Empire of shadows, p.48
Empire of Shadows, page 48
Before Ellie could answer, Jacobs stepped from the shadows bordering the clearing.
“How very interesting,” he said smoothly as he approached the priest. “And why would you do that for us?”
Kuyoc’s eyes glittered. “Because you seem like the sort of men who reward good helpers. And maybe I like rewards,” he replied.
From the shadows of her hiding place at the mouth of the antechamber, Ellie frowned.
“The padre didn’t strike me as the mercenary sort,” she whispered.
“He’s not,” Adam returned bluntly. “The old man’s got another game here. I just hope to hell it’s not going to get him shot.”
As Ellie watched, Kuyoc reached into the pockets of his trousers. His hands emerged with a neatly rolled cigar and a slender box of matches.
Kuyoc set the cigar to his lips, lighting a match and puffing it to a low, orange light.
He smiled at Jacobs and held the tobacco out to him.
“Share a little k’uutz?” Kuyoc asked.
Jacobs took a step closer. He eyed the cigar thoughtfully without reaching out to take it, and then he raised his gaze to Kuyoc’s face once more.
“You wouldn’t be here to cause any trouble,” he asked, his voice dangerously soft. “Would you?”
Ellie’s throat tightened as her pulse quickened with instinctive fear.
No, she thought silently and instinctively. Don’t answer. Don’t say anything. Don’t tell him a lie.
“Me?” Kuyoc replied comfortably. His eyes were still sharp. “What sort of trouble could I be?”
Jacobs tilted his head thoughtfully.
“Why don’t you tell me?” he calmly demanded.
Kuyoc shrugged.
“None at all, patrón,” he returned easily.
Jacobs smiled. The expression was thin as a razor blade. Ellie gripped the stones more tightly.
“Thank you,” he replied.
He waved a casual order to Buller.
“Shoot him,” Jacobs said.
Adam’s arm circled her waist. Ellie hadn’t even realized that she had started to charge out of the antechamber.
“Not like that, Princess,” he whispered tightly at her ear. “You can’t help him if you’re dead.”
The men by the crate—Charlie, Lessard, Pacheco, and Flowers—had all gone still. The sound of their hammers died as they stared between Jacobs and the priest. Ellie could practically see the wheels churning in Charlie’s head. She suspected that Adam’s wry ally was frantically calculating his odds of intervening successfully on the priest’s behalf.
For his part, Buller was looking uncomfortably from Kuyoc to Jacobs. Shooting a priest must have stretched the limits of his admittedly flexible moral boundaries.
“Hold on!” Dawson protested as he scrambled over to where they stood. “What if he actually knows something about the mirror?”
“Do you?” Jacobs demanded as he turned back to Kuyoc.
Kuyoc’s front of cheerfulness had dropped. He looked at Jacobs with all the clarity and discernment Ellie knew him to possess.
“Yes,” the priest said flatly.
Jacobs looked thoughtful.
“Tie him to the column, then,” he ordered.
Buller and Price moved more readily to obey. The two guards easily hauled the slight, wiry priest to one of the thick stone pillars that punctuated the periphery of the cavern. Staines stumbled over with a length of rope.
“His crazy shirt’s in the way,” Staines complained. He waved a hand at Kuyoc’s homemade breastplate.
“So take it off him,” Jacobs snapped in reply.
Kuyoc raised a quick hand as Staines and Price moved to follow Jacobs’ command, holding them off. With a few quick tugs on the cords that bound his contraption together, he loosened it, shrugged it over his head, and held it out to the guards.
“Careful with that,” Kuyoc cautioned Staines deliberately.
Staines uneasily shoved the garment at Price.
The bigger guard sighed and tossed the bundle of reeds aside. The breastplate slid across the floor of the cave, coming to rest at the wall right near to where a dark crevice broke the smooth limestone surface.
Could the opening be another way out?
Ellie’s brain lurched automatically into a rapid calculation. She considered the position of the antechamber and the angle of the tunnel through which she and Adam had climbed to reach it.
