The Sword Thief

  Ian was staring out into the yard. "What's that?" he asked. "Wh-wh-what's what?" Amy said.

  He pointed to a dense hedgerow that contained a narrow gap. "Is it a hedge maze? Come on, let's go and look."

  "I -- I don't think so."

  "Why not?" Ian said. "What else are we going to do?"

  He had this funny look on his face, Amy thought. A curious smile, as if she had just refused an ice cream sundae or the winnings to the lottery. Like it wouldn't have occurred to him that anyone could possibly say no.

  "Alistair t-told us not to wander," she explained, shoving her hands in her pockets. Ian cocked his head teasingly. "I thought you were a brave explorer." "Oh, p-p-please ..." Amy said, trying to drip with sarcasm but fighting the tingle that was spreading up from the back of her neck. "Well," he said with a shrug. "Your choice." As he walked away, Amy lurched forward but stopped herself.

  What am I doing? she thought.

  He was a jerk. He was jerkier than a jerk. He was a new definition for jerk. She didn't have to follow him.

  Her fingers closed around the coin he had given her. She pulled it out of her pocket and flipped it in the air. "Heads I f-f-follow, tails I stay."

  The coin landed with the odd symbol facing upward. But was that a head or a tail? Ian sighed disappointedly. "Ah, well, my loss ... "

  As his hair, glinting in the sun, disappeared beyond the hedgerow, she turned and trudged into the house.

  "AAAAGGHHHHH!"

  At the sound of the scream, Alistair barged barefoot out of his room. He raced past

  Amy, who was being served orange juice in the kitchen.

  She followed him outside, with Harold and Dan close behind.

  In the distance, Amy heard a violent growl, a rustling from the hedges. Ian burst out of the opening, one shoe missing, running at top speed. "HELLLLLP!"

  Behind him was an enormous dog, a mutt that seemed to be part pit bull, part Great Dane, and from the looks of it, possibly part black bear.

  "What the-?" Alistair said. "STOP! SIT!"

  "I can't sit! He bit me on the bum!" Ian shrieked.

  "Really?"

  Nellie said, grinning.

  Alistair was limping onto the lawn now, waving his finger at the beast, which hung its head sheepishly and whimpered. "Is this how you greet me on my return, you naughty thing?" Alistair scolded. "Bad dog! Bad, bad Buffy!"

  "Buffy?"

  Dan said.

  GRRRRRRR.

  "Shhh, she's sensitive about her name," Alistair replied.

  "I'll sue!" Ian sputtered.

  "I'll sue you AND the dog. And the country of South Korea. And... and... "

  "The landscape architect?" Natalie said.

  "The landscape architect!" Ian shouted.

  "Buffy is actually a real pussycat," Alistair said, eyeing Ian suspiciously, "unless you surprise her."

  "Flowrf! Flowrf!" barked Buffy, throwing a spray of saliva left and right.

  "She is sooooo cute!" Nellie said. "These are handsewn Persian silk!"

  Ian turned around, revealing a tear in his pants that exposed boxers with pink dollar signs on a white background, then quickly spun back around. "Uh, never mind."

  "Sweeet," Nellie said.

  "Shut up," Natalie snapped, barely stifling a laugh herself.

  "I fail to find the humor in this!" Ian shouted, his eyes red with rage and embarrassment. "And neither will you. I will drain you, Alistair. I will bring you to your knees -- "

  "Young man," Alistair interrupted sharply, "I am too old and too wise to be intimidated by a fourteen-year-old boy who wakes me from a much-needed sleep by his foolish actions. Why were you snooping in my hedges when I told you not to?"

  "Who ever heard of planting a guard dog in the middle of a hedge maze?" Ian snapped back. "What is back there, Alistair? What are you hiding?"

  Alistair cleared his throat. Pulling a comb from a pocket, he tidied his hair as if he were about to go to a business meeting. "I suppose," he said, "we will have to do this now. Perhaps, Mr. Kabra, you would like to change." He called over his shoulder. "Harold, please apply some disinfectant to the young man's wounds."

  Ian went pale. "I'll do it myself," he said, heading into the house.

  Nellie flopped back in a lounge chair, her face covered with sunscreen. "Wake me when it's over."

  As they tramped through the hedge, Amy could see the hurt in Ian's eyes. He was wearing a pair of Harold's uniform pants now, which were a couple of sizes too large. "These itch," Ian grumbled.

