Adam held Ellie’s arm, stilling her, and watched as the creatures seethed toward the flames, leaving open a path to the promising mouth in the wall of the cave.
“Come on,” he said at last. They picked their way along in the gloom, avoiding stray or straggling insects until the tunnel swallowed them.
They paused at the edge of the light. Adam faced the darkness and thought about what he was about to do.
Plunging into an uncharted cave system was a chancy business even at the best of times. Doing it in the dark was insane. There could be pitfalls in the floor, branching tunnels leading off into an unending labyrinth.
Not that they had any choice. He couldn’t risk lighting another torch until they were safely out of range of the swarm. He would just have to move carefully—very carefully.
He would feel for air currents, follow them if he could, and if he couldn’t, choose a direction and stick with it until they reached a dead end.
“Let’s go.”
Slowly, cautiously, they made their way forward, creeping along the length of the tunnel. It twisted and turned but did not branch. Far from the light of Adam’s bonfire, they were consumed in a complete blackness.
Ellie stopped.
“Do you hear that?”
“Sounds like water,” Adam replied.
“Is that good or bad?”
“Let’s find out.”
They rounded a few more bends and the sound became immediate. With it came a strange smell, acrid and unpleasant.
“Stay here for a second.”
Adam took out the match tin and gave another silent thanks for the thing. It had proven reliably waterproof many times before, but never quite so urgently as now.
“Still have those torches?”
“Of course.” He struck the match, Ellie’s dirt-streaked face coming into view in front of him. He touched it to the resin-soaked wood she held out in her hand and a flame flickered tentatively to life.
“Watch out for any more of those bugs,” he ordered, then moved forward, Ellie following close behind.
They stood on a rocky ledge leading down to a quickly moving river. In the torchlight, the water showed a strange, opaque shade of red that looked eerily like blood. It bubbled darkly over boulders worn slippery smooth, filling the space before them. On the far side, Adam could just make out the opening of another tunnel.
“What’s that smell?” Ellie asked.
“Cave waters often have high mineral content,” he replied. “At least it doesn’t look too deep. I’ll try heading across. You wait here until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“I might not be able to do that.” Ellie’s voice was tight. Adam turned and saw a trail of dark insects trickling in from the mouth of the tunnel. His bonfire must have burned itself out, or else other nests hidden in this part of the cave had been roused by their presence.
One approached Ellie’s boot and she kicked at it, sending it down to the edge of the water. It landed with a soft hiss.
Adam moved in for a better look, Ellie close behind. The scorpion writhed on the ground, trying futilely to pull itself out of the water with its remaining legs. The rest appeared to have been burned away, along with the bottom half of its body.
“That’s not water,” Ellie said numbly.
“No. It isn’t.”
Acid. It made a sort of sense. After all, that was how caves like this were formed. Acidic water ate away at the soft limestone over thousands of years, slowly carving out the tunnels, chambers, and bizarre mineral formations that surrounded them.
This was different. There was nothing mild about the acidic content of the water in front of him. It was harsh enough to burn through the exoskeleton of the scorpion. Adam doubted his boots would fare much better.
A skittering behind them reminded him that the creatures were still coming. They were running short on options. Ellie realized it as well, her face pale but determined.
“We’ll have to cross on the rocks,” she said firmly.
Adam took in their smooth, shining surfaces. One slip, and her foot could end up in that soup. Dealing with a graze from a bullet while trapped underground was one thing. A chemical burn was another.
He contemplated carrying her, but even if she would let him—which he doubted—it would only make their passage more dangerous.
Ellie kicked another scorpion away and hopped onto the nearest rock. The acidic water swirled inches from her feet.
Adam gritted his teeth and stepped forward onto the neighboring stone.
“I go first,” he ordered. “Stay within arm’s reach if you can. That way if you slip, I can catch you.”
“Or I could catch you,” she retorted.
He looked forward at their path. Though slick and wet, the stones were evenly spaced in the stream, almost as though someone had placed them there on purpose. Though it hardly made their passage safe, it was certainly less dangerous than it would have been if they’d had to leap from one island to another.
He moved forward, testing each rock as he progressed, painfully aware of Ellie following precariously behind him.
The safety of the bank was only a few feet away. Adam became more confident. He turned back to give Ellie a reassuring smile, then watched as the stone beneath her foot gave an unexpected wobble.
He saw her slip, her balance gone. He lunged forward, grasping the fabric of her shirt. His legs spread between the two stones, he hauled her to him, catching her body against his own.
She looked up at him, her face inches away.
“Thanks.”
Adam’s mind momentarily went blank. Then he realized his heel had slipped into the stream.
“Go,” he said, pushing her toward the larger, secure boulder. She stepped over, then leaped nimbly across the remaining stones to the bank.
Adam pulled his boot from the river, trying to shake off the corrosive drops. He hurried to join her.
