Disclaimer: see Perspective Part 1. This story is #3 in the “Telempathy” Series.  
(Considering the length of this epic, readers may wish to re-read Parts 1-3 and 
possibly even Seven Dials and Shields before ploughing through this one).


PERSPECTIVE PART 4


Daryl sat patiently in the chair as Captain Finkelman slowly perused the 
paperwork, his fingers stroking the pants leg of his suit. As to be expected in 
the political jungle that was D.C., even the police precincts tended to be much 
more formal than in Cascade. Here there was no sign of Henri Brown type 
garish Hawaiian shirts, Blair-ish chinos and lumberjack shirt outfits, or even Jim 
style smart-casual pants and knitted roll-neck sweaters. All the plainclothes 
personnel dressed at least smart-casual, both males and females in simple but 
smart suits that wouldn’t have looked out of place on middle-management 
types on Wall Street. 

At least mom wouldn’t be able to complain he hadn’t gotten his wear of the 
blue suit she bought for cousin Daphne’s wedding, although like his dad, she 
would throw a fit when she found out exactly under what circumstances he 
donned it so frequently! The main point was that while the suit’s expensive cut 
fit him well, it wasn’t so tight that he would be unable to put his gun under it 
without it being noticed…once he finally got around to purchasing the thing. 
Daryl shoved that thought aside. It was clear such a thought had never 
occurred to Captain Finkelman, and Daryl was subconsciously aware that buying 
his own firearm would make his decision to join the police real in a way that 
even this becoming a Police Volunteer somehow didn’t, which was why 
consciously he kept procrastinating on the issue.

Finally she looked up and smiled at him with just a hint of lupine glee as she 
placed the completed paperwork in the admin file. Well aware that it would 
soon become apparent that Finkelman and Banks not only didn’t detest each 
other but actually got on very well, she had taken the precaution of going over 
the Police Volunteer program legislation with a fine tooth comb. The Captain  
had then personally typed up the agreement she’d just signed, as a precaution 
against some of the other Captains trying to get Daryl for themselves (or at 
least away from her) when they realised they’d been played like violins. 

Daryl stood up as she did, blowing out a deep breath. This was it. It was now 
half-past nine o’clock in the morning and from now on he would be a Police 
Volunteer at Metro Central Police Department, Washington D.C. His first 
semester as a college Freshman wouldn’t start for another few weeks, but 
when it did, all systems would be go. Daryl uncharitably felt a sneaky relief 
that his dad was too preoccupied with his own upcoming nuptials and keeping 
the FBI out of Cascade Central precinct to focus on his only son. He was 
mentally placing on bets on how long it would take for Simon to discover 
Daryl’s role.

“Oh, wait!” Captain Finkelman paused, “I almost forgot. There’s one more 
thing I need to show you before we get started properly. Come on.”

Leaving her office, she walked briskly down the corridor with Daryl’s admin file 
in one hand, he following easily in her wake as his six feet and four inches 
(exactly his dad’s height) gave him a good stride. They left Homicide and went 
along the corridor, Daryl automatically glancing down the wide staircase to the 
ground level; it was this staircase he’d seen Deputy Chief of Police Joe Noland 
descending on his very first day here as he waited for the desk sergeant’s 
attention. Now he could see Chief Mannion’s office but there was no movement 
behind the blinds that gave privacy to the half-glass walls of the office, and 
since the ebullient Chief seemed to share Blair’s inability to remain motionless 
for longer than two seconds at any given time that meant he wasn’t there. 

Daryl mentally catalogued the people he saw down there. Redheaded, slender 
and pretty Nancy Parras near her partner, tall sombre African-American Sgt 
Cutter; Detective Temple Page, young but relentless, also black and sombre. 
Nearby his reprobate partner Detective Kevin Debreno, who if scuttlebutt were 
to be believed forever teetered perilously on the edge of being fired in 
disgrace, though Mannion didn’t seem the type to tolerate any such 
shenanigans by his officers? Already there was major scuttlebutt about Debreno 
facing some big hearing over his arrest of the man who had murdered his 
girlfriend, a local hairdresser named Maria Rodriguez, except that Rodriguez 
had once been a prostitute named Cashmere Brown and as such a big no-no for 
a detective. It was unlikely that Page could or would help him; Daryl had read 
in the paper a few days ago how Page had been sued for $400,000 by the 
mother of a man he’d arrested, and how the Mayor had refused to cover the 
award. Page would be working at ninety to pay out those costs.

Over there in the corner was newly appointed Detective Phil Brander, big, 
beefy, Caucasian and overweight, with a major Jones for Nancy Parras. Finally, 
in the office next to Mannion’s, Daryl could see the Chief’s current right-hand 
woman, Sherry Regan, incidentally his first ex-wife, mother of his children and 
a decorated veteran police officer in her own right. Chief Mannion had 
managed to persuade her to step into the breach as Director of Statistics and 
overseer of his much-vaunted “Comm Stat” system whilst his dear friend, Ella 
Farmer, a former file clerk and the original Director of Statistics, recovered 
from a very serious heart attack. Daryl had already overheard the scuttlebutt 
was that Ella would be unable to return to employment again, but the rumours 
were more regretful than spiteful, and it was clear the woman was greatly 
admired by the officers she worked amongst.  

Daryl went on attaching names to faces as he followed Captain Finkelman. 
Uncle to innumerable nephews and nieces, his stepfather Frederick Heyer was 
himself childless and had no desire to change that state, but when he and Joan 
married, he had found Daryl to be pleasant company, an intelligent and 
articulate youth. Daryl had been so pleased to have someone to divert his 
mother’s attention away from him and attempting to micromanage his life that 
he had made an extra effort to get to know his stepfather. Now Frederick 
Heyer’s explanations were coming in very useful. The wily diplomat had let 
Daryl in on the secret of his swiftly progressing political career even over 
diplomats with more experience and/or money, more forceful personalities or 
better looks and greater ‘presence’.

His secret was memory. Heyer had trained himself to remember the name, face 
and basic details of anyone he came into contact with. During the first 
meeting, even if it only lasted a few minutes, Daryl’s stepfather mentally 
‘placed’ the other person in the most bizarre or silliest context he could and at 
the end of each day, tested himself on all the new people he’d met and what 
he could remember about them. Since the truth of the world was that it did 
matter who you knew and not what you knew, the effort had repeatedly paid 
off. Frederick admitted to his stepson that he’d once obtained a coveted 
promotion by accident simply because he happened to remember and enquire 
about the health of an undersecretary’s wife, even though her health issue had 
been mentioned in passing during a brief conversation five years past.

Now Daryl was following his stepfather’s advice diligently. Having read Blair’s 
publicly submitted thesis to Rainier, namely Closed Societies: The Thin Blue 
Line, (which had earned his friend the treasured doctorate and paradoxically 
enabled Dean Edwards to get rid of him), Daryl had to admit that Blair had 
pegged the social interaction of typical American police departments 
accurately. 

Growing up and visiting his dad at work many times, Daryl had seen first hand 
how police officers reacted to ‘new’ people in their precinct, even or 
sometimes especially when that person was a police officer from another 
precinct, and so on. It was vital to make a positive impression within the first 
ten seconds of such a meeting otherwise your life would be unbearable. Since 
it was imperative for Daryl’s career ambitions that his intended next four years 
as Police Volunteer with the Metro P.D. go as smoothly as possible, he needed 
to prove that he was quick on the uptake. Knowing who people were, being 
able to name them by the end of day one and evince an interest in them 
personally would mean they accepted him so much more quickly. 

Having minored in Psychology herself, Captain Finkelman had already pointed 
out to Daryl that her patronage was a double-edged sword. While under her 
tutelage he would have the opportunity to experience real police work instead 
of being an unglorified gopher, but her unpopularity with her fellow captains 
who longed for the sexist complacency of her predecessor meant that Daryl 
would experience  ‘dislike by association’ before too long, even without him 
being a black teenager in America’s most racially unequal city.

Daryl’s footsteps slowed as he realised Captain Finkelman’s tour of the Metro 
Central building was about to take them through those double doors whose 
upper frosted-glass panes bore the large gold legend: INTERNAL AFFAIRS. Giving 
him an understanding glance over her shoulder, Finkelman nevertheless 
indicated with a tilt of her head that he follow, so he did.

On the face of it, this area didn’t look much different from Homicide or 
Burglary or Vice or Narcotics, and the men and women working here just 
looked like the detectives downstairs. But there were differences. Every eye 
fixed on them like heat-seeking missiles as they entered. There was no 
friendliness in any gaze, not an iota of warmth. Every person examined them 
impassively and warily. 

Daryl had expected nothing else. Internal Affairs was a closed society within a 
closed society. To be an Internal Affairs member, even if you were a civilian 
administration employee, was to be elevated to a select and selective group, a 
rare breed. 

However, it was also an inevitable stigma. The IA detective was forever set 
apart from his or her fellows; the simplest and most accurate description: 
pariah. Even non-IA cops who qualified for living sainthood eyed their IA 
colleagues with wariness and suspicion. Bad cops feared and fretted about IA, 
while good cops considered them at best a hindrance and definitely a divisive 
element. Internal Affairs personnel found their section invariably situated in 
the furthermost part of the precinct; nobody joked or smiled around them; 
conversations automatically dropped into whispers when they were present 
even when what was being discussed was as innocuous as two guys wondering 
whether it would rain tomorrow. 

“Could I have a quick word with you Chief, when you’ve got a minute?” Captain 
Finkelman asked with a great measure of respectfulness in her voice that told 
Daryl how much she liked and admired Jack Mannion.

Daryl himself was also impressed with what he’d heard and so far seen about 
Chief of Police Jack Mannion. It was clear that the Chief wasn’t one more 
politician; he really cared. That showed - and motivated his subordinates 
accordingly. The crime rate had gone down significantly across the board since 
his appointment but Mannion was also doing his best to ensure that it stayed 
down once the press cameras and sound-bite seekers had gone… Automatically 
he looked at the man Chief Mannion was conversing with, and nearly gasped in 
shock! 

What was Jim doing here? Panic set in - was it his dad? Daryl opened his mouth 
but his frantic questions were never uttered as Finkelman brought her slender 
two-inch heel down none-too-gently on his foot and he subsided with a gurgling 
whimper of pain. 

“Do you want to come to my office?” Mannion asked.

“No sir, I just wanted to introduce my Police Volunteer assistant.” Quickly 
Finkelman explained the programme’s history and development before 
introducing, “This is Daryl Banks. He’ll be starting as a Freshman at 
Georgetown this Fall.”

“Hello, sir,” Daryl said respectfully, his tone taking in both men, even though 
mentally he was still reeling as he utilised all his willpower and forced his eyes 
not to stare avidly at Jim Ellison.

Who wasn’t Jim. 

Not-Jim was dressed with extreme formality in a pale grey double breasted 
suit, crisp white shirt (with a collar that had to be super-starched), sober 
silver-grey tie and black shoes so highly polished they were mirror like. His gold 
shield hung from the top pocket of his suit exactly in line with his suit jacket 
seams, the excellent cut of the clothing showing its quality, as well as the way 
it rendered the discreet bulge of the man’s firearm nearly invisible. His hair 
was also not as much of a ‘buzz-cut’ as Jim sported, and there was more of it. 
Over and above those subtler differences though, Not-Jim’s eyes were bleak, 
iced-over blue chips as hard and as unyielding as granite. Jim Ellison had never 
– would never – turn such a look upon Daryl.

“I trust Mr Banks has been vetted fully?” Not-Jim asked Captain Finkelman, his 
voice and facial expression going beyond unfriendly and into downright hostile, 
his tone managing to somehow imply that he thought the Captain was too dizzy 
for this requirement to have occurred to her.

“Absolutely,” Captain Finkelman smiled sweetly at Not-Jim. “The DUIs were 
just a kid thing and well, running a crack house from his bedroom, everyone’s 
entitled to one mistake.” 

Mannion’s jaw muscles twitched as he tried and failed to not grin at her retort, 
but as Not-Jim went, impossibly, even more rigid than the dime-store Indian 
pose he’s been excelling at when they came in, the Chief interceded gently, 
“Okay, Captain Finkelman, thanks for the intro, get your new assistant to work, 
hey? Daryl Banks,” he reached out and shook hands with Daryl, “I hope you 
enjoy your time with us.”

“Thank-you, Sir.” Daryl managed, vaguely aware that Mannion had 
misunderstood the situation and was clearly under the impression that Daryl’s 
stay at the P.D. would be a short duration/one semester deal, but he was still 
reeling at being inches away from Jim’s Evil Twin.

Captain Finkelman ushered him out of Internal Affairs and led the way back to 
her office, mentally giving her young charge points for restraint as he remained 
silent the entire way. Once inside however, Daryl erupted.

“Who the hell was that?!” he cried out, slumping down in the seat the other 
side of her desk.

Aware that shock had temporarily suppressed his normal good manners, Sarah 
Finkelman let his tone slide; she could sympathise all too well with his bugged-
out eyes and the way his jaw was getting carpet burns.

“That was Captain Vincent Hunter of Metropolitan P.D. Internal Affairs. He 
transferred to Central a week before Mannion came here as the new Chief of 
Police.”

“But…I mean…” Daryl shook his head. “He’s like…Darth Vader to Jim’s Anakin 
Skywalker…” He jumped slightly as Captain Finkelman actually giggled, her bob 
of walnut-brown curly hair bouncing in rhythm to her mirth.

“Tell me about it!” She leaned back in her seat, sobering, and decided Daryl 
had better be aware of the ‘politics’ as soon as possible. “After Simon, your 
dad, came back to work, I went back to my own precinct in Olympia, but I had 
some serious thinking to do. My gender, my race and my religion meant I would 
always struggle to achieve a permanent Captaincy in any precinct, but Jim and 
Blair making out like I did all the work on the stolen gas case gave me a boost 
in negotiating power. So I transferred from Washington State to Washington 
D.C. and applied for the Captain’s job under Mannion.”

“You were his first appointee after he started the job,” Daryl reiterated what 
he already knew.

