chamber, slashing back and forth with his maul. Mercer scrambled back, unable to parry the swipes, only just managing to avoid being hit.
He came up fast against a large antique desk. The oracle loomed overhead. Mercer barely had time to note that the ridges covering the outside of the golden orb were mountain ranges and plateaus. The oracle was an intricately detailed globe on an unheard-of scale! Donny swung again. Mercer rolled to his right, around the desk’s leg. The hammer split the wood, upending the heavy piece of furniture. The scrolls and leaves of parchment that had littered the desktop flew like scattered birds.
Randall fought through the mess, swinging his hammer again and again, as tireless as a machine. His face remained an expressionless mask. From the floor, Mercer drove his hammer at Donny’s ankle, a weak effort that forced the bigger man to move aside only to feel if the blow had been worse than it felt. Mercer scrambled up on the far side of the ruined desk.
Tisa was shackled to a nearby chair. She’d screamed when the table had shattered. Now she watched wide- eyed as Donny shifted away from Mercer and took three long strides across the work area toward her. He stopped when he stood above her, the head of his hammer resting on her bent knee.
“Hey, Mercer, wanna see something cool?” He raised his weapon.
Mercer got to his feet. The oracle chamber felt as hot as the burning monastery above him. He was bathed in sweat. His muscles felt drained, rubbery.
“I thought you were here to dance with me.” His voice came as a rough croak. “Can’t change partners now.”
“This will only take a second.” Donny had enough animal cunning to know if he injured Tisa, Mercer would come at him, blinded by rage. An easy victim.
He watched Mercer as he raised the hammer a bit higher. He could let gravity drop the heavy mallet and the bones around Tisa’s knee would turn to pebble-sized chips.
Something within the oracle lurched, a mechanism of some sort that gave a steadily rising ticking sound directly above the trio. Donny looked up, Tisa looked at Mercer and Mercer rushed Randall.
He caught the movement a moment too late. Mercer’s swing lacked power because it came from his off foot. Still, the steel head caught Randall in the stomach, driving deep into his flesh. Donny doubled over, curling tight in a spasm that ripped the hammer from Mercer’s hands. When he wheeled away, Mercer’s hammer was still lodged in place. Donny dropped his own.
Mercer bent to scoop it from the stone floor and went to finish the fight. He took his eyes off Donny for only the split second necessary to grab the fallen sledgehammer. Donny moved fast, faster than Mercer could have believed. His strike hadn’t been anywhere near as damaging as he’d thought. Donny had gained a firm grip on Mercer’s hammer. His face showed pain, but also a fierce hatred and a deadly determination. Mercer just got his hand on Donny’s hammer when Randall waded in. He swung once at Mercer’s shoulder, a glancing blow that spun Mercer in place, presenting his vulnerable back to his opponent. Donny couldn’t get the hammer to swing around quick enough so he rammed the butt end into Mercer’s spine.
The agony was a spike driven so deep Mercer felt the hammer was going to explode from his abdomen. He roared as pain flooded his nervous system, nearly short-circuiting his brain. Donny kept up the pressure, screwing the wooden handle into Mercer’s flesh, tearing the ballistic material of his fatigues and ripping into his skin. Perversely, his own blood lubricated the handle, allowing Donny to jam it deeper into the wound.
He was slowly being skewered.
Mercer let his legs collapse from under him. The handle tore from his back with a wet sucking sound. He rolled away from Donny as fast as he could. The wound left a trail of blood dappled on the stone. He got back to his feet in time to meet Randall’s charge, barely able to parry the hammer swing. He continued to backpedal, exchanging ground for the moments he needed for the worst of the pain to abate.
“Bet that felt good,” Donny taunted. “It’ll feel even better when I shove this thing up your ass.”
Mercer smiled around the agony. “You should buy me flowers or candy first.”
“In a minute I’m going to hammer that grin from your face and make you swallow your teeth. After that you’re gonna beg me, Mercer. You’re gonna beg me to let you die.” Donny wiped at his brow, smearing his hair dye across his forehead. “You still think you’re better than me?”
