Read The Divine World Page 23


  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Arris spent the rest of the afternoon in his guest room, napping. If there had been one thing his years in the Army had ingrained in him, it was that there were never enough opportunities for rest once a mission had begun, and any spare moments for catching up on sleep were to be taken. Since his current predicament left him with no mission details to correct, no equipment to tend and no men to instruct, he felt no qualms about idling the rest of the day in sleep. That and his mission had ended days ago in disaster, technically speaking, turning Arris into a rescue mission for the rest of the team. Staying put and being well-rested to respond to their actions was the logical choice given he had no way of getting off the island by his own means. And, anyway, there was a re-supply boat coming to the island in a day or so, so he felt no hurry to abandon his respite in paradise, as weird as this version of it was.

  He padded across the stone floor in his bare feet and pushed through the doors onto the balcony outside his room. It seemed an odd way to live, alone on an island in the middle of the ocean, willingly detached from civilization and all its modern conveniences. Arris wasn’t one for sitting on the couch watching television, but he liked having a television and the opportunity to while away time in a make-believe movie world. Although he mostly watched history or science programs, subjects he could plug back into the real world, at least theoretically. Not that he missed having a television in his room or in the mansion, but it’s absence seemed odd to him, given their ubiquity in the modern world.

  He looked out over the tree tops and breathed deeply, the sea air reaching his nostrils. Come to think of it, he didn’t miss any of the things he used on a daily basis back in his life at home. For a moment, he even didn’t miss his life, his house, his car, the computer at the work station in the basement, the refrigerator, microwave, cell phone or the never-ending stream of bills, junk mail and credit offers the postman stuffed into his mailbox six days a week. There was something to be said about the simple life.

  He smiled to himself cynically. This wasn’t the simple life. Arris turned and scanned the length of the mansion: this was the high life mocking the simple life. Everything here was done by people living a simpler life; somewhere, servants cleaned the place, prepared the meals, and maintained the grounds. Someone else brought food to wherever the kitchen was; someone else labored daily to provide Onorien the luxury of not having to grub about in the dirt extracting life’s necessities.

  This was the high life.

  Everywhere else in the world, people yearned, knowingly or not, for the conveniences that made life easier, for just-add-water boxes of food; for cold, pasteurized milk readily available in a refrigerated case; for the instant connectivity of a cellular phone; for the banal normality of the ready availability of an ice cube. Those who already had that, Arris thought, wanted something like this on the side: a way to get away from it all and yet still not want.

  Arris thought about the hours spent in the water under the hot Caribbean sun only days earlier, the salt water lapping at his face as he bobbed in the open sea. His lips had become dry and he had felt the skin on his face burning from exposure, and he had thought briefly of how a simple tube of lip balm and a baseball cap would’ve made his life infinitely easier. But he longed for those things for only a moment, knowing that letting his mind wander away from the reality of his situation was a sure way to turn it into a death spiral.

  So he had floated and taken inventory of the things he did have, the items in his make-shift “civilian” emergency vest, a tricked out fishing vest rigged up by the company and stuffed with as many civilian versions of what was normally carried in a military vest. He hadn’t expected to use it as anything other than a prop, so he hadn’t initially bothered with it as he had floated in the current. A quick inventory-by-touch turned up an orange signal panel in one of the pockets, and he had folded that in half and tied it around his head as a bandana, shielding him from the sun and giving anyone looking for him a one-in-a-billion odds increase of seeing him in the sea of blue-green water.

  His emergency radio hadn’t worked. Or, if it had, nobody was picking up his calls in the blind, so he had turned it off and floated along, hoping to see an airplane that he might be able to contact. He saw nothing until dusk settled in, the point at which the first tendrils of despair had begun to wriggle into his consciousness. He had been floating for more than a dozen hours in the sun, and now he would have to face the ocean alone through the night, the world’s largest sensory deprivation chamber. The stars populated the sky and the moon slowly rose, but it was the smallest comfort, only proof of infinity extending outward from his tiny endpoint in the universe. Then he had seen a charcoal smudge of against the darkness of the horizon. He made some effort toward paddling toward it, but the hours of floating under the sun had sapped him of much of his strength.

  And then the current grabbed him, some unseen hand in the water directing him to the shadowy protuberance rising from the ocean. His feet touched the bottom of the sea, the beginning of the slope up to the shore of the beach of the island. He had stumbled drunkenly through the surf, his arms and legs slack, his eyes burning from lack of saltwater, his mind wandering feverishly, trying to latch onto the new reality. He would live. At least, for a little while longer.