“Yes, I was, and I was a nervous wreck.” Captain Finkelman made a moue of 
distaste. “It was only after Chief Mannion phoned me personally to offer me 
the position and I’d accepted that I began to check out what Metro Central had 
been like under Chief Normandy and found out just how much of a misogynistic 
dinosaur my own predecessor was. The first day I walked in I knew I would be 
facing a mountainous struggle against overwhelmingly hostile and bigoted 
attitudes, so you can imagine my relieved delight when I walked past the desk 
sergeant and spotted none other than Jim Ellison in the bullpen.”

“Ah-huh…” enlightenment filled Daryl’s tone.

“Quite.” She grinned anew at the memory. “I went straight up to him, pumped 
his hand like a politician in election year, clapped him on the back, 
congratulated him on finally discovering his fashion sense and declared, “‘It’s 
great to see you Jim, by the way where’s Blair?’”

“What did he do?” Daryl asked, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, resembling 
Sarah’s young nieces and nephews when she was telling them highly-amusing, 
carefully edited stories of being a policewoman.

“Icily informed me that he was Captain Vincent Hunter of Metro P.D. Internal 
Affairs, not ‘Jim’, and who the hell was I?” She giggled again. “The thing was, I 
didn’t believe him. I laughed and said, “‘Sure Jim, whatever you say, see you 
later!’” before strolling up to my new office to the sound of jaws cracking on 
the floor behind me. That afternoon Captain Hunter came into my office with 
Deputy Chief Noland. He had his driver’s licence, Captain’s shield, birth 
certificate, marriage certificate and divorce papers plus Academy graduation 
photograph. He laid them in front of me one by one on the desk and finished up 
by stating that as Captain of Internal Affairs he was requesting I take a tox’ 
screen immediately.”

“He wanted you to take a drugs test on your first day?” Daryl didn’t know 
whether to laugh or be horrified as he pictured the formidable man demanding 
Captain Finkelman submit to a ‘toxic screening’ to determine if there were any 
illegal substances in her blood stream.

“In retrospect, I can’t blame him,” mused Captain Finkelman. “I scrutinised 
every piece of paper he had and I’m afraid I tactlessly made my 
disappointment that he wasn’t ‘Jim’ rather obvious in my facial expression and 
tone of voice. We sorted it all out in the end, but we’ve made it a point to 
avoid each other ever since. It hasn’t been that hard, if I’m honest. Captain 
Hunter is an unyielding and forbidding man who doesn’t invite human contact.”

“Jim Ellison is very hard and cold when you first meet him,” pointed out Daryl, 
“but once you get to know him, he’s a good friend.”

“I’m afraid the more you get to know Captain Hunter, you just get worse 
frostbite,” Sarah muttered dryly, then she leaned forward and steepled her 
fingers together, having realised that Daryl was an eminently mature and 
sensible youth. “Daryl, something tells me that you’re very good at keeping 
secrets –” once again that split-second flicker in his eyes told her she’d hit the 
nail on the head “– so I’m going to tell you some things that I do not expect to 
repeated outside of this room, though you will hear countless distorted versions 
of them by the resident gossips and those who compulsively tittle-tattle around 
here.”

“Yes ma’am,” Daryl responded automatically to the sternness in her tone.

Having made her point, Sarah leaned back in her chair once more, composing 
her thoughts. “Before IA, Captain Hunter was a Lieutenant in Homicide over in 
the North-East District, and he was better than good. He and his partner had a 
sixty-five-percent case solved rate, which for Washington D.C. is incredible, 
and he’d been married for nearly ten years to a burglary detective who was a 
respected veteran in her own right. As the gossips will so eagerly tell you, one 
day a couple of years ago, Hunter dropped by his house one afternoon needing 
to change his clothes and found his wife in bed with his partner.”

Daryl winced, having expected something similar by the time she was on the 
second sentence. Blair’s Closed Societies thesis had gone into detail about the 
intensive, oftentimes ‘incestuous’ relationships with the law enforcement 
world. 

“It wasn’t true.” Captain Finkelman’s voice hardened as she mentioned the 
rumour-mongers. “They were not having sex with each other. However, he did 
walk in and find them kissing passionately in the kitchen.” She sighed deeply. 
“I know them both. Callie Hunter and A.J. McRae were in love with each other 
for years. However, they were both too honourable to ever act on that 
attraction, especially Callie. Her parents were both serial philanderers and she 
was determined that she would never end up like them, to put it crudely, 
‘enslaved by my dick or my pussy’. Unfortunately they had a moment of 
weakness and by one of those incidences of astoundingly bad cosmic luck that 
was the moment that Hunter walked through the door.”

“What did he do?” Daryl asked half-fearfully.

“Within twenty-four hours he’d filed for a transfer to IA, twenty-four hours 
after that he’d served divorce papers and moved into a new apartment.” Sarah 
recited the speed and brutal efficiency with which Hunter had excised his wife 
and partner from his life. “About a week after Mannion took the Chief’s job, 
the old Captain of Internal Affairs resigned, actually before he was pushed, 
since he was a crony of Chief Normandy and about as much use as a chocolate 
fireguard. Hunter was promoted straight in; outstanding record, et cetera.”

“But the story doesn’t end there,” Daryl said knowingly.

“Of course not,” Captain Finkelman exchanged a wry glance with her student. 
“Callie married A.J. the day after the divorce was finalised. He carried on in 
Homicide but she did what she’d wanted to do for some time and applied for a 
promotion to an administrative position so she and A.J. could start trying for a 
family. Eleven months later Jason arrived on the scene and their twins 
Alexandrina and Calliope are a couple of months old now. Anyway, a few 
months ago now, there was a big stink at North-East 6th Precinct, and one of 
the detectives up before Captain Hunter was Victor Gomez, A.J.’s new 
partner.”

Daryl merely raised his eyebrows, well aware that Internal Affairs personnel 
wielded a power disproportionate to their actual position on paper. An 
incompetent IA detective, or worse one with an axe to grind like Cascade’s 
already-dreaded new import Parker Dackholm, could utterly destroy the life of 
a good, decent cop unless controlled or removed from the position where they 
could abuse their power. The possibilities for havoc open to Vincent Hunter as 
Captain of IA once he’d got such a way into his ex-wife and ex-partner’s life 
were endless. “How did Captain Hunter react?”

“Impeccably,” Captain Finkelman intoned dryly. “Vincent Hunter has all the 
warmth of a force ten gale blasting across the Antarctic tundra in December 
and he is pitiless, merciless, relentless, ruthless and inexorable. Doubtless why 
he’s been nicknamed The Terminator. However, he is also rigorously thorough, 
completely impartial and scrupulously fair – though don’t make that claim in 
front of Temple Page, as those two hate each other’s guts. Hunter’s the 
epitome of everything Equal Opportunities tries to make us, but in a bad way; 
race, religion, sex, age, colour, creed, rank – none of them matter to him in 
the sense that if you’re dirty he’ll get you. He’s universally terrifying, but if 
you are an honest cop, or you have genuinely made an honest mistake, you 
have nothing to fear other than a sharp dressing down from your Watch 
Commander. It’s generally known that Hunter never slaps on the cuffs and 
reads you your Miranda rights until he’s got you backwards, sideways, upwards, 
downwards and six-ways-from-Sunday.”

Daryl snorted, “Sounds like he’s Jim’s Evil Twin and Parker Dackholm’s Good 
Twin.”    

Prudently not answering, Sarah instead continued, “Anyway, of course all the 
vultures were out when Gomez came to see the IA panel. You know the main 
staircase that runs through the building?”

“Er, yes?” Daryl blinked at this sudden non sequitur. 

“If you walk from the fifth floor down to the fourth, or up from fourth to fifth, 
when you reach the middle landing, you’ll see a very slight dip in the floor, a 
little spot where the floor sags for a few millimetres. Never stand on that spot 
unless you want the entire building to know what’s going on, because by some 
peculiarity of acoustics anyone who is standing on that spot when they speak 
has the same effect as if they were wearing a state of the art surround sound 
system; their every breath is transported into the farthest corners with crystal 
clarity.” Captain Finkelman recited this all flatly and then explained, 
“Detective Gomez came out of his IA grilling like a limp noodle, but wearing an 
expression of dazed relief, as if he couldn’t believe that he wasn’t being 
dragged away in leg irons. A.J. McRae had come to Central to pick him up, and 
by one of those coincidences that no writer of fiction would ever dare use, but 
which happen daily in real life, they met on that landing, and Gomez just 
happened to stop at that little dip.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Oh yes.” She grimaced. “Neither of them had ever been to Central and had no 
idea their every word was echoing in stereo from the basement to the rafters. 
Gomez told A.J. the good news and admitted he’d not believed A.J.’s many 
assurances that Hunter would be ‘nothing but fair and impartial’ throughout 
the whole mess: “‘The guy’s not human!’”” She gave a deep sigh, “To which 
A.J. replied that that was the whole problem. His exact words were: “‘Hunter’s 
the best cop I ever worked with, and the worst partner I ever had.’””

“I think I understand that,” Daryl said after a moment, “At least, I know where 
he’s coming from. It’s why I came to the District to train to be a cop, because 
I’d never get out from under my dad’s shadow, or Jim’s, in Cascade, even 
though one day I intend to go back there.” 

Her already high impression of Daryl Banks’ intelligence going up another 
notch, Sarah Finkelman nodded. “Basically A.J. explained to Victor that there 
was nothing more demoralising in the long run than being Jimmy Olsen to 
Hunter’s Superman. Vincent Hunter had twenty-five commendations, citations 
and medals for bravery by the time he made Lieutenant in Homicide. He 
assured Gomez that he was much happier with a partner who wasn’t a 
supercop, since it meant he wouldn’t give himself ulcers trying to be good 
enough to be his partner anymore, “‘just like Callie doesn’t have panic attacks 
now.’””

“Ouch.”

“Yes.” She straightened in her chair. “Gomez and A.J. had no idea that they 
were addressing the entire Central precinct, and there was no big explosion 
about it from Hunter. He remained as stone-faced as ever, and he continues to 
blank out A.J. and Callie as if they never existed, but these things get around 
like wildfire in D.C., this town lives on innuendo and rumour. Captain Hunter 
knows that the stories follow him around like a bad smell; the instant he leaves 
a room the place catches verbal diarrhoea. What makes it worse is that A.J. 
and Callie are so much more relaxed since it all blew up. They have children, 
they go on vacation with their partner’s families, Callie took up painting again. 
I don’t have much truck with psychobabble, but it must hurt Hunter.”

Daryl nodded. “At the risk of sounding presumptuous, that’s probably why he’s 
so closed off. He was betrayed by his wife and best friend, which was bad 
enough, but as time’s gone on, he can’t even take comfort in them being hoist 
by their own petard because all their complaints about him – undemonstrative, 
perfectionist, aloof, uncommunicative - have been validated by how happy 
they are together and in their current lives.”

“Do I detect the voice of experience?” Captain Finkelman guessed.

“Sorta.” Daryl grinned sheepishly. “Don’t tell my dad, but I was one of those 
little pitchers with big ears. I grew up around Cascade Central precinct right 
through Jim’s divorce from Lieutenant Carolyn Plummer – who stayed on as our 
Forensics Chief for a couple of years after their divorce. Some days the chill 
was positively arctic. Then there was my mom and dad who, to be honest, 
should never have got married. I love my mom, but she bears the lion’s share 
of the blame because she married my dad thinking she could change him from 
being a cop. On the other hand, being a cop was always first in my dad’s life 
his family came second for a long time, which isn’t a nice feeling.”

“Don’t worry, my lips are sealed.” She smiled at him. “I’m the aunt-confessor 
to entire hordes of my siblings’ offspring. If their parents knew half the stuff 
they tell me…My hair was straight as a dye at one time!”

He smiled at the feeble joke as she intended, then she became brisk. “Anyway, 
I just wanted to put you in the picture. My advice is to give Captain Hunter a 
wide berth – say a couple of football field lengths – if you possibly can. 
Otherwise, you’re all ready to go, so let’s get your first day as a working stiff 
started, shall we?”

“Yes ma’am.” Daryl stood up respectfully as she rose.

“Right, let’s go. Your first and most vital daily task will be your foray to the 
nearest coffee machine, where you will battle against vicious enemies who 
make the taking of Iwo Jima look like a walk in the park…”

* * *

“Dr Martin?” Jim raised his voice slightly as he called again, “Bert?”

The door of Bert Martin’s home swung open to reveal a tall, plump African-
American woman with white-streaked hair and a huge smile. Blair’s first 
thought was of the actress who played ‘Tess’ in Touched By An Angel – Della 
Reese with height.

Beaming broadly as if they were long-lost children, she ushered them inside, 
introducing herself as Judith Martin, Bert’s wife and assistant, St. Mary Vale 
and Witt’s End’s midwife and nurse. “Bert’s in the surgery. Here, you take this 
now,” she handed Jim a tray loaded with coffee and freshly baked chocolate 
and blueberry muffins, about enough to feed an entire platoon of starving 
Marines, “and go see him. I don’t expect to see any of those muffins left when 
you get back now.”

Hastily thanking Mrs Martin as she went back to her work, Blair led the way 
while Jim followed with the tray. The main house was attached to a double 
garage on one side and the doctor’s surgery with morgue in back was built onto 
the other side, likewise reached through a side door which led into the surgery, 
and then another door into the morgue at the rear. 

They entered to see Bert Martin peering through a microscope at a slide. He 
and Jim having remained in the main surgery out front on their previous visit, 
Blair couldn’t help but feel surprised at the modernity of the area, since this 
sort of equipment didn’t come cheap. The so-called ‘soft sciences’ like 
anthropology and sociology did quite often involve laboratory work so Blair 
knew a little about equipment costing, and this place was kitted out to make 
any chemistry professor jealous. Not bad for a rural doctor who had to be 
earning a pittance.

“Ah!” Martin grinned ruefully as he saw the tray that Jim set down. “Empty 
nest syndrome strikes again.”

