Part 20
The woman immediately whipped out a tablet like the one we'd seen before. "It's a theogram!" She began flipping through the familiar grouping of symbols to find one that matched.
I coughed. "You might want to search the minor gods for this one," I suggested.
"No need," said Tony, pointing to the wall. Up in the corner of the mosaic mural was another depiction of a god, marked on his chest with the same symbol. He stood near a shore of some kind, with his feet covered by water. "This one is Pylerion, god of the tides."
"Piler-what-on?" The man echoed. "How do you spell that?"
"Never mind, I've got it." The woman with the tablet finished searching and pulled up the entry with that very name upon it.
Tony's eyes kept moving, like he was looking for something else, and he ambled back to the main portion of the room. I scurried after him.
"Hey," I managed as we meandered around the different discoveries happening throughout the space. "That was pretty cool back there--how did you know what to do with the stones?"
He was staring upward now, toward the open shafts. More people were rappelling down to relieve some of the ones who had been there all morning, while the other one had several ropes that were apparently attached to winches at the top, with hooks at the end. Drea shouted orders and darted around the room as she supervised securing a load of jars to the hooks, sending them up through the shaft one by one.
"Careful! Don't break the seal on that!" she cautioned one of the assistants.
I looked at the jars, each plugged with what looked like a huge pool of wax over the top, and at the wide part just below the neck, different kinds of symbols--or theograms, as they called them here. I saw the mark for the fish god, and the tide god, and even a couple for Trikymios.
"What are these?" I asked Drea.
She grinned. "Sacrificial jars," she explained. "Some of them are sealed, so we don't know what's actually in them, but past research indicates that jars of this sort were commonly used to hold the food and drink dedicated to a god. The ones with broken seals," she showed me an open jar, "give us a pretty foul-smelling indication that these are most certainly the same kind of jars."
Even at arm's length, the stench made my face involuntarily spasm.
"Ugh, this one's heavy!" an assistant remarked, hauling it toward the hook mechanism.
Professor Silver stepped forward. "Here, let me help you," he offered, grabbing the other side of the jar. Too late, we heard it scrape over a protruding stone.
"Be careful!" Drea started to say, but as she was still speaking, the ancient jar suddenly shattered, and a load of coins spilled out across the dirt floor.
The assistant stared with wide eyes. "Oops," was all he could say.
We all looked at Drea. She wasn't as impressed. "Great," she moaned. "Now we have an even bigger mess to clean up. I should have known the sacrifices weren't all just food and drink!"
Someone else brought a canvas sack, and even Kayce, Professor Silver, and Tony all crouched down to help them gather the small coins from out of so much dust.
"Hey Pris!" Jordyn called to me from the edge of one of the tunnels leading out of the room. "Come see this!"
I left the guys to their coins and joined my friend. She was tracing a series of spidery silver-white lines with her finger. "It's a vein of some sort," she mused. "The rock changes from this point onward."
My lips just barely formed a smile. It looked pretty, but I wasn't a geologist. "What does it mean? Is there something down there that changed it?" I gestured to the shadowy tunnel in front of us.
Jordyn shrugged. "I don't know. Check and see."
We'd left our lanterns on the other side of the room, but I saw a sconce bearing a torch resting on the wall. It definitely seemed to have enough ash to work like striking a match when scraped along the flinty rock. "Here, we can use this--"
"Don't touch that!" Somehow, Drea had gone from standing in the middle of the room to holding my wrist in a death grip. Her face had gone white, and she stared at me with wide, panicked eyes.
Kayce jogged over to stand beside her. "What's wrong with grabbing a torch?" he asked.
Drea lost her open, friendly look as she peered at us with sudden suspicion. "The torch isn't the problem... it's what it's attached to." She pointed to the chalked X scrawled under the sconce. "The last time somebody disturbed a sconce like this, we experienced a cave-in that took several days to clear out!"
Jordyn shied away from the walls and pulled her arms close, shivering in her shorts and T-shirt. "We just wanted a light to look at this tunnel," she whimpered.
Drea seemed to recover her old manner in an instant, like a thrown switch. She gave Jordyn a big smile. "Well, if you wanted to do more exploring, all you had to do was ask! Wait a moment, I'll grab us a few lanterns and I can take you down this tunnel myself."
My instinct kicked in and alarm bells started ringing. I tried catching the gaze of any of my friends, but they were too busy looking in other directions. Professor Silver was the only one who looked at me, but his eyes stared right through me with a distinctly vacant expression in them.
Before I could say anything, Drea was back and passing out lanterns. "Remember, my warning still applies: don't do anything or step anywhere I have not shown you. We've almost reached the end of the dig anyway."
Now that the tunnel had more light, I could see the silvery streaks giving way to stone that was more deep-grey than light-brown as it had been so far. I asked Drea why the color changed.
