“I don’t know,” Giovanni said. “But even in the thirteenth century, thieves existed.” He looked pointedly at Tenzin. “Or so I’ve heard.”
Ben said, “But maybe the angel churches aren’t churches at all. Or they weren’t churches. If they were treasuries, that could be why Emperor Lalibela wanted to keep outsiders away.”
“Lalibela wasn’t known for his riches,” Giovanni said. “He was widely hailed as a humble king who lived very similarly to his people. He left no castle or palace. The churches are considered his greatest achievement.”
Tenzin raised one eyebrow. “So maybe he was guarding something else besides treasure.”
Giovanni was slowly nodding. “Like a powerful object hunted by immortal powers?”
“Maybe,” Tenzin said. “According to Sadia, Bêta Gabriel is not a typical church.”
“And that’s exactly what we’re looking for.” Ben squeezed his little sister tight and placed a kiss on her forehead. “Brilliant baby.”
“Thanks,” Tenzin said.
Ben stared at her.
“Oh, you’re talking about Sadia.” Tenzin pulled her legs up to her chest. “I knew that.”
The following night, Ben, Tenzin, and Daniel climbed up a hill where a rocky outcropping was shaded by towering eucalyptus trees. Ben was walking with the earth vampire while Tenzin flew ahead, irritated by even the idea of the ground.
Ben could feel her tension and knew she was reaching the end of her patience.
Not unlike a certain ancient vampire who was approaching Lalibela.
“Do you think Arosh is already in the city?” Daniel looked suitably worried. “I really don’t want to create stone walls in the middle of populated areas.”
“I think he’s going to have to behave if Saba is with him.”
“She was with him last time.” Daniel ducked under a low-hanging branch, still following stairs cut into the side of the hill. “You think she’ll have more respect for the humans than for us?”
Tenzin flew toward them, hovering in the dark night. “In short? Yes. She considers humans like little children, unable to defend themselves and thus off-limits to truly powerful predators like her. It’s not that she cares more for humans than vampires, but she would consider the fight uneven.”
“Like it was when she razed the Aksumite kingdom and tried to wipe out the Solomonic dynasty?”
Tenzin raised a finger. “To be fair, that prince murdered her favorite daughter.”
“Not humanity’s finest moment.” Ben veered toward the right when he saw a deep channel cut into the side of the mountain. “We’re here.”
Tenzin came to settle on the narrow stone bridge that started at the base of the hill and grew narrower and higher toward the churches. “The bridge of heaven.” She skipped up the narrow path. “Symbolizing the journey of a devout, earthly life.”
“Narrow.” Daniel looked down at the steep drop off the right side. “And precarious for a human.”
“They don’t allow the humans to climb this way anymore.” Tenzin pouted. “Pilgrim safety or something like that.”
Ben suspected that a drop from the top of the bridge really did mean a quick trip to the hereafter. It was well over three stories high at the peak.
“Are we sure about this?” Daniel asked. “Are we really taking advice from a five-year-old?”
“She’s six,” Ben said.
“Oh, that makes it completely different,” Daniel said. “What was I worried about?”
Ben paused and turned to Daniel. “We were planning to search this church anyway. We’re just moving it up the queue.”
“When Arosh’s arrival is imminent?”
“Hey, you didn’t disagree with Sadia’s assessment.”
“I don’t, but if King Lalibela was the one to hide the scroll, I simply think it’s far more likely to be in a church, not a strange building with more questions than answers.”
“The angel church.” Ben looked ahead and began to climb next to the earth vampire again. “What if Sadia was right in more than one thing? She’s the one who was wondering if angels were really just wind vampires that humans didn’t understand.” He looked over his shoulder; Daniel was following them. “What do they say? Out of the mouths of babes?”
Daniel spoke under his breath, his eyes fixed on the dark outline of the churches in the distance. “Surely He said to those around him, ‘Out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants, you have perfected praise.’ The Son of God didn’t say anything about wind vampires, my friend.”
