Eye of the Oracle

chapter 2

REUNION

Still facing Hannah, Elam reached back into his mind and recalled the ancient Hebrew he once spoke so well. Now the language seemed foreign, but the words came quickly enough. “I know who you are,” he said.

Hannah’s mouth dropped open. She sputtered, also speaking Hebrew. “What . . . what did you say?”

Elam slowly withdrew the Ovulum from his pocket and lifted it in his open palm. “I know who you are.”

Hannah grabbed Elam’s arm, pulled him into the bedroom, and slammed the door. “Who are you? How did you get the Ovulum?”

Elam raised a shushing finger to his lips. “Are any other boarders here?”

“None who speak Hebrew!” She gripped his wrist so tightly, pain shot along his arm, making the Ovulum tremble in his palm. “If you are a slayer, you were a fool to come with neither sword nor shield.” She squeezed even harder, revealing a strength that belied her petite frame. “Now, I will ask again, and you will answer. Who are you, and how did you get the Ovulum?”

“I am Elam, son of Shem,” he said, laying a hand on his chest. “The Ovulum came to me by the will of Elohim. Since Noah was my grandfather, and Methuselah was his grandfather, it rightfully belongs to me.”

Hannah gasped. “Noah was your grandfather? How is that possible? You are not more than sixteen years old, eighteen at the most!”

Elam extended a hand and gently placed his palm on her cheek. “How old are you, Thigocia?”

Hannah released his arm and backed away, her voice spiking with alarm. “Where did you hear that name?”

He stepped toward her, but when he noted the anguish in her eyes, he halted and spoke in a soothing tone. “I have kept watch over you for fifteen hundred years. I prevented Devin and Palin from finding you at least a dozen times.”

Hannah backed up against the bedroom’s far wall and flattened her palms against the plaster. “You” she swallowed hard “you have been following me around for centuries?” She glanced at an open window, just an arm’s length from her hand. “Why should I believe a word you are saying?”

Elam raised the Ovulum onto his fingertips. “Because I bear the dwelling place of the Eye of the Oracle.” He drew it closer to his face and said, “Fiat lux.” The glass began to glow, and a nebulous crimson cloud took shape within.

A look of curiosity swept across Hannah’s face. She took a half step forward, craning her neck. “Can you see him?”

The cloud congealed into the shape of an eye, bright and clear. Dozens of reddish hues painted the pupil, the iris, and every serpentine capillary. Elam nodded at the pulsing egg. “Yes, but he rarely speaks, he ”

A squeak sounded, the whine of the front door’s rusty hinges. Elam spun around and laid his ear on the bedroom door, whispering, “Are you expecting someone?”

Hannah shook her head and began inching toward the window. A slow creak drifted in from the hallway, a bending floor plank on the other side of the door.

The Ovulum’s temperature spiked hotter in Elam’s hand, and an urgent whisper hissed from the shell. “Fly! A dark knight is coming quickly!”

Elam rushed to the window. Hannah had already straddled the sill. Grabbing her wrist, he lowered her to the ground, then scrunched low and leaped out. They backed away from the cottage, watching for any movement in the room. Suddenly, Devin vaulted through the window frame. Before the dark knight hit the ground, Palin followed. As Devin straightened, he faltered for a moment, clutching his leg in pain.

“He’s hurt!” Elam said, grabbing Hannah’s arm. “Run!”

Hannah jerked free. “No! I am through running!” She snatched the Ovulum from Elam and held it in her outstretched hand. “Thousands of years ago, I saw the Ovulum protect the ark of Noah from the most powerful demons in the world. I am sure it can hold off two of their stupid lackeys.”

Devin withdrew his sword and stalked toward them with Palin at his side, his sword also at the ready. As the Ovulum pulsed bright rings of red, Devin stopped and sneered. “You would battle two knights with a glass bauble?” he asked in an old English dialect.

“It is enough for the likes of you,” Hannah snapped, using the same dialect.

Devin swiped his sword over Hannah’s palm, slicing through the Ovulum. The top half fell to the ground and spun in the grass. He flashed a mocking smile. “Sorry to crush your hopes, dragoness, but your faith is fatally misplaced.”

As Devin drew back his sword again, the lower part of the Ovulum spewed a towering fountain of scarlet sparks that streamed in every direction. Hannah jerked her hand away, dropping the broken egg. The half shell rocked back and forth and continued gushing until the streams coalesced into two cyclonic columns that spun like crimson tornados between the pairs of opponents.

