The Diamond Dragon (Kip Keene Book 4) (10 page)

Keene still clung tight, looking at the ever-strengthening beam of light emanating from the portal key. A sensation of incredible lightness passed over Keene’s body. He felt his fist close, clinging to nothing but empty air. The edge of the hole widened.

And then Keene tumbled into the darkness, with no idea where the bottom would take him.

Keene didn’t hit the ground. The blackness just ceded into a snowy landscape overlooking a magnificent vista. Cold leached into his bones almost immediately. He sprang up from the snowbank, shucking ice from his short hair. Half of a desk chair slid down the slope, clattering into the canyon below.

“Strike? Leif?” His voice echoed across the empty mountain ranges. He titled his head up, but couldn’t see the peak. A violent shiver racked his body. No answer came beside the faint echoes. Keene rubbed his bare arms for warmth and stared at the steep, narrow ice shelf before him.

The path couldn’t be more than two feet wide. Good thing he’d come prepared with plenty of gear.

Keene stared at his jeans and T-shirt, the sneakers on his feet. The thin air barely sated his lungs, even with his new exercise regime. The view might be spectacular, but chances were, he was going to die.

He walked towards the path with a measured gait and looked over the edge. Vertigo seized his body, and Keene almost fell forward to his death. Instead, he managed to lean back and smash himself up against the vertical shelf, hugging the slick wall like it was made of sticky tape.

“Don’t look down, Keene,” he said, coaching himself as he took small horizontal steps along the icy edge. “You’re just walking on the street.”

His heart didn’t believe him, and his body shook. Motivational speaking wasn’t in his future. On the other hand, if he took a swan dive to the ground, at least he could claim a verdant meadow as his final resting place. Too bad it was thousands of feet below. Otherwise its beauty might be comforting.

He froze when he heard another voice from above. “Help! Help!”

“Strike!” Keene didn’t dare look up for fear of losing his balance. His peripherals scanned the pathway. It widened up ahead, to a positively luxurious three feet. His breath held most of the way, Keene reached the small safe haven a couple minutes later. Carefully, he turned around and looked up.

Nothing but pure white snow and skies unadulterated by clouds. It’d be majestic if nature wasn’t conspiring to kill him.

“Hey,” Keene said in a normal voice, the mountains amplifying the sound to thunderous proportions, “I’m down here.”

No answer.

Keene was about to open his mouth again when a flaming arrow whizzed by his ear, singing his short hair. He was so surprised that he didn’t even move—fortunate, because panic would have resulted in a quick death. Instead, he stood still, watching as the arrow hissed in the snow before burning out.

Funny. Someone was shooting at him.

Then Keene got it into his mind that
no, really, someone was shooting at him
. His legs began pumping before his brain could protest that the ground was slick and the path ahead was still narrow. Keene darted along the ice shelf, one foot in front of the other like a tightrope walker, pushing himself as fast as he dared.

Another flaming arrow hit the frozen shelf a few steps ahead of him. Keene skidded to a halt, almost flailing into the canyon. His hands scrambled for purchase along the smooth wall, but no handholds were to be found. The ice was perfect, as if made of the finest glass. He could find no burrs or imperfections.

Keene slid through the burned out arrow, snapping the wood in two with his shins.

“Strike!” He yelled. “Someone’s shooting. Get down!”

As if to confirm that this was true, a rock fired from a slingshot crashed at his feet. Keene jumped, immediately regretting the decision. He floated through the air in slow motion, his brain looking at the tiny foot path and the infinite, mile wide chasm that spread out to his right.

He blinked, the movement taking an hour.

Just make sure you don’t put both feet on top of one another
.

He shifted his sneakers in the air, trying to decide which foot to put down first.

Then he hit the ice, the impact causing a hitch in his step, but no other complications. As he continued to run, Keene made a pact with himself never to jump on slick, narrow ice shelves ever again. You only got one of those moves without dying.

Dead ahead, the mouth of a cave beckoned. The ice shelf curved off to the left, disappearing in an unknown direction. Solid ground that didn’t threaten constant imminent death appealed to Keene. He put his head down and willed his feet to go faster, before an arrow stopped his progress permanently.

A final arrow sailed just over his head. He could smell the burning oil in the crisp air.

The cave was only a couple yards away now.

He was going to make it. He took another step.

But there was a small gap between the path and the cave.

And now Keene was headed into the abyss.

