“Valin came here,” Mack mused. “Why? Why here?”
“I will question the old gentleman,” Xiao said. “He’s fleeing, but he’s fleeing slowly.”
It was true. The old man was fleeing very slowly, and Xiao easily caught up with him. She was back seconds later—just after Mack stopped Stefan from prying a gold
flower off the wall—with the news that a very strange boy with a sword, and a man all in green, had indeed entered the temple.
“The man says they spoke some words of a language he did not know and disappeared,” Xiao reported.
The man with the amazing white beard had nerved himself to come back after Xiao reassured him. And now he pointed helpfully to a spot. There was nothing very interesting about this spot except, obviously, it was in the Golden Temple. But the spot itself wasn’t different from a thousand other spots. Except for the ceiling fan.
Yes, there are ceiling fans in the Golden Temple, and yes, they are gold. In this case, though, probably just gold paint.
Mack stared up thoughtfully at the fan, which was turning slowly. Xiao and Stefan stood beside him, likewise staring thoughtfully up at the fan. Although Stefan’s precise thought was, So where’s the lentils?
Here’s the thing to know: the people who worship at the temple are not exactly the same as the people who built the temple. The Golden Temple was started in the sixteenth century, and back in those days people knew that you couldn’t just build a golden temple in the middle of a sacred lake without causing some disturbances in the space-time continuum. Of course in those ancient times they didn’t call it the space-time continuum because that concept wasn’t invented until Star Trek in the twentieth century. But those ancient builders knew some things. They knew there was something strange and compelling and magical about this spot, which back then was actually in the middle of a forest, not a city.
In fact, when they were first building the temple, they hoped to keep that strange force under control with four walls and four entrances and a lot of stone, marble, jewels, and gold.
It worked. For four centuries it worked.
Then, modern folk decided they needed some comfort. So they added ceiling fans. Had they just put in air-conditioning, that would have been fine. But a ceiling fan? That’s a vortex, my friends, and vortices28 are known disturbers of the space-time continuum.
Especially if you add Vargran.
“What words did Valin speak?” Mack mused.
“We may never know,” Xiao said.
“What are lentils anyway?” Stefan wondered.
“Wait,” Mack said, and snapped his fingers. And then his cell phone chimed to let him know that he had a voice mail, and worshippers and tourists alike, who had begun to filter back in, shushed him and gave him some hard stares, so he muted the phone, thus continuing to doom Richard Gere Middle School.29
“What if we tried . . .” And then Mack said, “Unt-ma nos Vargran!”
Unt-ma being the “or else” tense of the verb repeat. And nos meaning “earlier.”
Suddenly the breeze blowing off the fan was a lot stiffer.
A lot stiffer. Like a tornado. A small but powerful vortex that just wrapped itself around Mack, Stefan, and Xiao.
Their hair whipped into their eyes. Their clothing snapped and pressed against them. They had to shout like reporters in a hurricane to be heard. The cloths they’d worn on their heads were torn away and it suddenly occurred to Mack that, whatever was happening here, it probably would have been a good idea to be wearing shoes.
He had tender feet, Mack did.
A fiery line, like molten gold, formed a circle around them on the floor. Mack exchanged a look with the turbanned gentleman, who nodded as if to say, “Yep, that’s what happened with the other two.”
And suddenly the Golden Temple was gone. Or to be more accurate, Mack, Stefan, and Xiao were no longer standing in a stiff downdraft in the temple, but were instead standing in ankle-deep water in a lake surrounded by a forest.
It wasn’t much of a lake, really. If it was all as shallow as the part they were standing in, it would be easy enough to walk to the shore in any direction. And a bewildered Mack was trying to figure out just which shore would be closest when Stefan said, “Huh.”
Stefan had many variations on “Huh.” This particular version meant something like, “Dude, you better look at this.”
Mack followed the direction of Stefan’s stare. And there, on the shore behind them, were about a dozen men on horses. They were rather fantastically costumed (the men, not the horses). Some wore white robes; some looked like they were wearing animal skins; others wore what appeared to be colorful silk.
They had an amazing variety of headgear: tall fur hats that looked like they came from mountain goats, blue turbans, golden scarves, and floppy felt caps. They had amazing sashes, scarves, pennants, and belts.
None were bearded, but almost all had impressive mustaches. They were dark-skinned, similar to Valin, but with faces that wore scars that were clearly from having come too close to bladed weapons. They had bright, alert, slightly crazy eyes.