“You, on the other hand—you’re very good with words. So good that you almost lose me in them. So you think some of the sacred texts are about here?”
“In the proverbial nutshell, madam, if that old saw is something that makes sense in these times. Yes, I believe that when you showed us those papers some time back I was privy to witness no less than a map of this very place. For reasons that would take too long and would be too, too bizarre to unveil right now, I had heard of such a place as this before. It took some time for my addled and frankly decaying synapses to make the connection, but I believe that— if I am correct—then we will have discovered the way to access the bolt hole of the Illuminated Ones.”
Tammy blew out her breath loudly. “Shit, you can’t be that crazy, ’cause I never heard anyone who was use words like that! What do you think, Glo?” the auburn-curled Amazon asked her queen.
“I say that mebbe crazy men aren’t as stupidworks as the rest of their kind.”
She smiled, then called out, “Petor, get over here, honey.”
The gangling youth who was the queen’s bearer appeared at her side as if from nowhere, showing that the secret training he and Jon had undertaken to be better warriors than the majority of Gate menfolk had been of some benefit, which Gloria duly noted.
“I’m going to have to watch you,” she murmured with a raised eyebrow, ‘”cause that was pretty warrior-like for a man. Anyway, get the chest from my things, sweets. We need to look at the sacred writings.”
Petor disappeared into the crowd without a word, reappearing a scant few minutes later with the battered tin trunk in which the writings and maps that were sacred to the Gate were stored. He put it down before Gloria and handed her the key, which he kept secreted away where only he and the Amazon queen knew. It was among the belongings that traveled with the trunk, but inaccessible to anyone else, and he had extracted it before removing the trunk.
Opening the old tin box, which was rusty and battered on the exterior but carefully lined and cleaned on the inside, leading Ryan to the conclusion that the exterior decay was a blind to prevent the box being stolen by anyone who might think it important, Gloria carefully extracted the maps and documents, placing them before Doc.
“All yours, sweetie,” she said quietly. “See if you can find it, but be careful.”
Doc lifted the first piece of rolled paper and gently straightened it on the cold marble floor of the lobby, his eyes scanning its contents. As he did this, he murmured, “My dear woman, I would not dream of anything else. I shall treat it as I would my own aged, fragile bones.”
A silence descended over the group as they watched Doc. It was almost as if the rest of the camp disappeared and a bubble of complete calm had enveloped the nine people clustered around the hunched figure of Doc Tanner, shutting out the rest of the Gate, the building in which they were situated, the compound, even the very Deathlands itself. Everything was focused on Theophilus Tanner.
And Doc was determined to find the right document. Muttering to himself, he unrolled paper after paper, laying it out flat and examining it carefully. Those that were full of text were immediately rerolled and stored back in the box. Those that were maps or diagrammatical in design were carefully examined, Doc poring over the detail, particularly on those that seemed to be of buildings rather than areas.
Gloria looked across at Jak, questioning in her glance. Had she done the right thing in allowing Doc access to these sacred writings, or was he just as crazy as he seemed? Jak read this in her glance and shook his head. He knew that sometimes the crazier Doc seemed, the more likely he was to be onto something.
“Hot pipe, I wish he’d find it,” Dean murmured softly to Petor, “because I don’t think I can take much more of the suspense.”