Altar of Bones (69 page)

Her left boot stepped on a loose stone causing her ankle to buckle underneath her. Instinctively she brought her free hand up to steady herself and it knocked against something hard. Her eyes flew open, and she was staring at a wall of solid rock not more than an inch from the end of her nose.

The white noise in Zoe’s head flared up into a single loud, penetrating scream.
Get out, get out, get out
.

She tried to pull her hand out of Ry’s grasp, but he held on. “Eyes shut and breathe.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, so hard it hurt. Her breaths scraped in and out of her throat, burning, and her chest felt as if it were going to explode. She wanted out, out, out—

“Talk, Zoe.”

“Huh?”

“Talk about whatever comes into your head. Babble away. It’ll soothe my nerves.”

Zoe made a little yelping noise that was supposed to be a laugh. “Like you’ve ever had a nervous moment in your entire life, O’Malley. Ever since that night I crawled out of the Seine and you shot me with that tranquilizer gun, it’s been one hairy moment after another for us, and yet you go about saving our asses and knocking off the bad guys like it’s just la-di-da and all in a day’s work with you. It’s enough to give us normal people an inferiority complex—”

Her bottom brushed against something hard, startling her. She tucked it in, and the front of her anorak scraped against the rock in front of her.
Oh, God …
“Ry? It’s getting narrow. Really, really narrow.”

“We’re here.”

Slowly, Zoe opened her eyes. Enough light still penetrated through the gap in the rock for her to see that they stood at the top of a flight of narrow steps cut into the sheer side of what looked to be a bottomless pit.

Ry took a step toward the edge, and pebbles scattered, hitting the cave floor below them. Okay, not bottomless then.

“I know I should be scared spitless about going down into that,” Zoe said, whispering for some strange reason. “But after surviving that the slit-in-the-rock-from-hell, I feel like I could tackle those steps while turning somersaults.”

Ry grinned at her as he pulled a flashlight from his pocket and aimed it down into the cave. “It’s actually not that deep,” he said, and he, too, was whispering. “Fifteen feet, maybe twenty at the most.”

The climb down, while steep, turned out to be easier than it looked. At the bottom they found a kerosene lantern hanging on a hook. Ry took it down and gave it a little shake. “It feels full.”

Zoe didn’t bother to ask him if he had something to light it with; she knew he would. The man was always prepared for anything.

She watched while he held a butane lighter to the lantern’s wick, and it caught. He lifted the lantern and together they turned in a slow
circle as the light moved over the walls of the cave. It was round, nearly perfectly so, and it wasn’t all that big, maybe twenty feet in diameter. An evil-looking oily black pool took up most of the middle, and across the pool, against the far wall, stood an altar made out of human bones. A hot geyser bubbled beneath it, enshrouding it in a soft veil of steam.

“The altar of bones,” Ry said.

“But not
the
altar. If Popov was telling the truth about that, and there’s no reason to think he wasn’t. It’s creepy, though, to think all those bones were once people. I wonder who built it and why.”

“To worship some ancient god or goddess, maybe? But it also could have been set up as a decoy all along, to make people like Popov, people who manage to get this far, believe they’ve found the source of the bone juice, when the real altar of bones is somewhere else.”

“Yeah, but where?” Zoe said. “I don’t see anything else down here that it could be, except maybe the pool. But besides being too obvious, Popov claimed he had that tested, too, and the pool isn’t it.”

Ry cast the lantern light over the walls of the cave again. Water dripped into the pool from the ceiling, making a melodic
plop, ploppity, plop
noise. Zoe saw stalagmites, a few rotting pieces of wood, the remains of a campfire, and a battered metal bowl. Etched deep into the stone walls were the crude outlines of seven wolves, each one chasing after the other, in an endless loop around the cave.

“The wolves …”

“What?” Ry said.

“It was what my grandmother wrote at the end of her letter. Something about not treading where wolves lie. Maybe these wolves carved into the wall are some kind of clue to where the real altar is. Another Keeper riddle.”

