by A D Davies
“Yeah, whatever,” Jules said as he snapped the bangles together, their alternating edges magnetically sealed and respective glows flaring at his touch. “Why don’t you try first?”
Valerio took them back, their light dying as usual. “To prove you’re something different than me? Okay.”
With the confidence of someone who had no doubt, no uncertainty, Valerio stood beside the infinity-shaped groove, Horse dutifully holding a standard flashlight on the surface. No need for the black light now.
Valerio hovered the pair of bangles by the lock. “If the wrong person uses this, what do you think will happen?”
“Nothing,” Jules said. “What, you think some two-thousand-year-old burglar alarm’ll call the cops?”
“I’m not concerned with the rabble of savages who followed Doubting Thomas into these hills. The people I fear are the ones who harnessed the energy that powers this key. We don’t know its origins or understand its effects. You saw what it did to the saltwater in the bay. Do you think that was an accident?”
“I don’t know what to think. I ain’t in a lab.”
Valerio shook his head, humoring a simpleton. “Didn’t you see the fresco? This is a civilization who lived side by side with the protohumans that populated the earth at the time of the last Ice Age, a civilization who predicted floods as the ice melted from the north. They put together these items that repel saltwater and built this.” He swept the bangles toward the twenty feet of flat wall like a game-show host presenting a speedboat.
Here’s what you might win!
He said, “This is constructed of the same rock. Unlike the cave, which is a mix of granite and limestone and a ton of other geological compounds. This door, that one over there with the markings, these bangles... they’re quartzite, the same as the Egyptians used to build their pyramid capstones and the statues of their most precious leaders. Infused with these odd flecks, the things that glow, it seems to give the bangles a property that only you can activate. But quartzite, Jules, is found all over Africa and the Middle East. You know where you don’t find quartzite?”
“India,” Jules said. He noticed something on the wall above the grooves, a symbol he’d never seen before, a hand interrupting a circle, one he hoped he was reading correctly.
“Right,” Valerio said. “India. So not only did these people create a pair of pretty accessories that can repel seawater with such force it all but destroys my favorite yacht, they schlep a hundred tons of it up into the mountains of India to protect whatever lies within here from the rising seas.”
“But the flood waters never made it this far.”
“They didn’t know that. They saw the signs of a rising sea and prepared for the worst.” Valerio placed the infinity-shaped bangles on the edge of the grooves, lined up as any key about to slot into its hole, the two almost-circles not quite identical so it could only go in one way. “But they did want to install this failsafe. A slab that will repel water when activated by a special person. A single entity chosen from the genetic mush of humanity.” He shrugged. “But hey, let’s take the chance they didn’t build a burglar alarm into the system.”
Valerio’s shoulder dipped, the movement plain from Jules’s years of training and experience. He wasn’t bluffing. He was going to insert the key.
Jules’s arm shot out so fast, Horse drew his gun. But all Jules’s grasp did was prevent Valerio from pushing the stone shape into the groove. Horse lowered the weapon.
No need for words, Valerio placed the bangles into Jules’s hand. They lit up, red on the bottom, green on top. Valerio stood aside.
“Don’t try anything,” Horse warned, backing off with his boss.
“As if.” Jules slotted the conjoined bangles into the groove, pushing them in halfway before coming to a solid blockage. He held them there, the glow from within muted, bleeding out to the edge.
Nothing happened.
“Huh,” Jules said. “That’s something of a letdown.”
Valerio frowned. “No. We can’t be wrong.”
“Try it the other way up,” Horse said.
“Don’t fit.” Jules tried twisting it in case it worked like a huge doorknob. “Can I let go of this now?”
Valerio stared. “No. Stay where you are.” But he wasn’t staring at the bangles, or the wall. He focused on Jules. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Discipline.
That was the only thing that set Jules apart from most people in this world, certainly in the West. The discipline to train, to learn, to immerse himself in a subject until he’d mastered it fully, be it conventional archeology or the science of OOPARTs—Out of Place Artifacts—or the physics of how an object such as a human body is affected by gravity.
