The Dragon's Tooth (19 page)

The big cook forced them onto stools while young men and women in white rushed by with trays. Sterling stopped a girl, robbed her of two plates, and slapped them down on the table in front of Cyrus and Antigone. Fried eggs. Ham. Toast.

Cyrus dug in happily. Antigone buttered a piece of toast.

“Strange times for you two,” Sterling said. “And for the rest of us. Keep your strength up, and no more fiddling about with monks. Choose your battles while you still can. Soon enough, they’ll be choosing you.”

Sterling leaned onto the table beside them. He lowered his voice. “Big Ben Sterling isn’t having a laugh now. Last night, the vice-cook was killed by an intruder. Greeves found him drowndead in the harbor. He’s spent the morning storming about like the world’s largest wet wasp.” He nodded back at the dining hall. “There are plenty in there that think you’re not worth the trouble.”

He eyed them both. Cyrus stopped chewing. Antigone dropped her toast. “But you are worth it, aren’t you? The kitchen knows you are.” His voice sank even lower. “Hear this, Smithlings: People say old Bones carried a pair of keys on a ring. People are wondering where those keys might be. And they’re thinking, well, Skelton was killed in your motel—God rest his dirty soul. John Horace Lawney caught himself a bullet getting the pair of you here. You two are candles lit for trouble’s moths, and the kitchen knows why.”

He smiled and raised his thick eyebrows above friendly eyes. “Phoenix hasn’t got the keys, nor has that bone-chewing stooge, Maxi. If he did, he wouldn’t care one wormed apple for you two. But you see, I know it’s more than just keys that’s lighting this fire. Before his death, whisper was that Bones was holding a set of triplets—relics rarer than a butcher’s fresh cut.” Reaching up, he tapped the bell on his right ear. “A tidal pearl, I heard.” He tapped his left ear. “Bark of a truth tree.” He leaned all the way forward and his eyes bounced between them. “A Resurrection Stone.”

“What?” Antigone asked. “Are we supposed to know what that is?”

Big Ben Sterling curled back his lips and clicked his jaw. “The Soul Knife. The Reaper’s Blade. Old Draco’s Crown—the Dragon’s Tooth. In the chapel, you’ll find brass plates scratched with the names of the O of B’s dead from each of the World Wars. You’ll find newer plates listing the thousands lost at sea, lost on land, and fallen from the sky just in my own lifetime. Those lists run long and sorrowful, but another plate could hang just as long, etched with the names of those who died questing and feuding for that Dragon’s Tooth.

“Keepers and Explorers have died for it, murdered for it, betrayed for it, sold their souls and been damned to the Burials for it.” He paused. “Billy Bones found it. Or so the little birds began whispering two years back. This world has a nest of secrets, but there can’t be many that Phoenix wants his claw hands on more than that little chip of death. If I were a betting man, and I am, I’d put my vice-cook’s name right on that brass list of dead, just beneath William Skelton’s. And those keys, well, I might have just heard some Keepers whispering about doors being opened in the night that should have been closed.”

Antigone glanced at her brother. Cyrus swallowed. His hand floated up toward his neck and stopped. He could feel Patricia, but the weight of the keys was gone. His hand dropped. He’d slept with them in his pocket, but he couldn’t feel them against his leg. Sterling’s eyes were on him. He couldn’t reach for his pocket now. Scooping up eggs, he loaded his cheeks.

“Mr. Cyrus,” said the cook. “Miss Antigone. You can trust Ben Sterling. I was a friend to your father and he to me. I even taught your mother a few of the kitchen’s ways, and that’s not something that’s happened for another. Time may come when you two need a friend who can keep a secret. If you do, Ben Sterling will be standing there, just like he always was for your father.”

Cyrus slid his hand down to his leg and looked at his sister. He could feel chilly sweat beading on his forehead. He groped his legs, but the only lump was a little square that he knew was holding a beetle. Antigone was staring at him, her eyes widening.

“Something wrong, Mr. Cyrus? Egg too slippy?”

“No.” Cyrus was forcing himself to breathe slowly. “No.”

