Gosh, this chapter was a bitch to write. That'll teach me to start posting stories before I've fully worked out all my plot details, eh! Anyway, here we have, I think, a detailed, plot-hole-free, vaguely historically accurate installment.
Thanks to those of you who expressed concern over my concussion - I appreciate it, and I'm fully recovered now. :-) And, since almost everyone of you (rightfully!) expressed a dislike for the treatment of Kurtis, I've happily left it to the imagination this time. I've illustrated what he's going through, that was all that was important and we don't need to suffer that anymore.
SilverDragon - Thankyou kindly. Well done for recognising that last scene as the dream sequence Lara had. The plot thickens, no?
NFI - Thanks for reviewing again! Look, no Kurtis mistreatment today! Yay!
Linzi - Thankyou too. We'll be learning a lot more about Mr Fishman. Originally I was going to introduce him than almost immediately kill him off, but I think he's kind of interesting...
Lady Lara Croft - Oooh two reviews! My gratitude to you!
Godavari - You are too funny for words:-) I loved your review. Reign in that pokey stick because here's another installment! Although, you'll have to wait until next chapter to find out what's happening with Kurtis' freaky visions. Hee Hee.
Tombs of Forgotten Warriors
Lara exited the jeep and slammed her door, looking over to Bryce and Hillary as they climbed out of the other side. "Lonely Planet were not wrong when they said that driving in Ukraine was not for the faint hearted." She took a calming breath and straightened her hair and clothes. "And I thought driving in central London was chaotic…"
They looked up, taking in the massive gothic building before them that attracted their attention with its elaborately carved entrance and pillars and drew their gaze upwards with its elongated architecture punctuated with ledges and gargoyles at each floor, shooting up towards the sky.
"If we can't find what we're looking for in there, then it doesn't exist and the Helmet of Hades will remain forever hidden," Hillary remarked.
"Let's hope you're right," Lara muttered, and together they walkedto the largest library in Odessa.
"So remind me," Hillary continued, "what is it that we're looking for, exactly?"
"A keyhole."
"A keyhole?"
"Bryce's research gives me the key – the Ritual of Anubis – but not the keyhole. When and where do we need to perform the ritual?"
Bryce got slightly defensive at that. "Hey – my research didn't make any references to the needs for a when or where."
"That's why we're here," Lara smiled, pushing open the door.
The reception was attended only by a wiley old woman with long grey hair and an old fashioned, dark coloured dress that was made even darker by the sombre lighting that seemed to purposefully pervade the whole place, as if its gothic origins prevented it from entering the era of the electric light. Lara smiled slightly as they walked past reception, happy to find herself unchallenged. Obviously their only obstacle would be in checking out any books they found, but hopefully the institution had been dragged far enough into the modern world to incorporate photocopiers, and Bryce probably had his handheld scanner anyway.
After some searching and a lot of use of a Ukrainian/English dictionary, they eventually found the mythology and ancient history sections, hidden adjacent and deep in a corner of the sixth floor stacks, even more dimly lit than the rest of the place. Hillary made a face as he selected a random volume, the dust coming off thick on his fingers, and opened it up.
"My god," he said, "the last time this was checked out, I was eight."
"Doesn't surprise me," Bryce said. "It's not like we've seen more than five people the whole time we've been here."
"It's a shame," Lara said quietly. "Sad, when you think about it. All these books, all this knowledge, and it's just…forgotten. Left by the way side. People don't have time for this anymore, and when they do need it they just run a search on the internet."
"They don't know what they're missing," Bryce piped up, surprising everybody with his words. "It's nice to get back to a nice book that's older you are and hidden in some dark, peaceful corner of a library. It's like…being the first person in longer than you can reasonably imagine, to read some long forgotten knowledge…like finding treasure, y'know? A privilege." Bryce continued to leaf through a yellowed book, unaware of the amazed stares he was receiving from Lara and Hillary. Exchanging a look that could only be described as conveying, 'Well, what d'ya know?', they said nothing and turned back to their own searches, choosing the English language books first.
Half an hour later they were sitting around a well-polished table by an original window, books open and spread out across the whole area lit by the pale afternoon light, Bryce's laptop squeezed into a corner and taking notes.
"Watch your internet connection, Bryce," Lara quietly warned. "I don't trust Fishman not to have Maria spy on what we're doing."
"What makes you think they'd need to?"
"What was it he said? 'Taking his time and sorting out the practicalities'? Gareth is as clueless as we are when it comes to the details. If he wasn't, he wouldn't be risking losing the Helmet to all the other raiders out there."
Interrupting with a complete change of subject as though he had been unaware of the other conversation all along, Hillary spoke.
