by Jenn Stark
I frowned. I still had the ring that had been sent to me via Justice Hall, tucked tightly into my jacket pocket. It didn’t seem like a good idea for me to flash it to Emilio now. “So that’s what everyone is looking for? This ring?”
“No,” Emilio said, surprising me. “The ring was a symbol of a greater bounty. Through her networks, the grandmother shaman in my village learned that shamans all over the world had gotten the same vision. The ring would be where the Moon would be, but the Moon herself was the ultimate goal. The ring was simply a sign that everyone was in the right place.”
Oh, great. Suddenly, me carting this rock back into the lost city didn’t seem like the brightest idea. “It’s a homing device?”
“A beacon,” Emilio agreed, nodding eagerly. “A siren song for the Moon. The shaman believes it is in the lost city, perhaps recently unearthed, and where it beckons, the Moon must follow.
Nikki shifted against the rock wall, taking it all in. “Back to these caves,” she said. “What is this about them being cursed? Cursed by who, and with what?”
“Stories of lost cities in Peru don’t date back solely to the Incan times,” Emilio said. “There were many people who sought refuge in these sacred mountains, many who bartered with the gods for their safe passage and protection.”
“Yeah, well,” Nikki said. “The fact that these cities got lost in the first place doesn’t seem to argue too much for their rep as a safe haven.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not,” Emilio said. “Yes, enemies prevailed on occasion, but not before that which was most sacred was able to be secreted away and protected. In those dark days, the survivors gave up their lives, but not their legacy. The secrets of this land remained.”
“Buried treasure,” Nigel said. “That’s what you’re talking about, treasure of one stripe or another.”
Emilio nodded. “There is no end to the magic of this place, the healing totems and plants, deadly venoms that, mixed in the right way, can transform those who take them into creatures of myth and magic. And protecting all of it was a deep and powerful magic—perhaps the shadows, darkness, and the mystery of the Moon.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “There’s a temple of the moon at Machu Picchu, but it’s tiny compared to the temple of the sun. Moon worship isn’t the primary focus of this area of the world. It never has been.”
“It never will be,” agreed Emilio. “The moon is ever a retiring maiden, hidden behind the brightness of the sun and the glittering strength of the star. She makes her way quietly across the skies, never drawing attention.” He flashed a grin. “Until now. Now she has grown fierce, yes?”
“Right,” I echoed. I stared down the long corridor. About twenty yards ahead, it split off into two directions. “No one else knows of these caverns?”
“The shaman guards her secrets most zealously,” Emilio said. “If she shared it with anyone, it would only be because she thought they had a better chance than we did of getting her what she wanted. That is unlikely, given your involvement, Justice Wilde. But not impossible.”
“She also is not impervious to attack or corruption,” Nigel pointed out. “If someone got to her and extracted the information they needed from her, we could have company down here before we know it.”
“Yeah, but, like I said, I’m not picking up any readings,” Simon said. “So if there are other people down here, they’ve got better toys than I do, which would put them in a highly specialized group.” He stopped short of saying it wasn’t possible, but that assessment was certainly implied. I tended to agree with him.
“Okay, well, we’ll go with that,” I said. “If someone else got to your contact, she didn’t send them this way. That doesn’t mean there isn’t another way into the lost city. We’ll head out in five.”
I moved off from the group, leaving them to reset their packs. Meanwhile, I had some instrument readings of my own to do. I dipped my hand into my pocket, not for the gaudy Moon ring, but for my deck of cards, this time illustrated in a more standard Rider-Waite style. I drew three cards out of the deck at random, pulling them free and flashing them toward the dim light shining from Emilio’s lantern.
The first card that caught my eye was the last I’d drawn, and one I expected. The Moon. I smiled despite myself. Always nice of the cards to let me know I was on the right track. Still, one of the images on the card caught my attention specifically, the dogs howling up at the crescent moon, paying no attention to the lobster beside them. I could almost hear their howls against the dark and lonely night, and I wondered again about the guardians of this place and where they might be.
If Simon couldn’t pick up on their energy readings, who was protecting them? Or where had they gone?
The other two cards drew my focus, but I knew them so well already that I stuffed the pack back into my pocket, willing to chew on the information without further study. The Four of Swords was a card of rest and recuperation. That could also speak to the Moon herself, secreted down here in her lost city, potentially in some sort of long, protracted contemplation. But I’d been through my share of cave systems enough to bet on a slightly different reading. Namely, that we were going to find ourselves knocked flat on our backs before too long, whether by choice or not.
Then there was the final card, one of the few cards I actively disliked in the deck, and one I’d already seen once all too recently. The Five of Swords. You win, but you’re not happy that you win. Or, someone else didn’t want you to win. Or, whatever it is you wanted wasn’t going to be handed to you on a platter, you had to work for it. It was a messy card with messy readings influenced far too much by the cards around it. Only, this wasn’t a traditional reading, and the supporting cards had shed no light on the subject. Feeling incomplete, I drew another card.
The Six of Cups. Something from the past was going to become really, really important.
Here we go.
