Skykeepers (39 page)

Sasha opened her mouth to explain, but then log-jammed, stopped, and looked at Michael, who said, “I think we should all probably take a look together.” His eyes were his own again. There was no sign of the strange magic.

Then he turned and headed down the tunnel in the direction Ambrose had indicated, the orange glow of his light stick dipping slightly as he walked. Sasha hurried to catch up, so they were walking side by side as they came to a corner, turned it, and saw the first real carvings they’d seen in the subterranean tunnel, a row of screaming human skulls, their eye sockets seeming to follow as Sasha moved past them.

Only the first few carvings were of human skulls, though. After that, they started morphing, becoming something else entirely. The farther inward the Nightkeepers went, the less the skulls looked human, the more they started to look like sharp-eared cats and dogs, and a wide-skulled bird of prey that looked familiar to Sasha, though she couldn’t quite place it.

“Egyptian,” Michael said under his breath, then raised his voice: “Rabbit, any of this looking familiar?”

So far, they’d been unable to identify the tomb Rabbit had seen during his impromptu vision quest, and Strike had understandably put a potential wild-goose chase to Egypt pretty low on the priority list. But Ambrose had said something about a sarcophagus. What if the tomb Rabbit had seen wasn’t in Egypt after all? The ancestors of the modern Nightkeepers had fled Akhenaton’s religious cleansing in 1300-something B.C. and wound up in Central America, so it wouldn’t be impossible for some of the Egyptian techniques to have transferred. Only a handful of Nightkeepers had survived the First Massacre, and they had quickly assimilated into the indigenous population, eventually boostrapping the Olmec into the culture that had become the Mayan Empire. Which meant—

“If this shit is what I think it is,” Strike murmured from behind Sasha, “we’re walking in our first ancestors’ footsteps. Literally.”

She shivered as icy fingers walked down her spine as a staggering suspicion formed.

The tunnel ended at an open doorway. Lifting her glow stick, Sasha stepped through into a vaulted chamber that was roughly rectangular, its construction not nearly as regular as the architecture of the Mayan-era Nightkeepers. Which played if they assumed it’d been built by one of the first few generations of magi after the transoceanic voyage. The space seemed to have been carved out of the limestone base itself, hewn from the stone using cruder implements than the ones used to make the later pyramids at Chichén Itzá and elsewhere.

The walls were painted rather than carved, and even though Sasha had halfway expected the hieroglyphs, it took her a moment to make the transition. Her brain was used to the Mayan glyphs, the anamorphic figures and humans drawn and carved with flattened foreheads and conical skulls, heavy brow ridges and protruding noses. These painted figures didn’t wear feathers and jade, weren’t offering blood to the gods. No, the paintings were done in a different, though related style, one of angular figures posed stiff limbed, their catlike eyes marked at their edges with curlicues and lines, making each eye into a glyph itself: that of the sun god. Other gods were painted elsewhere around the room: the falcon-headed Horus, Bast the cat, Nekhbet the vulture, Hathor the cow, Anubis the jackal.

They were the gods of the Egyptian pharaohs prior to Akhenaton. And they were the gods of the single adult mage who’d survived Akhenaton’s religious purge and had led the Nightkeeper children and their familial slaves to safety.

In the center of the room rose a huge waist-high box of carved and painted stone. The lid bore a life-size representation of a man laid out flat on his back with his arms crossed over his chest. Instead of the traditional staff and flail found on an Egyptian coffin, though, the figure held a ritual knife in one hand, an oval object in the other. A chill washed over Sasha when she recognized the latter as a highly stylized cacao seedpod, which had symbolized life and wealth in the Nightkeepers’ new world.

Magic hummed in the air, latent and waiting, identifying the chamber as a place of enormous power, just as the hieroglyphs marked it as incredibly ancient, incredibly important. “Is it . . .” She trailed off, afraid to put it into words.

Strike crossed to the coffin and dropped to his knees, though she couldn’t have said whether the move was shock or obeisance. Leah moved up beside him, braced one hand on his shoulder, then passed another along a line of boxed text, something that looked partway like a cartouche, partway like Mayan glyphs. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s the First Father’s tomb.”

