The entrance to the City of Ghosts was a slit of sandstone canyon, tight and pink as a virgin. The sinuous passageway was no wider than a room at its base, the sky a distant blue line above. The walls rose as high as six hundred feet, at times leaning in like a roof, as if closing like a crack in an earthquake. The embrace was disquieting as we walked with packs down its shadowed floor. Yet if rock can be voluptuous, this rose and blue barbican was a seraglio of rolling flesh, carved by water into a thousand sensuous forms as pleasing to the eye as a sultan’s favorite. Much of it was banded into layers of coral, gray, white, and lavender. Here rock dripped down like frozen syrup, there it puffed like frosting, and in yet another place it was a lace curtain. The sand and rock wadi formed a crude road that dipped downward toward our destination, like a causeway to some underworld in a satyr’s dream. And nature wasn’t the only sculptor here, I saw when I looked closely. This had been a caravan gate, and a channel had been carved into the canyon wall, its dark stain making clear that it had once been an aqueduct for the ancient city. We passed beneath a worn Roman arch that marked the canyon’s upper entrance and strode silently, in awe, past niches in its walls that held gods and geometric carvings. Sandstone camels, twice life-size, sauntered with us as bas-relief on the sandstone walls. It was as if the dead had been turned to stone, and when we turned the canyon’s final corner this ghostly effect was redoubled. We gasped.
“Behold,” intoned Silano. “This is what is possible when men dream!”
Yes, here the book must reside.
We’d been traveling to this place several days from Nebo. Our party had followed the Jordanian highlands, skirting green pastures on the high plateau and passing by the brooding ruins of Crusader castles, as forsaken as the Templars. Occasionally we dipped down into deep and hot mountain canyons that opened to sandy yellow desert to the west. Tiny streams were swallowed by the dryness. Then we’d climb up the other side and continue south, hawks wheeling in the dry thermals and Bedouins shooing their goats into side wadis, watching silently from a safe distance until we passed. The siege at Acre seemed a planet away.
As we rode I had plenty of time to think about Silano’s Latin clue. The part about the angels pointing seemed somewhat plausible, though what forces were at play was beyond me. What had jarred my memory, however, were the words “snail shell” and “flower.” The same imagery had been used by the French savant, and my friend, Edme François Jomard when we climbed the Great Pyramid. He’d said the pyramid’s dimensions encoded a “golden number” or ratio—1.618, if I recalled—that was in turn a geometric representation of a progression of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. This mathematical progression could be represented by an interconnected series of ever-growing squares, and an arc through the squares produced the kind of spiral seen in a nautilus shell, or, Jomard said, in the arrangement of flower petals. My comrade Talma had thought the young scientist half addled, but I was intrigued. Did the pyramid really stand for some fundamental truth about nature? And what, if anything, did that have to do with where we were going now?
I tried to think like Monge and Jomard, the mathematicians. “Then at last the clear light reveals a certain part which formerly was both unknown, nor was it cognized in your estimation,” the Templars had written. This seemed like nonsense, and yet it gave me a wild idea. Did I have a clue that would allow me to snatch the Book of Thoth out from under Silano’s nose?
We camped in the most defensible places we could find, and one evening we climbed a hillock to spend the night in the limestone remains of a Crusader castle, its broken towers orbited by swallows. The ruin was yellow in the low sun, weeds growing from the crevices between stones. We rode up through a meadow of wildflowers that waved in the spring wind. It was as if they were nodding at my supposition. Fibonacci, they whispered.
As we bunched at the half-fallen gate to lead our horses into the abandoned courtyard, I managed a whisper to Astiza. “Meet me under the moon, on the battlements as far from where we sleep as possible,” I murmured.
Her nod was almost imperceptible and then, acting as if irritated, urged her horse ahead of mine to cut mine off. Yes, to the others we were bitter ex-lovers.
Our own trio had made a habit of sleeping a little apart from Najac’s gang of cutthroats, and when Ned was deep into his lusty snores I crept away and waited in the shadows. She came like a ghost, wrapped in white and luminous in the night. I rose and pulled her into a sentry post out of sight of any others, milky moonlight falling through the arrow slit. I kissed her for the first time since our reunion, her lips cold from the chill, her fingers knotting in mine to control my hands.
