A loud cawing noise came from above. Peering upward, Flynn dimly glimpsed a large shape soaring through the dense clouds overhead. He suddenly remembered the immense piece of eggshell on display in the tomb.…
“Er, Shirin? Did the book say the cave was guarded by a huge rock—or a roc?”
Her face fell as she grasped what he was asking. “You mean—?”
The answer came in the feathered form of a colossal bird, which came swooping down from the clouds toward the carpet, its grasping talons extended, as though straight out of “The Second Voyage of Sinbad.” The roc was just as described in the classic tales: a monstrous bird of prey whose wingspan was at least fifty feet long, with ominous gray plumage that turned bloodred at the tips. Its pointed beak was that of a raptor, and large enough to swallow a grown man or woman in one gulp. Its prodigious shadow fell over the carpet and its stunned passengers.
“Sorry,” Shirin said. “I might have misread that line.”
“You think?” Flynn replied. “Granted, it was a rush job.…”
Gasps and shouts greeted the roc’s attack. Dive-bombing the carpet, the monster grabbed a henchman with its talons and carried him, shrieking, back up into the clouds, while everyone else ducked low to avoid the speeding roc. The wind from its giant wings rippled the surface of the carpet.
Caught by surprise, Khoja took a moment to respond to the threat. “Open fire!” he shouted, lifting his head. “Bring that bird down!”
“But, First of Forty,” another gunman said, “what about Ahmed?”
“Never mind Ahmed! Open fire, I said!”
The thieves shot at the sky, the sharp report of the gunfire hurting Flynn’s ears, but all they succeeded in accomplishing was making the roc drop its human cargo. Still screaming, Ahmed hurtled past the carpet, barely missing it, before plunging toward the rocky peaks below. The remaining thieves, including Marjanah, continued firing at the roc, which only seemed to make the monster angrier. Apparently, hitting a swiftly moving target from a wobbly flying carpet was even trickier than you might think.
Flynn took another tack.
“In the name of Solomon … evasive action!”
The carpet responded immediately, careening wildly through the sky in a desperate attempt to elude the roc, which flapped after them in pursuit, squawking furiously. The aerodynamic rug banked sharply to the right, then to the left, while zigzagging up and down and from side to side. Flynn held onto the raised edge of the rug for dear life, while regretting that flying carpets did not come with airsick bags. Khoja and his gang kept firing at the roc, but the carpet’s barnstorming maneuvers tossed them all about, making it all but impossible for anyone to get a bead on the monster, which continued chasing after the carpet with surprising speed. Flynn recalled that Sinbad had once escaped a deserted island by strapping himself to a roc’s leg and letting the gargantuan bird carry him away.
Talk about brave, he thought, or desperate.
The roc took another run at them, as though engaging in an old-fashioned aerial dogfight, and the carpet flipped over to shield its passengers from the winged monster’s talons, which tore ragged gashes in the fabric, only inches from where Flynn and Shirin and the others had been crouching right before they were unceremoniously dumped into the empty air below the carpet. Gravity tore Shirin’s hand from Flynn’s as they found themselves in freefall, plummeting toward the rocky hills far below.
Seatbelts, he thought. I knew that rug needed seatbelts.
The wind howled in his ears, almost drowning out the screams of Shirin and the rest as they accelerated toward the ground at 9.8 meters-per-second-squared—which did not, he lamented, give him much time to formulate a clever strategy, no matter how many degrees he’d earned. His favorite books passed before his eyes, along with other indelible memories, some more recent than others.
I’m so sorry, Shirin. Your story deserved a happier ending.
Then, just when it seemed as though the Library were about to have an opening for a new Librarian, the carpet looped beneath the falling men and women to catch them before they hit terminal velocity. Flynn and the others smacked back onto the carpet, which absorbed the impact like a safety net. He found Shirin’s hand and pulled her close. He could feel her trembling, almost as much as he was.
“Let’s not do that again,” she suggested.
“Don’t talk to me. Talk to the rug.”
