Mr. B raised his sword, ready to strike, as a cloaked figure stepped through the broken door frame.
The figure walked casually across the entryway, hands clasped behind his back, not bothering to remove his boots as he stepped onto the mat with all the nonchalance of a curious tourist perusing an art exhibit.
“Hello, fat man. It’s been a long time,” the cloaked figure said.
“You’re already too late, Apep,” Mr. B said flatly.
“Oh, now, I don’t think so. I would say I am right on time. I already have the God Stones and soon you will be dead, as will all these ridiculous children you’ve enlisted to fight the battle of a man long dead and forgotten.”
Garrett peeked out from behind the wall just enough to catch a glimpse of Mr. B’s lip curl as an ancient rage swelled inside him.
“You really think your Garrett and his little band of friends can defeat me?” Apep said, unclasping his hands. “Even when Turek could not? When all his men could not? When you yourself could not? Not only did you fail to stop me, you failed to save your master.”
Mr. B’s shoulders dropped slightly, causing his sword arm to droop. Garrett and Lenny exchanged looks.
“Oh, come now. Did you think I didn’t know about Garrett? Really?”
“Yes. He will defeat you,” Mr. B said, holding his sword high and ready, careful to keep his eyes fixed as he slowly circled. “He is the heir of Turek. The prophecy has already been foretold and your fate is sealed. He will destroy you, ridding the universe of your very existence once and for all.”
“Pft! Prophecy,” he huffed with a chuckle before pausing to study a sword hanging on the wall. “Your collection is very nice, very… authentic.” He held out a gloved hand and splayed his fingers. The sword flew off the wall and into Apep’s hand as if magnetically drawn right into his palm.
“I know this. You can’t assemble the stones, Apep. You don’t know how,” Mr. B said.
“This is a minor problem soon to be rectified,” Apep said, pointing one of the gloved fingers of his free hand at Mr. B. “You know, I’ve waited a very long time to end you. To finish what I left undone so, so long ago.” He was matching Mr. B’s circling motion step for step now as he began spinning the sword casually in his hand.
Hearing the stranger’s voice, Garrett felt compelled to get a better look at the guy. Carefully he tried to ease himself ever so slightly past the edge of the wall and sneak a peek out from the hall. Apep was completely concealed under a long trench coat, his face shrouded in the shadow cast by an oversized hood.
“Careful, Garrett. Don’t let him see you,” Lenny warned, pulling at Garrett’s dobok sleeve. “I think we need to go.”
“Christ! They both have swords,” Garrett whispered urgently.
Pete came belly-crawling up to them. “Maybe we should get the heck out of here like your teacher guy said,” he advised.
“Hold on, Pete!” Garrett said, still trying to see what was happening. Apep was spinning the sword in front, then behind his back, then in front, back and forth in an advanced flowering technique Garrett had never seen. “Are you seeing this!?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Apep said, abruptly tossing the sword to the side. “Let’s not bother with this. I’ll let you see what you have been guarding all these years with your own eyes… before I remove them from your skull.” Apep reached for the fastener of his duster with a gloved hand and unclasped it. Slowly he pulled one side open from his chest, and one by one the God Stones levitated out from an inside pocket of his coat. Inside each stone, a strange force danced with energy. As they rose upward, they spaced themselves apart evenly before forming a perfect circle. The circle of stones ascended above Apep and Mr. B, spinning slowly overhead.
Mr. B narrowed his eyes and stood fixed, his grip on the sword tightening despite his centuries of practice keeping it loose in his hand.
His whitening knuckles did not go unnoticed by Apep, eliciting a knowing smile and wag of his finger. “Tsk, tsk, Master Brockridge – control your fear.”
Still peeking around the corner, Garrett was the first of the three in the hall to see the stones. Something inside his head went strangely and suddenly wrong – like someone had grabbed the funny bone of his mind and begun to squeeze. The pain went from dull to sharp in the matter of a few heartbeats and was quickly followed by the immediate impulse to vomit.
