Paladin Prophecy 2: Alliance (11 page)

“Without a canoe?” asked Brooke.

“Just keep paddling, oh ye of little faith,” said Ajay.

“I need to get to work here,” said Will. “Head back to the pod and get ready. We’re going in tonight.”

Will wolfed down his sandwich, drank half his water, and went to work examining the boxes. He discovered that all of them had dates scrawled on the side, so he cranked up to his highest speed, motored around the room rearranging them, and had them neatly arranged in chronological order in less than twenty minutes. Three equal rows, forty boxes in each, lined up in the center of the room. Some were sealed; most were open. Their weight varied greatly; some were packed solid and heavy with books and ledgers, while others contained nothing but rolled-up maps.

He started going through them, not immediately finding any connection between Haxley and the Knights but he was thrilled by what he did discover. This was a treasure trove; the whole history of the Crag appeared to be in these boxes. In a box labeled
cornish
he found maps of the island dating to the nineteenth century, along with the original blueprints for the castle. Will snapped pictures of those. He also came across a wealth of information about the Center, with records for the school that were as recent as 2006.

That surprised him: He’d been under the impression the Crag had always been a private residence, so it made sense that documents related to the history of the house would be present, but what were all these records about the Center doing here?

There was such a wealth of material that his biggest challenge was deciding where to begin his search. He settled on looking for anything related to one year in particular, the first moment when they knew for a fact that the Knights of Charlemagne and the Black Caps intersected in time: 1937. The year when that photograph was taken, showing Hobbes and Nepsted together, at the dinner given for Henry Wallace.

Will eventually located a couple of boxes with 1937 scrawled on the side. Most of the contents appeared to be mundane paperwork relating to maintenance of the castle grounds. Accounting and payroll ledgers. Books of receipts from vendors. Canceled checks in files, hundreds of them, all drawn from an account for the Greenwood Foundation—the parent organization that owned the Center and its assets, including the NSEA—and for the most part signed by the school’s treasurer and accountant.

But not all of them. Paging through the 1937 check files, Will found one written in October in the amount of $315. This “Greenwood Foundation” check was made out to Henry Wallace—who, as they already knew, had been the United States’ secretary of agriculture.

In the lower left hand corner was written,
Reimbursement for travel expenses.
That date lined up with the photograph Brooke had found of Wallace at the private school dinner.

Then he discovered something even more curious about it: This check—and
only
this one of all the hundreds he’d gone through—was signed by Will’s great-grandfather, Thomas Greenwood, the school’s founder and first headmaster.

So it seemed that the Center—and Thomas Greenwood
personally
—had invited Wallace to the school for that event, and perhaps other activities, even paying his way so he could attend.

But why? This certainly seemed to confirm that the Center—and its founder and headmaster—still approved of the Knights at that point in time. It even suggested that, for some unknown reason, Thomas Greenwood wanted a prominent national figure to meet with them.

Will couldn’t find any other documents relating to the dinner, but he wanted to check the 1938 boxes to see what he could find there. He checked the time: nearly 11:00 a.m.

Lemuel Clegg would expect him for lunch in the kitchen in an hour. He needed to look for the security center and scout the hatch entrance, which didn’t leave enough time to search through any more boxes with the level of detail the job demanded. Based on the small sample he’d seen, there were many things about the Crag and the school in these boxes that they needed to know—maybe really important things—but if he rushed through them, his eyes would cross eventually and he’d stop paying attention and would surely miss something.

This was a perfect job for Ajay. He’d take one look and would retain it as reliably as scanning all this data into a computer.

But how to get any of this to him? Will could sneak a small number of files out in his backpack, but it would take forever to process all this material that way and they didn’t have that much time. The other alternative was to somehow sneak Ajay up here, during daylight, so he could buzz through all of it himself, but that presented even more obvious risks.

No solution immediately came to mind.