“We don’t have time,” she whispered. “Najac is awake and thinks I’ve gone to relieve myself. He’ll be counting the minutes.”
“Let the bastard count.” I tried to embrace her.
“Ethan, if we go too far it will spoil everything!”
“If we don’t I’ll burst.”
“No.” She thrust me away. “Patience! We’re close!”
Damnation, it had been hard to stay on keel since leaving Paris. Too much exercise and too few women. I took a breath. “All right, listen. If this lightning trick really works, you need to help me separate from Silano. I need time to try something on my own, and then we must rendezvous later.”
“You know something you haven’t told us, don’t you?’
“Perhaps. It’s a gamble.”
“And you’re a gambler.” She thought. “After we harness the lightning, tell him you’ll trade your share in the book for me. Then I’ll pretend to betray you, and go with him. We’ll abandon you. Act frustrated.”
“That won’t be hard. Can I trust you?”
She smiled. “Trust has to come from within.”
And with that she slipped away. We took care that the rest of the time we were as prickly as porcupines. I hoped it was truly a ruse.
We followed the old caravan tracks and I feared Ottoman patrols, but it was as if the clash at Mount Tabor had temporarily made Turkish forces disappear. The world seemed empty, primeval. We were trailed once by native tribesmen, tough little men on camels, but our party looked tough too, and poor to boot, hardly worth robbing. Najac rode to talk with them with his toughs, and they disappeared.
By the time we reached the city of the Templar maps, no one followed us at all.
We turned west and dropped from the edge of the central plateau toward the distant desert. Between us and that waste, however, was the strangest geologic formation I’d ever seen. There was a range of moonlike mountains, jagged and stark, and in front of them a boil of brown sandstone, lumpy and rounded. It looked like a frozen brew of brown bubbles, or wildly risen bread. There seemed no way in or around this odd formation, but when we came near we saw caves on it like a pox, a hundred-eyed monster. The sandstone, I realized, was dotted with them. Carvings of pillars and steps began to appear in the outcrops. We camped in a dry wadi, the stars brilliant and cold.
Silano said the paths we would tread the next morning were too narrow and precipitous for horses, so when the sky lightened we left them picketed at the canyon’s entrance with some of Najac’s Arabs as guard. I noted the horses were oddly nervous, neighing and stamping, and they shied from a wagon that had appeared at the edge of our camp sometime in the night. It was boxy but covered with tarpaulins, and Silano said its supplies included meat that made the animals skittish. I wanted to investigate, but then the morning sun lit the escarpment and picked out its cracklike canyon and welcoming Roman arch. We entered on foot and within yards could see nothing of the world behind. All sound disappeared, except the scuffle of our own feet as we descended the wadi.
“Storms have washed cobbles over what was once an ancient road,” Silano said. “The flash floods boil most frequently this time of year, records say, after thunder and lightning. The Templars knew this, and used it. So will we.”
And then, as I have described, we came after a mile to the canyon’s other end, and gaped. Before us was a new canyon, perpendicular to the first and just as imposing, but this is not what amazed us. Instead, on the wall opposite was the most unexpected monument I’d ever seen, the first thing to be on a par in glory with the immensity of the pyramids. It was a temple carved from living rock.
Imagine a sheer cliff hundreds of feet high, pink as a maiden’s cheeks, and not on it but in it, carved into its face, an ornate pagan edifice of pillars and pediment and cupolas rearing higher than a Philadelphia church steeple. Sculpted eagles the size of buffalo crouched on its upper cornices, and the alcoves between its pillars held stone figures with angel wings. What drew my eye weren’t these cherubim or demons, however, but the central figure high above the temple’s dark door. It was a woman, breasts bare and eroded, her hips draped with Roman folds of stony cloth, and her head high and alert. I’d seen this form before in the sacred precincts of ancient Egypt. Cupped in her arm was a cornucopia, and on her head the remains of a crown made of a solar disc between bull’s horns. I felt a shiver at this weird recurrence of a goddess who’d haunted me since Paris, where the Romans had built a temple to this same goddess on what is now the site of Notre Dame.
