With nothing to repel it, the second cherubim lurched forward, heading straight for Chase and Sophia—and its blades smashed into the inert statue with a horrendous clash of metal. The recoil sent the moving cherubim spinning back across the chamber, while the broken figure was thrown to the floor in pieces. One of the blades stabbed a foot deep into the wall beside Chase. The statue’s severed head came to rest at his feet, the lion face glaring accusingly at him.
He lifted Sophia. She was starting to recover from the electric shock. “Nina! How much longer?”
“Not goddamn much, I hope!” Nina cried. The fourth note was still playing, the bowl humming, but the final piece of the lock still hadn’t opened—and the cherubim was almost upon her.
Scuffling footsteps in the passageway. The Covenant soldiers were through the tunnel—
A click.
“Eddie!” Nina shouted as a crack appeared between the doors, the metal panels slowly swinging apart. “It’s opening!” She kept her hand on the contact until it was just wide enough to fit through. The moment she lifted her fingers, the doors jolted to a stop. “Come on!” She yanked the cylinder from the spindle and leapt through the gap just ahead of the cherubim’s glowing blades.
She was clear—but now that she was out of the room, the statue immediately changed direction toward new targets.
Chase pulled Sophia up. “Can you run?”
“I’m not sure,” she mumbled.
“Get sure!” They could go to either side of the cherubim near the door—but one way would put them dangerously close to its swords, and the other would expose them to gunfire.
He made his choice and pulled Sophia with him toward the blades.
The cherubim rumbled toward them. One of its arms swung around to block their path.
“Duck!” Chase dropped beneath the blade as the other sword, a blur of cold light, slashed through the air behind them.
Almost clear …
One of the cherubim’s feet bumped against the little step around the chamber’s edge.
The statue was jolted, throwing off the timing of its swinging arms. Sophia saw it coming and dropped lower, but Chase barely had time to react.
He flattened himself against the wall—but the very tip of the sword caught the side of his shoulder. A fine spray of blood splattered the wall behind him, though the pain of the cut was nothing to the burning as a fat electrical spark spat from the point of contact.
The glowing blade swung back at him—
Sophia shoved him forward, throwing herself flat against the floor where it met the wall. The spinning sword buzzed over her head, lopping off a clump of bleached hair. “Eddie, go!” she shouted, pushing at his legs. Clutching his shoulder, he staggered upright as Sophia crawled beneath the arc of the blade.
The door was not far away. He could see Nina’s worried face on the other side. A glance at the entrance: the Covenant forces were not yet in sight, but he could hear them cautiously advancing, not knowing that their prey was now unarmed.
But they would realize that fact at any moment …
Sophia was on her feet. The cherubim was already reversing course, the eagle face sneering. The other statue was also grinding back across the chamber. “Run for the door!” Chase told her. She didn’t need any prompting, rushing past him before he’d finished speaking.
He followed, looking down the passageway. Three men in desert camouflage, Zamal in the lead; recognition, then anger crossed his bearded face.
Sophia was through the gap. Chase dived after her, clothes tearing on the door’s edges as a fusillade of bullets clanged against the thick panels just behind him. He landed hard on the stone floor and rolled away.
The moment he cleared the room, the flashes of earth energy across the ceiling ceased. The two cherubim stopped moving, their swords winding down.
“What happened?” Chase demanded, sitting up. Nina peered through the opening to see Zamal running into the chamber, his two men behind him.
The cherubim remained still.
“Oh, crap,” she gasped. The act of getting safely through the door had deactivated the trap—which meant Zamal and the others had a clear run at them. “Shut the door, quick!”
She shoved one of the doors. Chase braced himself and pushed the other, Sophia joining him. The mechanism moaned in complaint, offering stiff resistance on top of the sheer weight of the metal panels. The gap narrowed, inch by sluggish inch, as Zamal sprinted past the cherubim, yelling in Arabic, about to hurl himself against the bullet-dented doors—
The doors closed. Something clunked; a fraction of a second later came a bang as Zamal barged against them, but the lock had refastened.
