“Yes, most of it is unimportant. See here, this is mostly a recital of some old Scriptic principles and modern alchemic philosophy.” Geoffrey pointed to the perplexing language. “Are you familiar with alchemy?” he asked Tom.
“No.”
“It’s a silly study, really. It’s an unofficial branch of magic, or a ‘paramagic,’ as I refer to it. Its focus is the transmutation of substances into other substances, such as common metals into gold.”
“Transmutation?”
“Yes, changing one material into another.”
“Ah. Is that possible?”
Geoffrey laughed, shaking his head
“Well, Ine can change her sword into a bird.” Tom persisted.
“That is transformation, Thomas, not transmutation. The difference is basically a matter of shapeshifting as opposed to re-creation. Also, in this case, Yata is a supernatural being, not a common bird.”
“I see.” Tom looked over the entryway and squinted into the dark passage. “So there is nothing in these scribblings meant to keep us out?”
“Oh, traps, you mean? No, this is all harmless,” said Geoffrey, crouching to read the lower half of the stone.
“Excellent, then we will continue into the ruins,” said Tom, checking Love’s notes and having no doubt the passage had something to do with Nok dol Ghon. Perhaps a few clues to the genamite stone’s location lay inside the temple. Love’s compass insisted as much; that and Geoffrey’s observations proved the place to have a strong link to the Alchemist, whoever or whatever it was.
“Shall I light the way?” offered Molly, as the party gathered ’round the entryway.
“Yes, but stay just behind me,” said Tom, keeping Brother in his right hand and using the other to keep from knocking his head on the ceiling or running into hanging obstructions, such as the many vines that mischievously grabbed at his hair.
“Thomas, didn’t Alecandre Love’s notes say something about this place?” asked Molly, her voice resonating in the passageway.
“You’re right. Hold out your hand.”
Molly reached around Tom’s torso, under his arm, holding her palm over the notes to make them legible enough for both of them to read. Tom unfolded Love’s notes to the page where the four verses were written. Each verse was apparently associated with one of each of four locations necessary to pass through before reaching Nok dol Ghon. Molly read aloud the first verse, which was inscribed beneath a depiction of ruins in a place called Kua’ti, an Atlantean derivation of “quarantine”.
“It says, ‘Let none hope for lucre, for when coin changes hands it spreads a disease of the heart and mind. The taxation—a golden day of pestilence, after which the impoverished will wake and the avaricious will sleep.’ What does it mean?” she said, withdrawing her hand as Tom put away the notes.
“That money is filthy?” Tom said sarcastically.
“Obviously,” countered Molly. “You don’t think it is a warning?”
“Oh, I should think so, yes. And it’s vague enough to entice me on. Let’s keep going.”
After a short trek down the tight corridor, Tom lost a few paces of sight ahead of him. Molly intensified the glow coming from her palm, but a tangled mess of vine growth impeded the light and cast disorienting shadows on the stone walls. The darkness ahead of them rippled and moved. Ribbons of light moved across Tom’s view, and he could not make out what was causing it. He put one hand to the wall in case the corridor was to fork in another direction or open up without warning. Suddenly sensing a change, Tom abruptly halted.
“Oh!” Molly gasped as she ran into Tom, not knowing he had stopped.
“Sorry. Let’s be careful. The hall’s ended and we’re in a new room.”
As Tom crept forward and Molly followed, the great room became brighter and brighter. There were no torches or lanterns on the walls or ceiling. No, the glow from Molly’s hand was being bounced all around by shining surfaces. Heaps upon heaps of golden coins—millions to count—rose up like monuments all around them. Treasures and riches from all the world’s great empires poked out from the caches, and from them hung jewelry and dazzling raiment, set with gems or ivory. Friezes of oceanic creatures and half-human beings rose from floor to ceiling. The entire mythos of the merfolk was represented, and in the middle of the ceiling, the highest point, the gods and goddesses of the Atlantean pantheon looked down upon the room.
The rest of the crew filed into the room in a disorderly manner, pushing and shoving to get a better look at the trove of wealth dazzling their salt-stung eyes. All the men felt their palms itch, but only three were possessed enough by the sight to scramble ahead of their captain and indulge in the bounty.
