Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

“A musical instrument? It is nothing more than that?” Guo continued to watch him, as if he could read in al-Tusi’s eyes the truth about the device. “I shall take it with me then. Perhaps I will learn its mysteries.”


Al-Tusi shrugged, but this time he wasn’t trying to hide anxiety. Guo had overestimated the urghan’s importance.

Now if he will just get out of the way, I can find the real prize.

“Yes,” the general went on. “Perhaps you will teach me how to play it.”

“I am no musician,” al-Tusi replied, staring at the urghan, surreptitiously searching the surrounding tabletop for the Book. “And I have the Khan’s business to attend to here. I must try to preserve what little of the library you have not already destroyed.”

With what he hoped was an air of casual disdain, al-Tusi turned away and started gathering scrolls and codices from the tables. He purposely ignored the parchment on the table with the urghan, hoping that Guo would lose interest, or more accurately, that he would be deceived by al-Tusi’s apparent disinterest.

“I leave you to your task,” Guo said, after a long silence. He strode toward the exit, pausing at the threshold. “I think I would like that instrument, though. I’ll send some men to collect it. Please make sure nothing…untoward…happens to it.”

As soon as the general was gone, al-Tusi let out the breath he had been holding, and he hastened back to the table. With barely restrained urgency, he began sorting through the papers arranged around the urghan.

Where is it? It has to be here.

His fingers lit upon the parchment. He was surprised at the memories a simple touch evoked, but he tucked the nostalgia away, along with the roll, which disappeared into the folds of his robes.

Let Guo have the urghan; without this, he will never begin to grasp its true importance.

But securing the parchment brought him scant comfort. The Book was nowhere to be found.




He searched every document in the room, and when he was done, he searched the other observatories and reading rooms. Over the days that followed, he would inspect every scrap of paper or parchment that Guo’s soldiers had not destroyed—setting aside more than four hundred thousand unique documents—but the one book he sought most continued to elude to him.

There was a simple explanation, of course. The Book, that singular, irreplaceable chronicle of the experiments conducted at the Prime…the tome that, quite literally, contained within its pages, the secrets of life itself…was gone.

Destroyed.

Pitched into the Tigris like so much waste.

At first, al-Tusi was inconsolable, but as the days and weeks passed, he realized that perhaps his father had been right about such things. Allah had seen fit to remove the knowledge from the world.

The Caliph had tried to use the discovery as a weapon of war. No doubt, men like Hulagu and Guo would have attempted to do the same, and if they had somehow succeeded…

Al-Tusi didn’t want to contemplate what that might mean.

Perhaps it was best that the Book was gone.

Inshallah





Yunnan Province, China, 2005



Katherine Geller stared at the endless emerald-green tea plants covering the distant hills, with a mixture of nostalgia and contempt. She was a coffee drinker and had been since her late teens, imbibing mug after mug of the beverage, sweet but without milk, as she studied and crammed to get through her university courses, and subsequently her PhD in Biology, along with Masters degrees in molecular biology, organic chemistry and epidemiology, respectively. Coffee was a drink she associated with ambition and the drive to succeed; tea just made her think of Richard.

They’d been good for each other, even if they hadn’t been terribly successful as a couple. Richard had also been driven to succeed, and with the nearly limitless resources of his inheritance, his only limiting factor was the scope of his vision. She had helped him articulate his grandiose schemes, and he in turn had opened doors for her that she hadn’t even known existed. They had pushed each other to new heights, competed with and dared each other, and in the end, extended their reach well beyond what either of them had thought possible to grasp. Perhaps because their personalities were so much alike, the intimate relationship that had started it all—which they both recognized from the outset as nothing more than a diversion—had withered on the vine. Not surprisingly, they were both better for it. He had gone on to pursue his ambitions, and she had returned to her true passion: research.

They were still close. His company was discreetly funding her current endeavor. She called every day on the Qualcomm satellite phone he had insisted she take along, but their conversations rarely evoked any kind of emotional response. The sight of the hills covered in tea however, reminded her of the god-awful fresh-cut peppermint tea that he was always trying to get her to drink, and that took her to more intimate places in her mind.