“Take it slow,” he warned. “But if you think it’s starting to go, run like hell.”
Fighting the urge to simply run across, Fiona took a step onto the bridge, then another. She could feel it vibrating beneath her, could almost see flakes of oxidized metal crumbling away with each footfall.
Halfway.
The bridge groaned and started swaying… Just my imagination, she told herself.
The ledge was just ten feet away now.
Close enough.
She launched herself forward, but the extra force generated by the attempt punched a hole clean through the walkway. Her toe caught on the edge, and she pitched forward. Her knee struck the deck, the impact crumbling the metal like a stale potato chip. In her mind’s eye, she saw the entire bridge disintegrating under her as she struggled to get back to her feet—
Pierce caught one of her outstretched arms and yanked her the rest of the way off the bridge. He held her upright, which was good, because her legs felt like overcooked spaghetti noodles. “I said, take it slow,” he chided. “You all right?”
She glanced back at the bridge, which to her complete astonishment, looked pretty much unchanged. “Uh, huh.”
He waited until she had both feet firmly planted, then let go and directed her attention to the wall. “Take a look at this.”
She took a deep breath, her heart still pounding like a jackrabbit’s, and shone the flashlight where Pierce indicated. There was something carved into the wall, but it was not Phaistos script.
“You know what that is, don’t you?” Pierce said.
She nodded slowly, still not quite able to believe what she was seeing. “It’s the Mother Tongue.”
The reason for Fiona’s initial encounter with the Herculean Society and the man who called himself Alexander Diotrephes, was her knowledge of the old and almost completely forgotten language of the American Indian Siletz tribe. It was a Salish dialect with several unique components that, if Diotrephes was to be believed, could be traced back to the original human language, what he called ‘the Mother Tongue.’ It was a manner of speech that transcended mere words, and could affect matter in seemingly magical ways. Diotrephes had also called it ‘the Language of God.’
With it, Moses had commanded the elements, unleashing deadly plagues against Egypt, and parting the waters of the Red Sea. Many centuries later, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel had used his knowledge of the Mother Tongue to animate a clay effigy of a man — a golem—to protect Jews living in the ghettos of Prague. Such incidents were exceptional. Very few people living even knew there was one original language. Although all languages could be traced back to it, the oldest tongues that were the closest descendants of the Mother Tongue — like the language of the Siletz — were nearly extinct.
Fiona’s grasp of the Siletz tribal language had led, not only to her acquaintance with Diotrephes, but also to the upheavals that had destroyed her former life, and inadvertently given her a new one as Jack Sigler’s adopted daughter. She was now the only person alive who spoke the Siletz language, and according to Diotrephes, she was the perfect candidate for mastering the Mother Tongue.
Unfortunately, there was no Rosetta Stone for that ancient language. Fiona’s interest in linguistic studies was a direct result of Diotrephes’s desire to unravel the mystery of the Mother Tongue. It was no exaggeration to say that she had a gift for learning languages, but she was no closer to understanding it now than she had been at the start. She could see fragments of that original tongue sprinkled throughout modern languages in the same way that certain words in English could be traced to Latin roots, but trying to rebuild a language that had not been spoken for thousands of years was like trying to guess what a completed jigsaw puzzle might look like after finding a few random pieces underneath the couch.
She stared at the letters but their meaning was lost on her. “This doesn’t make any sense. Alexander didn’t know how to speak the Mother Tongue. So why would he put this here?”
“Maybe he knew more than he let on. Or maybe he was able to figure out some of it, the way you figured out how to read the Phaistos script.” With his knowledge of the Herculean Society’s inner workings, Pierce knew as much about the Mother Tongue from an academic perspective as Fiona did, even if he couldn’t speak any of it. “Ten bucks says that speaking these words will unlock our back door.”
“I have no idea what it says.”
When it came to ancient languages, Pierce was fluent in Greek and Latin, but those were languages that could be taught. While there were traces of Mother Tongue in many modern languages, teasing them out was less about knowledge and more about intuition. It was a gift. And not his. But Fiona…she might be the only person alive who had actually spoken — and forgotten — a few phrases. But that was four years ago. “If anyone can figure it out, it’s you.”
“I appreciate the pep talk, but the Mother Tongue isn’t just about knowing what the words sound like or even what they mean. It’s deeper than that.”
Fiona struggled to think of a way to explain the mechanics of the mysterious language, a combination of vibrational frequencies and focused intention that could affect matter at the subatomic level. She had no doubt that if she was able to master the words and frame the appropriate mental image, the stone wall would become as insubstantial as mist, but doing that was like trying to move a muscle by telling it to move. Mastery of the Mother Tongue was more a subconscious process than a conscious one.
But there was no other choice.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and envisioned a tunnel through the rock wall that led out of the cavern. As she did that, she began to clap her hands against her thighs, pounding out a slow but regular rhythm. Then she began to sing.
Her grandmother had taught her the chant, the first words of the Siletz language that she had ever learned. It was a song to the spirits of the sea, praising the power and beauty of the waves, thanking the spirits for the bountiful gift of fish and oysters that sustained her people from one turning of the seasons to the next.
The thought of her people, the Siletz Nation, all but extinct now, nearly broke her out of the rhythm, but she focused on the words and let herself be carried along, like a leaf on the wind.
The chant was repetitive, but she gradually changed the words of the song, asking the spirits to open the door to the world beneath the sun. It was not meant as a literal prayer. She was, more than anything, hoping to get lucky and find the right words. Hopefully, the words for ‘open the magic door’ were the same in both the Mother Tongue and the language Fiona’s grandmother had taught her, but either her mental discipline was insufficient, or the words just weren’t right.
Nothing was happening.
She tried harder to visualize the rock opening up, and chanted the words again.
Without warning, something like a gust of wind pushed her forward, slamming her against the stone wall and silencing both the chant and the persistent beat she had been clapping. She felt a tightness in her inner ear, the result of a sudden change in air pressure that went from uncomfortable to agonizing in the space of a heartbeat. Before she could start to make sense of it, she was assaulted again, this time by an ear-splitting sound, like a jet engine tearing itself apart.
Is this something I did?
She turned to Pierce, who seemed equally bewildered by what was happening. The noise was coming from behind them, from out of the depths of the Labyrinth. In the dark mouth of the passage back across the bridge, she glimpsed a dull red glow, growing brighter. The maze had been transformed into a passage to Hell itself.