She held it out toward Jake, out of sight from the shadowy creature. Marika again tapped at her throat.
Then Jake remembered. Bach’uuk had described one feature that his sharp eyes had picked out of the shadowy form as the assassin fled Kalakryss. A clasp at the throat, decorated with a chunk of bloodstone.
Jake turned and faced the sculpture of shadow. Marika slipped the wand into the hand Jake hid behind his back. He lifted his chin and stared as the figure closed the distance.
“Though the master wants you,” it hissed, “that doesn’t mean I can’t make you suffer for your trouble. And what better way to make you suffer than to see one of your friends die?”
The creature pointed an arm. Jake risked a glance and saw Pindor struggling to pull himself out of the black pool. He had got his head out and gasped for air. Then the shadows rose over his friend’s body, flowing up and filling his nose and mouth, leaving only his eyes above the darkness. Pindor twisted in fear. His mouth stretched in a silent scream as he tried to draw air.
Jake shoved around and faced the shadow-cloaked monster. “Let him go!”
Jake drew back the creature’s attention. It wanted to savor his pain. But when it turned its head, Jake spotted the glint buried in the shadows. A chunk of blackness darker than any shadow. The bloodstone clasp.
Jake whipped his arm around and stabbed out with Balam’s dowsing stick. The crimson crystal cut through the shadows and reached the black stone. With a touch, the bloodstone seemed to jump. A tiny scream flowed as a fiery light burst from the wand’s tip. Jake blinked away the glare and saw the chunk of bloodstone had gone dead white, drained of its power.
“No!” the creature moaned, echoing the cry from the stone.
The shadows collapsed like a wash of snowmelt after a sudden thaw. Jake stumbled free as the pool around him turned from tar to thin air. He fell back into Marika, but they kept their footing. Pindor coughed and choked, but he was still alive. Bach’uuk helped him to his feet. Pindor picked up his sword and lunged groggily forward. He pressed the tip of his sword over the heart of the assassin.
With the bloodstone clasp undone, the shadows melted away from the cloaked figure. Blackness flowed down and revealed a pale face and an overly large belly.
“Magister Oswin!” Marika gasped.
He showed no remorse, only disdain and disgust.
“Why?” she begged.
“Why not?” he scoffed, curling a lip.
“But you’ve always served Calypsos.”
A hard laugh escaped him. “No. I’ve always served Kalverum Rex, my true master. Since I was an apprentice, I served him, recognized his brilliance. Someone not frightened to delve into alchemies that others shunned. He found a dark path to godhood, and I was allowed to follow him.”
“Then why didn’t you leave with him when he was banished?” Marika asked, her face pale and sick.
Again that wicked smile bloomed. “While others were allowed to go with him, he forced me to remain behind. To be his eyes and ears. To bide a time when he could again return!”
“So you were his spy!” Pindor said, and poked his sword enough to get the prisoner to wince.
“And his saboteur,” Jake added with a nod toward the murky emerald sphere.
“All these years…” Marika said.
“Such gullible swine.” He spat on the floor. “You know nothing about this land here! Nothing about the forces that close even now around you. With but a word—” He suddenly twitched and gasped. He stared down at his feet.
The shadows had pooled there like a discarded cloak. But they did not lie limp. Around the Magister’s feet, the shadows began to churn like a whirlpool.
“No, Master!” he moaned.
Oswin’s legs began to sink into the inky whirlpool. His eyes got huge and panicked. His face suddenly twisted in pain. A scream burst from his throat. Not pleading this time—pure agony. Oswin attempted to lunge out of the churning pool, but he was caught as surely as Jake had been before. He sprawled on the floor.
They all backed away.
The black tide pulled his body deeper, sucking him away. His fingers clawed at the smooth stone floor, but he could gain no purchase. His face screwed up into a mask of pain and terror.
“No! Not like this!”
Marika took a step toward him. Jake held her back. The fiend might drag her with him.
“My father,” she pleaded. “What happened to him?”
Oswin seemed not to hear her, or simply didn’t care. His fingers left bloody tracks as he was sucked into that black churning maw. He vanished with one final scream of terror.
Marika turned away and pressed her face into Jake’s shoulder. He put an arm around her. The whirlpool continued to churn, but like water flushing down a bathtub drain, it was quickly gone, leaving nothing but the smooth stone floor.
They all took a moment to steady themselves. Pindor poked his sword at the floor, as if testing its solidity. Jake kept his arm around Marika. They moved shakily forward and passed under the crystal heart of the temple. Jake knelt by the emerald sphere. It no longer even wobbled. Deep within the stone, where the other spheres glowed, this crystal was dark—no, not just dark, it was black.
A solid piece of shadow rested at the heart of the stone.
Jake carefully placed a palm on the surface. It was cold, but nothing more. He placed his other palm on it. He could fathom no way to clear out the poisoning darkness within. There was no way of reaching it with Balam’s dowsing stick, not through solid crystal. And Jake’s penlight had no more juice. They could not even try shocking it.
Jake glanced to Marika. She shook her head. They needed a true Magister, not two apprentices.
