The Rosetta Key

She looked away over the valley, her tone hollow. “I don’t remember our landing, just the fall. The last thing I remember is your face, looking down from the lip of the basket. It was the most awful thing I’ve had to do in my life. As I cut the tether I saw a hundred emotions in your eyes.”

“Horror, if I recall.”

“Fear, shame, regret, anger, longing, sorrow . . . and relief.” I was going to protest but instead I flushed, because it was true.

“When I swung that tomahawk I freed you, Ethan, from the burden thrust upon you: safeguarding the Book of Thoth. I freed you of me. Yet you didn’t go to America.”

“You can’t cut the rope that binds us with a hatchet, Astiza.” So she turned back and looked at me again, her gaze fierce, her body trembling, and I knew it was all she could do to keep from flying into my arms. Why was she hesitating? Once again I understood nothing. And I couldn’t reach out either, because there was an invisible wall of duty and regret we had to break down first. We couldn’t properly begin because we had too much to say.

“When I woke, a month had passed and I was with Silano, nursed in secret. The savants had given him research quarters in Cairo. As he mended his broken hip he continued to read every scrap of ancient writing that could be scoured for him. He’s assembled trunks and trunks of books. I even saw him picking through blackened manu-scripts that must have come from Enoch’s burned library. He hadn’t given up, not for an instant. He knew we hadn’t emerged from the pyramid with anything useful, and he suspected the book had been 1 9 0

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carried elsewhere. So once again I became his ally so I could use him to get back to you. I hoped you might still be in Egypt, or someplace near.”

“You said you expected me to go to America.”

“I doubted, I admit. I knew you might run. Then we heard rumors about inquiries being made, and my heart quickened. Silano had Bonaparte jail the real messenger and sent his own man in his place to Jerusalem to discourage you. Yet it didn’t work. And as the count began to piece together a new plan, and Najac left to spy on you, I realized that fate was conspiring to bring us all together again. We’re going to solve this mystery, Ethan, and find the book.”

“Why? Don’t you just want to bury it again?”

“It can also be used for good. Ancient Egypt was once a paradise of peace and learning. The world could be that way again.”

“Astiza, you’ve seen our world. Or has the fall knocked all sense out of you?”

“There’s a church on the rise just above us, ruins now. It marks where Moses may once have sat, gazing at his Promised Land, knowing that for all his sacrifice he himself could never enter it. Your culture’s old god was a cruel one. The building itself dates to Byzantine times. We’ve found a tomb of a Templar knight, as Silano’s studies led him to expect, and in that tomb bones. Hidden in one femur was a medieval map.”

“You broke apart a dead man’s bones?”

“Silano found mention of the possibility while studying in Constantinople. Fleeing Templars came this way, Ethan, after their destruction in Europe. They hid something they’d found in Jerusalem in a strange city this map describes. Silano has discovered something else as well, something that may involve electricity and your Benjamin Franklin. Then we heard you’d been executed at Jaffa, but your body was missing. In desperation, I gave Monge the ring, wondering if he’d come across you. And now . . .”

“Were you ever in love with Alessandro Silano?” She hesitated only a moment before answering. “No.” t h e

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I stood there, hoping for more before I dared ask the next, most logical question.

“I’m not proud of that fact,” she said. “He loved me. He still does.

Men fall in love easily, but women must be careful. We were lovers, but it would be hard for me to love him.”

“Astiza, you didn’t need me here to carry two golden angels.”

“Do you still love me, Ethan, as you said along the Nile?” Of course I loved her. But I feared her, too. What had poor Talma called her, a witch? A sorceress? I feared the power she’d once more have over me when I admitted my attraction. And what of poor Miriam, still besieged in the walls of Acre?

Yet none of that mattered. All the old emotions were flooding back.