Demonkeepers

“What is it?”

“Information.”

He took a step toward her, his eyes lighting. “Does it say how to get me back into the library?”

“No.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “It says: ‘To reach the lost sun, play his game on the cardinal day.’ ”

“Oh,” Lucius said. “Oh, wow. Oh, shit. I know what that means.” Their eyes met, and they said, nearly in unison, “We need to get this back to the mansion.”

With the great room in the middle of being renovated, the residents of Skywatch gathered at the picnic tables beneath the big ceiba tree, mopping at sticky-humid sweat and bitching about the gnats that had made a sudden appearance in the normally bug- free canyon. Strike, who’d already been briefed on the discoveries, opened the meeting, then turned things over to Jade and Lucius.

Jade was pale and withdrawn, so Lucius did most of the talking. He described the clues that had led him to the hidden chamber, and summarized what they had found inside it. He finished by reading Vennie’s words verbatim from the pink notebook, ending with what sure as hell sounded to him like a prophecy: “To reach the lost sun, play his game on the cardinal day.”

When he finished, it seemed that the world itself had gone silent, save for the whine of gnat wings.

After a moment, he said, “That’s random enough that I’m willing to bet it’s a snippet from the library, especially given how well it lines up with both the triad prophecy and what we’re going through now. If she asked the library, for example, what information the Nightkeepers needed most from her, that might have been the answer.”

“Was there anything else in the box?” Nate asked.

“It was empty except for the notebook. My guess is that the stars may have removed their sacred texts from it, maybe in preparation for the attack. But there’s more.” He lifted the box from where he’d left it sitting on the table, and turned it in his hands, so the orange daylight made the shadows dip and move across the carved wooden surface. “I translated the glyphs on the outside of the box. It’s another prophecy, this one about the library, and presumably the uber-Prophet who is supposed to arise during the triad years. Paraphrasing to modernize the grammar and clean up the end, where the grammar gets a little wonky, it reads: ‘In the triad years, a mage-born Prophet can wield the library’s might . ’ ” He shook his head. “By becoming the non-Prophet, I must have blocked the true Prophet from being formed at the end of last year. So I think we can consider that a prophecy of the null-and-

void variety.”

“Is there such a thing as a voided prophecy?” Sasha asked. “It seems to me that all of the prophecies the ancients have left us have factored into things in some way or another. Maybe not the way we’ve expected them to, but they’ve factored.”

“I don’t see how this one could,” Lucius answered. “I’m not mage-born, and there’s no mistaking that part of the translation.”

Sasha looked thoughtful. “Maybe that’s not all of the prophecy.”

“Gee. Why don’t I go to the library and check? Oh, that’s right. Because I fucking can’t.” He exhaled. “Sorry. It’s just . . . Shit. Sorry.” Sasha hadn’t done anything to deserve his mood. “You’re right; it’s certainly possible that there was another box that continued the saying. That might account for the funky way this one ends, glyph-wise. But that’s pure speculation, and we’re running out of time. I don’t think we dare waste the time searching for something that might be a figment of our imaginations.” He paused. “Besides, there’s another option. Something we can try relatively easily, right from our own backyard.” Lucius hooked a thumb over his shoulder, past the training hall to the high parallel walls that had been built back when Skywatch was originally constructed in the twenties.

“I hope you’re all up for a game.”

“ ‘Play his game,’ ” Michael repeated. “You think the prophecy is talking about the Mayan ball game?”

“I know it is,” Lucius said with bone-deep certainty. “The entire game was one big metaphor for the sun’s daily journey, first across the sky, then through the underworld. It stands to reason that it would be a way to reach Kinich Ahau.” I hope. Because if this didn’t work, they were pretty much screwed.

“It’s like volleyball, right?” Sven asked. “Bounce the ball back and forth, no holding, and keep the ball off the ground using the nonhand bodypart of your choice.” He paused. “But I thought the point of the game was to sacrifice the winners. Are we sure that’s a good idea?”

“We’ll do whatever it takes if it means gaining access to the only god not currently trapped in the sky,” Strike said implacably. “We need the gods—or at least a god—to form the Triad. No god, no Triad. No Triad, no hope in the war. Are you following?”

Yeah, Lucius thought inwardly, I’m following. Because they didn’t just need at least one god; they needed the damned Triad spell, and they didn’t have a clue where to look for it. They had exhausted all the possible searches on earth. Which left them with “not on earth” as their last option.

Aloud, he said, “Although sacrifice was sometimes part of the game, it wasn’t necessarily the winners who died. Sometimes it was the losers, and sometimes there weren’t any deaths at all. It depended on who was playing, and why. But that’s getting ahead of things. Strike asked me to give you guys the quick four-one-one on the ball game, so here it goes: First, to understand the game, you’ve got to keep in mind that it’s the progenitor of almost all modern ball games. Before its evolution, game balls were always made of wood or leather, and fell dead when they hit. That changed when the Olmec figured out the trick of mixing the sap from latex trees and morning glory vines to create a bouncy, elastic rubber polymer.” He paused. “For the record, that was good old human ingenuity, circa 1600 B.C., not something you guys taught us.”

He got a couple of snorts for that, a couple of nods.

“Anyway, because rubber seemed to have a life and mind of its own when it bounced but was otherwise inanimate, it was considered spiritual, sacred. It was used in medicines, burned with sacred incense as a sacrificial offering, made into human-shaped effigies, and poured into spherical wood or stone molds and turned into balls.” He held his hands a little less than a foot apart. “We’re not talking hollow basketballs, either. They were heavy as hell, though sometimes their makers lightened them up by using a sacrificial victim’s skull as a hollow center, and layering rubber around it. Regardless, these things could do some serious damage, which is why body armor evolved along with the game.”

He passed out a couple of pictures he’d printed off his laptop; they showed photos of various ball game scenes. “Here are some pics to give you an idea. Some were painted on slipware.” Including the scene that had been showing on-screen when he’d brought Jade back to his cottage. Their eyes met when he sent that one around; her cheeks pinkened. “Others are from the actual ball court walls.”

These included the famous scene from the great court at Chichen Itza: that of a kneeling ballplayer being ritually decapitated, the blood spurting from his neck turning into snakes. “Finally, here are some some three- D models that were made of clay.” He sent around the last of the printouts, showing replica “I”-shaped courts, with armored teams facing off over the ball, referees keeping an eye on out-

of-bounds, and fans sitting up on top of the high walls. “In a couple of them, you can even see piles of fabric and other trade goods, sort of the A.D. 1000 version of a stadium concourse.”

“Huh.” Michael flipped through the pictures. “It was really a ball game, the way we think of it.”

“Definitely. But like so much of life in the Mayan-Nightkeeper culture, it also had a strong set of symbolic elements. Although the game itself existed before the Nightkeepers arrived, things got far more organized after 1300 B.C., when you guys showed up. The Egyptians had formalized games with rules and scoring, amphitheaters, and such. Odds are, those came from the Nightkeepers, and the First Father brought them along for the ride to this continent.”

“Including the sun connection?” Nate asked without looking up from the pictures.

“Yep. On one level, the ball itself represents the sun, the ball court the underworld. You’ve got two teams —or sometimes just two opposing players—competing to control the sun.” Lucius paused, trying to decide whether the parallel with their current situation was creepy, prophetic, or both.

“Different versions of the game had different ways for players to gain or lose points, depending on how they returned, or failed to return, the sun ball to the other team, up to a match point of fifteen or so. Because