Chapter 7: Into the Tomb
The streets around the Louvre were unusually quiet and deserted this night – partly due to the icy weather, but mostly due to the fear of the Monstrum still casting its shadow over the French metropolis. Kurtis Trent was one of the few motorcyclists not scared off the streets by the serial killer rumors.
He sped down the Pont du Carrousel and continued to the double-tracked Place du Carrousel. The external wall of the Louvre's Denon wing whizzed by to his left. Reaching an opening between a café and a souvenir shop, the biker made a sharp 90 degree turn and drove into the alley. He parked behind a heap of garbage-stuffed plastic bags, where his prized bike couldn't possibly be visible from the narrow sidewalk in the distance. The man then footed it the rest of the way to his destination: a seedy dead end twenty metres from Place du Carrousel.
The layer of trash covering the floor incidentally served as camouflage for the manhole cover, making it nigh invisible to anyone not actually looking for the sewer entrance. Kurtis, however, easily spotted the disc through the malodorous mess of rubbish and grime. He brushed the cover tolerably clean with his foot before crouching down to grab the depressions.
After half a minute of fruitless exertions to pull the heavy, slippery cover up, his arms had had enough and his fingers were starting to go numb. "Oh, fuck it," he mumbled.
Kurtis stood from the filthy alley floor and reached his right palm out above the cover. This way of moving the stubborn plate would, in lieu of muscles, require mental strength. He was used to moving doors and windows like this, but lifting a circular object was new to his telekinetic repertoire. The man closed his eyes and remembered the Latin mantras his father had taught him.
"Vires. Maxima vires."
As he stood in the alley, concentrating all psychic energy on the manhole cover, he completely forgot about the rest of his surroundings. The earth could have quaked and he wouldn't have noticed at all.
"Levitatis!"
The manhole cover rose out of the hole and flew two metres sideways until it hit the brick wall and clanked to the ground. Kurtis' outstretched hand fell limply to his side and he slumped to his knees, gasping in agony. The few seconds just after moving a new kind of heavy object were always painful, but the headache wore off as quickly as it had gushed forth. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, stood and glared into the manhole.
The fall to the tunnel below looked perfectly safe. From there it should be a 45 minute walk through the labyrinth of sewers to the west end of the Louvre, where his recently purchased plastic explosives would help him get inside the museum. Kurtis produced a flashlight and dropped into the sewer.
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Lara's footsteps echoed through the dark, narrow corridor of the lab wing. A strong smell of gypsum and linseed oil wafted out from the restoration-workrooms to her right. The door to Carvier's office was located at the end of the hall, but Lara didn't have the code for the number plate.
She entered a security office through a steel door. The room had numerous file cabinets lined up against the right wall and four desks buried in paper work at the left wall. A round doorway with two D-shaped glass doors was located in the middle of the far wall. Beyond it, a single guard stood in front of several monitor screens, keeping an eye on the recordings of the few security cameras that weren't just put up around the museum to intimidate tourists from fiddling with paintings.
The panes noiselessly slid away as Lara approached them, and the security guard never knew what hit him when the tranquilizer dart pierced the back of his neck. Lara holstered the Dart SS and stepped over the unconscious man sprawled on the floor. It didn't take long to spot the monitor she was interested in. The reddish-toned screen gave her a bird's eye view of the late professor's room.
"Well, Mademoiselle keeps a tidy office," Lara thought as she used the control panel to zoom in on the mahogany desk opposite the entrance. The computer was still turned on and an Internet Explorer window open, but Lara couldn't make out the site. A scrap of paper was posted on the upper corner of the computer, the numbers '14639' scrawled across it.
Lara pivoted, left the security office and walked back down the hall to Carvier's office door. She quickly punched in the code and grinned when the door automatically swung open. "Bingo. Time to snoop around."
Lara walked up to the desk she had seen through the security monitor. Dust whirled up from the old wood as she pulled out drawers and opened cabinets, rummaging through piles of books and documents. In the lower right cabinet of the desk, she finally found Carvier's high level security pass and tucked the card into her pocket.
She briefly skimmed the internet site on Carvier's computer, 'shadowwhistories.pr'. Written in academic English, it contained information on Brother Obscura, the artist and Lux Veritatis monk who painted over the original images of the Obscura paintings. Apparently, he was ordered to disguise the "Black Alchemist"'s paintings with religious imagery. Then, the five paintings were hidden. But he made secret copies of them – sketches – and hid them, too. They became known as the Obscura engravings.
