The Quest - Smith Wilbur (читаем книги онлайн бесплатно TXT) 📗

The door opened slowly, its hinges squealing.

The splendour of the interior was undiminished, the emblems in the great pentagram glowing with marble and semi-precious stones. But their eyes were drawn irresistibly to the ivory shield at the centre. The ray of sunlight that fell through the aperture in the roof moved slowly but inexorably towards the heart of the pentagram. It would soon be noon.

The wind moaned and wailed round the outer walls of the temple, shaking the thatching and the roof timbers. They stood transfixed and watched the beam of sunlight. When it entered the ivory circle the power of the Lie would reach its peak.

A draught of icy air blew in through the ceiling aperture. It hissed like a cobra and fluttered like the wings of bats and vultures in the air around them. The beam of sunlight touched the ivory circle. Blinding white light filled the sanctum but they did not shrink from it or shield their eyes. They concentrated on the fiery spirit sign of Eos that appeared in the centre of the ivory disc. As the stench of the witch filled the air Taita stepped forward and held aloft the braid of her hair.

'Tashkalon!' he shouted, and hurled the hair into the ivory circle.

'Ascartow! Silondela!' He had turned Eos's words of power back upon her. The wind dropped abruptly and a frozen silence gripped the temple.

Fenn stepped up beside Taita and lifted the hem of her tunic. She tore the linen pad from between her legs and threw it on top of Eos's hair in the ivory circle. 'Tashkalon! Ascartow! Silondela!' she repeated, in a sweet clear voice. The temple rocked on its foundations and a deep rumble rose from the earth. A section of the facing wall buckled outwards, then collapsed in a pile of rubble and plaster dust. Behind them one of the roof rafters cracked and fell into the outer portico, bringing down with it a mass of rotten thatch.

With a thunderous roar the floor of the temple was torn open. A deep crevice split the pentagram down the centre, ripping through the ivory circle, and running through the paving between them, isolating them from each other. There was no bottom to the crevice. It seemed to reach down into the bowels of the earth.

'Taita!' Fenn screamed. They were divided, and she could feel the strength she had drawn from him guttering and fading like the flame of a lamp running out of oil. She tottered on the lip of the crevice, which sucked at her voraciously.

'Taita, I am falling. Save me!' She tried to turn away from the lip, her arms flailing and her back arched as she was drawn towards it.

He had not realized the full strength of the astral forces they had built

between them and he sprang out across the fatal pit to land lightly at her side. He seized her before she toppled into the crevice, swept her up in his arms and ran with her to the flower-shaped doorway. He held her close to his heart, recharging the force that Eos had taken from her. He left the inner sanctum and raced along the portico towards the outer doors of the temple. A massive roof timber crashed to the ground in front of them, narrowly missing them. He jumped over it and ran on. It was like being on the deck of a small ship in a hurricane. All around him more deep fissures opened in the floor. He leapt over them. The earth heaved and quaked. Another section of the outer wall just ahead tumbled down into a pile of loose debris but he bounded over the rubble and burst out into the open air.

Still there was no respite from the primordial chaos of the elements.

Staggering to keep his balance on the heaving earth, Taita looked about in wild amazement. The lake was gone. Where the pale lucid blue waters had lain there was now a vast empty basin in which stranded shoals of fish flapped, crocodiles writhed and ponderous hippopotamus tried to find their footing on the mud. The red rock barrier was nakedly revealed, its magnitude defying the imagination.

Abruptly the upheaval ceased, replaced by an eerie stillness. All of creation seemed frozen. There was no sound or movement. Taita placed Fenn carefully on her feet, but she clung to him still as she stared out over the empty lake. 'What is happening to the world?' she breathed, through pale dry lips.

'It was an earthquake of cataclysmic proportions.'

'I give thanks to Hathor and Isis that it has passed.'

'It is not over. Those were merely the first shocks. Now there is a lull before the full force breaks.'

'What has happened to the waters of the lake?'

'They have been sucked away by the shifting crust of the earth,' he told her, then held up a hand. 'Listen!' There was a rushing sound like that of a mighty wind. 'The waters are returning!' He pointed across the empty basin.

On the horizon rose a blue mountain of water laced with creamy spume that advanced upon the land with ponderous, stately might. One after another it overwhelmed the outer islands and came on, rearing higher into the sky as it approached the shore. It was still several leagues distant, but already its crest seemed to tower above the height of the bluff on which they stood.

'It will sweep us away! We will be drowned! We must run!'

'There is nowhere for us to run to,' he told her. 'Stand firm beside me.”

She sensed him throwing a spell of protection round them, and immediately joined her own psychic forces to his.

Another gargantuan convulsion racked the earth, so violent that they were thrown to their knees, but they clung together and gazed at the approaching wave. There was a sound like all the thunder of the heavens, so loud that it dulled their hearing.

The red rock barrier was split through from its foundations to its summit. Its entire surface was crazed with a network of deep cracks. The huge wave rose high above it and crashed into it in a smother of foam and leaping wave crests. The mighty rock pier was submerged beneath it.

Then there was a roar as the fragments of red rock tumbled over each other and were carried on by the force of the tidal wave into the empty bed of the Nile. They were swept along the riverbed as though they were of no more consequence than beach pebbles. The waters of the lake continued to pour through the breach in a thunderous green spout. The riverbed was neither deep nor wide enough to contain such a volume so the waters burst from its banks and reached as high as the topmost branches of the trees on either side. They were uprooted and toppled into the flow, to be borne downstream like driftwood. Dense clouds of spray towered into the sky above the tumultuous cauldron, catching the sunlight and spinning it into marvellous rainbows that arched across the river.

The crest of the tidal wave surged up the bluff towards where they crouched beside the ruins of the temple. It seemed that it would engulf them also and carry them away in the torrent, but its strength dissipated before it reached them. The residue of its might swirled round the shattered walls of the temple, and reached as high as their knees before it faltered. They linked arms and braced themselves. Although the waters dragged at them, together they were able to resist being swept into the lake.

Slowly the elements regained their composure, the tremors of the earth subsided and the waters of the lake stilled. Only the Nile thundered on, green, wide and smoking with spray towards Egypt in the north.

'The river is reborn,' Fenn whispered, 'just as you are, Magus. The Nile is renewed and made young again.'

It seemed that they would never tire of the magnificent spectacle.

They stood for hour upon hour gazing down on it in wonder and awe.

Then, on an impulse, Fenn turned in the circle of his arms and looked

towards the west. She started so violently that Taita was alarmed. 'What is it, Fenn?'