Strike nodded raggedly. “I think so. Anna will have to translate everything and confirm, but . . . yeah. It’s him. The First Father.” He reached out a shaking hand, let it hover for a moment, then touched the carved stone with deeply ingrained reverence. “Gods.”

Of all of them, it made sense that the king would be hit hardest by the discovery, because he’d known all along that the Nightkeepers were real, the histories were real. According to those histories, a single adult mage had survived Akhenaton’s massacre to lead the Nightkeepers’ children and the newly made
winikin
out of Egypt to the Mayan territories. From there, the First Father had created the original writs. He’d shaped how their civilization was to proceed along the millennia until the end-time. He’d written down the thirteen original prophecies, and then the demon prophecies that Iago had used to destroy the skyroad. The First Father had been the beginning of so many things, the wellspring of so much of the history and culture of the Mayan-era Nightkeepers, that it seemed impossible to believe he was truly a historical figure. Yet Sasha was actually standing there, staring at the sarcophagus that had been wrought by the people who had known him, lived with him, and had fashioned his last resting place after those of the god-kings they had known in another land, half a world away. And now, it seemed, that coffin also held the answer to the Nightkeepers’ prayers: the library scroll.

Michael took a long look at the carvings on one side of the sarcophagus: a stylized scorpion atop a pair of wavy lines, with row upon row of hieroglyphs below it. “Hey, Rabbit. Is this your scorpion?”

The younger mage darted through the crowded chamber, glanced at the carving, and whipped out his cell phone to take a few snaps.

“I’m guessing that’s a ‘yes,’ ” Michael said dryly. But then he glanced at Strike, making sure he and the others were wrapped up in their own explorations of the chamber. Lowering his voice, he said, “Ambrose said something about using the scorpion spell to break his connection to the barrier.” He paused. “What, exactly, did you ask the scrying spell right before you saw the carvings?”

Rabbit hesitated only fractionally before he said, “I started by asking how to call a new
nahwal
, and how I’m supposed to help in the war, but I didn’t get shit. Last thing I asked was how to keep Myrinne.”

Michael smiled grimly. Yeah, that was about what he’d figured. “So the answer was for you to get rid of the Xibalban’s mark?” He supposed it made sense that the Nightkeepers’ purest connection, that of the
jun tan
, would be unable to form in the presence of dark magic.

Rabbit nodded, eyeing the hieroglyphs. “If it broke Ambrose’s connection to the barrier, d’ya think it’d break the hellmark connection, too?”

“Your scrying spell seems to think so.” Which made Michael wonder what other connections it could break.

“What have you two got?” Strike asked from the other side of the tomb.

“Not sure,” Michael answered. “Maybe nothing.” But maybe everything.

He’d almost killed Sasha. When she’d put herself between his machete and her father’s demi-
nahwal
, Michael had seen her, had known who she was, but he hadn’t registered it or cared; he’d been too damned caught up in the raging fury. In that moment he’d hated himself, hated the world. The sluice gates had held, but somehow the Other had been inside him regardless, urging him on, bringing the blood fury it had been taught to love, to feed on.

Who the hell was he? Michael? The Other? Both? Neither?

He didn’t know how he’d stopped himself from cutting her head off, and he couldn’t promise he’d be able to stop himself the next time. The
muk
hovered at the edges of his soul. The dam hadn’t cracked or broken; it had gone insubstantial, friable, like the barrier was becoming as the countdown to the end-time continued. And he knew, deep down inside, that if the Other broke through now, there would be no stopping it until everything—and everyone—around him was dead. Where the Other had once killed with all manner of human weapons, now his alter ego wielded the
muk
like a weapon, with deadly and precise command.

More, Sasha had flat-out asked him about the “silver magic,” which he feared meant she was already too close to it. The Other’s power had been drawn to her from the very beginning; it wanted her goodness and life, wanted to corrupt her, use her, destroy her balance. And that absolutely, positively could not be allowed to happen.

He’d die first, damn it.

