‘The centre of the SS world?’
‘Exactly.’ She read from the page. ‘My journey begins at Heinrich’s centre of the earth.’
‘Christ, how could I miss that?’
‘There’s more: You must look upon the faded map for the sign of the Ox.’
Simultaneously, they looked towards the tracing paper still lying in the middle of the floor. Jamie reached it first and Sarah quickly knelt beside him.
‘The faded map is the Black Sun.’
‘Yup, has to be.’ She nibbled the inside of her lip. ‘But what is the sign of the Ox?’
‘Get your laptop.’
She stared at the screen. ‘The runes on the Black Sun all seem to be from some kind of runic alphabet called the Elder Futhark. There are other Futharks, but this one is what’s called proto-Germanic. The Elder Futhark has twenty-four runes broken up into three groups of eight.’ She looked up at him, her brow creased in concentration. ‘Jeez, this is complicated. Each rune has dozens of entirely different meanings, depending on how it’s used. It would take years to decipher the stuff on the Black Sun even if you knew what you were looking for.’
‘But we’re not interested in the Black Sun, are we?’ he pointed out. ‘We’re only interested in one symbol. Which one is the Ox?’
She shot him a poisonous look and bent over the screen again. It took only moments before she cried out triumphantly. ‘Here! It’s kinda like an n or a sort of inverted U. Uruz, sign of the aurochs, which this says is a kind of giant cow or oxen.’
‘Let me see.’
She showed him the screen and they both turned to the traced drawing.
‘You’ve done it.’ Jamie hugged her to him and the feel of her body sidetracked him for a second. ‘There it is.’ The Ox rune lay a short way from the centre of the drawing on one of the legs of the sun symbol. ‘Now all we have to do is translate it to the silk map.’
‘How do we do that?’ She frowned.
‘Magda said the spear of destiny was aligned north to south. That means the point of the castle is north.’ Suddenly he saw what she meant. ‘The spear must align with one of the legs of the wheel, but which one?’
‘There’s no way to tell.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a circle. It doesn’t have a top or a bottom, a left or a right. If we could find one point of reference . . .’
‘Bugger,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re so bloody close, I can touch it.’
Sarah shrugged. ‘Nobody said this was going to be easy.’ With a last glance at the tracing she returned to the journal. She’d been reading for fifteen minutes while Jamie continued to stare in frustration at the drawing when she suddenly stiffened.
‘Idiot.’
Jamie turned to her. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s not your fault.’
‘I mean you. Why didn’t you show me this damned book earlier? Walter Brohm may have been a great scientist, but he was a lousy poet. Listen to this: Where Goethe met his demon, avoid the witches’ trail. Below the water you will find it, but you must look beyond the veil.’
‘You’re right,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s rotten.’
‘You are an idiot. Where Goethe met his demon. Don’t you know who Goethe is?’
‘Some kind of German writer, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was.’ Her voice was dangerously patient as she handed him the journal. ‘He also wrote a version of the Faust legend. Remember Faust? In Faust’s footsteps?’
Jamie winced. ‘You’re right, I’m an idiot. But what does the rest of it mean? Witches and water and beyond a veil. It’s just gibberish.’
‘One step at a time, lover boy. First we need to find where Goethe met his demon.’ She began a search on the laptop, while Jamie retrieved the Tragicall History from his rucksack.
‘According to Marlowe, Faustus met the devil’s representative in a place called Wittenberg, which . . .’ he exchanged the book for the road atlas they’d used to cross-check the escape map ‘. . . is here, about a hundred miles to the north-west. We could be there in about three hours.’
‘Uhuh, but we’d probably be going in the wrong direction. Remember, this isn’t about Faustus, it’s about Goethe. Goethe based his Faust on Marlowe’s play. His demon is the same Mephistopholes who visited Faustus in the original and gave him twenty-four years of access to absolute power in exchange for his soul. But if I remember rightly the two stories are very different. Marlowe’s Faustus began by wanting to do good, but Mephistopholes ensured he wasted his opportunity. Goethe’s is a much deeper and more complex tale. They only have one thing in common. Nothing good can come of doing deals with the devil.’