38

“I WON’T have it!” Monique insisted. “You can’t hide in this room the rest of your life, waiting for some books to magically appear on the desk!”

“It has nothing to do with magic,” Thomas pointed out. As promised, he’d remained immovable, eating and sleeping in the library. There was a bathroom off the main room, and he’d left only four times to shower.

He had accepted their offer to hook up a monitor and let them show him how to scan the Net using a small finger piece. He wore a pair of black cargo pants beneath his freshly laundered tunic rather than the jeans and T-shirts he’d become accustomed to wearing over the past few days.

Kara looked at the Net feed. “She’s right, Thomas, we can’t just keep you in here forever.”

“It’s only been a few days, not forever. Have you no mercy? I’ve suffered a death, for all I know. Chelise could be dead, slain by the Horde at this moment. My own son, Samuel, could be living with Eram. I have to find my son, for the love of Elyon. Time is of the essence. Michal was very clear!”

They stared at him as they always did when he began one of his tirades, which favored more poetic desert speak. He stuck one finger into the air.

“If there’s but one chance in a million to bring my son back to my side, I will suffer all consequences. He is my son!”

“And now this is your world,” Monique cried, pointing at the Net feed. “For all you know you’re a prophet meant for this world.”

“I’m no prophet,” he said. “I’ve never claimed to be a prophet. I have no interest in being a prophet.”

“Michal told you to make a way. Perhaps you’ve already done that.”

Thomas hadn’t considered the possibility. Michal had also said he might save his son if he returned quickly.

“Nonsense! Samuel is waiting for . . .”

It was as far as Thomas got. The room flashed with a bright light, like a strobe. He spun toward the desk.

Kara gasped.

There stood Billy, dressed in only a loose undergarment. Blood ran from several wounds on his arms and neck. A long scratch marked his white chest. And his green eyes . . . They were rimmed in blood.

Beside him sat the four lost Books of History.

Billy stared at Thomas for a few seconds, unmoving. Tearstains streaked his cheeks. The man looked as though he had come to them from either Ba’al’s dungeons or the Black Forest itself. Even Teeleh’s lair.

This was the same redhead who’d tricked them once, but whatever had happened to him seemed to have left his eyes empty. He’d lost his soul. He should be locked up, Thomas thought, and the key to his cell should be taken back to the desert. But that would stop nothing.

“I . . .” His voice was scratchy. “There’s another one like me. He’s going back to the beginning to kill you. He has black eyes.”

Monique stepped forward. “Billy, where is Janae?”

“But I’m not him,” he said. “I think I might be the antichrist.”

Then Billy turned from them, walked to the exit, opened the door, and vanished into the hall, leaving black prints from his bare feet on the marble floor.

The books . . .

Thomas reacted without thought. He rushed forward, grabbed the knife on the desk and cut his finger.

“Wait!” Kara ran. “Wait!”

He wasn’t fully versed in the rules of these books. The possibility that they’d been fixed so that he couldn’t return swallowed him. Why else would Billy have left them unattended?

“Hurry!”

He reached for Kara’s outstretched hand. Monique stood back, staring. He shoved the knife at Kara. “Cut yourself.”

Springing across the room, Thomas took Monique’s face in his hands and kissed her once on the lips. “Thank you. I am indebted. But I have to go.”

“I know,” she said. Tears misted her eyes. “Go to her. Find your son. Find Janae. Please. Save my daughter.”

He released her, leaving a smear of blood on her cheek. Then he leaped back to the books, where Kara waited with a bleeding finger.

“Ready?”

Kara faced Monique. “You’ve been like a sister to me.”

“And you to me. I think we’ll be seeing more of each other.”

Then Kara and Thomas pressed their hands on the opened page, and the world around them vanished.

THE FIRST clue that something different was happening to Thomas came almost immediately. The last time he’d vanished into the book with Qurong, he’d spun through a vortex that deposited both him and the Horde leader in Monique’s library.

But this time, what started out as a tunnel of light suddenly expanded and then faded into emptiness. The violent transition from one world to the other or forward in time, depending on how it was seen, had been replaced by a perfect calm.

