“I’m very proud,” he said sarcastically.
“Move.”
The incline did not end at the gateway. It continued on for another three hundred feet before flattening out to an even landing.
With his lamp held high, John Savage led the way to the Chamber of the Primaries.
The apex predator was frustrated. Its quarry was on the level below. And the walls seemed to be in a constant shift. Apertures that were once at one location were there no longer.
With unprecedented speed and agility it moved through old warrens and new, searching.
And stopped at a setting where the scent was strongest on the level. The whiff of its prey was marginal; the floor between them acting as a buffer, but the scent was still there.
It circled the area of the floor, trying to establish the exact point of its prey beneath it. With its frill in full expansion and its olfactory senses in full play, the Prisca was able to pinpoint an exact location. After circling a few more times, it raised its tail and brought it down against the floor. The full impact of its log-like tail created a star-point crack against the floor, a breach. And then it followed through with another devastating blow, the crack now growing into fissures that started to race across the floor.
Another blow of its mighty tail — up, then down, the floor shaking, the cracks growing deeper, longer, the black silica starting to give. As it continued to pound its way through, the beast roared its guttural cry of triumph as the floor gave way to shards and chunks that looked like lumps of black coal. The hide on its tail was becoming red and raw from the continuous strikes, the flesh giving way to open wounds.
But this was an alpha predator that was not going to be denied or turned away.
This time it would feed. So again… and again… and again, the Prisca’s tail came down against the floor.
“How are we moving along?” asked Leviticus.
Nehemiah offered a shrug and a harrumph. The sun was blazingly hot, which hampered the team’s actions somewhat. “We’re moving,” he said. “But not as fast as I hoped. It’s too hot.”
Leviticus looked along the horizon and watched it shimmer as a battery of heat rose from the earth. “We still have plenty of time until nightfall,” he said. “The optimum thing is to be safe. Make sure everyone has plenty of water.” Nehemiah nodded. “So what do we have so far?”
Nehemiah pointed to the middle of the squared structure. “We have charges set up at the middle point, situated to go off first. We have other charges branching out from that point and working toward the perimeter. These will be the second volley to go off. The perimeter charges will be last. Right now, the perimeter is all that’s left to load. But it’s going to take time given the size of it.”
“How much longer?”
Nehemiah looked skyward as if the answer was written against the blue canopy. “Six, maybe seven hours,” he finally said. “We should have this baby done with by dusk.”
Leviticus looked at his watch. “I’ll have the choppers here just after sunset, then.”
Nehemiah shot him a thumbs-up. “Works for me.” And he walked away.
Leviticus glimpsed the length of the shimmering horizon: Seven hours.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Hold up,” Butcher Boy said with his hand raised. Everyone stood still, listening. “Anybody hear that?” It was a repetitive pounding noise. It wasn’t close, but it wasn’t too far, either. “Another tripwire somewhere?” he threw out. They listened further.
“I doubt it,” said Alyssa. “Who would set it off?”
“Maybe one of those things,” said Hall.
She shook her head. “There has to be some type of catalyst to manually set it off. They don’t have the physical capabilities like we do to initiate a temple shift.”
“Then perhaps we’re not alone.”
“We’re alone.”
“Then what’s causing that racket?”
…Bang… Bang… Bang…
“Ms. Moore?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.” They moved onward with Savage in the lead.
The level appeared without challenges, without death-determining riddles, the corridor as inky black as all the rest. But there was an indescribable calm here, the type that drives a person into a false sense of complacency. The molasses-like weight of a pall was gone.
But not everything was serene. The banging continued, causing Alyssa to sneak a peek over her shoulder. What is that?
“What’s the matter, Ms. Moore? Getting concerned, are you?” asked Butcher Boy.
She shook her head and lied. “No.”
In return he gave her a wry grin. The type that said, I know better.
Savage also felt a personal calm — an inexpressible feeling of peace that had eluded him for years. He looked at Alyssa and smiled. What lifted him even more was that she returned his smile with a grin of her own. They were getting close to something wonderful. Whether it was driven by anticipation or by something else not understood, they didn’t know.
They finally came upon a chamber doorway with no riddles or obstructions. Above the opening were characters that read: The Chamber of the Primaries. Alyssa’s heart skipped, a hand unknowingly going to her breast. “The Chamber of the Primaries,” she whispered in awe.
Savage stood aside to give her room to enter. “The privilege should be yours,” he said, gesturing like a matador allowing a bull to pass.
She stepped inside an incredibly massive room, much larger than the ballroom-sized chamber above. The ceiling was domed and sparkled with star-point glitters of light from the glow of the lanterns. The ceiling was encrusted with chips of pure crystal marking the constellations in perfect facsimile, the entire ceiling a planetarium.
Every square-inch of the black silica walls had been used as tablets with characters in pre-Sumerian script, pictograms, cuneiforms, pre-history shapes, and hieroglyphics. In the central part of the arena was a rise with wraparound steps that led up to the main level.
They were in awe, the crystal against the pitch-black ceiling as real as a universe could be.
Aussie and Butcher Boy lowered their weapons, feeling oddly content.
Obsidian Hall raced around like a little boy in a candy shop, throwing caution to the wind.
Savage stayed close to Alyssa, who for the moment seemed to forget that people around her existed. “It is something… else,” he said.
Alyssa shrugged off her backpack, grabbed her father’s crumpled paperwork, and pressed it close to her. For you, Daddy. We do this together. She took the steps to the main level.
The top of the rise was even more magnificent. It was perfectly circular and acted as a platform to hold the incredible sculptures they discovered at the temple level, the carvings of the bull and the bear and the lizard, as well as other creatures discovered as bas-relief carvings on the Göbekli Tepe pillars. She looked above each sculpture and immediately understood. They were representations of certain constellations: the bull, Taurus; the bear, Ursa Major; and the lizard, Scorpio — the forepaws and curving tail of the Megalania Prisca mistakenly considered to be the celestial shape of a scorpion over time. There was a correlation between Heaven and Earth, the stars and the indigenous creatures within the fauna of Eden, a single concept of uniform existence.
“This is amazing,” she whispered to no one in particular. “Absolutely… amazing.”
“There’s no gold!” shouted Aussie. “No bloody gold at all!”
Within the circle of sculptures, the center point of the landing, two pods were standing approximately four-feet tall. They were egg-shaped, and their casings appeared to be fashioned from veined marble. But they weren’t. They were crafted from the non-porous composite.
Carefully, she slid a hand over surfaces that were completely unblemished, not a single mark, scratch or chip marred the smooth and silky exterior of the pods. She then looked straight up at the cluster of conjoined crystals that made up the image of the sun, the Giver of life. Then back to the egg-shaped pods.