The Magic Circle, Katherine Neville [parable of the sower read online .TXT] 📗

It’s my understanding that for the past fifty years, even throughout the war, Dacian Bassarides’s permanent base was in France, and that he’s great chums with Zoe, who’s now in her eighties. If anyone could arrange a tryst with him, she should be able to.”

I knew it was too dangerous for Sam to go to Paris seeking Dacian Bassarides. He’d have to clear immigration and security in two countries using false IDs. But I soon found the solution to the problem:

Hadn’t Wolfgang Hauser said he wanted to help “protect” my inheritance, and that he hoped I would meet my aunt Zoe in Paris to learn more about it? Since the Pod was sending us to Russia on government business, maybe we could arrange a layover for the two of us to visit with Zoe in Paris. Though Sam didn’t sound thrilled at the idea of my April-ing in Paris with Wolfgang, it was after all Sam’s idea that we interrogate Dacian Bassarides. This seemed the simplest way to do it.

We concurred that Sam should spend the next weeks, while I got my Franco-Russian trip set, shaking our family tree on the sly to see if he could knock down a few rotten apples—and that it would be a good idea to visit his grandfather, Dark Bear, on the Nez Percé reservation at Lapwai. Though neither of us had seen Dark Bear in years, we thought he might provide insight into Sam’s father, when Earnest lived at Lapwai before Sam was born—information that might shed more light on at least one member involved in the family schism that we knew had inherited manuscripts.

But I understood that my family added up to more than eccentricity, fame, and feuding war parties. There was something mysterious that seemed to lie buried at its very core. To explore that core we needed fresh data gathered through an impartial outside source. It was then that I thought of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Few outsiders or “gentiles” are aware that the Mormon Church maintains extensive genealogical facilities near Salt Lake City, containing records on family lineage that date back to the time of Cain and Seth. Olivier told me these records were kept on computers, the world’s bloodlines woven in microchip technology, hidden deep in bomb-proof caves within a Utah mountain—like the rune tapestries of those fabled Norns of Nürnberg, I thought.

Though we had our missions laid out, Sam and I still had the problem of how to make contact after we left this cabin and parted ways—not easy, when we couldn’t guess where either of us might be tomorrow morning. Sam had a plan: Each day, wherever he happened to be, he’d find a copy center and fax my computer at work leaving a fake name but a real number where I could fax him. I’d go to a copy shop and send him any new info with a key to decrypt it and a number where he could reply. This would work in the short haul, since there were copy shops in every town around the globe—except maybe in Soviet Russia, once I got there.

When Sam extinguished our fire and we came out of the cabin, though we’d been inside little more than an hour, the sunlight glittering from the snow in the high meadow was already dazzling. Just before I put on my dark glasses against the glare, Sam tossed his arm around my neck, drew me to him, and kissed my hair. Then he held me away.

“Just remember I love you, hotshot,” he told me seriously. “Don’t run into any more avalanches; I’d like to get you back in one piece. And I’m not at all sure about this business of your going to Paris.…”

“I love you back,” I told Sam, smiling. Putting my glasses on, I took his hand. “Meanwhile, blood brother, may the Great Bear Spirit walk in your moccasin prints. And before we part, you must swear to me on her totem you’ll take care of yourself the same way.”

Sam smiled too, and held up his hand, palm toward me.

“Honest Injun,” he said.

I was coming over the top of the high meadow when I saw his outline against the shadowy blue snow in the lower meadow, an athletic form in a sleek dark ski suit and goggles, his shaggy hair moving in the morning breeze. I didn’t need to see his face. No two people could move with that grace and agility on the snow. It was definitely Wolfgang Hauser. And he was headed toward me, following my tracks, the only ones that had yet been cut down there, I was sure, in last night’s new snow.

Holy shit. Thank God we’d decided to take separate routes out. But at the speed Wolfgang was moving, it would only be moments before he reached the place in the woods where Sam’s tracks and mine joined this morning. How in hell was I supposed to explain why and with whom I’d decided to go skiing in this isolated spot before dawn? The question of what Wolfgang himself was doing here, when he was supposed to be six hundred miles away in Nevada, would just have to wait.

In panic, I bolted off the rim and slashed down through the woods. It had never occurred to me that I should return by the same path I’d used that morning. I wasn’t even sure where my old trail was in these woods, or—since it had still been dark—exactly where Sam and I had met. My only ambition was to find Wolfgang before he himself reached that spot and we would have something very, very difficult to discuss. I was moving so fast through the blur of woods that I skied right past him.

“Ariel!” I heard with a Doppler effect, and screeched to a halt, nearly wrapping myself around a tree.

I gingerly crosshatched back through the woods. Wolfgang, skating between the trees, pulled aside fir branches laden with last night’s snow as he