'Lars titled this property in your name,' Stephanie said, 'for a reason. He came here for a reason. Something has to be here.'
'Perhaps,' Cassiopeia noted. 'But the abbe in town told Mark that Lars found nothing. This could be more of the perpetual chases he engaged in.'
Mark shook his head. 'The cryptogram led us here. Dad was here. He didn't find anything, but he thought it important enough to buy. This has to be the place.'
Malone sat atop one of the chunks of stone and stared up at the sky. 'We have maybe five or six hours of daylight left. I suggest we make the most if it. I'm sure it gets pretty cold up here at night, and these fleece-lined jackets aren't going to be enough.'
'I brought some equipment and gear in the Rover,' Cassiopeia said. 'I assumed we could be underground, so I have light bars, flashlights, and a small generator.'
'Well, aren't you Johnny-on-the-spot,' Malone said.
'Here,' Geoffrey called out.
Malone glanced farther into the decayed priory. He'd not noticed that Geoffrey had wandered off.
They all hustled deeper into the ruin and found Geoffrey standing outside what was once a Romanesque doorway. Little remained of its craftsmanship beyond a faint image of human-headed bulls, winged lions, and a palm-leaf motif.
'The church,' Geoffrey said. 'They carved it from rock.'
Malone could see that indeed the walls beyond were not human-made, but were part of the precipice that towered above the former abbey. 'We'll need those flashlights,' he said to Cassiopeia.
'No, you won't,' Geoffrey said. 'There's light inside.'
Malone led the way in. Bees hummed in the shadows. Dusty shafts of light poured through slits cut through the rock at varying angles, apparently designed to take advantage of the drifting sun. Something caught his eye. He stepped close to one of the rock walls, hewn smooth but now bare of any decoration except a carving about ten feet above him. The crest consisted of a helmet with a swathe of linen dropping on each side of a male face. The features were gone, the nose worn smooth, the eyes blank and lifeless. On top was a sphinx. Below was a stone shield with three hammers.
'That's Templar,' Mark said. 'I've seen another like it at our abbey.'
'What's it doing here?' Malone asked.
'The Catalans who lived in this region during the fourteenth century had no love for the French king. Templars were treated with kindness here, even after the Purge. That's one reason the area was chosen as a refuge.'
The ponderous walls rose high to a rounded ceiling. Frescoes surely once adorned everything, but not a remnant remained. Water leaking in through the porous rock had long ago erased all artistic vestiges.
'It's like a cave,' Stephanie said.
'More a fortress,' Cassiopeia noted. 'This could well have been the abbey's last line of defense.'
Malone had been thinking the same thing. 'But there's a problem.' He motioned to the dim surroundings. 'No other way out.'
Something else caught his attention. He stepped close and focused on the wall, most of which rose in shadow. He strained hard. 'I wish we had one of those flashlights.'
The others approached.
Ten feet up he saw the faint remnants of letters roughly hewn on the gray stone.
'P, R, N, V, I, R,' he asked.
'No,' Cassiopeia said. 'There's more. Another I, maybe an E and another R. '
He strained in the dimness to interpret the writing.
PRIER EN VENIR.
Malone's mind came alive. He recalled the words at the center of Marie d'Hautpoul's gravestone. REDDIS REGIS CELLIS ARCIS. And what Claridon said about them in Avignon.
Reddis means 'to give back, to restore something previously taken.' Regis derives from rex, which is king. Cella refers to a storeroom. Arcis stems from arx – a stronghold, fortress, citadel.
The words had seemed meaningless at the time. But perhaps they simply needed rearranging.
Storeroom, fortress, restore something previously taken, king.
By adding a few prepositions, the message might be, In a storeroom, at a stronghold fortress, restore something previously taken from the king.
And the arrow that stretched down the center of the gravestone, between the words, starting at the top with the letters P-S and ending at PR?-CUM.
Pr?-cum. Latin for 'pray to come.'
He stared again at the letters scratched into the rock.
French for 'pray to come.'
He smiled and told them what he thought. 'The abbe Bigou was a clever one, I'll give him that.'
'That arrow on the gravestone,' Mark said, 'had to be significant. It's dead in the center, in a place of prominence.'
Malone's senses were now alert, his mind surging through the information, and he started to take notice of the floor. Many of the flagstones were gone, the remaining cracked and misshapen, but he noticed a pattern. A series of squares, framed by a narrow stone line, ran from front to back and left to right.
He counted.
In one of the framed rectangles he tallied seven stones across, nine down. He counted another section. The same. Then another.
'The floor is arranged seven, nine,' he told them.
Mark and Henrik moved toward the altar, themselves counting. 'And there are nine sections from the rear door to the altar,' Mark said.
'And seven go across,' Stephanie said, as she finished finding a final floor section near an outer wall.
'Okay, we seem to be in the right place,' Malone said. He thought again about the headstone. Pray to come. He gazed up at the French words scratched into the stone, then down at the floor. Bees continued to buzz near the altar. 'Let's get those light bars and that generator in here. We need to see what we're doing.'
'I think we also need to stay tonight,' Cassiopeia said. 'The nearest inn is in Elne, thirty miles away. We should camp here.'
'We have supplies?' Malone asked.
'We can get them,' she said. 'Elne is a fairly good-sized town. We can buy what we need there without drawing any attention. But I don't want to leave.'
He could see that none of the others wanted to go, either. An excitement was stirring. He could feel it, too. The riddle was no longer some abstract concept, impossible to understand. Instead, the answer lay somewhere around them. And contrary to what he'd told Cassiopeia yesterday, he wanted to find it.
'I'll go,' Geoffrey said. 'Each of you needs to stay and decide what we do next. It's for you, not me.'
'We appreciate that,' Thorvaldsen said.
Cassiopeia reached into her pocket and produced a wad of euros. 'You'll need money.'
Geoffrey took the funds and smiled. 'Just give me a list and I'll be back by nightfall.'
FIFTY-EIGHT
MALONE RAKED THE FLASHLIGHT'S BEAM ACROSS THE INSIDE OF the church, searching the rock walls for
