The Oracle Code

52

The sporadic gunfire echoed loudly in the narrow passageway. Lourds ran quickly and nearly fell when he reached a flight of stone steps carved into a steep grade. He slowed down and caught himself, barely managing to keep his balance. He shone his flashlight ahead of him.

The passageway went on for a long ways. At least there hadn’t been that sudden ending he’d feared.

“Keep going.” Fitrat waved him forward. “I’ve left two men to slow them down, but with limited ammo, they won’t be able to hold them off forever. We need to find another way out.”

Lourds pressed on, following the tunnel as it continued heading down at a sharp angle. Haros ran at Lourds’s side, evidently feeling more comfortable with him than with anyone else.

“What do you know about this tunnel?”

“It leads to Hades, as I said.”

“Why do you know about this place?”

“Because my father taught me after my grandfather died. It has always been so in my family.”

“Why?” Lourds ducked under a section of the roof. “Low ceiling!” he called in Dari for the men behind him.

“Because my family was chosen to be the priests of Hades. The duty has been handed down from generation, from one to another, since the temple was built. There has only been one priest allowed at any time.”

Lourds remembered that from the stories he’d researched. “That was thousands of years ago.”

“I know.”

“Have you ever seen the well open?”

“No. The way has been blocked since before my father’s father twenty-six times back.”

Lourds did the math and figured out that no one had been inside the cave system in at least five hundred years. “Do you believe this passageway leads to Hades?”

Haros hesitated, then shrugged. “I do not know. Sometimes, I think. It is a cool story.”

“Ever tell your friends?”

“No. It is forbidden. If my father had found out I did something like that—” Haros fell silent. “I don’t know what would have happened.” Then a look of pain crossed his face. “I did tell one person. My best friend. I told him, and he laughed at me, and the next day, my father died in a boating accident. I never told anyone again. When I saw you here tonight, I knew I had to stop you. I swore to prevent anyone from coming here. I have failed at that.”

“We didn’t have a choice, Haros.”

“And if you had? Would you have turned away when I asked?”

Lourds didn’t want to answer the question.

The passageway suddenly forked in a small cavern.

Lourds hesitated, playing his flashlight over both branches. “Do you know which way to go?”

“No.” Haros looked scared. “We do not want to go much farther.”

“Why?”

“Because my father told me there is the Place of Dreams and that I should beware of it.”

“What Place of Dreams?”

“It is a cavern somewhere in here, a place where the Oracle came and dreamed her dreams after the Romans tore down her temple.”

“The Oracle came here?”

“Yes. She had no choice but to go into hiding. So she came here.”

Fitrat stood impatiently behind Lourds. “Professor.”

Lourds chose the branch on the right and charged through. “Why did the Oracle come here?”

“Many people remember the Oracle, Pythia, as a representative of Apollo, but that was not the truth of the matter.”

Marias trailed after the boy. “That is true, Thomas. In the beginning, the office of the Oracle was held by the goddesses Themis and Phoebe, and the cave where she prophesized was sacred to Gaia herself.”

Haros nodded. “As my father told me. When the Romans tore down the Oracle’s home, Hades honored a request from Gaia and built her a new home here.”

That made sense to Lourds. After the Oracle was routed from her home, prophesies continued for a time. She had to be operating from somewhere. And Elis had been a major trade port at the time. There would have been ample opportunity for several people to speak to the Oracle.

“You said no one was allowed past the wall. How did the people speak to the Oracle?”

“She went out to meet them in the harbor. She had a building where she did her business every seventh day. One day, the last Oracle died, and she went beyond the wall.” Haros pursed his lips. “Somewhere within this passageway, before you reach the River Styx, is the Oracle’s Place of Dreams where she came to find answers to questions she had been asked.”

Linko halted at the cave that held the branching tunnels. A single grenade had gotten them past the chokepoint at the tunnel’s entrance. He’d feared it might bring down the wall and close off the cave, but he’d had no choice. Now, he shone his flashlight around, looking for any kind of mark Lourds or the others might have left. He didn’t want to go stumbling around in the dark and end up getting lost. Losing Lourds now would be unacceptable.

“Gedenidze. Bring the thermal imager, quickly.”

The FSB agent trotted up and snapped on the thermal imager he had mounted on his rifle. After a few seconds of directing it at the two openings ahead of them, he nodded. “I have them. To the right. They are staying massed together.”

Linko peered over the man’s shoulder and saw the pool of red that indicated human temperatures. Against the cold backdrop of the cave, getting a reading was child’s play.

“All right. Do not lose them.” Linko trotted forward once more and kept listening. Although the heat signatures of the group could be seen, he didn’t know how far ahead they were.

He kept going into the darkness.

Six more times, Lourds was presented with choices on which tunnel to take. He hoped that his decisions weren’t going to lead them back around in a circle, or into the path of the Russians pursuing them, but he didn’t want to end up lost, either. The tunnel and cave system had turned out to be a lot larger than he’d imagined.

