Part 19
We had just passed outside the threshold of natural light, where the shadows just barely exceeded the amount of light available. The walls near the beginning had been mostly dirt and stone, shored up by planks installed by the archaeologists. Here, though, part of the original stone still remained, a slab still embedded in the wall. It looked like the back wall of a firing range, peppered with holes all over this one area.
Kayce ran his fingertips over the design. "What made this happen?" he asked.
Drea smirked as she stepped forward and pulled a piece of chalk out of her pocket. "Just wait," she said. "It gets better." She began drawing lines between the sprays, closing them in triangular shapes. What at first seemed like a randomized design ended up creating a pattern of triangles pointing in various directions: some up, some left, right, down, and slightly canted on the diagonal.
"Wait, you're kidding," I murmured, "so there is a pattern here?"
Drea nodded. "We stopped digging for three months while we tried to figure this one out, and after one of our crypto team solved the arrows, it took us three more months and a whole lot of seismic imaging to work out that--"
"It's a map," Tony butted in, stepping forward to examine the arrows more closely. "More specifically," he pointed ahead of us down the shaft. "It's a map of the route to the Inner Temple."
Drea chuckled. "Well, so far we can only confirm that you're right about the map thing. See, we figured out that each arrow represents a certain length, about sixty meters or so. If we followed the arrow's orientation for sixty meters, we'd arrive at the next point in the pathway, and about the only clear path would be in the same direction as the next arrow, and we could progress another sixty meters, and so on." She pulled out another chalk color. "By this point, we've made it about to here," she circled the thirteenth arrow on the map. "But if Tony here and a team of researchers are right, we just might end up getting to the Inner Temple after all."
In the deepening shadows of the lantern-light, I saw that brief flash again--but still, I couldn't find its origin, other than it seemed to come from the same vicinity that Tony occupied.
"If you have a map," Jordyn almost couldn't take her eyes off the amazing wall, "then why wouldn't you be able to just follow it all the way to the end? What's taking so long?"
Drea pursed her lips. "I'll show you."
She led us through another archway, right under the jagged wave symbol of Trikymios. The next room looked like part of it had caved in, leaving lines of rock and slender wooden posts exposed.
Jordyn leaned toward them. “What are—“
“Don’t touch those!” Drea snapped.
We all froze dead still at the urgency of her tone.
She fixed us with wide eyes. “Okay, so one of the reasons it’s taken us so long to dig down here is because we’ve encountered similar, uh, setbacks to the ones we had when we first started trying to branch off from the village.”
Professor Silver swung the beam of his head lamp all around the area. “Setbacks? You mean, like, booby traps?”
Tony scooted closer to me, and I felt him grab my hand.
“Hey look!” Kayce crouched against a corner of the room. “What does this symbol mean?”
We focused on his position. He crouched before a small altar built into the floor of the tunnel, set before a picture of something humanoid with a sideways oblong shape over it. Inside the oblong shape was a series of squiggles.
“That’s not Auraea or Trikymios,” I blurted.
“Right, we saw the mark of Trikymios out there,” Drea gestured to the arch. “We figure that this was another deity these people worshipped.”
“Good point,” Kayce agreed, coming back to join us in the middle of the room. “The Microtheon had to have been at least as big as the main Pantheon.”
“That’s neat!” our chaperone responded a little too loudly. “Everybody be on the lookout for other altars on our way through.”
“Look!” Jordan cried, pointing over our heads. There, on the archway we were about to cross, was the sign of Trikymios again, but the sign of this other god too, plus a few more strange marks.
“Fair warning as we go through this next spot,” Drea told us as she very slowly inched her way through the wide hall. “Don’t touch the walls, and watch very carefully to only step where I step.”
It should have been getting warmer in the tunnel, the further we got from access to fresh air, but Drea’s warning sent a chill over my entire body.
We lined up in single file, eyes focused on the feet of the person in front of us. Jordyn and Kayce ended up behind Drea, while Tony stood in front of me, and Professor Silver brought up the rear. My heart just about jumped into my throat when Tony lurched away from me and landed on a tile off to the side, but he pivoted right away and hissed, "Watch out!"
I stopped immediately, and saw what he had avoided: a pit with gleaming spikes protruding from it. Ahead of me, the group had scattered in similar fashion, with Drea lightly hopping and skirting her way past what we could only assume was a gauntlet of booby traps, both un-triggered and already sprung. I followed Tony, matching his movements, until I heard Drea call, "Okay, we're fine from this point."
As soon as she said that, Kayce called out, "Jordyn, don't--"
"Yikes!"
We all braced ourselves. Nobody so much as breathed in the dead silence, as Jordyn's feet slipped off the tile and she stumbled into one that hadn't yet been disturbed. Sixteen agonizing seconds ticked by before Drea reached out her hand and yanked Jordyn to safety beside her.
"That was a lucky break!" the geologist sighed.
Jordyn nodded, her whole body shaking visibly in the lantern-light. I watched Kayce wag his head, while Tony just clapped his hand on our teammate's shoulder without saying anything.
"You know," Professor Silver coughed, "at some point you might consider clearing out all the dangers from that place--I don't see how you could get any kind of equipment down here!"
