The Smoke Hunter
Page 31
And miss the chance to be the first one inside this place? Not a chance.
Adam forced his fear aside and let himself slip out into the void, keeping a white-knuckled grip on the rope. He found himself wondering whether it would be long enough to reach the bottom of the shaft.
His mind filled with the image of reaching for the next grip, and finding his hand closing on empty air. It was nearly enough to send him back into the tunnel.
Just take it slow. You can do this.
Praying he wouldn’t end up dangling off the tail end of the line, he began a careful descent, one hand over the other—and felt his feet touch solid ground.
The space from the tunnel to the landing he stood on couldn’t have been more than eight feet.
It figured.
The lantern was lowered to him along a second rope, Dawson following closely behind it. In the lamplight, Adam could see that he stood at the top of a steep, narrow stairwell, descending into the bowels of the temple. It was thick with the misty forms of spiderwebs.
“Be my guest,” Dawson said, motioning him ahead.
The stairwell progressed in sharp twists and turns. Though Adam couldn’t be certain, his instinct told him that it must closely follow the exterior facing of the temple, winding around at right angles as it descended. The space was barely wide enough for the span of his shoulders. Fat black spiders skittered away from the glow of the lamp as he approached.
After what seemed like an eternity, they reached another landing, one that opened onto a tunnel just high enough for Adam to walk through without crouching.
He stopped in the entrance. He had never encountered anything like this passage in any of his previous explorations. It could lead to anything—the tomb of a great king, some secret altar or offering-place. The utter mystery of it overwhelmed him, until Dawson broke the spell.
“What are we waiting for?”
“Nothing,” Adam muttered, and moved forward.
What he saw next nearly made him drop the lamp.
The space before him was immense, so large that Adam thought it must fill the entire interior of the pyramid. The pinnacle of the room, far above, was lost in shadow, the single feeble lantern he held utterly incapable of the task of illuminating it.
The whole structure was nothing more than a shell, one that must have been constructed with the architectural grace of a gothic cathedral. And what it housed…
It was too much to absorb at once. Adam’s mind reeled with it. First there were the walls, which were entirely covered in vividly colored murals, all of them stunningly well preserved. The images, like the stelae, were both familiar and uncannily different, but they held his attention for only a moment.
Stone tables lined the walls of the room, their contents flashing and glittering in the lamplight. They were covered with a bizarre array of objects. Adam saw grotesque, gleaming idols resting beside other devices that looked more like scientific instruments. Much of it—nearly all—was made of gold.
If he’d had any doubts about grave robbers finding this place before him, they were gone now.
Something about the shining array of artifacts nagged at his attention, but the brief sense of wrongness faded as his eyes moved to the object that dominated the center of the room.
An object that should not—could not—exist.
It was a pendulum, shaped something like a massive Christmas ornament, a golden globe that tapered to an elegant point at the base. It was suspended from the pinnacle of the temple by a cable, hanging with utter stillness over the center of a circle inscribed on the floor of the room. The circumference of the circle was lined with tiny, gleaming pins of polished white stone. Perhaps two thirds of them were toppled over, the remaining third waiting in a tidy row like soldiers lined up for review before a battle.
It was bizarre. It was also familiar. Adam had seen the exact arrangement before, on a visit to Paris during a break from his studies at Cambridge. What lay in the heart of the temple was a perfect replica of a system designed to demonstrate the rotation of the earth—the invention of a French physicist by the name of Foucault.
A man who had been born less than a hundred years ago.
It was impossible—more than impossible. Looking at it, still and shining in the flickering light of their feeble lantern, Adam doubted whether he was still entirely sane.
“You see it, too?” he asked Dawson, overcome by the urge to reassure himself that the object wasn’t a hallucination.
“Yes,” Dawson confirmed numbly. “I see it, too.”
Silence reigned as they struggled to absorb what lay before them.
Dawson moved to the tables that lined the walls. On closer inspection, Adam could see that here, too, were artifacts that should not exist in the bowels of an ancient Central American temple. He saw, carefully crafted in gold, devices that looked eerily similar to things he might have found in the observatory at Cambridge. But not all these models were as perfect as the pendulum. There was something that looked like a gyroscope at first glance, but a closer inspection showed him that it couldn’t possibly function.
It was as if someone had seen a gyroscope in operation and attempted to re-create it from memory without any real knowledge of how it worked or even what it was.
It made his skin crawl, a sensation that was not improved by turning from the tables to study the paintings that covered the walls.
The artistry was magnificent, the figures depicted both mythically enlarged and yet powerfully human. The work was also startlingly well preserved, making it seem as though it had been brushed onto the plaster the day before.
The paintings were divided into scenes, forming a series—a series about which there was something unsettlingly familiar.
In the first panel, a group of people, primitively dressed, watched a flaming object descend from the sky. In the next, the same group stood around a circle painted deeply black. Waving lines of blue-gray smoke rose from its surface, coming together to form the image of the god of the city, a figure that was somehow both grotesque and glorious. The people who surrounded the god held up their hands as though in offering. Each cupped a small red pool that Adam suspected must represent blood.