"And Anubis appeared from the depths of the seas, as tall as the mountains westward and as black as the waters in the storms he brought. He looked upon the bank where the warrior knelt. 'For I am your servant; your voice rouses me from my slumber. Arise, messenger of my lord. The Gates are open.' And the warrior stood, forcing Anubis to his knees, and the waters bubbled as though boiling. He was swept deep, taken down into the underworld, and the warrior was seen no more."
Lara and Bryce looked up, startled by the description.
"That's the translation of a Latin inscription found on an otherwise unmarked tomb unearthed during an excavation of Tyras, the Ancient Greek city built on the banks of the Dnister. Apparently the inscription was roughly done, as if it wasn't supposed to be there. They theorised that maybe it was the metaphorical explanation for an unknown drowning victim." Hillary elaborated.
"Mountains westward…that must mean the Carpathians, Egypt doesn't have any. And black waters…the Black Sea was thought to be named so because of the dark storms that pervade in winter," Lara murmured.
Bryce chipped in. "We already know from that old map in our library that the Black Sea is where the Underworld is, and it doesn't sound like Egpyt, not to mention that it was found in Ukraine - that has to relate to the Ritual of Anubis being used to gain entrance to Hades."
"So we perform the ritual on the banks of the Dnister at the mouth to the Black Sea?" Hillary asked.
Lara nodded. "When, though?"
Bryce took the book from Hillary and turned to his laptop to take notes, but stopped when he found the internet search he'd been running had finished and there was now a search result window taking priority on his screen. Holding the book limply in one forgotten hand, he now scanned through the page summaries, his eyes moving quickly. "I think I may have just found that one out."
He put the book down, opening up one of the internet sites and scan reading, summarising aloud to his companions as he went. "There's an Egyptian myth…about a boy and his father who are the only ones to ever go to the afterlife and return…the boy was some sort of sorcerer…he took his father to the Temple of Osiris…did a ritual…they toured the afterlife and returned. Looks like the whole thing happened over the course of one night – they had to be back before dawn, before the Boat of Ra that carries the dead was reborn into the morning."
"And the ritual?" Lara asked.
Bryce read in more detail, a smile growing steadily. "Almost exactly the same as what we've researched as the Ritual of Anubis."
Lara grinned. "Then we make for the Dnister at sunset."
Above them, a CCTV camera whirred as it zoomed in on their position, its outer casing spinning as it refocused on their activities.
In his hotel room, Gareth Fishman leaned over Maria, watching the streaming video on her laptop over her shoulder. Pixelated and black and white, two men and one woman sat around a library desk surrounded by books and discussing something one of them was reading off a computer.
"Can you read what's on that monitor?"
Maria continued tapping her keyboard, sending code to the library's surveillance cameras. The video on her screen zoomed in on the computer, and then sharpened, giving a perfect view of the online text.
Fishman grinned. "Take a screenshot, then see what's in that book Hillary's got." He straightened up, looking conceited. "Thanks, Lara, that's just what I needed," he said to himself.
The hotel lobby was two storeys high, with doors high up in the East and West walls leading through to the second floor rooms. A large marble grandiose staircase started out in the centre of the five-star lobby and reached up, splitting in two halfway up and curving out in opposite directions to meet the doors. Its balustrade was carved stone, its cool and old surface inviting one descending to stop and lean on it, looking down over the richly carpeted floor below with a dark wooden reception desk to one side and plush armchairs around low gilded coffee tables and free standing chess boards to the other. Grand though it was, it was a touch shabby, showing its age, but it only seemed to make the place more homely.
The inviting class of the place was, however, completely ignored by the two parties who now entered from opposite sides of the second floor almost simultaneously, clumping down the steps, overloaded with equipment and encumbered by warm hiking clothes. Halfway down the first flight the two groups stopped, spying each other at the same moment and coming to a halt both in conversation and motion, eyeing each other calculatingly.
After a moment's pause, they both began to continue down to the central reservation where the two staircases joined into the one, stopping on the small landing in front of each other and continuing to silently weigh each other up.
"Hello, Gareth," said Lara somewhat warily, flanked on either side by Bryce and Hillary.
"Morning, Lara," Fishman greeted, returning the look as his technical assistant Maria, stood to his side, looked Bryce and Hillary over. She took in Hillary's uncomfortable carrying of the practical clothes and Bryce's dishevelled appearance, his role clearly stated by the laptop bag slung over his shoulder, and looked down her nose with a gaze that oozed the air of a youngster thinking they knew it all. Bryce glared as Hillary politely chose to look the other way.
"Going somewhere?" Gareth asked.
"Nowhere special," was Lara's evasive reply.
"Right," Fishman acknowledged, nodding absent-mindedly, knowing full well where Lara was going and wondering how to excuse himself whilst maintaining a headstart.