“Your kids have just left home?” Blair seized the golden opportunity to ‘fish’. 
Bert chuckled, “Not exactly! We have three children, all long flown. Our 
eldest, Ebony, is thirty-one, she’s a paediatrician in Washington D.C. Denzel’s 
twenty-eight and is a Robbery-Homicide Detective with the San Diego P.D., and 
‘baby’ Damon is a strapping twenty-five-year-old Marine Sergeant currently in 
the ‘sand box’.” He used the colloquialism for Iraq wryly. 

“They sound great kids,” Jim encouraged. 

“Oh, they are.” Bert smiled as he reached for a muffin. “Thing is, I only have a 
sister, whereas Judith is one of eight kids, and she just can’t get out of the 
habit of cooking as if the entire 101st Airborne is coming to dinner.”

“If everything’s…as great…as these…muffins,” Blair managed to get out through 
bulging cheeks stuffed with chocolately goodness, “…I’m surprised they don’t.”

Feeling left out of the feeding frenzy, Jim also snatched a muffin. Unlike their 
massive consumption of breakfast yesterday, this morning they had kept it 
light, since after seeing Bert Martin, they were going to hike to Blair’s Guide 
Temple, something that should not be undertaken when they were reduced to 
waddling instead of walking. Still, the odd half-dozen muffins couldn’t hurt…

“Wow!” Blair exclaimed going over to peer at an object in one corner. “Is this 
the latest Cryo-Systems Ltd Centrifuge? The millennium model? I’ve been trying 
to get one for Cascade Community College. Is it really as good as the 
advertising?”

“Better,” Martin declared. “In fact, if you’re going to give it to a community 
college, take it. I can get another.”

“Are you serious?” exclaimed Jim as simultaneously Blair blurted:

“Are you insane?!” He winced. “I’m sorry, that was rude.”

“No, no, not at all.” Bert came to stand by the machine. “And the answers are 
respectively yes, and no.” He gave them both shrewd looks and Blair guessed 
he hadn’t missed their reaction to his well-equipped working conditions. “You 
may have noticed that the citizens of Witt’s End don’t exactly fit in the 
mainstream?” he suggested dryly.

“We have,” Jim admitted equally dryly.

The doctor’s face became sombre but not stern or angry. “By now you’ve 
realised that most people in this town have their own story, each one a strange 
or wonderful or tragic reason for making Witt’s End our sanctuary and haven 
from a mainstream society unable and unwilling to deal with our 
idiosyncrasies.” 

Jim and Blair waited patiently as the doctor paused for a moment, marshalling 
his thoughts.

“Next year both Judy and I will be sixty, and celebrating our fortieth wedding 
anniversary.” Bert explained, “We eloped at the age of twenty, got married in 
Vegas, honeymooned in Reno, came back with Judy four months pregnant to 
face the music. My parents and sister were upset but ultimately supportive, as 
were Judy’s parents. However…from being born, she and her mother’s father 
were inseparable. Judith was named for her grandpa Judah, and she is the only 
girl out of the eight siblings. Her grandfather disowned her for marrying a 
white man, and disowned any of his family – including her mother – who didn’t 
do likewise. Three of her brothers toed their grandfather’s line, the other four 
didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Jim said sincerely, “family discord is heartbreaking.”

“Indeed it was.” Bert took a long sip of his coffee, his eyes sad. “By now you’ll 
have worked out that if we celebrate our fortieth anniversary next year, and 
Ebony’s thirty-one, she isn’t our eldest child. Our daughter Kyiesha was born on 
New Year’s Day 1965. It was a very difficult time. I was working every second 
there was to keep myself in med school. Judy had to drop out once her grandpa 
stopped his financial support; it’s why she’s a nurse and not a doctor today. We 
were living in this damp two-room tenement, one room and a bathroom, with 
paper-thin walls, serenaded by screaming couples and gunfire medleys in the 
small hours. But Kyiesha was an angelic baby. She slept all night, cooed all day, 
fed without fuss and went quite happily to my mom and dad while Judy worked 
all hours to support us.”

Both men remained silent, having an idea what was coming.

“We moved out of the place four months before I graduated, when Kyiesha was 
two-and-a-half, into a little duplex we could just afford. She was three on New 
Year’s Day 1968, and at seventeen minutes past eight o’clock the following 
morning some middle-management executive high on speedballs and vodka lost 
control of his car; it mounted the sidewalk at fifty miles per hour and mowed 
down a bus queue. Judy was tossed into someone’s front-yard box hedge and 
escaped with a broken leg. Including Kyiesha, five children and two of the 
other adults were killed at the scene.”

“The driver?” snarled Jim.

Bert’s lips twisted. “He was a rich lawyer’s only son, and this was 1968. 
Kyiesha was a mulatto, and the other six fatalities comprised three African-
Americans, one Chinese-American and an out-of-state Hispanic vacationer from 
Santa Fe, who as it turned out was waiting at the wrong bus-stop. He got six 
months’ probation and a fine less than what he spent on lunch every week.” 

Neither Jim nor Blair replied – after all, what could they do except utter trite 
and meaningless banalities?

Bert Martin visibly shook off the memories. “Anyway, it was a turning point. 
After Judy recuperated, we moved – away from the memories. I was able to 
work in Paris for a while, and we went to Britain for a time, I even managed to 
work at Johns Hopkins for a while when we came back to the United States...”

“You weren’t happy?” Blair asked, subtly encouraging.

“It was rather more serious than that. Segregation may have ended in 1969 but 
most people’s attitudes were still stuck in One Million Years B.C. When Judy 
was pregnant with Ebony I was faced with a choice between resignation and 
being fired from Boston Memorial.” Bert frowned at them. “I’m telling you this 
because I’m aware you can trace some details through the AMA, but I expect 
this to go no further, is that clear?”

“As long as it doesn’t impact on our investigation of Edgar Fincham’s death,” 
Jim amended, “that’s fine.”

Bert nodded, picking up another muffin but staring at it absently. “As I said, 
being a black doctor at a prestigious mostly white hospital wasn’t that great. 
Publicly I was the token nod to multiculturalism; privately I got the worst shifts 
and the longest hours. However, it soon became apparent that some of my 
fellow doctors were playing fast and loose with the Hippocratic Oath. In their 
defence, I will say that the tradition of internship as practised in American 
hospitals is a disgrace. Interns are little more than slaves, and if you expect 
somebody to be on call twenty-four hours a day seven days a week then you 
have only yourself to blame if they start resorting to unsanctioned measures to 
keep themselves awake and functioning while you’re working them to death.”

“Been there,” Blair confessed with a shrug, “when you need forty-eight hours 
in one day and you’ve only twenty-four…pulling two or three all-nighters in a 
row to get everything done…”

“I don’t exactly have freedom of speech in that regard myself,” Bert 
acknowledged. “I’ve taken uppers and downers on occasions. However, there is 
a line, and some of my so-called colleagues weren’t just stepping over it they 
were falling paralytic over it with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and an eight-
ball of blow in the other. I went to the hospital administration and very quickly 
found myself in the position of resign or else we’ll fire you and discredit you. 
Most of the worst offenders had powerful relatives on the hospital board or else 
daddy was big in the city and mom owned a dozen senators.”

“Did you resign?” Jim asked.

“Yes. I knew I was fighting a battle I couldn’t win, and there was no way I was 
jeopardising my second child’s future for the sake of a principle, as amoral as 
that might sound. On the other hand, I couldn’t live with myself if I kept my 
mouth shut and stayed on, because I knew perfectly well that some of the 
doctors were already guilty of manslaughter. They were going into surgery high 
as kites or prescribing dangerous medication with the hangover from hell after 
skimming medical notes…I couldn’t be everywhere at once and if the shit hit 
the fan, I, as someone who clearly knew what was going on, would be the one 
thrown to the wolves while they howled for mama & papa to pay battalions of 
lawyers.”         
 
“Is that how you ended up in Witt’s End?” Blair surmised.
 
“Ebony was only three weeks old but we couldn’t afford to stay in Boston with 
Judy and me not working, so we decided to go on vacation to Canada with a 
view to emigrating and starting afresh. At the time my rage against the white-
dominated legal and medical systems of this country meant I couldn’t trust 
myself to be civil if we were pulled over by the police for driving while being 
black so we took the back roads. Unfortunately neither of us is very hot on map 
reading and after getting hopelessly lost we pulled up on Lorelei Lake, starving 
and exhausted with Ebony screaming in the back, to find a bunch of hippies in 
the processes of building what became Witt’s End.”

“And you never left?” guessed Blair shrewdly.

“Nope,” Bert smiled brilliantly. “All our children grew up here and now I 
wouldn’t leave this place if you offered me all of Bill Gates’ money and then 
some. Speaking of which…” he gave Jim a sly smile, “I know you want to know 
how I can afford such things as that microscope.”

Jim looked embarrassed but didn’t deny the insinuation.

Bert’s eyes dimmed slightly. “I can’t, Judy buys my toys for me. Shortly after 
our last baby, Damon, was born, Judy received a visit from an Attorney. Her 
grandfather Judah had left his entire estate to her on one condition – that she 
use it to maintain and provide medical facilities for the town of Witt’s End.”

“That was generous of him,” Jim commented.

“Guilty is more accurate,” Bert corrected. “Judy was going to refuse the 
money and let it be shared by her family but her mother and her brothers 
persuaded her otherwise. Her mother explained that Judah never forgave 
himself for Kyiesha’s death. He was only too well aware that had he not 
disowned Judy she would have been a doctor, like me, and we wouldn’t have 
been scrimping out an existence in that neighbourhood at all, so Kyiesha would 
never have been near that bus shelter. He wanted Judy to achieve her dream 
in some small measure, and though she decided against returning to complete 
her medical doctorate, she decided to use the money to do as he asked and 
built the surgery for Witt’s End and all the attendant accoutrements.”

“Her decision has obviously helped Witt’s End,” Jim pointed out. “I know from 
experience how fast a situation can go south even for an extremely fit person 
when there’s no medical assistance available.”

“Pretty much what made us decide to stay here,” Bert acknowledged with a 
smile, “and it’s a decision we’ve never regretted. But you didn’t come here to 
spend the day listening to me ramble on. Here,” he picked up a few sheets of 
paper stapled together and handed them to Blair who was nearest, “the results 
of your find at Edgar Fincham’s. You were right, it was candle wax.”

“That’s very easy to get in town?” Jim asked casually to distract Bert from 
noticing that he was reading the report “over Blair’s shoulder” from a good 
four feet behind the anthropologist.

“Ridiculously so,” Bert chuckled, “and in St. Mary Vale these days, now that 
the New Age culture has gone mainstream and upmarket. The only difference is 
that pot pourri in Witt’s End will cost you a buck fifty, in St. Mary’s Vale you’d 
have to re-mortgage your house. However, that blob of candle wax has some 
very unusual ingredients that I think probably indicate it’s home-made.”

“People make their own candles?” Jim queried his Guide.

“Sure. Well, not usually personally, but a lot of Naomi’s friends have specific 
scents that they like, so they go to a store and get them to add that particular 
scent or combination of scents to the virgin wax as made-to-order,” Blair 
explained.

Like a genie, Bert held out a slip of paper. “Here are directions to Nebula’s 
store, and her opening times.”

“Nebula?” Jim couldn’t quite make his voice as bland as he would have liked.

“Not my story to tell,” Bert shrugged with a casual but somehow steely tone in 
his voice. “But what made me think it was home made rather than store bought 
or store ordered despite the odd ingredients was the colour and the texture. It 
was a sort of unattractive dirty beige colour and it was definitely a blob – it 
was misshapen. Most store manufactured candles are pretty white or pastel 
colours and they’re smooth and carefully textured to be smooth, not lumpy.”

Jim, acutely aware of the way that Blair’s heartbeat had spiked slightly and 
that he was now tense, worked to bring the conversation to a close and they 
took their leave of Bert Martin and headed off, ostensibly towards St. Mary 
Vale. Once out of sight of the old doctor’s house they veered off into the 
woods in a direction that would take them around the north end of the lake; 
even Jim’s Sentinel eyes quickly lost the faint trail, and it was clear none of 
the tourist walking trails came this way. His lips compressed, Blair handed Jim 
the analysis of the wax blob that Bert Martin had done and he read it through 
quickly. 

What Jim knew about ‘New Age culture’ could be inscribed on the head of a 
pin with space to spare for the complete works of Shakespeare, but he knew 
enough to realise that Naomi’s peace-and-goodwill love-is-all-you-need crowd 
were unlikely to go in for candles whose main ingredients consisted of 
foxglove, thorn apple, deadly nightshade and…Wolfsbane? <How far up are we 
on the Big Bad scale?> Jim asked  with caution even here in the middle of 
nowhere; that the Murderer Presumptive’s candle  contained extracts from a 
plant mythologically supposed to drive away a wolf – Sandburg’s spirit animal 
guide, natch – might be a coincidence, but somehow Jim doubted it.    

<Very.> Sandburg’s mental tone was as sour as his face. <He’s not an amateur, 
if that’s what you’re asking.>
  
Jim lapsed into silence, adhering to Sally’s adage that if you couldn’t say 
anything constructive, keep your mouth shut, though of course William Ellison’s 
housekeeper had put it a lot more politely than that. As he’d admitted, it had 
taken him years to come to terms with spirit animal guides; fighting a war 
against evil in the spiritual/mystic arena that Blair was talking about was 
completely beyond Jim’s comprehension. Making the situation worse was 
Blair’s huge and understandable resentment over having yet another job 
dumped on him.  

Though Jim had been hurt by Blair’s admission of feeling ‘swallowed up’, he 
could definitely relate. Much of his desire to go back to pre-Sentinel Jim Ellison 
had been his own feeling that The Sentinel was devouring his life too much, 
disrupting and destroying what Jim wanted. Blair, of course, had sacrificed so 
much more…including his life…on the altar of What The Sentinel Needs and Jim 
could see how gradually like a creeping plant the Sentinel-verse had covered 
them both and intertwined itself into every nook and cranny of their lives. 

