“What the hell?” he muttered.
“I think whoever was here is gone,” Lina said. “The candle-lined passage is empty and the flames are still. The opening of the door didn’t really affect them. Nobody has hurried by lately, disturbing the flames.”
“Stay put. I have to check something.” He set the gun in an empty waist-level niche and took a penlight from his pocket, the same burglar’s tool he’d found in his uncle’s house in Padre. The thin beam revealed a finger- smoothed line around the rim of the door, just like on the outside. He pushed, prodded, cursed, stepped to the right—and the door opened. He stepped back across the entrance to the left and it closed again.
“Must be some kind of counterweight system,” Hunter said, retrieving the gun and putting it at the small of his back.
“As long as we can open it, I don’t care if it’s PFM.”
“PFM?”
“Pure flaming magic,” she said, feeling her heartbeat settle.
He laughed softly. “As good an explanation as any.”
“It’s cooler in here than I expected,” Lina said.
Hunter took a breath. “And dry. More PFM?”
“Works for me right now.”
“Want more light?” Hunter asked.
Her teeth flashed against her skin as she smiled. “Not yet. I like seeing it as the Maya did.”
“Sorry I left my copal torch at home,” he said dryly, switching off his penlight. “I only have the twenty-first- century kind.”
Smiling, she started to walk toward the end of the short, candlelit hall.
Hunter’s hand clamped around her wrist, stopping her barely a step inside the blunt passage. Startled, she looked at his face. In the knee-high candlelight he looked hard, almost demonic. She froze, listening as he was listening.
Nothing. Not even the faintest rustle of a lizard.
Gently he released her. Then he switched on his penlight again.
“I don’t—” she began.
“Let me look at the floor before you go exploring.”
The beam was thin as a laser, a cold slash of blue white. Unlike the floor, the walls and ceiling were finished in limestone stucco. The uncovered stone on the floor had been worn away by the passage of feet, leaving a dull streak against the surface. The streak led to the far wall, and what looked to be a dead end.
“Dirty feet,” Hunter said. “Or sandals. If it’s safe for them, it’s safe for us.” He clicked off the beam. “Go ahead.”
“Pit traps only happen in movies,” she muttered.
“I saw that one, too,” he said. “Ended well.”
Candlelight bent and straightened as they walked down the hall. At the back, there was another hall branching off at a right angle. On the far side there were stone steps leading down to a place where no candles glowed.
Lina counted six steps before she lost them to the darkness. What she could see was polished limestone, dimmed at the center by the passage of many feet.
The air was definitely cool, dry. A slight draft flowed out from the dark opening at the bottom of the steps.
“Okay, I’ll think about going modern.” She reached for the flap of the backpack Hunter wore and fished blindly around for one of the heavy flashlights she’d packed.
But when she retrieved it, she hesitated.
His small beam switched on again. The thin light burned blue across the darkness.
“Is that some kind of censer at the back?” he asked.
She moved to stand beside him on the narrow landing at the top of the steps. At the far side of the large room there was a stone carved like a grimacing face. Air seemed to breathe out from the mouth and eyes and cutout sigils in the cheeks and forehead.
“More like a grate, I think,” she said. “The air coming out is fresh, dry, quite cool. Eerie.”
She felt Hunter beside her, close and warm, definitely real.
“The grate could lead to an underground opening into a cave system,” Hunter said.
“The would explain the temperature, but the dryness?”
“Damned odd,” he agreed. He moved his hand to the left, revealing another bit of the room. What had looked like a dim shadow flared into startling life. “But so is a shrine with only red petals. No whole flowers that I can see.”
“At least the flies don’t like it.”
“Bodes well for the local wildlife,” he agreed.
Candles of varied thicknesses, height, and color were scattered throughout in the room. Thin wisps of smoke still curled from hastily snuffed wicks.
“This is the smoke you smelled,” she said suddenly. “The candles were put out when we got near. But where is all the smoke going? We should be choking.”
There was no answer but the sigh of air through the room. Though the grate was at the back, the whole room seemed clear.
“Whoever was here, it wasn’t looters,” Hunter said. “They would use better light and not worry about fresh flower petals.”
“Not looters,” Lina breathed, shivering lightly. She moved his hand, guiding the beam of light while she spoke. “Look at the big candles at the four corners of the room, look at their colors. Sak, the north, is white; Kan, to the east, is yellow for the sunrise; Boox, to the west, is black for sunset; and Chak, to the south near the shrine, is red for blood. This is a sacred place.”
“Or it’s narcos stashing stuff here and trying to freak out any locals,” Hunter said, but he didn’t really believe it.
“There’s nobody out here to frighten. No water but rainfall. Very little game to eat. No fruit trees to draw even monkeys. If narcos set this up, they’re only scaring themselves. Besides,” she said, releasing his hand, “can’t you
Hunter felt it. He just wasn’t happy talking about it.
Looking for a vent or some way for the smoke to escape, he moved the beam of his light overhead. Lines of blue raced over the ceiling and down the wall, everywhere blue, gleaming and silent, calling across the centuries. Gradually he realized that there was red and white and black, even jade green gleaming in polychrome pictures; but the impact came from the many shades of blue, the voice of a god pouring from images of feathered deities and serpents.
There was not an inch of walls or ceiling left bare.
Lina let out a sound that could have been awe or disbelief or both mingling as the serpents did, indistinguishable.
“Late Post-Classic Mayan glyphs,” she said faintly. “Very refined glyphs, very precise. As elegant in their own way as the Lindisfarne manuscript. The culmination of millennia of culture striving to describe the unknowable.”
Slowly Hunter played the thin light beam over the walls around the entrance where they stood.
“That’s not a mass of snakes as I first thought,” Lina said. “It’s a single gigantic serpent, made up of countless others.”
“I can’t see where one ends and the other begins,” he said.
“You’re not meant to.”
A sea of scales and massive wings covered in rainbow feathers arched over the entrance to the room. Each movement of the flashlight revealed more details, more complexity, more colors that seemed to change as they watched.
“This is impossible,” she said in a whisper.
“The clean air?” he said, still clearly caught by that unexplained reality.
“No. The range and subtlety of color is fantastic. Look at these rich greens. You expect to see blues endure,