The two groups looked each other over again, lips pursing slightly in polite hesitancy as everyone wondered the same as Gareth.
Fishman's eyes trailed over to Maria, betraying his intention to the other three.
"GO!" he yelled to her, ending the wait for all involved, and Lara and company took off at a dead run down the remaining stairs at the same time as their opposing team turned to flee, all five vying for space on the marbled steps with pushes and shoves, clattering at speed through the lobby and out into the car park.
Everyone piled into their hired jeeps, Hillary and Lara throwing themselves in even as Bryce propelled the vehicle forward, tyres squealing as it sped across the concrete towards the road.
Maria, unused to foreign travelling in lands where driving was on the right, accidentally found herself on the driver's side of their jeep, Gareth automatically taking the other side to her in his hurry and looking amusingly shocked when he realised he was in the passenger's side.
"Go! Just go!" he yelled as Maria squealed that she didn't have the required international driver's permit. "GO!" he shouted again as Lara's jeep rapidly approached the car park exit, and Maria, still squealing, slammed the car into first and lurched it forwards before slamming her foot down on the brake again and screeching that she was going to hit the car on their left.
"I could get a bus in this gap!" Gareth screamed back and, Maria frantically trying to keep the vehicle under her inexperienced control whilst catching up to Bryce, the jeep jerkily bounced towards the exit. "More gas! More gas! You're in the wrong gear!"
Maria wailed at him to shut up and leave her alone, and then hit the brakes hard at the junction with the road as, true to the unofficial Ukraine highway code, a taxi appeared out of nowhere and swerved across in front of them, roaring off into the distance with its suspension still rocking.
Trying to move off again, the car stalled. "Oh god! Let me!" Fishman complained, shoving the only recently qualified driver out of the door and clambering across to take the wheel.
Disappearing rapidly some way down the road, Hillary and Lara turned in their seats and stared out of the back window as Bryce watched in the rear view mirror, the trio shrieking with laughter as the automotive disaster of the Fishman vehicle grew steadily smaller behind them.
"That'll teach the little brat," Bryce grinned.
"I feel almost left out," Hillary said. "I have no rival."
"Oh you do," Lara replied. "Gareth was telling me last night how wonderful Maria is – that not only is she his technical assistant who turned down an international student's place at MIT for computer science, but that she also does all his organisation, cooking, cleaning and helps him with his work-outs. In other words, she's you two rolled in to one and twenty years younger."
"Sounds a precocious little horror," Hillary mused.
Bryce stuck his tongue out distastefully. "Can't drive, though, can she? And I bet she doesn't have a boyfriend. And I could have gone to MIT, y'know, I just couldn't afford it, that's all."
"Boys, boys, nobody could ever better you two or the jobs you do, and I certainly wouldn't swap either of you for a sucking-up bleached blonde who seems to have an attitude problem. And when you want to go to MIT, Brycie, just let me know and I'll pay all your expenses." Lara mussed his hair and grinned teasingly.
"And who would do my job whilst I was gone, eh?"
Hillary snorted in amusement at his own joke. "Maria!"
"Oi!" Bryce shot back, and the jeep continued on towards the coast and the mouth of the river Dnister, some twenty miles away, as the sun began to set over Southern Ukraine.
The jeep drew up slowly at the water's edge and the engine was cut.
Bryce stared out over the desolate landscape, cold and dark in the February bleakness. Trees on the bank waved gently and the black water rippled furiously as the surface was whipped by the wind. Streetlights along a footpath behind them cast their glittering yellow on the river, but the opposite bank was in shade, giving the thick foliage an almost menacing quality.
"Oh, what a surprise," Bryce remarked dryly, "Team Croft appear to have made it here first."
Lara grinned at him, opening her door and stepping out. A gust caught her immediately, biting through her leather jacket and streaming her hair out around her face, strands catching on her eyelashes and lips. Pulling them away fruitlessly, she wrapped her jacket tighter around her and hugged herself as Hillary and Bryce came to stand next to her.
"Nice night to call up the dead," Hillary remarked.
Kurtis fell hard against the wall of the cell as they threw him in, his knees slamming against the floor and his hands and the side of his face connecting painfully with rough brick. His eyes, hooded from the maltreatment before, were now completely shut, his breathing laboured, his consciousness comprehending nothing except the wait for the moment to pass.
The pain from the fall subsided, leaving him to sense only quiet. No sound, no movement. Just stillness. He was alone.
"Who are you?" came her voice, sweet, feminine, softly spoken and enquiring. Letting out a gasp of discomfort, he forced his eyes open and saw her standing there to his side, her hands held loosely at her front, her head cocked slightly to one side, watching him.
"What do you want?" she probed further.
"Lara," he breathed as his eyelids gave in once again, and when they fluttered back open moments later, she was gone.