out areas, and one or two spots where narrow places had been widened by hand. In the absence of the close-fitted stonework and stylized carvings she’d grown used to in ritual settings, the tunnel almost didn’t feel Nightkeeper in origin. It rounded a gentle curve, cutting out the daylight and leaving them to rely entirely on the foxfire, but the magic stayed true, with little strain on her reserves.
“I wonder how far—” She broke off when the tunnel widened to a cavern and she had an answer to how far it went.
More, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak or think as her entire consciousness logjammed on a rapid- fire kaleidoscope of images that she couldn’t process all at once.
“Oh,” she said. That was all she could manage, really, because the breath backed up in her lungs and her throat closed until only a stingy trickle of oxygen got through.
The budding symbologist in her locked on the spiral designs on the floor and ceiling, recognizing the multirayed galactic symbol of the Chacoans, who had appeared suddenly in the first few centuries A.D., flourished in the canyons of New Mexico, and then disappeared just as suddenly, leaving behind intricate stone cities built entirely for the dead. The scribe in her noted a small carved box of the sort the ancient Maya and Nightkeepers had used to store their most precious possessions.
The daughter in her, though, focused on the dry, desiccated corpse slumped up against the far wall.
Vennie’s corpse was much as Lucius had described its spiritual representation in the library, with a hooked nose and protruding teeth that bore little resemblance to the bright, laughing girl from the photos. Oddly, Jade found she could look at her mother’s death-ravaged face and hands without any real queasiness; on some level she’d been prepared for that. What she hadn’t been entirely prepared for, though, was for the body to be wearing the remains of high-top Reeboks, acid-washed jeans, a faded hot-pink sweatshirt, and a denim jacket that was two shades darker than the pants, and carefully decorated with iron-on patches for bands that now played on classic-rock radio.
The clothes didn’t just date the corpse; they drove home the child her mother had been, somehow uniting the two inside Jade. Yes, Vennie had been a wife and a mother, and had been torn between the responsibilities of the bloodline she’d been born into and the strictures of the one she’d chosen. But at the same time, her life had just been beginning. If it hadn’t been for the massacre, she would have been in her early forties now. She would’ve been at her prime as a mage, whatever form that magic might have taken.
“She barely even got a chance to know herself,” Jade murmured.
Lucius gave her a one-armed hug and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. Then he stepped away, giving her some space she wasn’t sure she needed. “Are you okay with me checking out the box?”
“Go for it.” She stayed with the body, though. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Sooner than she’d expected, he made a satisfied noise and held out something to her. “I think you should open this one.”
It was a hot-pink spiral-bound notebook with glitter stars stuck to the cover. To Jade’s surprise, she felt her lips curve in a smile as she took the small volume. “She wasn’t subtle, was she?”
“She was seventeen,” he said, which more or less said it all.
She met Lucius’s eyes. “Thank you. Not just for the notebook, but for all of it. For being here with me, for letting me see her first . . . For all of it.”
He tipped his head, but didn’t quite meet her eyes. “That’s what friends are for.”
Telling herself not to read too much into that—or too little—she nodded and cracked open the notebook. The lined pages were brittle and yellow; the first half of the book appeared to be class notes, full of cryptic scribbles about the hero twins and the end-time interspersed with doodles of the spiral pattern that was echoed on the floor and ceiling of the cavern, along with two repeated symbols: the star and the warrior’s glyph. “A little full of ourselves, were we?” Jade commented, though more fondly than anything. She thought she was getting a handle on her feelings where it came to Vennie, slotting her—for the moment, anyway—in a mental position she thought was someplace between sister and mother.
“Again, she was seventeen.” Lucius grinned, but lines of tension bracketed his eyes and mouth as he read over her shoulder. “Is there anything in there besides class notes?”
She flipped a few more pages, then stopped. Everything stopped—her voice, her breath, even her heart—as she stared down at the single page filled with looping writing.