He hung in the air, completely weightless, like floating in the sky without a hint of wind. Sunlight warmed his back, though there was no sun that he could see. Far below him the curved desert reality slowly rotated, peaceful, undisturbed, as if asleep. There were troubles down there in that desert, but he felt no concern now. Only perfect tranquility.

It occurred to him that he was holding his breath, perhaps from the wonder of it all. He drew breath, but instead of air, liquid flooded his nostrils and he felt a stab of panic. Water? His alarm gave way to the thought that he was in a lake.

Elyon’s lake?

He cautiously sucked at the water, allowing the warm fluid to flood his throat, his airways, his lungs. Forcing himself to ignore the instinct to panic, he drew the water all the way in, then pushed it out, an exercise that required a little more effort than breathing air.

Familiar pleasure swept through his chest, soft at first, then with more intensity until he couldn’t hold back a tremble that overtook his whole body. He was floating in Elyon’s lake a hundred miles above the earth as if it were heaven itself.

Elyon’s presence lapped at his mind, and he found himself laughing with the pleasure of it all. He arched backward, arms spread wide, overwhelmed by an intoxication that he’d felt only twice before in his life, both times in the depths of this very water.

His laughter grew until his muffled cackles of delight spread throughout the water. It was as if he was being tickled by the hand of God. Of Elyon. Here in his great lake of breathtaking pleasures.

The colors came from his left, streams of red and blue and gold, rushing through the water like translucent paint. He slowly swallowed his laughter and watched as the colors twirled and circled him, stretching back the way they had come for a ways.

A very long ways. Thomas knew this because he could see the whole distance. In fact, there was no end to what his eyes could now see. The streams of color went on and on. They didn’t stretch miles or light-years; they simply did not end.

Amazed, he reached out and touched a streak of red. It bent with the pressure of his finger. A shaft of electrical current rode up his arm and shook his body as if he were a rag doll that had stuck its finger in the wrong hole in the wall.

And with that current came raw pleasure so great that it could not, with any amount of human effort, be contained. So great that for a moment he thought it might overpower his life and leave him dead in the water. He had to pull his finger away from the color or surely die!

But he didn’t. He let it consume him. Every nerve, every cell, every bone, screamed with a gratification that reduced all other pleasures to a mere grin in a room of rolling laughter.

And he knew then that he’d found the hope. This was Elyon’s presence. This was a piece of heaven, only a piece.

He finally withdrew his hand. The colors veered away and ran in large circles a hundred yards distant, as if they had a mind of their own.

Thomas arched his back and dived backward, surprised to find he could pick up speed at will. He rushed toward the earth, feeling the waters rush over him. They caressed his skin and flowed through his lungs, flooding every fiber of his body with nearly uncontainable bliss.

The ground didn’t seem to come closer, so he accelerated. But the farther Thomas dived, the deeper the lake seemed to run.

“Thomas . . .”

A child’s voice whispered through the water, and he pulled up. “Hello?”

The voice giggled.

Thomas grinned. “Hello?”

“Thomas, up here.”

He snapped his head back and saw that the lake above was brighter.

“Come up here, Thomas.”

He clawed for the surface, desperate to be with the one whose voice spoke. He knew the sound. He had heard this voice.

“Thomas.”

“Elyon?” He began to cry spontaneously. “Elyon!” He was screaming and weeping and laughing at once, as if his mind had forgotten how to separate the emotions that caused each.

He effortlessly swooped upward, but his desperation to be with the boy had him bawling like a baby. “Elyon! Elyon, wait!” he cried.

“I’m right here, Thomas.” Then the boy giggled again, and Thomas rode the laughter to the light above him.

He burst through the lake’s surface, rose all the way to his knees and faced a bright-blue sky, then splashed back down like a leaping dolphin. He searched the horizons for the boy.

Clouds drifted silently. Sand dunes surrounded him. It occurred to him that he was standing on the lake bottom, two feet under the water’s red surface.

A red pool, no more than twenty feet wide on the top of a sand dune.

As he stared, the ground under his feet began to move. It rose upward. Not just the sand under the pool, but the dunes around him thrust upward toward the sky.

He crouched to steady himself, but quickly determined there was no threat. The desert rose hundreds, thousands of feet, and then slowed to a stop.

