The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

  But her own desires were different. Weren’t they? Rights for women, the equality they had so long deserved. For herself, professional respect. The freedom to pursue a career that wasn’t limited to typing or housewifery. Those desires weren’t evil, weren’t a lust for power or glory. They would benefit not just her but millions of women struggling for the right to look up, to dream.

  But would I kill for them?

  Because that was what it would take. The price the mirror demanded.

  It wouldn’t have to be human blood. There were smaller bones in that pile below. Birds, monkeys…

  Things that hardly mattered. Things she wouldn’t have thought twice about if they showed up on her dinner plate. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask to release an entire gender from virtual slavery.…

  The priestess watched her, silent and still, her black gaze impenetrable.

  The mirror glittered on the floor in front of her, dark with promise and possibility.

  Such a small thing to ask, it seemed to say. Just a little life or two.

  Ellie stumbled back, horror rising in her throat, nearly choking her.

  That was only how it would start. Little things, things no one cared about. But that wouldn’t be enough. There would always be more—more she could do, more she could want.

  Bigger prices to be paid.

  Across the cavern, the priestess looked older, worn around her edges.

  “Yes. You understand.”

  A buzzing began to whisper around the walls of the cavern. It sounded like a broken machine or the rapid, distant hum of many voices. It penetrated Ellie’s mind, itching at her. She climbed to her feet, grimacing.

  “What is that?”

  “You are waking up. We are running out of time.”

  “But I have so many questions. Where did the mirror come from? Was it always like this, or was it made, somehow—transformed into what it is now? Is it electrical, or some kind of psychic phenomenon?” An even more startling idea occurred to her. “Are there other things out there like this? Pieces of myth that aren’t just stories?” She shook her head, overwhelmed. “There’s so much I need to know.”

  The voices grew louder. She could feel the room shivering. The priestess was right: There was no more time.

  “Ask the most important question,” she demanded.

  The most important question.

  Her mind spun. She felt dizzy and sick. It was too much, too big a mystery. How was she supposed to know what question to ask?

  The voices rattled at her. Some of them were almost beginning to sound familiar. But running around and between them was something else, a sort of tugging at her soul. She could feel it, sense it pulling at her like a fish on a hook.

  What do you want. What do you want. What do you want.

  It was a whisper, a demand, a promise. Anything in the world, anything she could dream of… Desire, and it would be shown to her. Want, and it was hers.

  This wasn’t the priestess. It wasn’t the voices from the real cave, the one she’d collapsed in, instead of this reflection of it lost somewhere in the distant past. The call came from the dark stone in front of her, from the mirror itself.

  Want want want

  Back there, in that other room, Ellie was outnumbered, surrounded by enemies. Powerful enemies who had pulled out every stop to acquire this one thing, the single, impossible object that lay before her.

  What happens if they get it?

  Ellie didn’t know who Dawson and Jacobs really were, who pulled the strings behind their actions. The employer who used government codes, ordered murder and deceit to achieve his aims. The person powerful enough to scour ships’ manifests, probe her obscure past, and track her to the far side of the globe, hiring an army to set against her.

  Were the mirror to fall into hands like that, hands that wouldn’t hesitate to pay it the blood it demanded…

  She looked to the murals that haunted the walls, celebrations of victory drenched in death. Power run through with viciousness.

  She had to stop it.

  She couldn’t let Dawson and Jacobs bring the artifact back to their master. Somehow, outnumbered, unarmed, and temporarily unconscious, she had to stop them.

  But even that wouldn’t be enough. Amilcar Kuyoc had been right, she realized, her heart sinking. Where one foot had trodden, others would follow. If it wasn’t Dawson or Jacobs, someone else would find this place and claim the secret that lay before her.

  The world would never be safe until the mirror was no longer part of it.

  The thought was a splash of cold water. It hit her with perfect clarity, the question she had to ask. The thing she needed to want before she lost this moment.