“I don’t know. They aren’t lying down, for one thing. But solving riddles got us this far. How much of your grandmother’s letter do you still remember?”

“Not all word for word, but big chunks of it. Let’s see…. The first part was about no time left and the hunters closing in on her, and how she stayed away because of them, the hunters, only now she was dying …”

It suddenly hit Zoe then, what exactly her grandmother must have felt while she was writing her letter, maybe because Zoe had been living it herself these last two harrowing weeks—feeling that no place on earth would ever be safe for you again, no one you met could ever be trusted. But for her grandmother it had been worse because she’d had to endure it alone. For years.

Zoe blinked back tears and went on. “There was something about ignorance being no shield against danger, but how she dared to put only so much in her letter, and this next part I remember exactly, because I read it a gazillion times.”

She closed her eyes. She could see the Cyrillic script of her grandmother’s hand, blue on white paper …” ‘The women of our line have been Keepers to the altar of bones for so long, the beginning has been lost in the mists of time. The sacred duty of each Keeper is to guard from the world the knowledge of the secret pathway, for beyond the pathway is the altar, and within the altar is the fountain of—’ “

She cut herself off, opening her eyes. She stared hard at the altar, but that seemed to be all it was—an altar fashioned out of human bones. “For beyond the pathway is the altar,” she said again.

“Yeah,” Ry said, “but unfortunately, the pathway seems to be a secret pathway.”

“
She mentioned the pathway again later, though, when she wrote about the icon. Remember, ‘Look to the Lady, for her heart cherishes the secret, and the pathway to the secret is infinite’ “

Zoe walked up to the altar. She saw that the table part of it was also made out of bones, whole flat bones such as scapulas and skull plates, and parts of other bones that had been carved and then fitted together like jigsaw pieces.

“That story Rasputin told the tsar’s spy in the tavern that night,” she said, as Ry came up beside her. “He claimed he saw the Lady icon sitting on top of an altar made out of human bones. So at one time the Lady was here, on top of this altar. ‘Look to the Lady, her heart cherishes the secret, the pathway to the secret is—’ “

“‘Infinite,’ “Ry said. “Infinity.

The symbol for infinity.”

Zoe bent closer over the altar top, looking for the infinity pattern in
the bones—the figure eight lying on its side—but it was all a jumble. Ry took a step back, to look at the altar’s front again, and eventually she did, too. “It’s all just a jumble, Ry. I see skulls, femurs, fibulas, tibias, but in the end it all adds up to just a bunch of bo—”

“Skulls,”
Ry said. “Look. There are seven of them, like there were seven jewels that made up the infinity pattern on the icon.”

And as soon as he said it, the sleeping figure eight made by the layout of the skulls on the front of the altar jumped right out at her. “I see it, Ry. I see it. So what do you think? Do we press on the skulls like we did with the jewels?”

Ry grinned at her. “Yeah. I say we go for it.”

Zoe knelt down in front of the altar. She started with the skull in the center, as she had with the icon’s jewels, pressing into its smooth forehead with the heels of her gloved palms. She went through the pattern, up and to the left, pressing each skull in turn, and remembering to hit the center skull again on her way through the middle of the eight.

But when she got to the last skull, she stopped. “I know it doesn’t make any sense after all the really bad stuff we had to live through just to get to this point, but I think I’m more scared right now than I’ve ever been in my life.”

“No, I get it,” Ry said. “The mystery of what’s on the other side of the locked door at the top of the stairs can be an incredible lure, up until the moment when you’re faced with having to open it. Then the fear of what might be on the other side can stop you in your tracks.”

Zoe rubbed her hands up and down her thighs. It was probably impossible in the subzero cold, but inside her gloves, her palms felt as if they were sweating.

“All right, all right,” she said to herself. She drew in a deep breath, laid her hands on the forehead of the seventh skull, and gave it a good push.

