Children of the Sky (The Talari Subversion Book 1)

by Houston V. Grant

  We set off hiking as soon as I got back to camp. After about three hours we came to a small clearing and I spotted a mass of purple orchids growing on a tree on the other side. This was the place. By early afternoon, I had multiple samples of leaves, roots, and barks—all neatly labeled and vacuum-sealed.

  With my collecting done for the day, we wanted to see if we could catch anything in the nearby stream, so after setting up camp we rigged a couple of poles with jerky as bait and set out. It took a while, but we eventually caught a few decent-sized fish, and then moved further down the bank to a spot overlooking a deep pool. The water was unusually clear for this part of the world, and when I peered in I could see that the bottom wasn’t muddy. It was covered in leaves and twigs, but it appeared to be made of tile, and if I looked at just the right spot, I could see something sparkle.

  “Luis, how deep do you think this water is?”

  Luis squinted into the pool. “Maybe twelve or fifteen feet. Why? You’re not jumping in there, are you?”

  “There’s something sparkling down there. I wanna see what it is.”

  Shaking his head, ‘no,’ he said: “I would not recommend that. You don’t know what’s in there. Have you never seen River Monsters? Animals in this river are vicious.”

  “I know,” I said, stripping off my outer clothes. “But I can see to the bottom. I don’t see anything in there but little fish anyway.”

  Over Luis’s objections, I tied fishing weights to my canvas belt and strapped it around my waist to cut down on buoyancy. I tied a rope to the belt and gave the other end to Luis. “If I tug on this, pull me up,” I instructed.

  Luis reiterated his objections with a short and curt “you’re an idiot,” but agreed to man the rope.

  I barely made a splash when I broke the plane of the water. The bottom was only about ten feet down, and with a couple of strong kicks I was there. I was able to see the sparkling object easily. A quick sweep of my hand brushed away the leaf litter and revealed some kind of opaque, purplish crystal carved in the shape of what I assumed was a mushroom. I grabbed it and realized that it was a pendant on a thin, silver chain. There were two other gems just like it.

  My first thought about the floor of the pool was correct—it was covered in leaves and silt, but it was definitely a stone floor. I pushed off the bottom at the same time as I tugged on the rope and I shot upward, propelled from my own kick as well as Luis pulling me up.

  “You’re crazy,” Luis said as I climbed back onto the bank.

  “Maybe,” I said between breaths, “but look what I found.”

  Heading back to camp we came upon an animal-crossing near the riverbank. Luis pointed out the cloven hooves of a peccary and the four-toed prints of a capybara. The other jumbled-together imprints were harder to make out, but there was another that Luis pointed out—a jaguar. And unlike the others, its prints showed it coming out of the water, not walking towards it.

  “How old do you think these jaguar prints are?” I asked.

  Luis examined them more closely. “No more than a few hours. But there are capybara around. The locals say that man doesn’t really have to worry about jaguars when there are capybara around.”

  I grunted in response and looked back at the tracks, trying to count how many capybara had passed by. I wasn’t a particularly skilled tracker, but I did notice something I hadn’t seen before. The jaguar’s prints veered off into the grass shortly after it had come ashore. And almost hidden in the grass was one last print from the cat—with a missing toe. The thought had crossed my mind when I first saw the prints, but I didn’t want to consider the possibility.

  Could it be following us?

  But in front of me now was what looked like proof—this was the same animal that had left the prints back where we started. I didn’t want to seem alarmed, so I didn’t point it out. I just said, “Capybara or not, I’d rather get back to camp.”

  Back at camp we cleaned our fish and roasted them over the fire. I kept my rifle beside me the whole time, which earned me a few teases from Luis, but I didn’t care.

  Despite all the small and irritating bones the fish were delicious. Surprisingly firm for their size, they weren’t fishy tasting like freshwater fish can sometimes be. I brought up the jaguar while we ate. “I think it’s the same one from before,” I said.

  “Why?” Luis asked. “There’s jaguar all through this jungle. We’ve probably walked past ten of them and didn’t even know it.”

  “Maybe. But the prints I saw when we first landed had a toe missing. And this one is missing the same toe.”

  I could see Luis trying to think of a rational explanation, but he couldn’t come up with one. “You sure?” he asked quietly.

  “I don’t think it necessarily means anything that it’s the same jaguar,” I said. “I don’t know how big their ranges are. We walked this far in a day, maybe it’s normal that it did too.”

  Luis nodded. “And we haven’t seen it. It’s not like it came right up to our camp or anything. It was down at the water with a bunch of other animals.”

  “I agree,” I said. “But I’m still sleeping with my rifle.”

  “No argument from me,” Luis said.

  We stayed by the fire for a while after dark, marveling at the sky. With only our campfire for light, the Milky Way was perfectly visible and it was easy to see why so many ancient cultures had stories about constellations and beings coming from the sky. The glowing eyes watching from the forest were still unnerving, but what was most disturbing was when those glowing eyes suddenly disappeared. No sooner had I begun to speculate on what might be the cause than I heard snarling and a crash in the forest. “Alright, that’s enough for me,” I said, heading into my tent.

