by Layton Green
“Someone managed to escape the tomb,” Mateo said. “Or we wouldn’t have the map.”
“I don’t think so,” Mala said. “I believe the Alazashin explorer who found this place sent the map back with a messenger before he entered the pyramid, in case he failed to return. I don’t know what happened, but if the assassin had plundered the tomb and lived, history would record the deed.”
“The trees at the apex of the hill are much younger than those below,” Selina pointed out. “Half a century old, rather than hundreds of years.”
“So the Alazashin explorers dug it out fifty years ago,” Will said. “Or there was a wizard with them.”
With a nod from Mala, Gunnar stepped forward and heaved on the iron ring. It took a few tries before the heavy block groaned, but it opened to reveal a darkened cavity yawning below. Will dropped a large rock inside. It made no sound.
“How can that be?” Coba asked, leaning over the opening.
Mala shook out a glow stone and tried to illuminate the darkness, but her light failed to penetrate even a foot inside.
“It’s a magical ward of some sort,” Selina murmured. “Sound and light proof.”
“Can your own magic penetrate?” Mala asked.
The sylvamancer concentrated for a moment. “I don’t believe the ward will bar us from entry, but I cannot undo the spell. Whoever made this was stronger than I. Much.”
“The sorcerer king,” Mala murmured.
“I know enough about wards to know this is a one-way passage. Once we enter, we cannot go back the same way.”
Coba gave the cavity a nervous glance. “Dark hole is symbol for Xibalba. No one knows what comes after death.”
Xibalba, Will knew, was the name of the Mayan underworld.
“I should go first,” Selina said, as she stared down at the hole.
Mateo took her by the arm. “What if it’s an ambush? Take me with you.”
She kissed him on the lips, causing him to blush. “I can maneuver more easily on my own.”
Mala stepped to the edge of the hole. “How do the rest of us get down?”
“I’ll float you down as you enter,” Selina said, “two at a time.”
“What if you’re unable to?”
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take,” she said grimly.
As everyone prepared to descend, Yasmina took Will by the hand and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I’m staying behind.”
Mala turned to stare at her, waiting for her to continue.
Yasmina’s grip on Will’s hand was firm, her voice strong and composed. “I’ll be of limited use to you inside the tomb, and I have . . . things I need to do.” She glanced at the eagle perched on her shoulder, whose feathers had already taken on a brighter sheen. Yasmina shook her head. “I’m not even sure I can explain. I’m a steward of the land, not a seeker of treasure, and I sense I’m needed elsewhere now.”
“Where?” Will asked. He could tell by her voice she had made up her mind. Not only that, but as much as he would miss her companionship—she was his only link to home—he preferred her out of harm’s way.
“To the north,” she said mysteriously. “But first I’ll return to the meeting place and direct the Yith Riders here, instead of waiting at Ixmal. I’ll also attempt to have the owls clear the Arpui from this roost for good, so you may exit with impunity.”
Mala stepped forward and clasped her forearm. “Thank you, wilder. Your assistance on this journey has been much appreciated.”
Unsure how Mala would react to her departure, Will breathed a sigh of relief. He suspected she appreciated Yasmina’s fierce independence and dedication to the code of the wilder.
And, ever the pragmatist, Mala probably agreed with the decision. A wilder, especially a new one, would not be of much use inside a pyramid.
After Yasmina said her goodbyes, Will hugged her tight. “Take care of yourself,” he whispered.
“I will. You, too.”
“Are you going back to Freetown?”
“No,” she said sadly. “Not there.”
“I understand. What about getting home? How do we find you again?”
Yasmina smoothed the harpy eagle’s feathers as she stared at the shaggy sweep of jungle extending to the horizon. “I think I’ve found my home, Will.” Though her words were not unexpected, he was still stunned, and didn’t know what to say. She gave him an oddly knowing look. “Maybe you have, too.”
He glanced at Mala and then down at his hands, but didn’t respond. He had been avoiding those thoughts. His only goals right now were to help Val, get Caleb, and find a way home. Then they could all make decisions together.
