Seven Wonders Book 2: Lost in Babylon (18 page)

I raced up behind him and grabbed his bow and the vial of oil, which hung from his belt. Scooping one of the arrows off the ground, I poured oil over the tip, thrust it into the flame, and inserted it in the bow.

I pointed it at one of the vizzeet. With a screech, it spat at me, just missing my eye. The glob of goo landed on the ground behind me with a loud
tsssss
.

I drew the arrow back and released it. The flame arced through the blackness like a comet, directly toward the slavering beast.

I missed. The arrow embedded itself in a tangled thicket of vines that hung from above. Flames shot upward, licking at the feet of the retreating creatures.

The vizzeet were shrieking now, clawing one another to climb higher . . . away from the fire.

Marco stumbled toward me, holding the torch with one hand and his face with the other. “Once on the chin and once above my right eye,” he said.

“Hold still.” I pulled the other healing strip from his calf, ripped it in half, and pressed each section to a wound. “Can you see?”

“By the dawn's early light,” Marco replied.

A sudden
whoosh
made us all turn. An enormous bush, on the second level of the Hanging Gardens, had burst into flames. “This whole thing's about to go up!” Cass cried out. “We have to get out of here.”

I was about to destroy one of the Seven Wonders of the World. And if this thing went up in flames, the entire royal gardens wouldn't be far behind. Our chance to the find the Loculus would be lost.

Water
.

We needed lots of it. And fast. I took Marco's torch and held it high, lighting the second level of the Hanging Gardens. A grand stone stairway to our right, now overgrown with weeds, led directly upward. “Marco, follow me,” I said. “Cass and Aly, get yourselves to the bottom of the Archimedes screw. Find whatever makes it turn, and do it hard! Now.”

Marco and I raced to the stairs and took them two at a time. Already I could hear a deep, metallic cranking sound. Just to the other side of the banister, the Archimedes screw was slowly starting to turn.

I held the torch over the banister and saw Cass and Aly working a huge bronze crank below. Water began flowing upward. Just above our head, on the Hanging Garden's second level, it spilled into a tilted basin that fed a clay gutter that ran through the flowers. “Take a gutter, Marco!” I said to Marco. He looked at me blankly. “Can you shake that gutter loose?”

He put two hands around one of the curved waterways and pulled. At the third pull, the thing came loose in a shower of clay dust.

Around us the flames were catching on to the ivy and some nearby bushes. “We need to break the screw!” I shouted.

Marco nodded. “Hold this,” he said, handing me the gutter.

The thing weighed about a hundred pounds. I nearly dropped it to the ground but balanced it on the stone railing. Marco was kicking the side of a trellis, knocking loose a decorative carved-bronze border from one for the supports. As the mangled hunk of metal fell to the ground, I shouted, “Give it to me—and hold this thing!”

I grabbed the bronze shard and began hitting the screw. It sides were curved upward, cupping the water on two sides, keeping it in place as it rose. I battered the outer side until the water was spilling out. “Faster, guys!” I shouted down. “Turn it faster!”

The water began spattering outward. I took one end of the gutter and tipped it so that the high end would collect the flowing water and deliver it on the other end to the burning bushes. Marco slid in to help. We moved the gutter back and forth like a fire hose. “This is crazy!” Marco said. “We'll never get enough water!”

“Cass and Aly—turn harder!” I called down.

“Hold tight, Jack,” Marco said, letting go of the gutter. “I'll be right back.”

I held on as Marco ran downstairs and commandeered the crank.

The screw began gushing now, dousing the bush. The fire was already spreading downward, snaking along the ivy toward the ground. I lifted the gutter up and down, sending a shower far down the railing. Cass and Aly were behind me in a moment, with two wooden buckets they'd found among some garden tools.

They held the buckets under the gutter, collecting water. Racing down the railing, they chased the growing flames, pouring bucket after bucket until the fire was out.

It took a long time. Too long. I couldn't imagine why no one had caught us. Drenched in sweat, Cass came to my side, resting the bucket on the ground and wiping his forehead. He glanced at me in disbelief. “That was awesome, Jack.”

“Dudes,” Marco called from below. “The vizzeet are getting restless. Come on!”

