The Sage Stone Prophecy (Arkana Archaeology Adventure Series Book 7)

by N. S. Wikarski

  The entire point of this risky exercise was to set up surveillance in Metcalf’s office. Maddie believed that if she could monitor the old man’s conversations, she might finally learn what his endgame was. The Paladin thought her scheme looked great on paper. Getting himself from the guest wing to the office was the tricky part. If Joshua Metcalf learned of his existence, much less that he was sneaking around the compound after hours, Erik wouldn’t survive the night.

  The Paladin shrugged philosophically. He’d beaten steeper odds than this. He checked his pocket for the spare key to the Diviner’s office that Daniel had given him. “Showtime,” he murmured, then unlocked his prison door and advanced into the hallway.

  Erik took his time inching down one corridor and up another. His injuries didn’t allow him to move very quickly but a slow pace also allowed him to scan for any unanticipated dangers. The compound was a maze. From the outside, its cinderblock shape looked deceptively simple. Inside was another story. The hallways intersected and dead-ended at unexpected points. Erik didn’t know if the architect’s intention had been to confuse and disorient an outsider, or maybe the occupants themselves, but the strategy succeeded admirably. He found himself referring repeatedly to his layout map. More than a few times, he ducked down inches before stepping into a camera’s field of view.

  As he proceeded, he listened for stray sounds coming from the sleeping chambers, secretly praying that nobody suffered from insomnia. On that score, his biggest fear was running into Metcalf himself. Daniel had told him the Diviner rarely slept through the night unless he drugged himself into a stupor. Hopefully, this was one of those nights.

  The Paladin checked his watch. He’d only been traveling for ten minutes but it felt like two hours when he made the turn into the corridor where the office was located. He glanced up and saw the camera near the ceiling at the far end of the hall. During Chopper’s assassination attempt, Joshua had apparently tinkered with the angle of coverage as well as the feed. The camera no longer captured Metcalf’s office door. Daniel had been able to verify this after overhearing complaints from the sentries that “someone ought to fix that cam.” But nobody had.

  The Paladin smiled to himself. Their loss. If he pressed himself against the wall and kept low, he should be able to slip inside unseen. He hunkered down and unlocked the door, opening it barely enough to squeeze through. He paused to listen. No alarms sounded. He couldn’t hear running feet. One hurdle cleared.

  Now he turned his attention to the cameras above him. There were three. Two were affixed to the corners near the ceiling behind the Diviner’s desk. The third was directly above the desk itself. Incredibly enough, all of them were trained on a wall of paneling twenty feet away on the opposite side of the room. This meant that half the room was a blind spot. As long as Erik stayed close to Metcalf’s desk, he wouldn’t be seen. That suited his plan perfectly. There was nothing on the other side of the room that he needed. The camera placement baffled him though. He shelved that puzzle as something to contemplate in his leisure time. For now, everything he needed was on Metcalf’s desk.

  Erik straightened up and breathed a sigh of relief. He’d made it all the way to his destination without a hitch. Now came the fun part. Everything hinged on Metcalf’s cell phone. Erik’s first job was to find it. His task would have been far harder if the Diviner were a few decades younger. Unlike Millennials whose cell phones were grafted onto their hands at all times, the older generation usually left their cells lying around like a spare pair of reading glasses. The Paladin assumed Metcalf would store his phone in the office rather than carrying it with him when he retired for the night.

  That assumption proved to be correct. When Erik slid open the center drawer of Metcalf’s desk, the phone was tucked inside, still powered on with a full battery charge. That was a good sign. It meant that, except for recharging, the phone was always operational. He studied it—a brand new Android. Another good sign which indicated that Metcalf wouldn’t be likely to upgrade it anytime soon. Erik went to work. He downloaded a spy phone app which would embed itself in background processing. Then he patiently keyed in login credentials that Maddie would use on the net to reach the spy phone website. Erik was giving the Chatelaine and her security team the capability to remotely monitor all the phone’s activity including texts, phone calls and video images. All they had to do was access the site where the data was stored and listen in at their leisure.

  The spy app offered one even more useful feature. It controlled the cell phone’s microphone and would record any conversations occurring in the office. The phone itself had just been transformed into an audio bug hiding in plain sight. Metcalf would never know his cell had been tapped. When the Diviner got back to business the following morning, his every conversation would be overheard by the Arkana. Sooner or later he was bound to say something useful about his master plan.

  Erik smiled to himself and slipped the phone back into the drawer exactly where he’d found it. Then he surveyed the room as a whole to make sure he’d moved nothing out of place. Checking his watch again, he decided this was enough to get the Chatelaine started. Depending on what she overheard, he would most likely have to come back to search Metcalf’s files. At this point, he still didn’t know what to look for. It was just as well. He wasn’t in top shape yet and tonight had taken a toll. He could feel his bullet wounds reminding him that they needed time to heal.

  “Still, it’s a start,” he murmured and limped back the way he’d come.

  Chapter 23—Psychic Physics 101

  After they left the Jomon settlement site at Ofune, Ken drove the Arkana team about twenty miles up the coast highway. With no advance warning, he pulled off the road, parked the car on an access ramp beside an overpass, and told everyone to get out.

