Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  Jack raised his visor again now, sucking at the tube from his hydration unit, and switched to the altimeter on his computer. It showed 4,398 meters above sea level, about four hundred meters below the summit of the mountain and the same elevation above the town. They were only two hundred meters below the reading for the mine entrance that he had cached when they had been with Marco; that difference had been decreasing as the tunnel gradually gained in elevation, an encouraging sign of progress. What they could not measure, because their GPS did not work underground, was how far they had come, and how far they still needed to go. They had been forced to rely on old-fashioned dead reckoning, but after Jack had counted the first five hundred steps, something he had started doing to stave off the claustrophobia, he had given up. He knew they must be within a few hundred meters of the shaft, but even that was a daunting prospect. He desperately needed to stand up, to feel his bones fall into position again and to ease the incessant throbbing of the wound in his leg.

  He saw Costas turn over and continue to struggle on, and he resealed his visor and followed. He could see streaks of blue-gray ore in the rock, something he had started to notice a few hundred meters back, a sign that they were coming close to the mountain and its rich seams of ore-bearing rock. A minute or so later, Costas turned back, his headlamp flashing blindingly, and Jack saw him looking up.

  “We’ve made it, Jack. We’re at the shaft.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “I thought we were supposed to thank that chain-smoking devil of the deep.”

  “Not yet. He only holds sway in the mine itself.”

  Jack staggered out of the fissure and was at last able to stand upright, feeling a rush of relief as he stretched his limbs properly for the first time in more than an hour. Above them was one of the mine’s typical stepped shafts, a series of slightly offset circular wells about eight meters high dug one on top of the other, with a narrow ledge at the top of each section to allow another ladder to be perched against a revetment below the next ledge, and so on upward. It allowed miners to climb hundreds of meters using small ladders, while still being able to raise and lower buckets of ore through the central space. It was also extremely dangerous, as the ladders were precarious wooden affairs with slats that looked hardly thicker than Jack’s thumb, and the yawning hole of the shaft beside them became deeper and more deadly as the miners climbed higher. Jack exhaled, peering up at the smudge of light above. Nothing about this mountain was easy.

  He glanced again at his altimeter. “One hundred and forty meters to the mine entrance above us,” he said. “Are you ready?”

  “This place is like playing real-life snakes-and-ladders,” Costas said. “Let’s hope this one really is a ladder, and not a snake.”

  “I’m going first. Only one of us on a ladder at any one time, okay?” Jack stepped onto the lower rung of the ladder, feeling it nearly buckle under his weight. The rungs were only wide enough for one of his feet, and he had to remind himself that the ladders had been designed for men who were commonly a foot and a half shorter than he was and less than half his weight. The ladder sagged horribly as he reached the middle rungs, and then he was at the top, standing on an irregular rock-cut ledge perhaps half a meter wide contemplating the next ladder and looking down at Costas as he creaked his way up. This was going to be a hair-raising exercise, but there was no alternative.

  He repeated the procedure five times, and then ten, and then twenty, trying not to look down, and then he was one segment away from the top, the roof of the tunnel less than twenty meters above. He waited for Costas to join him, and they went up the final rise together, this time a series of rock-cut steps that brought them out just behind the El Tío god they had seen with Marco that morning. The light had come from the line of dim bulbs stretching in from the entrance; outside it was pitch dark, and peering through the tunnel Jack could see the brilliance of the stars as he had the night before. He snapped up his visor and breathed in the night air, relieved beyond measure to have finished that ordeal, but knowing that he could not relax yet with the biggest challenge still ahead of them.

  He glanced at his watch: 12:20 p.m., only twenty minutes late. Juan suddenly appeared beside them, his face beset with anxiety. “Mi amigo Pedro,” he said. “Have you heard?”

  Jack nodded, putting his hand on Juan’s arm. “Marco sent word to us. How many men?”

  “Three,” Juan said, holding up his fingers. “One older, two ugly men, bad people.”

