“I’m glad we’re not in a slot canyon right now,” Christa said. “That thunderstorm in the distance can create a flash flood in a canyon miles away, even one with a blue sky overhead, send a ten-foot wall of water down it. Just last week two hikers were crushed and drowned in a slot canyon near here while a group of tourists watched in horror from above.”
“I was just going to say nice view,” he said. He stood, brushing off his khaki shirt and pants, turned towards the dwelling. He planted his fists on his hips, his expression intent. She could see he was surveying the rooms and open windows not as an archaeologist, nor an historian, but as an FBI agent. “We stick to the plan. We get as many of the seven stones as we can and call Donohue. He’ll have his task force and Colombian contacts ready to deploy. We go with him to Colombia, free Gabriella, find the temple, get the antidote, save the world and take the rest of the day off.”
“Let’s get started,” she said, stepping forward.
He pulled her back. “You told me that this cliff dwelling was buried under five centuries of sand until that windstorm a few days ago.”
“Joseph and I were the first people to set foot on it since it was abandoned in the sixteenth century.”
“Set foot being the key words.” He crouched and pointed to a footprint in the sand. “Here’s your Trek hiking boot, ladies size 8.” He edged forward. “And this has got to be the smooth sole of Joseph’s moccasin.” He pointed to a third trail of footprints leading into the ruins, which had merged with and obliterated Joseph’s and hers. “Standard issue army boots. Look like they dropped down from the top of the cliff, probably rappelled with ropes, either the night you were here, or yesterday.”
She swallowed, her throat dry again. “They still here?”
“If they were, we’d be looking down their gun sights, not at their footprints.” He moved to the far side of the plateau and crouched again. From the expression on his face, she knew it was bad. And it was. A cluster of large, clawed prints converged on a circular pattern in the sand. “The beasts,” he said, “who chased you.”
“Wolves,” she said, with as much confidence as she could muster. In the light of day, the idea of evil shapeshifters that she had told him about on the plane last night sounded absurd. “They must have got here through the tunnels.”
“Weird. Whatever they are, they arrived after the soldiers left. Their prints are on top of the boot prints.” He stood and followed the trail of prints with his eye. “And the trail ends abruptly,” he pointed, “before reaching the cliff dwelling.”
“It looks like they doubled back,” she said.
“And didn’t come as crows from the sky,” he crouched again, “but from beneath the ground.” He bent closer and blew away the silt. A brush of his fingers revealed a straight edge leading to a right angle. She knelt beside him as he ran his forefinger clockwise along the edge. She ran her finger counterclockwise. Their fingers met, revealing a square, perhaps three-feet wide. He extracted his Eagle Scout pocket knife, opened the main blade and wedged it into the crack. “Help me lift it,” he said.
“Why do I feel like we’re opening Pandora’s box?”
“As long as we find hope at the bottom, I’m game.”
She wedged her fingertips into the crack beside Braydon’s. She could barely get a purchase on it. Slowly, they angled the heavy stone upwards. As it rose higher, she gripped it with two hands, pressing her palms against its surprising weight. It was a stone, rough on its underside, which had been chiseled at an angle to fit into place. Braydon kept his left hand on the stone, grabbed his gun with his right. “Guess I should have loaded in silver bullets.”
“Skinwalkers aren’t werewolves,” she said. “You got to dip the bullets in white ash to shoot them.”
“Now you tell me.”
The top of the stone reached its apex. One last heave flipped it heavily away from them, sending plumes of silt up like smoke. The boom of its fall echoed ominously from below.
Braydon targeted his gun into the opening, but all they could see was darkness beyond the pine logs that framed the square opening. Sunlight beamed on the top of a crude wooden ladder, its hand-hewn pine rungs attached to the two posts with a rough twine. She could just make out a segment of a circular wall in the beam of sun, built with rough stone bricks. “I think it’s a kiva,” she said. “Like the ceremonial rooms I told you about.”
