Chapter Thirty-Eight
ARTHUR HAD CALLED it that cupcake cathedral. Jack would have gone with ice-cream swirly church, but whatever.
Saint Basil’s stood at the south end of Red Square, lit on every side by spotlights, without so much as a stray dog to darken its cobblestone porches. A few hundred yards away, however, the scene at the Kremlin gate had descended into controlled chaos. Police vans were parked at all angles. A drab rainbow of uniformed men and women milled about in a hodgepodge of activity that all boiled down to one goal—catching Jack and Gwen.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked Gwen as Jack pushed the scooter into the bushes beside the church. “Don’t you read mysteries? Rule number one for murderers and thieves: ‘Never return to the scene of the crime.’ ”
Jack lowered the kickstand. “That’s not a real rule.”
“It is if you’re a criminal.”
“Yeah, well, what about rule number one for agents of the Elder Ministries?”
Gwen pursed her lips. “ ‘Defend the Realm against all enemies’ doesn’t apply.” She gestured all around them. “We’re in Russia, Jack, not England. This is not our realm.”
“Now you’re just nitpicking.”
As Jack mulled over the risk of leaving the jewel case strapped to the bike, the image of a worn bronze wolf’s head flickered in his brain. He grabbed the two girls and dragged them into the bushes beside him.
Gwen jerked her arm away, plucking a dead leaf from her scarf. “What is it?”
He pointed. Not two hundred yards away, talking to a Russian cop and impatiently tapping his wolf’s-head cane on the cobblestones, stood Ash. A huge companion stood beside him, wearing a heavy tweed coat with a fur-lined hood.
“Ash,” said Gwen, easing herself even deeper into the bushes. “And Shaw. Wherever did he find that ridiculous coat?” She let out a frustrated breath. “I’m not surrendering to those two, Jack. Shaw will hand us over to the Russians without a thought—probably ask for a medal. I told you we needed to get out of Moscow.”
“We check the cathedral first. Tanner wanted inside. There has to be a reason.”
“What reason?” Sadie settled in between them, finding the only stump suitable for sitting amid the wet leaves and mud. “He’s already got the Russian ruby.”
“Why does any tracker go poking around historic buildings?” Gwen drew out the professor’s book. “He’s searching for something. Perhaps Tanner has another jewel to find.” She opened the book to the last chapter and showed Jack. “Look. There’s a third stone.” Beneath a picture of a wedge-shaped gem—the same translucent red as the others—the title read THE TIMUR RUBY.
The Timur Ruby. The name hit Jack like a punch to the chest. Tanner had told him the Timur Ruby had sunk to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. But if the professor could walk, then the whole tale about what had happened in that island cave might be a lie. Tanner had never tried to save Jack’s grandfather. What if the exact opposite was true?
Jack fell back onto his rear among the dead leaves, shaking his head, not caring about the cold seeping through his jeans. “I don’t think Tanner’s looking for that ruby.”
“Why not?”
“He’s already got it.”
Jack told the girls Tanner’s story, allowing Gwen to reach the same conclusion about how Joe Fowler the Eleventh had really died. The two confirmed it with a silent glance to spare Sadie the pain of hearing that someone had murdered her grandfather.
The nine-year-old seemed to sense it anyway.
Gwen squeezed her arm. “I’m sorry.”
Sadie sniffled and nodded. “Me too.”
After a long moment, Gwen closed the book and tucked it away. “According to Lazarev, that ruby gave Tamerlane the ability to command men.”
The ability to command men. Hadn’t Tanner used that exact phrase? “Command,” said Jack, repeating the word out loud.
“Knowledge,” added Sadie, as if she knew what he was going to say next.
“Loyalty.” Gwen finished the thought. “Three rubies. Each grants a different aspect of the power to rule. That’s what Tanner’s after. He wants to be king.”
“Emperor’s more like it.” Jack glanced toward the Kremlin, checking on Ash and Shaw. They had moved farther up the square with their police escort. “There’s more. I don’t think the professor was always like this—a murderer, I mean. I think the rubies are changing him.”
