The son of Caesar walked into the Holy of Holies.
Thrasyllus managed to get to his knees, and Didymus helped get him to his feet. The two male demons were already passing beyond the curtain, but Acme had stayed back. She stood behind them, and her siren song pushed them forward, beautiful but deadly. They walked on, Didymus half carrying the spent man, because they didn’t know what else to do.
The Holy of Holies was smaller than Didymus suspected. It was in the shape of a cube. Five paces wide, five deep, and five tall.
At its center was an oil lamp on a small gilded table. Its single flame shakily licked the disturbed air of the chamber. A low and padded stool was beside it, and Didymus could imagine how a priest might kneel there, his eyes gazing beyond the flame, hoping to see the face of the divine.
“Where?” Tiberius asked, his voice impatient. “Your books brought us to this place. Where is it?”
“There are hidden doors,” Didymus whispered, remembering how they had read so many books, combed so many scrolls to discover the secret. “Behind one is a stair. Behind the others is death.”
Tiberius looked to Antiphilus, and the demon nodded in agreement. “Twelve doors,” it said, scanning the walls. “I see them.”
The doors were indeed easy enough to see, once you knew they were there. They were tightly fitted into the walls—their outlines only barely visible—but there were shallow handholds around the room, indentions just deep enough to use as grips to open each potential entry. There were four on each side wall, and four on the back wall.
“If you don’t know which one,” Tiberius said to Didymus, “I will bring legionnaires in one by one to open them. A dozen is a small price to pay. And I assure you that your death will be long and painful indeed. I will make you watch, screaming, while I burn your Library to the ground. I will let you bleed your last upon its ashes.”
“Please,” Didymus pleaded. “We aren’t meant—”
“Meant to have it? Indeed, you are not. But I am. Tell me where, or the first death you’ll see is your friend gutted alive in this place.”
Thrasyllus sagged in response, too exhausted to fight, too despairing to care.
“Let me do it,” the one called Bathyllus whispered.
Antiphilus nodded, and the demons lips thinned in a wide grin.
“No,” Didymus croaked. “I’ll find it. Just let us go.” They would find it with him or without him, he was sure. And dead they couldn’t fight whatever followed. In life … at least there was a chance.
“When your purpose is finished, I’ll let you go. You have my word, scholar.” The heir of Caesar gestured around the perimeter of the room. “Now, show me.”
Didymus nodded and hobbled Thrasyllus to the wall, where he leaned him to keep him upright.
“Don’t,” Thrasyllus managed. “You can’t let them.”
“It’s fine. It’ll be fine. Just rest. Get your strength.”
Didymus took a deep breath and turned. The demons just stared—Bathyllus looking slightly disappointed—but Tiberius stepped aside as the scholar stepped into the center of the room.
“Twelve doors,” Didymus said. “For the twelve tribes of Israel, descended from the twelve sons of Jacob.”
Gingerly, Didymus knelt down before the table, as a priest would. He closed his eyes for a moment—in acknowledgment of the sanctity, in assurance of his memory—then opened them to begin pointing at the doors from left to right, four to a wall around the room. “In order of birth, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin. Each tribe had a region, a part of the promised land. All except the Levites. They were given the keeping of the Temple, of this most holy place.”
Didymus stood and walked solemnly to the third door on his left, imagining how the Levite priests had so often done the same. “The door to the chamber was meant only to be accessed by the tribe of Levi. The third door.” He ran his fingers across the wall, remembering the hidden door to the chamber of the Ark in Alexandria so long before. His fingers slipped into the shallow handle. He took a deep breath, and he started to pull.
“Did-mus,” Thrasyllus gasped from the wall.
Didymus froze and turned. Thrasyllus, for all his exhaustion, was shaking his head. His eyes were wide.
“Not Greek,” the scholar managed to say.
Not Greek? For a moment Didymus blinked, confused, wondering what it could mean, his arm flexing to pull the door open anyway … and then with a lurch of realization he knew what the younger man meant. Greek was read from left to right. So was Latin. So was almost every language he knew.