Deep tears in the carpet, where the roc had slashed it, impaired the rug’s lifting capacity, causing it to sink ever farther toward the island, fleeing the upper reaches of the mountain to glide over the scraggly woods below. For a moment, Flynn dared to hope that the roc would be content with chasing them away from the hills, but apparently the cave’s guardian was as stubborn as, well, that other kind of rock.
“Here it comes again!” Marjanah shouted, having been caught by the carpet along with her cohorts. Typically, she looked more angry than scared. “Send it back to Hades!”
The wind from the roc’s mighty wings buffeted the carpet and its besieged passengers, causing it to toss back and forth as though adrift atop choppy waters and tearing wider the gaping rents in the fabric. Marjanah and her fellow thieves fired ineffectively from the unstable carpet, which was dipping ever faster toward the earth. Tearing his gaze away from the hostile roc, Flynn looked ahead and saw that the carpet’s headlong retreat was bringing them back toward the small cove cutting into the island. Pristine blue waters reflected the cloudy sky. He also noted that, preoccupied with the roc, none of the Forty were paying the least bit of attention to their captives at the moment.
“Can you swim?” he asked Shirin.
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
There was no time explain. The cove was coming up quickly. It was now or never.
“Take a deep breath!”
He shoved her off the carpet without another word of warning, then dived after her. Gravity seized them again as they fell toward the cove dozens of feet below. Inhaling deeply, he hoped the carpet was too busy evading the roc to dive after them again, and that the Forty were also otherwise engaged, and that the inlet was deep enough that he and Shirin could survive this plunge.
On second thought, that’s a heck of a lot of question marks.…
Gunfire blared overhead, competing with the raucous cawing of the roc, as the pair hit the water at high speed and sank beneath the surface. The cool water came as a shock, but at least they didn’t encounter any hidden reefs or boulders. Holding his breath, Flynn kicked his way back to the surface and poked his head above the salty water. Sputtering, he searched frantically for Shirin.
“Shirin?” he called out. “Shirin!”
“Flynn! Over here!”
She was bobbing in the brine not far away. To his relief, she appeared soaked but unharmed. They kicked toward each other.
“Warn me next time!”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not planning a repeat performance anytime soon.”
Now that he knew they had both survived, he peered up at the sky, but he caught no sight of either the carpet or the roc. He wondered what had become of Khoja and his minions. Had they fallen victim to the roc or perhaps made a crash landing elsewhere on the island?
“You see what happened to the others?” he asked Shirin. “Or the roc?”
“Sorry, I was too busy falling from a flying carpet.” A distraught look came over her face. “The book! Scheherazade’s book … we’ve lost it!”
He understood her distress. She was a scholar and historian, after all; losing the priceless tome had to be a huge blow to her, no matter what other challenges faced them.
“It couldn’t be helped,” he offered by way of consolation. “But at least we’re not bird food, and we still have a chance to find the Lamp before anyone else does.”
A faint smile lightened her expression. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re an incorrigible optimist? Even for an American?”
“Comes with the job,” he replied. “You kind of need to thin
k of the grail as always being half full.”
“Grail? As in the Holy Grail?”
“Remind me to tell you about how I broke it on my very first day on the job.” He winced at the memory before turning his attention to a sandy shore, studded with boulders, some fifty feet away. “Maybe after we’re back on dry land again.”
A strenuous swim later, they dragged themselves up onto the beach and collapsed, soggy and exhausted. They were soaked to the skin and weighed down by their sodden garments. Flynn couldn’t remember the last time they’d really been able to rest and recuperate—and, no, those hours they’d spent stowed in the back of the pickup truck didn’t count. His stomach grumbled, and he wondered what kind of foodstuffs might be found on an enchanted isle in the Arabian Sea. Shellfish, maybe, or a stray seagull?
Roc eggs were probably off the menu.
Shirin slumped against him. “I’ve never felt so exhausted.”
“You and me both,” he said. “But we can’t rest too long. For all we know, some of the Forty might have survived—”
A gun cocked behind them.