He stopped, turning back to look the way they had come. The opposite side was a mass of undulating black, an army of scorpions drawn toward the light of the torch but warned by some instinct from touching the deadly water. Adam looked around for any sign of the creatures on their side of the stream, but saw none.
As risky as the acidic water had made their crossing, it seemed to provide a barrier between them and the hordes of light-seeking insects. Had it not been there, he and Ellie would have been forced to try to find their way through the caves in the dark.
It wasn’t a pleasant prospect.
He took the other torch and lit it, handing it back to Ellie, then turned to the dark opening behind him.
“Let’s hope that was the worst of it,” he said, and led them on.
With the bugs held at bay by the ruddy stream, the tunnel around them seemed to be safe.
Well, perhaps safe was an exaggeration. They were still wandering through a large, unknown cave system.
Out of the frying pan…
There had to be a way to the surface somewhere. The basket of torches proved that. Someone had been here before, and they could hardly have brought all that in the way he and Ellie had come.
But why had they left the basket there? It was almost as though they had expected someone to make their way through that treacherous tunnel in the cenote, one he and Ellie had barely had the intuition to discover.
It was a mystery, a damned intriguing one—the latest in a series of them he’d stumbled across since finding this place.
Looking for answers to any of them would have to wait, though. His first priority was to get himself and Ellie safely out of this.
Ellie…
He could sense her behind him, hear her boots scraping against the rock as she followed him down the sloping track. He could recall all too vividly the way she had felt when they’d embraced, how she had tasted.…
The intensity had clearly not been one-sided. Her response had been just as visceral as his own.
Which meant what, exactly?
&nbs
p; Maybe everything. Maybe nothing. She was flesh and blood, after all, and with the rush of their escape in her veins, the threat of death looming over her head, she could easily have gotten caught up in the moment.
After all, he couldn’t forget the way she’d reacted to the notion of marrying him, even just in name.
The signals were more than mixed. They were incomprehensible, and his own emotions further clouded the picture. How could he trust his judgment of what Ellie was feeling when his own heart was such a mess?
Figuring it out would have to wait until they’d discovered a way out of this underground maze. And as Adam found himself facing a pair of dark gaps in the stone, that effort got a touch more complicated.
“There are two ways forward,” Ellie said, coming to his side. Her voice held only the slightest bit of apprehension. Good, Adam thought. Neither of them could afford to panic. This was sure to be just the first of many such choices they’d have to make to find their way to the surface.
He took a few steps into each of the two openings, enough to see that they did indeed lead away into darkness, instead of dead-ending abruptly. But which one to choose?
Ellie was making her own examination and came to a quicker decision.
“This one leads up. It seems to me that we’re more likely to find an exit the closer we are to the surface.”
“Possibly,” Adam admitted, less certain. He stood in the mouth of the second tunnel, feeling as though something important were calling for his notice. Just not quite loudly enough.
“This one slopes downward,” Ellie noted.
“Caves can be deceptive,” Adam replied absently, still chasing that nagging sense of missing something. “You never know where they’re really leading you. This system could be a labyrinth.”
“Well, if we can’t trust up and down, what other options do we have?”
“Someone else was here before us,” Adam pointed out with a glance back at the torch she held in her hand. “Maybe they left some bread crumbs.”
“Bread crumbs?”
“Like Hansel and Gretel.” His tone was vague. His attention had moved to the ceiling of the downward-sloping tunnel. Like the one they had just passed through, it was low, with barely enough room for Adam to stand upright.
He ran his fingers over the stone, then looked down at the residue that dusted them. From beside him, Ellie looked from his hand to the stain that darkened the stone above.
“What is it?”
“I think they’re scorch marks,” he replied.
Her eyes widened at the implication. She looked to her torch, the flames tickling at the roof of the cave.
“Bread crumb?”
“Looks like it,” Adam replied, and they started down the deeply sloping path.
The tunnel was steep but short, quickly emptying out into another chamber. The walls lay far beyond the range of the light cast by the small flames they held, but Adam could tell by the echoes of their footsteps that the place was vast.
It wasn’t a comforting notion. At least in a tunnel, there was only one way to go. Here, who knew how many options might present themselves, or how hard it might be to find signs of someone else having made the passage.
Adam cursed softly under his breath.
“We’ll have to follow the wall. Make a note of any openings and decide which looks the most promising once we make it back here.”
“But how will we know where here is?” Ellie asked.
“We’ll just have to mark it somehow.”
Adam turned to consider their options, and went silent. The opening behind them was far from unmarked. The stone around it was elaborately carved, shaped expertly into the blockish forms of gargoyle demons or gods, their expressions grotesque. The blocks formed a rectangular frame around the tunnel entrance that was further accentuated by a roughly painted border of some viscous black substance. It gave off a sickly sheen in the firelight.
Adam let his eyes follow the track the painted substance made as it moved from framing the doorway to running along the floor, hugging the base of the cave walls to either side of the opening until it receded into darkness.
He moved closer to it and rubbed it with his fingers. A bit of the stuff came away. It was sticky. He gave it a sniff.