As I raced down the stairs, I looked into the distance, toward the inner wall.
Where were the guards?
Even this far into the royal gardens, surely they'd seen the flames. “Hurry,” I said, racing to the door. “We have to get in here!”

Marco was at my side. He held the torch to the door and smiled at the sight of the carving. “Mary had a little lambda. Amazing. Okay, hold this.”

He gave me the torch, then leaned into the metal latch handle. It wouldn't budge. He pounded on the door. After waiting a moment, he drew back and lunged at it. His shoulder collided with a dull, pathetic-sounding thud, and he bounced back with a cry of pain.

From behind the ivy was a dull rattling sound, like knuckles rapping on wood.

I yanked aside the leaves.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“L
OOKS LIKE THE
barrel of an old-time machine gun,” Marco said.

“Or a Heptakiklos with a hat,” Cass remarked.

“A spinning roulette wheel,” Aly said.

My mind was racing. “It could be a code. Think. When we entered the maze at Mount Onyx . . . when we were stuck at the locked door in the underground cavern . . . both times we were able to get in.”

“Because of hints,” Aly said. “Poems.”

“The poems were all about numbers,” Cass pointed out. “Mostly about the number seven.”

Aly grabbed one of the cubes hanging by twine. “There are seven of these things. They look like doorbells.”

She began pulling them, but nothing happened.

“This is a carving, not a poem,” Marco said.

“Yeah, but it's the Heptakiklos, Marco,” I said. “The Circle of Seven. Seven cubes. Whoever did this knows about the Loculi! It's got to be in there. I hear the Song.”

I stepped back. It was impossible to think. My brain was clogged with the sound. My ears were pricked for the screeching of the vizzeet, the guards. Where were the guards?

Numbers . . . the patterns of decimals . . 
.

“Aly, do you remember that weird thing about fractions and decimals?” I said.

She nodded. “Put any number over seven—one-seventh, two-sevenths, five-sevenths, whatever. Turn that into a decimal, and the numbers repeat. The exact same numbers. Over and over.”

“I hate fractions,” Marco said.

“Oot em,” Cass added. (Which he pronounced
oot eem
—me too.)

I tried to remember the pattern. “Okay, one over seven. That's one divided by seven. We used that pattern to open a lock.”

“Torchlight, please. Now.” Cass knelt and began scratching in the sand:

“Dude, you remember how to do long division?” Marco said. “You never got a calculator?”

“Point one-four-two-eight-five-seven!” Cass said. “And if you keep going, you get the same numbers. They just keep repeating.”

“Okay, I'll do them in order.” Aly immediately yanked on the first cube, then kept going. “One . . . four . . . two . . . eight . . . five . . . seven!”

“Voilà!”
Marco said, pulling the handle.

Nothing happened.

In the distance I could hear voices. They were faint but clearly angry. “We're not going to get out of this alive,” Aly said.

I shook my head. “The guards should have been here already,” I said. “I think they're afraid. With luck, that'll give us extra time.”

From under a nearby rock, I saw a sudden movement and jumped back. A giant lizard poked its head out, and then came waddling toward us. Leonard, who had been sitting at the bottom of Cass's pocket, now jumped out into the soil. “Hey, get back here!” Cass shouted.

As he bent to scoop his pet off the ground, a shadow swooped down toward us.

Zoo-kulululu! Cack! Cack! Cack!
Wings flapping, the giant black bird descended to the ground. It landed in the spot where Leonard had been, its talons digging into Cass's mathematical scratching. With a screech of frustration, it jumped on the Babylonian lizard, missed, and flew away with an echoing cry.

The voices outside the wall stopped. I could hear the guards' footsteps retreating.

“He ruined my equation,” Cass said, looking at the talon prints in the sand.

Those, my boy, are not bird prints. They're numbers
.

In my mind I saw Bhegad's impatient face, when he was trying to cram us with info. I looked at the top of the Heptakiklos again:

“That's not a hat,” I said. “Those are cuneiform numbers. Bhegad tried to get us to study them. But I don't remember—”

“Ones!” Aly blurted out. “Those shapes are number ones.”

“Okay, there are two of them,” Marco said.

“Two over seven!” I exclaimed.

Cass quickly wiped away his division and started again: