9

by James Phelan

  Sam couldn’t imagine that. The waterfall literally shot out from a hole in the mountain and once gravity exerted its influence, the water cascaded straight down, far clear of the cliffs behind.

  ‘Now, we just need a clear place to set down …’ Rapha said.

  ‘What about there?’ Sam said, pointing to a muddy landslide near the left bank of the river created at the foot of the waterfall.

  ‘Maybe,’ Rapha said, ‘let’s go around first and take a better look.’

  He banked the ultralight around, away from the mountainous cliff face, then circled back towards the water. At their current altitude, they were level with the top of the waterfall.

  ‘What’s that?’ Sam said, pointing around halfway down.

  ‘Let’s get closer,’ Rapha said, lowering the aircraft and buzzing past an outcrop revealed by the retreated, drought-affected waterfall.

  ‘Are those . . ?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rapha said as they flew right by five tall stone statues depicting people. ‘They’re Chachapoyan … and I just found our place to land.’

  28

  Sam had to close his eyes for the landing approach. Rapha had done another circling arc to bring the ultralight towards the statues, only this time he was so close to the cliff face that Sam felt he could reach out and touch it. Ahead, in front of the statues but behind the curtain of water, there was a ledge about six metres wide.

  ‘I’ve seen these in a newspaper photo,’ Rapha said. ‘But it’s no entrance to a lost city, otherwise I would have read about that, I’m sure!’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Set down and take a look,’ Rapha said.

  ‘You’re serious?’ Sam said.

  ‘Saves us climbing the cliff under the waterfall,’ Rapha replied. He was silent as he powered right down and glided to a slow landing.

  The ground was as hard as it looked. As soon as they made contact with the ledge, Rapha yanked on a lever that sent out a grappling hook that bounced and jangled along as they bounced in their seats—finally snagging against the rocky ground and pulling them to a violent halt, just centimetres from the end of the ledge.

  ‘OK …’ Sam said. ‘That was the second scariest thing I’ve ever done.’

  ‘The second?! What was the first?’ Rapha asked, gathering his breath back. He shut off the engine and closed the fuel line.

  ‘You know, after the last couple of weeks,’ Sam replied, taking off his helmet and climbing out of the plane, ‘I’d have to think about that.’

  Sam looked down and saw the ground underfoot was actually a smooth, cobbled surface like an ancient road, worn with centuries of use, yet it was so well constructed that no grass or weeds could grow in the microscopic joins between the stones. When Sam walked up to the statues, he found they were over twice as tall as him.

  ‘Come, Sam! See this,’ Rapha called, squeezing behind the statues.

  ‘What have you …’ Sam trailed off as he looked, stunned, at a hidden plateau behind the statues. ‘Man, you’d never know all this was here from the air.’

  ‘I guess it explains how they got the statues up here,’ Rapha laughed, looking out at the wall of forest. ‘The trees must screen this meadow.’

  ‘But where to now?’ Sam said. He searched the back of the statues but couldn’t see anything revealing in the rock face behind them.

  ‘When we landed, I think I saw something,’ Rapha said, leading the way around a slight curve in the face of rock past the last statue. The scrub cleared to flat stony ground, the carvings in the rock as intricate as a mosaic.

  ‘This is it,’ Rapha said, pulling a headlamp torch from his pack to illuminate a stone-lined archway built into a natural cave formation behind the waterfall. ‘This is the entrance to the city.’

  They looked at each other silently as Sam slipped on a headlamp and switched it on. Inside the cave, the stone floor continued until the cave narrowed to a tunnel that seemed too well-formed to be natural.

  People have been here. The Cloud People?

  ‘The waterfall must have hidden this,’ Sam said. ‘We’re lucky we came when it wasn’t so full—we might never have seen this.’

  ‘Yes, I think you are right,’ Rapha said. ‘Let us see where it goes.’

  ‘Wait,’ Sam replied. ‘Careful where you step.’

  Rapha looked from Sam to the tunnel floor. Etchings in the rock showed scenes of hunting and war, telling some ancient story in the stone. ‘In case we wreck the archaeology?’

