The Pharos Objective

PROLOGUE

One hundred sleek Arabian horses and their dark riders, carrying torches and armed with hammers, pikes and rusty axes, thundered across the wave-battered promontory toward the lighthouse. The riders roared past Dakhil, who stood upon the crumbling red granite stairs between two colossal statues with missing limbs and fractured torsos. In the shadow of the towering Pharos Lighthouse, Dakhil imagined that the sun had been anchored permanently behind the massive structure, unable to escape its dominion.

He trembled as the riders headed straight into the arched doorway — the toothless, yawning mouth of the Pharos — and he shivered as the Mediterranean winds tugged at his black robes and snatched at his turban. The ancient lighthouse stood in silent indifference, and by a trick of light and shadow it appeared to be expanding, calmly breathing in the Muslim riders, inhaling men and horses alike.

“I hope you have been true to me,” said a voice at his shoulder. Dakhil turned to face Barraq Najdeelen, caliph of Alexandria and commander of the military forces occupying the city.

Alexandria had fallen to the Muslims two hundred years earlier with little resistance from the Christians. Once the jewel of the Roman-Egyptian era, an unparalleled center of wealth and knowledge, the gods had all but abandoned Alexandria; and now the once-proud cosmopolitan city was a mere strategic port, valued only for its access to the rich interior trade routes. And of course, for its military potential. This harbor, well-protected by jagged reefs and low-lying shoals, had seen fleet after fleet sail against Constantinople while enjoying the defense of the marvelous Pharos Lighthouse.

Barraq knew his enemy would eventually seek to recapture the city. “The infidel King Michael despises the Pharos. It is a sign of our strength and a looming reminder of Christian impotence.” He breathed in the sea air, and his long, oily beard whipped over his shoulder.

“I have spoken only the truth,” Dakhil said, nervously taking a step back. High above, the great mirror, a twenty-foot disc of reflective metal, scratched and clouded with age, winked at him, threatening to expose his lies.

Barraq tilted his head back. “You have been in Constantinople two years, my friend. Perhaps they found you out as my spy, and in exchange for your life you offered to come back here with malicious rumors?”

“No, My Lord. I am ever your loyal servant.”

“We shall see.” Barraq let his fingers drop to his belt and carefully trace the hilt of his scimitar. “This treasure — you do not have further specifics?”

“My Lord?” Dakhil trembled again, and wished he could step out of the shadow of the lighthouse. All the way up its precipitous walls, the crumbling statues of the ancient gods of Egypt, Greece and Rome pointed accusingly at him while the tower itself appeared to lean over for a closer look.

“What is it exactly? The men speak of Alexander the Great’s lost hoard. Is it gold and silver? Jewels beyond compare…?”

“More valuable still,” Dakhil said, and again offered a prayer to all the gods that were ever dreamed up by men, hoping the legends were true. The timing for this had to be perfect. He had inherited certain knowledge, information that was beyond the understanding of popes, kings or caliphs. Information, he had been told, that must remain hidden until directed otherwise.

But Dakhil was not one for patience. The title of Keeper did not suit him. Life was short, and who knew if the world would continue to exist after his own breath expired? So he had decided to release just a hint of what he knew, disguised as a rumor from the enemy’s camp, hoping to excite the caliph’s men to do what he himself could not. Brute force would surely succeed where patience had failed.

“What could be more valuable?” Barraq asked. Suspicion flashed in his eyes.

Just then, a muffled cry reached their ears from above. A shout, then a horrifying scream. Barraq and Dakhil looked up and shrank back, although they were in no danger. The huge mirror had been wrenched free of its mounts in the zeal of the treasure-seekers and rolled out one of the porticos and over the edge hundreds of feet up. It took two men with it, rotating end over end as it plummeted from the top spire and slammed onto a ledge, crushing one man and dislodging a hail of stone and debris before it bounced off and plunged another two hundred feet. Finally, upon the limestone blocks of the courtyard, it shattered in an eruption of glass and metal, releasing a tortured cry — a lament for the end of its twelve-hundred-year existence.

Dakhil cursed. “Why did they go up? That was not the way. The secret tunnels… the chambers are below the foundation!”

Barraq waved away his protests. “I instructed my men to be thorough.”

“Fools,” Dakhil whispered. He now began to fear that the caliph’s men were not up to the task.

Barraq withdrew a stick of dried wheat from his saddlebag and chewed its tip. “Tell me, Dakhil, what reward would you ask if we find this treasure?”

Still ruing the loss of such a mighty artifact, the great mirror that had reflected the sights of a millennium, Dakhil said, “I would ask, My Lord, for but one item.”

“One only?”

