The Dakota Cipher (27 page)

The trunk now had shrunk to something I could wrap my arms around. There were no hammers up here that I could find. Yet the very top of the tree still seemed truncated in that odd way I’d spied from the ground. Why?

I hauled myself up the last twenty feet, finally hitching myself up a gnarled extension of trunk no thicker than a maypole. When I looked again for Red Jacket the ground was already blotted from view. The prairie was walled off by a circular wall of cloud that seemed to be rotating slowly around the immense tree like a vast, gauzy cylinder. Its top was lit brilliantly silver by the sun, but the lower reaches were already dark. I heard a low growl of thunder. Hurry! There was something bright and odd glittering above, a golden thread, and it jutted from the very uppermost reach of the tree with a gleam like a promise.

This highest point had clearly been struck by lightning, as one would expect of the tallest organism on the prairie. But why hadn’t the tree burned or died from what must be a hundred strikes a season?

I pulled myself the last inches, fearful the snag would break off or some new jolt of electricity would stab my perch. I was swaying a good twenty feet in the wind.

And then I had the answer to what had puzzled me on the ground. The golden thread I’d spied was in fact a stiff wire, a twisted strand of metal that poked from the tree’s peak as if growing out of the wood. It looked more likely to be an alloy of copper and silver and iron. The topmost snag had extruded a shiny filament like a twig.

If I’d not been an electrician, a Franklin man, I might have found the wire peculiar but not very illuminating. But I’d caught the lightning! What I was looking at, almost certainly, was a medieval lightning rod. Bloodhammer’s Templars, or Norse utopians, had wired
this tree. The metal would draw lightning strikes and, if the wire was long enough, conduct them to discharge into the ground. Which meant this wire should lead all the way down through the tree.

Something was under the roots of this behemoth.

My skin prickled and I felt an uneasy energy in the air, the black clouds ever-darkening. More from instinct than prudence, I suddenly let myself slide down this uppermost stub to the first branch below, where I clung like an ape. As I squinted back up at the stub of wire, there was a flash and an almost instantaneous boom of thunder. My eyes squeezed shut as I went half-blind.

A bolt hit the tip of the wire and the tree shuddered. A jolt punched through me, but the worst of the energy was shielded by the wood as lightning was drawn down through the wire. I gasped, shaken, but hung on.

Then the tingle passed, the wire sizzling.

Fat droplets of cold rain began to fall.

I had to get off this tree.

I
DESCENDED AS QUICKLY AS
I
COULD BUT A FALSE STEP WOULD
mean a fatal fall, so I had to pick my way with care. It seemed an eternity until I came within hailing distance of my companions and could shout to Magnus. “There’s something under this tree!”

“What?”

“A strip of metal runs from the top through the trunk! It draws lightning! And I think it must be to power something down below! We’ve got to find it, because Red Jacket is coming!”

By the time I’d climbed to the lowest branch, swung by my arms, and then dropped to the carpet of leaves and soft earth below, Magnus had made another circuit of the trunk. “This Yggdrasil is planted as firmly as the Rock of Gibraltar,” he said.

“It’s been nearly four hundred and fifty years since your Norse were here.” I didn’t say “might,” or “maybe,” I was accepting the presence of these long-lost Templar explorers as established fact. “The tree has undoubtedly grown a great deal, and maybe grown unusually fast because of the infusion of electricity, as the French scientist
Bertholon theorized. But as it grew upward, it somehow carried a strip of wire skyward to serve as a lightning rod. I think the wire ran out, and lightning strikes keep the tree trimmed to the height it is now. That wire had to come from somewhere below.”

He squinted up at the branches. “I don’t see a wire.”

“It’s inside the wood, going all the way to the ground. And what was the point unless the ground end of the wire is attached to something important? And if it was important, wouldn’t you want a way to get back to it? So there was a way under once, a tunnel or door.” I was glancing about myself, impatient because the Indians were coming. “Where that root arches at the butt of the tree, perhaps.” I pointed. “Imagine the wood growing over and around it. I know the tree looks solid, but…”

Magnus eyed the bark speculatively. “So there’ll be a door again. Forgive me, Yggdrasil.” He took his huge ax and went to a concave cavity at the base of the tree near an enormous root. “It
is
odd how it grew here. The tree is indented.” He aimed, and swung. There was a crack, and the tree groaned. “If there’s a tunnel, we’ll need torches.”

“Little Frog and I will gather branches,” Namida said.

“How could your Norse Templars know to come
here
of all places, in the middle of an unexplored continent?” I asked as my companion chopped.

“They didn’t,” Magnus said. “They knew the continent was here, from the Vikings, and after Black Friday of 1309 they scattered for survival and took their artifacts with them.” He swung and chopped, swung and chopped, his breath catching as he talked. “From the Indians they hear of a rich hunting ground with rivers running north, south, east, west…. Is it the ancestral site of paradise? They’re far beyond the reach of their persecutors, with superior technology amid primitive Indians. They had steel, and the natives didn’t. They dreamed of establishing a utopia centered around the energy of whatever artifact they’d brought.” Chips were flying.

