by C. E. Murphy
32
He didn't, in fact, go back to his own room later. Not with Ragar's journal waiting. He got a cup of coffee instead, and settled back down with the ancient papers. It was too easy to forget himself, and simply turn the pages, reading the journal of the last decade of Ragar's life, instead of painstakingly noting out letters and acting out the deciphering of the text. Lorhen caught himself reading for the fourth time in an hour and pushed the pages away, looking for a clock. People had been in and out of the galley several times, eating and drinking, but he'd been mostly left undisturbed, and had no sense of the time.
"You've been at it all day, Logan," Anne said, poking her head in the door. "Come have a drink with the rest of us. The party's started."
Lorhen looked up, around the emptied-out room. "I didn't even notice everyone had gone," he said, rubbing his eyes. "What time is it?"
"About seven thirty. You look tired."
Lorhen smiled, straightening the papers before standing. "I am," he admitted. "I think it's going to be an early night, party or not."
Anne laughed. "You'd better be able to sleep through a ruckus, then. I don't think anybody else is planning on going to bed until the sun comes up."
Lorhen came to the door, switching out the light as he followed Anne out. "I'm wearing my brain out, looking at all that writing. I keep staring at it and expecting it to suddenly make sense."
Anne shook her head. "I'll just drive a robot," she said. "You can do the hard part."
"Without you and your robot I wouldn't have any work to do," Lorhen pointed out. "Funny how it all kind of works together, isn't it?" The shiver of Ghean's presence ran through him as they approached the conference room that had been emptied out for the party. She waited inside the door, and slid her arm through Lorhen's possessively.
"I thought you'd run out on me," she said. "Jerry wants to get a picture of all of us with our pretty stone chair."
"Not me," Lorhen said. "Someone kept me up all night, and I've been thinking all day. That sort of activity makes for tired researchers. Call it vanity, if you want. It'd be an unflattering picture."
"Smile and bear it, Logan," Ghean said. "They already think you're crazy for not letting Michelle film you."
"You painted me as the eccentric scholar," Lorhen muttered, as Jerry, armed with a DSLR, waved them over to pose with the stone chair and the rest of the submarine team. "Couldn't you have mentioned I thought cameras stole souls, or something?"
Once the shot was taken, Lorhen gallantly insisted he be allowed to take a picture with Jerry in it, switched places with the young man, deleted the photo with himself in it, and took a photo of Jerry and the crew before handing the camera back. "Can't wait to see them, but everybody's taking their phones out for pictures now, and I really don't like being caught on film."
"Pixels," Jerry said, and Lorhen shrugged agreeably. "What is it, a privacy thing? Personal privacy is so last century, Logan."
"I know. I'm the last bastion against the inevitable future." It was a pity that being Timeless didn't have a more exotic side to it, like vampires were supposed to: no reflections, and pictures couldn't be taken of them. Although that would no doubt cause its own problems, not the least of which would be getting a decent haircut. Lorhen escaped from the crowd as quickly as he could, sharing a glass of champagne with Ghean. Then, pleading mental exhaustion, he kissed Ghean's cheek and took his leave, catching Michelle's amused glance on his way out the door.
"'Mental' exhaustion?" she asked quietly, and Lorhen laughed as softly.
"I have to sleep sometime. Good night, Michelle." The door closed behind him, and for a moment Lorhen stood in the relative silence of the hallway, sighing with relief. The Retribution was extraordinarily quiet, virtually all of the crew cheering their success at the party. It was as good a time as any, Lorhen decided. Striking while the iron was hot, no time like the present, and mostly, cliches aside, he would have all night. He went to his cabin, glancing out the window as he unzipped the suitcase that still lay on his bed. The sun had almost set, vivid colors fading to grey. Within a few more minutes, it would be dark. With the party below, it was unlikely anyone would notice him creeping around on deck.
