be haunted. Few come this way anymore.”
Seichan glanced toward Gray. Her expression was easy to read:
If you’re looking for the entrance to Hell . . . you picked the right river.
30
June 26, 11:20 A.M. CEST
Strait of Gibraltar
Still trapped aboard the Morning Star, Elena stood before the library’s half circle of panoramic windows. She gaped at the monolithic limestone rock jutting four hundred yards above the sea. As the yacht passed close by it, the Rock of Gibraltar filled the entire expanse of glass.
“One of the Pillars of Hercules,” Monsignor Roe commented beside her. “Easy enough to see how it got its name. Just the sheer size of it.”
As the superyacht sped onward, the western side of the Rock came into view, revealing a sprawl of dockyards, piers, and the small city of Gibraltar huddled beneath the limestone cliffs and facing a little bay. She stared farther to the west. They’d be out of the strait in another thirty miles.
A little less than an hour.
From there, the city of Cádiz on the southern coast of Spain was the same distance again—which meant she was running out of time.
Monsignor Roe reminded her, “They’ll want some better guidance soon. There are over sixty miles of coastline between Cádiz and Huelva.”
She turned to the sprawl of books, notes, and maps spread across the library. Her heart pounded harder. Yesterday she had convinced her captors that the semi-mythic city of Tartessus—a site that much of the ancient world believed was Tartarus—lay somewhere along that stretch of the southern Iberian coast. Today her captors would want her help to narrow that search. Or at least offer some possible sites to explore.
But where?
She had hoped to have more time to come up with possible answers. Unfortunately, the Morning Star had a few tricks up its sleeve—or in this case, under its hull. She turned to the windows. With this section of the library cantilevered out from the main superstructure, she could make out the port-side foil cutting through the blue water.
Yesterday, after she had directed her captors here, the yacht had not spared its engines. It had sped away from the Tunisian coast, revealing what the prior three-hour cruise to Africa had not—that the yacht was a hydrofoil, a big brother to the little one that had ferried her here. Once under way at full speed, the Morning Star had risen up on twin foils and cut like a silver dagger across the Mediterranean.
Still, even under full power, it took the yacht more than sixteen hours to make the voyage to the strait. Elena had been hoping it would’ve taken longer, not only for her sake, but also to buy Joe’s group extra time to solve a mystery going back millennia.
In the end, though, will it make any difference?
She had no idea if Joe and the others were making any progress. To help them, she needed to keep these bastards searching southern Spain for as long as possible, which meant sending them on a scavenger hunt, one convincing enough to keep them from looking in the true direction.
Even now, she cast her gaze to the south, trying to peer through the ship and down the west coast of Morocco. When the gold map had activated, she had been close enough to see the fiery river pass through the Pillars of Hercules and begin to bend south—not north.
She pictured the little ruby she had discovered along the Moroccan coast on the gold map, where according to the geologic record, no volcano existed. Its location was also consistent with the mazelike path between tectonic plates.
The latter still mystified her.
But she was certain about one thing. During Captain Hunayn’s first voyage across the Mediterranean—when he sought Tartarus—he must have visited southern Iberia. Maybe he even discovered the rich city of Tartessus. How could he not at least go look for the place? Especially with all the history pointing this way. And if he did discover it, perhaps he learned something from Tartessus that directed him to the true home of the Phaeacians—or whatever that advanced culture was called. She could even guess what it was that he might have learned. From the stories of Tartessus, it was indeed a major bronze producer. Could they have been the ones who supplied the Phaeacians with the bronze necessary to help with the manufacture of the Phaeacians’ mechanical constructs? Had the Phaeacians in turn paid the people of Tartessus with knowledge and tech? Was that why the city of Tartessus had been described