“It’s a honeybee,” said Zofia suddenly.
“What?”
She held up the chain pendant. “It’s in the shape of a honeybee.”
“A strange fashion choice,” said Enrique, distracted. “Or a symbol, perhaps? Maybe he sympathized with Napoleon? I’m fairly certain honeybees were thought to be a symbol of his rule.”
“Did Napoleon like mathematicians?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Honeybees make perfect hexagonal prisms. My father called them nature’s mathematicians.”
“Maybe?” said Enrique. “But seeing as how Napoleon died in 1821, I don’t think I’ll have the opportunity to ask him.”
Zofia blinked at him, and a pang of guilt struck Enrique. She couldn’t always process jokes the way the others did, and sometimes his attempts at wit came off severe rather than sophisticated. But Zofia didn’t notice. Shrugging, she placed the honeybee chain on the coffee table between them.
Enrique turned the artifact over in his hands. “Where did he come from, though? Was he waiting the whole time, or was there a door there?”
“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 noncommittal hrmm sound 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. “Sator could mean ‘founder,’ usually of a divine nature? Arepo is perhaps a proper name, though it doesn’t seem Roman. Maybe Egyptian. Tenet means to hold or preserve … then there’s opera, like work, and then rotas, 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 am tired of 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.”
Enrique whistled. “You’d be the most dangerous woman in France.”
As a rule, it was impossible to break verit stone. Every piece that existed at the entrance of palaces, banks, and other wealthy institutions were raw slabs that had naturally come apart during the lengthy mining and purification process. All of which made procuring a gravel-sized piece of verit unheard of, even on the extensive black market that usually suited their purposes.
“The words are the same,” said Zofia.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re just the same. Can’t you see it?”
Enrique stared at the letters, and then realized what she meant. There was an S in the upper left and bottom right corner. An A adjacent to both. From there, the pattern made sense.
“It’s a palindrome.”
“It’s a metal square with letters.”
“Yes, but the letters spell the same thing backward and forward,” said Enrique. “Palindromes used to be inscribed on amulets to protect the wearer from harm. Not just amulets, though, come to think of it. There was one in ancient Greek found outside the Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople. Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin. ‘Wash the sins, not only the face.’ It was thought the wordplay would confuse demons.”
“Wordplay confuses me too.”
“I shall withhold comment,” said Enrique. He studied the letters once more. “There’s something familiar about this arrangement … I feel as though I’ve seen it before.”
Enrique walked over to the library within the stargazing room. He was looking for a specific tome, something he had come across during his linguistic studies in ancient Latin—
“Found you,” he said, pulling out a small volume: EXCURSIONS TO THE LOST CITY OF POMPEII. He quickly scanned the pages before he found what he was looking for.
“I knew it! This arrangement is called the Sator Square,” he said. “It was found in the ruins of Pompeii in the 1740s, commissioned by the king of Naples. Apparently, the Order of Babel helped fund the excavation alongside Spanish engineer Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre in hopes that it would reveal previously unknown Forge instruments.”
“Did it?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” said Enrique.
“What about the palindrome’s meaning?”
“Still under scrutiny,” he said. “Nothing else has appeared like it in the ancient realm, so it’s either a riddle or a cryptogram or a very bored inscription by someone who was about to be killed by a gigantic volcano. Personally, I think it’s a key … Figure out the code and the brass square will unlock. Maybe there’s some math involved here … Zofia? Any ideas?”
Zofia chewed on the end of a matchstick. “There’s no math to it. Just letters.”
Enrique paused. An idea flying to his head.
“But numbers and letters have plenty in common…” he said slowly. “Mathematics and the Torah led to gematria, a Kabbalistic
method of interpreting Hebrew scripture by assigning numerical value to the words.”
Zofia sat upright. “My grandfather used to give us riddles like that. How do you know about that?”
“It’s been around for some time,” said Enrique, feeling his academic tone creeping into his voice. He had a bizarre urge to sit in a leather chair and acquire a fluffy cat. And a pipe. “Mathematics has long been considered the language of the divine. Besides, the system of alphanumeric codes doesn’t just belong to the Hebrew language. Arabs did it with abjad numerals.”
“Our zeyde taught my sister and I how to write coded letters to each other,” said Zofia softly. She twirled a strand of platinum hair around her finger. “Every number matched its alphanumeric position on the alphabet. It was … fun.”
