“No, Bick,” said Tommy. “A lodestone is a naturally occurring magnetized rock that ancient mariners used to use to make primitive compasses so they could navigate in waters far away from any land.”
Yep, there’s one subject where Tommy is actually more of an expert than Storm: boat driving.
“The Vikings used to glue a lodestone on top of a chunk of wood and float it in a bucket of water,” he said. “Because it was magnetized, the lodestone would always point toward magnetic north.”
“Exactly, Thomas,” said Dad. “If we find the Sacred Stone, I suspect it will, somehow, point us to Paititi.”
We kept hiking. And hacking machetes against ropy vines. And chopping floppy leaves. And slicing through wet green stuff.
For hours and hours. My legs and my arms were killing me.
Storm noticed a few more landmarks from her memorized map. She assured us we were heading in the right direction. Unfortunately, that direction was deeper and deeper into the rain forest. I had so many mosquito bites, my knees looked like they had acne.
Just when I didn’t think I could take another inch of jungle, it ended.
We stepped into a clearing and faced a sheer cliff of weathered volcanic rock. Dozens of openings that looked like windows were chiseled into the stone. It was kind of like staring at a ginormous skull with too many eye sockets. Or a honeycomb made out of concrete. Either way, it was spooky.
“Each one of those niches was a tomb,” explained Storm. “Or an entrance into a deeper tomb. The City of the Dead was built by an ancient Andean civilization that lived here long before the Incas.”
“They probably died here, too,” quipped Beck. “I’m guessing that’s why they needed so many tombs.”
“And,” said Dad, “much like the ancient Egyptians, these ancient Andeans thought death was merely a continuation of life. Therefore, they placed pottery, utensils, food, and, yes, even jewelry inside the funeral niches with the remains of their dearly departed loved ones.”
“So that’s where you’ll find the Sacred Stone?” said Chet. “In one of those holes?”
Dad just nodded.
Meanwhile, my stomach lurched up into my mouth.
I had a queasy feeling that, to find the key to the Lost City of Paititi, we were going to have to crawl through a bunch of creepy caves crammed full of even creepier skeletons.
CHAPTER 43
“Do we have any idea which one of those holes we’re supposed to crawl into?” asked Beck.
“No,” said Dad. “So we need to split up into teams. Beck and Bick? You’re together. Start on the top level and work your way from left to right.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I even saluted.
“Tommy and Storm? I want you guys to take the lowest tier. Move right to left.”
“Gotcha,” said Tommy.
Storm raised a hand.
“Yes, Storm?” said Dad.
“Can Tommy do most of the crawling? I’m wearing shorts. I really don’t want to scrape my shins on broken bones and pottery shards.”
“Of course. But Storm? Keep your eyes open for the Sacred Stone.”
“Got it.”
Dad turned to Collier. “Chet? You’ll be with me. We’ll work the middle row of caves.”
“Cool.”
“If you find the stone, give the family whistle,” said Dad to everyone.
We all nodded. Except, of course, Chet. He wasn’t in our family. He didn’t know the secret whistle or our secret handshake.
“Um, what’s the whistle sound like?” asked Chet.
“You need not worry,” Dad told him. “If you and I find something, I’ll give the whistle. All right. It could be a tight squeeze in those niches. We’d better stow our gear down here.”
We all slipped off our backpacks and set them on the dusty ground.
“Whoa,” said Tommy, who, by the way, is an excellent tracker. “Are those footprints?”
Dad knelt down and examined the markings Tommy was pointing to.
“Worse,” said Dad. “Those are boot prints. Judging by the tread marks, I’d say they are high-end hiking boots, the kind one might purchase at an expedition outfitter.”
“So they likely weren’t worn by the locals,” I said.
“You are correct,” said Storm. “Most indigenous people in the Andes wear hojotas, which are sandals made from recycled tires.”
“Precisely,” said Dad.
“Could it be those other guys?” said Beck, looking around nervously. “The submarine pirates who stole the treasure map out of the Room on the Lost?”
“Impossible,” said Storm. “Even though they had the map, they didn’t have Father Toledo’s letter. They wouldn’t’ve known what to do with the landmarks, such as the sleeping-lady mountain.”
“With the pointing toes!” added Tommy.
“What if Father Toledo sent two letters to the pope?” I wondered out loud. “What if he made a copy and stored it someplace else? Someplace where the bad guys found it.”
“I suppose that’s a possibility, Bick,” said Dad. “So let’s work fast and keep our eyes and ears open. The Sacred Stone is the key to the city of Paititi. We can’t let it fall into the wrong hands!”
We all hustled off to our assigned slots.
Beck and I clambered up the sides of the necropolis and crawled into our first tomb on the top row.
It wasn’t too scary. Unless, of course, you don’t particularly enjoy wriggling along on your belly on top of a bed of scattered skeletons.
CHAPTER 44
Beck and I were in our third tomb when we discovered (accidentally) the first booby trap.
I threw a chunk of broken pottery to scare off a pack of squeaking rats ten feet in front of us. It must’ve hit a trip wire as it tumbled through the air because, all of a sudden, dozens of pointy-tipped darts shot across the cave in both directions.
