Dakhil shrugged. “To own something from a lost age… such a possession would be priceless.” He hoped his answer would satisfy the caliph. Of course, Dakhil knew exactly what he wanted: the most powerful item in the collection. He had done his research, he had memorized the catalog, he knew right where it was. The trick would be to find it and take it before the wrath of the soldiers and the caliph descended on him.
However, if the legends were correct and the lighthouse defenses truly existed as rumored, his job might be easier. He felt the metal edge of his sword against his hip, and the two daggers in his boots chafed against his skin.
I shall have to be quick.
Barraq made a sound like a mocking laugh, but before he could speak, an ominous roar came from the lighthouse. This time, it was accompanied by a rumbling under the earth. The tower itself began to tremble and a great dust cloud burst from the doorway and hissed from the hundred windows and cracks in the lower section.
Dakhil started to run toward the entrance with Barraq close behind. They climbed the flight of eroded stairs, raced past toppled statues and across an overgrown courtyard toward the door, where three men just now emerged, black-faced and covered with dust. Coughing, they dropped to their knees, one man holding up his hand. Blood oozed from his ears and his nose, one eye ruined.
“Gone, gone!” he cried, even as his comrades fell, spitting up blood and then lying still.
Barraq grabbed the survivor and shook him to his feet. “Speak, fool! What happened?”
“A door—” He coughed out blood, speckling Barraq’s face. “—strange signs upon it… twisting serpents and a staff. We could not open it. We three returned to seek your advice, to call for the Magi. But the others… they would not wait.”
Barraq shook him again, harder. “What happened?”
“Hammers! I heard hammers striking the door, then”—he gasped and clawed at Barraq’s face—“they screamed, ‘Trap! It’s a trap!’ The walls shook, the floor gave way. Then the sound”—another coughing fit seized his body—“of a roaring wave.”
Barraq slowly turned to Dakhil as he let the man drop to the ground. “A trap…” he echoed, just as other men began streaming out of the doorway.
Dakhil reached for his sword, and they fell upon him before it cleared the sheath.
The seventeen men who survived had been higher up in the tower. The other eighty-three, including their horses, had, by some unknown device, been swept out into the harbor.
Dakhil was led to the rocky shore east of the lighthouse and was forced to watch the bodies of those he had betrayed wash up against the stones, forced to stare at those he had sent to their deaths, their bloated, battered corpses a testament to his impatience.
He looked on, attempting stoicism, even as Barraq’s men set about sawing off his hands at the wrists and his feet at the ankles. Amidst his screams, they cauterized the stumps with flames from an oil-soaked torch and then chained him to the rocks in the water at the base of the lighthouse, facing west, away from Mecca.
At one point during the ensuing days of agony, as the gulls and the ravenous fish came to feast on his flesh, Dakhil recalled the old Greek legend of Prometheus. He had, after all, merely longed to bring light into the world, to present a powerful gift to mankind. Unlike Prometheus, he had failed; but like the Titan, he had nevertheless been ruthlessly punished.
Barraq left him there after retrieving the dead and placing a team of six men at the summit to staff a continually burning pyre. They could not afford to lose any more ships in the treacherous harbor, and their vigilance against Constantinople must not cease. He rode off on the tenth day of Dakhil’s slow death, too soon to see the lone boat steal across the harbor through the moonless night.
A man in a gray cloak stepped out onto the embankment and calmly traversed the rocks until he reached the dying man. “It seems,” he said after a moment of contemplation, “your father chose poorly.”
Dakhil moaned. His chewed-out eye sockets, above the ragged flesh and protruding cheekbones, turned toward the sound. His lungs choked on seawater and congealed blood. “No…”
“We are Keepers,” said the stranger. “Keepers. A sacred trust we have held for centuries. I cannot forgive what you have done.”
“Believed… it was time,” Dakhil muttered as the water crashed over his emaciated body and the cloaked form bent over him.
“It is not for us to decide the time. Only to keep the secret until the world is ready.” The words, spoken deeply, powerfully, came from within the folds of his hood. “In the meantime, the Pharos protects itself. The Pharos has always protected itself.”
Dakhil moaned.
The cloaked stranger moved in closer. “While I cannot forgive, I can be merciful.”
A thin blade cut through Dakhil’s throat with almost no resistance and produced very little blood. A soft gasp wheezed into the surf.
The man stood up. He bowed his head toward the flickering beacon high above in a final sign of respect and a renewed commitment to its protection. Then, with a heavy sigh, he made his way back into his boat and sailed into the shadows.
BOOK ONE
— THE LIGHTHOUSE —
Whoever wants to conquer Egypt has to conquer Alexandria, and whoever wants to conquer Alexandria has to conquer the Harbor.
1
Sixty feet under the harbor’s churning waves, his blue fins kicking just above the reef’s dangerous uppermost protrusions, Professor Caleb Crowe held the grapefruit-sized marble head in his bare hands, letting the colder currents wash off the sediment and muck. He turned the sculpture around, marveling at the late classical Egyptian artistry — the perfect symmetry, the deep-set, thoughtful eyes.
Isis.
The headdress and the Sothis star on her forehead placed this artifact in the Ptolemaic Dynasty — just about the right age. He reached for the camera hanging from his neck, considering how he might use this photo in a series of Ancient History lectures he was currently preparing for the spring semester at Columbia.
In the shadowy depths, the reefs and amphorae intermingled with the huge rocks, immense pillars and chunks of masonry thrust between the long-forgotten shipwrecks. Caleb’s breathing quickened, echoing in his ears even as the Mediterranean’s pressure squeezed his head in its grip. The current tugged him sideways into a massive block of moss-coated basalt.
He let go of the camera and reached out to steady himself. And as Isis looked on, the bare skin on his fingers touched the ancient slab—
— and something like an electric jolt ripped through his nervous system, starting at the base of his spine and spearing out in all directions. The water shimmered, the sea bottom shuddered, and a red-hot pain tore open the doors to his mind, barged inside and exploded in a blast of golden light like a swarm of maddened yellow jackets on fire, careening off the insides of his skull.
Caleb hadn’t had a clairvoyant vision in more than four years, and to have it strike now, of all times, at the bottom of Alexandria’s harbor, with his air running out and his dive partner wandering off on his own somewhere beyond the dim shadows, was about as dangerous as it was startling. The vision ripped through him like a teasing jolt of pleasure, then just as quickly left him alone again in the cold water, with Isis’s eyes looking upon him with pity.
There was a brief moment of confusion, then it returned with a vengeance. He doubled over, hyperventilating, burning through his oxygen, seeing…