The Granite Key (Arkana Mysteries) (28 page)

Erik shrugged and instead of following
Griffin
, he chose to leap down through the hole in the roof. Cassie struggled for a few moments with the notion of entering yet another creepy underground space. She took a deep breath and followed
Griffin
down the ramp.

The sun was sinking rapidly now. It barely provided enough light to illuminate the interior of the main chamber.

“How do you want to tackle this exactly?” the girl asked.

Griffin
held out his hand to Erik. “I think we’ll need torches again, if you please.”

The Security Coordinator retrieved the items from his back pack and handed them around.

Griffin
walked into a secondary burial chamber and trained the beam of his flashlight on the walls. “I imagine we should look at the walls of these structures. Ceilings too if they’re still intact. See if there are any key symbols carved into the stone. Remember the field journal said, ‘A message in stone waiting to be unlocked by one who holds the key.’”

“Sounds like a plan,” Erik agreed.

The three of them scoured every inch of the tholos but found none of the symbols from the key.

Erik went ahead and located the next underground tholos tomb. He scouted them out one by one as Cassie and
Griffin
searched their interiors.

The process was tedious and time-consuming. The sun had already set. They finished checking the tombs in the south cemetery and took the same approach with the crypts in the cemetery to the east of Karfi. None of them wanted to leave any tomb unchecked so they worked feverishly to finish them all. Despite Erik’s earlier warning, it was apparent that it was already too late for them to make their way down the mountain without the use of their flashlights.

The evening air grew chilly and damp. Cassie was grateful that she had heeded Erik’s advice to bring along a jacket. Although the sky was lit with stars, there was no moon, making the landscape even harder to navigate. They were down to the last tholos that Erik had been able to discover. It was in worse shape than the others. The dome was still intact but cracked in many places and the mound of earth which had once covered it had eroded centuries ago, exposing the top of the tomb to the elements. The retaining wall of the dromos had buckled and was on the verge of collapse. Rocks were piled along either side of the narrow ramp so that the trio had to crawl over heaps of stone to get to the stomion. The bottom half of it was clogged with loose rock.

The tomb itself consisted of a single round burial chamber. A search of it revealed nothing. The three of them squeezed back out the door and crawled disappointedly up the ramp. Cassie grew clumsy as she began to favor her blistered foot. She tripped and slammed into a tall boulder at the top of the dromos, crushing her little toe.

“Ouch,” she yelled, and then cursed under her breath. She leaned against the rock for balance as she inspected her foot, sure she had broken a toe. “What the…” she trailed off.

She found herself in the same spot only now it was the middle of the day. The sun was beating down on her head. Her arms were large and sinewy. She realized she was a man cutting deep marks into a large stone.

“Cassie, Cassie, are you all right?” Distant voices in her head were calling her. It was as if she was under water and somebody on the surface was shouting her name. Somebody was shaking her by the shoulder.

“Cassie! Snap out of it!” The voice grew louder and closer. It was Erik’s. His hands were clamped to her upper arms. He shook her so hard that her teeth rattled.

“Huh?” she asked groggily, disoriented. Gradually she came back to the present. She was seated on the ground, gazing stupidly from one man to the other.
Griffin
trained his flashlight on her face. She blinked. “Get that thing out of my eyes, will you?” She turned to Erik and winced. “And as for you, ouch! Let go of my arms. You’re hurting me.”

Erik exhaled deeply. She almost imagined it sounded like a sigh of relief. “She’s OK,” he said tersely, standing up. Then recovering himself, he demanded, “What the hell was that all about?”

She was back now. The realization of what had happened hit her and she leaped to her feet, wincing slightly. Her toe still throbbed. She was beginning to understand exactly what it was all about. “Guys!” she exclaimed urgently. “I think it’s here! You need to look here!” She pointed in the dark toward the massive block of stone behind her.

Both men simultaneously trained their flashlights on the rock.

“Good goddess!”
Griffin
exclaimed.

