And now, we can see why. The round stone that “imprisons” the circular base of the Blue Grail is radiating strange impossible light, likely the result of some kind of alien chemical reaction, which had caused it to turn a shade of blue instead of its natural grey color. As the surface of the stone brightens even more, the parts of it which are orichalcum remain dark, revealing a pattern of symbols similar to the ones found on the main pyramid stones. The result is a visual negative, an opposite way of viewing the symbols—heat up the background stone itself and not the orichalcum design. I’m guessing, it’s Ujaste Naat’s clever way of leaving the orichalcum alone and bypassing the pyramid program with its unpredictable anti-tampering consequences.
Looking closer—the symbols on the stone are spaced evenly along the circle perimeter, and each one is separated from its neighbors by a vertical line, like a radius running for the center, creating pie wedges, so that each wedge contains one symbol.
We count, and there are ten wedges and ten symbols in total.
“Let me guess,” Brie says, coming up behind me silently and peering over my shoulder, so that I start at the sound of her voice. “Ten Symbols and ten Categories?”
“A solid guess,” Avaneh responds. “It’s very possible that each of these symbols represents one of the Games Categories.”
“But we don’t know which,” Chihar says. “This might be the key to solving the Challenge.”
“Okay,” I say, pointing at the Contenders in the view who remain standing very still in a circle, watching the stone. “So, what are they doing? Waiting for something else to happen?”
Just as I say this, one of the Contenders, a Red, steps closer, and then, after a look exchanged with Naat and the others, begins to walk around the Grail stone, examining the symbols closely.
Suddenly the Red stops, and places his hand against one of the symbols, slamming his palm down hard against the stone. At once he cries out in pain, and pulls his hand back, turning his palm over to stare at the burn. Even from our remote vantage point it’s visible that his palm has been branded, in negative. Meanwhile, the stone remains unchanged.
“Well, that was a stupid move,” Brie says.
“Yes, but useful for us to see,” Kokayi says. “Better to know what not to do, while letting some fool do it for you.”
“What I want to know is, what are they trying to accomplish?” I say. “Okay . . . what if that round cradle stone is actually not a single solid rock? What if the wedges are separate pieces and can be moved apart like pie slices?”
“Very possible.” Chihar takes out his water flask and takes a few sips. “If the wedges are movable, then the Blue Grail base can be freed.”
Lolu nods. “Even with one wedge taken out, it would allow the Blue Grail to be removed also. Just slide it outward along the groove caused by the missing wedge.”
“Perfect,” Brie says. “Now we just need to figure out how to do it.”
For the next hour we watch as Team Naat tries to do all kinds of things to the round cradle stone imprisoning the Blue Grail on top of the pyramid. A few more explosions follow, gadgets are deployed, and several Contenders get their hands burned and make angry gestures of frustration. They manage to achieve nothing.
As the morning brightens, the artificial illumination in and around the pyramid fades away, and we are once more cast into a permanent state of twilight formed by shadowy stones.
“This is not going anywhere,” Tuar remarks, getting up to stretch and surrendering his surveillance place to Lolu. Meanwhile I move in to take over Avaneh’s spot.
“Pathetic to watch,” the Technician girl mutters, pointing to the latest injured Contender from Team Naat.
“Any idea how much longer they’ll be up there?” I ask. “I’d think the other teams would want their own turn up on the summit.”
Lolu glances up at me. “Do you think we should go up there too?”
I bite my lip. “Probably not now, but at some point later, maybe. . . . I’d like to see that round stone up-close.”
“But not enough to risk your life,” Brie says, giving me a hard look. “Just stay here, safe and sitting pretty, my Imperial Lady. I mean it, you’re not going anywhere. Who cares about the Blue Grail? Let the other fools handle it.”
“Agreed,” I say calmly, so that Brie is almost surprised.
Survival is priority one, I want to add, but for some reason keep my mouth shut. Not sure why, but I get the sense it mightn’t be the right thing to say for the strong team leader that I’m pretending to be.
