by A D Davies
“Must be two a.m. Or three. How are the kids?”
“Missing you. Like I am. And we’ll miss you a whole lot more if you die. Or end up like me. Damn it, Charlie, we agreed. No more field work.”
She wiped a tear from her cheek. “Give the kids a big kiss from me. I’ll be home tomorrow. Next day at the outside.”
“At least tell me you got all you need.”
Charlie had prepped on the way from the Pakistani air force base. “We’re using the sat-comms and running the subvocal units through that. Shorter battery life, but with the remote relays that work underground, we’ll stay in contact. Unless we go seriously deep. Bridget reckons the building was buried due to monsoons and ground erosion from higher up, maybe a landslide. Plus... Dan is good at this. He’ll look after us.”
Dan’s head twitched while everyone stared forward. They touched down.
“As good as I was?” Phil asked.
“No one is.” Charlie wiped another tear. “I’m sorry it worked out like this. But I’ll be home soon.” She checked Phil’s short-bladed knife, sheathed at her thigh, and patted it for reassurance. “I promise.”
Bridget tried to tune out the conversation and was relieved when it was over. Dan told them all to stay on board while he scouted, but as the engines wound down, they were quickly surrounded by villagers. Bridget pulled her earphones off and slid open the door and climbed out. Toby and Charlie followed, all waving the people back. The rotors were still turning.
Everyone was dressed in bright colors, oranges and greens, simple loose garments, a few in white robes. All the men sprouted facial hair, and the women’s hair grew long. Curiosity rather than fear or anger clouded their faces, meaning the village was not entirely isolated from the modern world. Just a distinct lack of electricity and motor vehicles.
Dan and Harpal joined them on the hardscrabble ground, the result of decades, maybe centuries, of feet upon it rather than anything industrial. The building dominating this open space was definitely a church, shaped in a crucifix as seen from above, with just enough room between there and the well to land the helo.
Bridget led the body language; open palms patting the air were pretty much a universal indicator that they were not here for trouble. She had picked up a smattering of Hindi over the past forty-eight hours and felt like an alien as she called over the winding-down engine, “Leader.”
A handful of people looked at one another. As the helicopter’s racket abated, voices sounded from behind the main bulk of the crowd. It parted close to Bridget.
An old man approached through the gap, dressed in black robes that he wore like a toga, topped with a white strip in the approximation of a priest’s clerical collar. He spoke too fast for Bridget to pick up anything.
Toby stepped in and pointed at the hillside. His words were in English; slow, firm, as if that might break down the language barrier. “Danger. Bad people.” He gestured at the team with him. “Good people. We stop them.”
The man, whom Bridget assumed to be a leader in an elder system still utilized in rural communities, replied equally slowly in his own language. It sounded like Punjabi, which Bridget had not studied at all. Hoping for a degree of cross-language cooperation, she used what little Hindi she knew. “We bring bad news.” Two days of intermittent study was simply not enough, although she learned far quicker than most. “Uhh... people... in the tomb.”
The old man’s eyes wandered to the hillside. He placed one fist on top of the other as if holding a stick, then shoved the imaginary stick toward the ground and up over his shoulder. He was miming something.
“Digging?” Bridget nodded. “Yes.” She mimicked the mime. “Digging.”
The man stamped on the ground and made a noise in his throat like a child playing army, an “explosion” sound, and rocked back on one foot.
Dan stepped forward. “They mined the route.” He also made an explosion sound, duplicating the eruption with his fingers.
The old man nodded and spoke rapidly. Bridget picked out words from his earlier sentences, matching them to their exchange.
“They can’t follow,” she said.
Dan and Harpal exchanged a look. Harpal said, “And nor can we.”
An enormous bang rocked the hillside beyond, jerking the ground under their feet as the real explosion tore through the air.
“They’ve found the entrance.” Toby strode cautiously toward the elderly priest, halting when the man’s escorts shifted closer. “There isn’t much time. Please help us.”
