by N. D. Wilson
Sterling breathed in deep. When he spoke again, his voice had found a different rhythm. The swirl and bustle of the kitchen was forgotten. His story had dropped into a rocking chair beside some quiet fire.
“When Man was first tilling ground and tending gardens, before he thought to wall his cities, Draco the Devourer came on down from his stars. He hated Man for his body and soul, joined together in one creature, and he meant to rip the two apart forever — Man would be mere flesh, or mere soul, but never both. Old Draco fashioned himself a monstrous scaly body and a set of charmed teeth with edges to them that could slice a soul’s hair sideways.
“But things just didn’t go as planned — they never do for dragons. Raging, Draco spread his wings and dropped through the sky’s floor. Cities burned, and everywhere he went, souls withered, sliced and uprooted from their flesh. But one boy picked up a stone, and while men fled screaming, he threw it into the demon’s mouth and knocked out just one tooth as long as the boy’s own arm. He picked it up by the root, and with it, he slew the dragon body. Draco retreated into the stars, but he left behind that tooth.”
The cook smiled. “And if you listen to an old cook, that’s where the tooth came from.”
“You’re joking, right?” Antigone asked.
“Am I?” asked Sterling.
Antigone ran her hands over her hair and looked at him sideways. “Well, you don’t believe that. A star dragon?”
Sterling straightened. “Come with me,” he said, and springs squealed in his steel legs as he strode away. Cyrus and Antigone followed him across the kitchen to a side door.
“I’ll tell you this much,” the cook said over his shoulder. “Jason used that tooth to fetch the Golden Fleece. Called up immortal warriors with it from sown Dragon’s Teeth, and it was the only blade he could use to cut them down. Cadmus used that blade to call warriors from bone when he founded Thebes. It can call the dead to life — though not as they were — and shatter the undying. Alexander used it to raze the world and only failed when it was stolen. Julius, Hannibal, Attila, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler — all of them sought it, and some of them found it. For a time.”
The cook lumbered down the corridor in front of them, bells jingling, flour drifting off him in slow curls. He was leading them back toward the Galleria, toward the leather boat on its pedestal. Before they reached it, he stopped and pointed up at the wall, where an enormous reptilian skin ran along above the floor.
“Is that real?” he asked.
Cyrus scanned it. “Is it from a huge snake?”
“Not a snake, lad. Follow it around the corner.” The cook turned down a side hall, and Cyrus and Antigone followed him. The skin ran with them. And then it splayed into the fingers of a claw — three forward and one back, each of them longer than Cyrus was tall.
“Not a snake, lad,” Sterling said again. He walked to the end of the hallway and turned into another passage. Cyrus, in a daze, staggered along beside his sister, not paying any attention to where they were going. Whatever the tooth did, it was gone now. Probably forever. He should be relieved. He tried to be. But all that he felt was lead-bellied failure.
Sterling stopped and gripped the handle of a black door.
“Well, it doesn’t have to be a star dragon,” Antigone said. “It could be a dinosaur.”
“Could be,” Sterling said. “But if I was eye to eye with a flying reptile the size of a house and with a mind to eat me, I wouldn’t use the word dinosaur.”
He forced the door open with a pop and stepped to the side. “After you, Miss Antigone.”
Antigone stepped into darkness. Cyrus followed her, dust and decay trickling into his lungs. He sneezed. The door boomed closed and they were left with only four senses — ears straining, skin tingling, the smell of fur and formaldehyde, the taste of old, undisturbed air.
The cook’s bells jingled. “This is one of six African collections, though Celtic and Asian is a bit mixed up in everything.”
He punched a switch and electricity crackled overhead. After a moment, an army of dangling lanterns fluttered to life beneath the high, beamed ceiling.
Row after row of shelves and collection cases, full to overflowing, teetered up beneath the lights. Tiny, cluttered spaces, no more than two feet wide, ran between each row. A backbone the size of a large tree hung above it all, dangling from anchor chains.
Cyrus’s eyes widened, his failure forgotten for the moment. “What is all this stuff?” he asked. “Why is it here?”