Mercer glanced around and saw something that gave him the start of a plan. “I have a better barber, that’s for sure.”
“You ain’t nothing. All that money, all them people talking about how good you are. It don’t mean shit down here. Here it’s just you and me. You think that Ph.D. of yours is gonna save your life?”
“No. The fact that you’re a goddamned moron is going to save my life. I came here with fifty Special Forces soldiers. While you’re bragging about how tough you are, they’re sweeping the tunnels. They should find this room in about two minutes.”
It was clear Randall hadn’t considered Mercer’s backup. His eyes narrowed. “Then I’ll kill you in one.”
Behind Mercer was a set of black iron stairs that spiraled to the scaffolding surrounding the top section of the oracle. Even as Donny was making his last threat, Mercer was in motion. The stairs were tight, a narrow corkscrew that made it impossible to mount more than two steps at a time. The confining structure shook as Donny raced after him.
Around they went, climbing ever higher. Halfway to the top, the oracle was close enough to the stairs for Mercer to reach out a hand and touch. He almost stopped running when he looked closer at the mysterious machine. The oracle was an enormous clockwork mechanism. Tiny brass gears and ratchets covered the oracle’s surface. Openings allowed him to see inside the device. Within the oracle was a complex collection of pistons, springs and cogwheels that drove plates on the surface. Some of the gears inside the machine appeared to be twenty feet in diameter, like something out of a factory.
That’s how they did it. The oracle was a model of the earth’s tectonic plates, the huge slabs of solid rock that glided on the planet’s liquid mantel. Somehow the builders had known about plate tectonics and crustal displacement long before it was discovered by Western science. Tisa had said that the plans for this machine were centuries old even before they were brought to China five hundred years ago. Meaning the designers had had generations to observe the earth’s movement, extrapolate how that motion would affect other regions and create a machine that could accurately predict future geological events.
As he moved past the globe’s equator he noted the Hawaiian Islands were sharp cones jutting from the near featureless plain of the Pacific basin. A cylinder half filled with mercury projected from the central island. It had to be Kilauea, Mercer realized, the volcano that had been erupting on Mauna Loa for years. The mercury must represent the volume of lava that belched from the volcano over a certain amount of time. Near it was another, smaller mercury vial. It was Loihi, the newest island in the Hawaiian chain. Mercer knew that the top of this volcano was still deep underwater. Craftsmen must be able to add to the oracle, he thought, when new discoveries about the earth were made.
He quickened his pace, climbing up the Pacific side of the oracle. There were the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Strait. He could see the rift valleys that crossed Alaska. Small brass armatures kept the miniature plates together but could allow them to shift suddenly if there was a significantly sized earthquake.
Mercer reached the top of the stairs at least one story ahead of Donny Randall. The platform ringing the oracle wasn’t nearly as wide as he’d hoped, and the wood scaffold was old and water seeping from the cavern roof had rotted it in places. He’d planned on waiting at the head of the stairs to ambush Donny, but there was hardly enough space on the landing to stand and nowhere to swing the sledgehammer. The scaffold was hemmed by rock on one side and a tall but rickety railing overlooking the globe on the other. The lights blazing off the oracle’s facade were blinding.
Donny reached the last twist in the spiral stairs. He paused, watching the landing, and once he was satisfied that Mercer couldn’t attack, he came all the way up.
“Two minutes for your rescue, huh?” He was slightly out of breath from the six-story climb.
“Among other things I’m an eternal optimist,” Mercer panted. He stayed well back from Donny on the circular catwalk, needing the space to think how he was going to get out of this.
Below them, at the top of the oracle globe, the gold sheets that covered the Arctic Ocean had been removed for maintenance. Looking down was like looking into the guts of a mechanical monster. Massive wheels turned slowly inside the oracle, driving ever-smaller cogs and gears, transferring the tremendous geothermal energy of the mountain redoubt into the finite movements of the delicate surface mechanisms, each capable of infinitesimal shifts
