just like a snapped-off blade. Katya put her finger out and touched it. She grasped and pulled it, but it would not budge. “Look at that silvery stuff on my fingers. That’s chromium,” she said excitedly. “The metal beneath is oxidized, but it was once high-grade steel, hand-forged. The Chinese plated their best blades with chromium to stop them rusting. This is an ancient Chinese sword blade. A fantastic find, Costas.”
“Just give me a bowl of sheep grease, then send me out into the hills,” Costas murmured. He peered closely. “It looks like someone jammed it into the rock, to break it off Maybe they needed a shorter blade.”
Jack was thinking hard. “Any idea what kind of sword?”
Katya felt along the blade. “I know exactly what kind,” she replied quietly. “A long, straight cavalry sword, a type favored by the Mongols. A type that was only really practicable on horseback, so if you were on foot and desperate for a weapon you might want to break it to make a more useful thrusting sword.”
Jack gasped. He remembered the tomb from the jungle. The warrior in the carving, the adversary of the Romans in the battle scene. The warrior with the tiger headdress. He turned to Katya. “You don’t mean a gauntlet sword, do you? A pata?”
She nodded. “I grew up with images of these swords all around me. The gauntlet was always gleaming golden, in the shape of a tiger. That’s what’s missing here. That’s why I was so stunned when you told me you had one. I knew your pata must be the sword of a tiger warrior, but I couldn’t be sure of the connection. Well, here it is in front of us. I’m certain of it. The gauntlet from this blade is the one John Howard found inside that shrine in the jungle.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Jack said.
Katya touched the blade again, and breathed out slowly. “So the legend is true,” she whispered.
“What is?” Costas said.
“Another part of the legend.” She looked up and around. Jack sensed her apprehension. “We should move away from here.” She picked up a flat stone and put it over the crack between the rocks, concealing the blade. She led them back up the hill to the ledge where they had been sitting, where she had left the book. “The legend of those who were dispatched to destroy the guardian of the tomb, the one who had transgressed,” she said. “The one who followed his prey relentlessly over mountain and through jungle, whose successors maintained the watch over the centuries, seeking that which had been taken from the tomb of their emperor. The tiger warrior.”
“And the sword?” Jack asked.
“The pata sword of the first tiger warrior was taken in battle by the raumanas, the Romans. The legend tells that when it is recovered, the tiger warrior will once again surge forward and defeat all, and find what he has been seeking.”
“Before you ask, it’s secure, locked in my cabin on Seaquest II,” Jack said.
“I can feel it again now,” Katya murmured. “What you once said to me, Jack, about walking into the past, seeing it in your mind’s eye. I felt it when I was searching among those boulders with Altamaty, looking at those rock carvings made by my ancestors. But touching that blade has done something else for me. It feels exhilarating.”
“That’s when I get frightened,” Costas murmured.
Jack turned toward the lake. Starlight speckled across its surface, like phosphorescence left by a boat’s wake, a ghostly trail from the past. He felt the tingle on his skin again. Once, an Innu hunter in the Arctic had told him that the tingle you feel in these places is the divine wind, a wind of stupendous speed that you hardly feel because the air is so thin. Another Innu had laughed, and said it was just the cold. Jack had often thought about that when he had been in high mountains. Maybe it was just dizziness, oxygen deprivation. And this time it was an uneasy feeling, something that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He looked toward the mountains to the south, a forbidding wall of rock and snow. That was where Licinius must have gone. He sensed the Roman stumbling away from this ravine, glancing at his companions as they disappeared across the lake to the east, then turning to the mountain passes, running hard, every sinew in his body straining to a breaking point. Jack turned back toward the dark ridge behind them, and looked hard. A distant throbbing became a roar, and the landing lights of a helicopter swept over the ridge as it headed down to the shoreline.
Katya got up. She turned to Costas, and gave him a steely look. “Time to go. And to find out about the Brotherhood of the Tiger. The modern version.”
