They pulled themselves over the crest of a steep, boulder-strewn hill, all of them breathing heavily from negotiating the unforgiving terrain. Sydney’s hands were raw from where she’d clutched at rough outcroppings for support. It had taken them more than three hours to go less than two kilometers inland. She held a damaged hand to her wounded back. For the first time in her relic-hunting career, she wondered if she could go on. She was growing light-headed and nauseated from the unrelenting ache, and she was reminded forcefully that even she had limitations.
A glance at Lloyd suggested he was no better off. His swarthy features were hollow, his face a sickening shade of gray, his skin glistening with a sheen of sweat. Normally a powerhouse of energy, he now moved like a man in slow motion, limbs stiff and knees quivering with each step.
She understood in a flash of clarity.
Lloyd was dying. Not just injured. Dying.
Tears obscured her vision, an overwhelming sense of loss that nearly cost her her footing. Dammit, no relic was worth this much!
Glancing at Nigel, she was relieved to see the determined set of his jaw. Imagine... Nigel had proven to be so strong, capable... And vulnerable, she reminded herself. She’d nearly lost him, too. She sent up a silent prayer of thanks that some unknown facet of the Viper’s personality had spared her colleague and best friend and...
A shout interrupted her thought. Her eyes followed its trajectory to a flurry of activity below, where a dozen figures clambered across the dig site, their deft negotiation of the uneven ground attesting to the long hours spent traversing it. Weapons bounced across their backs as they ran, rifles belted at a diagonal over multiracial, muscled flesh. This was no archaeological team taking meticulous care to preserve their find. No matter how dignified their veneer, the Gural Nataz was nothing more than a collection of crude guerillas, carrying out its raids sans any political agenda. It was greed incarnate.
Lloyd motioned for them to move, and Sydney straightened, biting back a groan. The world wavered around her for a moment, then righted itself.
She didn’t argue the when Nigel reached out to catch her elbow, steadying her, concern etched into his every nuance of motion and appearance. Whatever he read in her face, it prompted him to move closer, his hand closing around hers. She swallowed, finding it hard to break free of his gaze. Finally he pulled her along, and she followed, unable to explain how he’d suddenly taken the lead again in this rollercoaster of fortunes. She merely clung to his present superior strength and kept her focus on watching for trouble.
There should be a security team around the dig perimeter, she thought, frowning. Yet she saw no slight movement, no flash of a cigarette lighter, felt no rising of the hairs at the back of her neck that told her she was being watched. Was the Gural Nataz team so certain of itself that it discarded its normal precepts? Then she became aware of the sounds of their footsteps on the loose volcanic scruff, noise that cut through the silence. The hillsides echoed back its sounds, amplifying them.
There would be no way to sneak up on their enemy. There would be no element of surprise to save them, not unless they could find a way to jump from the towering boulders without killing themselves in the process. The Gural Nataz would hear them coming.
A sickening thought hit her, and she froze, unable to take another step. Her eyes drifted to the pistol in her hand, and the truth became crystal clear. Lloyd planned to fire on the camp from behind the cover of the boulders. He intended to employ guerilla tactics, himself, murdering the men and women who stood between them and the prize. It was the only way they could get Ichriem and get out without being killed themselves.
No! She would do almost anything for a relic, and almost anything to prevent the Gural Nataz from controlling what could be the world’s most potent weapon. Almost anything. But not murder. She wouldn’t take lives, picking them off like playing a video game. If she did that, she would be no better than the armed criminals below.
Nigel leaned in to whisper, "Sydney, can you keep moving? I know you should be resting, not traipsing across this hellhole, but we can’t leave you behind to rest."
His lips were so close to her ear she swore they brushed her skin, and she shivered, unable to reconcile the flood of emotions the thought unleashed. Her eyes fluttered closed for a moment and she nodded, surprised to hear herself whisper in return, "I’m fine."
His expression accused her of lying.
They moved along a rocky bluff, following a narrow ledge that wound along its lines. More than once they had to turn sideways to keep from falling, and more than once they dislodged dark pebbles that clattered downward hundreds of feet to the base of the cliff. Sydney didn’t waste the energy to ask where they were going. She focused putting one foot in front of the other, and in maintaining her grip on Nigel’s hand. She clasped it even along the most dizzying moments of their climb. Lloyd moved slowly but deliberately. Sydney prayed that his assurance wasn’t pure bravado.
Lloyd sagged against the stone wall, and for a moment Sydney was terrified that he would follow the pebble cascade to his death.
But a hand snaked out to brace him, and Lloyd glanced up, eyes wide. A slow smile spread across his face, a smile tempered by pain and grief. "Thanks, Bailey. You’re good people."
Preston chuckled, "I see now why you left my hands free."
Straightening, Lloyd sucked in a breath, blew it out, and announced, "Almost there."
