Night Hunt, page 7
part #9 of Harbinger P.I. Series
“How do you think this works?” I asked my dad.
He looked up from the menu he’d been perusing. “Hmm? How does what work?”
“Dragging the girls into the Shadow Land. The yaghul places the pictogram on them, which allows him some sort of magical connection to them. Marcia became comatose when her energy was being leached away. I wonder how long it would have taken until enough of her essence was in the Shadow Land that the yaghul could perform the ceremony.”
“There’s no way to know a detail like that without a lot of research,” he said.
He was right. I called Carlton.
“Hi, Alec,” he said when he picked up. “How was your Christmas?”
“Fine,” I said. “I hope yours was too.”
“Yes, Muriel and I had a nice day.”
“Good. I need you to look into something for me.”
“Of course. That’s what I’m here for. What do you want?”
“The Harvest of the Maidens. It’s an ancient Sumerian ceremony. I need everything you can dig up on it.”
“No problem. I’ll get on it right away.”
“Thanks, Carlton.” I hung up.
The waitress, whose name was Sandra, arrived at our table and gave me a little wave and a smile. “Hi, welcome back. The usual?”
Surprised that she recognized me among the hundreds of customers who must come through the door every day, I nodded. “Yes, please. Thanks.”
She scribbled on her notepad and turned to my father. “And for you, sir?”
“I’ll have whatever he’s having,” he said, offering her a warm smile.
“Okay. That’s two Darla Double burgers, two fries, and two Cokes. Anything else I can get for you?”
“Coffee would be great,” I said.
“Coming right up.” She headed toward the kitchen.
When she was out of earshot, Dad looked at me and said, “Alec, I know you think that I only came here because there’s something I want you to do, but that isn’t true. I wanted to see you. To spend time with you. In fact, after seeing what happened to you today, I’m not going to ask you to do the job I had in mind.”
The coffee arrived. While Sandra poured it from the pot, I watched my dad through a curtain of rising steam that rose from the cups. I didn’t know if he was being sincere or if he was trying to draw me into his plan by telling me he didn’t think I could do it so that I’d respond with some sort of, “Yes, I can, just watch me,” line. If that was the case, he really didn’t know me at all.
After Sandra had left—taking the coffee pot to another table—I said, “So what is this job?”
He sighed. “Like I said, I don’t know if it’s a good idea.’
“Cut the crap, Dad. We both know you want me to do it, whether it affects me or not. It obviously involves using my magic, so tell me what it is you want nullified, healed, blasted, or all of the above.”
“No, I won’t cut the crap, Alec, because there isn’t any. I’m telling the truth. What I saw today worried me. Sure, you can nullify a magical pictogram and sleep it off, no problem, but the job I want you to do will prove to be more challenging than that. I’m sure you’ll recover from it eventually, but at what cost? And what happens in the future, when you unleash the full power of the Melandra Configuration? What will happen to you then?”
“I have absolutely no intention of unleashing the full power of the Configuration,” I told him. “I just tap into it and draw as much energy as I need.”
“And what if a day arrives when you need to use its power to save the world?”
That made me smile. “You’re being overly dramatic.”
“Am I? You don’t know what the future holds, Alec.”
“Do you?” I countered.
That made him pause. He looked out of the window at the parking lot with a sad look on his face. “Not exactly, no.”
I could tell he was hiding something. “What’s that supposed to mean? Do you know something about what’s going to happen? A prophecy or something?”
He sighed and looked at me, a hint of sorrow still in his eyes. “Prophecies don’t always come true. They only tell us what will most likely happen in the future. They never tell the full story.”
Sandra came over to the table with the burgers and fries. She set the plates in front of us and said, “Anything else I can get for you?”
“I’d like a Caesar salad, please,” said a voice from behind me. “And a pot of tea.”
I turned and saw Felicity standing there. She was dressed in a pale blue trench coat, jeans, and boots, and she looked radiantly healthy. She turned to face me with a smile.
“Coming right up,” Sandra said, heading toward the kitchen.
I got out of my seat, unsure how to greet Felicity. It was too long since I’d last seen her and now that she here in front of me, I felt a flood of emotion that threatened to overwhelm me.
“Hi, Alec,” she said, opening her arms for a hug.
I drew her close and relished the familiar closeness. When we broke the hug, she said, “Long time no see.”
“Too long,” I said.
She sat next to my dad, which disappointed me. But then I remembered that they were here to talk business. Our positions at the table reinforced that.
I retook my seat opposite them and waited to hear their pitch.
“I hear you’ve been busy with the Mister Scary case,” Felicity said, opening the conversation but not in the direction I’d expected.
“Yeah, he’s been busy too. He marked the most recent final girl with an ancient Sumerian pictogram that has something to do with an old ceremony called the Harvest of the Maidens. I managed to cut the connection, so she’s okay. For now, anyway.”
“But doing so cost Alec dearly,” my dad said. “He became weak and lost consciousness.”
Felicity nodded. “Yes, that’s a side effect of using the magic.”
