King's Crusade (Seventeen) (3 page)

Reznak came to a halt a minute later. The tunnel ended abruptly in a blind wall. He frowned. The draft was stronger here. He squinted at the edges of the passage and switched the torch off. They were plunged into darkness.

‘Why did you—’ Goodwin started.

‘Look ahead,’ said Reznak sharply.

Goodwin’s gaze switched to the wall in front of them. ‘What is that?’ he murmured after a few seconds.

A faint glow surrounded the edges of the wall. Reznak slid his fingers carefully along the top right-hand corner of the rock face until he felt the faintest gap. He removed a knife from his belt, stabbed it into the narrow space, and pulled down. Canvas ripped under the blade and fluttered outward in a strong breeze. Sunlight flooded the passage, dazzling them with its brilliance. Goodwin stepped eagerly past him.

‘Stop!’ shouted Reznak. He grabbed the back of the professor’s shirt just before the man walked out into the nothingness before him. Goodwin uttered a strangled cry and jerked backward from the ledge.

Reznak moved carefully to the edge of the opening that had been carved into the side of the mountain. Another peak loomed in the blue sky ahead of him. Four hundred feet below, a riverbed snaked along the floor of a valley. He studied the steep, almost vertical wall beneath him and spotted the steel struts embedded in the rock.

‘They used a crane,’ he said in a voice stiff with rising anger. ‘That’s the only way they could have gotten this high. A goddamned bloody crane!’ His words echoed down the walls of the canyon.

He closed his eyes briefly, took a deep shuddering breath, turned, and stormed past the scientists. He entered the cave and stopped in the middle of the floor.

‘It doesn’t look like they found the second chamber; otherwise, we’d be looking at another hole in the ground,’ he said, struggling to mask his fury while he looked around. ‘They may not have known of its existence.’ He turned to Goodwin. ‘Where was the entrance?’

It didn’t take long for one of the GPR units to be lowered from the worksite above them into the borehole where they had entered the tunnel. Twenty minutes later, Brennan muttered, ‘Bingo,’ under his breath. They crowded around him and studied the images on the radar gram.

Ironically, the tomb raiders had dug their tunnel exactly five feet from the opening to the second cave. It was impossible to tell with the naked eye that a heavy stone slab lay next to the southwest wall; the edges were so well concealed they resembled the underlying rock.

Another ten minutes with pickaxes finally revealed the entrance to the cave. Below it, a staircase chiseled out of the rock spiraled down into darkness. This time, Reznak descended the steps without ceremony. Fifteen feet beneath the main cave, he reached the bottom of the stairway and paused. As his torchlight washed across the space before him, his eyes slowly widened.

Over the centuries of his existence thus far, Reznak had borne witness to some of the most incomparable wonders of this world. Yet, he had never beheld such a sight as the one that now lay in front of him. It took another pair of gas lanterns brought down by Goodwin and the two Crovir scientists for him to truly appreciate what they had discovered.

Like the cave above it, the second chamber was a perfectly designed, symmetrical oval, measuring about thirty by twenty feet. Except here, the walls did not curve up to meet the ceiling, which in this instance was flat. Instead, they ran vertically around the space to form an almost continuous facade but for the opening to the staircase. From the appearance and color of the granite, the second cave looked to be in an entirely different rock formation.

In the center of the floor stood two large, plain, circular pillars that rose to meet the ceiling. Judging by their orientation, Reznak suspected they were positioned exactly beneath the impressions of the missing tombs in the cave above. Carved within each granite column, at about waist level, was an alcove that held a large clay pot. Although his heart was slamming against his ribs and his fingers itched to discover what the earthenware contained, Reznak could not stop his gaze from straying to the most impressive aspect of the room.

Engraved into the walls of the chamber, untouched by time and man, complex pictographs covered the rock face from floor to ceiling, forming a huge, circular, ornamental scroll that looked as fresh as the day it was inscribed.