It was not an unexpected theme. Both the Mayan and Aztec cultures had included elaborate rituals of sacrifice. Their gods demanded blood—the blood of conquered enemies, criminals, or the innocent—in exchange for boons, including the gift of prophecy.
Small red droplets fell from the cupped, outstretched hands, landing on the dark circle beneath them.
More scenes followed, illustrating the story of the rise of the city, the building of its temples and palaces. But it was a panel from near the end of this visual narrative that caught Adam’s eye most powerfully.
In that scene, the people of the city had grown great, as was evidenced by their bewilderingly elaborate finery and the massive size with which they were depicted. They held court over the huddled forms of a few primitive tribes, offering them gifts—a tongue of bright orange flame, a bolt of lightning, weapons, and the glyphs of a written language.
This was it, he realized. He was looking at the story of Tulan Zuyua, as told from the other side. The primitive clans came to seek magic and wisdom from a people who, to them, must have seemed like gods. The image could have been taken straight out of the Popol Vuh.
He was looking at corroboration. The clear evidence that the tale the Mayans told of their movement from primitive tribe to brilliant and powerful civilization was not a myth. It was fact. And he was standing in the heart of it.
The realization nearly brought him to the floor.
Dawson’s voice cut through, breaking the spell.
“It’s not here,” he announced.
“Huh?” Adam was incapable of giving a more intelligent answer, his brain still consumed by the epiphany.
“The mirror isn’t here,” Dawson elaborated, frustrated. “There must be another chamber somewhere.”
Adam involuntar
ily turned his gaze to the painting directly opposite the entrance to the room. It was the image of the city’s dark, grinning god, wreathed in smoke and framed by the painted outline of what looked very much like a doorway.
There was something huddled at the foot of it, something that at first glance had looked like a pile of dried sticks and debris. But as he moved closer, Dawson stepping quickly after him, he realized he was looking not at a bit of refuse but at the remains of a human being.
The dry air of the room had worked to virtually mummify the corpse, turning the skin to brittle brown leather and beautifully preserving its elaborate wardrobe. The robe was made of jaguar hide trimmed with vibrant macaw feathers. The ground beneath the body was scattered with tiles of jade and gold, the cords that had once bound them rotted away long ago. The shaft of a shining obsidian blade protruded from the relic’s chest, still clasped in a withered brown spider of a hand.
Dawson ignored the fallen form, moving immediately to the painted frame. He ran his hands along it urgently.
“There must be some way to open it.”
Adam looked up from where he had crouched on the floor, examining the desiccated figure.
“I don’t see any sort of seam or junction.”
“It must be there,” Dawson insisted stubbornly. “Why else would they paint a doorway unless it held a door?”
Might as well ask why they painted anything at all, Adam thought irritably, but kept it to himself. He was detecting a touch of desperation about Dawson that made him seem a bit unsteady. It brought Adam’s awareness back to exactly how vulnerable his situation was. The wonder of the discovery had almost pushed it from his mind, made him forget that he was a hostage here. And not the only hostage.
Ellie. It was up to him to get her out of this. And at the moment, he hadn’t the slightest idea how he was going to do it.
Ellie sat on a stone block, hands bound, and thought of everything she’d rather be doing. Velegas had the men busy establishing the camp. There was a particular urgency to the business. Since their arrival in the city, the clouds overhead had grown thicker, bringing a premature darkness and a heavy stillness ripe with the promise of moisture.
The rains were coming.
The plaza before her, the one from her dreams, was one of the few parts of the city not broken by the thick trunks of ancient trees or covered in crawling tendrils of greenery. Outside the wide rectangle of neat, close-laid paving stones, jungle and ruin melded together, the bush creeping in across the tumbled stones of promenades and palaces. Ellie could see lights flickering through the trees and pillars. Jacobs had posted patrols of armed guards as soon as they’d arrived. They were another complication, but one she couldn’t be entirely unhappy with. The memory of the slaughter she’d stumbled across the night before was still fresh in her mind.
She’d seen no resumption of the normal animal life of the jungle here in the ruins. There were only insects and small, bright birds, which meant this probably wasn’t foreign territory for whatever predator had stalked them on the road here. While the armed men would make escape more difficult, they would also, she hoped, keep her from being picked off while she sat on an overturned altar, bound and helpless.
While the rest of the men cleared brush and strapped down tents and equipment, she knew Dawson had taken Adam straight to the top of the tallest temple in the complex. She could see the glow of lamplight from its entrance. Dawson would be looking for the Smoking Mirror, and as soon as he found it, both she and Adam would become expendable.
Whatever he had promised before, Ellie couldn’t wait for Adam to come to the rescue. There was no telling when Dawson would give him a chance to slip away. Even if he did have an opportunity, would he recognize it? Or would he be too caught up in the thrill and mystery of the discovery that surrounded them to remember the danger?
