CHAPTER
TEN
François looked down the pit into darkness. He saw and heard no sign of motion or life. Outside the palace grounds the rain continued, with occasional flashes of lightning. Water trickled down the sides of the well.
“It’s possible this is not a great idea,” Marty said. “I want to acknowledge that sometimes you’ve had great ideas. This might not be one of those times.”
“Are you kidding me?” François asked. “We want to know where the City of Gods on Earth is and where the other half of the Fleet of the End of the World went to, and you’re telling me there’s an actual map, and now you don’t want to go.”
“That’s all true,” Marty acknowledged, “but I don’t understand why you need to see this map for yourself. I can picture it in my head easily and I’ve drawn you its likeness in the dirt.”
François waved dismissively at the words. “I need to see this with my own eyes.”
Marty shook his head. “You’re also glossing over that there are leathery-skinned demon-men down there who apparently eat humans.”
“They’re not demons,” François said. “We were very clear with the Neshili about that. They’re people.”
“We told the Neshili that so they wouldn’t panic,” Surjan said.
“Right.” François tested the rope, still anchored to the tripod he had built. “And I don’t want you to panic when we go down there, either.”
Marty harrumphed.
The three men stood above the same well Marty and Surjan had gone into before. Lowanna and Gunther were there too, as well as four of the palace warriors with their long spears and atlatls. One of the warriors kept contriving reasons to be standing beside Lowanna—to hand her small objects or clear her way—and Marty looked peevish about it.
François wasn’t sure where Kareem was.
“You know right where we need to go, right?” François asked.
“We know,” Surjan said.
“So, we run in”—François patted the pocket of his tunic—“I copy what I need to from the map with this charcoal and bit of linen, and then we come right back up.”
“What do you need to copy from the map?” Marty asked.
“I won’t know until I see it,” François said. “At worst, all of it.”
Surjan laughed. “You really are used to getting your way.”
“I’ve got a feeling about this.” François shrugged. “Look, don’t we agree that we want this data that the Neshili is talking about? We need to understand more about these things down below. And besides, the Grays are probably asleep during the day. And if not, they’re probably leery of us after what they got at the Sacred Grove.”
“Or really angry with us.” Marty ran his fingers through his hair and turned to one of the warriors. “You, what’s your name? Sharpie?”
“Sharrum,” the warrior said.
“You come with us,” Marty said. “Bring your three men.”
“But the lady Lowanna—” the warrior objected.
“Lowanna is indeed a lady,” Marty said, his nostrils flaring. “She is also a sorceress who could blast you to jelly with a word. She will be fine without your assistance.”
Lowanna crossed her arms and cocked her hips. “True.”
Sharrum looked to Surjan in appeal, and Surjan nodded his agreement with the plan.
The Neshili warriors went down first, two at a time, the second man holding torches to light the chamber below. When they pronounced the landing safe, the three party members quickly followed. François came last, carrying a rectangular board under his arm.
The area below the palace had the look of grand subway chambers, the sort that are sometimes sealed off when not used, only to be rediscovered decades later. It also had the aspect of a maze, shot through with passageways launching off in all directions. As they walked quickly through the passages, they passed pits suggesting levels farther down. Water flowed in streams across every level surface and down many of the walls.
Maybe the ecological crisis that was forcing the Grays into action was as simple as a flood? Maybe the right metaphor wasn’t Eve eating the fruit, it was Noah. The Grays needed an ark.
François stayed alert for signs they were being followed, but he knew that Surjan, with his heightened senses, or maybe the Neshili warriors, with their long experience, would hear signs of approaching enemies or predators long before he would.
Finally, they squeezed through a ragged corkscrew crack that had opened into a large fireplace, and dropped into a cube-shaped room.
The water here was knee-deep.
A warrior named Piyam, a young man with a round face but a pointed chin, held two torches high. Marty, Surjan, and the other three Neshili men stood watch, while François looked at the map on the wall, his heart racing.
“Piri Reis,” he said, the name coming to him.
“Is that a place?” Marty asked.
“It’s a man.” François wrapped the linen around his piece of wood and began sketching what he saw. “A Turkish admiral. And he had this map of the world made, oh, along about the time of King Henry VIII. And he seems to have been copying from earlier maps, and his map was surprisingly accurate considering this was a time before the Europeans had crossed the oceans. Or at least before Columbus.”
“You’re not saying this map was made by a Turkish admiral,” Surjan said.
“I’m saying the maps Reis copied from had some relationship to this map,” François said. “Maybe his maps were copies of this one. Or maybe they came from a common original.”
“A map made by some admiral of the City of the Gods,” Surjan mused.
“Cuba’s lying the wrong way,” Marty pointed out.
“If that’s Cuba. Piri Reis copied from earlier maps, so there’s the interesting possibility that he was copying from maps that were really old, and maybe his map shows at least some of the landmasses as they were, not in 1500 C.E., but as they were during, say, the last ice age.”