“Thor’s hammer.”

He nodded, swinging the great ax again. “Perhaps they fought the Indians with it. Perhaps they reburied it when it became apparent their small numbers couldn’t prevail. And perhaps, with no time to build a pyramid or tower or other way to mark its place where they could find it again, they used ancient secrets to tie it to a living tree that could be a beacon to future Templars, while terrifying the Indians to stay away.”

“A beacon hidden by its own storms.”

“Yes, and the storm itself a beacon. So this tree, if not Yggdrasil, is a machine, to sustain what we’ve come to fetch.”

“Sustain how?”

He nodded upward at the sky.

The day kept turning darker as the clouds built, and I heard a rumble of thunder. The tree’s energy somehow created its own storms each day as the sun climbed higher, and its own winter each night. Lightning flickered high above like that wielded by Thor’s hammer. Or did I have it backward—did the lightning feed the tool?

“Men are coming!” Namida warned.

And yes, in the murk up the slope from which we’d descended there was movement in the trees. Red Jacket and his Dakota would be as bewildered as we were by the botanical giant and its cone of weather. They’d hesitate, I guessed, and then crawl closer through the high grass to watch and investigate. A bullet or two would make them slow down even more.

I readied the load on my rifle.

“Hurry!” Little Frog begged.

Now the ax was swinging as steadily as a metronome, the Norwegian’s aim precise, chips flying like confetti and spraying old leaves like new snow. The heavy ax was little more than a pinprick to the gargantuan tree and yet it seemed the monarch shuddered each time Magnus chopped, as if it hadn’t endured such indignity in all the cen
turies of its existence. Who else would dare attack? The idea of tunneling into the massive bole was insane—except as the ax work went on, the wood was changing.

“It’s punk past the bark and outer core,” Magnus said, breathing heavily as he swung. “It’s starting to come apart in chunks. This tree isn’t as strong as it appears.”

Another rumble from above and that curious prickling that I remembered from the City of Ghosts south of Jerusalem. The air felt alive, and crackling.

The meadow grass swayed as Red Jacket’s renegades crawled through it. I aimed at one such ripple, fired, and the movement stopped. Crouching behind a root, I reloaded. “Chop faster, Magnus!”

Now there were puffs of answering smoke from the high grass, the crack of gunfire, and bullets whapped into the trunk around us. Bloodhammer cursed as if they were annoying insects. The women dragged their bundles of twigs and wove them to make crude torches, using flint and steel to start a small fire in the leaves. I kept up a covering fire. Our persistent pursuers lay flat and invisible.

“There’s a hole!” Magnus cried.

We turned. A dirt tunnel like a burrow had appeared under the massive root, bigger than the opening into the bear cave. The tree had grown around the entrance. “Take the women and go look,” I ordered. “I’ll hold Red Jacket’s band off!”

I sighted, squeezed, and felt the reassuring buck against my shoulder, smelling the burnt powder. The sniping actually relaxed me. The familiar motions of cock, squeeze, ram, and prime were something to do, and I could keep our tormentors out of effective range. Bullets whacked back, my attackers invisible except for the puffs of musket smoke. They were smart enough to move after firing.

Finally I heard Magnus shout.

“We need an electrician!”

“Then come keep guard!”

Magnus crawled out and took the rifle with one hand, shaking the other as if burnt. “It’s very strange,” he said, wiping dirt from his mouth.

So I dropped down into the tunnel. The soil was held back by what at first I thought were roots, but then I realized the subterranean part of the tree had grown along the form of a tunnel made by a different support entirely: ivory. The Norse had lined the roof of their passageway with fossil mastodon tusks. Had they found the elephants? Found a boneyard? Or done in the last mammoths themselves?

The passage was drier than expected, and ahead was a scent of something scorched. I felt my way to the torchlight where the women were waiting. Namida and Little Frog were crouched in a womblike room too low for us to stand in, somewhere under the heart of the tree’s trunk, transfixed by an odd contraption. Ribs of root extended from tree trunk above to ground below, forming a cage of wood the size of a ship’s trunk. Above this cage, a glittering wire as thick as a feather’s quill descended from the cave roof to a wooden cylinder the size of a small keg. The wire took just one turn around the drum, so I guessed it had once held a thousand feet or more of costly wire that had unreeled as the tree grew upward over the centuries. When the drum was finally empty, the growth stopped, stunted by lightning because the rod could go no higher.

But that wasn’t what fascinated the women.

Instead, after its single turn around the drum, the wire also led downward to the thick, heavy head of…

An upright hammer.

The weapon was bigger than a carpenter’s tool but smaller than a sledge, and from the butt of its short handle to the massive head was about as long as my forearm. The hammerhead was fat and blunt, made of some kind of silvery ore that glowed, and looked to weigh at least fifteen pounds. More wires curved among the web of roots, and
the hammer was balanced on the end of its metal handle as if kept from toppling by electrical force.