  I woke a few hours later to the sound of something padding around outside the tent. I lay still and listened closely. Whatever it was walked all around the tent, but never came all the way up to it. I could hear it rooting around in the area where we’d buried the leftovers from our dinner, and it was gone after a few minutes. I felt safe enough inside the tent, but the fact that something had come into our camp had me a little anxious.

  We were both up before dawn, and as soon as I had the fire going I took a look around the camp. Luis had slept through the whole thing. Our tents were pitched on dry ground, so there were no pawprints to tell what it could have been. We packed up and got ready to move, then sat down to eat breakfast.

  Our fire was blazing, but the stars were still clearly visible as we sipped instant coffee. Then we heard the same snarl as the night before. I couldn’t see it, but I was sure it was the jaguar. And it was out there in the direction we’d planned on going.

  After talking it over, we decided to go back rather than go further in. After about an hour, we passed through another clearing and stopped on the far side to rest. I looked back, and standing just inside the treeline on the other side was a big, spotted cat.

  Luis followed my eyes. “It’s stalking us,” he said.

  “Let’s keep to the middle of the clearing to rest,” I said. “We don’t want it sneaking up on us.”

  The animal watched us for a few moments, then slipped into the forest. I scanned my memory for anything I could remember about big cats hunting humans. I’d read that tigers and lions usually became man-eaters because of some injury that made it hard for them to hunt their normal prey—humans were simply slower, weaker, and easier to catch. There was a tiger that killed 430 people in India in the early 1900s. When someone finally shot it, they realized it had two badly broken canines. A pair of brother lions that had killed almost fifty workers building a bridge in Kenya both had dental infections. And the jaguar stalking us was missing a toe.

  We didn’t stay long before moving again. The jaguar followed. It was getting bolder now and coming closer.

  “It’s trying to find the right ambush location,” I said.

  Luis agreed with me now. It started raining and the forest got very dark, very quickly. I looked
back and the jaguar was there, eyes glowing in the gloom. I shot at it, but missed, and it leapt, snarling, into the brush.

  We had to get back to our pick-up point, but hiking through the forest would be even more dangerous now that it was dark and raining. But looking off to the side, I could see a break in the vegetation ahead. The forest floor sloped downward and there was a rocky outcropping at the bottom. A spray of woody bushes with white flowers grew around the rim of a circular hole in the earth. When you looked down, the hole was lined with rough inset slabs of rock that almost seemed to have been placed there intentionally. From the floor of the hole, they led a few feet east into a low opening that went down into the hillside. I pointed it out.

  “No way,” Luis said. “I’m not going into some uncharted cave in the middle of the jungle.”

  “What choice do we have?” I said. “We can’t outrun it. We can’t escape it by climbing a tree. Our best bet is to go into this cave. Hopefully it’ll come in after us and we can take it out in a confined space.”

  “I don’t know,” Luis said. “Look at that drop. If we go down there, how are we gonna get back out? And it’s raining. I say we keep going. We can make it to the river in an hour and be right on time for our pick-up.”

  “At this pace?” I asked. “Creeping along and breaking our necks looking around at every sound? It’s gonna take us more like three or four hours and it’s getting dark. I’m not walking through the forest in the dark. We go down in this cave, we have natural shelter. We have food and water. We can build a fire and be assured it can’t get us from behind. We keep going tomorrow. It’s only day two,” I reminded him. “Armando promised to check at the same time for three days. We can wait until tomorrow.” Luis grudgingly agreed.

  I went in first. I took off my pack and dropped it to the ground below, then dropped myself down. Luis handed me his pack then jumped down too. Tangled vines hung from the ledge above, obscuring the entrance, but cool air flowed from the dark mouth in an obvious stream—I would’ve been able to find my way in even with my eyes closed. I used a stick to push some of the vines aside—squinting at them to make sure no spiders or snakes fell on me—and I peered inside.

  The first thing that struck me was the complete absence of sound. I hadn’t gone more than a couple of steps in and it was like I’d entered an isolation chamber. Coming in from the heat and humidity of the forest, it felt like being in air-conditioning. The chamber we were in was maybe twenty feet wide, with a seven-foot ceiling. As my eyes adjusted, I was able to see that the floor sloped down gently towards the back, but the roof stayed the same, so the space grew more open as you went further back. I pulled out my flashlight and shined it around.

  Luis was looking around with the same look of wonder that I probably had. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. He started walking down the slope, looking up at the ceiling and the walls.

  “Watch your step,” I said. “This is sinkhole country.”

  He nodded absentmindedly. After a moment he said, “Look at these walls. This isn’t limestone. This looks like granite.”

  I set about unpacking what I needed to make this cave home for the night while keeping an eye on the entrance.

  “Hey, turn your light off for a second,” Luis called out.

  “Turn off my light?” I asked.

  “Yeah, just for a second,” he said, “I wanna see something.”

  I checked the entrance again, then closed my eyes before turning off my flashlight. My eyes adjusted quickly and I peered into the darkness where I last saw Luis. Suddenly, I understood what he’d wanted to see.

