The Eye of God: A Sigma Force Novel sf-9 Page 34

  “Temur, do your people have a name for this cavern?”

  He nodded. “In our native language it is Emegtei, which means a woman’s belly,” he said, pantomiming a swelling on his own stomach.

  “A womb,” Gray said.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Temur said. He then bowed and backed away. “I hope you find what you seek. But I must now go.”

  “My friend can drive you back to Burkhan Cape,” Gray offered, motioning to Kowalski.

  Temur shook his head. “Not necessary. I have family not far.”

  As the man departed, Vigor motioned to the breathing hole, drawing back Gray’s attention. “A womb. That makes sense. This place is a birthing chamber for the island’s spirit animal.”

  Gray shook his head, not disagreeing. In fact, he was sure the monsignor was right. Instead, he was taking a different tack. “Vigor, didn’t you say that Olkhon Island is where Genghis Khan’s own mother was from?”

  His eyes widened upon him. “That’s right!”

  “So this sacred spot could have been chosen as some symbolic representation of where Genghis originated.”

  “His spiritual womb,” Vigor conceded.

  Kowalski frowned at the icy cavern. “If you’re right, then his mom must have been one frigid—”

  Gray cut him off. “This must be the right place.”

  “But how does that help us?” Vigor asked.

  Gray closed his eyes, picturing this chamber as a womb, the tunnel to the sea a birth canal, flowing outward with life.

  But life doesn’t start in the womb . . .

  It first needs a spark, a primal source.

  According to Vigor, Genghis Khan was technologically ahead of his time, and while he might not have known about the fertilization of sperm and eggs, the scientists of his time surely knew about gross human anatomy.

  Gray climbed from his ATV, grabbed his flashlight from his pack, and headed across the room, careful of the ice, giving the breathing hole a wide berth. He pointed his flashlight along the back wall, following that frozen flow upward, noting the rivulets of water still trickling across its surface.

  Twenty-five feet above his head, he discovered the source of the spring. A black hole marked another tunnel, half full of ice where the spring-fed flow had frozen over.

  Vigor understood. “Symbolic of a woman’s fallopian tube.”

  Down which life flows to the womb.

  “I’ve got pitons and climbing gear in my pack,” Gray said. “I should be able to scale the fall and reach that tunnel.”

  As he turned back, he read the desire in Vigor’s eyes and clapped his old friend on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. Once up there, I can rig a line. We’ll go together.”

  They rushed back to the ATV, and Gray began assembling what they would need.

  Vigor shivered and stamped his feet against the cold, but excitement shone in his eyes as he stared at the tunnel. “That passage up there must be seasonally locked.”

  Gray frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “In spring and summer, that hole is probably flooded, gushing with water, making it impossible to enter and traverse. Only in winter, when it’s all frozen over, is the tunnel open and accessible.”

  Gray paused to consider this. “Could they have done that on purpose? The date on the skull marked the coming apocalypse as November, a winter month.”

  Vigor bobbed his head. “They might have been limiting access, preserving the treasure inside until the season when it was best needed.”

  After fitting his boots with spiked crampons, Gray straightened with a coil of climbing rope over his shoulder and a harness in hand, fitted with pitons and an ice ax.

  Only one way to find out.

  8:32 A.M.

  Vigor watched Gray ascend the ice wall, holding his breath, a hand at his throat. Be careful . . .

  Gray appeared to be taking no chances. They had no time for accidents or falls. He planted each piton with great care into cracks in the ice, drilling the eyebolts deep. He kept three limbs on the wall at all times, moving steadily, stringing a line as he went.

  Three-quarters of the way up, Gray reached high and tested a split in the ripple of ice with his ax—only to have an entire section fall away from the wall. Like a glacier calving, it broke and plummeted below, crashing with a resounding boom. Ice boulders scattered all the way to the parked ATVs.

  Gray lost his hold and fell to his last piton, swinging from the rope, but it held. He got his feet back to the ice and continued his ascent with even more care. Finally he reached the top and pulled himself up with the ice ax, digging in with his crampons, into the frozen tunnel.