  He had stood under the night sky for a few moments after breaking free of the surf, stared at the billions of stars above him, the moon low on the horizon, and given a brief thought to trying to find some evidence of civilization, some outpost of mankind. This was the Caribbean, after all, and there weren’t uninhabited islands, so a resort had to be nearby. A few steps further in, though, and reality managed a brief return to his senses, and he gauged his distance from the waterline and guessed at the high tide mark, trudged as far up onto the beach as he could muster, and collapsed, rolling onto his back at the last moment of consciousness and hoping his final vision of life on planet Earth was not a million-light-year stare into the depths of the Milky Way Galaxy.

  Although, he thought now, opening his eyes to the jungle before him, that might be a beautiful thing to see as you shuffled off your mortal coil: infinity.

  “Quite a view of tranquility, is it not, Mr. Arris?” asked Onorien from behind him. “I never tire of it.”

  Arris turned and saw his host standing in the doorway, unsurprised by the older man’s stealth while curious at his apparent need to simply show up unannounced.

  “Indeed, Doctor,” Arris said, turning and smiling.

  “I hope my absence today wasn’t a problem for you?” Onorien said, stepping onto the balcony and surveying the jungle.

  “Problem? Nah,” Arris said, shaking his head, “I read another one of your thrillers to kill the time. I can see why people like them; you can open one up and speed right through it in no time and, when you’re done, there’s no nagging literature professor in the back of your skull asking you if there was any meaning to it. It’s just a way to kill time and occupy your mind.”

  Onorien smiled ever-so-slightly. “So much of life is killing time and occupying one’s mind, Mr. Arris, especially now that we humans live so long and have the time to while away, at least for those of us with the good fortune to have been born or raised in the modern world. Most people are still out there behind a team of oxen, wading through a rice paddy knee-deep in water or standing at some machine in a factory, stamping out trinkets they must wonder who has any use for.

  “So many people labor to create the impermanent, burning through the hours of their life as effortlessly as blinking, never aware of the wonders of living. Does the Chinaman toiling over a plastic mold in Peking know he is trading his life’s days away to create instantly disposable trinkets some fast food chain will stuff in a paper sack for some child in Chicago and his mother will pitch in the garbage the next day?

  “Is the Indian slaving away in a textile mill in Bombay even remotely aware some woman in Paris will look at herself in the blue jeans he’s sewn together
and wonder if they flatter her legs sufficiently? Does the Bangladeshi taxi driver hustling Londoners around town ever give a thought to the hours some information technology specialist spent puzzling over the best ergonomic design for the button placement on the cellular phone he barely notices is in his hand all day?

  “This is life in the modern world, Mr. Arris, and so many of us spend so much of our time completely unaware that we are even alive, living on the most beautiful planet mankind has ever seen,” Onorien said.

  Arris shrugged. “Well, you gotta do something.”

  Onorien let out a chuckle. “Yes … yes, you do.”

  Onorien kept up the same line of conversation through dinner, musing about the nature of the modern world and its endless conveniences, how they separated man from his nature and made him into something else, something less than what nature intended. Arris had heard this line of argument before, during dinner parties with his wife’s friends, intricate meals cooked with modern conveniences and exotic ingredients from the world over by hosts who decried the congestion of local freeways or shook their heads in disbelief that reduced calorie beers were so much more readily available – and popular – than whatever Sonoma Valley wine was being served.

  Arris had never said anything at such dinners, not even the time a co-worker of his wife’s remarked on a comment about the meatballs the hostess was serving, noting to the guest that the “secret” ingredient was quinoa, a slightly-difficult to find grain the hostess had used in them. The table had buzzed for a few moments about quinoa, various foodie types remarking on the versatility and healthfulness of the grain and how it was so rare in the diet of the average American. Arris was intimately familiar with it from the months he had once spent in the Andes training local militiamen to defend their villages against the drug traders nearby.

  But that was not Onorien’s line of thinking, Arris realized. Onorien wasn’t some well-to-do eco-warrior secluding himself from the modern world, nor was he a garden-variety environmentalist or animal rights activist upset with the way man was using the planet and its resources. The more Onorien talked, the more Arris realized that Onorien was somehow upset with mankind, as if humanity had faced a choice at some point in the past and had chosen a course at odds with the one Onorien would’ve picked.

