In a perfect world, the chamber would drain slowly and a concealed door would open, but Jade doubted her luck would be that good. It was far more likely that the door had been designed to be opened only when the chamber was dry, something that might happen only every thousand years, which mean that either the door would not budge, and she would still be trapped, or the rush of water through the newly opened portal would create a vortex with enough hydraulic pressure to suck her down and conceivably rip her limb from limb or smash her to a pulp against the walls of the vault.
She left the last stone as it was and kicked back up to the air pocket, hoping against hope that she would find Professor staring down at her, irritated but overjoyed to see her, but there was only the smooth wall of the sphere, with two bands of stone, one seemingly passing over the top of the other.
There was only one thing left to do.
She swam down, following the carefully organized bands of stone that now circumscribed the inside of the sphere, until she found the one piece that was still out of place. Without any further hesitation, she swam to it and gave it a final push. She did not wait to see the results, but immediately began kicking her legs for the surface. The sudden maneuver cost her the remaining eye cup, throwing everything into blurry indistinctness, but she kept kicking, racing toward the top of the chamber. Even though she could no longer see the smooth walls of the chamber, she could feel vibrations in the water around her. Something was happening. The interior of the sphere was moving.
She broke the surface with a gasp. The water was rippling all around her, and when she trained her flashlight straight up at the exposed section of the chamber, she saw why. The stone bands representing the Borromean rings were moving, rolling on three axes like a gimbal.
Suddenly, the entire chamber started coming apart. The square sections seemed to drop out of the ceiling, collapsing toward her. She threw up her hands to cover her head, but in that moment, she realized she was no longer floating, but falling. The water around her had disappeared as abruptly as if the entire bottom of the sphere had broken open, creating a whirlpool. Jade barely had time to gasp for air before she was caught in the frothing deluge and flushed away.
TWENTY-SIX
“Jade!” Professor hammered his fist against the smooth stone that had unexpectedly slid over the entrance to the underground chamber, blocking his access to Jade and slicing through the rope that was her only lifeline. His shout was as ineffectual as his pounding. Jade was cut off, beyond his reach.
“Damn it!” he raged, punching the stone again. “I told her this would happen.”
“What’s wrong?” Shah’s voice drifted up the short but cramped passage.
“I don’t know,” Professor replied, and that wasn’t a total lie. “Jade was trying to open the door, but now we can’t get through.”
“What does that mean? Is it some kind of booby trap?”
“I don’t know what it means,” he snapped. Then he took a calming breath. “We’ll just have to wait and see. Jade said she knew how to open it. She’s headstrong, but she’s pretty good with stuff like this.”
“So I’ve noticed.” Shah’s murmured comment was barely audible, and not just because he was speaking from the far end of the passage.
A strange hissing sound, like stone rasping against stone, filled the air, along with a faint but persistent vibration that seemed to be rising up through the rock.
Cave-in?
Professor’s first impulse was to scramble back down the passage, and maybe even take his chances sliding down the sheer limestone face they had climbed, in order to avoid being entombed beneath tons off falling rock, but he fought this urge, and focused his attention instead on identifying the source of the disturbance. A moment later, he realized that the smooth rock blocking the entrance to the submerged chamber was moving. He reached out to it, touching it lightly with a fingertip, and felt it rolling in place like an enormous ball bearing.
What did you do, Jade?
The tremor intensified, but the sensation of movement against his fingertip vanished, along with the stone that had been blocking the passage. Professor could now feel cold musty air rushing up through the opening. The breeze lasted only a moment, like the last exhalation of a dying man, but it was strong enough to tousle his hair. A few seconds later, the vibrations ceased and all was still.
Professor reached his hand a little further into the gap, felt nothing, and then shone his flashlight into the void. Instead of reflecting off the water that had been there only a few minutes before, the beam revealed what looked like stone steps disappearing down into the earth.
“Jade!” His shout echoed back but there was no answer from the depths.
He felt his pulse quicken, his body leaping to the obvious conclusion even before the thought could fully form in his brain. Jade was gone. Swept away.
“No. She’s alive.” He said it aloud, as if doing so might convince the universe to change its mind.
“What’s happening?” asked Shah.
Professor paid him no heed. He lowered himself through the hole and placed his feet on the steps. Once inside, he could see that the steps were formed of stone blocks, each about twenty-four inches to a side, stacked up to form a descending spiral staircase. There was a wall of tightly joined cut stone blocks to his left, and a yawning chasm, sixteen feet across, to his right, around which the steps coiled like the threads of a screw hole. The walls and steps were damp, but that was the only remaining trace of the water that had earlier filled the chamber.
“Jade!” Professor started down the steps, moving faster than was probably advisable given the unfamiliar environment, calling out to Jade over and over again, always with the same results. The stairs circled once, twice. His best rough guess put him thirty feet below the entrance with no end yet in sight, and no sign of Jade. He completed another orbit, screwing deeper into the earth, then another, and then the descent ended at a flat landing that curled once more around the open pit. At the end of the landing was an opening that led through the wall.
Professor stopped in front of the doorway and shone his light through. The landing was damp like everything else, but the stone floor on the other side of the opening appeared to be bone dry. About ten feet past the opening, a smooth stone wall — all the surfaces looked like burnished concrete rather than natural stone — curved away in either direction.
The absence of any footprints in the dry passage beyond told him Jade had not left by that route. He crossed back to the edge of the landing and leaned over, shining his light into the depths.
“Jade!”
Shah came down the steps. “This place is incredible. No one knows about it?”
Professor continued ignoring the other man. Short of taking a leap of faith into the unknown, there seemed no way to reach the depths below, but someone had gone to the trouble of excavating the chasm, and if he was not wrong, lining it with cement, and that strongly indicated a purpose and possibly another means of accessing the lower reaches. He turned back to the doorway and went through, with Shah just a few steps behind. He decided to go left, but ultimately the choice was irrelevant. The wall and the passage beside it curved around, forming a rotunda that probably would have brought him back to the staircase passage, only he never got that far. Halfway around the ring-shape walk, he spotted the glow of artificial light.