“Do you think this leads to another way out?” Nora asked.
“It had better.” Dodge experimentally pushed on the bricks just below the hole. The old mortar holding them in place crumbled away, and the bricks fell into the darkness beyond.
Hurricane nudged him aside. “Let me have a go at it. Knocking things down is my specialty.”
True to his word, in the space of only a few minutes, Hurley disassembled a portion of the wall large enough for them to walk through. The area beyond opened to another staircase going up, this one more cramped and thankfully not rigged for collapse. After a long, winding ascent, they emerged at the entrance to another large room, and as Dodge swept the area with his light he knew they had at last found what they were looking for.
The floor was covered in hundreds… perhaps thousands… of ceramic jars, arranged in neat rows with narrow aisles at regular intervals. The jars were sealed with a drizzle of lead solder, and attached to each was a tag of copper which had oxidized to a pale green. Dodge inspected the nearest jar; etched into the tag, barely visible now, were the delicately curving characters of what he assumed to be the Persian alphabet.
“We found it!” Nora gasped.
“We found the library,” Dodge said. “Finding what we came for is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“We’ve got nothing but time,” Hurricane opined. “I don’t see another way out of here.”
Dodge cast his light up and down the length of the room; there were no doors. “Maybe there’s another hidden passage that leads to the top. They had to have some way to get all this stuff down here.”
“I’ll start knocking on the walls and see what shakes loose.” Hurricane gestured to the collection. “I reckon that’ll be easier than trying to make sense of all that.”
As the big man started to move away, a strange humming filled Dodge’s head. For a few seconds, he dismissed it; between the noise of gunfire and the thunderous sound of the collapsing tunnel ceiling, his hearing still wasn’t quite back to normal. But then he realized that it wasn’t a sound at all, but rather a vibration, reverberating through his body like the beat of a bass drum.
He turned to Nora, and found her looking back at him with a confused expression. “I feel it, too,” she said. “Is it an earthquake?”
Before Dodge could answer, the jars on the floor started to rattle. “Get back!” He grabbed Nora’s arm and pulled her bodily toward the edge of the room, just as the ceiling started to fall.
This time, there was no crash of stone on stone, no thunderous tremor as tons of solid rock smashed down from above. Instead, there was only a hissing sound as sand poured down into the center of the library. The fired clay jars tumbled like bowling pins and were subsequently buried in a waist high pile. A cloud of fine dust filled the room, eclipsing the scant illumination of the flashlights, plunging them into darkness.
Through the miasma, Dodge heard the sound of conversation, distant and muffled, and not the familiar voices of his companions. There was a soft thud of something falling in the center of the room, and through the haze, he could just make out a rope hanging down into the sand heap, seemingly out of nowhere.
Not nowhere, Dodge realized. Though faint, he could make out light streaming in through a hole in the ceiling — a perfectly round hole — directly above the newly formed mound.
The rope started moving, squirming serpent-like, and suddenly there was another person in the secret library, expertly rappelling down the dangling line. The barely visible silhouette swept the room with a flashlight, and gave a triumphant cheer as the beam revealed the ceramic jars.
It’s a woman, Dodge thought. Then the light searched out the rest of the room, illuminating Dodge and Nora, and the woman spoke again. “Oh. Who the devil are you?”
Another figure descended the rope, with considerably less grace. The climber let go prematurely and tumbled backward down the sand pile. He sat up, rubbing his hands. “Ow! That burns!”
The voice was familiar, and Dodge finally put a name to it in the same instant that Hurricane called out: “Newton? Is that you?”
Chapter 12—Remember the Alamut!
“Dodge?” Newcombe got to his feet and took a cautious step forward. “It is you. What… how did you get here?”
Dodge was dumbfounded. Each question that popped into his head led to another that seemed even more important.
Hurricane saved him. “Well, Doc, how’s not as important as why, and why is, because we were chasin’ after the folks that absconded with you.”
“Absconded?” The scientist glanced at the woman who had preceded him into the room. “There’s been some kind of misunderstanding.”
“I’d say so,” Dodge finally managed. “I take it you aren’t being held prisoner by Walter Barron.”
“Prisoner? Good heavens, no.”
The woman glanced between Newcombe and the others, then abruptly stepped forward, extending her hand. “Findlay, where are your manners? I’m Fiona Dunn, but I insist you call me Fiona.”
Newcombe hastened to her side. “Fiona, this is Dodge Dalton. That’s Hurricane Hurley. And… Oh, Miss Holloway, you’re here, too?” He glanced at Anya and Rahman. “I have no idea who you are.”
“A pleasure, Miss Fiona.” Hurricane, ever the gentleman, stepped forward and took Fiona’s hand, and in so doing, Dodge realized, he distracted attention away from Anya. “Beggin’ your pardon of course, but I was raised better’n to address a lady with just her Christian name.”
“Fiona is an archaeologist,” Newcombe said.
“Among many other things. A pleasure to meet you all.”
“A woman archaeologist?” Nora sounded a little awed. “That’s extraordinary.”
Fiona cocked her head to one side, as if trying to decide on the most diplomatic response. “Well, it certainly is still a club for the old boys, but I can hold my own with the best of them. I found this, didn’t I? I suppose technically, you beat me to it by a few minutes.”
Hurley cleared his throat and then gestured to the opening overhead. “That’s a nifty trick. How’d you manage it?”
“A marvelous new invention,” Newcombe said. “A resonance wave generator. It uses principles suggested by Nikola Tesla—”
“The death ray.” Dodge had realized the answer even before the scientist had started talking, and realized that Hurley had as well.
“Well, it could be used that way, but I think that’s a poor choice of nomenclature.”
Dodge barely heard the scientist’s explanation for the device. All he could think was that he had failed — failed to prevent Barron from developing his death ray, failed to rescue his friend from the industrialist’s clutches, failed to protect the secrets of the Alamut library.
Once again, Hurricane’s voice cut through the confusion. “That’s mighty interesting, Doc, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather hear all about when I’m not in a hole in the ground.”
“Climb on up if you like,” Fiona declared, bending down to inspect one of the jars. “I’ve got work to do. I only hope the one we need isn’t buried under a ton of sand.”
“This is going to take a while,” Hurricane muttered.
“Well, it’s not as bad as all that.” She set the jar down and moved to a different row. “It is a library, after all; there will be a certain order to the collection.”
“Don’t tell me the Ismailis invented the Dewey Decimal System,” Nora said.