by Faith Hunter
Urlo angled his face away from her light and shrugged. “A while. One hour, perhaps.” He brushed at the caked dirt on his pants. His head was in constant motion, and then he glanced up too. “That is no longer a way out.”
Agata shone the flashlight beam up. Broken tree limbs, dirt, stone, and other debris had fallen through the hole in the ceiling, sealing it. The multiple explosions she’d heard. And it didn’t sound like anyone was trying to dig them out.
Playing the light around the chamber, she saw a dazzling assortment of gold objects. They didn’t seem quite so shiny given her predicament.
Agata set the flashlight down.
“My companions are most likely dead,” he said.
“They were cartel thugs.” She didn’t add that he also was a cartel thug. Did his face, in the dim light, take on the slightest hint of color? Ire?
“We are not thugs. We are survivors,” he returned. “We do what we have to. We . . . they—”
“Are most likely dead, as you said, and so no longer of any consequence. To the explosives, to the bullets, to that . . . that . . . cat creature. Dead.”
“Animal-spawn crossbreed,” he corrected. “It appeared to be a mix of tiger and caiman.”
“No tigers in the basin.”
“It looked like—”
“Yeah, well, whatever it was, Urlo, I’d call it mean and hungry.” She closed her eyes and recited her favorite Blake poem, an exercise to center herself. “Tiger! Tiger! burning bright, In the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
Her eyes opened in surprise at the daywalker quoting a line from the poem. Scholars of ancient English literature referenced it, but a hellhole-raised Dark half-breed?
“Quoting a centuries-dead poet will not get us out of here,” Urlo said. “This will be our coffin if we cannot get closer to the surface where the few conjures I know might help.” He dug the ball of his foot against the floor, displacing some of the gold. “The cartel may find the fallen above—”
“But they might not think to come digging,” Agata finished. She didn’t want them to come digging.
“What is this place, Agata D’Cruz?”
“Z. Like I told your buddies up top. It’s called Z.” She gave him a brief account of her years of work to find it. “And I’m taking some of it with me.” One of her sacks was still tucked under her belt. She pulled it out and began grabbing up gold figurines, pieces of jewelry, things that looked exceedingly valuable and small, things with inscriptions she didn’t have the time to decipher, stuffing them roughly into the bag.
“We need—”
“Yeah, to find a way out. We’ll do that. This won’t be our coffin. But we’re not leaving ’til this bag is heavy.” As she made a circuit of the room, she studied the walls, noting the painted figures, not Aztec or Incan or any of the other Meso-American cultures she’d studied. She stopped cold in front of one. It was an image of a winged warrior—a seraph. Farther along was a second one, darkly colored, in battle with the first. Behind the second seraph was a third figure, a man with snakes writhing from his hands to threaten the dark seraph—a neomage casting a conjure? Under the bright seraph’s feet was a defeated figure: an animal-man with prominent fangs—a nightwalker?
“Not possible,” she whispered. She knew the Light and the Dark came to Earth before in Biblical times, but this was more recent; the Amazon basin had no such civilization in 3000 B.C.
Had there been another Apocalypse, completely forgotten? And because mankind had forgotten, had it brought about another wave of divine retribution centuries later? She tentatively touched the wall, her fingers tracing a design, registering the smooth gold, coarse ceramic, and the fish-scale feel of ancient paint.
Some of the faded images looked tortured: buildings in ruins, a sun blazing, the moon cracking, trees burning, people running. A sprawling scene on one wall clearly illustrated an epic disaster.
Had Z been buried in an earlier Apocalypse? If Z was destroyed in the Apocalypse, was this mural painted afterwards? Agata knew she’d be pondering this for a very long while.
She needed a camera and more time. But right now, she needed to get out of here with what she had.
Agata looked for Urlo. He sat on the throne against the opposite wall, studying her.
“Over here,” she said, approaching him. There was a gap between the throne’s back and the wall. “I smell the river strongest behind the throne. Help me move this,” she said, gripping one of the armrests, but Urlo casually shoved the heavy chair aside. There was a slash in the wall behind it. “It’s a passage. A tight fit.” She’d barely be able to drag her overstuffed bag through it. Maybe it led to another chamber, a gate, a way out. The Lost City of Z must have had many buildings, and the Light Father had been so gracious as to let her find one filled with treasure. If she could find her way out, she’d come back and back and back, exploring, pillaging. Agata felt drunk on what the future could hold.
If she could get out.
The beam from her flashlight failing, she put on her night-vision goggles and slipped into the crevice. “I’m leaving,” she told Urlo.
“And I will make sure no one disturbs this place again.” She spotted him against the wall with the images of the warring angels. “Your lost city should stay forever lost.”
We’ll just see about that, she thought to herself.
The crevice opened to a twisting natural tunnel. From the smoothness of the wall, it appeared to have been carved from the rock a long time ago by running water—a tributary of a prehistoric Amazon. There were spider web-fine veins of silver threaded through it. Another poem sprang to Agata’s mind: “And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins and set them all free; Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun. Then naked and white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind; And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.” More Blake.
Agata prayed this passage would lead away from the treasure-filled coffin. Lead away so she could come back.
