They continued to wander through the maze of cabinets. Crowley checked each one thoroughly, sure that he wasn’t mistaken about Lorenzo’s tell downstairs. After half an hour he began to think that maybe he was seeing things where nothing existed, so desperate was he to find the Codex. Were they chasing ghosts, stumbling around like idiots after something that might not even exist?
Two men in red robes walked toward them, both with stern expressions. Crowley stood, faced them boldly. Rose moved from behind a cabinet she had been investigating and made a small noise of surprise. She came to stand beside him as the men approached.
Crowley smiled broadly. “Bongiorno.” He wasn’t entirely sure that was the correct greeting, but it was about the sum total of his knowledge of Italian.
The men slowed, still frowning, but didn’t stop. Once they had walked past and left the room, Crowley let out a breath he had been holding. “This is so frustrating,” he said.
Rose nodded, hands on hips. She turned in a slow circle. “It’s the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“If it’s even here.”
Rose stopped, suddenly still and focused. She leaned forward, peering between two tall cupboards designed like elaborate wardrobes. Beyond them was a smaller, squarer cabinet of dark wood with a deep grain.
“What is it?” Crowley asked.
Rose walked forward, pointing. “Look at the design on the front of that. Kinda stands out a bit, don’t you think. Are they fish?”
Crowley followed and the motif certainly did stand out. And it threw a flood of memory at him from his research years ago after his run in with the KOSS troops in Iraq. “Not fish,” he said. “Priests dressed as fish. I know something about this.” The design showed two men face to face either side of a stylized tree. The men wore entire fish bodies, the fish heads pointing up from their heads like huge hats, the open mouths not unlike a papal miter. The scaled bodies of the fish cascaded down behind the heads, lying tight to the men’s backs like form-fitting capes. The fish tails fanned out behind the men’s heels, almost brushing the ground. The two each held a bucket of some kind in one hand, their other hand raised as if in a benediction. Atop the tree motif was a large oval object, looking an awful lot like a pinecone.
Rose crouched beside Crowley to get a closer look. “Priests dressed as fish?”
Crowley chuckled, nodded. “Remember how I said I looked into all this conspiracy stuff after that weird experience in Iraq? This matches a lot of it. You see, thousands of years ago, a couple of thousand years BCE at least, there was a group of folk called the priests of Dagon. Now you’re going to have to bear with me here, because this gets a little crazy. Dagon was the fish-god of the Philistines and Babylonians and he wore a fish head hat, supposedly the origin of the Pope’s headwear today. See the open fish mouth? Looks like a mitre? In Chaldean times, the head of the church was the representative of Dagon and was considered to be infallible, was addressed as ‘Your Holiness’, and his subjects had to kiss his ring.” Crowley grinned. “This god-king sound familiar?”
Rose made a wry face. “Very papal.”
“Right. The tree there is a representation of the tree of life, or maybe the tree of knowledge. The pine cone represents the pineal gland, which is a tiny pine cone shaped endocrine gland in the brain, deep where the two halves of the thalamus join. I mean, you can take this stuff all the way down the rabbit hole. Some folk think that whole region of the brain is where the design of the Eye of Horus comes from with the ancient Egyptians. And I have to be honest, the resemblance is uncanny. Others think the god Dagon in his fish suit was actually an interstellar traveler in a space suit and so on.”
Rose blew out a derisive breath. “And this is where we start to put on our tin foil hats, is it?”
“Oh, we’ve needed to have those on for a while already. Anyway, the point is, lots of conspiracy theorists think the modern Catholic church is actually built on the cult of Dagon and all that stuff that went along with it. That’s why you so often see the pinecone shape in Catholic icons, the mitre hat and so on. So this cabinet here, with this design carved on it, is a pretty interesting find. Especially as, while I was researching the Knights of the Sedes Sacrorum, I discovered that their coat of arms bears a symbol very much like this, two fish priests face to face over a tree of life. That guy whose wound I patched up, with the KOSS tattoo? Those letters were written below a design very much like this.”
Rose swallowed, looked from Crowley to the cabinet’s strange carving and back again. “So we open this up and we find the book?”
Crowley shrugged, smiled. “It’s about the right size to have the Codex Gigas standing up inside.”
Rose took a deep breath and tried the cabinet handle. It clicked and the door swung open. Inside were shallow shelves with row upon row of small leather-bound volumes. Rose let her breath out in a rush of disappointment. “Damn it!”
Crowley narrowed his eyes, leaned past the side of the cabinet and back. “Not so fast. The depth of these shelves is all wrong.”
He began pulling the small tomes out in twos and threes, handing them to Rose to stack neatly to one side. Glancing around regularly in case anyone came, working as quickly as he could, Crowley soon had all the books out. He tugged at the now bare shelves and something shifted. He moved for a better grip, took hold of the uppermost and lowest shelves, and pulled. The back of the cabinet slid forward with a slight protest of grinding wood, bringing all the shelves with it. Crowley worked the cumbersome arrangement back and forth a few times and eventually it slipped free of the cabinet.
Standing in the revealed secret compartment was a tall book, its cover pale tan with borders of intricate pressed designs around a central plate of narrow diamond lines. In the center was an eight-pointed rosette of metal, with bright blue inlays and a raised central, flat-topped cone. Each corner of the thick embossed leather cover had brass quarter plates, similar in design to the central rosette, with Celtic-styled winged horses facing each other under raised knobs like the cover’s center.
Crowley and Rose sat on their haunches for several heavily silent seconds, staring. Eventually Crowley turned to face Rose and a moment later she met his gaze.
“This is it!” He pounded his fist into his palm. “We bloody found it!”
Chapter 33
Crowley reached for the book, then paused. He dug in his pocket and pulled out the linen gloves the archivist had given him earlier, then carefully removed the tome from its hiding place. He grunted under the weight of it, then Rose, her hands similarly covered, helped him maneuver it free.
The weight of it was almost overwhelming, as was the scent of its leather bindings and thick pages. It was three feet tall and nearly two feet across. The pages made the covers flare at bit at the edges, the book as thick as Crowley’s hand was long from the heel of his palm to the tip of his middle finger. He ran his hand over the cover, amazed to be in the presence of it at last. Something so old, supposedly so powerful. And not the fake in Sweden that everyone knew about, but had they discovered the unsullied original?
“Hey look.” Rose pointed into the cabinet.
Removing the book had revealed other items that had been secreted behind it. Small statues of stone and wood, documents, tablets. “Man, I wish we had time to look at all this stuff!” Crowley said. He pulled his phone out and took a series of quick photos into the cabinet, his flash a stark beacon with each one.
“We need to be careful,” Rose said. She rose on her knees to look over the strange cupboard, scanned quickly left and right. “Someone could come any minute. It’s weird the book is hidden here on the diplomatic floor.”