a gold alloy known to its builders as orichalcum, but even they paled in worth against the words inscribed upon them. The room recorded the entire history of Atlantis, from its earliest beginnings right up to its fall—and one of the hopes for Hayter’s expedition was that it would find those last words and solve the final mystery of one of humanity’s greatest legends.
Why Atlantis sank.
The pointer jittered over crumpled metal protruding from beneath a fallen block. “As you can see,” Hayter went on, “a lot of the panels have been lost. More than half of them are completely buried, and short of taking apart the temple stone by stone, it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to recover them.”
“Sharkdozer could do it,” Matt chipped in. “The heavy lifting arms can easily shift that lot. It’s just a matter of time.”
“And money,” Hayter said patronizingly. “Now, around two-thirds of the accessible panels are damaged to some extent.” The laser spot danced over gashes and twists in the orichalcum. “Fortunately, one of the larger ceiling slabs only collapsed at one end, and as you can see here”—he indicated a rubble-choked gap beneath a long block of stone lying at an angle—“it protected the texts beneath it to a degree. Once we cleared the debris, we were able to view them.”
Another click. The new picture was closer in on the now accessible space. More orichalcum sheets gleamed, words in a long-dead language discernible upon them. The chronicles of the Atlantean empire ran around the room, added day by day, line by line.
“Our translation team started work on this section as soon as the divers returned to the surface,” said Hayter. “Most of it’s similar to the other texts in the temple—accounts of the actions of the king and queen and other political leaders, military activity, and so on. Talonor’s expeditions are mentioned several times.” The Atlantean explorer’s unearthed records had led Nina to discover an ancient—and spectacular—Hindu vault high in the Himalayas the previous year. “But the part I think you’ll be most interested in is this.”
He used the remote to display a close-up of one particular section of the scribed texts. Nina examined it thoughtfully. “I recognize some words,” she said. “Something about … keys? The keys of … strength, it looks like. No, of power.”
Hayter seemed put out that she could understand any of it without his help. “I’ll save you some time,” he said, highlighting a line. “Beginning here: ‘Nantalas, high priestess of the Temple of the Gods and keeper of the sky stone, showed the magic of the keys of power to the royal court. In the hands of others they were nothing more than simple statues, but in hers they blazed with heavenly light.’ ”
Nina stiffened, immediately realizing the significance of the words. Matt cocked an eyebrow at her reaction, but said nothing as Hayter continued: “ ‘Nantalas told the king that the keys had given her a vision of the sky stone’—we’re not sure whether that’s referring to an actual meteorite or something more metaphorical, by the way—‘with its power unleashed, a power to destroy the enemies of Atlantis.’ ”
“These keys,” Nina asked. “Is there a description of them?”
“Yes, here.” Hayter indicated another part of the text. “ ‘Three figures of purple stone, in height less than one foot. When apart, the touch of the priestess lights one to point the way to the others.’ There was probably more, but the sheet was damaged.”
Nina ignored him. She had already heard enough to confirm her suspicions.
The artifacts Alexander Stikes had taken were three small purple statues. The first had been found inside the buried Pyramid of Osiris in Egypt; the second, hidden with other stolen historical treasures in a secret bunker owned by the insane billionaires Pramesh and Vanita Khoil. The third, split into two halves, she had discovered in the lost cities of Paititi and El Dorado in South America, where the Incas hid the riches of their toppling empire from the rapacious Spanish. A trio of crudely carved, seemingly innocuous figures.
Yet they had been found in places separated by continents, by millennia. There was no known connection between the empires of the Incas and the predynastic Egyptians. But both had hidden their statues in their most secure locations.
And now it seemed that the link was … Atlantis. A great empire that eleven thousand years ago had spread from a now submerged island as far east as Tibet, as far west as Brazil. They had apparently created