Bats.
Enormous bats.
Bats with bodies the size of housecats and leathery wings as long as his arms. There were thousands of them clinging to the ceiling overhead and they were waking up.
Kismet knew that most bats were insectivores, subsisting entirely on winged insects that they plucked out of mid-air with uncanny precision thanks to their natural sonar. Bats could often be found near large bodies of water, where mosquitos provided an endless food supply, which was an absolute necessity since their metabolism demanded that they consume a third of their body weight daily. Most bats weighed only a few ounces. Kismet didn’t want to think about how much these monsters would have to eat to sustain themselves, but he doubted that they had gotten so large on a diet of insects alone. In fact, there wasn’t any natural explanation for how these creatures had grown to grow to such an extraordinary size.
The Fountain. It’s close!
The realization caused him to momentarily forget his disappointment at the aborted escape attempt.
Just ahead, on the wall opposite where they had come in, barely visible in the gloom and partially hidden behind the rising mass of guano, he spied another passage. He pulled Annie close and hastened toward it, even as shouted warnings from Leeds and his men, along with Elisabeth’s strident curses, began to echo in the cavern. The noise multiplied, and suddenly the air was thick with giant bats, disturbed from their rest.
Kismet bulldozed through the accumulation of guano and tumbled through into the adjoining tunnel. It was cramped, the ceiling too low for them to stand, but the passage angled up and away from the escalating din in the cavern behind them and into the unknown darkness beyond.
Except it wasn’t dark. Kismet could just barely distinguish the outline of the walls and as he drew Annie forward through the winding tunnel, the illumination reflected from the limestone surface grew increasingly brighter until he had no difficulty making out the details of their environment — striations in the color of the limestone, patches of lichen, even a distinctive trail of human footprints worn into the path of rock chips that covered the floor.
He froze in mid-step.
Although he could see, quite literally, the light at the end of the tunnel, a wave of dread crashed over him. In his haste, he’d forgotten to look for more of Fontaneda’s traps, and now he felt as if he wandered into a minefield.
He stretched his foot out a few inches beyond what would have been his normal stride, stepping into the impression left, so he assumed, by the Spaniard. It was a gamble; did those tracks mark the safe route past another trap, or were they the bait designed to lure in the unwary?
Only one way to find out.
“Annie!” He gripped her by the shoulders and tried to hold her attention. “I need you to focus. If you want to get out of here, you have to do exactly as I say. Can you do that?”
A nod.
“There are footprints on the ground here. That’s the only place it’s safe to step…at least I think so. Got it? Step only in the footprints.”
“Got it,” she whispered.
The tunnel continued for only a few more steps, then opened into another chamber that was lit up like Times Square.
He suppressed the urge to rush forward. Between the place where he stood and the mouth of the cavern, a distance of about four feet, there were no footprints. Fontaneda always stepped or leaped that final interval.
He swung his arms back and then made the leap.
One foot touched down on the hard floor and then the other. Nothing else happened. As he turned, he saw a frame of wood, bristling with sharp stakes, poised just to the right of the tunnel mouth — Fontaneda’s final trap.
“Big jump, Annie. You can do it.”
She gave a furtive nod, and then took her own leap of faith. It wasn’t her graceful best, but she made it with a few inches to spare, and fell into Kismet’s embrace. He spun her away from the trap and turned to behold the wonder of Fontaneda’s magnificent discovery.
Almost immediately, he felt a faint tickling on his skin, as if he had walked through a strand of spider web. He brushed at his face and felt the familiar sensation ripple across the backs of his hands.
Static electricity, he realized. The atmosphere was ionized like the air around a Tesla coil, and long streamers of plasma — hues of red and violet — danced in the air all around them. Kismet had the impression of standing at the edge of a bottomless pit filled with electrical energy, but then he realized that the lights below them were merely a reflection — a reflection from the mirror-like surface of a large pool that dominated the center of the cavern.
Kismet recalled the line from the letter Leeds showed him, and similar words written by a man calling himself Henry Fortune hundreds of years later.
A cavern where fire dances upon the surface of the water.
They had found it. Fortune’s cavern. The Fountain of Youth.
SEVENTEEN
Annie watched breathlessly as Kismet advanced into the cavern, and for a moment, forgot completely that she was trapped underground.
The chamber was the largest of any of the caverns they had encountered thus far. It was roughly circular, at least a hundred feet across and nearly as high. The domed ceiling was spiked with stalactites that glistened with every hue of the spectrum and even a few shades that seemed completely unnatural. The pool dominated the floor of the chamber but a walkway — about ten feet wide — encircled it to form an unbroken ring, a near-perfect circle with only one minor deviation. At the rear of the chamber, the walkway became a staircase going up four of five steps to a platform that overlooked the water and another set of stairs that led back down to the walkway. There were carvings on the wall behind the dais and some kind of pedestal, an altar perhaps, but it was difficult to make out any details because the air between them was alive with brilliant discharges of energy.
The pool was the source of the light. Veils of color, red and violet, wove intricate patterns mere inches above the placid surface.
“How is this possible?” Annie asked.
“I think it’s ionized plasma, kind of like the aurora borealis. What’s making it happen here? I have no idea. But this is exactly what Fontaneda described, so whatever is causing it must be related to the…the power of the water.” He shook his head as if trying to remember something. “Leeds talked about a source; a Seed of the Tree of Life, and how it could…I guess the word might be ‘supercharge’ ordinary water into something that can make a person immortal. Maybe there are other effects, like this plasma storm.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Fontaneda didn’t say much more about it, but we should be careful nonetheless.” He watched at the light show for a moment longer, and then glanced past her to the entrance. “Leeds’ is the real danger. We have to find the source he talked about, the Seed.”
“Then what?”
“Use it for leverage; threaten to destroy it if we have to.” He took her hand and led her out onto the walkway.
As they neared the upraised platform, they passed a cairn of hewn limestone rocks, some as large as a man’s head. At one end stood an ornately carved cross. There was a name carved on it and a pair of dates. Annie looked at Kismet for an explanation.
“Fontaneda wrote about this. In the end, his companions decided to die rather than drink…” His voice trailed off as he looked thoughtfully at the cross, and then looked down at his own hands — scraped raw and streaked with chalk dust and bat guano — and his feet which had been cut to bloody ribbons by the journey through the cave. “The Fountain didn’t just give them youth. It healed their wounds. It made Fontaneda strong; supernaturally strong.”