Another crackle, this one deeper, more menacing. The layer of ice coating the wall above them fractured, a jagged line leaping over their heads toward a much larger hunk of precariously hanging debris.
A smaller crack shot straight up to the icicles hanging from a higher step—
With a sound like breaking bones, the frozen spikes fell.
Chase tried to dodge, but he had nowhere to go. One spear of ice hit his arm, slashing through his coat. Another hit the step, shaking it.
He toppled forward—
Sophia slammed an arm against his chest. He wavered, back arched, arms whirling …
She pushed harder, one spiked boot slipping with a shrill of metal on stone. Chase hung at the point of no return … then tipped back against the wall with a relieved gasp.
But the danger wasn’t over.
More ice showered over the trio as the crack above them widened. The large lump higher up ripped free, scattering shards in all directions. Nina yelled as it whooshed past, barely missing her—but hitting the previous step.
This time, it wasn’t the ice that broke but the stone, the weight of the plummeting mass wrenching it out of the wall. The preceding step almost followed, left hanging by one corner as the rest of the debris smashed onto more steps below before hitting the floor with a hideous, echoing crash.
“Shit,” Chase gasped, looking past Nina at the damaged wall. “Think we’re going to have to find another way down.” With one step missing and another on the brink of giving way, the next secure footing was six feet away and nearly three feet lower—a dangerous leap, given the treacherous ice.
Sophia’s arm was still across his chest. “Thanks,” he said to her.
She nodded. “You’re welcome.”
“Although … I’m a bit surprised.”
“What, that I didn’t let you fall?”
“Yeah. Realized that you couldn’t live without me after all?”
She smiled. “Not quite. It’s just that, for the moment, my chances of survival are far higher with you around. Saving you was simple self-interest.”
“And if it’d been me who was about to fall?” Nina asked, regarding her coldly. The smile vanished; the loathing in Sophia’s dark eyes gave her a crystal-clear answer.
“So now what do we do?” Chase asked, recovering his composure.
“We go on,” Nina told him. “I mean, we don’t really have much choice. Are you okay?”
He pulled at his torn sleeve to check the wound beneath, wincing at a jab of pain. “Arm’s cut. Doesn’t look too deep, but I’ll need to bandage it. It can wait till we get to the top, though.” Pushing himself against the wall, he stepped across the gap to the next step.
More carefully than before, they continued upward, ascending the spiral until they reached the level of the window. A narrow ledge led around the shaft to it. The glazing was almost fifteen feet in diameter, the shape of the statue’s head vaguely discernible beyond.
But it was the passageway opposite the window that dominated their attention. The entrance was arched, a vaulted ceiling retreating into the dark. The floor was thick with pooled ice. Pillars with ancient writing scribed upon them lined each side …
Glinting with gold.
Sophia stepped eagerly forward, but Nina put out an arm to stop her. “At least let Eddie get fixed up first, huh?”
“There’s no need to wait,” Sophia said impatiently. “Whatever it is the Covenant wants, we’ve beaten them to it. And it’s just down there.”
“And it’ll still be there in five minutes. Eddie, do you need any help?”
Chase had shrugged off his coat and retrieved a first aid kit from his pack. “Nah, I’ll just sit here and stitch myself up while you two keep arguing.”
“Oh, don’t you start. It’s bad enough having her sniping away in one ear without you doing the same in the other.”
He snorted. “You’re the one who brought her along. I would’ve left her in Ribbsley’s camper van if it’d been up to me.”
“That hasn’t stopped you from getting all pally with her again, has it?” she snapped.
Chase gave her a disbelieving look. “Where the fuck did that come from? We swap a couple of jokes and suddenly you think we’re nipping off behind the icebergs for a quick shag?”
Nina’s look of disgust was matched by Sophia’s. “I can assure you, Nina, that that absolutely did not and will not happen.”
“It better not,” Nina muttered.
Chase glared at her. “You going to help me, or what?”
