With her nervous system at breaking point, she stared at what the cloth had slid away to reveal—not believing what she saw.
She blinked several times to make sure her eyes were not playing tricks on her.
It seemed they were not.
She had been so certain it would be the Ark that she had not even considered the possibility it might not be.
But unless she was hallucinating, what she was looking at was definitely
not
the Ark of the Covenant.
She could feel the shock passing through her like a physical pressure wave.
With disbelief, she stared at the object lying on a red cushion on a table.
Disappointment and frustration crashed over her.
She sagged as the grim realization hit her.
It had all been for nothing.
She had come all this way to find they did not have the Ark.
She had got it dreadfully wrong.
Her capture had been pointless.
And now so would her death be.
She could feel herself choking with frustration as the sounds of the gunfire outside intensified.
She stared numbly at Saxby as he stepped aside, giving her a clear view of the object on the table.
It was a vicious-looking black iron spear tip, about a foot long. There were six sections of thin silver wire bound tightly around it, and a gold sleeve covering its centre. The lighting was dim, but she could also make out a Roman-era iron nail embedded into it.
She recognized it immediately, having seen it in the Imperial Treasury at Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, when she had been in the Austrian capital giving a guest lecture on Babylonian cylinder seals at the
Kunsthistorisches Museum
.
It was the Lance of Longinus, or Spear of Destiny—the Roman weapon used to slit open Christ’s side as he hung dying on the cross. The Allies had found it among Hitler’s treasures in Nuremburg and given it back to Austria.
So what was it doing here?
Had Malchus stolen it?
She struggled to understand, and also to work out why she was looking at a small artefact from around AD 30 when it should have been a much larger one from 1290 BC.
Malchus had returned to the centre of the stage, and was now holding the silver dish filled with goat’s blood high above his head, his eyes raised upwards in supplication. “
Et dabo prodigia in caelo et in terra sanguinem et ignem et vaporem fumi. Sol vertetur in tenebras et luna in sanguinem antequam veniat dies domini magnus et horribilis.
”
28
Whatever he was going to say next was drowned out as a hail of gunfire strafed across the cellar’s far wall, kicking up clouds of dust as the bullets gouged deep holes in the stones.
Groups of the men were now running back into the crypt again, taking up defensive positions around the stage, training their weapons on the door.
The large guard with the tattoos made straight for Malchus. “Some German crew,” he shouted up to Malchus above the noise of the gunfire. “And they’re heavily tooled up.”
——————— ◆ ———————
The
‘
Gruft
’
Vault
Wewelsburg Castle
B
ü
ren
Paderborn
North-Rhine Westphalia
Federal Republic of Germany
The exchanges of gunfire outside the chamber were intensifying—becoming louder and more sustained.
The hulking tattooed leader of Malchus’s security team was close to Ava, shouting orders at the other paramilitaries who had followed him back into the room. He indicated for them to take positions on either side of the cellar, leaving the centre clear. He pointed at the entranceway. “Door funnel. Kill zone.”
Ava’s heart was hammering.
This was not good
.
If the plan was to bring the fight into the cellar so the intruders could be picked off as they came through the door, then Malchus and his ceremony were the least of her immediate worries.
Her chances of surviving a firefight in the enclosed space were not good.
Meanwhile, Saxby had finished censing the Spear of Destiny, and he and Malchus were now crossing the stage towards her.
The smoke from the charring meat was mingling with the incense Saxby had been using to bless the various objects, creating a thick heady mix that was making Ava lightheaded.
As the two robed men approached her, she could feel her mouth going dry.
Was this it?
She stared into the eye-slits of their tall pointed hoods and thought with regret of Ferguson.
How long had he been in the well?
She had no way of knowing. She felt a pang of guilt. He would not be in this mess if it had not been for her. But at least while Saxby and Malchus were on the stage, focused on the ceremony, they would not be carrying out their revenge on him.
That would come later.
Unless she could think of something.
There were now more weapons joining in the exchanges outside—small arms and automatic fire.
The two sides were digging in.
To her surprise, as the two hooded figures drew level with her on the stage, they did not say anything or slow down, but carried on purposefully, walking straight past her.
Confused, she twisted her torso half around to see what they were doing, but the position of her body, lashed to the front of the post, severely restricted her ability to move.
Undeterred, she craned her neck around as far as she could, and looked out of the corner of her eyes into the darkened section of the stage directly behind her, where Saxby and Malchus were now walking.
Her heart missed a beat as she saw the area for the first time.
At the far rear left of the stage, beyond where Saxby and Malchus were standing, was a large object. And just like the Menorah and the Spear of Destiny, it was draped in a thick black cloth.
