‘Yeah, I was kinda hoping you wouldn’t point out the flaw in my one optimistic thought.’
The Land Rover continued across the empty expanse. Eddie lost sight of the aircraft, not knowing if it had changed course or was simply too far away. The terrain became harder, forcing him to slow down to navigate the rocky surface. Something appeared on the horizon ahead, a mirage rippling through the distorting heat-haze.
Nina peered at it. ‘Is that a hill?’
‘Hills, I think,’ said Eddie, as more shimmering peaks slowly rose into view. He noticed a faint column of what looked like steam drifting up from the tallest of them. ‘Or volcanoes.’ Nina’s lack of a reply made him suddenly very uneasy. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. You’re not telling me . . .’
‘I think that’s where it is,’ she told him. The light but insistent tugging on her soul felt somehow more intense.
‘In a fucking volcano?’
‘It ties in with Nantalas’s vision. And it fits with what I felt when I put the statues together in Switzerland. If Nantalas experienced the same thing, she’d interpret it based on her beliefs. Remember what the text said in the Temple of Poseidon, about Hephaestus? He was the Greek – and Atlantean – god of volcanoes.’
‘So it is inside a volcano. Great. How are we supposed to get to it?’
‘I have absolutely no idea. I don’t suppose there’s a fireproof suit in our gear?’
‘It’s funny, but I don’t think Alderley thought of that.’
The mirage took on a solidity as they got closer. The volcano was not particularly high, but it dominated the surroundings, a near-perfect cone looming over its foothills. After the better part of an hour they were on its flanks, the steepness of the rocky slope finally outmatching even the Land Rover’s hill-climbing abilities. Eddie stopped the 4×4 on a small sloping plateau and got out, looking up at the steaming summit. ‘So what do we do?’ he asked. ‘Go to the top and look down into the crater to see if we can see the meteor? Or a secret base with a monorail. That’d be cooler.’
Nina smiled. ‘I doubt even Blofeld would be dumb enough to build a base inside an active volcano . . .’ She stopped, frowning slightly.
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s another feeling, that there’s something . . .’ She slowly turned, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the sun as she looked across the hillside at a higher spot.
‘The rock?’
‘I don’t know. I just feel some kind of connection to this place . . .’ Almost absently, she headed up the slope.
‘Hey, hold on!’ Eddie hurriedly extracted the rucksack from the Land Rover, along with another bag of basic survival equipment, and went after her. ‘Take some bloody water, at least.’ He gave her the bag.
‘Sorry. But whatever it is, I don’t think it’s far away.’
They angled up the volcano’s side. While it was still active, the clumps of vegetation in the dirt, along with geological features that would require centuries, if not millennia, to erode, showed that it hadn’t erupted for a considerable time. ‘One less thing to worry about,’ said Eddie when Nina pointed this out. ‘I don’t want to be hopping over streams of molten lava like Lara bloody Croft.’
‘You don’t quite have her figure,’ Nina joked. ‘But I don’t think we’ll—’
She stopped as she cleared a rise – and saw something ahead.
‘Well, Christ,’ Eddie said, amazed. ‘There is something here.’
Part of the hillside had suffered a landslide, a swath of rock reduced to rubble. But among the debris were stones that very clearly had not been shaped by the random forces of nature. Straight edges and right angles stood out from the scattered scree. Nina broke into a jog towards the broken remains. ‘There must have been something built on the volcano!’
‘Or in it,’ said Eddie as he followed, pointing uphill.
About a hundred feet higher up was a dark opening in the scar where an earthquake had shaken loose the surface. Nina hesitated, wanting to investigate the stonework first, but then headed for the exposed passage. This expedition was not about archaeology.
The smashed masonry had come from a structure marking the way into the volcano, but the almost circular tunnel behind it appeared natural. ‘It must be a lava tube,’ she said as they approached.
‘So what’s all this?’ Eddie asked as they reached more debris on the ground. ‘Did someone build an entrance to it, like a gatehouse or something?’
