The Giant's Almanac, Andrew Zurcher [accelerated reader books txt] 📗

‘I have a document in my possession,’ he told him, ‘that the museum looters are desperate to find. They must not succeed. It reveals a secret, a magical secret, the means to locate a great treasure, carried out of the north by the Persians thousands of years ago, and concealed in a vault, buried in the ground not many miles from this place. The bulk of the treasure is so much gold, so many precious stones, such carving and metalwork as this world has never seen. Thieves have taken some of it already, hundreds of years ago’ – he waved his hand in the air, dispensing with this inconsequentiality – ‘but where they missed the main chamber of the vault, the bearer of this document will not, and will recover the hoard. But of much greater importance’ – and here the old man leaned in further, and spoke in the lightest of whispers – ‘it will permit the bearer to find a far greater treasure, even, than that: a set of instructions for the construction of one of the most beautiful machines that the human mind has ever devised. Indeed, it is the work of no human mind.’ And then he drew a paper from within his shirt, and pressed it into Ned’s hand, and said, ‘I am in danger. I may die very soon. Take the manuscript, and go to my brother, Professor Sassani, in Cambridge. Yes, young Mr Edward More, he said, I know you well enough. He is my brother. Tell no one about me, tell no one about this manuscript. Trust no one. But go to Sassani. He will take you on as his student. Study what I have told you. But be careful of my brother; he too is a thief, and a wicked man.’

And then the old man shuffled out, pushing weakly through the hotel’s battered door, past the armed soldiers and into the glare and dust.

Ned did as he had instructed: concealed everything from the archaeologists on the mission, and everything from Sassani – who did take him on as a graduate student, and supervised his doctoral dissertation on Near East antiquities. For four years Ned studied the ancient Persian military campaigns in Bithynia, in what is now north-east Turkey, and the various surviving objects they were thought to have brought back with them, which once stuffed the royal treasury in the Persian capital city of Ctesiphon. He was determined to learn everything he could about these artefacts, for he hoped that, one day, he might begin the great work that had been thrust upon him by that nameless and shabby old man in the hotel in Baghdad – the recovery of the lost treasures of the shāhanshāh, the Persian king of kings. Meanwhile he kept safe the manuscript he had been given. He could barely read it, the writing was so ancient, and the calligraphy so fluid and ambiguous; but he concluded, through long study, that it was only one scrap of a larger paper, a paper that had been torn in at least two pieces.

At long last, Edward More had finished his doctoral research two months earlier. He had planned to go to Syria, to consult a well-known scholar there whose work he admired. But then three things happened, all on a single day. First, he went to the British Museum in London to see a manuscript, one he had meant to consult during research for his thesis. He recognized it immediately as the lost and torn piece missing from his own document. When he returned to Cambridge that night, however, he found his flat had been burgled, and his own manuscript was gone. He immediately suspected Sassani; but when he called at Sassani’s rooms that very night, to challenge him, he found that the professor had suddenly withdrawn from the college and the university, with plans to retire to his country house in Scotland – on the coast of Ayrshire.

‘Keep House,’ said Clare, looking up from her painting.

‘Yes,’ said Ned. He put his cup down. ‘I drove up there last week. Unannounced. It’s a big place, much bigger than I had imagined. The housekeeper said Sassani was abroad, but because I was his student she let me stay the night. It was lucky I did.’

He reached in his pocket and took out a folded piece of newspaper. ‘I found this on Sassani’s desk,’ he said, as he leaned forward through the window to place it on the table before her. It was a photograph on newsprint of an old, bearded man, with some sort of article written beneath – Fitz could barely see it through the crack in the door. ‘That was the man who approached me in Baghdad,’ said Ned. ‘He was found murdered. Someone drove a long knife into him.’

Clare picked up the cutting and turned it over – and there, on the other side, she saw something. She had stopped painting; now she dropped her brush and her hands sprang away from it, as if she had been stung. Even from the door, Fitz could see the heavy drops of black, shed from the brush, soaking blots into the paper in front of her.

‘That’s the address of my mother’s cottage,’ Clare said. ‘My cottage. Written there. That’s our address.’

‘Yes,’ said Ned. ‘The address I was looking for when I ran over your daisies.’

‘What’s that word beneath it – it’s in –’

‘Yāqūt. It’s the Arabic word for ruby.’

I will return for my jewel. As big as your fist and as red as wine.

Fitz shuddered; the noise of thrumming in his head was so loud that he was sure they could hear it in the next room.

Clare was thinking, tapping one of her long fingers on the table. ‘So you wrote to me from Keep House. That day.’

‘Yes,’ said Ned. He was staring at her, from the window, with intense interest.

‘I see. Professor Sassani’s house. And now he is here. I think I should leave. That Fitz and