  "No spare pants in your carry-on?" Dan said. "Bummer!"

  Cackling, Dan scampered ahead. Ian turned toward Amy, trying valiantly to smile. "I meant, the bite marks itch. Not the trousers."

  She fell in step beside him. "He -- he -- should have -- " The harder she tried, the worse it felt. The words were like volleyballs stuck in her throat. "Alistair should have warned me?" Ian said. "Thank you. My feelings exactly."

  "Uh-huh," Amy replied. Talk much? she thought. She clutched her jade necklace, fiddling furiously with the chain.

  "You warned me, though," Ian said softly. "I should have listened."

  "Well, um ..." Amy said, feeling suddenly as if the temperature had shot up ten degrees.

  Ian laughed. "Oh, well. I suppose it will only hurt when I sit."

  Amy fell into step beside him, watching his footfalls land on the grass, counting how many steps she took compared to his. He had a strong stride.

  Before long, they reached the others. Alistair had stopped before a section of hedge and was groping around inside it.

  Dan was glaring at Amy.

  What was that about? his face said.

  Dan glanced accusingly at Ian. Before he could glance back, Amy turned away. She could read his mind anyway. She hated when he was right. Alistair was now clearing a section of brush to reveal a door with a round, cast-iron hatch. The Kabras, the Cahills, and Buffy all gathered around gawking, except for Buffy, who drooled.

  On the hatch was the number 5005. Beneath that was a heavy latch and a circular dial engraved with numbers from 1 to 30, like a combination lock.

  "This, my children," Alistair said proudly, "was barbecue pork."

  Dan rapped his fingers against the latch. "Been out in the sun a long time."

  "I mean, sales of my barbecue pork burritos bought this," Alistair said. "The combination involves four numbers, and all the information you need to know is here. You get three tries. I can give you one hint -- but that will use up a try."

  Ian frowned. Amy could see the wheels turning in his head.

  She took a deep breath. 5005. There was something about that number.

  "The number is a palindrome," Ian said, "the same backward and forward. That may mean something."

  "It's two-zero-zero-two upside down," offered Natalie.

  Dan exhaled loudly. "Rich doesn't guarantee smart. It's, like, so obvious, dude." "Pardon?" Ian said.

  "Don't overthink -- Uncle Alistair said we have everything we need to know!" He spun the numbers 5, 0, 0, and 5, and then pulled the latch. Stuck solid.

  "That was Try Number One," Alistair said.

  Ian glanced at Dan. "Maybe thinking isn't such a bad idea." "I think we need the hint," Natalie said.

  "Very well," Alistair said. "It is a riddle: Why leave the factory when the workers are in their prime?"

  The question hung in the air. Amy's mind raced.

  "Prime ..." Dan said, his face worked into a prunish mask of concentration. "Okay, what's the prime of someone's life? Like, twenty-one years old? Maybe one of the numbers is twenty-one!"

  As he reached for the dial, Alistair said, "Remember, you have only one chance left. If you fail, I cannot let you in."

  Dan's hand froze. "Come on, guys, help me out here. Twenty-one and ...?" "Well, when does a worker leave a factory?" Ian said. "This, I'm afraid, is beyond the Kabra experience."

  "Twelve noon for lunch?" Dan said. "And five o'clock to go home. So ... twenty
-one, twelve, and five?"

  "No!" Amy blurted out. She wasn't sure, but the hint was a lot like the ones in the Puns and Anagrams puzzles that Dan used to do in the Sunday New York Times.

  The hint was partially hidden in the wording -- you just needed to know how to read it. "Um, I think it's none of those. Can I try?"

  Dan scowled at her. "Amy,

  I'm the puzzle guy. I'm all over this."

  Amy shrank back. Maybe he was seeing something else. Dan always saw stuff no one else did. He was a genius at puzzles. He had solved an ancient code on a pile of skulls in the sewers of Paris. He had figured out the secret encoded in Mozart's sheet music.

  But he was being distracted now. He was looking at Ian as if he wanted to kill him with optical lightsabers.

  He wasn't thinking.

  "I -- I'm pretty sure I have this," Amy said. Alistair grinned. He gestured to the dial. "Please."

  Amy averted her eyes from the disbelieving glare of her brother. "Well, think about that phrase - 'Why leave the factory.' 'Why' sounds like the letter Y. If the letter Y leaves the word factory,

  you're left with -- " "Factor!" Natalie announced.