“Sounds like pseudohistory to me,” Marty said. “Tinfoil hat stuff.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” François decided to forego sketching in the windrose lines and focused on the coastlines, including the strange little blotches here and there. “And yet, some people think the map shows the coast of Antarctica, free of ice. So, how did he pull that off?”
“I’ll bet you a million dollars right now that most scholars in the year 2021 do not believe the map shows the Antarctic coast, free of ice.”
“You don’t have a million dollars, Marty,” François said. “But you’d be right. Of course. Still, there’s that weird, wrong-shaped Cuba. How hard is it to get the shape of Cuba right? And for that matter, why is it only one island? It looks for all the world like Cuba and Hispaniola have been swallowed up by some larger landmass.” He paused. “The Bimini Road.”
Marty sighed. “I’m afraid to ask what that is.”
“I don’t want to hurry the delicate artistry of the mapmaking,” Surjan growled, “but I would like it to go faster.”
“Okay,” François said, “I will adopt the language of your unimaginative, consensus-enforcing, guild-patrolling, jargon-speaking academics.”
“Remember that I hate academics myself,” Marty said. “I got thrown out of that guild after I punched one of them.”
“Ah, right.” François resumed drawing. “In that case, what those dumb bastards would say is that the Bimini Road is not a megalithic structure off Bimini Island in the Bahamas, but a natural rock shelf that just happens to look like a megalithic structure.”
“Wait,” Marty said. “You’re telling me . . .”
“The rock shelf that protects the bay,” François said. “We should go look at it closely, when we have a chance. It might be the Bimini Road. In which case, we know exactly where we are. We’re on Bimini Island, though of course it’s part of a larger landmass. Maybe the larger landmass that somehow survived onto Piri Reis’s map.”
“The Neshili use atlatls,” Marty said. “That doesn’t prove anything, but it’s an extremely old technology.”
“So, these people . . .” Surjan said, switching to English. “Where are they from?”
“Let’s not repeat Columbus’s mistake.” François spoke in English, too, and then snickered. “They’re not Indians, Surjan. I don’t know. Do they look Asian or Austronesian to you?”
“Their own claim is that they come from the east,” Marty said.
“They also say they come from outer space, and—” Surjan paused as he gazed back and forth from the pool of water to the wall with the map. He pointed at the water and said, “Look at the map in the water’s reflection. Do you see anything strange?”
François followed Surjan’s gaze and his eyes widened as he compared it to the wall. “Wow . . . are you seeing those crosshatches on the water? It’s almost like number markings on different parts of the map, but it’s not obvious from looking at the map itself, just the reflection.”
“Good eyes, Surjan,” Marty remarked. “How is that even possible?”
François shook his head and made some quick markings on his copy of the map. “The water reflects certain light wavelengths differently, and maybe it’s sort of a weird invisible-ink-type of situation. I’d never have thought it possible. Notice how there’s a number right on top of us and a series of others, one of which is also right around where we know there’s a portal, just south of Cairo.”
“Who knows what it means? The reflection shows a marking right where we are, but there’s no obvious sign of any portal, though I see marking near the Antarctic as well.”
“We need to get going,” Surjan murmured with a nervous tone.
“Well, I’ve copied what I need . . .” François shook the excess charcoal from his linen map, folded it up neatly, and tucked it into the pocket of his tunic. “Shall we go back up?”
Following the queen was child’s play for Kareem. She acted like a woman who was used to being obeyed; she ordered her servants to leave her alone and then didn’t watch to see whether she was being followed. Kareem’s soft step and sharp hearing let him stay just around the corner from her as she moved about the palace. The more difficult task was staying out of sight of the servants himself, but he was able to slip behind curtains or into window wells and once even out a window onto the tiled rooftop below it, and stay unseen.
It wasn’t fair that the other teammates had gained abilities that were literally magical, and Kareem had only seemingly found it easier to blend into the background—not exactly as dramatic a skill as what the others had. Lowanna could speak with animals and summon lightning. Gunther could heal. Marty ran up and down walls like a squirrel. François . . . well, maybe François hadn’t really gained magical powers. He could talk louder and was more persuasive.
And Kareem could see in the dark.
He fingered the metal of his sharpened ankh, feeling the urge to bury it in someone. It wasn’t only the satisfying sensation of plunging the weapon into muscle, sinew, and bone. It was the thrill of what would happen after the body was found. His desire for mayhem was an itch he had felt since their first jump backward in time, but at this moment it was overwhelming. Since the Grays had grabbed him, he had felt a lust for blood. For their blood. The few Grays he had killed in climbing out of the chambers beneath the palace hadn’t done anything to lift his desire.
But he couldn’t kill the queen. He had to follow her.
