Evil Star

him at the hacienda. He was there, with them, in Lima. And last night he must have somehow followed us to Salamanda's place. Or maybe he was always waiting for me to show up."
    "Maybe he could have told you where your friend is."
    "I wish he'd told us more. Who he was. Who he was working for."
    "Maybe he didn't know he was going to die." Pedro thought for a moment. "This temple ..."
    "Coricancha. If we can find it, maybe we can find Richard." Matt picked up a pebble and threw it into the sea. It made no sound as it hit the water. "How long will it take us to reach Cuzco?"
    "They said twenty hours when I bought the tickets."
    "Well, if we can sleep most of the time, at least we can talk."
    “Yes." Pedro frowned. "What about this place, Matteo? Where are we now? How come we can understand each other . . . and remember everything when we wake up?"
    "I don't know," Matt said. "When I met you here on this island, I hoped you'd be able to tell me."
    "No chance. I don't know anything about anything. I'm just me. I do juggling and I steal from tourists. It's all a mys-tery, and how I got mixed up with you is the biggest mystery of all."
    "Then let's get moving." Matt stood up. "I think we should get off this island. You've got a boat. We can take it."

    Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star
    "Where?"
    "There are five of us, Pedro. That's what this is all about. We have to find the other three."
    The two of them went over to the boat and dragged it off the shingle.
    Matt climbed in and Pedro pushed off. Sud-denly, the mainland looked a long way away. Matt looked up. The sky, still black, was clear. The huge swan hadn't returned.
    The swan. Salamanda had been talking about it in his dining room.
    "The swan must be in position five days from now. ..."
    That was what Salamanda had said, but what did he mean? Did he have the power to enter this dreamworld? Was the swan in some way controlled by him?
    Matt shivered. Pedro leaped in, water dripping from his ankles and feet. The boat seemed to have a life of its own. Almost at once it turned away from the island and, picking up speed, it carried them out to sea.

    • • •
    Matt jolted awake again.
    The bus had stopped at a crossroads with a few ram-shackle buildings and stalls selling food and drink. The old woman who had been sitting next to him got off. Pedro, carrying two bottles of water and some more rolls, was able to join him. As the doors hissed shut and they set off again, Matt remembered the piece of paper that they had found in Salamanda's study and took it out again.
    It had been photocopied from the diary. He was sure of it. The entire page was covered in lines, some of them form-ing shapes. There was a sort of rectangle that narrowed at one end. A drawing of what Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star looked like an elaborate spi-der. And there was writing everywhere, going in every direction, some of it so tiny that it would have been unread-able even if it had been in English. There were four lines in the very center of the page. They looked like a verse from a poem.
    And in the bottom left-hand corner, a blazing sun and two words in capital letters:

    INTI RAYMI

    Was that Spanish? Somehow it didn't sound like it. What did the page mean and why had Salamanda felt the need to photocopy it?
    Matt folded the page away. He would solve the mystery later, once he had found Richard.
    Matt looked outside and noticed the countryside was changing. It was much more mountainous, covered in dense green vegetation.
    The road, which had been straight before, now continued in a series of hairpin bends as the bus climbed ever higher. Matt remembered what Pedro had said and sniffed the air cautiously. It was definitely getting thin-ner. Even the color of the sky was different — a harder, more electric blue. There were farmhouses, thrown onto the upper slopes as if by chance, and strange fortresses, small and circular, made out of solid stone. It would be impossi-ble to grow anything here, or so Matt thought. But then they turned another corner and he saw that someone — the local Indians or some civilization before them — had carved fantastic terraces into the sides of the hills, shoring them up with boulders and then planting them with crops. It must have been the labor of a thousand years.
    Then the bus reached the top of a valley and Matt saw the city of Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star Cuzco spread out in front of him. It was like