Those pictures had been too far away. He wanted the real thing. And the more he Web- surfed, soaking up pictures of Mayan ruins and the artifacts that had come from them, the more he wanted to know everything there was to know about a civilization that should have seemed strange and foreign to his modern viewpoint, but instead made sense to him. He’d understood their religion as if he were being reminded of it rather than learning it fresh. Human sacrifice might not be part of modern life, but he got where they’d been coming from: They’d been trying to protect themselves against the downfall portended by the stars, and the prophecies that said great white gods would arrive from the east, bringing the end of life as the Maya had known it. Hello, Cortes.
And the more he learned, the more he wanted to know.
He wanted to touch the pieces of that past culture, wanted to absorb all the information he could find on them. And when he’d been working on the glyph string she’d handed out, looking up each image in the seminal dictionary put together by Montgomery in the fifties, when archaeologists and linguists had finally cracked the Maya code, he’d gotten a glimmer of something bigger than himself, a kick of excitement when he realized it wasn’t just a translation. . . . It was a puzzle. There wasn’t much standardization among the glyphs, which had been as much an art form as a language. A given word could be represented by a pictograph or a string of syllables making up the word, or sometimes both. Then the syllables themselves could be represented by many different glyphs, or the same glyphs could look entirely different, depending on the artist who’d rendered them. That very fact had slowed his shit down when he’d gotten to the translation. He still wasn’t sure if the third glyph was a hook-
nosed god’s face with suns where its eyes should be, or a really whacked version of a jaguar’s head, but he’d gotten up against deadline day and had to go with what he had.
Walking the halls now, with Jade at his side, Lucius remembered how badly he’d worked himself up by the time he’d headed over to turn in the application, how he’d been practically puking with nerves.
Back then, Anna had been less senior, so she’d had an upper- floor office. These days she had a primo ground-floor spot. But despite the difference in location, the clutter stuck to the corkboard hung on her door was much the same. Clippings of journal articles, some hers, some written by colleagues, offered the current state of the art in Mayan epigraphy. They bumped up against a scattering of cartoons and silly slogans, some hung by Anna, others by her coworkers and students. Slapped atop it all was a laminated page printed with her office hours and phone numbers, with a boldfaced note at the bottom: Knock. What have you got to lose?
The laminate looked new; the sentiment was an old, familiar friend. One that had been a mantra during certain parts of his life.
That first day, it had taken him nearly two full minutes to work up the courage. Now he just knocked, knowing that wasn’t the hard part.
“Come on in,” Anna’s voice called from within.
He pushed the door open, stuck his head through, and grinned past a sudden spike of nerves. “Damn.
And here I was looking forward to climbing in the window again.”
Anna looked up, her face reflecting pretty much what he was feeling: a new awkwardness to an old friendship. Sitting behind her big, messy desk, she was dressed informally even for her, in a navy blue UT sweatshirt and collared shirt. He couldn’t see her lower half, but was betting on jeans, based on the fact that she had her red- highlighted hair up in a ponytail and was wearing little, if any, makeup. The lack of makeup wasn’t why she looked tired, though; the fatigue was real. He knew that because he knew her, and knew she dressed down at the university only when she was feeling crappy. Summer session or no summer session, she liked being put together.
Then again, things changed. People changed. Just look at him.
As if paralleling his thoughts, she glanced at the window he had B and E’d under Cizin’s influence.
“Ten bucks says you couldn’t even fit through it anymore.” She waved him all the way in. “Come on.
Hey, Jade. Glad you could both make it. Any problems getting here?”
Jade shook her head. “None.”
“How are you?” Anna asked her, the question clearly a woman to woman, we’ve got our secrets deal.
Lucius turned away, giving them a moment to catch up, and to remind himself it was largely his fault that his and Anna’s relationship had suffered. He’d stolen from her; he’d betrayed her—albeit inadvertently—with a Xibalban. Because of him, she’d been forced back into her brother’s sphere.
Because of him, she wore a fourth mark, that of the slave- master, in addition to the jaguar, the royal ju, and the seer’s mark. He couldn’t blame her for not being excited to see him, after all they’d been through together and apart. Nor could he blame her for turning to Jade as a friend. Jade was warm and honest, analytical and near genius-smart. She was, he realized, a little bit like Anna in those ways. But where Anna tended to get caught up in her own emotions and had some drama-queen tendencies, Jade’s waters ran still and deep.
As the women did a brief what’s-up-how’s-it-going, he stuck his hands in his pockets and took a tour of Anna’s office, looking for new additions to her rogues’ gallery of fakes. She used the hobby as a teaching tool, showing her students—Lucius included—not just how to spot the fakes and haggle in fine old open-market style, but also how to get the so-called antiquities dealers to show them the real stuff they tended to keep under wraps. Her goals were twofold: first, to cooperate with local authorities in blocking the export of national treasures when possible, and second, to potentially track exciting finds back to their sources. Each year, particularly in the less developed areas of the former Mayan empire, new caches of antiquities were discovered and sold off, to the great loss of the archaeologists and the still-scattered knowledge of the two-millennium history of the Maya. At times during his graduate career, Lucius had pictured himself eventually working against the black-market trade in the low country, acting as sort of a reverse treasure hunter, trying to keep the finds in place rather than in museums—or at least making sure that the sites were rigorously documented before the artifacts were split up. He’d cast himself as sort of a geeky Indiana Jones without the fedora, working with some heavily armed locals, maybe even armed himself. In those dreams, he’d been doing his part to save the small corner of the world that he’d claimed as his own.
