“Before answering that,” said Heidi, “how about you tell us where the tomb actually is? Seeing as none of the rest of us know that little tidbit.”
“Also, we need to work out …” Bub trailed off, until we looked at him. He had that blank, sort of baffled look upon his face again, and he finally finished with, “… what’s for dinner?”
My lips pressed into a thin line.
“I just wanted to be part of the conversation.”
“Yeah, well, it looks like we’ve all been left behind on this one.” Bracing against the wall—most of the way up this first staircase now, and the jelly legs I’d been fighting were almost gone now, although not entirely—I paused to massage my head. Still had that killer headache going for me, which was just peachy. “We need to get back home and then …” I racked my brains, coming up naught.
“Figure out our next step,” Clay said helpfully from the stair ahead of me.
“Right,” I said, without adding: Before this Burnton beats us again.
9
Evening had descended over London by the time we got back. Though late summer, daylight was beginning its steady decline as we finally got back to Tortilla and the cut-through to my hideaway. The daylight hours had evaporated. Yet again, we’d been going non-stop, and this thing had hardly gotten started.
I went to the fridge, made of copper and gears and cooled by who knew what magic, and made my peace with the impending trial by downing a can of Monster. The zero-sugar sort, mind, because at least the post-caffeine crash was not as violent as a post-caffeine-and-sixty-grams-of-sugar crash.
Then we got ourselves set up in the library, poring through books. No particular clue what we were looking for other than mentions of Brynn Overson—which, legendary figure that he was—was going to make life exceptionally difficult, as references to him were damned near everywhere.
“Who is Brynn Overson anyway?”
A few months ago, that question would have come from Carson. Today, though, it was from Bub. Given a stack of books by Carson that were almost as large as he was, he leafed through tomes that looked minute in his fists, his greyish-green thumb and forefinger turning pages with almost comic delicateness.
“You don’t know who he is?” asked Carson, frowning.
“He’s a human Seeker,” said Clay. “Orcs wouldn’t know him.”
“Ohh. Well, let me explain—um. Can I?” Carson looked from me to Heidi and Clay and back again for permission.
“Go ahead,” said Heidi. “Can’t say that I have any particular interest in giving a history lesson right now. Or ever.”
With additional nods from me and Clay, Carson began a run-down of Overson’s history, which was short, but surprisingly thorough and accurate—the perfect advertisement for libraries everywhere, since all Carson’s knowledge of him had come from the books contained in ours.
“Brynn Overson is—sorry, was—one of the original Wayfaring Seekers,” he explained. “a principled and accomplished man. As well as tackling untold numbers of quests and making off with treasures the likes of which many modern Seekers can barely dream of, he was also responsible for developing what is now known as the Overson theorem—that being that each world has its own unique talisman, providing centralized travel to and from other worlds.”
I blinked. “Thorough, if a little Wikipedia-esque. Are those your own words?”
Carson shrugged, a touch of color to his cheeks. “I might’ve paraphrased a couple of biographies.”
Heidi had parked herself down one of the aisles. Sitting back against the connected edges of two adjacent bookcases, she had her legs tight to her chest and thumbed through a wispy book whose pages threatened to fall out.
“I still don’t know where you even found this clue,” she said, “let alone how you expect us to puzzle out where to go next.”
I dodged the question with a much better one of my own. “What I’m interested in is how Burnton found it,” I said. “Some Johnny-Come-Lately Seeker new off the bench, and he’s hunting down treasures that most of our kind haven’t even heard of? There’s got to be a story behind that.”
“Maybe he stole a journal from some bright researcher,” said Carson. “Like the person who built this library?”
“Err,” I said, shooting a look to Clay. First time he’d been to this hideout was today, and I wanted him to believe that this was something I had built. Not with my hands, of course; I wasn’t a brick-layer, for crying out loud … but I’d been rather hoping he might think I had put together this place using my vast riches, not just happened upon it.