  Sam shook his head and said, ‘In case we trigger a booby trap.’

  Rapha nodded and led on, slowly, carefully choosing his footing. A few times he paused and backtracked, walking around a carving that looked too ominous, watching out for a hidden mechanism that might trigger a terrible trap.

  But no traps were triggered and after a while Sam felt as though all the notes in Ahmed’s journal were not going to be needed.

  They followed the tunnel as it twisted and turned its way through the rock of the mountains, coming into a room that opened up to a round chamber. An empty round chamber.

  ‘It’s a dead end,’ Rapha said after several minutes of searching.

  ‘No, it’s not …’ Sam said, flicking through the pages of the journal. ‘I’ve seen this somewhere … here, see!’ Sam pointed to a drawing. ‘And the note shows that it’s here that we “ascend to the entrance”.’

  ‘Ascend?’ Rapha raised his eyebrows.

  ‘We climb?’ Sam said, shining his light upwards. The torch beam was lost in the inky black above. The two of them again searched the room with their torches, this time looking up.

  ‘Maybe this was it, once, a long time ago,’ Rapha said as he walked back in Sam’s direction. ‘A tomb or something, and whatever was here has been taken. Or maybe there was a rope ladder that’s rotted away?’

  ‘Or maybe not …’ Sam replied. In a wall before him was another mosaic carved into the stone. What made this stand out was that it was the only part of the wall that was decorated.

  ‘Here,’ Sam said, looking at the journal, and then the carving. ‘Can you read this?’

  ‘It’s a pictogram,’ Rapha said. ‘These are stairs, these are … guards?’

  ‘Ahmed’s notes say we ascend beyond the guards,’ Sam said.

  ‘So—what, beyond this wall?’ Rapha asked. ‘Or maybe it’s not a wall at all …’ he said, inspecting every bump and seam in the rock before him. ‘Maybe it’s a … door.’

  Rapha pressed a carved rock.

  CLONK!

  Just like Zara, his dream is showing us where to go.

  The wall slid back, just a few centimetres and then they pushed against it with all their strength. Big enough now to squeeze through, the opening revealed a narrow stone staircase, encased in centuries of dirt and dust.

  ‘Ergh!’ Rapha said, lifting his feet from thick gloop splattered all over the floor. ‘Bats?’

  ‘Well,’ Sam said, passing by. ‘At least we know there’s a way out if bats can get in here.’

  The stairs spiralled up the sides of the chamber into the black nothingness above.

  ‘Looks like we have a bit of a climb ahead of us,’ Sam said.

  ‘I’m right behind you!’ Rapha said, muttering under his breath. ‘I really don’t like bats …’

  29

  EVA

  Eva’s hands shook as she watched the monitor, seeing Lora walk out of the lift and into the lobby of the office floor where Mac was waiting. As Lora moved into the office’s reception area, the security footage switched to the tiny cameras the police had mounted in secret the night before, the resolution grainy and unclear. She watched as Lora was patted down by the bodyguards and was shown into Mac’s office.

  ‘She’s in,’ the police captain said into the radio. ‘All teams confirm ready.’

  The speaker on the desk relayed the radio replies of the police teams:

  ‘North exit, copy that, ready to move.’

  �
��East exit, copy that.’

  ‘South ready.’

  ‘West exit, ready to roll.’

  Eva turned to the four Guardians in the room.

  ‘I’m getting the jitters,’ she said to the nearest one. ‘I can’t watch.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ he replied in Russian-accented English. ‘She’s one of the best Academy graduates I’ve ever seen. Smart and fast.’

  ‘Here she goes, look,’ another Guardian said.

  Eva watched as Lora walked across the room to Mac.

  ‘Why’s there no sound?’ Eva asked.

  ‘Tech issue,’ a cop replied. ‘We’re workin’ on it.’

  Eva felt sick at the thought of something already going wrong—and then, she saw Lora do a double take, looking quickly around the room, then back to Mac.

  ‘… wrong guy.’