“Sara,” Nikki called, indicating we were ready to start out again. I turned back toward her, but the card tugged at me, and I glanced down at it more closely. Two children playing in a yard, one handing off a cup to the other. The Six of Cups was the card of nostalgia and childish things, remembering the past, celebrating it, being like a kid again. Something about all this bothered me. My childhood hadn’t been especially fantastic, though I was still luckier than most people in the world. What was it about the past, then, that was important? What was the clue hidden in the card?
The answer was doomed to elude me, as the first sound outside our group in twelve hours broke across the chamber—so loud, it practically shattered my eardrums.
Screaming.
20
We rushed together in a tight knot, Nikki and me in front, Nigel, Simon, and Emilio turned slightly to the side, unsure of whether the threat was coming from before us or behind us.
The noise was deafening, screams of terror high-pitched and feral accompanied by long, low howling moans that sounded like the bones of the earth were grinding together. A first gust of air came from the passage ahead of us, making Nikki wince and shrink down a little bit. She stood above the rest of us by a good half foot, and she grazed the top of her head with her hand as if surprised it was still there.
“That’s some serious cold,” she informed us. “That wind—it’s not right. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s not good.”
“Get as low as you can,” I ordered, and pushed forward. The passageway angled downward, and a few moments later, another surge of foul wind came up, the sound of screaming once more hard upon it.
This cut was lower, and I felt it slash across my brow. I crouched as much as I could and scrambled forward.
“Your shaman say anything about this?” I demanded of Emilio as we passed an open corridor, but he turned to me, eyes wide.
“She said nothing, nothing,” he assured me, legitimately panicked. Watching him, I could see the shift in the air behind him, a rush of wind that seemed to take on a living form. I could almost see the hand
s reaching out, sharpened nails grasping and grabbing. Those hands clipped Emilio in the back of the head and sent him sprawling, out cold.
“What the hell?” Nikki barked.
I dropped to one knee by Emilio, pulling him around. He was breathing, but only just, and the spark of his life force had dimmed to almost nothing. Drawing on my own deep reservoirs of energy, I did the first thing I could think of, pouring my own energy back into him. He was only marginally Connected, though like most hunters, he had some ability within him, and it was enough for me to kindle the healing process. His eyes fluttered open, and he gasped, but I didn’t have time for him to ease into his recovery. I yanked him to his feet, shaking him hard.
“She said nothing about this?” I demanded again, but he stared at me, mute with shock. From what little I knew about him, Emilio wasn’t one to volunteer himself for hazard duty. That didn’t necessarily improve our position.
“We’ve got another wave coming,” Simon said, only this time, he was facing behind us. “Based on the trends, this one will hit us at the waist.”
The passageway opened up slightly ahead of us, then sloped precipitously. If we could just get over that hump, the fell wind might easily soar over us. It was worth a shot.
“Get out into the room, then drop to your back,” I directed, remembering the Four of Swords card with the knight resting flat on his pallet. “Keep your body as tight to itself as possible. I don’t want anyone’s arms getting ripped off.”
“Roger that,” Nigel said, and we dashed forward.
We’d barely gotten over the ridge when I heard the howling Simon had tracked. It rushed up behind us.
“Down!” I shouted.
I felt it skim over the top of my body, barely a foot over my face, and I stared with wide eyes at the sight. There was definitely something in that mist—wraiths of some sort, bodiless forms. Absolutely something more than a really cold breeze.
“Okey doke, I’m airborne,” Nikki called out. I angled my gaze farther down and gaped. A strand of the wind had curled beneath Nikki’s head somehow and had lifted her body a good two inches off the ground. “Sweet Mother Mary on a—whoa!”
Without any further warning, she hurtled down the passage. My instinct to leap up and fling myself after her caused my own shoulders to get clipped, my body jerking and giving the stiff gale-force wind more purchase. A second later, I was airborne too, rocketing forward on a current of wind that thrust me bodily down the stone corridor.
Simon’s excited shout echoed down the rock walls, louder even than the wind. “We’re human luges,” he announced, his delight tempered somewhat by Emilio’s panicked scream as our Peruvian guide was also picked up and thrown forward.
I could hear Nigel explode into a flurry of proper-sounding British curses as the last member of our team also gave himself over to the unwanted conveyance system. Leave it to the Brit to have maintained his control longer than the rest of us, but this wasn’t a fight we were going to win, not at first.
The howling wind rushed us down the passageway, paying no mind to when the thing curved or split off. We slammed into walls, low-hanging ceilings, and outcroppings as it shoved us through the passageways. In one particularly harrowing swerve, we were thrown over a short cliff, falling twenty feet or more, a drop that could easily have caused broken bones at our speed but for a new and possibly more vicious wind tunnel that opened up beneath us, buoying our descent until we were hurled into another set of subterranean passageways.
