Jack Whyte - Order in Chaos

Will told him.

“So we’ll all ha’e bare faces from now on?”

“No, not bare. You sergeants won’t have to change your hair or beards at all, except for letting your tonsures grow out. But the knights will trim their fabled forks. And all the signs that we are Templars will be hidden.”

Tam grunted, pressing the last of an armload of logs into the fire with the sole of his heavy boot, and dusted off his hands. “Well, I’ll be interested to see what changes that will make.”

“It will make very little difference to who and what we are, Tam. But it should fool a casual eye from a distance. We don’t want to hide ourselves, but we do want to hide our identity, as you well know. Now, out of here and leave me to my labors.”

Tam merely nodded amiably, then closed the door firmly behind him as he went out.

Will reached for the heavy, cloth-wrapped packet on the table. It felt slick in his grasp, for the entire thing had been dipped in sealing wax, forming a smooth, solid, yet brittle protective skin. He hefted it for a moment, gauging its weight and wondering what it could contain, then took his dagger from its sheath and rapped the hilt down hard against the wax covering, pieces of which scattered across the floor. But wax adheres strongly to coarse-woven cloth, and he had a minor struggle to free the contents, finally resorting to his dagger’s edge to cut through the packaging.

A plain black slender iron key fell onto the table before he could catch it, and he sat still for a moment, staring down at it. It was slimmer than most such keys, almost delicate in appearance, and as long as his hand from heel to fingertips, its only decorative feature being that the handle formed the unadorned cross pattée of the Temple. He gazed at it, frowning slightly, then looked inside the wrappings in his hand to see the edge of a piece of parchment. He pulled it out and unfolded it, and as he read it he felt the small hairs stirring on his neck.

William

Should you become my successor you may have need to access the contents of the chests in your possession, for reasons yet to be discovered. There is among them one smaller than the rest, bound in brass and with a single padlock, sealed in wax. This fits that lock. Guard it well. It is the Master’s Charge. The chest contains the keys to all the others. Open them alone, in your own time, and view the vindication of our ancient Order of Sion, so that you may know what must be done to safeguard them, intact or apart, should a time of great need arrive. May God keep you, and all of us, in safety and in health.

D.M.

Will sat back heavily, aware only now that he should have been expecting this development, since it made no sense that he should be permitted to transport the fabled Temple Treasure without the means to open it. But the mere thought of now being able to do so, possessing the right to open the great chests and gaze upon their legendary contents, shrouded for so long in mystery, made him reel with dizziness.

Contemplating that reminded him that the Treasure itself was still floating aboard one of their remaining ships in the bay of Lamlash, awaiting the discovery of a safe hiding place. It was covered in sailcloth and not even under formal guard, and by now most people there had been kept busy enough to forget its existence. But more than a month had elapsed and no good hiding place had been discovered by any of the trusted men assigned to the task. That, he now saw clearly, was neither acceptable nor even tolerable. And as he thought about the problem, the answer came to him without warning, raising gooseflesh on his shoulders with its aptness. There was no place on Arran safe enough to hold the treasure; several large caves and caverns there were, certainly, but they were far from inaccessible to anyone determined to enter.

The perfect place, and, he instinctively believed, the only place made for such a use, lay far from Arran Isle on the Scottish mainland, in his father’s own lands of Roslin, deep in the forested hills southwest of Edinburgh and far inland from the sea. To the best of Will’s knowledge, no one but he and his brothers, three of whom he had not seen or thought of in many years, were aware of the existence of the place, a vaulted, subterranean cavern with a single narrow slit of an overhead entrance, discovered by sheer accident years before by Will’s elder brother Andrew when he fell into it while searching for an errant arrow and found himself rolling down a slope of scree into a vast black, empty space. The brothers had used the cavern as their secret place for several years after that, swearing fearful oaths that they would never reveal the place to others. Will had not thought of the cavern for years, having used the place for no more than two summers during his boyhood, and he would have wagered that his brothers, too, had forgotten about it. But now he recalled it perfectly, its single, narrow entrance, a black slash in the level ground at the base of a hill, invisible beneath an overgrown mass of ancient brambles.

The entrance would have to be enlarged, he knew, for it had barely been wide enough to admit small boys, and it was a fracture in solid rock, not a subsidence of soft soil, but he barely spared a thought for the difficulty involved. The brethren of the Temple had been building fortresses and palatial buildings for more than a century, using mathematical and geometrical methods handed down, by the Order of Sion, from the architects of ancient Egypt. And a result, stonemasonry, the greatest of the builder’s arts, both ancient and modern, had become an honored craft among the Temple knights, who referred to their lore as sacred geometry. Will knew a score of expert stonemasons among his own circle within the brotherhood, and there were five of them among his current command. To them, he knew, the task of enlarging the entrance and then concealing it completely afterwards would be a simple one, quickly completed.

He felt his stomach stirring in anticipation, knowing that, as a place of concealment for the Treasure, the cavern would be unbeatable, even safer and more secret than the cavern in the forest of Fontainebleau where the chests had lain in safety for decades.

Now, he decided, his priority must be the safe transportation of the Treasure to his father’s land and its proper concealment there. The thought of seeing Roslin again after so many years, of seeing the faces and hearing the beloved voices of his father and siblings and all their broods, brought him to his feet and set him to pacing the room, already busy selecting the party who would ride with him.

“Tam!” he roared, and the door swung wide a moment later to reveal his kinsman, wild eyed at the urgency of Will’s summons.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong, Brother Sergeant! I merely deliver advance warning. Clean yourself up and try to look respectable, and start practicing your manners. We’ll be heading home to Roslin within the week!”

FIVE

The days that followed seemed too short for the amount of activity that had to be packed into them, transportation from the island to the mainland being a high priority. Will had a galley at his personal disposal, commanded by de Narremat, but he decided to take along a cargo ship as well, one of the craft partitioned between decks to accommodate livestock, since he had estimated his traveling party at twenty trusted men, ten of them knights and ten sergeants, and all of them would need riding horses. He limited the number of spares to four mounts, but also had to include four dray horses for the wagon that would carry the Treasure chests, which brought the number to twenty-eight animals aboard a ship modified to carry thirty-six. The extra space he dedicated to the men of the expedition, since his galley could not easily carry all of them plus the space-consuming chests, and he was unwilling to leave the chests aboard the ship, where they would be out of his sight and control.