“There has to be something we can do, dude,” Wade Linus said. His long, thin fingers squeezed a red ball. He barely noticed that his tendons were getting sore, since he’d been at it for the past hour. “Like, we can’t just sit here.”

They’d made no progress on his hidden code theory. Maybe it’d just been a hallucination—wishful thinking, a random pattern popping out amongst a sea of noise. After busting on any trace of a hidden message, Linus felt more helpless than ever.

Carmen Svetlana wheeled around the cramped study in an office chair, a trail of dust following her as she rolled towards Linus. He felt her soft fingers touch his cheek. He almost smiled, but was too nervous about Strike and Keene to enjoy it very much.

“Wade, honey,” Carmen said in that wonderful voice of hers, “I’ve got a tip for you.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t call a woman who you’re sleeping with
dude
.”

“Oh, right,” Linus said with a small laugh. “I won’t do it again, du—babe.”

“You can’t pull that off.”

Linus flushed. “Fine. Carm.”

“Better,” she said with a smile. “I think I found something we can do.”

“Will it help Keeney and Striker?”

“Maybe.” Carmen scooted towards the imposing mountain of boxes stacked in the corner. She rifled through a few of them before returning with a stack of papers. “Check these out.”

Linus spread the photo copies across the ground, brushing aside a thick layer of dust from the floorboards with his palm. They were taken from the journals—the handwriting and artistic inclinations of Martin Redbeard instantly recognizable. What Linus didn’t understand, looking at the array of identical looking sheets before him, was how this was going to help anything.

“I don’t think your code idea is crazy.” Carmen came back and dumped another stack into his lap. “Maybe we’ve just been looking at it the wrong way.”

Linus laid them out from wall-to-wall, until the entire ground was covered in grayscale print.

“You said yourself, that they’re all the same.”

“I’ve been working on a little theory,” Carmen said. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail and pinned it up. Linus didn’t know what that meant, but she looked serious, like these papers were gonna get it. “Except no one will really listen to a junior agent. But when you said you thought there might be a code…”

“I just figured that the book had to contain something actionable. I mean, there’s nothing, babe.”

Carmen wrinkled her nose, her eyes flashing with a white heat.

“So, uh, tell me the idea, Carm,” Linus said.

“Check out the drawings of Shambhala.”

Linus got on his hands and knees, crawling over the sea of papers. From his vantage point, they looked remarkably consistent, down to the same crosshatching on the mountains. Aside from incredibly minor variances that could be attributed to the drawings being penned years apart, there was nothing to see.

“Can I be honest?” Linus said, getting to his feet.

“Please.” The word was terse.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Look at the mountain peaks,” Carmen said. “If I tell you straight out, then I won’t know if I’m crazy or not. You might start seeing the same noise.”

Linus looked out the grime streaked window. The soft glow of streetlamps glinted off the pane. Not like he had anything better to do. So he pored over the drawings, getting his eyes so close to the mountaintops that they were practically touching the paper.

Then he went to the next drawing, and the next—four in all, each from a different journal.

While the mountains themselves were rendered in almost identical detail, down to the scale, the peaks seemed to be deliberately different. In one rendering, a peak had snow lining the landscape. In the next, the snow would be sparser, with dots instead of…dashes.

It dawned on Linus.

There was a message in Morse Code hidden at the top.

“Give me a sheet of paper,” Linus said.

“I’m not crazy?”

“You’re brilliant. Just give me—screw it, I got plenty here.” Linus began to draw on the sheet, transcribing the code. Across all of the peaks on all the drawings, it would amount to little more than a couple sentences. He stared at the series of dots and dashes, leaving a gap where the journal from the mansion would go chronologically.

Carmen came up next to him, stepping carefully over the splayed out papers. “Morse Code. Son of a bitch, I should have figured that out.”

“You know what it says?”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Carmen said. “I’ll send a pic to the main office, unless you want to hand translate by a chart.”

“Nah.” Linus blinked as a camera flash went off. “Why do you think he coded the message?”

Carmen shook her head. “Makes no sense.”

“Uh-huh.” Linus rose from the ground and started pacing, government files be damned. The couplet was cryptic enough on its own, but this extra layer had him thinking about how the journals had actually gotten back through the portal. Their owner clearly couldn’t get through.

Only one thing made sense.

“Someone must be travelling through the portal,” Linus said. “A friend of Martin’s.”

“We don’t have any intel to support that.”

“Just like no one had any intel to support your hidden messages?” Linus leveled his gaze at Carmen. “It’s the only way these journals could have made it back.”

