“No doors except the entrance and exit we noted.”
“I just don’t understand what he wanted. Why wait for us? Who was he?”
Zofia glanced at the honeybee necklace and made a noncommittalhrmmsound and then stuck out her hand. “Hand me that.”
“Have you never heard the saying ‘you attract more flies with honey than vinegar’?”
“Why would I want to attract flies?”
“Never mind.”
Enrique handed it to her. “Be careful,” he said.
“It’s nothing but brass with some corrosion,” she said disdainfully.
“Can you take off the corrosion?”
“Easily,” she said. She rattled the square. “I thought you said this could be solid verit inside? This looks like the superstitious charms sold in my village. What proof did you have? What was your research?”
“Superstition. Stories,” said Enrique, before adding just to annoy her: “A gut instinct.”
Zofia made a face. “Superstitions are useless. And a gut cannot have an instinct.”
She took a solution from her makeshift worktable and cleaned off the square. When she was finished, she slid it across the table. Now, he could make out a gridlike pattern and the shape of letters, but little else. In the stargazing room, the fires had been banked. No lanterns were allowed so as not to disrupt the view of the stars, and only a couple of candle tapers stood on the table.
“I can barely see,” said Enrique. “Do you have flint to light the match?”
“No.”
Enrique sighed, looking around the room. “Well, then I—”
He stopped when he heard the unmistakable sound of fire ripping from a match. Zofia held a tiny fire out in her hand. In her other hand, she took a second match and struck it against the bottom of one of her canine teeth. Firelight lit up her face. Her platinum hair looked like the haze of lightning on the underside of a cloud. That glow looked natural on her. As if this was the way she was meant to be seen.
“You just struck a match with your teeth,” he said.
She looked at him quizzically. “I’ll have to do it again if you don’t light the candles before these burn out.”
He quickly lit the candles. Then he took one and held it over the metal disc that had slipped out of the compass, examining it. On closer inspection, he saw writing on its surface. All the letters on the square were concentrated in the middle, but there were enough squares for twenty-five letters to be written vertically and horizontally.
His heart began to race. It always did whenever he felt on the verge of discovering something.
“Looks like Latin,” said Enrique, tilting the disc. “Satorcould mean ‘founder,’ usually of a divine nature?Arepois perhaps a proper name, though it doesn’t seem Roman. Maybe Egyptian.Tenetmeans to hold or preserve… then there’sopera, like work, and thenrotas, plural for ‘wheels.’”
“Latin?” asked Zofia. “I thought this artifact was from a Coptic church in North Africa.”
“It is,” said Enrique. “North Africa was one of the first places Christianity spread, believed to be as early as the first century… and Rome had frequent interaction with North Africa. I believe their first colony is now known as Tunisia.”
Zofia took one of the other candles and held it close to the disc.
“If the verit is inside, can I just break it?”
Enrique snatched the brass square off the table and clutched it. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I amtiredof people breaking things before I get a chance to see them,” he said. “And besides, look at this switch on the side.” He pointed to a small toggle sunken into the width of the square. “Some ancient artifacts have failsafes to protect the object within, so if you smash it, you might destroy whatever is inside it.”
Zofia slouched, nesting her chin in her palm. “Perhaps one day I’ll discover how to chisel verit stone itself.”
