‘The alchemist survived. He joined an insurgent force rebelling against the Mongol-ruled dynasty. He rose through the ranks rapidly and became a commander, fusing with the Red Turbans and allying with the White Lotus. Soon, he became a General. He drew a staggering amount of followers and specialists who helped him reunite China and overthrow the dynasty.’
Sievers gave Denton’s father a slow, measured nod. ‘You believe he was the first Phoenix?’
‘He declared himself the new Emperor of China. The skystone he was studying—’ Alastair turned to the pieces of rock on the table ‘—I think this is it.’
Sievers turned on one heel, his gaze falling on Denton.
‘Agent Denton.’ His tongue lingered on each word. ‘What do you make of this?’
‘Not much, to be honest,’ Denton said.
He kept his hands behind his back. ‘You are not like these people here. What makes you different?’
The question caught him off-guard. ‘It’s hard to pinpoint but I’d say it’s my charisma and appreciation of wine.’
‘And why did you come here?’
‘I was assigned—’
‘That is not my question. Why did you accept this assignment?’ Sievers said. ‘What took your interest?’
‘Right now, this country is the center of the universe.’ Denton ran a tongue across cracked lips. ‘I wanted part of the action.’
Sievers almost smiled. ‘I had quite the mess to clean up in Norway after your visit.’
Denton shrugged. ‘It’s what I know. And I enjoy it.’
‘That is what makes you different.’ He turned to the others. ‘The people at our institutes are here for one reason. They go out of their way to avoid military service. Everyone who works for me is an intellectual criminal.’
Denton watched his father’s face curl with frustration.
Sievers strode toward Denton. The gray edge around Sievers’s eyes had disappeared. They seemed a lighter brown. Perhaps he’d stopped drinking so heavily.
‘You’re different,’ Sievers said. ‘Like I was, once.’
‘Well,’ Denton said, ‘at least let me buy you a drink first.’
‘What do you think of this meteorite?’ Sievers said.
‘I think it’s a waste of time,’ Denton said.
Sievers picked up the largest chunk of the meteorite, inside its container, and tossed it to Denton. He caught it in both hands.
‘Then you decide,’ Sievers said. ‘Do you disrupt the schedule and continue to pry at its secrets? Or do you look for our Phoenix viruses in the next rock, which arrives tomorrow?’
Denton watched a vein quiver under his father’s neck. He smiled, hurled the container across the hall. It smashed into a wall near an archway. The meteorite cracked into smaller chunks, skittering across the stone floor.
Alastair exploded with anger. ‘What about the Phoenix viruses?’
Sievers glared and Denton watched his anger mellow.
‘I don’t believe they are in this rock,’ Sievers said. ‘We have an expedition returning from Iceland. They are bringing meteorite samples from several recent impacts. If one of those rocks carries any of the viruses in this book—’ he gestured to the silk text ‘—you will find it.’
Alastair opened his mouth to speak but decided on nodding instead.
Sievers turned to Denton. ‘Life is just a dream,’ he said. ‘Only the eternal life is the true life.’
With that, he left.
Denton met his father’s glowering stare. ‘Should have left the cellar door open,’ he said.
Chapter 3
Denton settled the mostly consumed wine bottle on the table and stacked the trays of prisoner food to his chest. There were only six, fortunately. He started down the observation tower’s stairwell, metal lantern hanging from two fingers. The stairwell took him to the dungeon. Each cell contained two prisoners, limbs whittled and eyes faded.
He dropped the trays on the floor and pushed them under the cell doors with his boot. The trays contained a bowl of soup, sometimes brown, sometimes green. His father had made an effort to add bread rations, wanting the prisoners in better shape if a Phoenix virus did emerge. Denton hadn’t been hopeful but he kept the bread on the trays because he couldn’t be bothered removing it.
He placed the last trays before the third cell and noticed one of the prisoners standing. That’s new, he thought. The man was no older than himself. He had greasy, knotted hair and dirt-filled fingernails.
‘You are different from the others,’ the man said.
His words were barely louder than his breath.
Denton pushed a tray in. ‘So I’ve heard.’
‘Why is an American helping the Nazis?’ the man said.
‘Why not?’ Denton kicked the other tray in. ‘The food’s great.’
‘You don’t help anyone,’ the man said, louder this time. ‘Unless it helps you.’
Denton considered knocking the man down but it was too much effort to open the cell door. He hadn’t finished that bottle of wine yet. ‘Is this a new discovery you’ve been working on?’ he said.
‘You were betrayed.’ The man frowned. Confusion seemed to pass over him like a shadow. ‘You weren’t meant to come back.’
Denton was on the edge of walking away, but he found the feeble man curious. ‘By who?’ he said, scooping up the square-shaped lantern from the ground.
‘I don’t know.’ The man’s gaze dropped to the trays of soup.
The conditions in this place must have driven the man to madness.
‘It might be the soup,’ Denton said.
‘But you are angry,’ the man said. ‘Like smoke in the air. You are restless. There’s an itch—’
‘That I can’t scratch. It’s on my left just here—’ Denton pointed to his lower back ‘—do you think you can get to it?’ he said.
‘It’s worse than you think,’ the man said.
‘Are you some kind of witch? You know, they used to burn witches in this castle. We could rekindle that for you.’
‘I’m just a tailor,’ he said. ‘Or I was. I don’t know what I am now.’
‘Nothing,’ Denton said. ‘Nothing anymore.’
The man seemed confused. ‘You talk of yourself?’
‘Yes,’ Denton said. ‘But I’m also quite drunk.’
His hands closed around the bars of the cell. The lantern clanged against the iron. He needed some wine. Well, more wine. But he lingered at the cell for a moment. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Yiri Novotný,’ he said.
‘Eat your soup, Yiri.’
Denton left the deranged Yiri to eat his nutritionless soup and returned to the kitchen. Bottle in hand, he walked through the Hall of the Knights, past the long table and toward the senior officers’ quarters. The meteorite fragments had been cleaned up — no doubt his father, a hoarder if there ever was one, had stowed them somewhere safe. The silk text was still on the long table, untouched since Sievers’s visit that afternoon. The light of Denton’s lantern scattered across its hard plastic cover.
He opened it, almost ripping the front page from its binding, and flicked through. The primitive drawings of each comet looked more like branches sprouting from seeds in the ground. He knew as they breached Earth’s atmosphere they became meteors. Beneath each circle — or meteor head — an annotation: a thin strip of Chinese characters. On the opposing page, Denton could see the matching words in German.
Comets are vile stars.
They wipe out the old and establish the new.
Maybe it was the viruses, sprinkled with comet dust or dispersed from a nearby meteor impact. Maybe the viruses helped the evolution of new species.
Fish grow sick, crops fail, Emperors and common people die, and men go to war. The people hate life and don’t even want to speak of it.