The Crown of Fire

by Tony Abbott

The good-bye had been sullen, brief, matter-of-fact.

  “See you, Mom,” Darrell said. “That’s all. See you in Crete.”

  The best Wade could come up with was a long silent hug.

  “Be there, all of you,” Sara said.

  There was nothing stopping the rest of them now. Find Corona Borealis. Get to Crete. End the thing. But the agonizing miles and weary hours of travel ate at Wade like a cancer. Flying from Rome to Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego at the bottom curl of Argentina, took them more time than they had, with the final flight dragging on for no less than twenty-three hours.

  Wade’s insides were raw. He was beyond angry. In desperation he took up Becca’s notebook and read every page alongside the diary it translated, and—whether it was exhaustion or frustration or, more likely, the comfort of seeing Becca’s handwriting—he found something in the old diary that neither she nor anyone else had noticed before.

  On every single page of Nicolaus’s 333-page book were tiny, almost hidden characters. There was at least one to a page but often several. They had obviously been inked in afterward in a shaky hand—the writing reminded Wade of the shakiness of the Protocol—and were disguised as random marks or sometimes ornaments or even doodles.

  The trick was that if you didn’t know to look for them, you simply wouldn’t notice.

  How Wade caught them wasn’t a mystery. He was examining the diary and Becca’s translation side by side when he remembered the movement of her hand as she wrote and a tear formed in his eye. Before he could wipe it away, it fell onto the diary page. Carefully patting it dry with his fingers, Wade breathed in sharply.

  He saw a minute mark and recognized it.

  It was one of the “letters” of the Utopian alphabet that they had discovered in London when they were searching for Crux. If he recalled correctly, meant L.

  “Guys, there’s a message here,” he said. “A new one that Becca didn’t see and I barely did. I think it’s something we’ve never read before.”

  “I’ll translate,” said Lily.

  Wade went back to the beginning of the diary. Searching every page, he wrote every symbol in Becca’s notebook, while Lily and Darrell assembled the translation. They discovered that, unlike the other times the code had been used, this message was composed in English except for three words, and it was written to them.

  It began . . .

  tothenovizhnyibelievedicouldcontroltime. . .

  To the Novizhny

  I believed I could control time.

  Time controls me.

  All I have done is discover the terrifying scientiam temporis and learned the evil that we do when we tamper with it.

  To you four, I will set down every experience in as plain words as I dare. . . .

  Hans and I traveled in the deep future and deposited the cargo forced upon us by the tyrant Albrecht. You know what the cargo is. You know where it is. You know when.

  “We do? No, we don’t,” said Lily, scribbling the translation. “Never mind.”

  Hans, weeping at the horror around us, says, “Nicolaus, let’s go home now.”

  I feel his heart melting in his breast.

  But I have other plans.

  “I have decided to hide the crown myself, in a far future time and a faraway place. Thus, the first relic hidden will be the last one found. Before I die, but only just before, I will write instructions and lay them before the throne of Cepheus.

  “Somehow Carlo knew that,” said Darrell. “Keep going.”

  The astrolabe shudders as we sweep over vast expanses of white—both ice and snow.

  We land the golden sphere. The ice shrieks as I retract Corona Borealis from the armature of the astrolabe.

  But now a storm begins to form.

  “Teacher, I will take it!” Hans insists. “Keep the machine safe for my return.”

  “Here, then. Take this.” I scrawl the location for him.

  There followed a string of numbers and letters.

  Hans launches out into the wasteland. The blinding snowstorm descends. I see him bury the relic at the exact spot, to remain encased in the ice sheet for many ages.

  But even as I try to hold the machine steady, it quakes and wails, reacting to the extraction of one of its parts, proving Corona is more powerful than the other eleven relics combined.

  “Hurry, Hans! It will not hold!”

  He runs, slips, falls, rushes to his seat just as the astrolabe propels itself away and back in time. One year, two years, we are swept back into time, but Hans cannot maintain his hold on the levers. The machine upends.