“I’ll miss you, Will. Your brother always made me cry, but you always made me laugh.”
He felt himself choking up. He hugged her again and didn’t want to let her go. She eased away, squeezing his hand a final time. Staff in hand and head held high, her long stride carried her swiftly to the nearest owl.
“Wilder,” Mala called out.
Yasmina turned.
“Take Coba home, please.”
The sturdy Mayan was sitting cross-legged on the ground. He jumped up and opened his palms. “The treasure—you promised!”
“You’ve guided us well,” Mala said, staring at the maw of the tomb. Though his fee had been paid, she had also pledged him a share of the loot. “But this place is not for you. If we find coin and return alive, I’ll deliver your share myself. You have my word.”
Coba hung his head for a moment, then broke into a wide grin and did a standing back flip. “Good deal for me,” he said, walking backwards towards Yasmina. He pointed at Mala. “You stay alive so I be rich.”
The hint of a smile lifted her lips. “I shall try.”
Will felt a heaviness descend as Yasmina and Coba climbed onto a pair of owls and took flight, soaring towards the southern coast. Mala turned to address the group. “Without the wilder, the other owls could leave at any moment. I, for one, do not wish to be here when the Arpui return to their roost.”
Everyone peered nervously into the entrance. “Wait a count of twenty,” Selina said to the group as she clasped Mateo’s hand, “then descend one by one.”
After Selina stepped into the hole and disappeared, Mala counted off the seconds, then asked Gunnar to go next, followed by Mateo. They both dropped into the blackness.
Will took a deep breath. “Go ahead,” he said to Mala. “I’ll go last.”
She smirked. “Ever the chivalrous one, Will the Builder.”
“I saw what you did for Coba. That was kind.”
“Down there, he would be a liability. A risk to the safety of the group. I did what was necessary.”
Will laughed. “Whatever.”
“Tsk tsk. I’m afraid you’ll never learn.”
“Learn what?”
They were standing at the edge of the hole. She swayed right up to him and cupped the back of his neck, her body brushing against his. A tingle shot through him as she pulled his face close, eyes dancing, full lips parted. Just before their mouths met, the warmth of her breath against his, she pushed him backwards, into the hole.
“That I act in my own interest,” she said, as he tumbled headlong into the tomb.
Will was falling through blackness. Arms and legs flailing. Unable to hear his own shouts for help.
Long seconds later, he emerged into an enormous chamber illuminated by a dull crimson glow. Still in free fall, he noticed a sandstone floor thirty feet below, covered in life-size statues. Just as his voice returned so he could yell for help, Selina arrested his fall, floating him gently downward.
As he descended, Will craned his neck to get a better view of his environs. Visibility extended at least a few hundred feet, but he couldn’t see the walls. The limestone statues were placed five feet apart throughout the chamber; there must have been thousands.
The air was cool and dry. Fresh. No discernible odor. The source of the red glow was a mystery. Will glanced down as
he landed and noticed that large, dun-colored stone blocks comprised the floor, each carved with a prominent Mayan glyph. He looked up and saw, except for the shaft of darkness through which he had fallen, the same construction on the ceiling.
From up close, the statues looked incredibly lifelike. Most depicted a man or a woman in various upright postures, though a few displayed mythological beasts and godlike beings. Will joined the others as they craned their necks to gawk at the awe-inspiring scope of the underground structure. He had expected a claustrophobic apex chamber, the dusty tip of a pharaoh’s tomb. Instead he got a buried sandstone museum of unbelievable size.
Selina flew up to the entrance shaft and confirmed the journey was a one-way ticket. Will felt a sense of oppression at being trapped within the ancient tomb. He approached the statue of a young warrior raising a spear, dressed in a loincloth and an elaborate headdress. The statue’s chest felt as solid as it looked. Will ran his hands across the smooth surface, then looked up at the proud face and frozen eyes staring back at him.
The statue blinked.
