Dawnkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  “Yeah.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, figuring their problems had been momentarily back-burnered by the disaster. Glancing over at Strike, who looked royally pissed, he asked, “Was anyone hurt?”

  The king shook his head. “No, thank the gods. And we’ve still got all the translations from the statuette, right?” He directed the question at Jade.

  It was Lucius who answered, “Yeah. And digital pictures from every angle, under both natural light and starlight, which means we still have a chance of figuring out how to block the first prophecy.”

  “It’s not just the first one we have to worry about,” Anna said, pushing through the crowd, looking way more connected and focused than she had during the meeting.

  Strike stiffened. “You got something?”

  “It wasn’t easy.” She pulled her hands out of her pockets. They dripped with blood and held crystals.

  “Jesus, Anna!” Strike caught her hands in his, expression thunderous. “This wasn’t what we talked about you doing. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “That I needed to do whatever it took to punch through the mental blocks guarding my powers.” She was pale, swaying a little on her feet, but she smiled. “I did it. I got inside his head. I saw what he saw.”

  “Jox, get in here,” Strike snapped, and the crowd stirred as the winikin pushed through, took one look at Anna’s hands, and started dragging her out of the archive.

  But she dug in her heels and pulled away. “No, wait. Let me say this first. We’re not just talking about a single prophecy anymore. That’s why Iago wanted all the statuettes. He’s not trying to stop us from defending against Camazotz’s sons one at a time. He’s going to use the artifacts to bring all seven of them through at once, during the vernal equinox. He wants to jump-start the end-time by a couple of years.”

  Which meant they had a week to mount a defense, or the next stage in the end-time countdown was going to be coming very early.

  “Son of a bitch,” Nate growled.

  “We’ve got to find him,” Leah said quickly, her face gone very pale. She looked at Strike. “Are you sure you can’t lock onto him? What about Desiree?”

  He shook his head. “No. I couldn’t even lock on when I was standing there, staring at them, which means they’ve got some way of fouling ’port lock, maybe a version of whatever they used to jam the wards.” He glanced at Anna. “Did you see . . . anything else?”

  They all knew he was asking about Rabbit. The teen’s absence weighed heavily on the king.

  “No, I didn’t,” Anna said softly. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything good or bad.” She held out her hands, where the deep sacrificial cuts were starting to heal. “I’m an itza’at, not a mind-bender or a ’path. Even if I were full strength and all the way trained, there’s no guarantee that I’d have seen anything but what was at the forefront of his mind, which was the image of bringing all seven of the artifacts together during the vernal equinox.”

  Sven said from out in the hallway, “Gods damn it. If I hadn’t dropped the bowl—”

  “Don’t,” Alexis said firmly. “Don’t anybody go there. We’ve made the mistakes we’ve made, and most of them have been because we haven’t had enough information.”

  As usual, Nate thought but didn’t say. Whether or not he bought into the writs, information loss was a recurring theme with the Nightkeepers, as they had been victimized by cyclical acts of genocide that had not only wreaked havoc on the population, but also pretty much cut off info transfer from one phase of their history to the next. For a culture that believed in the recurring nature of time and liked to say crap like, “What has happened before will happen again,” the lack of forethought was pretty sad.

  Or rather, he realized with a sinking, shimmering sensation, it was downright unbelievable.

  “What is it?” Alexis murmured at his side, warning Nate that his face had betrayed his thoughts. Or maybe she’d picked up on something using the powers of the goddess—he still wasn’t sure what she could and couldn’t do. He didn’t think she was, either.

  “A repository,” he said.

  “Yeah, that was what Jade was just saying, how she’d scanned almost all of the books into the computer system, so this”—she indicated the bullet-riddled books— “shouldn’t cost us too much in terms of total information. Given that we can practically reproduce the statuette from the pictures and measurements we’ve got, this wasn’t as much of a disaster as it could’ve been.” She paused. “That assumes, of course, that all the statuette had to offer was contained in the carvings and starscript. I can’t help feeling like we’re missing something there, like maybe there’s another layer of script somewhere that we didn’t know to look for. Otherwise, why else was Iago so hell-bent on getting his hands on all seven of the artifacts?”