“Um, I think those were meant for us,” mumbled Beck. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No,” I said, sort of surprising myself by saying it. “We have to explore this cave.”
“What? Are you crazy? Do you want to trigger some other kind of crazy trap? Maybe even a giant rolling rock like in that movie you watch all the time?”
It’s true. I’m a huge Raiders of the Lost Ark fan.
“Think about it, Beck,” I told her. “There weren’t any booby traps in the first two tombs we explored.”
“True. Just spooky skeletons and squiggly snakes.”
“And cobwebs,” I reminded her. “And humongous furry spiders.”
“Yeah. Those were gross.”
“But,” I said, “this is the first tomb with man-made hazards.”
“Well, maybe the dead guy’s family was super-protective. Didn’t want grave robbers messing with their dearly departed loved one’s pottery and stuff.”
“Or maybe this is a passageway that will lead us to something super-special. Something that required extra security.”
Beck’s eyes lit up. “The Sacred Stone.”
“Exactly.”
“We should whistle for the others,” said Beck.
“Not yet,” I said. “What if we’re wrong?”
“You usually are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes. You are.”
We were dangerously close to launching into a fresh Twin Tirade, which would have been very hard to accomplish in such a cramped space. Tirades usually involved a lot of flailing arms, and we didn’t have room for that. Plus, we didn’t have time for a tirade. If the Sacred Stone wasn’t in this booby-trapped tomb, we had at least a dozen more to explore. So did Storm and Tommy, and Dad and Chet.
“We have to do this on our own,” I said.
“Fine,” said Beck with an exasperated sigh. “Just be careful.”
We crawled forward, past the piles of spiky darts littering both sides of the tomb tunnel. Bones and shards of clay crunched under our hands and knees. I brought my right hand down on a dus
ty stone. Beside me, Beck rested her hand on a skull.
The skull sank into the floor.
“Uh-oh,” she mumbled.
We heard heavy stones scraping and clunking together like prehistoric cogwheels and gears.
We also heard a horrible hissing sound coming from behind us.
“Um, Bick?”
“Yeah?”
“Is there, like, a giant snake back there?”
“I don’t know. I’m too afraid to look.”
“Me, too,” said Beck.
“We should probably do it together.”
“Yeah. On three. One… two… three.”
We both turned around and looked back to where we’d been.
The holes in the stone walls where all those darts had come flying out of were now leaking a thick, pea-green gas cloud.
The skull had been a trigger for booby trap number two!
“That’s some kind of poisonous gas!” Beck gasped.
I fanned the air under my nose. “Either that or the walls just farted.”
One thing was clear: We couldn’t go out the way we’d come in without running through (and breathing in) the gas cloud. We had to crawl deeper into the cave.
“It’s not all bad,” I said.
“What?” shouted Beck.
“Hey, if the gas kills us, at least we’re already in a tomb!”
CHAPTER 45
Call us crazy, but Beck and I decided to run.
Luckily, the cave ceiling became higher up ahead. We didn’t trigger any more booby traps—probably because whoever installed the dart launchers and the gas pumpers figured those two items would be more than enough to take care of any and all grave robbers.
And because they also probably knew we’d run into a wall.
Which is what we did. There was no rear exit. Just a tall stone wall.
“What’s that?” said Beck, shining her flashlight on a carving at the base of the wall.
“Some kind of Incan art,” I said. “Too bad we don’t have time for an art-appreciation class right now, Rebecca. We need to find a way out before that poison-gas cloud finds its way into this room.”
“Fascinating,” mumbled Beck, sounding like Mom when she’s in an art museum admiring a masterpiece.
“Hello? Earth to Beck? We’re about ten seconds away from dying a horrible, miserable death. I’m talking choking and gagging and bloodshot eyeballs.”
“It’s Incan art,” she replied, because, as the family artiste, she pays more attention during Mom’s art history lectures than I do. “Very curious.”
“What?”
“Storm and Dad said these tombs were built by a pre-Incan civilization.”
“So?”
“Pre-Incan means it came before the Incas. So why is there Incan art decorating this wall?”
Okay. She had a point. She might not have had very long to live, but she had a point.
“It looks like a solar disk,” she went on while I waved at the foul air tickling my nostrils. The stinky gas was seeping into the back chamber where we were trapped. “The sun, of course, is a very important symbol in Incan mythology.”
“Of course,” I said, coughing a little. My eyes started stinging.
“Beneath the solar disk, we see two kneeling figures on either side of a diamond-shaped object. It’s almost as if they are worshipping the diamond.”
“Well, maybe it’s some kind of sacred stone,” I said without thinking.
“Exactly,” said Beck, smiling, which I thought was a very odd thing to be doing ten seconds before you died dramatically and horribly in a poisonous-gas attack.
Then she did something even weirder: she placed her thumb against the carved image of the sun.
I heard another clunk and clink of stone sliding against stone.
Finally, I figured out what Beck already had. “The Sacred Stone!”
“Exactly!”
