Panacea (43 page)

The square stone ran about two feet on each side and did not lie flush. One edge angled up an inch or so above the floor line. Leander stood the lantern next to it as he knelt.

“Help me. I cannot do it myself.”

“Where is my friend?”

“If all is well, he waits below in the subcellar.”

That was enough for Laura. She dropped Rick's clothes, knelt beside Leander, and hooked her fingers against the edge. Together they pulled upward. The stone began to move, scraping against the sides of its neighbors. The damn thing was heavy and Laura feared she was losing her grip when the stone suddenly began rising on its own.

“I hope you're who I'm hoping you are,” said a familiar voice from below.

Laura's throat tightened at the sound.

Oh, come on. I couldn't have been
that
worried.

“Rick! You're all right!” He helped push the stone the rest of the way aside, then raised his head into the light. “I also hope you brought my clothes.”

“I did.” She shoved them through the opening. “What's down there?”

“I haven't had time to find out.” He looked at Leander. “You could have told us about this hole in the floor.”

“You did not give me a chance. And besides, you did not tell me you were hunting for Auburon.”

“Yeah, well … let me get something dry on and I'll help you down. We could use that lantern.” Less than a minute later he was back. “That's better. Who wants to be first?”

“I'll help you through,” Laura told Leander.

He shook his head. “I was down there many times in my younger days. I do not—”

“Uh-uh,” Rick said. “I'm not leaving you up there with that stone. No offense, and sorry to sound untrusting, but uh-uh.”

Laura could have said that the stone was too heavy for the old guy to move, but maybe he'd been only feigning feeble.

The old man sighed. “Very well. There is no trust left in this world, is there.”

Laura helped him slide through the opening.

“You're a light one,” she heard Rick say from below.

Okay, maybe he was just as feeble as he looked.

Laura handed the lamp down, then slipped her legs into the hole and began lowering herself. Rick's hands clamped on her hips, guiding her down, and she liked the feeling.

Far too long since you've been with a man, Laura.

“He is over here,” Leander said, once they were all settled.

He lifted the lamp and led the way over the broken, uneven rocky floor. The light didn't penetrate far into the gloom.

“From what you told us,” Rick said, “it doesn't sound like much was left of him.”

“His flesh had been cooked and his skeleton torn asunder, but all the parts were there. His friends and family gathered them up and buried them.”

“Then how'd they get here?”

“Paschal's work. He found this hollow in the stone of the upwelling and decided to play a trick on the friars. When the foundation of the abbey was complete, they exhumed Auburon's remains and sneaked them in through the same passage you used. And thus the odd sequence in the poem: martyred before imprisoned.” He lifted the lamp higher. “Here we are.”

Laura stepped forward and looked at the skeleton. It had been laid out on a raised flat expanse of stone. She hadn't expected any flesh and found none. Nothing left but bone. Obviously the poor man's pieces had been laid out in anatomical fashion and that was how they had remained … except for one of his legs.

“Where's his right femur?” she said.

“His thigh bone?” Leander stepped around the head to the far side of the body. “That was moved over here.”

Laura followed but stopped short, stunned. The femur stood upright in a niche in the rock. It looked just like the staff in …

“The tattoo!” And then she remembered what had been wrapped around the staff/femur in those tattoos. “Are … are there snakes here?”

She hated snakes but she would not—
not
go all girly and leap into Rick's arms.

“Snakes?” Leander said. “No. Why would there be? There is no light here. Nothing for them to eat.”

“Then why is there one on the panacean tattoo?”

“You told me you used the tattoo to find this place. Have you not asked?”

“We'd have loved to,” Rick said, “but pretty much everyone we met with except one was no more able to tell us than your friend Auburon here.”

Laura remembered asking Ix'chel, but she hadn't had any idea.

Leander looked puzzled. “What? I do not—oh, I see. That is too bad. The work of the 536 Brotherhood, I presume?”

“You presume right.”

Laura still couldn't fit all the parts of the tattoo into a coherent whole.

“Okay, I get the bone acting as a staff—that represents their martyr. And the shooting star is obvious now that we know what we know. But the snake?”

Rick said, “Didn't Stahlman tell us that snakes go with Asparagus or whatever his name, the god of healing and all that?”

“Asclepius—yes. But that's from another culture. It could be Asclepius, but I find it jarring.”

“Maybe it is a symbol for something else,” Leander said.

“Well, what else have we got?” Rick sounded disgusted. “We have the tattoos and we have the poem. We're missing something. We need another piece or we're stuck. We're sure as hell not going to find a dose of the panacea here in this dump.”

“That is what you are after?” Leander said. “The panacea?”

“Just one dose.”

“Do you believe in such a thing?”

Rick's reply faded out as Laura cudgeled her brain. One more piece … Rick was right … one last piece and the puzzle would be complete. She could feel it … so close …

“I am such an idiot!” She began tugging at her waist. “The belt … Chaim's belt!”