“Maybe I have faith anyway. Saba wants us to find this scroll,” Ben said. “The closer Arosh gets, the more I’m sure of it.”
Minutes after they had started the climb, Ben stood staring across a gulf at the shadowed facades of Bêta Gabriel and Rafael. Tenzin had already flown across the span of the steep drop and tested the door, which was locked. Then she flew to the carved base of the churches two stories down, inspecting the wells and cisterns carved into the rock, wells that had no logical point of access for anyone other than a wind vampire or an earth vampire who could scale walls.
“There are handholds.” Daniel peeked over the edge. “Difficult for a human free climber, but not impossible.”
“For an earth vampire?”
He shrugged. “A mildly amusing exercise. Nothing more challenging than that.”
Tenzin flew along the sheer walls of the space, her hands pressed against the rock beneath the wooden bridge that connected the cavern to the front of the church.
“We need to get inside.” She turned and her eyes were nearly glowing in the darkness. “I can feel something.”
“What?”
“Space.” Her voice was nearly a whisper as she spread her arms and hugged the wall. “So much space.”
33
They entered the church in silence, their shoes left on the rock platform outside. Daniel’s eyes swept across the pitch-black church, and he reached for a long yellow candle, lighting it before he swung the light over the space.
Tenzin’s immediate impression was that Sadia had a keen eye. The church was odd, different on a level she had trouble articulating, though she’d spent time in hundreds of Orthodox Christian churches in the span of her life. The interior space was broken into three rooms, an altar placed almost directly in front of the doorway in the main room with another smaller space going off to the left. In the far corner, she saw a black cut in the rock that led to the church of Rafael.
The air moved around her, curling and teasing her with secrets. It had whispered its mysteries to her from within the rock walls outside, beckoning her to discover the corners where it lived.
“Sadia was right.” She turned in a circle, looking up at the high ceilings. “This wasn’t always a church.”
“A palace?” Ben took a long rope candle from Daniel, lit it, and began exploring. “You said there was space beneath us, Tenzin. I can’t feel it though.”
“Kick back the rug,” the earth vampire suggested. “Feel the floor.”
The earth vampire was smarter than he appeared.
Daniel rolled back a corner of the rug near a wooden door on the back wall and pressed his hands to the earth. “There’s a solid meter of rock beneath us, but then there’s a chamber.” He shook his head. “I want to look for a tunnel; there has to be one.”
There was one. In fact, there were several.
Her eyes were drawn to a door high on the back wall of the church with stairs leading upward. “That doorway smells of bread.”
Daniel looked at her. “Yes, there’s a sacred bakery beyond it.”
“What makes bread sacred?” Ben asked.
Tenzin ran a hand along the walls and felt for the space within the rock. “There are many cultures in which bread is sacred. You’re familiar with the Eucharist ceremony, but bread is considered sacred by Wiccans and many pagan cultures as well. Egyptians considered bread essential to life.”
Daniel said, “The bakery h
ere feeds the priests and the monks mostly.”
“Gotcha.”
A whisper of movement captured her attention. “Stop and listen.” Tenzin raised a hand and closed her eyes. “Feel where the air is traveling.”
Ben walked to Tenzin and pulled back another corner of the rug, moving a large drum that was placed in a corner of the church that wasn’t a church. He bent down and placed his hands on the ground. “I still can’t feel anything.”
“Trust me?”
He looked up and met her eyes. “Always.”
“This way.” She followed a tendril of wind that drifted toward Daniel. The earth vampire had already spotted where that air was traveling even though she hadn’t said a word.
She spoke to wind, he to earth. And that earth had shown the vampire a rounded square hole cut deep into the rock and covered by a wooden door closely fitted to the stone passage and secured with a heavy iron lock.
“Can you open it?” Dan asked Ben.
