CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Michael growled, “Again with the ‘mick’ thing. What is that about?” But something in his eyes suggested that he already knew.
“Maybe it has something to do with the silver magic you’re channeling.” She turned on him. “Start talking. What are you doing? Why haven’t you told anybody there’s another type of magic Nightkeepers can tap?”
He stared at her, mouth working.
“Don’t.” She held up a hand. “Don’t you dare lie to me.”
“Sasha—” he began before breaking off, sounding desperate. Eyes wide, he said “What the hell?”
The rubble-filled tunnel shimmered, flickering in and out in a red-gold starburst . . . and then the debris disappeared, leaving the tunnel clear. Startled yells greeted them from the other side, where the other Nightkeepers were uplinked for big magic. Sasha gaped at them.
Strike broke from the circle and crossed to her, caught her by the arms. “Are you okay?” He looked from her to Michael and back. “What the hell happened?” Then he looked at the tunnel beyond them.
“What’s down there?”
Sasha opened her mouth to explain, but then log-jammed, stopped, and looked at Michael, who said, “I think we should all probably take a look together.” His eyes were his own again. There was no sign of the strange magic.
Then he turned and headed down the tunnel in the direction Ambrose had indicated, the orange glow of his light stick dipping slightly as he walked. Sasha hurried to catch up, so they were walking side by side as they came to a corner, turned it, and saw the first real carvings they’d seen in the subterranean tunnel, a row of screaming human skulls, their eye sockets seeming to follow as Sasha moved past them.
Only the first few carvings were of human skulls, though. After that, they started morphing, becoming something else entirely. The farther inward the Nightkeepers went, the less the skulls looked human, the more they started to look like sharp-eared cats and dogs, and a wide-skulled bird of prey that looked familiar to Sasha, though she couldn’t quite place it.
“Egyptian,” Michael said under his breath, then raised his voice: “Rabbit, any of this looking familiar?”
So far, they’d been unable to identify the tomb Rabbit had seen during his impromptu vision quest, and Strike had understandably put a potential wild-goose chase to Egypt pretty low on the priority list.
But Ambrose had said something about a sarcophagus. What if the tomb Rabbit had seen wasn’t in Egypt after all? The ancestors of the modern Nightkeepers had fled Akhenaton’s religious cleansing in
1300-something B.C. and wound up in Central America, so it wouldn’t be impossible for some of the Egyptian techniques to have transferred. Only a handful of Nightkeepers had survived the First Massacre, and they had quickly assimilated into the indigenous population, eventually boostrapping the Olmec into the culture that had become the Mayan Empire. Which meant—
“If this shit is what I think it is,” Strike murmured from behind Sasha, “we’re walking in our first ancestors’ footsteps. Literally.”
She shivered as icy fingers walked down her spine as a staggering suspicion formed.
The tunnel ended at an open doorway. Lifting her glow stick, Sasha stepped through into a vaulted chamber that was roughly rectangular, its construction not nearly as regular as the architecture of the Mayan-era Nightkeepers. Which played if they assumed it’d been built by one of the first few generations of magi after the transoceanic voyage. The space seemed to have been carved out of the limestone base itself, hewn from the stone using cruder implements than the ones used to make the later pyramids at Chichen Itza and elsewhere.
The walls were painted rather than carved, and even though Sasha had halfway expected the hieroglyphs, it took her a moment to make the transition. Her brain was used to the Mayan glyphs, the anamorphic figures and humans drawn and carved with flattened foreheads and conical skulls, heavy brow ridges and protruding noses. These painted figures didn’t wear feathers and jade, weren’t offering blood to the gods. No, the paintings were done in a different, though related style, one of angular figures posed stiff limbed, their catlike eyes marked at their edges with curlicues and lines, making each eye into a glyph itself: that of the sun god. Other gods were painted elsewhere around the room: the falcon-headed Horus, Bast the cat, Nekhbet the vulture, Hathor the cow, Anubis the jackal.
They were the gods of the Egyptian pharaohs prior to Akhenaton. And they were the gods of the single adult mage who’d survived Akhenaton’s religious purge and had led the Nightkeeper children and their familial slaves to safety.
In the center of the room rose a huge waist-high box of carved and painted stone. The lid bore a life-
size representation of a man laid out flat on his back with his arms crossed over his chest. Instead of the traditional staff and flail found on an Egyptian coffin, though, the figure held a ritual knife in one hand, an oval object in the other. A chill washed over Sasha when she recognized the latter as a highly stylized cacao seedpod, which had symbolized life and wealth in the Nightkeepers’ new world.
Magic hummed in the air, latent and waiting, identifying the chamber as a place of enormous power, just as the hieroglyphs marked it as incredibly ancient, incredibly important. “Is it . . .” She trailed off, afraid to put it into words.
Strike crossed to the coffin and dropped to his knees, though she couldn’t have said whether the move was shock or obeisance. Leah moved up beside him, braced one hand on his shoulder, then passed another along a line of boxed text, something that looked partway like a cartouche, partway like Mayan glyphs. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s the First Father’s tomb.”
Strike nodded raggedly. “I think so. Anna will have to translate everything and confirm, but . . . yeah. It’s him. The First Father.” He reached out a shaking hand, let it hover for a moment, then touched the carved stone with deeply ingrained reverence. “Gods.”
Of all of them, it made sense that the king would be hit hardest by the discovery, because he’d known all along that the Nightkeepers were real, the histories were real. According to those histories, a single adult mage had survived Akhenaton’s massacre to lead the Nightkeepers’ children and the newly made
time. He’d written down the thirteen original prophecies, and then the demon prophecies that Iago had used to destroy the skyroad. The First Father had been the beginning of so many things, the wellspring of so much of the history and culture of the Mayan-era Nightkeepers, that it seemed impossible to believe he was truly a historical figure. Yet Sasha was actually standing there, staring at the sarcophagus that had been wrought by the people who had known him, lived with him, and had fashioned his last resting place after those of the god-kings they had known in another land, half a world away. And now, it seemed, that coffin also held the answer to the Nightkeepers’ prayers: the library scroll.
Michael took a long look at the carvings on one side of the sarcophagus: a stylized scorpion atop a pair of wavy lines, with row upon row of hieroglyphs below it. “Hey, Rabbit. Is this your scorpion?”
The younger mage darted through the crowded chamber, glanced at the carving, and whipped out his cell phone to take a few snaps.
“I’m guessing that’s a ‘yes,’ ” Michael said dryly. But then he glanced at Strike, making sure he and the others were wrapped up in their own explorations of the chamber. Lowering his voice, he said, “Ambrose said something about using the scorpion spell to break his connection to the barrier.” He paused. “What, exactly, did you ask the scrying spell right before you saw the carvings?”
Rabbit hesitated only fractionally before he said, “I started by asking how to call a new
Michael smiled grimly. Yeah, that was about what he’d figured. “So the answer was for you to get rid of the Xibalban’s mark?” He supposed it made sense that the Nightkeepers’ purest connection, that of the
Rabbit nodded, eyeing the hieroglyphs. “If it broke Ambrose’s connection to the barrier, d’ya think it’d break the hellmark connection, too?”
“Your scrying spell seems to think so.” Which made Michael wonder what other connections it could break.