She pulled it off and held it up to the lamplight. “Does this mean anything to you? Anything at all?”

The old man leaned closer and peered at the string of letters. Finally he shook his head. “Nothing I see here makes sense.”

Rick took it from her. “Could it be a scytale?”

“Italy?” Laura said.

“No. Scytale.” He spelled it for her. “Part of the you-know-what training was codes, and a scytale is just about the oldest cipher there is. Before you say anything: Yes, we did classroom stuff too. The ancient Greeks used it. You wrap a piece of cloth around a cylinder and write the lines of the message along the length of the cylinder. When you uncoil the cloth from the cylinder, it looks like gibberish.”

Laura felt a tingle of excitement. “Which is exactly what we have here.”

“To decode, you wrap it back around a cylinder—but unless you use the same-size cylinder, it's still gibberish.” He looked past her. “And I think I know just the cylinder we're supposed to use.”

Laura followed his gaze … to the femur. Of course. It made sense. That was why the snake was coiled around it. As Leander had said,
Maybe it is a symbol for something else.
And then she remembered the closing line of the poem.

“‘His guardian leg shall bear you to new life.' Look at it standing there, like it's on guard. That has to be what the last line means.”

Rick looked at Leander and pointed to the bone. “Do you mind?”

Leander shrugged. “It is not mine. However, it does belong to local history, so please be careful.”

“I will.”

Rick squatted next to the bone, removed it from its niche, and began wrapping Chaim's belt around it.

“Look at the way they're lining up. Got your trusty notebook, Doc? We'll need to write this down.”

Laura pulled her pad and pen from her shoulder bag and knelt beside him. Leander stepped closer and held the lamp over them.

“This L here looks like it starts things off. Copy that line.”

Laura transcribed the first three letters, then …

Rick turned the bone and Laura copied the letters that rotated into view. Then the third line—containing a single letter—and then the fourth, fifth, and sixth.

“Okay,” Rick said. “What've we got?”

“Roman numerals.”

“Okay,” Rick said. “L-I-X is—”

“Fifty-nine.” Laura scribbled it in her notepad as she deciphered the Roman numerals. She showed the result to Rick. “This is what it says. I kept the line over the numbers, though I don't know what it means.”

“That was an old-old way of indicating a decimal point,” Leander said.

“Really?” Laura quickly reworked the figures. “I'll be damned.”

59.03

A

2.44

O

Rick laughed. “They're coordinates. But it needs north, south, east, west to make sense.”

“If that's the case, and if I remember my Latin correctly,
A
would stand for
aquilo
which means north, and
O
for
occasus
—west.”

“Two-plus degrees west,” Rick said, squinting. “That's somewhere in England.”

She wrote again:
59.03 N, 2.44 W.

A wave of exultation swept over her. “We didn't know where to go from here. Now we do. Next stop: England.”

Rick held up a hand. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. This doesn't come from Auburon's time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Another thing we studied was maps. I mean we were all over maps, and the classes came with some history lessons. These coordinates are latitude and longitude. One of the things we learned was that although latitude was calculated in BC times, no one figured out accurate longitude until centuries after our friend here was dead. These coordinates are recent—I mean, relatively speaking.”

“So these must be recent coordinates of … what?”

Rick closed his eyes. “Okay … two and a half degrees isn't far enough west for Ireland, so it's gotta be the U.K. Sixty degrees north is pretty far up there. So we're talking Scotland, I'll bet.”

“Oh, no. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

He opened his eyes. “Not Loch Ness. Please don't let it be Loch Ness. That would be too, too corny. That would make this all a big joke.”

“Well, isn't that consistent with your view of this whole thing—that it's all a cosmic joke?”

“The panacea is the joke. But these coordinates were laid down by humans—the people we're searching for.”

Laura had an awful thought. “But what if it's all misdirection?”

“Then we're fu—screwed. And we're fools.”

From above and behind them Leander said, “I'm sure this is an interesting conversation on some level, but the chill down here has prompted this old man's bladder to empty again. And since I don't want to insult the inhabitant by relieving myself in his sepulchre, I would appreciate help back to the surface.”

“Of course,” Laura said. She looked at Rick. “I think we've got all we're going to get out of this place. You agree?”

He nodded and began unwrapping the belt from the femur. “Our work here is done, pardon the clich
é
.”

He placed the bone upright in its niche again as she wrapped the belt around her waist. Then they made their way back to the hole in the roof of the subcellar. Ten minutes later they were standing in the midday sun watching Leander shuffle around to the far side of the abbey.

“Oh, man,” Rick said, spreading his arms to catch the rays. His hair was still wet from his swim. “Does that feel
good
.”

“Scotland…” she said. “Leander said the All-Mother worshippers came from the north and mixed with the Visigoths. Scotland would fit.”

She glanced at her watch. Not one
P.M.
yet. Marissa and Steven would still be asleep. Even if it were later, she knew she had little chance of finding cell service out here.