The Codex Lacrimae (25 page)

The image and voice evaporated as Ríg returned the Codex Lacrimae to the table.

He gasped, looking swiftly around to see if anyone had noticed what he'd just experienced, his face aflame with embarrassment at the thought of being in any room alone with a girl, let alone about to fall asleep in front of a fire. No one noticed his discomfort.

“So, in all your wisdom, Master Khaldun,” Perdieu was saying gruffly, no longer bothering to conceal his fury, “you decide to bring the book
here
,
with an army at your heels?” Perdieu exclaimed gruffly. “Huh. Must be convenient to have a garrison where you can retreat when you run into trouble.”

“To my knowledge, Brother Perdieu, the specific threat consists of two factors,” Ibn-Khaldun said, adopting the tone of a schoolteacher patiently explaining complex ideas to a classroom. “One of those factors is the book itself, and the other is the two men who've been pursuing me for the past six months. I know more about the Codex Lacrimae than I do the men, for I've discovered that its existence was known by the peoples east of Bangladesh long before I took possession of it.”

He paused, but no one spoke. The men in the chamber waited for him to continue.

“A little over a decade ago, a barbarian horde called the
Az-guli
came from beyond the Punjab in the East. They weren't Mongols, but they may as well have been, so terrible was their ferocity in battle. It was said that the man who led them, Raj' al-Jared, was building an empire, and determined to conquer all the lands westward to the Great Sea, or what your people call
la Méditerranée.

“Raj' al-Jared's army came in a wave across the Asiatic steppes, across Afghanistan, and finally arrived at the borders of Persia.” Ibn-Khaldun's gaze had fixed on the Codex as he spoke, his voice subdued. “My people fled at his approach, for horrific tales of his conquests preceded him. Tales that spoke of some darkling force Raj' al-Jared accidentally discovered while still a petty tribal chieftain in a Himalayan village.”

“There have been barbarian incursions before,” Mercedier commented. “Europe has had its share as well.”

“Let me finish,” the Muslim scholar replied. “This power that Raj'al-Jared discovered drove him to commit appalling atrocities. It was said that his own men would sometimes try to rebel at what he ordered them to do, but always his word would prevail, even if the members in his army screamed in resistance to his will.

“That is one of the aspects that truly frightened my people: how terrifying must a power be that could drive ‘barbarians' to despair of their own actions? So, initially we fled this man and his army, until we could flee no further. At the border of the Salt Desert in north-central Persia, the
Dasht-e Kavir
,
my people made ready to do battle. Fortunately, something occurred during the evening before the encounter, and the army of my people greeted a dawn that cast its light on a landscape devoid of the enemy. The barbarians had fled, leaving behind only the mutilated body of Raj'al-Jared.”

Ibn-Khaldun nodded at the troubled and confused expression of the Hospitallers around him.

“You wonder if old Ibn-Khaldun has seen too much of the desert?” He pointed at the Codex Lacrimae, which rested on the oaken table. “
That
book was the ‘power' that Raj'al-Jared found near his village at the foot of the Himalayas. For two years he kept possession of it, and on the eve of battle at
Dasht-e Kavir
,
it was stolen by one of his sergeants, a man who desired to possess the work himself. But, the book eventually betrayed him, also.”

Ibn-Khaldun looked steadily at Ríg, who'd again retrieved the tome from the table. He leafed through the yellowed parchment pages while his mentor spoke.

“I'll return to what I think of that in a moment, for it figures largely in what you intend to do with the book, Ríg.” He paused, and asked quietly of his young Hospitaller friend. “What do you think of the matter therein?”

Ríg glanced at Perdieu before answering.

“Of course, Ríg — you may respond.”

“
Je vous remercie, mon seigneur,”
Ríg replied, glad that things were getting back to normal in the dual relationship he had with Perdieu and Ibn-Khaldun; it was in Ríg's own interest to make sure that the paths he hoped for in life — those of warrior and scholar — remained clean and respectful of the hierarchies that each demanded, but the process of politicking was exhausting!

“There seems to be a consistent text in the book,” Ríg commented, his voice adopting the tone he took when teaching novitiates in the scriptorium. “It's interrupted frequently by odd sentence fragments that are clustered together in phrases, with curious symbols appended near each. Runes, I think.”

Ríg handed the book to Damian and asked him to open it to any page. “Do you see?”

“I cannot make sense of it,” Damian said, confusion in his voice.

“Let me see,” Mercedier demanded from his bed. Upon looking at the open pages, he shook his head. “
Hmph
.
Never seen its like. What language is it?”

“Language?” Ríg asked, smiling at the two elder Hospitallers. “Brother Damian, Mercedier...it's Latin.”

“Let me see,” Arcadian urged from beside Mercedier. He leaned over the bed to peer at the pages.

“It does, indeed, seem to be a collection of symbols or, as you say, ‘runes,' Ríg.” He said after flipping through a few pages of the book. Ríg noted that the grand master took a moment to flip to the frontispiece. What he, Damian, and Mercedier saw there made them all raise their eyes to look at the youth, but they said nothing. Everyone in the room could tell that Perdieu, too, wanted to see the inscribed word, but Arcadian's next question made the impulse moot.

“What made you think that it's Latin?” Arcadian asked.

Ríg glanced at Ibn-Khaldun, then looked again at the book in Mercedier's hands.

“Ríg, I, too, see only runic script when I've glanced through that book.”

The Hospitaller squire stared at him for a moment, then moved away from the group in obvious frustration.

“Ah, it's as I thought,” Ibn-Khaldun said. He inhaled deeply, as if steeling himself for an unpleasant task. “When you didn't recognize the book a few minutes ago, I thought that I'd erred. But, this ability to read the script…it, indeed, seems to have been meant for you, Ríg. We must prepare for the siege, so I'll hastily finish my story.

