Wow, Chloe ducked through the opening and walked into the cavernous room with Nate right behind her, stepping over the Aattened door, the keys sticking up like a gold Aower. The torchlight didn’t carry very far, but Chloe saw more iron sconces set into massive, Auted columns on either side of the room. She lit the one on the left then walked around the room lighting more of them, four in all, though there were many more pillars, as big as redwoods. The chamber was gradually revealed by the spitting torches, a Roman storehouse with a ceiling at least ten meters up. The patterned stone Aoor was covered with sandy dust, drifted in piles, the walls lined with small vases and rotting boxes.
All very interesting, but Chloe was most impressed by the four giant urns that dominated the center of the room, identical, each nearly three meters tall and made of smooth, reddish clay. They were grouped in a rough diamond, spaced evenly a meter plus apart, and were decorated with tall Roman figures obscured with dust, decorative bands of circles and Aourishes where the containers narrowed at the throat. Each was topped with a knob-handled lid as big as a manhole cover.
Sculpted and painted, perhaps, before Christ walked the earth. Chloe set her torch into a sconce and stepped back to admire them. That this chamber had survived, the urns undamaged for this long—
“Well? Did it work?” Sully panted, rudely breaking into Chloe’s respectful awe. “What’s happening? Is the gold there? Talk to me, I’m—”
Chloe pulled her earpiece out, saw Nate do the same as they both walked through the towering urns, touching them. Maybe he was feeling like she was, struck by the history and majesty of the ancient chamber, by the pulse- pounding triumph that attended finding a treasure hidden centuries before. The urns themselves were museum pieces, larger than any she’d ever seen and in pristine condition.
“Can you believe this?” Nate asked, touching one of the painted figures, a man in a toga with a crown of leaves. The figure was taller than he was.
“We found it,” Chloe breathed. “I can’t believe we found it.”
* * *
Chloe walked through the urns, touching them. Nate reluctantly slipped his earpiece back in, gaze eating up the incredible room. With the torches going, they were experiencing the chamber the way that the ancient Romans had, after they’d conquered the whole Iberian Peninsula and set up an outpost here, Barcino. Named by Caesar Augustus, 14 ad—he remembered it from the wiki he’d read. Not centuries ago, millennia. Just seeing it was almost worth getting beat up and half drowned. The gold in those urns would more than cover the balance.
Sully was nearly shrieking. “—be down there in five minutes and if you don’t answer, so help me God I’m gonna—”
“Sully, Sully,” Nate said. “It’s good. We’re in a Roman storehouse, at least two thousand years old, and there are these four giant urns, about eight feet tall…”
“Intact?” Sully broke in.
“Perfectly preserved.”
There was a long pause, and Nate imagined he could hear Sully’s envy in it. Chloe knocked on the urn, looking up at the lid as she put her earpiece back in.
“So what are you waiting for?” Sully asked, roughly. “Open them up and get that gold.”
Nate grinned. Poor guy, it had to be killing him not to be down here. “They’re priceless in their own right,” Nate said. “Moving as fast as we can.”
“Give me a lift?” Chloe asked. She stood next to the urn in her sleeveless black jumpsuit thing, hair pushed away from her golden face. She looked beautiful, triumphant and strong.
Nate dropped his pack on the dusty Aoor and went to the urn, crouching in front of her, putting his hands together. He boosted her up and ducked under her, her feet landing on his shoulders. He managed to straighten up, back to the urn, pushing against it to maintain his balance. Chloe got a knee up onto the curve of the container and shoved at the lid. There was a heavy, grating scrape, but the lid only moved a few inches.
Nate leaned on the dusty clay and held her ankle, her boot planted on his right shoulder—and heard a soft creak next to his ear. He turned his head as Chloe pushed again—
—and saw that a small crack had snapped into existence where he’d leaned to counterbalance her weight. Just a small one, but even as he watched, a tiny line branched out from one side… and another tiny line branched off of that.
