The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  Ellie found herself unable to avoid the sense that there was something intentional about those subtle exhalations.

  It was irrational, of course, almost certainly an invention of her own fear. But then again, there were living things that had survived down here through the long centuries. What they had encountered in the last room was proof of that. If something similar was hidden here, something silent and old, countering their feeble efforts to fight the dark… well, they would hardly be able to see it, would they? Anything could conceal itself in this thick, black night.

  She could hear the soft rustle of Adam’s clothing as he turned, uselessly surveying what lay around them. “There will be another door somewhere. I think we should choose a direction, follow the wall until we find it.”

  She nodded uselessly, then answered. “Agreed.”

  “I’ll lead. Stay behind me and watch where you step. I’ll be testing the way ahead, but there could be pits in the cave floor that I miss. Keep close and be careful.”

  She felt his hand connect with her arm. She gripped him back and he started moving slowly from the door.

  They walked without speaking, but even the grinding of boot on stone, the brushing of cloth on skin, sounded loud as a thunder crack in the stillness and darkness of the cave.

  They rounded a bend, and the ghost of the place returned again. Ellie felt it as a soft breath in her hair. Then came a distant murmur, a whisper like that of faraway, distorted voices. They were barely discernible, but they chilled her.

  It could be water, she thought. A trickle of running water somewhere nearby. Or just her ears playing tricks on her in the dark. The breeze shifted, brushed her again, and then the sound was gone. She hurried forward, keeping close as Adam continued his painstaking progress around the room. Abruptly he stopped, and with her hypersensitive ears she could hear the difference in the texture under his fingers, smoother and hollow.

  “I think we’ve got it,” he said. She joined him, running her hands over the door, feeling the edges. Like the others, they were flush, tightly fitted. And after a moment, it was clear their escape would be more difficult than it seemed.

  “No latch, no hinges,” Adam growled. “It’s another one with a trick opening.”

  Ellie sat down, feeling despair wash in. Who knew how big the cavern was? The release could be anywhere. It might take days to find it, days in the dark with no food or water.…

  She sniffed. Her stream of panicked thought stumbled to a halt, arrested by a strange instinct. There was something about the smell of the air here, something important.

  Phosphorus. The place where they stood reeked of it.

  She ran her hands over the ground as, behind her, Adam continued to curse at the door. It took only a moment to find what she was looking for. She rose, fumbling until she found him, and pressed it into his hand.

  “What—”

  “It’s a matchstick, Bates.”

  He groaned as the implication dawned. “It’s the same door.”

  “We’re back where we started,” she confirmed. She heard him begin to pace.

  “The exit must be somewhere else. Not the walls. Maybe the floor. Or overhead. If there’s someplace we can climb up, get closer to the ceiling…”

  She remembered the uncanny draft, the haunting whispering. A suspicion took shape.

  “Come with me.”

  She took his hand and led him around the cavern once more, feeling her way along the wall. She opened her senses as she moved. She was rewarded when she once again felt the hairs blowing gently on her head and neck, caught in a strange draft. Another step, and there were the whispers—intermittent, quieter now, but unmistakably there.

  “I need you to boost me up.”

  “Watch your head,” he replied. She bit back a yelp as she felt something press against the backs of her thighs.

  “What are you—”

  “Just hang on.”

  She slipped back as he rose, lifting her on his shoulders like a child. She barely kept her balance, only just remembering to raise her arms to ensure that her head wasn’t about to knock into the roof of the cave.

  Fortunately, the ceiling was high.

  “I wasn’t expecting that,” she said primly.

  “You said you needed a lift.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t mean—”

  “Princess…”

  His tone carried a warning. Biting back her reply and orienting herself again, she reached out with both arms, groping.

  “Closer to the wall, please.”

  He stepped in and her fingers brushed stone. She explored it, probing in every direction. Then her right hand slipped into nothingness.

  “To the right,” she ordered excitedly, and he moved. Both of her arms extended into a void, then found its edges. The breeze was blowing softly in her face, emanating from some mysterious source.

  “Hold still,” she said, and climbed awkwardly off his shoulders, hauling herself up into the opening. Once inside, she laughed aloud. Then she remembered herself.

  “Here,” she said, scrambling. “I think if I brace my feet, I can give you a lift.”

  “Just show me where the edge of the gap is.”

  “I’ll reach down to pull you up,” she said, extending her hands, her feet braced against the mouth of the tunnel.

  Adam’s hand brushed briefly against her own, then disappeared.

  Ellie felt a quick flash of irritation.

  “I’m perfectly capable of—”

  Her words were cut off as Adam backed up, then ran and leaped, grabbing the ledge. He pulled himself up, spilling into the tunnel right on top of Ellie.

  “Oof.” She gasped as the impact squeezed the breath out of her.

  Adam rolled clear of her. She tried to corral her scattered wits as she dusted herself off. It was a futile effort, given that she was fairly covered in bat guano.

  The tunnel was low, perhaps three feet in height, and curved immediately up and to the left.

  “Let’s hope this is it,” Adam said, and led them forward.

