James Rollins - Map of Bones

Unconsciously he had begun to swim faster. He lost sight of Kat on his right. He was last in line on this side. He slowed and she reappeared. Satisfied, he moved onward. A shape appeared ahead, jutting from the sandy bottom. A rock? A ridge of reef?

He kicked forward.

Out of the silty gloom, it appeared.

What the hell…?

The stone face stared back at him, human, worn by the sea and time, but its features were surprisingly clear, the expression stoic. Its upper torso rode atop the squat form of a lion.

Kat had noted his attention and swept slightly closer. “A sphinx?”

“Another one over here,” Vigor announced. “Broken, on its side. Divers have reported dozens of them littered around the seabed in the shadow of the fort. Some of the decorations from the original lighthouse.”

Despite the urgency, Gray stared at the statue, amazed. He studied the face, sculpted by hands two thousand years old. He reached one arm out and touched it, sensing the immense breadth of time between himself and that sculptor.

Vigor spoke out of nowhere. “Fitting that these masters of riddles should be guarding this mystery.”

Gray pulled back his hand. “What do you mean?”

A chuckle. “Don’t you know the story of the Sphinx? The monster terrorized the people of Thebe, eating them if they couldn’t solve its riddle. ‘What has one voice, and is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?’”

“And the answer?” Gray asked.

“Mankind,” Kat said next to him. “We crawl on all fours as babes, then upright on two feet as adults, and lean upon a staff in old age.”

Vigor continued. “Oedipus solved the riddle and the Sphinx threw herself off a cliff and died.”

“Toppling from a height,” Gray said. “Like these sphinxes.”

He pushed away from the stone statue and swam onward. They had their own riddle to solve. After another ten minutes of silent searching, they reached the rocky coastline. Gray had come across a tumble of giant blocks, but no passage, no opening, no clues.

“Back again,” he said.

They shifted down the coast and set out again, swimming away from the shoreline toward the boat.

“Everything quiet up there, Monk?” Gray asked.

“Getting a nice suntan.”

“Make sure you use SPF 30. We’ll be down here a while.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Gray continued for another forty minutes, sweeping to the boat, then back again. He came across a sunken husk of a rusted ship, more chunks of stone blocks, a broken pillar, even an inscribed chunk of obelisk. Fish in a rainbow of hues danced away.

He checked his air gauge. He was breathing conservatively. He still had half a tank left. “How’s everyone’s air holding up?”

After comparing, it was decided to go topside in twenty minutes. They’d take a half-hour break, then back into the water.

As he swam, he went back to his original pondering. He kept sensing they had missed something critical. What if the Dragon Court had taken some object from the cave, a second clue? He kicked harder. He had to let that fear go. He had to proceed as though he had the same intel as the Court, an equal playing field.

The silence of the deep pressed on him. “This just doesn’t seem right,” he mumbled.

The radio transmitted his voice.

“Did you find something?” Kat asked. Her shadowy form drifted closer.

“No. That’s just it. The longer I’m down here, the more I’m convinced we’re doing this wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said from out of nowhere, sounding hopeless. “I probably put too much emphasis—”

“No.” Gray remembered her worry topside. He kicked himself for rekindling it. “Rachel, I think you’ve targeted the correct place to search. The problem is my plan. This whole searching quadrant by quadrant. It just doesn’t feel right.”

“What do you mean, Commander?” Kat asked. “It may take some time, but we’ll get the area covered.”

That was just it. Kat had clarified it for him. He wasn’t one for systematic, dogged methodology. While some problems were best solved that way, this mystery wasn’t one of them.

“We’ve missed a clue,” he said. “I know it. We recognized the map in the tomb, realized it pointed to Alexander’s tomb, then flew here. We searched records, books, and files, trying to solve a riddle that has baffled historians for more than a millennium. Who are we to solve it in one day?”

“So what do you want us to do?” Kat asked.

Gray settled to a stop. “We go back to square one. We’ve based our search on historical records available to anyone. The only advantage we have over all the treasure hunters of the past centuries is what was discovered under Saint Peter’s tomb. We missed a clue down there.”

Or one was stolen, Gray thought. But he did not speak this worry aloud.

“Maybe we didn’t miss a clue at the tomb,” Vigor said. “Maybe we didn’t look deep enough. Remember the catacombs. The riddles were multilayered, multifathomed. Could there be another layer to this riddle?”

Silence answered him…until an unexpected voice solved it all.

“That goddamn fiery star,” Monk swore. “It wasn’t just pointing down at the city of Alexandria…it was pointing down at the stone slab.”

Gray felt the ring of truth in Monk’s words. They had been so focused on the inscribed map, the fiery star, the implication of it all, but they had ignored the unusual medium of the artist.

“Hematite,” Kat said.

“What do you know about it?” Gray asked, trusting her background in geology.

“It’s an iron oxide. Large deposits have been found throughout Europe. It is mostly iron, but sometimes it contains a fair amount of iridium and titanium.”

“Iridium?” Rachel said. “Isn’t that one of the elements in the amalgam? In the Magi bones?”

“Yes,” Kat said, voice suddenly sounding strained over the radio. “But I don’t think that’s the significant part.”

“What?” Gray asked.

“I’m sorry, Commander. I should have thought of it. The iron in hematite is often weakly magnetic , not as strongly as magnetite, but it’s sometimes used as a lodestone.”

Gray realized the implication. Magnetism had also opened the first tomb. “So the star wasn’t just pointing to Alexandria, it was pointing to a magnetized stone, something we’re supposed to find.”

“And what did the ancient world do with lodestones?” Vigor asked, excitement growing in his voice.

Gray knew the answer. “They made compasses!” He fed air into his BC vest and rose toward the surface. “Everyone topside!”

IN A matter of minutes, they were shedding tanks, vests, and weight belts. Rachel climbed into the pilot’s seat, glad to sit down. She pressed the button to raise the anchor. It chugged upward.

“Go slow,” Gray said. He had taken up a post at her shoulder.

“I second that,” Monk said.

“I’ll watch the compass,” Gray continued. “You keep us on a snail-paced circuit around the fort. Any twitch on the compass needle and we drop anchor and search below.”

Rachel nodded. She prayed that whatever magnetized stone lay down there, it was strong enough for their shipboard compass to detect.

With the anchor retracted, she eased the throttle to the barest chop of her propellers. Motion forward was barely detectable.

“Perfect,” Gray whispered.

Onward they glided. The sun slowly rose into the sky overhead. They pulled up the boat’s canopy to shade the group as the day’s heat climbed. Monk lay sprawled on the portside bench, slightly snoring. No one spoke.

Worry grew in Rachel with each slow turn of the boat’s propeller.