Sins 03 - Sins of Treachery

demanded. He felt a pull, a rising desire to discern what the book revealed and a pulse of latent power that begged to be unleashed. Perhaps the answer lay in these maps, Simon thought.
    Gest spread the pages out on a worktop, scanning them quickly. “This all looks authentic, Si, and I know you’re as aware as I am of the state of the bank accounts. We need whatever this points to.”
    “Even if it takes everything we have left?” Simon replied, looking around at his beloved lab, wondering if the risk was worth it.
    Gest grinned, and his eyes sparkled with a lust for adventure.
    “Every cent,” he said. “For we’ll get it back a thousand-fold. Remember his stories, Si, the ones he told us as boys. Diamonds and precious stones without name, all just waiting for us to pull them from the ice. And now we have the map to get us there.”
    Gest embraced his brother, spinning him around in the lab. Simon reluctantly gave into his merriment, smiling for the first time since his grandfather’s death and finally understanding why the map had been left to his headstrong, reckless twin.
    ———
    Two months later, Simon shook his head as he remembered that moment in the lab, the beginning of this trip to the frozen wastelands of the far north. The maps had indicated a little-known stratum of caves within the Arctic Circle but their ship could take them no further and now they had to take dog sleds for the final section of the journey inland. The trip had finished the last of the bank loans that Gest had secured against the mansion and the lab equipment and Simon cursed his own weakness at letting his brother mortgage his life’s work. His jaw ached from days clenching it, as each thunk of ice crunching on the side of the hull had reminded him of the miles of frozen water between them and civilization. For now there was no going back.
    The specialist team Gest had hired were finishing the last checks of the equipment they needed to carry inland, and Simon watched the handlers bring the sled dog teams out from the ship. The Siberian Huskies and Alaskan Malamutes leapt about and yelped, shaking their shaggy fur, tongues hanging out as their hot breath frosted the air. To Simon, they were reminiscent of wolves, with sharp teeth and thick fur, animals suited to this cruel environment and ready to do battle with Nature.
    “Cry havoc,” Simon whispered, “and let slip the dogs of war.”
    He zipped up his fur-lined coat, his hand skimming the top pocket where his name had been sewn in violet letters to help the crew tell the identical twins apart. As if he could be mistaken for his brother, Simon thought, as he watched Gest arguing with the expedition leader, making sure the man was following his instructions to the letter.
    Since his brother’s attention was elsewhere, Simon bent to check the position of the book within his pack. He had wrapped it in protective and waterproof layers, but he still felt a need to reaffirm its safety. As he put his hand on it, he thought he could feel a curious warmth emanating from inside and again he sensed a tendril of desire to place the book where it belonged. He looked up to see gusts of wind on the ice, swirling into figures like mutated angels, reaching for the book with ancient hands. He blinked and they became eddies of chill air again, but Simon tightened the straps on his pack, as the team readied to move out.
    Later that day, the expedition leader called a halt as he and Gest checked their coordinates with the old paper map against the modern GPS. Simon peered around, squinting at the sun through his goggles, taking in their surroundings with a dawning sense of recognition. They had stopped within a shallow valley and the silhouette of the icy hills around them matched one of the drawings in the book, old lines etched in a shaky hand that his grandfather had never been able to interpret.
    With rising excitement, Simon stepped off his sled. He snapped on cross-country skis and headed toward the edge of the valley, using his poles to spur himself onward. The barking and howling of the dogs followed him and he heard Gest shout in alarm, but he wanted to be the first to confirm whether this was indeed the place in the drawing.
    Beneath a strange formation of ice cliffs, reminiscent of a demon’s head, a precipice fell into a vast pit. A dank and foul-smelling waterfall poured dark-tinted water downwards, anathema to the clear crystal they had found elsewhere. The volcanic