The Seventh Stone (61 page)

The sun beamed directly down on the Breastplate and its gems, alighting it in a shimmering brilliance. But not for long. Sixty seconds, maybe, before the sun passed beyond the skylight. She rushed over, grabbed the Breastplate, and lifted it. Electricity zapped through her hands. A spasm shook her to her knees. Her heart beat furiously. A weight crushed her throat. She hefted the Breastplate and punched her arms through the tunic sleeves. The Breastplate fell onto her chest. This thing was heavy, and it wasn’t just the weight of the gold.

The sun grew blindingly bright. The gemstones glowed and sparked, filling the chamber with a kaleidoscope of colors, spinning, twisting. The spectral voices returned with a fury. Not just voices. Beings. Phantoms. They spiraled around the room, terrifying in their beauty.

“
I’m not afraid of you!” she screamed above the cacophony of whistling songs. Lying to God. Great. She fought to stand. Her knees trembled, threatened to buckle. She opened her arms in supplication. “Is this what You want? For a good man to die? For an innocent boy, Liam, to die? Help me, for God’s sake!”

The gemstones came alive with light. The sun beam struck her chest with the force of a fist. It clutched at her, drawing the light from the twelve gemstones. Lasers of color refracted to a point inches from her heart, twisted together and speared at the granite wall. The laser beam burned into the center of the Latin epitaph.

The ground trembled. She struggled to stay standing. This couldn’t be real. It was crazy to think this would work. It had to be a hallucinogenic gas emitted by the volcanic shifts in the chamber. A nervous breakdown wasn’t beyond reason. Colors became sounds. Sweet fragrances brushed through her hair. Pure emotion burned through reason like the sun through a cloud. Love and joy lifted her physically from the ground.

It couldn’t be. But it was. Nothing had ever been more vibrantly indisputable. “Mom?” She was here. In this room. More than a presence. Pure emotion. Tears streamed down her cheeks. A hand wiped them dry, then whisked away from her. “Don’t go!”

A blast—gunfire, from behind. The bullet drilled into the ceiling above her. Her feet descended, dropping onto the ground. Chunks of rock pelted down. The phantoms swirled around her, a white wind. She reached out, but dared not move. No matter what, that beam had to stay on target. “Mom!” she screamed. “I love you! I miss you!” She was still here. She had to be.

“
Blasphemer!” Baltasar shouted over the voices. She craned her neck, keeping the Breastplate in the sunbeam, its laser targeted on the wall. Baltasar was struggling to stand. The tunic covering his leg was red with blood. He gripped Braydon’s gun, aimed at her. “I am the one who must wield the power of the Breastplate. I am the Prophet.”

“
You’ll be a mass murderer if you stop me now.” The concentrated beam from the gemstones washed the granite wall in a red glow. A wisp of smoke escaped from the seam between two boulders.

“
And who is God, but a killer of non-believers? The core of every era in history, of every masterpiece, of every individual is our need to believe.”

“
The need to believe is a question,” she said, “not an answer.” Of course, a slow match. It had to be. Used in the early 1500s. Once lit, it smoldered, set off gunpowder in weapons. “Isn’t that why you said the Vatican executed Alvaro? If Alvaro used the Breastplate to find all the answers, then we wouldn’t need any prophets.”

“
I am the answer,” he said. “I will give the people that which their souls desire. I will teach them the rewards of piety and the catastrophic consequence of evil. I am the one who must open the portal to the Garden of Eden. I must bring about the genesis of a new world. I will find the fruit of salvation. I will return not only with the sacred Breastplate, but with the antidote. I will be the savior not only of souls, but of lives.”

“
Not if you shoot me in the back,” she said.

“
You are not worthy!”

“
No, I’m not.” She pressed her feet into the stone platform to keep the quaking ground from tossing her down. “But I’m here. And this is our only chance. Your ancestor hid a fuse between the granite blocks. And an explosive. The refracted beams from the gems is lighting the fuse, like using a magnifying glass to start a fire. But only if I don’t move.”