“These shelves hold the maps, journals, treasures, samples, and artifacts of every Journeyman, Explorer, Keeper, and Sage to have wandered the African continent on behalf of this Order.” The cook waved big arms at the shelves. “Most of this here is from Ashtown explorations, but some of the collections were brought over from the Order’s European Estates before the French Revolution.
“In here, if you know where to look, you’ll find pieces collected by old Marco Polo, including the rhinoceros horn that sent him into months of black dog funk.” Sterling laughed. “He thought the rhino was his long-sought unicorn, and sadly, it was nothing like he’d hoped a unicorn would be.
“You’ll find skins and photos of various things shot by Theodore Roosevelt — he was a little quick with the trigger when the bushes moved, but those were the times.
“You’ll find charts drawn by Magellan’s steady hand, photographs of Solomon’s diamond mines, and a Phoenician sphere — a true map of the world etched in a globe of silver. That little beauty was recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of Mauritius.” He clicked his teeth. “The Phoenicians are always good for a surprise. The map includes Florida, the Mississippi River, and Tenochtitlán — Mexico City these days. But none of that’s why I brought you here. Turn around.”
Cyrus and Antigone both turned.
“Oh …,” said Cyrus.
Antigone jumped back and covered her mouth.
A huge human skull was sitting on a red cushion beside the door. The jaw, four inches off the ground, was as wide as a horse’s chest. The smooth cranium was waist-high. The eyeholes were larger than cantaloupes, and gold had been plated in halos around them.
“This here is one of the sons of the gods,” Sterling said. “An immortal — not a transmortal, mind you — who chose Ethiopia for his kingdom and fashioned Stonehenge for his bathing circle.”
The cook patted the enormous head.
“That was before the stones were stolen by the Irish.”
“The Irish?” Cyrus laughed. “Stonehenge is in England.”
“Truth,” said Sterling. “But only because Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s padre, stole it again with a few cheater’s tips from the weasel Merlin.” He laughed. “And so it has always gone for the Irish.”
Antigone opened her mouth, but Big Ben Sterling shook his jingling head. “Don’t say a word, Miss Antigone, not about the Once and Future King. I won’t hear it.”
He looked back to the skull. “Well, this lad here, like most immortals, didn’t understand people. He cooked ’em, ate ’em raw, slaughtered ’em for sport, demanded their worship, and then still stewed ’em with apples for their troubles. But one day a young Ethiopian girl stole a sword from a priest, and so much for immortality. Do I need to tell you which sword it was, or are you two sharp enough to fill in my blanks?”
“Couldn’t it have just been a … big guy?” asked Antigone helplessly. “A pituitary problem?”
“Tigs,” Cyrus said quietly. “You’re a total hypocrite. My whole life, you’ve been telling me that dragons and unicorns and giants were real. I never believed you.”
“I never believed me,” said Antigone.
Cyrus pointed at the skull. “What’s the gold for?”
“A touch of religious decoration,” Sterling said. “The skull was idolized in a human sacrificial cult for more than a century. You can hear the thing breathe if you make it angry enough. The demon soul huffs and it puffs, but it can’t find its way back in. There are others—”
“Hold on,” Antigone said, raising her hands. “Stop! The skull gets mad?”
“Miss Antigone,” Sterling said. “Take me or leave me. You’ll sleep better if you disbelieve. It isn’t the skull that gets angry — it’s nothing but bone and gold. It’s what used to live in the skull, unable to leave — that’s all immortality is, drifting around, with nothing better to do than linger.
“This one’s been dealt with, and by a girl like you. But I’m sure he still thinks he was badly treated. I would, too, if I were a hellish big immortal, overfeeding on the villagers, seeing no end of myself in sight. Getting sliced by a wisp of a girl with a sharp tooth would be startling on a warm Ethiopian morning. A mortal would have coped better. We all expect a bit of death at the end.”
Cyrus backed away. He had already seen things in Ashtown that he didn’t want to believe. He stopped and crouched down until he was shorter than the skull. “What makes it mad?” he asked.
“Cyrus,” Antigone said, shivering. “Don’t even ask. I don’t want to know.”
