TEN

 

Arkaim, Russia

 

A silence hung over the group as they made their way out of the ice tunnel into a natural cavern system. Pierce couldn’t tell if his companions had been left speechless by the enormity of what Fiona had accomplished, or if, after everything else they had witnessed, they were taking this latest miracle in stride. He decided it was probably both, a not inappropriate oscillation between two opposing reactions that set up an interference pattern to cancel out everything else.

Miracle.

As a scientist, he was uncomfortable with the word. It felt like a cop-out. Every phenomenon had an explanation consistent with the Laws of Physics. Period. Admittedly, sometimes the explanation was beyond the comprehension of even the best theoretical minds, or as science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke had asserted, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Falling back on words like ‘miracle’ or ‘magic’ was just plain lazy.

Then again, he was an archaeologist, not a physicist or an engineer. He didn’t need to understand how Fiona had—using the Mother Tongue, or that weird ball of memory metal, or some combination of the two—turned the pool in the subterranean chamber into a skating-rink. At the same time, she had opened a tunnel through the ice that spiraled even deeper beneath the surface. It was enough for him to believe that an explanation did exist.

The strangest part was that it wasn’t even that cold. The ice was freezing to the touch, but the surrounding air was tolerable. It was as if the heat energy had been stolen away from the liquid water through some kind of endothermic reaction, rather than a more conventional exchange of heat with the surrounding environment.

Instant freezing by means unknown. Not a miracle, not magic, just a technology none of them could explain. Pierce might have said the same about his smartphone.

Bottom line, they were moving again, hopefully in the right direction.

The ice tunnel brought them to an outflow pipe—like a culvert deep beneath the surface of the pool—where the water drained out of the ancient city and joined an underground river. The passage rose, like the trap assembly in a flush toilet, then dropped in a frozen waterfall that splashed down the limestone wall. That was where the ice ended. Below them, the river was a glistening black void, a good twenty feet across, flowing through a deep canyon-like groove that cut through the uneven floor of the cavern.

Fiona offered no explanation for it, but said, “We should go upriver.”

“That will take us to the surface?” Pierce asked.

Fiona nodded.

“You saw that in your vision?” Gallo asked.

“Sort of. I think the vision was just my brain’s way of making sense of it all.”

“I’d still like to hear more about it,” Gallo said. “You mentioned the Raven?”

Fiona shrugged. “Just Raven…no ‘the.’ He’s a trickster figure in the mythology of the Pacific Northwest tribes, but his tricks usually worked out for good in the end.”

“And you saw Raven in your vision?”

“Sort of. It’s like I was inside the story. How Raven stole the sun and moon. My grandmother taught it to me. Well, a version of it. Every tribe tells it a little differently.”

“Not an uncommon thing in oral traditions,” Pierce observed.

“Tell us,” Gallo pressed.

“We should keep moving,” Lazarus said in a low, grave voice. Despite the fact that his clothes were now bloody tatters hanging from his large frame, he seemed to have made a full recovery from the wounds inflicted by the trilo-pede swarm, but Pierce knew how demanding, physically and mentally, the regeneration process was.

As they made their way into the cavern, following the course of the underground river, Fiona related what she had seen in her dream of Raven.

“And is that the way your grandmother taught it to you?” Gallo asked when she reached the end of the story.

“There were a few differences. In the original version, Raven waits until Girl stops to take a drink of water from the river, and changes himself into a tiny little fish, which she swallows without realizing it. Later on, she gives birth to the baby boy—Raven in a new disguise. I guess the idea of swallowing a fish and getting pregnant always seemed kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s why the dream was different.”

“Interesting variation on immaculate conception,” Gallo remarked. “Were there any other differences?”

“In the story, Raven first meets the girl outside her father’s house. She isn’t lost like I was in the vision. She doesn’t have to follow the river, and she doesn’t have to thaw it out with her song. I figured that part was my subconscious telling me how to get out of here.”

Pierce nodded. “You blacked out when you touched that thing.” He pointed at the orb Fiona still held in her hand. “Maybe it was telling you what to do, but your subconscious used the story to put it into a context you could understand.”

“Why that particular story?” Gallo asked. “Have you been thinking about it recently?”

Fiona shook her head.

“Do you think it means something?” Pierce asked.

Gallo shrugged. “Hard to say. I’m a historian, not a psychologist. But it’s an interesting story.”

“Seems like your basic turning of the year myth,” George said. “The sun vanishes as the solstice approaches. A deity—in this case the raven, a winter bird—transforms into a human to bring it back.”

“Well that’s one way to interpret it,” Gallo countered. “But if, as you suggest, that orb is trying to tell us something, maybe we need to open our minds to other possibilities.”

Pierce gave a noncommittal grunt. “Are you getting anything from it now, Fi?”

“I don’t think so. But it feels like we’re still going the right way.”

Thousands of years of water flowing through the surrounding karst, eroding the limestone as it followed the path of least resistance, had created a cave system that was easy to navigate. Lazarus, however, seemed to grow anxious as he brought up the rear.

Pierce dropped back. “Should we be worried?” he whispered.

“Always.” Lazarus gave him a tight smile. “Those things back there—”

“The trilo-pedes?” Fiona asked, looking back at them.

“Private conversation,” Pierce said with a tight smile. He forgot how well-trained her ears were at detecting language, even when the words were whispered. And he had to admit, her name for the enormous arthropods was appropriate.

“There were a lot of them in that pool,” Lazarus went on. “And it looked to me like they were drawn to us. Or to that thing Fiona is carrying.”

“You think there might be more of them here, in the cave?” Pierce found himself wishing that Fiona had brought along one or two of her golems. Before venturing into the ice tunnel, Fiona had uttered a short command, ‘Tesioh fesh met,’ one of the very few phrases in the Mother Tongue she had mastered, to disassemble the golems, just to avoid confusion if the buried city was ever discovered again. With the threat from the trilo-pedes neutralized by the ice, there was little reason to keep the golems, and besides, she could always make more if the need arose.

“I think there are probably a lot more of them here,” Lazarus said. “This is their primary habitat, not that pool. They’ll have the advantage here, even over Fiona’s golems. I’ll feel a lot better when we’re back under the sun. Until then, all we can do is keep moving.”

“George,” Gallo called out. “Look at this.”

Pierce jogged forward to join her and found her examining a wall adorned with streaks and splotches of black and red. It didn’t take too much imagination to see animal shapes, and human figures.

“Looks like we’re not the first people to discover this cave,” she said.

“That’s a good sign, right?” Fiona said. “It means there’s a way out.”

“No,” Pierce countered. “It just means there was a way out twenty thousand years ago. A lot could have changed since then.”

Before Pierce could amend his pessimistic assessment, there was a splash behind them, followed by a scrabbling sound. Pierce turned his headlamp toward the sound, just as something emerged from the river channel, heading right for them.

It was a trilo-pede, but bigger, with an armored thorax as broad as a queen-sized mattress, tapering into another six-feet of segmented tail.

It also wasn’t alone.

“Just once,” Pierce grumbled, “it would be nice to have a few minutes to look around.”