We heard more grinding. And rumbling. Centuries-old dust puffed out of cracks in the trembling walls. We both looked up at the ceiling, terrified it would collapse on us.
The floor flew open beneath our feet.
We both screamed as we disappeared through the trapdoor and into the darkness below. We fell, weightless, for a few seconds, then landed hard on our butts and flew down a slanted stone chute. It was like riding along on a slippery waterslide but without the water, just a thick layer of dust.
“At least the air smells better in here,” shouted Beck as we swerved through a curve and skimmed through what might’ve been the dry and dusty sewer pipes of the City of the Dead.
CHAPTER 46
Finally, after a few more twists and turns and scraped elbows (not to mention sore butts), we flew out of the stone chute and landed on a heap of something soft.
“Okay,” said Beck. “That was convenient.”
“Or planned,” I said, fingering the fuzzy pile of padding. “I think this might be antique llama wool.”
Beck snapped her fingers. “Inkarri used twenty thousand llamas to transport all that gold and silver to Paititi. His followers probably gave the herd a few haircuts and made this landing cushion when they decided to hide their Sacred Stone deep within this old necropolis.”
“We took the path they planned to take when Inkarri came back to reclaim his treasure,” I added. “They would’ve known about the booby traps and how not to trigger them.”
I shone my flashlight right. Beck shone hers left. It’s a twin thing.
My beam fell on a wall painting.
“It’s a map!” I said. “No, it’s the map. The same one Storm drew for us on her computer. The one the bad guys stole out of the Room.”
“And that,” said Beck, “must be the Sacred Stone.”
“Whaaa—”
I spun around to see what she was talking about.
There it was. A glittering, faceted yellow stone the size of a baseball sitting on a pedestal that had more of those kneeling Incan figures carved into its sides.
“No wonder they put it on a pedestal!” said Beck, her voice filled with awe.
Beck grabbed the stone before I could tell her not to (because, like I said, I’ve seen way more Indiana Jones movies than she has).
And, of course, the column started to rise. Once again, we heard the grind and scrape of stone against stone.
“Is the floor going to open up again?” sputtered Beck, backing up against the far wall.
“I hope not,” I told her. “But the weight of the Sacred Stone was keeping the column locked in place. You were supposed to put a bag of sand that weighed as much as it did on top of the pedestal before you grabbed the shiny stone!”
“Sorry.”
The column kept corkscrewing up from the floor. And that wall Beck had backed up against? It started slowly sliding open, disappearing into the rock like a pocket door.
“Bick? Beck?”
Tommy and Storm were standing on the other side of the sliding wall in what had to be a tomb on the level they’d been exploring. I could see a brilliant rectangle of blinding sunlight behind them.
“How’d you guys get down here?” asked Tommy.
“Very quickly,” said Beck.
“But this is our level,” said Storm. “Besides, you were supposed to whistle if you found something.”
Beck whistled. It was a very dry, very weak whistle.
“Is that the Sacred Stone?” asked Storm, clumping into the chamber to join us. Tommy was right behind her.
“We think so,” said Beck.
“And check it out,” I said. “There’s a map painted on the wall!”
Storm scanned the cave painting.
“It’s a perfect match,” she reported after comparing it to the visual files in her ginormous brain. “It’s exactly the same as the map Dad had on board the Lost.”
“Awesome,” said Tommy.
“Wow,” said Beck. “There’s like a dozen of you guys.”
Storm, Tommy, and I turned away from the wall map t
o check out Beck.
She had the Sacred Stone pressed against her eye and was staring through it as if it were a telescope.
Tommy shook his head.
“You really shouldn’t be playing with that,” he said, moving away from the wall to go retrieve the stone.
Beck gasped.
“You guys?” she said, still staring through the stone. “You’re not going to believe what I just saw!”
“What?”
“The Lost City of Paititi!”
CHAPTER 47
“Remember that time on the Lost when I looked at one of Dad’s maps while wearing my three-D glasses?” said Beck, still gaping at the painting on the sleek cavern wall.
“Of course we do,” I said. “You found the map Dad had drawn with some kind of invisible ink that could only be seen if you were wearing those stupid goggles you wore all the time.”
“Chya,” said Tommy. “And the hidden map led us all the way to New York City and the Grecian urn.”
“It was some of your best work, Beck,” added Storm.
I nodded.
“Thanks, you guys,” said Beck, her attention still on the map. “Not to brag, but I think I just topped myself. When you look at that wall through the Sacred Stone, you can see a second map filled with inscriptions.
“It’s way more detailed,” Beck reported. “And it looks like we’re not supposed to go directly to the City of Gold. We have to take a detour first. To a temple of some sort…”
“What?” I said. “We can’t take a detour. Mom and Chaupi need the gold from the lost city to stop Juan Carlos Rojas and save the rain forest.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Bick. I didn’t draw the map. I wasn’t even born in the 1530s, which was probably when Inkarri or his friends painted the wall of this cave with their invisible ink or whatever they used to hide the real route to Paititi.”
“May I take a look?” asked Storm.
“Totally,” said Tommy. “And Storm? Can you memorize it?”
Treasure Hunters--Quest for the City of Gold Page 8