The Rosetta Key

Jericho had not just survived the fall, but dragged himself clear of the wreckage. His clothes were half burnt and blown off and his skin was gray with stone dust, but he’d found an iron bar, slightly bent, and strode into the oncoming French like Samson. Men backed from his maniacal energy as he whirled the staff. A fusilier came up behind with aimed musket, but Miriam had somewhere found an officer’s pistol which she held with two hands and fired point-blank. Half the fusilier’s head was blown away. A grenadier was coming from the other direction. I remembered my tomahawk and threw it, watching it spin before burying in the attacker’s neck. He dropped like a cut tree and I pulled it back out. Then both Miriam and I managed to get hold of Jericho’s arms and drag him backward a pace or two, out of the reach of the bayonets he seemed desperate to impale himself on. As we did so, fresh troops from Djezzar surged past to engage the French. A hedgerow of bodies was building. Smith, hatless, head bloodied, was slashing with his saber like a man possessed. Bullets whined, pinged, or hit with a thunk when they found flesh, and someone new would grunt and go down.

My hearing was back, dimly, and I shouted to Jericho and Miriam,

“We have to get back behind our lines! We can help more from on high!”

But then something hummed past my ear, as close as a warning hornet, and Jericho took a bullet in his shoulder and spun like a top.

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I turned and saw my nemesis. Najac was cursing, my own rifle planted butt first on the rubble as he began to reload, his bullyboys hanging back from the real fight but popping away over the heads of the struggling grenadiers. That shot was meant for me! They’d come for my corpse, all right—because they knew what was likely tucked in my shirt. And so I was seized with my own combat madness, an anger and awful thirst for vengeance that made me feel like my muscles were swelling, my veins engorged, and my eyes suddenly capable of supernatural detail. I’d seen the flash of red on the bastard’s finger. He was wearing Astiza’s ruby ring!

I knew in an instant what had happened. Mohammad had been unable to resist the temptation of the cursed jewel Astiza had flung away in the Crusader court. When we were sleeping he had pocketed it, ending his periodic demands for money. And so it had been he, not I, who’d been slain by Najac’s longrifle shot as we fled along the aqueduct. The French brigand had checked to make sure the Muslim was dead and then seized the stone for his own, not knowing its history.

It was a confession of murder. So I picked up Jericho’s iron bar and started for him, counting the seconds. It would take him a full minute to load the American long rifle, and ten seconds had already passed. I had to fight through a thicket of French to be on him.

The bar sang as I wielded it in a great arc, as possessed as a Templar for Christ. This was for Mohammad and Ned! I felt invulnerable to bullets, ignorant of fear. Time slowed, noise paled, vision narrowed.

All I saw was Najac, hands trembling as he shook out a measure of powder into the rifle barrel.

Twenty seconds.

My bar swung into that thorn field of bayonets like a sickle clear-ing a trail. Metal rang as I batted it aside. Infantrymen sheered away from my madness.

Thirty seconds. The rifle ball was wrapped in its wadding and nervously fed into the muzzle opening with the short ramrod.

Najac’s French and Arabs were screaming and firing, but I felt nothing but wind. I could see the ripples in the smoky air as the bullets sped, the glint of frantic eyes, the white of bared teeth, the blood 2 5 4

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spraying from somewhere across a young officer’s face. The bar hit the ribs of a towering grenadier and he folded sideways.

Forty seconds. The stubborn ball was being rammed down.

I leapt across dead and dying men, using their bodies like rocks in a stream, my balance a spider’s. Round me in a circle my bar sung, men scrambling as they had from Jericho, Smith running a chasseur through with his saber, one Royal Marine dying and two more sticking their prey with bayonets. The sky continued to rain debris from the walls above, and I saw blossoms of explosions behind Najac as grenades and shells went off. Even as I pressed forward, Ottoman and English reinforcements were surging behind me, clotting the breech with their numbers and blood. A tricolor wavered and went down, then rose again, swaying back and forth.

Fifty seconds. Najac didn’t even take time to remove the ramrod but was fumbling to prime the pan with gunpowder and pull back the lock. There was fear in his eyes, fear and desperation, but hatred too.

I was almost on him when one of his brigands rose before me, hands raised above his head with a scimitar, face distorted by howling, until my bar took him on the side of his skull and exploded it, bits of gore spraying in all directions. I could taste him in my teeth.