Alex glanced back at the archivist. Igor’s eyes squinted with the pain of their loss. Terror and grief had drained his features to a deathly pallor.
Alex pulled the ancient text harder to his chest. “This is my burden to carry. It was my foolishness that killed them all.”
Igor lowered his arm.
With a heavy heart, Alex continued his climb. His cardiologist back in Rome had warned him against this journey, but it was not his recent angioplasty that made each breath an agony. Guilt tightened his chest. Each thud of his heart felt like a hammer blow against his ribs.
“I shouldn’t have rushed matters,” Alex said.
“No one objected to your timetable,” Igor argued. “We couldn’t risk word spreading. We had to secure it before anyone else ransacked the site.”
Alex swallowed hard. He had used that same reasoning yesterday, urging the group to proceed quickly. But that wasn’t his only motivation. With his failing health, he couldn’t let this chance pass him by. At his age, he had come to learn a hard truth.
Patience was a luxury of the young.
Guilt-ridden and heart-sore, he rounded another turn in the stairs. He swiped sweat from his brow with his free hand. The air was stiflingly humid; the walls were slick and damp. As his lips moved in a silent prayer for the dead, his heel slipped on a patch of black mold. With a cry,his arms windmilling, he crashed to his knees. He felt the impact all the way up into his molars. The precious text flew from his hand, struck the wall, and bounced down the steps.
Alex winced, less from the pain than from the harm he might have wrought. Down on one hand, he craned back. “Is the book damaged?”
Igor hurried over, recovered the volume, then climbed back up to him. Alex tried to stand, but Igor waved him down.
“We should rest a moment. Are you injured?”
Alex settled to a seat with a sigh. “Just my pride.”
The young man dropped to the stair next to him and handed him the book. “Looks only scuffed. Its binding, while old, has proven stubborn.”
Relieved, Alex rested the ancient text on his lap. He pictured all that had been lost under the tons of rock. Any recovery, if even possible, would take weeks. Beyond the loss of lives, he remembered the books he had briefly spotted, a treasure trove of Greek and Roman texts.
Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Hippocrates...
Alex sat straighter, startled by a sudden realization, a recognition of a theme to this hidden collection—or at least what had been stored in the open trunk.
“The books,” he mumbled. “They were all scientific treatises.”
Igor glanced over to him. “Monsignor?”
“They all pertained to Greek and Roman efforts to understand the natural world.” Alex rested a palm on the book in his lap. “Even Herodotus’sHistoriesis less a historical text than it is an analytical travelogue. It deals more with geography and the peoples of various lands. The massive work is said to be based on Herodotus’s travels across the known world of his time.”
Igor frowned. “If you’re right, why would such books be locked away? To what end?” He searched down the dark stairs. “And why booby trap the collection? What were they trying to hide?”
Alex shook his head. “I think it was more aboutprotection. To keep a secret.”
“What secret?”
“The location of the Golden Library.”
Igor gasped next to him—half shocked, half scoffing.
Alex ignored him and stared down at the bright leaf that adorned the leather cover. He knew it was that sheen that had made him pull the volume from the others. But it was not a lust for gold that had drawn his hand.
It was a longing for lost knowledge.
“If we could find it...” Alex started, but he left the rest unspoken.
Maybe such a discovery would help atone for the deaths below.
Igor’s shoulders slumped. “If it truly exists, maybe the library is cursed, as many have claimed over the centuries.”