The major issue with the whole Guide thing was that Blair Sandburg never did 
anything by half-measures. He gave 100% to anything he got involved in; 
trouble was, Blair was usually doing about half-a-dozen things at once, and any 
reasonably bright toddler could do the math and see that 600% constantly 
coming out of one pint pot equalled disaster1. Jim had lived through what he 
privately termed Blair’s constant “Phoenix” cycle of flying high followed by 
crash-and-burn before the younger man rose from the ashes and took wing 
again. Maybe the guy who’d given Blair his Phoenix tattoo hadn’t merely 
plucked a ‘cool’ design out of thin air after all… 

Back when Blair was a Teaching Fellow at Rainier Jim had witnessed in silent 
disbelief every time “finals week” came round, watching as Blair was sustained 
by some inner fire that nevertheless consumed him from within until he 
crashed into an exhausted heap the instant it was all over. When Blair had 
finally got his PhD and that snooty bitch Marcia Edwards had sent him that 
vicious letter ending his tenure at Rainier, Jim had been outraged on his 
friend’s behalf, but after Blair got his part-time position at Cascade Community 
College thanks to Eli Stoddard and his twin sister Dr Ellen McBirnie, Jim had 
realised that the spiteful Dean of Rainier had actually done Blair a favour by 
removing from him a burden that would have become harder and harder for 
him to carry every passing year.   

Jim could understand his friend’s reluctance to embrace the Shaman role; it 
was the same reluctance he’d felt, an entirely human if extremely ignoble 
desire to utilise the advantages of being a Sentinel whilst ignoring the less 
pleasant and/or culturally (to Western Society) unacceptable responsibilities. It 
was like how everyone dreamed of being a doctor or a fireman, but nobody 
wanted to be an undertaker or a garbage collector, yet these were equally as 
valuable, if not more so in the case of the latter. Once Blair started looking 
into shamanistic lore and learning, he would no more be able to stop himself 
than an avalanche; his own hard-wired responses would kick in and once again 
he would give everything of himself to the task to try and be the best shaman 
he could, not for his own glory, but for the benefit of others.

Blair was a great teacher, a rock-solid de facto cop, a peerless scientist in his 
field, an ardent supporter of worthy causes, but these and many other 
endeavours had simply gone to the wall as the necessity of being a Guide took 
precedence. Becoming a Shaman, in effect the Priest of Cascade, would be 
incredibly time-consuming and stressful for the younger man. No wonder he 
was so upset by all this. 

“I’m hoping the MP has fallen into the usual trap,” Blair’s voice as he spoke 
suddenly was still a bit stiff, but Jim realised his friend was making an effort 
for his sake.

“Which trap would that be?” Jim skirted a large, thorny bush.

Blair followed suit. “Egomania,” he stated. “You know how celebrities 
sometimes start believing in their own press? A similar thing happens. Some 
people who start messing around with stuff like this – the evil stuff like this – 
find they have a bit of talent, a bit more whammy than most, so their ego 
swells up like a balloon because evil people tend to be selfish, vain, egotistical, 
greedy, lustful and lots of other nasty traits that blind us to what we’re really 
like.”

“So?”

“So egotistical people don’t learn,” Blair said. “I had the same problem with 
some of my students – call it the Brad Ventriss Syndrome if you will. They get 
some knowledge, and find out they have a basic competency, and because of 
that make the mistake of thinking they’re qualified to be the CEO when in 
reality they’ve barely advanced beyond what it takes to be the security guard 
at the front gate.”

“So maybe the MP started with all this voodoo stuff, found he had a talent for 
it and stopped studying what he needed to study to become a real badass? 
Basically he’s overconfident?” Jim summarised.

“I’m hoping. ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ may be one of the wisest 
maxims anyone has ever come up with.”

“Yeah, back when I was with the Rangers the CIA always used to say that the 
only thing more dangerous than a professional was an amateur.”

Blair nodded. “There was an artist, John Blomsfield? I always liked him because 
he never spouted that art-crap jargon. He said that you should learn to lay 
bricks before you build a house. A lot of people learn how to make mortar and 
then their ego kicks in and they jump right ahead to building an entire suburb. 
I’m not saying the MP isn’t knowledgeable to a certain extent, because no 
beginner would have been able to pull of that trick with the Taipan no matter 
how much raw talent they had, but I’m hoping he long ago got to the point 
where his ego won out.”

Jim made no reply as he concentrated on the uneven terrain and they lapsed 
again into silence, but Jim would have bet Blair Jacob Sandburg against the MP 
when it came to ‘know-how’ any day of the week, no matter how much of a 
head start this freak had in the ‘forbidden lore’ department so beloved of 
fantasy writers. Intellectually, Blair was a lot like Rick Valenti and the U.S. 
Navy SEALs’ ethos of always training, always moving ahead, always trying new 
weaponry and new methods. They never stopped researching and taking in new 
information, but whereas SEALs tended to limit their thirst for new knowledge 
to arenas such as ‘blowing things up’ and ‘even more kick-ass weaponry’, with 
Blair Sandburg it was a universal curiosity. 

His brain was perpetual motion in organic form. Even in his sleep he fidgeted 
and turned as his neurons ceaselessly worked. He had a great deal of 
knowledge about a lot of things but never made the mistake of thinking he had 
learned everything there was to know, rather in fact he was an intellectual 
Oliver Twist, wanting ‘more’. If, or more likely when, Blair picked up the way 
of the Shaman that Incacha had bequeathed to him Jim had no doubt Blair 
would know the subject sideways, back ways inside and out by oh, probably a 
week Thursday. 

Doubtless why the MP had tried to take out Blair with that snake and not the 
apparently more dangerous threat of Jim Ellison, as Valenti had so rightly 
picked up on. What had the PD’s shrink said? Blair radiated a warmth and light 
that others were drawn to, most especially those others that were somehow 
broken inside, as if knowing instinctively that Blair might be able to fix them.

It stood to reason that others with similar abilities or knowledge would 
recognise that in Blair even if he didn’t himself. Hadn’t he mentioned how 
when he was a child he and Naomi would enter some new culture and the local 
spiritual leader would home in on Blair like they were Tiddles and he was 
catnip? 
      
“Uh ah…”

Jim came back from his musing as Blair stopped and scowled, the Sentinel 
automatically checking his surroundings. To his right he could hear about two 
miles away the sound of the river running into Lake Lorelei and the sounds of St 
Mary Vale and Witt’s end. The north east side of the lake was still very much 
untouched forest due to the terrain, with most of the hiking/horse/bike trails 
and walking paths situated on the Western side where the land was more open 
and less rugged. They were now standing on the lowest tip of the Cascade 
Mountains. Indeed, about five feet in front them towered up a huge rock face, 
a rough granite crag that was actually part of the mountainside.   

“What’s the problem?” Jim asked.

Blair sighed and pointed at the impenetrable escarpment. “I’m following the 
…hum…of the temple and it’s tugging me straight through there.”

For a moment, Jim considered his options. Blair Sandburg’s legendary ability to 
get lost inside his own apartment was known throughout the PD and admitted 
to cheerfully by Blair who claimed that since he had Jim, he didn’t need to 
remember what direction he was travelling. Now something in Blair’s stance 
told Jim that he would react unkindly to a joking suggestion that his non-sense 
of direction had perhaps brought them here. Besides, if all Blair was doing was 
just following the ‘hum’ as Jim had followed it to the Temple of Sentinels in 
Sierra Verde, he couldn’t go wrong now matter how lousy his sense of direction 
was. 

“This can’t be the Temple of Guides, surely?”

Blair relaxed when Jim forbore to make any cracks about Blair’s inability to 
find his way out of a paper bag. “No, this is just a big rock.” Then he 
brightened, “Still, can’t say we didn’t try. Lets go back and –”

“Whoa, Chief, let me look!” Like all true friends, Jim was aware that 
sometimes what his best friend wanted wasn’t what his best friend needed. In 
the increasingly probable instance of Blair having to go mano-a-mano with 
Witt’s End’s own home-grown Darth Vader, he would need some instruction 
from the Powers That Be. Blair might want to forget all about his dream and its 
implications, but that wasn’t in his best interests.

Carefully extending his eyesight, Jim examined the rock face, but immediately 
realised that was indeed all it was. The cracks, gouges and uneven surface 
were the result of untold millennia of wind, rain, snow and ice. No chisel or 
hammer had ever been near the formation. Jim walked up and down for a 
distance of about twenty feet in front of the wall, avoiding the trees and 
thickets of vegetation but could see nothing untoward. He touched the rock 
with his fingertips and then dialled up his sense of smell, but the rock was just 
that, rock. No way was he going to tongue this thing so that left hearing. He 
very carefully dialled up his hearing, screening out subterranean animals, 
insects, birds, mammals, the breeze and other distractions, but there was 
nothing…although… 

Jim looked at the wall again. He could hear water dripping. Nothing unusual in 
that, since he could see at least four deep crevasses that must become 
waterfalls when it rained; however, the rhythmic ‘tp..tp..tp’ had a  slight echo 
to it, as if the water were dripping inside something large and empty…a cave?   

But if so, how to get to it? The Temple of Sentinels in Sierra Verde had been 
built for Sentinels-period, including those of weaker ability than full-blown 
Alphas like Jim, and Alex Barnes. Presumably the Temple of Guides had 
likewise been built in the knowledge that not all Guides could be super-duper 
Shaman types, so there had to be some nice, normal plebeian access. Moving 
more slowly and ignoring the way Sandburg was clearly itching to leave the 
vicinity, Jim carefully began to pace his way along the rock barrier, until he 
felt a slight breeze coming from the cliff in front of him, and there was a patch 
of darker darkness. “Jackpot... Chief, over here!”

Sandburg joined him and looked as Jim showed him. “Cool,” he grudgingly 
admitted. 

If you stood in front of the cliff it appeared to be as solid at this point as 
everywhere else. However, if you laid your hand against the rock and stepped 
right about five times, your hand would encounter an edge. The shelf of rock, 
about thirty feet high and ten wide, was like a screen door on your house. If 
you slipped behind it, as Jim did followed by Blair, you found yourself standing 
in a narrow, roughly rectangular fissure between the rock shelf and the main 
cliff face. The breeze had been coming from here. Jim had to admire the 
ingeniousness of it. Even from a foot away you would never have known, 
especially as to find the gap you had to practically hug the rock and shuffle 
along it.

“Jim?” Blair was unable to see behind his friend’s large bulk; his voice was soft 
and uncertain and reluctant.

“There’s a cave…no it’s a tunnel.” 

There was a roughly triangular opening in the cliff face, six feet wide and twice 
as high as Jim. He peered in, as did Blair, for there was faint sunlight coming 
in. The narrow passageway curved right out of sight, but any notions that it 
was a natural fissure were ended at the sight of the bas-relief of a wolf’s head 
carved into the ceiling rock. Moving forward cautiously, Jim began to walk, 
dialling down the faint echo of his and Sandburg’s footsteps and eliminating the 
drip-drip of the water from the ceiling. “Clever.”

Behind him Sandburg’s breath hitched and then he relaxed. “What?” 

“This tunnel is a very gradual but continuous curve. It means you can never see 
what’s around the corner. Nice psychology – or nasty, depending on your 
viewpoint.” 

By Jim’s estimation they had been walking for another minute or so when they 
literally saw another triangle of bright sunlight at the end of the tunnel. 
Walking forward, both men paused inside the threshold to allow their eyes to 
adjust to the light, then exchanged glances and stepped out into the unknown.

* * *

Daryl Banks flopped back on his bed and wiggled his toes with a relieved groan. 
He had intended to hoard the healthy sum of money that had been given to him 
by his paternal and maternal grandparents, mum, dad, stepfather, uncles and 
aunts against the inevitable costs of college.  Daryl was aware of how much his 
father had paid for him to attend St. Aquinas and even though Simon was still 
being as generous, Daryl wanted his father to focus his income on the soon-to-
be second Mrs Banks, Dr Leonie McKinley. Besides which, Daryl knew his dad. A 
desire for more children than the one he had had led to Simon instantly liking 
Leonie’s children, and Simon wouldn’t be impartial – what he would spend on 
his biological child would also be spent on his ‘new’ children, Kyle, Cal and 
Ellie.       

However, Daryl now had a new priority. Tomorrow he was going to go into D.C. 
and splash out on a pair of handmade, made-to-measure real leather shoes. If 
he was going to be a Police Volunteer with Captain Finkelman, whom he now 
re-christened “The Washington Whirlwind”, he needed his ‘good’ (i.e., non-
sneaker) footwear to be his comfortable footwear, besides avoiding the fashion 
faux pas of wearing a suit, shirt and tie with boots or sneakers. Captain 
Finkelman had gone through the building like a hyped-up tornado with an 
increasingly hobbling Daryl trotting behind.

She’d finally released him at lunch after they’d worked out his volunteer 
schedule, suggesting that he come in every day for an hour or so and then start 
‘officially’ a week Monday with the commencement of the Freshman semester. 
Daryl had agreed and as soon as she was out of sight, hobbled his way to the 
Metro and got off as close to Georgetown as he could. Upon reaching his and 
Xan’s room the first thing he’d done was kick off the shoes and drawn himself a 
nice hot bath for a good long soak until his toes stopped throbbing. Re-dressing 
in camouflage pants and a plain white T-shirt, Daryl lay down on the bed; it 
was barely one in the afternoon and he was absolutely exhausted. 

Mentally he added a black suit and a grey one and another couple of ties to his 
shopping list; his dad had simply rotated about four suits throughout his 
working life…saved himself a fortune on fashion, as he liked to say. Fortunately 
his classes worked so that he was in lectures all day Tuesday, Wednesday and 
Thursday mornings, thus he would be able to don his suit at the PD Monday, 
Friday and Thursday afternoons. It was better than having to constantly go 
back to the dorm every day and change from his suit to casual gear for class; 
he would be tormented mercilessly if he turned up for lectures in a double 
breasted suit with matching vest and polished shoes, and likewise viewed with 
derision if he turned up at the precinct to work in jeans, T-shirt and sneakers. 
While he wouldn’t say the Washington D.C. police were fashion plates, they 
had an acute awareness of the ever-lurking media. From what Daryl had 
glimpsed at the precinct, some journalists and news crews spend their whole 
lives ensconced in Jack Mannion’s lobby waiting for his next controversial 
initiative or for him to lock horns with some high profile personage again. Daryl 
grinned to himself; he’d been here less than forty-eight hours and already he 
was beginning to consider his actions in relation to the knowledge that this 
town breathed politics like the rest of the world breathed air. 

