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Plymouth, England 1910
The coachwork canopy of the Lanchester 16 kept the persistent drizzle at bay, but did little to banish the chill. The driver seemed impervious to both, but the young boy who sat beside him had lived most of his life in the desert and the cool, damp air cut deep into him despite his best efforts to disappear completely into a heavy wool blanket.
The boy’s name was Hassan ibn Ali, though he had not been called this in many years. His master—the man who now drove the Lanchester along the muddy old carriage road—called him ‘Blue Boy’ or sometimes just ‘Blue,’ and mostly that was how he thought of himself. The master was not a cruel man, though Blue greatly feared to cause him displeasure. He had seen the man call down lightning from the heavens and that alone was enough to terrify him. Besides, he liked the color, especially the cerulean hue of a cloudless sky at noon. Whenever he saw that, which wasn’t often at this latitude, he thought of home and the life he had lived before the master’s arrival.
It almost felt like a dream to him now.
Their destination was a great stone house, perched atop a hill. Blue supposed that on a clear day, the house would have a spectacular view of Plymouth Sound to the east but on this dreary night, the only indication that they were near water was the relentless pulses of illumination against the dismal clouds. Two flashes every ten seconds from the Eddystone lighthouse which lay several miles offshore, at the entrance to the harbor.
The house was dark and looked deserted, but as they rolled up the drive toward it, the driver worked the klaxon, sending out a piercing note to herald their arrival. As the car pulled to a stop, a door opened revealing lamplight within. The Lanchester’s engine coughed and sputtered for several seconds and then with one final harsh bang, like a gunshot, fell silent. Blue shed the blanket like the second skin it had become and with great reluctance opened the door and stepped out into the gray drizzle. As soon as he was in the open, he deployed a large umbrella and immediately found some shelter under its capacious dome, but he knew this would only be a brief reprieve. He circled around to the opposite side of the automobile and held the umbrella high above the door to protect the driver as he emerged. As the umbrella moved away from Blue, he again felt the chilly rain on the back of his neck but he endured this discomfort with gritted teeth. His duties did not require him to be warm or dry.
He had to hurry to keep up with the master’s long determined strides, which posed a new set of problems. The mud was slippery underfoot and with his arm extended, it took all his concentration to keep his footing. By some miracle, they reached the front door where a man holding an oil lamp gestured for them to hurry inside.
The old house was draughty and Blue could hear the sound of water trickling against stone, indicating at least one leak in the old thatch, but it was a marginal improvement. He shook the water off the umbrella before setting it aside, and then helped the master out of his cloak and galoshes. Beneath his wet weather clothes, the master wore a long saffron colored gown, decorated with spangles, and wound about his head was a white turban, adorned with a star ruby cabochon brooch. The costume was probably meant to make him look like a holy man or mystic from the Far East, but the overall effect was a touch too theatrical, making him seem more like a stage magician or worse, a carnival mountebank.
It was a deliberate choice, more effective at altering his appearance and hiding his true identity than any magic spell.
He did not always dress like this. Only when he was with Blue... Only when he was Adam Garral. And when he was Garral, he wanted those who saw him to remember his outlandish attire, not his true face.
The man with the lamp did not speak, and with the light held before him, his face remained hidden in shadow. When they had doffed their wet weather clothes, the man turned and beckoned them to follow.
They were led to an interior room where a roaring fire at last drove the chill from Blue’s bones. He unconsciously moved closer to the hearth, savoring the warmth that radiated from it. The man with the lamp—Blue now saw that he was about the same age as the master, of similar build and handsome, though heavier—set the light down on a table, and settled himself into one of the chairs arrayed around it.
Garral glanced down at the seated man for a moment. “Still playing at cards, Alick?”
Blue craned his head to get a better look and saw dozens of rectangular pieces of pasteboard spread out on the tabletop. He edged closer, curious despite his desire to stay near the fire, and saw familiar symbols sketched on some of the cards—swords, cups, pentacles—and crudely drawn figures on others. Most were blank.
The man at the table looked up, a scowl on his slightly plump face. “I hate that name.”
“I know,” Garral said, gravely, then burst out laughing.
The other man shook his head irritably. “Why are you here, Adam?”
“You know why,” Garral replied. “The mirror. You have it. I want to look into it.”
“The mirror is a bauble. A parlor game.”
“Then you should have no objection to letting me have a look.”
The card maker regarded him with naked suspicion. “You’ve learned something, haven’t you? Some new insight?”
“I won’t know until I’ve tried.”
The card maker nodded slowly. “Very well, but you must share it with me.”
Garral inclined his head in a gesture of surrender.
The other man leaned to the side and began rooting in a carpet bag that rested alongside his chair. When he straightened, he held in his hands something that looked to Blue like a misshapen dinner plate made of smoky glass. He placed it on the tabletop and slid it toward the visitor.