And as the lock closed … the trap came back to life.
The two troopers reached Zamal, flanking him as they tried to force the doors open—then all three looked up in surprise as crackling energy bolts flashed across the ceiling. Sparks spat from the wings of the two cherubim, their swords glowing with the unnatural rippling blue light as they started to spin once more. The massive figures ground toward the soldiers, terrifying angels straight out of ancient mythology, a sight fearsome enough to freeze even Zamal for the briefest moment before he fired his SCAR at the nearest behemoth.
To no effect. The bullets punched straight through the thin copper plate of the wings, unable to do anything more than dent the thicker metal of its body.
The other troopers also fired, but with no more success—and now they were trapped against the doors as both cherubim closed in, fiery swords turning every way …
Nina heard the men’s screams, which were cut off abruptly by a series of wet thunks as pieces of their bodies splattered over the doors. The cherubim bumped against the step, shifting back and forth in inanimate confusion as the objects to which they had been drawn were suddenly spread out over a much larger area.
But the electrical charge generated by living bodies quickly dissipated, and without it the trap shut down. Silence and stillness returned to the chamber.
Nina recoiled from a trickle of blood running under the doors. “I don’t think we want to go back out that way,” she said. In the beam of her flashlight, she saw Chase’s face tight with pain as he held his shoulder. “Eddie, are you okay?”
“Won’t be going to the world juggling championships.” Wincing, he opened his fingers slightly to examine the wound. A three-inch slash had been cut through his shoulder muscle, blood seeping from it.
“I’ll get some bandages,” she said, opening her pack.
“Work on the move,” said Sophia, striding past her. “There’ll be more of them on the way. And I think,” she announced, looking up, “we have quite a climb ahead of us.”
Around them rose the steep face of the plateau. Part of the cliff had been cut away by the statue’s builders; a stepped stone path zigzagged precariously up to the summit, doubling back on itself multiple times before finally reaching the top.
For a moment, Nina forgot about the bandages as she stared at the clifftop above.
Whatever the Covenant had been fighting to keep from them, whatever the secret of the Veteres … it was waiting up there.
THIRTY-SIX
Two Humvees emerged from the tunnel into the enormous chamber and stopped near the edge of the ravine. Vogler, at the wheel of the first vehicle, struggled to contain his astonishment. Even as a devout, lifelong Christian, a true soldier of God, he had been forced to admit that in an age where new scientific discoveries pushed the boundaries of human knowledge further on a daily basis, there were aspects of the Book of Genesis that seemed more likely to have come from the fallible interpretations of ancient man than to be the flawless word of the Almighty.
But this … this reaffirmed his faith in a moment. The Garden of Eden was real. Undeniable. And if the stories of Eden were true, then so, too, were all the other events of the Bible.
The question was, he thought as he spotted the vast idol: what did the Garden of Eden hold that was not in the Bib
le?
Callum was less impressed by the wonder of their surroundings. “So where’s Zamal?”
Vogler picked up the radio handset. “Zamal, this is Vogler. Zamal, come in.” No response but the faint hiss of static. He repeated the call, still with no result.
“They’re dead,” the American said bluntly. He let out a dismissive snort. “Muslims. Huh. If they spent less time praying and more training—”
“Be quiet,” Vogler ordered. Muslim or not, abrasive and arrogant or not, Zamal had still been a comrade. He scoured the surreal landscape of the pocket jungle with binoculars. His adversaries would almost certainly have headed for the statue … “I see them,” he announced at the sight of three small figures slowly picking their way up a narrow path behind it. “Chase, Dr. Wilde … and Blackwood.”
Callum took out his handgun. “Time for a reunion, don’t you think?”
“I do.” Vogler turned the wheel and set off, driving the big 4×4 into the jungle.
