Back on shore, the bronze-legged mammoth checked its pace for a heartbeat, deciding whether to pursue Ilya around the edge of the lake or go after me. In the animal’s moment of hesitation, I swung
Puff
’s rear end in a doughnut spin across the ice until I was facing the mammoth head-on. My hand went to the button on
Puff
’s dash. The MAC-10s lifted their eager little noses and clicked girlishly into place.
“Hey, Dumbo,” I told the mammoth. “See if this helps you fly.”
The MAC-10s packed enough kick to push
Puff
a full foot back across the ice. I contented myself with a three-round burst from each gun, which I thought would be ample to turn the mammoth into worm food. All six shots were on target—how can one miss a yobbing great pachyderm?—but the results were less decisive than I wished. Four of the bullets simply vanished into the thickets of hair, having no visible effect; whatever damage they caused was hidden by the creature’s pelt and showed no sign of disrupting anything vital. The two remaining bullets struck the mammoth in its now-bronze legs and ricocheted harmlessly away with the clang of a temple gong.
“That was disappointing,” I said. But my shots still had a result: they convinced the animal to chase me rather than Ilya.
It pounded across the beach and onto the ice, feet hammering the frozen whiteness with the rumble of kettledrums. I watched, hoping the ice might give way or the beast’s bronze legs would slippy slide out of control on the slick surface. No such luck—the mammoth’s metal toes dug in like skate blades, providing traction as the animal barreled toward me. Briefly, I contemplated the possibility of a prehistoric mammal competing in the world figure skating championships, doing sit spins and triple axels . . . but there was no time for whimsy as the creature bore down upon me.
I gunned
Puff
’s engine and sped off, taking advantage of the lake’s flat straightaway with no fallen trees to dodge.
Puff
zoomed from zero to sixty in better time than many automobiles on dry pavement; too bad the blasted mammoth matched me speed for speed. In fact, I could hear it gaining on me, the clamor of bronze feet growing louder by the second. I had to resist the urge to look back over my shoulder to see how close the beast was. At the rate I was going, I couldn’t afford to take my eyes off the road.
All right,
I thought,
if velocity isn’t the answer, let’s try maneuverability.
I heaved to my right in the tightest turn possible, nearly rolling the sled but barely hanging in by leaning hard into the curve. The mammoth was a blur of bronze as I came around and shot past it. For a split second, I was close enough to smell its musty hair, damp with snow, clotted with well-aged dirt. Then I was racing back the way I’d come, with the mammoth receding.
Ha!
I thought . . . momentarily. But I hadn’t lost my pursuer, nor had I tricked it into tripping over its feet as it wheeled in my new direction. The infernal creature had much faster reflexes than you’d expect in an elephantine herbivore. If real Ice Age mammoths had been so quick, our great-great-ancestors would have never hunted them to extinction.
Speaking of extinction, it was time to devise a new plan before I myself went the way of the dodo. Ilya was too far away to help—I’d left him behind in my first top-speed rush across the lake, and, first-time driver that he was, he’d fallen farther back as the chase continued. He just couldn’t manage high-velocity craziness on ice . . . though he was doing his best and coming my way as fast as he could. In the meantime, I’d have to deal with Mr. Mad-and-Hairy on my own.
If I couldn’t outrun or outweave the beast, I decided to retry my earlier tactics: 9-millimeter rounds, served piping hot. I’d try to hit something vulnerable; the eye is a perennial favorite, though I’ve also had success firing into wide-open mouths. Sometimes a bullet’s easiest route to the brain is through the soft palate.
So I swung around once more, curving sharply to bring
Puff
’s guns to bear before the mammoth got too close. A burst from the left gun tracked across the beast’s front—one bullet ricocheting off bronze, two more striking meaty targets without effect—then the right gun took over, one bullet hitting flesh, one clanging on bronze, and one flying aimlessly off into chill air. Tsk. But see how accurate
you
are when firing full auto from a snowmobile spinning in doughnuts over glare ice.
None of my shots dampened the mammoth’s bloodlust. None even slowed it down. Growling, roaring, trumpeting, the monster hurtled forward. Ice cracked with every footfall, yet the frozen surface was just too thick to break under the creature’s weight. Of course, if I could persuade the monster to pound over the same patch of ice several times, weakening the crust with every transit . . .
Okay. New strategy.
I revved
Puff
again and surged away . . . in the nick of time, because the mammoth was bearing down rapidly. Too rapidly. Something flicked past my ear as I bolted: a long shaggy trunk, grabbing for my head, missing by inches. I dodged quickly—left, right, left—barely keeping out of reach.
