The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  He still held the rifle. He dropped it like a poisoned thing, his hand shaking. The rage-fueled passion, horribly familiar, was already gone, extinguished in the cold water of his fear.

  The mirror…

  He whirled toward it. The body of the Mayan was sprawled across the surface. Blood pumped from the wound in his head, staining the stone a vivid red.

  It will clean, he thought, fighting the rising sense of panic. Remember the bird, the bloodstained channel in the stone that surrounded it. They sacrificed to it like a god. This can’t be the first time. There had been no stains on its perfect surface, which meant it must be capable of being washed. No one would need to know, not even Jacobs.…

  Jacobs. He had sent for Jacobs.

  The men were watching him, faces wary. They must sense it, how he was losing control. He had to regain it—quickly.

  “You two,” he snapped. He forced authority into his tone. “Move him off of there. You”—he pointed to a third—“fetch water and rags.”

  They obeyed him. Dawson watched them move with a sense of profound relief.

  He would get through this.

  Ellie watched, hands shaking with shock and anger, as the men Dawson had screamed into action hurried over to Amilcar Kuyoc’s corpse. It had all happened too quickly. There was supposed to be time, a chance for them to intervene. If they could have reached one of the more inattentive men, seized his weapon… They were supposed to be able to help, not sit crouched in hiding while a single bullet snuffed a man out like a candle.

  But why? she wondered. Why had he come? Why wasn’t he safely back in his village where he belonged?

  The village. Someone would have to tell them. She and Adam—they could find the place again. She thought of Kuyoc’s grandson, Paolo. There was Cruzita, and his stoic, hardworking sons. Ellie would have to tell them what had happened to their father.

  Assuming she and Adam got out of here without getting shot themselves.

  Something was happening by the body. There was a hissing, eerie and serpentlike. Where Kuyoc’s blood spilled across the dark surface of the mirror, thick white smoke was billowing up, rapidly rising and spreading.

  It reached the men Dawson had sent to remove the corpse. They coughed, waving it away from their faces. Then, abruptly, they sank to the ground.

  The sheer surprise of it nearly brought her to her feet.

  What was going on?

  She watched as the pale smoke spread farther into the room, and more men dropped to the ground. Those still standing began to panic, shouting and running for the exit.

  This was it—their chance. That is, if they could slip through the crowd without running into the apparently toxic smoke.

  What on earth was it? And what had it done to the men who had fallen? Were they dead, or simply unconscious?

  There would be time to consider it later. Now they needed to move.

  She shifted around the sarcophagus, putting herself in Adam’s sight line. He was tying something around his face. It was the sleeve she had torn from her shirt, still damp from their journey through the caves. He had taken it from his wounded hand. Seeing her, he motioned urgently toward the narrow gap in the wall, the entrance to the labyrinth.

  No, she thought. Not that way.

  They needed to make for the other door, the way out.…

  Then the smoke reached her, and she sank into darkness.

  25

  ELLIE WOKE UP IN the bathroom.

  Not just any bathroom. It was the bathroom of the Imperial Hotel, with its cool white tile, luxurious towels, and massive tub.

  The light of a golden afternoon filtered through the high, narrow windows. It was quiet, clean, and peaceful.

  Ellie did not have the foggiest notion how she’d gotten there.

  “That’s because you aren’t really here.”

  The voice came from behind her. Ellie climbed quickly to her feet and turned.

  It was the woman: the one with the scarred cheek, the Mayan cast to her features, and the sadness in her eyes.

  “Oh. I’m dreaming.”

  The thought came with some dismay. Ellie really might have preferred to be near an actual tub.

  “No. You are not dreaming. You are seeing.”

  “Seeing what? A bathroom?”

  “What you desire,” the woman replied simply.

  She was wearing the plain gown of a Mayan peasant. Her hair hung down her back in a long braid. She sat in a chair at the back of the room, her hands folded in her lap, looking as though she had never been anywhere else.

