Tomb of the First Priest: A Lost Origins Novel

by A D Davies

  “Boss issued instructions,” Horse said. “They follow instructions. Unlike some.”

  “Whatever we find is confidential and proprietary,” Valerio added. “Look here.” He gestured to the walls again: more artwork, more stories in pictorial form. “It’s strange. We know they had language, writing, like cuneiform, yet they chronicle their history like this.”

  “Sensible,” Jules said. “They probably found older writing themselves so didn’t want room for a language barrier.”

  “Yet here I am, not caring a jot what happened to them.”

  “Just what they can do for you.”

  “Correct,” Valerio said. “And I want it kept between us if at all possible.” He gestured to the mercs. “They are the help. Nothing more.”

  Drips fell overhead, the first moisture they’d encountered since the initial blockage near the entrance. A series of stalactites had formed, hundreds of years of calcified deposits mimicking a set of teeth trying to bite down and bar the way. There were only a couple of feet between the points and the floor, forcing them to crouch almost to their bellies to bypass the formation. It ran for only six and a half feet before returning to normal.

  “Runoff?” Horse said.

  “Maybe,” Jules replied. “Or an underground stream going over our heads. Might even be what feeds the village.”

  “Again,” Valerio said. “Who cares?”

  Beyond the stalactites, the corridor widened. Its walls seemed rougher now, more related to their natural state. Both Valerio and Horse appeared to notice the same thing, but Jules only had the lamplight to go by.

  Horse stopped and switched his flashlight aside. “What’s that?”

  They were looking at a door in a passage to the side. Modern by the standards they’d witnessed so far, but thick and solid.

  Several yards farther along stood another. Plus one opposite, this one blocked with rough-cut bricks and smoothed over.

  Moving his head closer, Jules found more writing hewn into it, hard to make out.

  Horse produced a thirty-inch light bar, casting the surface in a purple glow. The letters stood out better.

  “Thomas’s followers wrote these,” Valerio said. “They’re far more up-to-date than what we’ve seen so far. Perhaps even written by Thomas himself.”

  “How d’you know that?” Jules asked.

  “Because they’re in Hebrew. Says we are ‘approaching the point of great reward.’ Well, that’s nice.” Valerio stood and moved on.

  Jules sped up to fall in alongside. “For someone who doesn’t care about history, you sure know a lot.”

  “It serves my purpose to know a lot. The endgame is all that matters. And the endgame, it seems, is approaching.”

  The corridor opened wider, doubling in size to accommodate a spacious anteroom. It wasn’t until they had advanced another minute that they realized there was nowhere else to go. Not a corner nor another display of art.

  The wall ended in an even finish, ten feet high and twenty wide, set into the contours of the bedrock and surrounded by those hieroglyph-like markings. The language of whoever built these chambers.

  “Okay, Jules,” Valerio said. “This is it. The final door.”

  “It can’t be this simple.” Bridget hovered over the mummified anthropomorphic bundle that they assumed to be the apostle Thomas. Afraid to touch anything, she arranged the flashlights that converted into lamps, allowing her to see as if a bulb had been turned on in a modern basement. “All this way, all those lines, those languages, and he’s just lying here behind an unlocked door.”

  The room was a split-level, seemingly carved rather than constructed, the two stairs down from the crypt and altar made of one solid piece. The lower level contained fabrics in vastly differing states of decay, a musty smell pervading the crypt. Vases ranged from twelve to fifty inches tall, and two doors occupied opposite walls: one wooden, the other solid stone, more of a barrier than a thoroughfare.

  “Not everything has to be difficult,” Toby said, his professorial manner clear over the daisy chained commlink pods.

  “But we have no proof. For all we know, Thomas is lying in the Santhome Church like the Christians say. This could be some guy who followed Thomas. Maybe a chronicler, which explains the book he’s holding.”

  “True. But does it matter? If this is actually Saint Thomas or not, his writing brought us here. To the place he was trying to reach. The place he wanted his fellow apostles to seek out. Somewhere he wanted to protect.”

