The Sam Reilly Collection

by Christopher Cartwright

  Built like a solid rod, it was nearly half a foot in length and no more than three inches thick. At the head of the device appeared something that resembled a telescope. Only there were no pieces of glass to be seen. Instead, its sharp rectangular angles rotated so that light reflected for no apparent purpose. Strange markings, completely foreign to him, covered the sides, making it appear old. At the base, he noticed something rotate. It had twelve different positions, and each one slightly changed the angle of the reflective metal at its head.

  Olsen grinned as he shuffled the artifact in his hands.

  It felt heavy. More like the weight of a large axe than an ornate looking glass. It was the first time he realized it was a strange red color, ruining his hope that it was gold.

  All the same, it begged the question…

  Where did it come from?

  Albert bent down to wash it again. Over the hill, Felix approached, slow as ever. Terrified that someone might take it from him, Albert slid his finding inside his large jacket pocket, and continued to dig, if only a little hopeful of another such discovery. But he was not so rewarded. In the high tide of that afternoon the canal was opened to the ocean. Water flooded in, and with it, all hopes he held of finding more unique riches.

  That night he visited his master, who was aboard Felix Brandt’s ship, preparing to return to Amsterdam in the spring.

  The Delfland’s rigging had been stripped for winter. Even without it, Albert could see it was a grand sailing ship, befitting a very rich landowner. Hank met him on the upper deck.

  “Hello Olsen. What can I help you with?”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you, sir.” He looked sheepish as he asked, “Can I come inside and talk privately?”

  “Of course, young man. Come downstairs and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Olsen followed his master deep into the ship. Locked away since it had been stowed for the winter, the Defland still appeared fit for the King of Holland. Inside, the cold interior was expansive, more like a palace than a boat, which often required the use of every inch of her room. He was taken aft, where the master’s cabin rested.

  Reassured that his master was the only person aboard the ship, Albert quickly told his master of the discovery and his worry that someone might steal it from him. When he was done, Hank lit a large candle. Then he smiled and said, “May I examine it?”

  “Of course.” Albert took it out of his pocket and handed it to him.

  Bringing the light of the candle over the metal device, Hank took a cloth covered in strong liquor and began cleaning the orange metal. It reflected the light as powerfully as any gold that either of them had ever seen. Hank polished the device until it became reflective like a mirror. On the side of the rod a strange marking could be seen.

  Albert had never seen the shapes written anywhere. Hank looked at it, mesmerized, and gasped as he saw the writings.

  “Have you seen it before?”

  “No, never,” Hank answered, still polishing it reverently.

  “Then what made you gasp when you saw the markings at its center?”

  “It just looks very similar to something an old friend of mine once showed me from Africa. They were sketches of course, and clearly can have nothing to do with this… even so, the markings bear frightful similarities.”

  “What was so interesting about your friend’s sketches?”

  Hank looked torn. As though he were deciding how much to tell. Then replied, “My friend returned for a second expedition to Africa, but neither he nor any other member of his 22-man team returned.”

  “Do you think the two places could be connected?”

  “What, an old city in Africa and here?” Hank shook his head. “I doubt that very much.”

  “So, can you deliver it to my fiancée? I have another 6 months of service, but I know that you are returning next month for a short while. I trust you. Can you take it for me?”

  “Of course. If you trust me with something so valuable?” Hank replied, his voice reassuringly kind, like a father to a son.

  “I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t.”

  “Then of course I’ll do it.”

  *

  Felix Brandt couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw it as he came over the hill. Albert Olsen had found the Arcane Stone!

  The child had no idea of its purpose, but even a fool must have recognized its immediate value. And that would lead him to show it to someone, and before long, someone who knew about it, who had waited many generations to find it, would get access to its secrets.

  No, Olsen was a good boy, with a bright future, but something had to be done.

  Felix left his house after dark. He should have waited later, but he couldn’t afford the possibility that Olsen would be innocent to such an extent that he would show someone tonight. After debating the problem over and over, he walked out into the street.

  Along the rocky edge of Pearl Street, his footsteps echoed quietly into the night until he reached its end. There he turned right and walked along the Heere Gracht, where the moon shined sympathetically on the first high tide, which flooded the newly deepened canal. Soon, he thought, ships would line it as they had in Amsterdam.

  At the end of the canal he reached the wall, where many of the laborers took shelter. It was unusual for a man of his background to be seen at such a place in the early evening, but as the richest man in the new settlement, he had little to fear for his actions.

  He knocked on the door. Albert Olsen answered immediately. His shoes were still on and it looked as though he’d only just arrived home from somewhere.

  “Hello Mr. Brandt,” Olsen said, politely.

  “May I come in?”

  Olsen looked nervous. “Of course. Is something wrong?”

  “It’s all right. I just wanted to talk to you.”

  The room was small, with a bed at one end and a fireplace next to it. There was little more to it and nowhere to sit.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have much to offer you, Mr. Brandt,” he said, while placing a small pot of water on the fire. “Would you like a warm drink? I’m afraid I don’t have anywhere for you to sit.”