Come on, you’re not fooling anyone, Gwen pathetic wannabe pretender Lark. You’re never going to be that kind of leader.
The crisp morning wind seems to echo my wandering thoughts, as strong gusts rip along the shadowed stones, whispering and wailing in human voices, like ancient ghosts. . . .
It occurs to me, what if the Ancient Egyptian gods of antiquity—slumbering among these blocks of stone in this grand mausoleum tomb that has been undisturbed for centuries, and now, suddenly and oh-so-rudely displaced—are awakening?
Seriously, what if it’s not the wind that I hear?
Chapter 65
Okay, now I’m really losing it, I think, as I pause to listen to the wailing gusts of ocean-filled air. It seems to be carrying real voices—and I don’t mean voices of distant Games spectators watching us up on the cliffs.
Voices of actual human beings who are here, somewhere nearby.
And for some reason, as I think that, I feel my hair standing up on its ends, and prickly goose bumps rise along my skin. . . .
Stunned by the impossibility, I look away from the surveillance and glance at my teammates, scattered around the Safe Base and other nearby stones. No one seems to be acting out of the ordinary. Chihar is eating a small piece of his meal bar. Zaap and Kokayi are doing various stretch exercises and leaping from stone to stone. Avaneh and Tuar are out of sight, probably wandering nearby, or gone to answer the call of nature (and yet again deface the ancient stones—no, I don’t want to think about it). Brie is going through the contents of her bag. Kateb is peering closely at something on a nearby block, and scraping at the limestone with his knife. Finally, Lolu is right next to me, engrossed in the surveillance feeds.
Then why is it that I feel so strange?
Setting aside my unease, I return my attention to the surveillance screen. The top of the pyramid is still occupied by Team Naat, and there goes another explosion—this one producing a boom loud enough to be heard by us here inside the Safe Base. On the cliffs the audience sends up a roar, and the Games announcers chatter about “another brave technical effort by Ujaste Naat.”
Lolu curses softly and shakes her head in annoyance. This time the smoke cloud is orange-brown, and as it dissipates, the cradle stone is still intact, but it’s no longer glowing. And the symbols have disappeared from view, leaving only a blank stone surface. However, the Contenders milling around it now appear shocked as they stare, their faces reflecting fear and confusion.
Even Ujaste Naat himself has lost his arrogant, confident expression. He frowns and takes a step backward, away from the round stone with the Blue Grail. The other six Contenders on his team start backing away also. A Yellow stretches his hand and points at the cradle stone and starts speaking in agitation. The feed is video-only, and I strain to guess what he’s saying, but my Atlanteo lip-reading skills are lousy.
“Okay, what happened just now?” I say under my breath. “Why are they acting like that?”
“Not sure,” Lolu says, biting her lip with tension. “They are looking at something. But what?”
The audience noise rises, and the next few seconds are chaos. The Red and both Greens, and Ujaste Naat himself, all lurch violently backward, away from the center of the pyramid summit, while the Yellow, the other Blue, and the White collapse, falling forward on hands and knees on the stones, and cower in terror. . . .
Lolu and I stare in confusion, because there’s nothing there, n
othing that explains what is happening on top of the pyramid. The orange smoke is completely dissipated, and the Blue Grail sits as always, its base locked in the cradle stone. But the members of Team Naat are acting as though they’re witnessing something horrifying. Those who are still upright begin to climb down, away from the summit, while those on the floor start crawling, also trying to escape.
“All right, the audience is going nuts out there, so what’s going on?” Brie says, coming up to us to stare at the screen.
I shake my head. “No idea. Suddenly they’re panicking and running away, but from what, I don’t know. There’s nothing that we can see—”
“And no other teams attacking them,” Lolu adds.
“Hmmm.” Brie narrows her eyes. “Zoom in on that round stone.”
“Be my guest,” I say, moving back and letting Brie at the surveillance controls.
From the outside, the dull roar of the audience continues to swell until it overpowers all other sound, including the wind and the ocean surf.
Just as the surge of noise dies down, we hear the elevated voices of Tuar and Avaneh, as they return to the Safe Base, and appear to be arguing.