Gwen offered him a hand and pulled him off his rear, up to a crouch. “Clarify.”
“I saw the effect the Black Prince’s Ruby had on the Duke of Alencon at Agincourt. It made him . . . evil. And I saw something similar when I touched the Russian ruby. I sparked, and a guy named Nicholas went nuts right before my eyes. He killed a bunch of soldiers with cannons.”
“The Decembrist Revolt,” said Gwen, looking down at the leaves between them. “It was in the book. Tsar Alexander had died, and the army split into factions, each supporting one of his brothers. The majority supported Nicholas, but a few thousand rebels marched to the palace to demand the throne go to his other brother, Constantine.” She raised her eyes to meet Jack’s. “Nicholas tried for hours to disperse the rebels peacefully. And then, in a sudden fit of rage, he ordered his cannons to fire into the crowd.”
“I saw it happen.” Jack grimaced at the memory. “It was as if the moment Nicholas decided to claim the crown he became a different person. In a matter of seconds, he went from berating his cavalry over the death of one rebel to gleefully tearing hundreds to shreds. It was definitely the ruby. I felt it.”
Gwen pieced it all together. “Atrocities throughout history are linked to each of these jewels, even though they were separated by whole kingdoms. What will Tanner do once he’s got all three?” She glanced at the cathedral. “We really need to get in there.”
“Oh. So now you’re on board with sticking around. What happened to ‘Rule number one doesn’t apply’?” Jack didn’t wait for a reply. He stood up, only to have her yank him back down again. He let out an exasperated sigh. “But you just said—”
“The police are everywhere, Jack.” Gwen nodded at the steps, glowing white in the spotlights, easily seen from the Kremlin gates. “Do you really think the professor used the front door?”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
JACK KEPT ONE EYE on the Kremlin as the three snuck along the periphery of the cathedral, checking the doors. No sign of Ash or Shaw. He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“That one,” said Gwen, nodding toward an entrance sheltered from the spotlights by a grove of pines. “He would have entered there.” They hurried into the shadows beneath the portico, and Jack tugged at an iron door. It squeaked free of its frame. There was a strip of tape over the latch to keep it from catching.
“See?” said Gwen. “The Phantom was here.”
“Wait.” Jack held her back with a light touch on her arm. “Lazarev.”
“Yes. The guy who wrote the book about the rubies.”
“Yeah. I know. But . . .” Why had the archeologist’s name popped into Jack’s head right at that moment? He let out a breath, trying to bring the noise of the distant police chatter under control. His head was still buzzing from the explosion at the hyperloop.
Lazarev. The name had come to him from somewhere—somewhere close.
Jack slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and took hold of the zed. The buzzing dissipated. He saw the voices from the police radios, like smoky trails of purple script that he couldn’t read. He saw the flashing lights, red, blue, and white, reflecting on the wet stones all across the square. He gathered all that useless data, acknowledged it, and let it fade into the gray mist of his subconscious, leaving only the small courtyard behind the church.
Trees: pine boughs waving in the breeze. No Russian names there.
A black marble sign bolted to the side of the cathedral: Cyrillic, with no translation.
A trash bin: crumpled paper cups, cigarette butts, and a
gleaming rectangular shape poking out—an ID card, with most of the name visible.
Lazarev.
Jack rushed out across the lighted cobblestones, letting go of the zed. All the noise came rushing in again. He stumbled, almost fell, and had to stop at the trash can to steady himself.
“Jack,” hissed Gwen. “Get back here. Someone will see you.”
“Like I don’t know that?”
He felt something cool on his upper lip and instinctively raised a hand to check. It was wet—a nosebleed. Jack turned and wiped it away with his handkerchief. He couldn’t let Gwen see.
“That took way too long,” complained Gwen, taking the card the moment he got back to the portico. But she didn’t seem to suspect anything. She squinted at the name. “Dimitri . . . Lazarev. State Historical Museum of Russia ID. With a data chip and everything.” Her eyes widened a touch. “This is an access card, Jack. I remember where I know Lazarev’s name from.”
