“Ah,” Dr. Pym said, “dinner.”
Except it wasn’t. The dwarves were laying out stacks of butter-smeared pancakes, piles of fatty bacon, thick, cheesy meat-stuffed pies, jars of jam, marmalade, and honey, brackets of golden toast, steaming bowls of porridge, hunks of soft cheese, pyramids of plump jelly-filled donuts, and, finally, a jug of what had to be hot apple cider.
“Dwarves,” Dr. Pym said, “are strong proponents of breakfast for dinner, and I must say I have grown to like the custom. Thank you, my friends.”
The serving dwarves bowed low, their beards sweeping the floor as they backed out and closed the iron door.
“Come now, you two. I know you’re worried about your sister, but you must keep your strength up. You’re no use to anyone if you get run down. And I have some things to tell you that I think you will find very interesting indeed. So let’s dig in, shall we, before it gets cold?”
And he leaned forward and cut himself a thick slice of ham, egg, and cheese pie. Michael glanced at Kate. She nodded, and they both took up positions around the table and went to work.
“Now let me start by asking you something.” Dr. Pym was eating a jelly donut and trying, without much success, to keep it from dripping onto his suit. “Am I correct in assuming that you are yourselves looking for the book?”
“Yes,” Kate said; she was sawing through a thick stack of blueberry pancakes. “It’s the only way we’re ever going to get home. Only we have no idea where the book is.”
“Well—” The old wizard popped the last of the donut in his mouth, a large dollop of jelly landing unnoticed on his tie. “Then it is a good thing I do.”
Kate and Michael both froze.
Then Kate said, “What?”
“It is a good thing I do know where it is.” He’d begun sorting through a pile of cinnamon twists, searching for the longest and sugariest. “Ah, here we are.” He pulled free one doughy, golden spiral and held it up for admiration.
He told them that the book was hidden beneath the Dead City.
And what was the Dead City?
The Dead City, Dr. Pym explained as he chomped panda-like down the stalk, was the ancient dwarf capital. It had been abandoned some five hundred years earlier after being devastated by an earthquake.
“Are you all right, my dear? The pancakes not agreeing with you?”
“I’m fine.” Kate’s voice was strained. She was recalling her dream from the night before, of the city inside the mountain, how the earth had split open to swallow it. Was that the same city? It had to be.
“Anyway”—Dr. Pym licked clean his fingers—“the book is locked in a vault beneath the ruins.”
Kate felt a chill come over her. Why was she having these visions? Once again, she remembered the Countess saying that the book had marked her.
“Does the … does the Countess know?”
“Well, she clearly knows something. She’s had the men of Cambridge Falls digging there for the past two years.”
“Bhuhoduuknoballdis?” Michael asked (he had most of a banana pancake crammed into his mouth).
“A good question,” Dr. Pym said. “Perhaps I should start farther back.”
He brushed a shower of golden crumbs off his jacket, reached for a donut, and began.…
As the children already knew, there were once three great books of magic. The so-called Books of Beginning. Of the Books’ various properties and powers, Dr. Pym did not think it necessary to delve into at present. Suffice it to say, twenty-five hundred years earlier, after the city of Rhakotis was sacked by the armies of Alexander the Great, two of the Books of Beginning did indeed vanish. However, the third was smuggled out of the city by a very clever, very attractive young wizard. (He mentioned the young wizard’s handsomeness several times. It seemed to be a key point in the story.)
For years, this young wizard remained on the move, secreting the book from one hiding place to another. He knew there were many dark forces who craved the book’s power and who would have used it to foul and destructive ends. Eventually, after perhaps a thousand years, the no-longer-quite-so-young wizard carried the book over the ocean, climbed into these mountains, and made a pact with the dwarf king to hide it.
Once again, Kate felt a shiver of recognition. This was the vision that had led her through the maze. Was the book giving her clues? Did it want her to find it?
“Are you going to eat that waffle?” Michael whispered. “Because it’s chocolate chip—”
Kate pushed the waffle at him.
The dwarf king had his greatest masons build a vault deep below the city, and there the book was placed. For another ten centuries, all was quiet. Then the earthquake struck, and it not only destroyed the city, it killed much of the population, including all who knew of the book’s existence. So when the dwarves moved south to rebuild their capital, the book was left behind, forgotten under the ruins.