She huffed. “What can I do?”
“Just pull my sleeve back a bit so I can get at it,” he told her, peeling the torn material from the cut.
Nina held the fabric open as he ran an antiseptic swab over the cut. “Does it hurt?”
“Take a guess,” Chase said, grunting as he pinched the edges of the cut together and applied a Steri-Strip dressing across it, then wrapped a bandage over that. “That should hold it—unless we have to do any climbing or anything else that’ll rip it.”
“Let’s hope there’s an easier way back down.” Nina looked around as he put his coat back on and saw Sophia crouching by one of the pillars. “Hey! I said to wait.”
“Yes, you did” was the dismissive reply. “I can read some of this text—it’s talking about the tree of life.” She stood, anticipation clear on her face. “Whatever it is, it’s here.” Sophia’s flashlight illuminated the passage, revealing a chamber at the far end. “Come on.”
She hurried down the corridor. Exasperated, Nina caught up, Chase following.
The three flashlight beams swept across the chamber’s entrance to reveal what lay inside. Beneath the omnipresent ice, Nina made out stone shelves, much like those she had seen inside the ruined chamber in Australia … but these were intact.
And still held their contents.
“Oh …” she said in wonder as she entered the room, moving the light along the length of one of the shelves. It was filled with clay tablets, a long rack containing dozens upon dozens of the flat rectangles, standing on edge like books. She continued to pan the beam, revealing more tablets … and more … and more.
And beyond them, more shelves. And more. The chamber stretched away as far as her light could reach, a vast warren of ancient knowledge. Chase and Sophia also probed the room, finding yet more stacks of tablets receding into the distance.
“We—we need more light,” she gasped, pulling off her backpack and fumbling in it for a packet of glow sticks. Almost dropping them in her haste, she bent them to crack the inner glass tubes, chemicals mixing and fluorescing to give out an orange light, the first warm color she had seen since entering the frozen cavern. “Look at this! Look!” she cried, almost skipping into the nearest aisle in her excitement as she placed glow sticks on the shelves. “It’s a library! It’s the entire knowledge of the Veteres!”
Chase rummaged in his own pack for a lantern and switched it on, noticing a large gap on one shelf. “It’s not that entire. Somebody’s taken a bunch of stuff off this shelf. Hate to think what the overdue fines are after this long.”
“There are more missing over here,” Sophia added, peering down another aisle. “And here, too.” Whole sections were empty, entire shelves gaping.
Nina took off her gloves, lifting a tablet at random. The ice crackled before finally giving up its prize. She recognized a handful of the words on it; there was mention of wind, cold, and storms. A record of the weather?
Another snap of ice from a few aisles away. “This one seems to be about some sort of dispute between families,” said Sophia after a few moments.
Nina retrieved a couple of glow sticks and moved deeper into the maze, stopping at an empty shelf. Examining it, she made out words carved into the stone slab itself. “Sophia, look at this,” she called. Sophia and Chase joined her. “I think it’s an index—it’ll tell us what’s missing, rather than what’s been left behind.”
Sophia brushed away the frost. “I think i
t says ‘grain.’ Some sort of crop, anyway. And that’s ‘water’—not the sea, but fresh.”
“Something about farming?” Chase suggested. “Like how to grow grain?”
“How to irrigate grain,” Nina hypothesized. The reason why some sections of the library were empty while others had been left completely intact was becoming clear. “That’s something that’d be useful if you had to pack up and start from scratch. But historical records, accounts of legal disputes … not so much.”
“You think they took the missing tablets with them?” asked Sophia.
“They cleaned out the rest of the place when they left, so there’s no reason why they wouldn’t have taken valuable knowledge with them—the kind of knowledge that would help them survive. But this …” She pulled another tablet free. “This is still an incredible find—it’ll give us an amazing amount of information about how the Veteres lived. When they went back to Australia to escape the changing climate, they left it all behind, because it would just be deadweight. And when you’re sailing thousands of miles in primitive boats, the last thing you want aboard is deadweight.”
