The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

Sam with a grim smile, “we wouldn’t need to be holed up here in an isolated cabin just to speak to each other, after a week of having to mess around with secret codes.”

“Mess around!” I said in frustration. “You’re the one who’s been messing around, with your rigged funerals and biblical anagrams and secret meetings! But after what I’ve been through this past week, I want answers and I want them right now. What’s in that missing package, and why did you send it to me?”

“It’s my inheritance,” said Sam, as if it were clear. “Please listen to me, Ariel. You must understand everything I have to tell you. Seven years ago, just before he died, my father told me for the first time what Pandora had left him. He’d never discussed it before, he said, because by the terms of Pandora’s will he’d agreed to keep the bequest confidential. So Father put it in a box in a bank vault in San Francisco, where our family’s law firm was located. When Father died, I retrieved the box and brought it here to Idaho to study. It contained many old, rare manuscripts Pandora had collected over her lifetime. The package I sent you contained copies of these—”

“Copies?” I cried. “You had to fake your death—our lives are in danger—over a bunch of duplicates of something?”

“These are the only copies.” Sam spoke a bit impatiently, it seemed to me, for someone who’d taken so long to explain himself. “When I said the originals were old and rare, I should have said ancient. They were stored in a hermetically sealed box against decomposition. There are scrolls made of papyrus and linen, or of metals like copper or tin. A few are written on wooden boards or metal plates. My judgment, based on the materials and languages used—Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Sanskrit, Akkadian, Aramaic, and even Ugaritic—is that these manuscripts originated in many regions of the world and were written over a long span of time. I knew at once that what I held in my hands was incomparably valuable. But I also sensed, as my father might have, that they were somehow dangerous. Many have disintegrated badly with age, nearly crumbling into dust, and can’t be photographed easily without complicated, expensive equipment and processes. So I’ve made copies of each—myself, by hand, a labor that’s cost me many years—so I could begin to translate them. Then I put the copies in the vault and I hid the originals where I don’t believe they’ll be found. At least, certainly not until my translations into English are complete.”

“And have you been able to translate many?” I asked.

“Quite a few,” Sam replied. “But it’s all an odd ragbag of seemingly unrelated things. Letters, stories, testimonials, reports. Bureaucratic administrivia from imperial Rome. Celtic and Teutonic legends. Descriptions of Thracian festivals and dinner parties in Judea, tales of pagan gods and goddesses from northern Greece—and nowhere a thread that connects it all. Yet there must be something or Pandora wouldn’t have collected them to begin with.”

My mind was racing, but it was going in a circle. How could documents like these be connected to the neo-Nazi conspiracy plot I’d expected after listening to Laf and Bambi? All the events they’d described happened in this last century, while languages like Ugaritic, so far as I knew, hadn’t been spoken in millennia. I thought of the Norns in their hidden grotto inside that mountain at Nürnberg, weaving and spinning the fatal game plan for the world’s last days. But what if no one could read it when it was done?

As Sam took a swig of tepid coffee, I could sense the frustration a codebreaker as good as he must feel at removing the skin of the onion and contemplating the layers remaining to reach the core.

“If you haven’t been able to find any connection among these manuscripts of Pandora’s after years of trying,” I said, “why does everyone think they’re so valuable and dangerous? Could they be related to the objects in the Hofburg—the ones everyone says Hitler was trying to collect?”

“I thought of that, even before you mentioned it just now,” said Sam. “But more important to me was figuring out where the documents came from, how Pandora obtained them, and why she wanted them in the first place. And perhaps most significant was to understand why—of all people—she bequeathed them to my father.”

“I’ve wondered the same thing myself, since I learned about the documents,” I admitted. “Do you know?”

“Maybe,” said Sam. “But I want to know what you think. Before now, I’ve had nobody to discuss my theory with. It has to do with Pandora’s will. When Pandora died, my father was called to Europe for the reading of her will, as a principal heir. He was surprised. After all, she was his stepmother only while she was briefly married to Hieronymus. She hadn’t seen him since the ‘family schism’ took place. In fact, as I’m sure you’ll agree, Ariel, Uncle Laf’s story of our family must be filtered through a different prism from that of our fathers Earnest and Augustus. They could hardly have held her in such high regard, when she ran off and left them in Vienna to be raised by their father.”

Sacrée merde, I thought, when confronted once more with my complex and bitter family history. But suddenly something occurred to me: Was it possible Pandora had actually counted on the deep bitterness and complexity of our family interrelations? I said as much to Sam.

“I already had more than a strong feeling,” said Sam. “But when you told me your stories just now, everything fit. I think it’s been at the root of everything from the beginning—I mean the family schism itself. Let’s look at it closely. At the start, it was Pandora who created the split at one blow by going off with Laf and Zoe. It’s been a sharp thorn in our side of the family that Pandora abandoned your father