The Librarians and the Lost Lamp (18 page)

“That all sounds much too plausible.” She leaned against the tree. “I suppose it was too much to hope that we had seen the last of them.”

“Never underestimate the opposition,” he said. “In my experience, the bad guys tend to be annoyingly persistent, and head starts seldom last for long. If I had a dinar for every time I thought I'd beaten the other team to the prize only to discover that—”

“I get the message,” Shirin said. “All the more reason to move on, then.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Twilight soon gave way to darkness, forcing them to rely on flashlights to make their way through the hills. Flynn kept his beam aimed down at the ground to avoid shining the light up into the sky. They stumbled awkwardly over the rough, uneven ground, passing through narrow defiles between steep, forbidding slopes. Flynn hoped the way down would be easier than the way up. His legs were already aching from the climb.

“Almost there,” Flynn said, squinting at the GPS device. “Maybe fifty yards or so.…”

All at once, the trail dropped away in front of them. Flynn threw out an arm to block Shirin before she could step over the edge of the cliff.

“Careful,” he warned. “Looks like a long way down.”

They found themselves overlooking a deep ravine at least a hundred feet across. A rickety-looking rope bridge spanned the ravine to connect with a narrow ledge on the other side. Peering down over the edge of the precipice, Flynn glimpsed a desolate river valley maybe 150 feet below. White water surged over raging rapids, and massive boulders eliminated the possibility of any Butch-and-Sundance plunges into deep water. A chill mountain breeze caused the rope bridge to sway back and forth, reminding Flynn uncomfortably of crossing a similar bridge over the Amazon years ago. That bridge had literally disintegrated behind him as he'd run across it.

He wasn't looking forward to reliving that experience.

“
You have reached your destination,
” the GPS chirped.

“No,” Shirin said. “That can't be right.” She shined her own flashlight across the ravine. “Even if we cross that bridge, there's nothing on the other side but more rocks and hills.” Bitterness crept into her voice. “I should have known better than to buy into all this nonsense. This is where the story ends, all right.”

Flynn's ears perked up.

“That's right!” He consulted her notes by flashlight to refresh his memory. “The book said that Scheherazade was buried
where the story ends.
”

“So?” she asked, clearly puzzled by his reaction.

“So Scheherazade's stories never ended; that was the whole point of her tale. She practically invented the cliffhanger ending, so where better to bury her than in the face of a cliff?”

Overcome with curiosity and the always intoxicating thrill of possibly solving an age-old puzzle, he swept the beam of his flashlight over the opposite side of the ravine. At first he didn't see anything, but then the light of the beam was swallowed by a narrow black gap in the weathered stone face of the cliff, roughly twenty-five feet below the swinging rope bridge. Flecks of mica, embedded in the granite, sparkled in the beam, forming a constellation of tiny stars around the opening—as though marking the entrance to a hidden tomb carved into the very face of the cliff? Looking more closely, he saw that the flecks specifically mapped the constellation of Perseus, which was well known to medieval Arab astronomers, who actually named many of its stars, which still shone brightly in the … Arabian nights?

“Bingo,” Flynn said. “That's it. It has to be.”

“Maybe.” Shirin stared at the enigmatic gap, sounding intrigued despite her earlier skepticism. “But even if that is an opening, it's at least seven meters beneath that ledge on the other side of the bridge. There's no way to get down to that gap unless you've brought along serious mountaineering gear … or a hang glider.”

“Left the hang glider in my other jacket, I'm afraid, but give me a second to think.”

Let's see,
he thought, his mind racing.
If the bridge is approximately a hundred feet in length, and the entrance is roughly twenty-five feet below the top of the cliff …

“I've got an idea,” he said, “but you're probably going to think I'm crazy.”

“Too late,” she said.

 

14

2006

“I can't believe you talked me into this.”

Shirin was lying face down on the decrepit rope bridge, clutching a wooden plank with both hands. Flynn was lying directly behind her, doing the same. Smoke rose from the red-hot flames licking at the nearer end of the bridge, eating way at the ropes.