“Yes, if I may have first pick. A little thing, of no use to anyone.”

Barraq studied him. “If no one else has use for it, why would you?”

Dakhil shrugged. “To own something from a lost age… such a possession would be priceless.” He hoped his answer would satisfy the caliph. Of course, Dakhil knew exactly what he wanted: the most powerful item in the collection. He had done his research, he had memorized the catalog, he knew right where it was. The trick would be to find it and take it before the wrath of the soldiers and the caliph descended on him.

However, if the legends were correct and the lighthouse defenses truly existed as rumored, his job might be easier. He felt the metal edge of his sword against his hip, and the two daggers in his boots chafed against his skin.

I shall have to be quick.

Barraq made a sound like a mocking laugh, but before he could speak, an ominous roar came from the lighthouse. This time, it was accompanied by a rumbling under the earth. The tower itself began to tremble and a great dust cloud burst from the doorway and hissed from the hundred windows and cracks in the lower section.

Dakhil started to run toward the entrance with Barraq close behind. They climbed the flight of eroded stairs, raced past toppled statues and across an overgrown courtyard toward the door, where three men just now emerged, black-faced and covered with dust. Coughing, they dropped to their knees, one man holding up his hand. Blood oozed from his ears and his nose, one eye ruined.

“Gone, gone!” he cried, even as his comrades fell, spitting up blood and then lying still.

Barraq grabbed the survivor and shook him to his feet. “Speak, fool! What happened?”

“A door—” He coughed out blood, speckling Barraq’s face. “—strange signs upon it… twisting serpents and a staff. We could not open it. We three returned to seek your advice, to call for the Magi. But the others… they would not wait.”

Barraq shook him again, harder. “What happened?”

“Hammers! I heard hammers striking the door, then”—he gasped and clawed at Barraq’s face—“they screamed, ‘Trap! It’s a trap!’ The walls shook, the floor gave way. Then the sound”—another coughing fit seized his body—“of a roaring wave.”

Barraq slowly turned to Dakhil as he let the man drop to the ground. “A trap…” he echoed, just as other men began streaming out of the doorway.

Dakhil reached for his sword, and they fell upon him before it cleared the sheath.

The seventeen men who survived had been higher up in the tower. The other eighty-three, including their horses, had, by some unknown device, been swept out into the harbor.

Dakhil was led to the rocky shore east of the lighthouse and was forced to watch the bodies of those he had betrayed wash up against the stones, forced to stare at those he had sent to their deaths, their bloated, battered corpses a testament to his impatience.

He looked on, attempting stoicism, even as Barraq’s men set about sawing off his hands at the wrists and his feet at the ankles. Amidst his screams, they cauterized the stumps with flames from an oil-soaked torch and then chained him to the rocks in the water at the base of the lighthouse, facing west, away from Mecca.

At one point during the ensuing days of agony, as the gulls and the ravenous fish came to feast on his flesh, Dakhil recalled the old Greek legend of Prometheus. He had, after all, merely longed to bring light into the world, to present a powerful gift to mankind. Unlike Prometheus, he had failed; but like the Titan, he had nevertheless been ruthlessly punished.

Barraq left him there after retrieving the dead and placing a team of six men at the summit to staff a continually burning pyre. They could not afford to lose any more ships in the treacherous harbor, and their vigilance against Constantinople must not cease. He rode off on the tenth day of Dakhil’s slow death, too soon to see the lone boat steal across the harbor through the moonless night.

A man in a gray cloak stepped out onto the embankment and calmly traversed the rocks until he reached the dying man. “It seems,” he said after a moment of contemplation, “your father chose poorly.”

Dakhil moaned. His chewed-out eye sockets, above the ragged flesh and protruding cheekbones, turned toward the sound. His lungs choked on seawater and congealed blood. “No…”

“We are Keepers,” said the stranger. “Keepers. A sacred trust we have held for centuries. I cannot forgive what you have done.”

“Believed… it was time,” Dakhil muttered as the water crashed over his emaciated body and the cloaked form bent over him.

“It is not for us to decide the time. Only to keep the secret until the world is ready.” The words, spoken deeply, powerfully, came from within the folds of his hood. “In the meantime, the Pharos protects itself. The Pharos has always protected itself.”

Dakhil moaned.

The cloaked stranger moved in closer. “While I cannot forgive, I can be merciful.”

A thin blade cut through Dakhil’s throat with almost no resistance and produced very little blood. A soft gasp wheezed into the surf.

The man stood up. He bowed his head toward the flickering beacon high above in a final sign of respect and a renewed commitment to its protection. Then, with a heavy sigh, he made his way back into his boat and sailed into the shadows.