“We need to know how close he has come.”

“He blundered into it, that’s all. Others have before. He can’t know the significance.” 

“We have been aware of someone gathering them together for years now, and we know that mister Lucas here has an interest in both unusual artifacts and at least one of the shards. It must be him.”

“Then we deal with him. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Oliver resisted a deep, animalistic urge to groan in pain as the first vague semblance of consciousness returned to him, bringing with it the muddled impression of voices and the clear, achingly precise sensation of ropes cutting into the flesh of his wrists and ankles.

The first voice came again. Male, vague accent that could have been British, but was equally lilted with something that struck Oliver’s ear as half way between a southern American drawl and something out of the middle east, but that could have just been the muddled state of his senses. “Have you searched him?”

“Yes. His name is Oliver Lucas. As you suspected, he is from America and I found a keycard to a London hotel, as well as ticket stubs from the Chunnel. His vest contained an assortment of what appears to be camera equipment, though given the concealed gun I would not be surprised if other weapons were hidden within the camera gear, and a smartphone. He had the gun concealed in the bag. Nine millimeter Glock, thirteen rounds in the magazine, a model seventeen variant only sold to private security firms in Germany.”

“The missing one?”

“I presume, but no bullets were recovered from the scene and we have no contacts within the staff of that particular security contractor, so we’ll need to get prints off the ammunition and run them against the dead man’s license record. That could take a while.” Female, that voice, and faintly Scandinavian beneath the British accent, Oliver thought.

“And the folio?”

“In the main compartment of the bag.”

Oliver wanted sorely to open his eyes, but he feared that his captors would notice and begin their interrogation. He wasn’t looking forward to that. He had been captured before, by mercenaries, tribesmen, cults, but something about this situation filled him with a cold dread, like the ache that set in when wearing wet clothing on a cold day. Perhaps, he mused, that was precisely the issue. He was still wet from the rain and, now that the thought had entered his mind, he realized that he was cold as well, as was the metal chair to which he was tied. But there was still something more in the voices of his captors, which seemed to shiver with a chill metallic ring.

“He’ll be coming around soon. Search him more thoroughly before he does. We need be sure that mister Lucas has no more surprises in store for us. Anyone with the nerve to transport a stolen weapon across international borders is likely more dangerous than he appears.”

Footsteps crossed a floor that echoed with the sound of, not concrete, perhaps stone or tile, and Oliver felt warm fingertips press against the back of his head for a moment, then pull away. The footsteps came again, circling Oliver, and then the fingers were at his throat, unbuttoning his shirt. They paused and Oliver heard a sharp, feminine intake of breath, then a sudden pain in the back of his neck as the leather cord around his neck was grasped and yanked forward. He cried out, eyes snapping open, and saw a short woman with straight blond hair crouching before him, the broken cord of his pendant dangling from her fingers. She raised her arm so the singed knot of leather cord, which Oliver had wrapped in an intricate braid about the smooth heartwood, dangled between them. Her eyes fixed on Oliver for a moment, then returned to the heartwood. She raised a hand as if to caress the gleaming surface, then hesitated, her eyes filling with uncertainty.

She thrust the pendant at Oliver and hissed, “How did you come to posses this?”

He remained silent, but his face must have revealed something of his puzzlement, because the woman grasped his hair and leaned closer to study his face. Oliver met her gaze and felt though his breath were ripped away from his lungs as he stared into the deep, nearly opalescent gray of her eyes. He felt in that moment as if the entirety of his soul was laid bare before her, every act, motivation, and desire spilled out to this strange woman through the irresistible connection of her gaze.

“What is it?” the man said from behind, his voice breaking into Oliver’s mind like  a piercing note shattering a glass.

The woman released Oliver’s head and his chin dropped to his chest. He didn’t know how, but for some reason he felt more drained than if she had spent hours interrogating him. She rose and walked around behind Oliver, still carrying the necklace, and said, “He was wearing this around his neck.”

“No.”

“It does seem unlikely.”

How can they know what it is? Oliver wondered. His mind was starting to wind back up after the numbing assault of whatever drugs they had used to sedate him. There were only, he paused to count, four people in the world who knew the significance of the heartwood pendant he had worn about his neck since returning from Egypt with the shattered remnants of Moses’s staff. Of those, only Diana had been present when he broke the staff to prevent its power from ever being used for ill and had witnessed the smooth, almost oily gleam of the heartwood fall from the staff to rest upon the sands.