Puff
couldn’t muster enough speed to propel me away. Even evasion was getting iffy, as the mammoth became less and less easy to fool with feints. Its trunk swung again, and I ducked . . . not quite fast enough. The trunk brushed the top of my driving helmet; and even that glancing contact felt as strong as a bludgeon to my skull. Helmet or no, a direct hit might be enough to knock my head clean off my shoulders. Desperately I twisted
Puff
’s throttle, trying to squeeze more acceleration from the overtaxed engine before the trunk took another swat . . .
. . . and suddenly guns fired off to my left, round after round after round. Ilya had arrived, riding in like the cavalry. I didn’t turn back to see his bullets strike home, but they were obviously enough to divert the mammoth’s attention from me. The pounding bronze feet sprayed a shower of ice shavings as the beast rerouted its charge toward my friend.
I heeled
Puff
around as fast as I could and saw the mammoth racing toward Ilya, trunk whipping, spittle streaming. Its path would take it back over a region of ice that was already heavily gouged from a previous passage of the creature’s metal feet. “Opportunity knocks,” I muttered under my breath; but I barely heard my own voice over the mammoth’s bellowing and the sound of Ilya’s MAC-10s chattering. A moment later I added to the din, driving
Puff
hard, off on an angle, till I had a clear shot at the damaged ice. I held my fire till the mammoth was almost upon the crack-fractured surface. Then I pressed the trigger buttons, blasting both guns at the ice an instant before the great heavy beast ran walloping onto the target area.
Splish splash.
With all the noise of gunfire, snowmobile engines, and maddened animal cries, I didn’t actually hear the ice break. Nor did I hear the eruption of frigid water as a multiton pachyderm plunged in an involuntary cannonball, sending a tsunami into the air. I could see it all clearly though: the mammoth thrashing to stay afloat despite the mass of its flesh and the even greater weight of its bronze legs; the trunk flailing to grab some support from the ice surrounding the hole but finding the grip too slippery; the beast’s sodden hair dragging it downward that much faster; and at the end, a look of sad resignation stealing into the animal’s eyes just before it sank into the depths.
Dark cold water. Not a good way to go. I shivered and looked away.
Two minutes later, all was silent again: the chilly stillness of the north. Ilya and I had driven back to shore, with me trying not to imagine the frigid black drowning that awaited if we hit thin ice.
We automatically turned off the sleds once we were safely on land. The quiet sifted into us as the noise sifted out. I let myself exhale. “Hope there aren’t more of those monsters about.”
“If there were,” Ilya said, “they’d be here by now. We made enough ruckus to attract anything that might be interested.”
“Too right.” I scanned the trees surrounding the beach. “Surprising that Urdmann hasn’t showed up . . . or at least sent a few men to see what we’re up to.”
“If they’d seen the mammoth, they’d keep their distance.” Ilya glanced back toward the lake, as if he expected the beast to come bursting out of the ice. “What
was
that thing? I’ve visited this area dozens of times and never seen anything like it.”
I shrugged. “The bronze thigh we’re looking for—it can supposedly change normal animals into . . . nonnormal animals. Apparently, that means big bronze maniacal mutants.”
“Do you know where the thigh is?”
“Reuben never got an exact location—just that it was hidden near the center of the Tunguska explosion.” I glanced at Ilya. “You were Reuben’s translator when he visited the local tribes. You should know more about this than I do.”
Ilya shook his head. “Reuben was fluent in Russian; so were most of the people he interviewed. I never sat in on Reuben’s conversations except when he met with nomads who only spoke obscure native languages.”
“But you still must have picked up bits and pieces.”
“All I heard were folktales: myths that this area was inhabited by evil shamans who lived underground. But underground means caves, and this part of Siberia has none. It’s either swamp or solid granite. The rock has niches big enough for bears to curl up in winter, but no caves that reach any depth. That requires a different type of geology.”
“On the other hand,” I said, “Urdmann is here. And the mammoth was here. And the 1908 explosion was here. The source of such oddities must be well hidden or it would have been found by now. Tunguska has been visited by scientific expeditions, curiosity seekers, hunting parties . . . lots of people. They’d notice anything strange lying out in the open.”
“They’d notice a big killer mammoth too. Not to mention that saber-toothed tiger. But I’ve never heard reports of such creatures.”