  “Armed?” Jack said, lifting his fleece and showing the holster beneath.

  “Sí,” Juan said. “Like that.”

  “How long ago?”

  Juan glanced outside at the stars. “Three hours, when I hid from them and they took Pedro, and I sent word to Marco.”

  Costas looked at Jack. “So they’ve been down there three hours?” He turned to Juan, pointing at the tunnel. “How long will it take us to get there, to where we want to go?”

  Juan pointed at Jack’s watch. “Thirty minutes, not long.”

  Costas looked at Jack again. “If that’s the case, then they haven’t found the package, otherwise they’d be back up here by now.” He turned back to Juan. “What does Pedro know?”

  Juan became agitated. “Pedro knows nothing, nothing. He knows only the signs, the fish, he will take them there. But he does not know what I know, where to go at the bottom. They will hurt him, but he can tell them nothing. I am very afraid for him. They are bad men, they will kill him.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “The sooner we get down there, the better. They’ll know we’re on our way, and being down there for three hours can only mean they’re waiting for us. They took the wrong boy to tell them what they want, but they’ll know we’re bringing the right one.”

  “Is there anyone else here?” Costas asked Juan. “Any other miners?”

  “It is the Festival of Quyllurit’i,” he said. “The Inca festival of the stars. No miners today.”

  Jack unslung his pack, opened it, and offered Juan a helmet and breathing mask. Juan turned away, shaking his head, glanced at the El Tío idol and put a wedge of coca leaves into his mouth. Jack shrugged, pursing his lips. “I tried.”

  Juan picked up a wooden stake with cloth soaked in some bituminous substance tightly wrapped around one end. “Oxygen,” he said, pointing at it.

  Jack understood what he meant; he and Costas could test the air quality inside the mountain on their wrist computers, but for the miners it was done the old-fashioned way, with a flame. He wondered how the miners would gauge when to turn back. Normally when a flame flickered out, the oxygen level was already dangerously low, enough to cause blackout. If a miner fainted and remained unconscious for more than a few minutes in such conditions, he would die. They must have some sixth sense, something that told them to go no farther. Jack remembered the El Tío figures, and wondered whether they had a practical function as well. If you could not light a cigarette to give as an offering, it was telling you to go no farther. If you did go farther, you were propitiating a god no longer of protection but of destruction, a god who had told you that the passageway ahead only spelled death. It would have been an age-old wisdom that the boys would have known to ignore at their peril.

  Costas unzipped the inside pocket of his trousers and pulled something out, handing it to Jack. It was a small plastic sleeve, inside it a heavily patinated piece of eight that Jack recognized as the one found by Rebecca when she and Costas had gone metal-detecting near the cleft in the rock at the Schiedam site. “Rebecca wanted me to give you this. She wasn’t sure whether you’d be happy with me bringing it here, but she felt you might like to have it in the place where it was made, taking it back to its source. She didn’t say this, but I think she thought it might bring you good luck.”

  Jack took the coin out of the sleeve, weighed it in his hand and remembered his last conversation with Rebecca, wishing it had been different. He clasped his hand round the coin, then put it in his pocket, staring
grimly down the passageway ahead. “Okay. If that’s good luck, it’s good luck for all three of us. Let’s get the job done.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, they were standing beside the third fish symbol that Juan had found, carved into an old stone surface in the side of the passageway. All the miners knew about them, Juan had said, but they left them undamaged out of superstition, and none of the others knew what they meant or where they led.

  Jack had suspected that the end of this trail was not going to be straightforward, and Juan’s evident apprehension had not eased his mind. Juan had said that the center of the mountain was so much in danger of collapse that it had been declared a no-go zone, but still the dynamite men went there, risking everything for a few more barrow-loads of ore, risking the lives too of the procession of dust-shrouded boys who took it up the tunnels. Tonight the mine was quiet because of the festival outside, but the dust and gas from the blasting the day before was still there, along with ore in the passageway where the boys had stockpiled it on the way up. The only other people in the mine, somewhere ahead of them, were the three men of the Altamanus and Pedro, but there was little they could do about that now other than to keep as quiet as possible and hope that they saw them first rather than the other way around.