  “That’s not a problem. I don’t want to take up much of your time. I have a question for you.”

  “For me?” Olsen appeared confused, but Felix wondered if he detected a slight amount of fear too.

  “Yes, it’s about what you found today.”

  Olsen stopped pouring the warm water into a mug.

  “What I found today?”

  Felix carefully studied the man’s eyes. They failed to meet his own, and answered his question immediately.

  Yes, Albert Olsen is trying to hide something.

  “It’s quite all right, Albert. I don’t want to take it from you, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s just that I have a collection of local artifacts that have been discovered over the years, and I’m interested in one in particular. I have seen a number of drawings of it, and was hoping you may have stumbled upon it.”

  Albert kept quiet, but nor did he deny his discovery.

  Felix pulled out a rolled piece of paper with a drawing and opened it in front of him. “Did it look something like this?”

  Albert stared at it for a moment and said, “Yes, it’s identical. Where did you get the drawing?”

  “I was given it a long time ago, by someone who’d found it during an earlier expedition.”

  “Is it valuable?”

  “Yes, of course. Not in the sense that it is made out of gold or anything like that. But historically, it is worth a fortune. I once heard it described as the key to their greatest city.”

  “What city? The place was a marsh before we came.”

  “That’s not important.” Felix quickly changed the topic. He’d already said too much about THEM. “Did you show it to anyone?”

  “No, of course not. Something like that looked as though it could be worth more than my entire life savings! I didn’t want anyone to steal
it.”

  “Of course… You’ve done the right thing,” he reassured Albert.

  In one quick motion Felix slid the tip of the knife through the gap between Albert’s ribs and into his heart. It was as quick a death as could be contrived. A lifetime of training, and he’d never had the need to do so before.

  Albert barely made a sound.

  Felix wasn’t a born killer. And he took no pleasure in it. He stared at the boy’s face. Aghast, he noticed there was no hatred in Albert’s eyes and no pain, simply absent disbelief. Felix wanted more than anything to relieve the child from his anguish.

  “I’m so sorry Albert, really I am,” Felix said. “But some things, I’m afraid, were supposed to remain buried – forever.”

  *

  Hank Worthington watched as the fifth marker pole was driven deep into the ground below the shallow water, forty feet out from the bank of the river. Today was the first day of the process of reclaiming the land from the sea, so that the man paying his wages could have his mansion built on prime real estate.

  It wasn’t an entirely new idea for the Dutch, but on the outlying Trading Post, where land was plentiful, the return compared to labor required to achieve the task made it seem fanciful. Hank looked up, having heard the familiar sound of hammer on steel as the wooden marker pole was driven into the soft soil below until it struck bedrock. Tomorrow his team would begin the laborious task of backfilling the water below with rock and then soil.

  He shook his head at its absurdity.

  Built like a dike and doubling as a fortress to guard the entrance to the main canal, which Mr. Brandt too had commissioned, the expansion onto the river seemed outlandish, even to him. And Hank was a 3rd generation master water engineer, whose family had been employed on a number of water projects in Amsterdam. But this was different.

  “Felix Brandt is a fool,” he said out loud.

  “Yes, but a very rich one,” his apprentice agreed.

  “They’re the worst kind.” Hank pulled out the engineering plans to show his young apprentice. “Ordinarily, we would have supported this point here, where the natural bank of the river formed and then built his fortress above it, where it could still protect the entrance to the canal.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Because Felix Brandt was specific. This spot, right here. He even took me out in a rowboat and showed me precisely where he wanted the new land to reach.”

  His apprentice looked at the map depicting the landfill areas. “He wants a lot of new land? There’s nearly a square mile of it! I wonder why he doesn’t simply build further back. It’s not like land around here is scarce or valuable?”

  “Indeed. Why not?” Hank waited for the boy to come up with an answer on his own. When none came, he said, “Felix gave some stupid excuse that he would then one day own the greatest amount of deep water frontage on the island, and therefore could command its trade.” Hank gave a supercilious smile and then continued, “But I think he did so simply to prove that what he wants, he can have.”

  Out on the water, the familiar chime of hammer on steel continued as the sixth pole commenced being driven into the deeper water below.

  Hank’s ears piqued to the sudden change in resonance.

  That pole driver struck something other than sand, rock or wood. But what?

  From the shore he watched as the men withdrew the wooden pole and attempted to reset it. By the third attempt, one of his men dived down to see what they had struck. The big man who’d entered the water climbed back onto the barge after holding his breath for nearly a minute.

  Hank looked at the man’s face. Even from forty feet away, he could see that something was wrong. “Come with me. Let’s go see what the problem is.”

  “I’ll get the rowboat.”

  The two climbed into the small boat and his apprentice took the oars. Within a couple minutes they were tying up alongside the barge.

  “What have we got?” Hank asked, taking the outstretched leathery hand of Jeroen, who was driving the piers. The two had worked together for nearly twenty years.