“But they didn’t use it for black magic,” he prompted, “like turning people into Skinwalkers.”
“Can’t say for sure,” she said. “Historians only speculate that the kiva in ancient times was used for rituals. This Yikaisidahi cult was an anomaly, even in its day, influenced as it was by a completely alien culture, Tristan de Luna’s, the young apprentice to the conquistadors, the first guardian of the Turquoise.”
“An alien culture, the conquistadors, with a proclivity for ruthless violence,” he said, “and a religious fanaticism that had already been perverted through its inquisition. Sounds ripe for training evil killers to me.”
“Fanaticism doesn’t always end in fatalism,” said Christa. “From what we know about the first guardian, he was an intellectual, a gentle soul, whose father sent him with the conquistadors so he would man up, as they would say today.”
“These grave-robbing, curse-spewing, evil-doing Skinwalkers, you know, the ones who appear to be protecting what your gentle soul brought here,” he said. “Are they active during the day?”
Christa shrugged. “Most say Skinwalkers conduct their black magic only at night.”
“You sense any phantoms or other evil things set to skin us alive down there?”
“No more than up here.”
“I don’t find that reassuring,” he said. He handed her a flashlight from his pack, then zipped the pack closed and shrugged it over his shoulders. He hiked his leg into the opening, his foot finding a rung, while keeping his handgun trained on the room below.
She followed. The handhewn rungs bowed under her weight. The ancient twine whined and fretted against the posts, but the ladder proved sturdy, protected all these years from the elements.
As her foot hit the earth floor, that old scent of earthy silt filtered into the air, irritated at being disturbed after so many years in silence. Dust mites floated around her in the shaft of sunlight, lending a sense of being underwater, if it weren’t so utterly dry. The sudden coolness of the interior wasn’t refreshing, but chilling. She flicked on her flashlight. She needed to see something, anything, besides the beasts that lurked in her imagination, ready to spring from the shadows and rip out her throat.
The underground room was circular, about twelve feet in diameter, with walls of stone bricks and a ceiling of thick pine logs. “Open doorways,” she said, surveying the interior walls with her flashlight. “I count seven, each one about five feet apart.” Each was barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through, into a tunnel that swallowed her light like the mouth of a hungry snake.
To their left, about six feet away from the far wall, her beam hit a stone structure that looked like it had been used as a fire pit, with a back wall several feet high and two side walls tapering down to the floor. It was open to the center of the chamber. The charred logs of an ancient fire remained, still lingering, remarkably, with the scent of ash.
“No footprints,” said Braydon, “of Skinwalkers, or evil guys in army boots. This floor hasn’t been walked on for centuries.”
Her flashlight beam snagged on something behind the fireplace. She leaned in closer. It looked like, it was, the toe of a boot. “So we don’t have to worry about him,” she said.
Braydon approached the fireplace like a cop smoking out a shooter. She let him go first. They circled around to the back of the stone structure. She stopped herself from retching, again.
A mummified corpse sat propped up against the stones. His eyeless head gaped at her, his gray, leathery skin stretched taut over cheek and nose bones. Hair sprouted from his scalp like a weed, turned r
ed by some freak of nature, the tendrils curling down past his shoulders. His desiccated skin had shrunk around his mouth into a toothy, anguished grimace. His jacket and pantaloons, once plush, burgundy velvet, were now his shroud, faded, torn, rejected even by the insects.
“First guardian, Tristan de Luna, I presume,” said Braydon.
“So he just sat here and died?”
“Or they closed him in,” said Braydon. “It would have been nearly impossible for one person to lift that stone blocking the opening.”
“Or he had the people lock him in, to protect the Turquoise before they abandoned the cliff dwelling.”
Braydon sucked in a deep breath and patted down the corpse. Patches of velvet disintegrated in his fingers. Luna’s head crept over to a pitiful angle. “Either way,” he said, “he doesn’t have the Turquoise on him and he’s not going to be telling us where to find it. That key we found in the base of Luna’s armillary sphere isn’t any good without the strongbox it unlocks.”