Her stomach sank. The hole must be the other end of the opening that had sat at the top of the mountain of bones. That meant it was the gap through which all those people and animals had been thrown.
Had they been killed right here? She wondered over it queasily as she peered out at the graceful beauty of the cavern.
Price and Staines finished binding the priest to the pillar. The job complete, they ambled away. Staines winced a bit as he bent over to retrieve Adam’s Winchester from the floor.
“You said he was trying to get caught,” Adam complained in a low grumble. “Was he also trying to get himself tied to a rock?”
“I’m guessing that wasn’t part of his plan,” Ellie admitted.
Adam gave a tired sigh and rubbed a muddy hand over his features. “Great,” he concluded and neatly slipped from the tunnel.
Ellie instinctively dropped to a crouch as she watched him dart across the shallow flow of water and tuck himself behind a rippling stone formation.
No one noticed. All of the men in the room were once again focused on watching the construction of the crate.
With a breath, Ellie followed after Adam.
Her boots splashed down into the cool stream, the sound amplified by her nerves. Ellie hurried through it to the cover of the ragged field of stones that bordered the clearer ground, keeping to the shadows where the glare of the paraffin lights failed to penetrate.
Adam gently caught her arm as she reached him. He pressed a finger to his lips in warning. Silently, he led her through the maze. They darted from stalagmites to thick limestone columns as they circled the cavern, inching their way toward the bound priest.
Finally, Ellie tucked herself behind a fall of debris beside the column where Kuyoc was bound.
Staines and Price had wandered back over to the others. Now that the priest had been confined, nobody paid him much mind.
“Are you all right?” she asked, pitching her voice to a hushed whisper—one that wouldn’t be heard over the clamor of the hammering and the constantly rushing water.
The priest sighed and chuckled lowly to himself.
“Why should I be surprised that you are here?” he muttered—then his eyes narrowed as he threw a quick glance toward her hiding place. “How are you here?”
“We took the long way,” Adam replied from where he hovered in the shadow of a massive stalagmite. He kept a wary eye on Jacobs, Dawson, and their men.
“The Path of Kings?” Kuyoc demanded as his tone sharpened. “The pair of you walked the Path of Kings?”
“If by that you mean all the demon god puzzles and skull-eating bats,” Adam grumbled. “Then yup. Sure did.”
“We’re going to get you out of here,” Ellie promised with an intent look at the men in the center of the cavern. “But I’m afraid that first, Mr. Bates and I need to make sure those two do not leave this place with that mirror.”
Kuyoc startled.
“That’s why you walked through the caves?” he demanded. “To stop them getting the glass?”
“Sssh!” Ellie urged as Staines threw a frowning look back at where they crouched.
“Well—somebody did throw us in a well,” Adam admitted.
Ellie shot him a glare.
“That was you. You threw us in a well,” she pointed out.
“And what did you plan to do with it?” Kuyoc cut in.
“The well?” Ellie said, confused.
“The glass,” Kuyoc repeated with barely concealed impatience. “After you stopped those two from getting it.”
“We hadn’t really thought that far ahead,” Adam said. He scratched his stubble a little ruefully.
“We just knew they couldn’t be allowed to leave with it,” Ellie offered stoutly—or as stoutly as she could while still whispering. “Because it’s…”
Her voice trailed off at the awkwardness of the rest of the explanation.
“An object with the power of a god?” Kuyoc filled in dryly.
“You know!” Ellie gasped.
“What—you think I would be trying to destroy it with a bunch of dynamite if it was just a piece of furniture?” Kuyoc shot back.
“Destroy it!” Ellie squeaked.
“Hold on—dynamite?” Adam pressed at the same time.
Ten yards away, Staines turned and frowned.
Ellie dropped. She pressed herself closer against the stones as she heard the guard’s steps move closer.
“You talking to yourself, crazy fool?” Staines demanded.
“Praying,” Kuyoc corrected him neatly. “For God to protect me from the demons of this place sure to be outraged by your desecration.”