  Nate only half heard her; his brain was locked on the idea of a repository. “Not a repository,” he said. “Alexandria.”

  Alexis frowned. “As in Virginia?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “As in ‘the library of.’ I was just thinking how there’s a central flaw in Nightkeeper thinking if we can be so badly derailed over and over again by catastrophic failures of the oral and written traditions.” He barely even noticed that he’d used “we,” where before he’d held himself apart from the Nightkeepers as much as possible.

  Strike narrowed his eyes, considering. “You’re thinking there’s a hidden library somewhere down south.”

  Nate nodded. “Our ancestors cached artifacts. Why not knowledge?”

  “Which would be great if we knew where to start looking.” Alexis turned her palms up, indicating that she didn’t have a clue.

  “I know.” Nate dragged his fingers through his hair, thinking. He turned to Lucius, grateful to see that one of the others had snagged the MAC from the shaken bond-servant, who was on his feet now, pale but resolute. Nate asked him, “You ever hear something that might’ve hinted at there being a hidden library?”

  But Lucius shook his head. “Can’t think of anything, but Jade and I can certainly check through the books and—” He broke off, scrubbing his hands across his face. “Or we could’ve if I hadn’t just shot them to pieces. I can’t believe I did that. I don’t know what the hell came over me.”

  Strike and Anna exchanged a telling look.

  “Wait,” Alexis said, her voice excited. She turned to Nate. “You said it yourself when we were in the ATM caves: Why were our parents there before us?”

  He furrowed his brow. “Because they were trying to find out—” He broke off as it connected. To Carlos, he said “When Gray-Smoke and Two-Hawk left, right before the massacre, are you sure they were casting an actual question spell?”

  The winikin thought for a second, then spread his hands. “It was a long time ago.” He looked behind him at the other winikin, then over at Jox. “Anyone?”

  He got a round of head shakes.

  Nate said, “What if they were trying to investigate the king’s vision, not through magic, but by finding a cache of information, codices and such, that our ancestors had collected before the conquistadors started burning texts? We know they warned the kings against letting the galleons lay anchor, and we know they had prophecies warning of dark times ahead. Seems like a good time to stockpile.” He paused, remembering the artifacts in the ATM cave system. “Or maybe they cached their books even earlier than that, back in the nine fifties, when the Xibalbans released the Banol Kax and the empire fell. That was when they cached the artifacts; why not a library too?”

  Anna shook her head. “It’s a good story, but you’ve got no proof.”

  “Actually . . .” Lucius said, “I may have seen something the other day, on that old map of the cave system.” He cast around for a few seconds, then plucked a splayed-out book from the floor where it had fallen in the melee. He righted one of the chairs and used it as a desk, because the table was leaning on three legs, with the fourth broken off midway. After flipping through
several battered pages, he stopped, tapping Painted-Jaguar’s map. “Here. There’s a glyph hidden in the drawing of the dead-end waterway beyond the temple. It could be the jun glyph, which stands for ‘book’ or ‘folded codex’. ”

  Jade leaned close. “I didn’t see that before.”

  The others crowded close to look. Nate didn’t know the glyph, but he knew where Lucius was pointing, all right. He muttered an oath. “Don’t tell me.”

  “It makes sense,” Alexis murmured in return. “Why set booby traps if you’ve got nothing to protect?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After Strike finished the postattack debriefing, Lucius headed back to his rooms, dogged by a nagging darkness the likes of which he hadn’t felt in weeks. He’d shot the shit out of the archive. How the fuck could he rationalize that?

  He and Jade had been sitting together, dragging through the laborious chore of cross-checking the information from a set of scanned-in pages. A weird rattling sound had cut through the air, and seconds later a blond woman had popped into existence in the middle of the room, wearing combat gear and a soldier’s stone-faced expression, and toting a nasty-looking machine gun. She’d taken one look at Jade and Lucius and opened fire.

