Necropolis

monk's handwriting. But she didn't even seem to notice that the tumi was there. She closed the bag again.
    "Thank you," she said.
    Richard looked at me. Neither of us said anything. We snatched up our belongings and hurried forward.
    It was only afterward that we understood what had happened.
    The tumi has another name. It's also known as the invisible blade. When the prince of the Incas gave it to Richard, he said that no one would ever find it, that he would be able to carry it with him at any time.
    He also warned Richard that one day he would regret having it — something neither of us really like to think about.

    But now we both realized what we had just seen. It was a bit of ancient magic. And it was all the more amazing because it happened in the setting of a modern, international airport.

    ***
    Monday night
    We took off exactly on time, and once the seat belt signs had been turned off, I sat back in my seat and began to write this. In the seat next to me, Jamie had plugged himself straight into the TV console, watching a film. Richard was across the aisle, working with a Spanish dictionary, trying to unravel the diary.
    A bit later, I fell asleep.
    And that was when I went back. I had wanted to visit the dreamworld again, ever since I had discovered the path set into the side of the hill. Was it really possible that a civilization of some sort had once lived there? Might they be living there still? The dreamworld was a sort of in-between place, connecting where we were now with the world that Jamie had visited and where he had fought his battle, ten thousand years ago. It was there to help us. The more we knew about it, the better prepared we would be.

    ***
    I was right where I wanted to be, back on the hillside, halfway up the path. But that was how the dreamworld worked. Every time I fell asleep, I picked up exactly where I had left off. So if I woke up throwing a stone into the air, when I went back to sleep, I would immediately catch it again. And I was wearing the same clothes that I had on the plane. That was how it worked too.
    The hill became steeper and the path turned into a series of steps. They had definitely been made by human hands. As I continued climbing up, they became ever more defined, and when I finally reached the summit, I found myself on a square platform with some sort of design — it looked like a series of Arabic letters — cut into it. The letters made no sense to me, but then I lifted my head and what I saw was so amazing that I'm surprised I didn't wake up at once and find myself back on the plane.
    I was looking at a city, sprawling out in all directions, as far as the eye could see. More than that. From where I was standing, high up on the hill, I could see thousands of rooftops stretching all the way to the horizon, perhaps ten miles away, but I got the impression that if I managed to walk all the way to the other side, it would continue to the next horizon and maybe to the one after that.
    It was impossible to say if the city was ancient or modern. It somehow managed to be both at the same time. Some of the buildings were huge, cathedral-like with arched windows and domes covered in tiles that could have been silver or zinc. Others were steel and glass structures that reminded me of an airport terminal, and then I realized that there were actually dozens of them and they were all identical, radiating out of central courtyards like the spokes of a wheel. Towers rose up at intervals, again with silver turrets. Everything was connected, either by spiral staircases or covered walkways.
    There were no parks and no trees. There weren't any cars or people. In fact, I wasn't looking at a city at all. This vast construction was one single building: a massive cathedral, a massive museum, a massive…
    something. It was a mishmash of styles; some parts must have been added hundreds or even thousands of years after others — but it was all locked together. It was one. I couldn't work out where the center was. I couldn't see where it had originally begun. Nor could I imagine how it had come into being. It was as if someone had taken a single seed — one brick — and dropped it into a bubbling swamp. And this, after thousands of years of growth, was the result.
    Leaving the platform behind me, I walked down the other side of the hill and made my way toward the outer wall. I was now following a road with a marble-like surface, and it was taking me directly toward a great big arch