But right then, his discipline abandoned him.
The odds, the stakes, the fatigue of the past week—blame what you will—but usually those outside influences barely affected him. Today, his eyes flitted to the one place he demanded they not stray.
The symbol.
The circle interrupted by a hand.
And Valerio clocked it. Studied it a moment. Then laughed. “Oh, nice try, sir! Seriously, that was very neat. And you nearly did it.” He pulled up close to Jules. His hand wrapped around Jules’s free wrist, and Jules closed his eyes in resignation. “I told you before, you’re only almost as clever as me.”
There was no point resisting. Jules was a puppet under Valerio’s control as Valerio moved Jules’s arm and slapped his hand on the smooth surface beside the door.
Completing the circuit.
Previously unseen symbols on the slab lit up in red and green, and muffled clunks and thumps reverberated above and below.
“See?” Valerio said. “Magic!”
Chapter Forty-Five
Bridget squinted through the mist of dust roiled up by its first unsealing in centuries, revealing rows upon rows of books lined an aisle wide enough for three people to stand shoulder to shoulder. The shelves on either side were flat, smooth stone bound by something they could not make out and towered twice Bridget’s height. She leaned inside the doorway, leaving her feet outside, viewing the interior: two further aisles, equally long and wide and apparently stacked with tomes close to identical to the one before her.
“It’s a library,” she said. “Toby, this is the biggest collection I’ve ever seen!”
With Dan aiming the chest-cam beside her, Toby said, “Okay, let’s... Bridget, we’ve gotta keep calm. The objective is not in here. If it was, we’d be fighting Valerio’s goons right now. We need the bangles. If he doesn’t want Saint Thomas and he isn’t interested in books, we need to stop Valerio getting his hands on whatever is in the main body of the structure.”
“What main body? How do we know this isn’t the prize?” Bridget snatched a flashlight and entered the space, trembling, unable to choose a starting point. She remembered the book from Thomas’s body, though, and pulled up short of touching anything. “Toby, this library is older than Alexandria.”
“Bridget...” Toby’s warning tone remained firm. A tone she ignored.
Just one. Just one can’t hurt.
She raced down the shelves, shining the light so it finally reached the end—two, three hundred yards away—then trotted back to where she started. No book stood next another of the same size, at first appearing like a rushed job, but Bridget sensed an intent there. Each volume was bulky, far bigger than trade paperbacks or even the bigger hardbacks of today. The smallest she could see in this fraction of the library stood fifteen inches tall and at least three wide. She selected one at random, a brown spine five inches thick and fifteen tall.
She still wore her gloves, but the texture came through as if her hands were bare—a hard, rough finish, similar to bark. Maybe it was bark. Treated with an oil or something as a preservative. It certainly felt hard, and it smelled old. For a long moment, she inhaled the scent.
“Bridget, we can isolate this,” Toby said. “Come back when we have more time
.”
“It was a sealed room,” Bridget answered. “Thomas’s book was subject to the elements. There’s a damn waterfall just outside. Charlie, tell me I’m right.”
Charlie did not reply right away. She was Toby’s ally, his first member of the team. And every time she quit, she always came back. For him.
“It was sealed,” Charlie said. “But who knows what was sealed in there too?”
She was agreeing with Bridget, but being diplomatic about it.
Bridget said, “Thanks.” Then she opened the book.
The first page was illustrated, a man with a spear battling a lizardlike creature with wide jaws and a forked tongue, like a dragon with no wings. A form of writing Bridget had never encountered lined up in columns beneath the picture, closer to a Chinese style than hieroglyphs or cuneiform, but definitely no modern language.
Her skin tingled, and she consciously informed her lungs to breathe, otherwise she’d suffocate. “I don’t even know what these pages are made from. Or the ink they used. It’s so... bright. So strong.” She partially lifted the page and shone a flashlight behind. “This isn’t papyrus, and it’s not like modern paper. Less grainy. Thicker but more translucent. How—”
Charlie marched up beside her. “Get a grip, lass.” Her Welsh accent always strengthened when she was being assertive. “We’ll have all the time in the world to inspect this place, but for now, we have more important things to deal with.”
