The Smoke Hunter
Page 30
Then word began to whisper its way down the caravan. Mendez heard it first and hurried back to them, his eyes bright with excitement.
Ellie felt a surge of nervous energy. Please don’t let it be another body, she thought.
“They’ve found it,” he announced.
Suddenly alert, Ellie looked up. Ahead of her, the canopy broke, revealing the massive face of a cliff that loomed over their stretch of jungle. The gray stone face of it was marked by a startling, sinuous line of black stone.
The river of smoke.
The open space between the cliff and the jungle was narrow, the caravan crowding it as drovers tried to herd both men and mules into some semblance of order. The wall of stone was sheer, towering some two hundred feet over Ellie’s head. Stubborn shrubs clung to its stony surface, while thicker foliage draped its crown like a decaying bridal veil.
At the base of the cliff, the black vein of stone vanished into a narrow ravine.
This is it. Ellie could see the image of the map in her mind. The dark opening in front of her was the final stage of her journey. On the other side lay the place she’d crossed half the world to find.
The White City.
Velegas emerged from the opening, climbing nimbly over a jumble of boulders. He jumped down, dusting off his hands as he approached Dawson.
Nudging her way past a stack of gear, Ellie moved closer.
“There’s more rockfall inside, but it looks like the way is clear after that. I won’t know for sure until I scout the rest of it.”
“I’m going with you,” Dawson announced, dismounting from his mule. “You as well, Bates.”
Adam stepped past a cluster of bearers. Ellie felt her pulse jump. She hadn’t seen him since the night before, and the image of him covered in another man’s blood was still sharp in her mind.
Dawson was blithely giving orders. She realized what was happening. He was arranging the team that would scout the way through the passage, the men who would be the first to see the place she’d come all this way to find. They’d be the ones to discover what had survived the ravages of war and disease. Would the temples still be intact? What about the secondary structures? The courtyards and public forums? Was it really all untouched?
Dawson motioned to the men he had gathered. They were about to find out—and were leaving her behind.
She felt a rush of outrage.
The hell they would.
She pushed her way through the crowd, arriving at the opening of the ravine just as Dawson was shouldering his pack.
“I’m going with you,” she announced.
“Out of the question,” Dawson sputtered. The others around him looked shocked at her appearance, all except Adam. He looked worried, which only inflamed her determination.
“Mr. Bates is not the only trained historian in this camp.”
“Mr. Bates did not set off a bomb in one of our boats,” Dawson countered somewhat desperately.
“And what am I going to do to you in there? Throw sand in your eye?” She took a long look around the waiting caravan, the sacks of equipment, the crates swinging from the backs of the mules. “On the other hand, I suspect there’s far more potential trouble I could get into here.”
Dawson looked aghast, then grasped at a quick inspiration.
“You can’t get through there with your hands tied,” he pointed out.
“I could help her.”
The offer came from an unexpected source. Flowers stood behind her. At a look from Mendez, standing among the crowd, he shrugged. “She’s light.”
To demonstrate, he gripped her belt, and Ellie fought for balance as he hefted her easily off the ground. He set her back down again gently.
She risked a glance at Adam. He appeared to have been consumed by a coughing fit.
“Oh, for pity’s sake…” Dawson looked to Jacobs for help.
“Let her. If she causes any trouble, we’ll shoot her.”
The threat was delivered as casually as a comment about the weather, which made it all the more chilling. He would do it, she realized, and with that little concern.
She brushed the fear aside. It didn’t matter, anyway. She didn’t plan on causing any trouble.
At least, not yet.
Ellie felt the change in atmosphere as soon as she stepped through the entrance to the ravine. The passage was so narrow, they were forced to walk single-file. The high walls let in only thin shafts of light, giving the place a cavelike atmosphere. Thick green foliage clung to the stones, dripping moisture onto her neck as she moved past.
The path twisted and turned. Ellie often lost sight of Adam moving near the front of the team, her view obscured by the trailing vines or the jagged walls of the cliff.
It was eerily silent. Not even the ever-present buzz of insects broke the stillness of the place. The men around her seemed to sense it. They spoke only when necessary, and then in murmurs.
Even the murmurs faded as the ravine widened.
Light spilled down into the space, sparkling off the drops of moisture that clung to the dangling greenery. Dawson and the others had stopped ahead of her and were looking up at a sheer wall of stone.
It was made of the same dark substance as the “river of smoke” that had led them there, but there was nothing natural about the carving that decorated it. Standing nearly three stories high, it was a massive and gruesome relief of the now-familiar god of the people of the White City, the demonlike visage she’d first seen on the medallion.
It loomed over a sculpted mountain of slaughtered men and women like a vulture and held a severed head aloft, a long, serpentine tongue catching the blood that dripped from it.
Ellie found herself grateful that the inhabitants of the city had met their end centuries before. Looking at their monument, she wasn’t quite certain she would have wanted to meet them in the flesh.