She had tried to seduce Surjan. This didn’t seem like an obviously bad thing to Kareem. Wasn’t she Surjan’s wife, since he killed the old king? Maybe she was just trying to make the best of a bad situation. Maybe she wanted to be Surjan’s ally. Maybe she even found him handsome—he was tall and broad-shouldered and had a manly beard. If the queen had tried to seduce Kareem, he might simply have let her succeed.
But Surjan thought she was trying to manipulate him, so maybe she had ill intent.
As vast as the underground labyrinth was, the palace above was still big enough to have unoccupied rooms and even wings he’d yet to explore. Kareem was uneasily reminded of Giza, and the sense that the current inhabitants were a numerous but tiny people, squatting on a territory settled and built by giants. He shook the feeling off and followed the queen into a washing area. Lurking in the shadows, he watched as she washed in a stone bath, perfumed herself, dressed in linens thin as gauze, and then slipped through a back corridor into unused chambers.
She was headed for the temple that adjoined the palace. Old scar-faced Tudhal ruled over his clutch of acolytes there, and Kareem was a little uncertain how to stay hidden from their view. Dodging up to the highest story of the palace, he let himself out a window onto the gable of the east wing. He ran light-footed along the top of the gable like a tightrope and crouched in the rain and shadow at the far end, watching through the vines covering a trellis and walkway below, in the space between the palace and the temple.
The rain pouring down his neck and chest was cool, but it felt good. Kareem felt alive. When the queen walked from the palace to the temple beneath him, dressed to break hearts, he felt like a wild animal, like a predator, poised to strike her down. He had to force himself to grip the tile of the gable beneath his feet, and not dive down, plunging the sharpened ankh into her breast.
Then she passed into the temple. He took a deep breath, shook off the murderlust, and leaped over the gap to the temple.
He landed on a circular platform with a knee-height balustrade around its edge. The only part of the temple taller than this platform was a spire rising to the east, thin as a flagpole, and it was only ten feet or so taller. In the center of the platform, spiral stairs descended into the interior. The balustrade was made of stone, a single ring carved of a single chunk of rock, six inches in diameter. Its upper surface was marked with notches at regular intervals, and here and there squiggles that looked like writing, but Kareem couldn’t read them.
Out on the ocean, a blue-white chunk of ice the size of a small stadium rocked through the rain and wind toward the rock shelf.
Kareem crept to the stairs and listened. To his quiet delight, he heard the murmuring of two voices in the room below. One of them was the queen’s, and the other was Tudhal’s. He could have remained where he was and simply listened, but Kareem knew he could get closer, so he did.
He padded down the stairs, found a shadowed corner of the staircase from which he could observe the space below, and sat.
The room below the platform was dominated by a large brass contraption. He squinted and stared at it, trying to find apt comparisons. It looked like several wire spheres nestled within each other and overlapping each other. It moved as he looked at it, and he realized that there was a brass globe in the center. Arms spun around and within the spheres, and the arms ended in additional globes; some of them had smaller balls circulating about them, and the whole was moving—
It was the solar system. He’d seen a model of such a thing before, maybe in school, or was it in Cairo that he’d seen posters about the opening of a new planetarium he’d never be able to afford to go visit?
He couldn’t tell what made this thing move, but some power source had the whole thing spinning. And then he frowned. He should bring François back here to look at the model—François was knowledgeable about such things, certainly much more than Kareem was.
Kareem wasn’t certain, but he thought the model had one planet too many.
“I can make you king.”
That was Queen Halpa speaking. Kareem tore his attention away from the orrery and looked at the rest of the room. There were shelves stacked with scrolls, small brass hand tools Kareem didn’t recognize, and broad tables. The queen sat on one of the tables, leaning back seductively. Old Tudhal stood beside the table, looking like a dog fidgeting and trying to be patient until its master told it to go ahead and eat the leftover shawarma.
“What about the gods?” Tudhal asked. “What about the will of the gods? I couldn’t possibly defeat that monster Surjan in hand-to-hand combat, not even if he was asleep.”
“You underestimate yourself.”
“I am no fool.”
“I made the last two kings,” the queen purred. “I can make you.”
Tudhal pressed himself closer, against the heavy wood of the table. Halpa turned back her shoulders, seeming to open herself like a morning flower without actually getting any closer to the old priest.
“It couldn’t be a fair fight,” Tudhal murmured.
“There are no fair fights,” Halpa said dreamily. “There is only the will of the gods, and the one they choose.”
By God, Surjan had been right. This woman was a conniving wench . . . yet Kareem admired the game she was playing.
Also, Kareem kind of wished he had something to drink. Sitting and watching this seduction was the most entertainment he’d had in months.
“How do you know the will of the gods?” Tudhal’s voice was thick.
“I am the will of the gods.”
Kareem had seen enough. He stayed until the tension of seduction finally gave way to the boring mechanics of table-mounted acrobatics, and then got up and padded away in the rain.