“Yeah, and no plan at all,” Harpal said.
They’d all gathered in the aisle, giving Bridget room but close enough to talk. Now everyone’s attention fell on Harpal.
“We don’t know what’s out there,” he went on. “We know approximate numbers. We know they’re armed with guns and explosives. And we know they’re willing to kill if anyone gets in their way. So what’s the plan?”
“We’ll be sneaky.” Dan slapped him on the back and delved into the library proper, wafting away the occasional concentration of airborne particles, there being virtually no breeze to disperse it. “Seriously, though, reconnoiter first. If we can snatch the goods, and maybe Jules too...” He glanced at Bridget, then continued without turning back. “We’ll get him if we can. But I won’t risk any of you. If Valerio wins, we regroup.”
“Where are you going?” Charlie called after him.
“I want to see where this leads. Coming?”
They explored for ten minutes before happening across another door. Bridget kept stopping to probe an odd-looking book—an unusual color, gold or silver binding, a ridiculously huge tome that Dan would struggle to lift...
Charlie or Dan kept her moving, though, with Harpal again bringing up the rear.
She managed to snag a smaller one and turned it over in her hands as they walked. “Again, this cover is like wood. Like the inner layer of bark this time. It’s been treated. Maybe with an oil, or—”
“It’ll slow us down,” Dan said.
“But it’s... the most amazing thing we’ve ever found. Is no one else interested?” Bridget’s throat tightened. Why couldn’t they understand? “This place... it’s a source of ancient knowledge. We are going to answer so many questions. The whys, the whats, the hows. It’s—”
“How do you know that isn’t the Iron Age version of Fifty Shades of Grey or Harry Potter?” Charlie asked.
“I...” Bridget’s gut hardened, but she forced the shock back and expressed herself in a Toby-like phrase. “I beg your pardon?”
“That book. We read all sorts of stuff for entertainment. You might be holding a schlocky murder mystery. A hard-boiled private detective from Mesopotamia.”
Dan chuckled. “Yeah. Detective Horus and the Case of the Missing Cat. Could be a kid’s schoolbook.”
Toby’s disdain bled through their earpieces. “None of you are helping.”
Bridget flipped through the tome, coming across a section featuring circles intercut with triangles, and held it up, flashlight close. “See? This is geometry.” She flipped more pages, the technical drawings matching up to a building shaped as a pyramid, only with three peaks instead of one. “It’s a diagram.”
“Like I said,” Dan answered, “could be a schoolbook.”
Bridget snapped it shut and was about to call Dan some terrible names when their military specialist raised his fist in an instinctive “Stop” signal.
All obeyed.
They had neared the end of the aisle. Dan tested the shelf with his hand—solid—and pressed himself against it. The team copied him, but slowly enough for Bridget to spot what had alerted him: another door. This one made of stone, smoothed flat and embedded in the surrounding rock, wider than the one in the crypt but not by much.
Like the top end, the bookshelves were not flush to the final wall, so a passage ran perpendicular to this. Dan scanned down one way, then another.
“Damn,” he said, using only the flashlights, “next time we uncover an ancient library guarded by the body of a saint, we really need to pack night-vision goggles.” A final check, listening too. “But it looks clear. Bridget, you’re up again.”
She signaled for some space. The door wasn’t the same as the one they came through. This one left no gaps into which to jimmy a crowbar, no handle, no visible crack around the edge. It appeared sealed. Then she located what served as a doorframe and asked for more light. She dusted off the lines etched there and soon discovered symbols related to the ones from the corridor approaching Thomas’s crypt.
Then she found the grooved pattern. Like a figure eight. “Charlie? That’s like when Jules connected the bangles back in Mumbai.”
Charlie leaned in for a closer look. “You sure?”
