The Shards of Heaven (41 page)

“Pullo,” Hannah asked, turning in his direction, “would you mind helping here?”

The big man grinned, seemingly glad to be doing something he knew how to do. Handing his lantern to one of the other men, he stepped up to the rock handle that she had exposed and gripped it. After Hannah gave him an encouraging nod, he began to pull.

Pullo strained, gritting his teeth. His thick arms bulged, the veins wrapped round them standing out like tightening ropes. His jaw clenched, and sweat appeared among the thinning gray hairs atop his forehead.

At last, the hidden door began to pull outward. It came slowly at first, groaning as stone rubbed on stone, but then it opened faster as momentum shifted in Pullo's favor. Little tendrils of dust misted down from its edges, scattering on the floor.

Hannah held a lantern through as soon as there was room. “It goes on,” she said, barely able to contain her thrill. “I see steps.”

Pullo pulled the door open far enough that even he could get through, then stopped. He was panting, his arms looking loose and tired, but he was smiling proudly. Caesarion patted him on the back. “Well done, my friend,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” said Pullo. Then he retrieved his own lantern and motioned for Caesarion to follow Hannah and Jacob through the door. Only when everyone was through did the big man pull the door shut behind them. It swung more easily now.

The passage beyond was, as Hannah had seen, very short, quickly encountering a flight of stone stairs that reached up into the darkness. They crept up the steps almost reverently.

“There are no seams,” Pullo whispered. “No tool marks. Nothing.”

Caesarion looked around. The walls, the ceiling, even the floor—everything was perfectly smooth, yet it appeared to be natural, without signs of the workings of men.

“The power of the Shard,” Jacob said in wonderment. “The Ark controls earth above all other things, just as the Trident controls water. This was built by its power. We must be very close.”

As he spoke, they reached the end of the stairs, their lantern lights pushing back the darkness of a chamber that appeared to be a perfect, featureless cube, perhaps a dozen paces on a side. In the middle of it, set high upon a three-tiered dais and glinting the light of their feeble oil lamps back to them in shimmers, stood the Ark.

Caesarion had read the stories of the Ark, but whatever his expectations were upon actually seeing it, they were surpassed by the reality before him. The Ark sat broad to them, its acacia-wood sides—angled ever-so-slightly inward from the base to the gold-trimmed top—gleamed as if freshly polished, covered over with ornate twists of metallic vines and leaves. At the center of the side facing them was the very same symbol that was upon the pendants of the guardians: a triangle, pointed downward like a flipped pyramid, set atop a perfect circle cut through by a horizontal line across its bottom third. On each end of its top sat two small statues, one wrought of silver and the other of what appeared to be the same clean gold: elegant beings that knelt facing each other, heads bowed in reverence, the wings sprung from their backs stretched out, feathered tips straining to touch over what appeared to be a black disk beneath them. To Caesarion's eyes they appeared Egyptian in design, embodiments of the goddess Maat. From where he stood their closer wings were lowered, the back ones raised, as if they meant to frame something in the empty space above the Ark—as if, he thought on reflection, they were offering a seat between them.

Hannah, Jacob, and the other guardians instinctively knelt. Caesarion followed suit, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that even Pullo did the same. Bowing his head, Jacob began to chant in a language Caesarion did not know, his voice smooth and strong in devotion. The rest of the guardians joined in his song, a building pulse of ancient and worshipful humility whose power Caesarion could recognize even if he didn't know the words behind it. He closed his eyes and let the chant flow through him like a low hum in his chest. A small, absent part of him noted how
right
it all felt at this moment, as if it tapped into some vestigial part of his own being that had always been there even though he'd known it not, while the greater part of him just swam away on the rising tide of the sound, unthinking of anything but this moment of prayer and the vast, unfathomable power of the One God.

Only when the last note was done did he open his eyes and see that Shushu had not bowed with the rest of them. He'd instead walked forward and mounted the three steps of the dais, moving around the Ark to stand behind it, facing them, his hands reaching out as if he might embrace the twin beings on its top.

Caesarion shouted at him to stop, but it was too late. Smiling, Shushu gripped the Ark and closed his eyes.