  ‘Sound’s back on,’ the captain said.

  Eva leaned in closer to the speaker and the screen.

  ‘You’re telling me that you didn’t attack the Councillors in Paris?’ Lora continued.

  ‘That’s right,’ Mac said.

  There was a pause, then Lora said, ‘And that’s why you called this meeting—to set the record straight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you prove it? That it was not you, or that the attack was not ordered by you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lora paused again, waiting for more. When he said nothing, she asked, ‘Well? Prove it, or you’ll be arrested on suspicion of the attack and questioned by the police.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mac said. He continued to just stand there, behind his desk, resolute as Lora walked right up to him—

  ‘Something’s not right!’ the Russian Guardian said.

  Then, Eva watched as Lora grabbed at Mac’s face and seemed to pull at it.

  ‘What the …’ Eva said, looking closer at the screen.

  Then, Lora stood on the desk and held something up to the camera’s lens.

  ‘What is that?’ Eva said.

  ‘A mask,’ the police captain said after ordering his teams into the office. ‘Mac gave us the slip somewhere and sent in a phony.’

  ‘He’s buying time,’ Eva said. ‘He wanted us tied up here on a wild-goose chase. But why?’ Eva looked at the guy under the mask as police rushed the room. He was confused and frightened at what was happening.

  I hope it’s not because Mac is out there making a play for Sam.

  30

  SAM

  ‘The stairs end here,’ Sam said, nearly slipping off the wet stone underfoot and falling back into the void. He looked back down the dark chamber. The drop to the stone floor would be enough to kill and the stairs were slippery. ‘Watch your step.’

  ‘OK. Any bats?’

  ‘No.’

  Ahead, the landing turned a corner and funnelled into another tunnel. Sam led, always wary for anything that might be a trap and realising that it was likely impossible that they’d see one until it was too late, for everything was made from the same grey stone, the finish impossibly smooth. They walked out into the tunnel, where the ceiling curved into an arch. The walls bore pick marks from their excavation out of the solid rock.

  ‘Stop!’ Rapha called. ‘The floor!’

  ‘What is it?’ Sam asked. He froze and looked down to his feet. The stones here were irregular in shape but they still fitted neatly into one another. It was almost as though instead of being carved and fitted together they’d been melted together—some had four or five sides, others had ten or twelve, yet somehow they all slotted together like a tightly packed jigsaw.

  ‘This part of the floor is different to the rest of the cobbles,’ Rapha said. ‘Larger, for one thing. And look closer, some are a bit lower than others.’

  ‘But these ones are higher than the surrounding stones,’ Sam said. ‘And … they have carvings on them. Monkeys, jaguars—’

  ‘Birds, snakes …’ Rapha continued. ‘Bats.’

  ‘I’ve seen this before,’ Sam said, taking Dr Kader’s journal from his pack. ‘Here, look.’

  ‘The way the tiles are notated in here, it’s like the whole hallway is a hopscotch game,’ Sam said. He shone the torch on a section of floor ahead that had disappeared, now only an ominous gaping hole. ‘Only this is no game. You step on the wrong piece, it’s game over—for good,’ he said.

  ‘Your Dr Kader must have pieced this together from records left by the survivor.’

  ‘Yeah. He only survived for a few days after being found at a settlement, but the map was made from the story he told before he died,’ Sam continued. ‘And that helped spawn the legend of the lost city of gold.’

  ‘El Dorado …’ Rapha shined his flashlight over the symbols and looked back to the drawing in the journal. ‘It’s very similar to the stones before us. Pretty clear recall from a guy on his death bed.’

  Sam paused, then said, ‘You think that he was delirious?’

  ‘He had the fever,’ Rapha said. ‘I’ve seen what it can do.’

  Sam looked again at the floor, and then the diagram.

  ‘I think we’ve got no choice but to trust this book,’ Sam said.

  ‘I just hope he remembered the right tile.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam said, then he read from the journal. ‘Look, it says here, stick to the single monkey figures only.’