Garral sucked in his breath when he saw it but tried to hide his reaction behind another smile. He stared down at the obsidian disc for a moment, his expression only mildly curious, but Blue could sense the eagerness in him. Garral’s entire body seemed to vibrate with it, like a plucked harp string. Blue took an involuntary step closer, as if drawn by his master’s magnetism.
Garral abruptly pivoted, grabbed a chair and adjusted it so that it was positioned in front of the black mirror, and then, snapping the sleeves of his ornate gown with a dramatic flourish, lowered himself into it.
He placed his hands on the table, palms down to either side of the mirror, and closed his eyes as if meditating. After a few seconds, his eyelids fluttered open and he reached up with this right hand to touch the ruby on his turban with a finger. His lips began moving, framing a silent incantation. Blue knew this was a pretense, a charade to divert their host’s attention away from what Garral was doing with his left hand. Under the table, hidden from the other man’s view, but not from Blue, Garral was gripping a small block of cobalt colored stone.
The object was a talisman of some sort. Blue still remembered the first time he had seen it, the night Garral had called down fire from the sky, the same night that he had entered into his master’s service. The stone, unlike the ruby brooch, was a source of real power, though Garral had never succeeded in duplicating what had happened on that fateful night. Now, or so it seemed, he was trying to unlock its potential in a different way.
Garral now leaned over the flat black mirror as if to stare into it, and slowly, tentatively, reached down to touch it with his right hand.
The moment his fingers made contact, he jerked them back as if the mere touch had burned him. Blue ran to his master’s side, reflexively laying a steadying hand on Garral’s shoulder. In that same instant, Garral touched the mirror again.
A memory sprang unbidden into Blue’s mind. He vividly recalled the first time he had seen the mirror, resting on an altar in a room made of jade, hidden at the heart of a dark pyramid temple in the jungles of New Spain—the land now known as Mexico.
But no, that couldn’t be right. He had never seen this strange mirror before... Had not felt even a faint glimmer of recognition upon seeing it.
Yet his memory of its discovery was beyond vivid.
A score of men had died on the journey to reach the temple, felled by wild beasts and fever, hazards common to the emerald hell through which they had blazed a path, seeking gold and other riches. Five more had died inside the maze of passages that cut through the pyramids interior, and what had killed them was beyond Blue’s comprehension. Everything about the pyramid defied reason. The walls were joined at impossible angles, like something that could only exist in a nightmare....
He remembered taking it from the altar... Picking it up with his own hands....
Now he remembered another day, many months later. He was on a ship... Not a steam-powered vessel, but a sailing ship, a massive craft with three masts stabbing up into a cloudless azure sky. The riggings hung empty, the sails lowered, the ship unmoving. The crew, swarthy, rough looking men, stood in rows on the deck, similarly motionless. A second ship lay alongside the first, the two held together with ropes and grappling hooks. Men, armed with long knives and old matchlock pistols and muskets, were crossing over.
Pirates, Blue thought, and then a name came to mind.
Drake.
Blue staggered back a step, and as he lost contact with Garral, the flood of memories ceased with the abruptness of a door slamming shut. He shook off a sudden sensation of vertigo and returned his attention to Garral, desperate to know what he had just experienced, but afraid to ask.
Garral had not moved. He sat as still as a statue, one hand touching the obsidian mirror, the other surreptitiously gripping the lapis lazuli talisman. Blue started to reach for him again, but hesitated, remembering that they were not alone.
The card maker was staring intently, almost hungrily, at Garral.
Before Blue could do anything else, Garral jerked in his chair and then sat up straight. His head turned back and forth, eyes dancing as if trying to remember where he was.
“Adam,” the awed card maker whispered. “What did you see?”
Garral stared at him mutely for a moment, then reached out across the table with both hands. His left seized one of the blank paste board cards. His right wrapped around the long shaft of a pencil. He brought both to him and then began sketching an image.
The tip of the pencil moved with preternatural swiftness and precision, and in mere seconds, an image took shape. It was a human form, and for a moment, Blue thought he was looking at the likeness of the crucified Christ. Garral continued sketching, adding details—small figures surrounding the central figure, a web of lines that reminded Blue of the riggings on the sailing vessel he had... remembered? Imagined?
Garral stopped sketching, contemplating the sketch for a moment, and then laid the pencil down beside the card.
“That?” The card maker said. “That is what you saw? What is it?”
Garral returned a cryptic smile. “Why, my dear Alick, it’s everything.”
––––––––
McMurdo Station, Antarctica—Now
“When I got on this plane, I really thought it meant I was done freezing my balls off.” Uriah “Bones” Bonebrake gazed down the lowering ramp of the US Air Force C-17A Globemaster III extended range cargo plane and out across the stark white Antarctic landscape and shook his head sadly.
“You know what happens when you assume.”