“Isis!” Astiza cried. “She’s a star, guiding us to the book!”
Silano smiled. “The Arabs call this the Khazne, the Treasury, because their legends claim this is where Pharaoh hid his wealth.”
“You mean the book is in there?” I asked.
“No. The rooms are shallow and bare. It’s somewhere nearby.”
We rode to the Khazne’s entrance, splashing across a small stream that ran down the center of this new chasm. The canyon twisted away to our right. A broad staircase led to the dark pillared entry. We stood a moment in the cool of the temple’s portico, looking out at the red rock, and then stepped into the room beyond.
As Silano said, it was disappointingly empty, as featureless as the room that had held the empty sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid. The cliff had been hollowed into straight, sheer, boxlike inner chambers. A few minutes of inspection confirmed there were no hidden doors. It was plain as an empty warehouse.
“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 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 beehive 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.”
A narrow 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 without a scrap of green, as stripped as a skeleton. The sun was sinking 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 pocking 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.
“Monsieur Gage, surely the situation is plain by now,” Silano said impatiently. “You join me, join the Egyptian Rite, and win a share of power.”
“Join a man who in Egypt sent me my friend’s head in a jar?”
He sighed. “Or, you can leave with nothing.”
“And what claim of ownership do you have?” I had to play my part.
He looked around, amused. “Why, all the guns, most of the provisions, and the only hope of deciphering what we’re about to find.” Najac’s men raised the muzzles of their weapons. It especially annoyed me to have to look down the barrel of my own rifle, in Najac’s greasy hands. “I really don’t know what Franklin saw in you, Ethan. You have such a slow grasp of the obvious.”
I pointed to the building clouds. “It won’t work without me, Silano.”
“Don’t be a fool. If you don’t help, then no one gets the book and you have nothing. Besides, you’re as curious as I am.”
I looked at Astiza. “This is the deal, then. I help you set the seraphim. If it works, you do get the book. Take it, and be done with it.”
“Guv’nor!” Ned cried.
“But I want Astiza in its place.”
“She is not mine to give, monsieur.”
“I want you to let us go, without harm or interference.”
He glanced at her. She was avoiding both our eyes. “And you’ll help if I agree?”
I nodded. “We’d better hurry.”
“But it’s her choice, not mine,” he cautioned. Astiza’s face was a mask.
“Her choice,” I confirmed confidently. “Not yours. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Agreed.” He smiled, the grin as cold as a beaver trap in a Canadian creek. “Then help us prepare.”
I took a breath. Could I trust her? Would this work at all? I was gambling all on a Latin riddle. I fished my pyramid souvenirs out from my clothing and watched the sorcerer’s eyes gleam as he seized them. “Use the clasps that attached them to Moses’ staff to mount them on the top of your metal poles,” I directed. “We’re going to make a Franklin lightning rod.” I’d noticed two holes drilled in the top of the leveled plateau, and Silano confirmed they were mentioned in the Templar documents, so we inserted them. But there was no connection between them.
I studied the flat plane. There were grooves in the sandstone rock, I saw, forming a six-pointed star. The poles were at opposite points.
“We need a connection between the poles,” I said. “Metal strips, to conduct electricity. Do you have any?”
Of course not. So much for Silano’s research! It was growing darker, thunder rumbling as the cloudworks swelled and mounted. Funnels of dust skittered on the valley floor far below, weaving and bending like drunks.
“I don’t see what the rods will do, if isolated,” I warned.
“The Templars said this will work. My studies are infallible.”
The man had an ego to match Aaron Burr. So I thought of what could replace the metal strips, because my enemies were right: I was as curious as anyone. “Najac, do something beside scowl,” I finally suggested. “Use your water bag to fill these grooves with water, and add some salt.”
“Water?”
“Ben said it can help conduct electricity.”
The water filled the little runnels until the star gleamed in the thick, green-purple light. The sun was swallowed and the temperature dropped. My skin prickled. More thunder, and I could see first tendrils of rain curling downward like feathers, evaporating before they touched the ground. Lightning stabbed to the west. I backed to the edge of the plateau. Ned and Mohammad followed me, but no one else seemed frightened. Even Astiza was waiting expectantly, hair swirling, her eyes on the sky and not me.