From the look on Lenny and Pete’s faces, they felt it too. Both covered their ears and pressed their eyes closed, fighting the growing agony.
Garrett forced himself to look through squinted eyes, but the pain was so intense and getting worse by the second. Beside him he heard Lenny moan.
Apep held his hands out, palms up. “Alright, Grand Master Brockridge,” he said, giving a sarcastic emphasis to the formal title. “I have a proposition for you. It’s quite simple really – if you can beat me, the God Stones are yours. You can do with them as you please, bury them again, hide them in the dirt to satisfy your petty fear. Waste all their potential. Waste them and their power. But if you fail, oh my! I kill you and everyone on this wretched planet. I build my army and this world – this world burns, and I open the gate to my kingdom and leave this one behind in so much forgotten ash.”
Bolting forward, Mr. B struck down with the blade at Apep’s face with a vicious overhead chop.
Apep stood motionless with his hands to his side until the last possible second before sidestepping. The blade swooshed by, missing his shoulder by millimeters.
Above them, the God Stones spun.
2
Perfect Circle
Wednesday, April 6 – God Stones Day 1
Rural Chiapas State, Mexico
“Gabi!” a voice echoed from down the gorge.
A man with a wide-brimmed hat poked his head inside the tent. “Gabi, they’re calling for you!”
Gabi’s eyes sprung open wide with excitement. She sat the small animal bone and brush down on the tray and burst from the tent, rushing past Juan and into the hot Mexican jungle. The sky was a cloudless blue, as deep as the ocean and as still as a cenote. And there, high above, in the middle of it all, hung the burning sun, poised proudly against the royal blue backdrop, unmoving, as if nailed to the sky itself.
“Slow down, Gabi! The site is thousands of years old – it will still be there when you get there,” Juan called after her, laughing.
A giant smile stretched across her face as she hurried down the well-worn trail. Gabi was fast, fast as the wind. Faster than any boy her age, that was for sure. The trail wove down deep into the gorge, zigging and zagging between shoulder-high piles of rubble extracted from the collapse that had nearly killed the Moores over a year ago. As she drew close to the crevice, she saw María waiting, a hand extending a helmet toward her as the other beckoned her forward.
“Is it time?!” Gabi exclaimed, gasping for breath as she pulled the helmet over her silky, black hair.
“Sarah asked me to find you. She wants you to join her inside,” María said, her headlamp still on, though barely noticeable in the early afternoon sun.
“Down below?! Is it open?! Is she asking for me to come down to the lower chamber?!” The excitement spilled from her, overflowing like a fountain.
María smiled and laughed. “Yes, she is asking for you down below. Now come, let’s not keep her waiting.” María helped her with her chin strap as Gabi pulled her long pigtails above the helmet’s backstrap. “¡Perfecta! Now in you go,” she said, ushering her into the crevice.
In the process of clearing the collapse, the team had needed to widen the opening. As she walked easily through the crevice, she could only imagine the terror the Moores must have felt as this whole place came down around them. Gabi’s hands began to sweat, but not because she was nervous about being deep underground. No, it was quite the opposite. She had been waiting for this moment for months.
Sarah said she had a strange feeling this site was old, really old. How old, she couldn’t say. No on
e could – not yet. But it wouldn’t surprise Gabi to find out this site stretched back three thousand years or more! What if it were the oldest site in all of Mexico! And given its south-central location, it almost had to be an ancient Maya site. Of course, they would need carbon dating to prove it, Sarah said, but with the bone and pottery shards they had sent to the lab, they would have confirmation soon enough.
The prospect of this site being the oldest Maya site in all of Mexico excited Gabi. Why shouldn’t it? If it were true, this site was her heritage – her people. After all, her mother, Itzel, was modern-day Maya.
Most of today’s Maya lived in southern Mexico and Central America and most worked in agriculture. But her mother had wanted something else. Itzel got into archeology because she wanted to protect her heritage, yes, but she also longed for adventure. Gabi felt that same longing too.