“Why not just warn us more directly?”

“Maybe his ally is being watched,” Linus said. “A second-in-command, travelling with his superior.”

“Nah. If this ally got caught with what’s here, that’d be it. Toast. There’s plenty of incriminating stuff already, without breaking the code.”

“Or,” Linus said, scratching his chin. “It could be a test.”

“A test?”

“Look, whoever comes through the portal has to save the girl, save the world, all that stuff, right?”

“Right,” Carmen said, her voice tinged with skepticism.

“So you can’t just have any random person coming through. You gotta have someone clever, resourceful. A problem solver. Someone who can
actually
save the world. Hell, if he just put the message out there, and the whole world converged on Shambhala or something, what a nightmare that would be. It could make things much worse.”

“I don’t know, seems—” Carmen’s phone chimed, and she immediately looked at the message. “Okay.”

“Okay what? Good? Bad?”

“Just okay,” Carmen said. She read the message. “Energy destroy universe. December 17, [missing]. Burn [missing]. Must destroy it. Trust Prashant at [missing].”

“We’re missing three journals?”

“Apparently.”

Linus hurried back to the first drawing. It made no sense to string the code out over twenty years. Why not just get it out all at once? After all, if one of the journals was lost, then the message was lost with it. The mountaintops were obvious, an attention grabber. The full code had to be embedded in each of these.

He scanned the picture.

The crosshatching on the mountains. Always the same—and in the lines and strokes, the stops and starts, the same code had been carefully placed in each picture. Linus double-checked the symbols and handed the newly transcribed message to Carmen.

He almost jumped when she received the translation.

“Energy destroy universe. December 17, 2015. Burn the Diamond Dragon. Must destroy it. Trust Prashant at frequency 462.462 mhz.”

“We can get through,” Linus said, almost not believing it. “We can get through to Shambhala.”

“I’ll go get a radio,” Carmen said. “You stay here.”

Linus almost smiled as he heard the door shut.

He was going to be able to help his friends after all.

Hopefully it wasn’t already too late.

Keene’s right arm caught the lip of the frozen cliff. The pull of gravity nearly ripped his shoulder from its socket, but he managed to cling to the chilly edge, his feet dangling over a sheer drop. His other arm instinctively reached to help, and he pushed himself back on to land.

He rolled into the mouth of the cave, breathing heavily.

Even though his bare skin was pressed against the tightly packed snow, Keene barely noticed. He was still alive. Although the arrows were a problem. He rolled over again and stumbled to his feet, into the darkness.

“Hello?” In here, his voice sounded even louder than it had in the open ranges. It bounced off every surface and converged upon him. Nothing answered besides the whispering wind. He edged further into the darkness.

At least there would be no arrows here.

His hands ran along the cold rock. Light would sure be nice. He pulled out his phone, but it still didn’t work. A stroke of good luck would be too much to ask for. He tossed the useless device into the dark. A crashing sound came back to him a few seconds later. Keene gulped. Apparently there were large holes in here, too. Keene gingerly felt his way onwards into the heart of the cave, praying that no gaps would suddenly swallow him.

A fist rocketed through the air, slicing through the frozen quiet. The blow connected with his jaw as if his invisible attacker could sense where Keene’s body was. His cheek stung heavily in the chill.

Keene gave a wild swing in return, but connected with nothing.

Another blow buffeted the other side of his face, then another.

Keene stumbled backwards, scrambling on the ground. His options were to be skewered by arrows or beaten to death by ghosts. No wonder the elder Redbeard wanted to get the hell out of paradise so damn badly.

His hand scraped along a loose rock, and he tore the jagged crag from the ground, brandishing it in the darkness.

“Back off,” Keene said, his voice projecting more fear than he would have liked, “I’m armed.”

“If you can hit me.” The voice came from behind, and before Keene could whirl around, a small but firm pair of hands shoved him headfirst into the ground. “Which you can’t.”

Keene rolled over and punched the empty blackness. “I’ll—I’ll get one in.”

“I doubt it.” A light leather boot came down on his wrist and the rock tumbled loose. He struggled to free himself and grab his weapon, but more weight came down on his forearm. “Keep going and I’ll break it.”

“Or shoot me with an arrow?”

“That wasn’t me.” A sudden burst of light erupted in the middle of the darkness. A young woman holding a lantern materialized in the center of the orange glow, like an apparition. “That was the Centurions.”