Nina reached yet another hairpin twist and stopped, leaning exhaustedly against the rock wall. “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
Chase, ahead of her, paused in his ascent of the path. “Ah, come on, this is nothing. You walked up more stairs than this when the lift broke down at our old apartment, remember?”
“Yeah, but I hadn’t been chased and shot at and blown up then, had I? And I almost threw up that time, as well.”
“If you’re going to be sick,” Sophia said as she caught up, “at least have the courtesy to let me get above you first.”
Nina irritably brought up a hand as if about to stick a finger down her throat. Sophia sneered but quickened her pace as she passed. “How much farther?”
Chase peered upward. “Looks like another six zigzags.”
Nina groaned. “Six?”
“Maybe seven.”
“Seven? Oh, great. And I thought—” She broke off, hearing a distant sound over the dripping of condensation.
Sophia heard it too. “Trucks. It must be those Humvees.”
Chase looked past the statue’s outstretched arm across the jungle, but saw no sign of movement. He could hear the noise, though: powerful engines revving. “They’re racing Humvees through the bloody Garden of Eden? Who’s driving, Jeremy Clarkson?”
“Will they be able to get them across the ravine?” Nina asked.
“Even if they can’t, they can still get out and use that log,” said Chase. “Either way, it won’t take ’em long to get here. We need to shift.” He moved back to Nina and took her hand. “If you’re going to hork, just don’t do it down my back.”
They set off again, increasing their pace as much as they dared along the precarious winding path. It took close to fifteen minutes before they finally rounded the last hairpin, the path curling up to the top of the plateau. To one side, a narrow stone bridge led across the gap to the statue’s shoulders.
“Finally,” Nina gasped. Both her legs ached, a rod of hot pain through the wound in her right thigh.
“Better be something good up here after all that,” Chase said, the bandage on his shoulder damp with sweat.
Sophia blew out a dry breath. “I could certainly use a source of life right now.”
Nina overtook Chase, the pain subsiding beneath her urge to find out what awaited them. The source of life, the most sacred, best-protected part of the Veteres civilization; entombed in ice in the Antarctic, guarded by “angels” here. But what was it? She broke into a clumsy jog, hurrying up the last few yards of the path to see …
Beauty.
The summit was a swath of glorious colors, a field of wildflowers. White, red, yellow, purple, sunset orange, vivid blue, all gently swaying in the breeze circulating around the cavern. The floral carpet spread across most of the plateau—leading Nina’s gaze to something at its center.
A building.
Like much of the ancient civilization’s architecture, it was a stone dome, but it seemed older, heavier, built to last for all time. And there was something else, almost hidden beneath the dazzling petals. Small stone markers rose from the ground, arranged in concentric circles around the building.
She moved to the nearest, pushing the flowers aside to reveal a rectangular slab about eighteen inches high. Letters were carved into the surface. The Veteres language.
“They’re gravestones,” she said softly. “This whole place … it’s a cemetery.”
“What?” said Sophia, sounding almost outraged. “This is what we came to find? A graveyard? How can a graveyard be the source of life?”
“It’s obvious, innit?” said Chase. “They die, they’re buried, they go back to the earth … and new life comes from them.” He flicked a hand at the flowers.
Nina smiled at him. “Right. All life comes from death, in a manner of speaking. Life-forms feed off other life-forms. And every single atom in our bodies was created by the death of a star.” She stood, facing the building. “It’s another piece of metaphorical language. The source of new life … is the death of the old. And if they believed in an afterlife, then this—being buried according to religious ritual—could have been where they thought it started.”
“So if this is a cemetery, what,” said Chase, indicating the dome, “is in there?”
“Or who,” Sophia added. “It could be a mausoleum, for rulers or important families.”
Nina regarded the structure thoughtfully. “If the Veteres buried their dead in the earth, there’ll be nothing left in these graves after all this time. But if that’s a mausoleum, and they used stone rather than wood or cloth to contain the bodies …” Her heartbeat quickened. “There might be remains.”
