Peter's gaze was drawn to a spot on the floor just in front of the altar stone. It was hard to tell in the
flickering shadows, but it seemed that the hard-packed earth floor had at some point been disturbed.
Eyes narrowing, Peter sank to his knees in front of the altar block. He'd been extra careful not to touch
anything in the chamber for fear of contamination— the bacteria on a normal human hand could be
enough to do it, and once contaminated, it was near-impossible to get a proper radiocarbon dating fix.
Peter and Mills might not get along, but Peter had never forgotten the first rule the professor had
taught him: Never do anything to disrupt an ancient site.
But now Peter's head was pounding. He'd discovered something unknown, something no one else
even suspected. His thoughts of Robert Mills, of careful assessment, of nonintrusion, were forgotten
as he stared hard at the small patch of disturbed soil. Something had been buried there.
Balancing the flashlight on the floor to illuminate the spot, he leaned forward and began to scrabble at
the surface with his bare hands. He knew that he shouldn't be doing this—that he should call the
professor and arrange for a proper stone-by-stone excavation—but his mind was curiously detached,
he felt driven, and he didn't even register the pain in his fingertips as they scraped at the stony earth.
The soil came away more easily than he'd expected, and his heart thudded as his right hand dosed
around something cold and hard. He tugged at it, twisting it slightly to ease it from the earth that held
it. It came free with a jerk, sending an almost electric tingle shooting up his wrist and arm.
Peter picked up the flashlight in his other hand and focused its beam on his find.
It was a carved stone ax head, made from some kind of heavy granite rock, four or five inches wide
and double that in length. At each end it had been honed to a razor-sharp edge that seemed unaffected
by its long years below ground. And on each side of the ax blade, a spiral was carved—a
counterclockwise spiral.