  They stood and traced the route ahead—an easy step from one to another, although there was an area near the end, about ten metres away, near the black area where the floor had dropped out, where they could not see a monkey carving.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ Sam said. He pulled his backpack’s straps tighter, slipping the journal into his pocket. He stood rock still. Thinking … waiting.

  ‘Sam?’ Rapha nudged.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m going,’ he said, taking some settling breaths. ‘I mean—it doesn’t say what happens if you get it wrong. What do you think would happen?’

  ‘Perhaps don’t think about it is the best advice?’ Rapha said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I mean, maybe the floor will drop out from under you,’ Rapha offered.

  ‘Awesome. Yeah, I think I preferred the “don’t think about it” bit.’ Sam paused longer, relaxed as much as he could. He lifted his leg and set off, reaching out with a long step to the first monkey tile. He tested it gently but it remained strong underfoot, with no movement at all. He brought his other foot to it and they just fit, blotting out the tile. ‘OK, so far so good.’

  Sam made his way with a wide stride to his left. Overbalancing, he shot out his right foot which landed on another monkey tile next to it.

  ‘Phew, that was lucky,’ Sam said, trying to plot the way ahead.

  ‘It does make me wonder,’ Rapha called out, now at the first tile. ‘What happens if we step on another carved figure …’

  Sam stopped and stared down at the area ahead, just before the section that was missing.

  ‘What is it?’ Rapha asked.

  ‘There’s a group of tiles up ahead that are all covered over in bat droppings,’ Sam replied. He crouched down, all his weight on his monkey piece of the floor tile. He shone his flashlight along the surface. ‘I can’t make out any of the markings at all—it’s all just dark and slimy.’

  ‘Can you jump to the other side?’ Rapha asked, shining his light ahead. ‘Land just there, before where the floor has disappeared.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sam replied. It’ll be close …

  ‘And don’t stop,’ Rapha said, his flashlight piercing the darkness ahead. ‘That patch where the floor has given out, that’s the end, so you make it over that, we’ve got this licked.’

  ‘Licked?’

  Rapha shrugged. ‘Heard it in a movie once.’

  ‘You’re enjoying this now, aren’t you?’

  ‘Beats getting shot at on the river.’

  ‘Even if there’s bats?’

  ‘Where?!’

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  ‘Or,’ Rapha said, looking b
ack to where they’d started, ‘we could go back and find something to clean the tiles off with, so we can see what they are?’

  ‘No, I think I can make it,’ Sam said, visualising the leap in his mind. He practised his launch a couple of times, then leaning back on his heels for momentum, he pushed off, leaping forwards.

  Sam just made it to the other side of the moss. His feet skidded on the damp cobbles on the other side, causing him to slide towards a two-metre section of missing ground.

  He jumped again—

  And landed in a tumble that ended when he spread out his arms and legs and stopped himself against a wall. He got to his feet, dusted himself off, then turned back to face Rapha, smiling.

  ‘Piece of cake. Your turn.’

  ‘OK …’ Rapha said, although he looked spooked. He tried a different approach, going back two monkey pavers, readying himself, then he ran and jumped—

  One tile.

  Two.

  He made his final leap.

  The back of his foot landed just short of the end of the moss, making an ominous CLICK as his weight rested on a different tile.

  ‘Jump!’ Sam yelled.

  In one fluid movement, Rapha bent and sprung forward, arms outstretched as he threw himself through the air.

  Sam lunged forwards, grabbing the front of Rapha’s shirt and pulling Rapha towards him as—

  A stone wall thundered down from a recessed slit in the ceiling, smashing the grimy section of tiles and sending out showers of dust.

  Sam and Rapha covered their faces and coughed in the settling dust.

  ‘That was—’

  ‘Close,’ Sam said. ‘Too close.’

  ‘We’re trapped,’ Rapha sighed, staring at the wall behind them.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ Sam said, determination in his voice, looking away from the wall. ‘We’re just not going out this way. Come on, we have to keep moving.’

  31

  ALEX

  ‘That’s everything I got,’ Shiva said, running over to where Alex was taking cover behind a tower of big steel shipping containers.