The Rosetta Key

The floor was mostly covered with a grand wool carpet, stained and torn but no doubt left by the Bourbons. It ended at a balcony that overlooked a dark space. Below was a ground floor, paved with stone, that had large double doors leading outside like a barn. A coach and three carts were jammed into it, the carts heaped with boxes. So Silano was still unpacking. A wooden stair led to where we were, explaining why this particular apartment had been chosen. It was convenient for shipping things in and out.

Like a wooden sarcophagus.

The coffin from Rosetta had been lost in the shadows but I saw it now, leaning upright against the wall. The tracery of ancient decoration was gray in the dim light, but familiar. Yet there was something oddly forbidding about the case.

“It’s the mummy,” I said. “I’ll bet the count has spread word. This 3 2 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

is the spirit the sentry was talking about, the thing that keeps men from snooping in this room.”

“A dead man is in there?”

“Thousands of years dead, Boniface. Take a look. We’ll all be like that, someday.”

“Open it? No! The guard said it comes alive!”

“Not without the book, I’ll guess, and we don’t have that yet. The key to the fortune under Notre Dame might be in that sarcophagus.

You’ve sent men to execution, jailer. You’re afraid of a wood box?”

“A casket.”

“Which Silano brought all the way from Egypt without trouble.” So the goaded jailer screwed up his courage, marched over, and swung the lid open. And Omar, guardian mummy, face almost black, sockets eyeless and closed, teeth grimacing, slowly leaned out and fell into his arms.

Boniface shrieked. Linen wrappings flapped by his face and musty dust puffed into his eyes. He dropped Omar as if the mummy was on fire. “It’s alive!”

The trouble with miserly pay for public servants is that you don’t get the best.

“Calm yourself, Boniface,” I said. “He’s dead as a sausage, and he’s been dead for several thousand years. See? We call him Omar.” The jailer crossed himself again, despite the Jacobin animosity to religion. “This is a mistake, what we’re doing. We’ll be damned for it.”

“Only if we lose our courage. Listen, the hour grows late. How much risk can you tolerate? Go to the church, pick its locks, and hide our tools. Hide, and wait for us.”

“But when will you come?”

“As soon as we get the book and answers from the count. Start tapping on the crypt floors. There has to be a hollow somewhere.” He nodded, regaining some of his greed. “And you promise to come?”

“I won’t be rich unless I do, will I?”

That satisfied him and, to our relief, he fled. I hoped it was the last I’d ever see of him, since to my knowledge there wasn’t a scrap t h e

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of treasure under Notre Dame and I had no intention of going there.

Omar the mummy had done us a favor.

I looked at the corpse warily. It would stay still, wouldn’t it?

“We have to find the book fast,” I told Astiza. The trick was to finish before the count came back. “You take that side’s shelves, I’ll take this one.”

We flew along the books, spilling them out, searching for the book somewhere behind. Here were volumes on alchemy, witchcraft, Zoro-aster, Mithras, Atlantis, and Ultima Thule. There were albums of Masonic imagery, sketches of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the hierarchy of the Knights Templar, and theories about Rosicrucians and the mystery of the Grail. Silano had treatises on electricity, longevity, aphro-disiacs, herbal cures, the origin of disease, and the age of the earth.

His speculation was boundless, and yet we didn’t find what we were looking for.

“Perhaps he takes it with him,” I guessed.

“He wouldn’t dare do that, not on the streets of Paris. He’s hidden it where we wouldn’t think—or dare—to look.” Dare to look? At Rosetta, Omar had served as sentry. I considered the poor tumbled mummy, its eroded nose to the floor. Could it be?

I rolled him over. There was a slit in its wrappings and his torso, I realized, was hollow, vital organs removed. Grimacing, I reached inside.

And felt the slick, tightly wrapped scroll. Clever.

“So the mouse has found the cheese,” said a voice from the doorway.

I turned, dismayed we weren’t ready. It was Alessandro Silano, striding toward us erect and young, years flushed away, a drawn rapier flicking back and forth as he strode. His limp was gone and his look was murderous. “You’re a hard man to kill, Ethan Gage, so I’m not going to repeat the indulgent mistake I made in Egypt. While I wanted to dig up your mummified corpse and toast it in my future palace, I was also hoping I’d someday have this chance—to run both of you through, as I will right now.”

c h a p t e r

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Astiza and I were both weaponless. The woman, for lack of something better, picked up a skull.

For little more reason than to hold what we’d come for, I scooped up Omar and his eternal grin, the Book of Thoth still inside. He was light and fragile. The bandages were like old paper, rough and crumbly.