The Last Odyssey (Sigma Force #15) - James Rollins Page 0,71
a phylax empsychos, an ‘animated guardian.’ Talos would run around the island throwing boulders down on anyone who threatened Crete.”
“I’d say that’s animated, all right,” Joe admitted.
“But there’s two details about him that I think are important. First, another way Talos killed people was to run up and hug them against his red-hot bronze form, burning them alive with the fires inside his body.”
“Sounds sorta like what those flaming crabs were trying to do.”
She nodded. “It was also written that Talos was powered by a golden ichor, an oily fluid that burned with fire and could not be put out. Which again matches Mac’s description of what seemed to fuel those fiery crabs.”
“If you’re right, then Mac wasn’t the only one who had encounters with these creatures.” Joe stood up and clanked over to her side. “Way in the past, others must’ve run into something like them, too.”
“And built mythologies around them.”
As an archaeologist, she knew many myths were based on kernels of truth.
“But how does any of this help us right now?” Joe asked, turning to the wall clock.
“It doesn’t,” she admitted.
Nehir had ordered her to glean some insight about the golden map, to help guide her team to where Captain Hunayn had traveled after leaving the island of Vulcano.
She stood up and shifted over to the map box and lifted its lid. The golden coastlines gleamed around the rich blue of the lapis lazuli sea. But her gaze focused on the silver astrolabe resting in its cradle. She knew now it wasn’t the same sphere from the ancient dhow. It was clearly too new.
Someone made a facsimile.
Last night, she and Joe had risked flipping the lever on the map’s side. They retreated a few steps, remembering the radiation given off by it. They had listened as gears turned, the box hummed, and once again, the tiny silver ship—likely representing Odysseus’s boat—left its port in Troy. It sailed out a few inches into the representation of the Aegean Sea, then stopped and spun in place.
They had tried it again a few times during the night, but only achieved the same result. She had gained no new insight and finally stopped trying, fearing they were irradiating themselves for no reason.
Still . . .
She reached down with both hands and gently lifted the silver astrolabe out of the map. She had not dared try this before, but desperation now made her risk it.
“If you break that . . .” Joe warned.
“Hush.”
She sensed something important about the astrolabe, something she was missing, something her sleep-deprived mind couldn’t grasp. She lifted it closer and rotated the sphere in her hand. She noted the tiny pinprick holes drilled throughout the inner shell. Likely serving as ventilation holes for the clockwork mechanism inside.
Wait . . .
She shifted the astrolabe to one hand and reached to her desk. She moved the photocopy of Hunayn’s journal closer and turned to the last few pages and read a line there: “‘Only I was allowed to possess the beams of the Ship-Star, the three tools necessary to unlock the one true course amidst the map’s many false paths.’”
She straightened with a start. “I’ve been such a fool.” She held out the astrolabe toward Joe. “Hold this.”
He did so with a sick expression, as if she’d just passed him a coiled rattlesnake.
She reached into her pocket and removed the three bronze pins that had fallen from Hunayn’s journal. The captain had been protecting far more than just those old books.
“What are those?” Joe asked as she approached him with the bronze rods.
“‘The beams of the Ship-Star,’” she said, quoting the journal. “As a nautical archaeologist, I should’ve already figured this out. The Ship-Star is one of the old names for the North Star, a shining beacon for sailors going back millennia.”
“And that’s important, why?”
She ignored his question and examined the tiny flags at the tip of each pin. A tiny Arabic symbol was inscribed on each. As Joe held the astrolabe, she searched its surface, looking for the corresponding mark.
“There you are,” she whispered as she found the right one.
She carefully inserted the pin with the matching flag into the little hole next to it. Then after some furtive squinting, she found the second and pushed its rod into place
She explained as she looked for the last symbol, “Astrolabes have to be constructed to the latitude of the user, fixing the North Star at its center.” She tapped the silver artifact. “But not spherical astrolabes. They’re universal tools. One can