stuck a flashlight in his belt. Climbing the first two steps, he swung the hook on a rope, tossing it upward. He was rewarded with the dull clunk of metal on stone as the hook fell back.
Two more attempts and he gave up. 'Shaft's too narrow; I can't swing the rope with enough velocity to get to the top.'
Gurt tied one end of rope to her belt. 'We climb, then.' Lang shook his head. 'I climb. If I fall, I want to be sure there's someone to drive me to the nearest hospital.'
'If you fall from there, a hospital you will not need,' she observed.
Lang tried to ignore the truth in her observation as he sat so that his back was against one wall and his feet against the opposite. Using hands and feet pressed against the stone, he began to work his way upward and then stopped, reaching to the back of his belt.
He pulled out the Glock, holding it where she could see it. 'I need to get rid of all the weight I can. Take this.'
She caught it neatly, stuffing it into the back of her pants. She watched until he was nearly indistinguishable in the shadows above her head, playing out rope as he climbed. Soon she could mark his progress only by the grunts and exhalations of breath echoing down the shaft. Finally, it was quiet.
'Lang?',
There was a tug on the rope. 'Gimme a minute. There! I've secured the rope to a boulder. Now I can pull you up.'
Although she knew he could not see, she shook her head. ''A pull I do not need. I went through the same training as you and am even younger than you. I can climb myself.'
There was a properly abashed silence from above as she began.
The top of the shaft opened onto what Lang guessed had been the courtyard. The destruction of the Cathars' redoubt had been complete: Cut stones were strewn in a semicircle, few of which still rested on another. The keep's tower had presented more of a problem, probably because of the attackers' impatience with tearing it down starting at the top. Instead, it looked as though it had been split lengthwise. Behind the courtyard yawned the mouth of a cave, not particularly deep, but as tall as Lang guessed the keep had been, located so that, once encircled by the outer wall, the defenders of this hill would have had a fortress assailable from only one direction.
As their guide had said yesterday, part of the top of the hill had fallen in, leaving the center of the cavern open to the sky and filling the interior with rubble of white stone. Anything that had been under the collapsing part of the cave's roof was going to remain there.
Without spoken agreement, Gurt and Lang separated, each slowly walking along the inner perimeter of the wall and into the shadowy darkness of the cave. Since the collapse, the white stone sides had become streaked, crumbling under the relentless force of the elements. Vines had managed to take root in what appeared to be solid rock. If this was the cave shown in the photograph on Blucher's CD, any inscriptions on its walls were going to-be difficult to find. In another year or two, exfoliation would obliterate them forever.
Lang swept his light from the top of the cave downward and across the rubble-strewn floor. Twice he stopped, thinking the beam had picked up what he was looking for, only to find that the natural fissures in the walls could briefly assume the appearance of human-made letters just as rocks on the floor took on the look of handmade objects. If Skorzeny had filled four truckloads from this cave, either he was taking largely geological specimens or the cave had deteriorated greatly in the last sixty years.
Problem was, which was it?
'Lang, here!' Gurt's voice had the tinge of an echo.
Impatiently, Lang picked his way around piles of debris to where she stood, her light steady on a section of wall no more than four or five feet above the floor. There was no doubt he was looking at man-made letters over holes carved into the stone.
'Is like a bee, bee…' Gurt was pointing to rows of evenly spaced holes cut into the rock.
'Honeycomb,' Lang supplied, forgetting the inscription for a moment as he inserted a fist into one of the holes.
It was about two feet deep and perhaps ten inches across. Gurt looked puzzled. 'A rack for wine?'
Lang shook his head. 'Wine would have been somewhere underground to keep it as cool as possible. This would have been a library.'
'For books?'
'For scrolls, I think.'
'They did not have books?'
Lang nodded absently. 'Of course they did. You've seen those beautifully illuminated Bibles. But in ancient times, libraries, like the one at Alexandria, would have had racks like these where scrolls could be stored in clay tubes.'
The mystery of what Skorzeny may have needed trucks to haul away may have been answered, but that raised an even more perplexing question, one Lang voiced.
'Problem is, why would Cathars in the thirteenth century be writing on loose parchment when the rest of Europe had started using bindings?'
Gurt pointed to the carved letters. 'There the explanation may be.'
He reached out and touched some sort of growth that obscured part of the inscription. 'We're gonna have to cut this away.'
Gurt grabbed several sprigs and started to pull before Lang could grab her arm. 'Cut it, not pull it loose. Shallow as those roots are, they have to be widespread. Yank them hard enough and the face of the rock will crumble.'
Nodding her understanding, she handed him her flashlight and took a small knife from her pocket. Where had she gotten it? He had never seen it before and, harmless enough, it was not something that would have cleared airport security. Whatever its source, it sliced cleanly through each branch and root. In minutes, the wall in front of Lang was clear of vegetation.
Lang stepped back, the better to play his flashlight across the lines of letters. His first impression was of precision. This inscription was not some ancient graffiti scratched into rock but the measured characters of a professional mason. Time, moisture, and other natural forces had effectively erased several letters, their former presence noted only by blank spaces.
IMPERATORIULIANACCUSAT (-) REBILLISREXUS IUDEAIUMIUBITREGI (-)UNUSDEISEPELIT
'Julian, Emperor…,' he read aloud. Gurt followed the flashlight's beam with interest. 'Who?'
Without looking away, Lang said, 'Julian. Roman emperor in the late fourth century. In Christian writing, he's always referred to as 'Julian the Apostate.' He was the first non-Christian emperor since Constantine, the last pagan, reinstituted the persecution of the followers of Christ.'
Gurt looked closer, playing her own light along the lines. 'This was here cut by a Roman emperor?'
Absorbed by the antiquity of what he was reading for the second time, Lang shook his head. 'Most likely at his order.' He pointed to a word. ' 'IUBIT,' he commands. I doubt Julian ever came here after he took the throne. Before then, he was governor of this part of Gaul. He wasn't emperor long. An inscription attributed to him is rare.'
'How do we know it wasn't actually written here by the Cathars? Anyone could have, er, forged such writing. It could be a forgery. Then what?'
'Send it to Dan Rather.'
'Who?'
'Never mind.'
Lang frowned. Either he was misreading the Latin or something was wrong.
A light breeze hummed across the opening above while he ran his fingers along the words.
'What does it say?' Gurt asked.
'I'm not sure. I can't tell, for instance, whether this word, accusat, is missing the ending. It's chipped off. I can't tell if someone is making an accusation, made an accusation, or of whom. Likewise, the word regi. It has something to do with a palace, a feminine, first-declension noun. But without the last two or three letters, I can only guess if whatever Julian's talking about belongs to the palace, is in the palace, and so forth.'
Gurt understood that the endings of nouns denoted not only the gender of the thing in question but also