  “Then...” Bridget steadied herself, breathed, slowed her swirling thoughts. “Should we even be here?”

  A pause. All waited for Toby’s response. Sometimes it was best not to interrupt.

  Toby said, “Think of it this way, Bridget. There’s a whole village above you, descended presumably from Kerala Christians who pilgrimaged to what they believe is their founder’s true resting place. They guard it, protect it, by simply not making a fuss. The well is just an underground stream. No clues pointed to it as an entrance.”

  “You mean it doesn’t matter what’s true?” Bridget said. “Only that they believe it, and that’s why we’re here? That’s what gives it value?”

  “It means they trusted us,” Charlie added.

  “Why would they do that?” A moment of thought, then Bridget dropped her pack off her shoulders and rummaged to find her gloves, latex like a doctor’s, only thicker, with a thin cotton outer layer.

  The walls were bare except for the unknowable language of an ancient people, one—if Toby’s historical musings were correct—predating the last Ice Age. From a time when, it was thought, humans were little more than advanced primates.

  If the body was indeed the apostle, Doubting Thomas—and they all now apparently thought of it this way—it was possibly the greatest find of the twenty-first century; if it could be proved that this language existed long before the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, it was a finding that rewrote history. It changed everything they thought they knew about human origins, and the Lost Origins Recovery Institute would be at the center of it—leading the charge into a new world of science and knowledge.

  Thomas held a book to his chest. It resembled the one stolen from the Windsor archives only much older. Perhaps the original. Perhaps the one in Valerio’s possession was a reproduction and Thomas decreed he be buried with the one he brought out of Jerusalem, the document that delivered him to the cusp of history.

  Even in the first century AD, discovering evidence of such ancient ingenuity would have been a marvel. Plainly Thomas knew it.

  Charlie said, “You okay?”

  “Sure.” Bridget snapped back to the present.

  She’d been staring at the pictographic lines, faded but indisputable. Now she took in the room properly: a thick, mottled desk in one corner suggested a place of study or work, so large and wide that if it’d been in the office of an executive, there’d be questions asked about what he was overcompensating for; the fireplace indicated that ventilation must be possible; physical ornaments varied in size, age, and expertise, from exquisitely carved elephants to waist-high vases, perhaps offerings from the priests and villagers who kept watch over their founder.

  “Valerio and his mob made the aggressive move,” Charlie said. “We came with an open hand.”

  “Hmm?” Bridget again snapped back to the here and now.

  “The reason the elders trusted us. I think we did it right. They blew stuff up.”

  Harpal and Dan hadn’t moved. This wasn’t their comfort zone. They plainly got a thrill from the achievement, but it was Bridget who took over in these instances.

  “If this is the tomb,” Harpal said, “how come Valerio isn’t here yet?”

  “He had a head start, and the full text,” Dan added. “This isn’t much of a shortcut.”

  “Could it be there’s something else he needs?” Charlie asked. “The book talked about power, about forging history.”

  Bridget stood over the body. She spoke auto
matically, absently. “Thomas split up the bangles, sent them away.”

  “Yes?”

  “So if they’re a key to some powerful knowledge, he wouldn’t have been able to get back in. The key doesn’t open Thomas’s tomb. The answer is in the full manuscript. The one Valerio has.”

  The book, the one used to transcribe Valerio’s, lay on Thomas’s chest, secured by hands crossed over the cover. Had it been there all this time, for close to two thousand years? A crucifix lay atop it between his fingers.

  They needed to know.

  Bridget pressed lightly on the surface. A brittle material, but it did not give. “Help me.”

  Dan stepped up and snapped on a pair of gloves. Wedged his hand under Thomas’s and smiled.

  “What’s funny?” Charlie asked.

  Dan stuttered at first, but blinked it away and said, “I’m holding hands with someone who probably held Jesus Christ’s hand at some point.”

  “One degree of separation from our Lord and Savior,” Bridget said. “But try and put your fanboy squeals aside a moment. I’m taking his book.”