  He didn’t know how he’d done what he’d done. He just knew that the moment he’d seen sweet, soft-voiced Jade in the path of fire, a strange, luminous green had hazed his vision, and his body had gone into hyperdrive. Or maybe the world had slowed down; he didn’t know which. All he knew was that one second a line of automatic weapons fire had been walking its way across the archive toward Jade, and the next he somehow had the gun in his hands and was blasting away at the blond bitch. When the bullets finally ran out and the green haze cleared—he was a little iffy on the time line there, because he hadn’t exactly passed out, but things had sort of shifted suddenly—the room had been full of people, the door to the second archive room was open, and the Ixchel statuette was gone.

  And according to Jade, he’d shot the shit out of hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of texts, which might’ve been scanned already, but had been irreplaceable nonetheless. “How could I have done that?”

  “You know how,” Anna’s voice said from behind him.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and fisted his fingers around the raised scar on his palm. “You said the makol couldn’t get to me through the wards.”

  After the slave-bonding ceremony, she’d told him exactly what had happened the previous fall, how he’d learned that she was hiding a codex fragment in her office, and had broken in and stolen it, influenced somehow by the Banol Kax even before he’d begun to read the transition spell. She’d described how she’d had a vision of him cutting himself and invoking the spell, and had contacted Strike and a senior mage named Red-Boar to help him. They had teleported to Lucius’s apartment and found him most of the way turned makol.

  As she’d spoken, he’d known he should’ve been shocked and horrified. But his only real thought had been, Of course, how could I have forgotten all that? He didn’t remember any of it, not really. But everything she said had clicked at a gut-deep level, with a sort of cosmic “aha!” that labeled it as the truth. It explained why he sometimes saw things through a luminous green sheen, why he’d been out of sorts since last summer, and why he’d felt more like himself inside the compound, which was warded against makol magic.

  At least, it was supposed to be.

  “The wards went down during the parley,” Anna said. “That’s how Iago ’ported the third Xibalban, the blonde, into the archive, and how the makol got through to you just now.”

  He stared down at the raised scar ridge on his palm. “Fuck me.” He closed his fingers over the scar, hiding it.

  “At least I didn’t kill Jade.” That would’ve been beyond unthinkable. Of all the surprises he’d found at Skywatch, his almost instant friendship with the shy archivist was by far the nicest. If he’d hurt her . . . “Does Strike think it’s too dangerous to keep me in the compound now?”

  “He’s not sure,” she said, both of them avoiding the point that if he was too dangerous to keep in the compound then he was too dangerous to be let free and there was really only one other choice.

  “What do you think?” he pressed.

  She looked at him long and hard before answering. “I think we can’t afford to sacrifice any valuable allies at this point.”

  He knew her use of the word “sacrifice” was no accident. Horror mixed with anger within him, yielding a deep-seated resentment much like what he’d been feeling for months now. But the wards were back in place, which meant . . . what? Were these really his feelings, or had something taken root inside him in defiance of the Nightkeepers’ shielding magic?

  Oddly, the latter thought didn’t bother him nearly as much as it probably should have.

  “So what now?” he asked her.

  “We’re not making any hasty decisions,” she said firmly, though that wasn’t really an answer. “I’m flying back tonight, but call me if you need to. And if you start having flashes or whatnot, tell someone. Promise me you won’t try to fight dark magic on your own.”

  “I won’t,” he said. But he didn’t promise.

  By day two of Rabbit’s imprisonment, he’d become very familiar with the wooden rafters above his cot, and with the walls and floor of his one-room prison, which was locked and warded, not just with a spell to keep him in, but with one that blocked his magic. Which totally sucked.

