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  Grace put her hand on his face, her fingers tracing the slope of his brow, the high curve of his cheekbone. “I know who you are,” she said numbly, all emotion exhausted except for the uneroded joy of touching him. “I know what you are, Guardian. I came from the year nineteen ninety-seven to find the Treasure, and use it to destroy the man who killed my husband and my brother.”

  Chapter 26

  NIALL SAT AT THE TABLE, QUIETLY LOOKING AT THE BOOKS Grace had brought. Thinking to convince him she was telling the truth, she had told him where her sack was hidden and he had fetched it, but she realized now he hadn’t required proof. He looked at the books out of curiosity, and for knowledge, not for confirmation.

  He rapidly absorbed the changes in the language, saying once, “I knew the rhythm of your speech was odd, even though you spoke English.” Another time: “So there are other lands across the ocean. I have always wondered.”

  He wasn’t shocked, he wasn’t disbelieving. He was highly educated; he spoke seven languages, and he dealt daily with the fantastic. But he was unnervingly calm, and it was destroying what little of her nerves were left.

  “These papers you translated,” he finally said, turning to face her. “You say I wrote part of them?”

  “Yes. You signed your name, and dated them. Thirteen twenty-two.”

  “I have not written any papers,” he said.

  “But I saw them—”

  “Perhaps you are the cause of their existence.”

  She digested that, and bit her lip. “You mean they wouldn’t have been written if I hadn’t come back? But I came back because of what you wrote!”

  A bitter smile touched his lips. “I have hated God for what He allowed to happen to my brethren,” he said calmly, “but I cannot doubt His existence. How could I, when I guard His power on earth? Who knows what the hand of God does?” He shrugged. “I have ceased trying to understand Him, I only do my duty.”

  “You hate God?” Stunned, she could only stare at him.

  “How could I not? I did not want to be a Knight; I was forced into the Order. I have a talent for killing,” he said in unflinching acceptance of his skill. “I became the Knights’ best warrior. I learned the secrets we protected—in service of God!—and He allowed his servants to be butchered in defense of those secrets. No Knight betrayed his greater oath, not one talked even with the flames of the stake licking up his legs, devouring his entrails. They suffered and died, and He let it happen. Perhaps He directed it, to destroy those who knew. Only I am left, and fool that I am, I have kept my oath all these years, because my last oath was not to God but to my friends who died for Him.”

  His tone was unemotional, his eyes remote. Grace wanted to go to him but somehow she couldn’t, he was too distant.

  “Look at me,” he said. “I have thirty-nine years. I should be growing old, but my hair remains black and my teeth stay in my head. I never sicken, and if I am wounded I quickly heal. He has cursed me to guard His damned Treasure even after I should be dead.”

  “No,” she said softly. “You’re just a healthy man.” She could reassure him on this, for she was all too piercingly aware of his humanity, his mortality. “In my time, people easily live into their seventies and eighties, sometimes even over a hundred. I’m thirty-one.”

  His brows lifted and he looked a little surprised. He surveyed her, noting her smooth, clear skin and lack of wrinkles, her shiny hair. “You look a mere girl.”

  She didn’t want to think of her looks, with her eyes red and swollen from her emotional storm, her face drawn with fatigue from the long night of nothing less than debauchery. She sat down on the bench, wanting to be close to him even if she didn’t dare touch him.

  “Tell me of this Foundation,” he ordered.

  She told him what she knew. She had already choked out the details of what had happened to her, how Ford and Bryant had died, and why. He listened, his long fingers drumming on the table.

  “I wonder how they discovered the Treasure’s existence,” he murmured at one point.

  “An archaeological discovery, probably,” Grace said. She hesitated. “This Power—what exactly is it?”

  “It is God’s power,” he said. “With it, all things are possible.”

  “But power isn’t something you can leave in a chest and take it out when you need it! God can’t store His power in the basement of a Scottish castle and—”

  He shook his head. “Nay, ’tis not that. Though He could, if He wished. The Knights understood that, the fact that mortal man cannot understand God, that we must not say a thing is impossible, because all things are possible to Him, and our understanding too paltry. God is not limited by our imagination or our small minds. The Church makes rules and says they come from God, but they come only from man and his attempt to interpret God.”

  Believing God was so powerful, how indeed could he not hate Him? Grace wondered. Niall had long since reached the conclusion that God had deliberately destroyed the Templars, for had He wished to save them they would still be flourishing.

  “But why would He want to destroy the Order?” she whispered, and Niall’s black eyes flashed.

  “To protect the Church,” he said tiredly. “Flawed as it is, still the good outweighs the bad. The Church gives the framework of civilization, lass. Rules. Limits.”

  “How were the Knights a threat to the Church?”

  He stood and walked away from her to the window, where he looked out over the wild and beautiful land he ruled. “We knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Everything.”

  She waited, and the minutes passed. Without looking at her he said, “Did you note I never called you by name? Your name! Grace-Saint-John. I want you until I think I shall burn alive, but your name eats at me. There is no state of grace, there is only one of ignorance.”

  She hadn’t noticed, but now she felt a pang, as if he had rejected her. Perhaps he had; he hadn’t touched her since her confession. “What did you know?” she whispered.

  “They found it all in the Temple, in Jerusalem. The Lion Throne, that great barbaric throne on which are carved both Yahweh and Ashara, god and goddess, male and female. They were two, and they were one; the ancient Israelites worshipped them both. Then the priests deliberately destroyed all the altars built to Ashara, and tried to erase knowledge of her. Yahweh became Jehovah, the one God.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. Archaeology had uncovered all that, eliciting a storm of conjecture among the scholars of ancient Jewish history.

  “There were other things,” he said. “The Cup. ’Tis a plain thing, and despite the quest for the Holy Grail it gives no powers. The Banner. The army it flies over is never defeated, its firebirds rising again and again from the ashes. It plainly depicts the same lions of the Throne, though legend has it that it isn’t that old, and that only the Knights had it.” He sighed softly. “And there is the Cloth.”

  Her mouth went dry. “The Shroud?”

  He made an impatient gesture. “So it would be called, but that is false.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “The cloth in which Jesus was wrapped when he was taken from the cross,” Niall explained.

  “Then it is the Shroud. He was entombed in it.”

  Niall’s eyes were blacker than she had ever seen them before, looking through her. His mouth had a bitter line. “No, not a shroud, because he lived. He was God’s son in spirit and the cross could not defeat him. The Church built itself around the preposterous tales of the resurrection even though its own writings plainly state he did not die, and afterward the truth could not be told without destroying the Church. So we remained silent to protect the Church, to serve God—and He destroyed us in return.

  “His face.” The words were pulled out of him, taut with fury. “We had his face from the Cloth. We revered it, because he was proof of God’s power. Jesus lived! God reached down and saved him, because his duty was fulfilled, and then he left in an explosion of light