  She used one hand on Dan’s as they released the pressure on the tome, then pulled it slowly free from the dead man’s hold. A tiny hiss emanated from the body as Dan gently placed the hands back on his chest. Bridget worried that it might snap something, betraying the villagers’ trust in them, but the mummified corpse remained undamaged.

  She shifted to the desk, its surface mostly free of dust, only a smattering of insects now growing curious about the interlopers and venturing from the shadows to investigate.

  Placing her hands on either side, Bridget appraised the book with a dry mouth and a tingle down her back. “Judging by the age, the difficulty in removing it from the apostle, and the feel of the material, I’d say it’s animal hide.”

  Per Toby’s request, Dan came alongside her to film it.

  She went on, “The pages appear to be something approximating paper but might be an organic weave, treated hair or wool possibly or something like papyrus.

  “Be careful,” Toby said.

  Bridget lifted the cover to a forty-five-degree angle. She felt the creak more than heard it so slowed her action. At a full ninety degrees, she could read the words. “It’s not a reproduction of the journal, or the one that came with the Aradia bangle.”

  “How can you tell?” Dan asked.

  “It’s Aramaic.” The ink, whatever was used on the material, was faded but mostly legible. “It’s talking about this place. Like an introduction. He calls it a ‘house of gods.’”

  “Gods plural?” Toby said. “Not Jehovah? Not Yahweh?”

  “I know the Hebrew and Aramaic words for God, Toby. This is a noun, not a personal pronoun or synonym. He’s telling the person reading this to ‘seek knowledge before power. Educate yourself. Power is dangerous without understanding.’ It’s a warning.”

  “What else?”

  Bridget angled the front leaf farther over and turned the first page. Only she didn’t turn it completely.

  As she ran her hand under that page to ease it toward the cover, whatever it was made of cracked.

  “No,” she breathed. “Wait, don’t—”

  But she could not stop the page from crumbling. Its component parts disturbed from centuries of dry, motionless slumber with the priest who had brought them all here. The words inked on the surface turned to dust, and the substance of the page fell like dandruff onto the one beneath.

  Tears peaked in Bridget’s eyes. “Oh no... I’ve... ruined it.”

  Dan reached for the book.

  She slapped his hand away, glaring daggers. “Don’t try and clean it away. Don’t even breathe. I’ve done enough damage.”

  “Bridget,” Toby said. He would have seen the whole thing. “Let’s get it vacuum packed and we’ll figure it out later.”

  Dan withdrew, but his eyes—still on the book—went wide. He inclined his head to get Bridget to return her thunderous gaze to the page. She did so.

  The tiny flakes shifted. Dancing. Some kind of vibration maybe, but then they flew sideways, congregating at the edge before fluttering to the desk.

  Bridget gasped. “What... ?”

  “Hey, look what we found,” Charlie called.

  Bridget and Dan spun to where Harpal and Charlie had opened the stone door using mini crowbars. The pair shone their lights inside, a light breeze ruffling their hair.

  The reason the disintegrated paper blew away.

  Bridget deflated, a bit of an anticlimax after all. “What are you doing touching things you don’t yet understand? You could’ve—”

  “Toby said there wouldn’t be any booby traps,” Harpal interrupted.

  “And we were bored,” Charlie said. “But, seriously, Bridge. You have to see this.”

  Bridget left the book for now, and she and Dan trotted over. Throughout their exchange, neither Charlie nor Harpal had looked away from the direction of their flashlight beams, their expressions similar to Dan’s giddy face when he found the crypt.

  Harpal crouched in the doorway, shining a powerful bulb into the darkness. “We can’t even see the end of it.”