He frowned momentarily, always aware of the need to protect Jim Ellison; 
though the ‘truth was out there’ if anyone wanted to look, it wasn’t likely 
anyone would unless given a reason – for instance headlines exposing what Jim 
was. Lee Brackett had had the advantage of being the CIA Debrief Officer with 
various reports from diverse sources crossing his desk at the same time, 
whereas most covert military or secret agent types would have to spend a few 
hours piecing together that information. In a way, that was partly why Jim was 
actually quite well protected; there were lots of individual fragments of facts 
floating around the cosmic ether, but looked at in isolation they were 
meaningless. 

However, noting the increasing tendency towards sensationalism over 
journalism in American media, Daryl knew there would be a ‘feeding frenzy’ 
when – rather than if – the facts eventually came to light. He had overheard his 
dad relating Jim’s less than stellar experience with that True Crime 
documentary crew, which had proven that ethics came a distant second to 
ratings with a lot of the media. In this town, it was clearly going to be best to 
adopt the SOP – Standard Operating Procedure – of assuming that there was 
always a microphone and/or camera within ten feet. Should Jim be forced to 
do anything extraordinary while here visiting Daryl, the youth had little hope of 
not seeing it splashed all over the evening news. 

Daryl consciously relaxed himself; all he had to do was keep his wits about him 
and put a bit of pre-emptive planning into play rather than starting to fret 
about something that might not happen. He was just another non-entity college 
student, not Prince William for goodness sake! Nobody would be interested in 
him; besides, both Jim and Blair were on top of the situation anyway. As part 
of ‘Us’ or the SSN – Sentinel Support Network, as Megan Connor had christened 
them – Daryl knew that despite being deeply involved with the MCU, Jim and 
Blair were focussing on leaving the MCU at least, if not the PD altogether three 
years from now, if not sooner. 

His dad had already aroused unwelcome interest by remaining as Captain of 
MCU long after his record should have seen him promoted to Chief of Police, 
maybe even Commissioner by now, ditto with Jim’s recent promotion to 
Lieutenant from Detective. With Jim’s case solve rate he only had about three 
years if that before the brass would be trying to get him into the captaincy. 
Daryl didn’t need any high IQ to know that such a job would kill Jim by inches. 
Being a police captain was about pen-pushing and politicking and these were 
not duties of the Sentinel of the Great City.                      

Finally, making a mental note to think carefully about their activities when Jim 
and Blair visited, Daryl cast an eye on his stuff, but his toes protested mightily 
at the thought of him putting any weight on them. This two-person suite was 
very nice and roomy. Each of the two beds was large, with a lockable bedside 
table and snazzy reading lamp set an angle that if one occupant wanted to 
sleep whilst the other crammed for some exam late into the night, the light 
should not disturb the sleeper. The gleaming bathroom was spacious and en 
suite, as was the living/study area that sported a sofa, TV, all the usual 
accoutrements plus a tiny kitchenette for making coffee, breakfast and snack-
meals in the knowledge that most students ate in the refectory. Daryl wasn’t 
that untidy, his mother had made sure he learned that no magic fairy picked up 
the clothing tossed on the floor and that the toys carelessly left out would be 
assumed to be discarded and taken promptly to the nearest thrift store. 

However, much as Daryl loved his dad, Simon Banks trying to arrange a double 
wedding incorporating his own matrimony at the same time as settling into his 
new position as Chief of Police at the same time as the FBI dropped by and 
wanted to move in was not a pleasant experience. So although Daryl had 
packed, re-packed and re-re-packed ready for his move, he ended up bringing 
his possessions in one trip as he copied the example of his imminent 
stepbrothers and stepsister and vacated the paternal presence, at least until 
someone sedated Simon or got him on Prozac.   

Most of his belongings had been neatly stored in his share of the closet and 
drawer space, but Daryl had to admit there was a certain level of clutter that 
would have made his mom’s fingers twitch, while Xan’s side of the room was 
spotless. Everything down to the knick-knacks looked as if they had been 
positioned by a battalion of maids instead of one unenthused teenage boy. It 
made Daryl feel slightly guilty which in turn made him feel annoyed. But not 
today, today the Banks feet had had enough –

The door opened and Xan himself entered along with his buddy, Stevie Dax, 
who had the room across the hall. Xan stopped at the sight of Daryl sprawled 
on his back on the farthest bed, barefoot with his eyes closed. “Dar’? You 
okay?”

He sounded almost nervous and for a moment something passed over Stevie 
Dax’s face too quickly for Daryl to quantify. “Don’t get me started,” he 
groaned theatrically. “You know, that old thing about parents marrying before 
they had kids was so right on the nail. You shouldn’t have your own parents’ 
wedding inflicted on you; it’s cruel and unusual punishment!”

Xan laughed and came fully into the room with Stevie, who also smiled. “Your 
dad, huh?”

Daryl sat up, suppressing the twinge of remorse he felt about using his dad’s 
impending marriage as the reason for his current state of weariness. However, 
he had no intention of telling Xan or anybody else about his starting work as a 
police volunteer until he had safely been ensconced in the role for as long as 
possible. While he didn’t for a minute suspect Xan of malice, he knew that the 
other youth might say something in all innocence to Simon Banks if he rang, 
and with his dad being the poster-child for stress right now, he’d go ballistic.  

“I’m counting the seconds to a week Saturday,” he admitted, not entirely 
untruthfully.

“The semester starts that Monday after, isn’t that cutting it a bit close?” Xan 
enquired, flopping on his own bed and gesturing Stevie towards a chair.

Momentarily Daryl noted the oddity of Dax waiting for Xan’s permission to sit 
down but was distracted by his own concentration on not revealing anything 
about being a Police Volunteer just yet. “It’s all happened very fast. It’s a 
double wedding, you see, my dad and Leonie McKinley and one of the MCU 
detectives, Henri Brown, to Rhonda Delagardie, who is dad’s secretary at 
Cascade PD, but Rhonda’s pregnant and she wants to get married before she 
ends up looking like a whale – her words, not mine. With me and Ellie at 
Georgetown now, Kyler lives in LA and Callum in Seattle, it was a case of do it 
quick or see it drag on for a decade.”

“You sound as if you really like Leonie,” Stevie commented.

Daryl smiled without artifice. “She’s really great for dad. I’ve been very lucky; 
a lot of my schoolmates had either rich daddies whose ever-changing every-
younger wives went past like revolving doors or rich mommies who picked the 
biggest sleazoid loser as stepfather material simply because he could go all 
night like a stevedore – sorry, too much information, I know.”

“Just a bit! Yeeuck, now I have that image in my head, man,” Xan complained 
with mock-heat.     

“I’m luckier than most. My parents didn’t get divorced until I was thirteen and I 
get on well with my step-dad too,” Daryl told Stevie. “Frederick Heyer, he’s a 
diplomat. He was a godsend when he married my mom. One of the 
disadvantages of being an only child is that there is nothing to distract parental 
attention, especially when they want to take their mind off the fact that their 
marriage is going down the pan. My dad always had being a cop to distract him 
from becoming too wrapped up in my life, but until she met Fred, mom didn’t 
have that outlet.”

“So are you doing anything at the wedding?” Xan asked. “I’ve been a page boy 
twice and take it from me, no male looks good in velvet.”

Daryl laughed. “Oh yeah, I was page boy to my cousin Melinda and Geoffrey. 
Blue velvet – yuck. But yeah, I’m my dad’s best man, Kyler is giving Leonie 
away as the eldest son and Rafe, Henri’s partner is his best man…”

* * *      
     
Jim was dimly aware that he was standing there with his mouth literally 
gaping, but he had more important things to focus on. 

The two men stepped out into the sunlight to find themselves on a ledge 
partway up the basin of a hollowed out mountain and promptly forgot about 
everything else. Directly in front of them, rising up from the meadow, was the 
Temple of Guides. 

Like the one in Sierra Verde, it was a step-pyramid constructed of stone. There 
any similarities ended. The Sierra Verde temple was an overgrown, semi-
collapsed ruin. This one… Each terrace created by the step-construction had 
been planted with flowers and shrubs, and bas-relief carvings of animals on 
stone panels on the outside of the pyramid were clearly visible even without 
enhanced sight. A broad flight of steps led up to a door, just as at Sierra Verde, 
but these steps were flanked by a row of guardians – stone carvings of wolves. 
In fact, it looked as if the builders had finished the place barely an hour ago; if 
some guy had still been packing up his tools, Jim wouldn’t have been surprised.

It was this thought that made Jim realise something else – he felt no inner 
need.  At Sierra Verde the compulsion to get to the temple had been a literal 
burning in his bones, as necessary as to breathe, but now he felt no such thing, 
in fact, maybe even an aversion to the great edifice. In Sierra Verde, there 
could have been an entire city or a fleet of alien motherships on every side and 
Jim would have been oblivious, but now he found it quite easy to get past the 
initial shock of the stupendous site and examine the peripherals. The crater of 
an obviously long-dormant volcano, it was roughly oval in shape, with deep 
fissures in some of the crater sides, like a giant hand tried pleating the rock. 
These formed shallow canyons and gullies and Jim’s enhanced sight easily saw 
how they had fences at the mouths; some of the canyons were livestock pens, 
others had some sort of cereal crops growing in them, still others had small 
orchards. 

The crater sloped lower down to the left in a shallow gradient; on the far wall 
of the crater where a narrow waterfall a hundred feet high thundered down, 
Jim’s eyes discerned an artificially geometric shape and then penetrated the 
mossy weathering to see waterwheels – several of them – powering what 
seemed to be mills set up in shallow cave recesses as the water churned a deep 
lake and then flowed across the crater as a shallow, wide diagonal river, 
bisecting it. There were cave dwellings like that tribe – Anastai, Anata, no 
Anastazi – in the walls of the crater, some of which came near to this ledge…

And gave the inhabitants/defenders a near on perfect tactical advantage. 
There were no steps leading straight down but rather a long stone ramp that 
curved gradually down the crater wall to the grassy meadow floor. Men on 
horseback could in single file get through the entrance tunnel, but there was 
only room for one horse or two adults on foot to exit out onto this exposed 
ledge at a time. If they were enemies, they could be picked off by archers from 
the ‘windows’ and ‘doors’ of the nearest cave dwellings on this wall.

Likewise it was impossible to get in unnoticed. The only way down was the long 
stone ramp, again only wide enough for one horse rider or two adults abreast, 
that provided ample opportunity for the intruder to be spotted and contained 
at the bottom of the ramp. Jim glanced up – assault by air was also a no-go. 
Any defenders would have perfect line of sight if they occupied the cave 
dwellings and secured the stone ramp, and any soldiers that were dropped in 
the middle of the crater from a helo would be exposed to a complete crossfire.      

“Wow…”

Jim suddenly realised from the almost dreamy quality of Blair’s voice and his 
vacant, rapt gaze that the younger man was mesmerised by the temple. 
“That’s the sum total of your eloquence?” Jim had meant the words as a joke, 
but couldn’t prevent a peevish edge tainting his words as his dislike of the 
temple increased. 

Fortunately Blair didn’t notice, visibly shaking off the effect. “It’s amazing 
man.”

“Yeah,” said Jim neutrally. “They’ve done well not to be spotted by air though 
– police chopper, tourists and the like.”

Blair glanced up skywards and then looked around the crater generally, though 
of course he lacked Jim’s enhanced vision. “They’ve disguised everything 
pretty well, besides from the air it’d be a totally different perspective. If you 
were in a helicopter a hundred feet above the crater looking straight down, 
sure you’d see the stone cap of the pyramid, but then all you’d see would be 
the shrubbery and plants in the terraces and the surrounding meadow – it 
would just look like a hill with a bare crag on top. There are no other buildings 
in the crater to give away habitation. Like that thing in World War 2 with the 
Germans in the desert?”

“Sure,” Jim grasped instantly Blair’s reference. “Someone amongst the allies 
realised that aerial photographs have no perspective unless you have known 
landmarks. So the allies build a cardboard cut out “battalion” of tanks in the 
desert. When the German recon planes flew over and took pictures, they saw 
the shadows of the tanks, but there were no comparative topographical 
features, so they had no way of knowing whether the tanks were two feet or 
twenty feet high.”

Blair nodded, “That’s it…the Germans probably had someone equally bright 
enough to do the math, but they had no choice but to work on the assumption 
that the desert army was real. From the air this would just look like a lot of 
foliage and rock. Oh man…this place could have been undisturbed for years!”

Blair was a good ten feet down the stone ramp before Jim had blinked, trotting 
ahead with enthusiastic zeal shining from his face. Not likely. One large hand 
clamped firmly on the scruff of the Guide’s neck. “Whoa, hold it right there, 
Darwin.” 

As Blair was forced to stop or be strangled by his own clothing, Jim marched 
forward so he was in front of his friend and began a more cautious descent, 
aware of Blair’s indignant glare boring into his back. Tough; Jim had no doubt 
that the natives were restless and from his experience with the Chopec, knew 
indigenous tribes could and did coat their arrows with a whole host of cute 
you’ll-die-in-agony-guaranteed poisons.    

They reached the bottom of the stone ramp after a good two minutes walk that 
emphasised the sheer scale of the crater; it was least as long as four football 
fields lain end to end and possibly even wider. There was no sign of human life 
in the vicinity but Jim ignored Blair’s loud, huffy see-you-were-overreacting 
sniff as he began to walk towards the temple, which loomed gargantuan and 
silent like some budget-busting SFX prop on a sci-fi show. Casting out his sense 
of smell as well as his ears, Jim caught the scent of sheep shit and other 
herbivorous manure, which while unpleasant nevertheless backed up his visual 
assessment that the meadow was simply grass and not disguising something 
noxious. He could also detect brief silver flashes in the river ahead that were 
presumably fish, so the water wasn’t a trap either. 