But the jig had been up before Carson opened his mouth. “Sorry,” said Clay, smiling sympathetically. “You’re always on the go, so I’d be hard-pressed to see just when you could’ve accumulated all these books in the past few months. You’re amazing, but not in the wizard, conjured-out-of-thin-air sort of way.”
I died a little inside. “I … got the clock?” One limp, lame finger pointed to the million-world clock, which presently mapped Harsterra. A typhoon-like storm spun around the northern pole, edges smeared into a kind of hexagon. A read-out informed us that the vortex had been circling for four hundred and twelve years. (It said the number of months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds too, but I figure you don’t care about that. And if you do: six, two, one, sixteen, forty-nine, thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. You get the picture.)
I turned back—and jolted at the sight of Heidi, who had slunk up to my elbow without my realizing.
She regarded me with suspicious eyes. The falling-apart book she’d been leafing through was discarded on my table. A soft puff of dust wheezed out on impact.
“How did you find the first treasure temple?” she asked.
No beating around the bush here then.
I swallowed. “Clay told me about it, obviously.” It was true enough that he’d have my back if she turned those laser eyes of hers onto him.
“How did you know about the quest?”
“Uh …” I groped for words blindly, looking for something, anything that would sate her—
“Hey!” Carson exclaimed. “I think I have something here.”
“Excellent,” I breathed. I jumped up and out of my chair, its legs shrieking against the floor behind me.
I rushed over to his side. Heidi followed, arms folded and face dark. Clay joined too, holding his place in the book he’d been reading with his iPad mini. Only Bub remained seated. His lips worked as he squinted at a page held maybe four inches from his nose.
“Here,” said Carson, pointing. “It references the keys to the crypt of Brynn Overson. And on this page—” he flipped back on, finger running down the text to find what he was looking for. “Aha. A reference to the Chalice Gloria.”
I bowed closer to read—
But Heidi had wheeled on me. “The Chalice Gloria?”
“Uh, yes,” I said, ignoring her gaze burning a hole in my forehead. “Well, that’s a lucky coincidence isn’t it. We have one of those.” I frowned hard, trying to read, trying to appear to be reading so she would take some of this wretched heat off me over this quest I had not shared one iota of information about prior to this afternoon’s sudden visit with Clay.
“That is not coincidence.” Her eyes narrowed further. At least, I was pretty sure they did. It damned well felt like it.
Though I had failed to read, Carson had done a fine job of it. Flicking back to the next page, he said, “It doesn’t say. It looks here as if the first key, plus the second, equals ... something, though.”
“What kind of something?” Heidi asked.
Crypt access, I thought, exchanging a wordless look with Clay.
Carson scoured. “The ledger doesn’t specify. Something cool though, I hope, and not another jeweled cup.” He peered back at it for a moment, where it sat on the mantel, inset gemstones glittering. When we’d first snatched it out of Borrick’s clutching fists at the last possible moment, it had looked a glorious, beautiful thing. And i
t was, I knew … but in the months since, that victory had become the norm, nothing exciting. And the cup, which had been sitting on the mantel for all this time, had become background furniture. Sort of sad, really, considering the legend surrounding it.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he added, quickly turning back to me. “It’s nice and everything. We just … we can’t really do anything with it, can we?”
I frowned. “What would we do with it?”
He shrugged. “Drink out of it?”
“Drink what?” asked Heidi.
“I dunno. It’s the sort of thing that frat guys have at a kegger.”
“A kegger,” said Heidi. “We call that a party here, you know. And when have you ever seen frat guys drink out of a legendary cup at their shameful parties?” When Carson opened his mouth to answer, she swiped a hand through the air. “Wait. Scratch that. Have you ever been invited to a ‘kegger,’ even once?”
I tried to cut in. “Can’t we just—”
“And I’m not done with you, either.” Heidi rounded on me, nostrils flaring. “Maybe it’s just me, but I’m beginning to get the idea that there was a little more to your quest for the Chalice Gloria than met the eye—and a little more than you deigned to share with us—you know, your friends? So ‘fess up. Did you know there was more to your quest?”
