Or, more likely, a gesture of, Gods be with you, dumb-ass.
The Daykeeper left the machete and his canteen and took off, humping it back down the trail at more than twice the speed they’d made forging forward.
“Thanks for your help,” Lucius called, figuring there was no need for hurt feelings. He had plenty of supplies, a GPS unit, and a satellite phone for emergencies. He could see the path—more or less, anyway—and figured there was a good bet that the temple site he was looking for was somewhere up ahead. He was good to go.
Yet his feet wouldn’t move.
He stood there as the sound of Abe’s retreat faded into the background jungle chatter, and he was completely frozen as the two halves of him pulled in diametrically opposite directions. The logical part of him, the part that’d absorbed Anna’s training and already couldn’t believe he’d gone behind her back like this, wanted to go with Abe. The Daykeeper knew his shit. If he said the signs were wrong, then the signs were wrong and it was time to leave.
The other part of him, though, the part that brought him strange, twisted dreams in the night, dreams that curled with fire and tasted of blood—that part of him wanted to grab the machete and keep going. The temple was up ahead; he could feel it, practically see it. There was no reason to turn back now and every reason to keep going. And then he was moving, though he couldn’t have said why or how; he just knew he had the machete in his hand and was using it to widen the narrow trail, pushing through the densely packed vegetation, wading through an ocean of green.
Five minutes later he saw the first sign of civilization he’d seen in hours, and it wasn’t modern. The carved stone pillar lay on its side, broken into three pieces along the seams where the stacked sections had been sealed together.
Called stelae, such pillars had been the Maya’s billboards. In the ruined city of Chichén Itzá, they were grouped together by the hundreds in the Hall of Pillars, and had offered up everything from local proclamations and records of political changes to histories and legends. Elsewhere—including the burbs of Chichén—stelae were scattered farther out, standing alone, sometimes in the seeming middle of nowhere, a testament to a culture that might be long gone, but remained alive in its writings. Those scattered stelae had typically been more along the lines of road markers . . . or sometimes warnings.
Feeling a creepy-crawl heading down the back of his neck, Lucius knelt beside the stela and swiped at the encroaching vegetation, which had grown only partway up to cover the carved limestone. Can’t have fallen that long ago, he thought as the heady excitement of fieldwork cleared his brain a little.
Would’ve been covered otherwise.
If it’d been any more overgrown he might not’ve seen it. As it was, the only reason he’d noticed the whitehued stone was because he’d had to hack around a section of denser brush. It was a happy coincidence that he’d stumbled on the thing. Or maybe it’d been fate. The Nightkeepers hadn’t believed in coincidence, after all.
Using the flat of the machete to scrape away some thorny, clinging vines, he uncovered a swath of carved stone. It took a second for the sight of the main glyph to register. When it did, he stopped breathing.
He’d found the screaming skull.
It was the one glyph he’d needed to prove his thesis. The one glyph he’d been unable to conclusively identify from actual writing samples.
“Holy shit.” He’d been so sure it existed, had been pretty sure he’d found it at least twice before, but Anna had torpedoed his translation the first time, and the second time . . . well, back then they’d still been friends and he’d taken her at her word that it was really Jaguar-Paw’s laughing-skull glyph.
In retrospect, he had a feeling she’d Photoshopped his digitals to make sure of it. And wasn’t that a nasty suspicion?
A faint warning bell chimed at the back of his head, a brain worm that said the thoughts weren’t his own, and neither was the anger. But as he knelt there and the damp worked through the fabric of his breathable nylon cargo pants, the rage took root and started to grow.
He’d trusted her, and she’d blocked him at every turn.
I’ll show her, he thought, pulling his camera out of his pack and taking a dozen snaps of the stela, and the tell-tale glyph that symbolized the Nightkeepers’ involvement in the zero date, and their vow to protect mankind. In theory, anyway.
“No theory about it,” he said, rising to his feet and shouldering his pack, the weight feeling far lighter than it had only moments earlier as the certainty flowed through him. He was almost there, almost at the end of years of searching for something the experts said didn’t exist. The stela had been a marker; he was sure of it. And maybe a warning, but he couldn’t bring himself to care, just as he hadn’t been scared off by Abe’s talk of bad omens.
The thrill of excitement drew him onward, the promise of discovery, the mystery of what the hell’d happened to Ambrose Ledbetter, and the burning certainty that he had to find Ambrose’s daughter, Sasha.
Lucius had e-mailed Ambrose once or twice about his end-time theories, but the old coot had stonewalled him, and their one in-person meeting had been more of a midconference snarl in passing from Ledbetter than an actual meeting. Lucius hadn’t even known Ledbetter had a daughter until Sasha had phoned the glyph lab looking for Anna. Yet it was Sasha’s voice he heard at the back of his head as he hacked his way along the thin trail, and her picture, which he’d downloaded from the Web page of the high-end restaurant where she worked, that he held in the forefront of his mind. She was pretty enough—okay, gorgeous—but it wasn’t her looks that he’d focused most on. There had been something about her eyes, something about their shape and intensity. That something had sent a chill down his spine and kicked some serious heat into his bloodstream, driving him onward.
He wasn’t expecting that she’d be at the temple, was actually hoping he didn’t find her there, because if he did, odds were he’d be looking at her remains. But if luck—or fate—was with him, then he’d find a clue to where she and Ambrose had disappeared to.
The background hum of the rain forest—bugs or something, he didn’t know what—rose as the sunlight went from afternoon slant to predusk dimness. He knew he should make camp, but something pushed him to keep going—a lighter patch up ahead, maybe, or perhaps simply the certainty that he was close, so close to his destination.
And then he was there. One second he was hacking at clinging green fronds, and the next his machete broke clear. Expecting his rote-mechanical swing to meet resistance, he stumbled forward when it hit only air, and wound up in a small clearing that was barely the size of his apartment kitchen.
A gap in the canopy let through a shaft of light from the setting sun, and the beam shone bloodred on a carved stone doorway leading into the side of a hill. Only it wasn’t a hill, he realized after a second. It was an unrestored ruin, a pyramid that had succumbed to a thousand years of zero maintenance and been reclaimed by the land. Vegetation had covered all the stone with leaves and clinging vines, with the exception of the doorway, which gleamed almost new-looking in the fading light. It was a stone arch, with the cornice and lintelwork that the Maya stoneworkers had put into regular use by the height of the empire. They might not’ve had the wheel or known how to work metal, but they’d been pretty damn untouchable when it came to rock.