A caldera filled with lava, he thought. One of the orange spots on the map?
As he let his mind absorb the spectacle of people burning, their souls clinging to their tortured, disintegrating bodies, their hands linked and their melting tongues trying hard to utter words, he experienced some of the fury of the volcano. But this was not just a window to a disaster. It showed more: bodies falling from ethereal shapes—souls? Some were only there for a moment before blinking out. Others rose away in pairs.
He looked desperately through the image for the Galderkhaani Pao and Rensat had been discussing: the witch, the demonized figure, the one who would not seem to belong. His eyes were drawn to a dim figure above the flames, above the city, hovering in the sky like a banshee of Irish lore. He tried to bring her into focus but lost the image when his fingers returned to their previous position.
Pao and Rensat returned, standing still and silent like clothes stored for the winter. Is this how they had spent part of their endless time as earthbound spirits? In some kind of contemplative stasis? Did time even have any meaning for them? Without periods of sleep to measure the hours, did the destruction of Galderkhaan seem no more than a few decades distant?
Mikel began to search through the images again, posing himself a scientific question: here on this side of Antarctica there were no volcanoes. The bedrock had long since been mapped. Yet if he was here watching history, there had been a volcano, at the very least the remnants of a caldera somewhere. Unless—
Absolute devastation, he answered himself. The mountain must have been leveled, then swallowed by the sea, then ice.
Rensat and Pao began to move again. They were still very silent. Suddenly, Mikel felt a very low, slow vibration pass through the room. The walls themselves were vibrating. The tiles were becoming almost blindingly luminous. The sound was deeper, much more internally loud than the erupting volcano had been. Amazingly, as Mikel’s body wavered under its force, he watched Pao and Rensat tremble in exactly the same manner and motion. Mikel felt terror return, stronger than before.
“What was that?” he said to himself.
Rensat asked the same thing, a moment behind him.
“I don’t know,” Pao admitted.
Behind Mikel, the tunnel began to glow with a dull orange. He heard a distant cry from the direction in which he’d encountered Jina.
Something was coming. Something—tracking him or the other two? Was that what Rensat and Pao had felt, what she went in the other room to find?
Rensat looked in Mikel’s direction. “There is another… no, several others,” she said.
Pao studied his companion. “Rensat, is it possible that it is Enzo?”
“How?” Rensat asked. “She was lost, her mission unfinished. And the ascended cannot communicate with anyone, not in her plane, not in ours.”
“What if she has found another voice?” Pao asked with rising enthusiasm. “What if she has found a body?”
“But how? I don’t understand.”
“You remember Sogera, his experiments with braziers,” Pao said. “Enzo was there, I remember her clearly. She saw how the flaming sunbird continued to hiss as her flesh was consumed.”
“But not her soul,” the woman said. “Blessed Enzo, if it is so!”
Rensat began to share Pao’s renewed—fervor was the word that came to Mikel’s mind. It was as if they were born again, their eyes and expressions almost manic.
The rumbling remained constant, the glow grew brighter, and now the heat began to rise. Mikel began to feel like he imagined the poor figures in the vision had felt… only in slow motion. Helpless as the fire neared, with nowhere to turn, except to each other. He wondered if the tiles had somehow anticipated his future, showed him something he needed to know, to experience by proxy—death throes,by fire—in order to escape his own possible fate.
Dear god, he thought. To die without sharing what I’ve discovered—
That mustn’t be, it would not be. If it were true that the stones had some kind of access to his mind, they might also save him. He looked at the ghostly couple and placed his hands in the widely splayed position he had in the previous chamber.
Do something! he yelled in his mind.
But he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, except escape, and, obviously, the tiles could not teleport him free.
Looking into the room Mikel realized, suddenly, that the material Pao and Rensat had been studying was an instruction manual for the tiles. His eyes scanned them desperately for guidance. He saw one figure walking—and a wall opening.
Right, he thought. The tiles can be removed. He looked them over from bottom to top, side to side. Which one is the key?
Now a tile just to the right of his face began to glow brighter. Without hesitation he placed both hands on it, just as the figure in the drawing did. One hand above, one below, fingers spread. Nothing happened. He moved his fingers slightly. Then again. Then again.
Come on, Mikel!
All the while the heat grew against his back with a predatory ferocity: this wasn’t a fireball spit up by the earth. Something was coming toward him and bringing with it a shrieking victim. Perhaps, as Rensat had said, it was Enzo—with her newfound and unwilling voice, Jina Park.
Another minute shift of his fingers and, almost at once, the tiles opened like the door to the cave of the forty thieves. He surged through like a bull, the tiles snapping shut behind him, locking him in and blocking the fury on the other side. The heat was gone.
Mikel came to a skidding halt, standing upright in a moldering room with dry powdered bones beneath his feet and the living tiles bright before him. The smell of something akin to gunpowder hung in the air like incense, tart and inexplicable.
And there was something else: he was not alone. Before him stood the two spirits of the dead Galderkhaani.
Spirits who were seeing him.
CHAPTER 14
It was dark in Caitlin’s apartment but even darker inside her head. She refused to allow her fears to drag her into despair, which meant doing what she always did: fighting back. As much as she wanted to be alone, watching over her son, she knew she shouldn’t be. Which was why she let Ben stay.
Caitlin kept Jacob home from school, something she didn’t like to do, but after his experience the day before, she thought it prudent. The vice principal concurred. Ben called in sick.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor while Jacob read in his room, they had spent the morning and early afternoon reviewing everything they knew of Galderkhaan, trying to figure out the meaning of what Jacob had said: “en dovi.”
“Those letter combinations don’t appear in any of the language we’ve encountered so far,” Ben said conclusively. “Which leaves us two possibilities. First: they aren’t Galderkhaani. Jacob might have been speaking English. Or maybe phonetic French. That novel he’s reading, Jules Verne, is in both languages.”
“What’s the second possibility?” Caitlin asked.
“The second possibility,” Ben said, “is that they are proper nouns. The names of places or people.”
Caitlin considered that. “I wish I’d paid more attention to names when I was back there,” she said. “Then I could be of some freaking use here.”