The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  Hard to know how we missed what’s visible even with the naked eye. Not much further up Little Ararat itself, there’s a leveled area the size of a soccer pitch. The bulldozers that made it are still there. It looks like a small military encampment, with tents, a helicopter. At one edge there’s a low concrete building, obviously new, like a bunker.

  “Some kind of headquarters?” Mack says. “See how it’s positioned behind that ridge, like it’s protected from view? Let’s take a look.”

  “We don’t have time,” Morag protests. “How are we ever going to get to the main peak before moonrise?”

  “We’re probably already too late for that,” I point out. “Anyway, Dad and Rosko might be up here.”

  We hurry up the loose, dusty scree in single file. It’s so steep now that we have to lean forward, dig our toes in, constantly use our hands. But Mack has good hunter’s instincts. He takes us in a curve that brings us up behind a big yellow backhoe, right next to the back of the building, and we’re not observed. In fact it looks as if the place is deserted, until we see a man at the front, sitting casually on an upturned crate with his back to us. He’s smoking a cigarette, but there’s a gun across his lap.

  The building is smaller than it looked. When I scoot along the back wall, under a row of high windows, I have no trouble seeing in, and there are just three rooms in a row. The first is a sort of mess hall, with long tables and an open kitchen running down one side. The second is a bathroom. But when I heave myself up and look in the third window, what I see is so improbable that it’s hard to take in.

  A bare concrete cell, maybe twelve by twelve. There’s a single door on the other side, and a small window through which I can just see the head of the man seated outside. Inside, the only furniture is two metal chairs, back-to-back. Chained to the chairs with their arms behind them—chained to each other in fact, and held by a single big padlock—are two prisoners in stained clothes.

  The one on the left, wearing a bloodstained Seraphim scarf, is Julius Quinn—which makes no sense. The other one I have trouble even identifying at first, partly because I’m looking for Dad and partly because his face is a purple mass of bruises.

  Rosko.

  Yes, Rosko.

  Things happen fast after that.

  CHAPTER 22

  HOME OF THE GODS

  The guard has heard something. I see him look up and move away to my left. No time to warn Mack and Morag—a few seconds later, he comes around the end of the building, sees them, and raises his weapon with a shout. Thank goodness I’m on a grit-free concrete walkway: as they raise their arms, Mack still holding his rifle in one hand, I’m able to take six long, silent strides that put me right behind him. Several methods of disarming him run through my mind, all of them useless, because I can’t risk him getting off a shot. As I hesitate, and he screams at Mack to drop the rifle, Morag’s eyes dart toward me. He senses I’m there, steps slightly forward as he turns. I jump, have to overreach, the angle’s not right. His gun is already aimed at me, I’m already tensing for the explosion in my chest, when the butt of Mack’s rifle slashes down across his temple.

  He goes limp, drops the gun with what sounds like a groan of disappointment, and sinks to the ground.

  Édouard Colbert.

  I’m so shocked that I stand over him motionless. It’s Morag who collects the gun, Mack who snatches some discarded electrical cord from a pile of builder’s rubble and expertly ties Édouard to the backhoe, pulling his arms up hard behind him.

  At last I find my voice. “Why the hell do you have Quinn in there, Édouard? You and Sophie taken over the Seraphim or something? And where’s my father?”

  Quinn?—Morag mouths the word and throws a questioning glance at me. Édouard looks at her with a sort of leering interest for a moment, then at me with undisguised contempt. “Your father is where he is needed, on Ararat. Those two are here”—he gestures toward the cell—“because they will be needed later.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. Dumb little rich boy.”

  “Give me the keys to the cell.”

  He spits and looks away. In response, to my astonishment, Morag walks over, crouches between his outstretched feet, and places the muzzle of his own gun directly against his crotch. In an icy voice I have never heard before, she says:

  “We’re not exactly flush for time here, soldier-boy. Give Daniel what he wants. Now. Or I’m going to shoot your two best friends.”

