Spell of the Highlander

Page 17

“So what does it tell us of this ancestor of ours?” Drustan said curiously, jarring him from his thoughts.
Dageus snorted, disgruntled. He’d hoped for much more, and planned to dig deeper in the chamber to see what else he could uncover about their epic ancestor. He believed an understanding of the past was necessary to ensure a bright future, that those who forgot the past were condemned to repeat it. “From the parts I’ve managed to decipher, little more than that he was, in truth, a man, not a fable, and that the chamber was not forgotten but deliberately hidden from us. Da believed there’d been a battle or illness that had taken many lives abruptly, including all those who knew of the chamber. But ’twas not the case. The final entry in the journal is not his, but a warning about the use of magycks. Whoever made the entry also made the decision to seal the chamber, altering the rooms above to forever conceal it.”
“Indeed?” Drustan’s brows rose.
“Aye. So many pages have been torn out, I doona ken what Cian MacKeltar did that was so terrible, or what became his fate, but the last entry makes it plain that the chamber was secreted away because of him.”
“Hmm,” Drustan mused, sipping his scotch. “It makes one wonder what a man might have done to cause such drastic measures to be taken—the separating of all future generations of Keltar from the bulk of our knowledge and power. ’Twas no small thing to divide us from our heritage.”
“Aye,” Dageus said thoughtfully, “indeed, it does make one wonder.”
“Can you frigging believe it, man? Somebody broke the guy’s neck and left him there on the commons, dead as a doornail!”
“Great. That’s just what we need. More crime. The university’ll use it as another excuse to put the screws to us and raise tuition again.”
Jessi shook her head, pushed her way through the group of undergrads loitering at the coffee bar. As she placed her order, she wondered if she’d ever been so young, or so faux-jaded. She hoped not.
Campus was abuzz with gossip. The police had released few details, so everyone was pretending to know something. Funny thing was, she really did know something about the blond, well-dressed “John Doe” found dead on the campus commons yesterday, and she was the only one not talking.
And she wasn’t about to.
When she’d flipped on the TV last night, only to discover the local news featuring a story on the murder of one of the two men she’d spent most of the day convincing herself weren’t real, she’d sat, stunned, staring blankly at the screen long after the segment had ended.
The police were investigating the blond man’s murder. He’d carried no identification and they’d issued a statement asking anyone who might know something about him to come forward.
All of which begged the questions: If the rest of the world could see the blond man, too, did that mean she wasn’t crazy?
Or did it mean that the blond man was real, but she’d still hallucinated the man in the mirror and accompanying events?
Or did it mean she was so-far-gone crazy that now she was hallucinating news programs in a sick (though—if she had to say so herself—admirably determined and impressively cohesive) effort to lend credibility to her delusions?
Ugh. Tough questions.
She’d mulled over such convoluted thoughts for hours, until finally, in the wee hours of dawn, she’d achieved a measure of calm via a firm resolution: She would approach her current predicament the same way she would approach an archaeological inquiry, by applying the meticulous methods of a scientific analyst.
She would gather all the facts she could and, only when she had everything she could dig up, would she endeavor to piece the facts together into the most accurate representation of reality she could achieve with them. There would be no further talk of crazy, nor thoughts of it, until she’d completed her investigation.
Critical to her investigation: a talk with Professor Keene. She needed to ask him questions about the relic she’d come to wish she’d never laid eyes on—like where the heck it had come from?
Maybe it wasn’t a relic at all, she thought, briefly buoyed by the possibility, but a gag-relic of some kind, a special-effects prop from a Stargate episode or some other SciFi channel program. And maybe it had state-of-the-art, highly technical, cleverly hidden audio/visual feeds hooked into it somehow. And it all powered some really tiny, extraordinarily sophisticated projection screen system.
Which . . . er, didn’t exactly explain the interaction between attacker and man in the mirror, but hey, she was just working up possibilities, devising and discarding.