However, unlike the other two ancient artefacts, the heavy cloth over it was not able to conceal the unusual shape lying beneath it.
Ava could feel a prickle of electricity running up the back of her neck as all the hairs stood on end.
It was rectangular—like a packing chest, with what looked like two long poles sticking outwards from either side, a high peak above the centre of the top, and two lesser peaks at the top left and right.
In the split second it took her to realize what it was, the cellar began to feel unbearably hot, and she was suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. It was partly the angle at which she was twisting her neck, reducing the blood flow to her head. But it was largely the sheer shock of what she was looking at—seeing it there. Finally. In the same room as her.
The Ark.
She inhaled deeply, not quite believing her eyes.
It had been there all along.
She was perspiring.
Right behind her.
She watched in a daze as Saxby and Malchus stopped in front of it, one at either end.
She held her breath as they slowly took hold of the black cloth.
Time seemed to stand still and then move in slow motion as they gently slid the material off, revealing the object underneath.
If it had not been for the physical pain from twisting her neck round so far, she would have been sure she was dreaming.
When Saxby and Malchus had unveiled the Menorah, she had wondered if any antique artefact would ever be able to impress her as much again.
But now, looking at the Ark, she immediately knew the answer.
Stunned, she could only stare at it as an avalanche of intense emotions broke over her.
It was nothing like she had imagined, and like no drawing or model of it she had ever seen.
The sheer quantity of gold was spellbinding. It glowed and gleamed in the light from the braziers every bit as radiantly as the Menorah, bathing the air around it in a shimmering aura.
The Bible said it was made of acacia wood, then covered with gold inside and out, with four gold rings for the gold-covered carrying poles and a lid with hammered gold cherubim at either end.
But the Bible mentioned nothing about the sublime decoration.
She could not discern the details clearly, but she could see enough to tell her that the Ark and the lid were divided into panels of beaten gold. That was not so unusual. What was mesmerizing her was that every square inch of gold was covered in a riot of imagery.
Nothing had ever prepared her for this moment.
The Ark was indescribably beautiful—more intricate and skillfully made than she had ever imagined.
She did not doubt its age, but found it impossible to believe that these two objects—the Ark and the Menorah—had been created by Bezalel of Judah and Aholiab of Dan, two amateurs chosen in the Sinai desert as the Hebrews crossed from Egypt to Israel. From what she could see in front of her, the Ark and Menorah had undoubtedly been made in one or more workshops by whole teams of highly skilled and experienced artisans.
Dizzy with excitement, she tried to take it all in, to feast upon it. Others in the room were doing likewise. Despite the dangerously close gunfire, a large number of the men in the room were now crowding around the Ark.
They were partially obscuring her view, so she could see little more of the Mercy Seat than that the cherubim’s wings stretched up at a dramatic angle to create a triangular space above the lid. According to the Bible, that was where Yahweh said he would meet with the Hebrews.
She had once put together a three-dimensional computer graphic recreation of King Solomon’s Temple for the British Museum, and had included a replica Ark to scale. Looking at the real one now, she was pleased to see she had been correct in concluding it used the shorter cubit, which made it around three-and-a-half feet long by two feet wide.
It was still an immense size—a huge weight for the men who had to carry it around.
She stared, captivated by the extraordinary relic—a gleaming window into the long-lost roots of western history.
As she was drinking it in, Saxby had begun censing it, and Malchus had returned to the front of the stage, where he was crouching low by the grate. He had the bowl of hyssop in his hand, and was emptying the remaining drops onto the coals with a loud hiss. He dipped the now-empty bowl into the silver dish in which the goat’s blood was still bubbling, then handed it to Saxby, before picking up a large old leather tome from the Table of Practice.
Ava watched closely as he headed towards her, the volume open in his hands.
This was surely it?
The start of the section of the ceremony which would climax with her murder?
She could not quite believe that they were continuing with the ritual.
Surely the gunfight meant they would have to stop?
But as Malchus continued to approach her, he showed no sign of calling a halt to the proceedings.
Breathing deeply to quell her rising panic, she noted that the curved knife he had used to slit the goat’s throat was still on the floor by the animal’s carcass. He had not picked it up yet, which was reassuring. But she knew it would not be long now.
As he drew level with her, she could smell the goat’s dried gore on his hands. She tensed, unable to keep images of its slashed throat from her mind.
Malchus turned so he was standing beside her, and held out the book in front of him so they could both read from its aged pages. Ava did not recognize the title—the
Lemegeton
, but from the deep ochre cover, hard boards, leather thong binding, and typography, she guessed it was from the 1700s.
