| |
Kemerhisar, Turkey—one week later
“I knew this would go horribly wrong,” Uriah “Bones” Bonebrake muttered, shaking his head in disgust.
“Silence,” hissed the young blond-haired man who held a pistol pressed to the side of Jade Ihara’s neck.
“What do you want, Black?” Dane Maddock asked.
“You know what I want,” sneered Aramis Black. “Give them to me now, or she dies.”
Aramis Black—that was the name the man had given them a few days earlier when they had first met but probably not the name on his birth certificate—was a magician. Not a sleight-of-hand illusionist, but an honest to goodness sorcerer, a student of the dark arts which, Maddock thought, might explain how he had been able to sneak up on them, seemingly materializing out of thin air, to grab Jade and put a gun to her throat.
Black belonged to an occult society based in Plymouth, England, presently led by an exotic raven-haired beauty named Aliyah Cerulean. Aliyah and Black, along with the other members of their order, had until recently been the guardians of a purportedly magical talisman which they called “the Magna of Illusion,” an obsidian mirror found in a temple ruin in Central America in the Sixteenth Century and allegedly owned by famed occultist Dr. John Dee, who had used it for divination and prophecy.
Maddock had no idea if any of that was true, but the mirror was real enough. He knew this for a fact because he—along with Jade and Bones, and their new companions, Rose Greer and Nick Kismet—had stolen the Magna of Illusion from the order’s treasure vault on Drake Island in Plymouth Harbor.
Maybe “stolen” wasn’t the right word.
Aliyah, had drawn them into a trap so that she could seize two relics which were in their possession: The Apex, an amulet of blue stone in the shape of a pyramid, discovered more than a century earlier by an ancestor of Kismet’s adopted father; and a black metallic sphere, which they had dubbed “the orb” but which Kismet sometimes called “the anomaly,” discovered in an ice-bound pyramid in Antarctica just a week before.
The three objects—the Apex, the orb and the mirror—were part of a set, it seemed; three of four, each representing a different alchemical element—fire, earth, water, and air—and each linked to a suit in the mystical Tarot deck—wands, disks, cups, and swords. The search for the fourth relic was what had brought Maddock and his friends to the ruins of ancient Tyana, on the Anatolian Plateau of central Turkey.
Aliyah desired all four relics, believing that they would imbue her with immortality and other supernatural gifts. She had also expressed a desire to kill Nick Kismet, in revenge for the death of her husband, who had perished while attempting to steal the Apex from Kismet. The five of them had turned the tables on Aliyah and her magicians, escaping with all three artifacts, which seemed to Maddock like fair restitution for the trouble she had put them through. Evidently, Aliyah Cerulean had a different definition of “fair.”
Bones shrugged in response to the threat. “Kill her. It’s no skin off my handsomely aquiline Cherokee nose.”
Jade glowered at him. “Maybe we should trade places, Uriah.”
“She will only be the first to die,” Black hissed, shaking her for effect. “And lest you think you can repeat that little trick you used against us on Drake’s Island, know that there are sniper rifles trained on you at this very moment.”
“‘Lest’?” Bones said, giving Maddock a sidelong glance. “Who talks like that?”
Maddock ignored his friend. The quips were just Bones’ way of dealing with stressful situations. And pretty much every other kind of situation, too.
“How did you find us?” he asked.
His curiosity was genuine, since they had taken great pains to disguise their movements from England to Turkey, but he didn’t really need an answer to the question. What he was really doing was stalling. The sniper threat felt like a bluff. On the flat plain where the ruins were situated, there weren’t a lot of places with a good line of sight, though there was a stand of trees to the northwest where, conceivably, a gunman might be able to reach sufficient elevation to draw a bead on them. Maddock wasn’t ready to call that bluff just yet.
Another familiar voice spoke from behind them, answering the question. “You seek the Tabula Smaragdina,” said Aliyah Cerulean. “Where else would you go?”
The Tabula Smaragdina—the Emerald Tablet—was an alchemical, or more accurately, hermetical text which purported to contain the secret for creating prima materia—the key ingredient in the so-called Philosopher’s Stone—which could be used to create an elixir of eternal life or transmute base metals into gold.
The text was well known, handed down through the centuries, translated and studied by great thinkers such as Roger Bacon, Albert Magnus, Sir Isaac Newton and even Carl Jung. The text included one of the key principles of alchemy, “As above, so below,” but also hinted at a relationship between matter and energy which would not be understood until the dawn of the nuclear age. The origin of the short text—just fourteen lines—was uncertain, but the oldest documentable source of the text was found in an Eighth Century Persian manuscript called Kitāb sirr al-ḫalīqa—the Book of the Secret of Creation and the Art of Nature—attributed to a man named Balinas. Balinas, also called Pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana—claimed to have copied it from a tablet made of emerald—thus the name—which he had discovered in a vault below a statue of Hermes in the city of Tyana.