  A moment later, a light bloomed up there, turning the waterfall into rippling blue glass. His head popped back out, and Gray waved a flashlight.

  “Passage goes on!” he called down. “Let me secure a line! Kowalski, help Vigor into a climbing harness!”

  In short order, Gray had a rope running through an eyebolt screwed into the roof of the tunnel. Kowalski hooked Vigor to one line. By pulling on the other, the big man practically hauled him up the waterfall. Vigor did his best to help, pushing off pitons or grabbing the next.

  With hardly any effort, he found himself on his belly next to Gray in the tunnel. Vigor looked down its throat. It looked like a chute drilled through the heart of a sapphire crystal.

  “Let’s go,” Gray said, crawling on his hands and knees. “Stick behind me.”

  The passage rose at a slight angle upward, making the traverse across the ice flow treacherous. Its surface was slippery, trickling with cold water. One mistake and someone could go body-sledding back down the tunnel and shoot out into the open.

  Another fifteen yards and the ice rose so high in the tunnel that Gray had to slide on his belly, squirming like a worm to continue on. Vigor waited at the bottleneck, suddenly feeling claustrophobic.

  Gray’s voice echoed back. “It opens past the squeeze! You need to see this!”

  Spurred by the excitement in his voice, Vigor repeated Gray’s action, wiggling his way through the pinch. Near the end, a hand clamped onto his wrist and pulled him the rest of the way out, like a cork out of a bottle.

  Vigor found himself standing in another cavern, atop a frozen pond. To his left, the shore of the pond rose in a sheer cliff of bedrock, maybe four meters high. Gray pointed his flashlight’s beam to a set of stairs cut into it long ago. The way appeared to lead to a ledge up top.

  “C’mon,” Gray said.

  They scaled with care. Gray used his ax to clear a few steps of thicker ice, until finally they reached the top.

  Gray offered his arm to help Vigor to his feet, but he ignored Gray and stood up, staring at the far wall. Through a thin crust of blue ice, he saw an arched set of black doors.

  Vigor gripped Gray’s arm, needing his solidity to make sure what he was seeing was real. “It’s the entrance to Genghis Khan’s tomb.”

  8:48 A.M.

  Gray didn’t have time to stand on ceremony or savor the discovery. Using the butt of his steel ax, he cracked and scraped at the shell of ice covering the doorway. Huge sheets fell with every strike, the door ringing with each blow, indicating it was metal. In less than a minute, he had the doorway clear.

  The archway was no taller than his head.

  As Gray brushed the hinges clean, Vigor touched the surface reverentially. He had his own flashlight out and shone the beam at a spot where Gray’s ax had pocked the metal door.

  “It’s silver under the layer of black tarnish!” Vigor said. “Like the box holding the bone boat. But look, where the door is gouged deep, I can see splintered wood under the metal. The silver is only plated on the surface. Still . . .”

  Vigor’s eyes glowed brightly.

  With the crude hinges cleared, Gray swung a latch up that held the double doors closed. He offered Vigor the honor of pulling them open.

  Plainly holding his breath, Vigor grasped the handle and yanked hard. With a grinding of
ice crystals still in the hinges, the doors parted and opened wide.

  Vigor fell back from the sight.

  It wasn’t what they had been expecting.

  While nearly empty, it was no less astonishing.

  A circular gold chamber glowed before them. Floor, roof, walls . . . all were covered in rosy-yellow metal. Even the inner surfaces of the doors were plated with gold, not silver.

  Gray allowed Vigor to step inside first, then he followed.

  Everywhere the gold had been sculpted and carved by skilled artisans. Across the roof, gold ribs led to a circular ring. The walls held posts of gold. The intent of the design was obvious.

  “It’s a golden yurt,” Gray said. “A Mongolian ger.”

  Vigor stared back at the archway. “And when the door is closed, it forms a solid vault. We’re standing symbolically inside the third box of St. Thomas’s reliquary.”