The crowd all looked to the elder, who cast his attention over each member of the team, one at a time. His head turned to the hill, then back to Toby. He nodded once, faced away, and his two assistants escorted him back toward the church.
The crowd remained parted, so Bridget led the way, the others falling in behind her.
Chapter Forty-One
Valerio’s group discovered the blockage after a quarter mile of trekking, a wall of tightly packed rock fused with mud and centuries of creeping moisture. Because of the confined space, they set a long fuse, and every man retreated into daylight and waited for the explosives to do their job.
The dust and smoke from the detonation took longer to settle than expected. It was at least five minutes until anyone could see more than fifteen yards, and Jules predicted a further ten minutes until they could reenter, and he was correct. Ten minutes of Valerio stomping impatiently and demanding people hurry up, sending them in to check on the state of the place. In the end, they probably headed down sooner than either Jules or Horse wanted.
Within seconds of delving back into the cave with their mouths wrapped in scarves, the initial scouts turned into amorphous gray blobs before disappearing entirely. Even their headlamps vanished from view. When they reappeared, the swirl and stink of burning had all but dissipated, and a nod to the Ravi brothers brought a thumbs-up from both.
“Okay,” Horse said. “We’re back on track.”
They retraced their steps from earlier. Everyone including Jules wore head-mounted LED lamps, occasionally dazzling one another, but the cumulative effect as the men spread out was to illuminate the whole passageway. Dust continued to dance, and Jules pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose, conscious of potential damage to his lungs.
Long-term only.
It likely doesn’t matter.
I’m dead anyway.
As they approached the explosion site, Valerio issued an order. “We go first. Everyone stick at least ten yards behind.”
He did not give a reason. At first Jules thought he was worried about pursuit, but once they passed the blasted-away threshold, he realized maybe Valerio had other concerns. A megalomaniac such as him preferred to keep his own secrets.
The cave walls smoothed out. The deeper Jules went, the flatter the walls became until the ground could have been modern concrete, skimmed flat and laid as flagstones on a sidewalk in an upscale neighborhood.
Defining this space as a “corridor” would not be an exaggeration.
Aiming the light at his feet, Jules found a layer of dust and debris from the explosion, but it lay fresh over what appeared to be cobblestones under a skim of glass. He crouched to touch it, joined by Valerio and Horse.
“Amazing.” Valerio spread his hand flat. “I saw this once before in South America. The scientists I hired said it was a sandstone layer blasted with extreme heat. Maybe an old magma tunnel. But this... there’s no volcanic activity here.”
Jules lay down, head on his side, staring along the path, his flashlight beam in line with his eyes. Beyond the debris layer, it rippled slightly on a steep decline but was almost as flat as any modern office building’s floor. “Agreed.” He scrambled up and sprang to his feet, dusting himself off. “It’s man-made.”
“Woo!” Valerio stood and held up a hand for a high five. “Come on, don’t leave me hanging.”
Jules trudged on. “Horse, you’re needed.”
Horse slapped his boss’s hand, and bo
th escorted Jules onward. But then Jules had to stop again.
“What now?” Horse asked.
Jules approached the wall where he’d spotted markings that he assumed to be writing. Faded but distinct etchings. Four rows of pictographs unlike any he’d seen before; nothing like Egyptian hieroglyphs and not that weird Indus writing either. Wavy lines, boxes, straight lines, some crisscrossing.
“It’s been sealed for so long,” Valerio said, touching the glyphs. “This is going to be in-credible.”
“They’re uniform,” Jules said.
“Hmm?”
“Look at this. Like a snake.” He brushed over a longer figure, then a duplicate farther down. “They’re identical.”
“So?” Horse said.
“So this is solid rock. You don’t beat this out with a chisel and duplicate the shape. I couldn’t even carve a letter E this perfectly.”
“He’s right,” Valerio said.
Horse exhaled through his nose. “Of course he is.”
“They used a tool. A molded tool, like a stamp. That’s impressive.” Valerio stood away. “Come on, this is just the beginning. Let’s see what else we can find!”
