Page 27 of Sacrifice

A crinkle formed between his eyes. “I have to go.” He stalked away.

She could hear his footsteps on the stairs before it occurred to her to move. She shook her head to clear the fuzz.

Wow!

Lucien made her head spin. She wobbled to her lonely desk and sat down, cradling the orb in her lap. Her coffee was cold, but she drank it anyway and tried to focus.

The envelope.

She opened it up to find it held details of the delivery schedule, written in Lucien’s copperplate handwriting. She’d never known anyone to write like this. It was like he was from another time.

The scent of him drifted up from the paper and she breathed it in. Old leather and spice. A tingle washed across her back as she remembered the feel of him. She sighed.

Several items on his list were being supplied by the British Museum itself. The Aztec Stone of Tizoc was currently in storage, according to the list. There were many treasures stored deep below the museum in the labyrinthine vaults. It was the domain of the Curator and his army of porters. Eve knew where it was but had never had cause to visit. Perhaps now she had justification.

According to Lucien’s notes, the Stone of Tizoc was to take center stage in the main room. She checked the description and found it was a twelve-foot-long Aztec stone altar that weighed four tons. That was going to be a challenge. Eve wondered how many of Rupert’s team it would take to get something like that moved to the fourth floor.

According to the list, other items were currently on display in museums around the globe. The Louvre, the Smithsonian andthe Pergamon were all contributing, and a few were coming from private collections, the owner's details difficult to decipher from Lucien’s short codes.

These things would need to arrive really soon if she was to have any hope of getting the exhibition organized in time. In a snap of resolution, she decided that there was no point hanging about in the exhibition space, waiting for news. She’d deliver the stone to Rupert and check on the other exhibits progress while she was there. If anyone was going to know when these things were likely to arrive, it would be him.

She made her way downstairs.

Eighteen

Visitingthe museum’s archives was like stepping back in time. Just a small remnant of what once had been the British Library remained, but the collection still held thousands of manuscripts in the vaulted spaces of the basement.

Eve loved the idea of so much history stored secretly beneath visitor’s oblivious feet. Like a kid in a sweet shop, she followed Henry Claymore, the Head Librarian, into the rare books section, where it smelled of dust and decaying paper. Henry sneezed.

”Probably best if you just wait here,” he said, directing her toward an untidy desk. “Gets a bit dusty. Help yourself to a biscuit.” He smiled kindly.

An open pack of chocolate bourbons lay on a jumbled pile of papers. Eve plonked herself down in Henry’s shabby leather chair and the man himself disappeared into the stacks.

“Got several tomes suited to your exhibit list,” he called. He was out of sight, but Eve could still hear him shuffling about. “In this section, somewhere.” His voice tailed off, but he reappeared briefly from behind another teetering pile a few stacks along. “The first one’s just one of those mischievous documents that seems to have a life of its own.”

His blue eyes twinkled as he pushed half-moon glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He sniffed. “Now, where is it?” He disappeared back into the shelves.

Some minutes passed, there was a good deal of clattering, the juddering scrape of a ladder on the stone floor and then Henry said “A-ha! There you are!”

It made Eve smile. She’d always liked Henry. He was so eccentric and his encyclopedic knowledge of the arcane was bordering on legendary. As was his seemingly never-ending supply of chocolate bourbons. The other staff referred to him as ‘Herodotus’ after the Greek historian. She wasn’t sure if he knew, but thought he would probably take it as a compliment.

She squeezed a biscuit from the pack and nibbled at a corner.

Henry reappeared and laid a book in front of her with a dusty whomp of air. He sneezed extravagantly.

“My apologies. The paper mites are getting out of hand again.” He eyed the chunky old-fashioned humidifier squatting behind his desk and gave it an exploratory tap with his foot. It gurgled feebly. He returned his attention to the book. To Eve’s eye it looked extraordinarily old; its cover blackened and warped by time.

“Crystal balls have long been associated with scrying, the means to communicate with another plane.” He held one hand up to his eyes as if to shield them from the sun. “Seeing into the future. That sort of thing. This one’s pretty special, of course.” He eyed the globe currently settled in its silky nest beside the biscuits. Eve had set it down there while she waited. “A sun stone of this quality is a rare natural phenomenon. Note the pearlescent glimmers despite the low levels of ambient light.”

Eve looked into the stone. It drew you in. She imagined she could see the entire universe suspended in its crystal.

“Highly sort after in the fourteen and fifteenth centuries,” Henry said in a hushed voice. “I’m pretty sure there’s a referenceto them in this work by the Dutch Physician and Alchemist, Johannes Wier.” He looked up at Eve and rubbed his hands together in a self-satisfied kind of way. He opened the book with a small brass rod he’d pulled from his jacket pocket.

The pages were yellowing and stained, with heavy gothic lettering and woodcut illustrations of constellations, planets, and astrological symbols.

“Now, I have studied many astronomical treatises in my time,” Henry said. “But this is one of the few books that mentions this specific kind.”

He turned the page to reveal an illustration of a ritual. A woman laid on her back with the knives placed at strategic points on the surrounding floor.

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