Pindor stared back toward where Oswin had been sucked away into the void. “He betrayed us all. But I guess it makes a certain strategic sense.”
Marika snapped at Pindor, “Sense? How does any of this make sense?”
Pindor waved an arm around the chamber. “The Skull King needed a Magister. Only a Magister could pass through the barrier that locked the temple and bring down the shield that protected our valley. It was no wonder the Skull King accepted his banishment so easily. He knew he could return to the valley whenever he was ready.”
Jake stood back up. “But that doesn’t mean we have to let him.” He nodded to Bach’uuk. “We came here with a plan—your plan, Pin—to find a place to regroup and seek more allies.”
Marika joined them. “We can’t let him win.”
“We won’t,” Jake promised—though he hoped it was an oath he could keep.
As they set off, a screech blasted outside the temple. It was so loud that it hurt Jake’s ears even inside the temple. He swore it shook the floor under them.
Jake remembered the cries of triumph that had excited the grakyl horde a few moments ago. He suspected that the cause of that excitement had just arrived.
“Has he come?” Marika asked, voicing what Jake feared. She didn’t need a name. They all knew to whom she was referring.
“Let’s go,” Jake said.
25
WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME
Bach’uuk led them to the tunnel beyond the crystal heart. It opened into a twisted set of narrow stairs that headed down into the lower levels of the pyramid. They went single file. Jake realized they had to be beneath the pyramid by now, or maybe the pyramid was actually larger than it appeared from above. Maybe what was on the surface was just the tip of a much larger structure.
Around and around they went.
Finally the stairs ended at another room, flat roofed but circular in shape. Giant stalactites of crystals hung from the high roof like the fangs of some colossal fossilized beast. They glowed and illuminated the space ahead.
Jake followed Bach’uuk into the chamber as he headed toward yet another tunnel on the far side of the room. It looked like more stairs—heading down again.
How far down does this place go? Jake wondered, but his full attention remained on
the room. His feet slowed. Marika and Pindor kept close to him.
On the floor rested a giant device. It was a circular wheel, made out of pure gold. It lay flat on the floor and stretched ten yards across. Its inner edge was notched like a gear. A second wheel was fitted inside the first one.
As Jake watched, the larger gear revolved a few degrees with a loud snap, turning the smaller gear inside. Then it stopped, as if marking time. And maybe it was. Jake walked around its outer edge. Though there were no marks on it, Jake recognized the shape.
Marika realized the same as she followed behind Jake. “It’s like our tribe’s calendar wheel.”
Jake nodded. The Maya had developed a detailed calendar using wheels fitted together like gears. Again he wondered which came first. Had the Maya built this? Or had some ancient Maya stood where they were now and returned home with the knowledge? Jake continued around the edge. According to Marika, the pyramid had been here long before any of the tribes had arrived, even before the Neanderthals had made their home here in the valley. Jake began to suspect he was looking at the possible source of all ancient science, knowledge found here and taken back home.
Bach’uuk, who’d seen all this before, waited at the entrance to the far tunnel.
Jake began to head over when he finally noted the curved walls of the room. Row after row of ancient script covered the walls from floor to ceiling, so crisply inscribed, it could’ve been cut with a laser. Jake scanned the ancient writing.
What language was it? Who wrote it? Jake ran his fingers along the letters. It had to be the builders of the pyramid. Possibly the same ones who drew the Lost Tribes of Earth to this wild land.
He continued along the wall and crossed toward Bach’uuk, whose brows grew heavier with impatience. They had to keep going. But as Jake continued around the room, a drawing appeared ahead. It had been carved in a blank space on the wall. It showed three circles with shapes sticking out, creating a shadowed bas-relief.
Jake moved away to view it full on—then stopped in midstep. He gawked at the first circle, unable to speak. He edged closer. Though the detail wasn’t great, the shapes looked like a crude map of Earth. He drew a finger along the forms carved within the first circle, whispering the names of the continents.
“Africa, South America, Australia…”
The next circle showed those same continents moving closer together, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle. The bulge in South America fit into the curve of Africa. And so on.
The last circle showed all the continents fused into one whole.
Jake gasped and moved away again to take in the whole view. He began to understand what he was seeing. Back during the time of the dinosaurs, the world was just a single large supercontinent. But a great cataclysm and the forces of flowing magma eventually broke apart the single large landmass and formed today’s seven smaller continents.
Jake swallowed and mumbled the scientific name for that supercontinent drawn in the last circle. “Pangaea.”
Pindor stood at his shoulder. He looked oddly at Jake. “I didn’t know you spoke Greek.”
Jake frowned at him. “What?”
“Pangaea. It’s Greek. I studied it in school.”
Jake felt a creeping sense of realization. Pindor was right. The word Pangaea was actually formed by two words in Greek. He pictured it in his head.
Pan = all
Gaea (Gaia) = world
So Pangaea translated as “All-World.”
Jake frowned. All-World was also the name for the universal language used by everyone here. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? He glanced at Pindor and the map. Then he turned in a slow circle as an icy realization struck him. His friends weren’t speaking All-World, they were speaking Pangaean.