They found steps. Lots of them. One staircase, twenty feet wide, digging so far down that their flashlights did not reflect an endpoint.
“What do you think?” Valerio asked Horse.
Horse fiddled with a flap on his jacket and removed a couple of sticks, snapped them on so they glowed green, and tossed them as far as he could, illuminating the stairs deeper. “We’ve come this far.”
Jules led the way, testing each step so he didn’t slip, but there didn’t seem to be much danger of that. It was so dry in here; it had been hermetically sealed until Valerio’s C-4 came along, so the prospect of moisture was slim. The trailing men moved slower, the gap between them increasing. The group was smaller now, six of them. Others must have turned back or been posted as sentries.
Jules’s flashlight showed the bottom of the staircase, a gaping black hole that led to another corridor. It was hotter here, the pressure from so much rock creating a pocket of stale air.
Valerio virtually skipped now that they were back on even ground, overtaking Jules in order to be the first to see what came next, his headlight and now a second flashlight in his hand allowing him a clearer sweep of the way ahead. In a mere thirty seconds, his excited, childlike call rang out: “Come see this!”
Jules and Horse broke into a jog and caught up quickly.
A recess in the corridor hosted a square recess, four feet high and wide, hewn out of the rock—but that wasn’t the most surprising thing. Displayed in the middle of the hole, a metallic goblet shaped as a wide, heavy wine glass stood alone in the dark.
“It’s bronze,” Valerio said, his fingers hovering inches away.
“Or gold,” Jules said. “What’s up? Worried we’ll get chased out by a giant boulder?”
Valerio’s light dazzled Jules as the billionaire faced him. “The people who constructed this place lived thousands of years before Jesus Christ. They created our bangles that open an as-yet unseen door, and which, incidentally, did about fifteen million dollars of damage to my favorite yacht. So excuse me if I’m a little cautious about—”
Jules reached out and grabbed the cup. Weighed it in his hand. Nothing happened. He passed it to Valerio, who looked like he’d just soiled himself. “Gold.”
Jules moved on.
Horse rushed to get ahead of him, prodding his chest as he spoke. “How the hell did you know that wouldn’t kill us?”
“Logic. The display case is sold rock, no place for a pressure plate, primitive or not. Plus, if we need a magnetic infinity key to get to the juicy stuff, I’m guessing it’s pointless killin’ us at this point.”
“So what’s it for? The cup?” Valerio said.
“Guess? Here.” A circular basin jutted from the wall, one hole as wide as a thumb above it and another larger one below in a gutter. “It’s dry now, but if there was water coming outa here, the cup’s a welcome. Symbolic or literal. It’s a long walk, right?”
Valerio thought for a second, then broke into a grin and slapped Jules on the back. “You would be so rich if you worked for me.”
Jules walked on.
Valerio tossed the gold cup into the basin, and within another hundred yards, they examined yet more wall space.
“More light,” Valerio commanded.
Horse jogged back to the men watching their rear and returned with enough flashlights to illuminate a larger section of wall, leaving the guards with only the glow sticks dropped at their feet.
A mural appeared clearly before them.
Although the colors bled and flaked, the representation survived: mountains, fire, rain, flood, figures of seemingly important people. Important because they stood taller and were positioned higher than the smaller humans fleeing the disasters. All the people were rendered in profile or head-on, staring directly back at anyone observing the mural.
It spanned farther than Jules first realized, covering from floor to ceiling and stretching around the next corner.
“I’ve read this book,” Valerio said, eyes wide, hands animated, obviously dying to touch it but resisting, this time for fear of damaging it rather than of injury or death. “Societies would add to the story as the years go on. We see tapestries in Europe that do the same, cave paintings in America. Horse, you have my journal?”
Journal?
First Jules had heard of that.
The journal was a black hardback notebook full of scribblings and crude drawings like the one Toby kept. Valerio raced back and forth over sections of the painting.
