As the sound of distant thunder reverberated through the hollow of the mountain, however, knocking a light trickle of rock dust down on them, they paused, glancing at each other.
“What was that?” Kate murmured.
“Cannon fire,” Rohan answered grimly.
“Papa’s engaged the Promethean ship!”
He nodded. “He said he’d sink it.”
Kate gave him a look of determination. “Then let’s finish doing our part, too.”
“We’re halfway there. What’s the next number? Should be thirteen, right? Over there. Big stretch. Steady …”
The echo of cannon fire rumbled in the distance as they pressed on, finishing the Fibonacci sequence, until they came to the opening at the top of the pyramid.
They had to slide down a pole wrapped in scaly, brownish green snakeskin leather to reach the bottom of the pyramid, which contained nothing but a fine layer of sand and four arched doorways, one on each wall. These led into four unmarked, lightless, narrow passages that would take them farther into the base of the mountain.
“Eerie,” Kate remarked.
“Looks like we have to choose a path.”
“Yes, but choose based on what? They’re all identical.”
He nodded, gazing into the nearest pitch-dark tunnel. “And all equally deadly, I wager.”
“Maybe. Do you have a compass?”
“You know me, ready for anything.”
She raised an eyebrow at the roguish innuendo in his voice. He reached into his knapsack and pulled out his compass, tossing it to her with a quick, flirtatious smile.
She blushed a bit and flipped the compass open. “As I was saying. We already know they used the table of elements to devise the clues. Now, the four cardinal directions each corresponds to one of the original four elements of the ancients. We’ve already gone through water—the waterfall, fire—the Hall of Fire, then we had to swing through the air. That only leaves the element of earth. Which corresponds to … north.” She looked up from the compass to the door ahead of them.
He stared at her in admiration. “You’re good.”
“Maybe it’s just my Promethean blood.” Wryly, she handed the compass back to him.
He returned it to his knapsack. “Better let me go first again.” He stalked toward the north tunnel. “I’ll make sure it’s safe, then come back for you.”
“Please don’t.”
He turned to her. “What’s wrong?”
She moved closer. “I don’t think we should separate. What if something happens, and we are cut off from each other? Whatever we have to face, I think our chances are better if we stay together.”
He gazed into her eyes, flooded with tenderness for her. He gave her a reluctant nod. “Of course. Stay close,” he ordered softly.
She joined him with a grateful smile, then they set off into the darkness with only their one remaining lantern to light the way. The passage took a winding route, first dipping low under the seabed, then ascending through the recesses of the mountain.
The climb was steep, but Rohan was just happy that nothing sharp swung out of the darkness to lop off their heads. After they had walked for about a mile, the tunnel began widening ahead.
He held the lamp up higher as they approached a square anteroom with a large iron door. Beside it, he spotted a brass plaque with a dial like the previous one outside the Hall of Fire.
“Lord, I’m glad to be out of that tunnel. Looks like we’ve got another clue to solve—”
“Careful!” He put out his hand to stop Kate from stepping over the threshold into the anteroom until he had examined it more closely, but she had already put her weight onto her leading foot—and at once, a grinding noise confirmed that she had tripped another mechanism.
“Sorry!”
Rohan looked up and immediately saw the square panel of the ceiling begin slowly descending.
It was covered in long spikes.
“Kate!”
To his horror, she dashed ahead of him to reach the brass plaque.
“We have to get this door open! I have the clue right here. Come on, Rohan!”
“Bloody hell.” He darted across the room, more for the purpose of pulling her out of there if it came down to it.
The ceiling was now about twelve feet above them, but descending inexorably as Kate flipped open the book, rushing through the pages. “Oh, where the blazes is it?”
“Kate!” He fitted himself between the spikes and put his arms over his head. The instant the base came down to his hands, he began applying counterpressure to slow its descent. “Get out of here!”
“No, I have it now! Here: ‘Of wisdom, wealth, and power, he owned the lion’s share, but he lost all in losing her, and embraced despair.’ ”
“Kate!”
