Book of the Just

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  The text of the gold book read like the Psalms—lyrical, so that without context it made no sense. Angelo felt like he understood the emotions conveyed in the beautiful words: the gnawing hunger for something that the writer also feared, a bone-deep weariness of journeying, and the elation of the promise that it would all be over soon. But Angelo didn’t know what was being hungered for, or what would be over and why. He felt sure Mouse would have known. He slammed his hands down against the desk, his frustration and disappointment biting at him like ants and a nasty worry beginning to burrow deep into his chest. He was pretty sure that this wasn’t the Book of the Just. Or, if it was, it offered no answers about how to defeat Mouse’s father. It offered no hope.

  This book was clearly old—the language itself marked it as being from long before the time of Christ, and the nature of the book, with the writing embossed on hammered gold plates and bound by rings, surely signaled its authenticity as an ancient artifact. But Angelo could find no evidence that it was the Book of the Just—no catalog of battles or songs of victories that might be spells, nothing about how to still the sun and moon as mentioned in Joshua. The text of the gold book seemed personal, more like a poem of lament—how terrible life was, the wish for an end to it all, the hope of victory of the good over the evil.

  It fit with what Angelo knew of other apocalyptic texts, like a lyrical version of Revelations. But it wasn’t nearly as specific or detailed. It did mention Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness, which made Angelo wonder if the gold book was really just the origin of another Dead Sea text—the War Scroll, which relayed in great detail a prolonged battle between the Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light. Maybe one of the apocalypse-obsessed Essenes got frustrated with the vague, metaphoric language in the gold book and decided to fix it—make it concrete, make battle plans.

  But none of this speculation helped Angelo understand why the book had been sent to him or what he was supposed to do with it. Where was the secret that would give him the power to make Mouse’s father pay for what he’d done?

  Without warning, grief ripped through him like shrapnel, stealing his breath and sending him staggering from where he stood at the desk, back onto his cot. He didn’t have time to give over to it—he balled his fists in the sheets and lifted his head, trying to breathe, trying to push down the hotness welling in his chest. Frantically, he pulled at his backpack, yanking it open, searching. He tossed out clothes and drove his hand deep into the bag, feeling for it, his anchor—Mouse’s stone angel.

  It wasn’t there.

  He scanned the room quickly, though he knew he had not seen the angel since he’d come to Valaam. He lowered himself to the floor, searching under the cot, crawling along the floor of the tiny cell.

  The angel was gone.

  He buried his head in hands and slid out prostrate on the floor. He’d lost his last piece of Mouse. She was fully and completely gone.

  He lay there, for minutes or for hours he couldn’t say and didn’t care. It was the singing that brought him out of his mourning. His mind, wanting something to make her real again, tricked him into thinking it was Mouse at first, but then the low, uniform bass shattered his dream. It was the monks. They were singing a song she’d sung, an old Bohemian hymn, “Lord Have Mercy on Us.”

  Angelo opened his eyes. He was looking up at the snow falling outside the window. An eagle owl roosted in a spruce near the rock cliff behind the building, his speckled feathers standing out against the snow, his orange eyes huge and watching Angelo. Angelo reached up to grab the corner of the desk to pull himself up, and his fingers brushed the rings of the gold book precariously perched at the edge. He squinted at the stacked ends of the plates where they fastened to the rings that bound them. There was something odd about them.

  He shoved himself up to his knees, his eyes on the same level as the plates, his breath held tight with excitement. Along the top edges of each plate were little gold hills and valleys, too precise to be happenstance. They looked like the tongues and grooves of something that fit together.

  A thrill of discovery ran through Angelo as he clutched at the nearby chair, dragging himself onto it. He didn’t bother with the archive gloves or the tweezers. He just carefully pulled at the joint where the ends of the gold rings met until they slowly opened, just enough for a plate to slide through.