One of the columns lifted off the ground and soared into the sky, while the other drilled downward and splashed a huge cloud of dust into the dark knights’ faces. Devin and Palin covered their eyes, coughing and gagging as they backed away.

Elam lunged for Palin and threw him down. Wrapping his arms around the knight’s sword hand, he slammed the mail-clad arm against the ground, then pried the sword free and jumped up with the hilt in his grip. Setting his feet, he pointed the blade at the pair of slayers as they continued to cough uncontrollably.

More dust erupted from the lower end of the spinning column, blending russet streaks into the crimson cyclone until it looked like a swirling pinwheel of flesh and blood. The streaks solidified and coiled into a tight cylinder. As the spinning slowed, a man’s body took shape, his hands at his sides and his eyes tightly shut.

The turning stopped. The man gasped a deep breath, then opened his eyes and looked around frantically. Spotting Hannah, he swept her up and began to run.

Still holding Palin’s sword, Elam rushed after them. Hannah thrashed in the man’s arms, screaming, “We can run faster if you will let me go!” She jabbed her elbow into his ribs until he stumbled and dropped her. After toppling over her body, he flopped face first into a patch of dandelions.

Elam hustled to the man and rolled him over. He seemed familiar somehow, and since he had come out of the Ovulum, he likely wasn’t an enemy. “Are you all right?” Elam asked in modern English.

“We have to escape,” the man replied in Old English. “The effects of the gas on the slayers will not last long.”

Elam and Hannah each grabbed one of the man’s arms and helped him to his feet. Elam glanced back at the two knights. The slayers were slowly rising, still coughing, but not as vigorously. “We must make haste,” the man continued. “Are there any rapid conveyances?”

Hannah nodded. “Yes, I have horses.”

“In the pasture down the road!” Elam swept his arm forward. “Come on!”

The trio dashed away from the cottage, scaled a low fence, and sprinted across a grassy field. When the horses came into view, Hannah pulled on Elam’s sleeve, slowing him down. “Careful, or we will frighten them.”

With Palin’s sword still in hand, Elam walked briskly, alternately glancing at several horses grazing about fifty paces in front, then behind him at the slayers who followed at a distance. “Can you ride bareback?” he asked Hannah.

“Yes. Can you?”

“I think so.” Elam turned to the stranger. “Do you ride?”

The man nodded. “Yes, but never in this world.”

Elam propped the sword over his shoulder. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I will explain soon enough.”

“Wait here.” Hannah strode ahead. As she approached the horses, she held out her hand toward a bay mare and spoke as though she were addressing another human. “Legossi,” she said, returning to her Scottish-soaked, modern dialect, “we are in great danger. I need you and Hartanna and Clefspeare to carry us to safety. Will you do it?”

The mare replied with a lengthy bob of her head. Two other horses, a dapple-gray mare and a chestnut stallion, both nodded in the same way. Hannah sidled up to the stallion. “I will take Clefspeare,” she said, switching back to old English. “Elam, you ride the bay mare. You” she pointed at the stranger “you can ride the dapple gray.”

Elam checked the slayers’ progress as they crossed the field. Palin, now brandishing Excalibur and running ahead of his injured master, would be at their throats in seconds. Elam dropped his captured sword and set his hands in a cradle near the ground. “Hannah! Quick! I’ll boost you!”

“No need for boosting!” Taking a running start, Hannah leaped over his hands and vaulted onto the stallion. Then, snatching Elam’s collar, she hauled him to the bay mare and lifted him high. Elam grabbed the horse’s neck, swung his leg over her back, and righted himself. The stranger leaped onto the dapple-gray mare and slid deftly into place.

Now only a dozen paces away, Palin charged toward them, Devin’s sword in one hand and a dagger in the other.

Giving Clefspeare a firm kick, Hannah shouted. “Let us fly!”

The stallion bolted, and the mares galloped after him. Elam squeezed the mare with his knees to steady himself, but sudden pain made him lurch. He clutched his upper arm. Palin’s dagger! The jagged blade had penetrated deeply, probably to the bone. He jerked the dagger out and slung it to the ground. Pain ripped through his neck and down his spine. Blood flowed freely, coating his arm in seconds.

