The Rosetta Key

“Unless there’s a trick to this place, like its mathematical dimensions, there’s nothing here,” I said. “What’s it for?” It seemed too large to live in and yet not big and luminous enough for a temple.

Silano shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We are to find the Place of High Sacrifice. If there’s one thing we can confirm about this, it isn’t high.”

“Glorious, however,” Astiza murmured.

“Illusion, like all else,” Silano said. “Only the mind is real. That’s why cruelty is no sin.”

We came back outside, the canyon half in sunlight, half in shadow.

The day was hazing. “We’re lucky,” Silano said. “The air is heavy and smells like storm. We won’t need to wait, but must act before the tempest breaks.”

This new canyon slowly broadened as we followed it, allowing us ever better glimpses of the maze of mountains we’d entered. Rock shot skyward like layer cakes, rounded loaves, and doughy castles.

Oleander bloomed to reflect the strange rock. Everywhere the cliff walls were pierced with caves, but not natural ones. They had the t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

2 0 7

rectangular shape of human doors, indicating people had once carved them. It was a city not built on the earth, but of it. We passed a grand semicircular Roman theater, its tiers of seats again carved from the cliff itself, and finally passed out to a broad bowl enclosed by steep mountains, like a vast courtyard surrounded by walls. It was a perfect hiding place for a city, accessible only by narrow and easily defended canyons. Yet it had room enough for a Boston. Pillars, no longer holding anything up, reared from the dirt. Roofless temples rose from rubble.

“By the grace of Isis,” Astiza murmured. “Who dreamed here?” One cliff wall was a spectacle to rival the earlier Khazne. It had been carved into the façade of a fabulous city, a riot of staircases, pillars, pediments, platforms, windows, and doors, leading to a bee-hive of chambers within. I began counting the entrances and gave up.

There were hundreds. No, thousands.

“This place is huge,” I said. “We’re to find a book in this? It makes the pyramids look like a postbox.”

“You’re to find it. You and your seraphim.” Silano had pulled out his Templar map and was studying it. Then he pointed. “From up there.”

A mountain behind us that rose above the ancient theater was carved into battlements but appeared flat on top. Goat tracks led upward. “Up there? Where?”

“To the High Place of Sacrifice.”

¤

¤

¤

Anarrow footpath had been built from crude steps chiseled out of sandstone. It was muggy and we sweated, but as we climbed our view broadened, and more and more cliffs came into view that were pockmarked with doorways and windows. Nowhere did we see people. The abandoned city was silent, without the keening of ghosts.

The light was purpling.

At the top we came out to a flat plateau of sandstone with a magnificent view. Far below was the dusty bowl of ruined walls and toppled pillars, enclosed by cliffs. Beyond were more jagged mountains 2 0 8

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

without a scrap of green, as stripped as a skeleton. The sun was sink-ing toward looming thunderheads that scudded toward us like black men-o’-war. There was a hot, humid breeze that picked up funnels of dust and spun them like tops. The rock shelf itself had been precisely flattened by ancient chisels. At the center was an incised rectangle the size of a ballroom, like a very shallow and dry pool. Silano consulted a compass. “It’s oriented north and south, all right,” he pronounced, as if expecting this. To the west, where the storm was coming from, four steps led to a raised platform that appeared to be some kind of altar.

On it was a round basin with a channel.

“For blood,” the count told us. His cloak flapped in the wind.

“I don’t see anyplace to hide a book,” I said.

Silano gestured to the city far below, ten thousand holes pock-ing the sandstone like a lunatic hive. “And I see infinity. It’s time to use your seraphim, Ethan Gage. They are made of holier metal than gold.”

“What metal?”

“The Egyptians called it Ra-ezhri. Tears of the Sun. The finger of God is going to touch it, and then point to where we must go. What do we need to draw down the finger of Thoth? How can the essence of the universe give us a sign?”

He was crazy as a loon, but so was old Ben, I suppose, when he proposed to go kite-flying in a tempest. Savants are a balmy lot.

“Wait. What happens when we retrieve the book?”

“We study,” Silano said shortly.

“We don’t know if we can even read it,” Astiza added.

“I mean who gets it,” I insisted. “Someone needs to become the caretaker. It seems my seraphim are the critical tool, and my skill at setting them the key. And I’m not really on the French or the British side. I’m neutral. You should entrust it to me.”

“You couldn’t have found this place by yourself in a thousand years,” growled Najac, “or care for a grocery list.”

“And you couldn’t find your right ear if you had a cord tied from it to your cockles,” I replied with irritation.