Oliver pulled his head upright and risked a look about him. 

He gasped and blinked, certain that his eyes were deceiving him, but the view remained the same. A wall of glass rose up from the black and white tiled floor before him, comprised of hundreds of triangular sections of glass, each separated by a narrow band of metal, studded with rivets and painted with a thick accretion of many layers of white paint. Beyond the glass Oliver could see a school of fish nibbling at the long, green, wavering fronds of an underwater plant. Shafts of sunlight cut down through the water in a continual dance of radiant spears, which sparkled across the curving dome of glass above his head whenever they struck it. 

“Breathtaking, is it not, mister Lucas?” the man asked.

Oliver twisted his head to look behind him and see the speaker, but he could only catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure from the corners of his eyes as he strained. He twisted his body violently about, attempting to knock the metal folding chair around, but a heavy hand descended on the back of the chair and held it in place. 

“I come to this place whenever I have the opportunity. It holds a particular fascination to me, like the ruins of Petra, or the crumbling remains of a Roman ludus. Do you know what all of these remind me of, mister Lucas?”

Oliver shook his head, almost afraid to ask.

A hand settled on his shoulder, the long fingers flexing slowly, purposefully, as if to display their strength, then coming to rest as the thumb of the hand caressed the nape of Oliver’s neck. Oliver heard a hushed rustle and crack, like a large silk bed sheet being snapped out of its fold, then settling down to the bed through hushed air, then a breath of warm, dry air gusted across his left cheek as the voice whispered in his ear, “It reminds me of the corruption of mankind. Always you reach outward and upward, grasping, clawing, pushing yourselves beyond where you rightfully belong. Your kind was made to live in gentle harmony with the world, tending to creation as gardeners, not the brutal engineers you have become.”

“Who the hell are you?” Oliver growled, jerking his head away from the hot breath of his captor. The fingers at his neck pressed more tightly and Oliver stopped moving. He held his breath for what felt like several minutes and found that his eyes had fixed upon the distorted reflection of his own face in the glass wall.

The silence was shattered by a raucous laugh, which echoed from the walls and crashed into Oliver’s ears like the cry of an entire crowd. A dry heat blasted along the left side of his face. The pressure on his neck tightened for a brief moment, then disappeared entirely. Oliver again heard the strange rustling sound, then the familiar creak of old wooden joinery as a body settled into a chair behind him. Footsteps clicked across the tile floor and Oliver felt himself tilted backwards until, looking upward, he could see the woman who had stripped him of the heartwood standing above him, gripping the back of his chair. He could just see the glint of her eyes, which were squinted beneath the gold of her hair, which fell in a short sweep around her ears and perfectly framed a delicate face the shape and color of an almond. The hint of a frown creased the corners of her thin red lips and Oliver wondered, only for a moment, whether she might feel pity for his predicament. 

Then she grimaced and turned his chair around to face the other man. 

Oliver’s eyes were torn from the woman and fixed upon her companion, as if by an irresistible magnetism. For a moment Oliver could not focus on the man, as if he were at once a man sitting ten feet away in a wingback chair of red velvet, and a giant, squeezed down to the size of a human by a trick of forced perspective as he sat upon a mighty red throne hundreds of feet distant. The flickering rays of sunlight, twisted and shaded green by their passage through the water above, cut through the air with shafts of color. His eyes, visible even from this distance under a heavy brow, were the same silvery gray as the woman, and they seemed to glimmer as rays of sunlight passed over him. He was dressed in a formal white shirt, open at the neck and secured at the wrists by sapphire cufflinks, under a finely cut vest of grey wool, with matching grey pleated slacks. His white hair slicked back with painful precision above a high, bronze forehead. He lounged in the wingback chair and studied Oliver with a contemptuous curiosity as he idly dangled the heartwood pendant from his left hand.

“Oliver Lucas. Treasure hunter and smalltime, but effective, smuggler of artifacts for unscrupulous museums and collectors throughout America. Masquerades as a travel photographer. Am I wrong about anything so far?”

Oliver glared back at the man and shook his head.

