“Ithoughtthey were artifacts,” Theo said excitedly. “I told you so in the archives, the day we found the mirror.”
“Perhaps there’s somewhere they fit into the door,” Lisabet said, bending down to start searching from the bottom. “It wouldn’t have to be big.”
“Here,” said Theo, pointing to a spot underneath the wordtokenon the door. “Look, there’s these two small slots, like an equals sign. They’d take hairpins.”
Anders and Rayna both lifted their hairpins, holding them up to the slots, his on top and hers underneath. They looked like they would fit. “Runes facing in,” he suggested.
As one, they pressed them into the shallow trenches in the door.
His fingertips tingled as they always did when an artifact filled with essence activated, and with a click somewhere deep inside it, the door swung soundlessly open, revealing a long hallway. One by one, dusty lamps along its length were coming to life, revealing door after door, and hundreds of strips of metal lining the stone floor and walls, as if turning the whole place into one enormous artifact.
They were in.
“True blood,” said Lisabet, interrupting Anders’s internal celebration.
“Huh?” He blinked at her. “Oh, the next thing on the list.”
“Do you think it means, like, a pure dragon bloodline?” Rayna asked. “This place was built a long time ago, maybe that was possible back then.”
“I don’t know if any of us has that,” Anders said with a frown. “Maybe Ellukka would come closest, she doesn’t have any family in Holbard, or even outside the dragons, as far as I know.”
“Maybe,” said Lisabet, “it wants a descendant of the creator of this place, whoever that was.”
“Or someone who worked here?” Theo suggested. “I mean, Drifa got in here to hide the piece of the scepter, and she left you two a way in, so that makes me think you’d have the right blood to get inside.”
In the end, they decided the only option they had was to experiment. Theo and Lisabet each took one of Anders’s hands, ready to pull him back to safety, and heart thumping, Anders prepared to take a step backward onto the first flagstone inside the tunnel. He had to hope they’d have time if things went wrong.
He took a look at each of the others, then stepped back, holding tight to their hands.
Nothing happened.
Everyone breathed out.
“Right,” said Lisabet. “Let’s see if Theo or I can make it in, just in case. We’d be helpful in the search.” She politely wasn’t saying that both she and Theo knew more about artifacts than either Anders or Rayna, she from her years of study, and Theo from his recent work as a researcher. But Anders had to agree.
Anders hovered behind Lisabet as Rayna and Theo took her hands. After a soft, nervous sound, she stepped back.
Instantly the flagstone beneath her foot crumbled to dust, and in less than a heartbeat she was standing on nothing at all. She screamed as Rayna and Theo yanked her back to safety, and Anders struggled to help without stepping into the emptiness, and in two heartbeats the whole thing was over. Anders blinked as the flagstone she’d been standing on started to re-form itself, the dust settling back into place and becoming rock, the metal strips laid into the stone all around it glowing softly.
“So just us two, then,” said Rayna, into the silence that followed. They were equally cautious as she stepped in, but after a moment it was clear that the floor would permit her to stand behind Anders.
“Step three is true purpose,” said Theo. “Maybe tell it what you want?”
Anders adjusted the satchel he was wearing over one shoulder—it held the map and the three pieces of the Sun Scepter—and raised his voice. “We’re seeking the last piece of the Sun Scepter,” he said, in what he hoped sounded like a confident tone.
At first, he thought nothing was going to happen. But then the strips of metal in the floor and the runes and lamps along the walls all dimmed, leaving the hall in almost complete darkness, lit only by the glow of the lamps in the entrance hall where Lisabet and Theo stood. Before Anders could voice his disappointment, the glow started to return. This time it was just one long strip of what had looked like iron, laid into the flagstone floor and carved with some of the most intricate runes he’d ever seen.
It had turned a pale blue and was leading away into the distance.
“I guess it’s that way,” said Rayna, with a nervous laugh.
“I hate to say it,” Lisabet said, “but you should hurry. Just because Mikkel and Ellukka haven’t sounded the alarm doesn’t mean the Dragonmeet isn’t on its way.”
She was right. Anders carefully adjusted Kess inside her sling—she wanted to climb out, but he wasn’t sure whether cats needed the right blood too, so they compromised on letting her stick her head out to see where they were going—and the twins set off following the blue strip of metal.
They walked past a long hallway of closed doors, and Anders couldn’t help wondering what was behind them. But this wasn’t the day for finding out, and they plunged on into the middle of Cloudhaven, following the path the place had laid out for them.
Eventually it took them up a flight of stairs, and then another, and when they emerged at the top it was to find a room lit by natural light from the outside. The swirling fog was visible beyond the thick glass windowpanes—the glass was less even than Anders was used to, much older, and he thought perhaps it would be harder to see through. It was impossible to tell, though, with the ever-present clouds outside.