“
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead,” Baltasar shouted above the din of the earthquake. “Then he placed his right hand on me and said: "Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last.
I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.” He was quoting the Bible, Daniel in Revelations when he dreamed of the coming apocalypse. As long as it kept him from pulling the trigger. “Write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later.
The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.”

The sun passed by the skylight. The refracted light left the Breastplate and flew across the chamber like an arrow from a bow, piercing through the granite wall. It disappeared. The light. The voices. The colors. Gone.

A gloom settled over the chamber. The roars of the distant volcano rumbled through the temple. The sound of defeat.

Then, a spark. A wisp of smoke. A flare. The fuse was lit. Time to take cover, to protect Braydon.

Contreras pointed the gun at her, his hand shaking. “The Breastplate. Now! Or I will shoot you.”

The only way the Breastplate would save her now was if she let it go. She tore it over her shoulders, flung it towards him. “Go to hell!” She ran to Braydon, grabbed his arms. His hands felt cold. He was still, without life. She heaved with all her might, dragged him away from the granite wall.

The blast exploded through the chamber.

CHAPTER
68

Christa huddled over Braydon’s body, her cheek against his. He was cold. A rock smashed onto her back, knocking the breath from her. And it hurt like hell. She couldn’t hear over the ringing in her ears. Worse, it was too dark to see anything. That meant it hadn’t worked. The explosion hadn’t blown a portal to some legendary Garden of Eden, never mind to the afterlife. She twisted around onto her back, got stabbed with pain for her trouble. Above, the skylight no longer welcomed in sunlight. A massive tree trunk had crashed on top of it, allowing only wrinkles of blue sky to penetrate, and even less hope.

“
Damn it!” She kicked away the skeleton, the “lucky one” with the chainmail that lay near her feet. Its bones flung away in a mocking dance. “Damn it to Hell!” She turned her head to look at Braydon, lying beside her. His eyes were closed. Other than that, he hadn’t moved. She laid her hand on his. “We could have been something,” she said. Oh, what the hell. “I could have loved you, Braydon. Maybe,” it shouldn’t be so hard to say it, “maybe I already do.” As far as the rest of that overwhelming love and joy that she felt had filled the chamber when she wore the Breastplate, it had been shattered into more bits of rubble than the granite wall.

She got onto her knees, looked up. One last chance. And she was no longer too proud to risk it. “God, in Heaven, I swear,” she said. “Save him, and I will believe. You can keep your Breastplate. And I’ll still believe.”

Nothing. No, worse than nothing. That bastard, Contreras, was still alive. His face was a mess, sliced by flying shards of granite, blood smeared around his eyes. He pawed his way towards the Breastplate. It had somehow survived intact, like some spiritual force field protected it, if you believed in that sort of thing. And she didn’t believe, not anymore. She didn’t even want to believe anymore. He had nearly reached it. She couldn’t let him win, not after what he’d done to Braydon, to anyone she had ever loved. “No way,” she said. “Not now. No way in hell are you going to get it.” All she had to do was pry Rambitskov’s dead fingers off that halberd. A worthy weapon for her last act on Earth, or maybe her first one in Hell.

She pushed herself up, and stopped. Braydon’s fingers clasped hers, squeezed, and let go. She twisted towards him, brought her cheek to his. His skin was no longer cold, but hot, feverish. His breath puffed weak and rapid on her neck.

He groaned, barely audibly through the insistent ringing in her ears. One word. “Water.”

She felt for his pulse. It was ragged, but beating. Thank God. He was alive. Yes, thank God. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that he had been dead. And yet he lived. She shook her head. “Welcome back,” she whispered. She didn’t understand. She didn’t need to. The portal to life beyond death had opened. It worked both ways. He was moving his other hand, out to his side, reaching out, scrabbling his fingers. In the mud.

She leapt over him, dug her own fingers into the cool, damp soil. “I see it, Braydon.” It wasn’t more than a trickle, bubbling through the jumble of stones that was the granite wall and seeping across the packed earth floor. She rushed over to its source, tore away a layer of stones. A whiff of river-cooled fresh air puffed through the lingering sulfuric stink of gunpowder.

