Chapter 16

As I followed Lienna down the dank, uncomfortably narrow tunnel, I reminded myself that this was on my secret agent bucket list: an Indiana Jones-style adventure into the heart of a cryptic haunt full of archaic treasure.

Hopefully there'd be no booby traps, cannibalistic cults, or snakes awaiting me.

A clump of heavy-duty extension cords paralleled our path, and the odd LED kept our course visible. Unlike a human worksite, there were no signs of shovels or heavy machinery. The tunnel was precisely cut; it was likely the work of a terramage—or a team of terramages.

Since we were now out of sight, I dropped my invisi-warp, instead keeping my ears alert for any warning signs of life, either from within the tunnel or from the mythic workers returning after their break. The passageway went on for dozens of meters, and unless my internal GPS had gone offline, we were headed toward the center of the former ring fortress—awfully close to that portentous seal designed to entrap whatever subterranean eldritch horror we were about to visit.

The passageway bent abruptly sideways, as though the terramage excavator had missed the mark by six feet. We rounded the corner and stopped.

"Woah," was all I could muster.

The crypt was about the size of my condo's living area, with a couple feet of headroom—but its shape was the real oddity. The rock slabs that created the walls were angled in such a way as to create a long, narrow oval. It was like we were in the belly of a stony, underground ship with an iron sarcophagus in the middle. The metal coffin was raised up on a massive slab of granite with Old Norse runes etched into it.

In fact, almost every square inch of the tomb's slanted walls was covered in the ancient writing, accompanied by a handful of carved illustrations. At about head height, small stone ledges jutted out, around two dozen of them, like empty shelves.

More work lights were propped up on wooden scaffolding, and power cords snaked off into the dimly lit corners, where I spotted two fresh-looking passageways that would force me to walk in a half crouch. A six-foot-wide folding table was set up against the wall, with several binders and notebooks sitting on it, waiting for the archaeologists to return.

Speaking of which, we couldn't waste any time on our crypt-creeping adventure.

Lienna's eyes, alight with scholarly intrigue, were sweeping over the walls. "It's amazing to think that all of this is over a thousand years old."

That was very cool and all, but my attention was locked on that giant iron sarcophagus. "They didn't open that, did they? And please tell me an overzealous librarian didn't read from any suspiciously evil-looking black books."

I didn't see Lienna's eye roll, but I heard it in her tone. "Of course they opened it, Kit. That's how archeology works."

Creeping forward, I stepped onto the stone base and leaned over the sarcophagus, prepared to flee for my life—but the interior was empty. A thin layer of dust covered the iron bottom.

"Great," I muttered darkly. "So the Viking mummy has already been resurrected. Did you notice any locusts on our way here?"

"Vikings didn't mummify their dead." Lienna threw me a scolding look. "Now quit wasting time and start taking photos of everything. I'll start here."

She parked herself in front of the table while I walked slowly around the perimeter of the room, snapping copious photos with my phone, half my attention on the three passageways, perpetually paranoid of unwanted visitors—either living or undead.

While the carefully etched ancient Norse writing meant less than nothing to me, the perfectly rock-carved illustrations provided some details: sword-wielding soldiers, giant serpents, violent birds of prey, and a lot of fire all told a very violent, very deadly tale. As I stepped closer to one particular carving of a Viking warrior impaled on a lance, I noticed how strangely precise each line was. It was as if this tomb's interior decorator had time-traveled a laser cutter to create the design. Assuming an H. G. Wells explanation was off the table, that left one possibility.

Magic. A right-brained terramage with an eye for detail, to be precise.

The uncomfortable feeling of being very small and unimportant amidst the endless flow of time and history swept over me. I knew magic was old, of course, but seeing the ancient remains of a mythic life and a mythic culture really drove it home. We were blips on the timeline, there and gone, only to be remembered by our giant metal sarcophagi.

On my left, Lienna was taking photos of each page in a binder, skim-reading as she went. Not wanting to break her concentration or hover annoyingly over her shoulder—I could not read that fast and I wouldn't even try—I stepped into the side tunnels to check what else was down here and found several small niches but no more script-walls.

Returning to the below-ground burial boat, I made another slow circle. This was where the Consilium's weapon had been discovered, the one they'd been trying to acquire for twenty years, but the more I looked around, the less this seemed like a place where a terrible weapon of doom and destruction would be found.

"A queen," Lienna whispered.

I turned to her. "What?"

"This is the tomb of a Viking queen. And this"—she waved at the script etched into the walls—"is the story of her life and death. As told by the victors, at least."

"What victors?"

She flipped to another page and snapped a photo. "The queen—she's called Bodil—was born a peasant but rose to power because of her magical ability. She conquered most of Denmark before she was slain in battle."

"So whoever created this tomb and sealed her body inside was also the one who killed her?"

"Yeah. The opposing king is called ‘god killer' in the text. He brought an entire army to battle and defeat Bodil."

My eyebrows rose. Just how powerful had Bodil been? I faced the sarcophagus, reassessing it. "Any mention of an artifact or weapon?"

"Not yet. These notes are all about various possible interpretations of the wall text." Lienna turned another page. "It's mostly a big warning about Bodil and ‘her kind.' It talks about her and her partner wreaking havoc with their magic, and how ‘monsters' like them should be slain at the first sign of their evil power."

"Harsh," I muttered. "Who's this partner? Did they have the same magic?"

"I'm not sure. Her partner is called ‘the sha'ir' and it isn't clear if he's a companion, lover, husband. Again, this was written by the king who killed her, so we can't expect it to be terribly accurate."

"The sha'ir?" I asked. "That doesn't sound like a Norse word, not that I'm an expert."

Lienna shook her head. "It's Arabic, actually. The sha'ir were poets who were believed to be endowed with supernatural power."