Flynn groaned. Turning his head, he saw Khoja, Marjanah, and two of their henchmen emerge from the woods and brush fringing the beach. They looked a bit beaten up and disheveled, but Khoja had managed to hang on to the turban hiding his face—and his pistol.
“Have a nice swim?” he asked.
17
2006
Flynn’s spirits sank deeper than the bottom of the cove. Just when he’d thought they’d gotten away from the Forty, they were right back where they started, just a good deal wetter than before. He took off his boot and dumped out a canteen’s worth of water. He was too exhausted and out of breath to even think about trying to flee from the armed criminals.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “did you manage to bring down the roc?”
“I wish!” Marjanah snarled. “That filthy, feathered monstrosity nearly killed us all. I’d like to see it roasting on a spit!”
Flynn was starting to think the Second of the Forty had anger-management issues.
“Then how…?” he started.
“Did we survive?” Khoja said. “After you deserted us? We were in dire straits, I admit, with the carpet ripping apart beneath us even as that blasted bird kept on coming. In desperation, we sliced the rug into fragments, one for each of us, and used them to parachute down to the ground, while dividing the roc’s attention so that most of us made it to safety in one piece.” He shrugged. “A shame about poor Harufa, but let’s hope his tough hide gives the beast indigestion—or at least a full belly for the time being.”
Flynn cast a nervous gaze upward, but he didn’t see the roc. He made a mental note to keep watching the skies.
“What about the book?” Shirin asked anxiously. “Did you manage to save the book?”
“Spoken like a museum curator,” Khoja observed. “But I’m afraid the book was lost during the tumult. It could have landed anywhere on the island.”
Shirin’s face fell. “Oh.”
“We managed to salvage the bulk of the carpet, however.” Khoja gestured toward one of the surviving henchmen, who had apparently been drafted into toting the shredded fragments on his back. “Who knows? Maybe the carpet can be stitched back together at some point, perhaps with the Genie’s help. Indeed, maybe he can even help us find your precious book.”
Flynn saw another opportunity to try to reason with Khoja. “You know, releasing that Djinn is a seriously bad idea. From what I hear, he’s much too dangerous to let loose from his Lamp, especially if you empower him by rubbing it too often.”
“You Librarians,” Khoja said scornfully. “You have access to some of the most powerful magical relics on the planet, yet you’re too timid to wield that power.”
“That’s because we know how easy it is for such powers to end up using you,” Flynn said. “And just think what could happen if you lost control of the Djinn, which is a very real possibility.”
Khoja didn’t want to hear it.
“You’re wasting your breath and my time,” he said. “You’re not going to scare me away from our prize, not when we’re finally this close.” He waved his pistol at Flynn and Shirin. “Let’s get a move on, before that bird gets hungry and comes hunting for us.”
Flynn was feeling a tad exposed on the beach, beneath the open sky. The beckoning woods, meager as they were, did offer slightly more cover. He grudgingly stood up and helped Shirin to her feet. Gritty sand clung to their soaked clothing despite their best attempts to brush it off. Shirin swept her wet hair away from her face.
“That’s more like it.” Khoja turned to Marjanah. “Any luck contacting our people?”
She shook her head while scowling at her satellite phone. “I’m not getting anything: voice communication or GPS. Something is jamming us.”
“Magic,” Flynn guessed. “This whole island is probably cut off from the modern world, like on Lost.” He frowned for a moment. “You know, I never could figure that show out.”
“Let’s hope that you’re better at locating hidden caves,” Khoja said. “I trust I don’t need to repeat the usual threats?”
Flynn didn’t need to be a Librarian to grasp that he and Shirin were still outnumbered and outgunned by their enemies, despite the roc reducing the bad guys’ numbers by one more henchman.
“I think we can skip that part,” he agreed.
Khoja lowered his gun, although Marjanah kept fondling her knife in a way that Flynn could have done without.
“So where to next?” the First of the Forty asked.