Sophia sounded almost offended. “So all this is worthless? They took all the most important tablets with them and left the junk behind?”
“It’s not worthless,” Nina said irritably, her professional pride insulted. “I just said—”
“It’s of absolutely no use to us right now. And it doesn’t help us deal with the Covenant. We already knew the Veteres left here and went back to Australia—we’re no better off than we were before. Just a lot colder.”
“There’s still plenty more to look at,” Chase said, standing beside Nina. “This tree they kept going on about might be just round the next corner.”
Sophia swung her flashlight back and forth, finding only more shelves. “Somehow I doubt that, Eddie,” she said with a sneer.
“I don’t mean literally the next corner, for fuck’s sake. Christ, this is just like when we—”
“It’s not literal,” Nina interrupted. Chase and Sophia looked at her. “The tree, I mean,” she continued, her mind racing as a new idea took form. “It’s not literal—the translation doesn’t literally mean ‘tree’! Ribbsley got it wrong, just like he did about wind and sand—it’s symbolic, something with multiple meanings depending on the context.” She paced rapidly back and forth along the aisle. “What else can a tree represent? What’s the symbolism behind it?”
Sophia quickly overcame her anger to focus on the problem. “Growth and change,” she said. “Or cycles, cycles of nature.”
Chase’s thoughts were more practical. “You get wood from trees. Or fruit.”
“The tree of the gift,” said Nina, “the tree of life. If it’s not a literal tree, then what is it? The something of life, the something of the gift.”
“It’d help if we knew what the gift was,” Chase said.
Nina tried to remember the Australian inscription. “The Veteres thought their god was punishing them. And their term for ‘god’ included ‘tree’—‘the one great tree,’ wasn’t it?” Sophia nodded. “So to them god and tree were interlinked. What were they thinking? How did their minds work?” Words clicked through her own mind, alternative meanings flashing past like possible solutions to a crossword clue. “So what is God? God’s the creator, the provider, the giver of life … the source,” she concluded. “The source of life, the source of the gift, the one great source. And a tree is a source, of lots of things—it gives you shelter, food, wood …”
“It fits,” Sophia reasoned. “They used the word ‘tree’ as a symbolic representation for source—of anything.”
“Which means,” Nina said, looking at the shelves, “that we’re in ‘the source of the gift.’ The library is the source of the gift.”
“So what is this gift?” Chase demanded.
“It’s knowledge!” Nina said, laughing. “The gift from their god was knowledge! The ability to record and pass on everything they’d ever learned to their descendants, who passed it on to their descendants, and so on. And all of this at a time when we thought humans hadn’t even developed cave paintings. My God, this is amazing!”
“Their god wasn’t quite so impressed,” said Sophia. “He tried to destroy them, remember? For ‘giving the gift of God to the beasts.’”
Chase looked dubious. “How do you give knowledge to animals?”
The answer came to Nina. “You train them. That’s what the hypogeum must have been—a training area. Start them out in harsh, cramped conditions under constant supervision to break them, then move them to easier surroundings once you’ve got control. First the stick, then the carrot. I doubt PETA would approve, but it’d work.”
“So their god decided to freeze them to death for teaching their dogs to fetch? Bit steep.”
“That’s primitive religion for you. If things go bad, the only conceivable explanation is that you’ve somehow angered your god.”
“So if ‘the tree of the gift’ is actually the source of knowledge,” said Sophia, “what about ‘the tree of life’? The source of life?”
“I don’t know,” Nina replied, “but that sounds like something the Covenant would be interested in, don’cha think?” She gathered up the glow sticks. “Let’s find it.”
The library extended for some distance. Nina judged that roughly a fifth of the storage space was empty—which meant that in their flight to warmer climes, the Veteres had been forced to abandon four-fifths of their entire recorded knowledge: an incredible loss to any society. Had they simply sacrificed too much of the knowledge they needed to survive?