Her mother and father had met at university, where they bonded over their love for ancient Maya culture. Her father Andrés was born in Villahermosa, and though he wasn’t Maya, he loved everything about history, culture, and archaeology. He always told Gabi the greatest mysteries of the universe were hidden just beneath her feet.
Gabi wanted to follow in her parents’ footsteps studying ancient cultures like the Olmec, the Aztec, and most of all the history of her own culture, the Maya. But she was only thirteen and, even though she was the luckiest kid on the planet, a very real fear lurked at the back of her mind. A fear that they could hit a dead end, or run out of funding, or be driven out of the area by warring factions of the cartel, or any other of a hundred reasons they could be shut down and forced off the site. But the truth was, even if this site shut down, they probably could find work and they would be okay even if times got tough. But the real reason she worried had little to do with losing the dig site and much more to do with losing the woman leading it – Sarah.
Most lead archaeologists wouldn’t allow Gabi, at only thirteen, onto the dig site. No kids, they said. She will get in the way, they said. She will get hurt, they said. She will hurt something, they said. Instead she had to stay at the base camp and complete her homeschool work and maybe, if she was lucky, she would be allowed to help catalog the less valuable items, such as broken pottery shards or items such as animal bones pulled from refuge pits. But Sarah was different. Even though Gabi had only been twelve when she arrived at the site, Sarah insisted she be part of the team. Not only part of the team, but right in the mix learning everything she could, either working with her parents or right at Sarah’s side. Sarah said she reminded her of Dr. Moore’s daughter, an American girl named Bre. It was Bre who had discovered the crevice. Sarah said Bre was going to be a great archaeologist someday, even better than Sarah herself. Best of all, Sarah said Gabi could be too, if she worked hard and applied herself.
Working hard was not a problem for a Maya, and she proved it every day, working until she was forced to stop. It didn’t seem like work at all for her. Working with Sarah every day was an adventure!
For over a year now they had studied every inch of the mountain while another team worked to clear the collapsed cave. In all those months, they had been unable to find the alternate entry even after a careful search of the entire mountain, grid by painstaking grid. She got to learn about ground-penetrating radar and how to read the GPR graphs. What they confirmed was fascinating. The site was not a simple cave that led to a cenote under a mountain. It was a very cleverly, purposely concealed pyramid. One that had not been swallowed by time but swallowed by intention. It wasn’t uncommon for new pyramids to be discovered that had long ago been devoured by jungle, but it was rare – no, not rare, unheard of – for a pyramid to be intentionally buried, especially one this big. If Sarah was right, this pyramid could be nearly double the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza! That would make it not only the oldest but perhaps also the largest in history.
To uncover the pyramid and find the opening might have taken decades, but thanks to Bre stumbling upon the eroded crevice at the bottom of the deep gorge, they didn’t need to wait. All they had needed to do was clear the collapse.
It had been hard work. But after more than a year of painstaking effort, they could finally explore the innermost bowels and see for themselves what this chamber of the Moores was all about. Only today the team had removed the last of the blockage in front of the spiraling staircase. Finally, they would get some answers.
“Gabi,” María said in a quiet voice from behind her as they crossed the first chamber. “What Sarah speculated was right. The trap the Moores sprung had been ingeniously designed to leave the lower chamber whole, but completely inaccessible. The entire lower chamber is unharmed.”
Gabi gasped. “That’s wonderful!”
Behind her the sound of grunts, sledgehammers striking stone, and stone striking hollowly against the basin of a wheelbarrow reverberated through the upper chamber. The laborers still worked to clear the chamber in the other direction. Perhaps soon they would be able to explore the pyramid above.
Here we go, Gabi thought, making her way past the single piece of pristine pottery. It was the only piece not crushed by the collapsing ceiling that nearly killed the Moores. Her mother, Itzel, stood next to the lintel archway leading to the lower chamber. “I can go down?” Gabi asked.
“Yes.” She nodded. “Sarah and Fredy just went down a moment ago. We don’t even have lighting set up yet. Your father is working on that now, but they said it is safe for you to join.” Itzel cupped Gabi’s face in her hands. “Just be careful, noconetzin,” she said, leaning in to kiss her daughter’s nose.
