Heart's Desire (25 page)

*We aren't lying,* Jolinar said. *We're just not telling the whole truth.*

*There's not that much difference right now,* Rosha said.

*Then why did you?*

*Because you're not ready to tell him yet,* Rosha said. *And you come first.*

*The mission comes first,* Jolinar said.

*Sometimes the mission is fixing what's broken,* Rosha said. *Because we still need to use it.* Jolinar started to set the next crystal into place and then realized it was clouded, its depths streaked with burns. She reached for another one instead. It wouldn't fit as well, but she could make it serve—

“Hey, Tau'ri!” Keret said, shaking her. “What's the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” Sam said, trying to clear her head. The memory had been so vivid. Including what she needed to do. “We need to re-route the power away from these three crystals, so that I can switch this one and this one without shorting anything else out. It looks like I'm going to need to disconnect this wire and reconnect it.”

“Use the switches,” Keret said. “Four open, six closed, nine open, eleven open.”

Now that Sam looked closely, she could see the markings on the switches. “I can't read your numbers.”

Keret swore under his breath. “Let me up there,” he said, and Sam leaned heavily on her improvised rope harness as Keret scaled the pillar himself. He flipped switches swiftly. “Move them fast.”

Sam didn't need to be told that twice. She switched out the crystals as fast as she dared with tired fingers. She could see how to construct the bridge, and as soon as she set the last crystal into place, she was sure it was working.

“Hang onto something,” she said, and adjusted the power, the play of light through the crystals shifting as she did. She felt the momentary disorientation of weightlessness, and worked to get her feet under her as the gravity reversed itself.

The ropes binding her to the pillar jerked painfully as her weight returned, and she disentangled herself as fast as she could. She leaned across a bank of controls to shout into the mouthpiece of the speaking tube. “Sir! Are you all right?”

There was a pause long enough for her to start worrying, and then Jack said, more reflectively than anything else, “Ouch!”

“Sorry, sir!”

“I think we've leveled off,” Jack said. “I'm going to try to bring us down using the elevators. If you're thinking about making us all weigh twice as much as we should right now, please just… don't, all right?”

“Understood, sir!”

“You're both madmen,” Keret said.

“We're just doing our job,” Sam said, and smiled when he shook his head in disbelief.

“M
ajor Carter? Please respond.”

Daniel waved Teal'c silent hurriedly at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Teal'c silenced the radio immediately and thrust it back into its hiding place as Reba came clattering down the stairs from above. She pushed back a heavy wool hood, shaking snow from her hair, but she looked satisfied.

“The worst of the storm is going south of us,” she said. “You'd best come up. If what the tablets say is true, we'll be coming in sight of the ruins soon.”

Daniel waited while she unlocked the cargo cage door, slipping out with an apologetic shrug at Teal'c.

“Here,” she said, thrusting a heavy woolen blanket at him. “You're no use to me if you freeze.”

He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders like a serape and followed her up to the deck. It was bitingly cold above, the sun just barely up and still shaded from them by the highest peaks.

“The ruins will be fairly high up the mountainside,” Daniel said, and hoped that he was right. He had felt sure of his translation at first, but an edge of doubt was beginning to creep in. He was all too aware that if he was back at the SGC, there were a number of words he would have wanted to compare to their use in other sources, just to see if in context
—

“So you say,” Reba said, but then she shrugged. “Well, at least that means there's less chance of them being somebody's farm by now.”

“I haven't seen many settlements in this area,” Daniel said.

“You've been all snug and warm below, so you haven't seen much,” Reba said. “There are a few, sheep farmers and crop farmers. There's not such a thing as a town this side of the High Ridge, though, and precious few trails that are passable most of the year. A lot of people think twice about a life where they've got no way on or off their farm other than when the High King bothers to send an airship.”

“It sounds like it was a fairly big installation,” Daniel said. He leaned out to see over the rail, and then snatched his hands back when the cold metal bit like ice. “I don't suppose I could have my gloves back?”

“I think Tami's using them. Aren't you?” she called cheerfully to the man at the helm, who turned to reveal a face blotched with what looked like burn scars. Frostbite, more likely, Daniel thought, and was glad they hadn't tried to escape the ship somewhere that would have meant a long hike in this weather.

“Sorry,” the man said without sounding it, holding up one hand to show off one of Daniel's gloves. “But I suppose I could be making it a trade.” He pulled a pair of rough woolen mittens from his pocket and tossed them in Daniel's direction, but Reba fielded them neatly out of the air.

“You're getting soft, Tami,” Reba said, starting to pocket them herself.

“If you expect me to explore the ruins, it would help if I could take my hands out of my pockets,” Daniel said.

Reba shook her head. “I'm still not running a guesthouse here,” she said, but she handed the mittens over. They were threadbare and less than clean, but Daniel slipped them on anyway. He leaned out over the rail again. “How close are we?”

Reba strode forward, shouldering Tami aside to squint at the instruments. “Close,” she said. She shaded her eyes with her hand as they turned east, sailing through the rocky gap between two towering peaks. “See there, that pass?”

“I wouldn't call that a pass,” Daniel said. The peaks she was pointing out were joined by a rocky saddle of land higher than Daniel felt any reasonable person would want to climb to cross between them.

“Call it a ridge, then, or what you like, but that's where your ruins are supposed to sit.” Reba frowned. “I can't see anything like buildings from here.”

“We're still pretty far off. And they may well have been overgrown, or even covered over by earth and shifting rocks.”

“In which case what are we supposed to do?”

Daniel couldn't help sounding a bit exasperated. “Dig. You'd be amazed how few fabulous ancient treasures are just sitting around in exposed buildings with nice wide doorways, waiting for people to walk in and pick them up.”

“I suppose treasure hunting is your livelihood,” Reba said.

“It used to be, anyway,” Daniel said. “Not treasure hunting, exactly, but looking for the remains of past civilizations.” He shook his head. “These days I spend more time fighting the Goa'uld.”

“Fighting the gods seems a remarkably pointless effort,” Reba said.

“I have days when I think so, too, but… okay, there, what is that?” He shaded his own eyes, trying to make sense of the shapes on the high ridge.

 
“Rock,” Reba said. “Rock and more rock, it looks like to me.”

They were drifting closer, slower now than any airplane would travel, and angling to come up parallel to the ridge. He could see how broken the ground was now, a series of deep ravines and sharp shelves of rock splitting the land into jagged stair-steps.

“It should be here,” he said. The only growing things were some patches of low, tangled evergreen, not big enough to hide the shape of a building.

“Should isn't good enough,” Reba said, drawing her zat. Daniel scoured the rock with his eyes, willing something other than broken rock to appear.

“Wait, there!”

Reba's mouth tightened as if she suspected him of stalling for time, but she followed his gaze to the unmistakably man-made curve of a tumbled stone wall. It was near the top of the ridge, shielding anything beyond it from view.

“Can you take us over the top?”

Reba frowned. “I could, but I won't. We're in the lee of the wind on this side, and we may as well stay here as cross the ridge and get battered against the rocks on the other side.” She pointed to a broad shelf of rock some distance below the wall's curve. “We'll drive an anchor there and tie up.”

“How are you planning to get up the ridge?”

Reba looked at him sideways. “Climb,” she said.

To Daniel's relief, while it was a steep climb up the rocks, there were only a few places where he could find no obvious way upward. In several places, they found the remains of stairways cut into the rock, although they were broken and often led from one gaping crack in the rocks to another. Each time Daniel had to admit he saw no way up, Reba shook her head and took the lead, scrambling up sheer rock faces with no apparent concern for the possibility of falling and then tossing him down a rope.

By the time they reached the ruins of the wall, his shoulders were aching and he could feel the beginnings of a headache threatening from the exertion at this altitude. He was grateful that he'd spent the last couple of years in Colorado Springs, rather than somewhere nearer sea level. Like Sha're's home on Abydos, he caught himself thinking, and pushed the thought ruthlessly away. This was no time for distractions.

He hauled himself over the wall and sat down on it for a moment, considering the view beyond. There had clearly once been an extensive complex of buildings here, although many of them had been tumbled as the earth shifted. The smooth facades and the remains of sweeping pillars were nothing like the architecture he'd seen in the capital.

“This definitely looks Ancient,” Daniel said.

Reba gave him an impatient look, coiling her rope and hooking it to her belt. “Find the device.”

The tablets had implied that the temple complex was laid out in a grid, but it was hard to make out the original lines now. He slid down from the wall and started making his way down the steep hillside. Beyond the lowest wall of the complex, the ground dropped off precipitously, which made climbing downhill toward it a little dizzying even though it was a good distance below him.

“Do you know where it is, or not?”

“I'm looking,” Daniel said. The wind was worse on this side of the ridge, scouring grains of blowing snow against his face, although at least now that he wasn't having to use both hands to climb, he could catch at the ends of the wool blanket he was wrapped in when they whipped loose and threatened to snatch the thing off him entirely.

“What are you looking for?”

He scuffed at the rock with his toe, trying to determine whether he was looking at a deliberately created path or simply the results of the fracturing of the rock. “I'm trying to see how this place was originally laid out.”

“Because?”

“Because I need to know that to find what we're looking for. I don't tell you how to fly your ship.” He scrambled down a little further, and then slid faster than he meant to down the steep slope, catching himself on the edge of a fallen slab.

Reba tossed him the end of her rope wordlessly, and he caught it and knotted it carefully around his waist. He'd gotten used to using his tac vest for that, which was strange when he thought about it. He felt naked now without the vest, and without the magpie collection of gear he packed for the field, an ultimately doomed but still often useful attempt to prepare for every possible circumstance.

“It should be…” He slid down another rocky slope, and caught himself before he toppled over the edge of a deep ravine that split what he thought had once been some kind of courtyard.

“Do we have to cross this?” Reba said, weighing the rope in her hand as if judging whether any of the rocks on the other side were solid enough to anchor it securely.