“Give me a little room.” Ben knelt down and took the lockpicks from his pocket. They looked delicate against the dark iron, but within minutes, Ben had the lock open and removed from the door.
With Daniel, Ben slowly pulled up until the heavy wood door swung up and over to reveal a wide, round hole dug into the bedrock of the mountain.
“It’s a hole in the ground,” Ben said.
“No.” Daniel leaned forward. “It’s a doorway.”
“There’s no door.”
“You are mistaken, my friend.” Daniel put his hands on the bottom of the pit and dug his fingers into the rock as if it were no harder than clay. “It’s designed to be opened from the bottom, or there’s some mechanism we can’t see.”
He lifted the rock straight up, revealing a finely cut slab angled slightly so it wouldn’t fall through the passageway it revealed.
“Give me that candle.” Daniel held out his hand, and Tenzin passed him a long lit rope candle, which he lowered into the passageway before he looked up. “There are footholds carved into the side.”
“Is it damp?” Tenzin forced her voice to remain steady. Something within the rock called to her even though she despised being underground. She saw the candle flicker as the air moved over it.
It’s not damp. The earth is not close to my mouth. Feel the space between the rock.
“It’s dry.” Ben looked up. “And the air smells fresh. There has to be an outlet on the other end, Tenzin. It’s not a closed passageway.”
She nodded. “Daniel goes first.”
“No objection,” Daniel said. “I’ll call when I reach a floor or if I get into trouble.” The man handed the candle to Ben, then slowly lowered himself into the passageway before he reached up and took the light again. “It’s tight. We better hope there’s a better exit, because I think I’ll have to widen the rock if we try to go back up this way, and that would be noticeable.”
“Okay.” Ben was watching the darkness as Daniel disappeared. “So we look for an alternate exit. Got it.”
“The air movement would indicate that there is another exit,” Tenzin said.
Daniel didn’t speak for a long time, but minutes later, he called up. “Ben? Tenzin? I think… you better come down here.”
“How big is the space?” Ben looked at Tenzin.
“Once you get through the tunnel, there’s space.” A long silence. “Quite a bit of space.”
Ben stared at Tenzin, but she had nothing to add.
“We go down,” she said. “Like you said, it’s not a closed passageway.”
He jumped up and went to close the door of the church. “We’re probably not coming back this way.”
I certainly hope not.
Tenzin knew there was something waiting for them. She knew it the same way she knew her father feared her and Ben never had. “We go down.” She moved to the passageway. “I’ll go first.”
All three of them stared at a wooden chest standing roughly four feet high on a platform in the center of the cavern and covered in rich purple cloth and animal skins. It was nearly four feet long and about three feet wide. Near the base of the chest were two long, reinforced poles, one on either side.
“Is it?” Daniel’s voice was small.
“I… Maybe?” Ben shuffled closer to her side. “Tenzin?”
Tenzin cocked her head and stared at it, her mind racing. The object under the heavy veils positively oozed with power, more than she’d ever thought possible. It was similar to amnis but carried a different flavor when it reached her mind.
“It’s powerful.” That was all she could say about it. All she knew for certain.
Power. Massive, massive energy.
Still, the power felt familiar. She saw the currents twisting around it, as if suspended and pushed by an upwelling of air. She felt the connections between the rock and the air, the space between both. The power emanating from the chest was something far closer to amnis than any other force she’d felt in the human world.
Ben reached for her hand and knit their fingers together; in the wash of reflected power, Tenzin felt her blood brimming within him, moving in his veins, the life within him battering her with the sudden realization that she was a fool.
An utter fool.
He was already marked by her and she by him. While vampire biology might not have caught up yet, there was no way she could walk away from him. It was as impossible as the object pulsing in front of her eyes.
He was her mate. They would have to deal with it one way or another.
Not the time, Tiny.
She could almost hear the disapprobation in his voice.
Focus, Tenzin.
Daniel was still having trouble speaking. “I mean… That is, the dimensions are… accurate. If it is… You know.”