“Ah, she’s a believer now,” said Sterling. He stepped back beside Cyrus. “Don’t you worry about Sir Roger here. There’s only one or two things to anger him. Most of the time I don’t think the big lad even knows he’s here.”
Sterling looked down at Cyrus. “If you whisper the name of the little girl who did him in, the demon finds a memory. And, of course, if either of you happened to be carrying that tooth with you, he’d be more than a little upset.”
Antigone looked at her brother, confused. Cyrus turned away from her, staring at the skull instead. She thought he still had the tooth. That’s why Sterling brought them here? To see if he really had the tooth? Well, he didn’t. He was an idiot, and he’d let it get stolen.
“What happens when he’s mad?” Cyrus asked. He hoped his voice sounded normal.
“Oh, he does a bit of heavy breathing — absorbs some of the room’s light. Years ago, the Journeymen named him Sir Roger, and they got a fair bit of use out of him when it came to hazing the Acolytes.”
Cyrus shifted his weight. “Say the name.”
“No. Stop. I’m leaving,” Antigone said. “Seriously, this is dumber than poking a rattlesnake.”
Sterling sighed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Cyrus. But I couldn’t do that to your poor sister. But I’ll spell it so you can test my word when you’re alone sometime — it takes a bit more courage alone. S-E-L-A-M. The name means ‘peaceful,’ a lovely spice of irony.”
Putting his hands on his hips, the big cook scanned the room. “There are other skulls like Sir Roger in the Order’s collections in Europe and Africa — a pair in Istanbul have only a single eye — but this one required the Dragon’s Tooth for the harvest. Like the lads we keep in the Burials.”
Cyrus stood up. Kill me. The whisper ran through his head. The man with the bullet hole and the beard had known he was carrying the tooth.
Edgy nerves were all over Antigone’s face. “What do you mean? About the Burials?”
Ben Sterling jingled to the first row of shelves. He was at least a foot too wide to fit between them.
“Well,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s pretty, but what options do you have when an immortal or transmortal takes to … misunderstanding people? The Sages collect names. Make lists. Do their best to monitor behavior. And it’s up to the Explorers to collect more than names. Before and after everything else, Ashtown is a prison, and don’t you forget it. Beginning and end, start and stop.”
“Wait a sec,” said Cyrus. “Are any of the people in the Burials dead?”
“Not always people,” Sterling said. “Never dead. They sleep.”
“For how long?” Antigone asked.
Sterling shrugged. “Forever. Or, like Maxi, until they are wakened, roused, released, or busted loose. In the beginning, the Burials were all neat and orderly — a polished little dungeon. But there were too many incidents, too many revivals and escapes. Now each Burial is hidden. A guard might know one or two, but only the Avengel keeps a full map. But I’m scaring you now. There hasn’t been a transmortal put down in nearly a century.”
“You know,” said Cyrus, “I saw the thing on Skelton’s keys. It was small — like a petrified shark tooth. I don’t see how it could be the tooth you’re talking about.”
Antigone shot him a warning glance.
Cyrus shrugged. “I saw it. So what?”
Sterling’s face spread into a wide smile. “Did you touch it? Did you handle it?”
“I don’t know,” Cyrus said. “I guess. He had me park his truck. It was just a little black point — not a sword big enough to take off a giant’s head.”
The cook sighed happily, tugged his beard, and then crossed his arms. “Billy Bones, you had the point,” he said quietly. “You old dog.”
He looked back at Cyrus. “The tooth was shattered centuries ago by monks who didn’t want it used as a weapon. They scattered pieces around the world to be used in healing — they said — but the truth was rank grisly. To them, the shards were Resurrection Stones, and they used them to raise the dead. After certain … questionable rites, the gravely ill and mortally wounded would be sealed in chambers with the shards.
“Resurrection rooms, they called them, though nothing appealing ever resurrected. If you’re with Nolan, you sleep in one of those rooms now.”
Antigone grimaced.
Ben Sterling tucked his hands into the pockets of his apron and shifted his weight, leg springs sighing. “Look around in here if you like, but I hear the kitchen calling.”
