snatch it. Did she know what it was?
But just as she strained to snatch it, Aurora’s horse screamed and pitched forward, launching her over the animal’s neck. Horse and rider crashed into the artefact I’d found with a spray of mud, golden script shattered into golden confetti. Antique wood and flakes of wisdom went flying in yellow destruction, Aurora wailing in outrage as she slid in a scrim of ruin. The horse was on its back, writhing in agony, filaments of gold on its hooves. And then Namida reared up on the other side, heaving Magnus’s axe over her head, and brought it down on the pony’s throat, killing it.
She’d used the abandoned weapon to bring the horse down.
Aurora, scrabbling on her hands and knees, went for the other woman with a shriek of outrage, the broken rapier still in hand, slashing. Namida’s grip slipped as the sword scraped on the axe handle and both weapons slid away.
My rifle!
I yanked the spearhead from my calf, roaring at the pain, and crawled across loose gravel and mud to get my weapon. The two women were wrestling in the dirt, grappling for Aurora’s broken sword.
‘Namida, get clear so I can take a shot!’ I hollered.
The Indian woman shifted her grip to Aurora’s forearms, grunted, and heaved, throwing Lady Somerset and the broken rapier to one side and then bending to the other to give me a clear line of fire. Sprawled awkwardly, I raised my rifle and aimed. Aurora was prone on the ground too, not the best target, and I had but one shot. Careful! Sight, stock to shoulder, breathe, hold, squeeze …
I fired.
And something came up in my aiming point just as I did so. The bullet pinged and ricocheted harmlessly.
Aurora Somerset had lifted Magnus’s bloody axe as a desperate shield, and by the worst luck I’d hit it. The noblewoman flashed a smile of wild triumph.
And then she leapt on Namida like a tigress before the Indian woman could react, hauling my lover’s head back by the hair and holding the rapier to her breast.
‘No!’ My cry was utter desperation. I was too crippled to rush them in time, my rifle would take a full painful minute to reload, and I was too far to throw the lance. I was helpless, and my enemy knew it.
‘I want you to grieve as I’ll grieve,’ Aurora spat. ‘I want you to remember your squaw as I remember poor Cecil.’ And then she rammed the sword stub home, screeching in victory like a banshee as she sawed into the poor girl’s chest.
I’ve seen more than my share of horror, but Aurora was right, this one seared into me. Namida’s eyes were as wide as a frightened calf’s as the metal bit, her heart exploded and gushed, and the blood ran over Aurora’s hands to make her some kind of monstrous Lady Macbeth. Namida’s high cry was choked off by the stabbing, her mouth open in final surprise, and then the blood poured down her deerskin blouse and her eyes rolled and glazed.
I remembered her first words.
‘Save me.’
My heart fell through the earth.
‘You monster!’ I roared. I grabbed the lance and began crawling towards this witch whom I’d somehow been enamored with, this wicked harridan who’d help cause the death of all my friends. Magnus was right, there is emotional pain that is worse than death, and I wanted to either finish Aurora or have her finish me. ‘Come on me, then! Let’s end this, now!’
She reared upward, pitching Namida’s dead body aside like a sack of potatoes, and smiled the grin of the devil herself. ‘What did you read?’
‘What?’ The question was so unexpected that I stopped crawling towards her for a moment, the leak from my leg an undulating scarlet snake behind me. I could feel the slow throb of my wound.
‘How much of it did you see?’
She was talking about the golden sheet and its message, I realised. Somehow she knew it – and the Templar bodies – might be there.
‘You … knew?’
‘What did it say, Ethan?’ she asked again, her broken sword dripping with my lover’s blood. ‘What was the message?’
‘You think I’d tell
She laughed then, the laugh of the insane, and kicked at the fragments that her horse’s tumble had scattered. ‘You will. You will because I will
‘Wait! Come back, damn it! End this!’
A laugh again. ‘Oh, Ethan, we are nowhere near the end. Once we saw the map, the old texts began to make sense. What we’d whispered about in the Rite.’
‘Aurora!’
She twirled the haft of the rapier like her parasol.
So I hurled the lance. It fell well short, halfway between her and me, and she could have turned and rushed me then before I crawled to retrieve it. She could have tormented me like a wounded bull, darting in to deliver wound after wound, until, exhausted and depleted, I bled into the mud and expired.
But she didn’t. She didn’t look back, and said nothing more. She just kept walking away from the tree and out of its crater, a swing to her hips, as if something satisfying had at last been settled. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d whistled.
She wanted me alive.
She wanted me to follow what I’d read.
And by the time I crawled back to my rifle and reloaded it, Aurora Somerset had disappeared into the trees.
CHAPTER FOURTY-FOUR
What came next I recall only dimly. I was in shock from blood loss, electrical discharge, grief, the plague that had ravaged the Indian village, amazement that the hammer had existed at all, and confusion. What message had I come away with? A Latin script kicked into oblivion by the hooves of a dying pony. What did it mean? I hadn’t the faintest idea. What did Aurora think I knew? I had even less notion of that. Where had she gone? She’d passed into the trees like mist, as if she’d never existed.
I was utterly alone. I saw no Indians, no buffalo, no smoke.
I bound up my wounded leg as best I could and drank some dirty water from one of the puddles. Rain continued to fall.
Then I knelt and dug three places in the mud to bury my Pierre, Little Frog, and Namida, using Magnus’s axe as a crude hoe. Good farmland, I noted as I scraped. Good land for Jefferson’s yeoman farmers. A good place for democracy.
What a price my friends and I paid for that geographical information.
And Napoleon? This was a place that could swallow armies.
I think I had an idea what should become of Louisiana.
So did my thoughts blessedly wander. Then it was done, three holes together. Namida first, laid as gently as I could, pushing her eyes closed. Then brave and burnt Little Frog, who’d seized the god’s fire to avenge little Pierre. And then Pierre himself, his clothes slightly scorched, his skin raw from the cruel lashings of the accursed Cecil Somerset. I’d failed to protect any of them.
As the rain came down I mounded dirt on the first and the second and began on the third, scooping handfuls to hurl on the body.
Suddenly Pierre coughed and spat.
‘What are you doing, donkey?’
I reeled back from his grave as if the devil himself had spoken. By Franklin’s lightning! And then the
