Threshold (34 page)

Queen looked up in time to see a shower of long, sharp darts fall from the ceiling, falling at her like a hundred miniature spears.

FIFTY

Wiltshire, England

THE SMALL FLASHLIGHTS
they carried did little to light the deep craggy tunnel, but King and Alexander moved quickly despite the low light. If Richard Ridley was at the end of the tunnel, they wanted to catch him by surprise. If they didn’t it might mean battling one of his golems or oversized sandfish.

Or several.

Their best bet was to knock him unconscious and shut his mouth before he knew they were there. Not knowing what waited for them at the end of the tunnel made King apprehensive, but he fought against the feeling with the knowledge that he had beat Ridley before, and the man beside him had killed the legendary Hydra on his own—a creature that took the entire Chess Team and Alexander’s aid to defeat in the present day. Having his handgun at the ready eased his nerves, too. Upon seeing Ridley, who could not die, he didn’t need to sneak up and knock the man unconscious; shooting him in the head until his mouth was bound would work just as well and provide some catharsis.

The tunnel walls were rough at first, loose soil had been dug away and pushed out through the entrance. Stone had been crushed. It was a giant burrow. But just fifty feet in the scene changed. The tunnel became square and gray. Man-made. Old.

“Merlin was a busy man,” Alexander said.

“You buy that story?” King asked.

Alexander paused and gave King a lopsided smile that said:
Remember who you’re talking to.

“Right,” King said. “If it’s possible Stonehenge was created by Merlin, what would he have buried beneath it?”

“Given Ridley’s interest, I would assume some form of ancient knowledge regarding the mother tongue. In what form, I can only guess.”

King didn’t like guessing, or the perpetual feeling of being two steps behind, which he felt in regard to Ridley and Alexander. He lacked a complete picture of both men’s motivations, and that disturbed him.

They paused at the change in tunnel structure.

King moved his light over the wall, which was made from lines of giant rectangular blue-tinged stones. “Its bluestone,” King said. “Same as many of the henge stones. You think this runs all the way to Stonehenge? Two miles?”

“It seems likely. Perhaps a symbolic journey to the underworld.”

“Or literal,” King said as he started moving forward.

“Let’s hope not,” Alexander replied, breaking out into a quick jog.

King wasn’t sure if Alexander’s reply was serious or an attempt at humor, but followed without a word. He wasn’t about to look like a fool by asking. The two ran in the near darkness, dimming their flashlights with their hands as much as possible to conceal their approach.

They ran blindly, unable to see or hear anything ahead. When King judged they’d run almost the entire two miles, he slowed. “Were almost under Stonehenge,” he whispered.

They walked a short distance more with their flashlights off and then stopped to listen. All was quiet. They continued forward in darkness, hands on the tunnel walls for balance and direction. Then the walls fell away on both sides.

After what felt like a lifetime of quiet breathing and listening, King flicked on his flashlight. He scanned it back and forth, handgun in hand, looking for a target. He found nothing to shoot. The circular space was devoid of living or animated targets, but it held plenty of fascinating finds. The floor was covered in two-foot-tall vertical stone poles that looked like the stumps of a petrified forest. They were arranged in a classic glyph pattern with some rings of pillars being larger than others. The room was constructed entirely of bluestone. A large sarcophagus sat at the middle of the room, encircled by rings of stone.

King and Alexander slowly made their way through the circles, panning their lights around the room. Closer to the sarcophagus, King could see that the lid had been slid away. It sat shattered on the floor on the far side. Their flashlights revealed a body within.

The body was wrapped in tight linens from head to toe. Gathered around it were gold objects and sealed vessels. Its face, partially exposed by time’s rot still held remnants of a white beard.

King shook his head. “It looks—”

“Egyptian,” Alexander finished.

“Is that possible?”

“Anything is possible. It’s likely this man fled Egypt with knowledge of the mother tongue. Seeking to start his own empire, he used golems to create this monument, just as the people he left behind in Eygpt were doing to create the pyramids.”

King looked closely at the man’s face, the bone structure and hair. “He doesn’t look Egyptian. Or Arabian for that matter.”

“That’s because he’s not.”

King looked at Alexander, who looked extremely unhappy.

“He’s Jewish.”

“You don’t think this is…”

“Moses? No. But possibly a member of the exodus. Someone close enough to Moses to pick up some of the mother tongue. And someone who would have heard about the pyramids, but never saw them.”

“Why’s that?” King asked.

“The original generation that fled into the desert is said to have all died out during their forty-year migration. Even Moses didn’t enter the Promised Land. He only saw it from a distance before dying. Whoever this man was, he knew about the great monuments constructed by the golems, but knew nothing of their architecture.” Alexander took the man’s hands, which were bent open, as though in prayer, and turned them inward. They moved with ease until one overlapped the other.

“And though I cannot tell you who this man was, I can tell you who he likely became.”

King came to the same conclusion before Alexander could voice it. “Merlin.”

“Which is a shame,” Alexander said. He saw King’s confusion and explained. “There will be no way to hide this discovery. Within hours, the site will be swarming with British authorities. Within months, everything that can be carted away will be. And the body of this man, buried in peace for thousands of years, will be carted off to a museum. He will be tested, dissected, and eventually put on display. Millions will flock to see the body of the great Merlin, whose dying wish had been to be buried in the tomb he created, with his most cherished possessions … including the one that was stolen.”

