It had been a long time since Shah called this place home, but there was nowhere else to go.
He recalled a line from an old poem. Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
The reunion with his family, and particularly his father who had never approved of his son’s travels — both literal and philosophical — had been a little strained, and Shah sensed there would be many more tense conversations in the days to come, but for the moment, things appeared calm.
Deceptively so.
His entire world had foundered. He was in exile. Everything he owned was gone, his possessions abandoned along with his New York apartment. He did not know if the authorities in the United States would seize his assets or pursue criminal charges against him, and it seemed prudent not to find out. He still had a controlling interest in the Crescent Defense League, though whether it could or even should continue remained in doubt.
After what he had learned under Bell Rock, he wasn’t sure of anything.
The dream of a second Golden Age of Islam — an era of spiritual and secular prosperity, an end to the destructive schism between Sunni and Shiite — was dead for him. He believed it was possible, probably even inevitable, but he would have no part in bringing that dream to fruition. He would never be the promised Mahdi.
How could he, knowing what he now knew?
It was all a lie. Islam. Christianity. The holy writings. None of it could be trusted.
Raina shuffled into the sitting room of the furnished flat they had rented, carrying a tray with a delicate silver tea service. His wife had been extraordinarily supportive through everything, which only deepened Shah’s sense of guilt at having been led astray by the wanton seductress Gabrielle Greene.
Gabrielle was dead by his own hand, but her poison was still in him.
I will make it up to Raina, he promised himself, yet he knew not how.
“Atash,” she clucked. “Drink some chai. It will calm your nerves.”
He managed a wan smile. “Thank you, my wife.”
She decanted a small amount of the amber liquid into a cup and passed it to him. He had never been much of a tea drinker. Coffee had always been his beverage of choice, an appropriately hyperactive drink for his hyperactive existence in New York.
Maybe it’s time to turn over a new leaf, he thought. A new drink to begin a new life.
He took a sip. It was mildly spicy from the addition of zardamom pods and cinnamon, and just sweet enough to make him wish that it was more substantial.
This will take some getting used to.
He had just finished a second sip when a knock at the door startled him. They were not expecting visitors. With the possible exception of his parents, who believed it was his place to visit them, not the other way around, no one even knew of the apartment.
He jumped to his feet in alarm, and nearly toppled over from the resulting head rush.
“Atash, calm yourself,” Raina said. “It is only the groceries. I cannot make a home if I have nothing to cook. Finish your tea, then you can help me put things away.”
Shah sat down quickly, fearing that he was about to black out, but the wooziness lingered. He tried to place the tea cup on the table, but misjudged the distance, spilling its contents onto the floor.
Behind him, he heard Raina speaking to the deliveryman. “You are early,” she scolded, though not too harshly. “Five more minutes and he would have been out.”
What?
He jumped up again, whirling toward the door, and then promptly collapsed onto the floor. He could feel the puddle of warm tea soaking into his clothes, but his limbs were completely unresponsive. A black fog was settling over him, but just before the light went out completely, he saw his wife and the man that she had just admitted to their apartment.
Her voice reached out through the ether. “Oh, Atash. You almost ruined everything.”
Because I spilled the tea?
His thoughts were as muddled as everything else, and it took him a moment to connect what he had seen in that last glimpse before his eyesight failed, and what was now happening to him.
She drugged me. Raina drugged me.
“It was yours for the taking,” she continued, only now there was a hard edge to her words, a tone he had never heard in all their years together. “We worked so hard to prepare the way. Oh, we knew you weren’t ready, but that cretin Roche forced our hand, and then had the audacity to tell Jade Ihara about it before we could put him in the grave. But still, Gabrielle showed you such wonders. How could you do this to us? Why?”
The questions must have been rhetorical. There was no way he would be able to respond, and he knew she was not speaking to the man she had just ushered in.
Yet, in a way, she was. He had caught a glimpse of the visitor’s face in the instant before the drug took away his vision. A face exactly like his own.
“You almost ruined everything, Atash,” Raina repeated. “Fortunately, you can be replaced.”
FACT FROM FICTION
We’ve always believed that the best stories are built on a foundation of truth, and this one is no exception. Now it’s time to separate what is real from what we’ve made up.
Archimedes—We’ve only scratched the surface of Archimedes’ genius. His discoveries, which include establishing the value of pi (the ration of a circle’s circumference to its diameter), are the basis for calculus and physics, without which most of our modern scientific advances could not have been made. One scholar made the observation that, if more of Archimedes’ writings had survived, we would already be living on Mars. Sadly, most of his writings were lost to history, the parchment books scraped clean and written over during the Middle Ages.
The Archimedes Palimpsest, mentioned in this novel, is real. It was discovered in a monastery just before World War I, the ancient Greek writing barely visible on the parchment which had been cleaned and resized, and used for a medieval prayer book. It has only been in the last decade that modern fluoroscopy techniques have made it possible to read one of Archimedes’ most important works. The part about a Vault and a timelock that can only be opened every thousand years is our invention, but if Archimedes had wanted to create something like that, he probably could have.
The war machines described in the prologue and in the Arkimedeion museum, including the Archimedes Claw, used to pick up entire warships and then drop them down, smashing them to pieces in the harbor, are believed to be real. The heat ray, an array of parabolic mirrors capable of focusing the sun’s light into a sort of laser beam for setting ships on fire, has long been attributed to Archimedes, but it is unlikely that he actually created such a device, or that it would have worked as suggested. In 2006 the MythBusters television program ruled the Archimedes Heat Ray “busted.” In 2009, in conjunction with students from MIT, the show revisited the “myth” and found that, while it was technically possible to create such a device, it would have been of extremely limited usefulness in warfare.
The Arkimedeion Museum in Syracuse is a real place, but the layout of the museum and its contents are the authors’ creation. Sadly a research trip was out of the question and descriptions of the facility are limited to a number of less than favorable visitor reviews, some of which complained that many of the interactive exhibits were not functional. As rule, we like to avoid presenting real world locations in a negative light, but those reviews seemed like an opportunity for a little exercise in “what if?”