“It looks stable enough. What do you think?” she asked.
“I still think you’re a genius, Dr. Swan!” He grabbed one of her hands and squeezed it with the warm affection of an old man. “Thank you.”
Carefully, they crossed the chasm and after crawling through a narrow tunnel, reached the third challenge. Again, it appeared to be a relatively large cavern, but this time the entire room was separated by 20 tall stones, which reached up toward them, like totem poles. From their height, Billie and Edward could step along most of them and reach the other side, but any misjudgment of their footing and they would fall to their deaths.
The steps ranged from one to three feet apart and at points were narrow enough that whoever was attempting to cross would have only enough room to place one foot on it. Even so, with only mild circumspection, even an 80-year-old man could make his way across to the level ground on the other side.
“Looks easy enough, doesn’t it?” Edward said. “This is the challenge of bravery. What’s to be afraid of? I’ve seen you hop from branch to branch above crocodile infested waters, my dear Dr. Swan, this must be simple by comparison?”
“Yes. Dangerously so.”
“What are you worried about? None of the other challenges have been that hard, once you take a step back and look at them.”
Billie looked carefully at the simple maze of totem poles they would have to navigate to across. “I don’t like it. Every other challenge has first appeared difficult, only to become simple. Now this one appears simple. There must be something wrong.”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Edward said. “This time I’ll go first.”
She watched as Edward carefully took the lead and stepped from one precipice to the next with a certain level of agility that surprised her. His confidence rose the further into the maze he stretched. By the time he was halfway through, he was merely skipping from one stone to the next until he reached the fourteenth stone.
Then, as he landed on it, the stone sunk. Not by much, perhaps four or five inches at most. But then, so did the next one and the one after that until, the final few stone steps had lowered so much that it would be impossible to jump from the last one onto the level ground on the other side of the chasm.
He smiled, patiently. “Okay, I guess I see the problem.”
“Yeah. All right, Edward. See if you can come back here and we’ll see if there’s another way through. Maybe there’s a secret path or something that could let us through?”
“What did you find for this challenge in the original Atlantis?”
“An almost identical room. Filled with similar totem pole-like structures.”
Edward jumped over the remaining stones and landed back on the same side of the chasm as Billie. Reassured to be back on the ground, he said, “And how did you beat it?”
“Funny you should mention that.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because when I beat this challenge last time I took a fairly lateral approach to the problem, which we might have trouble reproducing.”
Edward curled his eyebrow. “Are you going to tell me what that is, or shall I keep trying alternative routes through the secret labyrinth?”
“I had dynamite with me. And I knocked over the final three totem poles, so that they lay diagonally along the final wall. Then I jumped from one to the other.”
“You cheated?”
“No one said how we were supposed to get through the challenge. Only that failure would result in death.”
“Christ! And you didn’t think to mention this before you came in here – without any dynamite?”
“No. That’s why I brought you along. I figured that maybe you and I would be better equipped, mentally, to solve the puzzle.”
Edward laughed as he thought about it. All that rested on their ability to pass this simple puzzle. 20 stepping stones. Six that dropped lower and lower the closer you got to them. If they’d brought some sort of makeshift ladder it would have been easy. “Okay, so let’s work the problem.”
Billie drew a series of vertical and horizontal rows with her finger in the sand to make a grid similar to what they were looking at. Then slowly filled in the squares with crosses for where the stone steps appeared.
From above, there was no obvious pattern.
Billie stared at it for a few minutes and then said, “Okay, there’s only so many options. Let’s try skipping ever second step. Then every third step. We’ll keep breaking it up until we come up with a solution.”
“It seems like as good an idea as any.”
“I’ll go first.”
Billie skipped every second stone until she reached the final 6 steps. The second she reached the sixth step, the remaining five dropped to where they had been when Edward had attempted to cross them. Like last time, they had become impossible to cross.
She quickly returned and repeated the process by choosing a new pathway. This time starting from the right hand side of the secret maze. Somehow, she was certain the perfect path was hidden in plain sight.
Billie tried another twenty-two pathways before she noticed it. To the right were another two stepping stones, which she’d dismissed out of hand originally because they took her further into the chasm, instead of across it.
“What about this?”
Edward look to where she was pointing.
“It’s something we haven’t tried yet. May as well give it a go.”
She carefully made the larger jumps toward the two stones. Instantly, when she landed on the final stone, each of the six stones at the end raised in height until they were level with the opposite end of the chasm.
“That’s it Dr. Swan! You’ve done it.”
She turned to see the final six stones had somehow returned to their original height again. Billie focused on the next closest stone, preparing to jump.
Whoosh!
Billie heard the sound before she saw the giant axe swing toward her. A split second before it collided with her, she landed on the first stone.