Chapter 39
– Decoding The Past

Griffin
fell to his knees in front of the boulder, his fingers tracing the lily pattern on its face. The stone was four feet high, rounded in the back but the front half had been polished flat to allow an inscription to be carved on it.

Erik kept his flashlight focused on the rock so
Griffin
could try to decipher the message. “I don’t believe it,” he said incredulously. “Between the two of you, you actually managed to find it.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised.” Cassie’s tone was less hostile than it might have been. The fact that Erik was paying them any kind of compliment, even a backhanded one, was a welcome change from his usual attitude. She sat on the ground at the base of the stone holding her flashlight over the photos of the key markings, comparing the symbols to the carving.

“Yes, this is definitely it!”
Griffin
could barely contain his excitement at the find. “The lily above the inscription is an exact match to the ones on the key. It’s a coded way of saying, ‘To find The Bones Of The Mother.’ His hand traced another line etched a foot below the lily. “And here we have a line of symbols that I ought to be able to translate in a few moments.”

The Scrivener sat on the ground in front of the boulder and drew a small notebook and pencil out of his jacket pocket. From another pocket he drew a thick stack of folded pages. “This will take a bit. I have to compare the symbols on the boulder to the ones on the key, translate those to Linear B, then translate the Linear B text to modern Greek and then to English. Cassie, if you wouldn’t mind training your torch on these pages while I write.” He began scratching on the pad and referring to his various reference sources. For several minutes he seemed to be conducting a monologue with himself. “No, that’s not it. The syntax is wrong. Let’s try it this way. Ah, that’s better. Now we’re making progress.”

Cassie thought about taking a nap, flashlight in hand, while he nattered on but then he snapped his notebook shut decisively. “Right, that’s it then.”

“You got it?” Cassie asked, instantly alert.

“Yes,” he replied somewhat guardedly.

Noting his tone, Erik asked, “What is it?”

“Well, the good news is that now we know how many relics there are. The bad news is that they aren’t hidden together.”

“Why don’t you just tell us what the line says?” Cassie urged.

Griffin
sighed. “It reads, ‘You will find the first of five you seek.’”

“Five,” Erik echoed. “I guess this isn’t gonna be a slam dunk after all.”

“They could be hidden anywhere,” Cassie moaned. “Scattered halfway across the planet for all we know.”

“Not to worry,”
Griffin
said reassuringly. “We have more code to translate. Hopefully the next set of characters will give us the location of the first relic at least.” He ran his hand over a second line of symbols carved several inches below the first.

It took several more minutes of page-shuffling and note-scratching before
Griffin
glanced up, scowling slightly.

“That is not a happy face,” Erik observed.

“Admittedly this line is a bit obscure,”
Griffin
hedged.
 
“It reads: ‘When the soul of the lady rises with the sun.’”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” the Security Coordinator challenged irritably.

Griffin
shrugged. “Haven’t a clue. It may be a metaphor. It may be a reference to a point in time. In either case, this will take additional research to sort out.”

Cassie slumped forward and rubbed her forehead. “Guess we aren’t going to be able to scamper off and collect those bones tomorrow then, huh?”

“Don’t give way.”
Griffin
tried to sound comforting. “There’s bound to be something less abstract in the next line.” His fingers traced some additional markings carved in the middle of the stone. “Oh dear,” he said in dismay.

Erik pointed his flashlight on the spot. Directly below the first two lines of code, the rock had been hollowed out. Beneath the niche were additional glyphs.

“Hmmm,” the Scrivener said ponderously.

“More problems?” Erik sounded tense.

Griffin
referred to his photos of the symbols and then back to the boulder again. “You see these markings just here? They don’t seem to match any of the characters we have.”

“Great!” Cassie exclaimed. “We came all this way to translate two lines that don’t tell us anything yet.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” the Scrivener intoned. “Give me a few moments to puzzle this out.” He sat down cross-legged on the ground in front of the stone and stared at it.

Cassie thought he’d gone into a trance because he continued to stare at it for about ten minutes without moving. She groaned. This didn’t look good. What were they missing?