  Once the trio emerged from the car, they glanced at one another in surprise.

  “This sure doesn’t look like a dig site,” Cassie commented. “It’s a highway running underneath an overpass.”

  Ken’s eyes twinkled with amusement. “It’s not the highway that’s interesting. We came to see what’s above it. Follow me.” He began walking up the ramp to the top of the overpass.

  The visitors obediently trudged behind him.

  When they reached the top, they all paused to catch their breaths. The overpass wasn’t a bridge at all. There were no connecting roads on either side. It consisted of nothing but a flat open space with a number of rocks strewn about.

  “What is this place?” Daniel voiced his colleagues’ bewilderment.

  “It’s the largest Jomon stone circle on the island of Hokkaido. It measures one hundred and twenty feet in circumference.”

  Cassie turned her attention to the design of the circle. Although the position of the stones seemed random at first, she realized that a pattern existed. There were two outer rings and a third oval ring at the center. The stones in the outermost ring were each about a foot long and must have originally been laid end-to-end lengthwise while the ones in the second circle were embedded in the ground at a forty-five degree angle with the long end pointing inward toward the middle.

  “We owe the preservation of this place to Mount Komagatake.” Ken pointed to a volcano off in the distance. “Its last big eruption centuries ago completely covered the circle in ash. When a new expressway was being built here, the Jomon site was sitting right in the middle of the construction zone.”

  “So they dug under it?” the Scion asked in disbelief.

  “Engineers were able to slide a tunnel underneath without disturbing the circle,” the trove-keeper said. “This is now a designated historic site called Washinoki. It dates from around 2000 BCE. In addition to the circle, a pit cemetery was also found.”

  “And we came here because...” Cassie trailed off.

  “Because I need the help of a Pythia to understand what it means,” Ken replied enigmatically.

  He walked up to the outer ring of stones. The others followed.

  “I wanted
to take you to Ofune first so you could get some sense of what Jomon culture was like. We archaeologists can reconstruct a culture using grave goods, dwellings, and statuary but stone circles are a different matter altogether. They tell us nothing.” He gave a wry smile. “We look at something like this and it’s all blind speculation. Some believe stone circles are intended to track astronomical phenomena. While that might be true of megalithic sites, I don’t see how that could be the case here. These stones are barely a foot tall.”

  The trove-keeper turned to Cassie, spreading his arms in helpless appeal. “Can you tell me why the Jomon constructed it and, more importantly, why here?”

  The Pythia tilted her head, assessing the risk. She couldn’t sense any danger. “OK, I’ll give it a shot but you guys should stay where you are. Whatever signal I get might be distorted if any of you step inside the circle with me.”

  All three men took a step backward.

  “We’re here if you need us,” the Scrivener reassured her.

  Daniel darted him a puzzled glance.

  “Griffin has seen the downside of my job more than a few times,” Cassie explained. She took a deep breath. “Here goes.” Then she stepped inside the circle.

  Much to her surprise, she didn’t fall into a trance. There were no people from the past wandering about. All she saw were waves of light hovering above the rocks—rising and falling like the Aurora Borealis. They formed concentric rings that followed the placement of the two outer rows of stones and spiraled inward to the center of the circle. “This is strange,” she muttered half to herself.

  Cassie stretched out her hands and spread her fingers. She moved like a blind person inching along a dark hallway, trying to sense fluctuations in energy. After advancing to the innermost ring of the circle, she stood for a moment. She could feel herself enveloped in a pillar of light that radiated from the ground beneath her feet up into the sky. A sound emerged from out of nowhere. It was made by a chorus of ghostly voices but they weren’t speaking or singing, just intoning a single note that changed in pitch at regular intervals. The sound spread outward like ripples in a pond until it bounced off the outer edge of the ring and returned to the center amplified.

  Cassie shook the noise out of her head. Frowning, she retraced her steps and crossed over to rejoin her companions.

  “At least you didn’t faint,” Griffin observed dryly.

  “What?” Daniel sounded aghast.

  “Occupational hazard.” Cassie shrugged matter-of-factly. “It happens sometimes. More often than I’d like.”

  “Did you sense anything?” Ken prompted.

  Focusing her attention on the trove-keeper, the Pythia said, “It wasn’t what I expected. I thought I’d see people performing rituals, making sacrifices, but it was none of that. It was all about energy.” She peered at Ken. “Do you understand?”

  He treated her to a perplexed stare. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Cassie glanced back at the circle. “I could sense a line of energy, like an electrical current, running right below the middle of the circle. It extends off in either direction but I’m not sure how far. Anyway, the stones are positioned in such a way that they pull that energy inside the circle and focus it in the center. I think the Jomon shamans must have been able to sense that force and they built a circle so they could use it.” She paused, stamping her foot in irritation. “I’m not saying this right! I can’t find the words to describe what this is. I only know what I saw and what I heard. It was light, or sound, or electricity, or maybe all three at once.”