He took only a few more steps when he disappeared into the rock, blinking out of sight without warning. Panic rose in Sydney as she searched the ground below them. She hadn’t even seen him fall.
"Hurry up, guys, we need to get moving here!"
Lloyd’s voice startled her, but there was a subtle Doppler shift that explained a great deal. He was inside a cave! Moments later, the entire entourage huddled inside the shelter, welcoming the broader platform underfoot. The dirt floor was just that – dirt. There was none of the loose stone that covered the rest of the island. It made sense, really. Beyond the cave, there were palm trees and other flora rising from beneath the sharp gravel, bearing testament to the fact that there really was soil below.
Nigel cried out, and for a moment Sydney thought he was hurt. A second shout told her otherwise, and he released the hold on her hand, dashing to one wall, his fingers hovering a couple of inches from the smoke-altered face. "Oh, my God, it’s amazing!" he exclaimed. "I haven’t seen anything like this before, though. What about you, Syd?"
She made her way across the floor, conceding to her weakness by sitting on the floor to examine his discovery. Most of the wall was blackened by soot. Yet marching across with remarkable precision, a line of narration ran in the color of the native stone, the pale green basalt that constituted most of the island. The creators apparently used some sort of pigment to write their message, and when the paint wore off millennia later, their missive became visible once again.
"Can you translate it?" she asked.
"It’s Phoenician," he replied, his voice taking on the distant quality that spoke of absorption. Pointing to a long passage, he intoned, "The fight was intense and many lives were sacrificed, but we won the prize. The Ichriem is..." He squinted. "Is..."
"Is ours," Preston interjected, stepping in next to his brother. "Ichriem is ours. We have brought it to the stronghold of Atlantis and flaunt it in our enemy’s face. They can see it, but their arms aren’t long enough to reach it. They worship their own power, forgetting to honor the Gods who granted that strength."
"Your Phoenician always was better than mine," Nigel sighed, a trace of the old bitterness coloring his voice.
"Only because I read your papers. They made sense of the textbooks. I was always so damned jealous of that, you know. You could take the most complex archaeological technicalities and break them down into English, making them clear as glass. I could never do that."
"You were jealous – of me?"
"Good God, yes. You were always dad’s favorite, too, no matter how hard I worked. And when it came to women, I was always second in line. They went for you first, and then for me."
Nigel tilted his head, and Sydney saw the gears churning as he considered that. "You went for my old girlfriends all the time."
"Well, yeah. I couldn’t get one of my own back then. You got the girls I wanted even when you were twelve and I was fifteen! It was downright humiliating!" Preston flushed, glancing at Claudia. "It doesn’t happen any more," he announced, glaring at his brother, apparently daring him to argue the point.
Lloyd cleared his throat. "Children, can’t this wait? I think you were translating here."
Giving Lloyd a nod, Nigel resumed, "It outlines a list of curses on the Egyptians, most of which came true. It says that the Ichriem isn’t to be taken lightly. They say its power is nearly that of the celestial gods, and that misuse could destroy the world. It is a tool..."
Sydney picked up where he left off. "That word – it doesn’t exactly mean tool. More like enhancer. And it says its power isn’t in its heart, it is in the hearts of those who wield it."
Lloyd exploded, "I know what it is. Does it say where it is? The Gural Nataz hasn’t found it yet. I want to keep it that way."
"Well, it says that the Phoenicians hid it where the Egyptians could see it but not reach it. Someplace high, perhaps?" Preston offered.
"No, they’d have been more ingenious than that," Sydney replied, chewing on her thumbnail. Her mind was awhirl with possibilities. "It would be arranged to taunt them. Height wouldn’t stop the Egyptians, anyway. They built obelisks and pyramids, remember? We still don’t know everything they did to raise stones that large to those heights."
To Sydney’s surprise, Nigel knelt to pick up a pebble from the floor, clasping it in his hand, turning it, his mouth pursed and eyes narrowing. "I wonder..."
"What is it?" Sydney asked, already suspecting.
Nigel tossed her the rock and advised, "See for yourself."
She reached for the clear stone, realizing that its color alone was a powerful clue to its origin. "Not native, is it?"
"Nope," Nigel replied. He was now grinning from ear to ear. "I’m surprised Claudia didn’t get it."
"I don’t believe it!" Sydney laughed. "It makes sense, when you think about it. The Phoenecians knew about it five thousand years ago." She turned the rock in her palm, delighted as she watched the smooth contours catch the light. "And the Egyptians would have been stupefied. They knew about it, knew how to manipulate it on a smaller scale, but something like this would have thrown them for a loop. They would have attributed it to the Gods, not to Phoenician industry."
She tossed the stone to Claudia, who burst out in a fit of giggles. "Oh my god! It’s glass! They embedded it in glass!"
End of Part Forty Seven
* http://www.glassonline.com/history.html
Go to Part Forty Eight.