  He hadn’t seen another human being since Iago left. He got fed twice a day, morning and night. He’d know it was chow time when he heard footsteps outside . . . and then the lights would go out, not in the cabin, but in his head. He’d freeze wherever he was, locked in place for a few minutes or so. Then he’d blink back in and there’d be food and whatever in the middle of the room, and he’d hear the footsteps moving away. Other than that . . . nothing. Which meant there wasn’t much else to do but count splinters and get tangled up inside his own head.

  He knew he should be trying to contact Strike and the others, knew he should be trying to find a way home, but some piece of him kept wondering whether Skywatch was really home anymore. What was to say they even wanted him back? From what he could tell by looking out the windows, the cabin was part of a ramshackle, closed-down resort. He wasn’t underground, wasn’t in a warded temple, which meant Strike should be able to lock onto him for a ’port if he wanted.

  He hadn’t bothered.

  That left Rabbit with a hollow ache in his gut, a burn of resentment in his heart. He’d depended on the Nightkeepers for magic and family and they’d shut him out. But someone else was offering to fill the gap. So the next time Rabbit heard the crunch of approaching footsteps, he shouted, “Don’t freeze me, okay? I want to talk to Iago.”

  The world blinked out. When it blinked back in, he found himself standing just inside the door of another, larger cabin. His brain sent him three snapshots immediately: the first was of Iago, standing opposite him in gray ceremonial robes; the second was of nine stone skulls arranged in a circle, facing a pale green ceremonial bowl; and the third was the sight of Myrinne, tied to a chair in the corner. Her ankles were bound to the chair legs, her wrists trussed behind her back, and she was limp. Unconscious, or worse.

  Rage hammered through Rabbit, slapping aside any thought of family, magic, or working with Iago. He lunged for her, shouting, “Myrinne!”

  And found himself hanging in midair.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Iago said. He raised his voice and called, “Desiree? I think we’re ready for you now.”

  Cursing, Rabbit twisted, finding that he could move some within the force that held him aloft. His muscles strained as he fought to get free, fought to get to Myrinne. “Let her go, you bastard!”

  The door opened behind Iago and a tall, exotic-looking woman stepped inside, wearing a long, sleek leather coat and high boots. Her red-toned hair was pulled back from her face, and her perfectly made-up eyes were pale hazel, nearly i
nhuman.

  “No!” he shouted when she started toward him, screaming again when she went straight past and reached for Myrinne.

  “Shut it, twerp,” Desiree said. Reaching inside her coat, she produced the ceremonial knife Iago had taken from Rabbit back in New Orleans. “Head and heart, or just bleed her out?” she asked Iago with zero emotion, like she was talking about squashing a bug.

  “Head and heart.” Iago nudged one of the carved skulls more precisely into alignment along the ceremonial circle. “We’ll need all the juice we can get.” He fixed Rabbit with a look. “Unless you’re interested in doing some magic?” He gestured at the green bowl in the center of the circle, which had taken on a faint glow. “This is the bowl of Cabrakan, the earthquake god, and I have need of his services.”

  “Fuck you!” Rabbit lashed out at him, threw fire, then screamed when the flames bounced off the field surrounding him, burning his clothes and skin. Twisting against the invisible bonds, he howled as Desiree licked the edge of the knife, blooding herself.

  Then Iago snapped his fingers and Myrinne awakened.

  She blinked a few times, then tugged halfheartedly against the bonds like she already knew they were there. Then she saw Desiree and her eyes went wide and scared. Pulling harder, yanking at the ropes, she strained away from Desiree and the knife. She managed to skid her chair a few inches across the floor, then bumped into a wall. “Don’t,” she whispered, voice cracking. “Please don’t.”

  But the cool-eyed woman advanced, taking it slow, drawing out the suspense—and the pleasure.

  “For gods’ sake, listen to her,” Rabbit shouted. “Don’t do this!”

  Myrinne’s head whipped around and she focused on him, her mouth dropping open in surprise, her eyes lighting with hope, then fear when she saw him hanging in midair. “Help me!” she screamed, straining toward him, her eyes glazed with terror. “Rabbit, help me!”