Urlo followed, scraping his shoulders at first and then somehow making himself smaller. The sharp angles of his face smoothed. He’d adopted a human guise. The fatigues fit that form near-perfectly.
He prodded her shoulder with a finger. “My spell is finished,” he said. “You had best pick up speed.”
“Spell?”
“Some such castings have names. This is called Seismic Shock. I put everything into it, Agata D’Cruz. It would be advisable to move faster.”
Agata heard a jarring, crashing sound far behind them. A gust of dust-laden wind from the same direction banged her into a wall.
“What did you do?” she hollered.
“Keeping your lost city lost, I say again.”
The rumbling behind her continued, so Agata took off along the passage. The tunnel twisted and turned, rose and fell. Side passages too narrow to navigate branched off from it, but they continued along the main tunnel. At one point it opened into a small natural chamber, and she paused to catch her breath. “You had no right,” she panted. “Damn you to—” she stopped herself. Curses carried real meaning, and Urlo was a creature of Darkness.
“No one needs to know if there was an earlier reckoning. They are paintings that do not matter now.”
She was too tired to argue. She felt like she’d been moving for hours. She was exhausted, wanted to rest, just a brief sleep. But the daywalker kept moving, and if he got far enough ahead of her, he might collapse the tunnel behind him, trapping her. She pushed on.
Some time later, after another complicated downward twist in their path, Agata’s hopes flagged as low as her energy. “The tunnel . . . it could go on for miles.”
“It does. But it will come to an end.”
If Urlo had meant to encourage Agata, he
hadn’t succeeded. But the scent of the river was stronger. And that gave her the strength to continue.
They struggled forward, the cleft in the rock angling steeply up now and narrowing. Agata struggled to squeeze both herself and the gold through it. She looked over her shoulder, seeing Urlo press his hands against the rock, words she couldn’t understand tumbling over each other out of his mouth. The tunnel behind them collapsed. Tremors persisted for a few moments, the ground groaned, and then there was silence.
“You . . . are . . . a . . . fool,” Agata hissed.
“Blake does not have a poem about fools,” he said.
“Odd that you know his work so well.” She edged forward.
“Ancient poetry is my friend,” he confessed. “In an . . . earlier time, I found comfort in Blake. Shelley, Keats, Tennyson. I have a very old book among my belongings, The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The pages are as thin as fog, and there is not much left of the binding. It is worth more than all the gold in your sack.”
“Wait. I feel a breeze.”
“Yes. The rock breaches the surface ahead. I have opened the way.”
“Opened . . . you mean you could’ve made a tunnel to the surface for us any time you wanted to? But you—”
“My magic can only affect stone . . . and a few other things. I was unable to help us until there was no dirt overhead to bury us. I didn’t seal the way back down until we were assured of a way out.”
They returned to their climb, Agata mentally calculating what equipment she would need to reopen the site in a month or two when the cartel had given up on the area.
Minutes later, the passage widened, jagged, newly shattered rock littering the tunnel floor, fresh air swirling around them; they’d reached the surface. Agata collapsed, thoroughly spent. She’d been underground for hours. It was night, and the moon and stars shone down on the river. The pale light grazed stones that had been blasted up at odd angles to jut between the larger trunks—river bones.
Urlo’s face was pointed up at the stars. It was parchment white again, angles and planes, his daywalker form regained. When he glanced down at her, his eyes took on a distant, almost sad, cast.
“I should kill you,” she said, “for what you did to that chamber.”
“This is Blake’s forest of the night,” he returned. “But you are not a tiger, and I am not a lamb. Be content that the cartel will not gain the gold. Be content that you have enough of it.” She noticed that the pockets of his trousers bulged. He’d taken some of the treasure, too.
“Agata D’Cruz.” When she looked up at his face, his violet eyes caught hers, held hers. “Past the new meadows, over the still stream. Up the hill side; and now ’tis buried deep, In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music—Do I wake or sleep?”
“That’s not Blake,” she said, fighting sleep, “that’s Keats . . .”
Agata closed her eyes and unwillingly drifted off to sleep.
She awoke some time after dawn, someplace that wasn’t where she’d fallen asleep. There was no sign of the daywalker, no sign of the tunnel. The sack was there, and still full. But when she inspected the treasures, there were new pieces she didn’t remembering taking. As for the rest, everything was golden, bejewelled, and obviously valuable, but there was nothing spectacular, nothing that would take the art world by surprise. Nothing with an identifying inscription or an incised Apocalyptic scene.
Her pack was somehow on the ground next to her too, despite the distance they’d traveled from the dig. It was spattered with mud and other stains, ripped by shrapnel, but a few things survived intact: food, flashlight batteries, even some of the detonators and one of her explosive charges. Not her maps and notes.
“That’s a setback,” she said to the birds, “but not a major one. I can just go back to . . . back to . . .”
She couldn’t remember. She recalled the blasting, the digging, the encounter with the cartel soldiers. She could vividly visualize the chamber, the murals, the tunnel, and Urlo. But when she tried to picture landmarks on the way to her find, picture her annotated maps, picture the landscape near the river where their tunnel had reached the surface, everything went hazy. The more she concentrated on them, the more indistinct they became.
“Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music—Do I wake or sleep?”
Urlo had left her gold, but had taken her treasure, her dream from her. But she’d found it once; she would find it again. Somewhere within scent of the river.
JEAN RABE is the author of three dozen novels and a hundred or so short stories. When she isn’t writing, which isn’t often, she tosses tennis balls to her cadre of dogs, visits museums, and plays wargames. Visit her on the web at: www.jeanrabe.com
A Wing and A Prayer
Early Spring 105 PA / 2117 AD
Faith Hunter
Evan looked at the mage in disbelief. “You want us to go in a hellhole? With no recon? No intel? Are you out of your mind?”
“Yes, yes, yes. And no. I’m quite sane,” Marc said, answering each question in order, fingering his gaudy amulet necklace. It was made of blackened steel links and dangling steel and copper leaves so finely made they whispered and tinkled at the slightest movement or breeze. And probably held the destructive power of an armored battalion. Enough to destroy a dragon, if he could get close enough. For which he needed the Army.
The steel and copper leaves meant Marc was a Metal mage of some kind. And mages made the back of his neck itch. His dad used to claim mages were responsible for all the plagues. For all Evan knew, the old bastard was right.
“I’m not leading my men underground—underground!—without intel, I don’t care what you think is down there. You get me some intel and we’ll talk.” Evan hooked his thumbs into his belt and waited, knowing it wasn’t over.
“If I get you the data,” Marc said, raising his head, his hair falling forward in a slow wave, “then what? Then you’ll tell me if you have a nuke? Then you’ll give me men and weapons and go with me to take the cavern?”
“Then we’ll talk about it.”
“And meanwhile the seraph and the mages that the dragon captured will suffer and bleed and die. My wife is down there!”
“Not my problem.” Mage women—whores, every one of them. And seraphs could burn to ash for all he cared.
“Even if I can bring a kylen to work with us? A kylen who can control his sexual urges in battle?”
Evan raised his eyebrows, watching Marc’s face clenched in hope and fear. Evan should have been irritated with the offer, but, instead, he considered. He’d fought beside a kylen once, when he was kid. Next to seraphs themselves, kylen were the best warriors on Earth, and having one on your side meant a better chance of victory, without the risk of humans dying by the hundreds afterward from the effect of the sword of judgment a seraph carried. Some kylen could draw on the same energy sources that the seraphs could. “You bring me the kylen and a map of the maze down there, and you got a deal.”
From his cloak, Marc pulled out a wad of papers and handed them over, a grin on his face. Realizing he’d been outmaneuvered, Evan sighed and looked at his adjutant. The man drew to attention, his face going white. He’d searched the mage and still let the papers through? Evan fingered the papers. They had to be glamoured.
Evan sighed. Having stars on your lapels meant you had weapons, ordnance, and soldiers at your beck and call. It meant that you could kill Darkness better than most. But it didn’t stop you from being conned by the damn mages.
The rising sun hidden by falling snow, Evan and Marc stood before a hellhole, inhaling the stink of sulfur and rot. The entrance to the dragon’s lair was right where the mage had claimed, which made Evan a bit happier about the entire event. And the screams of the tortured could be heard all the way up in the surface, which made the intel the mage had provided look credible.
Evan looked back, checking the armor on his men. It was the latest stuff out of DuPo
nt R&D. They called it Diamondtuff. Harder than diamonds, actually. Evan had been itching to try it out, though he’d never tell the mage. And the new fléchette rounds—Diamonite—that the men had been issued should make the darkuns’ body count rise. His men, dressed for battle, looked like something out of an old Pre-Ap movie. Star Wars, maybe. He snorted at the thought.
Now, if the kylen showed, and if the feathered wonder and the mage didn’t fall on each other and screw each other’s brains out before the battle got started, it would be a pretty good start to the day, Murphy’s Law notwithstanding.
Suddenly Marc shot up his head and sniffed. In a motion so fast Evan didn’t see it, the mage pulled his swords. Then he began to dance around in martial art forms, as if warming up. Marc locked eyes with him over the swinging swords and said, “He’s here, just like he promised.”
Out of the low-lying fog walked a winged warrior—a kylen. Evan’s men began to whisper, and Evan shot them a glance. Instantly they settled, but every eye was on the newcomer. Like the mage, he carried two swords, with small throwing blades belted around his thighs, a spear in a sling on his back, and a shield that Evan knew was magical. Kylen were damned hard to kill. Unless a Darkness was mighty lucky, most kylen could heal back from almost any wound, though it might take a while.
But they had weaknesses. Overconfidence. Inability to sitrep—read a situation and change a plan accordingly. They were unable to adapt to changes in situation too. And then there was the likelihood that they would be called back without notice to whatever Realm of Light had let them loose. They were virtual slaves, had to obey the seraphs, and had no personal freedom; it had to suck.
But living like they did had compensations. Human women found them irresistibly attractive. And if they happened on a mage without one of the new seraph stones that stopped mage heat, the resultant rut was said to be a freaking amazing bang—with love-’em-and-leave-’em benefits.
“I am Nireonel,” the kylen said.