He glanced back. Palin was pointing at the ground with the sword Elam had left behind. Elam grimaced. A blood trail! But he couldn’t stop to make a bandage. Hannah and the stranger were already too far ahead. Leaning forward and hanging on with his good arm, he could only watch the tall grass zip by underneath while blood dripped from his fingers. He might as well make a sign that said, “This way to the dragon!”

He tried to pull the mare to the right, hoping to steer his pursuers away, but she stayed on course behind the pair in front. Closing his eyes and laying his head on the horse’s mane, he focused on enduring the escape. The mare’s hoofbeats rattled his brain, and each jolt brought a new stab of agony.

Soon, the thunder of other hoofbeats grew closer, so close they seemed to hammer the ground in a stride-for-stride gallop next to him. Elam clutched the horse’s mane. Was Devin about to grab him? Too groggy to sit up, he tried to kick his horse, but he lurched to the side and fell. Strong arms caught him, lifted him into the air, and set him in place again on a different mount. A gentle male voice drifted into his ear. “Hang on, young man. Keep your courage. I will let you rest in a moment.”

When the horse finally stopped, another pair of hands grasped his uninjured arm as he slid slowly downward. Hannah’s voice lilted in his ears, her Scottish accent spicing her Old English. “I will lay him down! Move the horses away! Quickly now.”

Elam fluttered his eyelids, catching glimpses of tall blades of grass next to his cheek, Hannah’s worried face on one side of his body and the stranger from the Ovulum on the other. Every image seemed filtered by a dark screen. Even the sun wore a basaltic mask that coated the skies with gray. With pain roaring from arm to arm, he clenched his teeth, unable to put his torment into words.

The man’s voice drifted by, soft as a phantom’s whisper. “Can you stop the bleeding?”

Hannah’s sharp reply drilled into his ears. “Give me your shirt!”

New throbs shot through Elam’s brain, shocking him to a more wakeful state. He peeked through his partially closed eyelids. Hannah, dim and blurry, wrapped a shirt around his injured arm. After tying it in place, she pressed her hand on the wound.

Elam moaned. The pain was worse than the sting of Nabal’s cruelest whippings.

Hannah’s voice returned, now more soothing. “Shhh. I have to put pressure on it or you are likely to bleed to death.”

The stranger, now in a singlet undershirt, knelt at Elam’s other side and mopped his brow with a torn sleeve. “My dear lady, you seem to have experience with healing fallen warriors.”

Hannah kept her head turned toward Elam. “And you seem to have experience with heroic rescues. You remind me of a very dear friend of mine, an old friend from long ago.”

“How kind of you to say so. Was your friend a hero?”

Hannah’s eyes misted. “To me, he was much more than a hero much, much more.”

“I see.” He angled his head toward Elam but kept his eyes fixed on her. “Was this hero a former flame?”

A sad smile wrinkled Hannah’s lips. “You have no idea how well you have described him.”

The man’s eyebrows lifted. “Perhaps I do.”

“No,” Hannah said, sighing deeply, “you do not.”

The man turned his cloth over and dabbed Elam’s forehead again. “Have other flames come to warm the embers this love left behind?”

“What?” Hannah glared at him. “I would expect better manners from a man who sprang forth from the Ovulum!”

The man lowered his head. “Forgive me, dear lady. The Eye of the Oracle commanded me to ask that very question.”

As Hannah’s glare softened, she sighed. “Well, if the Eye bids me to answer . . .” She shook her head slowly, and her voice pitched slightly higher. “My embers are cold, and they are slowly crumbling to dust.” She yanked a blade of grass away from Elam’s cheek. “I do not allow even a spark to approach them. No one will ever rekindle my coals.”

“May I venture to describe this lost flame of yours?”

Hannah sniffed, her chin trembling. “If you must.”

The man took a deep breath and spoke with a poetic cadence. “Embodying the spirit of a paladin, he ignited the passions of your heart. Flashing the courage of a warrior, he burned away all your fears. Massaging with the gentleness of spring sunshine, he warmed your scales on cold, anxious nights.”

“Well done. It almost seems that you ” Hannah clenched a handful of grass. “Did you say, ‘scales’?”

“Yes. And if he is the fiery romantic that I suspect, he probably told you that he would eventually come back.” He gazed directly into Hannah’s eyes. “Is that true . . . Thigocia?”

