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The professor shifted his grip on the rifle as though it were a bit too heavy for him to comfortably hold.

“I told you that my colleague and I had been dispatched to this place to retrieve a single artifact,” he went on. “You were clever enough to deduce that the artifact in question was the Smoking Mirror.”

After you told me it was mirror-sized,Adam thought, resisting the urge to roll his eyes.

“But did it not occur to you to wonder why we would go to such trouble and expense for just asingle object?” Dawson added significantly.

“How the hell should I know?” Adam retorted with a flash of irritation. “Why do collectors raise all sorts of hell for anything? Some rich guy got fixed on it and threw a bunch of money at you to bring it back for him.”

Visions of all the looted sites he had stumbled across flashed through his brain—broken pots, defaced walls, torn up foundations, and bones scattered like refuse.

Adam’s hands clenched.

“But I do not work for a single individual, Mr. Bates,” Dawson returned meaningfully. “I am employed by… anassociationof individuals. Tell me—what collector who simply seeks to satisfy his greed has ever agreed to share his spoils with others?”

It was as if Dawson had flipped over a table. He worked for a group?

The professor was right. Adam didn’t know of any collector who cheerfully shared his stuff—not unless it was going to a museum that’d put his name in big letters all over it.

“What unites a group ispurpose,” Dawson continued pointedly.

The room in which they stood was growing more gloomy. The increasing darkness was due either to the onset of evening, or to the thickening clouds overhead. Adam couldn’t see the sky through the narrow, mountain-facing windows cut into the wall, but he could feel the tingling drop of pressure in the air, which promised a turn in the weather.

“I have not yet told you our true purpose here,” Dawson said. “I have kept it from you because I have been strictly sworn not to reveal it, even upon the pain of death. But I will tell you that a single, overarching goal indeed unites the association I am privileged to call myself a part of, and it is one that no man of morals and logic could fail to support… once he acknowledged the shocking truth that underlays it.”

Dawson spoke like a preacher firing up for a sermon. The tone set Adam’s nerves on alert. In his experience, men got more dangerous the more fervently they believed in something—and Dawson was still the one in the room with a gun.

“What truth is that?” Adam asked carefully.

“What do you know of the Smoking Mirror?” Dawson demanded.

“Not much,” Adam admitted bluntly.

“But you are aware that the mirror is both the name of a god and a mythological artifact of reputedly immense power.” Dawson’s eyes were bright with fervor. “A disk of polished obsidian in which one is said to be able to see across both time and distance—deep into the past, or far into the future. An object through which one might look with the very eyes of the gods themselves! Think on that, Mr. Bates—think what that wouldmean. The movements of any enemy could be laid out before you without relying on the vagaries of scouting or the terrible risk of observation balloons. The wisdom of our ancestors might simply unlock itself for our perusal. The unimaginable technology which our descendants will dream into life could be within our grasp evennow—requiring the most rigorous investigation to understand and replicate, of course, but think how much progress might be achieved were we merely able toseewhere the end result is destined to take us.”

“You’re talking like you think this thing is real,” Adam carefully noted.

“An alliance of highly educated, influential,well-bredindividuals has gone to a very great deal of trouble and expense to acquire the mirror, Mr. Bates,” Dawson countered. “Tell me—why on earth would they have done so if there were not a very good chance that it is, in fact,real?”

“Look, professor… I dunno who put this notion in your head, but I think maybe you and the rest of your highly influential people are getting conned,” Adam replied.

In response, Dawson tucked the rifle under his arm awkwardly. With his free hand, he reached into the inner pocket of his field jacket. He took out a slender wooden case—one Adam recognized from the moments in which he’d been able to make a brief snoop of the professor’s desk. Dawson opened it and removed the delicate bird bone from inside. He held it up like a trophy with a slyly triumphant expression.

“This is the humerus of a firebird,” he announced grandly. “It was recovered by one of our agents in the beechwood outside Vihorlat in Austria-Hungary. It is only a minor arcanum—a feather, I am told, would have a more immediate and impressive effect. This one takes a hair more effort, but I find it to be quite useful.”

Dawson proceeded to shake the bone vigorously.

For the first time, Adam wondered whether the man in front of him might not be a self-important academic but rather a complete and utter lunatic.

That would not bode well for his and Ellie’s prospects… which hadn’t been great to begin with.

Then the bone bloomed with a wild and fiery light.

?

Thirty-Three

A few minutes earlier