Tom continued forward, his eyes trained on the corners of the room and ceiling that were not gilded or bejeweled. These places, if any, were where trouble would be lurking. His first instinct was to assume that if the temple were trapped, danger would be lurking in places intruders’ eyes were not. Unable to spot anything alarming, Tom waved at the others so they would follow him on through the treasure chamber. He was not interested in gold. It was not going to save him from anything. Three of his crew, however, mistakenly believed the contrary, and they proceeded to fill their pockets. When Tom called back to them from the other side of the glittering hall, he received no reply. Annoyed, he turned and walked back toward the center of the chamber, swearing loudly at the men who continued to bathe in the riches like pigs in a wallow.
“We’re leaving, gentlemen!” shouted Tom.
One of the men turned, as if to say something, just as he let go of his handful of coins to clutch his face. His eyes blazed, red and bloodshot, and he expelled a crimson froth from his lips. When his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed, his counterparts dropped their loot and screamed, lifting their heels high to escape the bewitched mounds of gold. Tom watched in fear as the two choked and fell forward dead like the first man. Slowly Tom backed away and returned to the others, who stared at his pale expression in confusion.
“Do. Not. Touch. Anything,” he warned them, placing emphasis on every word individually.
“What happened over there? Where are the others?” asked Ine.
He shook his head in answer. “Everything you see is either hexed or painted in a poison,” said Tom. “Let’s move on, and stay together.”
Across the treasure chamber the party easily found another passageway. A sweep of the room by Tom and Leon proved there to be no other route to follow. As they pressed on, Molly found it extremely difficult to light the way enough for all to see. The crew closest to the rear followed one another in a chain, each man’s arm on the back of the man in front of him. Leon seemed to have the least trouble, and he assisted Geoffrey, not speaking much to the magescribe, who tried to make conversation.
“Molly, lend me some light. I want to look at the second verse in case it becomes impossible soon,” said Tom, twisting his shoulders so he could turn around in the small space available. “All right, there is an inner chamber,” he said, studying the map. “Beneath Kua’ti there is a place called Ma Yut. The Hole. The verse reads, ‘Hatred is a void; the lack of sense and feeling. The eyes of the soul walk through hell, starved of retribution, and so are sightless, even when the way is lit. The retaliation—a dark night, during which the angry will cry out in fury, and the forgiving will walk on in hush.’ That’s it?” he said, shaking his head.
“Thomas, are you sure this is the way?” pleaded Molly, hoping they might turn back and see the outside again.
“The farther we go, the more certain I am,” he answered. The light from Molly’s palm made him look like a ghost wearing a rueful frown.
Without warning the stone path began to change. Tom proceeded with more caution, finding gaps and other hazards in the floor. The nauseating sensation that he was headed down a slight incline was difficult to ignore. Molly, hard as she tried, could not produce enough light to be of much help to the eleven behind her. The darkness fought her eac
h time she tried to illuminate the passage. A magical presence refused to allow them to see more than the next step ahead.
“It’s another room,” said Tom, feeling the walls and finding that they gradually widened, as if to come full around to form an oblong chamber. “This room is smaller than the last, but, I suppose, forty paces across. Be careful, the floor crumbles underfoot, and then it sinks toward the middle of the room.”
“I can barely see anything,” complained Molly, tripping on fragmented stone blocks.
“Here, take my hand,” Tom offered.
“Look there!” said Molly. “Light coming from the other side of the chamber! It must be a way out! I …” she stopped, her vision spinning.
“Molly?” Tom turned and nearly fell over, struck by the same phenomenon. When he got his footing back, before he spoke again, a phantom caught his eye. Mouth hanging open, he squinted into the hazy dark and saw something he didn’t believe. Rubbing his eyes, he looked again, but his eyes insisted that his brother, Harlan, was standing just a few paces away, facing him. “How?” he whispered.
