by Sean Ellis
“What’s it say?” Lancet asked in a breathless whisper.
“‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,’” Mira muttered, not quite joking.
Atlas chuckled. “That’s a pretty close translation actually. It is indeed a warning, from our old friend Storm Jaguar.”
Though she was no expert on the Maya, Mira knew more about Storm Jaguar than any classically trained pre-Columbian archaeologist. The truth of the matter was, due to a series of unfortunate circumstances beginning with the actions of an opportunistic Dominican friar and extending forward five centuries, no one in the scholarly world had ever heard of him at all.
Storm Jaguar—the name was a literal translation of the ancient pictographic script—had been the king of an early city-state in western Honduras, well to the south of what most historians believed was the limit of Mayan expansion. His life story had become the basis for the Mesoamerican equivalent of an epic poem, committed to paper—or huun, as the Maya called it—in the fifth century.
A thousand years later, and several centuries after their civilization had mysteriously vanished, most surviving examples of the ancient texts were destroyed by Spanish conquistadores who believed the writings would inhibit conversion of the native population to Christianity. A scant few books, bound and folded into codices, survived the purge, preserved by Spaniards who recognized their worth, but remained hidden and forgotten for hundreds of years thereafter. Experts now knew of four authentic Mayan codices and had used these in combination with the relief carvings in Mayan ruins to develop a fairly comprehensive translation matrix, but none of the known writings mentioned Storm Jaguar. That name was found only in a codex that Atlas had purchased on the black market.
A translation of the document yielded, among other things, the Mayan equivalent of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale of how Storm Jaguar left his kingdom and journeyed to Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld. The tale expanded on the creation myths found in the Popul Vuh—a collection of folklore based on oral tradition passed down in the Quiché language—but the provenance of Atlas’ codex had been impossible to establish through conventional means. Which left only unconventional means.
Enter Mira Raiden.
Four months earlier, the closest Mira had ever come to a tropical jungle was the Rain Forest Café at the MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip. She had been making the circuit of Sin City casinos, winning big, but not too big, and gradually but determinedly feathering her nest. Gambling afforded her no addictive thrill. With her intuition guiding her bets, it was merely working for a living.
One night while playing colors at the roulette table, she had felt the tingle of someone watching her. Surprised that she had been noticed so early in the evening, she had nevertheless taken that as her cue to cash out her winnings and head for the door. The watcher in this case was not the pit boss, however, but rather a sweaty, smiling, little fat man who spoke to her as if they were already old friends.
“My dear Mira,” he had said, grinning cryptically. “You have a gift.”
Her “gift” told her that, where Marquand Atlas was concerned, looks could be deceiving, but she sensed nothing threatening about him. And that, coupled with the fact that he had correctly recognized her abilities and seemed impressed by them, was enough for her to accept his offer of a drink.
They made an unlikely pair in the cocktail lounge. Her elfin physique and features were not exactly glamorous, but she knew that most men found her attractive. Under normal circumstances, she could have had her pick of companions, and at first she had imagined that onlookers would wonder why she had picked the portly Atlas. Only later, when she finally began to get an inkling of his net worth, did she realize that the jealousy she had sensed was actually directed at her.
For his part, Atlas had never tried to impress her with his wealth, much less make any sort of sexual advances. From the outset he had focused solely on her unique attributes, all but interrogating her in an effort to define exactly what she was capable of doing. Later that night he had shown her the codex.
Without even knowing what it was, physical contact with the brittle, discolored pages had filled her with certainty regarding the codex’s authenticity. More than that, it had triggered what she could only describe as a homing instinct, a powerful urge that over the course of several weeks would lead her, with Atlas in tow, to a buried Mayan temple in Honduras more than three hundred miles from the ruins of Copan near the Guatemalan border and from there even farther south to the rugged wilderness of the Darien Gap in search of the legendary Mayan underworld.