Jack beat her to it. “The leftover enquiry from yesterday’s filings. Lazarev was the guy who lost his wallet in London.”
“You mean the guy who got his wallet stolen. Raven or her brother must have picked his pocket and then passed it on to Tanner.”
“So Arthur was telling the truth. The professor was definitely here.” Jack pulled open the iron door and waved the girls through.
If the cathedral looked like a collection of cupcakes and ice-cream swirls on the outside, then on the inside it looked like a gingerbread house. Jack felt like Hansel, leading two Gretels into the witch’s candy cottage. Every spire represented a single chapel, and each chapel was tight and cluttered, and painted with a bright, hypnotic mix of peppermint stripes, gumdrop flowers, and ribbon-candy swirls.
“I don’t see how loyalty, knowledge, and command could be curses,” mused Sadie as the three of them explored the first chamber. “Aren’t those good things?”
“Not if they’re corrupted.” Gwen tugged on a narrow door, finding only a shallow closet behind. “And that’s exactly what these stones seem to do. Loyalty can be misplaced. Knowledge can still lead you down the wrong path. And you can bet that every sovereign who’s ever been crowned has abused the privilege of command at some point. It’s human nature.”
The first chapel was a disappointment. Jack had been hoping for marble, maybe some bronze or copper, but everything was covered in painted plaster or wood. And all the precious metals were tucked behind glass. Even the floors were a disappointment.
“We’ll never find Tanner’s trail,” he said as he ducked through a candy-cane-striped archway behind Gwen. “This place is a maze. And there’s nothing here that’s good for sparking.”
“What about these?” She knelt beside a line of brick trim that ran along the base of the wall. The bricks were unpainted and formed a continuous line that ran from room to room.
Jack could spark off brick. Maybe. He had done it before, when his skills weren’t on the blink. But it certainly hadn’t been pleasant. He crouched down beside her, already reaching into his pocket for the zed. “They’ll have to do.”
A voice deep in Jack’s subconscious warned him about using the zed again. It was draining him. He felt it a bit more each time he let go of it. Each time the static and the buzzing in his head grew more insistent. But it also worked. The zed was more than a placebo. That much was clear now. He drew it out, turning so that Gwen would not see, and placed his other hand on the brick.
The wood floor disintegrated in wisps of black dust, dropping Jack into a jagged, incongruous blend of shifting shadows and glimmering specks of color. He landed in the same crouched position, but his surroundings bore little resemblance to the hallway he had left behind. Jack hated brick. It was a hodgepodge, to use Gwen’s word—a mix of materials that weren’t great for sparking to begin with. The specks were new, though. Some kind of metal. Jack wondered if the sixteenth-century Russian masons that built the place had used iron filings in the mix.
He pushed against the vision, pressing it forward through time, and saw a hundred shadows walk past in just a few seconds. One carried a child, surrounded by others, murmuring sweetly. Another was dragged, kicking and screaming in distorted, broken tones. Beautiful things had happened there, ugly things too.
Finally, the hall went quiet again, and Jack saw a black silhouette stroll by, tall and lanky, walking with the same confident gait Young Tanner had used in the winter square. The figure vanished at the next doorway, and Jack was left with a terrifying choice. If he wanted to follow, to have any hope of finding out what the professor was up to, he would have to interact with the spark. He would have to leave the safety of being a mere observer and push his way into that shifting, shadowy world.
Chapter Forty
JACK MADE HIS DECISION and stood, taking his hand from the brick. Instantly, the strange world of the spark threatened to knock him down again. He struggled to maintain his balance amid the chaos. All around him, the ill-fitting pieces took on greater dimension. The glimmering dust from the iron filings hung in the air like the high-definition remnant of an obliterated reality.
He staggered forward, glancing down at his hands, and found that he too had become a shifting silhouette. The previous morning’s fear of being trapped in the yellow gems seemed trivial. Surely, being trapped forever in this disjointed realm as a half-formed wraith would be the very image of hell.
