As silently as possible, he and Lydia stayed in the shadows and ran along the wall to the inner citadel. Four silent cannons observed their approach, and Caleb could almost hear their muffled explosions, subdued echoes from the conflicts of a bygone age. At the back gate, he rummaged through his bag for the bolt cutters, but paused as Lydia knelt by the padlock and told him to give her some light. “We don’t want them posting a guard in case we need to get back down there in the future.” A few twists and gentle stabs with two pins held in her nimble fingers, and the lock clicked open.
“Where did you learn that?” Caleb asked.
She merely smiled and winked.
He heard a noise — a soft, padded footfall — and his heart lurched. Pausing at the threshold, he looked back but saw nothing moving in the starlight-speckled courtyard.
“Come on,” Lydia said, and glided through the sandstone halls with a purpose, like this was all second nature. Caleb’s sense of unease returned. First, the incident in St. Mark’s Square, then the lock-picking, and now this feeling that somehow she’d been here before.
“Are you seeing someone? A girl with green eyes…?”
He put his imagination behind him and followed Lydia’s flashlight beam, which steadily led the way. She climbed to the second floor, and when he joined her he peered out the arched, barred window to see the sparkling lights of the city and the brilliant floodlights around the new library. After a moment’s reflection, they made their way to the great mosque. The heavy waterproof backpack, stocked with all their supplies weighed him down, and when he switched shoulders, he saw something white fluttering above, against the red brick dome.
Ahead, in the darkness before a bend in the corridor, he heard his name. It sounded so much like Nina’s voice. Suddenly Caleb was overwhelmed with the sense of foreboding he’d felt before, the same dread that far below his feet the secrets of the Pharos slumbered without a care, secure behind its defenses.
Again, that lone dove flew around and around the dome overhead, flirting with the trembling beam of light. Caleb’s mouth hung open and it happened again. A shift in perspective, a jaunt into a different medium where everything was a little more real, a touch colder, his senses sharper. He saw a man…
… in flowing white robes. “Come, Demetrius. It is time for you to see.” Two great Egyptian statues flank the entrance to a grand chamber lit by a half-dozen torches inside glass lamps set high on the walls. A pair of long chains rest on the floor, one hooked to the wall above the inscribed door, the other clamped to the feminine statue’s moon-shaped headdress. Four slaves are securing the chains and preparing a large, circular harness that could hold several men. “This is why you have come.”
Demetrius, out of breath, holding his side, moves past the enormous onyx statues. “What is that?” he asks Sostratus, pointing to a pit in the floor.
“Drainage vent.”
“And that?” He faces the great wall ahead, observing the pair of winged snakes coiled three times around the staff with an inscribed sun symbol above their heads. Six other arcane symbols surround the staff.
“The great seal.” Sostratus turns and points to a spot on the ground. “Stand there.”
In the flickering torchlight, Demetrius only now notices the symbols on the floor. One following the other, seven symbols painted and carved on seven large granite blocks leading to the sealed door. He steps onto the first block and reads the sign. “Lead?”
“We both will stand here,” Sostratus says as he joins him. “Then we shall move forward, block by block. At the next stone we will be secured by these chains.”
Demetrius looks to the next sign, two feet closer to the seal. “Tin?”
Sostratus lowers his head. “You will understand.”
“Hey!” Lydia shook him. Her face loomed over his, her soft hair tickling his skin. “Tell me you just saw something.”
Caleb leaned on her shoulder. The room was stuffy, oppressive. The dove had stopped its flying and perched somewhere overhead. “I think I’ve just been shown the way. Or at least, past the first two stages.”
Caleb’s legs were weak from descending the cascade of stairs, and as he stepped on each one he imagined they sighed with audible reminders of his guilt, mocking echoes of Phoebe’s pain, and their separation. Then he thought of Nina, and here he was, attempting the same feat that had killed her, with another woman he loved.
I hope I’m better prepared this time.
For someone experiencing firsthand what she had only previously imagined, Lydia remained quite calm. As they stood before the great seal, she shrugged when Caleb asked how she felt. “Just like the pictures in our room,” she said, shining the flashlight back and forth, then up the vertical crack in the door, aligned with the caduceus. “So this is it.”
She walked up to the wall and then shined the light back across her tracks, and Caleb saw for the first time the alchemical symbols for the metals, each about two yards square, taking up seven mammoth limestone blocks. Starting at the door, Caleb recognized them: Sulfur, Silver, Mercury, Copper, Iron, Tin and Lead.
“There they are,” Lydia said, shaking her head in wonder. “Guess none of you thought to look down.”
“No, we’d have seen them. The flood must’ve washed away the dust covering them.” Caleb aimed the light now at the wall, at the symbols around the staff. “Anyway, I think I understand. Each element corresponds to a planet and a stage in the seven steps of transformation. But this adds a new wrinkle. I believe we’ll need to turn the symbols on the door in the right order to get this started; then we’ll need to come back and stand on the first block, wait for whatever happens, and then move forward accordingly.”
Lydia stood before the seal, careful not to touch anything. “The symbols… protruding from… Wait, I see where you can grasp them by their edges and turn each one.”
“Not yet,” Caleb said, digging into his knapsack for the ropes, harness and carabiners. “Let’s get set for the water trap.”
When they had secured the first clip to the ring on the wall and the second to Seshat’s statue, they clipped the other ends to their harnesses, so all they had to do after passing the first test was to step forward, slip on the harness, tighten it and wait for the water to come.
They stood together at the door, shining both lights on the caduceus. Caleb saw that one symbol at the end of the upper inscription, the symbol assigned to the Golden Ones. It seemed to pull at his consciousness, to hang there as a marker of denial, a guardian that expressly denied him passage. And now, more fully versed in alchemy and familiar with the symbols, he was even more certain that this was a mistake.
“That sign,” he said, pointing, “I know it now.”
“What is it?”
“Exalted Mercury.” He stared at it and his breath quickened. “An upward-pointing triangle symbolizing Fire — in this case, the sublimated state of distilled consciousness rooted in the Above. And within that triangle, the symbol for what they call Exalted Mercury, which is essentially the Mercury symbol with a dot in the center, signifies that it has become the One Thing perfected.”