  They turned a corner and confronted another El Tío figure, sitting against the wall in front of them at a point where the passage divided. This one was more sinister than the one at the entrance, its face almost entirely devoid of recognizable human features, its body colored black and deep red, the horns on its head curved upward and inward like those of a bull. It had none of the embellishments or offerings of the others, and looked far older. Juan knelt down in front of it, took a knife from his pocket, and slashed the blade across his forearm, drawing blood. He pressed his dripping arm against the statue, smearing blood over the torso, and then picked up a handful of dust and rubbed it in the wound to staunch it. Jack realized that the dark and red on the statue was all blood, some of it recently congealed, other parts years old, and that what he had just witnessed was a form of human sacrifice.

  Costas stood beside him, his headlamp playing on the figure. “As if they didn’t give enough of themselves to this mountain already,” he muttered. “So, which way now?”

  Juan got up and pointed to the right. There was nothing else to indicate that this was the correct direction, no fish carving visible in the wall. Jack realized that the bifurcation in the passage must date from later than the seventeenth century, and that this could happen ahead as well. When those who had brought the treasure down here marked their route with their signs, this had been the sole passageway and they had only needed to make their mark at regular intervals; now, though, after much more tunnelling, the lengths between the marks would include points such as this one where later workings had added other tunnels going off to either side. It meant that they were now utterly reliant on Juan to know which was the correct route, and to lead them forward. What happened when Juan decided that he could go no farther, when the god of the underworld finally stopped him in his tracks, was something that had not yet entered Jack’s calculus.

  He suddenly felt faint, and swayed slightly, clutching at the wall. It passed as quickly as it had come, but it was a warning sign. He checked the air quality reading on his computer. An oxygen-deficient atmosphere was considered anything below 19.5 percent, and his computer was flashing an amber warning. Combined with the reduced pressure at altitude, meaning that there was less gas overall, they would already be within the danger zone, and he also had to factor in his own reduced performance as a result of blood loss and exhaustion from the events of two days ago. He reached into the left pocket of his trousers, pulled out one of the sachets of energy gel that he had put there and tore it open, quickly raising his visor and squeezing it into his mouth. The visor had only been open momentarily, but it had been enough for him to take a suffocating lungful of the dust outside, and he coughed and retched as he struggled to swallow the gel. He leaned back against the side of the tunnel, swallowing hard to get rid of the cloying taste of the dust, and pushed one of the hydration tubes forward through his helmet so that he could drink from it. He tried to relax, to control his breathing, to keep from hyperventilating. He knew that from now on he was going to have to be extra careful.

  They rounded a corner, and Costas stopped beside a small wooden crate covered in dust lying against the side of the passageway. He knelt down and opened it, revealing a stack of red sticks and coils of fuse. “Dynamite,” he said, taking out one of the sticks and holding it up. “Good old-fashioned dynamite. No electronic fuses, no fancy timers, just a wick and a match.”

  “Now is not the time to be playing with explosives,” Jack said. “The last time you did that, you finally used up our nine lives. Yours, and mine.”

  Costas thought for a moment, then took out two more sticks and shoved them into his trouser pocket. “I just have a gut feeling that these might be useful. Trouble is, the one bit of kit I don’t have is a lighter.”

  “Juan will have one. To light the cigarettes for El Tío.”

  Costas looked at Juan, held up the stick of dynamite, and made the motion of a lighter under the wick. “Juan, can I borrow your lighter, por favor?”

  Juan looked at him in consternation, the flame of his torch flickering perilously close to the crate, Jack thought. Then he glanced down the passageway and up it again, and made a sideways motion with his hand, shaking his head. “No, no, señor, it is too dangerous. The dynamite men ran away and left these here because the mountain is falling in ahead of us. It is too dangerous.”