Will stumbled backwards. It blinked again, and then the pupils flicked to each side.
“Did you see that?” Will asked, his voice hoarse.
“Aye,” Mala said.
The stone eye started roving in its socket, frantic, as if seeking to escape. Will looked at the next statue over and noticed the same thing. He whipped around and sought the eyes of every statue within sight.
They were all in motion.
Weapons raised, the party bunched together, unsure whether they would animate and attack them.
“Wait,” Selina called out, in a shaky voice. She stood inches away from a statue of a beautiful woman wearing a cloth wrap and covered in jewelry. The statue’s eyes blinked in a regular pattern, and Will had the impression the statue was staring at Selina as much as the sylvamancer was staring at her, trying to communicate.
“I’ve seen living stone before,” Selina said, “and the eternal sleep of an Encasing. This is neither. I believe,” she swallowed, “I believe these people are still alive, somehow trapped within the stone. Part of it.”
Will couldn’t tear his eyes away from the statue of the Mayan woman. “How old is this tomb again?” he asked.
“Thousands of years,” Mala said, unusually somber.
Will felt himself start to shake. “That’s . . . that’s an abomination,” he whispered. He raised his sword and, after an approving nod from Selina, held it up in front of the statue of the woman. The statue squeezed her eyes shut, and Will could feel what she wanted him to do. He touched the tip of Zariduke to the woman’s chest and began to slowly thrust forward. With a snick of blue-white light, the sword pushed through the stone with the resistance of warm butter. The eyes of the woman flickered with relief, then turned still and lifeless, just before the statue dissolved into dust.
“Magic,” he said through clenched teeth. “Not stone. Magic.”
Mateo’s knuckles tightened against his buckler. “All these people . . . free them, Will. Free them all.”
In a rage, Will howled and cut down the statue to his left, and another, and another.
“Stop!” Mala called out.
Will completed his swing, freeing another trapped soul, then turned.
“Don’t make a sound,” she said.
He corralled his anger and heard a low susurration, somewhere between a hiss and a rattle, faint but growing in volume. As the noise level increased, he realized it was not one prolonged sound but multiple bursts of shorter ones. It brought to mind the sound of a thousand shaking maracas.
A scorpion came into view, scuttling down one of the rows towards Mateo. The foot-long creature moved in short bursts, pincers extended, the rustling of its segmented body producing the sound they had heard.
When it drew close enough, Mateo whipped his sword at the arachnid, cleaving it down the middle with a crunch of exoskeleton.
Three more took its place. Will swiveled and saw them coming from all directions, rushing down the rows of statues, hundreds of them, stingers poised and ready.
He had once read that the bigger the scorpion, the less dangerous the sting.
But he didn’t want to test that theory.
Especially not on Urfe.
“Fly, Selina!” Mala said. “Find the exit!”
The sylvamancer took to the air as Will and the others prepared for the onslaught. As they formed a loose circle and spread out to give themselves room to fight, Will wondered what had caused the scorpions to attack en masse and realized that, like the Arpui, the hand of nature had probably not designed the colossal arachnids.
Zariduke emitted no snip of blue-white light when Will cut the first scorpion in half, but it died just the same. The monstrous things were quick, darting at sharp angles as they approached, and Will found that a spearing motion worked best. A single scorpion was no great threat, but they came in waves, pouring into the room like grain from a silo. He wished he hadn’t lost his shield. It would have proved invaluable against the stingers.
Mateo’s weapon proved the most useful. Will watched in awe as his cousin wheeled back and forth, using his sword as a whip, crushing the backs of multiple creatures at a time with the flexible urumi blade.
Mala fought with her usual brilliance, spinning and weaving with both blades, using the base of the statues to guard her back, scooping the scorpions away with the tip of her sword if they got too close. Stronger but slower than his companions, Gunnar looked awkward against the scuttling creatures, having to bend almost double to strike them. One reached his boot but Gunnar kicked it away.