The priest flashed Staines a slightly terrifying smile. Staines blanched.
“Shall I ask them to spare your soul from their vengeance?” the priest pressed.
“Yeah,” Staines replied. “That would be very nice.”
The guard hurried away.
“You can’t possibly be serious,” Ellie demanded. This time, she carefully kept her voice to a whisper.
“I wanna know more about this dynamite,” Adam countered.
“Quiet,” the priest ordered as he gazed out over the place where Dawson and Jacobs watched the last nails be driven into the crate. “I’m trying to make a plan.”
“I’ve always been more of an improvisation kind of guy,” Adam offered helpfully.
Ellie could practically see the quick, well-tuned wheels of Kuyoc’s mind churning. His gaze settled on her with a force she could feel.
“What do you dream of?” he demanded.
“Me?” she protested weakly. “I…”
Possibilities churned through her mind. There were so many things—equality, respect. The feeling of sand under her fingers. The freedom to follow the bright, intriguing instincts of her intellect.
Or was Kuyoc asking her a different question?
The air around her tightened, sparking with the potential of the moment before a storm. Her skin, still damp from her ordeal in the caverns below, shivered with a strange chill—and the answer popped from her lips.
“A woman with a scar on her cheek,” Ellie blurted.
Kuyoc’s eyes widened with surprise.
“What?” he gasped.
Ellie’s eyes flickered to the priest’s forehead—to where a similar scar marred his weathered skin.
There were things in the caves below that Ellie now knew were quite capable of inflicting such wounds.
“You were here,” she spluttered, barely managing to keep her voice low. “You were here before. You fought those monsters.” Her eyes snapped to the pendant he wore beside his cross—the one that looked so remarkably like a great, pointed fang.
“Tell me about the woman,” Kuyoc ordered. His eyes blazed with focus.
“I saw her in the desert. In London. And here,” Ellie admitted in an awkward, hushed whisper. “In this place. By the plaza. There was… There was ash raining from the sky.”
“Did she speak?” Kuyoc pressed urgently.
Ellie swallowed thickly and answered him with the echo of the words from a dream.
“What do you want?”
Kuyoc’s eyes slid closed. He shook his head and laughed—a dark, tired chuckle.
“Quis enim cognovit sensum Domini?” he muttered.
Ellie’s mind automatically translated the Latin scripture.
Who knows the mind of God?
When he opened his eyes again, Kuyoc’s look was dangerously intent.
“The mirror was made to grant knowledge,” he said fiercely. “But not the knowledge you ask for—not the knowledge you think you want. It has no ears. It does not care about your thoughts. It seeks the answer in your heart—in your desire. What desire do you hide in your heart?”
The crate by the mirror was nearly completed. In a few minutes, Dawson would order the men to lift the relic from its plinth, set it in the box, and carry it away.
Ellie’s chance to stop that from happening was slipping past her.
“How do you know all this?” she demanded. The words burst from her in a frustrated whisper.
Kuyoc’s expression softened with sympathy.
“Because I have used it, mija,” he replied solemnly. “Because it showed me the way to what I wanted in my heart.”
“San Pedro Siris?” Adam quietly guessed.
“Our leader wanted peace,” Kuyoc returned flatly. “He thought it would save us from the destruction being wrought by your British, but that isn’t how it works. It would only have sentenced us to a slower death.”
He pulled his gaze from the men by the mirror, fixing it dangerously on Ellie instead.
“I thought I wanted freedom,” he said. “And I did. But the mirror found another dream inside my heart—a deeper dream. That was the path it showed me.”
Ellie’s thoughts snapped to her own dreams—to the splashes of blood on white shirtwaists and the smell of smoke that bled through the air of London as she stood in the midst of a wild, violent ecstacy—and she knew.
“Vengeance,” she whispered. The word fell from her lips like a chip of ice.
The fire in Kuyoc’s eyes collapsed into grief.
