Chapter Twenty
In floriography, Blackthorn means difficulty.
Are you mad? I am not going to steal something from the British Museum.”
Silas stepped over the pottery shards and into the larger room. “As I said, it was stolen from me. You can think about it less as theft and more as… repatriation.”
“And who exactly stole it from you, that it wound up here?”
“The government,” Silas said.
“Then that’s not stealing! That’s confiscation. Quite legal confiscation, which is more than can be said about breaking into museums through tunnels. The guards likely already heard the pottery breaking, Silas. We should leave while we can.”
“We’re deep in the museum’s archives. Trust me, no one is patrolling down here. It’s only us, and the collective cultural history of half the world stored in boxes.”
Elswyth raised her elderwood wand, which cast a glow over the entire room.
Shelves extended on either side of her until they vanished into shadows.
Each shelf held innumerable artifacts: masks and scrolls and goblets, jewelry and totems and idols.
Any of them could have been displayed proudly in another museum. Here, they sat gathering dust.
She turned around. Behind her, the dark catacombs stretched endlessly.
She couldn’t imagine the repercussions if they were caught.
And yet, could she find her way back on her own?
The tunnels stretched for miles, twisting into the earth like roots.
She thought of wandering for days, strength slowly fading, only to die in the dark. The thought made her shiver.
She tapped her foot, refusing to move forward. “And why, exactly, did the government confiscate your artifact?”
Silas looked at her sidelong, arching an eyebrow. “It has some unique properties. They felt it would be better off in the hands of more competent researchers.”
Elswyth’s curiosity prickled at her. “What sort of unique properties?”
“You’ll see. Come on.”
Silas approached a large staircase and began to climb. Elswyth took one last glance at the tunnel behind her. Then, flustered, she followed.
“You are not very forthcoming. Do you know that? Especially for someone who claims to need my help.”
“You would do well to whisper from here on, Miss Elderwood. We’re entering the main rotunda.”
Silas opened a heavy black door, and the two stepped out into a cavernous room.
Above them, a glass atrium sprawled over the central rotunda of the museum.
At the center of the room stood an elderwood tree in a raised bed, ringed by white marble.
The leaves rustled without a breeze, casting eerie white light over the empty room.
She thought about the cluster of glowing roots by the sealed door.
Had that been the very same elderwood tree?
Silas closed the door behind them, gently pulling it shut. Still, the click seemed like an explosion in the empty room. He took Elswyth’s hand and strode across the central chamber. Elswyth watched the moon peer through the glass roof, casting long shadows across the marble floor.
They entered one of the archways on the opposite side of the courtyard and then lost themselves in a labyrinth of halls.
Whole Babylonian temples stood reconstructed in huge alcoves, alongside Sumerian tablets and Akkadian statues.
Finally, they came to a glass case, tucked away in an unfashionable corner.
A beam of moonlight from the high window illuminated the case and lone artifact within.
The amber jewel shone in the soft light, seeming to burn with a flame of its own, like an animal’s eye peering out from the dark.
Silas moved toward the case, the orange light reflecting in his eyes.
Elswyth realized that she’d seen the amulet before.
Silas had been wearing it the day she caught him with Venus in the hedgerows and again the night when they’d been alone together in the laboratory.
She’d assumed it was an artifact, but certainly not something worth confiscation by the government.
Up close, she could see a pattern of leaves delicately etched into the amber.
“There you are,” Silas said, the stone’s light reflecting in his eyes.
Elswyth moved toward the case. “An amulet. That’s what all the fuss is about?”
“It’s a remarkable piece of Sumerian craftsmanship,” Silas said.
“And you discovered it?”
“Locked away in the darkest tomb of a ziggurat. With a quite explicit curse upon the door, I might add.”
“Is that why the government saw fit to confiscate it? I never thought parliamentarians would be superstitious types.”
Silas shook his head. “No, the government did pay for that expedition, however, and so I suppose it was rather rude of me to hold on to the amberheart for so long.”
“Amberheart?”
Silas seemed fixated on the stone. “Hm? Oh, yes. It was written on the tomb. Ninbár-émuqqu, the Amber Heart. Poetic, isn’t it?”
“I suppose. But what makes the amulet so unique? Look around you. There are hundreds of similar pieces here.”
