Look at him. So arrogant.
Fine. If you can only see your death, then I won’t kill you. Just hurt you real bad.
He’d never expect it. She lowered her shoulder and flexed her legs, judging the distance. He had to be only about twenty yards ahead. Just like Quantico’s qualifying tests. She’d be on him before he knew it.
She took off. Bursting with speed, running headlong, preparing take him down and beat his face in with her gun.
Six strides in, she realized she’d been played. The first giveaway was that Montross-or whatever it was that looked like him-broke into a huge smile. The second was that she brushed against something hard that jarred her sideways into something else, something man-sized.
Another stride and she realized her left arm had been cut to the bone, blood spurting and flailing uselessly.
I’m in the army.
She tried to stop but her momentum carried her forward, almost ten feet away from him now, where he had folded his arms, and his smile had vanished, replaced by a look of grim satisfaction.
At his feet lay the briefcase.
Mine! She thought, and lunged for it.
She heard a click, and the ground beneath her feet settled.
There was movement. Lots of it. Grating sounds as warriors swiveled to her location, limbs flexed, swung and drove. She felt her rib cage snap as it was penetrated from left to right as a cold implement burst through her spine and out her stomach. She looked down to see the glint of steel. Looked back up and Montross’s glow was fading, his image disappearing even as that smile returned.
She had only time left for one brief thought.
I’m not… the Chosen.
17
Montross opened his eyes. His fingers unclenched from each other. Disoriented, he teetered on the edge of the crypt, almost falling backward into water before Nina caught him.
He blinked, took a moment to catch his breath, then glanced around before nodding to Nina. “I’ve taken care of securing our items for later retrieval. Now, what’s up with this crew?”
Nina shrugged, aimed the light at the feet of the four psychics, with their eyes closed, lost in their own trances. “They’ve been like this for three minutes. We don’t have much time left.”
Montross pulled himself up. He bent down at the head of Genghis Khan’s coffin. “Grab his feet,” he told Nina. “Let’s make us some room.” They lifted him, gracefully, carefully. Then, following Montross’s lead, Nina gently set the body down, lowering it onto the surface of the rising water. Then Montross gave the leather shoulder pad a reverential push, sending the body floating away.
“Farewell, Lord Temujin.” He stood on the center of the crypt dais next to the lever that had brought down the tower and studied it. “Give them another minute, then we’ll try something. It has to involve this lever somehow.”
“Or not,” said Phoebe, blinking and standing up fully. “It might be something much worse.”
Orlando woke himself up, then Alexander looked their way. “I couldn’t see anything.”
“Me neither,” said Orlando.
“And my dear brother Caleb?” Montross shined his light on Caleb’s face, which remained placid, motionless except for his eyes, which seemed to be fluttering in the full stages of a dream-vision.
“Don’t need him,” Phoebe said with a slight smile.
“So, what did you see?” Nina asked.
“I saw that somebody’s going to need to brave the eels.” She took a deep breath. “Those three step-stones down there that you used to activate the tower’s descent? They’ve got to be unstuck, pressed down again. Dragon, gryphon, centaur.”
Orlando took off his boots and got ready to jump in.
“What?” he said when everyone turned to look at him. “I’ve just done the math. I’m the expendable one here, the only one with a shot at this. And since gnarly girl here has still got the gun, I’m not going to wait to be asked.”
Phoebe smiled at him. “You’re my hero.”
He dropped over the side where Alexander was pointing. “That should be the dragon.”
“I hope,” said Orlando as he jumped in. With a splash, his feet struck the bottom and the water rose to his neck. The stone beneath his feet shifted, then rose up. “Okay, one down. And then up, I guess.” He watched the lights stabbing into the dark water around him. “Uh, Nina? I hope you’re as good a shot with these eels as you were with those soldiers.”
From above, a light darted around his body, scanning for movement. “Only because we need you,” she said. “Otherwise, you’re not worth the price of ammo.”
