All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [289]
Audrey would have called it “unscrambling a tangle in the weave of Fate.”
He called it meticulous programming and multivariate transcendental calculus.
He looked up, resting his old eyes, and taking in where he was (for sometimes he became so absorbed in the mathematics of the thing . . . that he forgot what precisely that “thing” was).
Had he a map he could have pointed to the Aegean Sea, between modern-day Greece and Turkey. A place once called Ieiunium Aequora or “Hungry Water” by Byzantine sailors for all the ships that entered the region vanished.
Today no such thing occurred. It was just another stretch of water among a million other stretches of similar waters . . . with a tiny rock of an island.
Millennia ago, however, that rock had been the high point of an archipelago upon which sat the grand city-state of Altium, grandest city of Atlantis. It had perched upon its hills like a bejeweled crown.
Under dark water, and accessible only through a submerged cavern guarded by beasts of mechanical construct, the city lay buried and sleeping.
In grottoes and forever in shadows were palaces, streets, gold-paved plazas, statues of heroes and gods and Titans and the mighty things that came before them; libraries with mountains of moldering scrolls; paintings that showed earthly paradises, battles among races that no longer lived, and portraits of the most beautiful men and women who ever existed—now all so faded, one could barely see a glimmer of their glory. It made him sad to think of how all was lost to Time.
Among this decaying splendor was the temple where Cornelius now sat, whose central domed chamber was held aloft by ivory mammoth tusks and columns of cracked crystal, and whose floors was paved with turquoise and lapis and jade.
This was the Chamber of Whispers, where Zeus had hatched his plan to overthrow the Titans.
Cornelius shifted on the uncomfortable stone bench, and rearranged the Dodger Stadium seat cushion he’d brought along with him.
Much better.
Within this chamber, holding the Council’s most precious secrets, was the Vault Eternal. The mad genius and master mechanic, Daedalus, had fashioned it to be impenetrable, with locks so intricate that even after a thousand years of study, Cornelius had only a hint of how it worked. To open it required three keys and three combinations simultaneously applied.
Proof against any thief.
One of the three keys was held by him.
Another key was held by Lucia, who had perched on the bench to his left.
She had toweled off from her recent swim through the entrance and had slipped into a set of ordinary sweats. Even in the gray cotton she looked elegant. Women had talents that eluded his scientific senses . . . and he appreciated that.
Lucia was wise, but always competing with the beauty of her younger sister, the ferocity of her older sister, and with herself (never quite perfect enough to live up to her impossible standards).
“Narro, Audio, Perceptum,” Lucia said, and rang her tiny silver bell. The tinkling echoed off the dome and was swallowed by the silence of this place. “I call this meeting of the Council of Elders for the League of Immortals to order.”
Gilbert sat opposite them. He glanced at his watch as if expecting someone to show (and indeed this was a possibility), but the deep worry on his face was something Cornelius had never seen on the Once King.
Kino sat on Cornelius’s right and wore black slacks and white shirt. He and Cornelius had come here together in Gilbert’s submersible.