The Dakota Cipher

CHAPTER FOURTY-TWO

‘Under the tree,’ Magnus croaked. His beard was smoking. ‘Down below, to save our lives!’

We retreated down the tunnel of tusks to the chamber we’d been in before, this time without the hammer suspended in its cage of wire and roots. The wires were smoking now, the tree shuddering with convulsions overhead, and Magnus looked horribly burnt.

‘Little Frog snatched it to avenge Pierre,’ Namida said shakily.

‘And half killed herself doing it,’ I amended. Smoke began to follow us down the tunnel. The heat was growing. ‘We haven’t found Eden, Magnus, we’ve found hell.’ I automatically, without thinking, began reloading the rifle that seemed welded to my fist. How many times had it saved my life?

‘No, no, this is paradise, I know it!’ Magnus gasped. ‘The hammer was the apple, we should never have touched it! But the sky god’s power is still here – we are connected to heaven by a wire! It will work, Ethan, it will still work!’

‘What will work?’ The giant was even crazier than before.

‘It will resurrect Signe!’

‘What?’

‘It’s the tree of life, Ethan, that’s what the Norse Templars were looking for! They were searching for the remnant of Eden and the youth of the world that it still might contain! The hammer was a seed, to collect the sky’s energy, and the tree a machine of rejuvenation! They didn’t have the time to make it work before they were overwhelmed by the Indians, but it’s been growing for four and a half centuries. Now, Ethan, now, I can bring her back!’

‘Bring back your dead wife?’

‘With my child in her womb!’

And in triumph, he held up the map case. ‘Don’t you wonder why I carried this across the prairie with no map?’ With burnt, smoking fingers, he winced as he tore the end of it open. ‘The texts are ambiguous, but I think they imply resurrection. That, or oblivion. I never loved anyone else, Ethan, never for a moment, not like Signe!’ And he dropped into his palm a cup of grey powder. His eyes gleamed. ‘Her ashes! Didn’t I tell you it’s the greatest treasure on earth?’

‘No! What do you mean to do?’

‘Stand back, both of you! I’m going into the cage with her and grasp the wire, but this time I think it will heal! So promise the old texts!’

‘Magnus, that’s insane!’

‘The electricity will reconstitute her! Why else would the Templars build this?’

‘Cecil said it was for some purpose we don’t know!’

‘The Somersets are the blind ones, in a dark cellar with jewels they cannot find.’ He smiled. ‘Signe and I will finally be together one way or another. I’m going to be a conduit for the lightning. I’m going to touch the finger of God! Get back, in case it doesn’t work.’

‘Magnus, Signe can’t be resurrected!’

‘You think I care about this life if she can’t?’ And he reached like a madman towards the web of root and wire, grasping towards the rod that ran to the top of the tree. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed at peace. Odin the one-eyed had finally found what he roamed the world for.

I fled.

As I hauled Namida back up the smoking tunnel, I saw him reach for the wire as Adam reached for the Almighty. ‘Come back, lost love!’ His fist squeezed the ashes.

And then there was a roar, a world-wrenching sound that dwarfed that of the lightning before, and I suppose our hearing was saved only because the clap brought down on Namida and me a roof of earth as the tunnel and its tusks collapsed on top of us. Magnus had triggered the apocalypse, and everything was snuffed out in an instant. We were buried alive, in ground that shook like a wet dog.

I clung to the Indian woman I’d dragged to this hell, cursing that I hadn’t followed my own instincts. I was to be entombed in a nameless prairie, never to report on woolly elephants, British scheming, or the sexual charm of aboriginal maidens!

And then, as Magnus had promised, we were resurrected.

Not in the biblical way. Rather, the earth erupted, carrying us up with it as a root ball as wide as a village was ripped out of the ground. First there was terrifying, suffocating blackness as the tunnel caved in, and then the light of our explosive rebirth, a tumult of earth, rock, and wood as roots flailed and soil flew up in great geysers of flying dirt. I dimly heard and felt a titanic crash of thousands of tons of wood striking the ground, shaking the earth even more. Then bits of burning foliage rained down out of a storm-tossed sky like little candles, lighting a gloom of dust and cloud. I spat soil and gasped for breath.

Finally it was quiet except for the hissing of a gentle rain. Or was that ringing in my ears?

Shakily, I sat up. Namida and I were black with earth, coughing, clawing it out of our ears, eyes streaming. My rifle jutted from the mess like a dirty stake. We were in a crater big enough to make a respectable lake. The great ash tree, our modern Yggdrasil, had been blown skyward by Magnus’s rash experiment and had fallen, flaming, to earth. It stretched a quarter-mile across the prairie, flames boiling from its branches. As it toppled it left a hole where the roots had been. Its root pan formed a vast disk and individual roots jutted two hundred feet high into the air, while the weight of its trunk had hammered a depression into the ground. Cracks in the earth radiated away from the trench where it had fallen.

The greatest tree on the face of the planet had been killed.

Of Magnus there was no sign. The cave was gone, of course, obliterated in the explosion and toppling. So was the cage of roots and wire, Signe’s ashes, and the Norwegian himself. He had connected with Valhalla, and vanished.

Maybe the couple found a common grave in the pit of the tree’s crater. Maybe they were vaporized by the energy they harnessed. Maybe they were remade in some better place.

And me? As always, I was left in this bitter world.

Oblivion from sorrow, I realised, was Bloodhammer’s real Eden. He wanted an end to his mourning, one way or another – and had got it. Norway, royalty, treasure? In the end it didn’t matter. Magnus had found the paradise of being subsumed.

Namida and I crawled from the crater to its rim, shaking. I dragged my now-battered rifle with us, knocking soil from the muzzle mouth, and used it to shakily lever myself erect. Then I helped up the Indian woman.

The grass fire at the tree’s base had consumed all the fuel and burnt itself out, leaving behind a smoking ring. Fires still radiating out from its periphery were dying in the drizzle. We found the bodies of Little Frog and Pierre and Cecil in the bare ground under the tree where the fire hadn’t reached, and the smoked, charcoal husk of Red Jacket. Several other blackened corpses lay in the devastated meadow. Of the rest of the Dakota, and Aurora Somerset, there was no sign.

I did find the hammer, curiously inert and shrunken. Much of its weight had evaporated in our apocalypse. The husk remaining was dull grey now, a lump of iron, no longer hot to the touch. Our wayward use had disarmed it.

‘Thor’s hammer, he called it,’ said Namida, looking at the weapon in wonder.

‘Just old metal, now.’

‘There are some things men shouldn’t find.’ She began to weep for her lost friends.

I looked skyward. The storm clouds had flattened to a sullen overcast, and the rain began in earnest.