“Now, how I myself learned of the book’s existence and location is not important—”
“How did you?” Michael asked. This was the kind of practical detail he couldn’t resist.
“My boy, I said it is not important.”
“I bet you found some old manuscript in a library. But it was pushed way in the back with all these other manuscripts, and for years and years nobody gave it a second glance, then you saw it and realized it was the young wizard’s diary and—”
“No, that was not how it happened.”
“Oh! I bet the trees told you, didn’t they? The old oak trees. They were probably just small baby trees way back then, but they saw the young wizard carry the book into the mountains and you cast a spell to make them talk—”
“Don’t be silly; no one can make trees talk. At least not oak trees. They’re terribly dull.”
“Then I bet—”
“You were the wizard!” Kate exclaimed.
“That’s crazy,” Michael said. “He’d have to be thousands—”
But he stopped himself, for Dr. Pym was smiling at Kate. “My dear, how did you know?”
Kate thought of telling the truth, that she’d suddenly realized that the ginger-haired man in her vision, the one who’d given the book to the dwarf king for safekeeping, was Dr. Pym—only much much much younger. But if she told him that, Dr. Pym would begin asking questions; he would want to know everything about her visions.
She shrugged. “Just a lucky guess.”
Dr. Pym glanced at her but went on.
He told them how, in the beginning, he had made a practice of returning to the region every few years. But as time passed and the book lay undisturbed, particularly after the earthquake, when he was the only living soul who knew of the book’s location, his visits became less frequent. His last trip was five or six years ago. It was then that he met Gabriel. And he discovered, to his alarm, that stories had grown of an object of great power buried in the mountains. It was as if those who lived here had begun to sense the book’s presence. Dr. Pym knew that sooner or later, these rumors would reach the wrong ears. He began searching for a new hiding place.
He scoured the globe, rejecting an undersea cavern here, a mountain fortress there. He was in the Amazon, examining a system of caves, when the news reached him of the Countess’s arrival. He returned immediately. By then, the Countess had been at her work for nearly two years. The men of Cambridge Falls, under the whips and blows of their guards, had dug a warren of tunnels beneath the Dead City. While they had not yet discovered the vault, Dr. Pym felt that day could not be far off. The book had to be moved immediately.
“What about the men?!” Kate cried. “Or the children?! Why not free them first?!”
“Katherine, your feelings do you credit. But the safety of the book had to take precedence. If it were to fall into the Countess’s hands, many more lives would be in peril.”
Kate set the scone she’d been eating back on the table. Her hands were trembling with anger. She told herself that given the choice, even if it meant that she and Michael and Emma would be trapped in the past forever, even if it only saved the life of one child and reunited just one family, she would let the Countess have the book.
The question, Dr. Pym continued, was how to retrieve the book. The Countess’s soldiers had set up a prison camp in the Dead City. Avoiding their sentries would not be easy. But even more daunting was reaching the vault itself. The earthquake, all those years before, had completely sealed off the passage.
“But I bet there’s a secret way, isn’t there?” Michael said.
“What a bright lad you are,” Dr. Pym beamed. “A good thing you’re not working for the Countess; our collective goose would be cooked.”
“Oh, I’d never work for her,” Michael said stoutly, then he glanced at Kate and muttered, “I mean … never again.”
Dr. Pym explained that when the vault was built, the dwarf king had a sort of back door constructed. It was intended for just such a calamity.
“Good old dwarves.” Michael grinned. “Always one step ahead.”
This secret entrance was accessed through a cavern far below the throne room. The walls of the cavern were covered with a rare kind of lichen that glows gold in the dark. Get to that cavern, and you could get to the vault.
“So how do you get to the cavern?” Kate asked.
“That, my dear, is precisely the problem. The earthquake jumbled everything about. Tunnels. Passages. Though I managed to infiltrate the Dead City, I could not find the correct entrance. My goodness! Have you tried one of these?” He held up a fat, custard-filled donut from which he had just taken a large bite.
“You got the last one,” Michael said sullenly; he had been eyeing the donut for several minutes.
“Oh, my apologies.” Dr. Pym tore it in two and handed over half; a somewhat messy operation, but Michael seemed to appreciate the gesture.
