| |
Maddock, a more experienced climber than Kismet, went first, rappelling into the borehole. Under normal circumstances, fast-roping down without a belayer would have posed no challenge to either of them, but the frigid temperatures and the requisite protective equipment brought with it a whole new set of variables. Maddock made a cautious descent, using the points of the crampons strapped to his mountaineering boots for traction, as he methodically worked his way down the smooth curving wall of the shaft. The blue-white interior of the borehole reflected and amplified the beam from his headlamp, lighting up the confined space like the old ice tunnel ride at Universal Studios. Finally, after about five tedious minutes of down climbing, he reached the bottom.
The floor of the shaft bore the marks of the Ice Worm’s teeth, a pattern of concentric grooves radiating from the center, under a scattering of ice powder, but beneath the scoured translucent surface, Maddock could easily distinguish a large dark mass, pressed up against it like an insect trapped in amber. He looked away, turning his attention to the immediate task, and called up. “I’m set.” His voice echoed weirdly.
After a few seconds, Kismet’s voice, distant and distorted, came back. “On belay?”
Maddock held the twinned ropes in his gloved hands, ready to take up the slack in the unlikely event Kismet lost control of his descent, and shouted back, “Belay on.”
“Descending!”
The rope twitched in Maddock’s grip as the other man made a careful but rapid descent without incident, and ninety seconds later, Kismet was standing beside him.
“So much for the easy part,” Kismet remarked, staring back up the long shaft.
Maddock nodded his agreement. Getting back to the surface would be a test of both skill and endurance. They would have to front-point their crampons into the ice and inch their way back up the rope using mechanical ascenders, but that ordeal was the last thing on Maddock’s mind. As Kismet began sweeping away the powdery ice shavings, Maddock unslung the backpack he’d brought down, and took out the black orb they had recovered from the Outpost and set it down on the floor, directly above the dark shape under the ice.
The orb was about eighteen inches or so in diameter, but unusually light, like a piece of Styrofoam. When they had first discovered it at the bottom of what might or might not have been a man-made pyramid hidden under the ice, it had actually been floating a few feet off the ground, suspended in some kind of invisible force field. That same force field had sublimated the ice surrounding it, turning it from a solid into a vapor without first melting it into water and without producing any detectable heat. Maddock was hoping to make it repeat that trick now, but after a minute or so of rolling it back and forth, there was no detectable change.
He looked up at Kismet and shrugged. “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Maybe there’s a step you missed,” Kismet said. “How did you get it to work back at the Outpost?”
“I don’t think we did anything. It just sort of woke up all on its own.” Even as he said it, he realized that wasn’t quite accurate. They had done something, albeit not intentionally. “The tomahawk,” he said, thinking aloud.
The sunken wreckage of the seaplane had not been the only clue to lead Maddock and the others to the Outpost. They had also found a metal hatchet head, engraved with the name of a pre-Revolutionary War soldier named Stephen Thorne. The strange history of that artifact had brought them together with Rose Greer, who had supplied the missing pieces of the puzzle, but the tomahawk had done something else, too. The blade, infused with a rare metal Rose had identified as ‘adamantine’ had been drawn to the orb like a magnet. Before taking the orb down into the borehole, Maddock had peeled the hatchet head away and entrusted it to Rose for safe-keeping, but now he wondered if perhaps the two objects worked together to create the phenomena he had earlier observed. Before he could explain this to Kismet however, the other man began stripping off his gloves.
“I’ve got an idea.”
Maddock sucked in an apprehensive breath. Although the bottom of the borehole was considerably warmer than the air outside the tent, sheltered and insulated by the ice itself, like the inside of an igloo, the temperature was still well below freezing. Without the protection of his gloves, Kismet would experience frostbite in a matter of minutes. The other man seemed unconcerned however. He flexed his fingers and rubbed them together for a moment, then reached up to his neck and unfastened the collar of his heavy winter parka.
Maddock caught a glimpse of something, a block of gleaming blue stone worn like a pendant around Kismet’s neck, and knew it had to be the Apex stone Jade and Kismet had talked about, the talisman that had prompted Kismet’s search for John Edward Grace. Kismet closed his left fist around the Apex, and then reached out and placed his right hand on the orb.
At first, Maddock didn’t think anything was happening. There was no pyrotechnic display, no discharge of electricity. But after a few seconds, he realized that the air around them was growing thick with fog. He swept his hand through the mist, trying to brush it away, but like smoke, the vapors were pulled into the vacuum created by the movement, but in that brief moment, he saw clearly the results of Kismet’s experiment.
The ice was giving up its dead.
Kismet remained like that for a full two minutes before drawing his hand back away from the orb. His bare fingers were covered in a dusting of ice crystals, but he shook them off and then stuffed his hands back into his gloves. The mist began dissipating immediately, coalescing into snowflakes which settled onto the floor, still partly obscuring what the orb had revealed. Kismet brushed the snow away to reveal the body, now completely free from its frozen tomb.
The cadaver lay on its side in a fetal curl, a last futile attempt to preserve body heat. Kismet gently rolled him over. In the stillness, the sound of the still frozen body crunching on the snow was both surreal and ominous. Then Maddock got a look at the man’s face.
He couldn’t recall if he’d ever seen a picture of the explorer, but making the identification would have been easy for anyone who had. The face peering up from the fur-lined hood had a leathery yellow cast, except around the nose which was shriveled and black, and the man’s lips had pulled back to form a wide grimace, but otherwise the body was almost perfectly preserved, even the eyes which were open in an eternal sightless stare.
“Is it him?” he asked. “Grace?”