  Costas put out his hand. “It’s for your friend Pedro. To rescue him, to frighten the men. They will be scared of dynamite.”

  Juan pursed his lips, shaking his head, but he reached into his pocket, handing over a Zippo lighter. “Gracias,” Costas said, slipping the lighter in his other pocket. “I’ll return it.”

  “I’m with Juan on that one,” Jack said. “I think we’ve come to the part of the mountain where the honeycomb of tunnels is halfway to collapse. Throwing a stick of dynamite into that could be bringing down the roof on our heads big-time.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Costas said.

  They crouched through another steep section of passageway into a completely different, cavernous space, dropping down over a rocky scree at least twenty meters to the bottom, where Jack saw his beam reflect off a pool of water. The cavern had clearly been formed from the collapse of numerous tunnels in the bedrock above, revealing rich seams of blue-gray ore all around. He could see why the dynamite men had come down here, the seduction of the place for them, but he could also see the danger. On the far side of the chamber above the pool was an extraordinary image of El Tío, this time not a model made of papier mâché but a huge bas-relief carved in the rock, showing only the horns and the rough outline of the face. It looked old, perhaps as old as the first Inca who had come to mine here before the Spanish arrived, and was surely the origin of the El Tío cult, a banshee of the depths standing sentinel at the mouth of hell itself. It must have terrified the first Spanish who saw it, and made them feel as they mined and blasted the mountain that they were constantly knocking on the door of the devil himself, tempting fate with every new seam they opened up. Juan must have seen it many times as he pushed barrows of ore up from this place, but it was horrifying him now, and he stood back against the wall of the passage, eyes wide and skin ashen beneath the pall of dust.

  Jack’s heart sank as he panned his light around the cavern. The collapse of the tunnels and the blasting had obscured the passage they had been following and revealed numerous alternatives, tunnels whose shattered entrances could be seen extending into the rock all around the edges of the cavern. The water at the bottom meant that what they were looking for must surely be here somewhere; those who had concealed the package in the seventeenth century would not have been able to take it beneath the water table. With the mass
of rubble filling the base of the cavern, it could be buried beneath tons of rock. They might have reached the end of the road, and yet there was still no sign of the three men and the little boy who they knew were down here somewhere.

  There was a low rumble in the mountain, and the ground shook, sending small cascades of rock from the ceiling and a shimmer through the dust in the air. “Not dynamite,” Costas said quietly, keeping stock still as he waited for more. “Natural forces.”

  “El Tío,” Juan said, his voice wavering. “El Tío.” His torch spluttered and nearly went out, and he lurched forward, swaying slightly. He turned and began to make his way back up the passageway, his face contorted with fear, shoving a fresh wedge of leaves into his mouth and chewing frantically. He squeezed past Costas, and made his way toward Jack. The torch spluttered again, and Jack slipped and nearly fell, cursing. His exhaustion was catching up with him, and in a flash his frustration boiled over. He grabbed Juan by the shoulders, pressing him against the side of the tunnel.

  “Where is it?” he said. “Dónde está?”

  For a moment he remained there, his body taut, and then he fell back against the opposite side of the tunnel, shocked at what he had done. Juan stared at him impassively, as if resigned to his fate, the same look that his ancestors must have given the Europeans who drove them mercilessly day after day to extract and carry the ore from these tunnels. Jack had treated him no differently. For a moment he felt like taking out the piece of eight that Costas had given him and tossing it into the bowels of the mountain, then turning back to follow Juan and leave this place forever.

  The boy spat out a stream of coca juice, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then picked up the torch from where he had dropped it. Jack held out his hand. “I’m sorry. Lo siento. Gracias.” His voice sounded hoarse, hollow. The boy looked at the proffered hand in silence, then pointed down the rock-strewn passage in front of them, to the place where the water was visible below the carved image. He made a gesture of someone diving and coming up again, and pointed down at the water. Then he turned and scrambled up the tunnel out of sight.