Day of the Djinn Warriors (22 page)

If Rudyard Teer thinks we’re in the same boat as Nimrod and Groanin, and we’re not, that gives us a possible advantage,
said John.
Which we might just throw away by going through the open sesame door like they did. I think our best bet is to go back to the hotel and wait there and hope that Philippa is able to solve Cardinal Marrone’s mystery in the painting back in Venice, and that she’s able to find that golden tablet of command. The way I see it, if we’re to go after Nimrod and Groanin, we ought to have something in our arsenal that can dig them out of any spot they might get themselves into. Marco Polo’s golden tablet is the one thing that can do that
.

What if she doesn’t?
asked Finlay.
What if Philippa can’t solve the mystery in that painting
?

If anyone can solve that puzzle, it’s her,
said John.
My twin sister has a brain in her head the size of a basketball. Especially since she spent that time
being groomed as the next Blue Djinn. But I dunno what happens next if she doesn’t crack it. I really don’t. From the sound of what that jerk Rudyard Teer was saying just now, I guess Philippa’s solving the mystery in that painting might just be a matter of life and death. In fact, it could be more important than that.

A
t the Gallerie dell’ Accademia in Venice, Philippa sat alone in front of the painting of the Doge’s golden palace. The four peasants who were examining the foundation stone of the palace on which appeared the apparently nonsensical Roman numeral equation looked every bit as puzzled as Philippa felt herself to be. She bent her brain one way and then the other, certain that the answer to the problem lay in solving the insoluble XI + I = X. Which being insoluble, wasn’t going to be easy. How could eleven plus one ever equal ten? It didn’t make sense. Of course, that was the whole point. If it had made sense, it wouldn’t have been a mystery. She spent a whole day just looking at the picture and thinking about it.

Philippa was alone in the Gallerie because she had told Marco Polo to stay at the hotel to stop him from distracting her. Having tasted Italian ice cream — the recipe for which he claimed to have brought from China at the end of the
thirteenth century — Marco had kept on telling her just how much better it was than Chinese ice cream. Frankly, Philippa wasn’t in the least surprised by that news. She was quite fond of Italian ice cream herself. Marco was also enthusiastic about pasta, coffee, Bellini cocktails, and, of course, the women of Venice, who are among the most beautiful in all of Italy. He did not, however, think very much of television. “It would be better,” he had declared, “if it wasn’t always the same thing on TV. This boy wizard, Jonathan Tarot, really irritates me.”

Philippa wasn’t inclined to disagree with him there, either.

A couple of times Sister Cristina turned up at the Gallerie and asked how Philippa was getting on. She even brought Philippa a book about the Cardinal Marrone mystery written by a man called Michel Bustinadité, and this was an easy way for her to make a note of the numbers that were painted along the bottom of the picture:

3376 619 77345 35007 32135 3704 0705

3751 1704 539076 535509 335 06 07734

Philippa wondered if these might be a code, like the dancing snakes she and John and Dybbuk had encountered in the picture that had taken them on their adventure to Kathmandu and Lucknow; as a result, she spent several hours trying to find the most common letters that might break the rest of the code. Using this method, she ended up with a message that started with “ee,” and since the only word she could think of beginning with two e’s was “eel,” she hardly thought that this method of unlocking what the numbers
meant promised to be very enlightening. There are no eels in Venice.

Weary from her extended brain work, Philippa lay down on the bench, which, being long and upholstered with leather, was very comfortable — more like a bed, in fact; after a while, she went to sleep.

She woke up with a pain in her neck. Her head had slipped off the bench while she was asleep and when she opened her eyes everything was upside down. Somehow the picture made better sense that way, which made her think she must still be half asleep and, shaking her head clear of sleep, Philippa sat up. It was a minute or two before it dawned on her that looking at the painting upside down was just about the only way she hadn’t looked at it.

Whipping off her jacket, Philippa made a sort of cushion out of it, and laid it on the floor, next to the wall. With her back to the picture, she knelt down, placed the crown of her head on the makeshift cushion, and then kicked her legs high into the air, into a headstand. Philippa hoped she might avoid the scrutiny of one of the museum attendants long enough to make the upside-down discovery she now felt was imminent.

