Touchstone (Meridian Series) (13 page)

       “So
you’ll live three weeks longer,” Paul teased.

       “Well,
are you telling me you aren’t curious about the references to time and eternity
in those symbols?”

       “Of
course I am, but what does it all mean?”

       “What
does it mean? Think, man! You were the one sitting in Castle Massiaf. The Wolf
was the nickname the Arabs gave to Reginald of Kerak. They called him Arnot—the
Wolf, and his behavior made the handle quite appropriate. He raided the
sultan’s caravan, capturing Saladin’s niece in the process. The sultan was so
enraged that he invaded the Christian lands, which led to the great battle at
the Horns of Hattin. Remember?”

       Paul’s
eyes had a distant look in them as he recalled the breathtaking sight of the
host of Teki Ad Din riding down from the north. The sound of the horses hooves
still beat in his mind, and he could see the sinuous  line of the rider’s
torches as they made their way through the valley. “Right…” He was piecing the
message together with the history in his mind now, following the professor at
last. “Reginald was a Primary Lever on that event. If he hadn’t looted that
caravan—”

       “Exactly!”

       Nordhausen
hurried along. “Now remember this bit here…
‘Yet if he be slain for his sin,
then all will be overthrown.’
That sure sounds like a warning to the
operatives in that castle to keep their bloody hands off Reginald.”

       “Are
you suggesting—”

       “Of
course I am!
They’re using the hieroglyphics as a code
. Maeve suggested
it herself in the debriefing sessions, and I’m convinced of it now. Then I go
off to look for some primary source material and when I get back none of you
have even
heard
about the hieroglyphics. But I was in the Nexus this
time. I know. I can read them, damnit, so the rest of you will just have to
believe me on this.”

       “Calm
down, Robert. Nobody is questioning your take on this.”

       “That’s
encouraging. Then you can see why they wanted the stone damaged, right?”

       Paul
paused rolling his eyes, a look of recognition on his face. “It sure is a good
way to preserve the secrecy of these message scrolls.”

       “Yes!
Rasil was carrying that scroll as a message. Didn’t you say this Kadi figure
questioned you about it? You said they called you
a
Gray Walker on the eternal
Hajj.
How’s that for a nifty metaphor for a
Time Traveler
?”

       “Yes!
In fact they called me the
Walker
come from the Valley of the
Moon.”

       “That’s what the Arabs call Wadi Rumm.” Robert fanned the
flames of Paul’s thinking, trying to build heat for his argument. “They
expected Rasil, and they were supposed to get this message.
The Wolf shall go forward and prey upon the
bounty of the lord... Yet if he be slain for his sin, then all will be
overthrown.
It
was a warning for them—a set of instructions, if you will. These guys were
Assassins. It was warning them not to exact revenge upon Reginald!” The whites
of his eyes added emphasis to his conclusion. “Therefore,” he pointed at his
drawing again,
“
When
the Old Man returns, the Lord’s Army shall come to the Gate of the West.”

       “The
Old man was Sinan,” said Paul. “The Gate of the West was the Horns of Hattin.”

       “Precisely.
Maeve and Kelly will both agree on that. They found it in the variance reports
they ran during your inadvertent mission. So we have a warning, and consequence
if that warning instruction is followed. It was an outcome favorable to the
Arabs. The whole Christian army was slaughtered at Hattin and ninety years of
Western occupation was ended in the holy lands. Rasil was carrying a message
intended to make sure that happened.”

       “It
certainly seems that way,” Paul agreed.

       “Why,
there’s no question about it! Now then—” The professor clapped his hands,
rubbing his palms together with anticipation. “The writer of that scroll would
have to be from the future to be aware of the importance of Reginald in this
matter.”

       “Yes,”
said Paul. “The scroll identified a Primary Lever and warned against
contamination. It clearly predicted the outcome if the instruction was
followed. But what’s that last bit you translated?”

       Nordhausen
looked at his drawing again. “Ah, yes. It reads:
The Priest of Time shall go
forth and see the Lord of Eternity
. It could also read ‘to meet the Lord of
Eternity.  The
Temple
Priest
was equated with the Old Man in this
symbol.” He fingered his diagram. “The Lord of Eternity…Hummm, I wonder who
that was?”

       Paul
took a deep breath. “Me,” he said glumly.

       “Oh?”
Nordhausen was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, eager to have his
support for his interpretation.

       “Sinan
was on his way to the castle—probably to intervene in the quarrel between the
Sami and the Kadi. That was why Jabr ali Sad smuggled me out of the castle and
hid me away in the library. But he was also going to eyeball me, I’m sure of
it. Word certainly reached him of my unaccountable arrival. He was coming to
take a look for himself.”

       “Sinan
is from the future, Paul.” The professor’s voice was hushed with the
implication of his statement. “He’s like a permanent CIA agent assigned to a
given Milieu—and look what he does in the history: he sets himself up in these
secret mountain strongholds to recruit and train Assassins to carry out
operations aimed at influencing events.”

       “It
sure looks that way. The Assassin cults survived for over 200 years, until the
Mongols finally stomped them out for good.”

       “Who
knows if they really succeeded?” Robert had the bit between his teeth now.
“Good lord! I’ve almost forgotten it, but Rasil said something—more to himself
than to me. He blew up the entrance to the Well of Souls, as he called it, and
said something like: ‘It will never again  deliver the souls of the faithful to
our agents in Massiaf.’ Yes! Then he said: ‘I wonder how Sinan will fare
without the scrolls to guide him now?”

       They
looked at each other, and the conclusion was plain on both their faces.

