Mocking his earlier attempt to plumb its secrets.
“ Failure,” he mutters…
… as men holding torches and descend a dark stairway, passing two huge statues and stand before a wall etched with seven symbols.
He climbs back up the stairs, having commanded his men to turn the symbols, hoping what the old Chinese philosopher told him about the alchemical combinations will work.
But while the door opens, it isn’t enough. Only a trick, a ruse. A test-one that has found him wanting. Forty men die. Some burned to death, others drowned. Forty is enough. The Pharos is too strong, and Temujin is not worthy-not yet. But he will be. When the world is his, when the keys are his. Then, maybe then, he will try again. He will truly earn the Way into the Pharos, the path to the ultimate treasure.
So now he rides, his horse kicking up sand and creating dervishes that his followers burst through and scattered. Finally, he arrives at a small collection of huts, altars, stones and markers.
He dismounts before his horse even stops, running ahead, outpacing his men who finally catch up with him at an unassuming hillock under a mass of large stones no different from dozens of others.
Temujin reaches into his burka and pulls out a scroll, which he promptly unrolls, revealing a crudely drawn map. “Here!” he shouts. “It is just as I drew in my vision. Here, beside six other markers, between two blank obelisks.
“ Here,” he says again, turning to his men, “is Alexander’s tomb. Dig! Keep anything of value you find, except for the stone, the one that looks like this.” He reaches for the cord around his neck and lifts the charm he took from Koneurgenc, the one from Cyrus’s tomb, a tiny piece of green stone shaped like a pyramid. “It will be on the body, around his neck maybe, or set in a ring. Bring it to me.”
Temujin steps away.
He kneels on the hot sand, and while his men work he meditates on his life, his future. His destiny.
Alexander Crowe awoke in the back of the jeep just as it came to a grinding halt.
Xavier Montross looked back, smiling broadly. “We’re here!”
Khenti Province, Inner Mongolia, 7:30 P.M.
As their guide drove them over the rough terrain, Montross stared with feigned interest at the scenery, the lush grasslands, the forests of pine, the flocks of sheep and cows, the lone camel. All the while, he had his thoughts primed for just one thing.
And while he waited, he occasionally reached inside the buttons of his shirt to feel the small triangular stone set as a charm on a silver necklace. He felt its power, sensed it tremble at his touch, the same as the Emerald Tablet. One and the same material, he had realized with excitement right away, after Nina had delivered it from the Petroneum. One of three just like it.
The other two were calling, reaching out for their brother.
After sixty miles in the jeep, cutting through rough grasslands, crossing meandering streams and navigating boggy marshes, they stepped out under a darkening sky and stretched, gazing up on the rising hillocks and toward the mountain range, and then back the way they had come over the vast steppes leading back to the Mongolian capital.
They had arrived at Burkhan Khaldun.
Their driver and guide, Nilak Borogol, led them to an encampment of a half-dozen felt tents- yurts as they were called. “This was all part of the Ikh Khorig, the Great Taboo,” he explained. “For centuries, this one hundred- square-mile area was defended ruthlessly. Trespassers were turned away-or killed.” He made a smug face. “Now, the government permits pilgrimages, and even allows tourists and foreigners entrance.”
“Foreigners like us?” Alexander said in a low voice.
Montross cut off Nilak’s response with a question. “Forbidden because the tombs of the great Khans are supposed to be here?” He spoke in a rushed voice, trying to sound like a naive tourist. “Genghis, his sons Jin and Odai, and grandson, Kublai Khan?”
Nilak smiled, and in the dying light over the cooling winds, Montross could see the tattoo just peeking out over the guide’s sweater. “Yes,” Nilak said. “But it is sacred for many reasons. Its closeness to the great Blue Heaven, for one. Its majestic scenery, the life-giving rivers: the Kherlen and the Odon. But also it was here that Temujin, Chinggis Khan himself, while still a boy, evaded the vengeance of his father’s killers. The mountain sheltered him among its forests and hills, preserving him for his destiny.”
“So it was a place he never forgot,” Montross said.
“His father was killed,” Alexander said, repeating what he had heard. “And he survived? Now I see what made him so cruel to everybody.” He shivered in his hooded red sweatshirt.
“Not cruel,” said Nilak defensively, “merely just. He was no sadist. While other conquerors delighted in the torture and debasement of their defeated enemies, Temujin only doled out justice to those who had defied him. He once said to the sultan of the Kharmezhm Empire, ‘You have greatly sinned upon the world and your own people. Why else would God have sent someone like me to destroy you?’”
Alexander smiled, then gave Montross a cold look. “I like that. A lot.”
“Yes, it’s all very Homeric.” Montross pulled back strands of his red hair into a neat ponytail. “But still a little paranoid, right? He made sure no one could ever find his grave, venerate his body.”
“Oh, we venerate him,” Nilak said, fingers balling into fists. “Through his relics, his statues. His mausoleums. There are specific holy days of worship. Incense and songs, rituals.”
“And what of his body?” Montross glanced at the hills and the steep ascent of the sacred mountain before them, rising to a flattened peak about seven thousand feet high. “Where is it?”
Nilak regarded him coolly as the breezes let up. “No one knows.”
“But there are many theories, right?” Montross’s voice had lost its naivete. “And these other camps here- Americans? Come looking for the same thing?”
“They have gone,” Nilak said with a dose of satisfaction. “Last month, and left their tents, some of their supplies. Gone the way of the Japanese archaeologists in the 1990s, who brought their ground-penetrating radar, their satellite survey maps and their tools, and found nothing. Some graves, but only of those more recent burials.”
Xavier turned his face to the mountain, listening to the wind sizzling through the firs. “They were looking in the wrong spot.”
He gazed at the deceptively difficult ascent, to be undertaken only with practiced horses who could navigate the steep rocky hillsides. “The Wall, right? Almsgivers Wall. Discovered by that Japanese team and dating to a much older era. It was the only area the government permitted them to search. They weren’t allowed on the peak or at the southern area called the Threshold, where hundreds of stone piles remain and lingering traces of a temple can be seen. And, what of other requests by similar, well-funded projects? Teams hoping to use satellite magnetometry to search for subsurface disturbances in the soil, a technique that would indicate areas that might have ditches-or tombs carved out of the ground? What about those? Why are the permissions not coming? What are they hiding?”
Nilak’s eyes turned cold, the blue leeching out into black, mirroring the great expanse of cloudless sky overhead. “Who are you, sir?”
Montross spread out his arms, smiling innocently. “Just a man and his son, out for a grand hike into history.”
Nilak stared at Alexander, considered the boy for a moment, then raised a hand, clenching his fingers into fists. At once, two Mongolian men emerged from the nearest tent.
Both had AK-47s slung over their shoulders, weapons which they promptly unhooked and turned toward Montross as they approached.
Montross noted the tattoos on their necks. “Ah,” he said, “the Darkhad come to greet us.”
Nilak held out a restraining hand and his men paused. A dog whined from inside the nearest tent, sounding more like a wolf, and Montross wondered if there were more men inside.
“You’ve come for the Great Khanite, the valley of the Khans,” said Nilak. “It was obvious the moment you landed in Ulaan Baatar. And your son here is no son. Although, he bears some resemblance.”
Alexander frowned. “What?”