  Onorien didn’t lament the rise of the industrial world, so far as Arris could tell. Onorien almost seemed to be arguing that all of the progress mankind had made over the last – how long? Arris couldn’t determine – millennia had taken humans in the wrong direction, a direction not exactly at odds with nature, but certainly in competition with it. Onorien argued without specificity that there had been another way forward and that this way was still available, that man could be whole and at-one with the world, harmonious in existence with the “life force that binds all living things together.”

  This caught Arris’ attention. “The what?”

  Arris had not said much during the dinner, content to listen to his host’s monologue. Nereika had simply sat at the far end of the table, picking at her food, a mixture of extreme boredom and total adulation at odds on her face, as if she had heard this speech a thousand times before but still found something fresh in it each time.

  “Ether, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said. “At one time, ether was thought to be the binding force of the world, the unknowable all-pervasive element that made the world work. It explained how light and sound was transmitted through the air, it was the force that allowed electromagnetism to work as it does. Indeed, it held the planets in place around the sun, and explained why the stars are where they are. Ether, Mr. Arris, was the explanation for how the unseen world worked, and many scientists spent their entire lives trying to identify it, to find it at work, to explain it to the common man.”

  “Yeah, well, we know how all that stuff works,” Arris said, “and I don’t remember any of my teachers ever mentioning ‘ether’ as a reason.”

  Onorien nodded and tipped a little wine from his glass into his mouth, let it pause on his tongue for a moment, and gazed calmly at Arris.

  “No, I don’t suppose any teacher has taught a student about ether in a very long time,” Onorien said, “but just because scientists don’t believe in it any longer doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Science explains the modern world, but it only explains the world science has created by observing the world according to a specific set of rules. Science only explains how things work, not why they work.”

  “That sounds like a pretty thin hair to be splitting,” Arris said. “What do you mean ‘why’ things work?”

  “We suppose we know much about how the world works, don’t we, Mr. Arris? We can explain, for instance, how water turns into ice, or how adding carbon to iron turns it into steel. We can even explain how an atom works,” Onorien said. “But nobody can explain why any of these things do what they do.”

  Not you, either, Arris thought as he listened. He was trapped in this conversation for as long as Onorien would drag it out, he realized, and suddenly wished he could take his leave to smoke a cigarette out on the lawn, as he would have had he been at a normal dinner party, excusing himself with a mixture of faux nicotine withdrawal and a hapless mini-shrug that he was a slave to his habit. But he had no cigarettes and he was the only guest, two issues that would make any sudden departure from the dining room awkward and rude. Arris was about to get a lecture on a subject he was fairly certain he wanted to know nothing about and, just as he had dozens of times before with village elders in tribal areas across the world, all he could do was sit still, smile, and sip whatever passed for the social drink.

  “Ether, Mr. Arris, is the energy force that breathes life into everything that lives. Everything that lives consumes it, either directly or indirectly. It is transferable and malleable,” Onorien said, standing and motioning for Arris to do likewise.

  Onorien stopped by a side table and motioned to the bottles on it. “A cognac?”

  Arris nodded. “Sounds good.”

  Onorien poured two glasses, pushed one to the side for Arris, and walked out of the room. They went down the hallway a short distance and turned into Onorien’s study, a journey that discombobulated Arris for a moment: he hadn’t realized the two rooms were so close. Arris paused a moment after crossing the threshold, trying to get his bearings, once again trying to figure out how the interior of the mansion connected. For a moment, the word “tesseract” flashed through his mind, but when he tried to remember what the word meant, it vanished from his consciousness, replaced by words his eyes transmitted to his brain based on what they were looking at. Arris almost felt drunk, though he knew he hadn’t had anywhere near enough to drink. He resisted the urge to shake his head and concentrated instead on the feel of the floor through his feet, creating an artificial horizon upon which he knew he could not count, but at least something to use as a starting point for any other movement.

  Onorien pushed the doors to the veranda open and stepped through them, tilting his snifter to indicate that Arris should follow. Outside, night had fallen. The jungle around them made no noise save for the wind pushing through the foliage; Arris could almost hear the sound of the surf, the gentle roar of waves crashing on sand. Maybe he was drunk?

  “Ether, Mr. Arris, is everywhere around us,” Onorien said, standing by the railing and looking out toward the horizon. “It is the power that drives everything on the planet; everything that lives uses it. It is the ‘why’ to how things work.”

  Arris steadied himself, setting his snifter on the railing and placing his hands on either side. Ether? He had almost forgotten the topic of conversation that had led them outside.