They made their way through the maze, eventually reaching the far wall—and discovering the entrance to another room. “It’s not a library,” said Chase, stepping inside. “Don’t know what it is, actually.”
Ally-ally-ally … his voice echoed back. Exchanging puzzled looks with the others, he raised his flashlight, and saw that the new chamber’s roof was domed. Nina moved her light across the room. It was circular, with what looked like pieces of machinery spaced around its edge. There was another, larger machine at the center, a conical copper tube extending upward from it almost to the ceiling.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Sophia, moving to the nearest machine. “It looks like a potter’s wheel.”
“They must have made some bloody weird pots,” Chase opined as he approached an identical device on the opposite side of the entrance. There was indeed a large wooden wheel at about waist height, a metal rod rising from its center, but mounted behind it on a hinge was a large copper cone, a thick needle protruding from the narrow end … “They’re gramophones!” he exclaimed. “Like the one you made in Australia, Nina.”
“This must be where they played the recordings on the cylinders,” Sophia said.
Nina went to the chamber’s center, holding out a glow stick to illuminate the machine there. “No,” she deduced, looking up at the copper tube. “It’s not where they played them. It’s where they made them. This room … it’s a recording studio. Look.” She followed the tube up to the ceiling, where the interior surface of the dome was marked with odd indentations radiating out toward each gramophone. Even through the ice, it was easy to tell they had been carefully carved into a very specific pattern. “The sound of the original goes up the tube to the roof—and then goes outward to each of the cones around the room. It’s a whispering gallery!”
“Like the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral?” asked Sophia.
“Yes, only this one’s designed to send the sound out in multiple directions rather than just to the point diametrically opposite. Pretty sophisticated, even today. The Veteres just keep getting more advanced, don’t they?” She took a closer look at the machine. Like the others, it had a wheel and a speaker cone, this one angled to point at the mouth of the tube above. Beneath the wheel, she noticed that the vertical axle was wound with fine copper bands. “I think this was designed to make copies of existing cylinders as well as to record v
oices. That’d explain why there was an echo on the cylinders we played in Australia—the recording cones were picking up sounds from other parts of the room.”
“So this is like a prehistoric iTunes?” Chase said. “Pick your favorite track and they’ll run off copies for you?”
Nina smiled at the comparison. “In a way, yeah. Although it might have been more for religious purposes. Just think what it would be like to have an actual recording of, say, the Sermon on the Mount. You wouldn’t need to interpret someone else’s written account—you’d have Jesus’ own words, exactly as he spoke them.” She bent down, removing a glove to rub the frost off what appeared to be text on one of the copper bands. “Although it’d put a lot of religious scholars out of business if everybody could—Ow!”
She jerked back, clutching her finger. At the same moment, a mechanical clunk echoed through the chamber. The wheel of the central machine shuddered, straining against the ice before falling still.
“What happened?” Chase asked, hurrying to her. “Are you okay?”
“I just got zapped!” Nina shrilled, more surprised than hurt. “Like a static shock.” She rubbed her finger. “Son of a bitch!”
Chase gingerly tapped the machinery. “It’s gone now.”
“Great,” Nina muttered. “A static charge sticks around for thousands of years, and guess who gets hit by it?”
“Eddie, turn the wheel,” Sophia called to them from the machine she had been examining. Chase took hold of the wooden wheel and pulled at it. It moved only fractionally, still jammed by ice—but the wheel of Sophia’s machine creaked in unison. The others did the same. “They’re all linked.”
Nina surveyed the room. “Makes sense. If you’re making copies, you want them to be identical. If each wheel was manually operated, they’d all be running at slightly different speeds.” She looked back at the axle. “So what’s making it work?”
“It can’t be electric, can it?” asked Chase. “No way this lot were that advanced.”
Nina looked back in the general direction of the statue, a puzzled frown crossing her face. “I don’t see how, unless … could they have used earth energy somehow? Those copper things outside the temple—they could be antennas.”