From Egypt the feather of a phoenix, from England a dragons tooth, and now in Switzerland they sought something else entirely. They had not seen their father for four years, and yet they felt closer to him than ever.
When they were children, he had not been there. Benedict Blake — great scientist, philosopher, explorer of arcane mysteries, environmentalist, and naturalist — had never been a great father. Their mother brought them up and protected them, and she often told them what a wonderful man their father was. But not to them. For Richard and Steven — as a boy, he had not found cause to change his name, for he had not yet been wronged — Blake was simply an absence in their lives. He lectured around the world and wrote books and articles, but he had never once spent a Sunday afternoon in their back garden playing football, drinking lemonade, and planning the long walk they would take that evening. He had never ventured into the woods with them to help them dam a stream, or grabbed a kite and run into the wind out on the moor, or sat with them on either side of him while he read a bedtime story or listened to them talk about their school day. He was a great man wrapped up in his greatness, and it squeezed out true time. They watched him waste his life when he should have been living it. And their mother, beautiful and mournful, was as sad as they.
And then the fire, and the murder and accusations, and for the first time in their lives, their father had looked after them. They had run, and while on the run, he told them what he wanted to do. How he wanted to seek vengeance. And he gave them both something very special before sending them on their way, something that, in retrospect, did not surprise them one little bit.
He gave them magic.
* * *
The site was not especially well protected. There was a security fence, but something had burrowed beneath one section of it long ago — a fox or a dog — and Gal and Richard managed to squirm their way underneath. They paused while Richard cast a spell of haze at a couple of security cameras, waiting for a few minutes for the enchantment to take effect. When the lenses of the cameras whitened with cataracts, the brothers hurried across the open ground, coming to a standstill up against the closest hangar. They looked around, waiting for the shout or whistle that would signify their being sighted, but all was silent.
The air was still, as if nature held its breath. Perhaps soon it would. When they had collected everything their father needed, maybe then the whole world would hold its breath. And when Benedict Blake had finished with it, the planet would start to breathe itself clean once again. That's how Richard and Gal thought of it; they were helping the earth to clear its lungs. Humanity was the bad habit, and the planet needed to give it up.
The hangar was huge. They had to scamper around its perimeter for a while until they found an open door, but once inside, the scale of the enclosure became apparent. It was at least the size of a football field, the ceiling maybe a hundred feet high, and the open space it created was unhindered by columns or supports. At its center sat the charred remains of a passenger jet. The aircraft had plunged into the Alps a week before, killing more than a hundred people. If only the investigators could reassemble those lives so easily ... but they did what they thought was the next best thing. Found out what went wrong, and why.
"If only they knew," Richard muttered.
"Even if they did, they'd never believe. That's their problem. They pay no homage to their Memory." Gal was haunted by Memory, that place, that emptiness where so much existed that should not. Every time he went there, he wished he were the weaker one, the translator his brother had become. He wished he did not have the strength it took to dip into the Memory, because he hated that place and what it represented, and as each year passed, his rage at the ignorance that had created it grew.