“I walked away from it. It offered me what I dreamed of, and it was a path paved in blood. Their blood,” he said with a sharp nod toward Dawson and the others. “Our blood. I resisted, but it was close. Too close.” His gaze snapped to Ellie once more and sharpened with challenge. “Could you do the same?”
Memories flooded in. All the little slights and exclusions, the casual aggressions. How they kept adding up, building inside of Ellie until it felt like they must take on a life of their own and burst out of her skin like a monster.
Fear clenched at her chest.
“I… I don’t know,” she confessed. Her throat felt tight.
Kuyoc answered with a sigh. For the first time since Ellie had met him, the priest actually looked his age, his shoulders bent by the weight of the burden he carried.
“She would not have come to you if you were not meant to be here,” he solemnly declared, and then raised his eyes to the heavens that lay on the far side of the dark stone of the cave. “D’iyoos ka’ u-kānān-t-e,” he said and shook his head.
“What does that mean?” Ellie pressed uncomfortably.
He didn’t answer.
“You passed through the cave below,” he said instead.“You saw what was there. If you want to see through the eye of the gods, you must pay for it in blood.”
Ellie’s thoughts flew to the mountain of bones piled in the cavern beneath them… animals and warriors, birds and children—an avalanche of the slaughtered and cast aside.
All of them were tributes. They were the price the people of Tulan had paid for the whispered secrets of the dark oracle that lay beneath the heart of their city.
“There were so many…” she said helplessly as the horror of it washed over her.
“Then think of how many more there will be if your countrymen take it from here!” Kuyoc countered fiercely. “Ask yourself whether they will hesitate to give the oracle what they must in order to get what they want!”
His eyes were a tangle of emotion—guilt and regret. Hope and fear.
He straightened.
“Cut my ropes, Mr. Bates,” Kuyoc ordered. His voice was firm with authority.
Adam glanced out at the men in the center of the cavern, and then darted to where Kuyoc was tied. Crouched behind the pillar, he severed the priest’s bonds with a quick twist of his machete.
“Does this mean you’ve got a plan?” Adam grumbled.
“Sure,” Kuyoc replied as he subtly shook himself loose. His eyes remained locked on the place where Jacobs and Dawson were arranging for the men to lift the mirror. “Now give your woman the knife.”
Adam startled. His gaze flashed from Ellie to the machete.
“What’s she supposed to do with it?” he protested as he handed the blade over with obvious reluctance.
“Use it,” Kuyoc replied with a flash of dark humor. “While you and I provide a distraction.”
“To do what?” Adam blurted with alarm.
Kuyoc ignored him, looking to Ellie instead. The weight of the machete was awkward in her grip.
“I have given you a weapon,” the priest said intently. “Find out what to do with it.”
“What—this?” Ellie demanded with a wide-eyed look at the eighteen-inch blade.
The priest gave a huff of exasperation.
“Not the knife. The dynamite!” he replied.
“What?!” Ellie squeaked in protest.
Kuyoc shook his head. “I hope that ghost knows what she is doing,” he said.
The priest plucked something from his pocket and tossed it at Ellie, who caught it with fumbling hands as she tried not to drop Adam’s enormous knife. She opened her hand and found herself staring down at a book of matches.
The sight sent a ringing note of panic through her, but before she could protest, Kuyoc stepped from the pillar. He raised his hands in the air and began to chant in a stream of mysterious-sounding Yucatec.
“He can’t possibly mean for me to use these. Can he?” Ellie demanded, waving the matches wildly at Adam as he slid into place beside her in the cover of the tumbled stones.
“I dunno, Princess,” Adam replied as he watched the priest grimly. “If he was talking about that dynamite from the shed, then there’s no way that stuff is fresh out of the factory—and I’m guessing you already know what happens to dynamite when it’s been sitting around for a while,” he finished pointedly.
Ellie did. Dynamite became notoriously unstable the older it was. If Kuyoc had managed to bring some through the bush with him, then he was lucky he hadn’t blown himself to pieces with it long before he got here.
But where could it be? The priest had only come to the cave with the clothes on his back… and that crazy breastplate.
