The Broken Museum

The next clue was hidden in the human world.

Elias did not like that. It had felt, for two days, as if the ordinary world had been pulled away like a tablecloth, and he had begun to live on the strange side of the cloth. Now they were going back, and he was surprised by how much it hurt.

Mara led them through a Gate beneath an old museum.

It was not one of the seven. It was smaller, a service Gate, she called it, a hallway between rooms. They came out into a cellar full of crates and straw, climbed a service stair, and emerged, blinking, into a vast dim hall.

It was after midnight. The museum was dark, and silent, and cold. Moonlight came in pale blue slabs through the high windows and lay across the floors.

"Where are we?" Noah whispered.

"A natural history museum. Don't ask which. It wouldn't mean anything to you."

"It would mean something to me, I live here."

"Then it's a museum in your city, and you have never once visited it."

"That's a lie, I came on a school trip, there was a whale skeleton..." Noah trailed off, looking around. The ceiling was higher than he remembered. The whale was nowhere to be seen. "Oh. That's not nice."

They moved through the dark galleries.

Elias felt the wrongness first as a pressure at the back of his neck. The exhibits were not the exhibits of a museum he knew. There were no dinosaurs, no stuffed birds, no little plastic labels. Instead, the cases held things that should not have existed.

A crown made of glass, so clear that it seemed to be only a shape in the air.

A sword with no blade. Just a hilt, bound in wire, and a faint hum where steel should have been.

A mask of pale wood with seven lines carved around the eyes.

A map on a tablet of clay, showing coastlines Elias had never seen, with the names of places in languages that had no living speakers.

"It's an exhibit that shouldn't exist," Mara said softly. "Artifacts from civilizations that were erased. Not lost. Erased. Someone went through history with a knife."

At the far end of the hall, under a high round skylight, stood a stone tablet.

It was larger than a door. It lay propped against a wall in a case of dark glass, lit from below by a single weak lamp. On its face, in shallow relief, seven figures knelt in a circle. They were of different sizes. Some were human. Some were not. All of them bowed toward the center of the ring, where the stone had been left blank.

A blank circle.

Elias recognized it.

"What civilization is this?" he asked.

Mara shook her head. "None that survived."

An alarm began to sound, a thin electronic whine from somewhere in the building. It wasn't magic; it was only the ordinary human world, ringing its little bell. But it was loud and it was coming closer.

"Noah, the exits," said Mara.

"I don't know the exits, I was nine."

"Then look for the exits."

Ilyan went to the door and crouched there, listening. Elias hardly noticed. He had gone to the tablet. Seven names had been cut into the stone around the circle, in a script that curled like smoke. He bent close. Six of them had been scoured away, leaving only a clean, pale scar in the rock.

One remained readable.

VALE.

His fingers found it before he decided to touch it.

The museum changed.

It did not fade. It shifted, like the picture on a screen flicking to another channel. The dark hall was still there, but now a pale light lay across it, and the cases were fuller, and the floor was cleaner, and a woman was standing a few feet from him with her back turned.

His mother.

She was younger than the photograph. Or she was older; he could not tell. She wore a long dark coat, and her hair was pinned up, and she stood very straight with her hands clasped behind her. She was speaking to someone.

A man stood before her, in white armor.

It was not the armor of a knight or a soldier. It was something more like the shell of a great pale beetle, smooth and seamless, with a line of gold across the breastplate. His face was handsome and tired. He held his helm in the crook of one arm.

"You promised," said the man.

"I promised to protect Elias."

"You promised the Covenant."

Elias's mother lifted her head.

She turned. And for a second she looked straight at the place where Elias stood. He felt it like a hand laid on his chest. He could not have said whether she saw him, whether the years between them had somehow folded in, or whether she was only looking at the tablet behind him.

"I am the Covenant," she said.

The vision ended.

The museum snapped back to cold dark, and the shrill of the alarm, and Noah's voice somewhere shouting about the fire door. Elias stood with his hand still on the carved name, trembling.

Mara was looking at him. She looked shaken.

"Your mother wasn't just a Gatekeeper," she said.

"What was she?"

Mara answered quietly, and the alarm swallowed half of it, and he made her say it again.

"She was the last person who could rewrite the Covenant."