The Templar Salvation (2010) by Raymond Khoury

it right back from you at half price and make you feel like he was doing you a favor.
    He also had access to whatever Conrad needed to pull off his scams, and he didn’t ask too many questions.
    “My father has something he thinks you might be interested in,” Qassem told him.
    “I’ll fetch my horse,” Conrad replied, not knowing that the young Turk’s mundane announcement was about to upend his life.

    HE RECOGNIZED THE BROADSWORDS IMMEDIATELY.
    There were six of them, sheathed in their leather scabbards, laid out on a wooden table in Mehmet’s small shop. Alongside them were other weapons that only confirmed Conrad’s startling realization: four crossbows, a couple of dozen composite horn bows, and an assortment of daggers and bread knives.
    Weapons with which he was very familiar.
    The broadswords were what interested him most. Though modest in appearance, they were formidable tools of warfare. Brutally efficient, expertly fabricated, perfectly balanced, but with none of the gaudy ornamentation commonly found on the grips and pommels of the swords of the nobility. A Templar’s sword was not an ostentatious display of wealth, nor could it be—the warrior-knights lived under vows of strict poverty. It was a weapon of war, pure and simple. A comfortable cruciform hilt crowning a pattern-welded blade, designed to carve through the flesh and bone of any enemy as well as through any chain mail that aspired to protect it.
    The swords did, however, have one small distinguishing feature, barely noticeable, but definitely there: the initials of the sword’s owner, on either side of a small splayed cross—the croix pattee used by the Order—the lot engraved on the upper section of the blade, just below the cross guard.
    Initials that Conrad also instantly recognized.
    An avalanche of images and feelings rolled over him.
    “Where did you get these?”
    Mehmet studied him with undisguised curiosity, then his doughy face relaxed into a satisfied grin. “So you like my little collection?”
    Conrad tried to keep a lid on the disturbance bubbling inside him, but he knew that the Turkish trader wasn’t easily fooled. “I’ll take the whole lot off you at the price you ask, but I need to know where you found them.”
    The Turk eyed him with added curiosity, then asked, “Why?”
    “That’s my business. Do you want to sell them or not?”
    The trader pursed his lips and rubbed his chin with his puffy fingers, then relented. “I bought them from some monks. We came across them at a caravanserai three weeks ago.”
    “Where?”
    “East of here, about a week’s ride away.”
    “Where?” Conrad pressed.
    “In Cappadocia. Near the city of Venessa,” the trader added, somewhat grudgingly.
    Conrad nodded, deep in thought, his mind already racing ahead. He and his two fellow knights had slipped through the surreal landscape of that region on their way to Constantinople. They’d skirted around several caravanserais, huge trading posts that were dotted along the silk road, built by Seljuk sultans and grandees to encourage and protect the traders who worked the camel trails between Europe and Persia and farther on to China.
    “Is that where their monastery is?”
    “No. All they said was that it was up in the mountains somewhere,” the trader said. “They were scrounging around for food supplies, selling whatever they could. They’ve got a drought out there that’s killed off anything the frost didn’t.” He chuckled. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter where it is. You can’t possibly be thinking of going there.”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s dangerous territory, especially for a Frank like you. You’d be crossing half a dozen different beyliks to get there and risk coming across ten times as many bands of Ghazis along the way.”
    Conrad knew he was right. Since the fall of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, the entire region east of Constantinople had broken up into a tapestry of independent beyliks , emirates ruled by