Behind her the stone axe, nearly twice her size, continued to swing like a pendulum behind her and directly above the stone’s she’d just jumped off.
“That was close.” She smiled, her infectious confidence returning. “All right. I’d say it’s time to complete this challenge and find that code to Atlantis.”
Edward started stepping over the stones. “Sounds good to me.”
She reached the sixth stone, and carefully stood on it. This time, nothing moved. Then she stepped onto the fifth stone. And again, the remaining stones dropped – several feet this time.
Edward swore. “We were so close!”
The both looked back at the swinging pendulum. After she’d stepped on the fifth stone, the axe returned to its waiting position high above the furthest stone into the chasm.
“It appears, someone has to remain standing on the stone,” Billie said. “If someone could stay there for more than a couple seconds, it might just be long enough for the other person to cross the stepping stones and make it to the other side. Once there, the reset lever could be pulled, and whoever remains could make it through the chasm.”
“That’s fine, but you jumped with less than a second to spare. Whoever stands on that stepping stone long enough for the other person to make it across, would need to be more than just brave – they would need to be suicidal.”
Billie’s large brown eyes widened with understanding, but she said nothing.
“What now?”
“I was worried about this when I read the three challenges.”
Edward spoke them out loud. “Strength, Intellect and Bravery?”
“Yes, it was the word bravery that I was worried about.”
“Why?”
“Because in the ancient Atlantean text, the word ‘Bravery’ reads very similarly to another word – SACRIFICE.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
“All right. Then it’s decided. I’ll sacrifice myself.”
“What do you mean? No, you can’t do that!”
“Of course I can. I’m the natural choice.”
“What do you mean? We’re both entitled to the choice of living.”
“Are we really?” The crest of his eyebrow raised up in a sign that she’d learned meant that he was right and he was about to explain why to her. “The way I see it, if we don’t solve this soon, we’re both going to die, and that’s for certain. But already, we know that’s not going to happen. One of us can survive this challenge. The question is who that’s going to be.”
“We should draw straws or something! Christ, you can’t just accept you have to sacrifice your life!”
“But the challenge is called sacrifice. And here it is.” Edward took a step out on to the precipice and then onto the free standing stone which stood like a totem pole in the valley. “I’m old Billie. If I live another five years that would be more than I or any other man my age would have any right to. But you – you could live another sixty or seventy years!”
“But…”
He didn’t let her protest. “The decision’s been made now. You have to save yourself. Don’t look so mortified. I’m not simply doing it for you. We both know there’s a lot more at stake here than our lives. You need to get through this so you can deactivate the code to Atlantis. You’re the only one who’s been there in living history. Only you can save the rest of them!”
“But it will kill you!”
“Yes, but you will live. And that is all that matters.” He spoke the words calmly, and Billie realized that they were the truth – she was the only one who could reach Atlantis in time and change the outcome. But all the same, she found it difficult to accept.
“There must be another way?”
“Maybe there is. But we don’t have time to find it. We have less than an hour before this temple floods once more, and then Mark and everyone else are going to find themselves having a really bad day.”
She thought about it silently and then hugged him. “Thank you, Edward. If I do succeed, the entire world is going to know that it was because of your bravery and act of sacrifice.”
He hugged her back, and she felt the warm tears on the back of her neck.
“Go,” he told her, and turned to make his way to the SACRIFICE step.
“Good bye, Edward.”
Moments later she watched him, eager to do so before he had time to change his mind, simply step onto the final stone. She turned to see the last six stepping stones raise until they met the height of the levelled ground on the other side of the chasm.
Billie began running across them.
A split second later she heard the axe drop.
By the time she’d heard the third swing Billie was on the other side of the chasm. She immediately turned around, and looked back at Edward, who was standing there with tears of joy over his formidable smile.
“You survived!” she said.
The axe continued, like a pendulum.
“Another illusion.” The white of his teeth smiled back at her. “Wasn’t that lucky!”
“Wait there while I find the reset lever.”
Edward looked at the swinging axe. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Minutes later, after she’d reset the challenge so that the two of them could walk across without repeating it, Edward was across the chasm and holding her tight.
“I can’t believe you just did that. Edward, you literally just gave your life for me!” she said.
A wry smile came across his face. “I might have guessed that it was merely a test… I’m very glad I made the right choice!”
“How did you know?”
“How did I know what, Dr. Swan?”
“That the sacrifice was only in thought, not in practice?”
“What makes you say I did?”
She stared at him. Her brown eyes fixed on him, forcing him to be honest.
“I realized the pygmies must maintain this place. That being so, it would make sense that they needed to be able to complete the challenges themselves. It simply didn’t make sense that they would sacrifice one member of their maintenance crew every time they needed to reach the temple of Poseidon.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Billie walked into the final temple. A broad smile played across her face.