“I’m not fluent in Old Testament measurement conversions,” Ben said. “But I’ll take your word for it.” He cocked his head. “Those… could be wings. On the top, I mean.”
“The replicas I’ve seen pictures of would indicate—”
“How accurate are the replicas? I mean, are we actually going to believe—?”
“Do you want me to look?” Tenzin reached out her hand, her fingers almost touching the edge of the decorated silk.
“No!”
She wasn’t actually going to poke it, but the panic in their voices was highly amusing. Daniel grabbed her hand inches from the rich gold and purple coverings that draped the chest while Ben grabbed her by the shoulders and physically pulled her against his chest.
“Tenzin, are you nuts?” Ben asked. “Even I know you do not touch that thing!”
“Am I nuts?” She mulled over the question. “I mean… am I tempted to touch the very holy magical object rumored to cause the death of anyone who even looks at it? Yes. Yes, I am. It’s supposed to be covered in gold. I love gold. But will I touch it? No. I may have unusual neural patterns and stilted social skills, but I’m not stupid.” She wasn’t even getting close to that thing. She’d learned long ago that some fires weren’t worth experimenting around.
Daniel could barely speak. “It’s the… Ark of the Covenant. The real… I mean, I always thought—”
Tenzin narrowed her eyes and turned to Daniel. “The Ethiopians have claimed for thousands of years that they hold the Ark. Are you really that surprised?”
“But no one ever saw it.”
“The high priest saw it.”
“But he wouldn’t let anyone check that it was actually there.”
“Of course he wouldn’t. If they looked on it, they would die.” This seemed like very obvious logic to Tenzin. She wasn’t sure quite why Daniel was having such a hard time with it.
“That’s why no one would believe him,” Daniel said. “Because they couldn’t confirm what the priest said.”
“Clearly they had reason.” Tenzin crossed her arms. “If the real Ark is here, it must be a replica in Aksum.”
Daniel blinked. “I mean… Are we even sure…” His hand drifted toward
the chest as if pulled by an invisible magnet.
“Sure enough.” Ben grabbed Daniel’s hand and pulled it back.
“But archaeologists—”
“Don’t know everything,” Ben said. “Otherwise this debate clearly would have been over a long time ago.”
“Well.” Tenzin was still staring at it. Oh, she wanted to see it. She was so tempted it was painful. “That definitely explains why King Lalibela told everyone to leave this chamber alone.”
“And they just did it.” Daniel spoke with quiet awe. “For nearly a thousand years.”
“Yeah, until a bunch of foreigners broke into the church and blew those good intentions out of the water,” Ben said. “Speaking of that, we should probably try to ignore that this thing is even here.”
“Good idea.” Forcing her eyes away from the suspiciously shaped chest covered in royal cloth, Tenzin examined the rest of the room.
Though everything was covered in dust, the air did smell fresh, and Tenzin knew Ben was right. This chamber and passageway had an outlet somewhere.
A hint of smoke in the air.
Tenzin turned to the candle Daniel was holding. The scent was no more than traces of a candle, she was certain of it.
But all the same, there was no need to linger.
“That box may be off-limits,” Tenzin said, “but the bone scroll isn’t. If Lalibela stored one secret and powerful object down here, then he may have stored another. Let’s get searching.”
There were more chests to open, but these were definitely older than the ones Ben had described beneath the church of Bêta Merkorios. These were heavy-lidded and made of solid acacia wood, often detailed with bronze rivets.
“The period looks right,” Daniel muttered. “I’ve been studying up on my woodworking.”
“Watching The Repair Shop is not the same as studying up,” Ben muttered as he opened a heavy chest with leather straps that fell apart in his fingers. “Oh my God, didn’t Giovanni say that Lalibela wasn’t known for his wealth?”
Tenzin turned to look at Ben, who was lifting a handful of gold coins from a chest.
The Bone Scroll: An Elemental Legacy Novel Page 25