Now, eyeing the window, which seemed to have shrunk over the past two years, he admitted inwardly that there was no way he’d fit through there now, as he had when he broke in to steal the transition ritual that Cizin had needed to come through the barrier. Lucius’s body, like his world, had gotten a whole hell of a lot bigger since he’d left campus.
Anna’s voice interrupted his prowl. “Stop pacing and sit, Lucius.”
Jade had taken a folding chair off to one side, so he dropped into the visitor’s chair, which was an old friend. He’d spent many, many hours working with Anna, their heads bent together as they argued over interpretations. The good old days, he thought with a trace of nostalgia and a hint of bitterness.
He focused on Anna, realized she was fiddling with her chain, a sure sign of nerves. “Why are we here?” he asked without preamble.
In answer, she lifted the chain from around her neck, pulling the skull effigy from beneath her shirt in the process. In the stark white light coming from the overhead fluorescents, the sacred yellow quartz glittered dully, and the shadowed eye sockets seemed to stare at him. Lucius wasn’t sure whether the jolt he felt was magic or awe at the sight of the ancient carving, which had been passed down, mother to daughter, through untold generations of itza’at seers.
The legendary crystal skulls were inextricably intertwined with the mythos of the 2012 doomsday, and had hit the mainstream with the last Indiana Jones movie—unfortunately so, in his opinion, but it wasn’t like Spielberg had asked him. And yeah, there were plenty of von Dä
nikenites who thought the delicately carved skulls that had been found at various Mesoamerican sites were proof of a higher—
aka alien—intelligence. But they weren’t. They were pure Nightkeeper; always had been . . . going back to the last Great Conjunction, when cataclysmic upheavals had loosed the demons from the underworld and destroyed the crystal cities of the magi, sinking them into the sea. Only a few hundred survivors had been left to drive the Banol Kax back to Xibalba and erect the barrier that would contain them for the next twenty-six thousand years. Turning nomadic, the magi had brought with them the few remaining artifacts they had retained from their once-great civilization . . . including thirteen life-
size crystal skulls.
The humans had found four of the skulls, all in clear quartz; three were in various museums, the fourth in a private collection. Rigorous science had concluded all four to be nineteenth-century fakes, based on their stone compositions and marks from tools that hadn’t been available to the Maya or Aztec to whom they were supposedly ascribed. Which wasn’t entirely wrong . . . The timing was just off by two dozen millennia or so. Of the remaining nine skulls, some of yellow quartz, some of pink, six were safely locked in the middle archive at Skywatch, two were missing in action . . . and one had been broken up into thirteen smaller skull effigies that had been given to the itza’at seers of the Nightkeepers. Twelve had disappeared the night of the massacre. Only Anna’s remained.
Lucius didn’t remember reaching out to touch it, but he was suddenly holding it in his hand, feeling the echoed warmth of Anna’s body and the unexpected weight of the skull, which looked far lighter than it actually was. Startled, he held it back out to her. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to grab. I just . . .” He shrugged. “This is what it’s all about, you know? It’s one of the skulls. I mean, holy shit!”
“Yeah. I know.” She didn’t reach for it, instead nodding to Jade.
He passed it over. “Watch out. It’s heavier than it looks.” When she took it solemnly, he looked back over at Anna, catching on that the effigy was why they had been summoned. “You think the skull might help Jade channel the scribe’s talent more reliably?” He tried to remember whether there had been itza’at s mentioned in the history he’d read on the star bloodline. He didn’t think so.
“No, the effigies are bloodline specific. It’d only work for a jaguar.” Anna paused, carefully folding her hands atop her desk blotter. “I need you to take the skull back to Skywatch and give it to Strike.”
Jade’s soft, “Are you sure?” was quickly drowned out when Lucius held up his hands in protest.
“You—” Oh, no. Hell, no. “You’re kidding.”
“Not about this.” There was deep regret in her eyes, but behind that was a strange sort of peace.
“Never about this.”
“But you’re our—their only seer!”
“I should have been,” she corrected. “Maybe I would have been, if I’d gone through my talent ceremony when I should have. But she said we should wait until after the attack on the intersection, so we could focus on my training.”
She was the queen, Lucius knew. Anna’s mother. She had been a powerful seer, but loyal to her husband and king. Nobody knew what she had seen, exactly, but her visions had led her to fake a stillbirth and send baby Sasha to be raised in seclusion. More, she had leaned on Anna to pretend she hadn’t yet reached menarche, thus ruling her out of her talent ceremony prior to the king’s attack on the intersection. Then, the night before the queen marched to battle at her husband’s side, she’d given the effigy to fourteen- year-old Anna, even though the teen hadn’t known how to use the pendant properly. Lucius had long suspected that some of the itza’at’s powers had reached out to young Anna that night, through the effigy’s connection to the queen. He had a feeling Anna had seen the massacre firsthand through that uplink . . . and that she’d been running from those memories ever since.
