The Eight: The Fire Part 36

Vartan and I walked to the river's opposite end and we looked across the vast expanse toward the fountains. From this perspective, those wavy patterns of stones beneath the shallow waters merged, like an optical illusion, to form a design that must be exactly what we were looking for: an enormous sheaf of wheat that seemed to be waving in a hidden breeze just beneath the rippling surface of the water.

Vartan and I stood for a moment without speaking, then he touched my arm and gestured down toward where we stood. Just at our feet, carved into the rock at the edge of the pool, was a motto: Quod Severis Metes As ye sow, so shall ye reap The top of the sheaf of wheat was pointing toward the frothing sea horses across the pool due north: the same compa.s.s direction that pointed away from Piscataway and Mount Vernon toward the very top point of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

'How,' said Vartan, taking my hand and looking down into my eyes. 'You mean, it's not just the Queen or where she is located that we are seeking. The secret is how we sow and reap. Maybe, how they were planted and how we collect them?'

I nodded.

'Then I think I know where your mother is pointing us with this wheat sheaf and where we are going,' said Vartan. Whipping out his more detailed map of D.C., he pointed it out. 'We get there down a path that runs just beside this park and underneath it, very steep Dumbarton Oaks Park, it looks like a large wilderness.' He looked up at me with a smile. 'It's a very long path, too, called Lovers' Lane designed for our alchemical project, no doubt. So if we find nothing while we're down there, perhaps we can resume some of our previous agricultural undertakings of last night.'

For now, no comment, though the cherry blossoms in the orchard we were pa.s.sing through were saturating the air with their heavy, sensual scent that I tried to ignore.

We went out the gates to the left and headed down Lovers' Lane. Dark trees smothered the sky here, and thick leaves from autumn still covered the earthy path. But in the meadow on the far side of the stone wall, we caught glimpses between the trees of jonquils, snowdrops, and starflowers already popping their heads up in the fresh spring gra.s.s.

At the bottom of the hill, where a tumbling creek ran along the road, our footpath forked in three directions.

'One goes up to the Naval Observatory, the highest point in Was.h.i.+ngton,' Vartan said, studying his D.C. map. 'The lower one goes to some river. Here it is it's Rock Creek, one of the lowest points, perhaps?'

Rock Creek was the third river with the Potomac and Anacostia that divided the city into a Pythagorean Y, as we'd learned from Key's pals, the Piscataway, and Galen's journals.

'If it's balance we're looking for,' I said, 'looks like it's the middle path.' After about half an hour, we came onto a bluff that looked out upon everything the rippling creek far below, the high rock that the observatory and the vice president's house resided on. In the distance an enormous arched stone bridge rose high above the river in the afternoon light, like a Roman aqueduct left in the middle of nowhere. This was the end of our road.

Here where we stood, ancient trees grew out of these even more ancient cliffs above us. Their twisted roots clawed for purchase in the rocky soil. Everything here was cast in deep shadow except one beam of western light that came through a wedge in the rock behind us, leaving a small pool of suns.h.i.+ne on the forest floor. Standing at this spot, with babbling waters far beneath us, birds warbling in the newly greening spring trees, it seemed that civitas was thousands of miles away.

Then I noticed that Vartan was looking down at me. Unexpectedly, and without a word, he folded me into his arms and kissed me. I could feel that same warm, glowing current of energy surge through me as before. He drew me away, and said, 'I only thought to remind us that the purpose of our mission has to do with alchemy and human beings not just with saving civilization.'

'At this moment,' I agreed, 'I'm wis.h.i.+ng that civilization could fend for itself for an hour or two, so I get something else off my mind.'

He ruffled my hair.

'But this has to be the spot,' I added. 'We can see everything above and below. We're at the end of the road.'

I looked around for another clue. But I saw none.

Then I let my eyes move slowly over the cliff that rose behind us. It wasn't actually a cliff more of a retaining wall of enormous, ancient boulders. The afternoon sun was just about to move below the V in the rock wall and what little light we had right here would vanish.

Then something struck me.

