A little more Salisbury Key - excerpt 2

Thanks to the lovely people who've said they enjoyed/were tortured in a good way by excerpt 1. This section comes from later in the novel, when Dan and Rayne have settled their, er, differences, and are working together to try and solve the riddle of Jason's death. They've found their way into a souterrain, a mysterious underground chamber on Salisbury Plain...

Excerpt 2

Wordlessly we divided the chamber between us. Rayne’s experience in his field had made him just as good at a fingertip search as I had learned to be in mine. I eased the torch into a niche in the corbelling, and by its downcast light we worked in silence, taking chamber wall and flooring inch by inch. Touch would often reveal what vision missed—a tiny give in a flagstone, a softness in otherwise hard-packed earth…

Yes. I closed my eyes, held my breath. I was on tiptoe by the chamber’s north wall. There had been something, so fleeting I’d brushed straight on over it, but now I reached back, gently urgent, to find the place again.

“Rayne! Here.”

He came to stand beside me, unhitching the torch on his way and shining it into the space between the edge of the corbelled roof and the wall, where I had felt the slight roughness, a breaking up of the ancient silky mud. “The wall’s a bit softer here. It’s been disturbed.”

“Really?” he asked. I glanced round and saw him step close to see for himself, eyes bright and intrigued. “Yeah. You’re right.”

“I can’t believe anybody would do this. Anybody with the knowledge to find this place, anyway. They’d have to know the value of keeping it intact, not digging around under the stonework, weakening the structure…”

“All right. Have a fit about it later, sunbeam. What now?”

“I’m going to dig in there myself.” He lifted an eyebrow at me, and I said defensively, “Well, I can’t do any more damage, can I? Will you fetch me the trowel from my bag?”

“You brought your trowel?”

“Yes. Always. You never know.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do.”

It didn’t take me long to dislodge enough of the broken earth to find the direction and dimensions of the niche that had been dug here. It was recent, or relatively so. The earth had begun to pack down, but not to bind itself under the pressures that had kept the souterrain walls in one piece. And I didn’t understand it. Here was a perfect, watertight chamber beneath the ground, a beautiful hiding place for any treasure or horror you cared to name—and yet someone had violated it, scraped a hollow upwards and outwards, compromised its perfect seal.

I worked as carefully as I could despite the damage, Rayne holding the torch and brushing aside the earth as I trowelled it aside. Something cold and slick touched the back of my hand, and I snatched it back, flinching. “Christ!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Shine the beam here. Oh, sorry. It’s just roots.”

I ignored his faint snort of laughter.

“I don’t understand. This goes right out under the edge of the roof stones, almost to surface. It’s damp. Why would anyone put anything…?” My arm was almost at full stretch inside the hollow now. One last reach and I’d have done all I could without more equipment, without going in from the surface.

The trowel scraped on stone. I pulled back straight away. Probably it was only a rock beneath the turf, but that sound always made us drop the metal in favour of flesh, brushes, whatever would uncover without harming. I shifted back, about to say give us a leg up—but he was already there, bending to lift me.

“Ta. There’s something here—blocking the passage or ending it, maybe.” I could feel a flat surface, a stone, filling the whole space. And what made my heart pound, my spine prickle, was the knowledge shooting up through my fingertips that the stone was carved. A tiny hollow, a circle surrounding it. “Cup and ring,” I whispered, and felt Rayne’s shrug where his shoulder was pressed to my thigh. Never mind—I’d enjoy explaining to him later the mystic nature of these notations in rock the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain had left behind them, the tantalising hints they gave of maps, constellations, symbols for the cycles of the moon. They had been one of Jason’s most beloved mysteries. He’d been running every pattern and arrangement found to date into a custom-designed computer program up until a couple of months before he died.

That was it. Cup-and-ring marks, and under them, around them, short lines in coherent order. Rayne passed the torch up to me without needing to be asked. One quick survey with the beam confirmed what touch was telling me. Not just enigmatic symbols—text, all around the edge of the stone. I thought for a second it was Runic, then recognised the neat dashes and diagonals of Ogham script. The oldest alphabet in the world, designed to be chiselled into rock, used from earliest Bronze Age forward to inscribe boundary markers, monoliths on the graves of chieftains.

“Text,” I said. “Text with symbols. Connected to them, translating them maybe.”

“What, like a Rosetta stone, or…”

“Exactly. Exactly. Christ—this is what Jason was looking for. I don’t know why he got so distraught about it, or what the hell connection there is with Hartcliffe Dean or bloody biochemistry, and I don’t care.” I could hardly breathe. This would qualify as a key, all right. There was nothing extant in the whole world that linked Stone Age consciousness to the staggeringly different world view that prevailed after the invention of script. “Quick, help me get this out. I’ve got to see it.”

“Okay. I’ll have to let you down. You all right? Can you reach?”

“Yeah, with the edge of the trowel. Just…”

The top edge of the stone came free. It almost fell into my hands, and I stretched out my palms for it, pulling muscles in my shoulders and back. I’d have taken any kind of pain to make this catch. When I breathed in, I thought the air brought me a trace of Jason’s scent, as if he were here with me, urging me on, teaching and guiding me as he had always done. “He knew exactly what he was after. I don’t know why he didn’t talk to me about it. This is his key.”

“Daniel. Get back.”

I froze, the carved slab in my grasp. I had never heard Rayne sound like this before. I tried to work out what was different, and after a moment I realised that it was the note of fear. It sent a cold pang through me. I hadn’t thought him capable. Not through bomb blast, near capture by armed guards, overwhelming sexual surrender on a stripped-down bed… He was reaching past me into the hole, shining the torch into the space beyond the carved stone. “What is it?”

“Dan. You know how you never do what I tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Fucking do it this time. Take the stone and step back now.”