Evil Star (27 page)

“You can take it wherever you wish. No policeman or security person will ever find it on you. It is part of you now. And one day you will find it has a use."

"Well. . . thanks." Richard reached out and took the leather bag. He dropped the knife in and closed it. He was surprised how light it all was. "Thank you for helping us. And thank you for finding Matt."

"Good luck, Mr. Cole. Look after Pedro and Matteo. They have need of you."

Richard turned and walked out of the palace. The prince of the Incas and his
amauta
watched him until he had gone.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star

'• • •

The helicopter took them to Cuzco, where a five-seater Cessna plane was waiting to carry them on the longer leg of the journey to Nazca.

Matt was amazed how smoothly every-thing had been organized.

There were no passports needed, no travel documents. They simply landed at Cuzco's airport, walked across the tarmac, and took off again. Not one offi-cial so much as glanced in their direction. It seemed that the Incas still had plenty of influence in Peru — and that while Matt was with them, he would be safe.

The flight took three hours. Pedro seemed more com-fortable in the plane than he had in the helicopter. He had barely spoken since the golden disc had been shown to them in Vilcabamba, and Matt wondered what was going on in his head. In the seat next to him, Richard was also unusually quiet. He hadn't told Matt what the Inca prince had said to him. Matt had decided not to ask, but obviously it hadn't been good news.

Atoc had flown the helicopter, but on the plane he was just a passenger, sitting on his own at the back, deep in thought. The pilot of the Cessna was behind the controls, almost completely invisible in a leather jacket, flying hel-met, and goggles. He had said nothing as they came on board and nothing during the flight, but suddenly he called out, shouting to make himself heard above the noise of the engine. Atoc leaned across the aisle.

"Look out of windows," he said. "We pass over the Nazca Lines."

The plane dipped, dropping ever lower, as if about to land. Matt felt his stomach rise. They were well below the level of the clouds, flying over a flat, empty desert and he wondered what he was meant Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star to see. The Nazca Lines? There didn't seem to be anything here.

And then he caught his breath.

There was a line, drawn in the sand, running dead straight for as far as his eye could see. It must have been carved in the earth and it couldn't have been done by chance. It was too precise. Next to it, he saw a shape, a huge rectangle, narrower at one end than the other, at least a mile long. A runway? No. Like the line, it had simply been drawn in the ground.

"Over there . . ." Richard said, leaning across him.

There were more lines, running in every direction, crossing over one another, all as straight as arrows. Matt had never seen anything like it. The whole desert was noth-ing less than a fantastic doodling pad on a gigantic scale. He couldn't imagine how it had been done or when. Nor did he understand how the lines had survived when surely the first puff of wind should have blown them away.

The pilot called out to them again and the plane tilted and curved.

Now Matt saw pictures, even more incredible than the lines. The first showed a hummingbird. It wasn't drawn naturalistically, but even so, it was unmistakable, with a long, pointed beak, wings, and a tail. Matt tried to work out its size. It was hard to say, but if he could see it so clearly this high up, it had to be at least a hundred meters long.

One by one, a fantastic menagerie of creatures appeared on the surface of the desert as the plane passed directly overhead. There was a monkey with a spiraling tail, a whale, a condor, and a huge spider with a bloated body and eight legs reaching out. Matt recognized the spider. It was identi-cal to the one he had seen on the page copied from Salamanda's diary.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star The drawings were simple, almost childlike. But no child could possibly have produced them on this scale. Each creature must surely have been the work of dozens of men. And there was something very precise about the way each one had been executed.

The legs of the spider, for example, were mirror images of each other, as were the wings of the bird. Every line was straight. Every circle was perfectly formed. It was obvious even at first glance that the entire tapestry had been produced with mathematical precision.

A single road — the Pan-American Highway — ran through the center of the desert, actually dissecting some of the lines. It was completely straight, too, but next to the drawings it appeared cold and lifeless. A piece of modern vandalism, cutting through a work of ancient art.