“Would this help?” Erik asked laconically as he held out the granite key toward
Griffin
.

“What?” the Scrivener looked up at him distractedly, not realizing what he was holding. Then recognition dawned. “Good grief, where did you get that?”

“You left it behind at the hotel. I thought it might be important so I brought it with me.”

Griffin
took the stone key contemplatively. “Despite my initial ideas about the key, I’ve come to the conclusion we don’t need it physically at all. In fact, I’m not quite sure what good it will do to...” He stopped short and caught his breath. “Hello, what’s this?”

Cassie shone her flashlight up at Erik. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

The Security Coordinator rolled his eyes. “I hardly ever know what he’s talking about.”

Griffin
was on his knees in front of the boulder again, apparently trying to fit the granite key into the slot in the large rock.

Erik and Cassie both focused their beams on the hollow spot on the boulder.

After
Griffin
positioned the key, he studied it for a minute. “No, that’s not it,” he murmured half to himself. He rotated the stone cylinder and tried fitting it into the slot again. “Not quite yet.” Rotating it yet again, he leaned back on his heels to consider. “Ingenious!” he exclaimed, his voice filled with admiration.

Cassie leaned forward to peer over his shoulder. “What is?”

Erik held his flashlight steady over the key.

“You see these markings on the boulder, just here?”
Griffin
asked her.

“Uh huh. What about them?”

“They constitute half of a symbol. The other half is on the edge of the key itself.” It would be the same as if I did this.” He took one of the pages of symbol photographs and drew a line across the row of hieroglyphs, bisecting each of them through the middle.

“Oh, I get it,” Cassie said approvingly. “Those weird hash marks on each of the edges of the key that we couldn’t figure out. They’re actually the top half of a symbol.”

“Yes, but the trick is to know which side of the key to fit into the groove on the boulder. The key has five sides, hence five edges with half symbols.”
Griffin
observed the boulder again. “I believe I’ve aligned them properly now. Let me try to translate the next line.”

He sat back down in a cross-legged position. Cassie held a flashlight over his various note papers so he could write unencumbered while Erik held a light over the inscription on the boulder.

It took
Griffin
another fifteen minutes of muttering and leafing through his notes to finish the job. “Aha!” he exclaimed. “A useful clue at last!”

His companions exchanged an eager look.

“It reads: ‘At the home of the Mountain Mother.’”

Cassie felt more than a little deflated. “Well, that doesn’t tell us much.”

“Just be glad I was able to make it sound even that intelligible,”
Griffin
protested. “Linear B is not a language that lends itself well to poetry. I might as well be using an accounting glossary to write blank verse!”

The girl relented. “I didn’t mean to make you mad. I know you’re doing the best you can.”

“Besides, that line isn’t as cryptic as you might think,” the Scrivener said smiling for the first time. “The term ‘Mountain Mother’ is a very precise epithet for the goddess. It was used specifically in connection with her place of worship on
Mount Ida
.”

“So that line gives us a place to look?” Cassie asked uncertainly. “There’s a mountain on
Crete
that’s called Ida?”

“Exactly so,”
Griffin
affirmed. “And a peak sanctuary where the great goddess was venerated. The home, if you will, of the Mountain Mother.”

 
Erik rubbed his head wearily. “Time for a recap. What does the message say when you put it all together?”

Griffin
referred to his notes. “The entire text now reads: ‘You will find the first of five you seek, when the soul of the lady rises with the sun, at the home of the Mountain Mother.’”

“So we know how many relics there are and where the first one is hidden,” the Security Coordinator mused out loud.

“All that remains is to solve the riddle of the second line,”
Griffin
added. “A task which cannot be accomplished here. Might I suggest we continue this discussion in more comfortable surroundings?”

Cassie stood up, dusting off her jeans. “I guess we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

From out of nowhere, an arm shot out across her throat, pulling her backwards. She could feel a gun barrel pointed at her temple.

A voice with a southern accent punctuated the darkness. “I’d say your work is just about done, folks.”