“The bride of the Alchemist, Rohan! The one your ancestor, Lord Kilburn, shot by accident when he was aiming at Valerian! What was her name?”
“Her name?” he retorted, pushing with all his strength against the weight. “I have no idea!”
“Rohan! This is central to your family’s story, you must know, come now, try!”
“Oh, God, what was it? Her name was, um—”
“Quickly!”
“Mary—no, Maria. No. It was longer than that. Margaret!”
Her back to him, Kate immediately began dialing the letters on the combination lock, ducking away from the spikes and bending lower to escape the ceiling that was about to flatten them.
“Kate, get out of here, now! I don’t know how much longer I can hold this up!”
She glanced over her shoulder at him and finally saw that he was using all his strength to hold up the spiked mechanism.
His face was beet red with the strain, his arms shaking. He could feel the veins bulging in his neck, the deep strain in his elbows. The pressure on his joints was enormous. “Get … out,” he wrenched out.
“But then
you
won’t be able to,” she whispered, aghast, as she grasped his situation.
“Please, Kate—if I mean anything to you, just go.”
“And you say you are unfit for love,” she breathed. Then she spun around, making her stand to finish the code—or die with him.
She ducked down between the descending spikes, still entering letters on the dial while Rohan was driven down to one knee like Atlas with the world on his shoulders, fighting to buy them a few extra precious seconds.
Kate kept working feverishly, dialing in the final letters of the combination. “R, e, t!”
The spikes suddenly stopped; at the same time, the iron door swung open ahead into the inner sanctum of the Alchemist’s Tomb. Chest heaving, Rohan dropped his quivering arms to his sides and hung his head.
“Wait for me next time,” he panted in reproach.
“I will. Sorry.” She gazed somberly at him and did as she was told, not venturing over the threshold of the room that had now opened.
As a clatter of unseen gears and pulleys began pulling the spiked ceiling back up to its original position, he straightened to his full height once more.
“Look, we did it! We found Valerian’s burial place!” Kate stared at him in girlish uncertainty, as though wondering if he was angry at her, as she pointed into the next room. “I can see the coffin!”
He heaved a slow, measured exhalation, then joined her at the edge of the burial chamber.
Obediently, she had remained outside the inner sanctum but pointed to the large stone sarcophagus that sat on a slightly raised dais in the center of the tight, low-ceilinged room. The sides of the chamber were packed with Valerian’s odd alchemical accoutrements.
“I don’t see any scrolls.” From the safety of the doorway, she began scanning the walls of the chamber, then glanced warily at him. “Are you all right?”
He grumbled in the affirmative.
“Don’t be angry at me, my love! It was for the best. You were being overprotective again. We had to press forward. We couldn’t go back—”
“I’m not angry,” he muttered, but it wasn’t her nearly killing them that had disturbed him. Her words from a moment ago still echoed in his head.
And you say you are not fi t for love.
Maybe, just maybe, he was. With the guilt for killing the father of those Promethean children lifted, and the Kilburn Curse revealed to be a superstitious sham, what could stop him now?
“Can I go in, please?” she cajoled him. “I have to find those scrolls!”
He growled, but after studying the room for a moment, he nodded. She tiptoed in ahead of him and began poking around in the ancient piles of her ancient ancestor’s personal effects, waving away a cloud of dust with a small cough.
She turned to him and shook her head. “I don’t see them.”
“Maybe they’re inside the coffin,” he murmured. “Should be weathertight. They might’ve put them in there with the body to help preserve them.”
“So.” Kate looked at him. “Let’s crack it open.”
Rohan eyed her uncertainly. Having only just recovered moments ago from his superstitious leanings, he still did not relish the thought of disturbing the dead.
Especially a dead warlock.
Nevertheless, he took a deep breath and went over grimly to the sarcophagus. He began lifting the heavy stone lid. His arms and shoulders still ached from the strain of holding up the spiked ceiling. Kate saw him wince and quickly hurried to help.
They exchanged a glance, confirming both were ready. By now, they both knew they might have to jump back fast if another nasty surprise sprang out at them, rigged to dispatch any would-be tomb robbers.
