The Rosetta Key

I lit another torch and descended, creeping down the spiral track like a careful snail. My compatriots stayed above, looking down on me. When I got to where the fall of water hit the pitch-black pool, my torch sputtered in the mist. How deep was this well? Too deep to retrieve whatever the Templars threw down here? For I’d no doubt they’d dropped their Jerusalem treasure down this funnel, trusting that surviving members would someday come back and reconstitute their order.

I gathered my courage. The water, as I said, was utterly dark, swirling like a drain, with green scum floating on its surface like curds.

Its smell was musty as a coffin. But we couldn’t get out the way we’d come, could we? So, setting my torch to one side where it promptly went out—my only light now was the dim torch of Ned and Mohammad above—I took a breath, prayed to all the gods I could think of, and plunged.

The water was chilly, but not shocking. I fell through ink. Soft, fibrous mats of algae brushed me as I fell, the slime of centuries.

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There may have been swimming things as well, white and pulpy in the dark—I imagined them, whether or not they were there—but I just kicked straight down, groping. I had two minutes to find what we sought, or drown.

The current started to hurry me. I began to panic, because it was increasingly apparent that fighting back upward would cost more time and breath than I had. I could not retreat, and I was being swept down and forward.

I noticed a peculiar glow. It came from ahead, not bright, but welcome enough after long seconds of utter blackness. I saw a bottom and it was reassuringly white, like a bottom of clean sand. Then I saw the true source of the paleness and almost swallowed water. The bottom was not sand, but bone.

I’d seen the frieze of skulls at the Templar chamber under Jerusalem, but this was a hundred times worse, an ossuary of the damned.

Real skulls this time, pale and dim but recognizable enough, in grue-some tangle with arms, legs, and ribs. It was a reef of bone, bleached white, teeth as long as forefingers, sockets as blank as a grave. The whole was wrapped in fuzzed chain and chunks of stone.

This had been a sacrificial well or execution chamber.

The current swept me over this boneyard, pulling me toward a growing light. Was I hallucinating as my brain starved of air? No, it was real light, and I passed out of a short tunnel and saw it even brighter above me. While the current wanted to pull me on to wherever the river went, I kicked furiously upward.

I burst out of water with my last shrieking breath. Those bones!

I spied and thrashed for a shelf of sandstone, grabbed, kicked, and flopped up out of the water like a played-out fish. For a while I just lay, gasping. Finally I got breath enough to sit up and look about. I was at the bottom of a sandstone shaft or well. High above, far out of reach, was the source of dim light. The underground stream I’d escaped ran past the shelf of rock and poured into another underwater tunnel. I shuddered. Might there be still more bones downstream, to be joined by mine?

I looked up to study the pale, silvery light of moon and stars. I 2 2 4

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couldn’t see the sky so I surmised something was reflecting the night sky downward. The illumination was very dim, but it was light enough to see that the walls of the shaft were smooth, without crevice or foothold and too far apart to span with my body. There was no chance of climbing out. And what else?

Men watching.

Dripping, I rose slowly to my feet and turned about in this dim chamber. I was surrounded by men, I realized, huge brooding ones in medieval armor. They were helmeted, bearded, and had kite-shaped shields grounded at their armored feet. Except they weren’t real men but sandstone statues, carved from the shaft walls to form a circle of eternal sentries: Templars. Perhaps they were representations of past grand masters. They were more than life-size, a good nine feet, and their gaze was grim. Yet there was something comforting about these companions as well, who would never let down their guard and yet stood back against the walls of the rock chamber as if they expected what they guarded was someday to be found.

And what was that? A stone sarcophagus, I saw, but not a lidless one like I’d seen in the king’s chamber of the Great Pyramid. This was in the style of European churches, its lid the sculpted figure of a European knight. The sarcophagus was of limestone, and the Templar, I guessed, was perhaps that first one: Montbard, uncle of Saint Bernard. A guardian for all eternity.

The lid was heavy, and at first seemed firmly set it place. But when I gave it a hard enough shove it shifted slightly, with a scraping sound.

Dust sifted from its edges. Straining, I pushed and pushed, until I had it ajar and could lower an edge onto the ground. Then I peered inside.

A box inside a box.