Read Chapter 17: Scarab's Sacrifice

The shriek from beneath the east wing followed Eamon down the service stairs, through corridors that hadn't seen a mop in decades, past pipes that groaned like tired animals. The scarab rode in his palm, its legs tickling his skin, pulling him left at intersections he would have taken right.

He stopped counting turns. The air grew older, heavier, thick with dust that tasted of copper and old stone. His flashlight beam cut through it, revealing walls that stopped being Victorian brick and became something older—rough-hewn blocks fitted without mortar, the marks of chisels still visible in the shadows.

The scarab chirped. It had never done that before. A soft, almost musical sound, like a tuning fork struck against glass.

Eamon followed it through a narrow opening, ducking under a lintel carved with symbols he didn't recognize. The space opened into a chamber maybe twenty feet across, domed ceiling lost in darkness above. At its center stood a stone pedestal, and on the pedestal—

Not the Codex.

Golden scales. True scales, not the blindfolded lady of justice kind, but a working balance: two shallow bowls hanging from chains, the whole assembly no taller than his forearm, cast in a metal that gleamed even in the dead light of his torch.

"That's not what I expected," he said aloud, his voice swallowed by the chamber's acoustics.

The scarab's chirping grew urgent. It scrabbled in his palm, turning toward the scales, its legs working frantically. Eamon knelt, letting it drop to the stone floor. It skittered forward with surprising speed, crossing the ten feet to the pedestal in seconds.

On the pedestal's face, carved into the stone, was the same constellation of marks he'd seen on the bronze dagger, the Greek statue, the carved bone fragments in the storage room. The language of keepers. The museum's oldest tongue.

The scarab climbed the pedestal. It paused at the base of the scales, antennae waving, then crawled up the central pillar and perched on the beam between the two bowls.

It chirped once more. A different note this time—longer, lower, almost mournful.

Then it touched the golden scales.

The reaction was immediate. Light erupted from the point of contact—not white, but gold, the color of the fragment in Eamon's pocket, the color of the casing Wainwright had given him. The scarab's body began to dissolve, its glossy black shell flaking away like ash caught in a updraft, its legs curling inward, its form losing coherence.

"No—" Eamon lunged forward, but the heat stopped him. Not physical heat, but something else, a pressure that pushed against his chest like a wall of air.

The scarab turned its head toward him. Its eyes, tiny pinpricks of black in the golden blaze, met his for a single second. In that second he felt the weight of its choice, the certainty of its sacrifice, the knowledge that this was always the plan. The scarab had bitten him knowing it would die. The bite was the beginning. This was the end.

The scarab's body collapsed into fine golden dust, which drifted down onto the scales and was absorbed into the metal. The light flared once, brilliant, then died.

The chamber went dark.

Eamon stood frozen, his flashlight beam trembling on the empty pedestal. The scales sat there, silent and inert, no trace of the scarab remaining. It was as if the creature had never existed, as if the past three days of itching, guiding, pulling—that impossible bond between insect and soldier—had been nothing but a fever dream.

His left palm itched. The Keeper's Mark, the scarab-shaped wound burned into his flesh, pulsed once with warmth. Then faded to nothing.

"That's it?" he said to the empty chamber. "That's all you had to say?"

The scales offered no answer.

He was still standing there, trying to process the enormity of what he'd just witnessed, when footsteps echoed from the corridor behind him. Maggie's voice, tight with worry: "Eamon? I heard something down here. What the hell are you—"

She stopped in the doorway, her flashlight sweeping the chamber, landing on the scales.

"Oh, no," she breathed.

"You know what this is?"

"The Balance of Civilizations." She stepped closer, her face pale in the dual torchlight. "I thought it was a myth. Even the old keepers' records only mentioned it in passing. 'The scales that weigh the spirits of the dead.' "

"Wainwright said the Codex was a decoy." Eamon gestured at the pedestal. "This is what they're really after. Not to feed the blade—to use these to channel everything at once."

Maggie shook her head slowly, fear building in her eyes. "No. This is worse than a channel. These scales don't direct energy. They balance it." She looked at him, and he saw the dawning horror in her face. "They equalize everything they touch. If the Codex activates these, all those trapped spirits won't just be freed. They'll be forced into equilibrium. Every warrior, every priest, every king and slave and sacrifice across every civilization—all of them, weighed against each other."

Eamon's mouth went dry. "What does that do?"

"It creates a single point of stillness." Maggie's voice dropped to a whisper. "A moment of absolute balance, where everything becomes nothing." She looked at the golden dust still settling on the pedestal. "The scarab didn't activate it to help us. It activated it to bind it to a living keeper—to you. That's the only way the scales work. They require a soul to anchor the balance."

"That tends to be destructive to the anchor," added a dry, familiar voice from the entrance.

Wainwright stood there, leaning on a cane, wrapped in a long coat, looking like he'd crawled out of a hospital bed to be here. "Which is why I never touched them." He gestured at Eamon with the cane. "But the scarab has made its choice. And now, Eamon, you have perhaps an hour before the stone door opens. You have one chance to use those scales and the blade to turn the Codex's power back on itself."

"One chance?" Maggie turned on him. "He's not trained. He's not even a full keeper. You can't ask him to—"

"I'm not asking." Wainwright met Eamon's eyes. "The blade is what matters now. The scales are the counterweight. Get them to the White Tower before the door opens, or London burns."

Eamon looked at the scales, silent and golden on their pedestal, holding the last trace of the scarab that had chosen him. He reached out, and his fingers closed around the central pillar. The metal was warm. Almost alive.

"Then we move," he said.