Ilya gave the slab a tentative push. It didn’t budge. He put his shoulder to it and shoved with all his strength. No good.
“Too bad Unauthorized Intervention is so far away,” Lord Horatio said. “We have a demolitions chap who could take out that stone as easily as blowing your nose.”
Teresa came back from walking a circuit around the temple’s exterior. “I don’t see any other way in. Of course, there might be a secret door covered by all these weeds . . .”
I shook my head pityingly. “You people have no instincts for advanced archaeology.”
“What do you mean?” Teresa asked.
I went to one of the stone heads ringed around the door. I got a good handhold in one of the eye sockets and gave a yank. The head pivoted easily, turning on a concealed axle in its base. “See?” I said. “It’s a Neolithic combination lock. Turn all five heads in their proper respective directions and the door will open by itself.”
“What are the proper directions?” Teresa asked.
Good question. We tried all five heads facing the door. Then all five heads facing out. Then three facing in and two facing out. Then three facing out and two facing in. Then a number of arrangements with some degree of symmetry and various combinations of the four cardinal points of the compass. Nothing. After fifteen minutes of wrestling the heavy stone statues, Ilya said his bullet wound was hurting so we all took a break. “Are you sure this is what we have to do?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I replied. “If there’s one thing I know about archaeology, it’s that ancient priests loved this kind of puzzle. It must have driven ancient architects barking mad.” I patted one of the stone heads. “Normally, one doesn’t have to waste time with trial and error. There’s usually some carved inscription saying, I am he who faces the rising sun or All eyes must look toward the sacred star.”
“I haven’t seen any inscriptions,” Teresa said.
“Neither have I. For once, we’ve found a culture that didn’t print the combination right beside the lock. But if we persist . . .”
It took another half hour to find the correct setting. As far as I could see, the proper arrangement of heads was entirely random . . . as opposed to some simple positioning that looked good but was easy to guess. Had the bronze foot helped its owners comprehend basic security precautions? Or had the Polynesians figured things out on their own, as a smart way to shut out hostile Aborigines? It didn’t matter. Once we got the right variation, the slab in front of the doorway slid open with the usual grating sound of stone on stone.
Success. Finally.
“All right,” I told the others. “You wait out here . . .”
Howls of protest from my friends. I cut them off. “I can handle whatever’s inside by myself. What I can’t handle is going into a stone building with only one exit, then finding Lancaster Urdmann and a dozen sharpshooter mercenaries aiming at the door when I’m ready to leave.”
“Lara, dear,” said Lord H., “you could let one of us come with you—”
“No. I want all three of you standing guard. Hide yourselves, with plenty of room to maneuver. Urdmann probably has more Silver Shields. You can’t fight anyone armored like that . . . but you can wait a minute till the armor dissolves, and then it’s a level playing field.” I looked at them all. “That’s what I need you to do. Make sure Urdmann doesn’t box me in while I’m getting the foot. And for heaven’s sake, don’t get taken as hostages! Stay out of sight, and run if anyone comes at you wearing a shiny force field. Especially you, Teresa. Ilya and Lord Horatio are a match for any mercenary, but you . . .”
“Me?” She gestured with her machete. “I’ve wrestled more crocs and won more bar fights than a Pommy girl like you can imagine. Don’t treat me like I’m the weakest link.”
“Fine,” I said. “Go forth and be strong. But be careful too.”
With that, I turned on my electric torch and entered the waiting temple.
The roof was just high enough that I didn’t have to walk bent over. I crouched a bit anyway. The temple’s dank atmosphere nurtured fuzzy black mold all across the ceiling, and the last thing I needed was spores of mutant fungus getting into my ponytail.
But that was a minor consideration. As soon as I came through the front door, I knew I had more serious concerns. The entrance vestibule was small, barely the size of a closet. Three passageways sprouted from it, leading deeper into the building. None of the corridors had a handy inscription saying, This way to the bronze foot; they seemed as close to identical as Stone Age building techniques could achieve.
I sighed. This place had maze written all over it.
