The Scepter of Fire

“This is Edmund,” Mistress Obsidian announced, smiling in her chilling way. “My inside informant. My spy extraordinaire.”

Edmund felt a churning deep in the pit of his stomach. How dare she pretend like he’d been in on it. Like she hadn’t tricked him into his actions.

“I thought it might be nice for you to explain to everyone what happened back at the School for Seers,” the headmistress continued. “Since you were so instrumental to the mission.”

Edmund ground his teeth. He shuddered as he recalled the way the school had shaken. How its walls had begun to crumble. How the kapoc tree’s branches had snapped, making the walkways crash to the ground. How his teachers and classmates—and his friends—had had to flee through the emergency transporter.

“It was evacuated,” he mumbled, hanging his head in shame.

“And why was it evacuated?” Mistress Obsidian pressed.

She was clearly enjoying this. Edmund felt a pang of hatred toward her that was stronger than any hatred he’d ever felt for his old love rival, Oliver.

“Because it was falling down,” he announced, all the bitterness he felt coming out in his tone.

All around the room, the Obsidian students burst into a round of applause. They seemed thrilled as they exchanged whispered exclamations with one another. The whole thing left Edmund feeling sick and ashamed.

Mistress Obsidian, on the other hand, looked utterly delighted. “Amethyst’s School for Seers faces ruination,” she announced, waving her hands with a flourish. “And so now is the perfect moment to send in an assault team.”

Edmund gasped. “No. Please, just let it be! What else is there to take from the school? Didn’t you already get everything you wanted?”

Mistress Obsidian sneered. “Edmund, Edmund, Edmund. Dear, stupid boy. The School for Seers contains some of the most important artifacts known to our kind. Professor Amethyst has kept locked away so many scrolls and texts, so many archives. He is sitting on so much knowledge. He thinks of himself as a gatekeeper, you see. He believes he and only a small number of seers scattered throughout history can be trusted to know the secrets of the seers. But I believe in sharing information. I wish to liberate the knowledge he’s kept locked up for himself all these centuries.”

Around the table, Edmund saw all the seer students nodding in agreement. So that was the lie Mistress Obsidian had fed them, he thought. Where she’d used his love for Esther to get him to do her bidding, she was spinning a tale to her students, too. They all thought of Professor Amethyst as some terrible man who kept all the seer secrets to himself. But Edmund knew better. He knew Professor Amethyst was the best seer in the universe. That he had taken a great burden upon his shoulders. That his heart was pure and all he ever wanted to do was teach his students right so that, together, they could keep the universe safe.

It dawned on Edmund that he’d betrayed the best mentor he could ever have been privileged to know. That the school he loved was doomed. That he was to blame for it all. He felt crushed. Hopeless. Desolate.

Mistress Obsidian’s eyes flashed with malevolence. She clapped her hands loudly. Suddenly, a swirling portal appeared at the far end of the room.

Wind rushed through the office. Edmund gasped, feeling it batter his clothes and hair.

Mistress Obsidian rose slowly from her throne and smiled, the lights of the portal flashing in her irises.

“Madeleine. Natasha. Malcolm,” she said. The moody black-haired girl and the strange skull-face boy leapt up at her command, as did Madeleine. Mistress Obsidian looked at the chubby boy. “And Christopher.”

He rose to his feet. There was something wrong about him, Edmund thought. Something less than human. He seemed haunted, like he’d gone through some terrible trauma. And he looked mean, like he wanted revenge.

“You are my team,” Mistress Obsidian announced. “My best and most brilliant students.”

Edmund watched, his stomach roiling with shame, as the four Obsidian students headed for the portal to finalize, once and for all, the destruction of the School for Seers, a process he’d set in motion the second he’d teamed up with the evil Mistress Obsidian.

“It is time,” she roared, shaking her fist to the sky. “Time to unlock the secrets of the seers once and for all!”

The four children disappeared through the portal and Edmund felt his shoulders slump. The School for Seers was doomed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Oliver, Ralph, and Hazel hurried after the boy, following his tracks as he ran through the streets of Florence. Oliver couldn’t quite believe they were in the time of Galileo. He had met so many of his heroes while traveling through time, it was kind of mind-blowing. If someone had told him back when he’d read his inventors book cover to cover that he would one day be meeting some of the people inside it, he would never have believed them!

Up ahead, a row of beige-painted, terraced buildings came into view. They were between four and six stories high, with each floor having a series of small, neat square windows. The terrace looked to Oliver like a row of townhouses, but the boy they’d been following hurried in through the carved wooden door of a four-story building. And as they drew closer, there, carved into the stone plaque beside the big, tall door, were the words Accademia delle Arti del Disegno.

“It’s much smaller than I expected,” Ralph commented.

Hazel ran her fingers over the grooved letters, as if trying to absorb some of its history. “You know our friend Michelangelo studied here, too?” she commented.