“Obviously, your old professor turned you in to us. Theft of a valuable, some might say priceless, historical document. Assault. Murder. Destruction of property throughout Germany. These are serious charges, mister Lucas.”

“I haven’t killed anyone,” Oliver growled. Clearly not police of any sort, no matter what they might pretend, he thought. Police didn’t drag you to an underwater lair for questioning and, come to think of it, Oliver doubted that even the British police had adopted drugging suspects at gunpoint as a standard procedure for arrests.

“I beg to differ. Just last month you killed a man in a cavern on one of the Cook Islands, did you not?”

How the hell does he know about that? A voice whispered in Oliver’s head. He bit down on his tongue and focused on keeping his face under control, then tilted his head to one side, miming confusion.

The man shook his head and chuckled. “You are welcome to continue your charade, mister Lucas, but I would advise against it.” He looked away from Oliver to the heartwood pendant dangling form his fingertips. He pulled it up to his hand with a deft flickering of fingers and examined it closely, saying, “This is a remarkable piece to be carrying around you neck so casually. In another age it would have been revered as a holy relic. Pilgrims would have traveled thousands of miles to gaze upon it, pray near it, purchase a vial of holy oil that had been blessed by a priest who held it.” His fist closed about the heartwood and he glared at Oliver with undisguised hatred as he said, “It is not to be worn about the sweaty neck of a thief like some trinket you picked up while on vacation! Do you even know what this is?”

“It is a piece of the staff that Moses carried when he freed the Israelites,” Oliver replied.

“Impressive. I had wondered at the specific origin of it, but you still have not told me what it is.”

“It’s...” Oliver faltered. He was unsure how to answer the question, and still trying to figure out how much this man knew about him. Clearly he didn’t know all of the details of the Egyptian adventure, but he somehow knew about what had happened in the cavern with Loki. 

“Precisely. You know the shape of the thing, Mister Lucas, but you fail to know what the thing itself is.” The man tucked the heartwood away in the pocket of his vest and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and steepling his fingers before his narrow lips. “Much like your obsession with certain shards of a particularly cold metal.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Please, save the lies. We’ve been watching you for years now.”

“I’ve yet to hear anything that convinces me you’re more than a rival. I do have a lot of enemies.” 

The man chuckled and his face contorted into a smile that turned Oliver’s blood cold. Something in the casual twist of the lips, the calm poise of his posture, the utter stillness of his eyes as he laughed told Oliver that this was a man who was in utter control, both of himself, and the situation. He held Oliver’s gaze for a long while, then  glanced upwards and gave a barely perceptible wave of his right hand. “You’re just like them, the builders of this place. You think that you are special, that the universe can be bent to your will, that the inevitable decay of time will not catch you in its net and pull you down into the maw of history. Trust me Oliver, I have seen more time than you can imagine, and the only constant for you mortals is your inevitable death.”

“I’m quite aware of my own mortality,” Oliver growled. He strained at the ropes binding his arms, trying to work a deep kink out of his left shoulder. “What about you?”

“Then there will be no need for me to compel you to tell me the truth.”

“Truth?”

“Where are the shards that you stole?”

“Shards?”

“Oliver, don’t make me hurt you to get the information I need. You’re obviously talented and,” he patted the pocket of his vest, “there must be something special about you to have gained access to this. It would be a shame for someone like you to die in agony, or for your beloved cousin to reveal what she knows about the shards in exchange for no longer receiving pieces of your body in the mail.”

“You keep her out of this,” Oliver shouted, surging up until his body bucked against the restraints and he fell back, wrists bloodied and strained ankles screaming.

“Ah, I thought that would be your heel. Sweet Amber, isn’t it, with her husband who knows nothing of your shared adventures, and she has a child on the way now, doesn’t she?”

“How the hell do you know any of that?” Oliver hissed. 

“It is my business to know. Now, if you will excuse me, I think you could do with some time to think about matters.” The man unfolded himself from the wingback chair and strode towards the narrow door set in the far wall of the dome, where the glass panes gave way to a wide sheet of metal, lined with empty brackets where shelves had once rested. He paused at the door and said, “Think carefully Oliver. We are going to know one another very well, one way or another, and it is up to you whether we work together, or I remove your extremities one joint at a time and mail them home to your precious cousin.”

Next Chapter: Living Electricity