“Just hold tight,” he replied, “and brace for impact!”

Second thoughts assailed her. “But what if it can't support our weight—”

The ropes burned through, and the bridge tore loose from its moorings. Still connected to the opposite end of the ravine, at least for the moment, it swung toward the cliff face with alarming speed, smacking into the unyielding stone with bone-jarring force. The impact bruised Shirin's fingers and nearly caused her to lose her grip on the bridge, but she held on for dear life. Gravity tugged on her dangling legs until she managed to find a foothold on one of the planks below her.

“Flynn!” she shouted, once she caught her breath. “Did you make it?”

“Still hanging in there,” he replied from below her. “Literally.”

As hoped, the bridge had become a ladder, climbing up the side of the cliff. Risking a glance down, she spied Flynn holding onto the ladder right beneath her. Unfortunately, she also saw the flames at the bottom of the ladder climbing rapidly toward them, consuming the dry rope and wooden rungs. Smoke tickled her nostrils. A charred plank escaped the blazing ropes and plunged like a fallen angel toward the rapids far below, smoke and flames trailing behind it before it crashed into the foaming waters and disappeared from sight.

This is all my mother's fault,
Shirin thought.
If she hadn't filled my head with wild stories about Scheherazade …

Wasting no time, she and Flynn scrambled up the burning rope ladder until they reached the opening in the cliff face. Abandoning the ladder, she threw herself into the murky recess, then spun about to help pull Flynn into the cave entrance as well. To her relief, the gap was large enough to accommodate them both. He grinned at her in the dark.

“You see,” he said. “It worked!”

The flames reached their level, and they backed away from the heat. Moments later, the flaming remains of the ladder fell away from the cliff and plummeted from sight. Shirin gulped.

“Wait a second,” she said. “How are we supposed to get out of here now?”

Flynn shrugged. “One thing at a time, please. Let's find that tomb first.”

His blasé attitude dumbfounded her, but she had no choice but to go along with it. “Just so you know, this is rather more peril than I'm accustomed to. I'm a scholar, not a daredevil.”

“That's what I used to think, too,” he said.

Turning away from the opening, they faced a dark tunnel leading deeper into the mountainside. “A natural cave?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” he said. “Watch out for booby traps.”

“Booby traps? Really?”

“There are
always
booby traps,” he said. “Or guardians, or guardians
and
booby traps.…”

She stared at him, aghast. “How is it you're still alive?”

“Clean living and a well-rounded education?”

They advanced down the tunnel, which widened into a larger corridor that had obviously been shaped, at least in part, by human hands and artifice. Scenes from
The Arabian Nights
were carved into the walls on either side of them: Sinbad sailing the seas, an enchanted horse galloping above the clouds, Ali Baba discovering hidden treasure, Aladdin summoning the Genie from his Lamp.…

Shirin paused before the latter bas-relief carving. Was that really what this was all about? A quest for a magic lamp?

No,
she scolded herself.
Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing as magic.

But a hidden tomb containing an original, handwritten copy of the
Alf Layla
? That was a discovery she could believe in, one that didn't require her to throw all her common sense and sanity off a cliff, as it were. That was archaeology, not fantasy.

No matter what Flynn seemed to think.

Something crunched beneath her feet, and she jumped in fright, almost dropping her flashlight. Flynn turned his own light toward her, exposing the shattered bones of some small animal. A rat, perhaps, or some other rodent.

She clutched her chest, feeling her heart racing. “Sorry. That gave me a start.”

“No problem. Everybody gets spooked by their first hidden tomb.” Flynn knelt to inspect the bones. “Nothing too exciting here, though. Most likely
Rattus norvegicus,
the common brown rat—which, as it happens, is found on every continent except Antarctica.” He squinted at what was left of a broken skull. “Hmm. This appears to have been gnawed upon.”

“By what?”