"That's an ancient mythic if I've ever heard of one." I wandered around the near side of the sarcophagus. "If this dude was an Arabic poet, what the hell was he doing fighting battles with a Viking queen in eastern Denmark?"

"I don't know yet."

I peered toward the entrance tunnel, wondering how long we had until Team Science returned. "Does any of this describe Bodil's ‘evil powers'?"

Lienna studied the page in front of her. "The archeologists are uncertain about that part of the translation. They aren't sure if the descriptions are exaggerations, old Viking expressions, or intended to be literal. Firestorms that burned men alive, thunder that struck down dozens of soldiers with each strike, maelstroms of wind, great chasms opening in the earth…"

"Sounds like magery. Really intense magery."

Lienna nodded. "But mages only have one elemental ability, or maybe two if they develop a combination skill, like a heliomage or volcanomage. But those aren't common."

"And no mage can use all the elements."

"There are more descriptions, too. Hordes of beasts and horrendous visions that drove men insane." She shook her head. "It sounds like a pile of hyperbole meant to spawn fear."

"Or Bodil was using a ridiculously powerful artifact that rightfully spawned fear in her enemies," I countered, stepping up beside her at the table. "We need to find information about the artifacts they found here."

Nodding, she returned her attention to the binder. I took over photo duty, digitally documenting each page while she skimmed the text. The binder was filled with plastic protector sheets into which pages of handwritten notes, printouts, diagrams, and photos had been inserted. Everything seemed to be focused on the wall script.

We switched to a fat notebook. It was full of archeological mumbo jumbo about soil samples and rock types and estimates of how old everything was, reminding me that archaeology wasn't just bullwhips and cursed treasures. A lot of it was just plain ol' geology and math.

Feeling the pressure of each minute that ticked past, I slid the notebook aside as Lienna opened another binder. On the first page was a photo of one of the shelves that lined the tomb's walls, but it wasn't empty. Sitting on it was a small silver sculpture of a woman warrior, a shield in one hand and a heavy sword in the other.

"Bingo," I whispered.

We went through the binder at top speed, snapping photos as we searched for an artifact that resembled the image from our stolen Trident file. Page after page flipped past, and I was about to lose hope when we reached the last one.

There it was: a copy of the same photo Darius had hijacked from Jayce Tyrian's office of a large, circular amulet with intricate and delicate lines etched in a swirling pattern across its surface.

I started snapping rapid photos while Lienna leaned over a page ripped from a notebook that had been tucked into a protective plastic sleeve.

"This was written by the site's first archeologist," Lienna murmured. "He says here all the markings on the sarcophagus are about never opening it for fear of unleashing the horror of her power upon the world."

"And he opened it anyway," I growled. "What's with scholarly types and ignoring ancient warnings?"

Lienna didn't seem to be listening, her eyes zipping across the page. "When he opened the sarcophagus, he found this artifact. It had been placed inside with Bodil's remains."

"Of course it was." A spiral of dread pulled at my gut. "Since they buried it with her, can we assume it's what gave her crazy powers? And that's why the Consilium wants it?"

"Maybe." Lienna tapped the page. "The archeologist was shocked to find that the artifact didn't have any Old Norse on it. The markings are all in Ancient Greek, Latin, and Arabic."

My eyebrows arched up. "Arabic?"

"Like the sha'ir. Maybe it originally belonged to him."

"And he just handed it over to Bodil so she could use it to conquer Denmark?"

"I don't know." Lienna's attention moved to the bottom of the page. "The last thing the archeologist wrote is that while he was waiting for instructions on where to transport the artifact for further study, it was stolen."

"By Floris Visser?" I guessed.

"Seems likely, since she's the one who has it." Lienna flipped the page over, but there was nothing else in the binder. "This is the only page I saw with this person's handwriting. Did the archeologist quit after the artifact was stolen?"

"Maybe he was fired for the lax security on his worksite," I suggested. "Either way, I'm more concerned about the artifact itself, AKA the weapon the Consilium is a scant thirty million bucks from acquiring. The archaeologist didn't say anything about what it does?"

Lienna straightened with a sigh. "It was stolen before he could study it in earnest. It can take years to work out what an artifact does and how to use it, and even longer when they're this old."

Something niggled at my brain, and I rolled my shoulders as I chased down the thought. "If the artifact was stolen before it could be studied and its purpose could be determined…"

"Then how did the Consilium know it was something they wanted?" Lienna finished for me. "Are they assuming it's a deadly weapon because Bodil was so powerful?"

"Maybe, but the story on the walls is pretty suspect. Even if the Consilium is hoping the artifact granted Bodil super-mage powers, that seems like flimsy evidence for an eight-figure purchase."

"We must be missing something."

We were definitely missing something. I turned away from the table, my gaze sliding over the hulking iron sarcophagus. The eyes of the figures carved on the walls watched me as I scanned the script. The "god killer" had been so terrified of Bodil and her artifact that he'd built all of this to keep her power from ever rising again.

Tension built inside me. The shadows seemed darker, the subtle flickering of the lights creating darts of movement in my peripheral vision. Had Bodil just been one ultra powerful mythic? Or had something truly evil been sealed away here?

Bing!

The loud chime made me leap half a foot off the ground. My shoes reconnected with the stone floor, and I realized the sound had been a text notification. Damn, I was getting jumpy.

I pulled out my phone. A message from Darius awaited me.

She isn't in Europe.

I blinked at the inadequately informative four words. Another message popped up.

A flight from Copenhagen to Ho Chi Minh City departs in three hours. Don't miss it.

"What was that?" Lienna asked.

"Darius found Floris Visser." I pocketed my phone. "It looks like we're going to Vietnam."

And there, we'd find out just how badly the Consilium wanted a Viking queen's mysterious weapon of war.