  Sounds like a bluff to me. Édouard too: “You don’t even know how to fire it,” he says in a defiant tone—but the words aren’t even fully out of his mouth when the gun goes off. He gasps, like a man in the first moment of terrible pain, and looks down in horror. But the only sign of injury is the dark spreading stain of his own urine. It takes him, and me, a second to process the fact that Morag has deliberately put a bullet into the ground half an inch from his body.

  “I spent a year in Iraq, Édouard. Amazing what skills a girl can pick up. I’ll give you another three seconds. One—”

  He doesn’t need three seconds. “Keys,” he breathes. “Top left pocket.”

  I scoop them out and run to unlock the cell door. Mack’s right behind me. Morag lingers long enough to point the gun back at Édouard. Stress brings out her accent again—so much so, this time, that apart from the content she sounds exactly like her mother: “Steh right therr. And if ye so much as blink withoot permussion, Cohl-behrt, I swear to God I’ll blow yer fockin’ heid off.”

  As soon as I swing the door open her whole attitude changes. She drops the gun, rushes to Rosko’s side, and starts examining his mangled face.

  “Roh-skoh? Wha’ the fock did they do to you?”

  “Nice to see you too, Morag.”

  “Noo noo, it’s great.” Greet. “It’s amazing. It’s—but—how—”

  “Those two Italian guys. Seraphim who turned out not to be Seraphim—just like the Colberts. The one with the ponytail tried to beat some information out of me.”

  “Like, where’s the Geographika? What did you tell him?”

  “I told him the truth. I said, ‘Your breath smells like rotting meat mixed with gasoline.’ ”

  “He could have killed you.”

  As if from all around us, Quinn’s rich voice fills the room. “Rosko is a Babbler, like me. He was probably safe. Whoever these people are, I get the sense that they need Babblers.”

  Rosko smiles. “Meet my famous cellmate, Julius Quinn. We’ve had a lot to talk about.”

  “A pleasure to meet you at last,” Quinn says. “Though the circumstances are less than ideal. I have planned today for a long time, but my arrangements have been”—he looks down at the chains—“interfered with. We have about twenty minutes to prevent a catastrophe.”

  “Could one of you two explain what the hell is going on? And start by telling me whether my father is dead or alive?”

  Rosko drops his gaze, as if embarrassed. For a moment I think the worst—and then I discover that if possible it’s worse than the worst.

  “Daniel,” Quinn says, “I’m going to make an educated guess, based on what your friend has told me. You think that I—or the Seraphim—kidnapped your father, killed Derek Partridge, and have been stealing Phaistos Disks. I assure you, I do want to see those Disks, because in a sense that you still do not appreciate, they are quite literally the word of the gods—of the Architects, as they in fact call themselves. But you have been chasing the wrong villain. I am the leader of a spiritual movement—a religion, if you must. I don’t like the term, because I am leading people toward the truth, toward their actual destiny, whereas all the other religions in history have the terrible disadvantage of being wrong about everything. Be that as it may, I am not in the business of murdering elderly professors. As for your father—”

  For a moment even he seems lost for words. “I do not know who these people are, or what exactly it is they want. But they are powerful, and well-organized, a
nd they infiltrated our organization months ago. Unfortunately, they have no idea what they are dealing with. They’re on Ararat right now, interfering with the Anabasis, and your father is one of them.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He was kidnapped.”

  He holds my gaze for a moment. “Was he, Daniel? Was he really? And what is your evidence for that?”

  While Morag and I stare at each other open-mouthed, Quinn continues. “I understand from Mr. Eisler here that he left Seattle in a great hurry, having received a message from Derek Partridge, and then disappeared. Right after that, you found evidence that Partridge had been killed. At about the same time, the Phaistos Disks were stolen from the Heraklion museum, a place with which—yes, he told me—you and your father have a previous criminal connection. And right now he is alive and well on Ararat, with others, no doubt.”

  “But why would he—Why would anyone—?”