“After conquering a city, Raj'al-Jared's army gathered all the male captives — be they five years of age or sixty — and brought them to the front gates. There they'd be reviewed by this tribal-chieftain-turned-warlord. He always held a large black book at his side, and asked each of the captives if he could translate anything in it. No one ever could, and his rage at the end of the interrogations was always the same.

“The soldiers would then construct two wooden, cylindrical towers that stood perhaps forty cubits in height, and he'd bind the captives to them. Depending on the size of the tower, fifteen to twenty men and boys were bound to each other by heavy straps at their biceps. Then another group of men and boys, equal in number to that of their fellows at the base, would he hoisted to stand atop the shoulders of their neighbors. So building, the tower of living men would rise slowly until it stood forty or fifty feet in height. Two days of steady labor would it take, the builders working in continuous shifts, filling the spaces between the bound men with mortar, or whatever material was at hand that could act as a fixing agent. All the while, the captives were given plenty of food and water, so as to make the upcoming torture and death last longer.

“My people called Raj'al-Jared's towers the ‘Screaming Pillars', for when the work was completed, the monster would set fire to the conquered town, having enslaved or killed the women, but leaving their menfolk strapped to the columns as a terrifying, vocal reminder of his passage. Their screams continued to pierce the desert air long after the last of this madman's army left the region.”

“How do you know all this?” Ríg asked, breaking the quiet that fell when the scholar finished his story.

“I came upon two of the pillars where the captives hadn't yet died.”

“What happened to them?” Perdieu asked.

Ibn-Khaldun grimaced. “I couldn't free the three men from the cement, so I beheaded them. It was the only solace that I could offer – besides being barely alive, they'd watched their women raped and killed before their eyes.”

“And the Codex? What do you think of its part in all this?” Perdieu pressed.

“Raj'al-Jared repeatedly promised freedom to any man who could decipher the Codex. No one could.”

“Except Ríg just read parts of it,” Mercedier said.

“That he did,” Ibn-Khaldun agreed, turning quickly away from Ríg because he was saddened by the utter dread he saw on the young man's countenance.

Faltering in this moment of confusion was all the confidence and stature that the boy had gained in the last five years since arriving at the Krak as a refugee from Mecina. Ibn-Khaldun dispelled the inclination to go and offer comforting words to his apprentice. There'd be time for that later, when they could return to the scriptorium and analyze the book properly.

So, the elderly scholar ignored Ríg's attempt to get his attention and looked at each of the gathered men. “This brings us to the obvious questions of, ‘What does it say?' and ‘What do we do with the information, if any, that it provides?'”

Power, Hospitaller. Power greater than any wielded by Asgardians or Norns.

Ríg glanced around, but no one seemed to notice that he was being spoken to!

The life of a friend.

He shuddered at the simplicity of the words, and at the horror lying behind what seemed to be an explicit offer from the Codex Lacrimae. But, offer of
what? ‘
Power?‘ What did that even mean, Ríg wondered, and if the book were actually making an offer, how could anyone ever seriously consider such a ghastly transaction?

Silence fell in the chamber, the thoughts of each man his own.

Chapter 13

A Grand Master Makes His Move

Earlier in the week, Clarinda sloshed through the wavelets of Caesarea's harbor and began running onto the beach with two members of her crew beside her. Rapier in hand, she focused on fury instead of grief and sprinted on the wet sand to the closest cement stairwell that would get her back to the top of the wharf.

A glance upward and to her left showed that Kenezki still fought with Alex on the quay in front of the shipwrecked galley, but the sound of their clashing blades was lost amid the shouts of men and clamor from dozens of sword fights taking place throughout the port city. The chaos of war engulfed Caesarea, from the roaring of fires that erupted after the ship-based trebuchets of the
Calypso
and
Maritina
cast burning pitch into buildings to the neighing of horses driven semi-mad as their riders galloped them through the streets of the blazing city.

“Mario! Raul!” she shouted to her companions as the three reached the top of the stairs and began running back to the ruin of the Genoese galley, “When we get there, flank Alex and me, and this time don't worry about any of us! I want Kenezki taken alive, but in any event
don't
let him escape.”

“
Si, Signorina
,
” both men said in unison.

She appreciated her sailors' loyalty, but would've preferred that the two men had stayed with Alex instead of diving into the harbor after her when Kenezki had kicked her overboard! Her left side still ached from the pirate's booted heel, but she ignored it as she had everything else since discovering Kenezki next to the still-warm body of Angelo Trevisan.

Padre...did we walk right past you yesterday? We did. You were still alive, and we walked by you, thinking that no one could be on the ghost ship. Evremar intentionally called it a plague ship so no one would think to look there!

Outrage turned into molten savagery as Clarinda ran harder on the limestoned cement of the wharf, closing the distance to the two fighting men.

The realization that her father might be imprisoned on the shipwreck changed the strategy she'd crafted the night before with Fatima and Khalil. Namely, while Clarinda's two ships would still provide naval support to the
bedouin
and Guy of Lusignan's land forces, she and Alex boarded the shipwrecked galley to find her father. They'd made their way back to the pier in a dinghy just as Pasquale ordered the first of the Greek Fire launches from catapults on the
Maritina
and
Calypso.

Clarinda's orders for Pasquale were that his men should target anything combustible in the port city and, if possible, to aim most of the payloads at two areas: the Templar castle of Evremar of Choques and the Church buildings of Archbishop Monachus.

The burning
naptha
and saltpeter missiles that arced overhead showed her that Pasquale's men were firing at will, the booming explosions and ensuing fires destroying Caesarea.