“Uh, Chloe?” Nate asked.
Chloe had managed to lever enough of the lid off to reach inside. She couldn’t see, the lid’s shadow covered the opening, but her fingertips touched something. Some kind of grain?
She pulled out a handful of the stuff and held it up. White crystals, nearly as fine as sand.
She smelled it, then touched her tongue to the crystals.
“Salt,” she said, frowning. Why would they hide gold in salt? Gold didn’t need preserving.
“Chloe, we have a problem,” Nate said.
“They used salt to store food,” she mused aloud, “but I don’t know why they’d put gold in—”
Nate jerked under her feet and the urn suddenly collapsed into a hundred pieces, spilling both of them to the ground. A tidal wave of salt hit the Aoor and slammed into the other standing urns. The one closest cracked with a dull sound and burst, the added avalanche exploding the next urn, which brought the last one down. Body-sized shards of clay clattered to the ground and drifted in the cascading avalanche of salt.
Chloe managed to keep from getting buried, but only just. She sat up on the settling white beach, looking around in disbelief.
“What’s happening?” Sully asked.
“It’s got to be here,” she said, crawling to her feet, staring around at the drifts of salt. The dust of it burned in her nose, the taste was thick in her mouth. It tasted like what-the-fuck. It has to be here!
“Or why all the tricks?” Nate agreed. He looked stunned.
“Answer me, guys, what do you got?”
Suddenly furious, Chloe kicked at the nearest mound, sent a storm of crystals Aying through the cold air. “Salt! Nothing but salt!”
“It’s not here,” Nate said. “The gold’s not here.”
“And remember those urns? Slightly less priceless now,” Chloe added, because if she had to suffer, Sully should too. The loss was literally incalculable.
She considered how she was freezing and exhausted and not five billion dollars richer, and kicked at the worthless salt again.
* * *
Chloe stamped around, fuming, but Nate just sat. He felt terrible about the urns—and if the gold wasn’t here, why all the puzzles and booby traps? The church, the arrows and spears, the water coffin…
Because there’s something valuable here. Something worth the trouble. Salt had been incredibly valuable once upon a time, but the Eighteen weren’t legendary for stealing salt, were they?
Nate looked around at the drifts of white, scanning them… and saw something sticking out of the salt near the edge of the spill, something darker than the shattered clay. He crawled toward it, salt gritting into his hands and knees, and felt his hopes rekindle as he got closer. Some kind of leather, mostly buried.
He reached for the object with both hands and fished out a heavily oiled satchel, a cylinder about three feet long and nearly black with age. He untied the oiled leather with shaking fingers, and unrolled the front Aap.
Inside was a scroll, backed in more leather. Nate lifted it out, letting the satchel thump into the salt as he rose into a crouch and started to unroll the bundle, his heart in his throat. Fine, light parchment was revealed, thin black lines in a grid—
“A map,” he said, laying the find on the salt, marveling at the medieval work—a close-up of Europe and China, the Philippines, Indonesia. His eye was drawn to the only water that was colored in, a compass rose near the Java Sea, a Aush of pale blue next to the islands.
The Malukus. The Spice Islands. South of the Philippines, it would have been a short trip…
“I’ve almost got this off,” Sully said, breathless. “I’ll be right down.”
Nate barely heard him, studying the map. “They never brought it back. The path to the gold begins in Barcelona, but it ends over here, in the East Indies…”
He turned to show Chloe… and she was standing on the other side of the salt beach, holding a gun pointed at him. She dropped her earpiece to the stone Aoor and stomped it, but the gun didn’t waver.
* * *
There was a nasty burst of static in Sully’s earpiece. Scowling, he clicked it a bunch of times, but he couldn’t hear anything. Had he turned it off?
“Kid? You there?”
Nothing. Shit. He went back to the task at hand with even greater urgency. Three of the screws were loose, there was just one holdout. He jerked at the stubborn grate, cursing under his breath.