It was true. On the wall to their right was a whole display of Sumerian jewelry: jade pendants and golden bangles, bronze rings and coral necklaces.
“Why don’t you find out for yourself?”
Silas reached for the case’s lock.
“You can’t seriously steal this, Silas. Won’t they know it was you?”
“How will they prove it? Plausible deniability, Miss Elderwood.”
He pointed the tip of his finger at the lock’s opening. From it, a black thorn sprouted and then branched into spindles. It snaked into the lock, and Silas concentrated, willing the thorn on his hand to move. In a moment, the lock clicked once, then twice, and then fell open.
“And that I learned in Marrakesh,” Silas said. He opened the glass case and reached inside, lifting the amberheart from its place on the bust. He avoided touching the stone but held the gold chain with utter reverence. He exhaled and then offered the amberheart to Elswyth.
“You want me to wear it?” Elswyth said.
“Do you want to see what makes it special or not?”
“It feels wrong to wear it. It’s a relic.”
Silas smiled. He moved around Elswyth until he was standing behind her. She felt him there, and then heard the click of a chain unfastening. He lowered the amulet over her head until it rested, cold, upon her breast.
“Think of it as a lord gifting you a jewel,” he whispered.
Elswyth caught her own reflection in the glass case. The amberheart, shining upon her chest, the ancient bronze chain around her throat. And Silas, leaning over her, his hand on her shoulder, his dark hair falling over his face.
“It suits you,” he said, meeting her eye in the reflection.
For a heartbeat, Elswyth just stood there like a deer faced with a hunter.
She was aware of the warm mass of him behind her, his hot breath in her ear.
She wanted to press her body backward, and feel all of him there, the strong sureness of him.
Still, she pulled away. Her heart raced.
“The point is not to look beautiful, is it? It seems to me like an ordinary stone.”
Silas looked her up and down, reading her expression. His hand still lingered in the air where it had touched her shoulder. Then he straightened up. “Reach into it,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Reach into the amberheart. With your floromancy.”
“It’s a stone. It won’t respond, obviously.”
“It is amber. And what is amber made from?”
“Fossilized tree sap. But that’s beside the point. The centuries have turned it to stone.”
“So closed-minded, Elswyth, really. I thought you were a scientist. Where is your spirit of experimentation?”
She turned away, cradling the amulet in the palm of her hand. The depths within seemed to move, shifting in the moonlight and shadow as though it held its own interior light.
She pushed vitae into the amber. And to her surprise, it responded. It sent a wave of vitae back, more than she’d put in it initially. A wave of warm light filled her.
She gasped. “How is that possible?”
“Haven’t the slightest. It seems to be some kind of floromantic battery. Reach into it again, then pull the vitae out. I assure you, you’ll find plenty.”
Elswyth turned the amulet over in her hands, searching for some kind of trick, some contraption hidden within. But there was only the stone. She paused and then reached into the stone again—only this time she pulled the vitae out.
A steady stream of it washed through her, filling her veins with light. Her fatigue lessened and her mind cleared—the consequences from all the night’s floromancy vanishing in an instant.
“It’s marvelous,” Elswyth said, “and you said this is… Sumerian. How old does that make it?”
Silas considered. “If my estimates are correct, and it is indeed from the Uruk period, that amulet is perhaps five thousand years old.”
Elswyth blinked. “And the vitae was inside the stone when you found it?”
Silas nodded.
“You mean to tell me that this vitae is five thousand years old?”
“And it hasn’t decayed a day,” Silas said. “That energy is still as usable as the day it was captured.”
“But how did they capture it at all?”
Silas frowned. “That I don’t know. Nor do I know how to put vitae back into it.
One day the vitae in that stone will run out, although it has shown no signs of slowing since it has been in our possession.
But if we can unlock the secrets of its use…
This is the future, Elswyth. Imagine it—a world where energy can be captured and stored for centuries, never lost, never diminished.
With unlimited vitae, we could feed the world.
End hunger. Mass produce medicine, solve problems we haven’t even faced yet.
Coal is useless compared to this technology, and it was created by floromancers at the dawn of civilization. It’s… it’s…”
“It’s the greatest archeological discovery in human history.”