‘I’ll make an archaeologist out of you yet,’ she said, smiling. ‘But I don’t think it was an entrance. Look how the stones are spread out – it’s an even distribution across the whole opening. This wasn’t built to mark the way in. It was built to block it.’
‘Until the landslide opened it up.’
‘Looks like it.’ They reached the opening. Even though little of the barricade was still intact, what remained had a distinctively harsh aesthetic that immediately suggested an Atlantean influence to Nina.
Eddie peered down the tunnel. It was about twelve feet in diameter, curling away into darkness like the trail of a monster earthworm. He sniffed for any tell-tale hints of sulphurous gases, but smelled only the desert air.
A feeling that something wasn’t as it should be made him move a few steps into the tunnel and sniff again. Still nothing – but now he realised why. ‘What is it?’ Nina asked.
‘This tunnel goes down into the volcano, right? And we know it’s still active because of the steam blowing out of the top.’
‘Yeah?’
‘So how come air’s getting sucked into the tunnel?’ He returned to the ruined wall and scraped up a handful of fine dust, then let the grains trickle out from his hand. They didn’t fall straight down, but instead curved away, drawn towards the shadows.
Nina joined him. He was correct; there was a definite flow of air down the lava tube, and it was at odds with the prevailing wind outside. But she had no clue how to explain it. ‘At least we won’t have to worry about being gassed if we go down there.’
‘If?’ said Eddie with a knowing smile.
‘Yeah, we’re going down there. I just wanted to, y’know, preserve the illusion of choice.’
His smile broadened. ‘That vanished the moment I married you.’
‘Hey!’
He winked, then became more serious. ‘There should be a couple of torches in that bag. Let’s have a look.’
Nina found the pair of flashlights and gave one to her husband as she switched on the other and shone it down the passage. The curving walls were slightly ridged, producing the unsettling impression of being inside the ribcage of a snake. The lava tube changed shape as it progressed, its cross-section undulating from a teardrop to a squashed ovoid, but the volume of molten rock that had formed it seemed consistent; the ceiling was never lower than eight feet high. ‘Do you think it’s safe?’
Eddie placed a fingertip to his forehead as if channelling psychic powers. ‘Lemme consult my massive knowledge of volcanoes and say . . . I don’t have a fucking clue.’ She stuck out her tongue, making him grin again. ‘There isn’t molten lava gushing up it, so that’s a good start. And so long as the wind’s blowing down into it, we should be able to breathe okay. If it changes, though . . . We should have brought a canary in a cage.’
‘Poor birdie.’ She aimed the light at where the tunnel coiled out of sight. ‘Should we get the rest of the gear?’
He shook his head. ‘You’ve got the basics, and I’ve got the bombs. If we need anything else, we can always go back for it.’
‘Let’s hope we don’t need anything else.’
‘You think we’re going to find this meteorite just lying there?’
‘It’d be a nice change, wouldn’t it?’ She started down the shaft.
Eddie walked alongside her. ‘So, let me get this straight. This priestess, Nantalas, basically sinks Atlantis when she cocks up how to use earth energy, and the meteorite shoots off like an ICBM. She convinces the king not to k
ill her, but instead uses the statues to find it.’
‘Right. So they could make sure nobody ever tried to use the power of the gods again.’
‘Well, we know they were here. But just blocking off the entrance doesn’t seem like their usual way of doing things. The other Atlantean places we’ve found . . . they were big on booby traps, weren’t they?’
Nina stopped suddenly. ‘Oh, you had to remind me, didn’t you?’
‘Better now than when there’s a giant scythe swinging at your head.’
More cautiously, using the torch to check the curved walls above as well as the floor, she set off again. The entrance disappeared round a bend, dropping them into darkness as they continued deeper into the mountain. ‘I don’t know how much effort the Atlanteans who came here would have put into building their defences, though. They would have had other things on their mind.’
‘Like getting back home to save their families before Atlantis went glug-glug-glug.’