Flynn contemplated the desolate gray mountain looming above them. It was small compared to the towering peaks of the Zagros back in Iran, but it was large enough to hide any number of hidden caves. He wished Scheherazade had been a little more specific in her directions.
A map would have been nice.
He looked to Shirin for assistance. “Do you remember anything else from the book?”
“Not really. An island, a cave, a rock … sorry, a roc.”
Flynn considered his options. He could insist he was stumped, probably at the cost of his and Shirin’s lives, but that would still leave Khoja and his minions free to search the island on their own, with no guarantee that the determined criminals wouldn’t find the cave eventually. Flynn decided he wasn’t willing to sacrifice Shirin just to slow the Forty down.
“Let me have one of those carpet fragments,” he said.
“Why?” Khoja asked. “They’re no good for flying in their present state. At best, they just slowed our descent like parachutes. If you’re entertaining some desperate fantasy of making a speedy getaway with Dr. Masri on a scrap of rug, you can forget about that right away. You’re grounded like the rest of us.”
“The thought never crossed my mind,” Flynn fibbed. “But I may have another use for that magic fabric.”
Khoja’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, but he assented after a moment’s consideration. “Fine. Let’s see what you have in mind.” He glanced at the henchman serving as a porter. “Rahan, give Mr. Carsen a piece of the carpet. A small one.”
“As you wish, First of Forty.” The man handed Flynn a remnant of the carpet about the size of a welcome mat and threw in a surly look as a bonus. “I’m watching you, Librarian.”
“We all are,” Khoja added. “You’re on, Carsen. Show us what you’re up to.”
Flynn gulped, not at all positive this trick was going to work. Holding onto the remnant with both hands, he held it out in front of him so that it dangled above the sand. He recited the incantation once again and repeated his earlier command.
“In the name of Solomon, take us to the Cave of the Lamp.”
Golden light shimmered briefly along the sliced edges of the fragment, which came alive in Flynn’s grasp, rising up so that it was horizontal with the ground. His fingers tingled as the piece of the carpet tugged, pulling him toward the looming mountain.
“It wants to go
this way,” he said. “I think.”
Khoja caught on immediately. “A homing device. You’re using it as a homing device.”
“More like a dowsing rod,” Flynn said, “but that’s the basic idea, yes.”
“Ingenious,” Khoja said. “You continue to impress me, Carsen. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in switching sides and joining our organization?”
Flynn didn’t even think about it. He’d dealt with a turncoat Librarian before. It was not a path he ever intended to go down.
“Not interested, sorry.”
Khoja shrugged. “Worth a try. Perhaps you’ll change your mind once we have the Lamp in hand, and the world is ours for the taking.”
“Again, not a good idea. Releasing the Djinn, I mean.”
“I beg to differ.” Khoja nodded at the mountain. “Lead the way, Librarian.”
The floating remnant tugged insistently. Flynn sighed and let it guide them forward.
He hoped he wasn’t making a big mistake.
18
2006
“Watch your step,” Flynn warned.
“I think that goes without saying,” Shirin said, “but thanks.”
Guided by the eager carpet remnant, they hiked up a narrow ledge along the side of the mountain. It had been a long and arduous climb already. The party, which was now comprised of Flynn, Shirin, Khoja, Marjanah, and the two bonus cutthroats, had quickly left any trace of vegetation behind, so that nothing lay before them but lifeless rock, dirt, and debris, along with the daunting prospect of yet more uphill hiking. A sharp drop-off on the left threatened to make a careless step one’s last. Loose dirt and pebbles rolled beneath Flynn’s feet, adding to the danger. Sinbad and Ali Baba had clearly gone out of their way to make certain that the route to the hidden cave—and the Lamp—was as difficult as possible.
Thanks a lot, guys, Flynn thought.
His legs ached from the climb. His damp clothes were cold and clammy, and his boots still sloshed with every step as he trudged wearily at the head of the procession. He was breathing hard, as was Shirin, who was right behind him. Khoja and his crew took up the rear, almost as though they didn’t want to turn their backs on their captives while navigating the precarious ledge.