Antigone spun back to the cook. “What is that thing, the tooth, even supposed to do?” Her voice was pitched too high. She knew something was wrong.

Cyrus shoved his hand into his pocket, but he already knew the keys were gone. The lightning bug glass buzzed his fingers as he searched around it.

Ben Sterling turned back to Antigone, scratching his beard. “I couldn’t say—not being a wizard, an angel, a demon, or a man of science. I’m just a cook missing his legs and making do with a pair of delicate ears.”

Hesitating, Sterling twisted around, scanning his kitchen. “Susanna!” he yelled. “Watch the line.”

Cyrus pulled a small piece of paper from his pocket where the keys had been. A short message had been written in hurried black letters.

Inflating his cheeks, Cyrus rolled the paper into a tight ball and dropped it back into his pocket. Trust Nolan? He’d been robbed. He felt insulted. Moronic. Was Nolan taunting him? He looked down at his breakfast, his appetite fading.

“The tooth,” Sterling said. “In tales older than the oceans, from when the moon was young and green, the tooth is always said to have the power of Death. But any sharp stick can kill you, I’m not meaning that. I mean Death’s own power. Death as men imagine him to be, carrying that long-bladed scythe, harvesting souls like corn. The tooth is like the Reaper’s Blade.”

Sterling breathed in deep. When he spoke again, his voice had found a different rhythm. The swirl and bustle of the kitchen was forgotten. His story had dropped into a rocking chair beside some quiet fire.

“When Man was first tilling ground and tending gardens, before he thought to wall his cities, Draco the Devourer came on down from his stars. He hated Man for his body and soul, joined together in one creature, and he meant to rip the two apart forever—Man would be mere flesh, or mere soul, but never both. Old Draco fashioned himself a monstrous scaly body and a set of charmed teeth with edges to them that could slice a soul’s hair sideways.

“But things just didn’t go as planned—they never do for dragons. Raging, Draco spread his wings and dropped through the sky’s floor. Cities burned, and everywhere he went, souls withered, sliced and uprooted from their flesh. But one boy picked up a stone, and while men fled screaming, he threw it into the demon’s mouth and knocked out just one tooth as long as the boy’s own arm. He picked it up by the root, and with it, he slew the dragon body. Draco retreated into the stars, but he left behind that tooth.”

The cook smiled. “And if you listen to an old cook, that’s where the tooth came from.”

“You’re joking, right?” Antigone asked.

“Am I?” asked Sterling.

Antigone ran her hands over her hair and looked at him sideways. “Well, you don’t believe that. A star dragon?”

Sterling straightened. “Come with me,” he said, and springs squealed in his steel legs as he strode away. Cyrus and Antigone followed him across the kitchen to a side door.

“I’ll tell you this much,” the cook said over his shoulder. “Jason used that tooth to fetch the Golden Fleece. Called up immortal warriors with it from sown Dragon’s Teeth, and it was the only blade he could use to cut them down. Cadmus used that blade to call warriors from bone when he founded Thebes. It can call the dead to life—though not as they were—and shatter the undying. Alexander used it to raze the world and only failed when it was stolen. Julius, Hannibal, Attila, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler—all of them sought it, and some of them found it. For a time.”

The cook lumbered down the corridor in front of them, bells jingling, flour drifting off him in slow curls. He was leading them back toward the Galleria, toward the leather boat on its pedestal. Before they reached it, he stopped and pointed up at the wall, where an enormous reptilian skin ran along above the floor.

“Is that real?” he asked.

Cyrus scanned it. “Is it from a huge snake?”

“Not a snake, lad. Follow it around the corner.” The cook turned down a side hall, and Cyrus and Antigone followed him. The skin ran with them. And then it splayed into the fingers of a claw—three forward and one back, each of them longer than Cyrus was tall.

“Not a snake, lad,” Sterling said again. He walked to the end of the hallway and turned into another passage. Cyrus, in a daze, staggered along beside his sister, not paying any attention to where they were going. Whatever the tooth did, it was gone now. Probably forever. He should be relieved. He tried to be. But all that he felt was lead-bellied failure.

Sterling stopped and gripped the handle of a black door.