He was about to move clockwise toward the gryphon at the twelve o’clock position, when Nina fired. He flinched with the splash right in front of him. A gout of purplish blood erupted, and an eel thrashed and spun, contorting itself into knots. Orlando saw a flash of yellow eyes and needle-sharp teeth, then it was gone.
“Great,” he said. “Now you’ve made it bleed. It’s going to lure its friends. Hope they’re cannibals.”
“Maybe not,” said Montross, pointing to the soldiers’ bodies, “but you may luck out. There are a lot of other lunch options floating around.”
Orlando moved, treading water and swimming to where the lights led him. In his peripheral vision he saw a floating body, waterlogged. A head turned his way and a single eye, half-eaten, blinked at him from a partially devoured face. As he watched, a grayish-blue eel slithered around the corpse’s neck, then attached its jaws to the man’s neck.
“Eyes ahead, Orlando,” Phoebe called.
“Easy for you to say.”
“Almost there.”
Another gunshot, another eel popped and splashed spastically behind him. He cringed, floated to the narrow portion at the head of the crypt, then waited.
“There,” said Alexander. “Hit it.”
Using his arms, Orlando pushed up like the start of doing a jumping jack but with his palms open, and sent himself down. He stomped with both feet and felt the stone give way, release and push up. “Got it.”
“Okay, one more. Hurry. Three o’clock position.”
Treading water again, he swam a half-hearted breast stroke, reaching out and helping himself by pulling along the crypt wall.
Another shot, and an eel’s head exploded right in front of him.
“ Judas Priest! Do you think you could- Ow! ” he screamed, as he jerked his hand out of the water and shook it, trying to dislodge the eel sawing its teeth into his flesh.
“Stop moving!” Nina yelled. “I can’t get a shot!”
Still screaming, Orlando spun around, then slammed his arm sideways, pounding the eel’s body against the crypt’s side. There was a satisfying crunch, and the jaws loosened. In the dazzling white light, those glowing eyes were locked on his, even as the jaws loosened.
“Get off me!” he yelled as his blood rushed down his wrist. Another swing, hard, vertically up and then down and then it snapped free. “Those things are evil.” He rubbed his hand, then washed it under the water, not caring at this point about attracting more critters.
“You’re almost there,” Alexander shouted. “Another few feet.” His flashlight beam pointed the way, and under the water, Orlando could just make out the outline of a centaur. He moved to it and was about to step ahead when something nipped his leg, just above the calf. Then, a pain as great as anything he could imagine as something chomped into his back, just above the tailbone. It felt like it was trying to burrow inside, gnawing and thrashing into tendons.
He barely heard the gunshots over his own screams, and he certainly didn’t notice that he had staggered forward, depressing the centaur stone and then he slipped under water, struggling against a sudden onslaught of eels. A veritable horde, jumping and wriggling like spawning salmon, converging on live prey.
“Orlando!” Phoebe’s shout was the last thing he heard before they dragged him under.
“No way I’m losing him!” Phoebe jumped to the edge, leaned
over and yelled back. “Someone grab my hand.”
“Ah shit,” Nina said, putting away her now-empty Beretta, and gripped Phoebe’s wrist with one hand, then hung on to Montross with the other. She lowered Phoebe down, just above the thrashing pile of slithering eels, and then a hand, thrust up in wild desperation.
Phoebe lunged and caught it, gripped it tight. His head emerged, bloody, an eel snapping at his ear. And then Montross yanked backwards, reeling in Nina, who slipped, but caught herself and got her footing just as Phoebe fell halfway in. Nina found some leverage and heaved her catch out of the water.
Four eels were still attached to Orlando. Phoebe hauled him up and together they slid him onto the flat mortuary slab, and as he writhed, screaming, bleeding from a dozen wounds, Nina pulled out a military knife, ten-inch standard-issue, serrated.