  "And the workers?" Amy said, reaching out to the latch. "They're 'in their

  prime'

  "Prime... factors?" Dan said.

  "So that would be the prime numbers that you multiply together to get five thousand and five ... " Ian murmured. "Sounds a bit far-fetched?" "I hate math," Natalie said. Amy's hand shook as she carefully turned the dial

  ,5 , 7, 11, 13.

  Click.

  She turned the latch and pulled the hatch open. "Welcome," Alistair said, "to the Oh sanctum."

  CHAPTER 1 2

  It's a small room, Ian thought, but ugly.

  He smiled. An old Kabra family joke.

  The Cahill brother -- Dan -- was gazing about the musty, wood-paneled room as if he were about to cry. "For this, you have a murderous, man-eating, killer beast?" he cried out. "To guard a library?"

  Amy was looking about the sanctum in awe. "It's ... beautiful!"

  The girl was modest and thoughtful. How bizarre. So rarely did Ian see these qualities in others -- especially during the quest for the 39 Clues. Naturally, he had been taught to avoid these behaviors at all costs and never to consort with anyone who possessed

  them. They were distasteful -- FLO, as Papa would say. For Losers Only. And Kabras never lost.

  Yet she fascinated him. Her joy in running up Alistair's tiny lawn, her awe at this piddling cubbyhole -- it didn't seem possible to gain so much happiness from so little. This gave him a curious feeling he'd never quite experienced. Something like indigestion but quite a bit more pleasant.

  Ah, well. Blame it on the ripped trousers, he thought. Humiliation softened the soul.

  He glanced at the cramped shelves, the mildewed oak walls, the cracked leather armchair, the hideous fluorescent lights, the mouse droppings in the corners, the scuffed moldings, and the artwork that seemed to have been bought at a tag sale for the color-blind. Beautiful?

  "It's books," Dan groaned. "Beam me up, Scotty -please!

  For once, Ian rather agreed with him.

  "Rare books," Alistair said, gesturing grandly to a section of four glassed-in shelves, "not to mention one of the world's finest collections of secret material about the Cahill family. A lifelong passion for me, as few items were ever duplicated. Here is our best hope of decoding the parchment!"

  Ian began to sit, but he thought of how that would make his posterior feel. Standing up wasn't pleasant, either, with the polyester trousers that felt like sandpaper on his legs. And Dan's whining just made the experience unbearable.

  He would have to avoid the brother. The sister, at least, was interesting. He wondered if her lack of cynicism would be contagious.

  How distasteful. Still...

  "Perhaps we should form teams," Ian suggested. "A race. Amy and I will scour the material on the top two shelves, Natalie and Dan take the bottom two." "Excellent," Alistair said. "Do you agree, Amy?" "Um ... " Amy said, her eyes darting away from him. "Uh... "

  A pity,

  Ian thought. So many females had this reaction to him. It really did limit conversation.

  "I've never been on an extra-Kabricular team before," Natalie said, smiling at her own wittiness. "But I'll try, I suppose."

  Dan was staring at an expensive but unfortunate painting of a couple quite familiar to Ian. The man's hair was piled in mangled gray wisps, his eyebrows bushy and his eyes wild. The woman had a strong face, the way a horse was strong -- long-jawed and big-eared. Above them floated all kinds of strange-looking symbols. "Who's the lucky couple?" Dan asked.

  "Ah, yes, the ever-glamorous Gideon and Olivia, the original Cahills, painted in the early 1500s," Ian said. "Your ancestors." "The Kabras improved the bloodline," Natalie said.

  "Ready?" Alistair spread out the parchment on a table, then grabbed a book off the shelf. "I will help the younger team, Natalie and Dan. Set... go!"

  Ian ran his fingers along the line of books, some with handwritten titles along the spines:

  Historicus Cahilliensis: Ekaterina, Vols. land II... Ekat Architectural Renderings ... A Review of Eighteenth-Century Cahill Literature.... Some of them seemed like pamphlets, notes torn from three-ring binders. It would be difficult to find anything helpful here.

  Amy was pulling down a thick book titled Origins of the Cahills: A Compendium of Contemporary Studies.

  "We're supposed to find a clue, not study history," Dan snapped.

  "But we know so little about the Cahill family," Amy said.

  Natalie looked up from a book she was skimming. "I don't know why your parents never told you which branch you were in. We knew the whole story before we were walking."