“Nothing’s hap—”

A terrible grinding noise shattered the silence of the cave, seeming to come at them from everywhere at once. Zoe reared backward onto her butt, then nearly burst out laughing because Ry had crouched and
whirled toward the front of the cave as if ready to go all kung fu on whatever might be coming to get them.

The grinding noise stopped abruptly. There was a moment of dead silence, then a whirring noise started up, like a fan with a leaf stuck inside it.

“Look.”
Zoe grabbed Ry’s arm as the rock wall behind the altar split open and began to slide sideways, taking the altar with it.

They stared as, inch by inch, the rock creaked open, revealing a narrow, arched hole that opened into darkness. But not a complete darkness. There was, Zoe realized, a weird, pulsating red glow to the blackness beyond.

Ry snatched up the lantern and headed for the crude opening in the cave wall. Zoe scrambled to her feet and caught up to him.

He stopped just inside, holding the lantern out in front of them. Pale, yellow light cut through the darkness, and Zoe gasped.

They stood at the entrance to a small, round chamber, less than six feet in diameter, and it was empty except for the dolmen standing in the middle of it. Three big, flat rough slabs of stone, put together to form an altar, like something you would see on the field of Stonehenge. And seeping up from out of the rocky floor beneath it, like coagulating blood, was a phosphorescent red ooze.

“We’ve found it,” she whispered.

Ry said nothing. His face was hard, intense, as he stared at the dolmen and the red ooze seeping up from the rock beneath it.

The ooze formed a small pool that was slowly trickling out into the cracks and crevasses in the stone floor. Etched into the floor in front of the pool were three wolves making a circle, noses to tails, chasing each other through eternity.

Don’t tread where wolves lie
.

A sudden image flashed in Zoe’s mind, of Boris the griffin shop man holding one of the keys to the unicorn casket in his hand and saying, “Clever, is it not? But then the Keepers have always been clever at devising riddles to keep the altar safe from the world.”

On some instinctive level Zoe felt Ry start to pull away from her, to go the dolmen—

“No!”

She grabbed his arm, jerking him back the instant before his foot came down on the circle of wolves.

He half-turned to her. “What—”, he began, then his eyes focused behind her, and he flashed a sudden, brilliant smile.

“Pakhan,”
he said. “What took you so long?”

M
OTHER
?”

Anna Larina Dmitroff stood on the other side of the crude opening in the cave wall, where the altar made of human bones had once been. Snow dusted her mink hat, the mink collar of a long quilted coat, and caked the soles of her fur-lined boots. She held a Glock 37 pistol in her hand, pointed at her daughter’s chest, but her eyes, every fiber of her being, seemed riveted on the dolmen and the iridescent red ooze that lay beneath it.

“The altar of bones,” she said, awe and a hot, hard desire roughening her voice. “I knew you would lead me to it eventually. All I had to do was wait and be patient.”

Zoe shook her head. “But how could you know where …?” A terrible coldness suddenly washed over her, but she wasn’t going to believe what she was thinking. She couldn’t believe it, because it would kill her.

Slowly she turned to look at Ry, and it felt as if she were moving underwater. “What did you mean, ‘What took you so long?’ You were
expecting
her?”

“I work for her, remember? She told me to seduce you, to worm my way into your trust, and you would lead us to the altar of bones. I gotta say you weren’t much of a challenge, Zoe.”

The pain in her heart was so fierce, she thought she would faint from it.
God
, what a fool she’d been. Trust no one, not even the ones you love. But like so many Keepers before her, she’d fallen in love and that love had betrayed her and made a lie out of everything she believed in.

“I hate you right now, Ry O’Malley. I hate you enough to kill you.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Zoe,” Anna Larina said, tearing her gaze off
the altar with a visible act of will. “You can be so obtuse at times. Can’t you see he’s improvising? Trying to make me think he isn’t the puissant traitor I know him to be. He might have been expecting me, but that lovely smile of welcome he gave me—it was all teeth and no fire. Isn’t that right, Sergei?”