PROLOGUE
SUNDAY 3:59 p.m.

A dying sun cast jagged shadows off timber fences that protruded from the earth like crooked teeth. The fences stretched along the greensward in a checkered pattern, in wide rectangles of disordered alignment that extended across the plains bordering the Loch of Stenness. There, amidst the gentle rolling pastures stood Maeshowe, a sudden, massive mound. The hollow, megalithic ruin was composed of one-hundred-thousand stones and overgrown with five millennia of grass. The passage grave had sat silently for ages, waiting for the sign.

The setting sun aligned with Maeshowe’s arched entrance, three oblong slabs of flagstone. A golden ray stretched down the narrow passage into the inner chamber, and inched across the floor to the tomb’s rear wall. The light moved up stone, crossing over faded runic inscriptions, and tightened into a single pinpoint of light that stopped on a blank stretch of rock.

A groan reverberated throughout the chamber. Sound bounced from stone to stone.

Dust swirled off the pebble floor.

With a spark, the dagger of sunlight caught fire to the wall. Like the fingertip of God, it carved an inward spiral into the stone, tightening and twisting towards the middle, until it reached the spiral’s center, where it gouged a three-inch hole into the rock.

In a matter of seconds, the sun passed below the horizon. The inner chamber returned to black.

As if stirred from sleep, the spiral’s afterglow burned ghostly white.

The noise returned, escalating inside the chamber until it erupted down the passageway. The cacophony burst out of the passage grave, across the countryside, and stopped short of the sleepy village, Stenness.

Maeshowe was awake.