But that night in Vegas, as her fingertips brushed the decorative leaves of the codex, she understood for the first time the thrill that made ordinary people gamble away their last dollar on the promise of what the next roll of the dice might bring.
“Is it a warning?” Lancet asked.
“A ‘No Trespassing’ sign, of sorts. It’s a boundary marker. Beyond this point, we are in the realm of Xibalba.” Atlas made a dismissive gesture. “From the looks of it, the lords of Xibalba have been gone for a long time.”
Mira wasn’t convinced. When they had discovered the tomb of Storm Jaguar in the catacombs beneath the temple in Honduras, she had felt only an overwhelming desire to press on, to retrace the steps of the ancient Mayan king. Now, however, on the threshold of that final discovery, her urge to move forward was being countered by a more primal instinct. It wasn’t exactly panic, but something pretty damn close.
Atlas evinced no such inhibition. Drawing his bush knife, he began clumsily breaking trail beyond the stele. Ever loyal to his employer, Lancet reclaimed his own blade from Mira and joined the effort, with considerably more effectiveness. As the two men hacked at the verdant barrier, Mira remained vigilant, sniffing for any hint of imminent peril.
In a matter of minutes, the jungle yielded up another carved stone—not a stele, but rather an entire wall peeking through the growth. The markings on it were definitely not Mayan hieroglyphs.
“It’s Atlantean,” gasped the billionaire.
The ambient sensations presently inundating Mira’s precognitive abilities could not quite hide the subtle change in Atlas’ aura. The very sight of the strange markings—a language that was far more reminiscent of a phonetic alphabet than any pre-Columbian pictograph—had awakened something deep inside the man, something buried so deep that she had never sensed it before. The only word to describe it was “hunger,” and the impression was so sudden and overwhelming that the irony was lost on her.
What have I done? she thought. I shouldn’t have brought him here.
Atlas continued chopping away the vines to uncover more of the unique text, and where he did, his fingers brushed at the recessed letters lovingly, his lips moving silently as he read whatever was written there.
Lancet stood paralyzed in disbelief. “You can read this?”
“It is the language of Atlantis. I had long suspected that what Storm Jaguar called Xibalba was really an outpost city built by refugees from that fallen civilization. This”—he patted the wall reverently—“is the tomb of the king of Atlantis.”
“That doesn’t explain how you are able to read it,” Mira countered.
“Tsk, tsk, my dear. Did you think you knew all my secrets?”
Actually, I did, she thought.
“Atlantis is just a . . .” Lancet looked to Mira, perhaps for confirmation that he was not going insane, but stunned by her own inability to detect Atlas’ hidden agenda, she could offer no such assurances.
He’s been looking for this all along. He knew what it was. He knows what it means. Suddenly the potency she had sensed from afar took on a dire implication. “Mr. Atlas, I think we should proceed with a little more caution.”
“Nonsense. We must find a way inside, and quickly, before the looters get wind of this.” As if to emphasize his newfound urgency, his next cut exposed the edge of a doorway. Beneath the artistically executed arched lintel, utterly unlike anything she had ever seen. T in her brief
experience with Mayan ruins—the passage was choked with rubble, but even this did not slow Atlas down. Sheathing his knife, he reached in with both hands and began pulling out broken blocks of cut stone that were twice as large as his own head.
Lancet tapped him on the shoulder. “Take a break, Mr. Atlas. I’ll get this.”
The billionaire, red-faced and panting, mopped his brow with a shirtsleeve. “Very well, but you must hurry. We’re so close.”
“We’re too close,” Mira murmured, but even in the grip of her newfound anxiety she was not immune to the thrill of discovery. After all, it wasn’t every day that a person found proof that Atlantis really existed.
With half of the blockage cleared away, it became apparent that the passage beyond was wide open. Eager to be inside, the billionaire squirmed his massive body through the narrow gap. A tiny spot of light blossomed in the darkness beyond and immediately began moving deeper into the interior.