I was getting twitchy and having a hard time hiding it. I now knew exactly what it felt like to be a deer caught in headlights. Thanks for these enlightening experiences, Heidi.
“No?” I said.
“Mira,” Carson said, shaking his head.
Heidi’s lips pressed into a tight line. “As I suspected.”
“Miss Brand is a terrible liar,” said Bub. “I have seen infant orcs lie more proficiently—and we are taught from birth never to utter untruths.”
“So are humans,” said Carson.
“Apparently it just doesn’t stick for all of us,” Heidi muttered. She was observing me with a flat look—which meant it was time for another game of Avoid Heidi’s Glare. Secondary goal this time: avoid the gaze of pretty much everyone in this room. My skin was warm, threatening to burst into flame from the blood rushing to my cheeks.
“Be fair, guys,” said Clay. “Mira is a Seeker. You can’t just expect her to spill all her secrets for the hunts she’s working on, especially one in progress, like this.”
My hero.
“No?” said Heidi. “Because she’s never kept things like this from us before. So what makes this one so special?”
“You can’t be blind to the way the temples are set up,” said Clay. “They’re not the product of some ancient accident. They’re build there on purpose, given with a relic, and then loaded with traps and obstacles, all for one purpose: to test us.”
Carson practically upended his seat, such was the ferocity with which he leapt to his feet. “I KNEW IT!” he cried, raising his fists heavenward. He looked like a footballer about to take a victory lap after scoring the winning goal—only, you know, dressed in a sweater and shirt instead of a football shirt, and lugging about a stupid manbag. Sorry. Canvas satchel. I’ll get it right next time. (Probably not.)
Clay shot him a look that reminded me of what I’d probably looked like for the first twenty-four hours in Carson’s presence. Nevertheless, he continued:
“This is one of the quests that promises … answers.”
“Answers about what?” Heidi shot back.
“Seeking,” said Clay. “It could redefine our world for us. This quest treads not only in the realms we have gone to before—metaphorical realms, not actual ones—but also new brings forth its own unsolved mysteries, codes to crack.” Tossing a thumb at me, he said, “I guarantee that’s why this one ran away from home. She’s astute—she would’ve seen it, I’m sure, seen beyond the Chalice Gloria, seen her chance to seize … well, glory, but more than that.”
Heidi scoffed. One crooked eyebrow on her forehead, and the sidelong look she gave me, suggested she believed nothing of the sort.
Clay turned to me. “Isn’t that right, Mira?”
I hesitated. Because this was not easy to say, to confess to. My family had tried to stamp Seeking out of me, the way I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame, magnetically impelled and unable to stop myself, my whole life. They’d spent long years trying to beat me down, force me into Emmanuel’s shadow, wall off the life I’d wanted to lead.
It had filled me with years of my own secrets. Because the truth was—I had seen this, or hints of it. My family’s library was nothing like this, in scale at least, but the books within it were priceless—and I had read through them whenever I could sneak into that chamber of records, of myths, my brain putting pieces together slowly, each new tidbit compounding and compounding until …
“Yes, I saw it,” I said. “It leapt out at me, actually.” And saying that felt … good. Like a load had lifted from my shoulders after having weighed me down for so, so long. “I saw the steps, broadly anyway, through centuries of Seekers’ records, journals, ledgers—and when I realized, when I really knew that what I was looking at was real, I just … I had to pursue it. That’s what finally pushed me to leave in January, and come here. And since then, I’ve been chasing it.”
“Without telling us,” said Heidi.
