Dawnkeepers

“Perhaps,” Anna said, and Nate got the distinct impression that she wasn’t just talking about the end-time. “But what’s the alternative? You think you’re going to rule in hell? Think again. The Banol Kax don’t deal that way.”

“And how do you know that for certain? From your precious gods? Not exactly an unbiased source.”

Desiree bared her teeth. “Speaking of sources, how is Lucius getting along? Tell me, has he—”

“Enough.” Iago’s voice was quiet, but it silenced her immediately. Focusing on Strike, he said, “I have ten times your numbers, Nightkeeper, and I have the other six prophecies. Moreover, I’m not bound by the traditions that you are. We have no winikin, no writs. We’ve adapted. We’ve grown. We need nothing from you.”

“Then why even bother to come?” Strike asked, his frustration obvious. “I fail to see—” Automatic weaponry chattered behind them, coming from inside the compound.

“Son of a bitch!” Nate snapped, making the connection between the buzzing sound and the sense of magic. “He’s overriding the wards. He’s got someone inside the compound! Bastard! ”

Without stopping to think, Nate lunged at Iago. With surprise on his side, he nailed the mage waist-

high with his shoulder, sending them both to the ground. He wound up astride Iago, and got in three good punches before the chirr of dark ’port magic surrounded him.

Roaring, Nate grabbed on to the lapels of Iago’s jacket and hung on, intending to go with him. He didn’t have a plan, didn’t have a weapon, knew only that he owed it to the old lady, to his king and his people. Seconds later he was flying through the air, slapped aside by an unseen giant’s fist to land hard, face-first in the dust.

Iago and Desiree had vanished.

“Come on!” Alexis was dragging him up and along before he could get a breath. Strike and the others were gone, undoubtedly having ’ported into the compound the second the gunfire started.

It’d stopped, leaving ominous silence behind.

Nate and Alexis ran for the mansion together, dragging each other along. When they reached the main room he heard a babble of familiar voices all talking over one another, and followed the sound.

He found the winikin and Nightkeepers gathered in the hallway outside the archive, with some inside the first room. He pushed through, with Alexis right behind him, and stopped dead when he got a clear view. “Oh, shit.”

The archive was a disaster area.

It looked like somebody had unloaded two or three MAC clips into the bookcases holding centuries’ worth of rare texts. Lucius was folded up in one corner, looking shell-shocked but alive, and clutching an autopistol. Jade was standing in the middle of the room with tears tracking down her face, her mouth open in an “O” of horror, a bullet-riddled book clutched against her breasts. The locked door leading to the second room hung from one hinge, and blast marks marred the doorframe.

Nate didn’t even need to ask. He already knew.

“Ixchel,” Alexis whispered, taking two steps toward the battered door and stopping. She raised her hand to her mouth, then let it fall away. She turned to Nate, reached out for his hand, and he felt her sorrow in the link of palm to palm. “They took the statuette.”

“Yeah.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, figuring their problems had been momentarily back- burnered by the disaster. Glancing over at Strike, who looked royally pissed, he asked, “Was anyone hurt?”

The king shook his head. “No, thank the gods. And we’ve still got all the translations from the statuette, right?” He directed the question at Jade.

It was Lucius who answered, “Yeah. And digital pictures from every angle, under both natural light and starlight, which means we still have a chance of figuring out how to block the first prophecy.”

“It’s not just the first one we have to worry about,” Anna said, pushing through the crowd, looking way more connected and focused than she had during the meeting.

Strike stiffened. “You got something?”

“It wasn’t easy.” She pulled her hands out of her pockets. They dripped with blood and held crystals.

“Jesus, Anna!” Strike caught her hands in his, expression thunderous. “This wasn’t what we talked about you doing. What the hell were you thinking?”

“That I needed to do whatever it took to punch through the mental blocks guarding my powers.” She was pale, swaying a little on her feet, but she smiled. “I did it. I got inside his head. I saw what he saw.”

“Jox, get in here,” Strike snapped, and the crowd stirred as the winikin pushed through, took one look at Anna’s hands, and started dragging her out of the archive.

But she dug in her heels and pulled away. “No, wait. Let me say this first. We’re not just talking about a single prophecy anymore. That’s why Iago wanted all the statuettes. He’s not trying to stop us from defending against Camazotz’s sons one at a time. He’s going to use the artifacts to bring all seven of them through at once, during the vernal equinox. He wants to jump-start the end-time by a couple of years.”

Which meant they had a week to mount a defense, or the next stage in the end-time countdown was going to be coming very early.

“Son of a bitch,” Nate growled.

“We’ve got to find him,” Leah said quickly, her face gone very pale. She looked at Strike. “Are you sure you can’t lock onto him? What about Desiree?”

He shook his head. “No. I couldn’t even lock on when I was standing there, staring at them, which means they’ve got some way of fouling ’port lock, maybe a version of whatever they used to jam the wards.” He glanced at Anna. “Did you see . . . anything else?”

They all knew he was asking about Rabbit. The teen’s absence weighed heavily on the king.

“No, I didn’t,” Anna said softly. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything good or bad.” She held out her hands, where the deep sacrificial cuts were starting to heal. “I’m an itza’at, not a mind- bender or a ’path. Even if I were full strength and all the way trained, there’s no guarantee that I’d have seen anything but what was at the forefront of his mind, which was the image of bringing all seven of the artifacts together during the vernal equinox.”

Sven said from out in the hallway, “Gods damn it. If I hadn’t dropped the bowl—”

“Don’t,” Alexis said firmly. “Don’t anybody go there. We’ve made the mistakes we’ve made, and most of them have been because we haven’t had enough information.”

As usual, Nate thought but didn’t say. Whether or not he bought into the writs, information loss was a recurring theme with the Nightkeepers, as they had been victimized by cyclical acts of genocide that had not only wreaked havoc on the population, but also pretty much cut off info transfer from one phase of their history to the next. For a culture that believed in the recurring nature of time and liked to say crap like, “What has happened before will happen again,” the lack of forethought was pretty sad.

Or rather, he realized with a sinking, shimmering sensation, it was downright unbelievable.

“What is it?” Alexis murmured at his side, warning Nate that his face had betrayed his thoughts. Or maybe she’d picked up on something using the powers of the goddess—he still wasn’t sure what she could and couldn’t do. He didn’t think she was, either.

“A repository,” he said.

“Yeah, that was what Jade was just saying, how she’d scanned almost all of the books into the computer system, so this”—she indicated the bullet-riddled books— “shouldn’t cost us too much in terms of total information. Given that we can practically reproduce the statuette from the pictures and measurements we’ve got, this wasn’t as much of a disaster as it could’ve been.” She paused. “That assumes, of course, that all the statuette had to offer was contained in the carvings and starscript. I can’t help feeling like we’re missing something there, like maybe there’s another layer of script somewhere that we didn’t know to look for. Otherwise, why else was Iago so hell-bent on getting his hands on all seven of the artifacts?”

Nate only half heard her; his brain was locked on the idea of a repository. “Not a repository,” he said. “Alexandria.”

Alexis frowned. “As in Virginia?”

“No.” He shook his head. “As in ‘the library of.’ I was just thinking how there’s a central flaw in Nightkeeper thinking if we can be so badly derailed over and over again by catastrophic failures of the oral and written traditions.” He barely even noticed that he’d used “we,” where before he’d held himself apart from the Nightkeepers as much as possible.