‘My god…these are cuneiform scripts,’ Goodwin whispered as he stepped to the nearest wall, his fingers shaking around the torch in his hand. ‘They must be—goodness—thousands of years old!’

Though he was not an expert on ancient Sumerian-derived languages, Reznak was nonetheless familiar with the characteristic wedge-shaped writings on the walls; the oldest known Crovir and Bastian texts had been etched in the descendants of the original Sumerian script, namely Assyrian and Aramaic. The fact that the inscriptions looked to be from that period of history only confirmed that these caves were more than likely of immortal origin and design.

‘These may be older than the clay tablets found at Jemdet Nasr,’ said Goodwin in a dazed voice. ‘I think they’re in the original proto-writings that came before the Sumerian language.’ The scientist turned and stared at Reznak. ‘You do realize that this is the archaeological find of the century? We’re going to need an Assyriologist to translate this!’

Impatience replaced awe in Reznak’s mind. He nodded briskly. ‘I know several. Now, let’s look at the pots.’

He had to wait while more scientists brought containers of equipment from the campsite. Everyone who entered the second chamber had to don sterile suits so as to preserve the original environment of the site, a measure Reznak himself had insisted on since the technology had become available.

An hour after they had started to photograph and record the provenance and association of the various elements within the cave, a voice suddenly interrupted the reverent hush that had fallen across the group.

‘What’s that on the floor?’ asked one of the scientists.

They stopped what they were doing and stared at where the woman was pointing. Her boots had disturbed the dirt between the two pillars in the center of the room. A faint impression was apparent between the grains of dust.

‘That looks like another inscription,’ said Goodwin, alarm raising the pitch of his voice. ‘Everybody stand still!’

They froze.

‘Can you see any other markings on the floor around you?’ said Goodwin anxiously.

Several minutes passed while the team inspected the ground. Slowly, one ‘No,’ after another began to echo around the cave.

Goodwin sagged. ‘Good. Step back carefully, Patricia. Let me take a closer look.’

Reznak stood over the professor while the latter lay on the floor and carefully cleared the indentation with a fine brush. It soon became apparent that the floor engraving was not Sumerian, nor was it derived from any of the other cuneiform languages. Instead, it seemed to be a unique, triangular-shaped design that had been chiseled into the epicenter of the space between the pillars. The immortal wondered briefly what had stood in that exact spot in the cave above, where he had observed the small rectangular imprint between the larger tombs. As the details of the motif were slowly revealed, his eyes widened, and a shiver raced down his spine.

When the entire etching finally lay exposed under the glare of the projection lights, Reznak could no longer deny the evidence before his own eyes. Carved into the floor of the cave was a large trishula.

It looked identical to the marking he had discovered on a little girl’s neck exactly three hundred and ten years previously.

For several seconds, the immortal felt too stunned to breathe. When air finally left his lungs in a harsh exhale, Reznak knew his life would never be the same again. In this one day, not only had he finally uncovered one of the greatest secrets in the history of the immortal races, he had also come a step closer to solving the second biggest enigma of his existence to date: the mysterious origin of the little girl who had come to mean so much to him.

Moments later, the contents of the clay pots were finally revealed. Several of the scientists paled and rushed out of the cave, heaving as they did so. The chill coursing through Reznak’s veins turned to ice as he stared inside the ancient containers.

The sun was low in the sky when the Crovir immortal finally emerged from the tunnel and climbed the wall of the canyon. He stopped at the summit of the rise and watched blindly while the orange orb sank toward the purple horizon. A dozen questions swarmed his mind, the most pressing of which concerned the identity of the unknown tomb raiders. However unpleasant the thought, he had to consider the possibility that someone on his team had betrayed him.

Reznak reached for his cell phone and started to dial a number. He hesitated before canceling the call. He needed more information before he could talk to her.