But it wasn’t the whole desert, he could see that now. It was a circular section of the desert, perhaps a half mile across, that had risen toward the sky in a massive pillar.

And now all was silent. No movement other than a slight breeze.

Thomas turned around slowly, studying his new horizon. It wasn’t until he’d finished a full circuit that he saw the boy, standing on a dune with his back to Thomas, staring over the edge.

He was a young boy, perhaps twelve, with black hair and dark skin, dressed only in a white loincloth, standing less than five feet tall. He was thin, and frail fingers hung by his sides.

Thomas’s heart forgot how to pump in that moment. An old teaching ran through his mind, one that equated Elyon with a lion and a lamb and a boy in one telling. They all knew he wasn’t a lake, or a lion, or a lamb. Neither was he a black boy, or a white girl, or a man, or a woman, or an eagle with eyes under his wings, for that matter.

He was Elyon, the Creator of all that was. He was the author and giver of life. And above all, he was their lover. The very essence of the Great Romance.

With a snap of his fingers, this boy on the dune ahead of Thomas could turn the world into a marble and crush all living things to sand. At a single word, a new world would roll off his tongue and spin into space.

A wink from this boy and the hardest heart would break into pieces, shattered by love.

Thomas thought it all in a moment, and then his heart began to crash in his chest. He had to move. He had to rush up behind the boy and throw himself to the sand in worship.

But before he could move, a fuzzy white creature waddled toward the boy from the left. Michal, the Roush.

Michal glanced back at Thomas once, then walked up to the boy. Without looking at him, the boy took the shorter Roush’s hand, and together they looked down. At what, Thomas couldn’t see.

Thomas found the courage to move, but carefully, thinking that sloshing through the water might be inappropriate. He walked out of the pool and had started down the depression that separated him from the dune on which the boy and Michal stood, when the first white lion walked into his peripheral view and settled on its haunches to his right.

Thomas twisted back and saw that a dozen huge, white lions had positioned themselves like sentinels around the entire edge, facing the boy. There was no threat, only a sense of honor. Elyon hardly needed such creatures.

Thomas walked up the dune and approached the boy’s open side, opposite Michal. Neither turned to him.

He wanted to speak, ask permission, fall to one knee, something, but he was having difficulty thinking clearly in the boy’s presence. And then Thomas saw the tears that darkened the boy’s cheeks, and he felt the blood drain from his face.

Thomas sank to one knee, smothered by a terrible sadness. He didn’t know why the boy was crying, but the sight of it flogged his mind and demanded he weep.

“What do you see, Thomas?”

Thomas? The boy had spoken his name? The boy knew him personally? Yes, of course, but to hear it . . .

What do you see, Thomas? he’d asked.

What do I see? I see you. I see only you, and it’s all I need to see.

His weeping grew in earnest, changing from sorrow to gratitude for being in the presence of one so great. He knew he should answer. Not to answer was a sacrilege worthy of eternal punishment. He wanted to answer, but he was too overcome by the boy’s presence to avert his eyes, much less speak.

The boy reached out for Thomas’s hand. Took his fingers.

The last reserves of Thomas’s poise snapped. He slumped to one side and began to shake with sobs. The boy held his hand, and Thomas gripped the frail fingers as if they were his only thread to life. He wept with deep, air-gulping sobs.

Waves of gratitude swept over him, and he knew that he’d been wrong a moment ago. The waters were not the hope for which Elyon himself had died.

This . . .

He could hardly bear to think it . . . but this . . . this was the great hope for which they were all created. For this moment.

There was nothing else that could possibly matter other than to hold the hand of the one who’d formed you with his breath.

Thomas could not stop, he simply could not, and the boy made no attempt to suggest he do so. Thomas curled into a ball, clung to the boy’s hand, and wet the sand under his face with tears.

It all made sense now. The pain, the death, the days and nights of fear as the Horde stalked them.

The ridicule, the disease, the fall.

The tears of the mother whose child had fallen and broken her jaw. The agony of the father who had lost his son to an arrow. For the pleasure set before them they, like Elyon himself, had endured it all.

Time seemed to stall.

