‘Maybe we should’ve kept it up here,’ suggested Howie. ‘Guns are one thing, but that was like a death ray.’
‘Nina thought it was best to put it back in its box, and considering what it can do, she’s probably right,’ Eddie told him. He did not entirely agree with her — his own opinion could have been decided by a coin toss — but had decided that presenting a united front was the only way to hold the already fragile group together. ‘If we need it, we can get it.’
‘Sure, so long as we don’t need it in a hurry,’ sniped Lydia. ‘Since it’s all the way down in the damn basement!’
Mukobo was now standing. ‘You see? If you trust in Chase, he will get you all killed. He cannot save you. Only I can. Let me go, and—’
Eddie pointed the Magnum at his head and thumbed back the hammer. ‘Move it. Through there.’ He nodded towards the booby-trapped tunnel. ‘Don’t tempt me to turn that thing back on while you’re inside it.’
Mukobo reluctantly set off, giving the other expedition members a last meaningful look. ‘Remember what I said.’
Eddie collected a torch and followed him. ‘Fortune, Paris?’ he shouted. ‘Keep an eye on things here.’ He hoped it was clear that he meant inside the palace as well as out.
‘We will, Eddie,’ Fortune assured him.
Keeping Mukobo at gunpoint, he headed deeper into the building. ‘Do you really think you will get out of here alive, Chase?’ said the warlord as they crossed through the second chamber. ‘You are a man of violence, as am I. We both know how this will end for you. Whether your friends meet the same end is your choice.’
‘Yeah, maybe I am a man of violence,’ Eddie replied, angered, ‘but the difference is that I only use it if I have to. You use it because you fucking get off on it, you sick bastard.’
Mukobo shrugged. ‘I use it because it achieves what I desire. As does every true ruler. That you do not understand this is why you were always a follower, and not a leader. Even in the SAS, you were only a common soldier, Corporal Chase. And when you became a mercenary, you again worked for other men, to achieve their goals. And now… ha! Your wife gives the commands. Where she goes, you follow.’
‘You can shut the fuck up about my wife,’ Eddie growled. ‘And I was a sergeant, actually.’
‘Until you were demoted.’
He frowned. ‘Brice been telling you about me, has he?’
They reached the third of Solomon’s challenges, Eddie ushering the Congolese into the cage before entering and rotating it so they could pass through. ‘Mr Brice has been very informative,’ said Mukobo. ‘I know all about you, Chase.’
The Yorkshireman tried to conceal his discomfort at the revelation. ‘Great, can you tell me my Facebook password? I forgot it ages ago. Now shut up, or you’ll go down to the bottom of the cave the quick way.’
Mukobo fell silent, though he clearly considered himself the victor in their little war of words. They entered the great cavern and picked their way down the steep steps. Lights were visible at the bottom, voices becoming audible as they neared the Chamber of the Shamir. ‘Nina?’ Eddie called as he approached.
Nina came to the doorway, concern on her face as she saw who was with him. ‘What’s going on? Is everything okay upstairs?’
‘Brought him down here before he offers Lydia thirty pieces of silver,’ he replied, pushing Mukobo inside. Ziff looked up in surprise from an inscription.
‘I don’t think she’d take it. Not after what he did to Steven.’
‘Well, I wasn’t going to give her the chance.’ He flicked the gun towards a high-backed stone seat. ‘Sit down, dickhead. No, arms over the top,’ he added as the warlord sat. ‘I’m going to tie you to it.’
Mukobo grimaced as he forced his bound arms over its unyielding back, then awkwardly lowered himself. ‘You really are afraid of me, aren’t you, Chase?’ he sneered as Eddie took a strap from one of the tripod lamps that had been set up in the room and used it to secure him to the throne-like chair. ‘I am already bound — what could I possibly do?’
‘More than you can now,’ said the Yorkshireman as he pulled the restraint tight. Mukobo held in a grunt of pain. ‘Hurts? Tough shit.’
Ziff regarded the new arrival with unease. ‘Isn’t there anywhere else you could keep him? We were working in here. And making good progress too.’
‘Oh, sorry, Doc,’ Eddie said with pointed sarcasm. ‘Is the civil war interfering with your archaeology?’
The Israeli scowled at him over his glasses. ‘That was uncalled for.’
‘So was this fucking maniac chopping off people’s hands.’
‘Eddie,’ Nina chided. ‘I’m sorry, David.’
The older archaeologist shook his head, then headed for the exit. ‘I need a rest anyway. Let me know when I can get back to work without any… distractions.’
The redhead watched him leave, then turned to her husband with an exasperated breath. ‘Dammit, Eddie.’
‘Well, I’m right. We’ve got more important things to worry about than reading Solomon’s blog.’
‘Actually, I’m not sure if that’s true,’ she told him. ‘David managed to translate quite a lot of the text in here. We found out why Solomon built the Palace Without Entrance, for a start.’ She went to one of the inscriptions on the rear wall.
Eddie joined her, positioning himself so he could still observe the African. ‘To piss off door-to-door salesmen?’
‘Not exactly.’ She indicated a particular passage. ‘This describes what he was told by Makeda and the historians of Sheba about the people who once lived here. The mine down there’ — a glance towards the excavations below — ‘was literally the source of the empire’s power. The Mother of the Shamir is a vein of… well, they didn’t know exactly what it was, and nor do we. I’ve been wondering if it’s related to the Sky Stone from Atlantis, or the meteoric material that became part of the prophecy in the Book of Revelation: an arrival from the wider universe. Or maybe it’s produced by the earth itself, like eitr or the water from the Spring of Immortality. Either way, it’s something beyond conventional science that we don’t fully understand yet.’
‘We seem to find a lot of stuff like that,’ Eddie noted wryly. ‘But even if they didn’t know what the Shamir was, they knew what it could do. Blow shit up, in this case.’
‘Yeah — and extremely well. The bigger the piece, the more extreme the effect. The Shamir that Solomon used to build the First Temple was tiny, but it could still split stone and metal. That one, though?’ She turned towards the altar, where the Shamir had been returned to its lead box. ‘Well, you saw for yourself. The story of the Battle of Jericho from the Bible, where Joshua used a horn to blow down the city’s walls? I think that’s what we’ve found.’
‘I thought you two said this place was much older than that.’
‘The stories were probably conflated over time, one mythology absorbed into another. Like the way the story of the Great Flood long pre-dates Hebrew lore. But once the people here found the mineral vein, the Mother of the Shamir, they used the pieces they were able to break off against their enemies. They got greedy, though.’ She gestured at the mine beyond the windows. ‘They wanted more Shamirs, bigger — and more powerful — ones. So they dug out this whole place to make the mineral vein easier to reach, built all the bridges and passages down to it. But something went wrong.’
‘What happened?’
She went to another section of the inscriptions. ‘They used the Shamirs they already had to cut away the rock down to here. When it was fully opened, though, when the Mother of the Shamir was exposed to daylight for the first time… it had the same effect as when Mukobo’s men brought that one,’ a glance at the lead box, ‘outside. Only hundreds of times more powerful.’