A translucent wall of shade barred his path through the archway where Tanner had gone—a barrier where all definition was lost. Perhaps it was the spark’s translation of the grout between the bricks. Jack pushed a hand into the darkness and watched his arm disappear. Not much comfort there. Then again, he was already pretty messed up, so he closed his eyes and soldiered on. There was no sign of Tanner on the other side.
Jack had delayed too long.
The next chapel was shaped like a hexagon, with corridors leading off in separate directions from three of the six walls. Tanner could have taken any one of them. Without considering the potential consequence, Jack looked up into the turning, grinding vision of the spire above. Vertigo took him—nauseating vertigo. He stretched out a hand to grab the wall and touched something living instead.
Beneath the arch of the first corridor, stood a fellow shade. Jack could make out the indistinct shapes of a bowler hat and an ankle-length coat. Why did he keep appearing?
“Dad?”
Jack’s voice came out as garbled as the rest of him, somewhere between speaking under water and shouting into a fan.
Instead of answering, the wraith took hold of his arm and yanked, stepping back and turning at the same time. The figure vaporized into the wall, sending the high-definition dust spiraling away in all directions.
Jack stumbled into the corridor. “Wait, Dad, I—” He cut himself off. At the other end of the hall, he saw Tanner. The young, wraithy version of the professor was gazing intently at a blank wall.
After a time, Ghost Tanner drew what might have been a pad from his coat and scratched at it with something that might have been a pen. Then he turned and entered another corridor. Jack raced down the hall, turned the corner to follow, and felt the ground drop beneath his feet.
“Aaaaah!”
“Hush, Jack. The police are outside, remember?” Gwen stood over him, with the tulips and gumdrops of the candy-painted ceiling standing out in sharp clarity behind her.
Sadie was there too. “Are you okay?”
He was back. With the fright of falling, Jack had thought of escape and fallen right out of the vision. “I’m fine,” he said, trying to stand, but he fell back to his knee.
“You’re not fine,” said Gwen, helping him up. Then her eyes widened with concern. “Your nose, Jack.”
He turned away and covered the bleeding with his handkerchief. “It’s nothing. We have to keep moving. I’ve got Tanner’s trail.” He slipped the handkerchief and the zed into his pocket, trying to push back the static resurging in his brain, and set off into the next chamber.
; Jack took a left turn at the archway where he’d seen his dad and followed the short passage to Tanner’s blank wall. Except the wall wasn’t blank. What had been a jagged, gray emptiness in the spark was actually a huge tapestry, protected by glass and hanging above a wooden table filled with votive candles. The artist had woven the image of a battle, immortalizing an army in spiked turbans attacking a city protected by little more than a wooden wall. A line of angels hovered above the frightened villagers, each holding out a hand to stop the invaders.
“I followed Tanner to this spot,” said Jack, striking a long match and lighting the candles. “He fixated on the right side of the picture for a few seconds and wrote something down.”
“There’s a plaque beneath the frame.” Gwen held her scarf to keep it out of the flames as she leaned in to read. “ ‘The angels of heaven turn back Tamerlane’s army at the siege of Volga. Circa 1396.’ ” She straightened, glancing over at Jack. “Makes sense. Saint Basil’s was built to commemorate Russia’s freedom from khans like Tamerlane. Although it was named for a poor shoemaker that stood up to the tsar.”
“A shoemaker. As in . . . a cobbler?”
Gwen raised an eyebrow. “I know, right?”
“Look. Rubies.” Sadie had zeroed in on a small unit of riders near the back of Tamerlane’s forces, on the right side of the tapestry.
The area was patchy, but Jack could see what remained of four multicolored banners flying in the wind. He shook his head. “Those are flags, Sadie, not jewels.”
“No. She’s right.” Gwen fished a magnifying glass from her pocket and held it close to the tapestry. “Check out the main banner, above the lead horseman.”
The foremost of the riders held his flag higher than the others. With the help of Gwen’s magnifying glass, Jack could make out three red circles on a field of black, forming a triangle. He frowned. “Three circles. Three stolen rubies. That can’t be a coincidence.” And there was something else. He could swear there was a tiny discoloration at the center of the triangle. But the tapestry was old. There were discolorations everywhere.
The Fourth Ruby Page 14