       “Sinan
is an agent,” Paul agreed. “From the future.”

       “And
Rasil was sending instructions from
Egypt
. That threw me at first, but the more I
thought about that scroll the more I was convinced that it was a rubbing.”

       “A
rubbing?”

       “Yes,
you hold the papyrus up to carved stone characters and the pressure of your
rubbing imprints the images, like modern printing, only without the ink. It was
a rubbing, Paul, and that meant the original message was carved somewhere,
carved in stone
. That’s why I wanted to look through the
collection in the
British
Museum
. I couldn’t find any reference to these
characters in the existing data. If Rasil’s scroll was a rubbing then—”

       “The
touchstone had to be somewhere…” Paul reached the obvious conclusion. “Good for
you, Robert. You’ve convinced me. Rasil opened his big mouth and now someone
has run a mission—at least according to this Golem report—to the year 1799; to
Egypt
,
to Rosetta.”

       “They
broke it,” Nordhausen nodded. “They’re trying to preserve the integrity of
their code.”

       “Interesting,”
said Paul, his tone hinting that he had some clear conclusion in mind. “Why
would they be using stone carvings to keep a record of the history? Because
that’s
the real touchstone. It has to be. It’s not the Rosetta Stone,
but this hidden record of the history.”

       “Are
you suggesting they have some kind of archive or something?”

       “Well,
Kelly came to the conclusion that we needed a reference point on the history
that was stable if we were to have any success guarding the
Meridian
. Otherwise how would we know if something changed? That’s what
this Golem report is all about. But it seems to me that our Arab adversaries,
if indeed they are Islamic radicals like the Assassins, are using a low tech
approach to this whole process. They’ve got these Oklo reaction chambers rigged
up to provide enough power to open the continuum at selected points. They’ve
established these one way gates, a natural Arch opening a breach to a selected
time. They’ve got little reception committees set up for the Walkers, as they
call them, and they’ve got agents and supervisors and God only knows what else!
I only saw a few rooms of that castle.”

       Nordhausen
gave him a grave nod of assent. “And while I was watching
H.M.S Pinafore
at the opera house someone from their side
ran a mission—to wipe out the primary key to their record of the history.
They’re using the Egyptian writing as a code, damn it. And if we go back
tomorrow we can see about stopping them!”

       “To
Rosetta?”

       “Where
else? We have to see if the stone was broken upon discovery. If it’s whole, we
have half a chance at fixing this thing. But what if it’s broken when they dig
it up? That would mean the damage could have been done at any prior point in
the history. We’d never find
that
needle in the haystack.”

       “That
would be hard to pull off,” said Paul. “No one knows when the stone was placed
there. If they weren’t careful they might do something that would affect the
discovery in 1799.”

       “Ah,”
Nordhausen countered. “But they know where it is—where it was discovered. They
could go back a year earlier, dig it up, damage it, and then bury it again. And
they know exactly what that stone said—in fact,
I
know what it said. I
still remember it.”

       “Tell
me.” Paul was suddenly curious.

       “Well
nothing really mysterious or important. It was really just a sign, a
proclamation by
 Ptolemy V Epiphanes
 laying
out all his good deeds in regards to the temples and priests to buy their
reciprocal good will and cement his legacy. The last line even states a
possible point of origin for the stone. It read: ‘This decree shall be
inscribed on a stela of hard stone in sacred, native and Greek characters and
set up in each of the first, second and third rank temples beside the image of
the ever-living king.” He gave Paul a satisfied look, pleased with his recollection
of the history and taken with the notion that he was the only one alive now
that knew this.

       “So
they had clues enough to look for it deeper in the past as well,” he concluded.

       “Possibly,
but that’s a much more difficult operation,” said Paul. “You just said that
they were going to carve this message in each of three temple sites. They would
have to get just the right one—the exact stone that eventually wound up in
Rosetta, wouldn’t they?  Otherwise they’d have to damage all three to be sure
none of them was ever found intact. There’s just too much variation and haze in
that direction. I like the idea of damaging it
after
it was dug up in
1799, or perhaps just a year before as you suggested—something very close to
the discovery date.  That has much more clarity—much more likelihood of
success.”

       “Well,
there’s one way to find out,” said the professor with a gleam in his eye. “Now
all we have to do is convince Kelly and Maeve.”

11

The
next morning
the four team
members met at the Lab as planned. This time Paul was the last to arrive, still
yawning when he came through the door and found the others milling about the
main control consoles, already deep in a discussion over temporal coordinates. 
Nordhausen was standing with an armful of books, volumes dragged from his well
stocked library. He was pushing one on Maeve, trying to gesture with a free
hand while she flipped through the pages. Kelly was seated at the console, and
Paul gave him a hearty ‘welcome back.’

       “We
didn’t think we’d have you here,” he said. “This is great! Now I don’t have to
run the numbers.“

       “There
you are, Paul.” Nordhausen was on him at once. “I realize these volumes have
been altered slightly by that last time mission, but they’ll give us a good
starting point on the history, and we can look up details in Kelly’s  RAM bank
to verify things.”

       Paul
glanced at Maeve, obviously checking her reaction to all this.

       “Oh,
don’t worry,” she said. “He’s been arguing his point for an hour now and—”

       “—She’s
agreed to approve the mission,” the professor put in excitedly.

       “She’s
agreed that 1799 is the key target date,” Maeve corrected him quickly.

       “Right—well
we aren’t throwing darts, Maeve.” The professor pressed on. “It’s the date we
need for the mission. Kelly’s already working up the preliminary numbers.”