  He heard doors open in the rooms above them.

  Good. Maybe she will help me to avoid prying eyes.

  “Leave or I’ll call the police and they’ll take you away just like your father.”

  Tareef pulled the scrap of paper from his pocket. “The police don’t want me. But they might want you. Help me get to this place or I’ll stand outside and wail until they come.”