Book of Stolen Tales (47 page)

The frame of the first gate had been made of wood. The second was constructed of stone. Half of the set of doors had been ripped clean away. The other side remained intact. Shaheen pointed at the floor and I saw a circular stone door jamb, shaped to allow it to pivot easily. The presence of this type of door indicated a high-status structure. An ancient bronze bolt dangled on the other side. Debris fell in a trail down the next flight of steps.

“Who would have destroyed these doors?” Shaheen asked. “Loretti and Hill?”

“Unlikely. A thick layer of dust has accumulated under the intact door,” I said tersely.

Mancini played his light over the third flight of stairs.

“We must be almost fifty feet underground now,” Shaheen said. “How much farther do you think will this go on?”

“Not until we reach hell, where you belong. If you're counting, we'll probably pass through seven gates.”

Just as I predicted, we entered three more gates, one finished in copper, green with age, and one of bronze. What remained of the fifth was black with tarnish, which meant it had been faced with silver. The flies stayed with us all the way, swarming around our heads, searching for a way to penetrate our suit fabric and nest in our eyes and ears. As we made our way down, my head cleared somewhat and I kept a close eye out for tunnels that might have been excavated off to the side. I couldn't see so much as an alcove, nor any culverts to drain away water flow.

It was extremely dry. No sign of water runoff or drips from the ceiling. In ancient times, this close to the canal and with periodic, if slight, rainfalls, there would have been a good deal of moisture underground. The early builders must have constructed the tunnel we'd first shimmied through to drain water away from the site much closer to the surface. The fact that it was so dry now meant their engineering still operated effectively.

Each foot we dropped, a greater and greater pressure descended on me. The murky surroundings and progression of ominous chimeras covering the walls added to my fear. I picked up the tones of a flute again, very faintly. Mesmerizing music with all the joy stripped out of it. Each step I took felt blacker and I knew I was indeed on a one-way road. There was no way I was getting out. Shaheen would execute me once we reached the end, of that much I was certain. His betrayal cut me so deeply I could still barely comprehend it.

Shaheen faced life-threatening conditions all the time. If you confronted your fears every day on your job, you found a way to cope. He seemed able to meet every setback or precarious situation with some wisecrack as if he were indestructible and the sheer force of his personality would see him through. And remembering what he'd endured growing up, I thought he wasn't far wrong. You could either take life on the chin or be swamped by it. Early on, he'd chosen the former.

His ability to stare down adversity had also warped his human side. There were only so many times you could kill, even to survive, before it permanently altered your soul. Mancini had obviously found a way to get through to him.

At the seventh gate the stairs bottomed out to a flat, square platform. Here, small polychrome terracotta cones had been applied to the gateway wall to produce remarkable geometric mosaic designs, and the gateway doors, completely intact, stopped even my three opponents in their tracks. The doors were covered with sheets of hammered gold.

On the right-hand wall, early craftsmen had painted an image of a winged demon, Namtar, guardian of the gate to the throne room I was sure lay just beyond the doors. Ben set his jacklight on the floor and in the odd configuration of light, the demon's form appeared to move. Mancini motioned to Shaheen. In a recess below the image of Namtar sat a collection of around two dozen stone rings identical to the weight Alessio had stolen from Renwick.

Mancini bent down and scrutinized them. He glanced up at Shaheen and said something on their private communication channel.

This was where the scientists had found the pathogen, contained within the ancient collection of spindle whorls. I hoped the fungus was still firmly locked inside them.

Shaheen ordered me to sit with my back against the wall. I refused. What difference did it make? I had little time left anyway. In my throat, I could feel my heart beating raggedly. They planned to leave my body here, where it would never be found.

“Load them up and for God's sake let's get out of here,” Shaheen said to Ben without taking his eyes off me. Ben shrugged off his backpack and unzipped the flap. Pulling on an extra pair of gloves, he crouched down and began dumping the weights into a polyethylene bag inside the pack.

Mancini went over to the doors and ran his hands across the gold surface. He put his head against one of the panels. I imagined he was hearing the same music I could detect, barely audible through my helmet.

While Mancini's attention was distracted by the doors, Shaheen motioned with his gun again for me to get down. The hell with that. I'd run out of options, I knew, but I could still run for it. I eyed the opening we'd just come through and tried to gauge whether I could sprint up the stairs before Shaheen fired off a round. The fear curdling my gut told me otherwise.

Shaheen's eyes shifted. Almost as if he were directing me toward the stairs. Engrossed in his examination of the doors, Mancini had his back to us. In a moment of blinding joy, I understood.

It was not me he planned to execute.

I crept over to the stairway and Shaheen gave me a slight nod. Still oblivious, Mancini pressed against the doors. The thin melody of pipes suddenly swelled to a deafening wail. Ben dropped his knapsack and stared at Mancini in alarm. Mancini put his palms flat against the doors and pushed with all his might. There was a loud click. He braced his shoulder to the golden surfaces and shoved again.

The doors burst open like plywood shutters breached in a hurricane.

Forty-Nine

M
ancini's light radiated off a huge room, every surface a shimmering, translucent blue. A blue so iridescent it mimicked the shafts of sunlight underneath a tropical sea. Every part of the interior—floor, walls, ceiling—was fashioned from sheets of the royal gemstone, lapis lazuli.

Against the back wall were two immense thrones of inlaid ivory and hammered gold. They were reflected, gold on blue, in the mirror-like walls and floor. On the wall behind the thrones mosaic tiles had been used to create the life-size image of a white horse.

