“The injection I gave myself just minutes before our brief meeting had not been perfected.” He chuckled. “When I jumped from the helicopter I had no idea if I would survive or not. But I did. I had received the regenerative gene of the Hydra, but there was one other gene that had yet to be culled. I discovered its effects when I looked in the rearview mirror of the car that carried me to freedom.”

King noticed that Alexander had stopped struggling and started listening.

“It was this side effect that spurred my continued research into the mother tongue. For years, long before we met, I searched the past for clues to long-forgotten powers—which, as you know, led me to the ancient remains of the Hydra. Ancient maps, runes, texts, hieroglyphs—I collected and studied the world’s history and came to a stunning conclusion: the Tower of Babel story is real. I don’t yet fully understand the mechanics of how mankind’s language fractured, only that it did. In the past two years I have pieced together several key phrases of the lost language that allow me to alter and reshape the physical world as well as the thoughts and emotions of the people in it. Not to mention I now have the key to ridding myself of this unfortunate disfigurement.”

“Be kind,” said the higher pitched, wet voice.

“Apologies, Adam. You will always be my first son.”

Adam. The name struck a chord with King. Ridley had been naming his golem clones after the bloodline from Adam to King David. Was this Adam the first of his lifelike golems?

“I hoped to separate myself from him—from Adam. Thankfully,” Ridley said, holding up a stone tablet, “the final piece of the puzzle arrived from Stonehenge.”

King could see a series of Egyptian-like runes covering one side of the bluestone tablet. He could probably spend his whole life on the task and never decipher what it said. Ridley, on the other hand, had apparently done so already. “One of Merlin’s greatest hits?”

Ridley grinned. “I’m afraid Merlin can’t take credit for the words recorded here. He simply recorded the words taught to him in Egypt. And it’s just one of the many ancient efforts to preserve the ancient language in stone—the only medium that can reliably last the test of time.”

“El Mirador,” King said, realizing that Ridley had been collecting bits and pieces of the spoken and written language.