“Well, if we were analysing a diagram of a large dismembered crab, you would have my full confidence,” said Luke. “Look, there’s a leg. There’s another leg. And another one. Oh, maybe that’s an antennae. Wait, no, it’s a leg.”
“Okay, two points don’t make a triangulation. So we’ve got to work this out.”
Chris stared at the symbols scattered across the photograph.
“How about a process of elimination?” said Chris, pulling out a pad of sticky notes. “Okay, we’re agreed on hands, feet, elbows, kidneys—”
Luke covered the relevant pictograms with scraps of yellow paper.
“Eyes, ears, mouth, nose…” continued Chris.
With only several further conflicts regarding identification, they were left with a blurry pictogram near the bottom of the map. The shape bore some resemblance to a vertical eye, or a long flame.
“Fire,” said Chris. “It must be an ancient stylisation, like how we draw love hearts.”
“The Holy Spirit came upon the apostles in holy flame,” murmured Luke.
Echoes of a common faith, a common myth, seemed to filter through countless cultures, endlessly transformed through the generations and giving rise to infinite variations.
Chris drew in the final lines, forming a triangle with the images of the head, heart, and spirit. Carefully, she joined each corner of the triangle to the centre of the opposite line, creating a six-pointed asterisk in the middle.
“Here there be dragons,” murmured Chris.
With any luck, here there be a very obvious and cooperative gate, leading to a very welcoming garden. Chris looked up at the slowly dropping sun, then back at the map of the canyon. The lines intersected at a point towards the north-east wall of the valley, somewhere between an eyeball and a tibia.
Travelling as the crow flies, it would have taken them less than half an hour to get there—even faster without packs. However, weaving through dried-up canals that forked and rejoined, twisting into coves and spits of rock, it was like wandering a labyrinth. Not the fun kind of labyrinth shorn from English hedges, low enough for the easily disoriented to wave for help. It was more like the kind of labyrinth people set up for bugs, baited with something delicious, and ended in a sudden slide and a watery plunge.
As they walked, Luke almost expected to see skeletons half-buried in the sand, but aside from the scuffed-out symbols, there was no sign that anyone had ever been here. There wasn’t even any graffiti.
“Do you suppose there’ll be a monument?” asked Luke. “There isn’t going to be a statue that asks questions and punches you if you get them wrong, is there?”
Luke suddenly wished he’d spent more time studying the riddles.
“As long as there’s something,” said Chris, more to herself than Luke.
They’d come all this way. There had to be
something
.
Chris looked down at the canyon map again, realising that she probably shouldn’t have used such a thick marker to draw the cross hair. Even so, it did look as though the lines intersected somewhere in this vicinity. There had been a sizable gouge in the wall just before, which could have been the eye. Further down the trail, Chris could see a boulder the size of a polar bear, with deep scratches where there might have been a proto-symbol of a tibia.
The trail split into three paths from here. One continued ahead, flowing through malt-coloured granite. The path to the left opened up into a wide passage, dotted with mounds of rock, rising from the sand like spurs of quartz. To the right, a narrow chasm squeezed between the canyon walls, ending in a T-junction at a smooth rock face.
“What does the map say?” said Luke, taking the photograph from Chris.
“Here, I think.”
“That sounds like an epitaph,” muttered Luke, squinting in the sunlight.
“It looks more this way.” Chris pointed to the trail ahead.
Luke suddenly shivered despite the heat, and he turned to look around at the empty passageways around them. He looked down at the photograph again.
“I think maybe this way.” Luke raised his finger towards the chasm.
“Don’t the walls look like they’re gonna suddenly slap together and crush you?” asked Chris, eyeing the narrow passage. “Okay, you go first.”
The chasm was wide enough for a single person to walk through comfortably, provided they weren’t claustrophobic. Luke went in first, with Chris bringing up the rear.
The walls were high enough to cast the passageway in shadow, and stepping into the shade felt strange after burning under the sun for so many hours. Although there was no breeze, Luke imagined he could hear an odd rush, as though the whisper of the ocean still echoed from the walls. It was with considerable relief that he emerged unsquashed on the other side of the chasm, standing at the T-junction with paths leading to the left and right.