“. . . I’m telling you, there’s no one there,” Avaneh says in a hard tone, moving quickly as she leaps down an upper stone to land on our Safe Base slab.
Tuar is close behind, but he appears grim and almost stricken. “And I tell you, I heard them! There are at last three Contenders behind us!” he says urgently. “It’s your choice to ignore my warning, but they’re coming here!” And then he looks at me. “Imperial Lady Gwen, I recommend we go on alert! Arm yourselves, now!”
I sit up in alarm, as my pulse starts pounding immediately. The others also stop what they were doing and reach for their closest weapons.
“Are we under attack?” Kateb returns his usual knife back to his bag in exchange for a larger one, and unfolds an interesting double-headed axe with a serrated blade edge.
“Not unless you count his attack of idiocy,” Avaneh says, her normally flat voice picking up more anger and energy than I’ve ever heard from her. “It’s just the crowds screaming up on the cliffs, that’s all. If anyone or anything was back there, I’d have known it! There is absolutely no one there, Tuar Momet, stop with the false alarm. I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing now—”
“Not a game!” Tuar replies with feverish eyes, and I watch him ready several weapons in the outer pouches of his bag. “I definitely heard their voices, they were even speaking a very common Mithektet Province dialect which I know really well. . . . One of them was moving with heavy footsteps, favoring one leg as if wounded, and two others were—”
“Enough! Are you saying I’m deaf?” Avaneh flexes her fingers into fists, without taking out any of her weapons. “There is only the noise from the cliffs, and the damn wind, and it’s gone to your head.”
Tuar makes a growling sound, and his huge meaty hand reaches for the closest knife.
“Quiet!” I say, putting my hand up. “Let’s just listen, okay?”
Immediately we all freeze and fall silent.
There is only the pulse in my temples, the faraway roar of the audience, and the wailing wind.
“Can you hear anything?” Brie says after a few moments. “I don’t.”
Chihar frowns, straining. “Not sure.”
Kateb meanwhile walks to the edge of the stone slab and looks down at the abyss of space between stones.
“Nothing,” Avaneh says, folding her hands at her chest. “Still want to argue?”
“Of course there’s nothing,” Tuar says with a growl. “They heard us and are now keeping quiet, waiting for the right moment to attack.”
“You’re saying you brought someone here, letting them follow you?” Zaap says. “Bad move. You should’ve stayed away and led them in circles. Now they know we have a Safe Base.”
“They? Who are they?” Brie glares back and forth from Avaneh to Tuar. “She says there’s no one, and you say there’s someone coming? What kind of crap is this—”
“We need to find out for sure,” I interrupt. “A few of us need to go out there and check the perimeter.”
“Agreed,” Kokayi says. “I’ll go. Those of us who move fastest. . . . Zaap, you come with me.”
Zaap nods silently.
“Okay, go,” I say. “But if you see anyone, don’t engage them, just run!”
Kokayi snorts. “Oh, amrevet, trust me to fly like a bird.”
And with those words the two of them leave very quietly, disappearing into the levitating field of stones.
The rest of us wait.
“If they don’t come back soon,” Lolu says, without looking up from the screen, “they’re likely dead.”
It’s been about twenty minutes since Kokayi and Zaap went out to scout. I shift from foot to foot nervously, since there’s no room to pace on the stone slab. Meanwhile, the surveillance view shows blinding white daylight, a background of silver-blue ocean, and a completely empty pyramid summit of sun-bleached stones, with no sign of Team Naat anywhere, not since they fled in such a hurry. Are they even alive? I’m talking about both Team Naat and my own missing teammates.
“Not necessarily,” I tell Lolu, trying to be optimistic. “They could be hiding and watching whoever it is.”
The wind comes in sudden sharp gusts, whistling and wailing. When it temporarily falls quiet, I could swear there are voices out there, that fade into whispers. . . .
“We should go after them,” Kateb says, getting up.