So, first step: He’d have to stretch out this mundane job so Lemuel didn’t stick him onto some other mundane task. With no way of knowing where they’d assign him next, and with Haxley out of town, better that he live up to Mr. Clegg’s impression of him as an insubordinate slacker. He quickly disarranged the boxes to make it look like he’d only started sorting them, memorizing the arrangement so he could still track their chronology.

Then he went downstairs to look for the Crag’s security control center.

The long stone corridor heading away from the circular staircase led to a number of tributaries, an endless warren of halls, some ending in locked doors, others in dusty storage rooms filled with old furniture and framed paintings. He even found a large vaulted wine cellar with a probably priceless inventory of bottles.

The air in these old halls felt as ancient as the stones in the walls and worn floors, probably the oldest part of the whole estate. He followed the passageways as they meandered around under the entire castle, hoping to find, at some point, that they might connect to the tunnel that led down under the lake, but no luck and, so far, no security center.

Making his way back to the stairs to the main house, Will felt a weird tingling curl its way up his back from the base of his spine to his neck. He stopped and after making sure no one was watching him—which was close to what this felt like—he closed his eyes and tried to track the source of this uncanny feeling.

He’d never tried using his sensory Grid indoors before, and it felt clumsy at first. His image map bumped into walls all around and above him, disrupting the flow, but when he stopped trying so hard—remembering one of Jericho’s instructions—all barriers melted away and his senses pushed past them.

He slowly isolated down the source of this eerie
watching
feeling. It was emanating from somewhere nearby, on the same level he was on, and it showed up on his Grid as a lambent glow from behind a nearby wall. As he tuned into it and moved closer, he realized it was conveying more than just physical sensations to him; whatever it was had an emotional component as well.

Not fear based. Warm and welcoming.

Someone—something—is trying to say hello to me.

Locking on to that feeling, Will tracked it around a corner and down the passageway toward the source. It drew him to a closed door, halfway down the hall. A worn, wooden door, old-fashioned, rounded at the top. Didn’t even appear to have a lock on it.

The sensation drifting from inside beckoned him like a magnet. It felt so agreeable and benign that resisting it didn’t even occur to him. He tried the old steel rod handle and it turned with a squeak. He cracked open the door and peered inside.

A long, low room with a couple of dusty landscape paintings on the walls. A single overhead light burning over the only piece of furniture, at the far end—a tall, plain wooden cabinet. Large, clean, unadorned, fashioned from dark sturdy oak.

What was the name for a piece like this, a wardrobe?

It’s called an armoire.

Will walked toward it. The pleasant feelings grew stronger as he approached. Something
inside
the cabinet. He thought he could see a faint white glow around the edges of the doors.

I’m supposed to open it.

Will reached for the doors. They seemed to tremble as his hands got closer, as if eager to throw themselves open for him. He could feel them vibrating as his fingers closed around the knobs. They opened smoothly, with a slight creak.

An object sat on a shelf, halfway up, just below Will’s eye level. A flat, plain rectangular wooden box, about 12 X 18 inches. No labels or markings on it, the box looked beyond antique, weathered and scratched. Will couldn’t resist the temptation to take it into his hands. The wood felt warm to his touch, oiled, dark, and smooth. He undid the simple latch and opened it.

Inside, nestled into a fitted mold lined with wrinkled royal blue silk, rested a circular brass plate, six inches across, etched with complex patterns of straight and curved lines. An ornate configuration of aged and weathered brass discs and circles were arrayed and stacked on top of the larger plate. Some of them formed wheels, half-moons, and curlicues; others ended in sharp points. The round ones were notched, like gauges. Although they were currently locked in place, all these smaller parts appeared capable of independent movement. This was clearly some sort of ancient measuring instrument, but the entirety of the device appeared functional in ways that Will couldn’t begin to fathom.

It’s an astrolabe.