  He freed the plates, one by one, and examined the top edges, which he had initially dismissed as margins, areas left empty where the book was bound. But they weren’t empty at all, as he now saw. They were carefully laid out with a neatly fitted system of teeth that paired with another plate. He fitted the tongues and grooves together for each of three pairs. Once all six plates were correctly matched, what he saw astonished him.

  The top plates rested with their text side down. He’d never thought to study the undersides of the plates. He’d assumed they were blank. But each of the three plates had a shallow etching visible only from one direction, like a perspective picture. When Angelo looked from either side or from what would be the bottom of the plate, he saw nothing, but from the top, the side where the rings attached, he could see a ragged line that ran across each plate. The end of the line on one plate perfectly matched the beginning on the next. The twists and turns looked like a road or a river. On the third plate, the line twisted back, spilling onto the middle plate once more and then turning back to sink down to the lower corner of the third plate—like something jutting out, perhaps an inlet or a peninsula. Maybe he was looking at a coastline.

  The bottom plates were still right side up, filled with the text that Angelo now knew well. But if the top part was hiding something, he needed to look at the bottom plates differently, too. He bent his head down to the table, laying his face flat on the surface so he could see across the plates. The script rose up like tiny gold mountain ranges and sank into gentle valleys. With his naked eye, he couldn’t discern any significant difference in the heights of the lettering, but he felt sure it was there. He sat back, thinking.

  As an idea came to him, he tugged at the center drawer of the old desk. Equipped for a monk’s study and meditation, it held a pad of paper and several pencils. Angelo ripped a piece of paper free and laid it across the bottom three plates. He rubbed the side of the pencil gently against the raised script. But he pressed too hard on his first try and ended up with a smudged copy of the words he already knew well. The second time, he kept his hand light, barely letting the pencil rest against the paper as he brushed it back and forth across the plate. A design emerged from the shades of graphite left behind.

  For the first time since Lake Disappointment, Angelo smiled.

  It was a map. Some of the letters had been shaped to be a little higher than their neighbors and left a trail of dashes and dots that led to a peak. Not quite an X to mark the spot, but little stars that erupted from the text, one on each of the three plates. Angelo had discovered a map, a map that led to three somethings. But where—and what?

  He took another piece of paper and made a rubbing of the winding road or coast etched into the upper plates. He would see if he could match it against anything. The library at the main monastery complex had Wi-Fi; maybe the internet would help him track down where he needed to start looking.

  But he still had no clue what he was looking for. He scanned the text of the three upturned plates, skimming over the now familiar words. About halfway down the second, he realized that the letters that now butted up against each other made new words—some letters at the far right edge of the first plate joining letters on the far left edge of the second. His eyes jumped to where the second and third plates met, and they, too, had a new set of words.

  Angelo wrote them down.

  I am

  Beyond the waters raised by God

  In the land of the lost ones,

  And deep in the mountain,

  Bitter with loss.

  The journey is long

  But the end is sweet,

  And the lion watches over m
e.

  May the breath of God guide you,

  And the Book of the Just redeem you.

  Peace.

  So it was a map. And there were three places to visit—beyond the waters, a mountain or cave, and a third place, some kind of an end. End of the road? End of the search? But what did it mean that “the end is sweet”?

  Angelo’s phone buzzed with another text from Kitty: IT’S BEEN DAYS. YOU SEEM STUCK. I’M COMING TO HELP. SEE YOU TOMORROW.

  The euphoria of his discovery fell away like shed skin. But it was more than panic at knowing he was out of time. When he saw her name lit up on his phone, his mind made another connection. Mouse’s angel—Kitty must have taken it.

  His face flushed with heat, angry at the arrogance that made her think she was entitled to whatever she wanted, whether it belonged to her or not. But quick on the heels of his anger came confusion and worry.

  Why had she taken it? She had wanted to know how old the angel was, but that didn’t justify stealing it. What else had she said about it? Angelo’s body went slack with realization. “Is that blood?” Kitty had asked. She had zeroed in on the smears of blood on the wing.