Hannah’s lips quivered. Still keeping her hand on Elam’s arm, she leaned closer to the stranger and gazed into his eyes. After a few seconds, a tear trickled down her cheek as she whispered, “My . . . my husband?”

He took the ends of her fingers into his hand and guided her around Elam. “We said, ‘till death do us part,’ but even death could not keep our love apart forever.”

“Makaidos!” Hannah leaped into his arms. “My darling husband! It is you! It is really you!”

Holding her close in his lap, he stroked her silky hair. “My human name is Timothy, but I will answer to any name you wish to give me.” He gently pushed her toward Elam. “You had better tend to your patient.”

“Oh! Yes! Of course!” She stepped over Elam and pressed down on his arm.

Elam grimaced, but the pain wasn’t quite as bad as before.

“How did you do it?” she asked, a broad smile stretching her cheeks. “I mean, how did you come back to life?”

Timothy mopped Elam’s brow again. “God preserved my spirit in the Ovulum, and I spent over a thousand years there learning from Enoch. He said that someday God would create a new body for me from the dust of the ground. When the Ovulum broke open, Enoch closed his eyes and said, ‘It is time.’ Then, he disappeared.” Timothy laid a hand on his chest. “And now I am here, back with my beloved.”

Hannah reached across Elam and took Timothy’s hand, drawing it close. She kissed his fingers and rubbed the back of his hand across her cheek. “What happened to Enoch?”

“I am concerned about him,” he said. “God took him from the earth long ago, and he resided in the Ovulum as a prophetic eye for thousands of years. But he knew he would be leaving, and he said he did not know where God would take him next.”

Hannah released the pressure on Elam’s arm and slowly peeled the blood-soaked shirt away from the wound. “It is just oozing now.” She patted Elam on the cheek. “You are certainly a fast healer.”

Elam forced a smile. “Must be from clean living.” He rose to a sitting position, blinking at the beams of sunlight filtering through the high treetops. Two horses stood in a shallow stream that trickled over their hooves, while the third nosed through a patch of clover next to a nearby oak tree. He raised his good arm. “Help me up. Devin will follow my blood trail, so we have to keep moving.”

“There is no hurry.” Hannah rose and pulled Elam to his feet. “With that bad leg of his, he could not possibly keep up.”

“He was a knight,” Elam countered. “He and Palin know how to mount and ride horses.”

“An excellent point.” Hannah brushed off her dress. “We will follow the stream to the River Clyde. If we can make it there by nightfall, we should be able to erase our trail in the water under the cover of darkness. Then we can follow the river to Uddingston.”

While Hannah gathered the horses, Elam picked up the drenched bandage and wadded it into a ball. A drop of blood slowly gathered at the end of a sleeve and dripped to the ground. “I have a better idea.” He forked his fingers at Timothy and Hannah. “You two can go to Uddingston. I’ll lead Devin away with a trail of blood.”

“No,” Hannah said, now riding on Clefspeare. “If he catches you ”

“The boy is right.” Timothy turned to Elam. “You must separate from us. Now that Thigocia and I are together, you are finished here. Enoch told me that your next assignment is to find Valcor, another dragon turned human. Although he fled from Europe for a time, he now lives in Glastonbury, England, under the name of Patrick Nathanson. You will learn how you must aid him as you so faithfully aided Thigocia.”

“My name is Hannah now,” she corrected. “And you will need to learn the new tongue quickly.”

Elam shook his head and chuckled under his breath. “Both of you could use a lot of work with your speech. Just relax, and don’t try so hard. I mean, you sound as stiff as dragons’ armor.”

Timothy smiled. “Is that so,” he said in modern English, his words lilting with the rhythm of a perfect Scottish accent. “You’d be surprised at what a man can learn trapped inside a glass egg for hundreds of years. I just breathed the Scottish air for an hour, and I’m already a Scotsman!”

“Excellent!” Hannah clapped her hands and laughed. “You even used contractions. I always found those difficult to master.”

A low rumble vibrated the ground. Elam strained to listen. Hoofbeats? If so, they were still far away, but closing fast. He waved toward the gray mare. “Timothy! Hurry! Whichever way you go, I’ll ride in the opposite direction.”

Timothy boosted Elam onto the bay mare, then leaped aboard the dapple gray’s back. “I trust we will see you again, Elam.”