  “The power of life comes from the sun. Every energy source on the planet, all life exists because of it,” Onorien said. “Herbivore, carnivore, even the smallest, most insignificant single-cell life form lives because of the sun. Plants take the energy of the sun and convert it through photosynthesis into life. Animals – some of them, anyway – feed on the plants, taking f
rom them the essential energy to live. Other animals feed on those animals, transferring once again, from form to form, the vital essence of the universe, the energy to live.

  “All living things die, but the energy of their lives does not. Instead, it is converted, once again, into stored energy: crude oil, natural gas, coal, what have you,” Onorien said. “Everything that lives or has lived is energy, power, life force. Everything that lives seeks a way to tap into it, to take the essence from another and transfer it to the self.

  “It is a source of energy so powerful that everything that lives must obey one command: create life. No living thing on the planet, Mr. Arris, can resist this command of the universe, the command to go forth and multiply. Not even the universe itself can ignore this simple directive. The scientists of the world tell you that the universe wasn’t until it was, a sudden cataclysmic moment in which all that wasn’t instantly became that which is, and all that there was at that moment obeyed this one simple, inevitable command: go forth and multiply.

  “And now we have infinite galaxies teeming with infinite suns surrounded by an infinity of planets. Out of nothing there is everything, and everything continues to create more of that from which it came. An atom in the vacuum of space yearns for another atom to become something it is not; a human seeks another not for the comfort of conversation, not for the warmth of an embrace, but for the solitary, ineffable desire to create one more,” Onorien said, lifting his glass and taking a sip of cognac.

  “Why do we exist to witness this wonder, Mr. Arris? Why is the world, the universe, life so unknowably complex that every time some scientist discovers some heretofore hidden aspect of living, it only opens up more paths to that which we do not know? Why is there no end to knowledge, to facts, to understanding?”

  Arris blinked hard and felt reality seep back into his mind. He glanced at Onorien out of the corner of his eye and Arris wondered what his part of the discussion was supposed to be. Arris had no answers to these rhetorical questions and he was fairly certain Onorien had none, too.

  “I don’t know,” Arris said.

  “Because we are meant to have faith in it all, Mr. Arris, not understanding,” Onorien said. “We cannot comprehend infinity, and we are not meant to. We are meant merely to have faith that there is infinity.”

  “Faith?” Arris said, the word forced from his lips unconsciously, almost incredulously.

  “Yes,” Onorien said, “faith.”

  “Like believing in God?”

  “If you must, if that helps, then, yes,” Onorien said. “But God does not reveal himself in any way that we can know, does He? He requires that you have faith that He exists.”

  Arris was confused. For a moment, he had figured he and Onorien were going to be talking about the infinite complexities of the universe and man’s thirst for knowledge, but now the conversation had taken a sharp turn into the metaphysical. He didn’t have anything to add to the original line of thought let alone bringing religion into it.

  “Are you trying to say religion and science are the same things?” Arris asked.

  “No, not exactly. They are, however, two sides of the same coin. Science asks how, religion, if you will, asks why,” Onorien said. “Through science, man attempts to learn the unknowable and constantly finds that there is yet another unknown thing to learn as a result. Religion, God, faith … the Divine World asks us only to believe that it exists, to have faith that what is truly is.

  “And what is is that we are all part of the same spectrum, the same life force, an unbreakable chain of being that extends in all directions, through all time. We need only have faith in this truth to access its power, to harness it to our needs, to be at peace with ourselves and the universe that surrounds us. One does not need to know how to split an atom to harness its power; one only needs to have the faith that it can be split.”

  Arris resisted a little laugh. “What? With my mind?”

  Onorien smiled and stepped toward Arris, reached out his hand and placed the tip of his pointer finger ever-so-near Arris’ forehead, but without touching him. “The mind is where faith resides.”

  Under almost any other circumstance, Arris would’ve stepped back at Onorien’s approach, would’ve flinched, at least internally, at being closed in on in such a manner. Instead, it almost seemed natural, as if Onorien were some paternal figure in Arris’ life, offering a valuable timeworn lesson and reinforcing it with a simple gesture.

  Onorien stepped back and motioned with his head for Arris to follow. “Come.”

  Onorien walked down the stone veranda and pulled open a door with glass panes and wrought iron work, paused and allowed Arris to walk in before him. Arris took a few steps in and stopped in a mixture of awe and disbelief.

  “Wow, you’ve got your own natural history museum right here on the island,” Arris said plainly, although he was slightly amazed Onorien had yet another odd room up his sleeve.