“Something with
very
sharp teeth,” he surmised. “Possibly—”

A scuffling noise, coming from deeper within the mountain, interrupted him. Shirin spun toward the noise in time to glimpse a pair of luminous red eyes peering at them from the darkness. She raised her flashlight, hoping to expose the owner of the eyes, but the beam revealed only another stretch of corridor. The incarnadine eyes had vanished so quickly that she wondered if maybe her own eyes had deceived her.

“Did you see—?” she began.

“Two hellish red eyes spying on us?” Flynn said. “You bet.”

The obvious apprehension in his voice did little to ease Shirin's nerves. She tightened her grip on her flashlight, in case she needed to use it as a club.

“Just another animal, perhaps, using this place as a lair?”

“We should be so lucky.” Flynn crept forward cautiously, seemingly intent on continuing their investigation despite the unknown creature ahead. His flashlight's beam merged with hers. “Remember what I said about guardians before?”

Shirin stuck with him, partly for lack of any viable alternatives. “What kind of guardians, exactly?”

He paused at the end of the corridor, at what appeared to be the threshold to a larger chamber beyond. He swept his flashlight's beam over the scene before them.

“The hungry kind, I'm guessing.”

Twin beams exposed a large, cavernous chamber littered with bones of varying shapes and sizes and species. The fleshless remains were strewn about carelessly, creating a jumble of loose bones. The smaller ones presumably belonged to rats and birds and other fauna, but some of the others … Shirin's blood was chilled by the sight of a partial human skull and a ribcage, lying a few meters apart. A quick scan of the chamber suggested there were other human remains mixed in with the bones of animals. A broken femur was deeply scored, as though the flesh had been stripped from it by sharp fangs or claws. A rusty scimitar, broken in two, had apparently done its owner no good.

“Looks like we're not the first people to find this tomb.” Flynn picked up the fallen sword hilt and examined it. A chipped metal blade lay a few feet away. “Approximately eleventh century, I estimate. Probably Turkish in origin.…”

Shirin's mind reeled at the grisly discovery, her excitement over locating the lost tomb warring with an almost superstitious dread of what might still be lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce on them at any moment. She was tempted to flee, but there was no place to go.

“W-what do you think happened to them?”

A maniacal cackle came from behind them, and they darted further into the cavern, kicking aside the larger bones and crunching the smaller ones beneath their boots. Chalky white droppings reeked to high heaven.

“Cackling,” Flynn muttered. “Have I mentioned how much I dislike cackling?”

A cord, strung low above the floor, snapped as the fleeing explorers ran through it. Bones rattled loudly as Flynn and Shirin were yanked off their feet by a net concealed beneath the gruesome debris. Before she knew it, Shirin found herself suspended high above the floor, trapped in the net with Flynn. They swung back and forth in the trap.

“A Guardian
and
a booby trap,” he muttered. “Figures.”

Torches, mounted in braziers upon the walls, flared to life simultaneously, lighting up the chamber—and revealing the inhuman being that had just captured them.

No,
Shirin thought.
This can't be possible.

The creature resembled a cross between a cadaver and a hyena. Leprous white flesh was stretched tight over a bony form whose ribcage was visible beneath the skin. Tufted ears, tapering to a point, and a canine snout eliminated any possibility that the figure was human. Feral jaws bared a mouthful of sharp white teeth well suited to gnawing on bones. Coarse gray fur sprouted beneath the monster's arms and across his shoulders. Elongated fingers and toes, each of which appeared to have one too many joints, ended in long yellow claws. A tattered loincloth protected the creature's modesty, much to Shirin's relief. Demonic red eyes gleefully inspected the hanging humans.

“Well,” he cackled. “What have we here? More foolhardy grave robbers come to sate my appetite?”

Shirin's skepticism shattered into a million pieces. “Is that really—?”

“A ghoul,” Flynn supplied. “Straight out of
The Arabian Nights.”

Shirin was familiar with the legends, of course. A
ghul
was a demonic, shape-changing monster said to prey upon the bodies of the dead. According to the
Alf Layla,
they were known to haunt ruins, cemeteries, and tombs. But reading about them was one thing; actually laying eyes on one turned her entire world upside down—and suggested that Flynn had been right all along.