Bones turned and met the smirking gaze of his tormentor. “Yes Jade, I do. I know that some ass—you—will give me a freaking spelling lesson.”
“I don’t often take the big guy’s side,” said Dane Maddock, standing right behind Bones and next to Jade. “But he’s right.”
Jade Ihara rolled her eyes. “You always take his side, Maddock. That’s your biggest problem.”
“That’s because he’s figured out that I’m usually right,” Bones said, with a grin that was more menacing than friendly. “And you haven’t. That’s your biggest problem. As rescues go, this one kind of blows. We’re still in Antarctica, we still have that orb we picked up at the Outpost, and as far as we know, this Prometheus group—whoever they really are—is still after us. And I’m still freezing my balls off. Which part of that did I get wrong, Jade?”
“The part where you actually have balls, I think.”
“Play nice kids,” Maddock said. “Let’s not fight in front of our new friends.”
“Sorry,” said Rose Greer, standing just behind him. “But I’m with Bones. It’s been fun, but I am so over this place.”
Maddock blew out his breath in a long audible sigh. He could see the exhalation floating in front of him, a vapor cloud turning into ice crystals before his very eyes. “Well, we can’t leave until we return the snowcat.”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think that ship has sailed.” This came from the remaining member of their group, Nick Kismet. “We may still be in Antarctica, but we’re about two thousand miles from your snowcat. I don’t think I’m going to be able to convince the pilot to make another trip like that anytime soon. Especially not with what happened this time out.”
Five hours earlier, Kismet and Jade had swooped in with the C-17 to pluck the rest of them from the middle of a harrowing firefight on the polar ice. The snowcat in question—a loaner—had carried Maddock, Bones and Rose from Novo Base on the part of the continent that was closest to the southern tip of Africa, to the Mühlig-Hofmann Mountains where they had discovered what appeared to be a man-made pyramid, jutting up from the ice like an enormous black tooth. Stranger still, they had discovered a tunnel in the ice which took them inside the structure, where they had found a strange spherical artifact with extraordinary, and quite possibly supernatural properties. Shortly after finding it however, they had been attacked by a group of gunmen—agents of a mysterious group that Nick Kismet had subsequently identified as Prometheus.
Although they had made it out of the pyramid with the artifact, they had been outnumbered and outgunned, and the situation had looked pretty dire until the unexpected arrival of Kismet and Jade aboard the C-17. Unfortunately, they had been obliged to leave the snowcat behind. If the surviving Prometheus gunmen hadn’t already helped themselves to the tracked all-terrain vehicle, it would eventually be covered over by an ever-deepening blanket of ice and swept away by the relentlessly advancing glacier.
After the rescue, the plane had flown nonstop over the frozen continent to McMurdo Station on the Ross Ice shelf, and as Kismet had pointed out, despite the fact that they were still on the same continent, the snowcat was as far away from them now as Los Angeles was from Detroit, and every inch of it was in the harshest, most unforgiving landscape on earth.
“Screw the pilots,” Bones said. “You couldn’t convince me to go back. Not for a million bucks.”
Maddock wondered if a million dollars would cover the replacement cost of the snowcat and sighed again. It would be a hell of a tax write-off, at least.
The cargo ramp settled into place and with one final whine of effort, the hydraulic actuators went silent. Beyond the ramp lay the packed snow of Williams Field—one of the official runways servicing McMurdo Station.
“Actually,” Bones said as he stared out at the brutally austere environment, “I’m not even sure I want to get off this plane. Can’t we just hang here while they top off the tanks?”
Kismet shook his head. “I’m afraid this bird won’t be heading back to civilization until we’ve accomplished our primary mission.”
“Believe it or not,” Jade chimed in, with more than a hint of sarcasm in her tone, “We didn’t actually come down here just to pull your asses out of the fire.”
“Oh, if only there had been a fire,” Bones sighed.
“Come on, Jade.” Maddock said. “Don’t tell me you just happened to be in the neighborhood. You knew right where to find us. And you already said that Tam sent you here. So what’s really going on?”
Jade glanced over at Kismet. “Do you want to tell them, or should I?”
Kismet shrugged. “They’re your friends.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Bones grumbled.
“Me either,” Jade shot back acidly, but then she shifted her gaze to Maddock and her expression softened a little. She pointed out at an approaching red shape, a massive vehicle trailing a cloud of blowing snow. “There’s Ivan. Come on. I’ll tell you what I know on the way, and Nick can fill in the gaps.”
With that, she moved past Bones and started down the ramp. Maddock knew she was being stingy with the information just to piss him off. Evidently, she was still sore about how their relationship had ended. He also knew the only way he was going to get any answers was to play along, so he followed her down to the ice.
Bones just shook his head. “Now I gotta ride with some dude named Ivan. I’ll bet he smells like beets. This day just keeps getting better.”