Callsign: King (Jack Sigler) (Chesspocalypse #1)

At the next junction she turned away from the sound of footsteps and quickly found the opening, a shadowy void in the floor, surrounded by the rubble of the fallen roof. She trained her light into the shaft, verifying with her eyes what her mind already knew: the hole penetrated every descending level of the temple. Motivated though he was there was no way Atlas would ever be able to shove his girth through that orifice. Mira faced no such limitation.

Effortlessly, she lowered herself feet first into the void, gradually but confidently letting her extended arms take the burden of her weight. The floor of the next level was perhaps another four feet below her dangling toes, but she knew better than to simply let go. Directly beneath her, the deep shaft continued, and while she was in a hurry to get to the bottom, she wasn’t in that much of a hurry. Instead, she spread her feet apart, straddling the opening as she landed. With increased confidence, she repeated the process three more times until, above the fifth level, her small light showed something other than a hole in the floor beneath her.

With each successive layer, the intensity of the sensation she had first encountered at the marker stele grew, and now that she was at last face to face with her destination, it was impossible to distinguish anything else. A blanket of psychic white noise emanating from the lowest stage of the temple left her precognitive faculties completely numb. But like a gambler, certain that the cards were about to break her way, the thrill of imminent victory compelled her onward.

From her overhead vantage, it was difficult to say exactly what the object occupying the center of the temple was. She thought it was an altar of some kind, positioned to lie in the beam of sunlight that had once reached into the depths of the temple at midday. If so, the altar was merely a showcase for something else, something that she could not quite make out with her tiny flashlight, but which she knew unequivocally to be the object of Atlas’ mad dash into the ruin.

“Jackpot,” she whispered, her lips curling in a triumphant grin as she proceeded to lower herself down onto the altar and then onto the supporting dais, where she got her first good look at the tomb of an Atlantean king.

The room was a circle, perhaps fifty feet across, and its single, continuous wall was adorned with a narrative mural executed in the same style as the frescoes she had glimpsed in the tunnels above. She took a moment to circumscribe the room with the beam of her light, and what she saw took her breath away. Protected from the elements, the images were perfectly preserved, the pigments still bright and vivid. Unlike the flat, two-dimensional images that adorned most ancient ruins, the artists who had decorated this tomb understood perspective and had created a remarkable illusion of depth. And while she was no expert on history or folklore, she recognized instantly the subject of the visual sequence. It was the story of the fall of Atlantis.

The tale began and ended with the only break in the circle, a vertical protrusion that stretched from floor to ceiling. At first she thought it was a door, but the carved relief—a perfect rendering of a man in repose—clued her in to its actual purpose: it was a sarcophagus.

Her brief examination of the life-sized sculpture revealed a nude male with exaggerated musculature and exquisite aquiline features. Unlike the death masks of Egyptian pharaohs, this figure wore only one piece of ornamentation—a circular diadem with a single hexagonal shape positioned in the center of his forehead.

The sculpted form on the sarcophagus featured prominently in the mural, and in most of those depictions, the circlet floated above his brow, the hexagon a white gemstone blazing with supernatural fire. Only the first scene was different. In it, the king struggled with another man—an oddly familiar figure that Mira felt she should recognize, but could not—for possession of the crown. Though she could not read the strange writing that framed the picture, it was evident that the battle between the two men directly contributed to the catastrophic collapse of the kingdom, shown on the subsequent panel.

From that point onward, the king wore the talismanic crown, leading the refugees of the doomed civilization to a new life in exile. The cycle ended with the king’s death and burial, and in the profound sadness displayed on the faces of the anonymous mourners, she saw written the final doom of Atlantis. She didn’t need to be psychic to know that the refugee city had not survived long following the death of that last king.

Remembering the purpose for her hasty descent, she turned at last to the altar at the center.

The stone pedestal stood on an upraised podium directly beneath the aperture. What she had first taken to be an object on display, she now saw was actually a fixed part of the altar, an irregular tableau with a recessed, ring-shaped groove at the center. There seemed little question that the niche was meant to display the crown, but the headpiece was conspicuously absent. Frowning, she glanced about the room, and only then realized that there was no other means of entering or leaving the tomb.