“Just like Fridays at the fish market,” she said with enthusiasm, and hacked down on the first eel, lopping its body free from its head. Again with the next one. “Hold his leg still!” she yelled, as she slashed down again. She turned to the last one on his neck. It must have seen the fate of its friends as it let go, hissed at her, and flopped sideways to escape.
But Orlando’s left hand rose up and caught it by the neck. He sat up, still screaming, and turned to the side, whipping its head down hard against the stone. Once, twice, three times until it was a bloody, lifeless mess. He pushed it aside, then looked down at himself. The torn clothes, the blood seeping everywhere.
And he smiled. “Did I do it?”
“Yes, but we’ve got other problems,” Alexander said, and he seemed to be shaking, swaying back and forth. “We’d better hold onto something.”
Phoebe pulled herself up, then reached over to grab Caleb, who was still somehow unconscious through all the screaming, still lost in the depths of an unbreakable vision.
“Hang on tight!” she yelled.
The tower shuddered, rocked, then roared upwards. The gears released. Hidden counterweights offset levers and pulleys and shot the tower back up, pulling free of the debris from the explosion with just a bump in its ascent, grinding upwards. Water spilled from its length, eels and bodies tumbled away with the recoiling waves.
Their lights reached out, illuminating the golden walls of the octagonal chamber until they gave way to the aquamarine siding of the dome, the murals now visible in multiple sections. Quiet images of Burkhan Khaldun, of women and children, of proud soldiers on horseback. And then the ascent slowed. The ceiling was only ten yards away as the minaret, scraping and shaking, finally grinding to a halt.
Phoebe’s flashlight beam sought everyone out. “All here,” she said with relief, still clinging to her unconscious brother. And then she looked below, shining the light all the way down the length of the tower.
“But why are we here?” Alexander asked. “Now we’re even farther from the door, and-oh.” He pointed over Nina’s shoulder. “There’s a window.”
“And there,” said Phoebe proudly, “is the other thing I saw in my vision.” She played her light over something that at first wasn’t even visible: a walkway, disconnected from their position, but level with the crypt, held up by angled supports cut into the walls. Perfectly blue, just as the dome, the walkway blended in, invisible from any other angle.
Montross clapped his hands. “Nice work, Phoebe.” He took off his backpack, so much lighter now without the tablet, and tossed it to her. “First aid in there, maybe even enough bandages for your friend. Make it quick and let’s go.”
She caught it, then gave him a wary eye. “Thanks. I think. But I still don’t trust you.”
“Don’t trust him later,” Orlando snapped, reaching for the bag. “Right now I’m bleeding to death.”
“We can trust him,” came another voice, and for a moment, Phoebe didn’t recognize it, so weak and shaken, like it came from a long distance away.
Caleb was awake.
His face was ashen. His eyes haunted. “I almost wish it wasn’t true, but my visions, my powers… they’re back.”
He stared at Montross. Stared until the other man lowered his eyes, nodding. “So you know.”
“I know,” Caleb said. “And I forgive you.”
18
“Well?” said Orlando, while having the deep bites in his cheek disinfected and bandaged up. “What’d you see? What could possibly justify what he did? Trying to kill us in Antarctica, stealing the Emerald Tablet, killing your wife!”
Caleb looked away from Montross. “Not now, Orlando. We don’t have time. And I need to understand more before I bring you in. It has to do with the tablet, with the keys. With everything.”
“We figured that much,” Phoebe said, tending now to Orlando’s back, lifting up his shirt and wincing. “You really need stitches. A hospital.”
“Or a proper medic,” Montross said. “But our dear brother is right. We don’t have time. Need to move now.”
Phoebe frowned. “But you said-” She flashed her light around. “Wait. Where’s Nina?”
Everyone except Montross looked around, even shining their lights down into the gloom.
“Don’t worry,” Montross said. “She’s left on a little personal errand for me.”
Caleb eyed him carefully.
Montross turned and headed for the walkway. “Let’s go. I’m sure we’ll be seeing her again. Very soon. Meanwhile, there’s a long trip back to the surface ahead of us.”