“Damn him,” Lancet growled before scrambling through the aperture in pursuit of his headstrong employer.
Mira’s slight form slipped through without even significantly shutting out the sun’s rays, and in the circle of daylight that illuminated the first few feet of the passage, she caught a glimpse of Lancet, already on the move.
Like the others, she carried a tiny squeeze light clipped to a breakaway chain around her neck. The powerful light emitting diode threw out a brilliant cone of illumination, but as she hastened after her companions, she felt such a sense of familiarity about the place that she probably could have negotiated the buried ruin in total darkness. She was starting to think that Atlas probably could have done so as well. Despite his bulk, he was flat out running ahead of them, drawn inexorably toward the center of temple.
There was no time to examine the halls and rooms through which she now raced. Flashes of light danced on the walls, revealing brightly colored human figures, veristic images, faintly reminiscent of the style found on the walls of Pompeii. The constant motion and vibration at the source of the illumination made it seem like the pictures were coming alive, and then it occurred to her that perhaps the movement glimpsed in her peripheral vision had nothing at all to do with the interplay of shadow and light. She hastened on.
The tunnels wound back and forth through the underground complex like a mystical labyrinth, and while she often lost sight of the flickering lights carried by the two men, she never faltered in choosing her path through the maze. But there was no escaping the grim reality that Atlas would reach the goal—the unknown prize at the heart of the ruin—before she caught up to him.
Then, inexplicably, she skidded to a stop. The goal, she realized, was not merely at the center of the ruin. Storm Jaguar had called this place Xibalba, the underworld, and just like Orpheus and Dante, his journey had taken him far beyond the first level of Hell. The prize Atlas sought lay somewhere below, in the bowels of this ancient subterranean temple. More importantly, there was a shortcut.
Whether Atlas knew about it or not was irrelevant. The most direct route to the temple’s core had not been constructed for the purpose of passage. It was a vertical shaft less than two feet in diameter that stabbed through the center of every layer of the temple, allowing sunlight from the surface to filter down into the deepest catacombs. The ancient architects had not designed this to be a ruin, but rather a living place of worship, and such a place needed light. The roof of the superstructure had long since collapsed, shutting forever the oculus, which had permitted the sun’s rays to enter, but the shaft remained.
At the next junction she turned away from the sound of footsteps and quickly found the opening, a shadowy void in the floor, surrounded by the rubble of the fallen roof. She trained her light into the shaft, verifying with her eyes what her mind already knew; the hole penetrated every descending level of the temple. Motivated though he was there was no way Atlas would ever be able to shove his girth through that orifice. Mira faced no such limitation.
Effortlessly, she lowered herself feet first into the void, gradually but confidently letting her extended arms take the burden of her weight. The floor of the next level was perhaps another four feet below her dangling toes, but she knew better than to simply let go. Directly beneath her, the deep shaft continued, and while she was in a hurry to get to the bottom, she wasn’t in that much of a hurry. Instead, she spread her feet apart, straddling the opening as she landed. With increased confidence, she repeated the process three more times until, above the fifth level, her small light showed something other than a hole in the floor beneath her.
With each successive layer, the intensity of the sensation she had first encountered at the marker stele grew, and now that she was at last face to face with her destination, it was impossible to distinguish anything else. A blanket of psychic white noise emanating from the lowest stage of the temple left her precognitive faculties completely numb. But like a gambler, certain that the cards were about to break her way, the thrill of imminent victory compelled her onward.
From her overhead vantage, it was difficult to say exactly what the object occupying the center of the temple was. She thought it was an altar of some kind, positioned to lie in the beam of sunlight that had once reached into the depths of the temple at midday. If so, the altar was merely a showcase for something else, something that she could not quite make out with her tiny flashlight, but which she knew unequivocally to be the object of Atlas’ mad dash into the ruin.
