by E. E. Knight
The ruins—above ground anyway, the Tomb Raider corrected herself-were not as extensive as Machu Picchu, nor did they have the horizon-changing outline of Mexico’s Mayan step pyramids. But the blocks of stone that made up the walls still stood flush, to the ancient engineers’ credit, though root and vine covered the quarried granite.
They searched the camp. The tents were deserted. Lara found a flowerlike rain catcher with several white plastic water jugs set beneath. They refilled their camel packs from one.
The Méne had guns enough for a military camp, as Lara learned when Borg lifted the lid of a crate and found weapons and ammunition stacked inside. She lifted a shotgun by its sling, smelled the residue in its lethal muzzle. What had they been shooting at?
A path descended to the cliff. She turned down it.
“I thought you wanted to go into the ruins,” Borg said.
“Not just yet. We need to slow up our friends a little further.” They trotted down to the cliff. It was not as sheer as the one from which she’d given the Plato its physics lesson, but it was still a precipitous drop. A series of wooden steps snaked its way up the side of the cliff from the river, with platforms placed every ten meters or so for tourists to rest and look down the picturesque gorge.
The wood was old and gray, sagging in some parts. Until recently, the Peruvian rain forest had owned it. But the stairs had been cut clear, and recent repairs with rope and roughhewn logs had made the rickety structure serviceable again.
Lara hurled a rock at a pair of scarlet macaws perched on the handrail halfway down.
“What did you do that for?” Borg asked.
“I didn’t want to hurt them. VADS: right nitro, left pyro.”
“What’s that you said?”
Lara loaded her guns and took aim at the platforms hugging the vertical part of the cliff.
She aimed, first right, then left, then two more rights, then another left…
“Good God!” Borg exclaimed as the bullets reduced the stairway to burning kindling.
She reloaded, selected a new section of the stairway.
“The Peruvians aren’t going to like this.”
“If we live, I’ll write them a check. Back up.”
A third load destroyed the top landing. The wood gave off a wispy white smoke as it crackled and burned.
“Now they’ll have to take the long way around. With any luck, we’ll be long gone by then.”
Borg stepped back as the staircase shrieked and collapsed with a crash. “What do you expect to find here?”
The Tomb Raider slid the hot guns back into their holsters. “I’m not sure. There’s something at the bottom of the Whispering Abyss that they need. If we can’t steal it somehow—”
“You’ll destroy it just like the staircase.”
“Only as a last resort.”
Borg shook his head. “You’re some archaeologist.”
“I never claimed that title,” Lara said. “Once, long ago, a man called me a Tomb Raider. Started off as a radio call sign. I didn’t like him much, but I liked the name. I get in, I get what I want, and I leave again before matters get complicated.”
“So now we walk all the way back up to the ruins.”
“Not exactly,” she said, checking her laces.
“How’s that?”
“Haven’t you been around me long enough? We run, of course.”
13
Whatever Ukju Pacha had been, it wasn’t a city. There were no dwellings or aqueduct-fed plots, as at Machu Picchu. Occasional towering stones jutted out of the ground next to smaller markers. A few post-and-lintel structures remained, roughly the size of the triptychs at Stonehenge, though the posts were built from many smaller stones and
only the lintels were a single block.
Lara and Borg found no depressions of any kind, no staircases leading to any kind of abyss, whispering or otherwise.
“What did your books say about this place?” Borg asked. He stood on his tiptoes to touch a lintel.
“Not enough. ‘Unidentified pre-Columbian,’ which is archaeologist-speak for ‘not a clue, sorry.’”
“It reminds me of a cemetery. Grave markers.”
Lara touched an ivylike plant growing up a mound of markers. Closed buds about the size of pea pods indicated it was getting ready to flower. She tore one open, pulled out the white petals. They began to turn brown in the warm air and sunlight.
“That’s an odd reaction,” she said.
Borg grunted. “Perhaps they are night-blooming flowers.”
Lara nodded. “The Méne worshipped the deep places of the earth. It makes sense that they might have worshipped flowers that bloomed in darkness. I wish I could see the ruins from the point of view of those condors! Perhaps a pattern would emerge…”
She broke off.
“What?” asked Borg, looking around. “Did you hear something?”
“No, I just realized something.” She scrambled up the marker, using narrow cracks in the stone as hand- and footholds.
“There’s an opening up here,” she called down to Borg. “Like a chimney.”
“Can you get in?”
Lara felt a mild breeze of cool air wafting from the opening. Taking her battered MagLite 6 cell from her pack, she had a look inside. The passage extended beyond the beam. “It’s too narrow,” she called back. “But at least now we know what to look for.”
Borg hunted amongst the markers for a wider passage.
Meanwhile, Lara returned to the strange vines with the closed buds. She felt that she was missing something, something about how they were growing…
Cultivated, that was it. No weeds grew where the flowering vines thrived, unlike the riotous chaos at the walls and gardens and outer markers.
The plants circled an area of three rounded chimneys. In the center of these, three slabs of stone leaned together, like drunks hanging on to each other around a bottle. A spill of budded vines fell from the top and grew thick all about the four-meter-high blocks.