One recommended technique for navigating mazes is to put your hand on the wall, then start walking. Never take your hand off the wall. In the majority of mazes, this approach ensures you’ll eventually explore every corridor, while always keeping the option of turning around and retracing your route without getting lost.
There are two downsides to this strategy. First, traversing the entire length of every corridor means you have to face every trap and monster the labyrinth holds. You stumble across every treasure, but you also blunder into every threat. Second, the hand-on-the-wall approach can be defeated if the maze designers know about it. One can easily create layouts that send wall huggers in a big devious circle, eventually leading them back to the starting point without ever entering the vault at the labyrinth’s center.
Personally, I prefer to deal with mazes by not playing the game. I head straight toward the middle, bashing through any walls that get in my way. (The guards at Hampton Court still have me under a restraining order.) But the full-speed-ahead approach isn’t an option in a building with stone-block walls. I’d have to use a more controlled algorithm: something methodical and thorough.
Drat. That didn’t sound like much fun. “Hey, foot!” I shouted. “You want to be found, yeah? So why not give me some help?”
I waited. Nothing obvious happened. And yet . . .
I turned off my torch. Dimly, the left-hand corridor was lit with a ghostly bronze glow.
“Ta,” I said, and started in the highlighted direction. It was only a few minutes later I realized I’d made the same mistake as dozens of shamans down through the ages: I’d invoked bronze energy for my own convenience without worrying about possible side effects.
Oops.
The bronze glow led me through the expected maze of twisty little passages. Nothing attacked. No eldritch horrors lurked in the shadows. I didn’t even have to avoid scythes swinging out from the walls or spiked pits opening beneath my feet. It was enough to make a girl feel neglected. But I pushed on regardless, until a furious racket broke out up ahead.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Unmistakably, the sound of gunshots. In the middle of this Stone Age temple, persons unknown were engaging in an anachronistic firefight.
Had Lancaster Urdmann got here ahead of me? We’d seen no signs of his presence. The temple’s stone door had been shut; the giant crocodile on guard duty had seemed sleepy and undisturbed. I’d noticed no tracks, no boat, no sentries. And the gunfire ahead of me wasn’t the trrrrrrr of Uzis but rapid single-round shots. Probably pistols: autoloaders, not SMGs. Such weapons weren’t Urdmann’s style—he preferred the sloppy overkill of full-auto blast ups. So who was shooting whom? And why?
The gunfight lasted at most ten seconds. During that time I raced forward, trusting that the shots would cover any sounds I made. As I came to a corner, a bullet nearly parted my hair—it spanged off the wall in front of me and went zinging down the corridor, bouncing three more times before exhausting its momentum. I threw myself back, expecting more shots . . . but none came. That last bullet had been an accidental ricochet, not aimed at me.
Then silence. The firing stopped. I waited, my back against the wall, holding my breath as I listened. The bronze glow around the corner seemed very bright. The sound quality around the corner seemed different too—not the cramped atmosphere of narrow passageways, but something
more open. I suspected I’d reached the center of the maze: the room where the foot was kept. Someone with a gun was in there. I heard the familiar spring-loaded sound of an ammunition clip being ejected and a new clip getting shoved in to replace the old one.
Carefully, I peeked around the corner. The first thing I saw was a corpse—a bony brown-skinned man with an elaborate headdress, his face demolished by bullets and his legs shot off at the knees. Zombie priest, I thought: one of the Polynesians who’d locked himself into this temple. He’d died of thirst or starvation, then had come back undead, thanks to the power of bronze.
As I watched, a figure appeared and nudged the priest with a booted foot, making sure the corpse was truly dead. I recognized the boot. I also recognized the bare leg, the hip holsters, and the stylish-but-functional leather shorts. I even recognized the pistols and ponytail. The only thing I didn’t recognize was the glowing bronze sheen that covered her: like a layer of copper paint coating the woman’s skin, clothes, and even her guns.
A bronze rendition of me. Metallic Lara. Hurrah, I thought. I’ve got an evil twin.