Jack grinned at Costas. “You ever been to Afghanistan?”
17
This is the pilot speaking. We’re entering Afghan airspace now.”
Jack shifted and stretched, then pressed the control to raise his seat to the upright position. He was in the forward cabin of the IMU Embraer jet, and he had spent the last three hours fitfully sleeping, two and a half of them on the tarmac at Bishkek airport in Kyrgyzstan while they waited for the optimum time for departure. The flight to Feyzabad in northeast Afghanistan was only an hour and a half, and the captain had wanted to arrive at dawn and return to Bishkek as soon as they had off-loaded. An airport in Afghanistan was no place to linger, even an airport under nominal ISAF control, and the Embraer would be fueled up to return from Bishkek to pick them up as soon as the call went in.
Jack had a sketch of the inscription in the jungle tomb clutched in his hand. He looked down and saw the Latin word. Sappheiros. In antiquity, that meant lapis lazuli, and that could only mean the lapis mined in the forbidding Koran Valley, high in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. One strand of the ancient treasure trail had pointed across the lake of Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan toward the eastern shore, to the place where Jack had begun to think a boat might have gone down in a storm two thousand years ago. The other strand led deep into the heart of Afghanistan, their route now.
Jack looked at the words of the inscription again. Hic iacet Licinius optio XV Apollinaris Sacra iulium sacularia, in sappheiros nielo minium. Alta Fabia frater ad Pontus ad aelia acundus. Here lies Licinius, optio of the 15th Apollinaris legion. Guardian of the celestial jewel, in the dark sappheiros mines. The other is with Fabius, brother, across the lake toward the rising sun. So Licinius had not taken his jewel south with him into the jungle. The velpu, the sacred bamboo tube of the Koya, the safeguard taken by Howard and Wauchope from the muttadar, may have been sanctified by its association with the raumana, the one who had come to the jungle and died in the shrine. But the bamboo tube had contained only a phantom treasure. The real treasure had been hidden somewhere out here, in the wilds of Afghanistan, during Licinius’ escape south from the lake. It was somewhere in the lapis lazuli mines, where the precious veins of blue had been worked since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs.
Jack remembered what he had been thinking when he had dozed off. The valley with the mines was on a route south from Lake Issyk-Kul to India, toward the community of Roman traders half a world away that had been Licinius’ destination. Licinius might have guessed that the warriors pursuing him were after what he had taken off the Sogdian. He might have seen the odds stacked against him and decided to stash the jewel. He might have known the value of what he had taken. Perhaps the Sogdian had spoken to him of it, told him of its power if it were to be reunited with the other jewel, the one taken by Fabius across the lake. Maybe the Sogdian had spoken in desperation, hoping his life would be spared. Or maybe he had warned Licinius, told him something that made him want to be rid of his treasure. Maybe he had been told that he would be pursued relentlessly, and that the mines were the only place the jewel could be safely concealed, where the power of the crystal would be absorbed into the rock of its source. Only there, perhaps, it would no longer attract those who would come after him, who would hunt him like the tiger, as if they had some sixth sense for it.
Jack slid out into the aisle, slipped on his boots and made his way aft into the main cabin, where several window blinds were open on the port side. The pilot had taken a counterclockwise route over Tajikistan to approach Feyzabad from the west, and Jack could see the faint glimmerings of dawn over the Pamir Mountains and the bleak wasteland of the Taklamakan Desert beyond. He leaned over the seats and stared at the awesome mountain landscape below. It was a place where the obstacles to human existence appeared insurmountable, yet for those who endured it the reward was to live halfway to heaven. He stood back and made his way down the aisle to the others. Altamaty and Pradesh were sitting beside each other, talking in Russian. Jack sat opposite and poured himself a coffee from the trolley. Costas had been with them when Jack had gone to lie down, describing in detail the layout of his beloved engineering wing at the IMU campus in Cornwall. Costas had gone away to sleep as well,