Maddock would have dismissed the story as fanciful if not for the fact that Nick Kismet had seen something that looked remarkably like an emerald tablet in a vision supplied by the Magna of Illusion. There seemed little doubt that the Emerald Tablet—not the text, but the original tablet itself—was the fourth elemental relic.
Maddock turned his head in the direction of the voice and saw Aliyah, flanked by two men with guns, presumably other members of her occult order.
“You obviously already have the sphere from the ice pyramid,” Aliyah went on. “That’s the only explanation for the power you used to defeat us at Plymouth. Only the sword remains—the elemental talisman representing air. The Smaragdine Tablet.”
Maddock shrugged. “The legend says that Balinas found the Emerald Tablet in a vault under the statue of Hermes in Tyana. It seemed like the place to start looking.”
Aliyah gave a cold laugh. “And it did not occur to you that others would have searched this place before you?” She shook her head. “Your ignorance amply demonstrates that you are not worthy to possess the elemental talismans.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Bones.
Aliyah waved a hand. “There is no statue of Hermes here. No temple.”
That was something Maddock and the others had learned even before boarding the flight to Ankara, Turkey. The ruins of Tyana consisted mainly of some arches supporting a Roman aqueduct and a public bath. The rest of the city, which had once been an important settlement in the region going back to the time of the Hittite Empire in the Second Millennium B.C.E., was gone—buried under the sands of time.
“Maybe not anymore,” Maddock conceded.
Aliyah laughed again. “And you imagined that, if you could find the place where it once stood, the vault would magically open to you, as it did for Balinas.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Maddock said, shrugging.
In truth, that was exactly what they had been hoping for. The four elemental relics were linked somehow, reacting visibly when in close proximity with each other, and they had hoped to use the three relics they possessed like a compass to lead them to the fourth.
“Is it really so hard to believe?” Bones added. “Come on. I thought you guys believed in magic.” He drew out the last consonant and then added, “With a ‘k’.”
Magick, as they had learned, was the preferred spelling for the occultists, a way of differentiating their ‘serious’ magical practices from the trickery of stage magicians.
“Give me the elemental talismans,” Aliyah said, her tone as cold and hard as a glacier, “and I will let you walk away.”
“Joke’s on you,” Bones said. “We don’t have them. Kismet and Rose took them. They didn’t tell us where.”
“Somewhere where they’ll be safe from you,” Maddock confirmed with a nod. “You didn’t really think we’d just wander around with them in a backpack, did you?”
Aliyah’s eyes narrowed, as if focusing laser beams of pure hate energy at them. “Then there’s no reason to bother with you any longer, is there?”
“Right?” Bones said. “See ya.”
Aliyah turned to one of the men beside her. “Kill them.”
Maddock sucked in his breath. “Are you sure you want to do that? Out here in the open?”
Aliyah’s lips curled into a malevolent smile. “Do you see anyone else here?”
“Let me guess. You bribed the local police to keep everyone away so there wouldn’t be any witnesses.”
Aliyah inclined her head. “Like I said, I knew you would come here.” She looked away and made a cutting gesture, signaling her desire to end the conversation. Permanently.
“Wait,” Bones said, quickly. “I lied.”
“What a surprise.” Aliyah did not look at him, but the two gunmen with her did. They raised their pistols and took aim.
Bones pressed on. “When I said I didn’t know where Kismet was going to take those magical doohickeys... That was a fib. I do know.”
Aliyah shrugged. “I think this is the lie. But it does not matter. I found you. I will find him.”
The gunmen circled around behind Maddock and Bones, maintaining a stand-off distance of several feet. “Kneel,” one of them said. “Hands behind your head. Fingers laced.”
“You saw that in a movie, right?” Bones retorted. “Trust me, it’s a whole lot different in real life.” He didn’t sound even a little bit fearful, which was more than Maddock could say for himself.
Where is Kismet, he wondered.
A foot struck him in the back of the knee and his leg folded under him, dropping him into a kneeling position.
“Wait!” cried out a new voice. A woman’s voice.
Maddock looked up and saw Rose Greer approaching, her hands raised. The straps of her backpack were visible, crossing over the top of her shoulders, looping around her arms. Maddock’s heart sank a little lower. The backpack contained two of the relics—the orb and the mirror.
Aliyah faced Rose. “Ah, what a surprise. Now we’re just missing one. Where is Nick Kismet?”
“He’s out there. Watching.” Rose kept her head high, defiant, but there was still a faint quaver of fear in her voice. She locked stares with Maddock. “He told me to tell you that he took care of the sniper. He also said you should look for the laser dot.”
The effect of these words on Aliyah’s magicians was immediate and dramatic. The men began looking around, checking themselves to see if they were being painted with the red dot of a laser aiming device, and as they did, their attention was diverted from the three captives, which was probably exactly what Kismet intended with the message.
