“Holding steady on this end,” Remi called when Sam reached the halfway point.
Sam reached the opposite wall, transferred first one hand, then the other, to the stalagmite, then swung his legs up and braced his right heel against another protrusion. Testing his weight as he went, he contorted his body until he was sitting perched atop the stalagmite. He took a moment to catch his breath, then slowly stood up until he was level with the opening. A quick boost with his hands and a shove off the stalagmite, and he was inside the crawl space.
“Be right back,” he called to Remi, then scrabbled inside. He was back thirty seconds later. “Looks good. It widens out farther on.”
“On my way,” Remi answered.
In two minutes she was across, and Sam was pulling her into the opening. They lay still together for a few moments, enjoying the feeling of solid rock beneath them.
“This reminds me a lot of our third date,” Remi said.
“Fourth,” Sam corrected her. “The third date was horseback riding. The fourth was the rock climbing.”
Remi smiled, kissed him on the cheek. “And they say guys don’t remember those things.”
“Who’s they?”
“They who haven’t met you.” Remi shone her headlamp around. “Any sign of booby traps?”
“Not yet. We’ll keep a sharp eye, but if your estimate on the age of that spear is accurate, I doubt any trip mechanisms would still be working.”
“Famous last words.”
“You have my permission to put it on my tombstone. Come on.”
Sam started crawling, with Remi right behind him. As Sam had promised, a few seconds later the crawl space opened into a kidney-shaped alcove roughly twenty feet wide and five feet tall. In the opposite wall were three vertical clefts, each no wider than eighteen inches.
They stood up and stoop-walked to the first cleft. Sam shone his headlamp inside. “Dead end,” he said. Remi checked the next: another dead end. The third cleft, while deeper than its neighbors, also petered out a half dozen paces inside.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Sam said.
“Maybe not,” Remi murmured, then started toward the right-hand wall, her headlamp pointing at what looked like a horizontal slash of darker rock where the wall met the ceiling. As they drew closer, the slash seemed to grow taller, rising into the ceiling, until they realized they were looking at a slot-like tunnel.
Standing side by side, Sam and Remi peered into the opening, which rose away from them at a forty-five-degree angle for twenty feet before rounding over a jagged bump in the floor.
“Sam, do you see what-”
“I think I do.”
Jutting over the ridge in the floor was what appeared to be the sole of a boot.
9
CHOBAR GORGE, NEPAL
The lack of treads on the boot’s sole told Sam and Remi they weren’t looking at a modern piece of footwear, and the skeletal toe poking through a rotted patch in the boot told them the owner had long since departed the earthly plane.
“Is it strange that this sort of thing doesn’t shock me anymore?” Remi said, staring at the foot.
“We’ve stumbled across our fair share of skeletons,” Sam agreed. Such surprises were part and parcel of their avocation. “See any trip wires?”
“No.”
“Let’s take a look around.”
Sam braced his legs against one wall, his back against the other, and let Remi use his arm to pull herself up. He made his way up the slope and over the hump in the floor. After panning his headlamp around the space, he called, “All clear. You’re going to want to see this, Remi.”
She was beside him in an instant. Kneeling together, they examined the skeleton.
Protected from the elements and predators, and entombed in the relative dryness of the cave, the remains had partially mummified. The clothes, which appeared to be made mostly of laminated and layered leather, remained largely intact.
“I don’t see any obvious signs of trauma,” Remi said.
“How old?”
“Just speculating . . . at least four hundred years.”
“In the same range as the spear.”
“Right.”
“This looks like a uniform,” said Sam, touching a sleeve.
“Then that makes more sense,” replied Remi, pointing. Jutting from what had once been a belt sheath was the hilt of a dagger. She panned her headlamp around the space, then murmured, “Home sweet home.”
“Home, perhaps,” Sam replied, “but sweet? . . . I suppose everything’s relative.”
A few paces from the flat area on which the skeleton lay, the tunnel widened into an alcove of roughly a hundred square feet. In several hand-carved niches in the rock walls were the stubs of crude candles. At the base of one wall, nestled in a natural hollow, were the remains of a fire; beside it, a pile of small animal bones. At the far end of the alcove were the remains of what looked like a bedroll, and, beside it, a sheathed sword, half a dozen crudely honed spears, a compound bow, and a quiver containing eight arrows. A scattering of miscellaneous items occupied the remainder of the floor: a pail, a coil of half-rotted rope, a leather pack, a round wood-and-leather shield, a wooden chest . . .
Remi stood up and began walking around the space.
“He was definitely expecting unfriendly company,” Sam observed. “This has all the signs of a last stand. But to what end?”
“Maybe it has something to do with this,” Remi said, and knelt down beside the wooden chest. Sam walked over. About the size of a small ottoman, the chest was a perfect cube made of a dark, heavily lacquered hardwood, with leather carrying straps on three sides and double shoulder straps on the fourth. Sam and Remi could find no hinges, no locking mechanisms. The seams were so well formed, they were nearly invisible. Engraved into the top of the chest were four intricate Asian characters in a two-by-two grid pattern.
“Do you recognize the language?” Sam asked.
“No.”
“This is remarkable,” Sam said. “Even with modern woodworking tools it takes incredible skill to create something like this.”
He rapped on the side with his knuckles and got a solid thud in return. “Doesn’t sound hollow.” Gently he rocked the chest from side to side. From within came a faint rattling sound. “But it is. Fairly light too. I don’t see any other markings? You?”
Remi leaned down and from side to side, examining it. She shook her head. “Bottom?” Sam tipped it. Remi checked, then said, “Nothing there, either.”
“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to build this,” said Sam, “and it looks like our friend here was prepared to give his life to protect it.”
“It may be more than that,” Remi added. “Unless we’ve stumbled onto the mother of all coincidences, I think we may have found what Lewis King was looking for.”
“If so, how did he miss this? He was so close.”
“If he didn’t make it across the pit,” Remi replied, “could he have survived?”
“Only one person knows the answer to that.”
They turned their attention to documenting the contents of the cave. Not knowing how soon they would return, and unable to take with them but a fraction of the artifacts, they would have to rely on digital photographs, drawings, and notes. Luckily, Remi’s background and training made her well equipped to do just this. After two hours of painstaking work, she proclaimed the job done.
“Wait,” Remi said, then knelt beside the shield.
Sam joined her. “What is it?”
“These scratches . . . the light caught them. I think . . .” She leaned over, took a deep breath, and blew on the shield’s leather surface. An accumulation of rotted leather dust scattered.
“Not a scratch,” Sam observed, and blew clear some more dust, then again and again until the shield’s surface was exposed.
As Remi had suspected, the scratches were in fact an etching burned into the leather itself.
“Is that a dragon?” Remi asked.
“Or a dinosaur. Probably his crest or that of his unit,” Sam guessed.
Remi took a couple dozen shots of the etching, and they stood up. “That’ll do it,” she said. “What about the chest?”