The Forbidden Stone. Tony Abbott

“Fire! Magister, awake!” A boy, sixteen years old, ran helter-skelter down the tower steps, racing to the inlet with empty buckets flying in his hands.

       The legend has given us the boy’s name: Hans Novak.

       Then came the thundering of hooves, and the young woman saw horsemen, fierce-faced and monstrous under plates of angled armor. Their blades were thick with blood, their eyes wolfish with rage. The village beyond was an inferno of flame. Now they’d come in for the kill.

       And there he was. The scholar. The mathematician. Magister. The man she felt she had always known. He leaped down the tower steps from its summit, his leather cloak flying behind him.

       “Fiends!” he cried at the horsemen. “I know why you have come! I will not obey!” From the folds of his cloak he drew a sword—Himmelklinge, he called it: “Sky Blade.” He jumped to the ground and planted his boots in the snow while the horsemen circled around, outnumbering him eight to one.

       The clash of sword against sword echoed under the sparkling sky. More than a scholar, the Magister was also a swordsman, trained in the ancient arts. She smiled at that. Swordsman. He fought off one knight, then a second and third, tumbling them from their saddles. Not only Sky Blade whisked in the air, but so did his dueling dagger, its wavy blade piercing the chinks in their armor. The Magister was swift and efficient, tutored by the best swordsman in Bologna. But his ferocity couldn’t last. Two horsemen roped the boy, wrestling him to the ground, his now-laden buckets spilling, cracking.

       The scholar’s dagger ceased flashing. Sky Blade fell silent.

       “Stop!” he said, hanging his head. “Release the boy. Release him, and I will do as the Grand Master says …”

      The sound of the car horn broke the night air and brought the young woman back to the present. She turned, drawing a stray strand of hair behind her ear. If the men in the car had looked closely they might have seen a three-inch vertical scar on her neck below her ear. She didn’t conceal it. In more ways than one, the scar was a sign of her survival.

      But the men in the car dared not look. Instead, a pale runtish specimen, large-headed and bent, shivering in his thin coat, stumbled out of the backseat and scurried over.

      “They have found him,” the man said eagerly, drying with a finger the drool that had leaked from the edge of his mouth. “They have found the head of the five. They have found him—”

      “Where?” she asked.

      “Berlin! Just as you suspected!”

      Her eyes lingered on the tower a moment longer.

      Her eyes. One blue, one silver-gray. A condition called heterochromia iridis. A chance mutation, both a blessing and a curse. Was this what made her so mesmerizing?

      Brushing a wave of hair back over her collar, she strode to the limousine, slid into the backseat, and caught a glimpse of the nameless driver in the rearview.

      “Airport,” she said. “We five fly to Berlin tonight.”

      “Yes, Miss Krause,” said the driver, who had a name, though she never used it. “Right away, Miss Krause.”

      “Galina. My dear,” said the pale man as he slipped into the seat next to her, “when we arrive in Berlin—”

      “Silence,” she said, and the pale man caught his breath and lowered his gaze to the ruby necklace that shone below the collar of her coat. The red stone was in the shape of a sea creature.

      A kraken.

      As the car roared away, Galina Krause glanced once more at the tower, standing black against the starry firmament.

      In her mind, the flames—as they always did when she imagined that night so long ago—coiled higher.

      “And so,” she whispered to herself, “it begins.”

      Just before two in the morning, in the sector of the city once called East Berlin, on a street named Unter den Linden, a long black car crawled to a stop with the quiet ease of a panther.

      The engine went silent.

      For decades Unter den Linden—“under the linden trees”—had been cut in two by the infamous Berlin Wall. Now that the Cold War was over and the wall was down, the avenue was whole again and teeming with life. Three floors above, a dim light shone in the window of a small apartment. The haggard face of an old man blinked out over the passing cars, the raucous music clubs, the bustle of pedestrians crowding the avenue. Their night was in full swing.

      All seemed normal, all seemed well.

      All was not well.

      Heinrich Vogel, retired professor of astronomy at Humboldt University, hobbled from the window into his study, deeply troubled.

       Was the great secret unraveling at last?

       And what of the future? Of humanity? Of the world itself?

      He stoked the small flame in the fireplace. It blossomed. Sliding into a chair, he typed furiously on his computer keyboard, then paused. Among the seven newspapers on his desk sat the Paris daily Le Monde. Two hours had gone by since his dear friend, Bernard Dufort, was to have called him. He always called the instant the coded crossword appeared online. He had done so the second Monday of every month for the last seventeen years. “RIP.” A morbid joke, perhaps, but one easily missed unless you knew to look for the letters near the intersection of 48 Across and Down.

      Tonight, there was no call. The encoded crossword did not appear.

      Vogel could only assume that the delicately constructed system of communication had been compromised. The inner circle had been breached.

      As he hit Send on his computer, he wondered whether his colleague at Le Monde had fled his post. Or worse. That he had not fled his post but had perished in defense of their secret.

      “In either case, I must leave Berlin,” he said to himself, standing and scanning the room. “Flee now and hope my American friend will understand my message … and remember the old days.”

      He checked his watch. Two a.m., give or take. It was six hours earlier in Texas, after office hours. His friend would see the email in the morning. The clues were there. If only Roald would connect and follow them.

      “I have kept you out of it until the last. Now, I have no choice. And young Wade. I dread this even more for him. The terrible responsibility …”

      He lifted the phone from its cradle and pressed a number into it, waited for the connection, and spoke four words.

      “Carlo, expect a visit.”

      He set down the receiver, knowing that the number dialed and each word spoken were twisted and garbled in a way that could be unscrambled only at the receiving end. Technology had its uses, after all.

      Checking his vest pocket for the fifth time in as many minutes, he fingered the train ticket. Then he placed his computer on the floor and stomped on it until its shell cracked. He removed the hard drive, bent it nearly in half, and threw it into the fire.

      “What else?” He spied the starfish paperweight on his desk. It was no more than a cheap beachside souvenir. A sea star—Asterias, its Latin term—molded in glass.

      Asterias. The name he’d called his hand-picked group of students so long ago. All that was over now. He gave the paperweight a pat, then took up a framed photograph. It was of himself two decades before, with three young men and two women standing under the blue glow of a café’s sign. They were all smiling. Professor and students. Asterias.

      “My friend,” Vogel whispered to one of the faces. “It is all in your hands now. If only you will take the challenge—”

      Something snapped sharply on the street below the