Lorhen piled clothes from the case onto the bed and smiled faintly at what was left. Just as well no one had inspected his luggage; explaining a wetsuit without SCUBA equipment might have been a handful. The wetsuit went onto the bed, and a loosely packed backpack came out of the suitcase, leaving it empty. He'd been worried about how to go overboard without anyone noticing, but the party would help that enormously. Lorhen stripped down to pull the wetsuit on, thinking that he should have brought Lisse along for the caper. Except that probably would have cost another five million, and she would have wanted to stay at the party anyway. It was fully dark by the time he'd finished dressing a few minutes later. Lorhen slung the backpack on, poked his head out of the cabin, checked the hall, and scurried up to the deck.
There wasn't as much as a close call. Minutes later, he slid into the submarine tank, kicking down several yards beneath the bottom of the ship. Drifting, he pulled the backpack off to take flippers, goggles and a headlamp out of it. A compass and a watch were already secured around his wrists, but he pulled the flippers and headlamp on, then snugged the goggles on, taking a few minutes to clear them. The headlamp's battery was guaranteed for twelve hours of use without recharging, and although with luck he wouldn't need it for anything like that long, he still didn't turn it on, not this close to the surface. Instead he pulled the backpack on again, then exhaled grimly and took a deep breath of water, letting pressure equalize inside and out. Even immortality didn't like that: the impulse was to cough and hack, spitting water out, for several horrible minutes until he adjusted. Then, finally, he began kicking downward.
The Mediterranean at its deepest was around forty-five hundred feet. Where Atlantis had sank, it was only—only, he thought with a shudder—about three thousand feet deep. Lorhen thought it shouldn't take more than an hour, even with the currents, to make it to the bottom. The pressure would not be comfortable, but neither, he thought dryly, would it be killing. Ghean had survived in it without pulverized bones or ruptured organs for centuries, and he knew how to acclimatize himself as best he could. Lorhen glanced at the watch's depth gauge: two hundred meters. He switched on the headlamp, turned the watch to a compass reading, and began the swim into the depths.
It took longer than he anticipated. The currents pulled him off course, and he spent more time swimming laterally than he'd expected. Every few feet he cleared his ears, hearing the faint internal squeal as the tubes tried to adjust to the rising pressure. Eventually his eardrums burst, sending him into a convulsive ball, clutching his head at the pain. Blood tinged the water around him and swept away in seconds. The continuing pressure would probably prevent them from healing, which was just as well.
He could feel his body adjusting to the pressure in other ways, what little gaseous air he had left forcing its way out to equalize the pressures within and without. He grew lightheaded as the fine adjustments were made, and slowed his descent. Whatever element of his Timeless body allowed him to survive in the water, required time to condition him to it. The lightheadedness passed as he slowed, and he maintained the new swimming pace, no new bouts of dizziness hampering him.
Once the internal adaptations were made, the water's pressure became an uncomfortable inconvenience, weighing his movements. It stopped just shy of pain, a pervading discomfort that was the price for daring the dive. Lorhen focused on the task of reaching the sea floor, aware that too much acknowledgment of the water's pressure would only make it worse.
Eventually the sea bed came into the range of his headlamp. Situating himself to find the city and locate recognizable sections took more time, and navigating his way to the ancient temple took longer still.
Disconcerting as exploring sunken Atlantis in the sub had been, the sensations were measurably more disturbing without the protect
ive walls separating Lorhen from the sea. Anne was more than right. Atlantis had ghosts, and too many of them had faded faces and voices in Lorhen's memory. He kicked up a side alley, broken walls on either side of him sullen reminders of the past. Ahead and to his left was an open area, city floor broken up, but largely intact; the layout suggested the area had never been walled. Lorhen hesitated there, swimming toward a wall shattered at half its height at the back of the empty stretch. Grime coated the wall, and he reached out to brush some of it away, leaving streaked lines against the wall. A few more swipes cleared much of the sediment away, and exposed the lower half of a carving in the stone.
