Callsign: King - Book I (A Jack Sigler - Chess Team Novella)
Page 18
At the next junction she turned away from the sound of footsteps and quickly found the opening, a shadowy void in the floor, surrounded by the rubble of the fallen roof. She trained her light into the shaft, verifying with her eyes what her mind already knew: the hole penetrated every descending level of the temple. Motivated though he was there was no way Atlas would ever be able to shove his girth through that orifice. Mira faced no such limitation.
Effortlessly, she lowered herself feet first into the void, gradually but confidently letting her extended arms take the burden of her weight. The floor of the next level was perhaps another four feet below her dangling toes, but she knew better than to simply let go. Directly beneath her, the deep shaft continued, and while she was in a hurry to get to the bottom, she wasn’t in that much of a hurry. Instead, she spread her feet apart, straddling the opening as she landed. With increased confidence, she repeated the process three more times until, above the fifth level, her small light showed something other than a hole in the floor beneath her.
With each successive layer, the intensity of the sensation she had first encountered at the marker stele grew, and now that she was at last face to face with her destination, it was impossible to distinguish anything else. A blanket of psychic white noise emanating from the lowest stage of the temple left her precognitive faculties completely numb. But like a gambler, certain that the cards were about to break her way, the thrill of imminent victory compelled her onward.
From her overhead vantage, it was difficult to say exactly what the object occupying the center of the temple was. She thought it was an altar of some kind, positioned to lie in the beam of sunlight that had once reached into the depths of the temple at midday. If so, the altar was merely a showcase for something else, something that she could not quite make out with her tiny flashlight, but which she knew unequivocally to be the object of Atlas’ mad dash into the ruin.
“Jackpot,” she whispered, her lips curling in a triumphant grin as she proceeded to lower herself down onto the altar and then onto the supporting dais, where she got her first good look at the tomb of an Atlantean king.
The room was a circle, perhaps fifty feet across, and its single, continuous wall was adorned with a narrative mural executed in the same style as the frescoes she had glimpsed in the tunnels above. She took a moment to circumscribe the room with the beam of her light, and what she saw took her breath away. Protected from the elements, the images were perfectly preserved, the pigments still bright and vivid. Unlike the flat, two-dimensional images that adorned most ancient ruins, the artists who had decorated this tomb understood perspective and had created a remarkable illusion of depth. And while she was no expert on history or folklore, she recognized instantly the subject of the visual sequence. It was the story of the fall of Atlantis.
The tale began and ended with the only break in the circle, a vertical protrusion that stretched from floor to ceiling. At first she thought it was a door, but the carved relief—a perfect rendering of a man in repose—clued her in to its actual purpose: it was a sarcophagus.
Her brief examination of the life-sized sculpture revealed a nude male with exaggerated musculature and exquisite aquiline features. Unlike the death masks of Egyptian pharaohs, this figure wore only one piece of ornamentation—a circular diadem with a single hexagonal shape positioned in the center of his forehead.
The sculpted form on the sarcophagus featured prominently in the mural, and in most of those depictions, the circlet floated above his brow, the hexagon a white gemstone blazing with supernatural fire. Only the first scene was different. In it, the king struggled with another man—an oddly familiar figure that Mira felt she should recognize, but could not—for possession of the crown. Though she could not read the strange writing that framed the picture, it was evident that the battle between the two men directly contributed to the catastrophic collapse of the kingdom, shown on the subsequent panel.
From that point onward, the king wore the talismanic crown, leading the refugees of the doomed civilization to a new life in exile. The cycle ended with the king’s death and burial, and in the profound sadness displayed on the faces of the anonymous mourners, she saw written the final doom of Atlantis. She didn’t need to be psychic to know that the refugee city had not survived long following the death of that last king.
Remembering the purpose for her hasty descent, she turned at last to the altar at the center.
The stone pedestal stood on an upraised podium directly beneath the aperture. What she had first taken to be an object on display, she now saw was actually a fixed part of the altar, an irregular tableau with a recessed, ring-shaped groove at the center. There seemed little question that the niche was meant to display the crown, but the headpiece was conspicuously absent. Frowning, she glanced about the room, and only then realized that there was no other means of entering or leaving the tomb.
She was trapped.
Panic washed over her and with it a surge of adrenaline. She had never experienced fear on this level. Her preternatural intuition had always provided ample warning of dangerous situations long before they reached a critical stage, but that sensory organ had been muted by . . . by whatever it was that she was supposed to find down here.