“If it is in my power.” Pressing the horse’s shoulder with his good hand, Elam steadied himself and nodded to both former dragons. His throat caught, and tears welled in his eyes. “It has been an honor to serve you. May the Lord Christ be with you always.”

Hannah rode to his side and patted Elam’s horse. “Legossi, stay with him and keep him safe.” Legossi gave her a horsey snort and nodded.

Hannah pulled Elam’s sleeve. “Farewell, brave warrior.” She kissed him on the hand. “Thank you for watching over me.”

With a firm kick into Clefspeare’s side, Hannah rode into the creek and galloped downstream.

Timothy guided his mare next to Elam’s. “You recognized me all along, didn’t you?”

Elam shrugged. “It’s been a long time. I wasn’t sure enough to say anything.”

“I understand.” He lowered his head briefly before returning his gaze to Elam. “Pray for me. I must tell my beloved about Roxil. As far as I know, she is still trapped in that God-forsaken town. And I also must search for the spirit of my father. I refuse to believe he is really that deceiver who indwells the body of Arramos.”

“I will pray.” Elam nodded downstream. “You’d better get going.”

He gave Elam a military salute and chased after Hannah. As his horse disappeared into the thick forest, Elam waited, listening to the approaching hoofbeats. He let the bloody bandage dangle over the ground for a moment, then rode along the creek’s muddy shoreline, following it upstream as he squeezed more blood onto the ground.

“That should do it,” he said out loud. “We’ll see if Devin takes the bait, and then we’ll try to find Valcor.” After patting the mare’s neck, he gave her a gentle nudge with his heels. “Okay, Legossi, let’s make tracks!”

Sapphira bolted upright in bed. Sweat dampened her nightgown and plastered her sleeves against her skin. The dream was awful. A man jumped out of a window with a sword and swung it at Elam and Hannah, but the dream suddenly ended. She never saw what happened.

Sapphira focused her bleary eyes on the portal screen, now just a vortex of fuzzy orange light. How strange! Had she shut it down and not remembered? Waving her hand at it, she whispered, “Expand,” but the dim eddies just swirled like deaf pixies, dancing on without a care.

Sapphira stared at a stubborn rash that had recently invaded her palm. Could the irritation be hampering her power? She touched it with her fingertip, reinflaming its awful itch, but she resisted the urge to scratch.

She pushed gently on Acacia’s back. “You’d better get up. Something’s wrong.”

Acacia rose to her elbows, barely opening her eyes. “What? What’s wrong?”

“The screen is off, and it won’t come back on.”

Acacia lifted an eyebrow. “Didn’t that happen once before?”

“Yes. Elam got a bunch of tar on the Ovulum. But it’s not black this time. It won’t expand at all.”

“Don’t worry about Elam. He’s been around for a lot of centuries. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Sapphira scratched her head and yawned through her reply. “I’m going to get ready for the day, and if the screen’s still blank, I’ll start worrying about Elam.”

“You do that.” Acacia turned over and nestled into her pillow. “It’s Easter morning, so we’re allowed to sleep in.”

“But we still have to eat.” Sapphira shoved her again. “And it’s your turn to get food today.”

Acacia sat up and frowned. “It is my turn, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so.” Sapphira rose to her feet and, with her vision still blurry, stumbled toward the museum, ready to step through her routine wash her face from the basin, measure the tree’s growth, pick out the new books she would read, and sit in front of the portal to watch Elam for a few hours before kicking back for a quiet afternoon of reading.

After splashing in the basin and drying her face, she picked up a measuring tape from a shelf and set one end on the ground near the slender trunk. Then, pushing her face in among the lush green leaves, she unraveled the tape against the trunk, moving it upward until it reached the top of the growth core, a height that roughly equaled her own. She pressed her thumb on the mark, and, after extracting herself from the foliage, read the tape and sighed. “Still sixty-three inches.”

Gazing at the surrounding shelves, she located the magneto bricks she had installed and counted the bright rainbow colors. All seven seemed to be working, but whether or not they did much good from so far away was impossible to tell.

She grabbed a pencil and a nearby scroll and marked down the tree’s measurement. “You haven’t grown an inch in three years now.” Rolling back to the beginning of her records, she tapped the pencil on the parchment. “I almost forgot! If I’m marking time correctly in the upper world, today marks one thousand years since you sprouted!”

Sapphira closed the scroll and put it away, smiling as she turned back to the tree. “Shall we have an anniversary celebration, or ” She stopped and stared. Something new hung at the end of one of the branches, something white and spherical.