“One, two, three—” They shoved the lid hard. It slid off the side of the coffin and crashed away from the dais onto the floor of the Tomb.
“What was that?” Kate murmured, glancing around as the rumble started.
The open door to the burial chamber slammed shut. The whole room began quaking, and the dais began to descend into the floor, while fine dirt like sand began pouring from the ceiling from a hundred small cascades.
“This isn’t good,” Kate remarked, while Rohan glanced down into the coffin, his heart pounding.
Valerian’s flesh had long since wasted away, his skeleton draped in the rotting wizard’s robes in which he had been buried. In his bony fingers, clutched to his chest, was a large, ornate key.
“Rohan, the roof’s caving in!”
“I know. Just a second.” With a grimace of disgust, he reached into the coffin and pried the key out of the skeleton’s bony fingers. Whatever case or chest it opened, the scrolls Falkirk was after were probably inside it.
“Um, Rohan, any ideas?” Kate asked more insistently, looking around. “How are we going to get out of here?”
The dirt was coming down faster. Rocks were starting to tumble in. It seemed the final trap in this mad labyrinth was that anyone disturbing the Alchemist’s eternal sleep was doomed to share his grave. The whole structure was beginning to come down on them.
They were about to be buried alive.
“There!” He pointed to where light broke through. He could barely see Kate through the pouring clouds of dust.
He tucked the key into his waistband, reached his hand out blindly in the direction of the sound of her coughing, and hauled her to him, making his way toward a break that suddenly opened in the roof.
He rushed toward it across the collapsing Tomb, pulling Kate with him. He knocked aside rocks crashing down on them and lifted her toward the hole in the ceiling. She pulled herself through while he tried to find a foothold.
Pure chaos and choking dust now filled the Tomb. He could not see. He could barely breathe, but he managed to stand on top of a large rock that had dropped down into the chamber. Fighting his way toward the surface, he began struggling frantically as the dirt began filling around his chest. Damn it, he was too big to fit through the opening.
Dust filled his eyes and ears and tried to fill his nose. Everything was shaking; he couldn’t breathe; but through the deafening rumble, he could hear Kate screaming.
He felt a sudden burst of cold air above, then both her hands clasped one of his, guiding his grasp to a solid ledge so he could pull himself up.
His scrabbling fingers locked on stone; below, his foot found one more solid surface on which to raise himself. Clawing, frantic, toward the light, he suddenly emerged from the waist up, then dragged himself away from the sunken hollow of the Tomb. The ground had given way, caving in on the now-covered burial chamber.
Kate and he were covered in dirt and frozen in the snow, but they had both reached solid ground. They were alive. He sat up and began coughing violently as his lungs cleared out the dust he had inhaled.
“Are you all right?” he asked Kate between coughs.
She nodded, looking extremely shaken, but they were both out of the cave, and he still had the key.
She came closer on her knees, putting her arms around him with a small sob. “I thought I’d lost you.”
He touched her hand, not wishing to let her know that he, too, had thought he was dead there for a second. “I’m here,” he panted. “It’s all right. Don’t cry, love. Where are we, anyway?”
They both glanced around, then looked at each other in awe. They had come up in the center of the ancient Dragon Ring: The mighty standing stones loomed all around them in a circle.
Chapter 20
K
ate was shaking with terror from nearly seeing Rohan die in front of her. Fighting back tears, she hugged him again, tenderly brushing some of the dirt out of his hair.
“I’m all right,” he assured her, glancing back toward the sunken hollow. “Let’s just get our bearings, now. Damn, I lost the compass. My knapsack didn’t make it.”
His words arrested her. She suddenly whirled around with a gasp. “The book!” She began searching frantically, to no avail. “I’ve lost it!
The Alchemist’s Journal!
I dropped it in the Tomb!”
“Kate, it doesn’t matter. Calm down. You’re alive. That’s all I care about. And I still have that key.”
“What good is the key going to do us when whatever it opens is buried under all this dirt? The scrolls must still be down there, in a box or a chest or something! But we’ll never get it now. The whole trip was a waste!”