This room displayed none of the watermarks seen in the previous rooms, meaning that it had remained dry throughout the ages.
The room was said to be one stadia in length and half one wide. But what the Atlanteans called a stadia appeared much smaller in real life. In fact, it appeared no larger than a movie theatre. The interior was less grand than expected despite fundamentally matching the description that Plato gave in his Critias Dialogue. The roof was made of intermittent ivory as described in the two and a half thousand-year-old story, and the walls had silver, gold and orichalcum scattered. Poseidon himself stood as a statue standing on top of the chariot drawn by a six winged horse. Unlike the descriptions she had read, the God of the Sea had gold armor, but it certainly was not made of gold. Poseidon’s height fell short of the ceiling by no more than a couple feet. Above his head, the ivory had turned brown.
“There’s a fortune worth of precious stones covering this temple, but nothing like we were led to believe,” Billie said. Her tone was almost disappointed.
Edward nearly read her mind. “But it seems an anticlimax of the vivid description by Plato.”
“Precisely.”
“I wouldn’t fuss. What we are after is worth a lot more than ten times this amount of gold.”
Billie smiled as she began to climb the back of the six winged golden horse. “Don’t remind me. We’re here to save the world.”
Edward began reciting the navigational guide they found in the Tibetan Atlantis. “For the six winged beast that pulled Poseidon’s chariot stared at something more valuable and dangerous still than the entire temple – the prefix to the code to Atlantis.”
She scaled the gargantuan beast without a thought of the thirty feet in which it rose above the ground.
And then swore.
The kind of curse that echoed throughout the temple until it sunk heavily in Edward’s heart, and he knew in an instant that all was lost.
“What is it?”
She quickly slid down the back of the horse.
“Someone’s beaten us to it.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because the entire piece of orichalcum in which it was supposed to be contained is completely missing. A blank hole in the ceiling is the only evidence that it once existed at all. Looks recent, too.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“There are drill marks in the ceiling. They look like someone’s used a power drill to quickly remove the orichalcum placard without any care for stealing the rest of the temple’s treasures. And that means to me that whoever did so knew the value of the code to Atlantis.”
“It also means that pygmy leader lied to us. Someone’s previously entered the temple and come out alive.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
Edward watched as Dr. Swan sat down in front of him. Despite her outwardly hard-ass appearance, he could tell she wanted to cry. The inner workings of her mind, unfamiliar with failure, continued to search for the next solution.
“If you don’t mind, Dr. Swan, I would like to find a way out of here. If we’ve failed, I for one would like to spend my remaining days on earth somewhere other than this godforsaken temple.”
“I agree, but I’m not convinced that this is the end. I refuse to believe we can’t find another solution.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but anything’s better than the alternative. Sam Reilly uses a computer whiz who can work miracles. Perhaps now that we have half of the code, she can break the first half of it. It’s unlikely, but I’ve never been very good at rolling over and
dying.”
“Okay, so you’ll take your chances on the cryptanalysis, and computer geeks. What will you do with your remaining days?”
“I’m going back to Atlantis. If I can contact Sam and Tom, I’ll bring them too, and we’ll revisit the temple. See if there’s anything I missed.”
Edward smiled at her, like he would his own daughter, if only he looked at his own daughter like that. She had betrayed him. Of that, he was certain, but he didn’t know why – after all he’d done for her. He looked around the temple. “Now that we’ve reached this point, do you have any idea how the hell we are going to get out of here again?”
Billie reached for a lever behind Poseidon and pulled. “That’s simple. We reset the three challenges, like this.”
The door opened behind them, as well as a number of doors behind that, so that they could simply walk out through the same entrance they came in.
“Okay, let’s go,” Edward said.
They climbed through the tunnel, across the stepping stones, past the swinging pendulum, which should have killed Edward, had it not been for his sacrifice. Then across the deep chasm, where the bridge remained after they worked out the right number of stones to move. And then through the tunnel with the cantilevered roof. Following the entrance tunnel, the dim light of the outside world became visible once more.
Billie stepped into the dismal sunlight of the pygmy’s jungle.
Mark picked her up in a joyous hug and said, “You did it Dr. Swan! By God, I thought for certain I was waiting for my death, and then the door popped open again.” He then noticed her more despondent appearance. “What’s wrong? Did you get it?”
“Someone beat us to it,” Billie mumbled under her breath.
“It was all for nothing.” For the first time, Billie heard Edward complain.
In the background the hundreds of pygmy warriors began to chant. Their weapons pounded the ground with a dire staccato. It could have been a warrior dance after victory, but as she studied them, Billie knew they were more sinister than that.
Mark looked at them, and said, “I guess we won’t have to worry about the end of the world, or stopping the cataclysmic event at Atlantis.”
Atlantis Stolen (Sam Reilly Book 3) Page 17