The Bone Labyrinth (56 page)

Shu Wei stepped beside her second-in-command. She didn’t deride the man, nor did she console him, as she knew Kwan’s failure was punishment enough.

Ultimately the boy’s escape would do little harm to the mission. Even if he reached the others and alerted them, thus removing the advantage of surprise, her team still outnumbered the enemy. And from the information gained by interrogating the boy and old man, her team had arrived with vastly superior firepower.

“Keep moving,” she ordered. “But proceed cautiously.”

With the enemy alerted, she did not intend to be ambushed.

As she headed down, a moment of petty irritation flared at the boy’s small act of betrayal. Once this was over, she would free the Black Crow to collect full payment for this stain upon his honor. From the way Kwan walked stiffly beside her, all but trembling with fury, he would exact his revenge most coldly.

2:23
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M
.

Roland gaped at the impossibility that rose before him. It was as if he had stepped into a clock designed by the Lord himself. A loud ticking echoed off the walls of a cavernous space, a perfect sphere of open air that dwarfed the group gathered at its equator. They were perched halfway up one curve of the wall. The roof arched smoothly above, stretching as high as the first level of the lost city, while the floor delved as deeply below.

The entire vastness was covered in beaten gold.

He was also enthralled by the
energy
trapped within the dark space. He felt it coursing across his skin, his hair, hanging in the air itself. He watched bluish coruscations skitter softly across the roof and crimson scintillations dance along the mystery below.

But it was what rose before them in the middle of the space that defied reason, that unhinged his senses. Between those plays of energy hung a massive sphere, filling a quarter of the cavern space. One half appeared to be the same blackish magnetic metal that bound the books in the library; the other was quarried of the same white quartz found in the opposite library. The two surfaces were not smooth like the walls, but inscribed with meteoric impacts defining large lakes and low mountains.

“It’s supposed to be the moon,” Lena said.

He inwardly nodded, afraid to move, lest what he saw vanished.

They had all stopped at a ledge that circled the room’s equator. A series of tiered levels continued down from here. But none of them dared venture farther, as if innately sensing that this was beyond all of them, that they were trespassers upon a sight they were not yet ready to view.

He continued to study the giant sculpture of the moon. It hung in the room with no support. He could not fathom what energies suspended it—perhaps some mix of magnetism and charged forces.

Equally inconceivable were the details captured in this rendering. Every lunar mare, crater, mountain, ridge, fault, and channel was carved upon the surface in perfect clarity. And it wasn’t just the crystalline surface, which clearly represented the day side of the moon. The hemisphere of dark metal was also similarly inscribed and sculpted, revealing the hidden face of the moon’s dark side.

Seichan stared up at that metallic surface, her eyes pinched with disbelief. She kept her voice to a whisper. “How could that be? How could these ancient builders know what was on the other side of the moon?”

Gray noted another mystery. “It’s turning. The sphere, it’s slowly but definitely turning.”

Roland realized the man was correct. The moon wasn’t just hanging in space, but it was incrementally rotating. Again the loud ticking struck his ears, making him think of a giant clock, reminding him of something he had read.

“
Sic mundus pendet et in nullo ponit vestigia fundo
,” he whispered.

Lena glanced at him, but only for a moment, before returning her attention forward.

He translated the Latin: “ ‘Thus the world is suspended, resting its feet on no foundation.’ Those words were written by Father Kircher, inscribed on a clock he devised, one driven by magnetism. It was a hollow glass sphere full of mineral oil, which held a copper globe of the earth suspended inside, slowly turning, marking time.”

“Do you think he got that idea from here?” Lena whispered.

“I don’t know, but Father Kircher believed it was such forces that drove the motion of the planets.” Roland pointed beneath the giant moon. “But undoubtedly Nicolas Steno must have been here and reported his discovery.”

Filling the bottom of the gold-plated cavern was a labyrinth of raised copper walls, easily as tall as a man, as if inviting one to walk into that maze. However, the entire structure was flooded with a dark fluid, almost to the top of its walls.

“It’s similar to the labyrinth gilded on the cover of Kircher’s journal,” Gray said.

“A pattern found throughout history and around the globe,” Roland added, “but this maze is clearly more elaborate, expanded upon, more intricate and convoluted.”

He pulled out Kircher’s journal and held it up, letting them all compare the maze below to the labyrinth on the cover.

Roland turned to Lena and read the understanding shining on her face. He touched her arm in thanks. “You were right from the very beginning, Lena.”

2:26
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Could it be true?

While Lena struggled to fathom all the mysteries and impossibilities found here, she recalled her first comment upon seeing the labyrinth on the damaged copy of Kircher’s journal, the one they had found in the caves of Croatia.

She repeated those words now. “It’s like a cross-section of a brain.”

Roland nodded.

She studied the more elaborate design below, noting every coppery curve and fold of those walls. They composed a perfect rendering of the gyri and sulci—the hills and valleys—that made up the human cortex and cerebrum.

“It
is
a cross-section of a brain,” Roland whispered. “One that is afire with energy.”

Lena watched the faint crimson tracery coursing along the copper walls, as if the entire structure were some ancient battery.

And maybe it is.

“But what does it mean?” Gray asked. “A cross-section of the brain supporting a suspended globe of the moon?”