“Agreed—I’m going with you,” Tuar responds at once, rising also, his big bulk imposing as he loosens a pair of large knives from their holders.
Avaneh merely looks at them with irritation. “Go on, then,” she says, looking up from her cross-legged sitting position. “Might as well get lost with the other fools.”
Kateb and Tuar head out, with troubled glances at me. I nod approval at them, then step over Chihar’s extended feet to crouch next to Lolu and the surveillance. She is cycling through the whole series of views, including the shadowed underside-of-the-pyramid view of the sandy beach directly below us, and a narrow strip of ocean surf over which one side of the pyramid levitates, alongside sewer pipes.
Usually it’s a pretty gruesome view that I prefer to skip over quickly, since there are always new dead bodies lying around there . . . bodies of Contenders who either fell to their deaths or were killed somewhere on the pyramid slopes above and then dropped below.
But now, I force myself to look closely, and tell Lolu to stop and zoom in. “Oh, wow . . .” I whisper. Because there’s Team Naat—or should I say, their motionless bodies.
Ujaste Naat, unmistakable in his blue uniform with the Technician logo, lies on the sand at the edge of the water. His limbs are bent at odd angles, his face to the sky, glassy eyes stilled in a mask of strange awe. The surf washes at his feet, swirling in rivulets of foam. . . . A few feet away are the others, all of them—two Greens, a White, a Red, a Yellow, and the other Blue. Some are sprawled face-down, others also turned skyward.
Each one of their faces that’s visible, wears the same strange final look—not quite fear, but awe.
“Weird,” Brie says, leaning over my shoulder and once again startling me (seriously, I need to be more alert before someone comes up from behind and kills me). “How did they all die?”
“Don’t know,” Lolu replies. “The last time we saw them, they were running away from something near the Blue Grail.”
“Zoom in closer,” I say, clenching my teeth, and forcing my revulsion aside. “Let’s see if they have any physical wounds. Do you see any? I don’t. . . . No blood anywhere. Uniforms look fine, no torn fabric. . . .”
Chihar moves in next to us to look also. “It is possible they simply fell. . . . It was a moment of panic.”
“All of them?” A few feet away, still seated, Avaneh is shaking her head. “Not very likely.”
I look from one person to another.
“Did the Games commentators say anything?”
“If they did, we missed it,” Lolu says.
“Well, there was all that audience roar a few minutes ago,” Brie says. “Probably that’s when it happened—whatever it was that killed them.”
“Doesn’t make me feel any better,” Lolu grumbles.
We stare at the view of the dead team for a few moments longer.
And then I happen to glance up for a moment.
That’s when I see it . . . a tall elongated shadow against the distant block of stone. The person whose shadow it is must be hidden beyond the adjacent stone hovering next to it, and does not realize the shadow is giving him away—definitely unwise on his part, but lucky for us.
I freeze and raise my index finger up for caution. And then, as I stare, it occurs to me that the silhouette shape is somehow very odd and also very familiar. It’s something I might have seen on any number of classical Egyptian relics.
A figure of a man with angular planes, wide shoulders . . . and the blunt head of a crocodile.
Sobek, god of the Nile.
I blink, and the shadow is gone.
What the hell?
Brie looks up in the same moment and sees my raised finger and stunned frozen expression. “What?”
I frown and lower my hand. Then I take a deep breath and shake my head. “Nothing. Thought I saw a shadow of someone hidden behind those rocks, but it’s nothing.”
Brie cranes her neck and glances in the direction of my stare. Then she returns her attention to the surveillance.
I take another deep breath, because my pulse refuses to slow down, and now there’s a prickling sense of unease, of somehow being watched. So I step away and let the others look at the screens while I move to the edge of the slab and sit down next to my bag.
Just as I open the bag to take a few bites of my protein bar, I happen to get an intense feeling of someone else behind me. My peripheral vision even registers something, a slight movement. I turn around, and there’s another shadow cast against a different stone—this time it’s a silhouette of a man with horns. Or rather, as I blink to clear my vision, it’s the horned animal head of a ram upon a man’s angular shoulders.
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