“Friend?” Ralph joked. “I don’t think meeting someone once makes them a friend.”

“He helped us save Esther’s life,” Hazel replied with a displeased frown. “That definitely doesn’t make him a foe!”

“Guys,” Oliver interrupted. “Now’s not the time to squabble. Come on, let’s get inside.”

He pushed on the large oak door, and it creaked open. Oliver felt like he was intruding on somewhere secret. It was a feeling that often overcame him when he poked around in the past. It was hard to truly accept that as a seer on a mission, the universe condoned his being in this time and place. He was always expecting some stern teacher to jump out and tell him to go away.

The Accademia delle Arti del Disegno was rather chilly inside, thanks in part to the marble floor and small windows that let in very little of the warm sun. The dark vibe was only emphasized by the lacquered wood paneling that went halfway up the walls, and a series of similarly varnished joists running across the width of the ceiling above them. Imposing stone statues stood at intervals along the length of the corridor, completing the grand, foreboding atmosphere.

As the children paced inside, their footsteps echoed. Oliver looked down the corridor, left, then right.

“There he is!” he cried as he saw the boy disappear in through a door.

They hurried after him and went in through the same door.

They were now in a large lecture theater that reminded Oliver, painfully, of Doctor Ziblatt’s classroom. It had the same horseshoe of benches and a stage in the middle, but instead of everything being white, shiny, and modern, the theater was made of wood. Instead of a big projector screen, there was a blackboard upon which was scrawled writing in white chalk that read: The art of perspective is of such a nature as to make what is flat appear in relief and what is in relief flat.

With a sudden sparking sensation, Oliver realized he recognized the quote. He felt a strange stirring in his mind as if cogs were turning. Then he worked out how he knew the quote. It was one of Leonardo da Vinci’s. And Oliver had not recalled the memory of it from a textbook or an overheard conversation, but had drawn it from his very own mind. That stirring sensation was his brain accessing Leonardo da Vinci’s knowledge, knowledge he’d implanted into Oliver’s mind during their last mission in Italy.

The shock was all-consuming. In the chaos of saving Esther and jumping through the portal, Oliver had all but forgotten about Leonardo’s implanted memories. Not only did he have Mistress Moretti’s immense seer powers and intelligence lying dormant in the gray matter of his mind, but he also possessed none other than Leonardo da Vinci’s! And just as Moretti’s language skills had suddenly appeared when he’d needed them, so too, it seemed, Leonardo’s knowledge was presenting itself to him. He wondered what other skills he may have acquired, the circumstances needed to access them, and the situation within which they may need to be utilized. Speaking Italian would certainly stand them in good stead for the rest of their time in Italy.

Oliver brought his attention back to the young Galileo, who was standing on the stage ahead of him. He looked to be in his early twenties, Oliver thought. Surely then, this was before he’d made many—indeed, any—of his great discoveries. Recalling the chapter in his favorite book of inventors, Oliver thought about how Galileo had been in his forties when he’d worked on the law of falling bodies and parabolic trajectories, and studied mechanics, motion, the pendulum, and other mathematical formulas. He’d been in his fifties when he’d made his great astronomical discoveries—mountains on the moon, the moons of Jupiter—and challenged the long-held belief that the earth was at the center of the universe, a belief that saw him condemned by the church.

Oliver sifted through his memories, trying to work out what the young Galileo had been working on in his twenties. It must have been his lost era, when he’d left the University of Pisa without graduating, having flip-flopped between studying medicine, mathematics, and philosophy. He wondered why Professor Amethyst would have sent them to meet Galileo at a point in history when he’d not yet discovered anything of worth.

Oliver, Ralph, and Hazel slipped into the back row of seats. As Galileo began to conduct his lecture, Ralph leaned in to Oliver.

“I don’t understand a word he’s saying.”

“It’s in Italian,” Oliver whispered back.

Ralph folded his arms. Hazel pouted.

“No fair,” she said. “I’d love to know what he’s saying. Can you translate?”

But Oliver shushed her. “I can’t translate if I can’t actually hear what he’s saying, can I?”

Hazel frowned and slunk down in her seat, adopting the same folded arm pose as Ralph. Oliver felt bad that they were going to have to sit through an hour of what was sure to be an extremely fascinating lecture without understanding a single word of it.

“As we can see here,” Galileo was saying, pointing to a painting that depicted a woman in a blue and red dress holding a little creature, “the figure has been positioned diagonally within the space, her head turned to her left shoulder, which is closest to the viewer. Thus the back of her head and right shoulder have been deeply shaded. Meanwhile, her right hand, resting here upon the ermine’s flank, and indeed, the ermine itself, as well as her nose, face, and left shoulder, have all been lightened. Thus, the artist has given the impression of the light diffusing. This gives us an understanding of distance, of position in relation to light.”

Lady with an Ermine, Oliver thought, the name of the painting suddenly popping into his head from nowhere.