“Stolen?” King said. “Something is missing.”

Alexander removed his hands from the body’s hands. They hovered in the air, clutching an invisible object. “His hands were pried open. Whatever he was holding is gone. And the thieves with it.”

“Damnit,” King said. Ridley seemed to be one step ahead of them at all times, like he knew where they were. King’s eyes widened at the revelation. “He knows we’re here.”

A series of rumbles from above shook the chamber. Dust fell through the cracks of the bluestone ceiling. If it collapsed they would be crushed to paste. But it wasn’t the ceiling of the chamber that collapsed. It was the tunnel. King turned toward the tunnel, aiming his flashlight down its throat. In the distance he saw a wave of debris falling from the roof and filling the void beneath. The tunnel was being packed tight from above.

Tons of bluestone, bedrock, and soil filled the tunnel and spilled into the burial chamber, stopping at their feet as though held at bay by the ancient powers of Merlin. King scanned the tunnel entrance. It was packed tight. He turned around the room, searching the walls for some sign of an exit. He found none.

They were trapped. Buried alive one hundred feet beneath Stonehenge.

FIFTY-ONE

El Mirador, Guatemala

A CRUSHING WEIGHT
fell on top of Queen, knocking her to her knees. But there were no pinpricks of pain that she’d expected to feel from the shower of trap-triggered needles falling from the ceiling. She rolled away and stood. When she turned around she saw Bishop, hunched over in pain. Close to a hundred needles stuck out of his back like porcupine quills.

Bishop grunted and fell to one knee. “Poison,” he said through gritted teeth. With the number they were doing to Bishop’s body, Queen had no doubt she’d already be dead on the floor. He’d saved her life.

Quickly and carefully, Knight and Queen plucked the darts from Bishop’s back. As the last dart came out, Bishop stood tall and shook his head; other than a poncho full of pencil eraser–sized holes, he was no worse for wear.

“I don’t understand why this trap hadn’t been marked,” Knight said, looking over one of the poison-tipped needles that now held a thin coat of Bishop’s blood on its black tip. “Hudson doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to wait on exploring a find like this.”

Queen saw the answer lying on the floor in an alcove obscured by loose stones—a bright orange “danger” sign featuring a decal of a man bending forward, arms up, and a shower of needles falling from above. She pointed to it. “I think someone down here was covering their back.”

She knelt down by the stone that triggered the trap and turned on a small pocket flashlight. A faint yellow residue, invisible to anyone wearing night vision goggles rimmed the stone. “A chalk outline was wiped away. We’re going to have to be more careful.”

“Or I can go first,” Bishop said, stepping over the marked stone.

“Or that,” Queen said, extinguishing her flashlight and following a few steps behind.

They successfully passed another trap without incident, descending the downward spiraling tunnel for another two minutes. Bishop stopped when his view of the tunnel brightened. There was an artificial light source ahead.

After removing their goggles, the team inched forward silently. The tunnel exit ahead was bright with light. They would be exposed if they got too close. Being the stealthiest, Knight went first, sliding forward on his stomach. With his eyes scouring the floor for signs of wiped away chalk it took him a few minutes to cover the distance in silence, but when he reached the tunnel exit his patience and gentle movements were rewarded.

The tunnel exited to a large circular chamber, fifty feet in diameter. The space was lit by a bright electric lantern, which rested atop a flat, stone altar top. Vertical stripes of black char rose up along the walls above a circle of small holes that would have held torches. A stone staircase decorated with the carved faces of the damned descended to a stone platform that encircled a pit at the center of the chamber. Four sections of the light gray stone surrounding the pit were stained dark brown with ancient blood. Funnels carved into the stone would have directed the flow into the pit, which looked like an ancient throat.

Here, like the tunnels above, the walls were covered in carvings, but between several murals was what looked like writing. In some ways it was similar to Sumerian cuneiform, but more stylized.

Seeing nobody present in the chamber, Knight waved the others to join him. When they arrived he pointed to the one thing that revealed where their quarry had gone—a rope. Tied to the five-foot-tall altar that held the lantern, a rope hung over the edge of the pit. Glowing from deep within the pit was a second light source, and a voice.

The words were hard to make out, but the deep, bass-filled voice was unmistakable. Ridley was at the bottom of the pit.

Queen grinned. He was right where they wanted him. Trapped, helpless, and at their mercy. One cut of the rope would leave him stranded for an eternity, like the Hydra from whom he stole his regenerative abilities.

They descended the steps and peeked over the edge. Were it lit solely from above it would have appeared bottomless, but Ridley’s light below revealed the bottom some two hundred feet down. Despite the distance, the sea of bones at the bottom was easy to make out. Ridley stood nearly waist deep in them, searching through them like a kid with an overfull toybox. In one hand he held a small digital recorder.

They watched as he picked up a small chunk of tablet and read off the words, which sounded strangely foreign, but felt familiar. When he was done he smashed the tablet against the stone wall.

Knight remembered that along with human and animal victims sacrificed to the gods, the Mayan also sacrificed their prized possessions including gold, silver, jewels, and codices.
He’s collecting the ancient language written on the codices and then destroying them,
Knight thought. He drew his knife, held it against the rope, and nodded to the others.