They skirted the walls of the fortress until they reached the point where the defenses adjusted to the quirks of a rocky outcrop. Zeno pointed to the place where the thick ivy obscured an entrance. On the other side of the wall, the outline of a building could be seen and Theresa guessed that it must be part of the fortress. At that moment the physician turned, leaving her alone in front of the door.
She struggled to force her way in since the damp had made the wood swell until it pressed against the stone jamb. On the third attempt, however, the door gave way, opening into a chapel room that was in such disarray it looked like a fight had taken place. The light from the entrance spilled onto the furniture, which was strewn across the floor, while the draft from the open door lifted scraps of parchment into the air in little eddies as if they were dead leaves. She examined every nook and cranny without finding anything of use, until suddenly she noticed the small door to the cell where her father had been imprisoned. Cautiously she went in, and there she found an untidy pile of writing equipment, which she quickly recognized as belonging to her father.
On tenterhooks, she rushed over to the codex with the emerald cover, where her father would keep important documents. If anything ever happens to me, look inside it, he had often said to her.
She took it without looking closely at it, then gathered all the pieces of parchment she could find in the room. She also took a stylus, pens, and a wax tablet. Then she took a last look around and ran out of there as if the Devil were after her soul.
When she arrived at the fortress entrance she had to notify Alcuin to let her in. When the monk asked her where she had been, she lowered her head and tried to slip away, but he took her by the arm and led her to a quiet corner.
“Looking for my father! That’s where!” the girl responded, shaking his hand off.
Alcuin believed her. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep her in one spot for long.
“And what have you found?”
She shook her head. Alcuin then noticed the wound on her head. And Theresa told him about the stone Korne had thrown at her.
Alcuin asked her to follow him to the scriptorium. He waited for her sit down, then paced back and forth in silence, as if debating whether to tell her everything that was going on.
“All right,” said Monk, having made up his mind. “I made you promise something once and you went against your word. Now I need to know whether you are prepared to keep an extraordinary secret.”
“Another miracle? Sorry, but I’m sick of your lies.”
“Listen to me.” He sat down. “There are certain things you do not understand yet. Love is neither pure, as you imagine it, nor tainted, just because I say it is. Men are not wicked and sinful, nor innocent and compassionate. Their actions depend upon their ambitions, their desires and longings, and sometimes, more often than you can imagine, on the presence of evil.” He stood again and wandered around the scriptorium. “There are as many nuances as there are variations in the sky. Sometimes it is warm and bright, sometimes icy and tempestuous—like one’s mortal enemy. What is real and what is a lie? The accusations Korne makes against you, confirmed by his relatives and friends, or your claim that you possess the absolute truth and are blameless? Tell me, Theresa, is there not a little bitterness within you? Does your soul not harbor a shadow of resentment?”
Theresa knew full well who was to blame, but she decided to keep silent.
“As for the miracles,” Alcuin continued, “I can safely say that I have never witnessed one. Or at least, not of the kind these fools imagine. But think about this: How can we be sure you were not resurrected? How can we ignore the fact that a protective force got you out of that inferno and guided you through the mountains? And sent you to Hoos, who saved you once, and then to that trapper who saved you again? Or even to the prostitute who took you in, or to me, when you sought a healer?” He looked fixedly at her. “Ultimately, all that I have done was done to protect you. The miracle was technically a lie, yes, but I assure you that I was guided by the hand of the Almighty. He has designed a fate for you that you are unaware of and that will now be revealed to you. A fate that Gorgias, your father, has been involved with since the beginning.”
Theresa listened, absorbed. He spoke of things she didn’t understand, but his words seemed sincere.
Alcuin approached the desk that her father used and pressed both of his palms to its surface. When he lifted them, his handprints were visible in the dust.
“Your father worked here, in this very spot. Here he spent his final weeks preparing a document of inestimable value to Christendom. Now answer me: Are you prepared to swear an oath?”
Theresa was frightened, but she agreed. She repeated after Alcuin that she would never, under pain of eternal damnation, reveal what she would soon learn about the document. She swore it on a Vulgate that she then kissed reverently. She promised that Hoos would never learn anything about it.
Alcuin took the Bible and placed it near his handprints. Then he eyed the prints in the dust left by Gorgias’s styluses and asked Theresa to look at them closely.
“According to Wilfred, your father disappeared a couple of months or so ago, and Genseric was found dead two weeks ago. Now, look at these marks. What do you see?”
Theresa examined them carefully. There were Alcuin’s handprints on the table, a row of styluses, and two small elongated marks.
“I don’t know… prints in the dust.”
“Yes, but look closely: The handprints I have just made are fresh, and yet the other two,” he said, pointing at the elongated marks, “whose shape undoubtedly corresponds to two styluses—they are already covered with a thin layer of dust. And even then…”
“Yes?”
“They are not identical. Not only in their shape, which is obvious, but also in the quantity of dust they have accumulated. The one on the left, which is a little bigger, has more than the one on the right.”
He walked over to the drawer where Wilfred kept the stylus they had found driven into Genseric’s stomach. He picked it up and positioned it perfectly over the smaller print. “As you can see, this print was made from this stylus, but the veil of dust over it is finer than the dust covering the print left from the bigger stylus. This tells us that the stylus I am holding—the one that ended Genseric’s life—was taken from the desk later than the bigger one, which lay in this other mark.”
He then went over to a nearby table where there were several books and picked one up. “The marks from these books, on the other hand, display a similar amount of dust to the mark left by the bigger stylus. Wilfred assured me that on the day your father disappeared, so did the codices and styluses. However, the thinner layer of dust that has settled over the print of the smaller stylus, again, the one found stuck in Genseric, suggests that it was actually taken from the scriptorium quite a few days later.”