“I was watching through the binoculars. You weren’t. He linked them together. This looks like it’s about the same size.”
“A key? Like we’ve been hearing about?”
“More of a pass,” Toby said over comms. His voice was crackling now.
“Dead end?” Harpal said. “Do we try the other door in the priest’s crypt?”
Charlie unsheathed her short-bladed knife and crouched at the symbol. She poked at it with her finger, dislodging a slew of dust. “This room has been closed off so long, there’s not even a spider here.” She inserted her knife. “Let’s see what sort of a lock can’t be picked.”
“What’s—oing on?” Toby asked, breaking up.
Dan angled to capture Charlie’s activity, waggling the knife around the figure eight. The door shook and lifted slightly.
Charlie grinned and proceeded to trace the figure-eight path with her blade, happy to have snagged some sort of mechanism.
The door rose farther as if her motion was working a lever.
Bridget knelt before the door, ducked low on her hands. “I have to see this...”
“No, wait!” Toby cried.
Charlie faced Dan’s chest, her blade continuing to scrape. “Pardon?”
“Charlie, Bridget, don’t do that!”
A crack sounded. The floor jerked upward. Dan snatched Bridget and stepped back to where Harpal was already holding position. Dan moved back for Charlie, but it was too late.
The floor under her split, a broken line spreading all the way to Dan’s position.
Charlie gazed at her friends, her look of wide-eyed resignation caught in their flashlights.
Bridget’s chest clenched. The sensation of falling flowed through her, although it wasn’t her who was in danger. “Charlie...”
Like a thin sheen of ice over a pond, the fissures spread too quickly. For a ten-foot radius, the whole space around the door shattered and crumbled away, taking Charlie with it.
Chapter Forty-Six
“Ain’t magic,” Jules said as a vertical crack opened down the center, a straight line of brilliant white light. He let go of both the bangles and the door.
“Explain it then, Logic Boy.” Valerio caught himself and said, “I mean ‘Boy’ as a superhero name, you understand. Logic Man would be better, I suppose�
�”
“I get the reference. Relax. At a guess, it must be linked to the outside. That’s daylight.”
Unseen gears cranked and turned. Something squealed, something man-made. The wall parted at the central split, gears grinding, a storybook giant crunching bones in its teeth. The light extinguished as fast as it appeared. Once the gap was wide enough for a car, all movement halted, an echo of the hidden mechanism lingering in the air.
“Pulley system and counterweight,” Jules guessed.
“Oh?” Valerio’s voice went high. “You know a rope that can last tens of thousands of years?”
“Ain’t seen evidence of this being more than two thousand years old. For all I know it’s less than that, an elaborate hoax. I ain’t had anything tested. Till I do, I’m leaving my conclusions in the air.”
“Ha! Doubting Jules. You and Thomas would have got along great.” Valerio pointed at the division. “Time to see what’s inside. Excited?”
“Sure,” Jules said.
“And oh look! I haven’t killed you.” Valerio left a stupid smile on his face as if to say, “told you so.” When he received no reply, he said, “You can join us in there. See what convinced these heathens to convert to Christianity. Or...” Valerio gestured to the two bangles. “Or do you just want to take your trinket back and be on your way?”
Jules removed the key/bangles from the lock and paced to the gap. Darkness looked back. He had come this far. “After you.”
Jules stayed out of it for the time being, observing only.
Horse assigned two men to watch the entrance and selected the Ravi brothers to accompany them inside. Both bowed shallowly and resumed their posture with their guns ready and their chins held higher than before.
Yeah, a great honor. Come with us and die with us.
The pair hung back a bit as Valerio led Horse and Jules through the gap.
It was dark inside, virtually pitch-black, the air cool and dry. A thick, vegetative smell hung heavy, almost oily in the way it coated Jules’s olfactory senses. Nature must have encroached here the way it hadn’t in the outer chambers. A pinprick of daylight from a vast, indiscernible distance above indicated a spot of damage, but it was not large enough to eliminate the need for flashlights.