“Smells like petroleum.”
“But why would they paint the door with it?”
Adam shrugged, then, on an instinct, touched the flame of his torch to the strange substance.
It caught. Flames spread quickly along the track of it, framing the door and then accelerating around the chamber. The stuff had been painted around the entire circumference and, in the flickering glow, illuminated three other elaborately carved doorways, and something else: a great mural in the center of the chamber floor, its sinister colors of black, white, yellow, and ocher accentuated by the circling flames.
They died back as quickly as they had come, their strange fuel spent. Adam and Ellie stood alone and silent once more in the feeble glow of their small torches.
“Bates?” she asked softly. “What is this place?”
He took a moment to reply, his mind still struggling through the impact of that elaborate arrangement, from the carved doorways to the vivid images painted onto the floor.
“I think it might be hell,” he replied at last.
21
THE SCENE DAWSON STOOD IN was something out of a nightmare. Workers swarmed around him, clanging hammers and chisels into every wall. Little remained intact of the original murals, just fragments and splashes of color visible through the thick haze of limestone dust that floated around them like a fog. Their sweating bodies were white with it, turning them gruesomely ghostlike, and the clouds of fine stuff stung at Dawson’s watering, red-rimmed eyes. He stood back, watching them work, breathing through a handkerchief he kept pressed to his face.
It had started with a hole—just one little gap chiseled into the surface of the painted doorway. He had chosen a spot that would least damage the priceless art of the mural. He did not want to destroy such a precious find, but he had to know, beyond doubt, that the image was simply that, and nothing more.
Behind the plaster he’d found only stone and rubble. No opening, no promise of another chamber hidden in the temple.
That was where Jacobs had found him, peering into the gap. He had entered the room so quietly, Dawson hadn’t realized he was no longer alone. It was the fear, quick and familiar, that alerted him.
He had tried not to let it show. Not that it mattered. Jacobs knew; he had no doubt about that. Jacobs had a preternatural instinct for another man’s fear.
“Tear all of it down,” he had ordered, taking in the entirety of the painted history. “Make certain it’s not here before we move on.”
Horror had overtaken terror at the notion of the destruction Jacobs was ordering.
“But the other walls…”
“All of it.”
So here he was, supervising an army of workmen made ghostly by the dust of what was once an astonishing relic, chipping away the very walls themselves in search of the entrance to a chamber that might or might not exist.
It could have been worse, Dawson reminded himself. Much worse.
A figure moved toward him through the haze. Even if Dawson had cared to learn their faces, the man would have been unrecognizable to him under his heavy coating of gray grime.
“We’ve punched through,” he reported.
“And?” Dawson asked unhopefully.
“Rubble.”
Dawson absorbed this glumly. “Move eighteen inches left and up, and start another.”
They had all turned up rubble, every one of the holes piloted through the facing stones since Dawson’s first. But there was no choice but to keep working until the whole room had been torn down to gravel. Then they would move on, taking the entire city apart stone by stone to find the mirror.
Dawson prayed it existed. The alternative was too miserable to contemplate.
There
was a call from the stairwell, the words obscured by the din of the hammering. One of the nearer men turned his ear, then shouted over to where the professor stood.
“What is it?” Dawson snapped, pushing past the swinging arms and dusty bodies to the entrance.
“They have a prisoner,” the man replied blandly.
A prisoner? Dawson could think of only two people in the vicinity of the city who weren’t in Jacobs’s employ.
“Is it Mr. Bates or Miss Mallory?”
“No. It’s some Indian.”
Some Indian…
Dawson’s mind quickly leaped through the potential implications. What Indian would be wandering in this remote place? What if he wasn’t wandering?
What if he lived here?
It had never occurred to him that the city might still be inhabited. The idea made him distinctly uncomfortable. He looked at the destruction that surrounded him and tried to imagine what a resident of this haunted place would think of it. Nothing good, he was certain.
He shook off the idea. The city was clearly a ruin. Even if the captive did “live” here, he was a descendant so distant he could have no knowledge of its secrets.
It wasn’t his problem, anyway. Prisoners, he decided, were clearly Jacobs’s area of responsibility.
But what would Jacobs do to an interloper—any interloper?
It didn’t matter. It wasn’t Dawson’s affair.
“Bring him to Mr. Jacobs.”
“We don’t know where the jefe is.”
“So hold the Indian until you find him!”
The man turned, calling over his shoulder, and Dawson realized with horror that the prisoner he spoke of was standing on the other side of the room.
He stood between two guards who towered over him like giants. He was an old man, brown and wrinkled. His head was bald, save for a few white tufts of hair, which made the scar that marked his forehead stand out starkly against the rest of his skin.
He was not dressed like any native Dawson had ever seen. Over his homespun shirt and trousers, he wore what looked like a bizarre homemade armor. It was a breastplate of dry reeds, bound together with twine. The effect was that of a Mayan Don Quixote.
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