The sooner he got the cuneiform scriptures analyzed, the better. The only way he trusted this to be done in complete secrecy was if he transported the entire second cave and its contents to his main research facility in Europe. It would be a difficult but not impossible task. He was on the phone making the arrangements before he even reached the Jeep.

On the ride back to Aswan, Reznak got a call that would put half of his best-laid plans on hold. Agatha Vellacrus, the leader of the Crovirs, had finally made her move.

The battle to avert a second immortal war had begun.

Though the cave was eventually excavated and moved to Europe, Reznak did not get to the clay pot artifacts and the scriptures on the walls for another fortnight, during which time the entire face of the immortal societies had changed. Following the death of Agatha Vellacrus and her only surviving son and successor at the hands of an army of Bastian and Crovir allies, he found himself in the unenviable position of being promoted to temporary Head of the Order of Crovir Hunters and became, for all intents and purposes, the leader of the Crovirs.

A week after he started his analysis of the data from the cave, Reznak called Victor Dvorsky, one of his closest friends and the new Head of the Order of Bastian Hunters. In between reorganizing their respective immortal societies, the two friends met up in the Crovir’s research lab to discuss the astonishing findings from the Eastern Desert cave. Reznak then asked his Bastian friend for the biggest favor of their relationship to date. After much deliberation, Dvorsky eventually accepted and provided him with the biological sample he had requested: a drop of blood from an extraordinary immortal whose very existence had determined the course and outcome of the recent immortal battle. A few days later, Reznak had the answers he had been looking for.

He called Dvorsky again, this time to arrange a meeting with that very special immortal. Finally, before he left Europe for the States, he spoke to the woman whose existence he sensed was undeniably linked to the oldest secret in immortal history.

‘Hi, Alexa? We need to talk.’

Chapter Two

December 2010.
California. USA.

T
he wintry sun beat relentlessly
upon the barren wasteland of the Mojave Desert as a cold wind coursed through the valleys and canyons of the National Preserve. It shook the Yucca palms and Juniper trees that covered the arid terrain and whistled through clusters of mesquite and creosote bushes, disturbing the lizards and snakes that lazed within the shelter of the scrub brush. As it danced over the vast sand dunes that dominated the landscape, the wind caused a low booming noise to echo against the foothills of the mountains.

Two thousand feet above the desert floor, Alexa King stood motionless on a ledge on the side of a cliff. A short distance to her left, a red-tailed hawk watched her curiously from its rocky perch. The bird of prey seemed strangely unaffected by her presence; it had yet to let out a fierce, rasping cry to indicate its displeasure at her intrusion of its territory.

Feet planted firmly apart and hands hanging loosely at her sides, she stared unblinkingly through her skydiving goggles at the bright landscape before her. Strapped to the back of the white, bespoke, nylon cordura and spandex wing-suit she wore was a small parachute. Beneath it, her custom-made body holster held her two stainless steel Sig Sauer P229 pistols and her twin sai daggers.

The red-tailed hawk cocked its head to the north. A second later, Alexa picked up the low-pitched hum of an approaching aircraft. She glanced at the Timex on her left wrist. The target was on time; from her covert surveillance over the last two weeks, she knew he would have left the Las Vegas airport exactly forty minutes ago on his way to Palm Springs to make the drop. She started the chronograph on the watch, reached behind her back, and slid the sais out of their sheaths.

Half a minute passed. The aircraft’s engine grew louder. Her watch beeped.

Alexa took off toward the edge of the ledge and jumped just as a white Cessna 172 Skyhawk with a red fuselage and tail shot past the curve of the mountain to her right. The aircraft was around five years old and registered to one Abraham McIntyre.

As she dropped toward the desert floor, she spread her arms and legs to open the wings of the suit, then turned and dived after the plane. She had practiced the jump a dozen times in the past few days; there was little margin for error. If the Cessna was traveling at a slower speed than it had the previous four times she had timed it, she would overshoot in front of the propeller and be torn to shreds.