A huge boulder blocked the way. It had to weigh three hundred pounds. On top of it balanced a massive pile of smaller rocks. “Hold on, Braydon. Don’t give up.” And more to herself. “Never give up.”

She ran over to Rambitskov. Swallowing hard, she wrenched his meaty, and now pasty white, fingers off the halberd. The halberd’s shaft was strong, probably seasoned ash. Even the insects hadn’t eaten it away. The top half of the shaft was reinforced with iron, probably carbonized, but still pitted with rust. It would have to do.

She set the rock that would have to serve as her fulcrum into place and jammed the halberd’s point beneath the boulder. If Archimedes could move the Earth with a lever, then she could at least try to save it with one. She pressed down. Nothing. Except laughing. It was Contreras. He had reached the Breastplate. He was fondling it, in his own world, his new world, where he was the savior. But he wasn’t looking at it. His eyes, red with blood, stared off. The flash from the blast must have blinded him, at least temporarily.

She laid all her weight on the end of the shaft. It shifted. A loaf-sized stone on top of the huge boulder wobbled and clattered to the ground. Then another. The boulder was balanced precariously on a scrabble of stones. One more good press could topple it. The shaft snapped. She tumbled to the ground, her knuckles bashing onto the rocks. The boulder tilted forward. She reached for it, pushed her shoulder against it. It rolled away, crashing to the floor, a small avalanche of rocks tumbling after it.

A cool, fresh breeze blew into the chamber. A jagged, five foot hole opened a window to a jungle tangled with every hue of green in every natural shape and texture. It may not be a Garden of Eden, but it was a cradle of life, its living essence compacted, ready to burst forth and multiply. Ready to save lives. A narrow river unfurled beyond the exterior of the demolished temple wall. It wound through the dense vegetation, carving a tunnel through the green, a passage into a deeper unknown. Intrepid arrows of sunlight pierced through from sky to ground, but it was easy to see why the Oculto Canyon was hidden from above. It wouldn’t be more than an undulating dip on the ocean of green that was the rainforest canopy.

Contreras was keening back and forth, clutching the Breastplate to his breast. He still gripped the pistol in his hand. He was crazy-eyed, dazed, maybe still blinded. Tears made tracks though the blood on his cheeks. She could take the Breastplate from him, bring it home, to Dad, the most powerful artifact ever lost to man. She shouldn’t have been so quick to promise God He could keep it, if He saved Braydon. But God had been mighty quick to keep his end of the deal. If you believed in that sort of thing.

She grabbed Braydon’s arm, tugged him into a half-sitting position, his weight heavy, unresponsive. She wrapped his arm around her shoulders, grappled him around his waist.

He found his footing, but clenched on to her for support. “Glock,” he said, pointing. His pistol was within arm’s reach. This time, she didn’t hesitate to get a gun in her hand. She swooped it up, jammed its cool, hard steel into her belt, and then shouldered her pack. Her pilot survival knife was near it. She slid it into its sheath on her left hip. They stumbled towards the jagged hole. She high-kicked her leg over to straddle the thick wall, heaved him up and steadied him against the broken stones.

She slid down the exterior of the temple wall, her boots splashing into a shallow pool, catching Braydon as he hoisted himself over the wall and tumbled beside her, faltering into the water.

“
Dam,” he said. “Alvaro Contreras made the temple into a dam.” His voice was slurred.

The river formed a reservoir as its downward spill hit the temple. The shallow pool was about thirty feet wide. “Most of the river water must seep into a subterranean channel, beneath the temple,” she said. The canopy above it was so thick it formed a green dome. It had the feel of a natural chapel, almost inspired her to pray again, but only to get the hell out of there.

The water permeated her boots and socks. It was warm, viscous, maybe affected by the volcanic activity. The air was cool, dry, nothing like the humidity they had left behind. It carried the scent not of oppressive fecundity but a delicate fragrance of a floral bouquet. The ringing in her ears gave way to the yelping of startled monkeys, the screech of a hawk and the rush of a distant waterfall.