‘Yeah. Still, they obviously put some work into sealing the entrance – they could have just filled the tunnel with rocks, but they went to the trouble of constructing a wall.’
‘If they thought the meteorite was sent by the gods, maybe they thought it’d piss them off even more if they didn’t show respect by building a proper barricade,’ Eddie suggested.
‘I really am rubbing off on you! That’s exactly what I was thinking. So, when are you going to enrol for a degree course?’
‘The twelfth of never.’ They continued their descent, Eddie licking a finger and holding it up to check that the breeze was still blowing from behind them. It was. ‘So, they built a wall – did they build anything else down here?’
They rounded another bend – and halted as their torch beams fell upon something ahead.
Nina’s eyes widened in astonishment. ‘I’d say . . . yes.’
33
The twisting lava tube opened out into a chamber cut from the volcanic rock – by human hands, not molten magma. The space was circular, about thirty feet in diameter. Offset from the entrance on the chamber’s far side was an imposing pair of tall stone doors. A metal plate was fixed upon one of them, glinting with the reddish-gold tint of orichalcum.
The doors were not what stopped Nina and Eddie in their tracks, however. It was what hung above them.
A giant hammer.
Its head was a single huge block of stone over fifteen feet across, one side matching the curvature of the wall. The handle was a thick beam crossing the entire chamber from a slot chiselled into the rock: a pivot. The entire massive object was designed to pound down and crush anything in front of the doors into a very thin paste.
‘I guess they did have time to build a booby trap,’ Nina whispered, as if afraid that her voice alone would trigger it. She shone her torch around the rest of the chamber. The walls, the lower parts coated by a layer of plaster, were covered with inscriptions: Atlantean texts. Near the entrance were several niches containing dusty objects.
Bodies.
She looked more closely. The corpses were tightly wrapped in cloth shrouds, heads left exposed. Empty-eyed skulls leered back at her.
‘Who are this lot?’ Eddie asked in distaste.
Nina knew the Atlantean language well enough to pick out a familiar name crudely marked in the stone above one particular nook. ‘It’s Nantalas!’
He directed his light at the shrivelled head. ‘Ha! Maybe you really are related.’ The beam picked out some surviving strands of distinctly red hair.
‘Very funny.’ She didn’t recognise the names over the other bodies, but understood the gist of an inscription nearby. ‘These must be her acolytes, I suppose. They died with her.’
‘How?’
‘Poison. It says that once the new Temple of the Gods was completed, they took their own lives in atonement for Nantalas’s blasphemy. Then I guess the other Atlanteans who came with them walled up the tunnel.’ She read more of the texts. ‘They took the statues with them – they were going to hide them in the empire’s farthest outposts so they could never be brought together again.’
‘That worked out well,’ Eddie said sarcastically. ‘Why didn’t they just smash the things?’
‘The same reason they didn’t destroy the meteorite. They thought it was sent by the gods, so smashing it would just have made Poseidon and co. even madder. And speaking of gods . . .’ She perused one particular section of text, then looked up at the suspended hammer. ‘I was right about them interpreting the volcano as being the forge of Hephaestus. They built this thing to honour him, by having his symbol protect the stone.’
‘So it’s a trap, right?’
‘Oh, yeah. Only someone who deserves to enter the Temple of the Gods can get through the doors. Anyone else . . . well, whoever wrote this was big on smiting.’
‘This isn’t the temple?’
‘No, just an antechamber. The actual place is through there.’ She indicated the doors . . . then, her curiosity fully aroused, started to cross the chamber to examine them.
‘Whoa, whoa!’ Eddie pulled her back. ‘Smiting, remember?’
‘I wasn’t going to touch anything,’ she said, annoyed. ‘Besides, if they just wanted to stop anyone from reaching the Temple of the Gods, they could have filled in the lava tube. There must be a way in, otherwise why even bother with the test?’
‘What test?’
