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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.” t h e
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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.” 2 1 4
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“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 hunt h e
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dred 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.
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We pretended to descend as if we were making for the entry canyon to leave the City of Ghosts. But after picking our way around some rocks, out of sight of Silano, we found a tricky descent down a wet, beautiful ravine on the west side of the mountain. We passed more caves and ruined tombs, next to spraying falls spawned by the rain—the desert was drinking its fill indeed, as the Templars had prophesized—until we were on the city’s floor. It was dusk, the rain over. Using low hills as cover to keep out of sight of the others, we reached the large temple we’d seen just as it was getting dark. It was cool after the storm, stars beginning to stud the sky.
This structure was in worse repair than the Temple of Dendara I’d explored in Egypt, and much less impressive. Its roof was gone, and what was left was a windowless pen of rubble with minimal decoration. It was big—the walls seemed a hundred feet high, with an arch tall enough to sail a frigate through—but plain.