Up close, as Jim cricked his neck peering up, he could see that the temple was 
almost identical to the one in Sierra Verde save that the guardian animals were 
wolves not jaguars, and of course it was in a much better state of repair. 
However, Jim was still not feeling any compulsion towards it, and his irritated 
dislike of it was becoming more prominent to the extent that he moved 
instinctively to block Blair when the man moved forward towards the steps.

“Jim!” Blair protested but didn’t move, even though every fibre of his being 
seemed to resonate with the temple’s nearness. <Jim?>

“Stay behind me,” Jim ordered curtly and placed his foot on the first stone 
step cautiously. Nothing happened so he proceeded, despite his discomfort 
admiring the psychology behind the building method. The stone steps were too 
narrow in breadth to get your whole foot on each step, and the gap between 
each step and the next was so high you had to lift each leg unnaturally high to 
take each step, which of course with one foot not fully on the step below 
threw you even more off balance.  Even assuming some invaders miraculously 
did get this far, it was impossible to charge up these steps at speed without 
coming tumbling down and breaking hips and necks in the process. 

Finally they were in front of the door, which was made of greenish-brown 
stone; limestone, or sandstone maybe? It was high, enough for a man nearly 
seven feet tall to walk under the lintel comfortably, but was square in shape 
rather than rectangular like modern doors making it seem squat. Unlike the 
carvings of animals that seemed to be trying to jump out of the terrace panels, 
the door was plain and completely unadorned. Its very blankness seemed 
somehow more ominous than carved warning images of skull-and-crossbones 
would have been.

Jim felt Blair pressing against his back practically thrumming with eagerness to 
enter. It said a lot for the other man that he had tolerated Jim’s wariness as 
long as he had. Suddenly spinning around to face his Guide, Jim shot out a hand 
to grasp the back of Sandburg’s head as he pulled the younger man into a rough 
embrace, tangling his fingers in the spring curls. <Mine.>

<Uh, yeah, Jim?> Blair responded to the mental growl since his face was buried 
in Jim’s chest. 

Releasing Blair’s hair momentarily but only to pull it away from the left side of 
Blair’s neck, Jim lowered his head and closed his teeth on the side of Blair’s 
neck at the vulnerable juncture of neck and torso, feeling the jugular pulsing 
strongly; he didn’t nip, he bit, and he wasn’t gentle, using his other arm to 
hold Blair in place.

“Owww!” Blair jerked reflexively, but Jim’s grip was too strong. <Hey, quit the 
Tarzan stuff man; that hurt!>

<No.>

<No? Back off right now, I am not your chew toy, Ellison!>

“Yes you are,” Jim pushed the Sentinel back in its box, getting the upper hand 
thanks to Sandburg’s irate use of his surname; he was only Ellison when Blair 
was really pissed off, but he wasn’t going to back down until his own point was 
made, “mine. Teddy Blair.” It was a feeble pun but it enabled Jim to retain his 
equilibrium as the man rather than the Sentinel as Blair spluttered indignantly 
again, turning the psychic plane a rich sapphire hue with mental epithets.

Retaining his control of the initiative, Jim turned and pushed open the door of 
the temple, which swung back in total silence and with an ease that bespoke 
superior craftsmanship and lots of cans of oil. Jim stepped inside, a still 
seething Blair on his heels. There was no need for enhanced sight, as the large 
room was quite light. It was directly underneath the apex of the pyramid and a 
narrow rectangular aperture had been cut into the capstone, allowing daylight 
to enter. The walls and floor were streaked white stone and the terraced roof, 
bringing Jim to mind of the skylights in his kitchen, had been decorated with 
some sort of luminescent paint. At strategic angles in the roof, carefully cut 
crystals had also been placed, reflecting and maximising the light potential 
from the room’s central features – two large rectangular stone troughs filled 
with clear blue water, just like in Sierra Verde.

Jim and Blair exchanged glances, the latter’s indignation forgotten. Blair 
hadn’t been into the temple with Jim and Alex Barnes; he had never got any 
further than the main doorway and had had other things on his mind like the 
fact that he and Megan Connor were handcuffed and an extremely irate 
Peruvian drug lord was standing behind them waving a pistol and threatening to 
off them both.  Jim had (eventually) described the experience at length after 
some prompting; however, the results had already spoken eloquently enough, 
when Alexandra Barnes was brought out on a stretcher with her brain fried. 
Never had the phrase, ‘don’t go in the water’ been more apropos. 

“Jim?” Blair spoke softly, his voice an echoing whisper in the room.

“It’s identical in layout to the Sierra Verde temple,” Jim admitted, “even to 
the two pools. Don’t go near the water, Chief.”

“Like I need that warning,” Blair smiled weakly. “What about these carvings on 
the walls?”

Jim walked carefully into the room proper but just as in Sierra Verde, there 
had been no booby traps. He looked at the pictures and then the lettering 
painted on the wall. “They’re not identical but the general theme seems to be 
the same.” He frowned. “It’s the same language though – which wasn’t 
Chopec.”

“Let me guess,” Blair stepped closer and peered at the wall and the unfamiliar 
lettering of what Jim would bet his last cent was a language unknown to any 
textbook, “it says: mix the nice drink in this recipe, go lay in one of these 
baths and hop out a veritable superman?”

“More or less, no mention of brain-overload,” Jim growled. “It’s the same offer 
that was painted on the walls in Sierra Verde, only this promises to make you a 
psychic super-empath with the power to control the thoughts of others at will, 
instead of a turbo-charged mega-sentinel with super-strength and speed.”

“I think I’ll take door number two,” Blair pointed to the much smaller door that 
was situated – not coincidentally or else Jim would eat his gym shorts – in the 
back right-hand corner of the room where the light was dimmest and it was 
therefore least visible, even with the light coming in through the open main 
door.

Again moving in tandem, the pair made their way across to the door with 
caution but not outright fear. Contrary to Indiana Jones-style movies, while 
tombs were booby-trapped, temples were not. The latter were specifically 
designed to draw a large number of people inside them and worshipers 
continually being sliced and diced by having to fight their way through a series 
of death traps were definitely bad for business. The temple was often 
constructed not for its own existence but to house a smaller, more portable 
object of veneration, and when danger threatened, the temple-goers often 
simply took this with them and rebuilt the housing temple elsewhere. 

This was much gloomier than the main room and Jim dialled up his eyesight a 
little, but the corridor was straight ahead and innocuous so Jim entered 
cautiously, Blair on his heels. This time the door swung silently shut behind 
them, making them turn quickly, but Jim’s eyes saw the rudimentary wood and 
metal ‘spring-loaded’ mechanism and there was a handle on the inside. Jim 
stiffened and growled irritably.

“What is it?” Blair whispered.

“Your heartbeat,” Jim tilted his head on one side, “your lungs; even your blood 
in your veins. When I try to extend my hearing, it’s muffled, but there’s also an 
echo effect from this corridor, magnifying your vital signs so they’re too loud.”

“Can you dial it down?”

“A little,” Jim acceded, but didn’t decrease the dials that much – once, and 
only once2, had they run a test to see if Jim could eliminate “Blair” from his 
Sentinel awareness. It had taken Jim over half an hour of concentrated effort 
to no longer smell Blair’s scent or hear his heartbeat and respiration or even 
detect his fingerprints on an item. Within an hour and a half, Jim had been 
almost blind with pain and practically on the verge of a full-blown anxiety 
attack/nervous collapse and had vehemently vowed never to do such a thing 
again.

“It must be the stone,” Blair mused. “In the city most buildings, especially 
modern ones, are much less well-built now than they used to be. The walls are 
brick not stone, they aren’t that thick and there are a lot of windows and 
doors. In comparison trying to get your hearing to penetrate several metres of 
solid rock will be a lot more difficult.”

Confident that Blair was as usual, right, Jim didn’t answer, he just moved 
cautiously down the corridor, which he could see turned right at a 90° angle up 
ahead. In the left hand corner, though, were the left wall should have joined 
the back wall to make the corner of the ? shape, there was a deeper shadow. 
Drawing closer, Jim could see that there was actually a doorway in the corner, 
though no actual door. Jim tensed when he seemed to see a pair of blue eyes 
looking back at him, but then both he and Sandburg paused in astonishment at 
the sight.

It was indeed a small chamber. The blue pair of ‘eyes’ were artificial orbs, 
large sapphires set in the head of a beautifully crafted panther carved from 
ebony wood. It was however, the least of the treasure. About eight feet high 
and six wide, the chamber was crammed with the sort of treasure Jim had last 
seen Johnny Depp and that other guy fighting over in Pirates of the Caribbean. 
Ornately etched gold plate was piled high with jewel encrusted chalices that in 
turned over-spilled with precious gems. Golden swords and daggers with ruby 
encrusted hilts lay as if carelessly dropped next to exquisite crystal goblets; 
coral threaded with gold and ropes of black pearls adorned beautifully carved 
animals inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver. Golden harps with silver strings 
and a sceptre with a diamond the size of a man’s fist were propped higgledy-
piggledy next ivory statuettes and carvings of rare camphor and cedar wood. 
Ingots of what looked like platinum were half buried under bone china jars of 
frankincense and myrrh and saffron. 

Jim and Blair exchanged a single eloquent glance, both having seen a different 
kind of ivory; nearly buried under a pile of what looked like Spanish gold 
doubloons were curved white things at that first glance looked like elephant 
tusks, until you realised they were a human ribcage, with a skull hidden 
underneath some more jewels.

Instead they turned the corner, Jim in the lead, moving cautiously as he dialled 
his hearing down to zero in defence against the amplifying effect of the stone. 
Blair’s breathing was slightly elevated with nerves and Jim also felt the sense 
of claustrophobia. This pyramid was huge, at least the size of Macchu Piccu, 
yet apart from the large main entry chamber, it seemed to have this only 
single, fairly narrow corridor running through the rest of it, which meant they 
were walking under hundreds of tonnes of rock. Determinedly not thinking 
about Washington State’s frequency of earthquakes or how the Cascades were 
a volcanic mountain range, Jim paused as another archway appeared on the 
left.

The two men paused, as in stark contrast to the previous gold-festooned 
chamber this was a study in minimalism. Small and square, whereas the gold 
store had been round like a bubble, the chamber was completely empty except 
for a narrow plinth that protruded up from the floor in the centre of the room, 
about five feet in height. Atop this on a flat square capstone was what looked 
like a coffee pot, only it was made of what seemed to be smoked blue glass, 
obscuring any contents. Without needing to exchange words, the two men 
made no move to enter, even though they understood the psychology. Unlike 
the treasure chamber, which was a straightforward appeal to base greed, the 
fact that the unassuming glass receptacle rated a room and a plinth all of its 
own hinted more subtly at great value, a better treasure.

They carried on down the corridor, which turned sharply to the left as it had 
earlier done to the right. <Was there anything like this at Sierra Verde?> Blair 
asked finally, using telepathy in deference to the amplification effect, since 
he’d never had any opportunity to actually study that temple with Alex Barnes, 
patroness of Psychos-R-Us Unlimited, and her drug-dealer customers trying to 
massacre everyone in sight.

<I never got that far into the temple, Chief,> Jim admitted, <besides which, it 
wasn’t safe. The place had obviously been looted and vandalised several 
times, probably starting with the Conquistadors trying to eradicate the Indian 
tribes’ pagan religions. I’m still amazed the whole place didn’t come crashing 
down on top of us when Barnes and I were in those pools.>

Jim gave a soft grunt as a familiar archway in the right hand wall of the 
corridor showed another chamber. He stopped, this time reasonably impressed. 
There was no treasure here, unless you had some serious homicidal urges. The 
chamber was packed with assorted weaponry and defensive armaments: 
longbows, crossbows, various types of shield from round Mongol-type shields, 
huge convex Roman shields to narrow oval Zulu-shields. Spears, maces, double 
and single-headed axes, broadswords of the type Mel Gibson had been waving 
around in Braveheart, rapiers and assorted daggers.

<Oh, wow, man, look, those double-curved swords, they’re Ottoman Turk 
Yataghans. That there, it’s a Sikh Kirpan, these things are worth as much as 
that pile of gold…> Blair explained. 

<All of it’s real too,> pointed out Jim, <no silly one-flick-and-snap gold and 
jewels here. All this is designed for your professional homicidal maniac.> He 
took a deep breath as his palms prickled; his testosterone had kicked in and he 
felt an instinctive desire to just try and see if he could pick up a broadsword, 
or maybe one of those cool double-headed axes. Or that spear thing with the 
hooks that looked as if it ought to be on the Home Shopping Channel with a 
‘free handy disembowelling attachment if you buy today’ advert. He 
understood that those who came here were warriors, and guessed that this lure 
would probably affect a soldier more than the gold or the mysterious vase.

It was with an effort of will that he turned away and moved past the archway, 
even though the gold chamber was the only one where he had actually seen 
human remains. With Blair at his back, Jim regretfully moved on down the 
corridor, slowly when he saw that the corridor widened out into a shallow semi 
circle, like the bulb at the bottom of a thermometer. Unlike the ceiling, floors 
and walls of the corridor, that area was not crafted out of the faintly 
luminescent white stone and so was much darker. Carefully scanning the floor 
for any “loose” flagstones or any suspicious bulges in the ceiling, Jim moved 
forward but nothing seemed to be triggered. 

“This is it?” Blair tried speaking Sentinel-soft and there was no resonance, 
clearly puzzled.

Jim warily risked pressing his hand to the back wall, but felt no difference that 
might indicate a hollow or hidden spring mechanism. It was extremely odd; he 
ghosted his fingers along the wall tentatively, wondering it there was some 
hidden chamber behind –

“Jim.” Blair’s tone was quiet and clipped and very controlled. “I need your 
help here.”