She pointed at the orichalcum plate. Visible on it was an indentation in the metal: a handprint. ‘I think that’s how you find out if you deserve to go through. Nothing’ll happen as long as nobody touches it.’ She started back towards the doors. ‘Probably.’ Eddie winced as she crossed under the hammer . . . but it remained still. Warily, he followed her.
Nina peered at the metal plate. The handprint, fingers splayed, was not large; a woman’s. Nantalas? There was something set into the centre of the indented palm. A piece of stone.
Purple stone. Part of the meteorite, the same substance from which the statues had been made.
She stared at it, thinking. Why place a material that could conduct earth energy on a door?
The answer was obvious. It was a lock, one that could only be opened with a biological key. Someone who could channel earth energy would be able to unlock it simply by pressing their hand against the panel.
Someone like Nantalas.
Or herself.
‘I know what it is,’ she told Eddie. ‘This place must be an earth energy confluence – maybe it’s why the meteorite ended up here, because it was following the lines of energy. So if I touch the stone, it’ll charge up just like the statues, and release the lock.’
Eddie did not share her confidence. ‘And if you’re wrong, it’s hammer time and I have to mop you off the floor.’
‘I don’t think I’m wrong. But just in case, you should go back over to the entrance. Take this with you.’ She gave him the bag of supplies.
He didn’t move. ‘We can blow the thing open.’
‘We don’t know how thick the doors are. And what if doing that drops the hammer? It’s huge – we’d never clear it without using all the other charges, and if we do that we won’t be able to destroy the meteorite. Eddie, I know what I’m doing. It’s the only way to get into the temple.’
Reluctantly, he backed up. Nina gave him a look of reassurance, then turned to the metal plate. She raised her hand and let it hover over the indentation as she spread her fingers to match the print.
Slowly, she moved it closer, about to press her palm against the stone—
‘Stop!’ Eddie yelled. She froze. ‘Don’t touch the fucking thing!’ He ran to her and bodily hauled her away from the door.
‘Jesus Christ, Eddie!’ she cried. ‘What is it?’
‘The hammer’s not the trap. That’s the trap!’ He pointed at the plate.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The whole point of building this place was to make sure nobody could ever use the meteorite’s power again, right?’
‘So why would they make a door that only opens for the exact people who can do that? It’d be like building a bank vault that can only be opened if you’re wearing a stripy jumper and carrying a bag with “swag” written on it! The last person they’d want to let in would be someone who can actually channel earth energy. Someone like you!’
She was silent for a long moment. Then: ‘Eddie?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m an idiot.’
He grinned. ‘I didn’t want to say it myself, but . . .’
‘No, seriously. I. Am. A. Moron! How the hell did I not figure that out? Oh, my God!’ She clapped both hands to her forehead. ‘I fell right for it. I’d be a quarter-inch thick right now if it wasn’t for you.’
‘Well, you’d have been able to slide right under the door.’ That triggered a thought, and he looked back towards the lava tube before regarding the doors quizzically.
‘You just saved my life, Eddie,’ Nina went on. ‘Again. Thank you. You know, I don’t appreciate you enough. When we get home, you can do that thing that I don’t normally . . .’ He was still looking at the doors. ‘Hello, hi,’ she said, waving a hand in front of his face. ‘Wife, right here, offering free perversions.’
‘It’s a kink, not a perversion,’ he said. ‘And yeah, I’ll definitely take you up on it. But have a gander at this first.’ He went to the door and knelt to peer at the crack beneath it, then took out a penknife and opened its longest blade. ‘Shine your light in there.’
Nina illuminated the narrow gap – and was startled to discover that it was not what it seemed. ‘It’s a fake!’
Eddie probed it with the penknife. The blade only went an inch deep before its tip found solid stone. ‘I thought there was something weird about the room,’ he said. ‘It must have been part of the lava tube before the Atlanteans dug it out – but if they built these doors to block the tunnel, why don’t they actually line up with it?’
It was true; the doorway was offset from the entrance opposite by quite an angle. ‘The lava tube twists about, though,’ Nina said.
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