She let her weight off Keene’s arm, and he rolled towards the wall. She held a short blade in her hand, in case he decided to try anything.

The light danced off familiar features. Short, but possessing a vitality and power in her frame that suggested she would do exactly as she said. Break arms, legs, whatever it took to survive these frigid peaks. But it was the wide brown eyes that allowed Keene to make the connection.

“Leif is your brother,” Keene said.

“What do you know about him?” The woman’s voice turned accusatory, and Keene saw that she had a bow of her own strapped across her back. Her hands flitted across the drawstring, as if she were considering forcing Keene to tell her at arrow point.

“This,” Keene said. He reached into his waistband, where the journal was still snugly located.

“The journals actually got through,” the woman said with a small gasp. “And they sent
you
?”

“Nice to meet you, too.”

Keene leaned against the wall and rubbed his scratched forearms. This girl looked almost identical to her brother, although her skin tone was richer. Bright blonde hair that glittered in the light. Her features made it clear that her father was originally from the Himalayas.

“So you’re the girl,” Keene said. “Martin Redbeard’s daughter.”

She gave a snort, and her hand fell from the bow. It lingered in the air next to Keene for a second, like she was deciding whether to help him up. Then she shoved it into her furry jacket, crafted from an animal that Keene didn’t recognize. Bear, maybe.

From the intensity radiating from her, he wouldn’t have been shocked to hear she killed it with her bare hands.

“What’s so funny?”

“That stupid name he chose,” the woman said. “He knew almost no English when he left home. Read it in a comic book at the airport duty free store.”

Keene got to his feet and brushed himself off. The woman walked before him. Luckily she had intercepted him right before a rough patch in the cave strewn with unfortunate holes. Another three dozen yards and he would have fallen to his death.

She deftly hopped from one rock to another, right over a four foot chasm. Keene gulped, closed his eyes, then made the same jump. He didn’t slow down for fear of losing his only source of light.

“His English was pretty good in the journals.”

Keene saw the woman’s shadow stop up ahead, around a bend. Her voice came back to him in a hush. “How many got through?”

The shadow started moving again. Keene heard no footsteps aside from his own clunky plodding.

“Most of them, I think. Well, the FBI has—you know what, it’s a long story.”

“We have a few hours before the Diamond Dragon rains its fires down upon the Earth.”

“
Enter the portal to save the girl. Protect the girl to save the world
.” Keene found himself in front of another narrow rock shelf overlooking a massive chasm. The woman navigated the thin pathway with the grace of a mountain goat, barely acknowledging that the terrain had changed.

Keene didn’t have the stomach for that, so he clung to the wall and made slow time. The woman was kind enough to stop and wait, although her tapping foot—quite audible, which was a first for her feet—clearly indicated her opinion on the matter.

“I found your friend,” the woman said when Keene was about halfway through. “The blonde one.”

“Strike,” Keene said. “How was she?”

“About a half mile from here, out in the open. The Centurions would’ve gotten her before too long.”

“See, I keep thinking you’re saying Centurions, like the Romans.”

“No. Not like the Romans.”

“Good to hear I’m not going crazy.” Keene sidestepped onto the larger platform and breathed a sigh of relief. The woman gave him a bemused nod and turned to continue walking. Up ahead, natural light flickered in from what Keene hoped was the exit.

“I meant they
are
Romans. Not like Romans, but a lost Roman legion from over two thousand years ago.”

“Fantastic,” Keene said, gritting his teeth. The high-altitude chill was beginning to get to him. Hopefully this girl had a way of starting a fire. Otherwise he wasn’t sure he’d be saving anyone. “You find Leif with Strike?”

The shadow ahead stopped again. “My brother came with you?”

“He’s obsessed. Just—look, you probably haven’t seen him in awhile—”

“Nearly twenty-five years. I barely remember him.”

“Right,” Keene said. “But he’s a little intense. I think this whole situation drove him kind of nuts.”

“I see. Up ahead.” The shadow ran off.

“Hey!” The cave dimmed, although the pitch blackness didn’t return thanks to the natural sunlight. Keene scrambled towards the beams like a fawn towards fresh water, tripping and cutting himself on a number of rocks along the way.

Thankfully there were no holes.

That would have been an unfortunate turn.

The light grew brighter, and he had to squint in order to keep his eyes open. Then the cave ended, and he was out in the bright white landscape once more, surrounded by blues sky, frosted peaks and an endless valley below.