“Eureka!” she whispered as her head filled with blood and a sudden understanding of the Roman numeral equation. “I’ve found it.” And she
had
found it, too. Upside down, the equation XI + I = X looked like X = I + IX. This, of course, made perfect sense since ten does equal one plus nine. This meant that the picture was only supposed to make sense as a
message when it was upside down. This surely meant the numbers along the bottom of the picture were also supposed to be read upside down.

Excited, she dropped to the floor, found the sheet of paper upon which she had carefully copied out these numbers from the painting, and turned it around so that the bottom was now at the top. And, after a moment or two, she saw that what the artist had done was basically just the same stupid, infantile trick that John had once shown her using a pocket calculator: how when you keyed the number 07734 and then turned it upside down, you got the word “hello.”

Cardinal Marrone’s hidden message was longer and less obviously meaningful.

The message read as follows:

HELLO. GO SEE BOSSES GLOBES. HOLI ISLE
.

SOLO HOLE. SEIZE LOOSE SHELL. BIG GLEE
.

Of course, reading the message was one thing. Understanding what it meant was quite another. These words were clearly directions of some kind. And very likely something involving the Duke’s palace. But it was clear to Philippa that she was going to need an older brain than hers to work out some of the references. She decided to return to St. Mark’s and enlist the help of Sister Cristina.

Scattering a flock of pigeons in her haste to be across St. Mark’s Square, Philippa saw that the line outside the palace was the biggest she had seen and seemed to stretch right down to the Grand Canal. She patted herself on the back that she’d had the good sense to see the palace already. Which was when
it started to dawn on her that maybe some of the message wasn’t so hard to understand after all. What else were the Doges or dukes of Venice than the
bosses
of Venice? And didn’t the palace have two of the largest
globes
Philippa had ever seen?

Hello
, the cardinal seemed to be saying,
this is the place to start
. Where better to begin a search for a magical treasure than in an ancient map room?

Changing course halfway across the square, Philippa made for the line outside the palace; an hour later, she found herself running up the stairs and through the palace to the map room where she remembered the two globes being on display.

These were considerably larger than any globes she had ever seen before. Each of them was as tall as an upright piano, about as wide as a car, and the color of old leather. Possibly they were very valuable. Certainly they were very old.

Philippa walked around the globes like a sculptor surveying his subject, and wondering why even in a palace anyone had ever needed two enormous globes. Made in the eighteenth century, the two globes, which stood next to each other on a marble floor, were protected by a small metal fence that was supposed to stop people from touching them. This was exactly what Philippa wanted to do. How else was she to find the Holi Isle? There was another problem, too. Being not much taller than the equator on the globes, how was she ever going to search the two northern hemispheres?

For the moment, she confined her search to the two southern hemispheres. Getting as close to the globes as she dared, she crept around them looking for — she didn’t know what exactly. Yet, at the same time, she presumed Cardinal Marrone would have left some indication on one of the globes as to where the holy isle was to be found.

When her search of the southern hemispheres was complete, she considered returning to the hotel and getting Marco Polo so that she might sit upon his shoulders, and then rejected the idea. Marco was much too old to manage something like that. Besides, the palace would be closing soon. There was no time to go back to the hotel and then have to wait in line again. What she needed was a set of steps …

Even as this last thought entered Philippa’s head, a man who was at least as tall as a set of steps entered the map room. He was black and good-looking and wore a New York Giants T-shirt that made her think he might be some kind of football player, and an American, to boot. She followed him around the room for a moment, noted that his guidebook to the palace was in English, and then made her move.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “You from the States?”

“New York,” said the man. “Just like it says on the shirt.” He smiled. “Where are you from, honey?”

“New York. I was wondering if you could do me a small favor.”

“Anything for a fellow New Yorker.”

“I need to see on top of those globes,” she said. “Only I’m too short. Could you maybe lift me up? On your shoulders?”

The man grinned. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” He dropped down to his knees. “Climb aboard. By the way, the name’s John Nevada.”

Even Philippa had heard of John Nevada.

“The football player?”

“Yes.”

“Pleased to meet you, John. My name is Philippa Gaunt.”

Philippa clambered onto Nevada’s shoulders and then uttered a quiet squeal as he stood up again, carrying her to a height of more than seven feet from which it was easy to see the tops of the two globes.

“I’m not too heavy for you, I hope.”