Sapphira sang out her sister’s name, extending the syllables. “Acacia! You need to see this!”

“Coming!” Acacia called.

Sapphira set her palm under the fruit and slowly lifted. It was light, much lighter than she expected. Caressing it with her fingers, she marveled at its tactile surface, more like the lumpy buds of cauliflower than the slick peel of an apple or a pear.

Acacia hummed a lively tune as she entered but suddenly stopped and smiled. “We have fruit!”

“Yes.” Sapphira rubbed the fruit with her thumb. “It’s kind of strange, though. It feels sort of fibrous, like it might be soft and flaky.”

“So, shall we have it for breakfast?” Acacia asked, reaching for the fruit.

“Wait!” Sapphira grabbed Acacia’s wrist.

Acacia pulled back. “Wait for what?”

“If this is the tree of life, it might make us live forever without ever getting hungry.”

“Right. I thought that was the idea.”

Sapphira cocked her head to the side. “Well . . . do you really want to live forever? I mean, this isn’t exactly heaven. I know we’re not aging now, but maybe we will someday, and from what I’ve read about heaven, I’d like to get there eventually.”

Acacia scratched her scalp through her tangled white hair and laughed under her breath. “All this time we’ve been begging the tree to produce fruit, and now that it’s here, are we going to change our minds?”

“Sometimes you have to when reality kind of smacks you in the face.”

Acacia tapped the fruit with her finger, making it swing back and forth. “So what should we do with it?”

Sapphira laid a hand over her heart. “Let’s promise each other that we won’t eat it unless we’re truly starving, like if for some reason we can’t get any food from the upper world.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Even if we were starving, we still wouldn’t want to live forever, would we?”

“I don’t know what I’d do if I were starving.” Sapphira caressed the fruit with her fingertip. “But it can’t be a coincidence that it showed up after exactly a thousand years, can it? It has to mean something.”

“True, but we don’t have anything but guesses.”

Sapphira leaned to the side and peeked at the portal screen. “Maybe we’ll see something today that will make it all clear. We always seem to get messages from the Ovulum whenever we really need them.”

Acacia leaned with her. “I don’t think we’re going to learn much from it. It’s still just a column.”

“I noticed.” Sapphira crossed her arms and began tapping her foot.

Acacia wrapped her fingers around Sapphira’s wrist. “I can read your mind, Sister. You’re not going to traipse over to Glasgow to see what’s going on.”

Sapphira stopped tapping. “Why not? With our disguises, we could get there without anyone noticing us. We’ll be wearing our sunglasses.”

“Oh, sure,” Acacia said, rolling her eyes. “I can see the people on the train, pointing at us. ‘Look at the poor little blind girls all dressed up in their frilly bonnets. Aren’t they cute?’”

“But today is Easter, so no one will think anything’s unusual. And maybe we won’t need bonnets at all. I read about a new hair dye that might work.”

“Another one? Those chemicals did nothing but give you a rash, and, besides, we can’t color our eyes. Wearing sunglasses might raise a lot of pity, but it’s not going to get us to Glasgow.” Acacia took Sapphira’s hand. “Look. Even if you could get there, how would you ever find Elam?”

Sapphira heaved a big sigh. “I guess you’re right, but when I can’t keep an eye on him, I just ” She pulled her hand slowly away from Acacia. “My palm! The rash is gone!”

Acacia touched Sapphira’s clean, healthy skin. “It healed overnight?”

“No, it itched terribly this morning.” Sapphira swung her head toward the tree. “The last time I remember scratching it was right before I touched the fruit.”

“How could fruit heal your rash?”

Sapphira caressed her palm with her finger. “Maybe it has medicinal properties.”

“And maybe it was a miracle.” Acacia touched the cross resting behind the waistband of Sapphira’s long gray skirt, part of the dreary outfit she had scavenged from a charity box. “After all the miracles you’ve seen,” Acacia said, “I don’t understand why you get so jumpy about Elam.”

Sapphira pulled out the cross and gazed at its seemingly invulnerable surface. “I guess you’re right.”

“I know what we can do!” Acacia whirled around and marched toward the exit corridor, her own mousy skirt spinning around her legs. “Let’s go visit Yereq. Maybe the screen will be on by the time we get back.”