“My god. Thomas.” Marias caught Lourds by the shoulder and brought him to a halt.

“What?”

“Up there.”

Lourds added his flashlight beam to Marias’s and spotted a set of curving steps that let up to a cave opening above them. In the darkness, concentrating on the light ahead of him, Lourds had missed the steps.

The opening was at least sixty feet above them.

But beside the opening, mounted on the wall, lay two beautiful, golden serpents curled around a staff.

“That is a caduceus. Hermes carried one.”

“I know.” Lourds’s mind was flying. “Apollo was reputed to have wound the body of Pythia around a staff, which he later gave to Hermes as a peace offering. But he killed the snake to provide a home for the Oracle.”

“And Hermes was also a psychopomp, a deliverer of the dead to Hades. He moved between the conscious and unconscious minds.” Marias didn’t take his gaze away. “We cannot leave this unexplored.”

Lourds was torn. “It could be a dead end. We could be boxing ourselves in.”

Fitrat looked at the cave. “It’s defensible. And we all missed it in the dark. Maybe the Russians will too. We could run for a lot longer and maybe never find a place as good as this.”

“All right.” Lourds headed up the steps with Haros at his side. There was barely room for both of them. The steps were broad, but they were steep as well. Worn indentations on the surface showed the path had been traveled many times. He couldn’t help wondering who had come this way and what had brought them.

When he reached the top, what he saw took his breath away. The opening led to a cave at least fifty yards across. A stone dais occupied the center of the room, but that wasn’t what most caught his attention. His flashlight beam picked up the mosaics on the walls, all of them made from gemstones or pieces of colored glass. The flashlight sparked from ruby, sapphire, emerald, amethyst, and a myriad other colors.

All of the mosaics were of women dressed in virgin white. In some, the women knelt at the foot of a beautiful man who glowed with the radiance of the sun. In others, they held court over dozens of men who were obviously enthralled by them.

Dazed, Lourds entered the room and moved from image to image. One of them showed armed Roman soldiers closing in on a woman in white. In the sky, a dark figure with a menacing helm and driving a chariot with four black horses flew toward her. In the next, several Roman soldiers lay withered and dying on the ground. The woman in white had joined the dark figure in the chariot.

“Do you see this?” Marias flicked his beam over the mosaics.

“Yes.” Lourds couldn’t help but feast his eyes on the artwork, on the sheer history that lay before them. Even though the stories couldn’t possibly be true, the artwork was a study in artifacts. But he was also grimly aware that Haros was at his side, and the boy was terrified.

“We should not be here. We should not be here.” Haros spoke in a thin, quiet voice.

Boris, I wish you had lived long enough to see where your trail led. You deserve the recognition for this.

Fitrat ordered three of his men to take up positions in the cave at the opening, but he sent Corporal Rahimi to the opening at the back to explore their options. The remaining soldiers moved quickly and efficiently.

“It is another tunnel.” Rahimi shone his flashlight into the darkness. “I cannot see how much farther it goes.”

“Then at least we have a way out of this place if things go badly. If we get lucky, the Russians will pass us by and we can double back and be gone before they know it.”

Lourds paid little attention to Fitrat and the soldiers, as he and Marias began exploring the cave.

“Thomas, over here.”

Lourds joined Marias at the back wall. As he got closer, he spotted the compartments carved into the stone. Inside the compartments were scrolls. His heart leaped for joy, and a new adrenaline rush swept over him.

“Look at this.” Marias tapped the end of the wooden roller of the scroll he held. The engraved image of a lion was unmistakable. “I saw this and it caught my eye. Do you remember the story of Philip II, the father of Alexander, and how he had the dream of sealing up his wife’s womb with a lion seal on it?”

Lourds shook his head. “No. On this one, you’re ahead of me. And I think I’d remember something like that.”

Marias grinned. “Shortly after Philip married Olympias, his fourth wife — the man had several — he had a dream. In the dream, he saw himself sealing his wife’s womb with the seal of a lion.”

“Not your everyday dream, that’s for sure.”

“There were a couple of different interpretations offered for the dream. One was that Olympias was already pregnant by the time of the marriage.”

“Explains the need for a wedding.”

“And the other is that Alexander was actually the son of Zeus, and Olympias was claiming demi-godhood for her son.”

“A popular claim back in the day.”

“Agreed. Anyway, I picked up this scroll because it had the lion on it and I thought immediately of Alexander. As it turns out, that was more prophetic than I had believed.”

“Well, this is the room of the Oracle. It’s a place for prophesies.”

Marias opened the scroll. “Look. This is the story of Alexander’s death. It says here that the scroll will tell the tale of how Alexander’s tomb was brought from the world and taken to the Underworld for Hades to reclaim the weapons and armor. The Oracle ordered men to find the tomb and bring it here.” He grinned at Lourds. “If it is down here, we will find it.”

“If we get out of this alive.”

Fitrat turned to them and spoke in hushed tones. “I hear them coming. Shut off your lights.”