The storm swept down on us like a cavalry charge. There was a gusting wall of wind, hurling grit, and the clouds overran us, great bags of rain and thunder that glowed silver as they billowed and ballooned. Lightning flashed and struck the peaks around us, nearer and nearer, the thunder like artillery. Fat drops of rain hit, hot and heavy, more like molten lead than water. Our clothing shuddered, and the wind rose to a shriek. And then there was a blinding flash, an instantaneous roar, and the mountain quaked. One of the rods had been hit! My knees went weak. Sparks blazed, and bright blue light flashed from rod to rod along the wet star grooves, and then arced across space from angel to angel. The seraphim turned glowing white. They swung, the iron rods turning, and their wings pointed northeast, tilting toward each other so that lines drawn from each would meet about twenty yards away. The lightning bolt had passed, but the rods held power, everything bathed in a purple glow not too different than the one we’d seen in the chamber below the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And then beams of light flowed from the wings of the seraphim, met in midair, and a single beam streaked like a rifle bullet, as if pulled, to strike a grand pillared doorway of another cliffside temple, two miles from where we stood. Sparks flew in a fountain.
“Yes!” Silano’s henchmen cried.
The ray held a moment, like a momentary peek of sun into a dark cave, and then faded. The mountaintop went dark. Dazzled, I looked at our metal poles. The seraphim had melted, the tops of the poles flattened like mushrooms. Silano had his arms up in the air in triumph. Astiza was rigid, her gown soaked, water dripping from the tendrils of dark hair plastered on her cheek. The storm was moving on toward the east, but behind its flashing prow came more rain, cooler this time, a hiss to cleanse the air of ozone. It poured down. We could all feel the electricity in the air, our hair still dancing to it. Water was sluicing everywhere off the cliff tops.
“Did everyone mark that?” Silano asked.
“I could find it with my eyes closed,” Najac promised, a note of greed in his tone.
“Satan’s work,” Big Ned muttered.
“No, Moses’!” Silano answered. “And that of the Knights Templar and all those who quest for truth. We are at God’s work, gentlemen, and whether the god is Thoth or Jehovah or Allah, his guise is the same: knowledge.” His eyes were alight with energy, as if some of the lightning had entered him.
I’ve nothing against knowledge—I sailed with savants, after all—and yet his words and look disturbed me. I remembered childhood sermons of Satan as serpent, promising knowledge to Adam and Eve in the Garden. What fire were we playing with here? Yet how could we allow so tempting an apple to go unpicked?
I looked at Astiza, my moral compass. But she had to avoid my gaze, didn’t she? She looked awed—that something had really happened—and worried.
“Gentlemen, I believe we are about to make history,” Silano said.
“Down we go before nightfall. We’ll camp in front of the temple that was illuminated and search it at first light tomorrow.”
“Or with torches tonight,” the eager Najac said.
“I appreciate your impatience, Pierre, but after a thousand years I don’t think our goal is going anywhere. Monsieur Gage, as always your company has been intriguing. But I daresay neither of us will entirely regret our parting. You have made your bargain, so now I can say it. Adieu, frontiersman.” He bowed.
“Astiza,” I said. “Now you can come with me.”
She was silent a long time. Then, “But I can’t, Ethan.”
“What?”
“I’m going with Alessandro.”
“But I came for you! I left Acre for you!” I displayed more bluster than a barrister facing damning evidence for a guilty client.
“I can’t let Alessandro have the book by himself, Ethan. I can’t walk away from it after all this suffering. Isis has brought me to this place to finish what I started.”
“But he’s mad! Look at his companions. They’re the devil’s spawn! Come away with us. Come with me to America.”
She shook her head. “Good-bye, Ethan.”
Silano was smiling. He’d expected this.
“No!”
“She has made her choice, monsieur.”
“I only helped with the lightning to get you!”
“I’m sorry, Ethan. The book is more important than you. More important than us. Go back to the English. I’m going with Alessandro.”
“You used me!”
“We used you to find the book: for good, I hope.”
In mock frustration I jerked out one of the iron poles to use as a weapon, but Najac’s gang raised their muskets. Astiza wouldn’t look at me as Silano shepherded her off the plateau, wrapping her head with her scarf.
