terrible operation lies in the back of the cave. With the powder, these conquerors could maintain their rule through ritual and terror. But in the end, the fungus turned on them. The mild earthquake that damaged the towers and caused the landslide must have raised a tectonic fungal cloud in the valley here, just like in San Joaquin. Except that here, in the confined space of the canyon, the dustcloud had no place to go. It filled the alcove, enshrouded the city of Quivira. All those skeletons, thrown atop the broken bodies in the back of the cave, were its priestly Aztec victims.”
Aragon stopped speaking and looked away from Nora. His face, she thought, had never looked so drawn, so exhausted.
“Now, it’s time for me to tell you something,” Nora replied slowly. “Modern-day witches may be the ones trying to drive us out of the valley.” She briefly told Aragon about the attack in the ranch house and the more recent conversation with Beiyoodzin. “They followed us out here,” she concluded. “And now that they’ve found the site, they’re trying to drive us away so they can loot it for themselves.”
Aragon thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think they’re here to loot the city.”
“What are you talking about?” Smithback interjected. “Why else would they be trying to drive us away?”
“Oh, I don’t dispute they’re trying to drive us away. But it’s not to loot the city.” He glanced once again at Nora. “You’ve been assuming all along that these skinwalkers were trying to find the city. What if they were actually trying to
“I don’t—” Smithback began.
“Just a minute,” Nora broke in. She was thinking quickly.
“How else could they have traced us here so quickly?” Aragon asked. “And, if indeed they killed Holroyd with corpse powder, where else could they have gotten it, except from this place?”
“So they weren’t after the letter to learn Quivira’s location,” Nora murmured. “They wanted to
“Nothing else makes sense to me,” Aragon replied. “Once, I believed that Quivira was a city of priests. Now, I believe it was a city of witches.”
They sat a moment longer, three figures ranged around the still form of Holroyd. Then a sudden breeze, chill with moisture, stirred the hair on Nora’s forehead.
“We’d better get going,” she said, rising. “Let’s get Peter’s body out of the canyon.”
Silently, they began rewrapping the body in the ripped drysack.
48
AS JOHN BEIYOODZIN URGED HIS HORSE down the trail into the valley of Chilbah, his heart quickly sank. From the first switchback, he could make out the expedition’s horses; the remuda was watering at the stream. The tiny creek meandered down the center of a great flood-plain, torn and guttered, scattered with boulders and tree trunks. He glanced upward anxiously, but the thunderhead was now out of sight, hidden behind the fin of rock.
He knew only too well that this valley was a bottleneck for the vast watershed of the Kaiparowits. The flood, coming down the miles off the Kaiparowits Plateau, would gradually coalesce as the canyons came together in the upper reaches of the Chilbah Valley. It was all uninhabited, from the Kaiparowits to the Colorado River—except for the archaeologists in the valley beyond, which lay directly in the path of the water.
He looked to his right, where the valley broke up into a series of canyons and dry washes. The water coming off the Kaiparowits Plateau would enter the Chilbah Valley through these circuitous, twisting canyons. It would then race through the lower valley in one overwhelming mass. It would be colossal, covering the entire floodplain and probably tearing into the banks. If the horses weren’t moved well out of the plain and up into the high benchlands on either side of the valley, they would be swept away. Many of his people’s horses had died in flash floods. It was a terrible thing. And if there were people on the floodplain of the valley beyond—or, even worse, in the slot canyon that connected the two valleys . . .
He urged his horse into a plunging lope down the rubbled trail. He just might have time to reach the horses and scare them up to higher ground.
Within five minutes he had reached the bottom, his horse heaving and slick. He let the animal drink at the creek, all the while listening up the valley with a keen ear for the sound he knew only too well: the peculiar vibration that signaled a flash flood.
Out of sight of the thunderhead, the horse was calmer, and he drank deeply. When he had slaked his thirst, Beiyoodzin steered the animal across the floodplain, then urged him up the steep banks. Once up in the rocky benchlands well away from the stream, he kicked the buckskin into a lope, then a hand gallop. As long as they stayed on the high ground, they would be safe.
As he galloped, winding among huge boulders and outcrops of rock, Beiyoodzin’s thoughts returned to the people in the second, smaller valley beyond. He wondered if they would hear the flood coming. He knew there was some benchland on either side of the creek, and he hoped the people had known enough to pitch their camp up there. The woman, Nora, had seemed to know a little about the ways of the desert. They could survive if they were smart—and if they heeded the warnings.
Suddenly, he reined his horse to a violent stop. As the flurry of sand subsided around them, Beiyoodzin remained still, listening intently.
It was coming. So far, it was only a vibration in the ground, an unsettling tingle in his bones. But it was unmistakable.
He clicked his tongue and urged the horse forward. At a dead run, the buckskin flashed across the sandy ground, leaping rocks and bushes, dodging cottonwoods, racing toward the grazing horses. Now, he could hear the ugly sound rising up in the valley, even over the noise of his own galloping horse. It was a sound without direction, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, climbing quickly in pitch from the subsonic to a shriek. Along with it came a wind that started as a gentle breeze and quickly gained strength, shivering the leaves of the cottonwoods.
Again in his mind’s eye he saw a world out of balance. Sixteen years ago, it had seemed a small, harmless thing indeed. Ignore it, everyone had said. If these were to be the consequence of that action, they were terrible consequences indeed.
He reached the edge of the benchland. Below, in the floodplain, he could see the expedition’s horses. They had stopped grazing now and were standing alert, their ears pricked up, staring upstream. But it was already too late to save them. To ride down into the floodplain now would be suicide. He shouted and waved his hat; but his voice did not carry above the growing roar, and the herd’s attention was elsewhere.
The ground trembled. As the noise continued to intensify, Beiyoodzin became unable to separate the terrified whinnies of his own horse from the scream of the coming water. He looked upstream, into the maw of an even stronger wind that thrashed at the salt cedars and pressed the willows almost horizontal to the ground.
Then he saw
But it was not a wall of water. Instead, Beiyoodzin beheld a seething rampart of tree trunks, roots, boulders, and boiling dirt; a huge churning mass, pushed ahead by the flood at eighty miles an hour. He struggled to control his horse.
The horses below wheeled in hopeless fright and ran. As Beiyoodzin watched—in a mixture of amazement, horror, and fearful reverence—the monstrous wall bore down on them relentlessly. In rapid succession the animals were struck and blown apart, turned inside out like the abrupt blossoming of a rose, the ropy eruptions of scarlet, chunks of meat, and shattered legs disappearing into the roiling mass of logs and boulders.
Piled behind the murderous wall of debris came the great engine of its momentum: a tidal wave of chocolate-colored water two hundred yards wide, boiling from benchland to benchland in a flow that for the moment was greater than the Colorado River itself. It blasted a path through the valley, leaping into haystacks of water and standing waves ten feet high. The flood ripped at the edges of the plain like a chainsaw, tearing out hundred-ton chunks of earth and sucking away cottonwood trees. At the same time, Beiyoodzin felt a wave of intense humidity