  The climb was long. They alternated between crawling on all fours and moving in a slow, awkward crouch along a narrow path that twisted, turned, and doubled back on itself.

  The tunnel turned once more, and at last Ellie was able to stand upright. Light, dim but discernible, spilled into it from somewhere ahead. She could see Adam twist, cracking his back with a groan of relief. His greater height would have made the journey up the tunnel even more cramped.

  He grinned at her.

  “Nice to see you again.”

  She appreciated the sentiment. Being able to make out the familiar shape of his face once more filled her with relief.

  “You, too.”

  She turned to examine their surroundings.

  The tunnel ended on a platform that hung over a vast chamber. The light came from an opening in the ceiling, spilling down along with the voices they had been following, which were clearly human now. But it was what lay on the floor of the cavern that left both of them speechless.

  Bones. They were piled upon one another in a mass that made the ancient carnage in the jaguar room look like nothing at all. It was a mountain, an avalanche of the dead. There were bones of all types from animals large and small, but even from the height of their perch, Ellie could see that the greater part of them were human.

  There had to be the remains of thousands of men and women down there. Children as well, she realized, noting the diminutive size of some of the skulls below.

  “What is this?” she asked in a whisper.

  “I think they’re sacrifices,” Adam replied softly.

  They stared at them together, awed to silence by the sheer enormity of the dead.

  “Is this normal? Do they find this in other cities?”

  “No.”

  “But the Mayans and Aztecs did conduct sacrifices.”

  “Not like this,” he countered soberly, looking out over the charnel house before them.<
br />
  “Then why…?”

  “I don’t know.” His tone, the vista before them, all of it sent a chill through her. She thought of the monsters they’d encountered below—the thick-bodied scorpions, the nightmarish bats. Had the men who designed that hell simply stumbled across such creatures? Or had they made them, bred beasts out of myth?

  The graceful architecture, the beauty of the city she had seen from the overlook at the ravine—it was nothing but a gilded surface. Everywhere she peered beneath it, she found horror and death.

  “There’s something wrong with this place,” Adam said.

  Yes, Ellie thought. That was what she had been feeling since the moment she had stepped into that impossibly familiar courtyard. This place was wrong. Beautiful, mythic—almost certainly the archaeological find of the century—but wrong. The mountain of bones in front of her only made it undeniable. For all its elegance and wisdom, something rotten lay at the core of this place. It had been festering there for centuries, demanding tribute in the lives of the dead piled before her.

  “This way. Quietly,” Adam warned with a glance at the hole in the floor, the light and the voices emanating down. They followed an open ledge that curved around the pit of bones. It ended at a crevice in the rock. Ellie squeezed through it and found herself standing at the bottom of a narrow staircase, roughly but deliberately hewn from the stone.

  She started climbing. As she climbed, the voices grew stronger and clearer.

  When they reached the top, they became familiar.

  “Carefully—carefully, I said! Do not let it drop.”

  The voice was Gilbert Dawson’s. And as she joined Adam at a narrow crack in the wall, she saw the figure to match it, wildly gesturing his arms as a group of men, sweating with effort and concentration, hefted a massive, weirdly flat disk between them, carrying it toward a similarly shaped crate lying on the ground.

  No, not a disk. The surface was dark, polished, reflective.

  The Smoking Mirror.

  It had to be, based on the anxiety in Dawson’s face and the care with which the men were handling it. She and Adam had crawled through their hellish maze only to drop right into the heart of Dawson’s excavation. If that was what it could be called. Ellie saw none of the activity she would have expected from a legitimate scientific effort. No one was measuring, drawing, or surveying. Men were leaning tiredly against priceless murals on the walls, and the books…

  She gazed at them with mingled wonder and rage. There were piles of them, every one of unspeakable potential importance. The possible keys to unlocking the secrets of an entire civilization, and Dawson’s men were dropping them into crates without so much as an inventory.

  “He’s not an archaeologist,” she muttered to Adam, who watched from beside her. “He’s a bloody grave robber.”

  “Right now, he’s mostly an obstacle,” Adam countered in a quiet tone.

  Ellie knew he was right. In her survey of the room she had identified only one possible way out, an opening leading to a ramp located directly across from where they hid. It might as well be on the other side of the world. High-powered lamps had burned away any gloom or shadows they might have hidden themselves in. There was no way they could reach it without being seen.

  “We’ll have to wait until they go,” she concluded, noting the number of men who carried pistols at their belts or had rifles slung across their shoulders. Behind her, Adam muttered something that could have turned her ears pink, but his lack of any other protest told her that he, too, saw the impossibility of their position.

  Since there was no telling how long they might have to wait, she gave her attention to a more thorough examination of the room before them. Even an untrained eye would have marveled at it. The high ceiling seemed to be held up by lofty pillars of stone, giving the whole space the feeling of a cathedral. Then there were the sarcophagi. She counted thirteen, each one massive, twice the length of a man. The stone was covered in glyphs and carvings, too detailed to make out at this distance, but clearly of stunning artistry. But the walls—that was artistry of a different matter. She felt her stomach clench and thought of the sea of dead beneath them.

  “Bates, look at the murals.”

