The Rosetta Key (28 page)

“And what claim of ownership do
you
have?” I had to play my part.

He looked around, amused. “Why, all the guns, most of the provisions, and the only hope of deciphering what we’re about to find.” Najac’s men raised the muzzles of their weapons. It especially annoyed me to have to look down the barrel of my own rifle, in Najac’s greasy hands. “I really don’t know what Franklin saw in you, Ethan. You have such a slow grasp of the obvious.”

I pointed to the building clouds. “It won’t work without me, Silano.”

“Don’t be a fool. If you don’t help, then no one gets the book and you have nothing. Besides, you’re as curious as I am.”

I looked at Astiza. “This is the deal, then. I help you set the seraphim. If it works, you
do
get the book. Take it, and be done with it.”

“Guv’nor!” Ned cried.

“But I want Astiza in its place.”

“She is not mine to give, monsieur.”

“I want you to let us go, without harm or interference.”

He glanced at her. She was avoiding both our eyes. “And you’ll help if I agree?”

I nodded. “We’d better hurry.”

“But it’s her choice, not mine,” he cautioned. Astiza’s face was a mask.

“Her choice,” I confirmed confidently. “Not yours. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Agreed.” He smiled, the grin as cold as a beaver trap in a Canadian creek. “Then help us prepare.”

I took a breath. Could I trust her? Would this work at all? I was gambling all on a Latin riddle. I fished my pyramid souvenirs out from my clothing and watched the sorcerer’s eyes gleam as he seized them. “Use the clasps that attached them to Moses’ staff to mount them on the top of your metal poles,” I directed. “We’re going to make a Franklin lightning rod.” I’d noticed two holes drilled in the top of the leveled plateau, and Silano confirmed they were mentioned in the Templar documents, so we inserted them. But there was no connection between them.

I studied the flat plane. There were grooves in the sandstone rock, I saw, forming a six-pointed star. The poles were at opposite points.

“We need a connection between the poles,” I said. “Metal strips, to conduct electricity. Do you have any?”

Of course not. So much for Silano’s research! It was growing darker, thunder rumbling as the cloudworks swelled and mounted. Funnels of dust skittered on the valley floor far below, weaving and bending like drunks.

“I don’t see what the rods will do, if isolated,” I warned.

“The Templars said this will work. My studies are infallible.”

The man had an ego to match Aaron Burr. So I thought of what could replace the metal strips, because my enemies were right: I was as curious as anyone. “Najac, do something beside scowl,” I finally suggested. “Use your water bag to fill these grooves with water, and add some salt.”

“Water?”

“Ben said it can help conduct electricity.”

The water filled the little runnels until the star gleamed in the thick, green-purple light. The sun was swallowed and the temperature dropped. My skin prickled. More thunder, and I could see first tendrils of rain curling downward like feathers, evaporating before they touched the ground. Lightning stabbed to the west. I backed to the edge of the plateau. Ned and Mohammad followed me, but no one else seemed frightened. Even Astiza was waiting expectantly, hair swirling, her eyes on the sky and not me.

The storm swept down on us like a cavalry charge. There was a gusting wall of wind, hurling grit, and the clouds overran us, great bags of rain and thunder that glowed silver as they billowed and ballooned. Lightning flashed and struck the peaks around us, nearer and nearer, the thunder like artillery. Fat drops of rain hit, hot and heavy, more like molten lead than water. Our clothing shuddered, and the wind rose to a shriek. And then there was a blinding flash, an instantaneous roar, and the mountain quaked. One of the rods had been hit! My knees went weak. Sparks blazed, and bright blue light flashed from rod to rod along the wet star grooves, and then arced across space from angel to angel. The seraphim turned glowing white. They swung, the iron rods turning, and their wings pointed northeast, tilting toward each other so that lines drawn from each would meet about twenty yards away. The lightning bolt had passed, but the rods held power, everything bathed in a purple glow not too different than the one we’d seen in the chamber below the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And then beams of light flowed from the wings of the seraphim, met in midair, and a single beam streaked like a rifle bullet, as if pulled, to strike a grand pillared doorway of another cliffside temple, two miles from where we stood. Sparks flew in a fountain.

“Yes!” Silano’s henchmen cried.