“How what? Thomas?” Molly’s vision did not recover entirely. She saw speckles of light and other colorful specters that dizzied her. In the next moment she felt a hand on her shoulder and softness on her back. She realized she was lying in bed, Christopher standing over her, but he did not realize she was awake. Molly, duped by the hallucination, forgot where she was and jumped up from the bed, drawing a pistol and threatening the vampire, should he touch her again.
As the others around her regressed into mad fits of violence and rage, Ine, unaffected by the chamber’s trick, spun around in circles, trying desperately to tell who was who in the dark. Afraid and confused, she tried to understand what was happening but could not. To worsen matters, the floor had begun to change. It was weakening—cracking, caving in. If the crew did not come to their senses soon, the temple was surely going to kill them.
Tom shut his eyes hard and opened them again, but Harlan did not go away. The dark room was gone, and now he stood in a familiar place—the house he’d lived in with his father after the accident that tore his family apart. Harlan stared at him from across the room, scowling.
Why did you run?
“You came to kill us,” said Tom, as the front door cracked and bowed in.
But you ran. You ran away. Harlan was speaking the words that resonated around the room, but his mouth never opened. You’re the killer.
“No, I’m not.” Tom held his clenched fists by his side. The front door caved in and several Black Coats stormed in. From the kitchen, he heard his father telling him to leave and save himself.
You killed me, and you killed our father.
Tom shook his head and rejected the accusation.
I will show you what happened to him, because of you.
In the next moments, several images flashed in Tom’s mind, telling him the story of his father, John, after Tom left home. First he saw his father defending himself from the Black Coats and quieting Harlan, who broke down in tears. When the vampires by his side walked past him and again tried to attack John, Harlan turned against them, killing them both and leaving the house.
After another flash, Tom saw his father crafting something—a locket—and drawing a bright light from his chest. … Another flash, and John was handing the locket to Gabriel Vasquez. … In the next flash, John was traveling east into Romania … and in the next instant, he reached out to touch a stranger’s shoulder in the middle of a street, in a village Tom did not recognize.
The next scenes passed in shorter and shorter bursts: his father and a woman, Piroska, his mother, together in a house … living in the house day by day, year after year … living for many years and seeing many seasons pass … growing crops, raising a few animals, chopping wood and dabbling in magic … loving each other day in and day out, and each night praying that their sons would come and find them.
Tom then watched his mother grow weak and ill, and his father care for her. The visions slowed, and Tom watched as his father went out each day alone to work the garden or chop wood. Piroska weakened, and John went out less and less. Then, Piroska died. Thomas’s father carried his mother to the top of a mountain beyond their house. For hours and hours he climbed, high, to where the last tree grew, and laid her beneath it. As he leaned down, John stopped abruptly and looked up and to the east. At that instant a bright light blinked on the horizon, and a similar light leapt from John’s chest, flying off to the horizon like a comet, soaring to the other side of the world, to Barbados. John fell slowly to one knee, and then the other, smiling on his way to the ground. As the vision faded, both John and Piroska Crowe lay together under the shade of an evergreen, side by side in eternal somnolence.
You killed us all. Harlan repeated the accusation.
“No, I didn’t,” Tom said quietly, his eyes burning. “You’re just a bad dream.” At that, Harlan faded away and Tom was again in the dark temple, staggering around on the uneven floor.
Chera, sitting with her hands around her knees, just behind Tom, had not yet found her way out of her nightmare. She was onboard a ship, the Isabella, owned by a man to whom she was unhappily engaged. Clinging abjectly to the starboard railing, she stared across the docks at another ship, The Quetzal—the first one. On its deck, a young woman, Venezuelan, like Chera, stared back at her, eyes swollen and mournful. The hot sun made the tears in them glitter. Sorrowfully the young women gazed into each other’s eyes, longing to touch, yearning to speak to each other once again.
As Chera heard her husband-to-be come down the Isabella’s quarterdeck stair, she quickly turned away from the railing and rubbed the moisture from her eyes. The marriage had been arranged by Chera’s father because she showed no interest of her own in matrimony. She wanted to sail, and her father refused her permission, telling her the only women who fell into company with sailors were women of ill repute. He couldn’t understand her compulsion to go to sea, let alone on The Quetzal, a sugar-carrying vessel of no particular esteem.