The pilot turned in his seat, pulling off his helmet and goggles. And that was when Matt saw that he wasn't a man but a woman, about fifty years old, with a square, rather plain face and long, almost colorless hair. She wore no makeup and it would have done little good if she had. Long expo-sure to sun and desert winds had wrinkled her skin beyond hope. But she had lively, bright blue eyes.

She was smiling.

"So what do you think?" she called out.

Nobody spoke. They were all too surprised.

"I'm Joanna Chambers," the woman said. "I heard you wanted to see me so I thought I'd come and collect you myself." The plane shuddered, caught in an air pocket, and briefly she returned to the controls. Then she turned round again. "They told me you've come to Peru looking for a gate," she went on. "Well, if there really is such a thing — if it exists and it's about to be opened — you'd better take a good look. Five hundred square kilometers of some of the Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star emptiest, driest desert in the world. That's where your gate is to be found."

************************************

Professor Chambers lived about a mile from the small, pretty airport that mainly served tourists wanting to visit the Nazca Lines. She had one of the most beautiful houses Matt had ever seen; a low, white building with a green-tiled roof and a broad veranda shaded by a colonnade. It had been built in a garden the size of a park, with llamas wan-dering freely across the lawn and dozens of birds filling the air with color and song. A low, white wall surrounded it but there was no gate, no guards. Everything about the place suggested that visitors were always welcome.

Richard, Matt, Pedro, and Atoc were sitting in the din-ing room, eating a late lunch of cold meat and fried yucca chips — which were like potato, only sweeter. The room had a bare tiled floor and a fan turning slowly above. It led directly onto the veranda. The professor was at the head of the table. Now that Matt could examine her more closely, he saw that she was a large, rather masculine woman, though not as unattractive as he had first thought. She looked like the sort of woman who should have been teaching gym at an expensive girls' school. She had changed into white trousers and a baggy white shirt tucked in at the waist. She had a bottle of iced beer in one hand, a thin cigar in the other. The smell of its smoke hung around them.

"I'm very pleased to meet you," Chambers said. “You're welcome to my house."

"Nice place," Richard muttered.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star

"I was fortunate to be able to buy it. I've made a certain amount of money out of writing books. About Peru — and in particular the Nazca Lines."

"What are the Nazca Lines?" Matt asked.

Chambers sucked on her cigar and the tip glowed an angry red. "I find it astonishing that you haven't heard of them," she remarked.

"They just happen to be one of the great wonders of the ancient world. I'm afraid it's all part of this dumbing-down. English schoolchildren! They don't seem to teach you anything these days."

"I haven't heard of them, either," Richard said.

"Bizarre!" Chambers swallowed smoke the wrong way and burst into a fit of coughing. She took another swig of beer and sat back in her chair. "Well, I'm not going to give you a history lesson. Not yet, anyway. First I want to know about you. I got a telephone call from a very special friend. Apparently, you've been to Vilcabamba?"

Nobody said anything. They hadn't realized how much she knew.

"I'm green with envy!" Chambers exploded. "I know that the Incas survived. They consider me their friend and I've spoken with them frequently. But I've never been to their lost city. As far as I know, nobody has — unless they've had pure Inca blood . . . apart from you." She nodded at Matt and Pedro. "They must think very highly of you. I can assure you, it's a great honor."

"They are gatekeepers," Atoc muttered. He seemed offended by the way Chambers had spoken.

"Gatekeepers! Yes, of course! Two of the five! The Old Ones ..."

“You know about that, too?" Richard asked.

"I know a great deal about a great many things, Mr. Cole." She Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star reached forward and took a grape from a bowl, then flicked it out of the window. A large tropical bird swooped down and caught it.

"And yes, I had heard stories about the Mad Monk of Cordoba and this alternative his-tory of his. I was never sure whether to believe it or not. But now that these children have turned up, I suppose I'd better! Now what about this page of yours? The one from the diary?"