  Weapons of antiquity were set up across the room: swords, pikes, halberds, maces, and daggers each rested on stands, small spotlights shining down on them from the ceiling. He walked to the closest table and looked down at the dagger, an eight-inch length of what appeared to be of bronze manufacture, with an intricate pommel behind a blade that curved ever-so-slightly. Arris quickly scanned the rest of the room, skipping past the oddball collection of artifacts and checking for exits – an old habit long ingrained in him.

  “It’s more than a room full of antiques, Mr. Arris,” Onorien said, closing the door and striding past Arris into an open space near the middle of the room. “These are artifacts of extremely rare pedigree.”

  “Well, they look old,” Arris said, moving from table to table and glancing at the items on each. He paused to stare down at a scroll, a rolled up length of thick yellow paper wrapped around a wooden dowel rod with decorative painting on each handle. Now, he took in the rest of the room, noting more than just weapons, but objects such as books, quarterstaffs, small lengths of intricately detailed batons and a random scattering of pieces of armor of various types: chain mail, plate, and studded-leather. On other tables, he noticed jewelry or gem stones, out in the open, on display as if there were no worries of a passing thief.

  Onorien watched as Arris meandered about the room; Arris was aware of his host’s gaze, wondered if it meant he was supposed to ask something about what he saw or if he was supposed to exhibit some measure of wonder. None of the weaponry was strange or unusual to Arris, though all of it was obsolete my modern standards. His official day job had long since trained him in the basic use of most of the weapons – he and Gregoire officially worked for a movie production company that trained Hollywood actors in military protocols and the use of weapons, both modern and ancient, so Arris was decently proficient in the use of bladed weapons – and the other objects in the room seemed to him little more than relics or collectibles somewhat more authentic looking than similar items he had seen on movie sets.

  He moved to another table and stared down at a bowling ball-sized globe on a stand, the silvery-black sheen of the glass seeming to both not reflect light and yet give off some barely-detectable shimmer. Arris turned to Onorien.

  “Is this a crystal ball?”

  Onorien smiled slightly. “It is.”

  Arris glanced back down at it. “I mean, is this supposed to be a crystal ball you could use to talk with someone else?”

  “It might, if there were anyone else who had one and knew how to use it,” Onorien said, taking a few steps through the room toward the table. “But the world is not full of people with faith in such objects, so if there were anyone out there with one, it is unlikely they would possess the idea that it could be made to work. So, it is simply a crystal ball.”

  “You see these all the time in psychics’ houses,” Arris said. “At least, you do on television shows with a psychic as a character. Kind of a standard-issue prop to let you know you’re looking at someone with mystical abilities to commune with the dead or something like
that.”

  Onorien shook his head ever-so-slightly. “Charlatans, Mr. Arris. Psychics are no more than confidence men preying on the ignorance of others. They believe in the performance of their con, not the divine nature of the world. They have no faith they can do what they claim, only the understanding that they can use overwhelming persuasion on the weak-minded to convince them they are seeing that which is not really there.”

  “Like a magic trick?”

  “Sleight-of-hand. Misdirection. Convincing a person to see that which is not really there is not magic,” Onorien said. “A man who can regurgitate a key while in a tank of water so he can open a padlock while blindfolded behind a curtain is not performing a feat of magic; he’s vomiting a key into his hand. The world knows nothing of magic anymore, Mr. Arris; it’s forgotten to time, buried under the crush of history and the rise of religion and science.

  “Once upon a time, all that man understood was considered divine. All things were connected, the energy of all living beings contributed to the locomotion of the world. Man killed an animal for dinner and gave thanks to the animal for giving its life up so that the man and his kin could live a little longer. Man had an understanding that all life came from the sun, an understanding hard won coming out of the ice ages before, that the sun and life were inextricably connected. Without the sun there were no plants; without plants, no animals; with no animals, no man.

  “Thus, the force that connected all living things was understood, and that force is the ether that permeates every living thing. That understanding gave belief that that force could be harnessed, directed, even transmuted so that man’s life on this planet could be easier. Man came to recognize his place atop the chain of life on the planet, understood that there had to be a reason he was given an understanding of the lifecycle that no other living thing had.

  “Man came to understand he was a divine creature, made from the same stuff as all life, but given something extra the universe withheld from all else, and that created faith in a higher order, a higher purpose to life. If man could just harness this faith in his divine position, believe that there was more to the world than what could be seen with eyes or heard with ears, then man could merge with the universe and harness the powers of the heavens.”