  What she desired…

  Ellie looked down at herself. Tibbord’s shirt and trousers were torn, caked with mud and bat guano. So was the rest of her. She reached toward her hair, then stopped, grimacing. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the state of it.

  And then there was the smell.

  Yes, she supposed if she wanted anything right now, it was probably a bath.

  Beyond that, none of this made any sense.

  “How did I get here?”

  “You aren’t here,” the woman replied. “You are in the mirror.”

  The mirror.

  Ellie could vividly recall how she had last seen it. The body of Amilcar Kuyoc had been crumpled on its smooth black surface, his blood pouring onto the stone.

  Pouring, and then hissing like water in hot oil where it touched.

  A reaction. A chemical reaction. That was the only explanation. The stone of the mirror looked like hematite, the same material that made up the medallion and the stelae they had passed on their way to the city, boundary markers or perhaps threats set in stone, warning away would-be trespassers.

  But it couldn’t be. Ellie hadn’t specialized in geology, but she knew enough to say with certainty that there was nothing in the substance of hematite that would react with human blood like that.

  Though even that theory had a flaw. If the stone was the substance reacting, there would have been scars or pockmarks on its surface, not that smooth, uncanny perfection. It was more as though the blood itself was reacting to the stone, not the other way around.

  Which was even more impossible. There was nothing in human blood with even the slightest potential to become that volatile.

  Ellie shook her head.

  “I’m fairly certain this is a dream,” she countered stoutly.

  The scarred woman was unmoved.

  “It doesn’t matter what you believe. All that matters is what you want.”

  The door to the room opened. Ellie whirled toward it and watched herself walk in.

  She was carrying Constance’s peacock-blue robe. Ellie watched a look of surprise dance across her own features as she took in the room, the size of the tub and the hot-water tap. She remembered that delight at finding a place like this in a second-rate colonial hotel. How delicious the prospect of a soak had felt after a long journey at sea.

  This was weeks ago, the afternoon she arrived in the city. The moments before she met Adam Bates.

  The Ellie of before tossed Constance’s robe over a chair, then turned the hot-water tap. She shook a box of lavender soap flakes into the water, oblivious to the snake curled up on the tile underneath the tub.

  But the Ellie of now was no longer paying attention. Her thoughts were elsewhere, with Adam.

  When she’d last seen him, he’d been pressed against the carved stone of one of the massive sarcophagi that circled the mirror, trying to work his way closer, to intervene before something happened to Amilcar Kuyoc.

  He had failed. They had both failed.

  But what happened to Adam?

  The white tile blinked from view. The tub, the robe, her former self, all of it winked out in an instant, and Ellie was someplace else. Someplace dark.

  No, not completely dark. Light filtered down from above. Ellie looked up and saw rock. A fissure in the stone opened overhead, letting in the deflected glare of the lanterns.

  She realized where she was: inside a crack
in the floor of the cavern.

  Adam was beside her. He had wedged himself into the tight space, his shoulders pressed against one wall, his legs braced against the other. The bandage from his wounded hand was wrapped over his nose and mouth. He breathed heavily through the wet cloth.

  She could see his muscles straining with the effort of keeping his body suspended and wondered why he didn’t just let himself down to rest.

  Then she looked at what lay beneath them.

  Nothingness. A vast drop, and then, barely visible in the faint light filtering through the fissure, bones. A mountain of bones.

  Ellie remembered looking up at that mass grave from below, when she and Adam had finally stumbled out of the deadly maze beneath the city. Adam had wedged himself into the gap in the floor of the tomb of kings, the same opening countless generations of priests had used to discard the remains of their sacrifices.

  She heard voices above.

  Jacobs was shouting orders. Men babbled in panic. Through all of it, Adam held himself in uncomfortable readiness, and Ellie wondered what the devil was going on.

  The world blinked again, and she was in the cavern above.