“Heck, no.” Nevada walked slowly around the globes. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

“I don’t know exactly,” she admitted. “But I’ll know it when I see it.”

“This isn’t a trick, I hope,” said Nevada.

“No, no. I’m perfectly serious. I have to write about these globes, you see. For a school paper. But it’s a little hard to study them when you can only see half of them.” She added plausibly, “I just wanted to see how accurate eighteenth-century mapmaking actually was.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “How accurate is it?”

“Europe looks pretty much the same.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking ever since I got here.”

“Wait,” said Philippa. “Stop a second.”

She leaned forward to take a closer look. Something gold on top of one of the globes was glinting in the sunlight streaming through the palace window. It was a little gold cross painted on the globe. Just off the west coast of Scotland.

That had to be it. How else would a cardinal mark a holy isle than with a cross? And with a gold cross for a golden tablet. That made perfect sense, too. When she got back to the hotel, she would look up this holy isle on the Internet and see what other clues she might discover to shed further light on the remainder of Marrone’s message.

“I think I’ve seen enough now,” she said.

Nevada knelt down and allowed her to dismount from his broad shoulders.

“Thank you,” said Philippa. “That was very enlightening.”

“No problem,” said Nevada, standing up once more. “Bringing enlightenment to the world. That’s my thing, you know?”

Feeling justly proud of herself and excited by this latest discovery, Philippa returned quickly to the hotel and went straight into the business center, where she logged on to a computer and began an Internet search for information on the holy isle.

There were two holy isles: one off the coast of northwest England, and the other — the one she was looking for — in the Firth of Clyde, off the west coast of central Scotland,
inside Lamlash Bay on the larger Isle of Arran. The island had a long history as a sacred site, with a spring said to have healing properties. It was also the site of the hermit cave of a sixth-century monk called St. Laserian.

A hermit cave?

Philippa looked again at the message revealed in the upside-down numbers. If a hermit was a person who lived a solitary life, sometimes in a cave, for the sake of his religion, might that explain the part of the secret message that used the words “solo hole”?

It had to be, although at the same time it did seem to Philippa that a remote Scottish island was a very long way to travel from Venice to hide the golden tablet of command. Fortunately, Michel Bustinadité’s book about Cardinal Marrone mentioned that toward the end of his life, the cardinal had taken a holiday on the Isle of Arran; this helped to persuade Philippa that it really might be worth the effort for her and Marco to fly all the way to Scotland and look for the golden tablet there.

Philippa booked the plane tickets. Two hours later, she and Marco Polo were on their way to the Venice airport. Marco was very impressed by the discovery that the Venice airport was named after himself. And even more so by the discovery that they would be traveling to Scotland aboard a plane.

“How long would it take to fly to China in one of these planes?” he asked Philippa.

“Maybe ten or twelve hours,” she said.

“And to think it took me ten months to get there,” he said, shaking his head. “Which is fortunate for me, I suppose. I don’t imagine anyone would have been interested in my book of travels if it had taken me just ten hours to get to China.”

“I think that’s what’s wrong with the world today,” said Philippa. “It seems too small, I guess.”

Before they boarded the plane, Philippa called Nimrod on his cell phone to tell him the good news and was disappointed to discover that she couldn’t get through. So she called home instead, hoping for some good news about her mother; while there was no news of her, either, she did at least get to speak to her father, who was sufficiently recovered from the Methusaleh binding to hold a meaningful conversation.

Thinking that it would be a nice surprise for him, she didn’t tell him that Layla was on her way back home — which was probably just as well, given what had happened. And she confined her conversation to a few general remarks about Venice and Scotland and China. Her father told Philippa he missed her and John a lot and urged her to hurry home. This was enough to bring a tear to her eye, as she missed home and her parents and her twin brother. She also was badly missing having her djinn power, not because she wanted to do anything particular with it but because having it gave her a tremendous sense of well-being and confidence, neither of which she had felt in a long while.

To Philippa’s great surprise, Marco did not display any nervousness during his first flight. Despite this — not to
mention his own reputation as a great explorer — Marco quickly revealed himself as a difficult person to travel with. He complained about almost everything: There were too many people on the airport bus; the seat in the plane was much too small; the in-flight meal was tasteless; the wine tasted like vinegar; air travel was very boring since there was nothing to see except air. During the flight, Philippa thought that she would go crazy, he complained so much.