A shudder passed through Jake as he faced the map again. Pangaea was a prehistoric world full of dinosaurs and primitive plant life. Like here. He raised his arm and placed his palm on the supercontinent.
Could this be where I am?
If he was right, he was staring at the shape of this world. All along, he’d been asking the wrong question since he and Kady had landed here. The question wasn’t where they were, but when. Jake was still on Earth—but two hundred million years into the past.
“This is Pangaea,” he said aloud.
Marika seemed mystified by his stunned response to the drawing. “Jake, what’s wrong?”
He shook his head. He didn’t have the time to explain, and he wasn’t sure they would believe him anyway. At least not yet.
Pindor pointed his sword toward Bach’uuk. “We should be going.”
Jake allowed himself to be guided away. He moved on legs numb with shock. A loud snapping click drew his gaze over to the clockwork mechanism on the floor. It turned another notch. The smaller inner wheel rotated. Jake glanced back to the wall, to the map of Pangaea.
It’s all about time.
Jake knew that was central to the mystery here. As he began to turn away, a rolling bit of gold on the floor caught his eye. The turning of the inner ring had bumped something that lay within it. It looked like a fat gold coin. It rolled to a stop inside the ring and bobbled a bit.
Jake stepped toward the pair of gears. Is that…?
“We have to go,” Pindor insisted. He shifted his sword between his hands, clearly worried about his people, his town.
But Jake leaned out over the outer ring and squinted at what lay within the smaller ring. It wasn’t a coin. Jake recognized the shape. He crossed over the outer ring, careful of the toothed gears, and gently stepped into the inner ring. He bent and picked it up.
He was right. It was an old dented pocket watch. Jake examined it, flipping it between his fingers. His father had one just like—
Jake discovered an inscription on the back. His vision darkened at the corners as he read what was written there.
To my beloved Richard,
A bit of gold to mark our tenth revolution
around the sun together.
With all the love under the stars,
Penelope
Jake felt the room suddenly tilt as a life he’d thought long dead momentarily came back. He stumbled to the side, tripped over the ring’s edge, and landed hard, but he didn’t even feel it. His world had become the watch—and the words written on it.
“Jake?” Marika hurried to his side. She held out a hand to help him up.
He ignored her and stared at the watch resting in his palm. His fingers closed over the gold case. It was cold and hard—and very real. He whispered the miracle, fearful of raising his voice and making it all go away.
“This is my father’s watch.”
Jake had no real recollection of how he ended up in a long narrow tunnel cut crudely out of volcanic rock. He remembered being dragged to his feet and guided by gentle prods and cautious words. He recalled more stairs, and a slab of stone that Bach’uuk and Pindor had to shoulder open. The passage lay beyond that stone, a secret tunnel. Bach’uuk led the way with a chunk of glowing white crystal raised in his hand.
They continued in silence. His friends sensed Jake had become a pond covered with a fragile sheet of ice. They trod carefully. Marika kept to his side, waiting for him to be the first to speak.
Jake carried the pocket watch with both hands. It was a weight he couldn’t bear with only one arm. It took his whole body to carry it.
“What does this mean?” he finally mumbled, more to himself than to Marika.
The question was a tumbling grain of sand that, once let loose, became an avalanche. Why is the watch here? How did it end up here? And when? Had his father and mother been to this land? Or did the watch get sucked here, like Jake and Kady, purely by accident and chance? If his parents had been here, why hadn’t anyone told him, mentioned them?
Questions swirled amid mysteries and the unknown.
Jake shuddered and finally let one last question rise. He fought against it because there was too much pain and fear around it.
Cou
ld my parents still be alive?
It was a dangerous subject. If Jake allowed himself to believe it and was proven wrong later, it would be like losing his mother and father all over again. Jake did not know if he could survive that.
Still…
He stared down at the pocket watch. He felt the heft of it, rubbed a thumb over one of the dents. This wasn’t a child’s fantasy, some hope without substance. This was his father’s watch…in his hand.
Jake gripped it and came to a realization. For now, that would be enough. He could know no more. His father had warned him against letting his imagination run wild. He said that a real scientist balanced hypothesis against tested reality.
Jake took a deep breath. He would do that here.
He’d found his father’s watch.
It was real.
What it meant remained unknown.
For now.
With his heart more settled, he allowed the words on the back of the watchcase to warm through him like a soft smile from his mother. A bit of gold to mark our tenth revolution around the sun together.
Jake’s focus broadened. He began to note the drip of water along the walls. He smelled a slight rotten-egg smell to the air. Sulfur from the volcanic vents. The passage grew warmer, even steamy.
He heard Pindor tell Bach’uuk, “We must be a league under the jungle by now.”
Bach’uuk shook his head. “Not much farther to go.”
“You keep saying that!” Pindor griped.
Jake swallowed and stared down at the pocket watch. He used a fingernail to crack it open. He felt strong enough to do that now. The watchcase was crooked, the hinges tweaked. But Jake cranked it wide. The crystal face of the watch was in no better condition than its gold case. A skittering crack split the surface. The damage flamed the fear in his heart. How had it become so beat-up?
Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow Page 21