'Vartan,' I said quickly, 'the book that al-Jabir wrote The Books of the Balance the deep secrets behind it, the keys to the ancient path, are supposed to be hidden in the chess set, right? Just as my mother's message to us is hidden in that tapestry?'

'Yes,' said Vartan.

'In the tapestry,' I said, 'the book that the angel is holding in her hand just like the "gifts" that Hestia was handing out that book also had a word printed on it, didn't it?'

'Phos,' said Vartan. 'It means "light."'

We both looked up at the steep wall of hewn stone, where the sun was dipping down.

'Can you climb?' I asked him.

Vartan shook his head.

'Well, I can,' I told him. 'So I guess this message was intended just for me.'

Less than one hour later, we were sitting at a table in the upper room at Sutalde, just Vartan and I, beside the wall of windows overlooking the western sun gilding the bridge and the river. I had three broken fingernails and I was nursing a scuffed knee, but otherwise I was none the worse for wear for walking up the side of a cliff.

Beside us on a third chair was my backpack that I'd lowered to Vartan from its cache on high. It still contained that list of map coordinates of the buried pieces, but now also the mailing tube with the abbess's chessboard drawing that we'd stopped to pick up from my post office on our way back down the hill.

Between us on the table sat a breathing decanter of Chteauneuf du Pape with two winegla.s.ses, and beside them, the heavy figure about six inches high, all encrusted with jewels, minus one emerald: the Black Queen.

And something else I'd found up there in the rock, sealed in a waterproof container. Vartan drew closer so we could study it together. It was a book written in Latin, clearly a copy of the original, with interesting ill.u.s.trations, though these, too, Vartan said, may have been added at a later date. It was apparently a medieval translation of an older book in Arabic.

The Books of the Balance.

The owner's inscription on the inside flap merely read: Charlot.

'Do not let yourself be hampered by any doubt,' Vartan was translating it for me. 'One introduces fire and applies it to the degree necessary, without however allowing that thing to be consumed by the fire which would add to its depredation. In this way, the body which is submitted to the action of fire reaches equilibrium and attains the desired state.'

Vartan turned to me. 'Al-Jabir does discuss how to make the elixir,' he said. 'But his emphasis seems to be always on equilibrium, balance among the four elements, earth, air, water, and fire, the balance within ourselves, and also that between us and the natural world. I do not understand why this idea is dangerous.' He added, 'Do you think your mother left you this book because she wishes for you not only to find the pieces, but also to solve this problem?'

'I'm sure she does,' I said, pouring the wine into our gla.s.ses. 'But how can I think that far ahead? One week ago I was estranged from my mother and I thought my father was dead. I believed that you were my worst enemy and that I was a sous-chef with a predictable, regimented life who could no longer play chess even if her life depended on it. Now it appears that my life may depend on it. But I can't predict anything even ten minutes ahead. Everything that I once thought I knew has been turned on its head. I don't know what to think anymore.'

'I know what to think,' said Vartan with a smile. 'And so do you.'

Closing the book, he took me by both my hands and pressed his lips to my hair, ever so gently. When he drew away, he said, 'How could you ever have faced your future until you'd resolved your past? Was it your fault that those "resolutions" turned out to be that all those things you'd always thought were true were actually only illusions?'

'But after all that,' I said, 'what can I believe now?'

Vartan said, 'It seems, as Rodo told us last night, that when it comes to this ancient wisdom, it isn't enough to believe. One has to find out the truth. I think that is the message of this book your mother left you, the message al-Jabir hid in the chess set twelve hundred years ago.'

'But what exactly is that message?' I asked in frustration. 'Let's say that we've gathered all the pieces and put them together. What will we know then that n.o.body else knows now?'

'Why don't we put together some of the parts that we already have right now, and try to find out?' Vartan suggested, pa.s.sing me my backpack.

I pulled out the cylinder tube that I'd mailed to myself, with the abbess's chessboard ill.u.s.tration, and handed it over for Vartan to open. Then I delved deeper into my pack to extract my mother's little sketch in plastic, with its list of map coordinates, which I'd stuffed in there just before we'd left my apartment, and then my fingertip snagged on something cold and sharp at the bottom of the pack.

