for being an idiot.
“What’s wrong?” Carson asked.
“Jeopardy!” I said. “Your answers must be given in the form of a question.”
I typed into the password field: What is the Black Jackal?
A new window telescoped open, filling the screen. I crowed in triumph, and Marian and Fred jumped from their seats and crowded in to see.
My bubble of victory popped. “It’s in hieroglyphs.”
Fred turned the laptop to get a better look. “Not hieroglyphs. It’s hieratic. A sort of transitional stage between picture writing and cursive-type writing called demotic. Hieratic was the language of the priests.” He followed the first line of text with his finger. “Ah yes. This is a Book of the Dead.”
“So you can read this?” Carson asked, sounding hopeful.
Fred shook his head as he scrolled down. “I recognize the opening passages. A proper translation of the details and specific semantics would take months. At least.”
A groan rumbled through the room, and it wasn’t from me. Though it could have been. The sound came from far below us, like the protest of a gigantic radiator.
What were the Jackal and his minions doing down there? The more time we spent here, the more time they had to fortify and prepare for whatever they were planning.
While Fred studied the document on-screen, I turned to Carson. His expression was stoic, but I could feel the tension in him. “When you asked Johnson about Alexis,” I asked softly, “what did he say?”
“Nothing.” He scrubbed a hand over his tired face. “But I get the feeling she’s close. I can’t explain how.”
“You don’t have to explain it to me.” I wished I were the type who could take his hand and comfort him, or that he were the type to invite sympathy. But all his walls were up, so I went back to the matter of the book.
This was one of those times when some Harry Potter–esque magic would be helpful, if I could just wave a wand and say some faux Latin and the words would realign themselves on the page. But I doubted even mad scientist Phin could pull that out of her bag of tricks.
A lightning bolt of an idea goosed me out of my slump, so abruptly that I startled a shriek out of Margo. No, not Phin. That was the wrong Goodnight to ask.
Turning to Marian, I said, “I need a book.”
“Well, I am a librarian.” She pointed to her glasses and bun.
Casting back through the week that I’d lived in the past twenty-four hours, I recalled the title I wanted. “Female Pioneers in Archaeology. Or something like it. I need pictures of women archaeologists of the nineteen thirties.”
“Ancient Egypt is nine-three-two,” she said, giving the reference number. “I can’t be more specific because the catalog is all on our mainframe, and that’s down with the power.”
See? Sometimes you needed drawers full of manila cards.
Marian found a flashlight in her desk, and Carson insisted on going back into the stacks with me. As if I had the least interest in going there by myself. In the reading room with the others, there was an illusion of security. The looming shelves of books were dark and cold, and the emergency lights didn’t reach into the corners. I stuck so close to Carson that I could feel his body heat.
“You really think you can call up your aunt Ivy from a picture in a book?” he asked. I hadn’t told him what I’d planned, but I didn’t suppose it had been hard for him to guess.
“I’m going to try.” For a moment there was just the sound of our steps on the tile floor. With the others around, we hadn’t had time to debrief or compare notes. “How did you manage to raise the shades of those Neanderthal warriors?”
“Desperation.” He shone the flashlight at the end of each row of shelves, looking for the 900s.
“I suppose the fact that the Brotherhood was here and waiting for us supports your theory that they knew all along where the Jackal was. Or rather, the artifacts they needed to raise him.”
“And now we know why they needed you,” Carson said, with no hint of I told you so.
“To open the Veil.” A knot of emotions twisted in my chest, all having to do with how stupid I’d been. “I can’t believe Oosterhouse played me that way.”
“I did say I didn’t trust him.”
There it was. The I told you so. I stopped in the aisle, in spite of the dark. “But remnants cannot lie! They can’t.”
Carson