The Key

85

It was light when Liv woke.

She’d had the dream again while she slept, only this time it had been different. The Tau had stood, not in some featureless darkness, but in the middle of an empty desert at night, a fingernail moon hanging low in a sky full of stars. It had been a dream shot through with anxiety and dread, although nothing had happened. She had just sat, staring up at the dwindling moon as it sank towards the horizon, slowly disappearing in a drift of sand until, moments before it and she disappeared entirely, she woke up.

She was lying in the lower bunk of a row of three in a wooden dormitory room that reminded her of summer camps she had gone to when she was a kid. It had the same smell of wood and dust and sunshine. There was also coffee brewing somewhere and her stomach growled in response. She tried to sit up and, to her utter relief, her body obeyed. The drug she had been given was losing its grip on her, but she still had the cottonmouth dryness of the recently sedated.

Easing herself out of bed, she slowly got to her feet, testing her balance and feeling the stiffness in her muscles. The room shifted a little as she rose and she had to cling to the steel frame of the bed until it steadied again. She could hear the pulse in her head and feel the dark threat of a headache lurking behind her eyes. Ordinarily she would have popped an Advil and got back into bed, but the smell of the coffee lured her on. She needed the caffeine and the rehydration: but most of all she wanted to see Gabriel again.

She found him in the next room, sitting at a table opposite Dr Anata and Arkadian. They were all hunched over a fold-out map pinned flat by a leather-bound book and a laptop wired to a phone. Gabriel rose from his chair and walked over to her, hesitant and slightly nervous, as if he didn’t quite know what he should do. Liv solved the problem for him by collapsing against him and squeezing him hard. He was wearing a pullover that felt soft against her cheek and held the same cedarwood and citrus smell of him that she remembered from before. She pulled back and looked up into his face. ‘Just checking you’re real,’ she said, her voice raspy from lack of use. ‘You’ve been popping up in my dreams — and not in a good way.’

Gabriel smiled. ‘I’m real,’ he said. He pulled a chair out for her and sat back down. ‘You want some breakfast?’ He said this as if they were on a weekend away with friends and she had slept in with a hangover.

Plates of bread and apples, and pots of honey and butter were set out on the table, and her stomach growled at the sight. It would all have been quite pleasant if the circumstances had been different. Gabriel poured coffee from a jug and stirred in a big spoonful of honey. She drank the sweet liquid, savouring the way it scalded the back of her throat and hit her empty stomach with the combined force of caffeine and sugar.

She looked down at the map on the table. It showed the eastern edge of Turkey and the brown expanse of Syria, Jordan and Iraq. ‘So where are we going?’ she asked.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

‘We’re not entirely sure,’ Gabriel admitted. ‘I… didn’t find the Starmap. Someone else had got there first. The monk who helped me get inside the mountain, Athanasius, is going to check the archives and try to find out what happened to it.’

Even though Gabriel’s words had mortal implications for her, Liv could hear the pain of disappointment in his voice and wanted only to reach out and tell him it was OK. ‘So we wait,’ she said brightly, trying to make it sound as if this was the best they could have hoped for.

Another awkward silence stretched across the table. Dr Anata broke it.

‘We haven’t got time to wait,’ she said. ‘I’ve been going through some research papers on ancient maps and other documents that I thought might point us in the right direction.’ Her voice was low and measured in a way that disturbed Liv deeply. ‘I discovered something, a couple of things actually: one that may be of use and one that — is less helpful.’

In her former life as a crime reporter, Liv had done a feature on what the police called ‘Death Notices’, the most hated part of any homicide detective’s job. It referred to the visits they had to make to victims’ families in order to break the painful news that someone they loved was never coming home again. In the course of her research, she had studied the specific changes in body language and the careful cadence of the voice as it shaped itself to deliver this most unwelcome of all news. Liv recognized those telltale signs now in Dr Anata.

‘We’d been working on the assumption that the countdown started when you released the Sacrament. But having read up on ancient systems of measuring time, I realize we were wrong.’ Dr Anata picked up the leather-bound book from the table and turned to the middle pages. ‘The Mirror Prophecy says you must follow the Starmap Home within the phase of the moon. So far we have applied our modern, fluid notions of time to this, and treated it as a relative measurement. For us, a specific period of time can start whenever we choose because we have clocks to measure it by. But the ancients only had the fixed rhythms of nature, so time for them was always expressed as an absolute. Therefore the phrase “Within the phase of a moon” does not refer to a twenty-eight-day period that started when you released the Sacrament. It refers to the fixed period of celestial time during which all of these events must happen.’

Liv realized now why Dr Anata’s tone and behaviour had been so horribly familiar. Like those detectives she had followed to unsuspecting doors, Dr Anata had been carrying the burden of death with her. Only this time it wasn’t news of some victim in the morgue, it was the prognosis for her survival.

‘How long have I got?’

‘The current phase of the moon ends tomorrow night,’ Gabriel said, his voice tight and controlled. ‘We have two days to find the ancient site of Eden or the Sacrament will die inside you, you will die with it, and God alone knows what will happen to the rest of us.’

Liv looked out through a dusty window to a uniform line of trees stretching away from the shack. Blossom drifted down from them like snow and above them, low on the horizon, she could see the partial moon, curling like a fingernail in the lightening sky.

‘You said you’d found two things,’ she said, watching it melt away, as it had in her dream, which now made a terrible kind of sense.

Dr Anata reached over and turned the laptop round so Liv could see it. ‘I found this,’ she said.

On the screen was a browser window with a picture of a cracked clay tablet.

‘This is the Imago Mundi, the oldest known map in the world, and part of the permanent collection of Babylonian artefacts in the British Museum. Imago Mundi literally means “map of the earth”, and many — myself included — believe it was inspired by the Starmap.’

Liv leaned forward and studied the photograph. A section at the top of the tablet was crammed with strange symbols and below that were two perfect circles — one inside the other — containing another symbol that Liv recognized immediately as the Tau.

‘I came to the conclusion that, if this was inspired by the Starmap, then the two would exhibit similar characteristics and principles. Maps are always designed to be uniform and stick to certain rules so that as many people as possible can interpret them. Modern maps, for example, always have north at the top, and the oceans coloured blue. And the one thing about this map that is consistent with every other from the same period is this.’ She pointed at the T in the centre of the circle.

‘It’s always right in the middle and everything else is relative to it. In the past, scholars assumed it was the Tau and must refer to Ruin, because of the city’s long associations with the symbol. But when cuneiform started to be decoded in the nineteenth century they discovered their mistake. The upright actually represents a river and the crosspiece a city, under whose walls that river flowed.’ Dr Anata pointed to a symbol carved into the right-hand side of the crosspiece. ‘Babylon. At one time it was the greatest city on earth and the centre of the civilized world. So naturally the very first map-makers placed it at the centre of everything.’

‘And you think the Starmap will do the same?’

Dr Anata nodded. ‘The route back to Eden will undoubtedly begin where all ancient journeys did, at the site where Babylon once stood.’ She pointed a silver-ringed finger at a spot on the map. ‘Al-Hillah — in the province of Babil, south central Iraq.’

Liv looked across at Gabriel, his face pinched in painful memory as he stared down at the point on the map marking the place where his father had been killed.

‘We should load up the jeep and get going,’ he said, rising from his chair. ‘The border’s a good few hours away. We don’t have much time.’