I froze.

I was afraid that I knew exactly what it was. Even before I pulled it out my heart was thudding.

It was a diamond tennis bracelet.

With an emerald-lined racquet attached.

I sat there, the bracelet dangling from the tip of my finger. Vartan glanced up and saw it. He looked at it for a moment, then at me, and I nodded. I felt ill. How did this get here? How long had it been here?

I now realized that this was the very backpack I'd left behind five days ago, along with my down parka in my uncle's suite at the Four Seasons. But how had this satchel wound up hanging innocently on the coatrack inside my apartment, with Sage Livingston's 'wired' tennis bracelet concealed at the bottom of the pack?

And how long had that d.a.m.ned bracelet been in our vicinity?

'Ah,' came Sage's affected voice from the doorway across the room, 'here we all are, together again. And I see you've found my bracelet. I wondered where I had accidentally dropped it.'

She stepped inside and shut the door behind her, then crossed the room through the forest of tables and extended her hand for the keepsake. I let it slip from my fingertip into my gla.s.s of Chteauneuf du Pape.

'That wasn't very nice,' said Sage, looking at her jewels through the murk in the bottom of my winegla.s.s.

How long had she been listening? How much did she know? I had to a.s.sume the worst. Even if she didn't know that my father was alive, at the very least she now knew the contents, and their value, of everything lying exposed upon this table.

I got to my feet to face her head-on, and Vartan did likewise.

But then I glanced down.

In Sage's hand there was suddenly a small, pearl-handled revolver.

Oh Lord. And I'd thought Key was the only one addicted to hovering on the edge.

'You're not going to shoot us,' I told Sage.

'Not unless you insist,' she said. Her face seemed to have been stripped from a Mount Rushmore of condescension. Then she clicked off the gun's safety and added, 'But if they hear a shot from in here, my colleagues who are waiting just outside may not possess those same reservations.'

d.a.m.n. The thug factor. I had to think of something. But my only thought was, what was she even doing here?

'I thought you and your folks had gone off together on a long trip?' I said.

'They left without me,' she told me, then added, 'They aren't necessary now. That's what I was chosen for. This contingency was already planned for, you know, practically since I was born.'

As she held the gun loosely in one hand, she studied the nails of her other as if it had been entirely too many minutes since yesterday's manicure. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, when she looked up at Vartan and me and added, 'Apparently, neither of you has even the vaguest conception of who I am.'

Those words again.

But this time suddenly I did know.

Slowly, the horror seeped down through my brain like red wine or blood, forming a veil just behind my eyes, staining my vision of the room around me, of Vartan, of Sage standing there with that gun in her hand, ready at any moment to call her security detachment from just outside.

She didn't require their aid in order to decimate me. I'd already been blindsided again. Nor did I need a gun in my face to put all of this into perspective.

Hadn't I already sensed, during that powwow at my uncle's suite, that somebody else behind the scenes was calling some secret shots? Why hadn't I seen, even then, that it wasn't Rosemary or Basil that it had been Sage, herself, all along?

Practically since I was born, she'd said.

How right that was.

Hadn't it been Sage, even when we both were children, who'd tried not to befriend me, as I'd imagined then, but rather to bring me within her sphere of control, her circle of influence, affluence, and power?

Again, it was Sage who'd swiftly broken up her social camp in Denver, moved her high-society operations to D.C. almost the moment I'd arrived there myself. Though I never saw her during most of those years, how did I know whether she'd been watching me? It was Sage, too, who'd somehow intruded herself into the midst of the Sky Ranch transaction, despite the fact that, realistically, she could hardly pose as a realtor.

What else had she posed as?

When it came down to it, no one ever seemed to notice much about Sage except her looks, her superficial style. She was always ensconced in a cloud of social comportment, camouflaged by her entourage. But I suddenly recognized that, like a spider in its web of intrigue, Sage had actually been at the middle of everything, everywhere, and with everyone. Indeed, it wasn't just the bugging device she'd planted in my backpack that gave her access to everyone's thoughts and deeds. She'd been privy to every private chat.

