The Kabbalah was a collection of ancient mystical teachings that were said to predate all the world’s major modern religions. It had acquired a certain mystique over the millennia since its secrets were known only by a certain few ‘initiates’. It was mainly concerned with, on the one hand, the eternal and divine realm of existence, and on the other, the mortal, tangible world that we live in—which it famously depicted in diagrammatic form in the Tree of Life image that Jack and the others had seen earlier.

In Kabbalistic lore—and indeed on the Tree of Life—Keter was the uppermost celestial plane, or, for want of a better word, Heaven. Malkuth was the opposite, the lowest level of the Kabbalah and the entryway to the darker underworld.

In his near-death state and unbearable pain, the monk was rambling, repeating some kind of mantra from his studies about the afterlife.

‘. . . If we can’t get to Keter, Malkuth will lead us . . .’

As the dying monk kept muttering, Jack scanned the tunnel around him, careful not to look back at the goldman.

The stone walls on both sides of the fallen man, he noticed, were pockmarked with many large slashing indentations that radiated outward, as if someone had detonated something in here and the blast had seared into the walls in a kind of spray pattern.

His gaze fell on the two re-solidified bronzemen and suddenly he saw a mark on the floor next to them.

Shaped like a small black star, it was a scorch mark of some kind, as if a grenade had indeed gone off here and left this charring on the ground.

Jack looked up at the ceiling directly above the mark.

And he saw it.

Or, rather, he didn’t see it.

A crimson orb should have been directly above the scorch mark, but instead of an orb, there was just an empty socket.

An orb had dropped out of that socket and hit the floor.

The orbs don’t just provide light . . . Jack realised.

If they fall out of the ceiling and hit the floor, they explode, releasing some sort of heat blast . . .

He looked again at the deformed Omega monk and the melted lumps that had once been bronzemen. He also thought about Dion and his Squires.

Something extremely hot had assailed them all, something so incredibly hot that it had melted their equipment to their skin and turned bronzemen to liquid. Although, notably, it hadn’t affected the goldman at all.

That was when he remembered another of Imhotep’s warnings:

Beware the liquid fire.

Jack looked from the scorch mark on the floor to the empty socket in the ceiling . . . to all the other red orbs running down the ceiling in a line.

Jesus. There were hundreds of them in here, and just one had done this.

Jack had been in deadly places before, but nothing with this level of lethality.

Keeping his head downturned, he signed to Lily: