The Burning (40 page)

“Can anyone see this?” she asked.

“See what?” Laura said.

Rachel followed the orb, ten … fifteen paces, until it came to rest, hovering against a flank of rock that angled down from the ceiling of the cave and widened at her feet. She touched the smooth surface as the golden light flashed left and then disappeared behind the rock. She took a step sideways and then, seeing the light appear again, stepped into a black space.

An entrance.

Concealed behind the wall of rock, as if hidden by a theatrical curtain, the entrance would have been impossible to see from the direction in which they had come. They had needed to stop at just the right point to find the angle of the opening.

By luck, or
someone’s
judgement, they had stopped in exactly the right place. Rachel reached her hands out into the darkness and followed the orb, turning left into another chamber. This space was lighter: illuminated from high above by a bigger, domed version of the crystals that had lit their way to this point and which seemed to suck up the ball of light, until it faded to a speck and then was gone. Stalactites dripped overhead and, in the middle of the chamber, surrounded by a spiky fence of stalagmites, stood a rough, stone sarcophagus.

“I’ve found it,” Rachel called. Her voice echoed around the chamber and reverberated back along the passage. “I’ve found the tomb…”

A
board
HOPE
, the atmosphere had grown a lot more tense since the screens had suddenly blacked out. Van der Zee was desperately trying to find out what had gone wrong and the guards watching Adam were even more agitated. Adam did not know how it had been done, but he felt sure that someone in the gang was responsible for jamming the satellite feeds. One of the French boys maybe, or—

Van der Zee slammed his hands against the tabletop and bellowed into the microphone. “What is going on here?”

Adam closed his eyes and saw an image of Duncan beaming, holding up what looked like a mobile phone and waving it about triumphantly. When Adam opened his eyes again, his smile was as broad as Duncan’s had been.

Van der Zee caught the look. “Did you do this?”

Adam said nothing, but kept on smiling, even though the guards on either side of him had taken a step closer.

From the speaker, the voice of the man in New York
echoed through the cabin. “What’s happening at your end, Van der Zee? We’ve lost pictures here; we’ve lost tracking data.”

Van der Zee reached for the microphone. “We’re working on it,” he said.

“Well, work on it faster!”

Van der Zee looked at Adam before waving a hand at the blank screens. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We still have visuals from the helicopter. We’ll still be waiting when your friends get back above ground.” He stared at Adam, letting his words sink in, then he turned back to his desk and hit the switch that connected him to the bridge. “Listen up. They know we’re here, so there’s no point hiding any more. Take us in as close to the shore as possible…”

Adam was rocked back in his seat as the boat began to move and pick up speed. He closed his eyes again and reached out.

He needed to let Rachel know what was happening.

The tomb was by far the plainest of the chambers they had found themselves in. The walls were white and undecorated. Though the roof was high above them, the space itself was narrow and there was barely room for the nine of them to squeeze inside.

“I’m cold,” Morag said. The breath plumed in front of her face as she spoke. Laura moved across to take the girl’s hand, feeling the sudden drop in temperature herself
like a cloak of ice had been thrown round her shoulders.

Ali nodded towards the sarcophagus. It was brightly lit by a beam from the crystalline dome of the roof. The stone had flaked away in places and discoloured over the many centuries, but carved into the side was the unmistakable shape of a Triskellion. “It’s time,” he said.

Gabriel nodded and stepped slowly across.

Rachel watched, still processing the information that had come through from Adam. “Listen … Duncan did his job with the phone,” she said, “but they’re getting closer. They’re on a boat—”

Laura nodded. “It’s the same boat that Adam’s on.” She turned to look at Kate, and was relieved to see a smile and a mouthed “Thank you.”

“We should hurry then,” Gabriel said. He beckoned Rachel across and they both squeezed between giant stalagmites and stepped over to the tomb.

“You OK?” Rachel asked.

“Yeah, fine.”

Rachel nodded. Gabriel looked anything but fine. He was pale suddenly and looked to be fighting something back: rage or tears, Rachel could not be sure. “Only, I remember how you were when they opened the tomb in Triskellion,” she said. “I know it’s upsetting…”

“I’m getting used to it by now,” Gabriel said. “There are a lot of bodies…” He stared down at the sarcophagus for half a minute, and when he turned back to Rachel, his mood had
changed. He looked more determined than ever. “Let’s get this lid off,” he said.

Gabriel and Rachel leant down and began to push. It was not going to be easy. Morag and Duncan rushed forward, squeezed between the stalagmites and lent a hand, quickly followed by the others.

“I think it’s moving!” Laura shouted.

Rachel closed her eyes and pushed with all the strength she had left, grunting with effort as the heavy stone lid inched aside, grinding against the stone beneath it and eventually crashed to the floor on the far side of the coffin, throwing up a thick cloud of dust and grit.

Without needing to be told, everyone waited until Gabriel had leant down and looked inside. Ali hummed the same sad tune he had been whistling since they’d left Mogador. Laura bit her lip, more impatient than she had ever been in her life. They all wiped the dust from their faces before moving forward to see what they had uncovered.

“They’re yellow,” Morag said. She and Duncan were on tiptoes, peering in over the edge of the sarcophagus. “I thought bones were supposed to be white.”

“They are old,” Ali said.

