Temple of the Gods

longest. Large sections of its walls had toppled outwards, giving the impression that it had exploded from within.

‘So that’s where they kept this sky stone?’ Eddie asked.

‘That’s right,’ said Nina. ‘It’s quite an unusual place, actually. Atlantean temples are usually devoted to a single god, but this was dedicated to… well, dozens of them, as far as we can tell. Although now that we know about the sky stone from the rest of the Kallikrates text, there might be an explanation. Nantalas said that it contained the power of the gods — plural. So the Atlanteans made sure to honour them all.’

‘If they knew there was something special about the meteor, enough for ’em to build a temple to put it in, why didn’t they use its power right away?’

Nina looked out at the broken building as they glided past. ‘There could be any number of reasons. They might have been afraid of it; the text said that some of the royal court were opposed to using its power. Or maybe they didn’t originally have all three statues — or anyone who could use them. It was obviously a big thing for Nantalas to be able to channel earth energy, so it could have been as rare an ability then as it is now, even amongst Atlanteans.’

‘Maybe you’re her great-great-great-great-et cetera grand-daughter,’ Eddie suggested.

Nina treated the jokey comment with more seriousness. ‘Maybe. I’m descended from someone from Atlantis, so who knows?’

The collapsed temple disappeared from view. Beyond it, something far larger came into sight.

The Temple of Poseidon.

Even after the destruction wrought upon it by the impact of the sunken Evenor, it was still an imposing structure. The submersible was approaching its northern end, where Eddie had first entered the temple five years earlier. An enormous wall of dark stone rose out of the sediment, stepped in tiers like a ziggurat near its base before curving smoothly inwards to form a great arched roof.

Nina noticed a sudden tension in her husband at the sight. ‘Hugo?’ she asked quietly. Eddie gave her a silent nod; one of his closest friends had died here. Matt also became uncharacteristically sombre for a moment. Eddie had not been the only one to suffer a loss at Atlantis.

The submersible drew closer. ‘That’s the tunnel,’ said Eddie, pointing at a small hole in the wall. The shaft had been constructed by the Atlanteans as a secret passage leading directly to the altar room.

‘You don’t need to crawl through a little hole to get inside now,’ said Matt as he guided the Sharkdozer towards the roof. The wreck of the Evenor came into sight, a long white axe that had sliced the four-hundred-foot-long temple in two. Something bright flickered in the gloom atop the rubble. ‘There’s the altar room.’

He brought the sub into a hover near the object, a marker pole covered in reflective material that caught the spotlights. Not far from it was a twisted mass of metal — part of the Evenor’s superstructure. The excavated sections of the altar room were visible before it, orichalcum sheets glinting on the walls.

Gypsy moved ahead of them and came to a stop above the dig site. ‘Sharkdozer in position, confirm,’ said Matt over the radio.

‘Read you, Sharkdozer,’ Hayter’s crackly voice replied. ‘Gypsy also in position.’

‘Roger that.’ Matt turned to Nina and Eddie. ‘This is the boring part, I’m afraid.’

‘That’s okay,’ said Nina. ‘I want to watch the whole thing. You never know what might turn up.’

‘I’ll give it a miss,’ Eddie said. He took a creased paperback thriller from inside his leather jacket and thumbed it open. ‘Been meaning to finish this for ages. I got interrupted by the whole wanted-for-murder business. I’ll just read it while you’re telling Matt how to dig.’

‘I’m not going to do that,’ she assured Matt.

‘Too bloody right you’re not!’ the Australian replied with mock offence as he took the manipulator controls. ‘Okay, Gypsy, I’m ready to start.’

The other submersible moved closer, spotlights and cameras panning for a clearer view as Matt began the long and involved task of removing the debris covering the altar room. The first priority was the wreckage from the Evenor; even though most of it had already been cut away, it was still a hefty chunk of steel heavier than the Sharkdozer could lift using its thrusters alone. It wasn’t until the sub touched down on top of the temple and used its skids to brace itself that the arms could apply enough leverage to start raising the broken section of superstructure.

It took the better part of an hour to get it safely clear. Once it had been dumped in the silt away from the building, work began in earnest. None of the fallen slabs were as heavy as the ship debris, but they were still fairly massive in their own right.

Time passed. Matt took a break to recharge with an energy drink and a sandwich, while Nina forced herself not to tap her fingers impatiently. Eddie smirked at her over the top of his novel, knowing how she was feeling. Then the work continued, the obstructing blocks gradually becoming fewer in number. Until—

‘There!’ said Nina, as Matt hauled one of the remaining slabs out of the way. ‘There it is!’

A golden light reflected back at them from the sheet of precious metal covering the newly revealed wall. It had been damaged in several places, a great jagged rip through one entire section obliterating the text… but the crucial part was still more or less intact.

The last inscription. The final written words of the great empire of Atlantis.

‘There, there there there!’ Nina jabbed a finger excitedly. ‘Get the camera on it, quick!’

Eddie snapped his book shut. ‘Calm down, love! It’s not going anywhere.’

‘I know, I know. But, well… I want to see it!’

‘She was like this the first night I was back home,’ he told Matt. ‘Couldn’t keep her hands off my pants.’

‘Eddie!’

‘What you do in private isn’t my business,’ Matt said, amused. ‘But give me a sec here, Nina — I still need to put this stone somewhere.’ He worked the controls, Nina fidgeting beside him. Finally, the block was released. ‘All right, let’s have a dekko. Gypsy, you got your cameras switched on?’

‘We never turned them off,’ said Hayter over the radio, sounding almost as enthusiastic as Nina. ‘Nina, we’ve got our translator hooked up to our high-definition camera. It’s got better resolution than the ones on your sub, so we should get our pictures first—’

‘Sorry, Lewis,’ Nina cut in as she opened the laptop containing her own copy of the translation software, ‘but I’m going to be selfish on this one. My primary interest here is the very last piece of text, so I want to work on that straight away. Once we’ve got the pictures, you can record the rest of the inscriptions. Okay?’

‘If you insist,’ came the sour reply.

Matt delicately brought the hulking submersible closer to the wall with careful blips of its thrusters. He stopped when the viewing bubble was about six feet away, the magnifying effect of the thick hemisphere almost making the text readable with the naked eye. But instead, he extended one of the secondary arms until its camera was less than a foot from the metal sheet. ‘You ready, Nina?’

‘Recording,’ she answered. ‘Go ahead.’

Matt slowly panned the arm back and forth over the final section of text. A window on the laptop’s screen displayed the live feed; another, larger window showed the whole inscription building up section by section as the computer automatically matched them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It wasn’t long before the image was complete, at which point another program began the more complex task of translating the ancient language into English.

‘Okay, Lewis,’ Nina said into a headset, ‘I’ve got what I need. You can move in now.’

The snideness behind Hayter’s simple ‘Thank you’ was clear even through the distortion. Matt backed the Sharkdozer away, and Gypsy took its place, cameras peering intently at the rest of the ancient record.

‘So, what does it say?’ Eddie asked, leaning across the confined cabin to examine the screen.

‘Give it a chance,’ said Nina. ‘It’s a lot faster than translating by hand, but it’s not Star Trek.’ Words were already starting to appear, though: the image-recognition software was picking out familiar patterns. ‘Nantalas gets mentioned several times… and so does the sky stone.’