Search: A Novel of Forbidden History by Judith Reeves-Stevens, Garfield Reeves-Stevens Page B

back, assessing her. Then she beckoned Jess to follow her into the long central hall of the cross-shaped shrine.
    Still barefoot, Jess walked on smooth limestone tiles worn with two distinct trails. How many generations of defenders had followed this path before her?
    Ahead, where an ordinary church would have had its altar, the long aisle ended in another wall, unornamented. Centered in that wall was a pair of doors, oak again, bound by iron. There was no latch to seal them.
    Su-Lin put her hands on the doors and looked back. “Jessica, you will follow as others have before you.” Again, the words sounded ceremonial. “You will arrive by a way you know not. You will be led in paths you have not traveled. Darkness will be made light before you, and what is broken will be mended. These things will you do for our Family, and you will not forsake it.”
    The Secret.
Jess nodded, ready for her turn. Her burden.
    The inner doors swung open.

    “The Chamber of Heaven . . .”
    Jess breathed those words, barely audible, as she turned slowly in a circle, awed, reverent.
    Each modern replica of this room that she’d seen before—whether here in Zurich or Hong Kong, Rome, everywhere—had resembled this one: circular, its walls plain stone, its ceiling midnight blue, a painted hemisphere of stars and constellations. In its center, a round table ringed by twelve chairs, signifying the equality of those who would sit there.
    But this ancient inner sanctum . . . this chamber . . . almost a millennium and a half older than any of the others . . . it was that much closer intime to the real Chamber of Heaven in which the First Gods had made their Promise to the Family.
    Her gaze traveled up to the dome high above the chamber’s curved walls of stained limestone blocks. The ceiling’s plaster was cracked in places, the vivid colors of its sky and stars faded in the dim electric light. She looked down to a floor black with age.
    Jess’s chest tightened with emotions she could barely contain. It was an incredible reaffirmation of her faith. To see that the Family of today had preserved the knowledge of this site so precisely over the centuries. Such respect for continuity of knowledge. Direct evidence that made it so much easier to believe that the rest of the Family’s traditions from the time of the First Gods had also survived their passage through the ages.
    “Over all that time . . .” Jess marveled. “Nothing’s changed.”
    Su-Lin took Jess’s arm. “Not quite.” She guided Jess to the room’s central table and positioned her behind the high-backed, carved oak chair marked with the symbol of Jess’s Family Line. “Look closer.”
    Jess put her bandaged hand on the chair before her. Not fifteen hundred years old, but what piece of furniture could last that long and still be in use? The chairs, she decided, had been replaced over the centuries, but they were still oak.
    She turned her attention to the table, to check if that wood had also been—
    Her eyes widened.
    “The table,” she said. “It’s stone.”
    “Look closer,” Su-Lin said again.
    Jess moved the chair aside and touched the table’s surface with two of her uncut fingertips. The cool stone felt smooth, honed. “Granite . . . fine grain . . . this green cast’s common to Switzerland, so I’d say it’s local. But why would it not be—”
    Her fingertips stopped as they reached one of the twelve lines that radiated from the table’s center, dividing it into twelve wedges. All the lines she’d seen before on the oak tables in the Family’s replica chambers were either painted on or made of inlaid wood or metal strips.
    Jess turned to her cousin. “The lines are engraved. Is that what you meant?”
    Su-Lin said nothing.
    Jess turned back to the old stone table. A moment later, she caught her breath in surprise. She’d missed something else. Something significant.
    In every modern Chamber of Heaven, the oak tables had been identical.