“That’s possible?” Dr. Delecta asked as the Mystic leaned back in his seat, casting him a suspicious look. “How?”

  “An insight into the Dark, I guess,” Al Hamra replied. “I remember when I developed the power of location it just came to me in a desperate moment. But this time it happened when I was investigating the cube. Like I understood something about the universe.”

  “What is it?” Saqr asked. “Is it bad?”

  He nodded, then shook his head. “Neither. Good for us. It’s a power of the cube itself,” he told them, holding the cube where they could see it and pointing to the faces embossed with Portal builder runes. “You see these faces with the symbols on?” The runes glimmered in the daylight, looking as if they had been carved from mother-of-pearl or opal. “If you depress them in a particular order, the cube causes a kind of fear and uneasiness in people nearby.” He looked around, pointed to one of the generators that maintained the insect exclusion field. “Maybe about that far. This is the series of symbols that our friend ‘Z’ sent to Islim, and which he used to activate the cube in the cave.” Seeing worried looks he added, “Don’t worry, I didn’t press them. I just know that’s what it does. But there is another code, a different set of runes, that will briefly paralyze everyone in about the same radius.” He looked around at them. “That’s the power I learnt.”

  “Useful,” Olivia observed. “If a little unsettling.”

  “So this cube gives an ordinary person the powers of a Mystic?” Dr. Delecta asked, picking up the cube and looking at it warily. “I could press the symbols in the order you learnt and make everyone scared?”

  “Or paralyze them.” He nodded confirmation.

  “But look,” Siladan pointed at the cube. “There are three faces with symbols on them. We don’t know what the symbols mean. But if you have found two orderings that produce an effect, shouldn’t we assume that every possible ordering could produce a result? That would mean there are twenty seven possible effects encoded in the cube.”

  “Oh.” This from Saqr.

  “Good point, Siladan.” Dr. Delecta handed the cube back to Al Hamra, asking him, “But you could only learn how to use one of them?”

  He nodded. “But I didn’t rush to study it. The second power just slipped into my mind. Maybe because I already can command people with my voice. Maybe they’re related?”

  “That’s a bit like what you did on the bridge,” Saqr pointed out. “Maybe it’s an extension?”

  “So with this cube,” Adam said, “We can scare people away, or get them to stand still?”

  “Does it work on Adam?” Saqr asked, as Al Hamra nodded in response to Adam’s question.

  “Test it,” Adam suggested, and then in a slightly louder voice as Saqr tried to object, “If we are going to use it on others, it will affect us too. We should know how it works.”

  “What if it summons a Sentinel?” Olivia asked. “I don’t care how it works if it does that.”

  “It doesn’t,” Al Hamra told her. “I’m sure of that.”

  “Does it affect the person who uses it?” Siladan asked, eyeing the cube like it was a scorpion or a wasp, and Al Hamra shook his head. “So,” Siladan mused. “If I carried it, and it didn’t work on Adam, we could go into a fight, I activate the box, and then we can kill people as they run away.”

  “Charming,” Olivia drawled. “You two are full of bright ideas today aren’t you?”

  “Olivia,” Siladan replied, his voice level in an ‘I’m trying to be reasonable with you’ style, “Remember the Nekatra? If we used this box then it would have affected us and them. But if you had run away, and me and Adam stood our ground, I could have paralyzed them all to stop them chasing us. Right?” He looked to Al Hamra, who nodded, though he looked uncertain. “Maybe you wouldn’t have got separated if we could do things like that?”

  Olivia shook her head, looking unconvinced, but after a pause added, “I agree though, let’s try it. Maybe it doesn’t even work if you know what it’s going to do?”

  Dr. Delecta stood and began backing away towards the exclusion field, shaking her head and holding her hands in front of her. “No, no, no! I’m not testing that thing. It’s gross.”

  “It’s better you stay out of it,” Adam told her. “We need you to check if anything goes wrong.” He looked around at the rest of the group. “Shall we?” And when, after a pause, they nodded, he turned to Al Hamra, nodding once. Their captain held up the box and pressed three faces quickly , flipping the box once as he did so.

  They all felt the wave of horror at the same moment, a sudden whispering tide of gibberish and a taste in their mouths like rotten meat or tooth decay. They blinked suddenly, heads snapping around as they looked for the shadow of the beast they thought was creeping up on them, and then Saqr gave a small scream and turned to run, stumbling through the camp towards the beach. She caught herself after a few steps, put her hands to her ears and stood facing away from Al Hamra, breathing heavily. Meanwhile Olivia stepped backwards towards her tent, hands in front of her as if she were placating a dangerous animal, and Siladan stood, gripping the table so hard his knuckles blanched white as he tried desperately to contain the fear he knew should not be real. Adam stood impassively watching until, a few seconds later, the effect faded away.

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  “Icons grace!” Saqr exclaimed as she returned to the comfort of the insect exclusion zone, sweating and shaking. “Even though I knew it was from the machine I was still so scared!” She peered at the cube, then looked over at Siladan where he was lowering himself back to his seat. “Did you hear the whispers?”

  He nodded, face drained of its usual energy, and looked to Adam. “Did you?”