Floods.
A wide-ranging fire.
A volcano erupting.
Maps and ships.
Constellations.
Skeletal figures indicated famine more than once.
Finally, Valerio settled on one of the higher-positioned characters, in profile, pointing at the sun. More people sat around him. In the direction of his finger, the ocean rose over the land, up to a pointed structure far inland with a star on top.
“They forecast this,” Valerio said breathlessly. “The weather change, the floods, the... oh my.”
Moving along the mural, Jules spotted something that made him gasp: a doorway in the rock wall. Perhaps once a natural chamber, now carved to nearly right angles like the corridor itself. They stepped inside, Horse positioning the additional flashlights so they could see the whole room at once.
Approximately twenty feet square, it was covered in the same style of artwork, only this time it was carved and overlaid by dry paint. Dragons and other monsters; some kings murdering people, other kings delivering food; a benevolent figure in robes at the head of a line of cripples, touching one on the forehead, and a line of upright healed people walking away from him; pitched battles from which souls ascended to the sky; another flood, this one consuming a city; a bold-looking man standing tall over a sword jammed into a rock, his hand on the hilt.
“Look familiar?” Jules said.
“Myths known the world over.” Valerio turned in circles as if trying to consume all the images at once. “Dragons, the result of people finding dinosaur bones. The rise of kings, good and bad; the healer figure of Christ and Buddha; and, of course, the special one.”
Jules raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“The special warrior. Only one can wield the mystical weapon. King Arthur and the sword-in-the-stone business is older than the stories of Camelot. The Bu-Bu tribe of northern Cambodia revere a man who can wrench a battle-ax out of a block of silver. It’s all the same mythos. This city.” He referenced another section. “Some might call it Atlantis, but every continent has seen great civilizations fall under nature’s wrath. Every modern story we have used to be someone else’s. Before Jesus, we had Buddha. Before Superman, we had Moses. Before King Arthur, we had...” He signaled the man with the sword. “Whoever that guy is.”
“So it
’s an art gallery,” Jules said, pretending to be bored. Like a sullen teenager, he slipped a phone from his pocket and snapped a photo of the wall, arcing it around to create a panorama.
“Where’d you get that?”
Jules flicked his head at Horse and took another picture. “I dipped his pocket when he was lumbering after me.”
“Hey!” Horse stepped toward Jules.
Jules pulled back. “Selfie?” He grinned and flipped the camera and photographed himself next to the sword-in-the-stone section.
“Asshole millennials and their selfies,” Horse grumbled.
“Come on, man. History is so cool.” Jules offered Horse the handset. “Besides, I’m not a millennial. They’re, like, thirty. I’m Gen Z if you want to be accurate.”
“Keep the damn phone. It’s a burner anyway.”
Disappointed that he hadn’t riled up the big guy more, Jules put the phone away. “Fine, can we get on with this?”
Valerio shook his head in disappointment. “Always in a rush to get where you’re going. Why can’t you just be where you are? So desperate to get your hands on you-know-what, you can’t appreciate being the first people in two thousand years to gaze upon this? They’re talking about an ultimate weapon to rule the land.”
“Yeah, but it’s just metaphorical crap, ain’t it? A myth.”
“Sure,” Valerio said, heading out. “Let’s say that. Metaphorical.”
Chapter Forty-Two
The conversation was slow going by any stretch of the imagination, but with their land under assault from Valerio, the elders—three of them—acted as if they trusted Toby and his friends. Two of the elders who sat by what would be the altar in a Western church were deeply creased gray-haired women, dressed much like the man: in black robes with a white Roman collar. They reminded Toby of a rather intimidating job interview he once attended.
The church itself was built in the same shape as those he’d grown up with but without glass, and sections of it appeared far older than many of the classic buildings around Europe and the Americas. He couldn’t possibly age it off the cuff, but he recognized the building techniques as similar to those between the first and fifth centuries AD. It was how Thomas would have constructed houses of worship in Kerala.