“Well, it doesn’t have to be a star dragon,” Antigone said. “It could be a dinosaur.”

“Could be,” Sterling said. “But if I was eye to eye with a flying reptile the size of a house and with a mind to eat me, I wouldn’t use the word
dinosaur
.”

He forced the door open with a pop and stepped to the side. “After you, Miss Antigone.”

Antigone stepped into darkness. Cyrus followed her, dust and decay trickling into his lungs. He sneezed. The door boomed closed and they were left with only four senses—ears straining, skin tingling, the smell of fur and formaldehyde, the taste of old, undisturbed air.

The cook’s bells jingled. “This is one of six African collections, though Celtic and Asian is a bit mixed up in everything.”

He punched a switch and electricity crackled overhead. After a moment, an army of dangling lanterns fluttered to life beneath the high, beamed ceiling.

Row after row of shelves and collection cases, full to overflowing, teetered up beneath the lights. Tiny, cluttered spaces, no more than two feet wide, ran between each row. A backbone the size of a large tree hung above it all, dangling from anchor chains.

Cyrus’s eyes widened, his failure forgotten for the moment. “What is all this stuff?” he asked. “Why is it here?”

“These shelves hold the maps, journals, treasures, samples, and artifacts of every Journeyman, Explorer, Keeper, and Sage to have wandered the African continent on behalf of this Order.” The cook waved big arms at the shelves. “Most of this here is from Ashtown explorations, but some of the collections were brought over from the Order’s European Estates before the French Revolution.

“In here, if you know where to look, you’ll find pieces collected by old Marco Polo, including the rhinoceros horn that sent him into months of black dog funk.” Sterling laughed. “He thought the rhino was his long-sought unicorn, and sadly, it was nothing like he’d hoped a unicorn would be.

“You’ll find skins and photos of various things shot by Theodore Roosevelt—he was a little quick with the trigger when the bushes moved, but those were the times.

“You’ll find charts drawn by Magellan’s steady hand, photographs of Solomon’s diamond mines, and a Phoenician sphere—a true map of the world etched in a globe of silver. That little beauty was recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of Mauritius.” He clicked his teeth. “The Phoenicians are always good for a surprise. The map includes Florida, the Mississippi River, and Tenochtitlán—Mexico City these days. But none of that’s why I brought you here. Turn around.”

Cyrus and Antigone both turned.

“Oh …,” said Cyrus.

Antigone jumped back and covered her mouth.

A huge human skull was sitting on a red cushion beside the door. The jaw, four inches off the ground, was as wide as a horse’s chest. The smooth cranium was waist-high. The eyeholes were larger than cantaloupes, and gold had been plated in halos around them.

“This here is one of the sons of the gods,” Sterling said. “An immortal—not a transmortal, mind you—who chose Ethiopia for his kingdom and fashioned Stonehenge for his bathing circle.”

The cook patted the enormous head.

“That was before the stones were stolen by the Irish.”

“The Irish?” Cyrus laughed. “Stonehenge is in England.”

“Truth,” said Sterling. “But only because Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s padre, stole it again with a few cheater’s tips from the weasel Merlin.” He laughed. “And so it has always gone for the Irish.”

Antigone opened her mouth, but Big Ben Sterling shook his jingling head. “Don’t say a word, Miss Antigone, not about the Once and Future King. I won’t hear it.”

He looked back to the skull. “Well, this lad here, like most immortals, didn’t understand people. He cooked ’em, ate ’em raw, slaughtered ’em for sport, demanded their worship, and then still stewed ’em with apples for their troubles. But one day a young Ethiopian girl stole a sword from a priest, and so much for immortality. Do I need to tell you which sword it was, or are you two sharp enough to fill in my blanks?”

“Couldn’t it have just been a … big guy?” asked Antigone helplessly. “A pituitary problem?”

“Tigs,” Cyrus said quietly. “You’re a total hypocrite. My whole life, you’ve been telling me that dragons and unicorns and giants were real. I never believed you.”

“I never believed me,” said Antigone.

Cyrus pointed at the skull. “What’s the gold for?”