CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Breathe, Jade told herself as she stared into the
dark entrance of a tunnel leading into the canyon wall.
Just keep breathing. She was glad she
had someone with her, though, and she was glad it was Lucius, who
was letting her take it slow when she knew he had to be dying to
get in there, not just for discovery for discovery’s sake, but
because he was hoping that the members of the star bloodline—or
maybe even Vennie herself—might have left behind some additional
clues that might, gods willing, get him back into the library. It
seemed that love—or at least great sex—wasn’t the answer. It was
all about the magic, after all.
“Dumb ass,” he said
suddenly. When she turned to him, he made a dope-slap motion. “I
didn’t bring a flashlight.”
“Let me try.” She
held out her hand and kindled a foxfire. The magic shone brightly
and didn’t sap her strength nearly as much as it had before. Was
she actually getting stronger? It seemed so. She took a deep,
steadying breath and didn’t let herself lean back into him. “Here
we go.” Then, remembering the claustrophobia, she asked, “Are you
going to be okay with this?”
His grin was that of
the overgrown boy he’d first seemed, in the body of the man he’d
become. “Just try and stop me.”
The tunnel was wide
enough for the two of them to walk side by side, so they did.
Unlike most of the Mayan-era Nightkeeper temples, it was tall
enough that Lucius didn’t have to duck. At first, Jade thought that
was because it was a natural fissure. As they moved inward, though,
she saw smoothed-out areas, and one or two spots where narrow
places had been widened by hand. In the absence of the close-fitted
stonework and stylized carvings she’d grown used to in ritual
settings, the tunnel almost didn’t feel Nightkeeper in origin. It
rounded a gentle curve, cutting out the daylight and leaving them
to rely entirely on the foxfire, but the magic stayed true, with
little strain on her reserves.
“I wonder how far—”
She broke off when the tunnel widened to a cavern and she had an
answer to how far it went.
More, she couldn’t
breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak or think as her entire
consciousness logjammed on a rapid- fire kaleidoscope of images
that she couldn’t process all at once.
“Oh,” she said. That
was all she could manage, really, because the breath backed up in
her lungs and her throat closed until only a stingy trickle of
oxygen got through.
The budding
symbologist in her locked on the spiral designs on the floor and
ceiling, recognizing the multirayed galactic symbol of the
Chacoans, who had appeared suddenly in the first few centuries
A.D., flourished in the canyons of New Mexico, and then disappeared
just as suddenly, leaving behind intricate stone cities built
entirely for the dead. The scribe in her noted a small carved box
of the sort the ancient Maya and Nightkeepers had used to store
their most precious possessions.
The daughter in her,
though, focused on the dry, desiccated corpse slumped up against
the far wall.
Vennie’s corpse was
much as Lucius had described its spiritual representation in the
library, with a hooked nose and protruding teeth that bore little
resemblance to the bright, laughing girl from the photos. Oddly,
Jade found she could look at her mother’s death-ravaged face and
hands without any real queasiness; on some level she’d been
prepared for that. What she hadn’t been entirely prepared for,
though, was for the body to be wearing the remains of high-top
Reeboks, acid-washed jeans, a faded hot-pink sweatshirt, and a
denim jacket that was two shades darker than the pants, and
carefully decorated with iron-on patches for bands that now played
on classic-rock radio.
The clothes didn’t
just date the corpse; they drove home the child her mother had
been, somehow uniting the two inside Jade. Yes, Vennie had been a
wife and a mother, and had been torn between the responsibilities
of the bloodline she’d been born into and the strictures of the one
she’d chosen. But at the same time, her life had just been
beginning. If it hadn’t been for the massacre, she would have been
in her early forties now. She would’ve been at her prime as a mage,
whatever form that magic might have taken.
“She barely even got
a chance to know herself,” Jade murmured.
Lucius gave her a
one-armed hug and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. Then he
stepped away, giving her some space she wasn’t sure she needed.
“Are you okay with me checking out the box?”
“Go for it.” She
stayed with the body, though. It seemed like the right thing to
do.
Sooner than she’d
expected, he made a satisfied noise and held out something to her.
“I think you should open this one.”
It was a hot-pink
spiral-bound notebook with glitter stars stuck to the cover. To
Jade’s surprise, she felt her lips curve in a smile as she took the
small volume. “She wasn’t subtle, was she?”
“She was seventeen,”
he said, which more or less said it all.
She met Lucius’s
eyes. “Thank you. Not just for the notebook, but for all of it. For
being here with me, for letting me see her first . . . For all of
it.”
He tipped his head,
but didn’t quite meet her eyes. “That’s what friends are
for.”
Telling herself not
to read too much into that—or too little—she nodded and cracked
open the notebook. The lined pages were brittle and yellow; the
first half of the book appeared to be class notes, full of cryptic
scribbles about the hero twins and the end-time interspersed with
doodles of the spiral pattern that was echoed on the floor and
ceiling of the cavern, along with two repeated symbols: the star
and the warrior’s glyph. “A little full of ourselves, were we?”