  The historian in her gasped with outraged horror and keeled over. But the woman, Eleanora Mallory, latched onto the notion with fierce determination.

  “Show me how to destroy it,” she called out.

  The priestess sighed, her whole being seeming to release some mighty tension. For the first time, Ellie could almost swear she saw her smile.

  Then the cave winked out, replaced by a quick, blinding succession of images. Amilcar Kuyoc standing over the mirror, reaching into his pocket. A shed with a padlocked door on the outskirts of a mountain village. A silver tin in Adam’s hands, and the flash of light in the darkness. She saw herself, for a moment, her hands covered in blood, holding a burning match in between her fingers.

  It could all be a dream, a hallucination. The ravings of her own unconscious mind.

  But if it wasn’t?

  She felt it, a seed inside of her. Doubt—small, perhaps, but solid. Undeniable.

  If it wasn’t…

  Then darkness swallowed her, and spit her out again into a blinding glare.

  Ellie coughed violently, pushing herself up from the floor of the cave.

  “There’s another over here!” someone shouted. Rough hands grasped her arms, pulled her up, and dragged her into the center of the room she’d left moments before, the tomb crowded with men and tools and the last, lingering wisps of smoke.

  She was dropped by a stone pillar, her legs shaking with strange weakness, her head spinning. A familiar figure slumped against a sarcophagi across from her.

  “You,” Dawson said, staring at her with red-rimmed eyes as he turned from choking down a mouthful of water.

  “Interesting,” said a dryer voice from above. She lifted her head and saw Jacobs looming over her, his dark eyes coolly assessing her face.

  26

  DAWSON WANTED TO BE SICK.

  Sickness would have been a relief. His body churned with horror, rebelling against and repulsed by the things that he had seen, the knowledge that was now his.

  It’s real.

  He had known it, of course. Recognized it in the impossibility of the artifacts he saw in the chamber above, the pendulums and gyroscopes, clocks and telescopes. But forming a rational, if terrifying conclusion was one thing. Experience was something else.

  The smoke had held him, and he had seen.

  He had seen the man in the tavern in Saint Andrews slip something into his drink, a gray powder that dissolved into the whiskey, leaving no trace. He saw a shadowy form bent over Anne, pulling the stopper from a vial under her nose. He saw her wake, her eyes glazing, the frantic fear becoming a drugged indifference.

  Since that night, Dawson had wanted nothing more in the world than to understand how he could have lived his whole life unaware of the murderous potential that waited inside him.

  He had his answer.

  It was a setup.

  They had both been drugged, manipulated into acting out a drama someone else had written. A drama where Dawson was meant to play the murderer, and Anne his victim.

  But why? Why would someone go to such trouble, just to compel a man to kill his own wife?

  And as the question formed, the answer presented itself—and with it revealed the key to another puzzle that had tortured him since that day in the Edinburgh jail.


  He saw Jacobs standing behind the tavern, handing the man who drugged him the envelope of powder.

  He saw Jacobs in his bedroom, looming over the drugged body of his wife. Playing the part of a lover who slipped out the window, leaving his paramour to the jealous rage of her husband.

  Jacobs had done all of it. But Jacobs had a master. Jacobs followed orders.

  The rest had come in a quick succession of images, flashes of insight mingled with the rising cacophony of calling voices and coughing men.

  He saw an office, a nondescript room with a print of Queen Victoria mounted on the wall. There were files on the desk, telegram slips, and scribbled notes.

  It looked like a government office, the sort that packed the buildings that lined Whitehall. And Dawson’s name was on one of the files.

  Familiar hands flipped through the pages. The man he had met only once, in a stinking basement jail cell, closed the folder and handed it to Jacobs, who stood waiting on the far side of the desk.

  “This one.”

  Dawson’s vision had narrowed. It focused on a ring. The man wore it on his right hand. It was a heavy brass signet, ancient-looking, engraved with the sign of a rock rising from tumultuous waters. A motto surrounded it, carved in Latin.

