Free Theodosia & the Eyes of Horus by R. L. Lafevers Page B

enveloped in a small cloud of pickled-onion-and-boiled-cabbage fumes. "Watch yourself, Theo" was all he said. Then he snapped the ledger closed and began climbing the stairs. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked at Henry.
    "What a beast!" Henry said. I winced, sure that Fagenbush hadn't made it to the top of the stairs yet.
    My suspicions were confirmed when the entire basement suddenly went black. I froze as Fagenbush's soft laughter floated down the stairway, followed by the click of the door closing. I waited to see if he would lock it, but no. He seemed satisfied to simply turn off the gaslights and leave us to fumble about in the dark.
    "I say, why is Fagenbush so mean?" Henry asked.
    I sighed. "I don't know, Henry. Perhaps he doesn't think
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    he should have to work with a young girl? Whatever the reason, it is most tiresome. I honestly don't trust him a bit."
    "Can't say that I blame you. You know, it's not as dark in here as I thought it would be," he added.
    "You're right." A faint sickly green light kept the room from being pitch-black. We quickly found the source of the light. It came from the shelf. From the Emerald Tablet under the wooden shield, to be precise.
    "Is it supposed to glow like that?" Henry sounded a bit awed.
    "Maybe. If it's as powerful as Stilton was telling us."
    "Does it mean something, do you think?"
    "That's what I intend to find out."
    "How?"
    I turned to look at him. "Research," I announced. "Piles and piles of it."
    Henry groaned, then moped his way up the stairs. I started to follow, pausing when I thought I saw a small patch of shadow dribble down from the ceiling behind the mummies. I blinked to clear my eyes, and when I looked again, it was gone. Clearly, the strange light was playing tricks with my vision.
    Thinking of green light reminded me that I'd yet to conduct a Second Level Test on the Emerald Tablet. I quickly
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    slipped a few wax bits from my pocket onto the shelf next to it. It wouldn't hurt to find out if it was cursed before we handled it much more. Then, because I realized I'd been distracted from my mass Second Level Test the day before, I took another moment and scattered more than a dozen wax blobs throughout the catacombs. It really was time to get a handle on the curses down here.
    "Are you coming or what?" Henry shouted down the stairs at me.
    "I'm right behind you," I called back.
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    CHAPTER NINE ALL ROADS LEAD TO ... CHALDEA
    ***
    "ARE YOU DONE YET ?" Henry asked for the third time even though we'd been in the reading room less than ten minutes.
    "No, Henry. I'm not done. I'm just getting started." The truth was, I hadn't even cracked open a book yet, just managed to pull them from the shelves. Honestly. Did he think I could absorb the words through my hands? "This will take a while, so you might as well get comfortable."
    He sighed, then trudged over to an open space on the floor, sat down, and pulled some marbles from his pocket. Satisfied that he would entertain himself for at least five minutes, I returned to my books.
    Since Stilton had said the tablet was revered by those who
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    studied alchemy and the occult, the best place to begin my research was with the grimoires, the ancient books alchemists and magicians of old had used to record their experiments and working knowledge of magic. One in particular, written by Silvus Moribundus, seemed like a good place to start. Much of his information came from Nectanebo II's head priest and magician. The problem was, the book was written in Latin in an old-fashioned script and there were a number of handwritten notes scribbled in the margins, all of which made it painfully slow to translate. Research is not for the easily discouraged.
    I thumbed through the old, worn pages looking for the words Tabula Smaragdina and felt victorious when I actually found them.
    Moribundus wrote that the tablet had been handed down from Hermes Trismegistus, who was thought to be a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the