Jade commented, though more fondly than anything. She thought she
was getting a handle on her feelings where it came to Vennie,
slotting her—for the moment, anyway—in a mental position she
thought was someplace between sister and mother.
“Again, she was
seventeen.” Lucius grinned, but lines of tension bracketed his eyes
and mouth as he read over her shoulder. “Is there anything in there
besides class notes?”
She flipped a few
more pages, then stopped. Everything stopped—her voice, her breath,
even her heart—as she stared down at the single page filled with
looping writing.
It began:
Dear Jade.
“Oh,” she said, a
single syllable of pained longing.
Lucius read the top
line over her shoulder, then simply touched his temple to hers in
support. “Read it to me,” he suggested, his voice barely more than
a whisper of breath in her ear. “More, read it to her. Let her know you got it, that she’s been found
after all these years.” Then he moved away, giving her the room to
make her own decision.
She nodded,
swallowing to clear the huge lump in her throat. “ ‘Dear Jade,’ ”
she began, and had to start over when her voice cracked. “ ‘Dear
Jade, please forgive me for what I’m about to do. And please ask
the stars to forgive me too. I know I don’t belong here anymore.
But I don’t really belong anywhere, do I? I’m an outsider, soon to
become a Prophet. Please ask them to use my voice to help the king
with his decisions. If it’s to be an attack, use me to win. If not,
use me to plan the 2012 war, though that’s still so far away.
Either way, please know that I am satisfied so long as the magi
don’t march to their deaths the day after tomorrow, which is what
I’m scared will happen if I don’t do this. And finally, please tell
your father, tell Josh, that it wasn’t always easy loving him, but
I never stopped. I love you both. Your mother, Venus.’
”
When Jade fell
silent, the cave seemed to hum with the echoes of her voice, the
sound becoming, for a moment, multitonal.
“Vennie must’ve been
a nickname for Venus,” Lucius observed. “Venus is one of the most
visible stars in the sky, and its patterns form a cornerstone of
the entire calendric system.”
Jade found a ghost of
a smile. “Venus. Yeah. That fits.” She sighed. “She must’ve written
this part before she tried the soul spell. She was assuming that
the Prophet’s magic would take her soul and she wouldn’t get
another chance to say good-bye.” Something nudged at the edge of
her brain—a question she hadn’t asked, a connection she was
missing.
“ ‘This part’?”
Lucius said. “There’s more?”
She nodded, skimming
ahead, not sure what she was feeling, what she was supposed to
feel. “The next one is another ‘Dear Jade’ letter. I think she was
expecting the members of the star bloodline to find her once she
became the Prophet—maybe there was some sort of magic signal to
announce its arrival?—and wanted them to have this info, but
couldn’t bring herself to write it directly to the family members
who had turned away from her. So she wrote them to a six-month-old
baby instead.”
“Or else she wanted
you to know she was, in her own way, a hero.”
Nodding, Jade began
reading again: “ ‘Dear Jade . . . Gods . . . oh, gods, how do I say
this? How can it be true? I said the spell right, made the
sacrifice, but the magic didn’t take me. Instead, it took
her, took someone I didn’t even know
about, but loved with all my heart—’ ” She broke off, her blood
chilling as she made the connection that had been bothering her.
“That’s why she ended up like you. She wasn’t possessed by a
makol. She was pregnant, and she didn’t
figure it out until it was already too late.”
Gods.
How was it that they
had missed asking that question? Jade wondered. Or had it been
asked and she skimmed over it, somehow guessing this might be the
answer and not wanting to add it to the mix? Nausea pressed hot and
thick against the back of her throat. A baby. A sister. Her mother
had sacrificed her unborn baby to the Prophet’s spell. And being a
soul spell, it wouldn’t have freed the child’s essence to enter the
afterlife. The baby’s soul would’ve been completely and utterly
destroyed. Poof, gone.
Lucius made a move to
reach for her, but she shook her head and held him off. “No. I need
to finish this.” If she didn’t keep going, she might lose it
entirely.
“If you’re
sure.”
She nodded and read:
“ ‘Tell the harvesters they lost one of their own because of me,
because I was too proud, too vain, too sure that the elders of the
star bloodline were wrong when they said it wasn’t yet time for the
last Prophet, that he wouldn’t be made until just before the triad
years. They were wrong, I thought, when really I was the one who was wrong, and an innocent paid
the ultimate price. Her soul isn’t in the sky. It’s just
gone, destroyed in order to propel me
between the worlds. I still need to go back into the library again,
gain what knowledge I can, and hope to hell it’s enough to convince
the king not to march. I didn’t get any answers the first time
because it took me too long to figure out the yes/no bullshit,
which doesn’t work exactly like the stories said it would. I’m
starving, but I ate all the bread, and the fountain ran dry, and .
. . and I’m whining. I’ll stop now and rest so I can keep going.
Sometimes it seems that all you can do
is keep going. I love you. Your mother, Venus.’ ”
“Now she’s starting
to sound more like she did in the other journal,” Lucius noted.
“Less like she’s writing a thank-you note—or rather, an apology—to
an elderly relative, and more like a strung-out, confused
kid.”