  The only reason Kitty would want someone’s blood was for a spell. Protective spells used the caster’s blood, but summoning and binding spells required the blood of the person or thing being summoned and trapped. Kitty already had Angelo on a leash; she didn’t need his blood. Obviously, she thought the blood belonged to Mouse. She was right, but Mouse was dead. Who or what did Kitty think she could summon with the blood from the angel?

  And again the answer came to him like a punch in the gut. Siblings share the closest biological relationship. His stomach twisted with the truth that seemed more clear as his mind moved through the possibilities. Angelo had assumed no one else knew about Mouse’s brother. And yet, they had known about her. Why wouldn’t they know about the boy, too? And if Kitty and the Reverend knew there was a brother, Angelo was sure they would do everything in their power to procure him. They had hunted long and hard for Mouse.

  Angelo let out a hiss. He’d been so focused on Mouse’s father, he’d never given her brother a thought. If Angelo was right about all this, the boy was in danger. But that worry was based on a lot of ifs.

  Angelo grabbed the back of the chair and pressed himself upright. He didn’t have time to figure everything out now. He needed to be gone before Kitty got here. He turned, hobbling across the small space without his crutches to snatch clothes and cram them into his bag. He packed everything quickly except the book and the box of ash, which he carefully hid in the back of the Petra statue.

  The night the Reverend had told him that Khalid was dead, Angelo had started planning. He would not have someone else’s blood on his hands. He knew then that he had to find a way to get lost, like he and Mouse had been lost. At her urging, Angelo had kept a fake ID and a credit card hidden in the lining of his bag. Once he was away from Valaam, he would use them to go wherever the map sent him. He would travel like a shadow, untraceable. Just like Mouse had taught him.

  He paused at the threshold of his cell, leaning on his crutches, his bag hanging on his back as he looked down the monastery hall. A bittersweet smile played at his lips. Mouse had been on the run, too, when she’d fled Podlažice. He was just following her lead—like always.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The jeep churned and bumped its way up into the highlands from Asmara, Eritrea. Angelo looked out over the coastal plains spilling down to the Red Sea. The Buri Peninsula jutted from the coastline at a sharp angle, the beacon landmark that had brought Angelo here. It looked almost exactly like the etched line from the backs of the gold plates.

  He’d been surprised at how quickly he’d found the map’s origin of location—just hours after fleeing the Valaam Monastery ahead of Kitty’s arrival. Obviously, his search had centered on the Middle East, but that still left an enormous expanse of land with tens of thousands of roads, hundreds of rivers, and dozens of coasts that might match the twisty line on the map. As old as the text was, Angelo had reasoned that if it had been a road laid out on those gold plates, he’d likely never find it—roads changed as easily as people did. His only hope had been that the line represented something more timeless, like a river or a coastline, something that had a hope of still resembling the mapmaker’s source.

  Limited to what he could search on his phone while being jostled about in the back of a Russian cargo truck on its way from Valaam to St. Petersburg, Angelo had known he needed to narrow the search further. The poem he’d found hiding in the margins of the plates was clearly meant as a guide. He had read over the lines, again and again, until he could see them emblazoned in his mind when he closed his eyes. I am beyond the waters raised by God in the land of the lost ones. He had no idea what the first meant—waters raised by God—but the last part of the line, a land of lost ones, had pricked at him. A text written in ancient Hebrew and a writer talking about lost ones—maybe it simply meant the lost dead or damned souls, but it could also be a reference to the lost tribes of Israel.

  As a seminary student, Angelo had been drawn to anything mysterious or unknown, so he had spent his fair share of hours hunting for the legendary lost tribes of Israel. Most scholars agreed that the ten lost tribes had likely scattered into what was now Syria and Mesopotamia, though some argued that a few had filtered into Africa. In fact, the only modern-day group claiming to be descendants of a lost tribe who had actually been accepted by the Israeli government as constituents under the Law of Return were the Ethiopian Jews. Thousands of them had been allowed to immigrate to Israel. There was even a tiny church in the Ethiopian city of Axum that claimed to have the lost Ark of the Covenant.