Memory, rather than intuition, completed the image. Another bull's head, though not encompassed in the circle of the Houses. Lorhen turned in the undisturbed water, looking across the floor again. The outer perimeter of his headlight brushed the back corner of the Bull's Head Tavern. A tabletop, broken in two, lay on the ground, wooden legs long since rotted away. For an instant, the activity of the pub the last time he'd seen it passed over him: voices, raised in general pleasantry; close-pressed bodies maneuvering around each other; Minyah, just outside the tavern, making someone apologize for something she'd done. Sour-faced Aroz, reluctant to greet him, and Karem, calculating how best to use him. Most vividly, Ghean, laughing in delight to see him, her brown eyes bright and excited, leaping up to hug him. Lorhen clamped his eyes shut, shaking his head to dislodge the images, and shoved violently off the floor. From here he could find the temple, if he could let memory guide him without overwhelming him.
It was easier than he thought it might be. Beyond the strangeness of swimming over streets he'd walked, he could almost make himself imagine that it was the quiet, moonlit night that he'd spoken to Karem in the temple. Keeping the illusion in mind helped keep other memories at bay, until he found the temple, and crouched on top of it, just above the hole Ghean had chopped in her escape.
It was impossibly small. Lorhen ran a finger around the edge of it. She couldn't have been much more than skin and bones. And hair, he thought with a shudder, remembering her parts of the story. He took the backpack off again, opening it to pull out a small hammer and chisel. They weren't the most effective tools, but they would insure the temple roof wouldn't crumble inward and bury the floor entirely, and they'd do the job. Lorhen pulled the backpack on again, more to keep it out of the way than anything else, and began diligently breaking away a larger hole in the stone. It was fast work, made easier by not needing to make room for an oxygen tank to pass through. A glance at his watch told him he'd been in the water for nearly four hours, much longer than he'd hoped. He estimated he had only another four to return to the surface, if he wanted to be sure to get back on the Retribution before daylight. Perhaps going up wouldn't take as long as going down had. He didn't believe that, but it was a little late to abort now.
Less than twenty minutes later he kicked down into the temple, struggling against the memory of Ghean's story. It took all his willpower to not swim back out of the temple and away from Atlantis. He hovered in the water for a moment, staring around the smoothed temple walls, then, with a kind of sick fascination, he reached up and turned the headlamp off.
The blackness was absolute. Even knowing the escape route, Lorhen flinched violently back from the darkness, as if it had come alive. More than four thousand years, he thought, horrified. In this silence, in this blackness. Gods up above. It's a wonder Ghean isn't stark raving mad. Swallowing a scream, anything that would at least break the utter silence, Lorhen switched the headlight back on, unspeakably relieved when light flooded the temple again. He remained where he was, trying to regain his equilibrium before he was able to circle the temple.
The altar had once been more than three feet high, in the center of the temple. There was no suggestion it had ever existed at all. The floor was perfectly smooth, other than the small stones that had fallen away as Ghean chipped her way loose. Looking around once more, Lorhen again quelled the desire to retreat, then knelt, sliding out of the backpack a final time. Chisel and hammer still in hand, he cracked a wedge out of the floor, then abandoned the tools for the backpack.
Two dozen shaped explosives lay in the bottom of the pack, waterproofed and set off by an electrical charge. Not entirely certain how much of a hole it would blow under the conditions, Lorhen set the first into the wedge he'd dug out, then collected the backpack and swam toward the opening in the ceiling again. As he reached it, a thought struck him, and he turned, watching the floor shimmer as the light ran over it. The texture changed twice, two strips near each other, where the stone turned to metal slag, boiled into the floor. Lorhen stared down at the legacy of the fight and shook his head. He's warned them it was holy ground. Then he kicked through the ceiling to the comparative safety of the Mediterranean, and set off the charge.
Sediment-filled water roiled out of the hole behind him in a rather satisfying manner. Lorhen waited for it to settle before going in to inspect the damage he'd done. An opening perhaps two feet wide and half a foot deep was gouged in the temple floor. Lorhen cleared the rubble out of it, set another charge, tamped it with some of the excess stone from the first explosion, and swam outside again. He went through the sequence another nine times, drifting in the water outside as the explosions tore holes in the temple floor: wash, rinse, repeat, Lorhen thought as he set another charge. His shoulders brushed the ragged edges of the tunnel he was creating, but there was enough room for passage.
