tossed like so many broken marionettes into a dark corner of a child’s cupboard. There was no obvious facility for hygiene, not even a hole in the floor, which was mostly covered with a thick layer of black earth no doubt made from their own waste. The limbs on some of the skeletons had been torn away, the dead feeding the living for a little while longer.
Holliday shivered; the sounds from this place would have been like the moaning of some hellish choir, the sounds fading with each passing day until there was only silence. There would have been no hope here: no hope of redemption, no hope of food or water, only a slow, hideous death. The cell Holliday stared into was the very definition of horror and evil personified, and the man who ordered its construction had been without compassion and had no love in his cold heart for any living thing on the planet. Reflexively, from an almost forgotten past, Holliday made the sign of the cross and whispered the formulas as he did so.
“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.” Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that Eddie was doing the same thing.
“We have no time for this foolishness, Colonel Holliday; we have much more important things to concern us now,” said Genrikhovich, his voice a little petulant. “We have better things to do than mourn the deaths of prisoners five hundred years ago.”
“Whatever else they were or might have been, they were men once, and their bones deserve a little respect from the living.”
“We won’t be living much longer if you insist on dawdling and saying your prayers, Colonel. I can assure you of that.”
Eddie dropped a big hand on Holliday’s shoulder. “You are a good man,
Holliday closed the door to the cell but he left the bar off; the dead men had been imprisoned long enough; now at least their spirits could be free. When he’d shut the door he went after the others down the low-ceilinged passageway.
The passage seemed to go on forever, sometimes curving, sometimes dipping down or up, depending on the terrain, but by Holliday’s calculation they were always heading in roughly the same direction. Ivanov answered the unspoken question.
“We are traveling south. Most of the research points to the Tainitskaya Tower, or the Secret Tower, as it is sometimes called, since it is the oldest.”
“Is that the only reason?” Holliday asked.
“No. It is thought that the Tainitskaya Tower also had two tunnels, one leading to the nearby bank of the Moskva River, the other leading across Red Square to the cathedral.”
“Was any such tunnel ever found?”
“They filled in the tunnel to the river in the 1930s, when the tower was completely sealed. They never found the second tunnel,” said Ivanov.
It was well past midnight before they reached their objective, at least according to Ivanov’s GPS, programmed on the basis of Father Ignatius Stelletskii’s eighty-year-old maps of the underground city. They stood in a small circular chamber with a rib-vaulted ceiling and finally stripped off their respirators and stepped out of their Tyvek suits.
At the base of each rib in the chamber’s vault there was a carved rosette, and beneath the rosette a pillar reaching to the dressed-stone floor. Twelve ribs, twelve rosettes and twelve pillars arranged in a circle around a raised stone plinth set in the middle of the floor.
Around the plinth a deep circle had been carved into the floor, surrounding it, carved wavering rays of light extending outward from the circle like a great, flaming sun with the raised dais at its center: an altar. On the plinth was a stone sarcophagus of a knight carrying a long shield, and on the shield a carved Templar cross. The fourth Templar, who carried the Sword of the South, Octanis, the last of the swords sent forth from Castle Pelerin. In the knight’s mailed fist he clutched a broadsword, and along the blade there was an inscription:
YA OHRANNIK VELICHAISHIE SOKROVISHCHA MIRA.
“It’s Old Russian,” said Ivanov. “It says, ‘I guard the greatest treasures of the world.’”
“A Templar tomb,” murmured Genrikhovich.
“I’m not so sure,” said Holliday.
Genrikhovich snorted disdainfully. “Don’t be absurd. The stone effigy is carrying a shield with a Templar cross blazoned on it.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you about the stone carving; I’m just disputing the fact that it’s a tomb.”
“What else could it be?”
Holliday, who’d seen something much like this not too long ago in the middle of Ethiopia’s Lake Tana, just smiled. He turned to Eddie. “Lend me a hand, will you?”
“Of course,
“On three, push as hard as you can,” instructed Holliday.
“What on earth are you doing?” Genrikhovich asked.
“Ready, one, two and three!” Holliday heaved and Eddie joined him. At first nothing happened, but finally the whole stone structure began to rotate on its axis, rumbling as it followed the narrow circular track in the floor.
At forty-five degrees from its original position the plinth and its stone figure of the Templar Knight revealed a stone staircase, its steps disappearing into the darkness.
They went down the stairway, one after another, the beams from their miner’s lamps playing over what lay ahead. Twelve steps and then a landing, and twelve more steps before a second landing and another ninety-degree turn. There were four sets of twelve steps, eventually turning through a full three hundred and sixty degrees and exiting into a strange, twelve-sided room, its ceiling an oddly shaped barrel vault high above them. In each of the twelve narrow walls was an equally narrow door.
Ivanov slipped off his backpack and unclipped the big eight-volt light from it. He switched on the powerful lamp and the room was suddenly brilliantly illuminated.
“It’s magnificent!” Holliday whispered.
The floor of the room was made of mosaic tile, its colors as brilliant as the day it had been constructed. The design was an arcane circular device surrounding a seven-pointed star that in turn enclosed another circle and another star. In the circular ribbons there were inscribed letters and words in an arcane language that might have been Aramaic or ancient Hebrew. In the center of the second seven-pointed star, a design depicting four swords had been picked out in the mosaic, their points not quite touching, the space between them a perfect cross.
Holliday bent down and ran his fingers over the mosaic. The designs hadn’t been done in ceramic, as he’d first thought, but in semiprecious stones. The whole floor was made up of obsidian, jade, agate amethyst and opal, garnet, moonstone and amber. The whole floor glittered and flashed in the light from the big lamp. Holliday stood again and stared.
“I think it’s a pentangle of some sort,” answered Holliday. “A magician’s symbol.”
Genrikhovich shook his head. “Not a magician, but an alchemist-in this case Basilius Valentinus, the canon of the Benedictine Priory of Sankt Peter in Erfurt, Germany, a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible and well-known to him. The design is the Key of Solomon; in this case instead of the Hebrew name of God being in the center it shows the four swords of Pelerin.”
“Aos, Hesperios, Polaris and Octanis,” supplied Holliday.
“Quite right, Colonel,” said Genrikhovich.
“Of which one is missing,” put in Ivanov. “Octanis, Sword of the South.”
Genrikhovich smiled knowingly. “Octanis is not missing, Father Ivanov. It is here, where it has been hidden for the past five hundred years.”
“Where?” Holliday asked flatly.
“Look around you and choose,” said the Russian, a faintly condescending and aristocratic tone in his voice.