Well, why not a Lara look-alike? The bronze body parts seemed to like making new versions of nearby life-forms. Now that I thought about it, I had invoked the foot’s power for help navigating the labyrinth. Perhaps that was considered an invitation for the foot to duplicate me. Or perhaps the foot had just decided to cause some mischief. Whatever the reason, I was now facing a bronze version of myself, complete with my favorite pistols: my beautiful voice-activated VADS. They could blow me to bits in the blink of an eye . . . and my bronze-coated double was likely just as good a shot as I was.
She was also likely bulletproof. Most bronze mutants were. If I tried to shoot her and my bullets bounced off, I’d lose the one advantage I had: the factor of surprise. My doppelgänger didn’t know I was here . . . so I’d get one chance, one split second, to catch her off guard.
Too bad. I wished I could start with a peaceful approach. After all, she was me. Sort of. She might be willing to talk rather than shoot; she might be a rational human being. Well, a rational something, anyway. But so far, every bronze mutant I’d met had been 100 percent homicidal. The mammoth, the eel things, the spiders, the undead—all had attacked on sight. This Lara was likely the same.
So I couldn’t risk making nice with my double. I had to put her down. Quickly. If I allowed her time to react, she’d start shooting. That would be bad. Whatever type of ammo she fired at me, I knew I wouldn’t like it: silver bullets, incendiaries, explosive rounds, plain old lead . . .
Suddenly, I smiled. My lovely VADS pistols were keyed to the sound of my own voice.
I holstered my guns. Then I whipped around the corner and charged my evil twin. As I did, I shouted, “Blanks!”
Time flows oddly during a fight. Sometimes it runs impossibly fast; sometimes it crawls in slow motion. Often it seems to do both simultaneously—a sluggish blur of flashing moments.
Flash 1: My first view of the scene. A room the size of a modest study. The bullet-ridden bodies of three priest zombies sprawled on the floor. In the center of the room stood a stone altar holding the bronze foot.
Flash 2: Lara Croft the second. “Dark” Lara. She raised her guns as I raced toward her. I don’t think she realized what I’d just yelled. I dearly hoped the VADS voice sensors were quicker on the uptake.
Flash 3: The pistols went off—all sound and no fury. My armorer once called me a fool for wasting space on blanks in my ammo clips. That shows why he’s just an armorer, and I’m the famous tomb raider.
Flash 4: Dark Lara called for normal lead bullets at the same time I yelled “Blanks!” again. The VADS hadn’t been designed to handle two versions of my voice simultaneously shouting contradictory orders. I didn’t know what it would do . . . but that didn’t matter, because by then, I’d reached my target. She hadn’t had time to fire.
Flash 5: My duplicate tried to dodge. I’d assumed that’s what she would do. Her head ducked to one side, but the ponytail trailed out behind, making a convenient target. I grabbed it.
Flash 6: I swung with all my might . . . holding on to the ponytail like a handle, flinging Dark Lara toward the altar. If she’d been human, I might have snapped her neck. As it was, I simply hurled her bodily into the bronze foot, releasing her ponytail at the point of maximum momentum.
Flash 7: Bronze woman met bronze toes at high speed. When they connected, something made a sharp hissing sound . . . like a high-pressure steam pipe gushing its contents. The noise didn’t come from the foot, which was flying through the air, knocked off the altar by its collision with Dark Lara. The foot struck the wall with a metallic clang and clattered to the floor. But the hissing continued, fierce as an angry cat.
Flash 8: My twin turned around. When I’d sent her speeding across the room, she’d struck the altar and hit the foot with her chest. Now I could see her torso was missing: an empty black void that was leaking away with that piercing, furious hiss. As I watched, the void expanded—creeping upward and downward, consuming my double’s body. It was like seeing a cinema reel that’s gotten stuck in its projector, where the heat of the light melts the celluloid film. The image on the screen starts to disintegrate at the point of greatest brightness; the melting spreads slowly but increasing in speed; then with a rush, the entire picture eats itself, leaving only bright emptiness.
The same thing was happening to my bronze double. I wasn’t surprised—the Sargasso eel priest had shrunk as soon as I’d struck him with the bronze leg. Then again, I’d been forced to batter him repeatedly to whittle him down to size. Dark Lara began to dissolve from a single crashing contact. Perhaps she’d been created so recently, she was still unstable. Or perhaps the difference was that the eel priest had originally been a flesh-and-blood human being, while my evil twin seemed to be nothing but a bronze creation, conjured out of thin air.