After the dozenth explosion, there was no rubble to be cleared away. Lorhen kicked down through the roof slowly, catching himself on the rough walls he'd made to look around the room below the temple.
It was water-filled, of course, but the walls were whole. The water, Lorhen suspected, rushed in as the charge blew away the last of the ceiling. Rock scattered around the table directly below his head supported the theory. Lorhen kicked down into the room, righting himself.
Aside from the hole in the ceiling, it looked exactly as it had the last time Lorhen saw it, more than four and a half thousand years ago. The table and its chairs were undamaged, except for a few scars on the table, which looked new. Stone and the rush of seawater had almost certainly caused them. Lorhen sat in the center of the table, closing his eyes to reconstruct the scene from the past.
Ragar had crossed the room to the left of the table from the door. The door, Lorhen recalled, which he wouldn't be able to see if it were closed. He opened his eyes and inspected the walls.
Forty-five hundred years ago, Ragar had been right. The stresses of the earthquake and sinking had changed the dynamics of the room slightly, though, and there was a visible line in the wall where the door sat. Had he not known it was there, Lorhen would not have seen it for perhaps days, perhaps weeks. He closed his eyes again, trying to remember the angle Ragar had passed the table at.
Standing, he echoed the movement as best he could, coming to stop at a point a third of the way around the room from the door. The release had been at waist height on the Atlantean scholar. Eyes closed again, Lorhen began exploring the chisels in the wall with his fingertips. Patience, he thought: this was the part that would take patience.
More than two hours passed before the soft double-click signaled that the right catch had been found. As smoothly as it had thousands of years earlier, a slab of stone slid out from the wall. Lorhen opened his eyes, half disbelieving that the gamble had paid off. Stone in stone, the Book's heavy protective case sat within the extended rock. With something close to awe, he lifted the stone box out. Cradled protectively across his chest, he brought it back to the table and his backpack, emptying the remaining charges out of the latter. He packed the Book carefully into the backpack. The charges he left scattered on the table; he wouldn't need them again, and it would perplex Ghean for a few seconds before she realized what he'd done.
Lorhen looked around the room once more, then pushed up through the tunnel, and the temple, to leave Atlantis with his buried treasure on his back.
<
br /> 33
A few hundred feet below the surface, Lorhen abandoned the flippers, headlight and goggles. The last was an unspeakable relief. Lorhen rubbed his eyes, feeling circulation restore as the pressure from the goggles was eased. He watched the flippers rotate heel-down into the water and sink into the darkness, and wrapped the goggles around the headlamp, letting them go as well. He could feel pressure against his eardrums again, indicating they'd healed sometime in the journey back to the air.
He broke the surface with a relieved gasp, pulling air back into his lungs. Much of an advantage as not needing to breathe underwater was, he still much preferred inhaling and exhaling. Shocked at his own exhaustion, Lorhen lay on the surface of the water, fatigue sending trembles through his body. The sky grew marginally lighter, and he groaned, turning in the water to search for the ship.
It took a few minutes to pick it out of the still-dull light, grey of the ocean blending with the distant clouds meeting the horizon. The Retribution was nearly a half mile away. Lorhen sighed and sank underwater again, swimming a few yards beneath the surface. It wouldn't do to have someone notice him swimming up to the ship at this point. It had been an incredibly long night, and all he wanted was a few hours sleep.
At least he had the Book. A thrill of triumph washed away his weariness for a moment. He hoped it hadn't been damaged or destroyed by the sudden onslaught of water he'd let into the secret room, but the relevant fact was that it was in his possession, not an unknown. If it was damaged, so be it. At least it wasn't a factor to worry about anymore.
Lorhen dove under the Retribution, turning on his back to look for the submarine dock. He broke the surface silently when he found it, then pulled himself up the ladder, hiding behind the sub to peeked out of the dock and watching for passers-by. After several seconds of silence, he hurried across the deck, glancing west to the horizon. The sky was beginning to color scarlet and gold with the rising sun, with clouds bundling together to make grey shadows in the warm colors. Sailors take warning, Lorhen thought, slipping through the door that lead eventually to his cabin. As it closed, he let out a soft breath. Almost there.