“Wait for me!” Sapphira hustled to catch up, whispering to her cross, “Give me light!” Instantly, a bright flame danced across the slender wood, smokeless and reaching tiny yellow limbs toward the cave’s ceiling. As the two walked silently through the tunnel, Sapphira reflected on the cross’s eerie glow and repeated the words to herself, “Give me light.” Though she hadn’t spoken them out loud this time, the command seemed to echo in her ears. “Give me light. Give me light.” She blinked at the undulating flames and shook her head. If there was a deeper message hiding behind those simple words, it wasn’t ready to show itself yet.

Now accustomed to the once forbidden path to the mobility room, Sapphira took little notice of the empty growth chambers lining the final corridor that led to the massive vault-like room. Even the bones of dead giants were easy to skip around. The stench of their rotting flesh had long since diminished, so they were just a morbid collection of stones the girls could easily dodge.

Now, marching right into the room seemed easy, almost too easy. The once prohibited journey had become like a stroll to the library, a way to pass the time. Sapphira raised her cross near Yereq’s growth chamber, illuminating the ten-foot-tall giant floating within the recess of the stony wall. “Hello, Yereq,” Sapphira sang. “It’s me.”

The sleeping giant’s face remained stony at first, but slowly, ever so slowly, a weak smile appeared.

“Someday I’m going to wake you up,” she continued, “but I can’t yet, not until I figure out the code in Mardon’s journal.” She turned to Acacia and let out a heavy sigh. “Do you ever get tired of hearing me say that?”

“I got tired of it after the tenth time.” Acacia nodded at the chamber. “But Yereq seems to enjoy it.”

Sapphira lifted the cross higher, sending the light over Yereq again. His smile spread across his face. She lowered the cross and gazed at her twin but didn’t want to ask her burning question for the hundredth time. Though it remained unspoken today, Acacia answered it anyway with her usual gracious tone. “Don’t worry. If we ever wake him, he’ll love you.”

Sapphira knelt at the base of the growth chamber. The counter now read “8550,” just a few ticks lower than the previous reading. She tapped the counter with her finger. “I think it’s still dropping at the same rate.”

“It’s moving so slowly,” Acacia said, “we’ll have to wait till the twenty-first century to see it hit zero.”

After rising to her feet, Sapphira waved the burning cross at the seven or eight chambers within reach of her light. “Maybe, but if Yereq and these giants wake up in a foul mood, I don’t want to be around.”

Acacia raised her finger. “If we take a meter, we won’t have to be anywhere near them. We’ll know when they’re about to hatch.”

Sapphira knelt in front of the chamber’s hearth again and pried the meter loose. “That’s strange.” She turned it over and examined the back. “No connection wires.”

Acacia crouched low. “So it doesn’t do anything?”

Sapphira flipped it to its digital side. “Maybe it’s just a visible timer that matches controlling timers embedded in the magneto bricks themselves.”

“How do you know so much about magneto bricks?”

Sapphira slid the meter into her pocket. “I helped Mardon with his experiments a lot more than I care to talk about.”

Devin stooped next to the stream and pinched a clump of blood-stained mud. “Only one set of tracks follows the trail.”

Palin guided his horse into the stream. “The other two might have stayed in the water. The bed is solid enough.”

Rising to his full height, Devin shook his head. “If they wanted to throw us off that way, all three would have stayed in the creek. The blood trail was meant to steer us away from the demon witch.”

“Shall we separate, then?” Palin pointed upstream. “The boy is wounded. It won’t be hard to catch him.”

“He is of no consequence, and I will need your help until my next infusion of power.” Devin limped toward his horse, a muscular roan gelding with a cropped mane.

Palin jumped down and gave Devin a boost onto its back. “When will you perform the next infusion?” Palin asked. “Your limp is getting worse every day.”

“Do you think I haven’t noticed?” Devin pulled out the candlestone’s chain and dangled the gem at his chest. “The blood we have is getting old. I want to wait until we can use Thigocia’s blood.”

“I see. New life from new blood.”

Devin guided his horse into the water and pointed downstream. “The witch will probably head for the River Clyde. She’s a crafty devil, so we’d better hurry or we’ll lose the trail.”

“Any more ideas about the man who came out of that egg?” Palin asked.

“No, but if he tries to stop us” Devin wrapped his fingers around Excalibur’s hilt “his head will be looking up at his body from a pool of blood.”