“Jackpot,” she whispered, her lips curling in a triumphant grin as she proceeded to lower herself down onto the altar and then onto the supporting dais, where she got her first good look at the tomb of an Atlantean king.
The room was a circle, perhaps fifty feet across, and its single, continuous wall was adorned with a narrative mural executed in the same style as the frescoes she had glimpsed in the tunnels above. She took a moment to circumscribe the room with the beam of her light, and what she saw took her breath away. Protected from the elements, the images were perfectly preserved, the pigments still bright and vivid. Unlike the flat, two-dimensional images that adorned most ancient ruins, the artists who had decorated this tomb understood perspective and had created a remarkable illusion of depth. And while she was no expert on history or folklore, she recognized instantly the subject of the visual sequence. It was the story of the fall of Atlantis.
The tale began and ended with the only break in the circle, a vertical protrusion that stretched from floor to ceiling. At first she thought it was a door, but the carved relief—a perfect rendering of a man in repose—clued her in to its actual purpose: it was a sarcophagus.
Her brief examination of the life-sized sculpture revealed a nude male with exaggerated musculature and exquisite aquiline features. Unlike the death masks of Egyptian pharaohs, this figure wore only one piece of ornamentation—a circular diadem with a single hexagonal shape positioned in the center of his forehead.
The sculpted form on the sarcophagus featured prominently in the mural, and in most of those depictions, the circlet floated above his brow, the hexagon a white gemstone blazing with supernatural fire. Only the first scene was different; in it, the king struggled with another man—an oddly familiar figure that Mira felt she should recognize, but could not—for possession of the crown. Though she could not read the strange writing that framed the picture, it was evident that the battle between the two men directly contributed to the catastrophic collapse of the kingdom, shown on the subsequent panel.
From that point onward, the king wore the talismanic crown, leading the refugees of the doomed civilization to a new life in exile. The cycle ended with the king’s death and burial, and in the profound sadness displayed on the faces of the anonymous mourners, she saw written the final doom of Atlantis. She didn’t need to be psychic to know that the refugee city had not survived long following the death of that last king.
Remembering the purpose for her hasty descent, she turned at last to the altar at the center.
The stone pedestal s
tood on an upraised podium directly beneath the aperture. What she had first taken to be an object on display, she now saw was actually a fixed part of the altar, an irregular tableau with a recessed, ring-shaped groove at the center. There seemed little question that the niche was meant to display the crown, but the headpiece was conspicuously absent. Frowning, she glanced about the room, and only then realized that there was no other means of entering or leaving the tomb.
She was trapped.
Panic washed over her and with it a surge of adrenaline. She had never experienced fear on this level. Her preternatural intuition had always provided ample warning of dangerous situations long before they reached a critical stage, but that sensory organ had been muted by . . . by whatever it was that she was supposed to find down here.
She took a deep breath, remembering how her abilities had guided her here in the first place. There had to be a way in and out of this chamber. Atlas knew it, and when she had been on the upper levels, she had known it as well.
When I’ve got what I came for, the way out of here will be obvious, she told herself. Then she laughed as she realized that this was probably how all those gamblers felt as they put their last chip on the table. An all-or-nothing bet. . . . Luck, be a lady tonight. No, it’s nothing like that. I was meant to be here. Something called me here. That’s what I need to focus on.
It was the crown. It had to be.
She turned back to the upright sarcophagus, looking past the life-like effigy, scanning every inch of its surface for some indication of where the lid had been sealed into place, but found nothing. There was no way to open the tomb. Frustrated, she hammered her fists against the unyielding stone and was rewarded only with a dull pain in the heels of her hands.
Think! It brought you here; it wants to be found. There has to be a way.
Willing herself into a state of calm, she attempted something she had never before tried; there had never been reason for it. With her eyes closed and her breathing deep and steady, she attempted to reawaken her quiescent sixth sense. Whether or not it worked, she could not say, but after a few moments, it dawned on her to look for some kind of mechanism.