“We’re losing daylight.”
Velegas’s voice cut through the tense silence, and the scouting team shuffled back into motion, leaving the dark, warning shape of the god behind as they plunged back into the dim, narrow confines of the ravine.
Ellie heard the end of the passage before she saw it, as the awed exclamations of the others echoed back to her. Her heart leaping, she dashed forward, stumbling over a scattering of boulders and spilling out onto a wide, flat ledge.
The landscape before her was an immense, vaguely circular depression surrounded by rugged peaks cloaked in deep forest. There, in the center of it, towers of bright, gleaming stone showed through thick veils of overgrowth. They filled the heart of the place, while, on the outskirts and climbing the steep mountainsides, Ellie could see remnants of terraced farmland.
As she watched, the deep light of afternoon blazed through a gap in the thick clouds bunched at the top of the mountains, spilling across the crowns of the temples and painting their white stones a startling gold.
It’s real.
The thought nearly brought her to her knees. The stones before her weren’t a myth, or the dream of a frustrated suffragette. They were real.
And she had found them.
A flock of rainbow-colored birds rose up, startled by some unseen disturbance. They wheeled over the ruins, flashing red and turquoise against the sky.
Ellie closed her eyes, half convinced that when she opened them, she’d find herself back at her desk in the Public Record Office, staring down at another pile of crumbling tax forms.
No. This wasn’t London. She wasn’t dreaming. She was here.
Adam moved to her side. His profile was gilded by the dying sunlight.
“Congratulations, princess,” he said. “Looks like you found El Dorado.”
As he spoke, the clouds shifted once more, swallowing the warm rays of light. She felt a breeze brush against the back of her neck, lifting the fine hairs there and stirring the leaves of the trees below.
Velegas’s voice rang out across the ledge.
“Let’s get the supplies through and set up ca
mp.” He turned his face to the wind, the creases of it crinkling with concern. “It smells like rain.”
As they descended, the sun dipped lower on the horizon and the clouds thickened, taking on a more threatening air. They followed a narrow track down the side of the mountain, a thin series of switchbacks along dizzying drops. Once they reached the ground, the path quickly widened. Pushing some of the debris aside with her boot, Ellie saw that she was walking on a solid surface of beautiful white paving stones.
It was a road. More than that, she realized. It was a marvel of engineering. The stones must have been precisely laid for its surface to have survived intact after centuries of neglect.
They followed the straight path it made through the thick undergrowth until it stopped at a low, wide stairway. Ellie climbed it as Velegas shouted orders to the men. The intriguing, jumbled piles of stone they had passed on their way had been replaced by larger structures, and as she reached the platform at the top, she realized she was standing in a great central courtyard, surrounded by the mountainous ruins of the city’s temples.
That was not what stopped her in her tracks, sending fear through her like a needle of ice.
The fear came because she had seen this before.
The memory was sharp and distinct. The plaza had been free of the creeping piles of vegetation then, the mounds of dry leaves. But she had seen those three smaller temples, and the massive white pyramid that loomed over all of them, dwarfing the other structures with its grandeur. She had stood here, talking to a woman with a scarred face dressed in a gown made of feathers, while voices whispered to her from the shadows.
Impossible.
It had to be a coincidence. A lucky guess made by her dreaming mind. She had looked at drawings of Mayan city layouts in the British Library. There were many variations, certainly, but was the square arrangement of temples in front of her really that unusual or surprising?
There had been other details in that dream. Corpses piled in the rooms of palaces, faces covered in oozing sores. Smoke drifting through the foliage, the sounds of war clashing in the distance.
None of that was here. It was just a ruin—a wildly intriguing ruin. No wonder it was sparking her imagination.
She was letting the atmosphere of the place get to her, and the weather probably didn’t help. The sky kept shifting indecisively between slanting light and lowering gray, and bursts of wind rushed strangely through the trees before passing, leaving them utterly still once more.
Flowers stood beside her, watching the men pushing aside piles of debris to make room for the tents. His expression was grim.
“This is a bad place,” he asserted.
“They’re ruins,” she countered. “I’m sure they all feel like this.”
She strode toward the site of the camp and tried not to notice her guard’s quick gesture against whatever evils he felt lurked in this place.
18
ADAM STOOD HALFWAY UP the steps of the temple, waiting for Dawson to catch his breath. He was torn between two conflicting impulses: first to leap ahead to the enclosure at the summit of the pyramid, and second to rush back to the courtyard, find Ellie, and make sure she was safe.
He couldn’t do either, thanks to the man panting beside him. Dawson had wasted no time, quickly identifying this massive structure as the ritual center of the city. He was determined to investigate it immediately, hoping that the artifact his employer sought would be inside.
Presuming it existed at all.
Dawson thought Adam’s greater knowledge of Central American ruins would speed up the search, and he was hardly in a position to decline. Until he thought of a way to get Ellie away from the camp, his best strategy was to stay on Dawson’s good side. Which meant there was no turning him down to check on the prisoner he was supposed to be mad as hell at.
