quickened her pace as she passed. ‘How much further?’
Chase peered upwards. ‘Looks like another six zig-zags.’
Nina groaned. ‘Six?’
‘Maybe seven.’
‘
Sophia heard it too. ‘Trucks. It must be those Humvees.’
Chase looked past the statue’s outstretched arm across the jungle, but saw no sign of movement. He could hear the noise, though: powerful engines revving. ‘They’re racing Humvees through the bloody
‘Will they be able to get them across the ravine?’ Nina asked.
‘Even if they can’t, they can still get out and use that log,’ said Chase. ‘Either way, it won’t take ’em long to get here. We need to shift.’ He moved back to Nina and took her hand. ‘If you’re going to hork, just don’t do it down my back.’
They set off again, increasing their pace as much as they dared along the precarious winding path. It took close to fifteen minutes before they finally rounded the last hairpin, the path curling up to the top of the plateau. To one side, a narrow stone bridge led across the gap to the statue’s shoulders.
‘Finally,’ Nina gasped. Both her legs ached, a rod of hot pain through the wound in her right thigh.
‘Better be something good up here after all that,’ Chase said, the bandage on his shoulder damp with sweat.
Sophia blew out a dry breath. ‘I could certainly use a source of life right now.’
Nina overtook Chase, the pain subsiding beneath her urge to find out what awaited them. The Source of Life, the most sacred, best-protected part of the Veteres civilisation; entombed in ice in the Antarctic, guarded by ‘angels’ here. But what
Beauty.
The summit was a swathe of glorious colours, a field of wild flowers. White, red, yellow, purple, sunset orange, vivid blue, all gently swaying in the breeze circulating round the cavern. The floral carpet spread across most of the plateau - leading Nina’s gaze to something at its centre.
A building.
Like much of the ancient civilisation’s architecture, it was a stone dome, but it seemed older, heavier, built to last for all time. And there was something else, almost hidden beneath the dazzling petals. Small stone markers rose from the ground, arranged in concentric circles around the building.
She moved to the nearest, pushing the flowers aside to reveal a rectangular slab about eighteen inches high. Letters were carved into the surface. The Veteres language.
‘They’re gravestones,’ she realised. ‘This whole place . . . it’s a cemetery.’
‘What?’ said Sophia, sounding almost outraged. ‘This is what we came to find? A
‘It’s obvious, innit?’ said Chase. ‘They die, they’re buried, they go back to the earth . . . and new life comes from them.’ He flicked a hand at the flowers.
Nina smiled at him. ‘Right. All life comes from death, in a manner of speaking. Life forms feed off other life forms. And every single atom in our bodies was created by the death of a star.’ She stood, facing the building. ‘It’s another piece of metaphorical language. The source of new life . . . is the death of the old. And if they believed in an afterlife, then this - being buried according to religious ritual - could have been where they thought it started.’
‘So if this is a cemetery,’ said Chase, indicating the dome, ‘what’s in there?’
‘Or who,’ Sophia added. ‘It could be a mausoleum, for rulers or important families.’
Nina regarded the structure thoughtfully. ‘If the Veteres buried their dead in the earth, there’ll be nothing left in these graves after all this time. But if that’s a mausoleum, and they used stone rather than wood or cloth to contain the bodies . . .’ Her heartbeat quickened. ‘There might be remains.’
‘Of who?’ asked Chase. ‘Adam and Eve?’
Nina nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yeah. Maybe!’ She set off for the stone dome, leaving a trail through the flowers as she weaved between the gravestones. Chase and Sophia exchanged looks, then followed.
The light level fell as she approached: this close to the edge of the cavern, the reason was simply that less daylight was coming through the holes in the ceiling, but it still felt disturbingly ominous. As she got closer, she saw an entrance, a single tall, thin opening with blackness beyond. She lit her flashlight and slipped inside.
‘Nina, wait—Why do I fucking bother?’ Chase muttered. He went through after her.
The interior was divided into three rooms. The first and largest was a pie-slice shaped chamber with the entrance at the centre of the curved outer wall, two smaller rooms leading off diagonally from the straight sides. Several stone benches were arranged within, on which dirt and fungus had built up over the millennia. The walls were also grubby - but Nina was already brushing away the filth of time to reveal the inscriptions beneath. ‘Sophia,’ she said, ‘look at this.’
‘It’s the same language,’ said Sophia, examining the ancient text, ‘but some of the characters are different.’
‘If this is where the Veteres originated, that’d make sense - this is the primal form of their alphabet. How much of it can you read?’
‘Enough to think that you were probably right about this being their entrance to the afterlife.’ She indicated one particular section. ‘This is something about their god - “the source of all things”. And he’s mentioned again here, and here . . . it’s a god-heavy room.’
‘Maybe it’s a chapel,’ Chase suggested.
‘Could be.’ Nina moved to one of the other doorways, shining her light into the room beyond. ‘There are more inscriptions in here . . .’ She stopped as she lowered the torch beam.
There was more in the room than mere inscriptions. At the centre of the dark inner chamber was a long stone object raised off the floor on carved blocks. A sarcophagus.
The last resting place of one of the Veteres.
‘So what do we do now?’ Chase asked, after a silent moment had passed. ‘When we found that Atlantean coffin, you weren’t happy about it being opened—’
‘We open this one,’ Nina interrupted. He gave her a questioning look. ‘I know, I know. Normally I’d never do anything like that without a proper survey, but if we at least know what’s inside the sarcophagus, it might give us a bargaining chip when the Covenant get here.’
‘Good point.’ Circling the sarcophagus, he saw that the lid was hinged at the back. ‘Here, give me that bag.’ He came back round the coffin and took the backpack from Nina, pulling out a claw hammer. ‘Okay, I’ll try to lift up the lid a bit. If you two can hold it up for a couple of seconds, I’ll prise it open more. Give me some light.’ Nina aimed the torch at the side of the sarcophagus. He ran his fingers along the edge of the lid before finding a slight imperfection and jiggling the claw end of the hammer into it. ‘Ready?’ The two women moved into position and nodded. ‘Okay, here goes . . .’
Straining, he pulled the hammer’s shaft back and down with all his weight. The lid rose about half a centimetre as the hammer’s head crunched against the stone. Nina pushed up as hard as she could. Sophia did the same; the gap widened to over two inches, a slit of blackness visible beneath. Chase quickly jammed the hammer in deeper and pushed down again. ‘Push it,
Nina and Sophia both strained to lift the lid higher. A rasp of stone from the sarcophagus made Nina cringe, but she somehow found an extra ounce of strength, and with an involuntary cry was able to open it wider. The hammer slipped, spitting stone chips into Chase’s face, but the women held the lid up long enough for him to grip its edge and shove it upwards. It swung past the vertical, then came to a stop with a bang, just beyond the tipping point.
Chase and Sophia stepped back as Nina shone the torch into the sarcophagus. Inside was a figure, tightly wrapped in a surprisingly well-preserved cloth shroud. The stone coffin must have been practically airtight; once the body’s decomposition processes had run their course, the remains had stayed more or less intact, no weather effects or organisms to disturb them.
She waited for the dust to settle before taking a closer look. The figure inside the shroud was tall.