I thought for a moment. “Suppose the folktales Reuben gathered were true. Suppose shamans
did
live in a cave system here, even if caves don’t occur naturally in this terrain. Suppose the shamans harnessed the bronze thigh’s powers to
dig
caves . . . and to preserve Siberia’s last mammoth and saber-toothed tiger by turning them into monsters. Both mammoths and saber tooths survived here up to the end of the last Ice Age, or even later. They only died out when humans hunted them to extinction. But suppose the shamans kept one mammoth and tiger alive with the bronze thigh’s magic, holding the animals as pets underground until Urdmann came along.” I looked Ilya in the eye. “If a door was sealing the cave entrance, Urdmann might have opened it and let the animals out.”
“Losing two men in the process,” Ilya said, nodding thoughtfully. “That suggests the door should be close to where we found the tiger’s body.”
“Let’s go back and look around.” I climbed back onto
Puff
. “There were plenty of tracks in the snow. If we can’t follow the trail of a mammoth back to its source . . .”
“I can follow a mouse across bare stone,” Ilya said. “I can track a flying chickadee by its wing currents. I can trace the thoughts of insects and the spoor of a speck of pollen drifting on the wind . . .”
Which was typical Ilya nonsense, but we still found the caverns without difficulty.
7
SIBERIA: THE TUNGUSKA CAVERNS
Close to the spot where the saber-toothed tiger had been killed, the lake’s edge blurred into frozen marsh. Frostbitten reeds, brown and withered, poked brittlely out of the ice. Some had been trampled by Urdmann and his team; the men’s tracks were easy to follow into the swamp and up to a hummock of stone that jutted waist high above the bog’s ice surface. The hummock itself, blown bare of snow, showed no footprints . . . and no footprints exited on the other side.
“Interesting,” Ilya said. He bent closer to the rock, looking for traces of Urdmann’s passage. His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “There’s a seam in the granite.” Ilya straightened up. “This stone must be a cap—like a trapdoor over the entrance.”
I looked at the hummock: a rock slab four paces wide and twelve long. “It must weigh tons,” I said. “Too heavy to lift by sheer muscle power. Let’s search for some hidden opening mechanism.”
In my tomb-raiding travels, I’ve encountered many concealed locks. Some were diabolical to find: you needed the Sacred Eye of This or the Holy Hand of That, and if you held them in the proper place at noon on the summer solstice while singing a perfect B-flat and standing barefoot in a bowl of crushed garlic . . . some giggling child would walk up and show you the secret entrance that local kids had known about for untold generations. This time, however, I thought we wouldn’t have such trouble. If Lancaster Urdmann had found the lock, how well hidden could it be?
Still, Urdmann possessed one major advantage over Ilya and me: he had the statuette. Its hieroglyphics had sent Urdmann straight to the cave entrance. If the statue also told how to find a lock that was otherwise impossible to locate . . .
“Over here,” Ilya said. “This is it.”
I kicked myself mentally for letting my mind stray. Ilya was pointing at a shiny gleam on the rock: a thumb-sized circle of bronze embedded in the gray stone. “A push button?” he asked.
“One way to find out.” With the toe of my boot, I tapped the bright metal. The top of the hummock pivoted horizontally on some unseen axle, swiveling ninety degrees to reveal a shaft sloping downward.
The opening was easily big enough for a mammoth and saber-toothed tiger to come charging out. Perhaps the tiger came first, and Urdmann—ever the avid hunter—gave chase. He’d lost two men killing the beast . . . but before he could take the cat’s head as a trophy, the mammoth showed up in all its trumpeting fury. Urdmann and his team fled into the caves, closing the trapdoor behind them before the mammoth could follow.
At least, that was one possible scenario. When I found Urdmann, I’d ask what really happened . . . provided I could restrain myself long enough from killing him.
Before going underground, Ilya and I assembled equipment from the packs on the sleds: the usual adventuring gear—lights, ropes, night-vision goggles, etc.—and of course, appropriate weaponry.
I was carrying my two VADS pistols. VADS stands for Variable Ammunition Delivery System, a voice-activated wonder that let me “call my shots” (so to speak). If I wanted normal ammo, I just had to ask. I could also order up silver bullets—more necessary than you might think—explosive rounds, incendiaries, and even a few blanks . . . in case I wanted to make a show of force without causing injury. Consider the oft-used expedient of firing a round into the air to get a mob’s attention. Any bullet shot straight up comes down again with almost the same velocity. Each year, a few unlucky victims die from free-falling bullets plunging into their skulls . . . which is why I load a blank or two in every clip to avoid such contingencies. Blanks are also good for faking deaths—your own or someone else’s—or for easing the monotony of an archaeological dig; a gun with blanks can serve as a starter pistol for a foot race or as a prop for an around-the-campfire production of
Hedda Gabler.