  Pro Albio.

  For Albion.

  Then the angle shifted. He looked not at the ring but at what lay beneath it. A piece of letterhead, neatly embossed and clearly legible.

  Office of the Foreign Secretary, it read.

  Five words that shattered every assumption Dawson had made about the man who owned him. He thought he had imagined the possibilities. His employer must be the head of a vast criminal network, or some avid wealthy collector.

  But he was looking at a civil servant.

  Then gabbling voices had risen like a wave, sweeping the vision away and replacing it with the cold stone of the cavern floor.

  He crawled to his knees, retching. His limbs shook, his world shattered. He wasn’t a murderer. He was a pawn. And the man who moved the pieces sat behind a desk in the British Foreign Office.

  Ellie couldn’t stand. Her knees were weak, her mind too thick to respond to what was happening around her as Jacobs’s men quickly and roughly bound her hands in front of her. Only a handful of them were on their feet. The rest lay on the ground, still recovering from the effects of the smoke.

  The body of Amilcar Kuyoc was beside her. The dead Mayan had been carried from the mirror and unceremoniously deposited next to a massive pillar of stone that ran from the chamber floor to its distant roof. On her other side, propped up against one of the carved sarcophagi, sat Dawson. His face was pale and glistened with sweat.

  His gaze shifted to Ellie. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Apparently not,” Jacobs replied. “Which means the other is most likely here as well.”

  “He’s not,” Ellie protested thickly. She forced herself to meet Jacobs’s eyes. “He drowned in the well.”

  Jacobs stared at her darkly, his expression unchanging.

  “Search the room. He won’t be far.”

  No, Ellie realized with a jolt. He wouldn’t be. In fact, she knew exactly where Adam was. The mirror had shown her.

  Impossible.

  But her eyes still moved to the crevice in the floor of the cave, opening to the mass grave beneath them. She could see Adam vividly in her mind, braced between the stone walls of the fissure, gritting his teeth and waiting.

  A handful of men hurried to obey Jacobs, carrying lanterns to the farthest corners of the cavern. Some plunged into the tunnel through which she and Adam had entered the space, the one that led back to the maze.

  The rest sat on the ground uselessly, looking weak and wide-eyed. Ellie moved her legs and discovered that she wasn’t feeling altogether steady either.

  Across from her, Dawson was pale, his eyes closed, face glistening with cold sweat. He looked worse than the rest of those affected by the smoke.

  The smoke that had triggered her visions.

  The memory came flooding back to her with painful clarity. She saw the woman with the scarred face—priestess. Saw past and present and the threat of the future.

  She remembered its song, that siren pull at her heart. Anything you want. Desire and it is yours.

  She tried to dismiss it. Her waking mind fought for that simple solution to the problem. Label it all a hallucination and brush it away. But the content of the visions lingered with disturbing clarity.

  Her gaze moved to the body on the floor beside her.

  Amilcar Kuyoc.

  The corpse of the old Mayan had been dragged off of the mirror. It lay crumpled nearby, ignored now that all of the attention was on the search for Adam.

  Kuyoc was still wearing his strange breastplate of reeds, though the helmet was gone, along with the better part of the man’s head.

  She felt her stomach heave and shifted her eyes away from his face. They rested instead on the dead man’s hand. There was something clutched in it.

  She glanced over at Jacobs and the others. The men in the room were either busy following his orders or still too absorbed in their own confusion to take any note of her.

  She crawled along the floor to the body and pulled the unknown object from Kuyoc’s fingers, then quickly shifted back to her original position. She checked the room once more. No one had seen her.

  Satisfied, she looked down at her prize.

  It was a tin of matches, not unlike the one Adam carried in his pocket.

  The one she had seen in her vision.

  But how could she possibly have known, even in her unconscious mind…

  The seed of doubt inside her sprouted, grew tendrils.

