Finally I saw one monkey leap from a tree and sink its teeth into the arm of another who was holding me. The whole troupe quickly joined in, screeching and beating at one another.
They were fighting for my possession.
I curled into a ball and prayed.
The chanting came as a relief.
I had been swung and dropped, slung over shoulders, tossed like a ball. I did not know where they’d carried me, as it occurred in nearly complete darkness. Through the mesh I had seen only fur and occasional eyes and teeth.
When the net was removed, I was sitting on a smooth rock surface at the edge of a large hole. The monkeys quickly dismantled their sack, then used the vines to tie my arms behind my back. The air was quite a bit cooler here, and I could hear languid drips fall into the blackness below. Rock walls rose all around me, their crags seeming to shift and dance with the reflected flicker of candlelight.
Across the hole was a doorway into another chamber, cut into the wall. People were chanting in there, their shadows moving in the light. I heard the strange music, too.
The voices were chanting in harmony to it.
“Hello?” I called out across the hole.
My voice boomed out, echoing off the walls. I looked up into a rock ceiling high above. I was in an enclosed place, some sort of cavern. I had been so smothered by the monkeys and the net that I had no idea how I’d gotten there.
In reply, a wizened man appeared in the cave opening. His cragged face seemed to have been hewn out of the rock itself, and his wispy white hair hung down to a silken robe. A gold-filigreed sash hung over the man’s shoulder with an intricately embroidered sun symbol. Under any other circumstance, I would have complimented his wardrobe. But the one-eyed monkey sat on the sash, grinning at me sassily
The man’s eyes rolled back into his head as he doddered toward me, and he held high a chalice so heavy that I was afraid it would break his frail arms. Behind him followed six other men, also chanting. The second carried an elaborately carved black sword on an embroidered cushion. I expected an orchestra to follow them, but their little cave appeared to be empty. The music, as always, was coming from nowhere.
And everywhere.
The old men circled the hole. The third in line had a small basket, from which the monkey pulled little stone tokens and dropped them into the hole. Each token landed with a loud, watery plop. So—a well.
“Who are you?” I pleaded, but they ignored me.
I edged away. Despite the horrific trip there, I felt oddly strong. The music, louder than ever, no longer hurt my head. In fact, for the first time in days my head did not ache at all.
As I listened to the strange guttural chant, the words seemed to arrange themselves inside my brain. Like the ingredients to a complex recipe, they flew through filters of grammar, structure, context, relationships. I was certain this was no language I’d ever heard before, but to my utter astonishment, I was beginning to understand it. Some of the words were obviously names—Qalani, Karai, Massarym—but I picked out “long-awaited visitor” … “select” … “sacrifice” … and something that sounded like the Greek letter lambda.
As they drew closer, I yanked at the bonds around my wrists. Yes. I felt a certain give. Talented as the monkeys were, they were better at weaving nets than binding wrists.
The men did not seem to see me. “Hoo ha, la la la!” I sang out, fearing that the men might be in some kind of sightless trance. Then I attempted their own language: “Where am I?” The words were awkward and thick on my tongue. “Who are you? Why am I here?”
Several of the priests gasped. The leader stopped. Close up, his face was almost transparent, a skull with a paper draping. If I could guess his age, I would start with one hundred and work upward. His eyes lit on me, seeming to return from some distant galaxy. I felt a sharp chill.
His ancient, creaky voice seemed little more than air. But he spoke slowly enough for me to understand. “I am R’amphos, high priest of the Great Qalani. You look on us with fear. With revulsion. You see us as we are now— broken, waiting. But a great time ago our people were abundant, our land fruitful, our leaders fair. We lived in balance and harmony.”
“Waiting?” I said. “For what?”
“For the glorious completion of our long-awaited task,” he replied. “A task granted to us by Qalani, whom we praise for allowing us to live to this day.”
“Praise Qalani!” the other men shouted.
“Eeee!” the one-eyed monkey concurred.
R’amphos handed the chalice to the third priest. The second priest lifted the carved sword off its cushion and bowed low, presenting the weapon to R’amphos. He grabbed the massive hilt. Its blade was thick obsidian, etched with runes.
I tugged harder at my bonds. My wrists ached. “What is that for?” I asked.
The old man’s face seemed to sag further. “You are a child. We know you mean no evil. But you have come to us according to the prophecy. And we cannot allow you to fulfill it. Please understand. It is for the good of all.”
I was certain then that I had wandered into a kind of nightmare bedlam, an island sanatorium of the insane. Surely I could escape.
The bonds seemed to be loosening a bit, but not quite enough to work my hands free. As I struggled, R’amphos edged closer. Time. I needed more of it. Perhaps I could try to reason with him. Convince him he’d made a mistake. Argue and delay him.
“What prophecy?” I asked. “Tell me all. You owe me that at least, before murdering me.”