But not Hebrew. The language of the Jews was read from right to left. He wasn’t about to open the third door. He was in front of the tenth.
He pulled his fingers back carefully, lest he disturb the door and whatever trap lay beyond it. He stepped backward slowly, gingerly, before he allowed himself to breathe again.
“What is it?” Tiberius asked.
“Wrong door.”
“Wrong door?” Tiberius asked, incredulous.
“Hebrew reads right to left.” Didymus nodded to Thrasyllus, who nodded back in clear relief. Then he walked across the chamber to the third door on the right. “An easy mistake to make.”
One of the demons hissed.
“Easy mistake? And what would have happened if you’d made that easy mistake and opened it?”
Didymus shrugged, remembering how the trap beneath Alexandria had drowned everyone but himself and Juba the Numidian. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it would have been bad.”
This time he didn’t hesitate. His fingers slipped into the shallow depression, and he pulled open the door with a gentle tug.
No death awaited him. At least not yet. Beyond the door was instead a smaller chamber that led to a stair cutting back in the other direction, sinking downward beneath their feet.
When Didymus turned around he could see that the eyes of Tiberius were fierce with the fires of triumph. “Bring the scholars,” he ordered. And then the son of Caesar strode back to the table, retrieved the oil lamp, and muscled past Didymus.
Light held high, Tiberius led them down into the cool shadows of the secret cave beneath the Holy Temple of the Jews.
15
THE SIXTH SHARD
JERUSALEM, 4 BCE
His arm beneath the astrologer’s shoulder helping to keep the exhausted younger man upright and moving, Didymus descended into a darkness lit only by the hungry flame of the lamp in the hands of Tiberius. The stairs beneath their feet were roughly hewn, a strange counterpoint to the pristine beauty of the treasured rooms above.
It was not a long descent. A mere fifteen steps downward and they found themselves once more on level paved ground.
Fifteen steps. And yet it felt like a world apart to Didymus.
The air was increasingly cool, perhaps even crisp as they had descended, and now at the end of the steps they stood facing a chamber, a hollow space that sat directly beneath the Holy of Holies. The Cave of Souls was not large. Between half and two-thirds the area of the sanctified chamber above, it was roughly square, with an uneven ceiling following a natural band in the rock. In a few spots upon the ceiling, tool marks still betrayed how human hands had worked to enlarge the gift nature had provided atop this holy mountain.
The light of the lamp in the hands of Tiberius revealed two small shrines in the space, simple niches that appeared to be cut directly into the bedrock. Both were overarched and decorated with arcane signs and letters that Didymus could not read. Looking from his left to his right, Didymus saw that each niche within the Cave of Souls held a block of stone, the clear object of each shrine’s veneration. The first was a thin cylinder, perhaps as tall as the scholar’s forearm. Upon its smoothed surface, shadowed by the lamplight, was the carving of a tree, stretching up from its roots to blossom with life just below its rounded top. The second block of stone was shorter but broader at the base: a perfect, featureless
pyramid. Small cushions rested on the floor before each shrine, and Didymus imagined the priests—all of them dead now, he reminded himself in horror—kneeling on them in worship.
Didymus wondered at the stones—part of his mind already swirling with theories about how these strange objects related to the faith of the Jews—but he knew that he had no time for such rumination. Tiberius wasn’t looking at the niches in the walls.
He was looking at the floor.
Though less magnificent than the patterns of colors of the exquisite cut stone of the Temple above, the floor here was still fitted tiles, white with crystalline seams that reflected the light. In two spots upon the floor elaborate inlays of carefully cut tile had been made. The closer and far smaller one was a black square, framing a pattern of red and white diamonds pinned by black triangles that enclosed a second black frame around a white square. Within that square, in turn, a black circle had been carefully inlaid into its center, superimposed by an upside-down triangle that had been crossed through by a horizontal line through its lower half. The second, much larger tile inlay was also a black square, but this time it enclosed a broad, pale-colored circle ringed by triangles pointing outward like flames. At its center was a much smaller black circle with six points protruding from its round surface.