Jim turned immediately and saw the entrance archway that had been hidden 
before. On the right hand side of the chamber, where it curved back to meet 
the main corridor wall, was yet another archway that was initially invisible 
until you entered and only then if you happened to look immediately over your 
right shoulder. The chamber was round, as the gold chamber had been round, 
rather than square, and it was filled with…knowledge. Leather bound books 
several inches thick lay piled high, amidst clay pots crammed with tightly 
rolled scrolls. Clay tablets with strange squiggles lay scattered on the floor as if 
just dropped.        

“Oh man,” Blair tightly squeezed shut his eyes. “This is bad, man.”      

“Chief?” Jim moved forward protectively, scanning the area.

“When you looked at those weapons back there, did you wish you could risk 
getting to them, just to have a look? Did your fingertips kind of tingle with the 
urge to touch?” Blair asked with his eyes still closed.

“Uh, yeah…” Jim responded as light began to dawn. 

“My fingers are throbbing, man.” Blair opened his eyes and looked at the 
chamber’s contents in the same way that a junkyard dog looks at filet mignon – 
with rapacious hunger. “Archaeologists, anthropologists, lexicographers, they’d 
all sell their souls for five minutes in this place and I’m standing a foot away 
from some of the most important writings the human species has probably ever 
produced.”                

“And that’s as close you’re going to get, Sandburg.” It was a promise, and a 
warning.

Blair sucked in a deep breath as gratitude from Jim’s presence mingled 
paradoxically with resentment of the man preventing him from getting access 
to those wonderful books. Jim’s face was calm yet inexorable and Blair knew 
that 5’ 8” of enthusiastic but amateur anthropologist was not going to win over 
6’ 2” of black-ops trained Sentinel. For a moment Blair’s mind flitted back to 
the death of Incacha, the Chopec Shaman who had lumbered Blair with his own 
shamanistic millstone. Jim had gone ballistic when the Forensic team had tried 
to do their job and Blair recalled how he had literally shoved Jim out of the 
door, a feat he had only managed because Jim – albeit only subconsciously in 
that instance – allowed him to do so. There were plenty of times he’d gotten 
into Jim’s face when their tempers were running high, but that had been the 
only time he’d really physically manhandled Jim. Right now his best friend and 
Sentinel was in full “save Sandburg from himself” mode –

“Whoa, Chief,” it was Jim’s turned to stiffen and blink. “I think that might 
take your mind off the books.”

Automatically, Blair turned his attention away from the tempting chamber as 
Jim pointed back down the corridor they had walked along. His eyes focused on 
what was now the back wall of that corridor at the point where it had made 
90° left-turn to bring them down to this dead-end. For a moment he saw only 
myriads of dots, then his eyes picked out lettering and he realised that the 
entire section of that wall was covered from floor to ceiling in letters, symbols 
and pictographs. “Whaa…?” Nervously he paused as he stepped forward.

“It must be okay,” reasoned Jim logically, “we passed it walking down here 
and didn’t set any traps off.”

Together they walked back down the corridor to where it made what was now 
a right-angled right turn, with the writing wall being the back. Jim took a 
couple of steps back, then looked at the surrounding walls, then walked back 
down the other corridor a few feet before turning and walking back again, 
paying close attention to the wall. “Very ingenious, you got that knife of 
yours?”

“Always,” dipping a hand in his jacket pocket, Blair pulled out the trusty Swiss 
Army knife he’d been given as a Bar Mitzvah present, one of the few Jewish 
traditions Naomi had embraced with regard to her son.  

Taking it, Jim very gently scraped at a bit of the wall a foot or so away from 
the writing and a fine powdery grey substance came with it on the tip. “See? 
The pyramid is constructed of plain stone, and then the inner walls are coated 
with some sort of sparkling paint that gives off just enough luminescence to see 
by without having to bring down flaming torches that could use up too much 
oxygen.”

“Why didn’t we see the pattern?” Blair asked as he peered at the lettering 
eagerly.

“I’d say because the rest is probably just random, meaningless swirls. We walk 
down the corridor, and like everyone else we’re concentrating on what’s round 
the corner, not on the wall and by that time we’re used to seeing random paint 
patterns. We walk straight past down the corridor to that dead end chamber. 
The wall writing is only visible if you turn around and look directly back the 
way you came, and of course you’ve that big distracting chamber of books 
that’s a lot more obvious.”

“Yeah, it’s a like a toddler. A three-year-old will always go for the shiny, 
bright, brand-new quarter rather than the tatty fifty-dollar bill.” Blair 
conceded probably with the voice of experience. “Oh, wow, look at this!”

“Can you read it?” Jim asked, aware that Blair hadn’t been able to read 
individual words in the main chamber, though he’d clearly grasped the broad 
theme.

“Yes…” Blair shook his head, “but I shouldn’t be able to. Nobody should be able 
to…wait, can you read it?”

“Mostly,” Jim admitted. “But it isn’t exactly the same as what’s written on the 
main chamber wall, some of the letters are different. I expect it means 
something that we can both read – more or less - a language we’ve never laid 
eyes on before?”

Blair nodded, his body beginning that ever familiar bounce. “There are well 
over half a dozen indecipherable scripts – ancient languages nobody has been 
able to translate – that have been discovered to date, and who knows how 
many more there are? That doesn’t even take account of languages that only 
existed orally and have become extinct.” He shook his head, making his curls 
bounce wildly, “This whole wall should be disconnected gibberish, but it makes 
perfect sense.”

“How so?”

“See the main script, the actual paragraphs of writing in the centre?” Blair 
pointed at the elegant curved script, “With a few minor variations in letter 
style that script is Voynich. The only example of this script that exists is the 
Wilfred Voynich manuscript, which seems to be some sort of herbalists 
textbook except that many of the plants it depicts are fictional and don’t exist 
anywhere in botany. That manuscript has been dated to about 1460 when it 
popped into existence with complex grammar and syntax from nowhere. It’s 
commonly believed that it was either a money-making hoax or coded 
information disguised to look innocuous.”

“What about the rest?”

“That top left vaguely resembles Indus; that bottom left seems to be Meriotic? 
The top right has some similarities to Vinca and the rest might be related Old 
Elamite…possibly.” Blair struggled to couch his explanation in simple terms, 
“You see, languages are different in their construction as well as sounds. For 
example, English utilises alphabetical symbols, whereas Chinese developed 
from pictorial origins. The English word for ship is comprised of four ‘symbols’ 
but the ancient Chinese word for ‘ship’ is a combination of three separate 
pictures denoting eight people in a sea-going vessel.”  

“Unless they’re all part of the same language, Chief,” Jim pointed out. “We 
use English, but the English we speak is a lot different to the English that we 
write, which is completely different to the English of text-messaging. We also 
use Morse Code and pictographs like STOP signs and crosswalks to convey 
meaning. Then we speak American English and the Brits British English, there’s 
African English and Indian English and pidgins and creoles, and dialects of 
English. In that sense ‘English’ is a far more complicated way of communicating 
than an archaeologist a thousand years from now would ever realise if all he 
had to go on was a single book.”

Blair scowled, “That would make this language the most complex on 
Earth…besides, the fact that we both understand it though we’ve never seen it 
before indicates that we share a race memory of it, which in turns 
indicates…that Sentinels and Guides have a common racial ancestry…”

“You mean Sentinels and Guides are from a distinct race of people?”

Blair shrugged. “I have no idea, but there are precedents. Certain races do 
have distinctive features. The Roman nose is a classical example, because that 
shape of proboscis was so prevalent amongst Roman Italians. Regardless of 
what racists would have us believe it is quite easy to tell a Chinaman from a 
Japanese man, or a Maori from a Samoan in one glance. A single race of people 
who for some reason scattered around the globe and took various aspects of 
their language with them…?” his voice trailed off and Jim could almost see his 
brain cells pulse feverishly as the Sandburgian intellect sank it’s teeth deep 
into the new theory.         

Except that they didn’t have time for this right now; so distract and divert. “Ah 
hah, I knew it.” Jim tapped the wall meaningfully.

“What?”

“The recipe for the juice; notice anything?”

Blair focussed on the recipe that was repeated from the main chamber, “It’s 
identical…oh yes, I see, except for the last ingredient which must be what 
stops the stuff frying your brain. Very clever; the power-hungry types like Miss 
Barnes go no further than the enticing DRINK ME lure in the main chamber and 
end up catatonic. The ones who are here because they want to make best use 
of their abilities to help people are more likely to explore the rest of the 
temple and thus find the complete recipe, and oh look, there’s even a standard 
disclaimer underneath it in case it doesn’t work –”

“What?” Jim demanded as Blair blinked and broke off. 

“Of course, all the rooms are tests to be passed.”  Blair responded. “That’s 
why the real recipe is down here in this dark corner –”

“- because naughty people like Alex would never have got any further than the 
shiny lure of the main room and those pools, I know.” Jim reiterated. 

Blair nodded, clearly thinking it out in his mind. “The first room was a simple 
appeal to base greed and avarice. The second was similar but subtle.”

“How?”

“It appealed to envy and resentment.” Blair explained. “Remember how I told 
you that I’ve looked in the eyes of people and seen the envy eating them up?”

Jim nodded, remembering all too well Blair’s telepathic diatribe at the café 
before Zinnia Seddon had appeared to take their order. How had he put it? Oh 
yes, envious people had discontent ‘gnawing away at them like acid’… 
<They’re the unhappiest people on earth and what makes them so evil is that 
they are consumed by trying to make everyone as bitter and twisted as they 
are. They impute the vilest of motives to the most innocent of situations.> 
Blair had clearly been ranting with the voice of experience.

He tuned back in as Blair was in full flow. “There are people who will pay vast 
sums, even steal and murder, to possess some unique artefact. They have no 
understanding of its historicity and may not even like the thing, but they’ll go 
to any lengths to be able to drool over their prize in some secret sub-basement 
gloating because they have something nobody else does.”

Jim nodded, seeing the lure of that blue glass receptacle to someone whose 
nature was as Blair described. “And the weapons were a straightforward call to 
anyone lusting for power.”

“Yes, but a bit more than that, I’d say.” Blair frowned in concentration. “To 
lure someone who loved violence. There’s a big difference between a man who 
would take any action necessary, including extreme violence, to protected his 
loved ones, if necessary, and a man who revelled in violence, who fed  off his 
ability to subjugate and wield power over other people, like the SS guards in 
Nazi concentration camps.”

“And number four is the good old ‘information is power’ bauble.” Jim stated.

Blair shivered with regret. “I’ll say. That was the killer; it was so much more 
subtle than the others. People say ‘information is power’ but a lot of times 
they don’t really believe it; for thousands of years the real power lay with 
whoever was the biggest warlord, and in this country plus most of the Western 
Hemisphere, we still measure a ‘real man’ by how big his biceps are, not how 
smart he is…”

“Thanks, Chief.”

Blair grinned momentarily at Jim’s dry tone but his smirk quickly faded. “But 
knowing stuff nobody else does in certain arenas really does imbue a 
disproportionate power on an individual.”

“Not like a caveman who suddenly understands television, but a caveman who 
suddenly understands firearms,” Jim illustrated, “like the drug lords with the 
Chopec – the Chopec wiped the floor with them only as long as they could 
remain unseen by the goons holding Uzis.”

“Exactly. In fact, I remember a historian years ago writing a thesis that 
basically put forward a similar case for Merlin –”

“Magician guy?” Jim interrupted.

“Yeah, helped Arthur; Knights of the Round Table, yadda-yadda. The basic 
theory was that Merlin wasn’t a sorcerer but a scientist. Arthur and Merlin both 
lived about 600 years before 1066, when the Normans conquered England, and 
the Chinese had invented the printing press about five centuries before that. 
When the Normans conquered England, Chinese and English peasants lived in 
exactly the same desperate conditions, but the difference was that Chinese 
peasants were a literate, educated stratum of society who went to a bookshop 
when they wanted to read something.”

“Let me guess, the historian reckoned Merlin knew some similar stuff?”

“More or less.” Blair looked again at the writing and pictograms carved onto 
the wall of the tunnel, reaching out to faintly trace the lines with his fingers. 
“The Chinese had also invented the compass, magnets, the blast furnace, 
flushing toilets and gunpowder. They were decades ahead in terms of botany 
and medicine. The Greeks had Archimedes who was Einstein and Newton all 
rolled into one and who helpfully wrote down most of his methodology. The 
Romans gave us a whole load of stuff not least indoor plumbing and they 
reached China. Islam was way ahead of Christendom in terms of medicine and 
astronomy. Even the Irish and the Welsh circumnavigated the globe centuries 
before Columbus was a twinkle in his father’s eye. Many scholars believe Arthur 
was part-Roman, illegitimate son of one of the Western Roman Emperors, 
Honorius, and most agree he and Merlin were related to some degree of 
cousinship, if not a closer genealogy.”  

“So Merlin could have been literate and had access to a much wider range of 
written knowledge than the rest of the English, or possibly was taught himself 
by someone who did.” Jim followed his line of reasoning effortlessly. 

“You just said it,” Blair postulated, “a caveman who understood firearms 
would instantly be the most powerful person amongst people who were still 
using bows and arrows. Think about Merlin – a lot of his stunts would seem 
miraculous to those without scientific knowledge. Some legends say he was 
able to create great fireballs from a distance of many miles against Arthur’s 
enemy; an intuitive leap to what uses Chinese ‘firecrackers’ could be put 
centuries before anyone else?”

“England’s first explosives expert,” Jim commented, remembering how 
fascinated the Chopec had been when he first started utilising the helicopter’s 
scavenged arsenal of grenades, MP5s and other toys against the drug barons’ 
henchmen.

“Yeah, but it’s even a more subtle test of your integrity than that. I mean,” 
Blair waved his hands around emphatically indicating both the wall and the now 
concealed ‘book’ chamber, “there’s a vast difference between reading a book 
and studying a subject to learn about it. So if the Guide does decide to dive 
into those lovely tomes, what’s his Sentinel supposed to do? Who’s watching 
the Guardian’s back while the Guide is busily engrossed in learning the secrets 
of all those scrolls?”

