“There it is,” Bird exclaimed. “The mural. Just the way I dreamed it earlier this morning.”
Mikhail looked her way, half in shadow. “Dreamed?”
“I didn’t have time to mention it, because Mr. Kleiner called. I realize it might sound weird, but I was dreaming about this mural, last night. And . . .”
Mikhail said, “Tell me what you see.”
She stepped up to the mural, scanning closely before she turned, her shoes crunching the rubble, and surveyed the chamber as she played the flashlight over it. “What a relief. That little quake caused more cracks to appear over there, and there, but the mural is untouched.”
Mikhail said, low-voiced, “It’s possible it’s deliberate. I mentioned the ward over the crevasse back there. But there are more in here. Several more.”
“What exactly are wards?”
“Think of them as energy on the mythic plane. This ward here is protective, but its energy, if you will—”
“It’s okay if you use the word magic,” she said. “I’ve always believed in magic. Even when I tried not to.”
His smile lit his face. “There are many hidden powers in the world, and ‘magic’ is as good a name for some of them as any. So. There is magic protecting this mural, but not a kind I am familiar with. What disturbs me is that I can’t tell how old it is, or who laid it. The only thing that tells me for certain is that it was laid by someone very powerful, or very meticulous. Or both.”
“Is that a bad or good thing?” she asked, stepping closer to him. She loved how he treated her like a partner, and answered her questions. But at the same time she felt very much out of her league.
Mikhail stepped up to the mural. “So I wonder if what we seek lies behind it?”
“What exactly are we seeking?”
“I don’t know. But it resonates on the mythic plane. Here.” He took her hands. “Can you sense it? Close off your regular senses and listen inwardly.”
She was mostly conscious of his grip, so warm and strong. His standing there so close sent shimmers of that light and heat into her core.
Down, girl! She scolded herself. Not now.
She shut away her body’s reaction to Mikhail’s presence, and tried to listen. Sniffed. Then squinted. What was she was supposed to be getting?
She heard the far-off boom and hiss of the waves on the shoreline, smelled brine and wet rock. Felt the small stones under her shoes. She listened harder, then became aware of a faint sweet chime on a steady note.
She opened her eyes, looking at him in wonder. “It sounds like someone struck a crystal glass. Is that it?”
“Yes!” He bent down and swiftly kissed her. “My marvelous Bird—you are truly sensitive. Later on I want to demonstrate more thoroughly just how wonderful you are.”
She gave a breathless laugh of anticipation, then let go his hands. The sound vanished. It was apparently something she could only hear, or rather perce
ive—because she was fairly certain that sound had not actually come in through her ears—through him. “So it’s something magical. Can you tell what direction it’s coming from?”
“No. It’s definitely not this mural, which has a protective ward. But that sound, which indicates there is something else hidden here, is what I’m after. Which is why I’d paid so little attention to the mural.”
She nodded, accepting that. But she couldn’t look away from the mural. “What is it that you see that I’m not seeing? I don’t recognize the style of these silhouette figures.”
“They are obscuring what I believe is a variant of the Chinese Seal Script, a very old calligraphic style.” He pointed to what looked like curlicues to Bird. “Which might have told me something if they hadn’t been painted over.”
She had no idea what might be script and what not. What drew her eye were the patterns. “Look.” She carefully extended a forefinger, not quite touching the rough stone. “Each group of shadow figures is doing some kind of activity, but the way the figures are oriented, the eye is drawn that way.”
She wound her hand in a clockwise circle.
“And if you step back—this is what I kept seeing in my dream—the groups are oriented in the clockwise circle as well. If you let your eye go from figure to figure, the way they are looking, and interacting. In the dream, it was as if the figures were pushing these chalky ones, because I think they were going this way, before they were painted over.”
She reversed the gesture, starting at the top right, going down, then left, then up. “But it’s not—I don’t think it’s a true circle.”
Mikhail leaned forward. “I admit I haven’t looked at the figures. I keep being distracted by parts of words. It’s as if they’ve bled from behind the shadow figures.”