Selina swooped back into the fray, alighting atop one of the statues. “There’s no exit I could see!” she yelled, causing Will’s heart to sink.
“The walls?” Mala shouted.
“The chamber is square. Solid all around. Scorpions everywhere.”
As if in response, two of the creatures scuttled up the statue on which Selina was poised, causing her to take flight again.
Mala swore. “There has to be a way out. My guess is a concealed door along the wall. Everyone—stay behind me. Watch your flanks.”
The scorpions followed the party as it moved through the chamber. The numbers were not yet overwhelming, but they were steadily increasing. Will knew it was only a matter of time before someone got stung or tired.
Mala moved as straight as she could, vying for the nearest wall. Whenever Will got a second to breathe, he destroyed a statue with his sword, unable to bear the thought of damning someone to an eternity of living stone if he could prevent it. When he tried to swipe through a man with the head of a deer, his sword passed right through the statue, and he almost lost his balance. Confused, he tried waving a hand through the statue.
Empty space.
Forced to resume fighting, a few yards later he tried to slice into the next mythological creature, a statue of a multi-limbed serpent standing on its tail. Again, nothing but air.
Will stepped into the base of the statue, reasoning it might conceal a hidden exit. His boot never touched the ground, and he stumbled at the edge of a shallow pit filled with a writhing mass of scorpions. He yelled and lost his balance. Just before he fell, someone caught him by the back of the shirt.
As Gunnar jerked him away from the pit with one arm, Will felt a pincer latch onto his boot. He shook his leg to get it off, then looked down and saw a mass of scorpions darting in and out of the bottom of the pit, as if it were riddled with tunnels.
“The statues of monsters are illusions!” he called out, as Gunnar set him down. “With pits beneath them!”
Someone screamed in reply. Will whipped to his left and saw his cousin holding his hand, backed against a statue and surrounded by scorpions. Mateo’s buckler was nowhere in sight. Before Will could reach him, Selina landed atop the statue and cleared the scorpions away with a Wind Push. She turned in a slow circle, thrusting the army of arachnids back, giving the party room to breathe.
Will felt little relief. The scorpions were already scuttling back down the endless lines of statues.
Selina jumped down to embrace Mateo, then gasped when she saw his hand. Will looked down in horror. The skin around his cousin’s palm was slowly turning gray and hard, petrified by a creeping stone poison.
“You were stung?” Mala asked.
He gasped. “Aye.”
She dug into her pouch and shoved a stoppered container the size of a perfume bottle at Mateo. “Drink,” she said.
He quaffed the healing potion and poured the last few drops on the injury, but there was no effect. Millimeter by millimeter, his left hand kept solidifying into gray stone.
“What do I do?” he cried.
Even Mala looked at a loss.
The scorpions returned, and Selina blew them back again. “I can’t expend all my power,” she said, her voice thick with emotion as she cast a sidelong glance at Mateo. “We must find the exit.”
They fought their way to the wall. The engraved stone blocks looked identical to the floor and ceiling. Mateo’s sword arm was intact, but the petrification had reached the fingers of his left hand.
Will felt nauseated. He couldn’t lose his cousin. Mala pushed against the wall to no effect, then ran her fingers along the seams of the blocks.
“Solid,” she said. “We’ll have to work our way around the perimeter. Go!”
The group formed a protective semicircle around their leader, moving along the wall as fast as they could. After they had progressed a few hundred feet, they finally hit the corner. The adjoining wall looked the same as the first. Will risked a glance at Mateo. The stone had crept to his wrist.
Think, Will. There has to be a way out. This is a test of brains, not brawn.
But he couldn’t find an answer, and the scorpions kept him too busy for prolonged thought. When the party reached another corner without finding an exit, Mala banged her fist against the wall in frustration. A scorpion broke through and almost stung her from behind, but Will batted it away at the last instant. He spun and stabbed another that tried to take advantage of the distraction.
His arms were tiring. Was there even a way out, he wondered? Was this room nothing but a deathtrap, a cruel joke by a long-deceased despot?