She could sympathize. Even now, she was fighting the temptation to examine the fallen stelae cluttering the courtyard, or to delve into the dark spaces between the columns of the palaces. This place was a brilliantly enticing conundrum. Not Mayan, but something else—the stronghold of a new civilization, or a very old one.
If she and Adam got out of this alive, they could come back. Dawson and Jacobs couldn’t excavate or even properly loot the city in the middle of the rains. The weather would force them out, and by then Adam could have alerted the authorities. There would be no trouble securing government aid to protect such a monumental find. They would have all the time in the world to uncover the city’s secrets—later.
In the meantime, the excitement of the ruins and the threat of the rains would work in her favor. Both were sure to be distracting to the guards. All she needed was the right moment and she would find a way to disappear.
Doing it armed would be nice, she thought grimly, remembering the screams and the blood. Preferably very well armed.
As though the thought had slipped out into reality, the evening silence was shattered by a sharp, panicked cry. Ellie looked to Flowers, who stood a short distance away, hands clenched on his rifle.
He read her expression and sighed.
“After you,” he said, and Ellie ran toward the source of the sound, the big man trotting behind her.
The commotion was centered on a long, low building that lined the far side of the courtyard. Rows of pillars framed the opening to dark rooms, and the bush rose up thick behind it, a backdrop of shadowy trees and falling creepers. As Ellie and Flowers arrived, a wide-eyed workman was stammering to Velegas, gesturing frantically toward one of the doorways.
Ellie shouldered through the crowd to the opening, then felt her hair rise at the scene revealed by the lantern light.
The room was narrow, deep, and packed to the ceiling with bones. She caught the odd glimmer of gold or jade shining back at her, hidden among skulls of all sizes, from those of full-grown men to the delicate bones of children.
The dream came back to her, vivid and brutal: the bodies strewn by the roadside and piled in the courtyard, covered in sores or bleeding from knife wounds. The author of the map said that the city had fallen and was ripe for the taking. He had not said how, but Ellie knew.
There had been a plague. Smallpox, she thought, remembering the look of the scars and sores in her dream. Panic led to war. They had torn themselves apart. There would have been no time to bury the dead, only to pile the bodies wherever they could.
How? she thought, stumbling back. How had she known this? Another lucky guess of her dreaming mind?
No. It was something more. She had been shown.
But why?
Fear forced bile into her throat. She pushed back the instinct to panic and run.
Run, yes.
Grasping at clarity, she looked at the faces around her, all of them transfixed by either horror or greed at the sight of that mountain of bones and gold. This was her chance.
She stumbled back, feigning illness. The crowd parted to let her by. As she reached the back of it, she glanced over the dark, bobbing heads to Flowers, who was just turning as he realized that she had gone.
Sorry, she mouthed, then darted into the shadows.
The shout of alarm was delayed only a moment, but it was all the head start she needed. The gloom had become thick and the brush that grew over the fallen stones of the city was ideal camouflage. It was also treacherous, as she discovered while stumbling over roots and ruined pathways. She heard voices and crashing footsteps behind her, and she glanced back to see the bouncing lanterns of her pursuers closer than she would have liked.
She quickened her pace until a broken pot shattered under her foot and sent her sprawling. She bit back a curse and crawled to her knees. Fumbling with her bound hands, she managed to grab one of the larger remnants of the artifact and, with a silent apology to her own archaeological instincts, threw it as far as she could into the trees, where it shattered noisily. Then she slid down into an open cellar hole beside the place where she had fallen, pushing flat against the ground.
She fumbled with her belt and trousers, loosening them at last and pulling out Adam’s secreted knife. She crouched down, bracing the knife between her knees and sawing at the ropes until at last the tension gave and she shook herself loose of them. Her unused muscles screamed, joints cracking as she stretched.
She kicked the frayed pile back into the chamber and made a silent, emphatic vow that she would never let someone tie her up again.
Free, she quickly adjusted her clothing, then crept back to the doorway. She could just see the glow of the campfires flickering among the tents of the camp. Steeling herself, she began picking her way as quietly as possible toward her next goal.
It was beginning to make sense—a terrible sort of sense that made Dawson feel queasy and weak, one that his brain struggled to accept. But the evidence was clear and undeniable, hanging behind him from the peak of the ceiling. It was scattered across the tables that lined the walls. This city had clearly been abandoned for centuries, yet some of the objects contained within this secret place in its heart were modern by his own standards.
They should not be here. And yet they were, and the reason for that stared at him from the murals painted on the walls. A black disk, emitting waving lines of smoke that framed the form of a deity of prophecy.
The Smoking Mirror. It was no myth. It was real, as physical as he was, and it was here, somewhere in this city—in this temple.
He accepted it. How could he deny it? Well—perhaps the way he’d denied everything else, all the other pieces of the puzzle that were now, grandly and terrifyingly, falling into place. How had he blinded himself to it for so long? Perhaps his decades of academic training had actually closed his mind, narrowed its perception to what the god Science deemed acceptable. He had refused to see the common link that bound the various objects he had been ordered to study, thinking them the whims of some anonymous eccentric.