to meet them in the harbor. She had a building where she did her business every seventh day. One day, the last Oracle died, and she went beyond the wall.” Haros pursed his lips. “Somewhere within this passageway, before you reach the River Styx, is the Oracle’s Place of Dreams where she came to find answers to questions she had been asked.”
***
Linko halted at the cave that held the branching tunnels. A single grenade had gotten them past the chokepoint at the tunnel’s entrance. He’d feared it might bring down the wall and close off the cave, but he’d had no choice. Now, he shone his flashlight around, looking for any kind of mark Lourds or the others might have left. He didn’t want to go stumbling around in the dark and end up getting lost. Losing Lourds now would be unacceptable.
“Gedenidze. Bring the thermal imager, quickly.”
The FSB agent trotted up and snapped on the thermal imager he had mounted on his rifle. After a few seconds of directing it at the two openings ahead of them, he nodded. “I have them. To the right. They are staying massed together.”
Linko peered over the man’s shoulder and saw the pool of red that indicated human temperatures. Against the cold backdrop of the cave, getting a reading was child’s play.
“All right. Do not lose them.” Linko trotted forward once more and kept listening. Although the heat signatures of the group could be seen, he didn’t know how far ahead they were.
He kept going into the darkness.
***
Six more times, Lourds was presented with choices on which tunnel to take. He hoped that his decisions weren’t going to lead them back around in a circle, or into the path of the Russians pursuing them, but he didn’t want to end up lost, either. The tunnel and cave system had turned out to be a lot larger than he’d imagined.
“My god. Thomas.” Marias caught Lourds by the shoulder and brought him to a halt.
“What?”
“Up there.”
Lourds added his flashlight beam to Marias’s and spotted a set of curving steps that let up to a cave opening above them. In the darkness, concentrating on the light ahead of him, Lourds had missed the steps.
The opening was at least sixty feet above them.
But beside the opening, mounted on the wall, lay two beautiful, golden serpents curled around a staff.
“That is a caduceus. Hermes carried one.”
“I know.” Lourds’s mind was flying. “Apollo was reputed to have wound the body of Pythia around a staff, which he later gave to Hermes as a peace offering. But he killed the snake to provide a home for the Oracle.”
“And Hermes was also a psychopomp, a deliverer of the dead to Hades. He moved between the conscious and unconscious minds.” Marias didn’t take his gaze away. “We cannot leave this unexplored.”
Lourds was torn. “It could be a dead end. We could be boxing ourselves in.”
Fitrat looked at the cave. “It’s defensible. And we all missed it in the dark. Maybe the Russians will too. We could run for a lot longer and maybe never find a place as good as this.”
“All right.” Lourds headed up the steps with Haros at his side. There was barely room for both of them. The steps were broad, but they were steep as well. Worn indentations on the surface showed the path had been traveled many times. He couldn’t help wondering who had come this way and what had brought them.
When he reached the top, what he saw took his breath away. The opening led to a cave at least fifty yards across. A stone dais occupied the center of the room, but that wasn’t what most caught his attention. His flashlight beam picked up the mosaics on the walls, all of them made from gemstones or pieces of colored glass. The flashlight sparked from ruby, sapphire, emerald, amethyst, and a myriad other colors.
All of the mosaics were of women dressed in virgin white. In some, the women knelt at the foot of a beautiful man who glowed with the radiance of the sun. In others, they held court over dozens of men who were obviously enthralled by them.
Dazed, Lourds entered the room and moved from image to image. One of them showed armed Roman soldiers closing in on a woman in white. In the sky, a dark figure with a menacing helm and driving a chariot with four black horses flew toward her. In the next, several Roman soldiers lay withered and dying on the ground.