  The mirror lay before her like a dark pool, the dead kings surrounding her in their heavy stone coffins. The rest had changed. There were no men scrambling about, no tools and crates, no Dawson and Jacobs. The cavern was silent with the stillness of centuries.

  Torches flickered from sconces on the walls, and the scarred woman stood in the midst of all of it, but not as Ellie had ever seen her before.

  She was fierce and resplendent, dressed in a strange and ancient finery. Her chest was covered by a breastplate of linked, overlapping tiles of jade and gold. A gold headdress sat on her brow, crowned with standing feathers in bright hues of green, blue, and red. Bracelets hung from her wrists and ankles, and the skin of a jaguar served as her skirt.

  It was the garb of a queen or a priestess. Perhaps both. It revealed the woman before her, illustrated her strength and the power that filled her slight frame. Ellie had to resist the overwhelming urge to kneel or curtsy.

  The impulse was lightened by a healthy dose of righteous indignation.

  “Who are you?” Ellie demanded.

  “The echo of a sacrifice,” the woman replied. It was the same answer she had given Ellie before. It was even less satisfying the second time around.

  “Stop being vague. I want to know who you are.”

  The shadows around her flickered. The woman shifted with them. She stood before Ellie naked, barely more than a girl. She was trembling, covered in filth. A red, raw, bleeding cut ran jagged across her cheek.

  Something about the sludge covering her skin looked familiar.

  Ellie’s mind flew back to the bats, the monsters waiting in the darkness beneath them. She knew what she was seeing. The girl was a young initiate, one who had only just crawled out of the maze of death hidden below.

  A ring of figures surrounded her, shadowy men made larger by the elaborate plumes of their headdresses. One of them stepped forward, holding a white kitten in one hand and an obsidian knife in the other.

  The girl accepted them both with shaking hands. She held the mewling animal over the dark mirror and, after only the slightest pause, neatly cut its throat.

  The shadows changed again. Ellie saw her older, one of a company of figures who hovered around the mirror with blood on their hands. She watched her slaughter a goat. A snake. A beautiful emerald-green bird. Saw her lean into the smoke that poured from the mirror’s surface, breathing deeply. Heard the low, strange drone of her voice, reciting the content of her visions.

  The images flashed by like slides in a stereoscope, forming and dissolving and resolving again into something new.

  The woman, her scar faded, knelt by the mirror with the knife in her hand, and the shadowy men behind her brought forth a child.

  The shift in her expression lasted only a moment, but Ellie saw it—the flash of recognition, of dismay. The boy was no more than three, his ankle and foot twisted with some deformity. Ellie saw her hesitation, the quick glance she flashed back at the ranks of priests watching from the darkness behind her.

  She saw hesitation become resolution. The knife clattered to the ground and she turned away.

  Another glided forward to take her place. The boy’s blood was spilled.

  Then the shadowy chorus was gone. Only one other figure remained. He was a pale, thin, rat-faced man with a scraggly goatee, dressed in the tattered habit of a Dominican monk. He looked at the woman with terror and disgust.

  The torchlight flickered again, and he, too, was gone. Only the woman remained, tired and worn with grief.

  “You were a priestess,” Ellie said, still recovering from the barrage of visions.

  She nodded.

  There were so many questions, so much Ellie didn’t know or understand. One tumbled its way to the fore.

  “Why am I seeing all of this?”

  “This is the mirror.” The priestess nodded to the dark, still stone that lay between them. “It is a window to anything that is, was, or might be. Whatever of the past, present, or future you most desire to see, it will show you.”

  “That’s fairy-tale nonsense,” Ellie blurted.

  The priestess shrugged. “Stories hide truth.”

  Ellie struggled to absorb it. Past, present, and future… the power of prophecy? No, it was more than that. It was virtual omniscience. It was…

  Impossible.

  Her rational mind pushed back desperately. She was a scholar, damn it. A scientist. She didn’t believe in magic mirrors.