He didn’t know how the word came into his head. He couldn’t even remember thinking it. He knew it meant this thing had something to do with sailors and ancient navigation but that was as much as he could recall. He picked it up. The astrolabe felt superb in his hands, a perfect size and balance, weight and shape—he could imagine the powerful attachment some ship’s captain from long ago might feel toward an object his whole existence depended upon, but Will couldn’t comprehend how anyone could operate any instrument so intricate and complex.

Then something else surfaced below those impressions that made no sense at all. He had the feeling that the object
itself
seemed to
like being held.
That didn’t stand up to logical scrutiny. This thing was just cold metal in his hands, not a living organism—

He heard the scuff of a shoe on stone. Will turned. No one in the doorway behind him. But his eyes picked up slight movement: one of the paintings on the wall to his right had shifted.

His hackles rose again. Someone
was
watching him. He kept perfectly still and felt he could almost hear someone nearby
breathing.

Will carefully placed the astrolabe back in the box. He was surprised to feel a deep twinge of regret as he let it slip from his hands. He closed the box, replaced it in the armoire, and silently closed the doors. He walked out of the room and shut the door behind him.

No one in the hallway. No visible door to any room on the right from where someone could have been watching.

But that didn’t mean no one was there.

Will sprinted away down the hall, turning on his speed, taking one turn after another through the twisting basement corridors for half a minute until he was absolutely certain that no one could have followed him.

If his eyes couldn’t find the security center, his Grid could. Will went halfway up the stairs, stopped short of the door, closed his eyes, and opened up his senses again.

As he directed the Grid through the rooms above, he picked up the energy trails of the household staff laboring throughout the house—vacuuming, ironing, changing linens, putting away dishes—but kept pressing on, looking for noticeable surges in power.

His perceptions shifted toward a cluster of energy on ground level in the wing of the house to his right, the one he’d already identified as the servants’ quarters. This was a lot more than human energy, electrical power in highly concentrated form. He silently opened the door and slipped into the house. Moving to his right, he couldn’t find a door that connected to where he felt the power coming from, but he caught a glimpse of the western wing through a rear window.

He closed his eyes again and quickly pinpointed the energetic glow.
There. Right there. In a room on ground level. Accessible through a door on the outside.

Will walked to the nearest door leading to the grounds in back of the house, trying his best to appear like he was lost and looking for something. He opened the door and waited for an alarm to go off or security guards to come rushing in his direction. Neither happened, so he marched outside, stuck his hands in his pockets, and strolled toward the wall of the western wing. No patrolling guards, no dogs, no trip wires in sight. When he reached the wall, he moved along it until he reached a small steel-framed window next to another door.

Inside, Will saw the castle security center he’d picked up on the Grid. A midsized office with an array of at least twenty-five monitors and stacks of sophisticated electronics and computer towers set against a wall. One young beefy man in a blue blazer and tie sat at a desk in front of the monitors. An earpiece in one ear, a coiled wire disappearing down below his collar.

Will stared at the back of the man’s head and sent a thought-form his way:
a clock with the hands spinning around.

The man looked up at a clock on the wall. Will pushed another picture at him:
a lavish lunch buffet, loaded with delicious dishes, like something out of a commercial.

The man glanced around, put a hand on his ample stomach, and glanced at the clock again. Ten minutes to noon, not quite time for lunch. Will pushed pictures of a greasy cheeseburger and a pile of fries and a cold soda at him, rapid fire.

The guard’s willpower wavered, his sense of duty battling his sudden hunger. Will could practically hear his stomach growling. One more push shoved him over the edge:
a slice of cherry pie à la mode.

The man stood and bolted for the exit. Will flattened himself against the wall behind the door as it flew open and the guard lumbered off toward the main house, breaking into a jog.

Will waited until the guard moved out of sight, then opened the door and entered. He scanned the monitors—images from all over the property, all of them surprisingly high-def, both inside and out. As he’d hoped, the interior of the tower room with all the boxes was
not
among them.