“So what’d you do?” Kate asked impatiently.
“Well, realizing I needed a guide, one who knew the tunnels below the Dead City and would recognize the cavern I described, I came to the only place to find such an individual—the dwarfish court. Everyone had enough to eat? Excellent. I think it’s time for tea.”
Dr. Pym took up the small iron kettle and poured out three cups of steaming amber liquid, cautioning them not to burn their tongues. He remarked that while frustrating in some respects, dwarfish iron did make for a truly first-rate kettle. Then he sat back, stuffed a wad of tobacco in his pipe, lit a match, sucked till it had begun to draw, and exhaled a long stream of almond-scented smoke.
“Now we have come to the second part of my tale. The story of Hamish.” Dr. Pym took a delicate sip from his teacup. “Until recently, the dwarves in this region were ruled by a queen, a just, wise old lady and a great and dear friend of mine. During my last visit—again, this was about five years ago—she assured me that her younger son (she had two) would become king upon her death. Her younger son was everything a future king should be: good and true and all those other dull, necessary qualities. Her other son, the elder, was a thug. A creature of ungoverned passion and very poor hygiene. It was clear to all that he would be a disaster as king. But alas, shortly after my visit the Queen died without leaving a will. Or at least”—Dr. Pym looked significantly at the children—“a will was never found, and so Hamish became king instead of Robbie.”
“Wait—you mean Captain Robbie?” Kate asked.
“Ah yes, you’d said you’d met the fine Captain Robbie. He and Hamish are brothers. Though as unalike as night and day, as”—he paused, searching for another comparison, then shrugged—“well, night and day pretty much says it.
“Now, Hamish had not been king long when the Countess and her
morum cadi
appeared at court. She flattered him with gifts and promises and begged permission to dig in the Dead City. She did not tell him what she was digging for. In fact, she claimed not to know herself. She said she was following a legend, a rumor. A story about some lost magical artifact. But she promised that when she found this mysterious object, she and Hamish would share it. In the end, he granted permission.”
“Is he an idiot?” Kate asked.
“Oh, most certainly,” Dr. Pym said. “But even so, it didn’t take him long to realize he had been duped, that the Countess knew exactly what she was searching for and had absolutely no intention of sharing it. You may well ask, so why didn’t Hamish simply retake the Dead City by force? After all, his forces far outnumbered those of the Countess. For now, I will only tell you that he had reason, good reason, to fear open confrontation. And so, he simply sat on his throne and stewed—quite literally, for the oaf refuses to bathe—and such was the state in which I found him.
“He was in the midst of one of his endless feasts. I think the buffoon actually believed I had come to congratulate him on his ascension to the throne. ‘What’ve you brought me, Magician?’ Those were his first words. I replied that far from bringing a gift, I required one.
“ ‘Oh, do you now?’ he snorted. ‘Is it bloomin’ Magicians’ Christmas? Why didn’t anyone remind me, eh?’
“I said I needed a guide. That I intended to outflank the Countess and spirit away the object of her efforts. I had considered spinning some elaborate yarn to mask my plan, but I felt that Hamish’s suspicions were so raw he would have sensed the ruse immediately. In any case, the effect of my words was instantaneous. Hamish pounced like a tiger—a dirty, foul-smelling, half-literate tiger.
“ ‘You know what she’s after, then?!’ he shouted.
“ ‘I do,’ I replied.
“He demanded I tell him all I knew. I refused. He threatened me. Still, I refused. He became irate. He screamed. He spat. He threw plates. Overturned tables. He punched his minister of culture. It was a tantrum such as I have never seen, and all the while he was shouting that as this object was buried in dwarfish lands, it belonged to the dwarves, that is to say, to him, and no one else.”
“He does have a point,” Michael murmured.
“I told Hamish,” Dr. Pym went on, “that the dwarves had merely been the custodians of the object. It did not belong to them.
“ ‘So you refuse to help me?!’ he screamed. ‘You think I can’t hurt you, Magician?! Is that what you think, you scoundrel?! You great white-haired ninny!’
“I replied that I knew full well he could hurt me. But even so, I would not tell him what was buried beneath the Dead City. And that”—Dr. Pym spread his hands to encompass the walls of his cell—“was how I ended up here. All this happened four days ago.”