Laura could barely keep the excitement from her voice. “They’re
really
old,” she said. “Older than anything I’ve ever seen.”

It did not look anything like a complete skeleton. What bones there were lay scattered in dirt, yellow and blackened
in parts where they had been broken. A few brown teeth were still attached to half a jawbone, and the top part of the skull lay at one end of the sarcophagus, the ragged hole in the top of it clearly visible. Rachel knew perfectly well how this man had died – she had seen it in her dream and heard it from Ali – but it would have been obvious to anyone seeing what was left thirty thousand years later.

“They didn’t leave much of him…” she said.

“Where is it?” Gabriel asked. He turned and stared at Ali. “It isn’t here.”

Rachel continued to stare down at the remains, but she knew what Gabriel was talking about. It was what they had come for.

The second Triskellion.

She reached up and took hold of the amulet that hung round her neck. The one recovered from beneath the chalk circle in the village that bore its name.

“I am not surprised,” Ali said. “These people were frightened, and superstitious, and they almost certainly knew what it was capable of. They would not have wanted it buried with the bones.”

“So where…?”

“My guess is that they put it somewhere it could not easily be discovered. Somewhere under lock and key.”

Gabriel began looking frantically around. “How do we find it? I need your help.”

“Not a problem,” Ali said. He nodded towards Rachel,
who was still fingering the amulet, then back to the sarcophagus. “We have
both
…”

Rachel saw it straight away. She took the Triskellion from round her neck and stepped across to where the same, three-bladed symbol had been carved into the side of the sarcophagus. She bent down and blew away the dust.

Not a carving. A lock…

“The Traveller hid it! He knew he was digging his own tomb; that they were going to kill him,” Ali said. “And he didn’t want the Triskellion to fall into the wrong hands. So he hid it where nobody would ever find it or be able to use it. But before he died, he left
us
a way in.”

Rachel looked up at Gabriel and he gave her a nod. She pressed the Triskellion into the stone. It was a perfect fit.

“That’s incredible,” Laura said.

Ali smiled. “Wait…”

The Triskellion began to glow and pulse, and from somewhere beneath the coffin, there was a series of clicks and the “
grind”
of something winding down. Everyone froze as the fence of stalagmites suddenly began sinking into the floor of the chamber. When the tip of the last one had disappeared, the light from the Triskellion died and the entire sarcophagus swung silently to one side, as if it were floating on a cushion of air.

There was a small square hole underneath: the entrance to some sort of well.

Rachel, Gabriel and the others inched forward and looked
down to see what the sarcophagus had been hiding. There were steps leading almost vertically down a dimly lit shaft. And at the bottom, a glimpse of something.

Turquoise, shimmering…

“Down there?” Gabriel asked.

“It makes a kind of sense, when you think about it,” Ali said. “It was plucked from the sea thirty thousand years ago.” He smiled. “Now you must do the same.”

R
achel handed the Triskellion to Gabriel. He gave her a tiny nod in acknowledgement. She knew it was down to her. Gabriel had made it clear that everyone had a job to do and she knew, in her heart of hearts, that this was hers.

Kate hugged her daughter close. “You can’t go down there, honey.”

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Rachel said. “I’m a good swimmer.” She kissed her mother. “Besides, it’s pretty dangerous up here too.”

“Inez and Carmen will go with you,” Gabriel said.

The Spanish girls nodded and, having each kissed Gabriel on both cheeks, they joined Rachel, who was staring into the shaft at the water below.

“Please be careful,” Kate said.

Rachel sat on the edge and swung her legs over the opening to the well. She pushed a foot out, feeling for a foothold and, finding one, started to climb down towards
the turquoise water. Inez followed, then Carmen, both treading carefully and holding on to the gnarled surface of the wall. A few steps down and what had appeared from above to be a narrow shaft, opened out into a cavernous, underground grotto. The interior was completely covered in multicoloured layers of coral, worn smooth by the constant dripping of water and soapy to the touch.

Rachel slid on her bottom down the last few steps and stood up on the rim of slippery rock that surrounded the water. She looked into the pool. The water was crystal clear, and ripples distorted the pebbles and rocks that covered the bottom. It could have been one metre deep, or ten.

She looked back up to the entrance, now high over her head. She saw her mother and Gabriel silhouetted by the light that shone above them. She watched them wave, then disappear from view.

“We’re on our own,” she said to Inez and Carmen. She turned back to the water. “It looks deep. I don’t know if I can hold my breath all the way to the bottom.”

“We can help,” Carmen said. “We have been diving since we were babies.”

Inez smiled and touched Rachel on the shoulder. “That’s what we’re here for. To help you breathe.”

Rachel looked from one twin to the other. “It’s now or never,” she said. “Guess we’d better take the plunge.”

Inez and Carmen flexed their arms, then dived into the
lagoon with the grace of porpoises, barely making a sound as they broke the surface of the water.

Rachel watched for a second as they slid down through the water, their black hair flowing behind them.

Then she took a deep breath, held her nose and jumped in after them.

Gabriel had told Laura to make her way back through the network of caves and passages towards the entrance – they would rendezvous on the beach – but she was eager to gather samples and take photos as she might not get another chance. Ali was doing his best to hurry them all along, keen to get Duncan and Morag out. But Kate was reluctant to leave while Rachel was still inside the caves.