Gray frowned. “That warning certainly supports what is inscribed on the wall plaque.”
“And sounds even more dire,” Anna added.
Bailey glanced up from the book. “There’s also this. Someone—no doubt Lomonosov—underlined the phrasefalsum viverra, orfalse pullin that line I just read. Could that be significant?”
Anna and Gray shared a look, but neither of them could make sense of it.
“And there’s a section I can’t read,” Bailey admitted. “It’s handwritten in the margin, a long passage, with an arrow pointing to another word in the text—magneticus—which means magnetic.”
“The note in the margin?” Gray asked. “Is it too faded to make out?”
“No.” He passed the book to Anna. “It’s written in Glagolitic.”
Ah...
Gray joined her, staring down at the crisp penmanship along the page’s edge. “Can you translate it?”
“I’ll try.”
She turned to Jason, who hovered behind them. Jason pulled out his tablet, which still had Anna’s Glagolitic conversion chart on it. They set about working on the mysterious message from Lomonosov.
Gray watched them, alone with his thoughts for the moment. As Anna tapped at the glowing screen, he suddenly recalled what had been nagging at him—both now and yesterday. The tablet in Anna’s hand had reminded him.
He drew out his own device, turned it on, and flipped through the photos that Monsignor Borrelli had taken. He settled on one, realizing how much it looked like the description in theInventio Fortunata—and what was drawn on Mercator’s map.
It filled half a page of Herodotus’sHistories, showing a mountainous valley that framed a lone peak at its center. Around it had been sketched a swirling pool.
Gray studied it.
Was this a glimpse of that same place, from someone who had been there?
Before he could ponder it further, Anna stepped back to them. “I think I have it all. Lomonosov’s annotation was long, but not difficult to translate. Still, it makes little sense.”
“What did he write?”
Anna stared down at the book in her hand and read the passage aloud. “‘Ah, dear Mercator, you hid well what you knew. Making large what is not. Building mountains where there are none. Burying the truth, like Catherine and I do now under a tower. Others should have looked more closely at what you drew, listened more intently when you claimed that this is not the truth—that it lies elsewhere.’” She looked up. “Again, the last line points to the wordmagnetic—as if that’s significant.”
Gray closed his eyes, trying to unlock this riddle. Lomonosov musthave written this for a reason, leaving this page open as centuries passed, sending a message into the future.
But what did he mean?
Gray talked aloud, trying to use his voice to tease out any answers. “Not only did that annotation point to the wordmagnetic, but he also underlined the wordsfalse pull, which possibly also suggests something magnetic.”
“Or falsely magnetic,” Jason reminded him, adding his voice to the puzzle.
Gray nodded.
There’s something there... but what?
Gray squinted, trying to bring it into focus. “‘Building mountains where there are none.’ Could Lomonosov be referring to the fact that there is no magnetic mountain sitting at the north pole?”
“And ‘making large what is not,’” Bailey added. “Mercator drew a huge landmass, a veritable continent. But from what Nicolas wrote in his book, it almost sounds like he’s describing somewhere far smaller.”
“A place that Mercator blew up huge,” Anna said. “Magnifying it, so he could delineate what Nicolas had described in a greater detail at the center of his map.”
Gray returned his attention to the map. “‘Burying the truth.’ Maybe Mercator was trying to accomplish what Catherine and Lomonosov were doing here by keeping the Golden Library buried. To preserve knowledge—but keep it safeguarded and hidden.”
“In Lomonosov’s annotation,” Bailey said, “he hints that Mercator drew the answer on this map. ‘Others should have looked more closely at what you drew.’”