In the midst of this splendor, the protracted disintegration of thousands of dead creatures stunned us into silence. Cruel hooks hung from the ceiling and on some of these rib cages still swung, the cartilage having dried and stuck like glue. The rest of the bones, long ago detached, had fallen to the floor. They'd been severely damaged—skulls flattened, long bones snapped in half, others crushed beyond recognition. They lay in cascading heaps reflected in the ceiling and blue walls rising above them. We stared at the sight. Khalid`s haunting reference to the jinn, the desert demon who feasted on rotting flesh, came back to me.

Mancini and Ben ventured through the doors and then halted as if they'd hit an invisible wall. Shaheen raised his gun again but dropped it and put his hands to his head. Mancini tore offhis breathing mask and flailed his hands as if to ward offsome threat. His voice broke and I realized he was crying. Ben ripped his mask off, jammed his hands over his ears, and screamed.

A shadow grew on the back wall, not phantom gray but deep maroon, the color of a spreading bloodstain. Amorphous at first, the shadow enlarged and split into two. The shapes began to take form.

One of them grew an abbreviated snout that widened into a viper's head with dark red pits for nostrils. Its body took on the thick muscular form of a predator; wings sprouted from its shoulders and raptor's claws curled out from its back feet. It wagged its snake head back and forth, like a cobra hypnotizing its prey. The image of Nergal.

The other curved into the hour-glass shape of a woman with horns on her spiky head and talons for feet, the sharp killing tools of the owl: Ereshkigal.

The things had a ponderous, dull quality and appeared to be without consciousness as we would understand it. Primordial figures from a time much deeper in history, before humans took their first great journey from Africa to Arabia.

None of the other men moved, either overcome by extreme fear or locked into paralysis as I'd been in my struggles with Alessio. But as if I had passed through Hades and come out the other side, the apparitions hadn't affected me.

The shadow forms began to advance sluggishly, like newborn animals taking their first wobbly steps. The viper head raised and locked eyes with me. I turned away from its gaze and caught Shaheen just as he began to topple over. Wrapping my arms around his torso, I hauled him back across the threshold. The shadow figures reached Ben and Mancini and tore away at their white suits. The viper's head slowly lowered onto Mancini's neck.

I knew fear would soon paralyze me, whether or not the spirits embraced me too. Shaheen's body, although thin, was dead weight and I felt like I was heaving a ten-ton truck up each riser. My mind kept focusing on what was coming behind me. I tried to shut those thoughts down, summoning every ounce of my strength to drag him up to the sixth gateway. If being hauled over the mud bricks hurt him he didn't react. I screamed his name but got no response. He'd pulled off his helmet in the throne room and the flies clustered around his face and neck. I swatted them with my free hand. They swarmed again the second I took my hand away.

Dragging him slowed me down too much. I propped him up against the wall and maneuvered his body over my shoulder like a sack of coal. My ascent was faster but my heart beat so hard with the effort I thought it would burst. I could still make my left arm work—for how long I didn't know as it was starting to go numb. My breath came in huge gasps and whatever light spilled out from the sacred chamber had all but disappeared. I had to feel my way up the steps in blackness.

As I passed the fifth gate and started the next climb I stumbled and lost my footing. Shaheen slid from my grasp and fell. Precious minutes slipped away as I painstakingly shifted him into a sitting position against the wall and hauled him over my shoulder again. I broke out into a cold sweat. I didn't see how I could make it to the top. And yet I made it through the next two gates.

I'd just reached the second gate when I felt what seemed like a gentle tug, as if Shaheen was being pulled off me. I staggered backward. If I'd been on the stairs I would have fallen again. The flies flew off Shaheen's face in a furious buzz.

Despite my heavy burden I bent and squeezed through the opening in the door and labored toward the next steps. The sense of pulling, of some powerful force reaching for Shaheen, grew stronger. At the same time I felt faint. It took all my strength to maintain my balance. My climb slowed almost to a crawl. I was weakening quickly and there was nothing I could do about it.

A realization flashed through me. The force I'd felt wasn't pulling Shaheen away; rather, it was invasive, flooding into him,
consuming
him. His body convulsed. I threw him through the next door.

The convulsions that wracked his body stopped while leaving his whole body rigid. He groaned. One step at a time now. Each one was agony. At the head of the stair we'd left a light behind to show the way and I could finally see the last gate. Tantalizingly close. But I was no match for the hungry force behind me. Deep pressure like a tidal wave bearing down forced me to stop.

I took Shaheen's second gun and crawled up the remaining steps. As I reached the door I turned and aimed high, past Shaheen, firing off a round. I prayed Ali would somehow hear it and that the earthen roof over the stair would suffer most of the damage, not the tunnel ahead of us. The shots reverberated in the enclosed space as if the blast had gone off inside my head. Mud brick and clods of earth split from the staircase roof, tumbling into the gap. I scrambled back down and threw myself on top of Shaheen, holding my breath.

The answer came moments later. Ali called out. I could hear him only faintly because I still had my helmet on. Soon he came into view. He took one look at Shaheen and grasped him under his arms. With him pulling and me pushing we got Shaheen through the gap and into the tunnel. My ear caught the faint sound of water rushing somewhere below.

By the time we reached the top, Shaheen was coming around. I told Ali that Mancini and Ben were dead. Light rain sprinkled down as we emerged from the tunnel. Soldiers waited for us topside, summoned by Ali as soon as Mancini had entered the tunnel. A Black Hawk stood by. Shaheen's eyes flickered open when he felt the cool drops on his face. He managed a few words and tried to give me the high sign. He said he wanted to walk on his own but a couple of the soldiers picked him up and rushed him into the helicopter. The rain had turned the site to rusty muck. The helicopter rose, its rotors deafening, whipping mud across the mound.