"You might not realize it, because we've been walking underground for so long," she said, "but the pathways we've taken have ever so slightly curved more inland, toward the mountain jutting up in the middle. That's mountain rock mixing with the bedrock you're seeing here." She gestured to the dark-grey stone all around us. "The literal roots of the mountain!"
A few more paces, and Drea stopped. "Okay, this is the tricky part," she muttered. "Remember, always do as I do!"
Our senses went on high alert, as we prepared to navigate another gauntlet. I couldn't see much besides rocks strewn along the tunnel floor and the odd holes in the walls, but nothing screamed "booby trap" to me.
Drea wrapped her arms close around her body. We all followed suit, at least as much as we could. Jordyn tried, and her elbows still stuck out from her body. Kayce lost his sense of balance if his hands weren't hanging right in front of him. Tony just kept his body relaxed and his hands hanging loose at his sides.
Progress down the tunnel was much slower than we'd walked before, as Drea seemed to feel compelled to evaluate every single step. In the dead silence as we followed her, I could even hear her voice speaking in some sort of rhythm, as if she was counting the paces.
"Six alternating steps... Four in a box... two hops... and three-in-a-row--*No!"
Her hand whipped out, and grabbed Kayce by the shoulder. He flailed a little as his balance teetered precariously. His reach barely brushed a protruding rock--but it didn't look marked or anything.
Drea pointed to a small divot next to the rock. "You see that?" She hissed in his ear loud enough for the rest of us to hear. "It probably houses a skull-piercing dart on a hair trigger, just waiting for some unsuspecting soul to make the wrong move!"
Jordyn shrank closer to her. "Probably?" she squeaked. "Why not get one of those seismic imagers down here to check the walls before you start walking back and forth past them?"
Drea squinted at the young geological student. "Seismic imagers use *vibrations to test the soil--one blast could probably collapse this entire tunnel!" She turned her gaze on each one of us in turn. "The paths to many ancient tombs are littered with the bones of people who didn't take these warnings seriously!" With that chilling pronouncement, she resumed inching her way forward.
I couldn't restrain a shudder as I passed the rock while keeping my body well clear of it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony deliberately separate from the tense group and reach out to lay a single finger on the rock.
Nothing happened. He saw me watching and he winked at me before sneaking back in line.
For myself, I watched the ground carefully as I followed Jordyn and Kayce's steps, patterned after the strange, almost dance-like movements of our guide. I only saw flat, consistent ground: no pitfalls, no hidden trip wires, no odd tiles, nothing. Even Jordyn stumbled a couple times and stepped on the wrong side of the narrow path, but no one noticed and nothing happened. Why all the theatrics, then?
I was still trying to work it all out when I came up beside Jordyn and she grabbed my hand. I stopped just short of slamming right into a wall. It kind of looked similar to the prayer wall we'd seen in the village--and there didn't seem to be any kind of lever or mechanism for moving it.
"Wait, that's it?" Kayce spoke up first.
Drea gestured toward the wall with a flourish. "Ta-da! This is as far as we've gotten."
"That can't be it, though," Professor Silver sounded almost frantic with disappointment. "What does the inscription say? Are there directions for how to get beyond this obstacle?"
Drea shrugged. "Beats me!" She shoved her hands in her pockets and seemed far less concerned about the wall than she had been over the entire tunnel. She even kicked it with the reinforced toe of her boot. "Dane and Tamis have been over it from every different direction: forward, backward, up, down, and diagonal. Not one part of it makes sense!"
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| The Stone Inscription (Made by me!) |
"I don't get it," Kayce was already pacing back and forth and muttering. "Why would a temple complex have a tunnel that just stops from here?" He measured with outstretched arms from one side of the wall to the other, as if that would help us figure out the mystery. Part of me wanted to inspect the wall closer; maybe there was something hidden in those shadows.
The problem was, Drea and her paranoia weren't going to let us touch anything. She pulled us back from the tunnel's end. "Talk to Greg; he seems convinced that there is some hidden temple area beyond this wall, not somewhere else. If only we could figure out the inscription..."
"Ah-ha! That's a great idea!" Professor Silver declared. "All right, classwork time!" He gestured to all of us. "For our academic work this afternoon, I want you all to work together to solve this inscription. Use what you have learned from your mentors, use the resources they have available--see what you can come up with!"
Kayce and I both groaned at the idea of spending even more hours down here, mining for data and staring at this boring block of text.
Jordyn raised her hand. "Okay, but can we do it on the surface, outside? I'm starting to feel like a mole rat down here!"
Drea nodded. "Sure, we can go all the way back, I guess. I'm sure we can snag one of the networked tablets, to give you guys a photo of the wall to work from."
We made our way back up the tunnel in largely the same fashion we had gone down, complete with the silly hops and turns. This time, I occasionally let my feet slide in the wrong direction, but, like before, nothing happened. The uneasy, sinking feeling in my gut grew and spread.
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