It began: Dear Jade.
“Oh,” she said, a single syllable of pained longing.
Lucius read the top line over her shoulder, then simply touched his temple to hers in support. “Read it to me,” he suggested, his voice barely more than a whisper of breath in her ear. “More, read it to her. Let her know you got it, that she’s been found after all these years.” Then he moved away, giving her the room to make her own decision.
She nodded, swallowing to clear the huge lump in her throat. “ ‘Dear Jade,’ ” she began, and had to start over when her voice cracked. “ ‘Dear Jade, please forgive me for what I’m about to do. And please ask the stars to forgive me too. I know I don’t belong here anymore. But I don’t really belong anywhere, do I? I’m an outsider, soon to become a Prophet. Please ask them to use my voice to help the king with his decisions. If it’s to be an attack, use me to win. If not, use me to plan the 2012 war, though that’s still so far away. Either way, please know that I am satisfied so long as the magi don’t march to their deaths the day after tomorrow, which is what I’m scared will happen if I don’t do this.
And finally, please tell your father, tell Josh, that it wasn’t always easy loving him, but I never stopped. I love you both. Your mother, Venus.’ ” When Jade fell silent, the cave seemed to hum with the echoes of her voice, the sound becoming, for a moment, multitonal.
“Vennie must’ve been a nickname for Venus,” Lucius observed. “Venus is one of the most visible stars in the sky, and its patterns form a cornerstone of the entire calendric system.”
Jade found a ghost of a smile. “Venus. Yeah. That fits.” She sighed. “She must’ve written this part before she tried the soul spell. She was assuming that the Prophet’s magic would take her soul and she wouldn’t get another chance to say good-bye.” Something nudged at the edge of her brain—a question she hadn’t asked, a connection she was missing.
“ ‘This part’?” Lucius said. “There’s more?”
She nodded, skimming ahead, not sure what she was feeling, what she was supposed to feel. “The next one is another ‘Dear Jade’ letter. I think she was expecting the members of the star bloodline to find her once she became the Prophet—maybe there was some sort of magic signal to announce its arrival?—and wanted them to have this info, but couldn’t bring herself to write it directly to the family members who had turned away from her. So she wrote them to a six-month-old baby instead.”
“Or else she wanted you to know she was, in her own way, a hero.”
Nodding, Jade began reading again: “ ‘Dear Jade . . . Gods . . . oh, gods, how do I say this? How can it be true? I said the spell right, made the sacrifice, but the magic didn’t take me. Instead, it took her, took someone I didn’t even know about, but loved with all my heart—’ ” She broke off, her blood chilling as she made the connection that had been bothering her. “That’s why she ended up like you.
She wasn’t possessed by a makol. She was pregnant, and she didn’t figure it out until it was already too late.”
Gods.
How was it that they had missed asking that question? Jade wondered. Or had it been asked and she skimmed over it, somehow guessing this might be the answer and not wanting to add it to the mix?
Nausea pressed hot and thick against the back of her throat. A baby. A sister. Her mother had sacrificed her unborn baby to the Prophet’s spell. And being a soul spell, it wouldn’t ha
ve freed the child’s essence to enter the afterlife. The baby’s soul would’ve been completely and utterly destroyed.
Poof, gone.
Lucius made a move to reach for her, but she shook her head and held him off. “No. I need to finish this.” If she didn’t keep going, she might lose it entirely.
“If you’re sure.”
She nodded and read: “ ‘Tell the harvesters they lost one of their own because of me, because I was too proud, too vain, too sure that the elders of the star bloodline were wrong when they said it wasn’t yet time for the last Prophet, that he wouldn’t be made until just before the triad years. They were wrong, I thought, when really I was the one who was wrong, and an innocent paid the ultimate price.