For a moment nothing happened. The guardians remained kneeling, though Caesarion could see that Hannah and Jacob were looking up, watching the Egyptian. Pullo stood as if he might run forward and pull the guard down off the dais, but then he stopped and stared as Shushu began to tremble and shake. His eyes opened, wide in shock, and his face suddenly twisted in voiceless agony. Trickles of red appeared at the corners of his mouth.

Caesarion felt something like a cold wind pulling toward the Ark, and it roused him at last to shake himself from his own paralysis and stand, thinking he might pull Shushu's hands away. Yet even as he stood there was a muted but terrible popping that reminded him, with sickening revulsion, of the sound of a ripe grape being crushed between fingers. The Egyptian's eyes rolled, bulged, and darkened toward black. He vomited a rush of bright blood. Then, before Caesarion could take a step, Shushu was flung back off the Ark with a resounding boom that Caesarion felt in his chest. The Egyptian flew through the air in a blur, striking the far wall of the stone chamber with the sound of shattering twigs before collapsing to the floor in a boneless heap.

Pullo and Caesarion rushed forward to the Egyptian, kneeling to look for any sign of life. There was none. The whole of his body was contorted with the appearance of pain and death. The air that hung about him smelled of blood and bone.

Hannah had stood and walked deliberately across the chamber to look down upon Shushu's remains. Her face was impassive. “It's said among our scriptures that the Ark is death to those who are unworthy,” she said. “I think it means that it destroys those unable to control its power.”

“But how can anyone know without trying?” Pullo asked, holding one of Shushu's wrists with a look of revulsion that Caesarion would not have imagined him capable of feeling.

Hannah shrugged. “I do not know. If any man had such knowledge of the Shards, it has not been passed on. It's not our place to be tempted with the power of the divine. It has always been thus.”

Caesarion looked down at the broken man before them. His stomach churned with anger, grief, and horror. And guilt, too, he decided: guilt because the dead man had been there only because of him, guilt because the Egyptian was dead while he still lived, and guilt because he knew that they would soon walk away from the corpse, moving on to the matters of the living. “What about Shushu?”

“We can do nothing for him now,” Jacob said, coming forward to join them. “Only the Ark matters. And we cannot take it back to the Serapeum. Unless your friend has failed, your boat will be close at hand soon.”

“Vorenus won't fail,” Pullo said.

“I hope not,” Hannah said. Behind them, the guards had found two long poles laid out to either side of the dais, and they were fitting them carefully through thick rings at the corners of the Ark's base, in order to move it without touching it.

Caesarion looked around at the featureless chamber. “How will we get the Ark to the sea?”

Hannah looked up from Shushu's corpse to the blank wall of stone. “We go through the door,” she said, pointing forward.

Pullo stood and ran his fingers across the smooth surface. “Another hidden door?”

“It is said to be based on the designs of Archimedes,” Jacob said. “It can only open from this chamber. Your friend Didymus would've liked to see it, I should think.”

“That he would have,” Caesarion agreed, at last standing to join them. “I can see nothing. How does it open?”

Hannah set her hand against the wall, leaned against it ever so slightly. “Archimedes was a very clever man,” she said. “Just push.”

There was a clicking sound from within the stone. Then, a few heartbeats later, it repeated. Then again, faster this time. And again and again, speeding up until they heard the sound of metal gears winding into motion. At last the stone wall vibrated and split vertically along a hidden seam. Tendrils of dust spilled out, and all at once two newly formed halves of a door swung out with smooth precision, folding back into the walls and revealing a passageway that was twice the height of a man and just as wide.

The smell of the sea washed over them all, briny and thick. Then, as the grinding sounds of rock and gear fell silent and the two halves of the door settled into their final positions with an echoing thump, they heard the call of seagulls and the steady beat of waves on a rocky shore.