“Of who?” asked Chase. “Adam and Eve?”
Nina nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah. Maybe!” She set off for the stone dome, leaving a trail through the flowers as she weaved between the gravestones. Chase and Sophia exchanged looks, then followed.
The light level fell as she approached. This close to the edge of the cavern, the reason was simply that less daylight was coming through the holes in the ceiling, but it still felt disturbingly ominous. As she got closer, she saw an entrance, a single tall, thin opening with blackness beyond. She lit her flashlight and slipped inside.
“Nina, wait—Why do I fucking bother?” Chase muttered. He went through after her.
The interior was divided into three rooms. The first and largest was a chamber shaped like a slice of pie, with the entrance at the center of the curved outer wall and two smaller rooms leading off diagonally from the straight sides. Several stone benches were arranged within, on which dirt and fungus had built up over the millennia. The walls were also grubby—but Nina was already brushing away the filth of time to reveal the inscriptions beneath. “Sophia,” she said, “look at this.”
“It’s the same language,” said Sophia, examining the ancient text, “but some of the characters are different.”
“If this is where the Veteres originated, that’d make sense—this is the primal form of their alphabet. How much of it can you read?”
“Enough to think that you were probably right about this being their entrance to the afterlife.” She indicated one particular section. “This is something about their god—‘the source of all things.’ And he’s mentioned again here, and here … it’s a god-heavy room.”
“Maybe it’s a chapel,” Chase suggested.
“Could be.” Nina moved to one of the other doorways, shining her light into the room beyond. “There are more inscriptions in here …” She stopped as she lowered the flashlight’s beam.
There was more in the room than mere inscriptions. At the center of the dark inner chamber was a long stone object raised off the floor on carved blocks. A sarcophagus.
The last resting place of one of the Veteres.
“So what do we do now?” Chase asked, after a silent moment had passed. “When we found that Atlantean coffin, you weren’t happy about it being opened—”
“We open this one,” Nina i
nterrupted. He gave her a questioning look. “I know, I know. Normally I’d never do anything like that without a proper survey, but if we at least know what’s inside the sarcophagus, it might give us a bargaining chip when the Covenant gets here.”
“Good point.” Circling the sarcophagus, he saw that the lid was hinged at the back. “Here, give me that bag.” He came back around the coffin and took the backpack from Nina, pulling out a claw hammer. “Okay, I’ll try to lift up the lid a bit. If you two can hold it up for a couple of seconds, I’ll pry it open more. Give me some light.” Nina aimed the flashlight at the side of the sarcophagus. He ran his fingers along the edge of the lid before finding a slight imperfection and jiggling the claw end of the hammer into it. “Ready?” The two women moved into position and nodded. “Okay, here goes …”
Straining, he pulled the hammer’s shaft back and down with all his weight. The lid rose a quarter of an inch as the hammer’s head crunched against the stone. Nina pushed up from chest height as hard as she could. Sophia did the same; the gap widened to over two inches, a slit of blackness visible beneath. Chase quickly jammed the hammer in deeper and pushed down again. “Push it, push!”
Nina and Sophia both strained to lift the lid higher. A rasp of stone from the sarcophagus made Nina cringe, but she somehow found an extra ounce of strength, letting out an involuntary cry, and they were able to open it wider. The hammer slipped, spitting stone chips into Chase’s face, but the women held the lid up long enough for him to grip its edge and shove it upward. It swung past the vertical, then came to a stop with a bang, just beyond the tipping point.
Chase and Sophia stepped back as Nina shone the flashlight into the sarcophagus. Inside was a figure, tightly wrapped in a surprisingly well-preserved cloth shroud. The stone coffin must have been practically airtight; once the body’s decomposition processes had run their course, the remains had stayed more or less intact, no weather effects or organisms to disturb them.
She waited for the dust to settle before taking a closer look. The figure inside the shroud was tall. Very tall—at least seven feet.