She took a deep breath, remembering how her abilities had guided her here in the first place. There had to be a way in and out of this chamber. Atlas knew it, and when she had been on the upper levels, she had known it as well.
When I’ve got what I came for, the way out of here will be obvious, she told herself. Then she laughed as she realized that this was probably how all those gamblers felt as they put their last chip on the table. An all-or-nothing bet. . . . Luck, be a lady tonight. No, it’s nothing like that. I was meant to be here. Something called me here. That’s what I need to focus on.
It was the crown. It had to be.
She turned back to the upright sarcophagus, looking past the life-like effigy, scanning every inch of its surface for some indication of where the lid had been sealed into place, but found nothing. There was no way to open the tomb. Frustrated, she hammered her fists against the unyielding stone and was rewarded only with a dull pain in the heels of her hands.
Think! It brought you here. It wants to be found. There has to be a way.
Willing herself into a state of calm, she attempted something she had never before tried; there had never been reason for it. With her eyes closed and her breathing deep and steady, she attempted to reawaken her quiescent sixth sense. Whether or not it worked, she could not say, but after a few moments, it dawned on her to look for some kind of mechanism.
She returned her attention to the sarcophagus, now using her fingertips as well as her eyes to search for the trigger that would unlock the ancient casket. As she did so, she realized the answer was staring her in the face.
The crown.
Or rather, the carved likeness of the crown that adorned the face of the statue. She reached up to the hexagonal shape in the center and pressed firmly.
There was a grating sound followed by a whoosh of air, and the entire block of carved stone began to move, sliding down into the floor. She took a step back and then directed her light into the depths within.
“You don’t look anything like your pictures,” she muttered as the beam illuminated the mummified remains of the Atlantean king. Indeed, the handsome, athletic figure had become merely a leathery, discolored shell. His skin had dried out and was stretched taut over his skeleton. His strong nose had shrunk into his skull. And where once he had gazed out at the world with intense dark eyes, there were now only empty sockets. There was one element, however, that remained consistent: the mummy still wore the silvery circlet with its single strange jewel.
Breathless with anticipation, Mira reached for the crown. . . .
Time abruptly jumped forward—how far she could not say—but in that lost bubble of memory, everything changed. She was no longer standing before the remains of the king, but instead lay supine in ne
ar total darkness. An instant later, pain stabbed through her skull, and was especially intense in the area just behind her right ear. When she gingerly probed the spot, her fingers felt something damp—her own blood.
A light flared off to one side and she reflexively turned toward it, wincing as the motion brought another throb from her wound. She fumbled for her own light, still turned on but hanging uselessly from the neck-chain, and raised it just as Curtis Lancet burst through a breach in the tomb wall. The opening had not been there before, she was certain of that. Someone had opened it from the outside, the same person that had cold-cocked her from behind. And if Lancet was only now arriving, that meant . . .
She twisted around just in time to catch sight of Atlas’ grotesquely fat fingers closing around the mummy’s neck.
“I promised you this day would come.” His words were for the ghost of the king alone. He was oblivious to everything else. “My hands at your throat once more, but this time, I will triumph. The Trinity is mine.”
Through the fog of pain, something clicked in Mira’s mind, and she realized why the figure struggling with the king in the mural looked so familiar. Atlas! But that must have been thousands of years ago.
For just a moment, Mira thought she saw the mummy’s hands start to move, as if to wrestle free from Atlas’ grasp. No, she told herself. It’s just an illusion, caused by Atlas shaking him.
Sputtering with maniacal laughter, the obese billionaire wrenched the corpse’s head from its torso, letting the lifeless body fall back into the sarcophagus. He cradled the severed head to his chest and pried off the crown. As his fingers made contact with the metal circle, the jewel flared to life, filling the tomb with penetrating supernatural radiance.
“What the hell?” gasped Lancet, staring in disbelief at the unfolding apotheosis. His gaze then dropped to where Mira lay, and as he spied the fresh blood streaming from the gash on the back of her head, his visage grew hard. With one hand raised to shade his eyes from the quasi-solar discharge, he wrestled his pistol from its holster and raised it toward the man he was sworn to protect. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, sir, but I think you’d better put that thing down.”
Atlas’ eyes showed not even a whisper of fear as he regarded his bodyguard. “Mr. Lancet,” he said, barely able to enunciate through his laughter, “your services are no longer required.”
Mira didn’t need a premonition to know what would happen next….
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
About the Authors
Sample: THE LAST HUNTER by Jeremy Robinson
Sample: DARK TRINITY by Sean Ellis
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