The passageway before them was clearly made to seem a simple part of the city's freshwater system: it had a trough cut down its center, and it gently ramped downward to what Caesarion immediately recognized as one of the primary water-carrying canals beneath the city, as broad as the avenue above it. The little sliver of its wide surface that he could see at the end of the sloping passage was flashing with the reflected light from some nearby opening to the sun and sea. Looking up, just on the other side of Archimedes' door, Caesarion could see a rock-lined opening in the ceiling that extended up, through the subsurface of Alexandria, to some rainwater collection point far above. There were hundreds of these collection points, which combined to help keep the underground aqueducts full even in the driest months of the year: like roots for trees or veins in flesh, the network of deep canals was the lifeblood of the city. And looking up here from the canal, no one would have a reason to suspect that the stone wall at the upper end of this particular tunnel was actually a most remarkable hidden door—not that it could be opened anyway.

Hannah had passed him by, picking her way down the drier edges of the sloping tunnel, and Caesarion followed her, marveling at what a brilliant piece of engineering and design it all was.

He had toured this very part of the undercity before, but when he at last reached the edge of the canal he saw it now with fresh eyes. There were walkways running along each side of the canal—just a couple of feet above the surface of the water and meant for maintenance, of course, but also just broad enough, Caesarion now supposed, to safely maneuver the Ark. Looking up here he saw the vaulting ribs of arches that extended out from wall to wall, stretching into shadow as they followed the paved street above, going south. A part of him expected to hear the rhythmic beat of marching footsteps echoing down through the stone—the sound of Octavian's armies overrunning the city—but he doubted that they would have reached so far so soon, and the stone above them was probably too thick to hear such things anyway. Looking in the other direction, to the north, he could see where the wide watercourse ended against the stone wall that marked the edge of the Great Harbor; he could see and smell the ocean through both the access gates at each end of the twin walkways beside the canal and the iron-barred spillway a foot or so above the water between them. Hannah had stopped at the canal's edge, but Caesarion moved along the walkway in the direction of the harbor and the light, feeling eerily like a ghost beneath the city that was—or at least had been—his.

The access gate was locked, as it ought to have been. Between its bars, Caesarion could see that Hannah's directions on the map had been perfectly accurate: the broad street above the canal was the very same road that ran forward along the Heptastadion, the giant causeway that stretched out from Alexandria like a finger pointed northward to the island of Pharos. Huddled just inside each of the locked gates sat four or five large clay jars, big enough to need two men to move them. Explosive pots, he knew. And outside each of the gates sat a square stone platform extending from the harbor wall, perhaps a dozen feet on a side, where the main supports for the Heptastadion's first wooden bridge were rooted into the strong rock a man's height above the tide. That bridge arched over the water, extending forward above Caesarion's head, shadowing the sea directly in front of the spillway. Though he couldn't immediately see them through the access gate, Caesarion knew that even more pots were hidden among the bridge's beams and rails higher above the water: he had ordered them placed there, he remembered, after one of his boat rides with Khenti, on the day he first learned of the Shards. They'd passed under this very same bridge, looking to see that such defensive explosives were in proper position to destroy it if the city were attacked from Pharos. Caesarion felt a strange kind of amazement to have returned to this place, and to see it through such different eyes. Not as a pharaoh now. Not anymore. Just a man in a greater fight to protect the Ark.

Hannah had followed him, and she quickly unlocked the gate using a key that few were meant to have—Caesarion decided not to ask how she had obtained it, instead wondering to himself how he had never noticed how much larger this access gate was than it needed to be—and let it swing open to its small platform beneath the bridge. Below, the harbor waves broke on scattered rocks, and gulls reeled in the cool air of the morning.

“He's not here,” Hannah said, looking out at the empty water.

Pullo had come up behind them. “He will be,” the big man said. “I know Vorenus. He'll be here. He will.”

Caesarion shielded his eyes to look back across the waves toward the Lochian palace and the royal harbor at its base. There were many ships moving in the early light, and his heart sunk to see their Roman colors. With Antony dead, Octavian hadn't hesitated to order the city overrun. All Caesarion's defensive planning—the new walls to the west, these explosives here—had been useless in the end. Alexandria had given herself over to Rome, her citizens too tired to continue the fight. With luck, the capitulation would at least save her from the torch. There would be panic, and there would be killings, Caesarion knew, especially in the first hours as the pent-up rage of the conquering Romans was released in vile and horrific acts—he'd read enough of sieges to know the way of things—but Octavian would see that most of the city's people would go unharmed. What good, after all, was a great city without her people?