Tiberius looked from inlay to inlay, before he walked over to stand upon the closer, smaller one. Lifting his foot, he stomped down hard upon the strange design in its center. The sound that returned was empty and hollow. He looked back at the demons with a new determination upon his face.
The one called Antiphilus came forward, and the son of Caesar retreated off the stone. Kneeling down, the demon ran his pale fingers along the symbol, tracing it with almost tender care. “What lies beneath,” he whispered.
“What lies beneath,” the other two demons intoned.
Then the demon, resting one hand upon the surface, reared back with his other. He held the position for a moment, lips moving in what looked like some kind of silent prayer, before he closed the raised hand into a fist and punched down upon the tile.
The blow came down as hard as a hammer strike. Didymus felt it reverberate through his feet on the floor. And he saw it smash through the center of the inlaid tile, shattering it into slivers of stone.
Antiphilus pulled aside the broken pieces, one by one, as Tiberius brought the light over it to see what was within.
The others leaned forward, too, and Didymus found himself wanting to join them. Whatever horrors he had seen this day, whatever sin it was to have penetrated the Temple and now broken this sacred stone, as a scholar he still yearned to know what treasure was within.
From his side, he felt Thrasyllus pulling away from his support to lean against the wall of the cave. The younger man was still weak, but there was a defiant light of life in his eyes. And there was, too, an understanding. “I’m fine,” he said. “Go on.”
Didymus nodded, and then moved over to join the others. The last piece of the stone was coming away in the demon’s hands, revealing a small stone depression holding several items wrapped in linens. Antiphilus reached down to pull the wrappings away from the top one. Inside, he revealed, was a flat, dark gray stone, crudely inscribed with words in the same alphabet that was above the shrines in the chamber. Hebrew, surely, but an old form of it, different from the kind of script Didymus had seen used in texts at the Great Library.
One of the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, Didymus assumed. Whatever the priests displayed in the Temple above would surely not have been the original. It would have been a copy of the ancient artifact, with clearer words, gilded lettering upon a polished surface. It would have been made to look sacred and holy, a divinely crafted thing—not a rough-edged rock chiseled by the hand of an old man.
Why the tablets would be here and not with the Ark—wherever that was—Didymus didn’t know.
Antiphilus felt around the hole, but found nothing but the second tablet and some other artifacts that Didymus didn’t know and that the demon seemed not to judge of any value.
The demon looked up at the one they called Acme. “So it is as you say,” he said. His voice was a quiet hiss in the Cave of Souls. “We were right. The Shard is indeed in Petra.”
Petra!
Didymus fought hard to control his reaction even as his mind reeled. Thrasyllus had said that the demons already had the Shards of Water and Fire, and that they’d have Air and Life soon enough. But the Shard of Earth, the Ark of the Covenant, was not yet in their grasp. Acme must have discovered it was in Petra, and it was that news that had so spurred them to action upon her arrival.
If the Ark was in Petra that would mean Caesarion was there. And good Vorenus, too, if he yet lived. He’d heard nothing of them since the attacks on Elephantine Island so many years ago.
I must warn them, he thought.
But how?
Antiphilus rose up and floated to the second inlay in the floor. Once more he knelt, and once more he gently traced its design. “What lies beneath,” he whispered.
“What lies beneath,” the two others repeated.
Again the demon’s fist rose up and then slammed into the floor at the center of the ancient inlay, destroying it in a single, vicious blow.
Tiberius lifted his light and all but the astrologer looked to see.
It was a smaller depression than the first, which seemed strange to Didymus given the overall size of the inlays. The broken pieces of tile had fallen on a layer of once-rich linens that Antiphilus pulled out of the hole and set aside. Beneath that, resting on a second, deeper bed of linens, were two small glass vials half full of a clear oil the color of honey. And between them was a tiny, latched chest of dark wood with old hinges and a metal inlay of the same symbol of a circle with six points upon it.