Nina circled the mausoleum dome twice, walking along a six-inch-wide ledge before finding the most appropriate place from which to drop to a walkway. This was after avoiding the gold-plated boat moored on the side, on a platform with a gear system and a lever-release.
Obviously, Montross and the others would need that. This transport would have been intended for Genghis Khan’s use, ceremonial perhaps, but those early Mongolians at least had the foresight to make it practical as well. Their leader could have simply awakened, travelled along the walkway out of the mausoleum, turned right and entered his waiting barge, which had been on the opposite side of the dome, hidden from the walkway entrance. The lever would lower the boat down to the sea.
It was carved beautifully, a masterwork of art and design. Exquisite carvings of mountains and lakes, scenes of warfare and conquest. Two metal-plated oars on the inside, it looked like it could hold eight comfortably. More than sufficient for the old conqueror to travel about his necropolis.
Leaving the boat, Nina instead took the hard way, hanging from the ledge and then dropping almost twenty feet. She bent her knees and rolled back, but still felt a painful jarring up her legs and back. Then she was up, securing her backpack. Inside it she carried a grappling hook, extra flashlights, spare magazines for the AK-47 slung over her shoulder and two fragmentation grenades.
She only hoped it would be enough. Where she was going-over the wall behind the looming monastery ahead-she had no visions to guide her. No roadmap of the future and no intuition of the time or place of her own death.
As she approached the western-most wall of the city, she leapt to the monastery steps, scaled a wall, jumping from alcove to ledge to windowsill back to another ledge. And then she was on the roof.
Close enough to jump, she thought, eyeing the distance between the western point of the rooftop and the thick wall. Foregoing the grappling hook, she got a running start, a huge push-off as she leapt into the open air forty feet above the seawater and the gleaming spikes below.
She caught the edge and the rock wall slammed into her chest on her way down. Wincing, but clinging to the ramparts, she kicked, found a toehold, and pushed up. Taking only a short pause, she retrieved her flashlight and directed it ahead, over the wall and down onto the field. Swept it across the ranks of the terra cotta multitude. All of them were facing the other direction, but Nina had no illusions about their vigilance-or deadliness.
Montross had told her where the case was, not far from the shore, but to reach it she would have to go through the very teeth of Temujin’s eternal def
enders.
Through, she thought. Or around.
She started walking to her left, aiming the light down over the wall, watching for a gap in the warriors. None appeared, not until she nearly reached the edge. The northern barrier, the sheer cavern wall. Up about fifty feet, a flare sputtered, losing its vitality but still flickering enough to cast wicked shadows over the backs of the army’s rear guard.
Nina took out her grappling hook, attached it to the rampart section, then without a second thought, rappelled down the side of the wall. At the bottom, cloaked in darkness, she flicked the rope hard, freed the hook and got out of the way as it landed beside her. After rolling it up and putting it back in her pack, she turned on the flashlight, examining the path along the cavern wall. There was a gap of at least ten feet as far as she could see. She hoped that the architects of subterranean Xanadu had expected only a frontal assault to the gate, and so didn’t bother to fortify the roundabout approach.
She was wrong.
The boat cut through the water easily as Xavier Montross took the first turn with the oar. Phoebe continued bandaging up Orlando, who shied away from the edge and flinched every time something broke the surface. Caleb sat in the front with Alexander, shining their lights at every building, marveling at the magnificence of the silent marble halls, their first glimpses of massive columns that had endured centuries in darkness. They steered alongside walkways and under majestic bridges, around silent gilded fountains, amphitheaters, and in one case, right through a temple whose center aisle had been submerged. Over their heads, the flashlight beams illuminated a painted daytime sky, complete with clouds and flocks of geese amidst an infinity of blue.
Past all these silent wonders, beyond immense statues of Temujin, some on horseback, others standing in silent repose, some as colossal as the pharaohs at Abu Simbel, they finally approached the western gate.
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