Drea shot him a scowl. "How do you think we discovered that this particular path was booby-trapped? You might say it's impossible," she ushered us through the archway into the next room. "But I can show you clearly that it's not!"
One by one, we stepped into the room and gasped. Compared to the narrow, cramped tunnel that we'd been in so far, the space was huge! Natural light filtered down from open shafts way above our heads, and small groups of three and four people worked busily, testing walls and un-burying jugs of every shape and size, prodding hallways and copying down any designs or inscriptions they saw.
Professor Silver placed his hands on his hips and squinted at the wide shafts from under the brim of his hat. "Huh... Well, I suppose that's one way to bypass the gauntlet of death."
Jordyn shot our guide a narrow look. "If there was a way to just rappel straight down here, then why all the theatrics with the tunnel?" she demanded.
Drea gave a wide grin. "My way's more fun," she stated.
I walked over to where a pair of archaeologists scanned a particular symbol on the wall with a specialized camera that seemed to filter through a whole bunch of different markings.
"Hey, that's that same marking we saw before," I mused.
The guy holding the tablet glanced at me. "On the first archway? Yeah, we're trying to figure out what it means." After a pause, he squinted at me. "And you are--"
"Pris," I introduced myself. "I'm one of the students joining you for the week."
"Oh." He returned to watching the flickering screen without bothering to offer the same courtesy I did.
"What's going on over here?" Without warning, Tony appeared beside me.
"They're trying to figure out what that other new symbol means," I replied in a low voice. Far be it from me to interrupt this important work! "They've got a special app that filters through different signs--"
"They're not going to find it, though." Tony cut me off--and, more importantly, I saw the orange flash again! I wondered if he was going to mention it, but he just stood there, shaking his head, just waiting for someone to prod him for more information.
The other researcher left off her scans of the ancient inscription below the symbol and stared at Tony. "What is that supposed to mean?" she said. "This is state-of-the-art equipment--"
Tony stood his ground. "The equipment's not the problem," he said, folding his arms. The orange light from the amulet seemed to reflect in his eyes as he spoke. "Your database is not sufficient. You're only looking through the known deities, the famous ones, the common ones. That symbol," He pointed to the wall before us, "happens to belong to Ichthykitos, a minor god of fish and whales."
Tablet Man scowled at Tony, but he did enter the name into a field on his tablet. The device let out a warbling chime, and a depiction of the very same god showed up on the screen. Both researchers stared in shock.
Tablet Man shook his head as he scrolled through the text. "I've never heard of this deity--how did you know?"
Tony shrugged as Kayce and then Jordyn joined us. "Well, it stands to reason that since Auraea and Trikymios belonged to the Microtheon, then maybe the group on Fourtouna would naturally end up worshipping other gods associated with them, as well."
The woman frowned. "Microtheon? I don't understand. What is that?"
Tony's eyes shifted toward me, and I felt a lurch of fear well up inside me. He couldn't know! Nobody else was supposed to know my connection to this novel concept!
Kayce coughed, saving me from definite embarrassment. "I can explain that. See, the Patheon only contained the major gods, the ones most people know about: Ares, Zeus, Athena and the rest. But gods like Trikymios and Auraea weren't a part of that; instead, a sect of Greek worshippers imagined these lesser gods as a secondary pantheon, a Microtheon, who were connected to the main Pantheon by association, but entirely their own functional group as well."
Tablet Man was adjusting something on the device, frowning in thought as he considered this information. "This is all new to me, but it checks out. Looks like we have Auraea and Trikymios accounted for, and now Ichthykitos."
"What about the other unidentified symbols?" asked his partner. "The ones Lacey and Markus are working on?"
Tablet Man shrugged without taking his eyes off the new windows popping open on his screen. "Don't know."
His partner took off without him. "Lacey! Mark! Hey guys! We've got some new info!"
Tablet Man grinned at Kayce. "You must be one of the college students," he seemed to find more appreciation for him than he ever showed toward me. "Tell me more about this Microtheon stuff!"
I broke away to engage Tony next to me--but he'd already taken off to another area, where a group of researchers were arguing over the arrangement of a series of colored stones within a mosaic on the floor.
"Match the divots," said the first person, a wiry man with silver hair. "It's probably connected to the inscription on the wall here. The color doesn't really matter."
"Yes it does!" said another, a woman with wispy, fine hair in a ponytail down her back. "See? It's supposed to be a pattern--light, dark, dark, light, light! Your way would take ages to match each gem to a divot!"
"Well, your way doesn't take into account the evidence of prior placement!" The wiry man screamed. His eyes wandered over to us, as the new faces. "What do you think?" he asked, staring straight at me.
I pointed to myself. "Me? Oh, um..." I was really more of a patterns kind of girl--he did have a point about matching the shape of the divots. But what if the shape had changed through erosion over the years this tunnel system lay buried? "I'm not too sure about things like this..."
Tony dropped to his knees. I watched him pick up stones one by one, turn them over in his fingers, and then gently lay them to rest in a divot.
"What are you doing?" hissed the woman, but Tony kept working until he had used every last stone in the pile. He stood up and dusted off his hands.
"There," he said.
We all stared at the design very clearly outlined by the dark stones in their proper divots.
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