“Not murder. Sacrifice.” The old man paused, his eyes growing more watery. He did not look homicidal or deranged but wearily determined. “It is foretold that Qalani’s child will return, riding the storm. He will be dying. And die he must. Because if he tries to save himself, he will, in time, destroy the world.”
For a moment I went numb with shock. Riding the storm … dying … It was as if he knew—knew of our shipwreck, my illness.
No. He couldn’t have. These things were coincidences. Guesses. Quasi-religious idiocy. I refused to be killed by these lunatics before Father had a chance to find the cure for my disease. I had to think clearly.
“Listen to me,” I begged. “You have the wrong person. My mother is named Greta, not Qalani. Greta Wenders. It doesn’t even sound close. My father’s name is Herman.”
R’amphos reached out toward me. I flinched as his cold, skeletal fingers gripped the side of my head and turned it. “You carry the mark,” he said.
I pulled away. I could feel one of the vines snap. My hands had a little more give. I could move my fingers, work my wrists.... “What mark?” I asked.
“I am sorry,” R’amphos replied. “I bear you no ill will, my child. But you see, this is a happy day. We all die. We become dust; we are missed by friends and family and then forgotten. But your death will bring life. You will be prevented from doing to the world what was done to the land of Qalani.”
“But—but I—”
The chanting started again in earnest. The monkey bounced eagerly, clapping its hands. R’amphos lifted high the sword and stepped toward me. He was so close I could smell a faint, musty odor from his silken robes.
I took a deep breath, raised my head high, said a prayer, and spat.
I had not lost my boyhood talent. The saliva jettisoned like a slingshot, directly into the monkey’s one good eye.
Wailing, the creature jumped toward me, teeth bared. The priest staggered, thrown off-balance.
I pulled against my bonds with all my strength. With a snap, they came loose. I swung my right hand around toward the monkey as it grabbed for my face. Its teeth clamped down hard on the tangle of vines I held. I completed the arc, sending the sadistic little creature into the well.
I brought my leg up. The old man was surprisingly quick, but my knee clipped the blade at the hilt, sending it into the air.
It smashed against the stone wall and fell to the platform. In a flash, three of the priests were upon me. As I fended
off one with a blow to his bony jaw, the others grabbed me from behind. They were wrinkled and liver spotted, yet their agility and strength overwhelmed me. First one arm, then the other, was pinned behind my back.
“I am not what you think I am!” I cried out.
R’amphos had picked up the sword and was stepping toward me. “We will not be turned back,” he rasped. “You must comply. For your own safety and that of everything you see.”
I yanked myself left and right. They had me immobilized. I watched in utter horror as R’amphos raised the blade and brought it down.
“No!” I screamed.
But as the word ripped from my throat, I was blinded by two quick flashes of orange and white.
The blade seemed to disintegrate into the air as an explosion blasted through the chamber. “LET HIM GO, YOU MONGRELS!”
Father’s voice rang out, seeming to come from all directions. He was running in from a dark opening to my right, smoke trailing from the barrel of his gun. In his other hand he held a flaming torch aloft, and he thrust it toward one of the priests.
The man screamed as his robe burst into flames. He jumped into the well below, his shrieks joining with the monkey’s. My captors let go, running away from the new intruder. The second bullet must have struck another priest, who lay bleeding on the ground.
R’amphos turned toward Father. “You must allow us to complete the sacrifice!” he cried in his language, his voice plain through the pandemonium.
Although Father did not understand a word, he was not at a loss for a reply. “Go suck on a rock,” he said, pulling me toward the opening.
We ran through a tunnel that sloped sharply upward. At the top of the slope, the pathway forked a couple of times, but Father seemed to know where he was going. I followed him until we emerged into fresh air.
He stopped, doubled over with exhaustion. “Must … catch my breath …”
“Thank you, Father.” I was relieved to be standing still, as my head pounded horribly. Taking the torch from him, I beat it against the rock wall until the flames died. The sun was rising now, and we wouldn’t need it. “How did you find me?”
“The monkeys …” he replied. “Loud beasts, you know … not much for secrecy when they’ve got what they want … so I followed their yammering through the woods.... I nearly lost them. But eventually I found my way here.”
He glanced back toward the opening. It appeared to be in the side of a rock cliff, roughly triangular and about six feet high. Beside it stood a massive stone that matched its shape, like a door that had been pulled aside.
“Are you all right, Son?” Father continued. “Did they harm you in any way?”
I held the back of my head. That seemed to ease the pain a bit. “The priest … he said—”
“Said?” Father cut in. His eyes were wide. “You understood him?”
“It was as if I learned the entire language in moments, just from the few words they chanted,” I told him.
“Remarkable,” he whispered.
Now the music was intensifying, as if summoning me back … back into the opening. My head felt as if it might explode. “Father, what is happening to me? What is going on? Why did those men want to kill me?” The story poured out—the prediction of my arrival, the deadly procession, the sword, the nonsense about my mother being named Qalani.