The ray held a moment, like a momentary peek of sun into a dark cave, and then faded. The mountaintop went dark. Dazzled, I looked at our metal poles. The seraphim had melted, the tops of the poles flattened like mushrooms. Silano had his arms up in the air in triumph. Astiza was rigid, her gown soaked, water dripping from the tendrils of dark hair plastered on her cheek. The storm was moving on toward the east, but behind its flashing prow came more rain, cooler this time, a hiss to cleanse the air of ozone. It poured down. We could all feel the electricity in the air, our hair still dancing to it. Water was sluicing everywhere off the cliff tops.

“Did everyone mark that?” Silano asked.

“I could find it with my eyes closed,” Najac promised, a note of greed in his tone.

“Satan’s work,” Big Ned muttered.

“No, Moses’!” Silano answered. “And that of the Knights Templar and all those who quest for truth. We are at God’s work, gentlemen, and whether the god is Thoth or Jehovah or Allah, his guise is the same: knowledge.” His eyes were alight with energy, as if some of the lightning had entered him.

I’ve nothing against knowledge — I sailed with savants, after all — and yet his words and look disturbed me. I remembered childhood sermons of Satan as serpent, promising knowledge to Adam and Eve in the Garden. What fire were we playing with here? Yet how could we allow so tempting an apple to go unpicked?

I looked at Astiza, my moral compass. But she had to avoid my gaze, didn’t she? She looked awed — that something had really happened — and worried.

“Gentlemen, I believe we are about to make history,” Silano said.

“Down we go before nightfall. We’ll camp in front of the temple that was illuminated and search it at first light tomorrow.”

“Or with torches tonight,” the eager Najac said.

“I appreciate your impatience, Pierre, but after a thousand years I don’t think our goal is going anywhere. Monsieur Gage, as always your company has been intriguing. But I daresay neither of us will entirely regret our parting. You have made your bargain, so now I can say it. Adieu, frontiersman.” He bowed.

“Astiza,” I said. “Now you can come with me.”

She was silent a long time. Then, “But I can’t, Ethan.”

“What?”

“I’m going with Alessandro.”

“But I came for you! I left Acre for you!” I displayed more bluster than a barrister facing damning evidence for a guilty client.

“I can’t let Alessandro have the book by himself, Ethan. I can’t walk away from it after all this suffering. Isis has brought me to this place to finish what I started.”

“But he’s mad! Look at his companions. They’re the devil’s spawn! Come away with us. Come with
me
to America.”

She shook her head. “Good-bye, Ethan.”

Silano was smiling. He’d expected this.

“No!”

“She has made her choice, monsieur.”

“I only helped with the lightning to get you!”

“I’m sorry, Ethan. The book is more important than you. More important than
us
. Go back to the English. I’m going with Alessandro.”

“You used me!”

“We used you to find the book: for good, I hope.”

In mock frustration I jerked out one of the iron poles to use as a weapon, but Najac’s gang raised their muskets. Astiza wouldn’t look at me as Silano shepherded her off the plateau, wrapping her head with her scarf.

“Someday soon you will realize what you just threw away, Gage,” Silano called. “What the Egyptian Rite could have given you! You will rue your bargain!”

“Aye,” Najac growled, his pistol steady. “So go back to Acre and die.”

I let the pole drop with a clang. Our acting had succeeded. If, indeed, Astiza was acting. “Then get off my mountain,” I ordered, my voice shaking.

Smirking, they filed back down the trail, taking the melted seraphim and the rods with them, Astiza glancing back just once as she made her way down.

It was when they were out of earshot that Big Ned finally erupted. “By the saints, guv’nor, we’re going to let that papist scoundrel steal our rightful treasure? I thought you had more grit!”

“Not grit, Ned, wit. Remember how I bested you at swords?”

He looked chastened. “Aye.”

“That was by brain, not muscle. Silano doesn’t know as much as he thinks. Which means we have our own chance. We’re going to find a trail off the back side of this mountain and do our own exploring, well away from that tribe of cutthroats.”

“Away? But they know where this book of yours is!”

“They know where the lightning strike threw its light. But I don’t think the Templars would be that obvious. I’m hoping they were students of the Great Pyramid.”

He was baffled. “What do you mean, guv’nor?”