When it occurred to Thomas that the boy had released his hand, he pushed himself up to his knees, meaning to beg forgiveness for his display, yet one more indiscretion. Because he was human, he might say, and humans stumbled over their indiscretions like oversized boots.

But the boy was gone. In his place stood a middle-aged man with a graying beard and a strong jaw. He wore a white tunic. Before Thomas could make the adjustment from Elyon the boy to Elyon the father, the man turned and stared at him with misty green eyes. “They’re denying my love, Thomas,” the elder said.

“No . . .” He looked at the desert below and for the first time saw what they were looking at. Far below them lay a great valley lined on all sides with armies that stretched far into the desert.

The valley of the miggdon figs.

“What can I do?” the man whispered.

But Thomas was still far too absorbed by the love that swam about them to consider any dilemma seriously. Let them destroy themselves, he thought. Let those who deny your love slaughter themselves. Just let me stay with you.

“They’ve turned away,” the man said.

A white lion stepped past Thomas and gazed at the scene below. Thomas jumped to his feet. All of the lions had crossed the sand and now stood in two lines on either side of their master, fixated upon the gathered Horde armies.

The man turned away from the scene and paced. He ran his fingers through his gray hair, deep in thought. “I made them. I wove them together in the secret place, I knit them in the mother’s womb.”

Thomas recognized the words from a song the Circle sang. A psalm.

“All their days were ordained, written in my book. They are my poem, created for such wonders.” His eyes lifted to Thomas. “But I gave them their own book and let them write in it. Now look what they have done.”

Thomas thought he might tear his hair out.

“What have I done, what have I done?” The man spun back to the cliff and thrust his arm to the horizon. “Look!”

Thomas looked. Something else had been added to the distant mix of Horde ready to wage war. They were Qurong’s army, gathered to battle Eram’s army, and for a fleeting moment Thomas wondered if Samuel was caught up in the mix. But what he saw now swept the worry aside.

A massive black swirl of Shataiki circled over the valley—millions of the black beasts, ravenous for the human blood that nourished them.

“Look,” Michal said, pointing to the west.

A flood of white approached like a wave of clouds. A sea of Roush.

Thomas could only think one thing now: This is the end. This is the end.

The man lifted both arms and wept at the sky. His shoulders shook with his sobs and tears ran down his face, wetting his beard. The lions turned to him and fell to their faces, hindquarters raised as they bowed. As one they moaned, a dreadful sound that filled Thomas with fear.

Elyon’s wail began to run out of breath. Slowly he lowered his head, arms still raised, chest heaving to find air. But his stare began to change from one couched in anguish to a glare filled with rage.

His face flushed red and his cheeks began to quiver. Alarmed, Thomas tried to step back, but his feet would not move.

And then Elyon screamed, full throated, at the sky. His hands knotted into fists and he trembled from head to foot with such wrath that Thomas could not stop his own body from quaking.

The lions roared as one, and the whole earth was swallowed in a thunder of protest that shook it to the very foundations.

Still the cry raged with inexhaustible fury. Thomas fell to his knees and threw his arms over his head.

“Bring us home!” he cried. “Rescue your bride!”

But he was yelling at the sand and no one seemed to be listening. He could hardly hear himself.

“Bring”—the roar ceased midsentence—“us home. Rescue us. For the sake of the Great Romance, rescue your bride from this terrible day.”

Silence hung around him, broken only by his own breathing. He snapped his eyes wide. Michal was flying off, fifty feet from the edge of the cliff. The lions were gone. The man . . .

Thomas stood slowly. Elyon was gone?

“Thomas?”

He caught his breath and spun to the voice. The boy stood by the red pool, staring at him with daring eyes. Had so much time passed?

“It’s time,” the boy said.

“It’s over?”

The boy hesitated, then spoke without answering the question directly. “When it is, you’ll know. And what you felt—that was only child’s play, my friend.”

He winked.

Elyon winked.

And Thomas could not keep his knees still.

“Follow me, Thomas!” the boy cried. He took three light steps down the bank, dived into the red pool, and vanished beneath the shimmering surface.

Thomas began to run while the boy was still in the air. It wasn’t until he was aloft, falling toward the water, that he wondered how deep it was.

He plunged beneath the surface and knew that these were Elyon’s waters, and his lake had no bottom.