“Maybe he has told us,” she said. “These openings in the wall have got to lead somewhere.” She walked over to the nearest opening and beamed her flashlight inside. “After a few feet, the passageway splits into two.”
“Seven openings from this chamber,” said Braydon. “Assuming one of the passages leads to the Turquoise, we got fourteen possibilities.”
She poked her head into the tunnel, probed her light deeper. “Then into two again.”
“I’m not much of a gambler,” he said, “but I don’t like these odds.”
“So how do you solve a puzzle?”
“I find out all I can about the guy behind it.” He scrutinized the skeleton. “Our guardian here had a passion. Astronomy. He not only brought the Turquoise here, but carried his armillary sphere across the Atlantic to the new world. Then he brought it here and hid it.”
“And he named the Turquoise after a Navajo constellation, Yikaisidahi, It Waits for Dawn.”
“How many planets would your average sixteenth century astronomer know about?”
“Six,” she answered. “Saturn was the furthest planet they could see.”
“Seven passages,” Braydon pointed out.
“Of course,” she said. She shown her light and felt her fingers along the inside of the first opening. “Your friend, O’Malley, wasn’t the first person to use symbols to guide people along the right path. Symbols have been used since the dawn of recorded history. Symbols were the first recorded history.” She felt something with her fingertips, blew away the dust only to have the fine silt cloud around her face. She coughed and blinked it out of her eyes. “The symbol of a circle atop a cross,” she said. “Venus’s hand mirror.” She hurried to the next passage and found a globe with an equator and a meridian. “Earth.” She fished the key out of her pocket and held it up. “The same symbol as on the handle of the key.”
Braydon checked out the next passage. “I’m pretty sure this is Mars,” he said, “a circle with an arrow slanting upwards.”
“Mars’s shield and spear,” she said, already finding the next symbol. “Jupiter’s thunderbolt,” then, “Saturn.” She was rushing now, out of breath. “A circle with a point in its center, the sun,” she called from the next passage, then, at the final opening, “Mercury’s winged helmet.”
“If you start at the Sun, the order of the planet symbols on the seven doorways go around the perimeter of this chamber in order of distance from the Sun, starting with Mercury, ending at Saturn,” said Braydon.
“The guardian’s armillary sphere was state of the art for the mid-1500s. Copernicus had just come out with his model of the Sun being the center of the universe, rather than the Earth. Very radical at the time. ” She shone her flashlight around to all seven entryways. “But where do we start?”
A thudding sound rumbled from above them. They both looked up, but could see nothing through the small opening to the plateau in front of the ruins. Christa listened as the distant sound grew louder. “Thunder?”
“Chopper,” said Braydon. “No doubt commandeered by Homeland Security. Your tax dollars at work. With a chopper at their disposal, they won’t take the time to climb up from the valley floor. They’ll just rope down from above like they did before.” He grabbed the timber and twine ladder, yanked it down and tossed it aside.
“What are you doing?” she said. “These tunnels could be dead ends. That could be our only way out.”
“We go up there, that’s a dead end, if you catch my drift, and the bad guys get the sacred stones we already have,” he said. “We can’t let that happen.”
“The key has the Earth symbol,” she said. “We could start there, but then what.”
“Luna’s sphere was Copernican,” he said, “with the Sun as the center of the universe. The center of Luna’s universe was that Turquoise. We start with Saturn, follow it to the Sun, the center. That’s where we’ll find the Yikaisidahi.” Without waiting, he ducked into the opening.
CHAPTER 56
Christa wedged into the tunnel marked with the symbol for Saturn. She swallowed back her fear. Those beasts had to come from somewhere and a dark, dank tunnel fit the bill. She found herself pressing against Braydon, only partially because of the confined space. “Your decisiveness is both enviable and exasperating,” she said.
“It had better be the right decision,” he said. “We won’t get a second chance.”