Ilya, on the other hand, disdained fancy high-tech weapons. He carried one of his country’s most popular gifts to the world: an AK-47 assault rifle. The rifle was officially outdated, replaced by the more modern AK-74 . . . but Ilya was a traditionalist, and, besides, AK-47s were easier to come by on the back streets of Omsk. Ilya also carried a beautiful katana that his great-grandfather had picked up in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese war. The sword was a masterpiece of samurai weapon crafting—perfectly balanced, sweet in the hand, and as sharp as the first breath of winter. I coveted it profoundly. If Ilya hadn’t been a friend, and if the sword hadn’t been his treasured family heirloom, I would have found some way to make it mine, either by buying it outright or by challenging him to a high-stakes poker game when we got back to civilization.
For now, I contented myself with a single wistful glance as Ilya slid the sword into an over-the-shoulder sheath on his back. Then I gave myself a
down-girl
shake and said, “Are you ready?”
Ilya shifted the weight of his pack a little. “All right. Ready.”
“Then let’s go. We have business underground.”
Together, we began our descent.
The tunnel downward was nothing like a natural cave. Its walls reminded me of the stonework in St. Bernward’s Monastery: rough cut but regular, clearly the work of humans hewing out chunks of rock. What had they used to dig? Primitive mining tools couldn’t possibly make headway through solid granite, let alone create the extensive mammoth-sized shaft that stretched before us. This underworld domain must have been excavated by the power of bronze—a power whose magnitude disturbed me every time I saw evidence of its work. Whether Bronze was supernatural or ultrahigh-tech, his body could produce gobsmacking amounts of energy. If one small body part could pierce Siberian bedrock like a dagger through flesh, how much more could one expect from the reassembled whole? How dangerous might our bronze Humpty Dumpty be when he no longer needed all Father Emil’s horses and all Father Emil’s men to put him back together again?
But I had more immediate concerns: Lancaster Urdmann and his crew. Urdmann knew he had company on his heels. He might well have set booby traps or an ambush to slow us down . . . so I had to focus on the present and keep my eyes open for trouble.
Ilya and I carried electric torches, but the tunnel had its own weak illumination. At first, I couldn’t tell where the faint light came from; I needed a full minute to realize that the glow was all around, reflecting off a thin sheen of ice coating the rock walls. The ice was no more natural than the walls themselves: it didn’t melt at all when I breathed warm air on it, and a close look showed it was perfectly faceted like an insect’s eye, with millions of tiny flat surfaces slanting in all directions. Human hands couldn’t have shaped such intricacy, nor could any human science preserve the ice’s form so perfectly year after year through every freeze and thaw. The smallest beam of light (from our torches, from the open entrance behind us, from sources farther below) bounced from facet to facet, diffusing far and wide. The glow wasn’t bright, but the tunnel was never completely dark—a netherworld dusk of thready gray propagated by fun-house mirrors. With every step forward, my eye was caught by flickers of motion nearby . . . my own reflection, broken to pieces, following us just out of reach.
To conserve our torch batteries, Ilya and I turned off our lights soon after we began our descent. Dim light persisted around us. The slope of the tunnel was gentle, our footfalls soft. The temperature increased as we went downward, though the ice on the walls remained hard frozen. Maybe the warmth was just my imagination—caused by the utter lack of breeze in that enclosed space or by the adrenaline in my veins as I waited for some sudden attack.
The shaft slanted downward a hundred paces before it leveled out. At the bottom, we came to a junction where the tunnel split in three: one route continued directly ahead while two others angled off on either side. We scanned the floor for hints of which way Urdmann went but found nothing useful—the gray rock showed no tracks. “Keep going straight,” I decided. Urdmann struck me as the sort who’d bull in one direction as far as he could go, unless he had good reason to detour. Ilya shrugged and started forward again . . . then stopped as he caught sight of the tunnel wall.
Like the walls of the entrance tunnel, it was encrusted with faceted ice; but beneath the frozen veneer, a mural had been painted on the stone. The style reminded me of ancient cave art from places like Lascaux and Altamira: pictures that originated long before the development of familiar visual conventions.
The artists—definitely more than one, with varying degrees of skill—had produced a profusion of images (animals, people, the sun, abstract designs) with no obvious organization. Some figures were crammed tightly together; a few even overlapped, such as a scarlet man with a spear who’d been painted diagonally across an orange reindeer. Other elements stood in isolation, perhaps to give them special status. One solitary form was clearly a mammoth with tusks, a trunk, and crude shocks of hair. Another was a blob of brown portrayed in otherwise empty space, as if no one dared draw anything near it. Under other circumstances, I would have had a hard time guessing what the blob was . . . but I had no doubt it was a life-sized depiction of a chunky bronze thigh.
“The colors are all so bright!” Ilya said. “I’ve seen photos of Stone Age art. Even the best preserved are faded.”
“The coating of ice must have kept these pristine. Not to mention there’s mystic power in the air. It might have helped people create more vivid paints in the first place.”
I walked slowly along the wall, thinking how many archaeologists would sell their firstborn for such a spectacular find. Like most art of its type, the mural paid tribute to the sacred glories of the Hunt: people with knives and spears stalked various species of game or gathered in celebration as they butchered the kill. A few human figures had animal characteristics—a man with antlers, for example, and a large-breasted woman whose hands had elongated fingers ending in claws. These would either be shamans wearing special costumes—an antlered headdress, a claw-studded glove—or tribal gods imagined to have both human and animal traits.
As I continued forward, however, the pictures changed. The style grew more sophisticated: fewer images drawn at random angles, a greater attention to small details. People were no longer painted as single-color silhouettes; they had light brown skin, dark brown clothes, and white eyes with black pupils. The animals changed from recognizable types—mammoths, deer, bear, wolves—into more alien forms. Creatures with reindeer heads sported long snakelike necks attached to bulky torsos. Bristle-haired cats had too many legs. Shapeless things waved tentacles. Disembodied mouths floated in the air, gnashing icicle teeth.
The people changed, too: the farther I went along the mural, the fewer
Homo sapiens
I saw. Each humanoid figure had some gross deviation, from bird beaks to forked tails to heads with faces both front and back. I had the unpleasant suspicion these weren’t just flights of fancy. They had the look of pictures painted from life.
Ilya obviously felt the same. “Does this mean the people became freaks?” he asked. “Or just that their stories got wilder? Maybe at first they drew themselves hunting . . . but after a while, they might have gotten bored with pictures of everyday life and started drawing fantasies—fairy tales full of ogres and demons.”
“That’s what traditional archaeologists would say. They’d tell you that over time, true-to-life representations must have fallen out of favor and artists turned to works of imagination. But you don’t really believe that, do you?”
“No.” Ilya made a sour face. “Their drawings remained true to life. The people who lived here turned into horrors. At least some of them did.”
He pointed to another section of the wall. Mutated humanoids were shown devouring a normal man—biting into his arms as he screamed in agony. Nearby, more mutants were . . . no, I shan’t describe it. I shan’t describe
any
of the atrocities depicted in that part of the mural. The world is depraved enough without me adding to the mess. Just take it on faith the paintings showed monstrosities behaving monstrously. No further details will be supplied.
Sickened, I turned from the pictures. Ilya joined me, looking as if he might vomit. “Did these fools summon demons?” he asked. “Did they open hell itself?”
I shook my head. “No telling what really happened . . . but I can guess. The shamans who used the bronze thigh as a talisman spent too much time in its presence. Over the years, it changed them. Their lives were extended, but their bodies and minds became so twisted . . .” I shook my head again. “There were other people down here, too: normal people. The shamans used them as playthings. From time to time, the shamans might have ventured to the surface for more victims. That would explain why local tribes have stayed well away from this area for many centuries—they didn’t want to get caught. In the end, the shamans must have run out of innocents to mutilate. They needed other ways to amuse themselves.”
“Such as?”
I forced myself to return to the mural. It continued for some distance—each pace representing an unknown length of time, centuries or even millennia, from the Stone Age all the way to . . . who could tell? I saw shamans facing hideous beasts, probably of their own creation: repulsive hybrids—part mammal, part reptile, part nothing on Earth. Sometimes the shamans fought these creatures; sometimes they coupled with them. After a while, it was difficult to distinguish the shamans from the horrors they constructed.
Near the end came the war. Previous sections of the mural had been painted in lurid detail by shamans proud of their perversions. They’d depicted exact patterns of blood spatter in loving portraits of mutilation. But the final pictures on the wall had the look of hurried sketches: one grotesque shaman stabbing another in the eye; two shamans hurling fire at each other; a shaman impaled on spikes at the bottom of a pit, while another stood by laughing; six shamans arranged in a circle with a lump of bronze in the center . . .