"So that's the engravings Werner mentioned in his notebook – the ones he could buy from that Mathias Vasiley guy in Prague," Lara thought. This whole affair was starting to get complicated.
A print of an Obscure painting hung above the fireplace to the left of the desk. The painting depicted a traditional Roman crucifixion in the foreground and a twilight landscape of dark green hills in the background. An ominous, fortified city loomed in the horizon. Lara read the caption, written on a piece of cardboard in Carvier's handwriting:
OBSCURA PAINTINGS – These five images were painted on thick wooden bases, much like Russian icons. They were created by the Black Alchemist Pieter Van Eckhardt in the 13- or 1400's. Together, the paintings hide an alchemic artifact called the Sanglyph, also known as the Blood Sign.
"I wonder what that does?"
The paintings were seized by the Lux Veritatis, painted over with religious imagery and hidden. It is also rumored that each painting has a metallic symbol of power built into it.
"So that's why Eckhardt wants the paintings," Lara guessed. She cast the Obscura print one last fascinated glance and then walked up to a worktable next to the open door. The documents on the table had details about the Obscura engravings. It said that all five contained encrypted maps of an Obscura painting's secret location. "Now that could be useful."
A few notes on alchemy were also scattered on the table. According to Carvier's research, alchemy was the first real science in Europe. Alchemists claimed they could change all matter, like metals into other metals. The alchemist's "Tree of Matter" was in fact an early form of the periodic table itself.
As much as Lara wanted to stay and examine the rest of the professor's notes, she had other, more important reasons for visiting the Louvre by night. She hurried out of the office and down the hall, unlocking the door at the other end with her security pass.
After making her way down a stairwell, another hall and a sculpture gallery, Lara found herself back in the awe-inspiring Grande Galerie. She walked across the vestibule and swiped her security pass at the double doors to the archaeological dig. They swung open, revealing another wide marble-staircase on the other side. Lara took two steps at a time and soon reached the basement at the bottom.
The floor and walls looked older here, made of crumbling stones. Various wooden boxes and barrels were placed haphazardly around the storerooms. Lara soon found the entrance to the dig site beneath the Grande Galerie. "Bugger. If only I had telekinetic powers," Lara muttered as she strained muscles to push the heavy steel doors open.
The immense hall on the other side was lit by numerous bright projectors casting their beams on the sandy ground. Shovels and cranes were seated motionless all around the metal fence surrounding the huge excavation in the middle. Lara had been wise to visit the dig at night, since the place would undoubtedly be crawling with Louvre's archaeologists in the daytime.
The crescent-shaped excavation went about five storeys down, wooden scaffolding and ladders lining the sides. A rocky bridge arched upwards between the edges of the pit, leading straight across to the other side, but the fence prevented Lara from stepping out on it.
In the far side of the pit, on the highest storey below the top edge, a brown disc covered with symbols was set in the vertical wall. It spun around at a fast, continual speed. In the horizontal ground above the wheel, a larger, circular bronze plate rested in the middle of the rocky surface. Lara had a feeling the spinning disc was some kind of ancient lock, and once she had cracked the code to unlock it, the horizontal disc would open - revealing the entrance to the tomb.
She'd check out the camp across the pit first, though. Following the walkway around the excavation, Lara approached the row of white trailers. A security guard came running out from the nearest one, pulling out a taser. "Arrêtez!" he bellowed, but a few encounters with Lara's booted foot silenced him.
The trailer he had emerged from contained nothing interesting apart from a switch on the wall next to a row of generators. Lara pulled the switch to turn on the power. The air slowly became cooler due to the ventilation system kicking in, and a geo-thermal device was powered up nearby.
Lara left the trailer and continued along the walkway to the right of the pit. Some metal doors in the wall caught her eye and she pushed them open. The room on the other side had a X-ray device suspended from the ceiling above a rectangle of dark soil. Lara walked up to a table with a control panel and started moving the scanner around, contemplating its underground finds on the bluish screen on the corner of the table. Silhouettes of human bones, broken medieval shields and a templar's sword drifted across the screen.
When the machine reached the far left corner of the square of soil, Lara finally saw something that could prove useful later: a metallic symbol resembling an O with an odd T sticking up from the top. Lara clicked the button for printing the scanner screen and grabbed the warm paper from the printer, crumpling it into her pocket.