Jade set the pendant carefully on her desk; it made a hollow, echoing noise that seemed to reverberate on more planes than just the audible level. “Don’t give up on us. Please.”
Anna avoided her eyes. “I’m not. I’m making a choice. I respect what Strike, you, and the others are doing, but I don’t believe in it anymore.”
“You don’t believe there’s going to be a war?” Lucius demanded. The question echoed back to their many debates on the subject of the Nightkeepers and the 2012 doomsday, which Anna had pretended to mock in an effort to keep him from looking too closely at the legends. Had she become convinced by her own arguments? Impossible.
She shook her head. “There’s going to be a war, no question about it. But I don’t believe that we can stop it. If we had the numbers and the skills . . . maybe. But a dozen magi? No. I’m sorry, but no. So I’ve decided that if I’ve only got another two and a half years to live, and there’s nothing I can do to change that fact, then I’d far rather spend the next thirty months living my life rather than chasing futile hope.”
Dull shock pounded through Lucius, alongside disillusionment. How could you? he wanted to demand. Anna had been his superior for the past decade-plus. She’d been his teacher, his mentor, his thesis adviser, his boss, and finally his slave- master. He had looked up to her. He’d harmlessly lusted after her, worried about her, and once he’d learned that she was one of the magi he’d spent a third of his life searching for, he’d practically worshiped her. But now . . . gods, now. How could he respect, never mind revere, someone who would willingly jettison the chance to make a difference?
But he knew her well enough to realize her emotions were already locked into her decision. So he went with logic. “According to the Dresden Codex, the Nightkeepers will need a seer during the final battle.”
“According to the codex, they’ll need Godkeepers and the Triad too. I don’t see either of those things happening.”
“They might.”
“They won’t.” Her eyes had gone hollow. “I wouldn’t do this if I had the faintest hope that we could change what’s going to happen. But do the math. There are too few of us. We’re cut off from the gods.
We don’t have the prophecies or the spells we would need to defend the barrier, if we could even muster enough strength in numbers or magic.” She shook her head. “No. We can’t do it, and we’re making ourselves miserable trying.”
Low anger kindled in his gut. “You’re giving up on yourself.”
Her eyes flashed. “I’m making a choice.”
“A selfish one. You’d rather be playing house with the Dick than working your ass off like the rest of us.” She opened her mouth to fire something back, probably a reaction to his old nickname for her unlikable husband, or an accusation that he was just jealous. But that wasn’t why he was pissed. It was that she had the opportunity to be the sort of savior he’d always wanted to be, the mage he was trying to be . . . and she was just walking away from it. So he steamrolled over her response, saying, “Look, I don’t know exactly what happened to you the night of the massacre, what you saw in your visions. But think about it. . . . That night, the Banol Kax and their boluntiku killed—what—a thousand people?
Try multiplying it by a million. Ten million. A hundred million. What do you think that’s going to look like?”
They didn’t know exactly what form the end-time would take. The Dresden Codex suggested a flood, while Aztec mythology called for fire. And what about the aftermath? Would there be one? The sixth-century Prophet Chilam Balam had talked about mankind turning away from machines, which suggested a massive technology loss. But would humanity survive or be destroyed entirely? Would the earth itself exist in the aftermath? The Xibalbans seemed to be banking on a shift in world order, with Iago intending to be at the top of the proverbial shitheap when everything settled out. The Banol Kax, on the other hand . . . who the hell knew what they were thinking? For all the Nightkeepers could guess, the end-time war would be akin to the Solstice Massacre, only on a global scale.
Anna blanched, but her
eyes stayed steady on his. “Screw you.”
“Lucius,” Jade said in warning.
He ignored her, pressing, “How are you going to feel on that last day, when everything starts to go to shit, and you realize that maybe, just maybe, you could’ve helped stop it?”
“Then you believe the Nightkeepers are going to fail too.”
He bared his teeth. “Don’t put words in my mouth. And no, I don’t believe we’re going to fail.” He deliberately included himself in that “we.” “I do, however, believe that we’ve got a far better chance of success with you than without you.”
“Bullshit,” she said scornfully, choking on a derisive laugh. “How have I helped so far? I’ve had a couple of visions that have confused things more than they’ve clarified them, and at that, I haven’t had a vision in months.”
“Because you’re blocking them,” he pointed out, taking a guess and seeing the confirmation in her eyes.
She glared. “I forced Strike to let you live, even after you violated my space, stole my property, and generally acted like an asshole. Remember that the next time you want to poke me about my duty to the Nightkeepers and the end-time war. If I’d been adhering to the writs, I would’ve let them sacrifice you two years ago when you conjured a godsdamned makol!”
“Maybe you should have,” he said bluntly. “So far I’ve done more harm than good. But you know what? That just makes me more determined to get it right from here on out.”
Anna shook her head. “You’ve always wanted to be more; both of you have. Can’t you understand that I’ve always wanted to be less?” She addressed the question to Jade, seeking an ally.
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