  I watch helplessly as Hans, my dear young friend, is thrown from the machine into the whirling oblivion of time.

  They sat dumbfounded in their seats. “Dad?” said Wade.

  “I heard,” he answered from his seat as he pored over the maps and charts they’d brought from Rome. “So now we have the diary’s confirmation. While the other eleven relics were hidden in the sixteenth century, Corona Borealis was hidden in the future and in Antarctica. And the location—these are coordinates—puts the relic very close to the current edge of the ice shelf, east of Esperanza Base. If it’s still there. This map I have is over a year old.”

  When the jet landed in Tierra del Fuego, Darrell was glad to be on solid ground again. He hated the endless flights, ping-ponging around the globe. Then some strange news.

  “There isn’t any airstrip in Esperanza,” Roald said. “The weather’s too bad for a ski plane to get anywhere near the base, and it’s too far for a helicopter to fly, so, believe it or not, we have to charter a yacht. It’s expensive and slow, but that’s how people get there.”

  So that’s what they did.

  The yacht covered the thousand-mile expanse of water in a little under four days. When they reached port, they were choppered immediately to Esperanza Base.

  As they descended, Darrell searched out the window. The icy wasteland that spread away in every direction was a vast and daunting expanse. The coordinates referred to a location that had once been a thick shelf of ice but, according to what they’d discovered in Tierra del Fuego, had been thinning in the last three years to the point of nearly breaking apart. Then, arriving at the base, they were hit with another piece of bad news.

  When Roald presented an official letter from British intelligence that Simon Tingle had arranged and briefed the base commander on the basic outline of their mission, the man grunted softly and shook his head.

  “The area you’re searching is several miles east of the research station and is as thin as a wafer in parts and collapsing. Even in winter, the surrounding water warms to such an extent that large chunks of the shelf simply break off from the mainland. Often they float free for a while. Sometimes, they simply dissolve over a period of days or weeks. These coordinates, well, they’re a problem. And not the only problem. Severe weather will be on us within the hour, and nothing’s going out there.”

  Severe weather did come, and quickly, culminating in a series of ferocious wind storms that prevented any exploration of the ice for another two days.

  “We have to get out there!” Darrell said. “Each day is one day closer to Galina’s deadline. We have to find the relic and destroy the astrolabe! We can’t wait this long!”

  “You’ll have to,” the commander said. “I’m not facing criminal action. People die out there, you know.”

  “They die everywhere,” Wade said.

  “Wade,” his father said. “Thanks, commander. We’ll sit tight.”

  Forced to wait for the weather to clear, Wade went over and over the situation in his mind. He needed to put it in order, to understand the logic of it. He knew there wasn’t any real logic to time travel, but he had to sort it out as well as he could.

  “Dad, guys, I’m trying to get this straight. I think it’s like this, but I may be wrong, so don’t bother to correct me.”

  “Yeah, that’s likely,” said Lily. “Go.”

  “We’ve already
said that Nicolaus and Hans traveled into a future where the ice is thick. But if it was thick when they left the relic here, how can it be thin now? It’s supposed to be the same time.”

  “We can’t change time,” Lily said. “Can we?”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” said Wade. “Maybe we can.”

  Roald shook his head. “Wade, are you trying to say that the future is actually not the future?”

  “I know it doesn’t sound right, Dad, but yeah,” said Wade. “Which is huge. If Nicolaus’s future—when he dropped off the relic—isn’t the same, now that we’ve reached that same future, it means the future can change from what had happened to something else.”

  “It’s a theory,” Roald said. “Multiple universes, maybe. Parallel timelines. The idea that every possibility actually exists and that the life we’re living is only one of them. There’s also the famous butterfly effect. It’s chaos theory, pretty heady stuff, but basically it says that a change in something as tiny as the flap of a butterfly’s wings can eventually affect the path and strength of something as huge as a hurricane. In other words, if you could keep the butterfly from flying at a certain time and place, you might prevent a hurricane.”

  “Or a flood?” said Wade.

