Free The Last Ember by Daniel Levin Page A

quarry of limestone to build the entire Temple. It supposedly stretches one thousand feet in diameter.”
    Salah ad-Din motioned for Ahmed to move in front of them. With the full swing of a metal pickax, Ahmed stabbed the wall, removing a large divot of dirt. He swung again and more packed dirt crumbled off the wall.
    “It could take weeks to excavate through this wall,” Cianari said. “The cavern must be filled with thousands of years of rubble.”
    “Again,” Salah ad-Din said.
    Ahmed kept swinging at the wall, his arms moving like a flywheel as he hurled one blow after another, making little progress. He stopped only to catch his breath.
    “Again!” Salah ad-Din yelled.
    The young man swung the pick again and the metal stuck in the wall as if it had penetrated. He struggled to remove the implement, and when he did, the small hole in the wall beamed a bright ray of white light through the tunnel.
    “We are one hundred feet underground,” Cianari whispered. “What is that?”
    “Again!” Salah ad-Din said.
    Ahmed swung the pick at the wall, each stab revealing another fleck of intense brightness, shooting through the tunnel like tiny sunbeams. The professor squinted, moving closer, trying to peer through the holes into the radiance on the other side.
    “What in God’s name is behind there?”

12
    T he hearing adjourned, but Jonathan remained in his seat at the Dulling lawyers’ table. Without so much as a word, Tatton glided out of the courtroom and Mildren dutifully carried his briefcase behind him.
    The courtroom emptied and Jonathan sat alone, staring at the witness stand as though, with enough concentration, he could undo what Tatton had just done.
    The leather-padded door at the back of the courtroom swung open. Jonathan turned and watched Emili walk toward the front of the courtroom. She passed through the gallery rail in silence and grabbed a folder she had left near the witness stand. She turned around without looking at him and walked back down the courtroom’s aisle.
    “Emili,” Jonathan said.
    She stopped and turned around slowly. The expression on her face brought another snapshot of their past back to Jonathan. It was in the Piazza di Spagna seven years ago at semi-dusk, and Emili was sitting for a local sketch artist. She agreed to it only because of the three drinks they had just had during a boring cocktail lecture at the French Academy. The artist, reading glasses on the tip of his nose, was hard at work, his broad strokes grazing the sketchpad. Suddenly big drops of rain began to fall. The artist hurried to collapse his easel and handed them the unfinished drawing, Emili’s face partly drawn as though floating on the sketch paper. The picture captured something hauntingly beautiful in its incompleteness. Her blond hair drawn in gray lines above a small, beautifully arched brow, and light sad eyes hovering in the gray of the sketch. “Oh, I look so sad,” Emili said, laughing in the rain. She called after the artist, a playful tone of challenge. “It looks nothing like me!” she said.
    And now years later, almost eerily, her sad gaze captured precisely the expression the artist had drawn.
    “I’m sorry,” Jonathan said. “I didn’t know Tatton was going to say any of that.”
    She walked toward him, saying nothing. Her lips parted, as though she had begun to speak and decided against it. She glowered at him, and standing close Jonathan remembered her green-gold eyes—the patina of ancient bronze, he always thought. But they were not that color now. Now they had darkened with her mood.
    “Sorry?” she said, watching him carefully. “You think I hadn’t heard that you represented the Sicilian antiquities pirate Andre Cavetti? Or how you brilliantly defended a Greek sarcophagus so it could be used as a fountain in some Las Vegas hot spot? You think I didn’t know you became a lawyer defending the people from whom we protected these artifacts? You think I didn’t know you went