The Rosetta Key

“Effendi, it’s just a broken pillar.”

“No, there’s something here. Some way down to flower and faith, like the poem said. It’s a locked door, and the key is . . . it’s a square with a square. Four corners and four corners? That’s eight. A sacred number? It’s in the Fibonacci sequence.” The other two looked at me, blank.

“But two triangles too, three and three. Six. That isn’t. Together they make fourteen, and that isn’t either. Damn! Am I entirely off course?” I felt I was trying too hard. I needed Monge, or Astiza.

“If you could overlap the triangles, effendi, it would make the Jewish star.”

Of course. Was it as simple as that? “Ned, help pull this column base. Let’s see if the triangles on this floor slide over each other.”

“What?” Once more he looked at if I were a lunatic.

“Pull! Like you did on the altar beneath Jerusalem!” Looking as if he was confirming his own damnation, the sailor joined me. By myself I don’t think I would have budged the frozen stonework, but Ned’s muscles bulged until they cracked. Mohammad helped too. Grudgingly, the base of the fallen pillar indeed began to move, the marble beginning to overlap. As the triangles crossed, they increasingly began to form the pattern of the Star of David.

“Pull, Ned, pull!”

“You’re going to bring another lightning bolt, guv’nor.” But we didn’t. The more the triangles overlapped, the smoother they slid. When they formed the star there was a click and the pillar base suddenly swung free, rotating out of the way on a single pin at its corner. The whole assembly had become weightless. As the base did so the six-sided star began to sink into the earth.

We gaped.

“Jump, jump, before it gets away from us!” I sprang and landed t h e

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on the descending paving. After a moment’s hesitation Ned and Mohammad did too, the Arab holding crude torches. We could hear the creak of ancient gears as we settled into the earth.

“We’re going to hell,” Mohammad moaned.

“No, men. The book and treasure!”

The sound of water was louder now, echoing into whatever subterranean chamber we were descending. We sank down a star-shaped shaft, our platform the six-sided star, and then it jerked and settled on the bottom. I looked up. We were in a well, far too high to climb out of. I could see only a few stars.

“How do we get back up?” Ned asked reasonably.

“Hmmm. I wonder if we should have left one of us on top? Well, too late now, lads. The book will tell us how to get out.” I said it with more confidence than I felt.

A low horizontal passage led off from our peculiar shaft toward the sound of water. We crouched and followed it. In roughly the length of the fallen pillar above, we came to a cavern. There was a roar of water.

“Let’s light a torch,” I said. “Just one—we may need the others.” Yellow light flared. I gasped. The stream from the thunderstorm was spilling down from the slit I’d observed above, the desert drinking its fill. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. The cavern we’d come to was man-made and shaped like a horn, or funnel, narrowing as it went down. Around its periphery a ledge wound, just wide enough for a man. We were clustered at its top. The ledge spiraled as it descended, and its pattern reminded me of the nautilus shell Jomard had shown me at the Great Pyramid, the one inspired by the Fibonacci sequence.

For the flower and faith. At the funnel’s bottom, the water was a swirling, turbulent pool.

“Whirlpool,” Ned muttered. “Not the kind of thing you get back out of.”

“No, it’s another symbol, Ned. The universe is made of numbers somehow, and the Templars, or the people who built this city, were trying to memorialize it in stone. Just like the Egyptians. This is what the book is about, I’m guessing.”

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“Underground places built by madmen?”

“What’s behind the everyday world we see.” He shook his head. “It’s a sewer, guv’nor.”

“No. A portal.” And faith.

“Blimey, how did I get mixed up with you!”

“Indeed, we are in an evil place, effendi.”

“No, this is a holy place. You two can wait here. I’m betting they wouldn’t build all this if there wasn’t something down there. Would they?”

They looked at me as if I belonged in an asylum, which wasn’t far wrong. We were all crazy as loons, looking for a shortcut to happiness.

But I knew I’d figured out the puzzle, that the mad Templars and their lightning had put their secret here, not where Silano was, and that if Astiza met us as promised I’d finally have it all—knowledge, treasure, and a woman. Well, two women, but that would be sorted out in due course. Again, I was gripped with guilt about Miriam, combined with sweet memory of her body and no little apprehension about her hurt.

It’s odd what one thinks about in tight times.