  Arris tipped the last of his cognac into his mouth and let it roll across his tongue, concentrating on the rich flavors of the liquid, feeling the twinge of alcohol near the back of his throat as he swallowed. He could tell Onorien was earnest in his – the word escaped him for a second, and then he remembered it from a Saturday afternoon spent with his kids years ago: “monologuing” – but Arris had no idea why Onorien would bother with such a long explanation. Was Onorien extolling paganism? Sun worship? Some sort of proto-environmentalism?

  “So, you’re a man of faith of some sort?” Arris asked, turning his head through the room and scanning the various items on display. These were not holy relics, but creations of man hammered out of iron or carved from wood.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Arris, most definitely,” Onorien said. “Mankind believed in this for thousands of years, created a variety of early religions centered on this very belief that man was of the universe. We created religions in which super-humans were our creators, gods with access to all the powers of the heavens, powers that could be transferred to man by the gods. Men could, even, become gods if their faith in their gods’ powers held true. Indeed, the gods would often choose men to test, set men against gods or their agents on earth, just to see how far a man’s faith could be stretched.

  “Mankind believed this until he created new religions to replace those ones, new religions which said the powers of life were outside of our reach, exceeded our grasp, that we were mere mortals intended to scrape out an existence from the dirt and water of the planet. We humans became divine only in the sense that we were created by a god to live on the planet among the animals,” Onorien said. “Indeed, we became animals, sentient apes descended from some unknowable tree of life, little removed from the beasts of burden we used to plow fields. Faith became something religion used to control the people; believe in this, do that, and you shall get your reward in the next life.

  “The religions of the world, these new ones with unitary gods who reign behind curtains and promulgate rules sets through priest classes, banned belief in the Divine Arts, pronounced ‘magic’ to be the realm of heathens, the unclean, of heretics. Those who refused were driven into the fringes of society, banished into the woods, where the old ways became things of scorn or proof of some primitive tribalism that threatened civilization.

  “And, now, we see the rise of science in the world, a godless religion that attempts to show how the world works, what the powers of the universe are and how they are inter-connected. And mankind takes another step away from the truth of his purpose in life, relying on a new group of self-appointed members of a new priest class to tell them how to best live their lives,” Onorien said. “Is it any wonder why so much of the world you spend so much of your time in is such a mess, what with all the competing ideologies on how one should live one’s life?”

  Arris shrugged. “Yeah, well, science kinda seems to work out okay at the end of the day,” Arris said, motioning to a small, slender length of gilt-inlaid ivory set on a display stand. “What happened when the magic these saps were supposed to believe in failed to show up when the guy wielding whatever-this-is showed up for a fight and the other guy had an actual sword in his hand?”

  “You assume that the wielder of that wand did not truly believe it would work because you have no faith that it would work. You don’t really think someone would show up for the fight of his life with such a thing if he didn’t truly believe it would work, if he did not have the utmost faith in it?” Onorien said.

  Onorien cocked his head slightly at Arris and spread his arms out to the sides, “All of the items in this room, Mr. Arris, were regarded by their original owners to have magical powers, to be divine instruments of one kind or another. This is what they believed. This is what they had faith in.”

  Arris was unconvinced and motioned to the ivory wand on the table. “Yeah, but my point is, this is just a stick with some paint on it.”

  Arris turned his attention back to Onorien and caught sight of a sword mounted on a wall. He approached it and stared at it reverently. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, and he’d handled plenty of swords both on and off sound stages, teaching background extras and actors playing minor characters how to properly and safely handle a sword so as to appear genuine on screen. This sword was different.

  “This is cool,” Arris said, moving in close.

  The sword was short, a 26-inch blade coming out of a one-handed hilt tightly wrapped in black leather. The metal of the sword was black, too, something Arris had never seen before; some blades were very dark gray or steel-blue, but nothing he’d ever come across was so pitch black it refused to reflect light. He bent toward it and noticed faint glyphs carved into the length of the blade on either side of the fuller that ran down the center of the blade. In the base of the hilt he noticed a small green gemstone set into the pommel, a tiny piece of crystal that was the purest color of translucent green Arris had ever seen with his naked eye, almost as if someone had bottled the green ray from a beam of white light shone through a prism.

  “That, Mr. Arris is the Divine Blade commissioned by a German baron in the early 1800s,” Onorien said. “Baron Ewald von Hoth, to be precise.”