  Gray remembered the skull and book had been sealed in iron, the boat in silver, and now they were inside the final chest, one of gold.

  Vigor moved to the right, as if nervous to enter any deeper. “Look at the walls.”

  Affixed to each sculpted gold post were what appeared to be jeweled torch holders. Gray reached for one, only to realize it was a crown. He searched the circular space. They were all crowns.

  “From the kingdoms Genghis Khan conquered,” Vigor said. “But this isn’t Genghis Khan’s tomb.”

  Gray had recognized the same as soon as the doors had opened. This was no sprawling necropolis, full of the riches and treasures of the ancient world. There were no jeweled sepulchers of Genghis and his descendants. That waited still to be found, possibly back in those Mongolian mountains.

  Vigor spoke in hushed tones. “These crowns were left to honor the man whose crypt this is.”

  Vigor headed along the edge of the room, clearly still working up the courage to move deeper. His arm pointed to the walls between the posts, to the art depicted there. The bright surfaces had been hammered and worked into vast masterpieces. The style was clearly Chinese.

  “It was typical for tombs during the Song dynasty to depict the life of the crypt’s occupant,” Vigor said. “This is no exception.”

  Gray noted the first panel to the right of the door showed a stylized mountain, surmounted by three crosses. Weeping figures trailed down the hillside, while an angry sky warred above.

  The next showed a man on his knees, reaching toward the wounded flank of another floating over him.

  Moving through the other panels, that same man made a great, terrifying journey, fraught with symbolic dragons and other monsters out of Chinese lore—until finally he reached the shore of a great sea, fraught with huge waves, where crowds welcomed him with flags and symbols of joy and enlightenment.

  “It’s the life of St. Thomas,” Vigor said, as they finished the circuit. “Here is proof that he reached China and the Yellow Sea.”

  But that wasn’t the end of the saint’s story.

  Vigor finally stopped at the last panel, having traversed the full circle.

  The masterwork here showed a giant of a Chinese king handing the man a large cross. Over the king’s shoulder, a comet blazed in a sky full of stars and a crescent moon.

  It was the gift to St. Thomas.

  Vigor finally turned to face the nearly empty room. The only object preserved in this golden ger was a cairn of stones in the center, not unlike the pillars seen flanking the entrance to the shaman’s grotto.

  Only this pedestal of rock supported a black box, simple and plain.

  Vigor glanced to Gray, clearly asking permission.

  Gray noted the yellowish pallor to the man’s skin. Not all of it was a reflection of the gold, he realized. It was jaundice.

  “Go,” Gray said softly.

  8:56 A.M.

  Vigor crossed to the cairn, to the box it held. He moved on legs numb with awe, close to losing his balance.

  Maybe it would be best to approach on my knees.

  But he kept upright and reached the stone pillar. The box resting there appeared to be black iron, but it was likely some amalgam as it looked little rusted. On the surface, a Chinese character had been etched.

  Two trees.

  Just as Ildiko had described and copied.

  With trembling fingers, he opened the lid with a small complaint from its hinges. Inside rested a second box. It looked as black as the first, but Vigor knew it was silver beneath that tarnish of age. Again a symbol had been inscribed there.

  Command.

  He obeyed that instruction and opened it—revealing a final chest of gold nestled within. It looked nearly pristine, shining bright, unadorned, except for the final mark found atop it.

  Forbidden.

  He held his breath. Using just the tips of his index fingers, he raised the final lid and pushed it back.

  He said a silent prayer of thanks for this honor.

  Resting inside, supported atop tiny pillars of gold, was a yellowish-brown skull. Empty sockets stared back up at him. Faintly visible, but still there, was an inscribed spiral of Jewish Aramaic.

  The relic of St. Thomas.

  Vigor came close to falling to his knees, but Gray must have noted him trembling. The man’s arm propped him up, kept him standing for what he must do next.

  With tears in his eyes, he reached to the relic. Vigor revered St. Thomas, placing him above all the other apostles of Christ. To Vigor, the saint’s doubt made him all too human and relatable. It was an expression of the war between faith and reason. St. Thomas questioned, needed proof, a scientist of his time, a seeker of truth. Even his gospel dismissed organized religion, declaring that the path to salvation, to God, was open to anyone willing to do just that.

  To seek and you shall find.

  Had they not done that these past days?

  “We found St. Thomas’s tomb,” Vigor said softly, stifled by awe and tears. “The Nestorians, along with Ildiko’s last testament, must have convinced Genghis to build this shrine to the saint. That’s why his gospel was crafted and left in Hungary. It was a written invitation to find this crypt. The first site preserved Thomas’s words—and this last, his very body and legacy.”

  Vigor allowed his fingers to touch that sacred bone, to lift the skull from the golden reliquary.

  Gray stayed at his shoulder. As Vigor cradled the relic of St. Thomas in his palms, his friend shone his flashlight to the bottom of the chest.

  In a sculpted gold bed rested a simple black cross.

  It looked heavy, metallic, as long as an outstretched hand.

  “The cross of St. Thomas,” Gray mumbled. “But can we be sure?”

  Despite the gravity of the moment, Vigor smiled.

  While Vigor had no doubt, Gray needed proof.

  “Duncan will know,” Vigor said.

  Gray checked his watch. “We only have an hour left. I’ll go check on their status.”

  “Go,” Vigor said. “I’ll wait here.”

  Gray squeezed his shoulder and quickly departed.

  Only then did Vigor sink to his knees, cradling the relic of St. Thomas in his lap.

  Thank you, Lord, for allowing me this moment.

  Still, despite his reverential awe, a flicker of fear remained. He was still haunted by the eyes of the shaman—and his warning.

  You are suffering much, but you will suffer more.

  9:04 A.M.

  Gray skidded his ATV out of the tunnel’s mouth and into the bright morning sunshine. The vehicle spun a full three-sixty on the ice before coming to a stop. He had dared not waste a minute and needed to be outside the cave for his satellite phone to work.

  He punched Monk’s number. It was immediately picked up.

  “Where are you?” Gray asked.

  “On a bus. Driving across the ice. We’re just about to the island.”

  Gray bit back a groan. The others were running behind schedule. “I need you to come straight here. I’ll call Seichan in a moment and have her do
the same. I’m three miles north of Burkhan Cape, along the coast, out on the ice at the entrance to a sea tunnel. I’ll leave my ATV in the sunshine as a marker.”

  “Did you find the cross?” Monk asked.

  Flustered, Gray realized he hadn’t even mentioned that. “Yes. But we need Duncan to confirm it.”

  And the Eye brought here.

  In the background, he heard Jada call to Monk, “Tell him not to move the cross.”

  “What’s that about?” Gray asked.

  “I’ll let her tell you. I’m going to see about a shorter route to your coordinates.”

  “What are you—?”

  But Monk was gone and Jada came on the line. “You haven’t moved the cross since you found it, have you?” she asked, sounding scared.

  “No.”

  He hadn’t even wanted to touch it without corroboration.

  “Good. I think the best chance for us to break the quantum entanglement between the cross and the comet is to keep the cross at its current spatial coordinates.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the cross is currently fixed to a specific point in the curve of the earth’s space-time. I want time to remain the only variable. I can show you my calculations, but—”

  “I’ll take you at your word. Just get that Eye here in time.”

  “Monk is working on—”

  In the background, Duncan could be heard yelling, “That’s your plan!”

  Gray heard a rising commotion, people yelling. “What’s going on?”

  Jada answered, flustered, but clarifying little, “We’re on our way.”

  The connection abruptly ended.

  Gray simply had to trust that they knew what they were doing. He called Seichan next. After a longer than expected delay, the connection was picked up.

  “Where are you?” Seichan demanded, sounding angry.

  Not having the time to analyze her curt response, he simply told her and ended with, “Come straight here.”

  She cut off the connection just as brusquely, not even bothering to acknowledge him.