And a house, somehow crafted of timber that, from the looks of it, must’ve been harvested at a far lower altitude. The woman was already making her way through the door. She set her boots outside and stared back at Keene with an unspoken directive.

Shoes go outside.

Keene bounded up the steps and removed his ice-logged sneakers. Then he opened the sturdy door and stepped inside.

The scent of strong herbal tea overwhelmed the small, cozy cabin. It was fairly bare, although a hand carved desk sat in the corner, stacked with leather journals. A healthy fire roared in front of a beautiful handstitched rug, on which Samantha Strike sat drinking from an animal hide pouch.

“Guess we got separated,” Strike said. “Good thing our mysterious friend here saved your ass.”

“Who says I needed saving?” Keene glanced over his shoulder, towards a long countertop. It appeared to be an all-purpose area work area, containing traces of cooking, carpentry and animal preparation.

“From the direction of your voice, Alessia here determined you’d head through the cave. It has lots of holes.”

“Everything around here has tons of holes,” Keene said. He sat down on the soft rug. “They need some safety signs or something.”

Alessia snorted and came back with a black metal pot. A bloodied leg of a freshly skinned animal peeked out over the corner. She shoved it into the fire, and the water inside bubbled.

“So she tells you her name, but not me,” Keene said. “What’s it about me?”

“I guess you’re not much of a people person,” Strike said.

“And you are?”

“I have my charms.”

“You didn’t introduce yourself either,” Alessia said. “But I’ll go first. Alessia Amatya. And yes, I am the girl whom my father has written so much about.”

“And you trust us why?” Keene said.

“She has an honest face.” The woman nodded towards Strike. “You, however…”

“He’s a thief and son-of-a-bitch,” Strike said. “But he’s saved the world a couple times, so maybe he’s all right.”

“We should hope,” Alessia said quietly.

“You see Leif anywhere?” Keene said.

Strike just shook her head and looked at the ground. “Didn’t hear him, either.”

“Damn.”

Keene looked at his watch. The dial had turned. It now read December 17, 2015. He looked up to see Alessia staring intently at him.

“What?” he said.

“There is little time,” she said. “Less than one day.”

“What exactly will happen if we don’t find this Diamond Dragon,” Keene said, not sure if he
really
wanted to know, but also knowing that he really
had
to hear it.

“I will explain from the beginning, while our food cooks.”

Alessia crouched before the fire and turned the meat over.

She and her father had been out playing in the fields with their dog, Baxter. It had been a few days after her fourth birthday. Suddenly the animal had disappeared into thin air. Her father had rushed over, holding her, and they, too, had entered the invisible rift. Luckily, unlike Strike, Keene and Leif, they had been dropped in the mountains within a few feet of each other.

The dog had lived out its life surprisingly happily in the frozen peaks. Her and her father, however, had had a rough go of it over the past twenty-five years—particularly when the locals had discovered Alessia’s hidden power and how it fit into an ancient prophecy, two thousand years in the making.

Shambhala had been a peaceful place for many thousands of years, tended to by monks that lived in the mountains and a self-sustaining agricultural society that lived in the valley. The monks’ task was to manage the Diamond Dragon, an ice temple housed deep in the recesses of the Himalayas, which was seated atop a massive pocket of unstable electromagnetic energy. Their expertise, learned over an immortal lifetime, allowed them to control its instabilities and prevent a cataclysmic implosion.

But many years ago, Shambhala was open to all seekers—although few found it, due to its remoteness. However, a lost group of Roman soldiers, separated from their legion during the Roman-Persian Wars, had walked hundreds of miles in the wrong direction, finally stumbling upon the land, near death.

The people had nursed the soldiers back to health.

And that was when the troubles began. The leader of the Centurions, a hulking brute named Cladius Maximus, had not wanted to leave. He wanted to stay—and rule this peaceful land of immortal souls, strip it of its secrets. Control its root of life, which granted its inhabitants eternal youth and seemingly boundless joy.

It hadn’t been hard to take control of the land, since the locals were ill-equipped to fight back against career soldiers who had fought countless battles. After the Centurions had seized control, all known entrances to Shambhala were walled off and protected against outsiders.

And for two thousand years, Cladius Maximus had sapped the joy from the valley and the Diamond Dragon had become more unstable—despite the locals’ warnings.

But the Centurion leader refused to listen, killing any of those who stood in his way. He was convinced that granting them access to the temple was a trick, a machination. So, for almost two thousand years, since that harsh winter of 15 A.D., the temple’s energy had built up.