Kismet was down there somewhere — lost forever.
Despair and exhaustion overcame her, and when she closed her eyes to hold back the tears, unconsciousness quickly claimed her.
Something splashed in the water next to Kismet, not a dislodged piece of stone, but something else. For a second, it looked like a snake and he instinctively tried to draw back from it, but then he realized that it was a rope, hanging down from the darkness overhead.
What the hell…?
It was like some kind of insane practical joke; a rope appearing out of nowhere, leading — where?
He reached for the line, snaring it on his second try, and clutched it greedily to his chest, but try as he might, he could not make the ascent. His arms were just too tired; his bare feet slipped uncertainly on the wet threads. With the last of his fading strength, he wrapped the line around his waist twice, tying it off with a crude knot, and then sagged in the noose, awaiting whatever would follow.
The rope went taut and Kismet was yanked straight up, out of the water. The line was pulled in steadily, as if attached to a reel, and after just a couple seconds, the ceiling of the cavern loomed close…and then swallowed him whole.
He spent just a moment in the total darkness of a vertical shaft, before hands reached out to draw him over a stone lip and onto a ledge. There was light here; a flashlight beam shone directly onto his face.
“Come on! Run!”
The voice was familiar, but he couldn’t place it, and there was not a single reason in the world to ignore the exhortation. He took off blindly, finding his way along the tunnel by following the cone of illumination cast by his guide’s flashlight.
The escape route chosen by Kismet’s barely glimpsed benefactor was more of an obstacle course than a tunnel. The passage had been carved out by nature, streams of water seeking the path of least resistance over the course of thousands, or more probably, millions of years, burrowing through softer portions of the rock matrix, driven by gravity and pressure. There were cramped spaces only a foot or two high where Kismet had to crawl, squirming around sharp corners and through choke points. There were places where he had to climb, groping blindly in the almost total darkness to find his way up to the next passage, visible only because of the indirect light from his savior’s lamp. The only constant was that they were going up.
The entire journey lasted only a few minutes and covered a distance of only a few hundred yards, but the tremors shuddering through the rock beneath him were a constant reminder that, at any moment, the whole place might collapse on top of him, smashing him to oblivion. And then, without any hint that the end — one way or another — was close, he spilled out into daylight.
He lay in a foot of water at the bottom of a limestone depression, a naturally occurring well perhaps twenty feet across. Above him, a vertical distance of about twelve feet, he saw the tree limbs waving gently, backlit by the azure Florida sky. Dangling down one side of the pit was a rope ladder. The man that had saved him was already halfway up, and at its top, a young African-American woman was shouting down at Kismet, urging him to climb.
He struggled to his feet, slipping uncertainly on the slimy stone at the bottom of the hole. The ground continued to shudder violently, but he managed to reach the smooth rock wall and used it to steady himself as he circled to the ladder. When his fingers curled around the rope rungs, he felt a surge of energy in his tired limbs.
The ascent was like a final insult, a parting shot from the hellish underworld he had just escaped. His bare feet couldn’t seem to find a purchase on the woven fibers, and when they did, the rope pressed painfully into the soles of his feet. Every time he tried to pull himself up, his arms felt he was lifting the weight of the world. But then, as he neared the top, he saw hands reaching down to him, and at last glimpsed the familiar face of his savior.
“Joe?”
The shoreline of Lake George expanded, claiming the new depths for itself. Standing at its edge, watching as the lake poured into the newly created sinkhole, Kismet saw that the cavern which had concealed the Fountain of Youth for untold millennia had not been far at all from the boundaries of the lake. In time, perhaps a few more centuries of pounding by tropical storms, the cavern would have flooded naturally, achieving the same result.
That he decided, would probably have been a better outcome.
Farther out, he could see the pontoon boat, scurrying away from the scene of destruction, heading north toward some unknown rendezvous with more of Hauser’s Prometheus allies. The passengers were mostly just dark shapes; he couldn’t tell if Annie was among them. He decided to believe that she was, and he knew exactly what he was going to have to do to save her.
He turned to face the pair that had rescued him: Joe — the young man from Charleston who had claimed to be Joseph King’s grandson — and his companion, an equally youthful woman. It had taken a few minutes of scrutiny for him to recognize her, but when at last he had, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
It was almost too much to process. He didn’t know whether to be grateful for their last minute intervention, or angry for the deception that had thrown him into the nightmare in the first place. “Are you ready to tell me the truth now?”
Joe’s expression was contrite. “I’m not really sure where to begin.”
Kismet turned to the woman. “Let’s go with an easy one then: Are you really Joseph King’s daughter?”
The young woman, who had, the last time he’d seen her appeared to be at least in her seventies, just nodded.
Kismet turned to Joe. “Father and daughter. Joseph and Candace — those are your real names?”
Joe’s mouth twitched into a nostalgic smile. “Candace was the name given to the queens of the ancient African people, the Nubians and the Ethiopians. It seemed like a good Christian name for her. I’ve been Joseph King — Joe — for so long that I don’t think of myself by any other name. When I was with Hernando, I was Jose Esclavo del Cristo Rey, but that wasn’t my real name either.”
“Joseph, slave of Christ the King.”
“I don’t know what my parents named me…” Joe trailed off as if trying to access that memory was particularly painful, then shrugged.
“You were with him from the beginning then. One of his explorers.”
Joe nodded. “I remember that I was the slave of a Moorish nobleman. After the Reconquista, I earned my freedom, but that didn’t exactly count for much back then. When the Inquisition started persecuting the Moriscos, anyone with black skin was a suspect. So I joined with Fontaneda and sailed to New Spain, hoping to find my fortune. I did, and as it turns out, a whole lot more.”
Kismet recalled Fontaneda’s account of the discovery of the Fountain and the long ordeal that followed. “He wrote about two survivors that returned with him to the Fountain, and how they chose to die rather than drink again from the Fountain. But there was only one grave down there.”
“I almost died, too.” The wistful look came back. “Can’t remember exactly why I thought that was a good idea. When I was too weak to resist, he saved me. After that…Well, as you can imagine, it’s a long story.”
“You killed Fontaneda, didn’t you?”
Joe sucked in a breath at the abruptness of the accusation, but Kismet didn’t wait for a response. “I’m sure you had your reasons, and I don’t care about any of that. Right now, I need something from you.”
Joe’s expression was no longer wistful or contrite. “Something more than saving your hide?”
“They have Annie. They want the thing that gave the Fountain its power — a Seed from the Tree of Life, and if I’m going to save her, I need to give it to them.” He fixed Joe with an unflinching stare. “So I need you to give it to me.”