  “It sounds as if you have tried commendably hard to make sense of what’s going on. Lists of Mysteries, maps, spreadsheets. Good. You inherited from your mother one great intellectual advantage over your father, which is not assuming too readily that you can understand everything by holding up the right scanner.”

  “What I overheard,” Rosko says, “it sounds like they’re planning to, I don’t know, measure the Anabasis or something. You know, get the Architects on infrared, figure out what’s really going on.”

  “They don’t believe any of what I have said,” Quinn continues, “because it is too far outside their current understanding of the world. But, unlike most people, they have grasped that something involving great power is going on, and I suspect that appeals to them. They are children in a dry forest with a box of matches. When the Architects help a trapped consciousness make the transition from the physical, you see, there is an immense transfer—”

  “The explosions.”

  “Explosions, yes. For want of a better word, since no scientist on earth has come even close to making sense of them.”

  Mack, who has been standing at the doorway, interrupts. “I’m sure this is fascinating. But if the ceremony is due to begin at moonrise—”

  “Your friend is right,” Quinn says. “Ten thousand people have gathered here to participate in a delicate, difficult ritual. They knew the risks—and the rewards. But they also understood that I would be leading them in the preparation, guiding their minds with the Architects’ language. Any interference with that—” He shakes his head. “It must be stopped now.”

  “So,” Rosko says, shaking the chain behind him, “maybe get us out of the heavy jewelry?”

  He heaves his chair up with an effort and scoots it round so that we can see where the two sets of chains are padlocked together. I hesitate, then look at Édouard’s keys for one that might fit. While I’m doing that, Mack seems to come to a decision. He strides across from the doorway.

  “You wanted to set up a vast Anabasis,” he says flatly, to Quinn. “Ten thousand people going to their immortal reward. And you all knew that some would appear to die, but they would be the successes, and others would fail—they would become Mysteries.”

  “We prefer to call them Partials,” Quinn says. “We don’t know exactly what happens to them. But yes. This is what we have been planning. Success depends on exactly the right sequences, exactly the right words, and I am still feeling my way toward that. Everyone up there knows this, but they trusted me to help them ascend. And any interference in the language of the ritual will guarantee its failure. I tried to explain this. Of course, they don’t believe me.”

  “My wife and daughter went to the Seraphim,” Mack says. “Or were taken by them. Even if I believed what you say—even if I believed they had been shown the stairway, and were now Architects—I would still want to kill you.”

  He raises his rifle, aims it directly at Quinn’s chest.

  “And if you don’t help us stop this, I will.”

  Without moving his eyes from Quinn’s, he shifts the barrel sideways, in an almost casual gesture, and blows the padlock to pieces.

  The helicopter is a squat old Soviet-era military transport. The paneling is dented, a logo on the side has been made illegible in a hurry with gray spray paint, and the tires I wouldn’t trust on a wheelbarrow. It’s a big beast—I could park Mom’s Westland Wasp, rotors folded, in the cargo bay.

  “Édouard Colbert came back from the main peak in this thing a few hours ago,” Rosko says. “Can you fly it?”

  Briefly, I allow myself to wonder if I’ll even be able to identify the essential controls. But if I don’t fly it, then what?

  “Sure. No problem.”

  Simple to start, anyway, but a complicated, unfamiliar layout. The thok thok thok of the big rotors feels as if it will shake the machine to pieces. While I try to orient myself, Mack bags the co-pilot’s seat and grins, pointing and flipping switches.

  “Armenian! It’s Armenian!”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. I’m too busy struggling with the fact that half the controls have labels in a language—a script, in fact—that I’ve never even seen.

  “Armenian!” he says again, bashing me in the shoulder. At last I get it. “That’s—that writing is really—?”

  “This is an Armenian Air Force machine,” Mack says, slapping the control panel as if this is the best joke in the world. “At last, my country’s military doing something useful!”