He could also safely assume that Dawson wouldn’t look kindly on being left behind as Adam raced him to the top of the pyramid. In spite of his many causes for concern, Adam couldn’t help but succumb to the intoxicating excitement of the discovery.
And it was intoxicating, on more than one level. He could already see that the ruins were startlingly extensive, the remains of an immense and powerful city. Then there was the iconography. Like the medallion and the stelae they’d passed on their way there, it held traces of Mayan and Aztec themes but was also significantly different. The confluence reminded him of Dawson’s theory—Dawson’s mad, impossible theory—that this city wasn’t just another Mayan ruin. That they had stumbled across the remains of an as-yet-unknown culture.
At last, Dawson recovered sufficiently to continue their ascent. As they reached the summit, he didn’t pause to examine the remarkable carvings decorating the facade of the sanctuary but instead plunged immediately into the dark, narrow chamber, Adam close behind him.
A face glared at them from the far wall. The carving was done in deep relief, just like the one Adam had seen on the wall of the ravine. It was another image of the ubiquitous god of the city, keeping fierce vigil over the ruins. But it wasn’t the idol that immediately caught Adam’s attention. It was what sat beneath.
The jars were half-buried in accumulated dust and debris, but Adam could see enough of them to know they were intact, their beautifully painted surfaces unmarred by so much as a crack.
Any grave robber or rogue explorer who had stumbled upon this place would have followed the same course as Dawson had and come straight to this high sanctuary. Once inside, there was no way they would have left those jars intact. They would have been carried off, or at least broken open in search of smaller gold or jade treasures.
The implication stopped his breath. It meant that this magnificent place, this whole city, had somehow managed to escape the ravages of thieves. Everything he saw would be exactly where the inhabitants had left it.
It was unthinkable. In all his years of work in the colony, Adam had never come across so much as a minor settlement that had not been robbed.
There would be no question of securing the funds for a complete and thorough excavation. As soon as word got back to the capital, he’d have more support than he could ask for. An undisturbed find from a potentially unknown culture…
“Is this it?”
Dawson’s voice snapped him out of his reverie. For a moment, his awe had made him forget that he wasn’t alone here, and that the man beside him was as trustworthy as a snake. Reality set back in like a sack of bricks.
“The interior has to be small to support the roof,” he replied automatically.
“But what about the rest of the pyramid? How do we get inside?”
“Any other structures like this that have been excavated were just full of rubble.”
Dawson muttered something in response, but Adam was no longer listening. A rustle of movement overhead drew his eye. There, tucked into the stones of the corbeled vault, was a nest of starlings. Except Adam couldn’t think of how a few birds could build a nest into solid rock.
He stepped closer and realized that one of the stones of the ceiling wasn’t a stone at all. It was a patch of some sort of plaster, crumbling away to reveal what looked like a broken slab.
The startled birds escaped from the sanctuary with a flutter. Dawson was still speaking, but none of the words registered. Adam’s attention was completely consumed by a dark space between the plaster and the jagged edge of the neighboring block. An empty space.
He grabbed a pick from the pile of gear the bearer had set down nearby, reversed it, and jabbed it up into the ceiling.
The patch disintegrated, revealing an opening in the roof of the chamber—an opening someone had clearly tried to disguise.
Dawson gaped up at it, then slapped the bearer roughly.
“Get a ladder!”
As the man stumbled out of the sanctuary, shouting down to the courtyard, Adam felt his curiosity reach a breaking point. Quickly assessing the distance, he jumped, caught the edge of the gap, and hauled his body up through it.
He could see oiled ropes, and devices that looked oddly like gears and pulleys. It looked as though the stones that surrounded the opening in the ceiling were connected to some kind of mechanism.
This wasn’t just an architectural accident, he realized. It must have been a door, with a trigger to open it disguised somewhere in the room below.
The Maya had never had any sort of technology like that.
But then, this wasn’t a Mayan city.
Tulan Zuyua.
He dismissed the thought. Tulan Zuyua was a myth. The place he was climbing through was real.
The tunnel before him sloped steeply down into darkness. There was no way to tell where it ended. He called back to Dawson.
“Tell them to bring a lantern as well. And a rope.”
The rope arrived first. After making certain it had been properly anchored to a solid pillar at the entrance to the sanctuary, Adam slowly began to work his way down the side of the vault. After a short distance, the ground disappeared beneath him.
He stopped, bracing himself against the sides of the tunnel. How far was the drop? The space around him was utterly dark, so much so that Adam could barely see the rope he held in his hands. There was no way to tell how far it might be before he reached solid ground again, and the temple was enormous, much taller than any Mayan structure he knew.
The thought that he might be hanging over a sheer drop to its base, like a blacked-out mine shaft, made his hands shake.
For a moment he contemplated turning around and letting one of Dawson’s bearers test the way down.