  And yet…

  She felt the pressure of it, pushing at the seams of her tightly built world. The realization that there was something more. Something greater and stranger than periodic tables and Newtonian physics. It had set its hooks in her weeks before, in Mr. Henbury’s office, when a pile of papers tumbled to the floor and revealed a crumbling book with a wild secret hidden in its core.

  It was in the uncanny dreams that had haunted her, in the myths she had dismissed as cultural curiosities but now knew to be fact.

  Tulan Zuyua was real. She was standing in the heart of it, talking to one of its initiates, to a woman who had been dead for centuries.

  It’s just a hallucination.

  But the protest was a weak one.

  What did a scientist, a true scholar, do when confronted with facts that contradicted a carefully constructed theory?

  Revise the theory.

  This was more than a revision. It was a revolution. No—that wasn’t it. Revolution implied forward movement. To admit there were things in this world that defied every law of physics Ellie had come to hold as true was a step backward, a collapse into the ages of human history when magic was as real as gravity.

  It was unthinkable. And yet, all of science had seemed like magic once, before years of painstaking study had revealed the secret rules that governed atoms, motion, and the void between.

  Something sang to her, a call that seeped through the rapidly forming cracks in her comfortable view of the world.

  Imagine, it whispered. Imagine the possibilities.

  Past, present, and future. The power to know. The hidden location of any ancient city, the fate of the suffrage movement. The identity of her true enemy, the person who commanded Dawson and Jacobs.

  That only scratched the surface.

  Knowledge was everything. Knowledge was the weaknesses of a rival. The compromising secret of an authority. It was the strategy to win every battle.

  Power. Absolute and total power.

  The implication was staggering. The call became an urge, as fierce and primal as any thirst she had ever suffered.

  Ask. Want. Desire.

  All Ellie had to do was wish it, and it would be hers.

  The priestess waited in solemn silence on the far side of the mirror.

  Ellie took a deep breath, struggling to regain the rational calm of a scholar as the
potential of the object before her screamed through her mind.

  “How does it work?”

  “Blood,” the priestess replied simply.

  It was a shock like a slap in the face. She remembered the ancient, rust-hued stains that colored the stone surrounding the mirror. The bones that lay beneath them, the remains of countless thousands of slaughtered men, women, children, and beasts.

  “You sacrificed to it.”

  The priestess nodded slowly. “That is the price it demands.” Her voice was sharp, bitter. “We grew rich on it. Wise, beautiful. We saw the path to greatness, and over and over again we took it. We were like gods.” Her eyes flashed, and Ellie wondered how she had ever thought the woman small. She looked magnificent.

  But her words made the mirror sound like a tyrant, a savage king roaring for the flesh of his subjects. The image reflected the vicious paintings that surrounded her, with their vivid portrayals of gods and men feasting on slaughter.

  Ellie shook the thought away. It was simpler than that. She had seen the reaction herself. Blood combined with the stone of the mirror to form the smoke that had brought her here, through some yet-unknown chemistry.

  It was still a deeply strange notion, but at least it retained the outward form of rationality. More so than the idea that the dark, still object before her possessed a will, an identity. A drive and thirst of its own.

  “Blood meets the stone. Creates a reaction. Then what?”

  “It shows you what you want to see. Not what you think you want, or what you ought to. Your true desire. It reads your heart like a book.” Her eyes darkened, her expression becoming fierce. “Do you understand what that means?”

  “That you don’t really control it,” Ellie blurted. “Desire isn’t rational. It’s… it’s animal. Instinct.”

  “Almost always,” the priestess agreed softly. “And it is never satisfied.”

  Ellie looked down at the mirror. In that moment it looked like a vast, black eye, staring coldly out at the world.

  It was like a cancer. A disease rotting away the core of this beautiful place. Desire wasn’t everything. Wanting something didn’t mean you should have it.