The Thrones of Eden 3 (Eden) (12 page)

The answers just weren’t coming to him.

Behind him, however, something else was.

#

They jammed themselves
against the wall upon the moment of impact, the scarabs mounting one another in haste to attain a greater height, a higher level, the top of the wall getting closer, the black sea rising.

When they scaled the landing they progressed forward as a collective, an ink tide spreading across the floor as a pool of darkness heading for the only direction that was available to them.

The pores in their antennae had picked up the aroma of their prey, the scent jumpstarting their olfactory senses, telling them that whatever stood ahead was now staying their ground.

The masses pressed forward, closing the gap between them and their quarry at record pace.

#

The noise of
mandibles opening and closing in pincer strikes was now a sound all too familiar and growing louder like the onrush of a train.

They had crested the landing and were moving closer, John knew this as he continued to rake his fingers nervously through his hair trying to figure out the riddle.
They follow and lead, but only as you pass.
Adorn yourself in darkest black,
and still they are darker.
Always they flee the light,
though without the sun there would be none. Find me from the four below, and to the Chamber of the One shall you go
.

He examined the dials, looked at the four possible answers. Then he studied the riddle, his concentration drifting as he became cognizant of the noise behind him, the sound of mandibles opening and closing in an orchestration of discordant melodies.

They follow and lead, but only . . . as you pass
.

Suddenly a memory came to him, a fleeting moment when walking down a street at nighttime. He recalled an instant when walking beneath a series of street lamps, watching his shadow wax and wane as he moved out of the light from one lamp and into the light of another.

Shadows? Waxing and waning. They follow and lead as you go from one light to the next. 

He looked at the second line:
Adorn yourself in darkest black,
and still they are darker.

Shadows are always blacker than black, aren’t they?

The last line:
Always they flee the light,
though without the sun there would be none.

Of course: ice can flee from the sun in an allegorical sense by melting in the sunlight. But it does not fit the criteria of the first two lines. Shadows, however, fits every criteria.

Behind him the noise was growing to a crescendo, the tide on its final leg of the journey.

“John,” Alyssa whispered. He could hear the slight tremor in her voice.

He simply reached out and grabbed the third dial, ∂. “This one,” he said. “It’s ‘shadows.’ The answer is ‘shadows.’”

“Then do something about it,” said Hillary.

The scarabs were so close that the sound of their exercising mandibles had become deafening.

But when Savage sensed the air of squeezing mandibles as close to him as a sighing breath next to his ear, he turned the dial.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Walls began to rise from the floor, creating barriers where there were none before, the scarabs suddenly finding themselves divided from their prey.

Areas of the floor began to rise and fall, becoming unstable as hidden weights and balances reconfigured the entire setting. The wall containing the ‘Riddle of Shadows’ slowly rose into the ceiling to unveil a hidden chamber. Plumes of dust sifted from shifting seams in the ceiling after millenniums of gathering sand and particles, the air becoming as thick and cloying as a gas canister igniting eddies of smoke.

Savage could hear the ticking of the scarabs’ mandibles against the wall that divided him from them, thanking God for the slight reprieve.

All around him people coughed and gagged against dust that was overwhelmingly dense, the air adrift with floating specks of desert sand so thick that the opposite wall appeared vague. People eventually fell to their knees coughing and hacking.

But as the air finally began to settle the room did not.

There was a circular emblem of an unknown symbol that was at the room's central point upon the floor, which began to rotate in clockwise motion and began to corkscrew downward, creating an opening in the ground, a hole.

The floor began to shift and reshape itself, rising and falling, the ground angling downward like the bell-shape of a funnel so that the slopes would lead to the opening of a hideous mouth of complete darkness, to another abyss.

John reached for Alyssa, missed, the tremors of the temple shifting and driving them farther apart from one another. Another wall cropped up. Another part of the floor angled. The temple was alive and angry, picking and choosing who would live and who would die.

People sought the purchase of solid footing that wasn’t there as the floor’s angle became too steep, the slopes too difficult to manage as arms began to pinwheel for balance. Eyes flared the moment their feet gave way beneath them, people falling, then sliding, their hands clawing against the slick floor to anchor them firmly, but failing, the men crying out in terror as they slipped into the hole, one right after the other.  

Hillary was the first to go, his face a semblance of a man knowing that his mortality was about to come to a swift and horrible end. The faces of others weren’t much different as they slipped over the edge, the looks of impotence knowing that there was nothing they could do to stop the freefall.

A part of the floor lifted, an even plane, rising along the edge of the funnel where footing remained solid. Demir, half his team, two ministers, and Alyssa were rising above the funnel, the landing rising like an elevator toward a stationary ceiling that was coming dangerously close like the walls of a vise. 

Savage fought for traction, his feet giving beneath him as he reached for Alyssa’s extended hand, their fingertips grazing, a glancing touch, and then his feet gave way, the floor too steep. And his eyes said it all, the sudden flash of hopelessness telling her that it was all right, that life was just a temporary stay and that he loved her with all his heart. 

Then he slid away from her with his hand held out in her direction, a final gesture of his longing to touch her one last time.

But then he was gone.

John Savage had fallen into the abyss.

#

The elevator-like
landing was closing in on the ceiling, offering them the decision to either jump to the funnel-shaped room below, or to become the mortar between the joining seams upon impact.

. . .
Twenty feet
. . .

The landing continued to rise.

. . .
Fifteen feet
. . .

Demir’s men seriously considered jumping, accepting the fall into the abyss as the lesser of the two evils.