Kismet nodded but said nothing. After a moment of silent regard, he reached out and began peeling back the stiff fur garments. He rooted around for a while and then drew out a rectangular parcel that might have been a leather pouch or book cover. As Kismet meticulously unwrapped it, allowing it to fall open in his hands, Maddock saw that it was the latter.
The cold arid environment had left the paper brittle but the writing was crisp and legible.
“His diary,” Kismet said, cautiously turning the pages, only giving each a brief glance. “I think we may have solved another mystery,” he said after a reading a few pages. “I think the reason he decided to leave the others was to make sure nobody ever found this.”
“A secret worth dying for?” Maddock said.
“Bigger than that. This would have outed him, and not just as an occult practitioner if you get my meaning.”
Maddock was pretty sure he did.
“He knew he was going to die,” Kismet went on, “and he knew that if this record ever made it back to civilization, his legacy as a heroic explorer would be tainted by—”
He broke off as something slid out of the book, fluttering as it fell, and came to rest on the cadaver’s chest.
It was a stiff piece of paper, like a card or bookmark, adorned with an elaborate painted image. Maddock’s first thought was that the object was a picture postcard, but the proportions weren’t quite right; the card was narrow and oblong, more like an over-sized playing card. Kismet retrieved the card and held it up for closer inspection.
The picture was of a smiling nude figure. The subject was androgynous, but seemed more male than female. Rising up behind him was a familiar representation of a caduceus—a staff with wings and two entwined snakes, often used—mistakenly—as a symbol of medicine. The figure’s face was turned up, as if gazing at the sun, and his arms were outstretched, one raised higher than the other, and hanging in the air around him, like falling objects caught in a freeze frame were several strange objects adorned with cryptic symbols; Maddock didn’t recognize them but felt like he should. There were other esoteric designs on the painting and a strange web of lines, like cables on a suspension bridge, radiated out from behind the figure. The man’s feet were crossed, left over right, as if he was being crucified on the caduceus, but something that looked almost like another pair of wings spread out from his heels, covering the lower half of the painting.
“It’s Hermes,” Maddock said. “Or Mercury, but they’re more or less the same. See the winged sandals and the caduceus?”
Kismet nodded in agreement, then flipped the card over to reveal another image, a cross that divided into multi-colored panels, and at its center, a single red rose.
Kismet gave a thoughtful hum. “The Rose Cross. It’s one of the oldest symbols of alchemy.” He looked up at Maddock. “This is a tarot card.”
Maddock didn’t know much about occult practices so he took Kismet at his word. “So it’s not the map?”
Kismet turned the card back to the image of Hermes. “I think maybe it is. Look at these symbols.
“There are four suits in the Tarot deck, just like regular playing cards. Each one is linked to one of the four elements of esoteric tradition—fire, earth, water, and air.” He pointed to the object close to the god’s right hand. It reminded Maddock of the Olympic torch, except entwined with the flames was an equilateral triangle. “This represents the suit of staffs or wands—or clubs. It corresponds to the element of fire. And this shape here—the triangle—that’s a fire symbol. Only I don’t think it’s just a triangle. It’s a pyramid.”
“That makes sense,” Maddock agreed. “The word pyramid comes from an ancient Greek term that translates as ‘fire in the middle.’ So that’s one. What about spades, hearts and diamonds?”
“In tarot, the suits are wands, swords, cups and coins—also called disks or pentacles.” He chuckled. “I really fell down the rabbit hole doing research on Adam Garral. Anyway, this black object below it definitely looks like a disk to me. And this...” His gloved fingertip shifted over to Hermes’ left side, to an object that resembled a trophy or two-handed drinking cup. Directly above it was another circle, but unlike the disk, it was rendered in such a way as to suggest a three-dimensional shape—a sphere.
“Cups,” Maddock said, catching on. “Water.”
Kismet nodded. “Modernized into the suit of hearts. Hearts pump blood which is mostly water. This last one...” He slid his finger down to the final image which appeared to be a puffy cloud pierced by something that looked like a shard of glass or a jagged lightning bolt. “That must be swords, representing the element of air.”
“Okay. I’ll buy that it’s a tarot card, but how is it a map?”
“I’m not sure it’s a literal map, although it might be. It’s more like a set of instructions for a scavenger hunt. Adam Garral found one piece of the puzzle in Egypt, in the Great Pyramid.”
“The Apex.”
“He was down here looking for another.”
“Which one?” Even as he asked it, Maddock realized the answer. “The orb. That’s what he was looking for. But which one is it?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say cups. The shape, like a drop of water. And it was sealed up in ice.”
Maddock recalled how Kismet had used the Apex and the orb in concert to evaporate the ice covering the frozen remains of John Edward Grace. “So now we have two pieces. What do we win if we collect all four?”
“Immortality. The ability to transmute the elements.” Kismet nodded toward the corpse on the floor. “That’s what he thought anyway.”
“And Prometheus? What do they want with it.”
“What else? Power.”
“Everybody wants to rule the world,” Maddock muttered. “So I guess we better find the other two pieces first, and make sure they don’t get their hands on any of them.”
Kismet laughed softly. “I like the way you think, Dane Maddock.”
“It’s Bones. He’s a bad influence. So, any idea where to look next?”
“One or two.” Kismet dropped the card back into the journal then closed the leather cover and stuffed the parcel into the pocket of his parka. “But first, let’s go somewhere warmer. I think we’ve accomplished all we can down here.”
Maddock knew he wasn’t just talking about the borehole. “Bones will be glad to hear it.”
Kismet stood and moved back, giving Maddock room to retrieve the orb. When the black sphere was again nestled in the backpack slung over Maddock’s shoulder, Kismet knelt beside the remains of the polar explorer and leaned in close. “Don’t worry, old man,” he whispered. “Your secret’s safe forever.”