  His father nodded. “Or a flood. But it’s a theory. Unproved. Maybe unprovable.”

  “Until now,” Wade said. “I think the future of Copernicus was changed because he didn’t predict climate change. I think the future and the past can be changed. This is what traveling in time does.”

  The hut door swung open suddenly, and the temperature lowered instantly. The base commander poked his head in. “You’re in luck. Sort of. We can get you on the ice, but not with a tractor. You either rappel down from the chopper or you take a dog sled.”

  “Rappel, no,” said Darrell. “Never again.”

  “Dogs!” said Lily, jumping up from the table.

  “Have you ever driven a dog sled?” the commander asked.

  “I went sledding once, and my neighbor had dogs,” Lily said. “How hard can it be?”

  Soon they were suited up with picks and snow axes and portable excavation gear. Wade’s father was issued a walkie-talkie and a GPS device, and Lily insisted on a camera—“To take pictures for Becca, when she gets better.” After that, they finished packing without saying much. Minutes later, they were powering over the snow in five sleds, each with a team of eight dogs barking and yapping.

  They journeyed east away from the base for the better part of an hour, the sky darkening by the minute. Finally, using a digital compass aligned with a satellite, they arrived at a crevasse-pocked area of the ice sheet about a half mile from the site when the storm winds lowered and the snow whipped up in hard, heavy waves.

  “We dismount here,” said Roald.

  In a matter of minutes twisters of biting flakes spun around them. Their battery-powered torches barely pierced the white wall as they crawled along the ice shelf linked together, the four of them. A single crewman from the base volunteered to stay with the dogs. He periodically blared out a location signal on an electronic horn, which set the dog teams yapping for minutes.

  At first, the ice shelf seemed firm enough, but Wade heard a constant grinding from deep beneath the surface. A slow hour later, exhausted by the unceasing wind and while the grinding became louder and steadier, his father stopped.

  Shielding the GPS device in front of his face, he said, “We’re here. The coordinates.”

  To Wade the place appeared no different from any other, except that it was equidistant from a pair of deep crevices some yards away on either side. Beyond them sat the flat blackness of seawater. They were perhaps a quarter mile from the ocean.

  “All right then.” Wade unfolded an ice pick from his pack and tapped it into the ice. It slid down more easily than he thought it would. “The ice isn’t hard here.” He pried up a chunk of it, tossed it aside. His father joined in while Darrell stood to the side, holding two torches on the spot from different angles, and Lily filmed. The rumbling of the ice beneath their feet now was joined by a high-pitched creaking.

  After ten minutes or so, Wade’s pick struck something hard.

  Not ice.

  The hit rang like iron against iron. He looked up. “Dad?”

  Together, the two of them got down on their hands and knees and picked through the ice shards until they saw a dark rectangular shape. Chipping carefully around it, they uncovered an iron chest over a foot square, with iron bands riveted across it.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Lily, taking videos and still shots from every possible angle.

  “It’s bigger than the others,” Darrell said. “Did we actually just find the twelfth relic in the middle of absolute nowhere? Corona’s supposed to be bigger, isn’t it, Dad?”

  “According to its slot on the astrolabe’s wheel it is,” Wade’s father said.

  Wade drew the chest out into the light of Darrell’s electric torch.

  Lily leaned in, the camera running, while Wade watched his father carefully unclasp the lock and lift the lid of the chest. The air lit up around them with its own blinding fury. Inside the chest sat an intricately woven ring of gold nearly as large as the chest itself. It was tinged with red and a glimmer of blue, its braided gold interwoven with silver wires and strung with sapphires and rubies cut into tongues of blue and red flame.

  “Corona Borealis,” said Wade. He turned to the camera. “Becca, we’ve found the twelfth relic of the Legacy—”

  The alarm horn sounded again.

  “We’d better get back to the dog sleds,” said Darrell. “We have what we came for.”

  The horn sounded again, only this time it continued in one long wail as if the crewman had jammed his finger on the trigger. Then, even over the wind thundering across the ice, they heard three dull thuds, and the alarm stopped abruptly.