However, Malchus was only using it as a prop. On its large leaves lay the smaller loose typed sheets of his translation of the London version of
The Sword of Moses
, along with printouts of the small pages of tiny original Hebrew and Aramaic writing from the genuine Oxford manuscript.
He began reading from the translation in a loud clear voice:
“Ye sacred angels, princes of the hosts who stand upon the thrones prepared for them before him to watch over and to minister to the Sword, to fulfil by it all the wants by the name of the master over all; you chiefs of all the angels in the world, I pray of you to do everything that I am asking of you, as you have the power to do everything in heaven and upon earth as it is written in the law.”
Ava read along, following the text, wondering what part she was supposed to play.
“I conjure you, Azliel, Arel, Ta’aniel, Tafel, Yofiel Mittron. With these your names, and with the powers you possess to which there’s nowhere anything like, I conjure you to show me, and to search for me, and to do all my bidding.”
She was listening carefully for any clues to how the ceremony would unfold.
From the ending of almost every name in ‘-el’, it was clear the spell first called upon a cohort of angels to assist with the summoning.
On the far side of the stage, Saxby approached the Menorah and dipped the asperges brush into the silver bowl, covering it in the goat’s blood.
Just as Malchus had done with the hyssop, he used the brush to flick splashes of it onto the Menorah. The globules of red sat immobile on the metal for an instant, before running down the glowing gold in thick viscous streams.
Ava assumed most of the neo-Nazis in the room would imagine it was just a piece of grotesque black magic theatre. But she knew all too well that the Bible was clear about the sacred properties of the blood of sacrificed animals. The Bible gave explicit and repeated instructions about daubing the altars of King Solomon’s Temple in blood. It was also precise about anointing priests with it, as Moses had anointed Aaron and his children with the blood of a sacrificed ram, and likewise had sprinkled the blood from young bulls onto the people at the foot of Mount Sinai to confirm their dedication to God.
As she watched Saxby, she could hear the gunfire outside getting louder and closer. She could almost feel the air shaking with the discharges.
Malchus was still reading the conjuration as Saxby turned to the Lance of Longinus, and began blessing it with the blood.
Next to her, Malchus was now reading from the second sheet of his translation.
“With the permission of my king, I conjure Yadiel, Ra’asiel, Haniel, Asrael, Yisriel, A’shael, Amuhael, that you attach yourselves to me and surrender the Sword to me, so that I may use it according to my desire.”
Glancing further down the page, she could see that the conjuration culminated with the core of the spell—the list of Yahweh’s mystical names to summon and bind him.
As her eyes flicked to the very bottom, she could see that where the list of mystical names should have been, the translator had written:
The original London manuscript only has an ‘X’ in place of each mystical name. It seems the medieval scribe of this redaction did not wish to make the spell widely available.
Saxby was now moving behind her, to the Ark. She twisted round as far as she could, in time to see him flick a brush of blood at it.
Once again, Ava could not help reflecting that, in their own warped and twisted way, Saxby and Malchus had done their homework. The biblical ritual in the book of Leviticus was clear that every year, on the Day of Atonement, the Hebrew high priest was to enter the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Ark with the sacrificial blood of a goat and a bullock.
When Saxby had finished daubing the outside of the Ark with the blood, he indicated to the men around it to remove the lid.
He clearly meant to sprinkle blood inside it, too.
Beside her, Malchus was still reading from the spell.
“Fulfil for me everything that I have been conjuring you for. Deliver unto me with this Sword the secrets from above and below, the mysteries from above and below, and my wish be fulfilled and my word hearkened unto.”
Without warning, she felt as if all the air in the room was suddenly on fire. It was so hot she could feel it burning inside her nose and mouth.
At the same time, there was a searing light and a deafening thunderclap that seemed to blow out her eardrums.
Before she had registered what was happening, shards of razor-sharp twisted metal hurtled past her head, and it felt as if someone had punched her viciously in the shoulder.
Disorientated and with her ears ringing, she stared around numbly.
The chamber was filling with black smoke, and beside her she could see Malchus lying on the floor. His hood had come off, and his face was bloodied. But he was conscious, gazing about in confusion.
Dazed, she saw a shard of gold sticking out of her shoulder. The chainmail had protected her from a more serious injury, but a long spike of gleaming metal had nevertheless punctured her skin and embedded itself deep into her muscle.
As she twisted round further to look behind her, she could no longer see any sign of the gold-covered Ark, lid, or carrying poles.
Instead, there was now a charred burning heap of smouldering wood fragments strewn across the floor, along with splinters and shards of tangled metal.