Back in the excavation hall, she turned right and entered another narrow trailer. The desks were all cluttered up with budgets, reports and photos of the dig. A terminal rose above this mess, displaying an internet article on the obscure mythical Nephilim race.
They were the cursed hybrid offspring of humans and angels, who had been expelled from Heaven. These Nephilim beings were said to be able to magically change their physical appearance, and had flourished in Turkey in early biblical times. They were now extinct, though. "Well, you can't win 'em all …"
It also said that the Black Alchemist, Eckhardt, made a pact with the Nephilim in Turkey, 600 years ago. In return for using his alchemic skills to help the Nephilim, he would live forever. "I wonder if this is the same Eckhardt who hired Von Croy?"
A paper with another newly unearthed symbol rested in the printer. This symbol was just a dot inside a circle. Lara snatched the printout and left the trailer. She walked back around the excavation until she found a break in the fence and climbed down a ladder to the scaffolding. In the opposite side of the pit, the disc was still spinning as ludicrously fast as always.
A horizontal ledge protruded just below the left end of the arched bridge. Lara took off from the railing and jumped across to the ledge. From there, she leapt onwards to the walkway before the spinning disc. The disc was actually split up in four concentric circles spinning in different directions and randomly changing speed all the time. It was almost hypnotizing to watch. But when Lara approached the disc, all four circles abruptly stopped.
Now that they were no longer in motion, Lara could make out the 64 golden symbols engraved in the bronze wheel, 16 symbols along the circumference of each circle. Four brackets were lined up along the left horizontal radius. Lara figured she had to place the right symbols in the right brackets by using the metal crank above the brackets. "That shouldn't be too difficult."
First, she pulled the crank until the symbols she had found in the camp above were in the two middle brackets. She used the levers farther up the walkway to lock them in place. "Okay, only two more symbols left. Where could I find those? … Maybe Werner wrote about this in his notebook." Lara produced the small brown book and skimmed the man's entries.
A metallic symbol is hidden beneath the surface of each painting. Check with Carvier about X-ray facilities in the Louvre?
Lux Veritatis – 'Light of Truth'. A secret 12th century order of warrior monks who hid the Obscura paintings in the 1400's. Said to posses the three Periapt shards – artifacts of power, crystalline shards shaped like spearheads – 'weapons of light'?!
The two missing symbols are hidden close by the buttress.
Next to that last note, Von Croy had done a rough sketch of the symbol wheel. He had also drawn two symbols – a crescent moon and a fleur-de-lis – with arrows pointing to the left and right circles of the wheel. Lara slipped the book back into her pocket and turned the crank until the moon symbol was in the outer bracket. After locking it in place with the left lever, she ran back to the wheel and cranked the final symbol into the inner bracket.
There was a deep, rusty noise from above as the horizontal trapdoor split up in numerous triangular pieces, rising from the opening like unfolding petals. "Finally," Lara breathed, made her way back to the smaller ledge and jumped up to the rock arch. By the time she reached the trapdoor, the petals had already unfolded completely to reveal a tunnel leading vertically into the unexplored depths beneath the Louvre.
"Obscura painting, here I come." Lara hopped off the edge and dropped into the darkness.
She landed on sandy ground. The cavern around her was illuminated by bright beams coming from holes in the ceiling, but the walls also seemed to be giving off a green glow. The smell of dust pestered her nostrils as she walked on through the caves. "Why is 14th century air always so stale?"
Lara soon reached an opening at the end of the passage. Beyond it was a truly breathtaking view. It looked like she was at the top of an immense, cylindrical hall clearly built by humans, with walls made of rectangular stones that were piled up with a precision rivalling the Egyptian pyramids themselves. Chunks of collapsed balconies and bridges lay in white klits on the distant bottom. Exquisite stone gargoyles protruded from the walls. Gold-coloured butterflies fluttered around, while hordes of bats hung from the ceiling.
"Wow! This is really something!" Lara blurted out, absorbing the view. Moments like this were the reason she had become an archaeologist. She hadn't felt the thrill of exploring an ancient culture's remnants since the events in Egypt several years ago. And until now, she hadn't realized how much she'd missed it …
"I could be right at home here. Now, how would Werner have tackled this?"
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A/N: Black Sinner: Yeah, it's not original at all, but that's part of what makes it so fun to write. It's a nice break from my more original stories. Besides, the game had a lot of missing dialogue and underdeveloped characters, so I'm hoping to fill in the holes here.
