‘Except that the dead don’t need it anymore,’ I reasoned, torn between sheepishness at my own Western greed and the entrepreneurial instincts to not let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip by. ‘When we’re outside we’ll need money to finish finding this book,’ I reasoned. ‘For heaven’s sake, at least put a ring or two on your fingers.’
‘It’s bad luck. People die when they rob from tombs.’
‘It’s simply compensation for all we’ve been through.’
‘Ethan, I’m worried there is a curse.’
‘Savants don’t believe in curses, and Americans believe in opportunity when it is staring you in the face. I’m not going to leave until you take something for yourself.’
So she put a ring on with all the pleasure of a slave slipping on its manacle. I knew she would come around to my way of thinking once we were out of this catacomb. That ring alone, with a ruby the size of a cherry, was a life’s income. We jumped in the boat and quickly sculled to the main shore. Once on the ground we felt shudders in the grand structure above, and a continued creaking and groaning as an aftereffect of the explosion. I hoped that fool Silano hadn’t used so much gunpowder that he’d bring the ceiling down.
‘We have to assume Bin Sadr and his assassins are going to be coming in the same way we did, if that keg of gunpowder worked,’ I said. ‘But if the medallion showed a V with two shafts, the other path out must be the eastern shaft. With luck we can pop out that way, shut the eastern door, and be well on our way before the villains figure out where we’ve gone.’
‘They’ll be transfixed by the treasure too,’ Astiza predicted.
‘So much the better.’
The disquieting grinding continued, accompanied by a hiss, like a cascade of falling sand. Had the explosion triggered some kind of ancient mechanism? The building felt alive, and disapproving. I could hear distant shouts as Silano’s henchmen descended toward us.
Still holding Bin Sadr’s staff, I led Astiza to a portal on the eastern end of the lake. It had two tunnels, one going down and another up. We took the upper course. Sure enough, it soon led to an ascending shaft opposite the one we’d come down. This shaft rose at the same angle, aimed for the pyramid’s eastern face. Yet the higher we climbed, the louder the hiss and groan.
‘The air is feeling heavier,’ I said worriedly.
Soon we saw why. The overhead voids I’d noticed in the western shaft were repeated here, and from the mouth of each one a granite plug was descending like a dark molar from a stone gum. They were steadily sliding down to seal the passage and any escape. A second was coming down behind the first, and a third beyond that. Sand, somewhere in the pyramid’s workings, must have worked as a counterweight to balance these stones in place. Now, with Silano’s disturbance, it had been triggered to leak away. No doubt the portals were closing on the tunnel we’d entered through, as well. We might be trapped down here with Bin Sadr’s gang.
‘Hurry! Maybe we can slip beneath before they shut!’ I started to wriggle forward.
Astiza grabbed me. ‘No! You’ll be crushed!’
Even as I struggled against her grasp I knew she was right. I might make it past the nearest, and even the one beyond that. But the third would surely crush me, or more likely trap me for all eternity between it and its brother behind.
‘There has to be another way,’ I said with more hope than conviction.
‘The medallion showed only two shafts.’ She dragged me backward with my necklaces like a dog on its collar. ‘I told you all this was bad luck.’
‘No. There’s that descending tunnel we haven’t followed. They wouldn’t just cork this off for all time.’
We hurriedly descended back the way we came, coming out again to the underground lake with its island. As we neared we saw a glow of light and soon confirmed the worst. Several Arabs were on the isle of gold and silver, shouting with the same glee I’d felt, wrestling for the best pieces. Then they spotted our torches. ‘The American!’ Bin Sadr cried, his words echoing across the water. ‘The man who kills him gets a double share! Another double for giving me the woman!’
Where was Silano?
I couldn’t help but wave his staff at the bastard, like a cape at a bull.
Bin Sadr and two of the men leapt into the little alabaster boat, almost capsizing it but also sending it skittering toward us with their momentum. The other three leapt into the cold water and began swimming.
With no other choice, we ran down the descending tunnel. It too seemed to lead vaguely east, but deeper into the limestone bedrock. I dreaded a dead end, like the descending corridor we’d seen with Napoleon. Yet now another sound was growing, the deep, throaty roar of a running underground river.
Maybe that was the way out!
We came to a scene out of Dante. The tunnel ended on a stone landing that jutted into a new cave chamber, this one faintly lit by a lurid red glow. The source of the illumination was a pit so deep and foggy that I couldn’t make out its bottom, even though a glow like banked coals seemed to be coming from its depths. It was an unworldly light, dim yet pulsing, like a navel of Hades. Rock scree and sand sloped down the pit’s sides toward the light. Something mysterious was moving down there, ponderous and thick. A stone bridge, cracked, pockmarked, and without railings, arched across the pit. It was enameled blue and covered with yellow stars, like an upside- down temple roof. Slip from its course, and you’d never get back out.
At the far end of this chamber the bridge ended on a broad set of wet, glistening, granite stairs. A spilling sheet of water ran down them and into the pit, possibly the source of the swirling steam. It was from the direction of the stairs that I heard the roar of a river. While impossible to see, I guessed there was an underground diversion of the Nile there, running in a channel across the far side of the chamber like an irrigation canal. The channel must be at the top of the wet stairway, higher than the platform on which we stood, and was so brimming with water that some was spilling over.
‘That’s our exit,’ I said. ‘All we have to do is get there first.’ I could hear the Arabs coming behind as I trotted out on the bridge.
Suddenly a block bearing one of the inscribed stars gave way and my leg plunged down into the gap, almost toppling me off the archway and into the pit. Only with luck did I catch the edge of the bridge and regain my footing. The archway block made a bang when it hit, far below. I looked down into the reddish fog. What was writhing down there?
‘By the timber of Ticonderoga, I think there are snakes down there,’ I said shakily, pulling myself up and retreating. At the same time I could hear the shouts of the approaching Arabs.
‘It’s a test, Ethan, to punish those who enter without knowledge. There’s something wrong with this bridge.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Why would they paint the sky on the bridge deck? Because the world is upside down here, because… the medallion disc! Where is it?’
After Astiza had retrieved it from its fall down the face of the pyramid, I’d tucked it into my robes. Souvenir, after all this trouble. Now I pulled it out and gave it to her.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘the constellation Draco. It’s not just the north star, Ethan. It makes a pattern we have to follow.’ And before I could suggest we consider the matter, she hopped past me onto a particular stone in the archway. ‘Only touch the stars that are in the constellation!’
‘Wait! What if you’re wrong?’
There was the boom of a musket and a bullet whined into the chamber, bouncing off the rock walls. Bin Sadr was coming at full charge.
‘What choice do we have?’
I followed Astiza, using Bin Sadr’s staff for balance.
We’d barely started when the Arabs came boiling out of the tunnel and stopped at the lip of the pit as we had, awed by the peculiar menace of this place. Then one of them rushed forward. ‘I’ve got the woman!’ But he’d gone only yards when another star block gave way and he fell in surprise, not as lucky as me. He struck the bridge with his torso, bounced, screamed, scrabbled at the lip of the arch with his fingers, and fell, striking the side of the pit and sliding down into the gloom in a tumble of rock. The Arabs moved to the lip of the ledge to look. Something down there moved, quickly this time, and the victim’s scream was cut off.
‘Wait!’ Bin Sadr said. ‘Don’t shoot them! See? We must step where they do!’ He was watching me as