I remembered that it was Felicity who’d found me lying on my lawn and helped me into my house the first time I’d tapped into the Melandra Configuration. We’d been fighting a Society of Shadows traitor named DuMont and I’d blasted him with a ball of energy. That was the night Mallory had become cursed. It seemed so long ago.
Mallory’s curse was lifted now but saving her had meant revealing the location of Rekhmire, an ancient Egyptian demon, to the Midnight Cabal. Two of their members had used that knowledge to release him from his magical prison. He was still on some other realm, at least, but he was now free of the shackles that had kept him prisoner there.
“I know it’s a side effect of the magic,” my dad said to Felicity, “but seeing him like that has made me reconsider our plan.”
“I have an idea,” I said, tired of being left out of the loop. “Why don’t you tell me what the plan is and then I’ll decide if I want to be a part of it or not?”
“You haven’t told him?” Felicity said, throwing an accusing look at my dad.
He shrugged. “I thought he’d be more likely to accept the job if it came from both of us. Or, more specifically, if it came from you.”
She let out a slight sigh and looked at me. “I’m sorry, Alec, I thought your father would have let you in on what’s happening, at least in a general sense. I thought this meeting would simply consist of going over the details.”
I threw my arms up in an exaggerated shrug. “I don’t know anything.”
Sandra came over and served Felicity the salad and pot of tea.
When the waitress had left the table, Felicity leaned closer to me and lowered her voice. “It’s quite simple, really. We want you to steal the Ariadne’s Thread for us.”
Chapter 9
“Ariadne’s Thread?” I looked from Felicity to my father and back to Felicity again.
She nodded. “The one that Princess Ariadne gave to Theseus to help him navigate the labyrinth of the minotaur.”
I knew the ancient Greek legend. King Minos, ruler of Crete, had built a labyrinth on an island to house the minotaur, a hideous half-man, half-bull creature that was the result of a curse from Poseidon.
Every seventh year, fourteen Athenian youths—seven young men and seven young women—were sent into the labyrinth to be devoured by the minotaur. That part of the legend reminded me of the much older story of the yaghul, who had demanded that sacrifices from the citizens of Uruk be sent into a maze to be fed upon.
According to the minotaur legend, a young man named Theseus decided to slay the minotaur and volunteered to be one of the sacrificial victims so that he could get into the labyrinth.
Upon seeing Theseus, Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, fell in love with him. She gave him a ball of thread to help him navigate the maze. Theseus killed the creature and then—using the thread—found his way out of the labyrinth.
If Ariadne’s Thread was real and still existed today, it would be a magical artifact of great power. Such an item would be hidden behind magical wards and protections. I wondered how Felicity and my father had learned of its location but then remembered that Felicity’s skills as a researcher were second to none.
“It’s more than a myth,” Felicity said. “It’s an actual magical artifact that has been hidden away for over seven hundred years.”
I did a quick calculation in my head. “If it’s from ancient Greece, I’d expect it to have been hidden for longer than that.”
“The Thread has been hidden at various times throughout history,” she said. “Most recently by the Knights Templar in the year 1312. They acquired a number of magical artifacts during the crusades and hid them in various places before their order was dismantled.”
“And it’s how they were hidden that’s so ingenious,” my dad said, before taking a bite of his burger.
“They were cloaked by a spell called an Archon Seal,” Felicity said. “It’s a very powerful piece of magic that creates an interdimensional rift around the object. The item—in this case, the Thread—is suspended within a magical barrier that surrounds it. The item itself is actually in another realm within the barrier. So it can’t be found by casting a location spell on this realm, because the artifact isn’t actually here.”
She picked up a saltshaker and held it up. “Imagine that the grains of salt inside this shaker are in a different dimension and the glass shaker itself is an Archon Seal in this dimension. We can see the grains inside, but we can’t touch them because they’re not actually there at all. They’re somewhere else. The Seal—or the shaker in this case—is keeping them on another realm. To get to them, we’d have to destroy the shaker and let them fall out.”
The metaphysics of magic weren’t my specialty, but I could see what she was saying. “So if I nullify the Archon Seal, Ariadne’s Thread will be brought back into this realm, like a magical candy bar dropping from an interdimensional vending machine.”
Felicity nodded. “Exactly.”
“But that will create some problems,” Dad said. “The sudden reappearance of such a powerful object will light up every magical radar on the planet. Its location will become known to every occult group in existence, including the Midnight Cabal.”
I thought about that for a moment. “So why don’t we just create a portal into the realm where the Academy is and take it there as soon as we have it? As soon as it appears on everyone’s radar, it’ll disappear again a couple of seconds later.”
Dad nodded. “Yes, we could do that.”
“Why do you want this thing, anyway?” I asked.
“Ariadne’s Thread is no mere ball of yarn,” he said. “It’s a navigational aid that works between the realms. A person who has the Thread in their possession could travel to any realm and be able to find their way back again.”
“Are you planning on doing a lot of traveling between the realms?” It wasn’t something I’d ever known my father—or Felicity, for that matter—to show much interest in before now. There had to be a reason they wanted this item that would help them navigate between realms.
“It’s something we need for the Academy,” my dad said. “Quite a few of the lessons will involve that kind of travel. The Thread will be a safety measure to make sure we get all of our students back home.”