At one point, I was pretty sure I blacked out, but was jolted awake a second later by a particularly hard knock to the side. I blinked my eyes wide to see that the passage had opened up in front of us and was no longer merely lit by the bouncing lantern of Simon’s device, which he’d somehow managed to hold tight against him during the long race through the caverns. The wind gathered itself for one final push. We were blown out the side of the mountain, bouncing and tumbling down a vine-covered slope until we finally came to rest on a wide rocky terrace. A stone wall loomed over us, dark rocks interspersed at regular angles with startling white stones set in the pattern of…llamas?
We lay there dazed for a long moment, then another.
“I don’t think I ever wanna do that again,” Nikki spoke first.
“You’ve got that right,” Nigel muttered, sitting up and shaking his head.
“Injuries?” I managed, but got only low groans and mutters in response from everybody but Emilio. The guide had crawled over onto one side, propping himself up to stare up the mountainside.
“Choquequirao,” he said, his voice oddly hushed. “We are on the steps of Choquequirao—the stairway that leads to the sky.”
“And we’re definitely the first ones here,” Simon agreed, rolling nimbly to his feet. He studied his device, moving it up and down as he pivoted in a slow circle. “I’ve got no life-forms, at least not any on two feet, closing in on the site. I don’t know how long that’s going to last, but we’ve got the place to ourselves for the time being.”
“How far a range can you pick up?” I asked.
He shrugged. “All the way to Vegas if you want to get technical about it, but that’d trip some triggers. With just a gentle nudge, I can cover about ten miles. We’ve got some time, in other words, but not a lot of it.”
“So now what?” Nigel asked, also rolling to his feet, though with decidedly more difficulty than Simon. “We’ve got no people heading here, but if you’re not picking up any human readings at all, that doesn’t bode well for Roland.”
“Not exactly,” Simon said. “I do have a two-legged life-form inside the walled city. Way inside, like practically beneath these terraces. That could easily be him.”
“He’s alone?” I asked, dragging myself upright and brushing off my legs—happily, they were more or less intact.
“If he’s got anyone with him, they’ve got shields stronger than I can penetrate,” Simon said, which, I noticed, wasn’t exactly a no. I frowned at him, and he waved the device at me.
“The signal gets pretty erratic. It could be the natural magic of the place, it could be the influence of another Arcana Council member, I just don’t know. There’s also this.” He pointed to the device and showed me the glowing red dot on its screen, far up the mountain from what was presumably Roland Franklin’s life indicator. “You want to know what it is?”
“Your tag?” I guessed. “When you sent out the homing beacons to tag all the members of the Shadow Court, you said you hit two other powerful magicians. This is one of them?”
“This is one of them,” he agreed. “I don’t have all my data to determine if it’s one of the outliers or a tag we’d previously assigned to a known bad guy, but just looking at it, it doesn’t look familiar.”
“So it’s the Moon,” Emilio said, his voice sounding slightly strangled. “The shaman was right. She has returned.”
“Either she has, or somebody’s trying really, really hard to make us believe she has. I’m not sure which is better.” I peered out over the lost city—or what I could see from this angle. Under the surprisingly bright light from the thin crescent moon, which now shone down from a cloudless sky, the ruins of Choquequirao looked otherworldly. A few impressively intact buildings emerged reluctantly from the mountainside, stretching up out of the thick foliage as if surprised to find the world was still going on without them. It was far less excavated than its sister city, Machu Picchu, but I could understand why hikers from around the world found this site to be more mystical. There was something affecting about a city that time forgot, especially one steeped in a mythology that spanned hundreds, even thousands, of years.
I turned to look up the mountain, then over to where a long stone aqueduct sluiced down to a series of shallow clearings—doubtless some kind of fountain or bath, fed from above. That was where Roland was, according to Simon’s device, while the tag Simon had sent out to all sorcerers of merit seemed to have landed far higher in the city, probably wedged inside some other ce
remonial structure.
I glanced at Nigel. “Let’s go back over Roland’s likely role in all this. None of his usual clients seem to be attached to this job, which makes it, what, something he did on spec?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Nigel said. “Roland is a fan of making money, but he’s not one to put himself out on a limb. He would have contracted a team to help him, even for a spec job.”
“Unless he couldn’t count on anyone to be a reliable team member,” Nikki put in.
“Or unless we’re the team,” I suggested. Nigel shot me an irritated glance, making me suspect I was on the right track. “You said it yourself, Nigel. He’s one of the slipperiest competitors you’ve ever hunted against. I barely knew the guy, but he obviously knew me, you, and the fact that you and I worked together. What if all this was an elaborate recruiting gambit?”
“Yeah, but we weren’t the only ones summoned,” Nikki pointed out. “That’s a pretty far-flung request for proposal if you’ve got every hunter on the seven continents with money to burn and serious skills converging on the same place.”
“And there is the problem of the other cities,” Nigel said slowly. “Not every hunter is coming to Choquequirao. So how does that work? Are all the rest a red herring, or are we the ones being fooled?”
“Or are all the hunters simply being weeded out, group by group?” Simon asked, peering around. “We made it this far, but we’ve got a pretty impressive team. What if part of the point of this hunt is to knock off a bunch of experienced hunters?”
I squinted up to the nearest six-foot-high llama bricked into the enormous stone steps. He wasn’t all that forthcoming.