The Tomb Raider tried beneath, but old masonry filled in the arches between the stones.
Nothing to do but go up again.
She grabbed a vine and used it to haul herself up the smooth, sloping granite. She made it to the top, stood triumphantly astride a triangular shaft leading into darkness. All around her other little chimneys of stone conducted air, and possibly light, into the earth. She marked a circle of them sixty meters away. A very wide circle. Could that be the cap of the Whispering Abyss?
Big enough for her. And Borg.
The Méne had even left a ladder within.
“Borg, get up here. I’ve found the way in.”
Borg made a motion with his right arm like a fisherman casting. Metal flashed as it fell. It took Lara’s eyes a second to recognize what they’d seen. Borg’s claw hand, at the end of a cable, landed in the hole. Borg reeled the cable back into his arm, and the grapnel-fingers fixed at the edge.
The Tomb Raider stood on the claw for good measure as Borg c1imbed—or rather winched himself up, using a pinch-hook he extended from the left piton arm for assistance at the top of the slab. The climb done, he folded the hook back into the piton arm as a man might close a Swiss Army knife.
“Does it have a magnifying glass for starting fires?”
Borg laughed. He pointed to a jawlike protrusion near the piton-firing muzzle with one of the grapnel-fingers. “No. It does have a pincer, so I can grip a stick.” He worked the grapnel-fingers. “Then I can rub it with another stick here. But I find it’s easier to just hold a butane candlelighter.”
His shaggy hair was like a golden halo in the sun. Lara wanted to kiss him, but she held back. His heart still belonged to Ajay, and it wasn’t for her to judge whether Ajay was brainwashed or not. At least, not without meeting her first.
Lara stuck her head in the triangular gap, shifted her body so that it blocked the sun, and let her eyes adjust. The ladder had duct tape running down one side of it. How odd. Sh
e followed the tape up and down with her eyes.
One of the rungs had what could be a pressure switch. The wires ran down to what looked like a plastic canteen.
Booby trap. Not powerful enough to damage the giant blocks, but anyone at the top of the ladder would be launched out the entrance like a circus performer shot from a cannon.
Cute.
It wasn’t that far down. She let herself fall through the hole headfirst, somersaulted as she dropped, and landed on her toes next to the ladder. A red switch at the side of the canteen glowed beside a small antenna. So they turned it on and off by radio.
Best not to touch.
She stood in a plain chamber, triangular, with an arched tunnel about a meter and three quarters high leading from each wall. They would have to crouch.
“Can you jump down?” she called up to Borg. “The ladder is dangerous.”
“Move the ladder, please.”
“I can’t. It’s wired to explosives.”
“I thought you meant it wouldn’t hold my weight. Just a moment.”
He blocked the sun, then descended at the end of his cable, his arm humming.
“How long are those batteries good for?” she asked, vexed for not thinking to ask sooner.
“Four days of use. A little less in extreme cold, or if I use the winch to pull my weight up a great deal. I climbed the Cordier Pillar of the Grands Charmoz with what is in the batteries and had power for thirty-six more hours.”
“We should be all right then. That’s some feat of engineering.”
“They made a video. The Japanese say I will be in the commercial once they go to market: ‘Extraordinary gear for extraordinary people.’ But they’re still having trouble with the artificial legs they’re working on. They want to bring out the arms and legs as a set. We shall see.”
She searched the floor. Footprints went into and came out of each arch. Beams of light from above illuminated all three dark tunnels at irregular distances. But only one had brown stains about the size of a euro coin.
“Looking for bread crumbs?” Borg asked.
“Bloodstains. Let’s start there.” It also went in the direction of the circle of air shafts she’d seen.
The tunnel was a tight fit. Lara had to crouch, and Borg had to duckwalk, through the tunnel for about thirty meters before it widened out into a long chamber, pyramid shaped, that just gave her room to stand up. Borg still had to crouch. The limited light from the air shafts in the tunnel didn’t allow them to view this new chamber, so they turned on their torches.
Dead end. Something glittered at the far wall.
“The builders weren’t very tall,” Borg grumbled.
The bloodstains ended abruptly in the middle of the floor, clustered a little more thickly near, but not at, the end of the chamber.
Near a gap in the floor.
Lara followed the gap; it ran along to the join at the bottom of the sloping walls at the edge of the room and turned back the way they’d come in. She had to go on hands and knees to explore thanks to the sloping roof. “This whole part of the floor is separate.”
“Same on this side,” Borg said, sniffing. “Do you smell oil?”
“Yes. Like a garage.”
She went to the far end of the pyramid chamber. It deadended at what turned out to be a mosaic, the first decoration they’d seen. Green glass, recently cleaned, formed the omega sign she’d seen before, though this one was more oval shaped than the others, almost skull-like.
“Never seen this variant,” she said, letting the light play in the reflections.
“I wouldn’t mind never having seen it in the first place.”
Was the bloodstain a false lead to another trap, perhaps? But her instincts gained over years of tomb raiding told her she’d gone in the right direction.
She saw a shadow on the other side of the glass.
“Borg, get your light closer, please.”