  “A little different from what they put upstairs,” he commented flatly.

  The images, massive and expertly painted, were of scenes from a nightmare. Men dangled from nooses, their entrails pouring out like a gory cascade. Grinning demons stood atop piles of decaying corpses, and a king mounted steps of victory holding a bouquet of human heads by their long black hair. All was violence, death, and blood.

  She tore her attention away from the paintings and looked for something else to focus on. She stopped at the sight of a small, eccentric figure moving across the cavern to the open crate that held the mirror—a familiar figure wearing what looked like a child’s mock armor.

  “Is that Amilcar Kuyoc?” she said disbelievingly. Adam came to her side to look.

  The Mayan turned. His gaze moved indiscriminately from Dawson to the other men in the room. His voice rang out in clear tones.

  “If any of you want to live, leave this place now.”

  She turned wide-eyed to Adam. His expression was grim.

  “He’s going to get himself shot,” he said. Then he slipped through the opening, dashed silently across a stretch of open ground, and ducked behind one of the massive sarcophagi.

  Ellie bit back a curse. What was he thinking?

  “Shoot him if he moves,” she heard Dawson order furiously. He pushed two armed men roughly into position on either side of the Mayan. He pointed to another pair by the door. “Fetch Jacobs. Now!”

  They turned and ran up the ramp, glad to escape the tension of the tomb.

  “The rest of you should follow,” the old man said.

  Dawson whirled, shouting, “All of you stay exactly where you are, or you’ll pay for it later.”

  Ellie saw the men hover, locked in indecision. They were clearly less convinced of Dawson’s authority than they were that of his colleague. Kuyoc also seemed unmoved, continuing to gaze at Dawson steadily.

  “Look,” Dawson tried. “Just step away from the artifact, and we can talk about it. No one needs to get hurt.”

  “Yes,” the old man countered. “Someone does.”

  Adam crept from one of the massive coffins to another. So far no one had seen him, their attention gripped by the drama unfolding between Dawson and Amilcar Kuyoc.

  How on earth did he get here? And why did he come?

  It was as much a mystery to her as Adam’s plan was—if he even had one. It would hardly be out of character for the man to go barreling into things on impulse, figuring he could make up the rest as he went along.

  That was one habit she’d have to break him of. She could hardly have him risking his neck at every turn.

  She caught herself. Who was she to break the man of anything?

  Well, he did ask you to marry him.

  The thought stopped her short.

  That had been entirely different, of course, simply an expedient way of solving the social tangle she’d gotten them into.

  Though there’d been nothing expedient about the passion he’d shown her in the cenote, or in the cave of the bats… right after she’d told him she was in love with him.

  The memory made her stomach drop, bringing with it an agonizing vulnerability. What was it that he had said in response?

  Thank God.

  Which meant what, precisely? That he felt the same? If so, why hadn’t he said so?

  Perhaps because he didn’t.

  The thought made her sick.

  Why did all of this have to be so bloody confusing?

  Adam made another dash, moving to a sarcophagus even closer to the drama unfolding in the room before her. Whatever his intentions toward her might be, one thing was certain: He was doing a rather brilliant job of trying to get himself killed.

  Whatever mad plan—or lack thereof—was motivatin
g him, he was almost certainly going to need help.

  She checked the men in the room. They were still looking at Kuyoc, watching him and Dawson like spectators at a Roman circus. Good.

  She slipped through the crack in the wall and hurried to the nearest sarcophagus.

  Not everyone missed her move. Adam was glaring at her from his hiding place.

  Stay. There, he mouthed urgently.

  Ellie nodded. She would stay—at least until she figured out what her next move should be.

  The fluttering, panicked feeling in Dawson’s core was increasing as the old man continued to stand there, his bizarre attire making him look even more clearly like a lunatic.

  He could see the doubt in the men around him. They were frightened. The atmosphere of this place was getting to them, making even the absurd threat of an old man in a homemade suit of armor seem real. What could the Mayan possibly do to them?

  To Dawson, on the other hand…

  If he intended some harm to the artifact, and succeeded in accomplishing it, Dawson knew who would be held responsible.

  “Listen to me,” he said slowly, stepping closer. “My partner is on his way here. And when he arrives, if he sees you by that mirror, he is going to shoot you.”

  “That would be very foolish.”

  “Why?” Dawson burst out, frustration rising. “What are you threatening us with?”

  The Mayan gave him a slow, sad smile.

  “I suppose it’s time to show you,” he said, and reached into his pocket.

  There was a crack, sharp and awful. The old man’s head snapped back. He crumpled, falling across the mirror as Dawson felt tension turn to horror. He whirled.

  “Who was that? Who shot him?”

  “You said if he moved…,” one of the men, loosely holding his rifle, protested weakly. Dawson felt rage grip him. It obliterated reason, fueled by panic. He ripped the gun from the man’s yielding hands and swung the butt of it against his jaw.

  “Not on top of the artifact!” he screamed.

  The man fell to his knees and spit out a tooth with a mouthful of blood.

  Dawson staggered back.

  No, he thought. Not again—not like Saint Andrews…