The priest had once been real. Dark Lara wasn’t. Easy come, easy go. The black void spread up her throat to her face, moving faster with every heartbeat. At the end, it bubbled outward in a rush, going, going, gone. Nothing was left of the bronze woman—not a hair, not a scrap of cloth. Just the echo of the hiss, reverberating down the stone corridors.
Then, even that faded away.
I picked up the foot. It had struck the wall so hard, the pinky toe had broken off. Hmm. But then, Father Emil had mentioned the toes could be severed from the whole. Whoever chopped up Bronze simply hadn’t bothered, as if doing a thorough job was too much work. I retrieved the toe from the floor and set it back in place on the foot. The body parts instantly rejoined: a perfect mend, with no sign they’d ever been separated.
“Wish I could do that,” I muttered. Foot in hand, I started back toward the temple’s exit.
I didn’t get lost on my way to the door, nor did I run afoul of any perils I missed on the way in. But when I got to the entrance, I had a sense of foreboding—enough that I stopped a few steps short of the doorway rather than going outside. From the shadows, I peeked around the corner of the doorframe. Nothing looked amiss: just heat haze and water and marsh plants, plus the ring of moai heads still turned in the directions I’d left them. The afternoon was quiet . . . in that almost-too-quiet way.
Of course, it was supposed to be quiet. If Urdmann and company hadn’t showed up yet, Teresa, Lord H., and Ilya would be hunkered down unseen among the reeds. If our enemies had arrived, my friends would be working on a suitable ambush . . . in which case I just had to wait till the shooting started, then join the fun.
I waited. Watched. Listened. Insects chirped, buzzed, hummed. Birds tweeted, twittered, cheeped. Occasionally, something went plop in the swamp—a frog jumping into the river or a fish breaking the surface to gobble a passing bug. Nothing appeared out of place.
Then a gas grenade dropped to the ground in front of me.
I had a split second to decide: out or in. If I ran out the door of the temple, I’d lose my sheltered position; I might get some cov
er from the moais, but I’d still be exposed to gunfire from a lot of directions. If I headed back into the temple, I’d be safe from getting shot, at least temporarily . . . but I’d also be bottled up. Not good. The gas grenade proved that Urdmann had brought chemical weapons—tear gas, nerve gas, mustard gas, who knew?—and I had no defense against such things. If I fled into the temple, Urdmann could lob a few gas canisters through the doorway, wait for the vapors to spread through the poorly ventilated passages, then come in for me once I was incapacitated. The temple offered nowhere to hide, no safe air pockets for me to breathe. So I really had no choice, did I?
I dived in a somersault over the grenade. When I landed I thrust out my right foot, kicking the not-yet-triggered grenade through the temple doorway. Better for the gas to be mostly contained inside the temple than to have it fill the air around me . . . especially if the grenade contained some fast-acting lethal toxin like sarin or tabun. I somersaulted again in between two moai, just as the grenade went off. A sickly yellow smoke coughed out of the temple door, but most of the payload stayed within. Good.
But I shouldn’t congratulate myself too soon. Another grenade landed several paces away from me. This time I saw where it had come from—the roof of the temple. Urdmann and his thugs must have climbed up there, then just waited for me to come out. I had no idea what had happened to my friends; probably gassed, just like I would be if I didn’t get away from the second grenade. My only hope now was to run for the river and vanish into muddy water. With luck, I could make it to cover under the swamp reeds. Then while Urdmann searched for me—and he would search for me, if only to get the bronze foot—I could pick off his men one by one.
First, though, I had to escape the gas. I took a deep breath; I wouldn’t be able to do that once the second grenade went off. Then, with my pistols set for explosive rounds, I rolled to my feet and sprinted toward the water. I fired back at the temple as I ran. No one was visible back there—Urdmann’s thugs must have been lying flat on the roof—but my shots would force them to keep their heads down. My tactics seemed to work, because no one up there tried to shoot me . . .
The Man of Bronze Page 22
