The desert gave nothing away. At noon it looked endless. Sand. Rock. Heat. A drilling mast standing against a white sky. And beneath it, a well that had spent days doing exactly what wells are first taught to do. Go down. The Apprentice watched another length of pipe disappear through the rotary table. “How deep?” The Directional Driller checked the numbers. “Deep enough.” The Apprentice smiled. “Then we found it?”

The town looked like success from a distance. That was its first lie. Smoke rose from a hundred cookfires. Mules crowded the hitching rails. Tents multiplied up the hillside. Men with shovels, pans, sluice boxes and fevered eyes moved in every direction like ants around a broken hive. The Apprentice stood at the edge of the ridge and smiled. “This is it.”

Long before our oldest maps were drawn, a tower watched over a nameless harbor— No road reached it— No record named the people who built it. The stones were already old when the oldest citizens were young— At the top of the tower lived a Keeper— That was not a name. It was the work— Each night, the Keeper climbed one hundred and twelve steps to a room without a door— The room held a brass wheel, a bowl of dark water and a narrow opening toward the sea. It also held a