“Ambrose said the scroll is inside the coffin,” she said in answer to a question from Strike. “According to him, it’ll open during the solstice, and we’ll find the scroll, which will tell us how to summon something—or some
one
—called a Prophet. It all has to happen during the peak of the solstice.”

“The solstice,” Strike murmured. He looked down at Leah, hope kindling in his eyes. “We could have the library a week from now.”

“The timing will be tight,” she warned, but her eyes were alight with hope.

Rabbit was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet, still taking pictures of the carved hieroglyphs. “We’ve gotta get these pictures to Anna, ASAP, but I’ve got zero signal.”

Strike nodded. “You’re right, we need to get Jade and Anna on this, on all of it. We’ll have to head topside, though—there’s no way I can ’port from down here, either. Too much interference.”

Cell phones were pressed into service to record the site for initial analysis, and then the magi formed a rough line and headed out. This time, Strike and Leah led the way, with Sasha near the end. Michael fell in behind her, forming the rear guard. As he did so, her sex magic slid along his skin. The darkness within him locked on the sway of her hips, the lethal grace of her movements, and the glitter of pure red-gold magic that sparked in the air around her. Like matter drawn to antimatter, he reached for her—no, the Other reached for her. Michael fought the monster back. Barely.

When they came to the point where the spell-cast rubble had blocked the tunnel, Strike paused while the others caught up. “We need to guard the tomb entrance, or close it off or something.” There had been no sign of Iago, but that didn’t mean he was unaware of their success. Given the power of the tomb it seemed unlikely the Xibalban could ’port directly into the chamber itself, but he’d already proven able to zap himself into the tunnels. They had to believe he’d try it again, if he could.

“I could collapse it for real,” Rabbit offered. He didn’t look like he was kidding.

“Don’t you dare,” Leah said immediately. To Strike, she said, “I hate to split the manpower, but maybe we should post guards.”

Michael prowled the area, partly to distance himself from Sasha, partly drawn by a tendril of power. He ran his hands along the tunnel walls, finally finding the point where it was strongest. “Gotcha.”

“You see something?” Strike asked.

“No, but I feel it. Some sort of variant shield magic . . . there it is. Got it. I don’t think this is Ambrose’s spell. I think it’s an older one, with an on/off switch of sorts.”

He waved the others away. When they were clear of where he thought the shield would drop, he touched the magic, nudging a tendril of shield magic toward the spot he’d found. Moments later, the rubble reappeared.

Sven blinked. “Whoa. Cool.”

Michael touched one of the busted chunks of debris. It felt like rock. For all intents and purposes it
was
rock, though it was an illusion, too. Kind of like him. Quickly, he showed the others how to work the spell.

Strike grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good work.” He turned away and headed up the tunnel, calling, “Moving out.”

Michael fell into his place at the back of the line, keeping an iron grip on the Other, which—for the moment, anyway—had slipped back behind the dam, laughing softly at Michael’s belief that it could be contained.
Go ahead and laugh
, Michael shot after it.
One of these days . . .

He trailed off, because he didn’t know what the hell to threaten the bastard with, given that the monster was part and parcel of himself.

When they reached the end of the tunnel, he was surprised to find that it was still daylight. It felt like they’d been underground forever, but in reality it’d been only a couple of hours . . . albeit a couple of hours during which a great many things had changed. At the thought, he fixed his eyes on Sasha, walking a few steps ahead of him.

As if aware of his gaze, Sasha glanced back as she stepped outside, into the orange-dappled sunlight. Her expression made him wonder what she saw in him in that moment, what she thought of him. “Sasha—” he began, then broke off when he saw movement beyond her, and his warrior’s talent sounded the alarm.

“Get down!” He lunged for her, knocked her to the ground, and covered her body with his own.

And all hell broke loose.

The air split with gunfire and a fat fireball of silver-brown Xibalban magic, sending the Nightkeepers diving for cover. The ambush was perfectly timed and stupidly simple, with the Xibalbans dug into positions around the temple mouth, hidden in the thick underbrush, where they could—and did—fire at will. The tree line afforded them access and visibility, the slight downgrade to the temple mouth giving them the advantage of higher ground.