The demon’s long, pale fingers reached down and gripped the box with a nearly loving care. The other two demons seemed to lean even closer, their full focus on the little container that was raised up from the hole into the flickering light of the Cave of Souls.
Didymus sensed a movement in the air behind him, like an exhalation of a thousand breaths upon his skin, and it felt like maybe there was a new coldness in the chamber.
No one looked away from Antiphilus and what he held. Tiberius was leaning so close over him that Didymus absently wondered if he would fall over.
The demon’s grip shifted, freeing one hand so that his fingertips could catch hold of the latch and lift it.
It definitely was getting colder. Not the chill of the demons, but a drop in temperature as if a storm were brewing over the Temple Mount outside. Antiphilus didn’t notice it. None of the demons did.
The latch came free and the old hinges creaked as the lid opened.
Yes, Didymus thought, even as he focused on what the demon was revealing. He could hear the storm now. A beating rain, hard and fast. Unnaturally fast.
Inside the box was a ring displayed on a wooden housing. The metal band repeated the same symbol as the chest itself, but the librarian’s eye saw it only for a moment. His attention quickly focused instead on the small, flat stone set upon it. Like the Shard of Fire, the stone was a strangely gleaming black. To Didymus it looked like a sinking pool of darkness, pierced through with a somehow even darker slit like the eye of a cat.
“The Seal of Solomon,” Tiberius whispered.
“Drown with it,” Thrasyllus croaked.
Didymus turned at the other man’s voice, and so was the first to see the rising rush of water that was pouring down the steps into the Cave of Souls. Thrasyllus was standing beside the steps where he’d left him, still leaning against the stone wall, but his hands were before him. In his fingers he held a second medallion, the Shard of Water in a new setting.
Acme made a high screeching sound, instinctively reaching for the pocket of her robes and finding it empty. Bathyllus spun and tried to launch himself at the human, but the wave of oncoming water pushed out his feet. Tiberius, too, was scrambling, trying
to keep his lamp aloft while keeping his balance.
Didymus, quicker to see the water, had braced against the initial blow. He stepped forward slowly against the tide, angling his way toward the wall and Thrasyllus instead of facing the direct onslaught of the water that had become a raging cascade down the stairs. Already the water was to his knees, visibly rising with each heartbeat.
The astrologer was gritting his teeth now, holding back a scream as his hands shook with the power that was flowing through him.
The Shard was killing him. Didymus could see it.
The power was stripping away his life, moment by moment. Whatever control he’d had over the Shard of Fire, it had been directed by Bathyllus. Facing a Shard alone now—already exhausted, with no preparation for the act—he was being destroyed from within.
The water was up to their waist, shockingly cold. For a moment Didymus thought he heard the echoing boom of a mighty thunderclap, but the sound was drowned out by the roar of the churning torrent filling the Cave of Souls.
“Let it go!” Didymus shouted. The younger man would die if he didn’t. Perhaps he would die even if he did. “Thrasyllus! Let go!”
The astrologer opened his mouth and screamed, raw and inhuman, and at last his fingers shot open. Thrasyllus fell down the wall, unconscious. The Shard fell into the rising waters that pushed it across the room, the metal chain flashing in Tiberius’ lamplight as it swung wide of the heavier metal housing. Didymus splashed at it with one arm, managing to touch the links of the chain for a tantalizing moment, but then it had passed him.
The astrologer was limp, and the water pulled his body from the wall. He lay on his back for a moment, floating, before the currents flipped him facedown.
“Thrasyllus!” Didymus jumped through the water now, fighting to land each step well enough to propel himself forward, inch by inch.
The main current down the stairs now caught the astrologer and sent him spinning into the chamber. Didymus dove, caught him, and turned him over. He felt the younger man’s lungs rise a moment before his body convulsed, coughing out water.
The Realms of God--A Novel of the Roman Empire (The Shards of Heaven, Book 3) Page 16