I arched an eyebrow at that. Until now, I’d assumed that Harbinger Academy would be a place of theoretical learning, not a base for practical experiments that involved sending students to different realms.
“Whether you have the Thread or not,” I said, “practical work involving the other dimensions sounds dangerous.”
My dad’s face darkened. “It’s a risk we have to take. Traveling to the other realms could be of vital importance in the future.”
“Why is that?” I asked off-handedly before putting a couple of fries into my mouth. As usual, there was something my father was keeping from me. It was obvious from his demeanor.
“You don’t need to worry about that,” he said. “I’ll simply say that the Academy will benefit greatly from having Ariadne’s Thread.”
I looked at Felicity, hoping she might add something to make my dad’s behavior less enigmatic, but she suddenly became intensely interested in the salad on the table in front of her.
I sighed, resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to get any more information out of them regarding their need for an interdimensional navigational aid. “Okay, tell me where this thing is hidden.”
Looking up from the salad, Felicity said, “Have you heard of Blackstone Citadel?”
The name meant nothing to me. I shook my head.
“Not many people have,” she said. “It’s an old fortress that sits on an island called Karak, in the Mediterranean Sea. The Knights Templar used the island as a base during the 13th Century, mainly as a harbor for their ships and a command post from which to launch their expeditions into Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Israel. They brought their spoils of war back to the island and locked them away in an underground vault beneath the citadel.”
“Of course, there’s nothing of value in the vault now,” Dad said. “When the Templars realized they were losing favor with the Vatican, they emptied the vault and transported its contents to various secret locations around the world. Holy relics, magical items, and powerful artifacts were all hidden away, locked behind Archon Seals so that they might never be discovered by the order’s enemies.”
He grinned and added, “The Ark of the Covenant isn’t in some government warehouse like in Raiders, it’s hidden away somewhere and shrouded by an Archon Seal.”
“Okay,” I said. “So where is the Thread?”
“We believe it’s still in Blackstone Citadel,” Felicity said.
“But you said the vault is empty.”
She nodded. “It is. Ariadne’s Thread is located on the top floor of the citadel’s northern tower.”
I could have asked her how she knew that, but I already knew the answer; she’d painstakingly researched old documents and made a connection between seemingly innocuous pieces of information in the same way a detective might build up a picture of events from eyewitness testimonies.
Felicity had probably sifted through thousands of records to arrive at her conclusion regarding the whereabouts of Ariadne’s Thread and it had probably taken her just as many hours.
“The Templars didn’t ship the Thread out from Karak along with the other items,” she said. “They kept it at the citadel because the small band of knights that remained there planned to escape persecution from the Vatican by traveling to another realm. They needed the Thread to make sure they could return at a later date.”
“How did that work out for them?”
“It didn’t. The information I can glean from the records seems to suggest that when the Templars tried to open a portal in the north tower, something went wrong. A team of inquisitors from the Vatican later arrived at the island but were never seen again. A second team was sent to Karak, but they also vanished. Eventually, the Vatican decided the Templars had conjured up some kind of demonic curse. The citadel was sealed, from a safe distance, and in an effort to keep the curse contained, a misplacement spell was cast on the island.”
“A misplacement spell?” I asked, unfamiliar with the term.
She nodded. “It’s a spell that ensures no one will travel to Karak. If anyone tries to sail there or get there by any other means, they’ll never find the island.”
“You mean it’s been moved?”
“No, it’s still in the same place it always was but it’s been magically veiled. There are legends throughout the Mediterranean about a cursed island, but no one has ever been there or seen the island.”
“So how do we get there?”
“The island isn’t on any modern maps, but I’ve managed to procure a 13th century map of the area. It isn’t a map of the island itself, but it does show a small landmass in the sea that I believe to be Karak.”
“Since we know precisely where the island is,” my dad said, “we can get to it, veil or no veil.”
I mulled over what I’d just been told. “Something doesn’t make sense. If the Templars opened a portal and went through it, why do you think Ariadne’s Thread is still in the tower? Wouldn’t they have taken it with them so they could find their way home?”
“I found an obscure document,” Felicity said. “A letter from a French knight named Guillame de Sablé. He was a witness to the events in the north tower and the only survivor. It seems that something went badly wrong when he and his companions opened the portal. Something hideous came through the opening and attempted to destroy everyone in the tower. Afraid that they might not survive the fight, and terrified that their enemies might later find Ariadne’s Thread, the Templars sealed the Thread inside an Archon Seal and hid it beneath a flagstone. While they fought the creature, they sent Guillame on a mission to the mainland to inform the Templar leadership of what had happened at the citadel.”
She paused and took a sip of tea.
“‘I’m assuming he made it to the mainland and told someone in a letter or something, and that’s how you know what happened,” I said.
She put the cup down. “You’re almost right. Guillame managed to take a ship from Karak to Italy. Once there, he relayed his tale to the leader of the Templar chapter there. The meeting was recorded by a scribe. The Vatican moved in on the Italian chapter a few days later and the scribe’s records were lost among thousands of other documents that were seized from a number of Templar outposts across Europe.”