  Angelo had shifted his search to Ethiopia and branched out from there, which had led him almost instantly to what he was looking for. It was on the southern end of the Red Sea, not quite Ethiopia, but close. A small section of the coastline of Eritrea followed the map line almost perfectly.

  Angelo had tossed his phone in the trash at the bus station at St. Petersburg so Kitty and the Reverend couldn’t trace it. At Moscow, he’d bought a one-way ticket to Eritrea with his fake ID. He had landed at Asmara four sleepless days after he’d first fled the monastery and had meant to take a day to rest before beginning the hunt for the first mark on the map, but Fate and his body had had other plans.

  He had woken the morning after his arrival at Asmara violently sick and so weak he had to crawl from the hotel bed to the bathroom. He had assumed it was a consequence of his hectic travel, but then his fever spiked. The woman who cleaned his room, Abrihet, had brought a doctor, who worried about meningitis. The doctor had drawn blood for a test and left antibiotics. Abrihet had cared for Angelo day and night while they waited for the results. When the word came that it was influenza and a few days in bed should make the mends, Abrihet had gone back to work and sent her teenage son, Birhan, to sit with Angelo.

  Once the worst of the illness had passed, Angelo had grown impatient, the clock ticking in his head again. He’d covered his tracks, just like Mouse had taught him, but she had also taught him that eventually the hunter always caught up with the prey. The Reverend had access not only to his own extensive resources but also to the unlimited reach of the Novus Rishi. Questioning the people coming and going from Valaam or utilizing face recognition software to search the footage at the Moscow airport—whatever the means, Angelo knew it was probably only a matter of time before they found him. And, if Kitty was using the blood on Mouse’s angel to craft a spell to summon Mouse’s little brother, Angelo was also running out of time to decide what to do about it—if anything.

  “Mister?” the young driver said to Angelo, pulling him from his thoughts as he watched the coastline disappearing behind trees and clouds. “My mother say something to you before we leave. What did she say?”

  “She told me to make you mind your manners,” Angelo answered. “And I wish you’d call me Angelo.”

  “Mister
is Mister—these are my mother’s manners,” Birhan said as he tugged on the steering wheel. “And what else did my mother say?”

  “Your mother said she wanted you to leave Eritrea,” Angelo answered, squinting at the suddenness of the sun climbing over the far mountains.

  “As I thought,” Birhan sighed. “I must join the army like all boys my age. She tells you this?”

  Angelo nodded but looked away. His face, he knew, was full of shame.

  It had been Birhan who had returned Angelo’s hope that he might yet uncover the map’s secrets before Kitty and the Reverend caught up with him. While still bedridden, Angelo had pumped the boy for information, asking about archaeological sites or place names that might have something to do with God and water.

  “We are looking for something?” Birhan had asked. And with that first question, despite Angelo’s misgivings, the boy had inserted himself into the hunt.

  “I am looking for something.”

  “What is this thing we look for?”

  Angelo had opened his mouth to answer and realized he couldn’t. He didn’t have a clue. “I think I’ll know it when I see it,” was all he could say.

  Birhan had laughed. “We do not know what it looks like? Do we know maybe where it could be? Where to start looking for this thing we do not know?”

  Angelo had shown Birhan the rubbing of the map, the book itself still sealed safely in Khalid’s Petra statue. Birhan knelt on the floor beside the hotel bed so he could get closer to the pages. “This thing we look for is old or new?”

  “Very old. And someplace where maybe there was an old kingdom. Or maybe a community of ancient Jews?” He tried to give pieces of the puzzle without really revealing anything.

  Birhan had sat back on his heels, his face puckered in disapproval. “Is Mister looking for the Ark of the Covenant, like Indiana Jones?” he’d asked, his voice dripping with disdain.

  Angelo had smiled again. “No, but something like it maybe. Certainly something old like it.”