Father listened in silence. I was expecting outrage, surprise, shock. But he merely nodded. With growing horror, I saw that he did not look terribly surprised.
“He said that I was going to destroy the world, Father!” I cried out, finishing the tale.
That seemed to shake him. “What? That’s absurd, Burt. Pay no mind to that superstitious claptrap. How could a mere boy destroy the world?”
“But the other things, the other parts of the prophecy—you seem to know them!” I blurted out. “It seemed like you recognized the story!”
Father looked away.
“‘He will be dying. And die he must’—that is what the priest said,” I recounted. “Is it true, Father?”
He bowed his head. In a silence that lasted maybe three seconds, I felt an epoch go by. “There are … things I should tell you,” he began.
The sound of distant shouting made him stop. I saw a flicker of light from inside the black triangle. Father’s eyes widened with alarm. “Run!” he cried.
We took to the woods. The voices were close behind us now. The priests had found the entrance. Father and I charged through the brush, but the old men were surprisingly swift, and they knew the terrain. As we burst into a clearing, one of them emerged from behind a tree—ahead of us.
We stopped. Three other priests were at our backs. One of them carried a long wooden pole, while another was brandishing a fist-sized rock. The third was the fellow whose robe had caught fire. It hung from his shoulders, a blackened, sodden mess. The hair on one side of his head had also been singed away. “Release the boy,” the priest said in the ancient language.
Father raised the gun.
“Stay back,” I replied in the same tongue. “We have no wish to harm you. But if you try to take me, we will.”
The priests hesitated. Then the burned one hurled himself at Father. With a curse, Father squeezed the trigger.
CLICK.
The gun was out of bullets.
The priest landed upon Father, yelling in fierce triumph. As the two of them rolled on the ground, the other three advanced on me. I backed away.
“Go, Burt!” Father said.
“No!” I protested. “I won’t leave you!”
“I’ll be fine,” he insisted. “It’s you they want! Run! Lose them in the jungle! I’ll find you at the shore camp.”
My heart ached. Leaving him went against everything I felt and believed. But I knew he was right.
“Go!” Father repeated. “I will find you!”
I turned and ran. I was traveling blind, pointed in the vague direction of the shore. My foot clipped a root, and I fell with an involuntary shout.
Picking myself up, I raced on. My ankle twinged sharply; I had twisted it as I fell. Around me, the cawing of birds was like a mocking chorus. They seemed to be scolding me, giving voice to what my heart and soul were feeling.
I went as far as my ankle would allow, before it began to throb painfully. I ducked into the shelter of a bramble-choked rock outcropping.
This outcropping. Where I sit now. Where worms poke their heads lazily from the soil, and grubs burrow into the mossy tufts between rocks. They will be here tomorrow, too. And the next day and the next century.
I will not.
I have felt safe while writing this. But the sun will go down, and the priests will not rest until they find me. I must return to the camp. I must find Father.
If he does not live, I will be alone. If he lives, how long will I? Where is a cure for my disease in this place of ancient priests and green-blooded beasts and net-weaving monkeys?
What is this place?
Who am I?
I pray that he will find me soon. That before I die we will have time to discover a way to save me. To save the world, if the prophecy is true. Perhaps the secret is in deciphering the tablets. If not—if we die here—I hope it will not be in vain.
The birds have silenced. Something must be nearby.
I will attempt to bury this now for safekeeping, for I think I hear
* * *
This is where the journal ends.
The rest is a jagged margin of paper, ripped to the binding. Sadly, the rest of the story is lost, but a search is on to find the missing pages and whatever secrets they contain. We will not give up until all possibilities are exhausted.
Meanwhile, it’s back to work. The story begins soon—in the Seven Wonders Book 1, The Colossus Rises.
—PL
COPYRIGHT
SEVEN WONDERS JOURNALS: THE SELECT
Copyright © 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers
All rights reserved under International and Pan-Ameri
can Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © November 2012 ISBN 9780062238900
Version 03282014
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FIRST EDITION
Dedication
JERAMEY KRAATZ,
MANY THANKS!
—P.L.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
*GO, DARIA. NOW.
My knees shook. I stood before the gate of the King’s Garden, trying not to look at the magnificent people who strolled in and out. I did not want my eyes, my face, to give me away. I hoped my clean tunic would fool them. I hoped that on this afternoon they would not see me as a street urchin, a slave, a wardum, a creature of the dirt.
My plan was crazy. But my friend Frada lay dying, and I needed to save her. I had to do the unthinkable. And fast. Pressing down the wrinkles of my garment, I held my head high and stepped through the gate.
I was greeted by a blast of bad breath. “Step aside!” bellowed a royal guard, dragging a large sack. “King Nabu-na’id the Great approaches!”