“Me?”
“See that?” She pointed to an angle line with three small marks. “That’s the number twelve in base four.”
“Who counts in base four?”
Jarrah tilted her head and smiled mysteriously. “Someone with four fingers instead of ten, I’d guess.”
“No one has…,” Mack said, then fell silent as a chill went all through him.
“Yeah. You get now why we wanted you to see this?”
“And what are the rays coming out of it?”
“Ah. That took a while to figure out. But then we found this.” She led the way back along the wall, back into the past. They had to climb over a jumble of rocks. “See that? Same symbol. Three thousand years ago. Someone like you was here. See how the distance and angle are zero? Someone like you, Mack, one of a group of people, the Magnificent Twelve, came here, was in this place right where you’re standing.”
Then, with hushed reverence, Jarrah pointed to a symbol that, judging from the marks, had just appeared a few months earlier. “See that? That’s a gum tree, a eucalyptus. A jarrah, you might say. And it is linked with you, Mack. And with the symbol for the Magnificent Twelve.”
She shook her head as if she still couldn’t quite believe it. “Weird, eh? To find your fate was chiseled ten thousand years ago.”
Mack could only stare. It shook his entire worldview. Although in fairness his worldview had already been rather badly shaken. His worldview was a cube of raspberry Jell-O in the middle of an earthquake.
His gaze was drawn to a sort of wheel chiseled at the top of the wall. Almost like a clock, but instead of numbers there were pairs of symbols.
“What is that?”
“Ah. That,” Jarrah said. “We don’t quite know. I mean, we understand the symbols. They’re pairs. Light and dark, speed and slowness, health and disease, and so on. We think they may be—”
“Sh!” It was Karri. “I hear something!”
There came a sound like nothing Mack had ever heard before. It came from deep within the rock. Like something grinding its way through the limestone. Like a monster chewing rock.
“It’s a pity this wall ends here,” Jarrah said. “Or we might know what’s happening.”
“Why does it end there?”
“One of two reasons,” Jarrah said. “Either it’s just that the rock face shattered at this point…”
“Or?”
Jarrah shrugged. “Or, maybe history is coming to a sudden end.”
Twenty-five
The chewing, grinding sound was getting slowly louder. “It’s Risky,” Mack said.
Stefan nodded. “Huh.”
“Risky,” Mack explained to Jarrah and her mother. “The Princess. She works for her mother. I guess it’s a really weird family business.”
“Risky…Wait! I know who that is!” Karri cried. She raced to the wall, began frantically searching it, then cried out, “There! Yes. You see this symbol, this head with too many teeth and wavy lines? It’s woven all through the story, often intertwined with the female death’s-head symbol.
“Ereskigal,” Karri said excitedly. “Ereskigal was the Babylonian queen of the underworld. But she’s known by many names. To the Greeks, Persephone. To the Norse, Hel.” She grabbed Mack by his shoulders. “Are you telling me she has a mother?”
“That’s what…um…what I hear.”
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Karri pushed him away. “The death’s-head symbol. The mother of evil,” she whispered. “I didn’t understand…I didn’t realize…” Eyes brimming with tears, she held her arms out for her daughter. “Oh, Jarrah. The death’s-head! It’s the Mother of Evil, the Breeder of Monsters. The…the…Pale Queen.”