'As a heart attack. The ancient Hawaiians called the valley Milu after an old chief who was the king of the dead. The valley's one of two places on the island where you're supposed to be able to access the shadows. Those cliffs are where a lot of the kings are buried, right in the rock. See that beach down there?' She indicated a crescent gash of black sand two kilometers long. 'Water's like glass, but the undertow and rip currents'll kill you.'
'If we don't peel off the road. That's almost straight down. I'll burn out my brakes. We'll never get back out.'
'This is a rental, right? So, let them worry about it. Trust me, you burn out the brakes, and they'll leave the thing where it dies. Costs a small fortune in nyuen to tow anyone out. Anyway, it's only a twenty-five percent grade, most of the way.'
'Only, she says.'
'Well, some of it's forty-five.' She gave him a tight grin. 'Look, the answer's down there. I'm offering to show you.'
'Why are you being so good to me?'
'Because I like you. Besides, I want to go home, and you're my ride. It's either that, or I take a horse.'
'The shrink said that only about fifty guys live in the valley.'
'Yeah, yeah, and they're all named Dave.' An eyeroll. 'So, you want to see this, or not?'
Personally, he was tempted to suggest astral projection, but she was a mundane, so… 'Shit.' He dropped the four-wheel drive into low and first. 'This had better be good.'
The road was short but fabulously steep: a single serpentine lane for most of the way, and in rotten condition. Worse, just as he lipped the edge, Alana said that this was one of the only places on the Big Island where you couldn't access the Matrix: 'No nodes within spitting distance.'
'And you live down here?' He was sweating, resisting the urge to ride his brakes. 'What do you do? Hunt with a bow and arrow?'
'I like the quiet.'
'I thought the Menehune weren't exactly the welcoming type.'
'I guess I'm just special,' she said. • • •
There were no lights at all, no houses he could see. To his right, he had the impression of a vast drop-off, and he heard the distant growl of the sea thundering against the shore. When the road finally leveled out, he let go of a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. Sweat plastered his shirt between his shoulder blades.
But that's when he noticed something else: the slight fizz in his ear was gone. No nodes. The silence was jarring, a sound all its own.
She studied him through the gloom. 'It hits everybody the same way first time around,' she said. 'Lee was really restless for awhile, like if he couldn't check his e-mail every five seconds, he didn't know what to do with himself.'
'Uh…' Inwardly, he was irritated that she read him so well. Never could fool Rachel either. 'I'm fine.'
She gave him a look that said she thought otherwise, but instead she unbuckled. 'You got a flashlight in that pack?' • • •
He had two, as it happened-with a great deal more specialized gear she didn't have to know about. • • •
The day disintegrated ten minutes after they left the rental. The night, choked with stars and a crescent moon, washed over the sky in a black tide. Their path through the woods was virtually nonexistent, a narrow cut that turned and twisted through thick stands of eucalyptus forest, thickets of wild ginger and lush hapuu ferns. He smelled water and the sweetness of lemon and strawberry guava, and when he followed his light over a suspension bridge fording a swift stream, the churn of water over rock threw up a fine, cool mist. The auras of the plants, a chorus of tree frogs, the inexorable rush of water-so much mana gathered together in one place…
Dear God, it's like discovering Gan Eden. His fingers toyed with Rachel's mezuzah, its metal too warm, its energies awakened to the mana infusing the valley. And for the first time in what felt like forever, he heard the whisper of a voice that he recognized as Rachel's: Because, my love, this is what it would be like to be free…
His breath hitched in his throat. Rachel? Are you…?
'Daniel?' Startled, he tore his astral gaze from the trees-and there she was, right beside him, the fiery sunburst of her aura like a beacon in the long night of his soul…
Alana touched his arm, shattering the illusion. 'Hey, you okay?'
'Fine,' he said, drawing in a long shuddering breath. He banished his astral sense and the mundane sprang up around him again. 'I'm just tired. How much longer?'
'We're here.' She stabbed her light at a hummock of red and brown rock. 'There was a huge tsunami in 1946. Steamrolled everything in the valley. Before then, this place was a major breadbasket. Taro fields, guava, mango, you name it. After the tsunami pulverized everything, the people just never rebuilt. The major temples were reduced to the functional equivalent of anthills. You want to see anything approaching what they were, you have to go further south to the Kohala Coast. But the tsunami also uncovered this heiau-at least, that's what I think. It's not in any of the historical or academic literature, and the Menehune know nothing about it.'
He stepped carefully, playing his light over rough-hewn rock walls that rose twelve meters at their highest point. The structure was roughly rectangular at its base but sloped inward as it climbed. More like a crude representation of a volcano than a pyramid, he thought, which made sense.
Nimble as a goat, Alana led the way up a scramble of boulders. He followed, negotiating a three-meter drop at the summit to what he saw was an open expanse marked by more rock mounds.
She pointed her light at the rock below their feet. 'That's coral, which is kind of weird this far inland. The way these things were built, slaves would've passed the rocks and coral in one continuous line from the ocean. If a rock were dropped or touched the ground, the slave would be sacrificed and the rock dropped far out to sea.'
He calculated they were maybe six klicks inland and whistled. 'That's a lot of slaves.'
'Several thousand. We're on the west side, and so this-' her light picked out a rock tumble that rose to chest height, '-is probably the tele, the altar. But that's not what's so weird. Look at the rocks.'
He did, and realized that what he'd thought were marks weathered into the rock by time and the elements were something else entirely. He touched a divot with tentative fingers, tracing a design of a vertical gash crisscrossed by two horizontals and surmounted by a small round divot. Head, arms and legs… 'It's a man. Rock carvings.'
'Petroglyphs, yeah, but here's the truly weird thing. The stones were supposed to be pristine. Yet every stone-and I mean, every single visible stone-is marked. This temple is one of a kind. And look here.' She swung her light at a tall pillar standing east of the altar. The gleam playing over its etched surface was weird and smoky.
'What is that?'
'This,' she said, running a reverent hand over the pillar's surface, 'is an oracle tower, an anu'u and no, I don't know any like this and especially none made out of a single piece of pure obsidian, solid volcanic glass. And look at these carvings. They're so delicate. Can you imagine how long it took, how much care was involved?'
Years, he thought, but he felt no special power emanating from this stone, saw nothing to indicate this was a focus, or that there might be something else hidden in its crystalline matrix. (He'd heard of such things: legends of skilled adepts able to detect the aura of the tiniest of insects entombed in amber. The theory went that since, by definition, DNA was organic and all organically-based organisms channeled mana, not only an aura but the flush of a metagenome ought to be present.) But there was nothing here. On the other hand, his talents didn't run that way.
He said, 'Okay, so what does all this have to do with you?'
'Here.' She circled around the pillar then angled her light halfway up the glassy surface to pick out a faint, egg-shaped blotch riddled with small pits. 'That's the sign for the Big Island and this big one with that sketchy pyramid is Maui with Haleakala, which would be visible from the western rim of the valley.'
Frowning, he pointed to a scatter of distinctive triangular wedges arrayed like the numerals on a clock. 'What are these things between the islands?'
'That is a location. Those wedges are the signs of the shark.'
'Like your tattoo.'
'You got it. Each island has its own shark-god. For example, the Big Island's is Ukanipo. But I've never seen petroglyphs arranged quite like this and these.' She indicated two concentric circles as wide as Daniel's hand just