“It’s Thor’s hammer,” I said in disbelief. Or
someone’s
hammer, connected to the lightning rod of this monster tree the same way I’d connected my Leyden jars of batteries to my hand-cranked generator at the siege of Acre in Israel. Mesmerized, I reached out to grab it, but Namida stopped my arm.

“No! Watch what happens.”

Suddenly there was a blinding flash and sparks flew like that fireworks display at Mortefontaine. The chamber shuddered and there was a low, distant boom, the far-off report of thunder. Then the sparks fell away, the hammer now blazing with electric fire that had been fed to it by the wire. It hummed. Slowly, its glow began to fade.

“It feeds on the lightning,” Namida said. “The tree does too, I think. Magnus tried to touch the hammer, and it burned him.”

So the hammer was being charged and kept ready, in much the same way I’d charged an electrical sword I’d used in a duel with Big Ned during the siege of Acre. Yes, the fundamental force that animates nature! Here was a weapon of some kind, yet what could we use to snare the thing without harming ourselves? I tried to think of what old Ben would have done, but was too distracted by the pop of gunshots from outside the tree. “We have to go help Magnus.”

We crawled back out. Magnus was crouched behind one of the enormous roots as I’d been and the three of us joined him.

“Did you get the hammer?”

“I don’t know how to seize it.”

Our assailants had crawled closer, taking less pain to hide themselves.

“We need it!”

“Magnus, we’re not gods.” I took my rifle back and handed him a musket. I shot, there was a yelp, their movement went still again, and then I heard an odd, nasal version of Cecil’s voice.

“We have Pierre!”

The voyageur was alive!

And so was my enemy.

“Hold your fire!” I ordered, reloading.

Slowly the English nobleman rose from the grass and hauled the Frenchman with him. The voyageur who’d rescued us was battered, his shirt loose, his eyes blackened, and his leggings in tatters. It looked like he’d been dragged across the prairie instead of marched. His hands were bound.

Little Frog gave a gasp, dark eyes bright with tears, and glanced desperately back at our tunnel.

But it wasn’t Pierre who startled me.

Instead it was Cecil Somerset himself. The handsome, proud face had been shattered by the rifle ball I’d fired during the canoe pursuit from Red Jacket’s village. His right cheek was cratered. Parts of his teeth and upper jaw were missing and his right eye was an empty socket. The wound was red and yellow with infection and pus, and his other eye was painfully squinted against the insects that buzzed at his head to feed on the corruption. The dashing aristocrat had been turned into a frightening monster. How long could the Englishman live with such a hideous wound? He must be keeping himself alive by force of will—because he wanted whatever was under the tree. His broken sword was jammed in his belt.

Another figure rose in the grass. Aurora! Makeup gone, hair greasy, clothes filthy and tattered from hard riding, yet she was still strikingly beautiful, tanned as an Amazon, holding a hunting piece of her own. Her fine bones and lovely figure were still there, and despite my logical loathing I couldn’t help but be wrenched by her allure. To underscore the gulf between us, she lifted her gun and deliberately sighted at me with no hesitation.

And then Red Jacket stood, too, one sleeve empty but holding a tomahawk in the other hand, his English coat ragged but still a bril
liant scarlet in the weird light. His look was simple hatred. He’d rip out my heart if he could. His mongrel band of Dakota and Ojibway renegades stood too, a scarred, vengeful bunch who looked more like pirates than princes of the plains. They looked greedy and foul, nothing like the proud warriors who had helped us on our canoe trip.

“My. Isn’t this a fine reunion?”

“We want you dead, Gage!” Cecil called in a voice made raspy from wounds and pain. “We want you to die horribly! I have twenty of the best warriors in the world here to make sure that happens! But we’ll spare you all—Bloodhammer, the women, even little Pierre here—in exchange for whatever artifact you’ve found.” He tilted his head back to look up at the tree. “I must say, the Rite never expected
this
.” Another flash, high above at the top in the clouds we couldn’t see, and a rumble of thunder. The light cast him in an eerie glow.

“The Egyptian Rite knew what we were looking for?”

“The Egyptian Rite knew that Ethan Gage is always looking for
something
.”

While Cecil looked as cocky as a man can with just half a face, his Indians, I noticed, were distinctly uneasy. They hadn’t expected this great tree either, with its weird storms and brooding shade. They too were thinking of the Wendigo.

“You call me
little
Pierre?” Pierre croaked in protest. “No man says that of the great Pierre Radisson!”

“Silence!” And Cecil struck him with a leather quirt, and then slashed him again and again as if reminded to take out his own pain and frustration on his captive. Little Frog gave a cry and a sob. I quivered with disgust. It took every ounce of discipline not to kill Somerset at once, but if I shot the monster, the others would strike Pierre down and rush us before I could reload. The voyageur swayed but stayed upright, eyes closed against the blows.

Magnus had given the muskets to Namida and Little Frog and now he picked up his ax, ready to charge like a Viking berserker. “Not yet,” I cautioned him.

Finally the Englishman stopped whipping our friend, gasping from exertion, while Pierre winced in miserable pain. Cecil’s one eye glittered with terrible madness, a tormented fury completely different than the passion of Magnus Bloodhammer.