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‘Great. What timescale are we looking at?’

‘I think we’ll have got as much as is practical from the Temple of Poseidon in another few days,’ said Hayter. The red dot of his pointer moved to another, larger structure, one with something considerably younger than the 11,000-year-old ruins overlaid upon it: the wreck of a ship. ‘Which brings me on to this.’

A click of the remote, and the map vanished, replaced by an underwater photograph. A stone chamber, badly damaged, huge slabs from the semi-collapsed ceiling jutting down into the space. Nina knew it immediately: the altar room within the enormous Temple of Poseidon. She had never been inside it personally, something that still bugged her, but had seen live video footage of it shot by Eddie before its partial destruction. The ship that had crashed on to the structure was the research vessel Evenor, from which the first underwater expedition had been launched. It had taken over four years before other explorers managed to clear away enough of the wreckage to find that some sections of the smashed temple had survived.

Atlantean artefacts and treasures had been recovered from the altar room by the IHA, but by far the most valuable of its contents was still in place. Parts of the walls gleamed in the diver’s spotlights. The chamber had been lined with sheets of precious metal, a gold alloy known to its builders as orichalcum, but even they paled in worth against the words inscribed upon them. The room recorded the entire history of Atlantis, from its earliest beginnings right up to its fall — and one of the hopes for Hayter’s expedition was that it would find those last words and solve the final mystery of one of humanity’s greatest legends.

Why Atlantis sank.

The pointer jittered over crumpled metal protruding from beneath a fallen block. ‘As you can see,’ Hayter went on, ‘a lot of the panels have been lost. More than half of them are completely buried, and short of taking apart the temple stone by stone it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to recover them.’

Sharkdozer could do it,’ Matt chipped in. ‘The heavy lifting arms can easily shift that lot. It’s just a matter of time.’

‘And money,’ Hayter said patronisingly. ‘Now, around two-thirds of the accessible panels are damaged to some extent.’ The laser spot danced over gashes and twists in the orichalcum. ‘Fortunately, one of the larger ceiling slabs only collapsed at one end, and as you can see here —’ he indicated a rubble-choked gap beneath a long block of stone lying at an angle — ‘it protected the texts beneath it to a degree. Once we cleared the debris, we were able to view them.’

Another click. The new picture was closer in on the now accessible space. More orichalcum sheets gleamed, words in a long-dead language discernible upon them. The chronicles of the Atlantean empire ran around the room, added day by day, line by line.

‘Our translation team started work on this section as soon as the divers returned to the surface,’ said Hayter. ‘Most of it’s similar to the other texts in the temple — accounts of the actions of the king and queen and other political leaders, military activity, and so on. Talonor’s expeditions are mentioned several times.’ The Atlantean explorer’s unearthed records had led Nina to discover an ancient — and spectacular — Hindu vault high in the Himalayas the previous year. ‘But the part I think you’ll be most interested in is this.’

He used the remote to display a close-up of one particular section of the scribed texts. Nina examined it thoughtfully. ‘I recognise some words,’ she said. ‘Something about… keys? The keys of… strength, it looks like. No, of power.’

Hayter seemed put out that she could understand any of it without his help. ‘I’ll save you some time,’ he said, highlighting a line. ‘Beginning here: “Nantalas, high priestess of the Temple of the Gods and keeper of the sky stone, showed the magic of the keys of power to the royal court. In the hands of others they were nothing more than simple statues, but in hers they blazed with heavenly light.”’

Nina stiffened, immediately realising the significance of the words. Matt cocked an eyebrow at her reaction, but said nothing as Hayter continued: ‘“Nantalas told the king that the keys had given her a vision of the sky stone —” we’re not sure whether that’s referring to an actual meteorite or something more metaphorical, by the way — “with its power unleashed, a power to destroy the enemies of Atlantis.”’

‘These keys,’ Nina asked. ‘Is there a description of them?’

‘Yes, here.’ Hayter indicated another part of the text. ‘“Three figures of purple stone, in height less than one foot. When apart, the touch of the priestess lights one to point the way to the others.” There was probably more, but the sheet was damaged.’

Nina ignored him. She had already heard enough to confirm her suspicions.

The artefacts Alexander Stikes had taken were three small purple statues. The first had been found inside the buried Pyramid of Osiris in Egypt; the second hidden with other stolen historical treasures in a secret bunker owned by the insane billionaires Pramesh and Vanita Khoil. The third, split into two halves, she had discovered in the lost cities of Paititi and El Dorado in South America, where the Incas hid the riches of their toppling empire from the rapacious Spanish. A trio of crudely carved, seemingly innocuous figures.

Yet they had been found in places separated by continents, by millennia. There was no known connection between the empires of the Incas and the pre-dynastic Egyptians. But both had hidden their statues in their most secure locations.

And now it seemed that the link was… Atlantis. A great empire that eleven thousand years ago had spread from a now submerged island as far east as Tibet, as far west as Brazil. They had apparently created the statues, then dispersed them to the farthest reaches of their dominion, to be passed down from one successive civilisation to the next.

The question was: why?

She fixed Hayter with an intense, all-business look. ‘Have you dated this section? How long before the fall of Atlantis was it written?’

Hayter was caught off-guard by her abrupt change of attitude. ‘It, ah, let me see…’ He flicked through his documents. ‘Based on your original report from five years ago, this section is, ah, around six feet along the wall from where the texts stopped. So it would have been written less than a year before Atlantis sank.’

‘And that section hasn’t been excavated?’ Her tone was almost accusing.

‘You can see for yourself how big the slab blocking it is,’ said Hayter defensively. ‘It must weigh tons. And there’s more debris on top of it.’

Sharkdozer could have cleared it if you’d let me try,’ said Matt.

‘It would have taken too long, and the effort would be far out of proportion to the value of the find. I had to prioritise. The more time we spend bulldozing, the less there is for actual archaeology, and we could do more digging for less effort in other parts of the temple—’

‘I want it cleared,’ said Nina firmly.

Hayter gawped at her. ‘W-what?’ he finally spluttered. ‘But if we do that, we won’t be able to explore the burial chamber. The support ship can only stay on station for another two weeks before it has to return to port, and if we waste time—’

‘This is my decision as director of the IHA,’ Nina said, standing. ‘I want all resources dedicated to clearing the rest of that area so I can see the final texts.’ She turned to Matt. ‘How long?’

‘I dunno,’ said the Australian, as surprised as Hayter by the turn of events. ‘A week, maybe more? There’s a fair old pile of stones that needs to be shifted.’