At this, the barest smile touched her face. Not once had he ever heard her talk about her family. But no sooner had she mentioned them than she set her jaw. Before he could say anything, Zofia grabbed a quill and scraps of paper.
“If I take all these letters from your Sator Square, and look at their position in the alphabet and add them up, here’s what we get.”
S A T O R ⇒ S + A + T + O + R = 19 + 1 + 20 + 15 + 18 = 73
A R E P O ⇒ A + R + E + P + O = 1 + 18 + 5 + 16 + 15 = 55
T E N E T ⇒ T + E + N + E + T = 20 + 5 + 14 + 5 + 20 = 64
O P E R A ⇒ O + P + E + R + A = 15 + 16 + 5 + 18 + 1 = 55
R O T A S ⇒ R + O + T + A + S = 18 + 15 + 20 + 1 + 19 = 73
“That hardly looks helpful.”
Zofia frowned. “Separate the numbers. The first line is seventy-three. Seven plus three is ten. Move to the next line. Five and five is ten. Each of them becomes ten when treated as a separate integer. Or, perhaps it is not ten. Perhaps it is just one and zero. See?”
“It’s like the I Ching,” said Enrique, impressed. “The movement of zero to one is the power of divinity. Ex nihilo and all that. That would fit if there’s a piece of verit inside this square because the stone was believed to examine the soul, the way a deity might. But that doesn’t give us a hint to how to open the box itself. Plus, do the letters look like they’re … sliding?”
Zofia held up the metal square, tilting it back and forth. She pressed the letter S and moved her finger. It dragged a couple spaces to the right.
For the next hour, Enrique and Zofia copied out the letters on at least twenty different sheets of paper before cutting them up, and trying to arrange them as they went. Every now and then, his gaze darted to her face. As she worked, Zofia’s brows were pressed down, her mouth slanted in a grimace. In the past year or so that she’d worked for Séverin, Enrique had never spent much time with Zofia. She was always too quiet or too cutting. She rarely laughed and scowled more than she smiled. Watching her now, Enrique was beginning to think she wasn’t really scowling … maybe this was just the face she made when thinking … as if everything was an exercise in computation. And here, with the numbers and the riddle before them, it was like watching her come alive.
“Language of the divine, language of the divine,” muttered Enrique over and over to himself. “But how does it want to be arranged? I see A and O which could theoretically be said to represent the alpha and omega power of God. Those are, coincidentally, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, said to suggest that God is first and last.”
“Then take out the two As and two Os,” said Zofia. “Wouldn’t it make sense if it stood apart?”
Enrique did as she suggested. Maybe it was the light in the room or the fact that his eyes were strangely unfocused in exhaustion, but he thought of home as he muttered a quick prayer. He thought of kneeling with his mother, father, Lola, and brothers in the church pews, heads bowed as the priest recited the Lord’s Prayer in Latin: Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum …
“Pater Noster,” breathed Enrique, his eyes flying open. “That’s it. ‘Our Father’ in Latin.”
His eyes skipped over the arrangement of letters, hands moving furiously as he moved the bits of paper into a cross:
“Zofia,” he said. “I think I know how to use it.”
He took the metal disc from her, then dragged the letters into the PATER NOSTER formation, with the As and Os placed outside of the cross. The square split down the middle, and a ghostly light shimmered before them. Zofia reeled back as the top half of the brass square slid away, revealing four gravel-sized pieces of verit stone that could ransom a kingdom.
12
SÉVERIN
Séverin was ten years old when he was brought to his third father, Envy. Envy took them in after Wrath accidentally drank tea steeped with wolfsbane. It was not a peaceful death. Séverin knew, for he had watched.
Envy had a wife named Clotilde, and two children whose names Séverin no longer remembered. On the first day with Envy, Séverin fell in love. He loved the charming whitewashed house and the charming children who were the same age as Tristan and him. When the men in suits and hats had dropped them before the house, Clotilde had told them, charmingly, of course, “Call me Mama.” When she said that, his throat burned. He wanted to say that word so badly his teeth hurt.
Clotilde allowed them almost one perfect week. Milky tea and biscuits in the morning. Warm hugs in the afternoon. Pheasant shimmering in golden fat for dinner. Cocoa just before bed. Two feather-down beds down the hall from the other two children.