He tugged the door open, jingled through, paused, and leaned back into the room.
“Cyrus, you said you parked old Skelton’s truck?”
Cyrus nodded.
“And he just gave you his keys?”
“Yeah, why?”
Sterling’s eyes sparked above his smile. “No reason.” The door shut behind him.
Antigone looked at her brother, irritated. “Cy, now he knows you have them.”
Cyrus moved to the nearest shelf. “I don’t have the keys, Tigs.” He fished the little paper ball out of his pocket and tossed it to his sister. “That’s what was in there this morning.”
Antigone unrolled it. “Trust Nolan?” She looked up. “We should tell Greeves. You said you were going to tell him about the tooth today anyway. He needs to know that Nolan has it.”
“I don’t want to tell Greeves.”
“Why? You want to hunt for Nolan yourself?”
“I just don’t want to tell him. It’s embarrassing. And I don’t want to hunt for Nolan. We have enough other things to do, but mostly I don’t think we could find him.”
“We should find Mrs. E.” Antigone tugged on her brother’s shirt. “She said she would help us this morning. C’mon, we should go.”
“I want to look around first.” Cyrus scanned the shelves.
“Cy, I’m not gonna hang out in here with you and Sir Roger.”
Cyrus grinned. “I think you are. If you head for the door, my mouth might just sort of slip.”
He walked toward the skull.
“Cyrus …” Antigone sighed. “If you want to play games, find a new friend.”
“I’m not playing,” Cyrus said. He tapped a gold-plated eye socket.
“Cyrus Lawrence Smith,” Antigone said, raising her eyebrows. “Stop acting your age. Do you think I’m scared? You wet your pants the first time we watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
“Seriously, Tigs?” Cyrus said. “Who has more nightmares? And this won’t be a nightmare. This will be real.”
“Little brother …” Puffing frustration, Antigone smoothed her hair, gritted her teeth, and pointed at the skull. “Selam.”
Cyrus jumped, staggering into his sister. The two of them crashed back into the shelves and down into a row.
Antigone felt her brother’s fist in her stomach and the hard floor against her shoulder blades. A box landed above her head. Glass broke. Paper rained down.
> Water slapped into her hair.
Above them, the lights dimmed.
fourteen. QUICK WATER
CYRUS COULDN’T ROLL to either side. And he didn’t want to scoot backward toward the skull. So he crawled forward, over the top of his sister, carefully sliding his hands through paper, glass, and some kind of puddling liquid.
“Get off!” Antigone slapped at him.
“There’s glass,” Cyrus said. “Hold on.”
Antigone pushed his hips up into the air, got her boots braced on his legs, and then heaved him into a somersault.
Cyrus slammed awkwardly to the floor.
“Ow.” He groaned. “Tigs, you just ruptured my kidney.”
Antigone sat up. “My apologies. Now shut up. I’m trying to listen.”
She leaned forward, staring at the skull.
Cyrus scraped himself up. “I think my hand is bleeding.”
“Shhh.” Antigone grabbed a shelf, thought better of it, and then pushed herself up off the floor. Water dribbled down from her hair and slapped onto her boot. “Nothing,” Antigone said. “Absolutely nothing.”
“The lights dimmed,” Cyrus said. “I know they did.”
“How would you know?” Antigone asked. “You were busy tackling me while screaming and sucking your thumb.”
“First,” Cyrus said, standing up, “I didn’t scream. Second, that was your thumb in my mouth.”
“Selam,” Antigone said, stepping forward. “Selam.”
Dust trickled across the floor. The lanterns dimmed and swung on the ceiling. For a moment, the temperature wobbled, and a long sucking sound, like a breath pulled through teeth, filled the room.
And it was gone.
The dust stopped.
The light grew.
“Hmm,” said Cyrus. “We’ve seen it. It happened. Now let’s agree not to do that again.”
Antigone laughed. “Really, Cyrus? Who was just pretending to be the brave one?”
“I wouldn’t have done it. I’m not dumb, Tigs. You’re just funny when you’re scared.”
“Yeah, right. Can we go now, or do you need to change your pants?”