The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves #1)(38)

“I can barely see,” said Enrique. “Do you have flint to light the match?”

“No.”

Enrique sighed, looking around the room. “Well, then I—”

He stopped when he heard the unmistakable sound of fire ripping from a match. Zofia held a tiny fire out in her hand. In her other hand, she took a second match and struck it against the bottom of one of her canine teeth. Firelight lit up her face. Her platinum hair looked like the haze of lightning on the underside of a cloud. That glow looked natural on her. As if this was the way she was meant to be seen.

“You just struck a match with your teeth,” he said.

She looked at him quizzically. “I’ll have to do it again if you don’t light the candles before these burn out.”

He quickly lit the candles. Then he took one and held it over the metal disc that had slipped out of the compass, examining it. On closer inspection, he saw writing on its surface. All the letters on the square were concentrated in the middle, but there were enough squares for twenty-five letters to be written vertically and horizontally.




His heart began to race. It always did whenever he felt on the verge of discovering something.

“Looks like Latin,” said Enrique, tilting the disc. “Sator could mean ‘founder,’ usually of a divine nature? Arepo is perhaps a proper name, though it doesn’t seem Roman. Maybe Egyptian. Tenet means to hold or preserve … then there’s opera, like work, and then rotas, plural for ‘wheels.’”

“Latin?” asked Zofia. “I thought this artifact was from a Coptic church in North Africa.”

“It is,” said Enrique. “North Africa was one of the first places Christianity spread, believed to be as early as the first century … and Rome had frequent interaction with North Africa. I believe their first colony is now known as Tunisia.”

Zofia took one of the other candles and held it close to the disc.

“If the verit is inside, can I just break it?”

Enrique snatched the brass square off the table and clutched it. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I am tired of people breaking things before I get a chance to see them,” he said. “And besides, look at this switch on the side.” He pointed to a small toggle sunken into the width of the square. “Some ancient artifacts have failsafes to protect the object within, so if you smash it, you might destroy whatever is inside it.”

Zofia slouched, nesting her chin in her palm. “Perhaps one day I’ll discover how to chisel verit stone itself.”

Enrique whistled. “You’d be the most dangerous woman in France.”

As a rule, it was impossible to break verit stone. Every piece that existed at the entrance of palaces, banks, and other wealthy institutions were raw slabs that had naturally come apart during the lengthy mining and purification process. All of which made procuring a gravel-sized piece of verit unheard of, even on the extensive black market that usually suited their purposes.

“The words are the same,” said Zofia.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re just the same. Can’t you see it?”

Enrique stared at the letters, and then realized what she meant. There was an S in the upper left and bottom right corner. An A adjacent to both. From there, the pattern made sense.

“It’s a palindrome.”

“It’s a metal square with letters.”

“Yes, but the letters spell the same thing backward and forward,” said Enrique. “Palindromes used to be inscribed on amulets to protect the wearer from harm. Not just amulets, though, come to think of it. There was one in ancient Greek found outside the Hagia Sophia church in Constantinople. Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin. ‘Wash the sins, not only the face.’ It was thought the wordplay would confuse demons.”

“Wordplay confuses me too.”

“I shall withhold comment,” said Enrique. He studied the letters once more. “There’s something familiar about this arrangement … I feel as though I’ve seen it before.”

Enrique walked over to the library within the stargazing room. He was looking for a specific tome, something he had come across during his linguistic studies in ancient Latin—

“Found you,” he said, pulling out a small volume: EXCURSIONS TO THE LOST CITY OF POMPEII. He quickly scanned the pages before he found what he was looking for.

“I knew it! This arrangement is called the Sator Square,” he said. “It was found in the ruins of Pompeii in the 1740s, commissioned by the king of Naples. Apparently, the Order of Babel helped fund the excavation alongside Spanish engineer Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre in hopes that it would reveal previously unknown Forge instruments.”

“Did it?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” said Enrique.

“What about the palindrome’s meaning?”

“Still under scrutiny,” he said. “Nothing else has appeared like it in the ancient realm, so it’s either a riddle or a cryptogram or a very bored inscription by someone who was about to be killed by a gigantic volcano. Personally, I think it’s a key … Figure out the code and the brass square will unlock. Maybe there’s some math involved here … Zofia? Any ideas?”

Zofia chewed on the end of a matchstick. “There’s no math to it. Just letters.”