And then, before the week ended, Séverin had heard Clotilde and Envy fighting behind closed doors. Séverin had been on his way to her tearoom. In his hand were flowers that he and Tristan had spent all morning picking.
“I thought they were heirs!” Clotilde yelled. “You said this was our chance to earn back a place!”
“Not anymore,” said Envy, his voice heavy. “One has an immense fortune, though he won’t see a penny of it until he comes of age.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do? Feed and clothe them on that measly allowance from the Order? This week’s meal cost a king’s ransom! We can’t go on this way!”
Finally, Envy sighed. “No. No, we cannot.”
That was the end of milky tea and biscuits, of warm hugs in the afternoon, of shining pheasant, of cocoa in bed. That was the end of “Mama,” for now she preferred to be known as Madame Canot. Séverin and Tristan were relocated to the guesthouse. The other two children no longer sought them out. The only blessing was that Tristan and Séverin were given a tutor from the university. And as it was all he was given, Séverin abandoned himself to it.
After Madame Canot moved them to the guesthouse, Tristan cried for weeks. Séverin did not. He did not cry when Christmas dinner was only for Envy and his wife and children. He did not cry when Envy’s daughters received a silk-eared puppy for a present, while Tristan and Séverin received a scolding for keeping their narrow, chilly rooms unkempt. He did not cry at all.
But he watched.
He watched them fiercely.
* * *
SÉVERIN STARED AT the bone clock.
He’d moved it from its original place on his bookshelf to his desk to help him concentrate. Behind him, late afternoon sun poured through the tall, bay windows of L’Eden.
It had been two weeks since they’d uncovered a few precious pieces of verit stone and the Horus Eye location from the catalogue coin. In three days, they would leave for House Kore’s Spring Festival celebration at Château de la Lune, House Kore’s country estate. On those sprawling grounds hid the Horus Eye, the rare artifact that could see the Babel Fragment.
The acquisition that would change everything.
And yet one fact kept pressing at the back of his skull … Enrique and Zofia had reported that a man had been waiting for them in the dark of the exhibit. That fact haunted all of them. Tristan, especially. Not that this particularly worried Séverin. Tristan was always the most terrified out of them, always concerned they were on the brink of death, always looking for a way out of it. Only this time, Séverin hadn’t indulged him.
> Last night, they’d been laying traps in the garden, trying to catch whatever creature had been killing off all the birds.
“You’re sure it’s not Goliath?” Séverin had asked.
“Goliath would never do that!” said Tristan, blushing. “But forget the bird killer. What about the man that almost killed Enrique and Zofia? Séverin, this acquisition isn’t safe.”
“When was it ever going to be safe?”
“But no one was after us before. They could hurt us. Really hurt us.”
Tristan scowled. “I bet it’s Hypnos. I bet he’s leading us into a trap. How else would someone know we’re after the Horus Eye?”
“He swore an oath of no harm. He can’t break it.”
“But what about someone working with him?”
“Our intelligence cleared all of his guards.”
“But obviously there’s someone—”
“—likely from House Kore,” said Séverin. “They’ve had teams dedicated to finding their matriarch’s missing Babel Ring, and they might have mistaken Zofia and Enrique for the thieves.”
“You’re too excited to see what’s right in front of you! This is different! And you’re not listening to me!” shouted Tristan. “Honestly, it’s all about your ego. What’s the point of this—”
“Enough.”
Tristan had flinched. Only when Séverin looked down did he realize he’d slammed his hand against the desk. But he couldn’t help it.
“What’s the point?” Séverin had repeated. “The point is getting back what was taken, but you don’t get that, do you? You were always used to Wrath, but I wasn’t. I used to have a family, Tristan. A fucking future. What do I have now?”
Tristan opened his mouth, but Séverin spoke first. “I have you, of course,” he’d said.
Tristan eyed him warily. Tense. “But?”
Séverin turned his palm skyward, eyeing his silver scar. “But I used to have more.”
Tristan had stormed out. When Séverin had gone to talk to him, he’d found the Tezcat door locked. No matter how many times he knocked and twisted the gilded ivy leaf … he couldn’t get through.
The Gilded Wolves Page 12