  In her few years of exploring the ancient world with LORI, Bridget had seen many things she had thought impossible: monuments recovered from sunken ships, a half-destroyed pyramid in the Chilean rainforest, a literal treasure chest that once belonged to Rameses II—albeit two feet square, but it was still special. And the reward for finding it and delivering it to the authorities had kept the institute running for another year. She’d listened, rapt, as Toby regaled her with tales from his days with the British Archeological Institute and their expeditions to Egypt, Cambodia, Brazil, Ethiopia, and more. In the deepest corners of her imagination, she admitted stupid, impossible ambitions to herself of finding legendary places such as Atlantis, and her ultimate, ridiculous fantasy of discovering that the Library of Alexandria wasn’t really lost, its destruction somehow a ploy to preserve its secrets.

  For a fleeting moment, there in the crisscrossing beams, she thought she’d realized that latter dream. But Alexandria had first burned in 48 BC, long before Thomas and the apostles were evangelizing around the world.

  This had to be far, far older.

  Harpal whistled, amazed eyes scanning the scene. “Knowledge is power. You think this is what Valerio wants?”

  Bridget’s head spun with what she was seeing. “It’s a library. My God, what have we found?”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Again, using his journal, Valerio ran one finger over the hieroglyphs and pictograms on the slab before them while Horse held a purple light to emphasize the ridges and shapes. The militiamen’s number had dwindled to six, the others presumably posted to manage a staged defense of any incursion into what was swiftly becoming “their” domain.

  Valerio’s domain.

  Jules was just an unwilling participant. Or was he?

  There had been ample opportunities to coldcock Valerio, which would leave him and Horse to fight it out. The skirmish at the entrance hadn’t been a real test of their competitiveness, Horse holding something back to avoid killing Jules with a stray blow while Jules pranced about to humiliate the big guy rather than beat him.

  Still, he had not resisted Valerio nearly as much as he had Toby Smith. Going against instructions in Windsor, improvising alone in Rome, then betraying them to Colin Waterston in Mongolia. He’d even disobeyed their rescue orders in Mumbai. With Valerio, it was different.

  With Valerio, he agreed.

  Valerio had tempted him with the promise of knowledge. With the promise of finally answering the one question Jules never once asked in the nine years since his parents’ demise. He’d often wondered, “Where is it?” and “How can I get it?” but never “Why?”

  Why did my mom and dad die trying to protect it?

  Why did she keep it all those years?

  He never asked where it came from or what it represented. All he knew was what it meant
to him and that he wanted it back. Because it represented fairness. It was his. By birthright and by any stretch of human morality.

  Now that Valerio had piqued those other questions, they hung as heavy as those that plagued him since his fourteenth birthday. If Jules didn’t answer them now, they would drive him as hard as locating the object had if not harder. Because now, as Valerio closed his notebook and stood back from the massive rectangle of smooth stone, Jules wanted to hop and squeal, a child unable to wait for Christmas morning.

  Talk to me!

  His face, his hands, his feet, remained impassive, a dead stare to meet Valerio’s grin, his bright eyes, his sheer... joy.

  “In there.” Valerio pointed to a section of wall to the right of the smooth stone surface. He stepped forward, finger still outstretched, and placed it into a groove.

  Horse joined him, the purple light shining on Valerio’s hand, his digit having disappeared up to his second knuckle in the surface. He traced the line up and in a curve to the left, spilling dust and crawling insects, before it dropped down into a near circle, then out again and around to a circle beneath the first—an elongated figure eight, an infinity symbol on its end.

  The exact dimensions of the two bangles when attached together.

  “Batter up.” Valerio offered the two bangles.

  Jules maintained his outwardly dour demeanor, hoping his bored manner gave Valerio the impression he’d given up, when really, internally, he was popping, recalling the first time he skydived, or the night he lost his virginity to a woman five years his senior, or that moment in Prague when he first laid hands on the bangle and thought his life was about to start. This, here, was the reason for all of it, every discipline and hardship he’d endured—the firearms, the free running, the martial arts, the history lessons, the code breaking, the psychology degree; from the evasion of police on four continents, the nights in police cells on two, the many failed relationships and shunned friendships, the physical and emotional hurt every damn time he got close... it all came down to this moment.