  It brought with it the memory of all she’d realized in her vision—all she had been forced to see about the world she’d thought she knew.

  She felt the edifice of her intellectual defenses crumble. The truth spilled in, with all its dark implications.

  The mirror was more than a stone. More than a ritual object. It was real, and it was dangerous.

  And she had to make certain it never left this chamber.

  She tried to call back the easy certainty of the moment before, to label it all “hallucination” and go back to comfortable denial. She couldn’t. The doubt was here to stay, and with it came a terrifying responsibility.

  She could just see the mirror from where she sat, the black surface peering over the sides of the crate. It was like a pool of ink, or a hole in the world, swallowing everything.

  A match. She remembered the sight of the flame from her vision. But how was a single match supposed to help her? She didn’t see any convenient hydrogen tanks nearby.

  There had been something else in that quick succession of images, something besides the old Mayan in his makeshift armor and a single tiny flame.

  A locked shed on a hillside.

  She remembered that shed. It was just outside Amilcar Kuyoc’s village. They had passed it on their way to his house. When he was asked, he told them easily what it contained.

  Dynamite.

  She looked at the fallen man’s body once more. Why had he worn that bizarre breastplate? He must have known it wouldn’t stop a bullet. He would have been better protected from the weapons of Jacobs’s men by silence and stealth, not rattling reeds.

  The armor was a burden, an unnecessary weight, and Ellie knew firsthand that one did not carry unnecessary weight into the jungle.

  So why had he brought it?

  She looked at it more carefully. There was something odd about the cords. Thick and stiff, one protruded from each of the reeds. They were cleverly woven together to form a single cable running up the side of the breastplate. But the cable was not attached to anything else. It served no practical purpose that she could discern, and could hardly be considered decorative. So why was it there?

  She looked more closely at the place where the cord vanished into the reeds. There was something in there, she realized. The
reeds were no longer hollow.

  Checking the attention of the others once more, she gave one of the cords a tug. It resisted her efforts, but then some inner adhesive gave way and the contents slid toward her.

  She needed to see only a fragment to recognize it. The sight set her pulse pounding.

  Apparently tree stumps weren’t the only thing Kuyoc intended to use explosives on. He had stuffed the breastplate full of it. The cords were fuses, carefully woven together. Light the business end, and Amilcar Kuyoc could easily have taken out the better part of the tomb.

  She carefully nudged the dynamite out of sight and crawled back. It was all she could do to resist the urge to retreat to a safer distance.

  He had come prepared to destroy something, and to give his own life in the process. But what? If it was Jacobs and his men, he could hardly hope to get all of them gathered in a single place. And anyway, he had not gone into the camp making threats. He had found his way here, to the tomb—had stood before the mirror when he took the matches from his pocket.

  He had known about it, she realized. Had known of its existence back when she and Adam had visited the village, and for who knew how long before then. She remembered what he had told them about the region they intended to explore, how he had tried—futilely—to scare them off. He must have known that the city was their goal and either followed them or made his own way here, prepared to destroy himself if necessary to keep them from acquiring the mirror.

  He had known what it would mean if such an object of power fell into the wrong hands—so much so that he’d been willing to die for it.

  She felt an unexpected surge of admiration, mixed with grief.

  Of course, this meant that technically, Ellie was sitting next to a bomb.

  “Nothing, jefe,” she heard one of the men say. He was standing by Jacobs, who did not look perturbed by the news.

  “You’re certain?”

  “There’s nowhere else to look,” the man protested.

  “Then let’s see what happens when we do this.”

  Jacobs strode to where she sat and grabbed her by the hair. He hauled her to her feet with it, the pain bringing tears to her eyes, and shoved her to the center of the room. She managed to slip the matches into her pocket before Jacobs pulled his gun from its holster and pressed the barrel of it to her temple. It felt hot against her skin, as though recently used.