A bar, placed horizontally descended from the center of the omega skull, just as the spinal cord did from the human brain.
The Tomb Raider searched above and below the glass, pressed here and there and—
A matched pair of stone panels below the omega-skull swung inward She checked the space with her flashlight. Not wide enough to crawl through, but she could easily reach the bar.
“Careful Lara!” said Borg, looking over her shoulder. “It might be another booby trap.”
“What religion are you, Borg?”
“Roman Catholic. I’m not observant, really.”
“Even though you’re not observant, would you booby-trap a cross at the front of a church?”
“Of course not.”
“Neither would the Méne. The bar is in a groove. I think it’s a lever of some kind.”
She tried moving it to the left.
The floor vibrated, and both Lara and Borg started at a deep rumble. A section of floor at the entrance to the pyramid chamber rose and rotated as it came up, mining into a shark-tooth of stone moving to block their entrance as the floor with the mass of bloodstains dropped.
“Run,” she called, jumping to her feet and hurrying to the gap. Borg was a step behind. Both jumped and landed on the descending square of stone.
She hadn’t noticed the gap bisecting the first section of floor.
The platform descended about three meters, into cooler, damper air, then stopped. The lubricant smell filled their nostrils.
They stood next to a pillar of salt. Or so it looked.
Lara wondered about the column. It was some kind of whitish crystal, slick with fluid, rising to a hole in the roof where the section of floor that had risen would be. It was the width of a mechanic’s lift and came out of a crystal ring set in the floor.
“Hydraulics,” she said. She wondered if the mechanism had survived the millennia intact, or if these new Méne had somehow brought it back into repair.
They stood at the edge of a cave—or, rather, a tunnel, now. It had a disturbing uniformity to it; it was about the diameter of one of the older London tubes.
Only one direction to go.
If time weren’t an issue, she would have taken measurements, photographed the sides of the cave for tool marks, chipped off a sample of the rock face, even taken a vial of the water trickling from cracks here and there before it disappeared into fissures in the floor. As it was, she just searched the cave ceiling long enough to find another bar like the one she’d found above. It shone faintly silver in the beam of her flashlight. She hopped up on a small ledge to better examine it.
The Tomb Raider tapped it with a fingernail. It looked like solid platinum, but it was harder than the precious kind. Perhaps it was the industrial kind with iridium mixed in to harden it.
Platinum existed in the Andes, along with richer deposits of silver and gold. But industrial platinum? Man-made, that—for in nature it was usually found mixed with baser metals—and only very recently, in archaeological terms, at that.
Unless this was an entirely new kind of metal.
They followed the tunnel, using their lights. It sloped down gently beneath them.
“It is a relief to be cool again,” said Borg after a moment.
“Yes. Almost pleasant down here.” Lara caught the sparkle of foil in her flashlight, lifted up a breakfast bar wrapper. “Garbage: the archaeologist’s friend.”
“What does it tell you?”
Lara pocketed the wrapper. She hated litter. “Our society values speed and convenience over taste.”
“So we’re still far from the Abyss?”
“No. And if I’m not mistaken, this may be it.”
They turned off their torches. Their eyes adjusted, picked up a faint glow.
“Hell?” Borg joked.
“Maybe just a doorway to it.”
“I don’t see a sign reading, ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’”
“Wouldn’t keep me out anyway,” Lara said.
She gazed in wonder as they entered the domed cha
mber, which was perhaps a little bigger than the forty-three-meter circumference of the Pantheon in Rome, if not as high. Around the edges of the dome, narrow, triangular-shaped shafts brought in light and fresh air. Modern lighting and power equipment waited, deactivated. A gaping hole in the center echoed with the faint sound of moving air. Kunai and his Méne had made improvements to the old stonework in the form of a girder, winches, and lines. A gigantic spool of cable rested at the end of the winch. Other cables went down the edge of the Abyss, some electrical, others climbing line.
Lara looked up a light shaft. It looked large enough to wiggle up, and at about head height the surface became rougher, though it appeared to narrow near the top, as a chimney does to better draw up air. Polished surfaces lined the back and sides of the shaft, helping the light down. Platinum again? The Méne used the stuff like pig iron. At the bottom of the shafts, where the light fell, little plots of earth supported slimelike lichens. She checked another shaft, found similar shining plate. This one had brown residue on it. Dried blood.
“The Whispering Abyss,” she said. The currents came up the shaft.
Borg crouched next to the generator. “Do you want this on?”
“No. I’m not trusting anything of theirs that’s electrical after seeing that bomb on the ladder. But we could use a bunch of these.” She tapped a box with her toe. Row upon row of chemical lights lay within, cylinders about the size of a small cigar, along with neatly wound lengths of cording. She cracked one and shook it until it glowed green, then picked up a lanyard and attached the chemical light to it with a small hook at the end of the lanyard. She hung it around her neck.
“Fill your pockets,” she said. She put another lighted lanyard around his neck.
She cracked another and shook it until it glowed green. Then walked to the center of the room.
The Whispering Abyss yawned beneath them. She measured the diameter of the sound with her eye. It was perhaps a little smaller than legend had it. It would make the jump difficult.