  “I think you might have sensed a telluric current here,” Griffin offered. “The earth itself generates an electrical current which emanates from the core and runs upward to the surface—an invisible power grid that covers the globe. These lines of electrical energy have been referred to as telluric current or ley lines and ancient peoples everywhere built sacred sites over them.”

  Cassie brightened. “That’s it!”

  “So they chose to mark this place because their shamans felt a spike in energy?” Daniel asked. “I assume it was to hold rituals here. Like a shrine or church.”

  “We already figured as much,” Ken demurred.

  “It was more than that,” the Pythia countered. “The rocks they chose for the circle were special. If this is a giant electrical circuit, then the stones had special properties that boosted the current of the place even more. It made the center of the circle act like some kind of giant tuning fork. It had the power to raise the energy field of the human body.”

  “Forgive me, but an invisible energy field that has the power to affect the human body sounds like pure fantasy,” Daniel objected.

  “All life, no matter how solid it seems, consists of spinning atoms that vibrate,” the Scrivener retorted. “All the tissues, organs, and cells of the human body resonate at specific vibrational frequencies. And those frequencies can be affected by external transmissions which cause the body to entrain with incoming frequencies. Energy, vibration, and frequency define the entire universe. That’s not fantasy. It’s physics.”

  “And before we all got our brains scrambled by tech frequencies, it was probably a lot easier for the average person to sense the frequencies in nature,” Cassie said. “To sense them and be influenced by them. This circle didn’t just ramp up physical health. Shamans could use it to boost their psychic abilities too.”

  Griffin studied the outer ring of stones. “I would imagine these rocks contain not only lodestone which possesses magnetic properties that could affect the path of the telluric current, but also quartz which can be made to resonate at different frequencies simply by reshaping its surface.”

  “There was a sound too,” the Pythia added. “Not a chant or a song. More like the sound people make when they say the word ‘Om’. It changed in pitch and the rocks bounced the sound back to the inner ring.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” Griffin said. “Quartz in known to have acoustic properties. The Jomon may have vocalized specific tones to augment the vibrations of the rocks. The concept is similar to Gregorian chants intoned in acoustically-perfect medieval cathedrals. Sound can have a powerful effect on human brain wave patterns.”

  “Oh ye of little faith.” Cassie gave Daniel a wink and a nudge in the ribs. “I guess my tuning fork analogy is sounding pretty good right now, isn’t it?”

  The trove-keeper shook his head in wonderment at the Pythia’s findings. “In all my years in the field, it never occurred to me to consider the physical properties of a site used for spiritual purposes.”

  “And I don’t think Washinoki is a special case either,” Cassie hastened to inform him. “Any stone circle would function like this one. Anywhere on the planet.”

  “I’ve read that geomagnetic anomalies have been recorded at several well-known henges,” Griffin said. “The stones at those sites also possess specific resonant qualities. Both those facts would imply that the builders of these sites were aiming to construct something more useful than elaborate rock gardens.”

  The Pythia paused to consider a new thought. “I have a hunch that even traditional cultures nowadays have forgotten what these sites were for. They still use them for rituals but the reason why got lost along the way.”

  “Thank you, Cassie.” Ken abruptly took her hand and shook it. “Your insights have opened a whole new line of inquiry for me. I owe you a huge favor. Whatever I can do to repay you, just name it.”

  “You might start by helping us with our Minoan riddle,” the Scrivener suggested delicately.

  “Oh, yes, of course!” The trove-keeper looked slightly embarrassed. “I forgot to tell you in all the excitement.”

  “Tell us what?” Cassie asked.

  “I reviewed the data you sent and I don’t think you need to search Sakhalin Island at all for clues.”

  “Really?” Daniel stepped in closer, his interest piqued.

  “Yes.” Ken rubbed his forehead distractedly. “Remind me of the riddle’
s wording again.”

  “Past the golden road of Boreas, where his islands kill the sea,” the Scion repeated helpfully. “Seek the great river’s mother. Her reliquary holds the key.”

  “Right.” The trove-keeper nodded. “It occurred to me that Sakhalin Island is meant to be nothing more than your starting point. The reference to islands killing the sea suggests a location near the Strait of Tartary but that isn’t where you’ll find the Sage Stone. It’s where you’re supposed to begin looking for it. I focused instead on the line about the great river’s mother. As you already know, the Amur River empties directly into the Strait of Tartary near Sakhalin Island. It’s the ninth longest river in the world so I think that qualifies it as ‘great’.”

  His listeners nodded their agreement.

  “But your riddle tells you to seek the great river’s mother. The Amur branches off into smaller rivers so I’d advise you to follow its course westward. The Pythia might be able to sense the presence of the Minoans along the way. The river’s drainage basin is in the Yablonovy Mountain Range in eastern Siberia.”

  “Once we get there, what’s our target?” Cassie urged. “We usually find our relics stashed in some holy mountain or other. Is there anything like that in the Yablonovy Range?”

  “No,” Ken said. “But there is a lake where three hundred different rivers flow in and out.”

  “The mother of rivers. That makes sense.” Daniel sounded pleased.

  “Lakes are great landmarks!” the Pythia exclaimed.

  “We found our last artifact on the shores of Lugu Lake,” the Scrivener added.