  Adam nodded. “I hear the Dark,” he told them. “And all its little tricks. I know what it is trying to do. But my psycho-sculpt prevents me from feeling it.” He looked around them. “It is obviously very powerful, though.”

  Olivia returned to the table, shaking slightly. “Do you think we could get used to it with exposure?” She asked Dr. Delecta as the bigger woman returned to the camp table, largely unaffected by the cube’s powers. “It seems we can resist it if we know what it does. Maybe with time we could ignore it? It would be useful.”

  “I don’t think we should use it,” Dr. Delecta replied. “We don’t know how it works. What if it sometimes damages us? What if it drives Al Hamra crazy? We should be careful with Portal builder toys that are linked to the Dark.”

  “I agree,” Al Hamra said, sliding the cube back into its leather holder. “But it’s useful to know we have it. And I will keep studying it, to see what else it does and what else I can learn.”

  Dr. Delecta lowered herself into one of the camp chairs with a sigh and pointed at the lenses, which sat on the table next to the cube. “Good. What about them?”

  The others gathered around the table as Al Hamra picked up the fragile-looking spectacles and held them up for all to see. “They enable the wearer to see creatures from the Dark Between the Stars. Invisible ones, like disembodied djinn, or Sarcofagoi hiding in shadows. I don’t know exactly what all the lenses are for,” he pointed to the strange set of extra lenses on hinges atop the frame of the main lens. “Maybe for different kinds of light.”

  “Could be useful,” Adam said quietly, “But let’s hope we don’t have to fight such creatures.”

  “I don’t think we should bet on that,” Al Hamra replied. “Our track record isn’t good. But,” he slid them into a small glasses case and handed them to Adam, “The good thing is you don’t need any special power to use them. I think you should have them, since you’re not afraid of creatures of the Dark. If we think they’re necessary, you should use them.”

  Adam took them with a grunt of acknowledgement, and slid the case into one of the pouches on his vest.

  “So we have some Portal builder technology that gives ordinary people the power of Mystics,” Siladan summarized, after they had sat in silence at the table for a few moments. “Which means, somehow, that Mystic powers can be embodied in things. And it also means that the Portal builders were familiar with the powers of the Mystics.”

  “We should assume that they’re all linked,” Dr. Delecta concluded for him. “The Portals, Mystics, Portal builder artifacts, and the Dark Between the Stars.”

  “And the creatures from the Dark,” Saqr added.

  “And we know the Draconites have engineered people not to be afraid of the Dark Between the Stars or its creatures,” Adam continued, pointing to his own chest by way of emphasis.

  “So that Butterfly ship, it might be Draconite.” This from Saqr. “But it might also have come from a lost Horizon, following a Portal trajectory we don’t know about, and caused some problem in Taoan.”

  “But if it did,” Siladan said slowly, thinking as he spoke, “And you think this dig is connected, then the timing tells me that there must be some other people in the Third Horizon who know about the lost Horizon. I think this dig was made about the same time as the trouble in Taoan. If they’re linked then there must be some people here on Kua or in Coriolis who were coordinating whatever happened here, at the same time as the trouble in Taoan.”

  “So while we were fighting to escape the Ghazali,” Al Hamra said, “Someone on Coriolis or Kua was trying to get the statuette and the Causality Stones, or stop someone else from finding them, and maybe trying to destroy the map of the Lost Horizon.”

  “We’ve stumbled on something big, then,” Dr. Delecta said. “Unless Saqr and I are wrong.”

  “I hope so!” Saqr replied. “But if we could get to Taoan and get the statuette back I would love to go through the Portal to find the Lost Horizon. Imagine how famous we’d be!”

  “Saqr!” Siladan raised his voice a little. “Are you crazy? We don’t know what we’d bring back.”

  “And we’d have to steal the statue from the Draconites,” Al Hamra pointed out. “Which,” he continued, as the others looked to their captain for a plan, “I’m willing to consider. But not until we have much better weapons, and more preparation. And we can’t do either without money. So before we leave this place, I want to explore the ruined towers on the far side of the rock.” He pointed in the direction of the distant towers, that the Sogoi had warned them were cursed, beyond the rock they had already explored. There was a burst of protest from Dr. Delecta and Saqr, but he waited for it to stop, gesturing for calm with outstretched hands. “We can do it,” he assured them. “We have the lenses and Adam is immune to the terror of the Dark. We know what to look out for. We can explore the towers, see if there are any artifacts there, and take them back to Coriolis to sell or use.” He pointed at the bag holding the sinister cube. “You’ve seen what we’ve already gained. What if we find another statuette, or we dig up some kind of super weapon? I’ve heard,” he looked to Siladan for support, “That even the sugar globes the Firstcome lit their ruins with are worth a lot in Archaeology Alley. If we can even come back with a couple of them we can fund the next step in our mission.”

  Siladan, of course, nodded eagerly at this, ready to continue pursuing his favorite interests. The rest of the team looked dubiously at Al Hamra, until Adam grunted and said, “I’m in. I’ll kill anything that gets in our way.” With that Dr. Delecta indicated her assent, and the majority was achieved.

  “Very well then,” Al Hamra concluded. “Saqr, I want you to take a grav bike and do a quick scout of the area. Tomorrow, we go back into the ruins.”