Kate rose to her feet, watching him.
Simon stared at the key and, without speaking, turned and walked from the room, down the darkened corridor with increasingly long strides. Kate’s footsteps sounded behind him. Then he nearly sprinted up the circular stone steps. He reached the door to his tower sanctum and entered. A quick word raised the soft luminance. He went to his desk and began to pour over a stack of journals.
Breathless, Kate stood in the doorway. “Simon? What is it? Can I help you?”
Simon shook his head without answering. He slammed one book shut and seized another, frantically rifling pages. Leaf after leaf of runic symbols flashed across his vision. Finally, he pressed his finger against a page with a shout of triumph. “Ha! I knew it!”
“What is it?” Kate joined him at the desk.
“Do you read druidic script?” Simon asked.
“I’ve seen some, but very little survives.”
“That’s because my father had it all. He received it from Pendragon. And now I have much of it.” Simon flipped the book toward Kate. It made little difference for most of the script was unfamiliar to her. He pointed to a symbol. In his other hand, he held the key in a tight grip.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know it.”
“It’s druidic runes writing an ancient Celtic language. I think I misheard my mother. I think she was saying marthsyl.”
The key glowed green.
Simon leapt to his feet, holding it out as if he had received an electric shock. It felt warm in his hand, and sharp pinpoints of otherwordly light wrote hidden runes across the gold surface.
The wavering emerald haze colored Kate’s amazed face. “Oh my God, Simon. Oh my God. What’s it doing?”
“I don’t know.” He stared at the key.
“What did you say? Does marthsyl mean hammer?”
“No. It means miracle or wonder.” He glanced up at Kate to see her staring past him with eyes wide in shock. Simon turned and saw a strange glowing spot on the wall. He stepped closer.
“It’s the symbol from the key,” Kate said. “The same one that’s on the wall in my father’s study at Hartley Hall.”
Indeed it was the stylized compass icon forged into the top of the key, and it was burning bright green against the rough white plaster. Then suddenly, between Simon and the glowing sigil on the wall, a strange wavering patch appeared in the air. He blinked hard at first, suspecting his vision was blurred. But the weaving distortion was the air itself, swimming before him, just above his eye level.
“Simon, step back,” Kate called.
The weird quavering space began to coalesce into a recognizable vision. It became a pulsating oval and in its center was a map of the world. Simon looked at Kate in wonder, and she was already coming around the desk to join him. There were marks on the map in various places, many of them overlapping and crowded atop one another. There was one on London, and several more around Britain, including one that was likely Warden Abbey where they stood. Some were clearly recognizable just from their geography. London. Paris. Cairo. Calcutta. New Orleans. Java.
“I know what many of those are.” Kate pointed at the glistening world suspended in midair. “They’re my father’s travels. Those must be all the places he went using the key. He was in New Orleans, just as Ambassador Mansfield said. And he was also in Cairo.” She reached out toward the map and where her hand came near, the scene suddenly reoriented itself to her touch, zooming in. The view drew tight on the eastern Mediterranean and new dots became visible including Alexandria and Jerusalem. She pulled her arm back, shaking it. “It tingles.”
Simon raised a finger to the dot over Cairo. The entire map shimmered and vanished in a swirl of energy. Both Simon and Kate stepped back as the aether whirlpooled before them. Out of the disorienting lines of power swimming in endless circles, recognizable shapes coalesced into a scene. A sandy street bathed in thin morning light. Walls rising up around it. Awnings. And the telltale enclosed wooden balconies that Simon had seen in drawings of Cairo streets.
“It’s Egypt,” Kate breathed. “It’s right in front of us. I can feel the heat. Look! There’s someone moving. We’re looking at Cairo!”
“It’s not real,” came Nick’s slurred comment from the door. “It’s a glamour or an illusion.”
Simon reached into his pocket and brought out a shilling. He thumbed it toward the portal. The coin flipped through the air and created ripples across the scene like a pebble striking the surface of a pond. The distortion quickly stilled and the shilling appeared midair in the Egyptian dawn and fell to the street with a puff of dust.
Kate laughed wildly.