Chris drew a deep breath as she emerged into the sunlight beside Luke.
“I hate the whole moving walls and big crushing rotating things,” said Chris. “I hate the ones that chase you down the corridors.”
There was something here. Luke could almost feel it tremoring through him. Chris swept her gaze down both pathways, and her eyes stopped at the smooth wall of the junction.
“The rock’s different here,” said Chris, walking over to the warm sandstone.
She looked closely at the surface, and it seemed to glint with a faint sheen.
“There’s a bit of silica in this,” said Chris, running her fingers lightly over the sandy rock.
Her finger brushed something. Chris looked hard, moving her fingers over the spot again. She could feel a faint depression in the rock, but her eyes told her there was nothing but unbroken stone. Chris pressed her face close to the wall, her eye level with the surface.
“You right there?” asked Luke, watching Chris sway from side to side, then up and down.
Slowly, Chris crouched further and further down until she knelt on the bed of the canyon, almost face to face with the wall. She turned to Luke with a lopsided grin.
“Check this out,” she said.
With an uneasy glance over his shoulder, Luke knelt stiffly beside Chris and looked at the wall. His gaze slid upwards, and about five feet from the ground, where there had previously been smooth yellow rock, there was a dark pictogram, carved sharply in the stone. Chris waited for a reaction.
“Hmm…” said Luke, pulling a sheaf of notes from his coat.
“Isn’t that cool?” said Chris. “The cuts have been made at a really acute angle upwards, like gills in a fish, so from above you can’t see the shadow. The silica kicks the light back up into the groove, so you have to be really, really low to see that there’s an inscription.”
The pictogram was proto-proto-cuneiform, with sharp lines and curves that seemed to catch the essence of an ancient thought. Luke flicked through his cuneiform notes—it resembled a word his gaze had lingered on in Sorakova’s office, as the fountains softly bubbled and clicked. It was a word that both called and criticised him, that swung before him like an ensign out of reach. His finger stopped on a simple pictogram, a pattern of lines that seemed to burn with the weight of human history.
“Faith,” said Luke.
Chris waited.
“Was something supposed to open just now?” asked Chris.
“This isn’t Arabian Nights. We’re probably supposed to use a key.”
“The key’s for the gate,” said Chris. “Getting in was the…”
She rummaged through her pack.
“Was it still the sign?” muttered Chris. “Damn, was it the humble man, the rolling man…do you remember what the riddle to get in was?”
“Langu—”
The rest of Luke’s sentence turned into a soft wheeze as his lungs gently deflated like an old balloon.
Chris turned around at a sound so faint it was like the noise made by a shadow falling. She followed Luke’s frozen stare through the narrow chasm to the clearing scattered with spires of rock. A shadow rushed from behind one boulder to another. It moved like a gust of air, and it was a very, very big shadow. Chris rummaged faster through her pack.
“Rolling… Words of the father… Sign will light the… Bugger.” Chris pulled out a scrunched set of papers wrapped around a squashed banana.
It was one of those unavoidable mysteries of the universe, like odd socks and people who didn’t replace the roll of toilet paper, that somehow there would always be a squashed banana at the bottom of a bag. Chris stared at the partly mashed banana. She hadn’t even bought any bananas.
“Sorry, I ran out of room in my pack…” said Luke, not tearing his eyes from the clearing.
Chris quickly scraped the fruit from the papers, shuffling through them with great urgency.
“Head, heart and spirit… Sign to light the way,” said Chris. “The next thing’s the Cherubim. Sign, light, sign.”
Chris looked up at the slowly setting sun, the late afternoon light flooding the canyon with a brilliant orange glow. Light. Sign. She dug her arm deep into the contents of her pack, groping through the branches, bags, and lint-covered toiletries. She turned at the sound of Luke gasping, a deep, hollow, sucking gasp of horror.
There was a low, subsonic rumble, as something large slunk out from behind a crag of rock in the clearing. Chris was suddenly reminded of why, if you believed a particular version of events, there was a time when apes were afraid to come down from the trees.