“There’s one more
line. Just a sentence scribbled at the bottom.” Jade scanned the
sentence, and went still.
“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
über-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 Chichén Itzá: 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 teams could lose
points as well as gain them, evenly matched games could last for
days. But in a twist that’s more billiards than volleyball, if a
player got the sun ball through a vertical-set hoop high up on the
ball court wall, it was an instant win. Eight ball, corner pocket.
Game over; hit the showers.”
Sudden understanding
lit Jade’s face. “The hoop represents the dark spot in the center
of the Milky Way galaxy, which they thought was the entrance to
Xibalba.”
“Exactly, which makes
the symbolism twofold. In the context of the sun passing through
the entrance to Xibalba, the game reenacts Kinich Ahau’s daily
journey into and out of Xibalba, even as the arc of the ball itself
symbolizes the sun traveling across the sky. From the perspective
of the dark center of the Milky Way, putting the ball through the
hoop represents the sun traveling through that dark center, which
is the astronomical event that’s going to coincide with the winter
solstice of 2012, precipitating the barrier’s
collapse.”
There was a moment of
silence before Brandt said sourly, “When you put it that way, seems
kind of dumb we haven’t been playing the game all
along.”
Lucius tipped his
hand in a yes/no gesture. “I’m distilling out the points that
relate to Kinich Ahau, but there are a ton of other connections
within the game: to reptiles and birds, to harvest festivals,
different gods and events, even to the class system itself. Chichén
Itzá had seven ball courts located at various positions relative to
the different temples and neighborhoods, which were stratified by
socioeconomic status. If you give me enough time, I could probably
make an argument for tying the game to almost any god or prophecy
you cared to throw at me.”
Brandt pressed, “But
you think this connection is solid?”
He nodded. “I do. In
fact, I think my subconscious has been trying to tell me about the
connection for a while now. I kept gravitating toward ball game
artifacts, when the game had never been that big a deal for me
before. So, yeah. The connection is solid.”
The other man nodded.
“Then I guess we’re playing. What are the rules?”
“In the ancient
versions of the game, serves were typically made with the hands or
forearms, returns with the hips, legs, and feet, which were
protected with light armor, some of which got pretty elaborate. In
addition to the shin and body protectors, there were hand stones,
which worked on the same principle as brass knuckles, adding weight
and force to the return hit, and yokes, which covered the hips,
lowered the player’s center of gravity, and increased the power of
a body hit.” Lucius sketched in the air as he spoke. “There were
face masks and helmets, of course, because the balls were heavy
enough to do some major damage. And there were other pieces that
were largely decorative, which the players wore for the opening
ceremonies and then stripped off for the actual game.”
Michael grinned.
“Sounds like a cross between a WWF grudge match and the Super
Bowl.”
“Mix in some major
religious overtones, and you’re not far off,” Lucius agreed. “The
ballplayers were the rock stars of their day. Even after
retirement, they were revered for their wins, and some became the
boon companions of their kings. To be buried with your ballplayers’
gear was a huge sign of power and respect.”
“How much of these
raiments survived into modern day?”
“Of the original
stuff, very little. Most of it was made of wood and leather, some
of rubber itself. None of that lasted long, given the climate. The
artifacts we’ve got now are mostly pottery replicas, like the ones
in the pictures I passed around.” He paused, grinning. “However,
rumor has it that there’s a pile of modernized equipment in the
back of one of the storerooms, along with a couple of experts who
are going to show us how it’s done.”
That got him a few
confused looks, until Jox, Carlos, and Shandi all rose from their
places at the far end of the table and came around to its head.
Carlos was carrying a banged-up cardboard box. All three
winikin, it turned out, had played
seriously before the massacre, and had been among those responsible
for teaching the younger generation the moves of the ritual game.
What has happened before will happen
again, Lucius thought. Circles within circles, past,
present, and future.
Jox stepped forward,
with the other two behind him, looking grim, efficient, and
suddenly very coach-like. “Everyone ready for the rules of the game
the way your parents played it?”
Almost in synchrony,
the magi turned and looked at the tall parallel walls of the ball
court. “I guess I always thought of it as another artifact,” Brandt
said. “It’s just always there, you
know? Like it’s watching over us.”
“And now maybe it’s
going to do more.” Jox nodded to the other two winikin; they dug into the box and started handing
out thin booklets that were heavy on diagrams, light on text, and
laid out the basics. Lucius had snagged one earlier and already had
it memorized. He’d even run through some of the moves, which had
come back to him with an ease that had surprised him. He’d never
been much into sports before. Then again, that was
before.
“We’re just going to
study pictures?” Rabbit asked from the far end of the table. Lucius
glanced over, surprised to see him and Myrinne at the outskirts of
the group. He hadn’t noticed the young couple’s arrival, and he
wasn’t used to Strike letting the girl sit in on meetings. More, it
seemed, had changed than just Rabbit’s level of
pyrokinesis.
“Only briefly.” The
corners of Jox’s mouth kicked up. “Then we’re going to
practice.”