A quaking rocked the the Isabella, throwing Chera off-balance. Her fiancé stumbled and fell over, and a loud voice pounded Chera’s ears.
“Chera! Can you hear me?” It was Captain Crowe.
“…Can you hear me?”
Geoffrey heard the words as well, but they were coming from Molly. She and Thomas were shaking him and Chera back to their senses.
“I don’t know where I was, but I was so angry,” Geoffrey said as Molly hoisted him to his feet.
“Where is Leon?” she shouted above the roaring, collapsing stone.
Leon, for the first time in many years, was standing before his father and uncle in the assembly hall at Chateau Beaumonte. All of his family members were gathered around, along with every notable associate of the Black Coat Society. His father, Arnaud, sitting at the head of a long table, was introducing Leon to the dark figures seated in the room. On and on Arnaud went, boasting of his son to the nobles, with Leon’s uncle René nodding happily in concurrence after each laudation. But, Leon, summoned before the assembly because of his nomination to the seat of patriarch, boiled with resentment—of the assembly, the pretentious nobles and his father’s insensitivity. The vampire sitting to the right of Arnaud was Don Violanti Pagani, one of the conspirators Leon suspected to have played a part in assassinating his father. As Leon snatched a glass of wine from the table and prepared to break it across Pagani’s smug face, a small hand stopped him. It was Ine’s. Turning toward her, he saw also Tom, Molly, Geoffrey and Chera.
“Leon! Leon!” Ine cried, shaking Leon and squeezing his hand.
“What?” Leon shouted as reality came back to him.
“We must go!” shouted Tom.
“This way!” called Molly, leading everyone toward the bright light across the collapsing room.
Leon, still caught in the shock between his hallucination and reality, did not hear the temple falling to pieces or the floor caving in as it opened up into a deep
, bottomless pit. The screams of several of Tom’s men could be heard fading away as they fell to their demise, numb to the world as they struggled against painful visions of their own pasts. The light coming from the escape passage made Leon’s eyes ache, so he shut them and held tightly to Ine’s hand as she pulled him through the exit to the safety of the other side.
A group of eight was left standing. Five more men were missing, lost to the collapsed temple. The way back in was shut, and the rest of the party moved on, knowing there was no way to help the fallen.
Before they were able to make any progress, the remaining crew members realized their troubles had only multiplied. The wilderness had changed wildly. After escaping the perils of the temple, the crew had re-emerged on a steep escarpment, high above the forest from whence they had come. Here the vegetation achieved only the most austere life. No birds called and no creature, save for a loner or two, shared the mountain with Tom and crew. The terrain beyond was striking—rugged and unreal, like a portrait of another world entirely, or something between this world and another.
Tom couldn’t discern the time of day by looking at the sky overhead. He couldn’t even find the sun, yet it was not night, and there were not enough clouds to hide the light of day. Instead the world above was purple, pink and deep blue—a cosmic conglomeration of all the shades of the heavens, scarcely mottled by islands of starlight.
The genamite compass behaved erratically, bouncing from left to right and back continually, never resting, but never spinning in a full circle. Tom took this to mean the genamite stone it sensed was close, but there was still ground left to cover.
“Thomas, did you see this?” asked Molly, directing his attention to a statue standing alone, nearly at risk of tumbling down the escarpment, clinging bravely to the rocky earth.
“This is To’ri,” he said, examining the figure—the likeness of a young and beautiful Atlantean goddess, whose form seemed to lunge forward, one hip resting against a rising throne of coral. In one hand she clasped a great pearl the size of a grapefruit. It looked heavy in her hand, her outstretched arm seeming to offer the orb to the nearest mountain peak, the place Tom guessed was agitating the compass he carried. “She protects the innocent,” explained Tom, “and judges the unjust by sounding a conch.” He pointed to the unique conch shell in the goddess’s other hand, which relaxed on the coral throne. Looking around, Tom saw a number of other figures, smaller and plain, strewn about the escarpment. Some of them knelt on one knee, others lay face down, broken and worn. Their presence was disturbing.
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