But then the landing stopped, allowing a ten-foot gap between floor and ceiling.

Alyssa continued to look down to the room below, at the hole, believing that John Savage was so much larger than life that he would simply crawl from its opening.

But he didn’t.

And she broke, feeling incredibly hollow inside, the wound far more excruciating than anything she could ever imagine.

Demir moved to a bended knee beside her and placed a gentle hand upon her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Moore. Savage was a good man.” But he wasn’t sure if she heard him or not since she never gave any indication or acknowledgement that he was trying to provide her with aid and comfort. 

It wasn’t until a moment later when she finally reached her hand out and placed it on his, and then patted it with appreciation. All the while she continued to look into the abyss, all hope draining.

Then it was gone as reality set in like a hammer blow to the chest, the air knocked out of her as she lay herself down onto the landing, and grieved.

Demir allowed her the moment.

 In the meantime Demir grieved his own losses, another three men lost to the abyss, leaving him with four soldiers under his command.

He looked at his MP5K and tossed it harshly aside, sensing its worthlessness in the temple of Mintaka, but not far enough where he couldn’t pick it up at a moment’s notice. His action was conducted more out of frustration and anger than it was out of a sense of the weapon’s futility.

He then leaned against a wall and slid down along its length until he was seated, his eyes staring at nothing in particular as the light of his shoulder lamp gave off a strong beam that settled against the opposite wall.

His men stood idle and waited. As did the two remaining ministers, each waiting for instructions.

But Demir offered nothing but a vacant stare.

Then in Turkish, and said in such a way that the commando sounded apologetic for disturbing Demir’s moment of meditation, softly asked, “
Mulazim awwal
Demir, what now?”

Demir’s eyes shifted and settled on the commando with a mechanical stare. And then he offered a false smile. “We move on,” he told him. When he got to his feet he looked down at Alyssa, who stopped sobbing but appeared like someone who had surrendered all hope to Mintaka’s fate. “Ms. Moore.”

She closed her eyes.

“Ms. Moore.”

“I heard you,” she said. She then forced herself into a sitting position; her cheeks stained with tears, and swept an arm across her face, wiping it dry. “I heard you,” she repeated drearily.

“Ms. Moore, we need to move on . . . if possible.” He then placed the flat of his palm against a wall where there were no riddles etched upon its side that would at least allow them the opportunity to move on. Just a barrier that was as cold to the touch as the surface of ice. Then: “Ms. Moore, please.”

She looked at Demir, their eyes meeting for a long and quiet moment.

“We need to move on,” he repeated unemotionally. “But there doesn’t seem to be a way.”

“There’s a way,” she said. “There’s always a way. These temples never paint you into a corner. They’ll drive you forward in sinisterly fashion—always marching you until no one is left, always offering a sliver of hope when there really isn’t any. But in the end, if you’re lucky enough, it will show you its secrets. And once you see them, and if you’re luckier still, it’ll show you the way out.” She sighed. Then: “Like John always said, there’s a solution to everything.” She moved to the wall and placed her palms against them.
Like John always said
, she reminisced as she could hear the echo of his voice traipsing through her mind,
there’s a solution to everything.

Oh, John.

And at that moment she wanted to weep.

CHAPTER TWENTY

They had been rerouted. The scarabs driven to every nook and cranny Mintaka offered, working avenues that guided them toward their prey, hungering. The temple shift was a temporary setback, the reconfiguration providing minimal obstacles.

The beetles had climbed and ambled through cracks and fissures that were created in the black silica walls when the pressures of the weights and balances proved too great for the aged fortifications to handle, the structure giving at points that had grown feeble over time.

Their olfactory senses told them that the scent of their prey was nearing. They could detect the ooze and sweat from their pores as signs of fear and could feel their weakening repose as they stood on a landing less than forty feet from their position.

The scarabs pressed forward as Mintaka offered them a bounty.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The wall held steadfast.

“There are no riddles,” offered Demir. “Just a wall.” He then looked over his shoulder to the funnel-shaped room below and to the abyss. Then he turned back to Alyssa. “Surely it is as you say, that the temple would not paint us into a corner—whatever that means.”

“It means that Mintaka, like the temple of Eden, would not push us into a situation where there was no way out.” She shined her light upward, hoping that there was a landing above the wall. But there was nothing. It was just as Demir stated—it was just a wall.

This didn’t make any sense to Alyssa. Mintaka was purposely driving them toward the Chamber of the One. For those who survived
,
they would eventually look upon the face of God. And for those who didn’t would fall short after failing to meet the challenge of the riddles. But there were no riddles, no etchings, no script or cuneiform of any type—there was just a landing that overlooked the abyss, its surfaces as smooth as glass.

She then looked over the remaining faces and felt disconnected, not knowing a single soul other than Demir, the only member of the group capable of speaking English, the great communicator. She scoffed inwardly. Life truly sucked at the moment.

But something tugged at her reasoning, a familiar voice telling her that just because something went unseen didn’t mean that it didn’t exist. Sometimes objects of interest exist in plain sight.

She then looked at the floor of black silica, her eyes roaming, scanning, Demir’s teammates giving her a wide berth as she continued to examine the surface.

“Do you see something, Ms. Moore?” asked Demir.

She shook her head:
not yet
.

She tested the flooring for weaknesses, putting her foot on a certain spot and gently rocking her weight. Then she found it. It was a tile made of black silica which was masked by the color of the surrounding floor, also black, with its seams barely perceptible in the light. In the center was a marking of an unknown symbol, the engraving somehow alien and familiar to her at the same time.