  Not a textbook takeoff, but my passengers don’t seem to notice, and at first the power of the thing surprises me. As we rise to a hundred feet and start moving away across the roof of the cell building, I catch sight of Édouard Colbert, still tied to the backhoe, straining to one side to protect his face from the gray storm of ash and rock dust that’s being kicked up by the rotor wash. Then he melts into the haze, we clear the ridge, and the great peak of Ararat rises before us like a giant.

  “What the hell am I looking for?” I shout to Quinn, who’s sitting behind me.

  “Head directly for the peak, aim just below the snow line, then veer west around the slope. There’s a glacier on the north side. We built a landing pad near there.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Moonrise is a psychological trigger, that’s all. This is supposed to be the largest single Anabasis in, well, we don’t know how long. Probably centuries. Anabasis is detachment of the mind from its physical basis—exactly what all those cognitive scientists, who think they understand consciousness, say is impossible. We can achieve it only by hitting exactly the right note, so to speak, and we don’t yet fully understand why that sometimes happens and sometimes does not. There’s a powerful PA system covering the whole top of the mountain. I was supposed to direct the event, to maximize the chances of success.”

  “And without that?”

  “Anabasis releases vast amounts of energy. There’s no scientific accounting for what that energy is, but it’s why the Mysteries are associated with explosions—and it’s why these people your father is with, whoever they are, have become so interested. They think they can harness it, poor fools.”

  Rosko interrupts him: “The energy is proportionate to the number of people, yes?”

  “No,” Quinn says. “It’s not proportional. It’s exponential.”

  I’m about to admit I can’t even remember what exponential means, when I glance back and catch sight of Morag. Her eyes have gone wide. She looks like she’s just seen an oncoming train.

  “M, what is it?”

  “Say the power released during one person’s Anabasis is the energy equivalent of a small grenade. I’m totally guessing here. A hundred grams of high explosive, maybe?”

  Mack nods, as if to say, That’s reasonable.

  “If it’s exponential, with ten people gathered together, you don’t get ten times the power—you get a hundred times.”

  “Enough energy to destroy a building,” Rosko says. “Like in Rome.”

  “Aye. And with the Anabasis of fifty people, it would be a factor
of twenty-five hundred—you’re going to hear it miles away.”

  I’m starting to catch on. “What if you have a thousand people? Or ten thousand?”

  She speaks almost too softly to hear. “Ten thousand squared is a hundred million. We’re in atomic weapon territory.”

  Quinn is nodding. “A successful Anabasis on a large scale means a massive release of energy. But the people at the center, the people undergoing Anabasis, they are protected. All the destructive force is released outward from where they are.”

  I glance at Morag and catch her eye. We’re both thinking of the same image: Mom on the Torre Sur, and that strange pressure wave like a bubble around her.

  “So,” Rosko says, “if everyone succeeds—if everyone ascends or whatever—the explosion doesn’t matter.”

  “Anabasis is what the traditional religions say will happen to our so-called ‘souls,’ ” Quinn says. “But there is no soul. Only the mind, and it can survive death only in particular circumstances. Any interference will cause most of these aspirants to fail, and become Mysteries. Or perhaps half will succeed, and everyone else will be killed in the explosion.”

  I’ve just managed to take on board that I’m flying us into a potential nuclear test zone when the helicopter drops, recovers all on its own, drops again. For a second I think we’ve run out of fuel, but it’s just that we’ve climbed to over twelve thousand feet—too close to this death trap’s operational ceiling. My whole body is trembling, my palms slick with sweat. “It’s OK,” I tell everyone, trying to sound confident and flipping some irrelevant landing light switches. It’s not OK. I feel like I’m pushing a loaded supermarket cart, with one funky wheel, across an ice rink in a hurricane. In good news, or bad, I’ll be landing it in a few minutes.

  As we begin to circle the peak, we’re close enough now to see that the fundamental pattern has already formed. On the top three or four thousand feet, inside the snow line, a great Phaistos Disk, made entirely from people, circles the ice-capped top of the mountain. You can even see the ring of twelve “words” around the bottom, and the spiral of eighteen circling upward to the summit.