  “Is there light in here?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  I couldn’t make him out clearly, but I could sort of see him as a darker shape in the darkness. He walked down the slope a little and disappeared around something that I hadn’t even noticed. “This is amazing,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, walking over to see what he was looking at. It wasn’t visible from where I’d been standing, but from this viewpoint, I could see that there was another chamber down the slope and to the right. There was a roughly triangular opening about waist high, and emanating from it, a faint purplish glow.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked.

  “I think it’s mushrooms,” I said. I was already walking towards the glow, collecting kit in hand. The opening into the glowing chamber was too small to climb or reach through, but I crouched down and looked in. My first guess had been right—the glow seemed to be coming from mushrooms growing on a column in the chamber. The light was too dim to make out much of what was in there, but considering that it was coming from a few mushrooms, it was pretty impressive.

  “Despite what most people think,” I said in Luis’s general direction, “cave dwelling mushrooms are extremely rare. And a bioluminescent one…that’s beyond rare. This might actually be an unidentified family. We gotta get into that room. Let’s finish setting up camp and find a way in.”

  “If cave mushrooms are so rare,” Luis asked, “what’s this one doing here? How does it live here? What’s sustaining it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Maybe it gets nutrients from the rock, or from water that seeps in from above. Really weird ecosystems and organisms develop in isolated places like caves. Its bioluminescence is interesting too. Purple is a very unusual color. I can’t think of any other purple bioluminescent organisms.”

  As I was clearing away a space to build the fire I noticed that underneath all the dirt, the stone of the floor was perfectly smooth. As I looked more closely, it became apparent that the stones were arranged. There were pieces missing, but it was a pattern. I looked around at the walls and the ceiling and looked more closely at the column in the middle of the chamber we were in. It was way too even and smooth to be natural.

  “Luis, you said it’s unusual that this cave is hard rock, right?”

  He nodded, noticing now what I was looking at. “Holy shit,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “This isn’t a cave. These are ruins.”

  “Holy shit,” he repeated.

  2

  With our fire burning, we both went to look more closely at the structure. I don’t know how we hadn’t noticed it before. Even though the stone was rough, it was even. The walls, ceiling and floor were all of the same rough, even stone.

  “Look at this,” I said, flashing the light around. “I don’t think any humans have been here in hundreds of years at least. Thousands maybe. This is pre-Columbus.”

  “I think you’re right,” he said. “Nobody has been in here in a very long time.”

  The import of the situation was hitting both of us at about this time.

  “Ok,” I said. “Here’s the plan: we go in together; we stick tight. If there’s anything valuable, we take as much as we can carry in our pockets—call it a finder’s fee—but we leave the site intact for archaeologists to excavate.”

  “Agreed,” Luis said. “And I want to be part of the excavation. Can we not tell anyone where it is unless they let us participate?”

  “Yeah, that works for me,” I said. “Just call me Indy.”

  The entrance chamber went back about a hundred feet, gently sloping down the whole time. The floor leveled out at that point, and after walking back for another fifty feet or so, there was a low, rectangular doorway cut into the wall. We had to scramble up onto a chest-high ledge in order to go in, and then had to duck down through the doorway.

  This chamber was maybe half as wide as the entrance, with doorways on both the left and right. The right doorway was glowing with the purple light we’d come to find, but my jaw dropped when I saw the chamber we were in.

  The walls were covered in symbols and paint that was mostly intact. Stylized images of people with slanted, black eyes were interspersed with some kind of thick angular script. In some of the images, the people were harvesting crops or carrying spears. In others they were laying on their backs, looking or pointing
upward.

  In the center was a panel that showed what I presumed was the ruler. He had the slanted, black, almond eyes that were endemic to all the images and was enclosed in an oval where he lay back looking up. He wore what looked like a helmet, and seated next to him was something that looked like a shark with legs. If someone painted that picture today, I’d say it was an astronaut readying for blastoff.

  There was a weapon rack against the back wall and it still held a number of spear type weapons with long, gloss black blades.

  Luis picked one up and turned it over carefully in his hands. With some surprise he said, “This isn’t wood—it’s some kind of metal. But it isn’t that heavy.”

  Luis was amazed by the lances, but what drew my attention was a much shorter baton that lay flat on the bottom of the rack. I picked it up and weighed it in my hands. It was about half the length of my forearm and made of the same dark material as the lances, but inlaid with script like that on the walls.

  I was studying the baton when I heard a scuffling coming from the entrance chamber. Luis and I glanced at each other.

  “What’s that?” he mouthed.

  I shrugged. My brain was automatically trying to think of rational explanations—maybe it was wood crackling in the fire. Or—I came up blank. The sound came again—still very faint, but more discernible that time. And then again, right outside the chamber. I put the baton in my pocket and raised my gun to my shoulder. My heart was racing and I was vaguely aware that Luis was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it over the blood pounding in my ears.

  I hadn’t even disengaged the safety when the jaguar leapt up to the ledge. Lips pulled back into a snarl that exposed its gleaming canines, it filled the doorway before my brain could process what was happening.