The creature was to a tiger what the Death Star was to a hat made from tin foil. At three metres tall and five metres long, it was the size of a caravan and could probably fit at least as many people inside. It had a ragged halo of tufts around its head, and its heavy coat hung in shaggy, matted grey and brown fronds, touched with tips of white as though it had just climbed out of some primordial sea. Most disconcerting of all were its eyes—solid orbs of turquoise the size of dessert plates, with sharp black slits down the middle. No gradients or flecks coloured its pupils, no white around the eyes—just an eerie, flat, electric blue from corner to corner. Staring straight at them.
It looked prehistoric.
It looked angry.
It bared its teeth in a snarl, and a thundering rumble emanated from it.
“That’s not a purr, is it?” asked Chris. “I’m not a cat person.”
“I think it can tell,” said Luke hoarsely.
The
Verhkoyanskiy
tiger padded quickly towards the chasm, then stopped in a semi-crouch, giving another low growl that seemed to thrum through the ground. At the same moment, Chris and Luke were both urgently assessing whether or not the tiger could fit through the chasm. Clearly, the tiger had no such reservations.
The creature suddenly ran towards the chasm, covering the ground in powerful bounds, and proceeded to ripple through the gap. Its fur pressed back effortlessly as it oozed through the narrow space in a solid core of menace.
“Sign the light—” Chris’s fingers wrapped around solid wood, and she pulled her crucifix from the bag. “Light—Sign— Oh, come on!”
Chris waved the cross in front of the wall frantically, and Luke promptly gave up all hope of survival. The shadow of the crucifix slid and pulsed across the surface of the wall, like experimental shadow theatre.
“Now would be good!” said Luke, as the creature burst from the chasm with a full-throated roar.
Something on the wall flickered as Chris swept the crucifix before it.
“Bunsen!” yelled Luke.
The caravan-sized tiger landed in front of them, its front legs bent in a predatory crouch. Paws the size of wading pools crunched the gravel and stopped at the familiar word. It took a crouching step towards them, teeth bared in clear hostility.
Chris moved the crucifix over the spot again, and saw the shadow on the wall grow darker, as though absorbing the light. She ran her hand over the section of rock, and it felt cooler against her skin. It was another kind of silica, maybe volcanic or…something else. These days, microchips used silicon for its superconductive properties, but could you actually build a computer out of rock?
The tiger made a lunge towards them.
“Bath time, Bunsen!” cried Luke, pressing back against the wall.
Bunsen flinched, dropping back and snarling. Clearly torn between drawing back and swiping Luke’s head off, the tiger darted forward, crouched, then jerked back as though from an open fire. It opened its mouth and a malevolent growl rumbled from the depths.
“Bath time!” yelled Luke, a note of hysteria in his voice.
Chris held the crucifix over the patch of silica, the shadow sharp and black as an abyss. She held her breath, trying to hold her hand perfectly still despite every other part of her shaking like an undergraduate on caffeine withdrawal.
Just as Bunsen was deducing that there was no actual water in visible proximity, let alone offensively fragrant suds, there was a deep underground rumble which did not come from Bunsen. The rumble seemed to rise towards them, breaking into a resounding crack as a perfect line split the wall, and two halves of rock slid back to reveal a pitch-black hollow, with stone stairs leading downwards.
Chris and Luke gaped at the opening. Bunsen’s face contorted into a snarl, ears flat as she edged closer towards swiping range. Chris and Luke looked at the deeply irate mountain of teeth and fur edging towards them, then at the carved stairs leading into the unknown.
Chris turned to Luke with a trace of something fantastic burning in her eyes and held out her open hand. Luke paused for the briefest moment before wrapping his fingers tightly around hers, and together they hurtled into the netherworld.
* * *
A boom thundered through the canyon like the herald of a storm.
Emir swivelled in the direction of the noise, almost expecting a flock of birds to launch dramatically into the sky. Before the tail of the swell rolled over their position, Docker was already sprinting down the trail, with Roman close behind.
“Find the target!” yelled Docker. “Scatter positions!”
In a loose formation they streamed through the canyon paths, wending through the fading echo. Boots pounded over the hard earth, the crimson light casting long, alien shadows across the ground. The rumble was starting to trickle away as they burst around a jagged corner.