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry. It’s—it’s not that I wanted all the glory entirely for myself, if that’s what you’re thinking, because I didn’t, never. But this was—in my house, this was the only thing that was really mine, this one thing that I’d been building and sitting on, keeping to myself, but knowing, for years. It was what separated me from Emmanuel and my mum and my dad. And as great as he was, in their eyes—in everyone’s eyes—I had found something he hadn’t, that none of them had. So I had to go after it. That’s the reason I left home,” I said, nodding to Clay in confirmation. “And, yes, the Chalice Gloria made my name known in our world … but it wasn’t all about that.”
“It was the first step in making your name,” said Heidi. She arched one eyebrow. “The great Mira Brand, more famous and accomplished than her older brother.”
“It’s not just me,” I said, trying not to show Heidi just how stung I felt. It was hard not to forget that she’d told me I was nothing more than my family’s famous name when we were in the swamp on our quest for the Tide of Ages. “It’s all of us, if this goes well. It has been all of us. We’re all credited with these successes.”
“You kept it from us.”
What was with Heidi today? Nothing but guilt-tripping at every corner, I swear.
And it worked too, this time. Because yes, her tirade (admittedly a very calm one) while cleaning Carson up hadn’t been particularly warranted, but the core problem now—that I had kept something big from my friends, something they’d have definitely wanted to join me in—I could see why that would be hurtful.
“Yeah, okay, I did,” I ceded, fighting to keep from looking hurt. “But come on now. We’ve been together for like three months. And I love you both, I do … love all of you,” I amended, eyes darting to Bub. “But … three months. It’s not that long.”
Carson murmured something under his breath. If the library hadn’t been so deathly quiet, I might not have heard: “Fair point.”
Bub nodded. “It hasn’t been very long.”
“You’ve only been here for, like, three months,” Carson said to him.
“That’s true.”
“Even less if you only count the time you’re not out doing …”
“Yes.”
“… what is it you do, Bub?”
Heidi was staring at me in that intense way that bordered on a glare, trying to cut through me like a laser. “That’s …” she began. “… a reasonable explanation.”
Phew. I felt a little bit of tension leave me.
“So,” she said—and her eyes gleamed. “Where do we go next?”
I looked to Clay—and then, perfectly timed, every single one of us turned our attention to Carso
n.
He was ready for it. Spinning his book around for us all to take a look at, he said, “I’m not one hundred percent sure, but …”
Heidi said, “That’s Ameri-geek-ese for ‘I know exactly where we’re going.’ Ain’t that right?”
Carson grinned. “I think we’re going to … Biristall?”
A collective noise came from the rest of us, comprised of my pained hiss, Clay’s breath leaving like a gut punch, Bub’s groan, and a colorful string of swear words from Heidi. And just like that, the grin on Carson’s face, like a ten-year-old who’d just won first prize at a school sports day, was wiped off.
“Welp, it was nice knowing you all,” said Heidi.
Bub’s groan droned.
Heh. Groan-drone.
“What?” Carson’s eyebrows knitted. “What’s wrong with Biristall?” He looked from face to face for answers, then flipped to the next page in his book.
The gentle pink of his cheeks fled, replaced with ashen grey.
“Oh,” he said. “That.”
10
Sooner or later, we weren’t going to be able to get onto trains anymore. Not all of us, at any rate. The human aspect of our group? No problems. Even soaking wet, having upheaved ourselves from a world connected to the women’s toilets, we would be able to ride British trains until the cows came home.
Burbondrer, though … eventually, someone, somewhere, was going to raise an issue.
But that day was not this one. Which seemed particularly ridiculous given that we were on our longest train journey ever, on our way to Cardiff. That was, by the look of all of our research (and by ‘our,’ I mean Carson, as always), the closest place we could cut a gate through to Biristall.
So that was where we found ourselves the next morning, me beside Heidi, opposite Carson and Clay, and Burbondrer squeezed into a set of double seats the other side of the aisle. Another pair faced him, but though the train was just crowded enough on the way out of London that every single seat in our carriage could have been used, a few passengers elected to stand rather than try to squeeze in opposite those protruding barbs. Smart, really.
The King of the Skies Page 8