  “We hit something hard. There’s no way we’re going to be able to drive anything through it.”

  “That’s fine. We’ll build over it anyway.” Hank looked at Jeroen’s clothes, still dripping wet. “You’ve had a look. What have we struck?”

  Jeroen looked nervous as he handed him a small ingot of orange metal. It could have been brass or even a copper alloy.

  “You found it down there?”

  “Yes. But I have no idea where it’s come from. There’s a lot of it down there. I think its best if you have a look for yourself.”

  Hank looked at the water. It wasn’t quite spring and the ice had only recently thawed. He was going to say something but Jeoren stopped him.

  “Trust me, you’re gonna want to see this.”

  Not wanting to spend the rest of his day arguing over whatever the hell his men had found, he took his shirt off and dived into the water. The icy temperature stung him, but he forced his eyes open as he swam toward the bottom. It wasn’t deep. Maybe twenty or thirty feet at most. His head barely dipped the surface before he saw it.

  It looked like the center of an old city. But nothing like any city he’d ever seen, or even heard of. And it was covered in the same orange colored, bright, metal that young Albert Olsen had discovered while digging in the canal. The entire place had the surreal appearance of a lost Egyptian city. Not that he’d ever seen one of those either. A friend of his had shown him sketches after visiting there when they were both students.

  Hank returned to the surface and climbed the rope ladder onto the barge.

  He could see Jeroen’s face – waiting to say ‘I told you so.’

  “Well Hank, what do you make of that?”

  “I’d better go to the owner with this one…” Hank said, without hiding the disgruntlement from his voice. “And that will mean delays.”

  *

  An hour later, Hank returned to the worksite. On the beach, a tent had been set up with a desk at its center - an office for himself and the architect. To the north it was protected from the wind by large piles of rock and soil in preparation for the build. Sitting opposite his desk, Jeroen and his apprentice waited for him. A glance at their faces told him they had both been waiting in expectation.

  He was still carrying the strange piece of orange metal when he came into the small worksite office, and sat down, placing it on the table as he would a paperweight – and said nothing.

  “Well Hank, what did Mr. Brandt have to say?” Jeroen asked.

  Hank cracked his knuckles together. “He says it’s the remains of the India Star, an old brass lined ship of war, dumped here years ago to stop the never-ending erosion to the beach.”

  Jeroen laughed at the explanation.

  “That’s bullshit and you know it as well as I do. That looked like a city to me.”

  Hank met his eyes, and forcefully replied, “Yeah, well maybe it was one of ‘their’ old cities, before we came. Now it’s ours, so why shouldn’t we build on top of it? It looks pretty solid to me.”

  “I don’t care if it was one of ‘their’ cities.” Jeroen lit a pipe. “Heck, some of that red metal stuff must be worth something?”

  “Yeah, well maybe Mr. Brandt isn’t too keen on slowing down his project while we all go archeological on his building site. Besides, so what if it is? All the better for building on. Anything that solid must make for a good foundation.”

  “So, then, what are we going to do with it?”

  “The owner says backfill with rocks and soil, lay the foundations, and prepare for stage two of the building.”

  “And that’s what you’re planning on doing?”

  “Like I said, it’ll make good foundations.”

  Jeroen stood up to leave and then said, “Hank…”

  “Leave it alone Jeroen. I said it’s time to go back to work. I want this place buried by the end of the week.”

/>   That night, Hank drank whiskey quietly in his own tent. Ordinarily he’d have been happy to have one with his men, but he needed the time to think this one through. Something in the back of his mind kept reminding him of the damn copper-colored ingot. He’d never seen anything glow like that. It was almost a type of orange gold.

  Besides, it didn’t make sense how the owner responded. Mr. Brandt was an extremely wealthy man, but that was no reason not to become wealthier. He’d bought the water lots fair and square. If there was an ancient golden city below, he could have easily claimed ownership.

  So, why had he been so quick and adamant to bury the lot of it? What didn’t he want the rest of the world to see?

  It was too much for him, and in the end, Hank knew he needed to have a more satisfactory answer. Returning to his work tent where he’d left the orange ingot as a good paperweight, Hank grabbed the strange metal, put it in his pocket and walked towards the steel forge, where men were working through the night to create the steel required for the new outpost.

  As the leading engineer, Hank was known by everyone who greeted him cordially, though surprised to see him there in the night. At the back of the room he examined the ingot. It was definitely made from the same strange glowing metal used in the artifact that Albert Olsen had discovered.

  He shook his head, still wondering at the young man’s sudden disappearance. It wasn’t like someone had killed him for it – after all, Olsen had already entrusted the artifact with himself before he disappeared. Perhaps, he had never intended on returning to Frejia, and this was the best apology he could find? First weighing it, he discovered that it was precisely 250 ounces. He then placed it inside the crucible and started the furnace. And watched as the strange metal smelted until it glowed with fire and liquefied.

  Zinc and lead were the first to go, being weak metals.

  He then poured off the liquid while the stronger metals, being gold, silver and copper, remained in a solid form.