Lena shook her head, remembering Roland’s description of the extraordinary, almost impossible to comprehend symmetry and dimension of the earth’s only satellite. A globe that produced the tides that supported life, a sphere of such perfect mass that it stabilized the spin and axis of the earth so the planet could become an abiding and secure home for complex organisms to evolve into an intelligence that could look to the skies and wonder.

She stared down at the depiction of the human brain and felt tears rising in her eyes. While she could not answer Gray’s question, deep down she knew the wordless truth, sensed the enormity of both what was designed here and what lay beyond these walls.

Roland tried to explain. “Maybe what we’re looking at here is these ancient teachers’ attempt to comprehend God.”

Lena sensed he was close to the truth, but the mysteries here ran even deeper than that, like how the dark side of the moon could be rendered in such detail by these ancients.

Roland sighed, perhaps realizing the same. “Or maybe
all
of this . . .” He waved an arm, encompassing not just this chamber of mysteries, but the greater mysteries beyond. “Maybe it’s another ancient intelligence’s attempt to communicate to us, to leave behind a message for us to discover, burying it both in our DNA and in the movement of the sun, earth, and moon.”

“But what’s the message?” Lena asked.

Gray offered one conjecture. “Physicists have always been baffled by how strangely—almost impossibly—the universe seems to be fine-tuned for the creation of life. Take electromagnetic force. It has a specific value that allows stars to produce carbon, the building block of all life. Likewise, the strong nuclear force, which holds atoms together, is also perfectly balanced. If it were a tad stronger, the universe would be made up entirely of hydrogen. A tad weaker, there would be no hydrogen.”

Lena understood. “If any of those constants were different, life would not exist.” She turned to Gray. “But how does what we’re looking at fit into all of that?”

He sighed. “I’m not entirely sure. But I think these ancient teachers built all of this as a model to show us that life too is a fundamental law of nature. Ultimately we were meant to discover these connections—these ratios and symmetries that tie our bodies to the larger universe—and to begin to comprehend a greater truth.”

“Which is what?” Roland asked.

“That we’re special.” He pointed down to the labyrinth of the brain. “That maybe the universe is centered around the creation of intelligent life, in the creation of us. That
we
are a fundamental law of nature.”

Silence settled over the group as they contemplated this possibility.

Roland finally mumbled, “No wonder Father Kircher hid this knowledge.”

“The world was not ready,” Lena added.

And maybe it’s still not
.

Roland nodded to the labyrinth below. “Nicolas Steno, later in his life, ended his pursuit of paleontology, ceasing his examination of fossils.” He turned to them. “Do you know what he devoted the final years of his life to studying?”

Lena shook her head.

Roland turned and stared below. “He studied the human brain.”

The ticking of this massive clock suddenly took on a new note, more frantic, less steady. It took Lena a full breath to realize the new cadence was actually footsteps, racing down behind them.

She turned to find a small shape flying at them.

“Jembe?”

2:28
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From the boy’s sudden appearance and breathless descent, Gray immediately knew something was wrong. Seichan stepped over and caught Jembe before he plunged headlong into the mysteries below.

He panted, his eyes wide upon what was suspended in the room, momentarily struck dumb.

Gray took his chin and drew his gaze to his own face. “What’re you doing here?”

Jembe pulled his chin free and glanced back. “I run fast . . .” He flitted a hand through the air. “Like a hummingbird. But here is very dark.”

Only now did Gray note the dark trickle of blood down the boy’s forehead. He must have struck his head while trying to find them.

Jembe clutched Gray’s jacket, gasping. “Bad people coming. They have Chakikui.”

Gray straightened, staring up.

Was it the Chinese again
?

Seichan wondered the same. “They must have followed us.”

But how?

Gray pushed that question aside and asked a more important one. “How many, Jembe?”

The boy held up ten fingers. “Another is still with Chakikui.”

And all likely armed to the teeth.

He yanked out his SIG Sauer as Seichan did the same. But the odds were not good.

Two pistols against a fully equipped strike team
.

“We’re too exposed in here,” Gray said and started moving everyone up, pulling the boy behind him.

“What about hiding in the libraries?” Lena offered, hurrying alongside him. “Those rooms go on and on, maybe circling all the way around this space.”

Roland nodded.

Even Seichan liked the plan. “It’s our best chance. We could secure the others while we play a little game of cat and mouse with our guests across the rooms.”

As they reached the top step and reentered the crystal chamber, Gray pointed toward the metal library, hoping the gold-plated cases and bulletproof books inside would offer some shelter. He momentarily considered sending everyone into the crystal library, while he and Seichan lured the marauders the other way, but the strike team might send searchers in that direction. If that happened, the others would be defenseless. So he stuck to his original plan.

He passed Seichan his flashlight. “Take them.”

“What’re you going to—”

“I’ll be right behind you.”

She nodded and herded everyone toward the open door, taking the light with her.

Rushing through the dark, he crossed back to the gold skeleton and the completed pattern atop the dais. In the past, Nicolas Steno must have successfully closed the doors to the moon room by scrambling the marbles and resetting the mechanism.

Gray didn’t need to be that thorough. He reached and merely switched a metallic sphere for a crystal one. With the pattern disrupted, the doors began to close with a soft sighing of hidden gears.

Hurry up . . .

He glanced to the stairs that led down here. Through the darkness, he spotted a faint light flowing from above. The enemy was approaching cautiously, likely edgy, knowing the boy would have alerted them. Still, he needed more time, so he raised his pistol and fired twice in that direction, hoping the threat would give the enemy reason to pause.