  Only the dogs were left howling.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “The crewman’s been shot,” said Darrell. He took a flare pistol from his pack and raised it like a handgun, ready to fire it. “How did they find us?”

  “Not the flare,” his stepfather said. “It’ll tell them where we are. Close the chest. We need to lose them.”

  Too late. The ice nearby exploded in bursts from the south.

  “Follow me!” Roald led the kids back into the storm when there was a deep whump and the air went crimson. A flare hung sizzling overhead, and they saw through the whirling flakes a tall man in a thick fur coat. His uncovered head was topped with silvery white hair. He raised a long-barreled weapon at them.

  “It’s Markus Wolff!” Wade cried. “He was chasing Carlo—”

  “Did he kill him?” Lily said. “Is Carlo dead?”

  Gunfire shattered the nearby ice when all at once a second series of shots sounded as if from above. Wolff slowed his progress and turned his weapon up toward the shots.

  “Someone’s giving us cover,” said Darrell. “Let’s circle back to the base!”

  “Too far,” Roald said. “To the dog sleds.”

  They struck out in a wide loop away from the battle when a second flare exploded, and the two sources of gunfire converged.

  Wade thought it was merely the wind thundering. When the sound blew away, he was unsure he’d heard anything at all. Then it came back. It wasn’t the wind. A helicopter hovered overhead, its rotors spinning the snow like a cyclone. A rope ladder unfurled out of the storm and struck the ice not a hundred yards away.

  “Over here!” a voice shouted through a loudspeaker. “Hurry up!”

  Wade slowed, staring up into the whirling snow. He watched a figure work its way down the ladder to them, his long hair flying.

  “It’s Carlo!” he gasped. “How in the world—”

  “He must have followed Wolff from Königsberg,” said Darrell. “Or the other way around!”

  Carlo jumped to the ground, holding on to the ladder. “Get—up—here!”

  All at once,
a deep thud shook the air. Wade saw Wolff on his knees, with his long-barreled gun aimed high. Flame erupted above them, followed by an enormous boom.

  The massive chopper wobbled oddly.

  “Get clear, now!” Wade’s father cried, pushing the children away from the ladder.

  The chopper tilted, the rotors faltered, and the giant aircraft dropped like an anvil. It crashed into the ice shelf, exploded in a fireball, and cracked the ice beneath their feet.

  “Murderer!” Carlo yelled, running toward Wolff, a semiautomatic blazing in each hand.

  “Come on,” Darrell yelled. “There’s an outcropping near the dogs. Keep going!”

  Wolff fired a third flare, and the ice shelf was bathed in yet another cascade of trembling red light. In the light they watched the two figures charging at each other, arms out, weapons blazing like a Wild West shootout.

  Carlo let go of the chopper’s rope ladder, dropping fast and hard and twisting his ankle sharply. He ignored it. Gripping his semiautomatics tightly, he climbed to his feet. The assassin was already there. He’d led Wolff on a chase from place to place—Königsberg to Moscow, to London, Stockholm, Vienna, and finally here—where he turned the tables on him only at the last minute. He ached with the memories of all the past cities and wastelands and times in which he’d lived, until here he was, at the strange, final end of it all.

  At the place of hope.

  The place of death.

  It seemed almost silly now, having written it all down in the handwriting they would instantly recognize and understand. But maybe none of what was happening made sense.

  Carlo hurried across the ice, his spent ammunition spinning left and right out of the chambers of his weapons. His shots thudded into Wolff’s side. The man reeled back, still firing. Two, three hits entered Carlo’s body armor, the last one piercing it. So, this is how it would end. He fell to his knees, flicked his eyes west. The children were nearly safe.

  He had to keep Wolff busy, draw the devil away from them, or his sacrifice would be for nothing. Time could be changed, but only if this final scene played out properly could it be changed for the good.

  Lurching to his feet, he mustered his strength and scrambled to the crevice.