Contrary to popular belief, laser aiming devices were rarely used for long distance shooting, and when they were, they were almost always in infrared wavelengths, invisible without the aid of night vision goggles. The visible red dot lasers so common in movies and television shows were typically used only with handguns, and had an effective range of only about twenty-five yards, with the “dot” increasing in size as the beam dispersed over distance. At distances of more than a hundred yards, the illuminated area might be several feet across.
Maddock still wasn’t convinced that there actually was a sniper, but in that moment, all that mattered to the magicians—Black and Aliyah included—was making sure that they weren’t being targeted. It was just the distraction Maddock and Bones needed to seize the upper hand.
Both men exploded from their kneeling positions, easily overpowering and disarming the two would-be executioners. In a flash, both gunmen were on the ground, their pistols now pointed back at them. Jade surprised Black—and Maddock, as well—by deftly ducking away from the gun at her neck, and then twisting around in Black’s grasp to ram her knee into his crotch so hard that even Bones let out a yelp of sympathetic pain.
Aliyah, unarmed and now outgunned, made an abortive attempt to flee, but only got as far as the nearest arch before a hand shot out to seize hold of her.
It was Nick Kismet, armed, not with a sniper rifle, but with his wicked-looking kukri knife, which he held in a saber grip, the tip just inches from Aliyah’s eye.
“I warned you what would happen,” he said, his voice low and menacing.
Aliyah tried to pull away, and when she failed at that, spat at him. “Go on. Kill me. Just as you killed my husband.”
Kismet’s expression changed, softened. He sighed and lowered the knife a few inches. “All right, you got me. I was bluffing. I never meant for your husband to die. He attacked me, I fought back, he fell. Call it self-defense or an accident. I didn’t want to kill him, and don’t want to kill you.”
“Do you think I want your mercy?”
Kismet shook his head. “I don’t care what you want. But if you keep this up, somebody is going to get hurt, and I guarantee it won’t be me.”
“Better believe him,” advised Bones, with a chuckle. “You think you know magick? Trust me, you don’t know diddly-squat.”
“You have no idea what I know,” Aliyah retorted.
Maddock wondered if the woman suspected the true meaning of Kismet’s statement. Several years earlier, Kismet had been drawn into a quest for the secret of immortality—and he had found it. Now, not only did he look ten years younger than his actual age, but he could recover from even mortal injuries, healing completely in a matter of minutes. Maddock would not have believed it if he hadn’t witnessed Kismet recover from a lethal jolt of electricity a few days earlier.
But even though Kismet was invulnerable, the rest of them weren’t which was why the continued harassment from Aliyah’s magicians was becoming a serious problem, particularly as they seemed all too eager to indulge in cold-blooded murder.
“Well,” Kismet said lowering the knife further but keeping an unbreakable grip on the woman’s arm. “It’s a stalemate then. I can’t allow you to keep coming after us, and since I’m not going to just kill you outright, that seems to leave only one option. You’ll have to come with us.”
“Now just hold on a second.” Maddock’s voice joined a chorus of protest. Everyone—from Jade and Rose to Black and the other magicians—had something to say about the suggestion.
Aliyah just eyed Kismet, warily. “You would do that? Knowing that I have sworn to destroy you.”
Kismet shrugged. “I’ve been told I have a weakness for bad girls.”
Aliyah’s face twisted with revulsion. “In your dreams.”
Maddock cleared his throat. “Nick, we can’t trust her. First chance she gets, she’ll turn on us. And even if she doesn’t get that chance, we’re not going to be able to travel with a hostage.”
Kismet continued staring at Aliyah. “You don’t have to be our hostage. Look, we both want to find the Emerald Tablet. We’ve already got three of the four elementals. That gives us an edge. But you know more about it than any of us. So, let’s work together.”
“And when we find it?”
“We cross that bridge when we come to it. Your best chance of ever seeing it is with us.”
Maddock exchanged a look with Bones, who just shook his head. “Put a snake in your pocket, you’re gonna get bit,” he said, with an expansive air, as if reciting some bit of tribal lore.
“It’s painful for me to say this,” Jade said, keeping her eyes on Black, along with the business end of the pistol she’d taken from him, “but I agree with Bones. She’s poison. We can’t trust her.”
Maddock shook his head. “No, Nick’s right. We’re not cold-blooded killers.” He turned to Aliyah. “And we’re not the only ones looking for it. It makes sense to work together.”
“If you refuse,” Kismet said, still staring at the woman, “or if they convince me that you can’t be trusted, we’ll drop you off somewhere. Probably out in the middle of nowhere, far from telephones and roads.”
Aliyah’s eyes narrowed again, but her expression lost some of its venom. “When you put it like that, how can I say no?”