The mayan prophecy (Timeriders # 8) by Alex Scarrow Read Free Book Online Page A

ideas but a proper language: verbs, nouns, adjectives.’ He turned towards his desk and rummaged through the mess. ‘Here … I’ll show you. I’ll show you. Ahhh … here it is.’
    He had in his hands several photographs. ‘So, I took some pictures of the writing.’
    He held them out for Maddy and Liam to look at. ‘The writing covered a couple of square feet of the cave wall, written quite small and broken into sections just like paragraphs. But there, see? If you look, each “paragraph break” has these uniquely different glyphs at the beginning and end, almost like quotation marks.’
    She stared closely at them: spirals followed by a wavy line.
     

    The exact same glyphs that had appeared in the Voynich Manuscript. So unique, so distinctive. She could understandnow how they would have leaped out of the manuscript at Adam, the moment he decided to try his hand at decoding the thing. The symbols were like beacons, crying out to be spotted by one particular person. Just like Rashim’s tachyon signals, calling out across time.
    ‘Adam,’ she said, handing the photographs back to him. ‘There’s a message in the Voynich Manuscript meant specifically for us. But look – you’re gonna love this, this mystery gets better … that particular passage in the Voynich was transcribed from a much, much older document. A document that dates back
another
thousand years.’
    Adam pushed a stray dreadlock away from his eyes. ‘Two thousand years old?’ He chuckled nervously. ‘Jesus time? Uh, so … you’re not going to say what I think you’re going to say?’ He looked at them both. ‘Right? You’re not …’
    ‘It depends,’ said Liam. ‘What do
you
think she’s going to say?’
    Adam grinned, shrugged, almost wanted to back away from what he was about to say. ‘Maybe, well, I was going to say something like the Dead Sea Scrolls? Something in the Bible … or … or …’
    ‘Actually, it’s the Holy Grail.’
    Adam’s eyes rounded. His eyebrows rose and made a double arch and his jaw hung open. ‘Oh Jesus …’
    ‘We didn’t manage to crack the message. And I’ll explain why later on. But we think … the answer may lie with this undiscovered tribe of yours. Perhaps even with this cave. Perhaps even in that writing. I don’t know.’ She cocked her head. ‘The reason we came back, Adam, is we need to know where that cave is.’
    ‘You want to go there?’
    ‘Uh-huh.’ She nodded. ‘We
need
to go there. Maybe even … go back in time, maybe even try and speak to these Windtalker people. If we can.’
    Adam nodded slowly, stroking his chin thoughtfully. The notion of time travel, messages buried in the Holy Grail, people from the Middle Ages knowing about him … all of it was insane and impossible, and yet equally these pieces seemed to have some cohesion, like a puzzle that might just click together if the other pieces could be found.
    Maddy was quite taken with his steadiness. His trembling had subsided. The nervous tics, the darting edginess of the eyes had gone. Now he seemed to be settling into some kind of super-calm meditative state.
    ‘Adam?’ She was surprised with how he was taking this. It looked like he was coolly piecing it all together. Quite impressive really. Until he ruined that illusion by doubling over at the waist, then dropped down to an untidy, wheezy squat on the floor.
    ‘Gimme a moment …’ He looked up at them with glassy eyes. ‘Feel a bit light-headed. I … I just need bit of … a bit of air here …’
    And then he flopped sideways on to his unmade bed.
    ‘I think he just fainted on us,’ said Liam.
    Maddy knelt down beside him. ‘Yup. We broke him.’
    ‘We’re taking him back to London with us?’
    ‘If he wants to come, I guess. What do you think?’
    Liam hefted his shoulders. ‘Why not? The more, the merrier.’
    ‘All right then. We need to bring him round.’ She nodded. ‘There’s a bottle of Coke over