“Someday soon you will realize what you just threw away, Gage,” Silano called. “What the Egyptian Rite could have given you! You will rue your bargain!”
“Aye,” Najac growled, his pistol steady. “So go back to Acre and die.”
I let the pole drop with a clang. Our acting had succeeded. If, indeed, Astiza was acting. “Then get off my mountain,” I ordered, my voice shaking.
Smirking, they filed back down the trail, taking the melted seraphim and the rods with them, Astiza glancing back just once as she made her way down.
It was when they were out of earshot that Big Ned finally erupted. “By the saints, guv’nor, we’re going to let that papist scoundrel steal our rightful treasure? I thought you had more grit!”
“Not grit, Ned, wit. Remember how I bested you at swords?”
He looked chastened. “Aye.”
“That was by brain, not muscle. Silano doesn’t know as much as he thinks. Which means we have our own chance. We’re going to find a trail off the back side of this mountain and do our own exploring, well away from that tribe of cutthroats.”
“Away? But they know where this book of yours is!”
“They know where the lightning strike threw its light. But I don’t think the Templars would be that obvious. I’m hoping they were students of the Great Pyramid.”
He was baffled. “What do you mean, guv’nor?”
“I’m betting we’ve just witnessed a little misdirection. I am a gambling man, Ned. And the Great Pyramid incorporates a series of numbers known as the Fibonacci sequence. Surely you’ve heard of it.”
“Blimey, no.”
“The French in Egypt taught me about it. And this sequence, in turn, is a representation of some basic processes of nature. It’s holy, if you will. Just the kind of thing Templars would be interested in.”
“I’m sorry, guv’nor, but I thought this was all about ancient treasure and secret powers, not numbers and Templars.”
“It’s all those things. Now, there’s a ratio that comes up in any geographic representation of the sequence, a pleasing proportion of a longer line to a shorter one that happens to be 1.61 and some-odd. It’s called the “golden number” and was known to the Greeks and the builders of the Gothic cathedrals and to Renaissance painters. And it’s encoded in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid.”
“Gold?” Ned was looking at me as if I were daft, which perhaps I was.
I found a patch of dirt and drew. “Which means the book may really be at an angle to what we’ve just seen. That’s what I’m betting, anyway. Now, let’s suppose that the base of a pyramid is represented by the line we saw shooting across the valley here.” I sketched a line pointing at the ruins where Silano and his team were headed. “Draw a line perpendicular to it, and it runs off more or less west.” I pointed toward the rugged range where the storm had come from. “Somewhere along that new line is a point that would be represented if we completed a right triangle by drawing from where Silano is going to my other line going west.”
“A point where?”
“Exactly. You have to know how long the third line, the sloping line, should be. Let’s suppose it is 1.61 times, roughly, that of the line to Silano’s Temple—the golden ratio, the physical embodiment of Fibonacci and nature, and the slope of the Great Pyramid itself. A pyramid built to incorporate fundamental numbers, the kind that go into snail shells or flowers. It’s hard to gauge distance, yes, but if we assume the temple is two miles away, then our adjoining line is a little over three…”
He squinted, following my arm now as I left the temple where the lightning beam had struck and swung it from north to west. “I’m guessing it would strike my imaginary western line just about where that imposing ruin is.”
We stared. On the floor of the valley was a wreck of an ancient building that looked like it had been battered by artillery for a hundred years. The dilapidation was actually just time and decay, yet it still stood higher than all the rubble around it. A line of old pillars, holding nothing, jutted up along what appeared to be an ancient causeway.
“You saw this angle where, effendi?” Mohammad tried to clarify.
“In the slope of the Great Pyramid. My friend Jomard explained it to me.”
“You mean that Count Devil is going to the wrong temple?”
“It’s just a guess, but the only chance I’ve got. Lads, are you willing to take a look and hope that the Templars cared for this number game as much as the ancient Egyptians did?”
“I’ve learned to have faith in you, effendi.”
“And my, what a joke it would be to find the bloody book first,” Ned laughed. “And some gold, too, I’m betting.” And he gave me that wide, menacing smile.