At my mother's private boum in Four Corners.

At the Brown Palace in Denver with Lily and Vartan.

At the Four Seasons in D.C. with Nim, Rodo, and Galen.

I suddenly recalled her comment there, about my relations with my mother: It seems we were mistaken.

Now I saw that it was this vacuous, socialite stance that drew attention away from her true role. And now I understood exactly what role had been intended as hers from birth.

I said, 'You're the Sage Livingston.'

She smiled coldly, one eyebrow raised in appreciation of my acuity.

Vartan shot me a sideways glance.

I turned to him and explained. 'I mean the "Wise Living Stone." In Charlot's story he called it the Philosopher's Stone, the powder that produces the Elixir of Life. When Sage said she'd been chosen from birth, that's what she meant that she was raised from birth to succeed her mother as White Queen. Her parents believed they had regained control of the White Team and the Game after they killed my father and held the chess piece. But somebody else took the reins away without them realizing it. They didn't know about Galen March and Tatiana or about your stepfather switching camps. They never understood the real purpose the Service was intended for.'

Sage let out an unladylike snort that drew me up sharply. I noticed that the gun, held in a tighter grip than before, was now pointed at a part of my body that I'd like to keep on ticking.

She said, 'The real purpose of the Service is power. It has never been anything else. It's completely naive to think otherwise, regardless of what those fools you've been listening to may have tried to lead you into believing. I may not be a star chess player, as the two of you are, but I do know what I'm speaking of. After all, throughout my life I've been suckled at the nipple of power real power, world power, power that neither of you could even begin to imagine and I haven't yet been weaned of it...'

Et cetera.

As Sage ranted on about how she'd been born and bred to suck power through a straw, I was getting more and more frightened by the moment. I could feel Vartan's tension even from here. It must have been as clear to him as it was to me that Ms. 'Philosophia de Stone' here had lost what little bit of a mind she might once have moderately possessed. But neither of us seemed able to figure out how to make a spring for her at ten paces or even to interrupt her tirade.

And it was becoming even clearer that, for those who were addicted to power, even relative proximity to this miserable chess set was like offering them an instant megalomaniac pill. Indeed, Sage seemed to have swallowed a bottleful just prior to her arrival here today.

Furthermore, I realized it was only a matter of time before our girl Sage might suddenly stop worrying about whether pulling the trigger would spoil her bright new manicure. I knew we had to get out of here, and fast. And that we must take our coordinates with us.

But how?

I glanced toward Vartan. His eyes were still on Sage as if he were calculating exactly the same thing. The ma.s.sive chess queen sat exposed between us upon the table, but even if we grabbed it to use as a weapon, we couldn't throw it faster than a bullet could reach us. And even if we could over-power her, we could hardly hope to escape those professional hirelings outside with the aid of just that little pearl-handled gun. I had to come up with something. I wasn't sure I could break through Sage's 'diatribe on suckling' long enough to reason with her, but anything was worth a try.

'Sage,' I cut in, 'even a.s.suming that you can collect all these chess pieces, what will you do with them? You're not the only one looking for them, you know. Where would you go? Where can you hide?'

Sage looked momentarily stunned, as if perhaps she'd never thought that far ahead in designing her castle in the air. I was about to press my point, but the phone on the matre d's desk near the front door began ringing. Sage kept the gun pointed at me as she took a few steps back amid the tables for a wider view.

Then I noticed the other sound. A soft sound. Something familiar pa.s.sing just nearby, though it did take a moment before I recognized it myself.

The whish of Rollerblades over stone.

It seemed to be moving stealthily past us toward the front, hidden behind that long, high rack that traversed the length of the room, displaying Rodo's collection of ceramic cider jugs. But even with the relentless din of the phone up there, how long would it be before Leda pa.s.sed close enough to Sage that she would hear it, too?

From the corner of my eye I could see Vartan start to inch his way forward. Sage swung the gun toward him and he halted.

Just then, as Key would say, all h.e.l.l broke loose. An awful lot of cider was about to hit the fan.

It all happened in a matter of seconds.