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Startled, she stared at what she had typed. The words hadn’t been consciously planned; her fingers had simply moved on the keyboard and they had appeared. Suddenly frightened, she closed the file on her journal. Her hands were shaking. She had to stop thinking of Niall as if he were alive. The fixation on him was too vivid, too powerful. At first concentrating on him had seemed reasonable, a way of keeping herself sane, but what if it were having the opposite effect and she was losing herself in fantasy? After reading her journal entries, any psychiatrist would be forgiven for thinking she had lost contact with reality.
But reality was seeing her husband and brother murdered, crouching in a cold rain too terrified to cross a street, going hungry and being cold, sleeping in storage buildings and fighting off attackers. Reality was freezing in horror at the sound of Parrish’s voice. What did she have left except the escape she found in her dreams?
She looked at the stack of documents, at the pages and pages of notes she had scribbled. “I have work,” she murmured, and the sound of her own voice was reassuringly normal. She might feel as if she were coming apart at the seams, but she still had the work. It had saved her for eight months and would continue to save her for a few days yet, though that damn Gaelic had nearly defeated her.
Just another week or two of work, and then the tales of the Knights Templar and the Guardian, of Black Niall, would be ended. When she wasn’t spending hours struggling with the translations every night before bed, the dreams of him would stop.
Unexpected desolation swamped her at the thought. Without Niall, the spark that made her feel alive, even if only in her dreams, would be extinguished. There would be no more translations, because she was too well known by sight in her field to get a job with another archaeological foundation, even under an assumed name. There would be no more intriguing puzzles, not that any other work she had done had come close to fascinating her as much as did Niall and the Templars.
She would have nothing but vengeance. The need for it burned inside her, but she sensed that beyond vengeance there was nothing but bleak, gray nothingness, assuming she survived. She would be on the run for the rest of her life, her identity gone, nothing to look forward to, and never knowing the joy of having Ford’s children and growing old with him, cradling their grandchildren, perhaps watching Bryant succumb at last to love and matrimony.
Being insane was better.
She pulled the Gaelic papers to her, opened the Gaelic/English dictionary, and picked up her pen.
As usual, she was drawn almost immediately into the magic of the papers, the sense of reading something enormously compelling and important.
“Mankind shall not know the True Power,” she read some minutes later. “The Cup and the Winding Cloth shall blind them to the sun, the Throne and Banner denied, but the True Power shall be used by the Guardian in the Lord’s stead, to pass through the Veil of Time and protect the Treasure from Evil.
“None save the Treasure can defeat Evil, and none save the Guardian shall use the Power.”
It read like a Bible passage, but she was certain nothing like this had ever been in the Bible. The Cup… that could refer to the Chalice, and the Winding Cloth could well be the shroud in which Jesus had been wrapped after the crucifixion. The Shroud of Turin was supposed to be Jesus’s shroud, but it was surrounded by controversy; there were references to its existence long before the fourteenth century, which was when carbon dating had placed its origin. Of course, the earlier references could have been to another shroud, perhaps the real one… which did nothing to explain how a fourteenth-century forger could have created a cloth bearing an impregnable negative image of a crucified man, five centuries before photography had been invented.
“The Cup and the Winding Cloth shall blind them to the sun,” she read again. If the Chalice still existed
, it had never been found. But perhaps the arguments about the validity of the shroud did indeed blind people to the true nature of faith; they were so busy making points and counterpoints that the argument became the focus and they couldn’t see the whole picture.
The Templars were irrevocably connected to the shroud. They had battled the Moors and won Jerusalem for the Crusaders for a time, and themselves occupied the Temple on the Mount for longer than that. During their occupation, they had determinedly excavated as much of the Temple as possible, perhaps finding many artifacts dating back to the early years of the Temple, to the very beginning of Judaism. What treasures indeed had they found… what Treasure?
One of the charges against the Templars was that they had worshipped false gods, for in every chapel the Templars had built after occupying the Temple on the Mount, there had been the face of a man, a stern, strong-boned face—the same face that had been revealed centuries later on the Shroud of Turin.
It followed that they had unearthed the shroud; it also followed that its location in the Temple gave it validity. But what else had they found? The “Cup” and the “Winding Cloth” were listed, as well as the “Throne” and the “Banner,” but the “True Power” was something else, something so far left undescribed.
“The Guardian shall defend the world from the Foundation of Evil.”
Grace sighed at the continued ambiguity. The Foundation of Evil was obviously Satan, but why hadn’t the writer simply said so? Evidently even medieval scribes had been afflicted by wordiness.
Just the word Foundation made her think of better days, with Ford and Bryant delicately and happily sifting mounds of dirt through screens, looking for the smallest shard of pottery; or sitting on the ground whisking a small brush over a half-buried bone. The three of them had loved their work, and the Amaranthine Potere Foundation had been one of the few places in the world where an archaeologist could be permanently employed. Independently funded, the Foundation hadn’t concentrated just on the hugely important digs, but on the smaller ones that would provide detail rather than drama. Bryant had once said that the Foundation seemed determined to leave no dirt in the world unsifted.
Grace stiffened, her pupils contracting with shock. Potere… Power. Amaranthine Potere Foundation, the Foundation of Unending Power.
Why hadn’t she made the connection before? Languages and translations were her field of expertise. She should have seen it, should have realized—
It was a stretch, a real stretch. It was ridiculous. A huge foundation committed to unearthing the Templar Treasure? The money spent would surely far exceed the worth of any gold found.
“The Treasure’s worth is greater than gold,” she whispered. Not money, then; the documents had made that plain. Power. The Templars had possessed some mysterious power, had dedicated their lives to protecting it.
She got up and paced, mentally feeling her way through the puzzle. Was it possible the Foundation existed to prevent people from learning about the Power, whatever it was? Could Parrish, in some twisted way, think he had to kill everyone who learned of the papers in order to keep the Power secret? Was he acting as Guardian?
No, she could drive a truck through the holes in that theory. For one thing, the Foundation hadn’t had anything to guard. The papers had disappeared centuries before and anyone who knew anything about archaeology could not have reasonably expected the documents would survive. Paper deteriorated rapidly; that was why there were relatively few original documents left from even two centuries before, much less almost seven.
No, forget about any mystic power, any great struggle between right and wrong. She was tired, and fatigue was fogging her brain. The most likely motive was money, pure and simple. Parrish must have reason to believe the Templars’ Treasure was enormous beyond belief, and as director of the Foundation he could expend any amount of effort he wanted in finding it. He must have devised some way of appropriating the gold for his own use. The Foundation was probably exactly what it seemed, an archaeological foundation, without any sinister motive behind its existence. Parrish was the villain, not the Foundation itself.
But the Foundation had been founded in 1802, and named “Unending Power,” long before Parrish’s arrival on earth.
Where had the funding come from, all these decades? Who had originally founded Amaranthine Potere? How was it sustained now? As far as she knew, there hadn’t been any fund-raisers.
She did know that the Foundation had a very sophisticated computer system, far more sophisticated than she might have expected an archaeological foundation to have; after all, why should a list of contributors, assuming there was one, be either secret or sensitive? The Foundation was supposed to be nonprofit; presumably donations would be tax-deductible, so any list of contributors would be public anyway.