At the split of the passageways, she shone her light on the symbols carved into the rock just inside. “Jupiter to the right, Earth to the left.”
Braydon crouched and crabwalked down the right-handed passage. The tunnel looked as if it had been hewn out of the solid sandstone. Good thing the floor was rock, not sand. Their footsteps left no prints. Even if Rambitskov’s men deduced what tunnel they had entered out of the confusion of footprints they left behind in the main kiva, they could only follow them so far before having to divvy up their hunting party. “I think we’re headed downhill,” she said, “a good sign,” but the darkness before and behind them was complete. They had gone at least fifty yards before they reached the next split. “Mercury to the right. Mars to the left,” she whispered. Shouts channeled through the tunnel from the plateau in front of the ruins above them.
“To boldly go where few men have gone before,” said Braydon, heading to the left.
“Going,” she said, “but not boldly. In fact, my knees are shaking.”
“That’s just strain from the climb up the cliff face,” he said.
“No, it’s the weight of the mountain pressing down on top of us.” She sniffed. “Does the air smell stale to you?” It was growing difficult to breathe. Rather than the baking heat of the sun, a damp chill permeated the tunnels, as if it emanated from another, darker world.
“Smells like the catacombs under Paris,” Braydon said.
“You mean where they buried their dead.” Lovely thought.
“I chased a jewel thief down there,” he said. “Beneath Paris are two hundred miles of passageways brimming with skeletons. The guy got lost. Started leaving a trail of diamonds, like bread crumbs. He never was seen again. I figured he died down there. I got the diamonds, though.”
“If you’re trying to take my mind off those beasts that might be stalking ahead of us, waiting to make sure we don’t come out alive, it isn’t working.”
“Actually, I was trying to take your mind off those beasts behind us” he said. “There are worse places to be.”
“I’m sure there are,” she said. “I just can’t think of one.”
Despite the confined space, Braydon quickened his pace and she hurried to keep up, her heart beating faster as they delved deeper into the tunnel system. Each footfall sounded like thunder in the complete silence. Every few yards, a patch of pebbles would break loose from the vibrations of their steps, pelting her head. If any section of the tunnel collapsed, they’d be trapped.
They followed the Earth, Venus and Mercury tunnels in rapid succession. Whispers of splas
hing water gurgled towards them. As they descended, it grew louder, more distinctive. Braydon stopped. She plowed into him. He flicked off his flashlight.
By the single light of her flashlight, she could see that Braydon was looking heavenward, his lips parted in wonder. She followed his gaze. Above her was a night sky filled with stars, too many stars. It was like no night sky she had seen before, even on a moonless night in the desert, away from any glare of civilization. “I may be clairvoyant, but I didn’t see this coming,” she said. “How can we have found our way to the outside of the cliff? And how can it be the middle of the night?”
“They aren’t stars,” said Braydon. “They’re glow worms. We’re in an underground cave.”
“If we’re still underground,” said Christa, “why does the air smell fresh and cool, like the desert night?”
“I’ve seen these bioluminescent bugs before,” he said.
“Tracking another jewel thief?”
“In Alabama,” he said. “I found him hiding out in Dismals Canyon, same place Aaron Burr hid for a couple days after killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Jesse James hid out there, too, so they say. At night, these glowing bugs they call Dismalites line the canyon walls like stars. And where there’s bugs,” he began. He flicked his flashlight back on and shone it at the ground in front of them, only it wasn’t ground. The flashlight beam reflected a vast pool of water so still it looked like a solid mirror, but for a tiny ripple expanding from below them. Their tunnel ended about twelve feet above the surface of the pool, as if they stood on the lip of a waterfall that had gone bone dry. Just above them and to their left, her flashlight beam illuminated another tunnel like theirs, but with a slender waterfall trickling down from it into the pool. “There’s water. We’ve reached the end of the trail.”
She scanned the cave with her flashlight beam. It barely penetrated the dark. “How long must it have taken a little waterfall like that to carve out an underground lake this size?” she wondered aloud.
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