Matt still had it in his pocket. He took it out and gave it to her. She read it briefly, once, then again. "Well, some of this is fairly straightforward," she said. "The place of Qolqa.
Inti Raymi. . .
that's only two days from now. Doesn't leave us a lot of time. I'm not sure about this white bird, though. It could be a condor, I suppose. . . ."

"What about a swan?" Matt said.

"A swan? What makes you think of that?"

"I heard Salamanda talking about a swan," he explained. He could have mentioned his dream but decided not to. "He said to be in position. At midnight."

"Are you
sure?"

“Yes."

Professor Chambers had irritated Matt and she saw it. "I'm sorry,"

she said. "It's just that it seems so unlikely. There's a condor and a hummingbird in the Nazca desert. You saw them today. But there's no swan. As far as I know, there are no swans in Peru."

"That's what he said," Matt insisted,

"What about the rest of the poem?" Richard asked.

"Well, the whole page refers to the Nazca Lines. There’s no doubt about that. The place of Qolqa, for example.”
She stopped herself.

"There's no point talking about the
Nazca Lines until you know what Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star they are, so I'm going to have to give you a history lesson after all. It would actually take me a week to describe them to you and even then I would only scratch the surface. But we don't have a week.

And anyway, young people these days have no concentra-tion. So let me try and put it as simply as I can."

Professor Chambers got up and helped herself to another beer, flicking the cap off with a penknife. Matt was almost surprised that she hadn't used her teeth.

"There are all sorts of mysteries in the world," she began. "Even now, in the twenty-first century. Stonehenge. The Pyramids. Ulure in Australia. There are all sorts of places and things — some of them man-made, some of them natural — that science can't explain. But if you ask me, the Nazca Lines are the biggest mystery of the lot.

"Let's start with the Nazca desert. It's huge. It's hot. And it's empty.

And about two thousand years ago, the ancient Indians of Nazca decided to trudge out here and draw a series of extraordinary pictures in the ground. They did this by removing the darker stones from the surface of the desert and exposing the lighter soil underneath. There's almost no rain in Nazca and very little wind.

That's how the lines have survived.

"Are you with me so far?"

She glanced at Atoc, who was rapidly translating for Pedro. He nodded.

"Good. Well, some of these pictures are very beautiful. You saw them
from the plane. There are animals — a whale, a condor, a monkey, a hummingbird, and a huge spider. And there are all sorts of triangles, spirals, and star shapes as well as hundreds of perfectly straight lines, some of them stretching for up to twenty-five miles."

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star She took a quick swig of beer.

"Now, this is where the mystery begins. The Nazca Lines can only be seen from the air. In fact, they were only discov-ered in 1927

when one of the first airplanes in Peru flew over them. I wish I'd been on board — that's all I can say! Anyway, obviously the Nazca people didn't have airplanes. So the question is: Why go to all the trouble of making the lines and the pictures if they'd never be able to see them?

"There have been all sorts of theories," Professor Chambers went on.

"One writer believed that the lines were some sort of airport for spaceships from another planet. It's true that one of the pictures does show a man with a round head, and some people believe it to be an astronaut. A lot of people think they were drawn for the benefit of the ancient gods. They'd be up in the sky, so they'd be able to see them. My own feeling has always been that they are in some way connected to the stars ... perhaps they were used to forecast stars. Or perhaps..." She paused. "I've often wondered if they weren't put there to warn us about something."

Her cigar glowed red. Smoke crept up the side of her face. She seemed to be deep in thought. But then, abruptly, she sat down again.

"Many theories. But the point is — nobody knows for sure."

"Is the place of Qolqa in the desert?" Matt asked.

"Yes, it is." Chambers nodded. "Once again, you should have seen it from the plane. Qolqa is a word in Qnecha, the ancient language of Peru. It means 'granary.' And it’s the name given to the great rectangle we flew over this morning."

'"Before the place of Qolqa . . ."' Matt read out the sec-ond line of the poem. "That means the gate must be in front of the rectangle!"