“You are indeed wise, young shaman.”

Both Jim and Blair spun round to face the speaker. An Indian man was standing 
about ten feet down the tunnel, having presumably followed them from the 
temple’s main chamber (or else beamed down through solid rock which was 
something Jim wasn’t going to think about even in the privacy of his own 
head). Rather than boots his feet were clad in brown moccasins, but he was 
wearing faded Levi jeans and a blue-checked ‘lumberjack’ type shirt; however, 
he was wearing the full regalia headdress of an extremely important tribal 
chief, and had long braided plats either side his head, his obsidian hair 
streaked with grey, though that was meaningless – Native Americans were often 
‘ageless’ in appearance. 

“There was nobody here when we came,” Jim deliberately made it a challenge 
rather than an apology.

“I’m Joe,” the man declared, ignoring Jim’s statement entirely. “You want to 
come?”

He turned and walked back towards the entrance with Blair and Jim hard on his 
heels. <Joe?> Jim sent the word to Blair in distinctly disgruntled tone <he’s got 
to be kidding.>

<At least he didn’t reel off something totally pretentious like Hiawatha> 
pointed out Blair. He waited until they walked back outside and had negotiated 
the perilous temple steps back down to the meadow before he said aloud, “So 
you’ve come now we passed the tests?”

‘Joe’ nodded. “I saw you come. I knew you had to be a Guide, as only Guides 
can find the temple. You passed the Six Judgements of Worth admirably –”

Blair raised his arm and waggled his fingers, “Er, six? What was the last one? 
There were only five challenges.”

“Don’t go in the water,” Jim raised his thumb and then each finger as he 
rattled them off, “and pass on the treasure, the genie’s lamp, the penis-
substitute swords and the ‘How-To Rule the World’ series in a hundred 
collectable volumes.” 

“How do you feel about the Temple of Guides?” Joe asked Jim. “And the 
tunnels you traversed? Were you at ease?”

Jim narrowed his eyes at the bland expression and amused tone. “No,” he 
admitted honestly. “It makes me bristle for some reason; those tunnels 
aggravated my senses like an overload.”

“Aw, Jim, why didn’t you say something?” Blair was instantly contrite. “You 
shouldn’t have come with me if it put you on edge – ”

Jim looked at him incredulously. “Are you nuts? This is the Sandburg Zone – five 
minutes after you went in there it would have been ‘sudden inexplicable 
structural collapse’ or some crap.”

“I’m not that bad!” Blair protested.

Jim rolled his eyes.

“That was the first of the six judgements,” Joe interposed smoothly, “and the 
one of greatest importance. The temples’ primary purpose is to test the 
strength of the bond between the Guardian and the Guide, as that bond is of 
paramount importance.”

“Yet some would have returned outside or not gone in at all due to their own 
discomfort,” Jim realised, “even though they had no idea what was lurking in 
there for their Guide to trip over.”

“Indeed, yet sometimes the Guide him or herself would made the error,” Joe 
said slyly as he continued to walk slightly ahead of them along the meandering 
river bank. 

Blair groaned, “Of course, the road paved with good intentions: the temple 
creeps the Sentinel out, so the Guide immediately jumps in and does what 
they’re supposed to do – look after the Sentinel.” Blair intoned in a sing-song 
voice, “‘Don’t worry, you wait out here. It’s a Temple of Guides for crying out 
loud, how dangerous could it be’?”

“What about those who failed the tests?” Jim asked Joe with an undercurrent 
of harshness.

“They were helped to work on those things that had made them fail,” Joe 
replied casually. 

How he saw the glance Blair and Jim exchanged with his back to them was 
impossible, but he chuckled, “You have been watching too many Indiana Jones 
movies, I fear, young Shaman. Sentinels and Guides are too valuable a resource 
to destroy so peremptorily; failure of the tests only equated to death under the 
most extreme of circumstances.”
 
“Glad to hear it,” Jim said coolly, clearly not warming to their tour guide, who 
seemed to be trying to hold in some vast amusement.

Joe shrugged, an eloquent roll of his shoulders. “The temples are a valuable 
tool of stone, but to judge the reasoning of the heart cannot be left to the 
impervious mercilessness of such things. You understand these things, Sentinel 
of the Great City. Two identical twin brothers each steal a loaf of bread. One is 
a rich brat out for kicks, the other is desperate to feed his hungry family. The 
crime is the same in each case, but the motivation behind them would suggest 
a different solution was needed.”

“The first guy should be punished,” Jim acknowledged, “but the second guy is 
desperate to save his family. Punishing him for theft is an exercise in futility 
unless you do something to remove the conditions that made him steal in the 
first place, like ensuring his family get something to eat.”

“Just so,” Joe concurred.

“Wait a minute!” Blair stopped dead, his yelp startling and unnerving Jim.

“What?” Jim demanded.

“Temples!” Blair folded his arms and stared at Joe. “You said Tem-pullz. Zz-zz-
zz. As in plural. Where’s the other one?”

Jim instinctively looked around as if expecting another edifice to pop into 
existence next to the first one.

“The Temple of Sentinels is further to the North of here, too far to trigger your 
impulse to go to it,” Joe added as Jim instinctively began to reach out as he 
had at Sierra Verde.

“But that’s incredible,” Blair’s eyes were like saucers. “I mean, this temple has 
got to be several thousand years old, how could it remain undetected for so 
long –”

“That is how it was meant to be.” Joe had finally stopped and faced them, 
smiling benevolently at Blair’s enthusiasm. “Much history has been lost to this 
world, young Shaman, and not for the better, because those who do not learn 
from history are doomed to repeat it. Long, long ago, this world knew openly 
what you call Sentinel & Guide pairings, along with other great ones amongst 
men. They went to places of faith and knowledge, to learn and understand, 
and develop not just themselves but the generations after them.”

“But?” Jim interposed, deliberately appearing unimpressed by this high 
rhetoric.

“There were those of great wisdom, teachers and scholars who understood the 
fragility of human knowledge – and power. Cities rose and fell before them, 
and beyond even war or pestilences, earthquakes and volcanoes and floods 
could annihilate in mere few moments information that it had taken decades or 
even centuries to accumulate, or even worse kill those whose knowledge made 
them irreplaceable.”

“The Greek Archimedes, he wrote The Method, detailing his processes,” Blair 
put in, “the most brilliant mathematician of any century, he was supposed to 
be able to draw a perfect circle in freehand. The Romans besieged Athens 
solely to capture him, but he was killed in the siege by an ordinary Roman 
legionary who had no idea who he was.”

“Just so,” Joe inclined his head. “There were many temples and schools and 
centres of great learning, but the wise ones sent out emissaries to every 
continent and nation, to chart every valley and plateau and mountain range, to 
seek out a place where there could be constructed hidden places, unknown, 
unseen and untouched by the world at large for all time. Places where their 
knowledge and secrets could be safeguarded and protected from fire or flood 
or fury, so that those who needed it in the future did not have to search it out 
again and again from the beginning.”

Jim and Blair looked at each other, grasping the potential of the notion; the 
printing press was the classic example of something that had been needlessly 
reinvented in Europe because nobody knew the Chinese had already done it a 
millennium earlier. 

“The scouts searched all over the world,” Joe was continuing, “but found only 
a few places, including what you now call the Cascade Mountains and these two 
very fortunately situated and fortunately dormant volcanoes.”

“Are there other places like this in the world?” Blair asked.

“I do not know,” Joe admitted with unconcerned shrug. “When these 
sanctuaries of knowledge were constructed, the one thing the architects 
deliberately omitted at each site was any reference to where the others were 
located, so that in the event of evil ones being the cause of a place’s 
destruction, they could not track down the other sanctuaries from it.”

Jim acknowledged the soundness of the idea, so simple yet so effective; during 
the Cold War Russian ‘sleepers’ who infiltrated the US had operated in the 
same way. Each person knew only their immediate superior, who knew only the 
guy above him and so forth, which acted as a countermeasure to the capture of 
one agent compromising the whole system. 

“You’re not a Guide though?” Blair said it as a question but there was a deep 
certainty in his tone.

Joe smiled again. “No, though some of my lineage have been such. I and my 
tribe are custodians of the temple. At each place there was chosen a group of 
people, reverent and righteous men and women, whose task it was to watch 
over, maintain and repair the sites.”

 “You’re saying that your people have spent the last God-knows-how-many-
millennia as glorified janitors?” Jim challenged.

Joe actually chuckled. “In a way, yes, our work has involved such duties. 
However, the primary charge laid upon our ancestors was that each generation 
should learn again and study anew the great knowledge stored here, so as to 
ensure it never became lost for any reason.”

“You mean copy out the scrolls and books as they decayed?” Blair asked with 
interest. Due to his Jewish background he was familiar with the tradition of the 
biblical copyists of antiquity, the Seraphim and their successors the Masoretic 
scribes who had copied the Old Testament scrolls painstakingly from generation 
to generation and ensured their survival to the era of printing. 

“In part,” Joe said, “but far beyond that. It has been the task of each 
generation not just to learn but to understand the information collected here, 
so that we can in turn teach it to those who come after us. Over time, 
languages change and die; who is there today that can read Egyptian 
Hieroglyphs as if they were the next Stephen King novel, or Linear A like it was 
a daily newspaper, or Voynich or Old Elamite?”

Blair and Jim exchanged glances and slight shrugs, seeing the validity of his 
statement. “I understand that,” Blair agreed, “especially as you’re right, so 
much has been lost over the centuries. The Romans had a process to bend 
ivory, which has been lost to time; they also refused to use iron but only silver 
in medical surgery but scientists have only just rediscovered that iron surgical 
implements hinder the body’s healing processes whilst silver encourages 
them.”

“There’s that iron pillar in India that was built hundreds of years ago but which 
doesn’t rust,” Jim conceded, “and modern engineers can’t built pyramids as 
well as the ancient Egyptians.”

“As you say,” Joe replied, “languages are constantly changing in both terms 
and meaning. Gay once referred to those who were cheerful and happy, bad is 
now really good. At one time Latin and Linear A and Elamite were thriving 
living tongues spoken by hundreds if not thousands of people, but now they are 
extinct and the knowledge written in them would have been lost forever.”

“So are you the one who’ll teach me to me a shaman?” Blair asked somewhat 
sharply.

Joe tilted his head and looked at him. “But you do not wish to be a shaman.”

“And your point is?” 

Blair’s rudeness astonished Jim as much as the open bitterness of the words 
upset him.

“The path of study in this endeavour is complex and dangerous. It is not 
something to be undertaken lightly even by the most willing of students. It 
must be your choice.”

“Yeah right,” Blair shot back. “I’ve already accepted that I’m going to be a 
shaman so can we just get on with it?”

“Why do you wish to study something you have no wish to be?” Joe asked 
calmly.

“Cards on the table time, huh?” Blair folded his arms and glared at Joe, 
radiating resentment. “Look, we all know ‘choice’ is a crock for me just as 
much as when Incacha pretended to give it to Jim.”

“Uh? Chief…”

Blair made a slicing motion with his hand to silence his friend and Jim’s 
tentative mental probe hit what seemed to be a glittering psychic glass wall of 
anger, preventing him reaching his friend’s mind. “Incacha told Jim that he 
was a Sentinel as long as he chose to be, but that was bullshit, because Incacha 
knew that Jim was too honourable and good a man to see innocent people die 
if he possessed abilities that could prevent that. The player has changed but 
the game remains the same. Do I want to be a Shaman? Like I want to join to 
the Ku Klux Klan! Most of the Real Blair Sandburg has already been smothered 
by the ever-growing Triffid that is the Sentinel-verse and there’s not that much 
of me left. But Witt’s End is being destroyed by a real life Voldemort-wannabe 
and we all know that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if innocent, decent 
people were badly hurt or even killed when I could have done something to 
stop this sicko. So can we please consider the module on Cryptic to be covered 
and move on to ‘Stopping the Evil Bad Guy 101’?”

The silence seemed to Jim to stretch taut like an overtaxed spring. Joe 
regarded Blair impassively as the younger man stood there glaring; only Jim 
could detect the faint tremor in his friend’s body and the sub-audible rasp of 
air in his forever-damaged lungs. 

Joe pursed his lips and then asked softly, “You view the Way of the Shaman as 
a burden you will regret?”

“In a word: yeah.”

Joe raised his eyebrows and then asked, “Did you regret learning to fly when 
you auto-rotated your comrades to safety?”

This time the silence was absolutely deafening. Jim looked at Blair’s suddenly 
white face in stupefied amazement. Auto-rotated? 

Blair actually shuddered as if very cold and his eyes glittered with something 
that could have been rage, or grief, or both. He turned his head to look and 
Jim and said, “If I tell you something, will you promise to just accept it and 
never, ever, never mention it again?”

Jim thought about it. “I can’t promise that,” he confessed with direct honesty 
as Blair drew in a deep breath, “but I will promise I’ll do my best.”

“I flew Apaches in Desert Storm,” Blair repeated his warning to Kincaid’s 
chopper pilot with flat emptiness. “It didn’t end well.”

To be concluded…

© 2005, C. D. Stewart

Author’s Note: Blair’s immortal phrase, “I flew Apaches in Desert Storm” has 
caused some discussion in the fandom as to whether Blair might really have 
military experience or whether he was just obfuscating. Considering the 
subsequent competence with which Blair, despite his vociferous objections to 
firearms, handled guns in the series I tend to go towards the former idea in my 
fiction – e.g., the efficiency with which Blair handled the M60 during the fire 
fight at cousin Rucker’s lighthouse for one.  I’m sure there must be more, but 
two good stories on the Apache theme are Shedoc’s Apache, Toshua’s When 
Secrets Fall From The Sky and Judy Seils Qualifying, all of which can be found 
at Cascade Library.   


1 A wonderfully phrased description expressed in the story Chemicals by Clea 
Saal, available at Cascade Library. 
2 This idea was taken from the great story, Loss, by DC Streets, which can be 
found at Starfox’s Mansion.