Gabi nodded, her focus fixed on the opening. She was so excited she wanted to run through the opening, but she knew better. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I will be along as soon as your father gets back with the lighting. He’s going to need María and I to help carry it all down,” she said with a smile.
For the first time ever, Gabi passed cautiously beneath the large lintel and found herself descending a wide, curving set of stone stairs. As she stepped down and then down again, her mother’s voice called after her, “And don’t touch anything, Gabriela!”
She knew her mother meant business when she called her by her real name.
She stepped down a few more stairs, her eyes darting from left to right, trying to take in everything she could cast her headlamp on. How long must it have taken to carve these spiraling stairs into the stone? As tempted as she was to run down them, she slowed, inspecting the work. Along the edge of the steps ran a seam. She looked at the other side and found a seam there too. What? She turned back to face up the stairs and confirmed a seam ran all the way across the back of the step. Directing her light at the wall, she searched but saw nothing, only perfectly smooth stone.
Stepping down again she leaned in closer, and there she found a seam running down the wall in a crisp, straight line tight enough she would not have been able to fit a sheet of paper between the two… two what? Maybe it was limestone, but she wasn’t sure. Limestone wasn’t typically this dark. Surely it wasn’t basalt? Either way, she only noticed the one vertical seam running from floor to ceiling. There was no horizontal seam. The ceiling stretched upward several meters.
She descended four more stairs until she reached the next wall seam. Couldn’t be! That would mean this one block, if it were a block, and it must be, or why else would there be a seam, must be two meters wide and four meters high. How much would that weigh? She couldn’t know that without knowing how thick it was, but it had to weigh dozens of tons. On top of this revelation was the fact the whole section she was looking at was curved. Creating a curved block this big with such precision would take some serious mathematical skill. This staircase wasn’t carved into the cave. This whole spiraling stairwell was somehow… what? Placed here? Just the thought of it was crazy, but if it were true that would be crazy cool! But how would they have done it? How could they have gotten such big stones in here? Unless, unless this came before everything above? She wondered
if Sarah had noticed the seams.
She hurried down the remaining steps until she was suddenly standing on the bottom step, peering out into a pitch-dark chamber. Her eyes went wide as she caught her first glimpse of an impossibly tall statue. She could see someone’s light a few meters away, coming from behind the giant, then suddenly another light filled her vision. She shielded her eyes as the silhouette of Fredy came into view. Gabi sucked in a short breath and held it before finally releasing it. “¿Neta?”
“Sí,” the grey-whiskered man laughed. “It’s for real, Gabi!”
Gabi thought of Fredy as the village elder, a wise man, always working close to Sarah as her trusted adviser. She wasn’t sure how old he was, just that he was really old – fifty something, maybe even sixty.
Fredy handed her a notepad. “Prepare yourself, Gabi, it’s remarkable!”
Gabi strained her neck to see past Fredy, her own headlamp pushing back the darkness of the chamber to illuminate giant stone legs. She followed the legs upward, tipping her head back to discover the giant wore an angry expression topped with a serpent headdress just like the one on the lintel at the top of the stairs. It must have been at least twelve meters tall, with the ceiling of the circular room stretching even further above.
“Breathe, Gabi.” Fredy chuckled.
Gabi pulled in another short breath. “It’s so big!” she exhaled.
“Come, Sarah is waiting for you.” He leaned in close to her ear. “She said, and I quote, ‘Get Gabi down here! I want her with us on this!’”
Gabi’s blush was invisible in the darkness of the chamber, but her bright eyes and wide smile spread infectiously to Fredy, who gave a joyful burst of laughter. To work so hard for so long, unsure of what condition they would find the lower chamber in, only to find it completely intact – well, it was cause for high spirits.
“Come on you two, get over here!” Sarah’s voice called in a mock order followed by her own giggles.
The Keepers Of The Light (God Stone Book 2) Page 2