Her soul isn’t in the sky. It’s just gone, destroyed in order to propel me between the worlds. I still need to go back into the library again, gain what knowledge I can, and hope to hell it’s enough to convince the king not to march. I didn’t get any answers the first time because it took me too long to figure out the yes/no bullshit, which doesn’t work exactly like the stories said it would. I’m starving, but I ate all the bread, and the fountain ran dry, and . . . and I’m whining. I’ll stop now and rest so I can keep going. Sometimes it seems that all you can do is keep going. I love you. Your mother, Venus.’ ”
“Now she’s starting to sound more like she did in the other journal,” Lucius noted. “Less like she’s writing a thank-you note—or rather, an apology—to an elderly relative, and more like a strung-out, confused kid.”
“There’s one more line. Just a sentence scribbled at the bottom.” Jade scanned the sentence, and went still.
“What is it?”
“Information.”
He took a step toward her, his eyes lighting. “Does it say how to get me back into the library?”
“No.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “It says: ‘To reach the lost sun, play his game on the cardinal day.’ ”
“Oh,” Lucius said. “Oh, wow. Oh, shit. I know what that means.” Their eyes met, and they said, nearly in unison, “We need to get this back to the mansion.”
With the great room in the middle of being renovated, the residents of Skywatch gathered at the picnic tables beneath the big ceiba tree, mopping at sticky-humid sweat and bitching about the gnats that had made a sudden appearance in the normally bug- free canyon. Strike, who’d already been briefed on the discoveries, opened the meeting, then turned things over to Jade and Lucius.
Jade was pale and withdrawn, so Lucius did most of the talking. He described the clues that had led him to the hidden chamber, and summarized what they had found inside it. He finished by reading Vennie’s words verbatim from the pink notebook, ending with what sure as hell sounded to him like a prophecy: “To reach the lost sun, play his game on the cardinal day.”
When he finished, it seemed that the world itself had gone silent, save for the whine of gnat wings.
After a moment, he said, “That’s random enough that I’m willing to bet it’s a snippet from the library, especially given how well it lines up with both the triad prophecy and what we’re going through now. If she asked the library, for example, what information the Nightkeepers needed most from her, that might have been the answer.”
“Was there anything else in the box?” Nate asked.
“It was empty except for the notebook. My guess is that the stars may have removed their sacred texts from it, maybe in preparation for the attack. But there’s more.” He lifted the box from where he’d left it sitting on the table, and turned it in his hands, so the orange daylight made the shadows dip and move across the carved wooden surface. “I translated the glyphs on the outside of the box. It’s another prophecy, this one about the library, and presumably the über-Prophet who is supposed to arise during the triad years. Paraphrasing to modernize the grammar and clean up the end, where the grammar gets a little wonky, it reads: ‘In the triad years, a mage-born Prophet can wield the library’s might . ’ ” He shook his head. “By becoming the non-Prophet, I must have blocked the true Prophet from being formed at the end of last year. So I think we can consider that a prophecy of the null-and-
void variety.”
“Is there such a thing as a voided prophecy?” Sasha asked. “It seems to me that all of the prophecies the ancients have left us have factored into things in some way or another. Maybe not the way we’ve expected them to, but they’ve factored.”
“I don’t see how this one could,” Lucius answered. “I’m not mage-born, and there’s no mistaking that part of the translation.”
Sasha looked thoughtful. “Maybe that’s not all of the prophecy.”
“Gee. Why don’t I go to the library and check? Oh, that’s right. Because I fucking can’t.” He exhaled. “Sorry. It’s just . . . Shit. Sorry.” Sasha hadn’t done anything to deserve his mood. “You’re right; it’s certainly possible that there was another box that continued the saying. That might account for the funky way this one ends, glyph-wise. But that’s pure speculation, and we’re running out of time. I don’t think we dare waste the time searching for something that might be a figment of our imaginations.” He paused. “Besides, there’s another option. Something we can try relatively easily, right from our own backyard.” Lucius hooked a thumb over his shoulder, past the training hall to the high parallel walls that had been built back when Skywatch was originally constructed in the twenties.