  Ian watched Amy as her face sank. He felt a flutter inside. Sympathy, he realized -- an emotion he often felt for the Kabra banker on days when the stock market performed badly. This feeling, however, was somehow a bit more ... vivid.

  He gave his sister a kick. "Natalie, have you lost your sense of... grace?" She glared at him for a moment, until the joke clicked in. " 'The Cahill family traces back to early 1500s Dublin, with the brilliant, eccentric Gideon Cahill and his wife, Olivia,'" Amy read aloud.

  Alistair nodded encouragingly. His niece was so excited she could barely get the words out.

  " 'Some say Cahill had indeed made a discovery to change the course of humankind,'" Amy continued. " 'But the nature of this discovery was never known. In 1507, a sudden fire swept through the Cahill home. All escaped but one. Gideon, desperate to save his life's work, was found burned to death at his desk.'"

  "What is it with Cahills and fire?" Dan whispered.

  Alistair felt a little clutch in his chest. The children had been through so much tragedy -- the fire that had trapped their parents, the one that had burned Grace's house. It occurred to him why he'd never wanted children of his own.

  You risked caring for them. And that kind of feeling could be dangerous in the hunt for the 39 Clues.

  " 'According to contemporary sources, at his death, Gideon had been studying the secrets of alchemy -- the attempt to turn base metals into gold,'" Amy went on. " 'He sought a substance called the philosopher's stone. The problem was, the substance did not exist -- yet. It was considered the key to the final quest. Being more perfect than gold, the stone, also known as alkahest, would be powerful enough to turn other substances into gold.'"

  "Thank you, Ms. Frizzle," Dan said, furiously reading through a pile of pamphlets. "Keep going, but this time try reading to yourself."

  "Don't you all see?"

  Amy said, jumping out of her seat. "We've done it!"

  "Done what?" Dan said.

  Amy grabbed her brother and swung him around like she'd done when he was three. "Gideon made that 'discovery to change the course of humankind'! He cracked the secret of the philosopher's stone.

  We've discovered the secret to the thirty-nine clues!" br />
  "What?" Ian said. "You figured out the parchment code? The clue?" "No -- something bigger than the clue," Amy said.

  Natalie plopped angrily down into a chair. "Did we lose? I hate being on a team."

  Alistair looked over Amy's shoulder, pushing aside the Kabras, who insisted on blocking his view. Amy flipped the page to a diagram of alchemical symbols:

  [proofreader's note: the alchemy chart shows the alchemical symbols for fire, water, earth, air, gold, sulphur, mercury, salt, and the philosopher's stone (alkahest).]

  Amy brought a coin out of her pocket. "The shape -- the philospher's stone -- it's on this coin!" she exclaimed.

  "Cool," Dan replied. "But what's so big about that?"

  "Don't you see?" Amy repeated. "This page is the secret to the whole thing -- what the thirty-nine clues add up to!"

  "So ... when we collect all of them ..." Dan said, a grin spreading slowly across his face.

  "We will possess the secret to alchemy -- the philosopher's stone!" Amy put the coin back in her pocket and glanced at the book. "We'll find out how the coin fits in, too. But listen --

  '"After the fire of 1507, Thomas and Kate fled Ireland for England, smuggling components of Gideon's work -- which they vowed to continue. Thomas married and had a family but began neglecting his sister and their mission. The angry Katherine ran away, taking something of such importance that Thomas left everything to chase after her. After trying Paris, Venice, and Cairo, Thomas gave up. Attracted to the rough samurai culture, he settled in Japan, assuming a modest lifestyle. His youngest son, Hiyoshimaru, grew up to become Toyotomi Hideyoshi.'"

  "The Bald Rat was the son of Thomas –the original Tomas?" Dan said. "That's promising."

  Alistair cast a wary glance at the Kabras. He could read their parched, sarcastic faces -- their impatience at the fact that Dan and Amy were learning things that the other teams had known for a long time. He knew they were struggling to wait out the Cahills' learning curve. After all, Dan and Amy had been very good at finding new Clues that had eluded the others. And they were on to something here.

  "Can't we skip past GO, collect two hundred dollars, and get to the parts we don't know yet?" Natalie said with a yawn.

  "Get off your butt, Natalie, and let's keep looking," Dan said. "We're ... thirty-seven clues away from the secret to alchemy!"