“I’m betting we’ve just witnessed a little misdirection. I am a gambling man, Ned. And the Great Pyramid incorporates a series of numbers known as the Fibonacci sequence. Surely you’ve heard of it.”

“Blimey, no.”

“The French in Egypt taught me about it. And this sequence, in turn, is a representation of some basic processes of nature. It’s holy, if you will. Just the kind of thing Templars would be interested in.”

“I’m sorry, guv’nor, but I thought this was all about ancient treasure and secret powers, not numbers and Templars.”

“It’s all those things. Now, there’s a ratio that comes up in any geographic representation of the sequence, a pleasing proportion of a longer line to a shorter one that happens to be 1.61 and some-odd. It’s called the “golden number” and was known to the Greeks and the builders of the Gothic cathedrals and to Renaissance painters. And it’s encoded in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid.”

“Gold?” Ned was looking at me as if I were daft, which perhaps I was.

I found a patch of dirt and drew. “Which means the book may really be at an angle to what we’ve just seen. That’s what I’m betting, anyway. Now, let’s suppose that the base of a pyramid is represented by the line we saw shooting across the valley here.” I sketched a line pointing at the ruins where Silano and his team were headed. “Draw a line perpendicular to it, and it runs off more or less west.” I pointed toward the rugged range where the storm had come from. “Somewhere along that new line is a point that would be represented if we completed a right triangle by drawing from where Silano is going to my other line going west.”

“A point where?”

“Exactly. You have to know how long the third line, the sloping line, should be. Let’s suppose it is 1.61 times, roughly, that of the line to Silano’s Temple — the golden ratio, the physical embodiment of Fibonacci and nature, and the slope of the Great Pyramid itself. A pyramid built to incorporate fundamental numbers, the kind that go into snail shells or flowers. It’s hard to gauge distance, yes, but if we assume the temple is two miles away, then our adjoining line is a little over three…”

He squinted, following my arm now as I left the temple where the lightning beam had struck and swung it from north to west. “I’m guessing it would strike my imaginary western line just about where that imposing ruin is.”

We stared. On the floor of the valley was a wreck of an ancient building that looked like it had been battered by artillery for a hundred years. The dilapidation was actually just time and decay, yet it still stood higher than all the rubble around it. A line of old pillars, holding nothing, jutted up along what appeared to be an ancient causeway.

“You saw this angle where, effendi?” Mohammad tried to clarify.

“In the slope of the Great Pyramid. My friend Jomard explained it to me.”

“You mean that Count Devil is going to the wrong temple?”

“It’s just a guess, but the only chance I’ve got. Lads, are you willing to take a look and hope that the Templars cared for this number game as much as the ancient Egyptians did?”

“I’ve learned to have faith in you, effendi.”

“And my, what a joke it would be to find the bloody book first,” Ned laughed. “And some gold, too, I’m betting.” And he gave me that wide, menacing smile.

W
e pretended to descend as if we were making for the entry canyon to leave the City of Ghosts. But after picking our way around some rocks, out of sight of Silano, we found a tricky descent down a wet, beautiful ravine on the west side of the mountain. We passed more caves and ruined tombs, next to spraying falls spawned by the rain — the desert was drinking its fill indeed, as the Templars had prophesized — until we were on the city’s floor. It was dusk, the rain over. Using low hills as cover to keep out of sight of the others, we reached the large temple we’d seen just as it was getting dark. It was cool after the storm, stars beginning to stud the sky.

This structure was in worse repair than the Temple of Dendara I’d explored in Egypt, and much less impressive. Its roof was gone, and what was left was a windowless pen of rubble with minimal decoration. It was big — the walls seemed a hundred feet high, with an arch tall enough to sail a frigate through — but plain.

A tunnel leading downward was not hard to find. In one corner on the inside of the temple there was a crater in the rubble, as if someone had dug in search of treasure, and at the bottom were rough boards weighted down with rocks. “Here it is then!” Ned quietly exulted. We threw the boards aside and found a set of sandstone stairs leading downward. Using dry brush to make crude torches, we lit one with steel and flint and descended. Yet we were soon disappointed. After thirty steps the staircase ended abruptly at what appeared to be a well, its sides of smooth sandstone. I took a rock and dropped it. Long seconds passed, and then there was a splash. I could hear water running below.