“I hope you’re all up for a game.”
“ ‘Play his game,’ ” Michael repeated. “You think the prophecy is talking about the Mayan ball game?”
“I know it is,” Lucius said with bone-deep certainty. “The entire game was one big metaphor for the sun’s daily journey, first across the sky, then through the underworld. It stands to reason that it would be a way to reach Kinich Ahau.” I hope. Because if this didn’t work, they were pretty much screwed.
“It’s like volleyball, right?” Sven asked. “Bounce the ball back and forth, no holding, and keep the ball off the ground using the nonhand bodypart of your choice.” He paused. “But I thought the point of the game was to sacrifice the winners. Are we sure that’s a good idea?”
“We’ll do whatever it takes if it means gaining access to the only god not currently trapped in the sky,” Strike said implacably. “We need the gods—or at least a god—to form the Triad. No god, no Triad. No Triad, no hope in the war. Are you following?”
Yeah, Lucius thought inwardly, I’m following. Because they didn’t just need at least one god; they needed the damned Triad spell, and they didn’t have a clue where to look for it. They had exhausted all the possible searches on earth. Which left them with “not on earth” as their last option.
Aloud, he said, “Although sacrifice was sometimes part of the game, it wasn’t necessarily the winners who died. Sometimes it was the losers, and sometimes there weren’t any deaths at all. It depended on who was playing, and why. But that’s getting ahead of things. Strike asked me to give you guys the quick four-one-one on the ball game, so here it goes: First, to understand the game, you’ve got to keep in mind that it’s the progenitor of almost all modern ball games. Before its evolution, game balls were always made of wood or leather, and fell dead when they hit. That changed when the Olmec figured out the trick of mixing the sap from latex trees and morning glory vines to create a bouncy, elastic rubber polymer.” He paused. “For the record, that was good old human ingenuity, circa 1600 B.C., not something you guys taught us.”
He got a couple of snorts for that, a couple of nods.
“Anyway, because rubber seemed to have a life and mind of its own when it bounced but was otherwise inanimate, it was considered spiritual, sacred. It was used in medicines, burned with sacred incense as a sacrificial offering, made into human-shaped effigies, and poured into spherical wood or stone molds and turned into balls.” He held his hands a little less than a foot apart. “We’re not talking hollow basketballs, either. They were heavy as hell, though sometim
es their makers lightened them up by using a sacrificial victim’s skull as a hollow center, and layering rubber around it. Regardless, these things could do some serious damage, which is why body armor evolved along with the game.”
He passed out a couple of pictures he’d printed off his laptop; they showed photos of various ball game scenes. “Here are some pics to give you an idea. Some were painted on slipware.” Including the scene that had been showing on-screen when he’d brought Jade back to his cottage. Their eyes met when he sent that one around; her cheeks pinkened. “Others are from the actual ball court walls.”
These included the famous scene from the great court at Chichén Itzá: that of a kneeling ballplayer being ritually decapitated, the blood spurting from his neck turning into snakes. “Finally, here are some some three- D models that were made of clay.” He sent around the last of the printouts, showing replica “I”-shaped courts, with armored teams facing off over the ball, referees keeping an eye on out-
of-bounds, and fans sitting up on top of the high walls. “In a couple of them, you can even see piles of fabric and other trade goods, sort of the A.D. 1000 version of a stadium concourse.”
“Huh.” Michael flipped through the pictures. “It was really a ball game, the way we think of it.”
“Definitely. But like so much of life in the Mayan-Nightkeeper culture, it also had a strong set of symbolic elements. Although the game itself existed before the Nightkeepers arrived, things got far more organized after 1300 B.C., when you guys showed up. The Egyptians had formalized games with rules and scoring, amphitheaters, and such. Odds are, those came from the Nightkeepers, and the First Father brought them along for the ride to this continent.”
“Including the sun connection?” Nate asked without looking up from the pictures.
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