Exhilaration slammed through him. The library!
Then gravity caught up with him and he fell a good three feet to land face-first on the chamber floor. His chin cracked against granite and the breath left him with a hiss of pain as he pancaked it hard. He was also unexpectedly naked, which made the pancake thing suck more than it would have otherwise. Stone slapped his belly and mashed his ’nads, and he let out a grunt as he hit. But the pain didn’t last long in the face of the crazy-making wonder that surrounded him.
He rolled onto his back, laughing and gasping for air. “I did it. I fucking did it!” Granted, the Prophet wasn’t supposed to physically—or metaphysically, for that matter—travel to the library, but maybe that was the sacrifice required for his having kept his soul intact. If so, that’s not going to be much of a sacrifice at all, he thought. Aloud, he crowed, “What glyph geek wouldn’t want access to a place like this?”
The walls were carved in the Classical Mayan style, with figures turned in profile as they bent over codices, holding quill pens and feather-and-fur paintbrushes, or hammering away at chisels, carving stories into stone. And if those walls pressed too close, sparking a hint of the suffocating claustrophobia that had plagued him for the past half year, he’d learned to shove the weakness aside and focus on the things that mattered. Like the library.
He’d finally gained access to the knowledge the Nightkeepers needed. Deaf gods be praised. More, there was a new and oh-holy-fuck problem facing them: namely that the Banol Kax had stolen the sun god and were planning on making a switcheroo in nine days. And although the information surrounding him dated only up to the fifteen hundreds, when the conquistadors’ pillaging of the so-
called New World had prompted the surviving magi to hide the library and create the Prophet’s spell, the Nightkeepers were hoping—praying—that the cache would contain additional prophecies dealing with the end-time . . . including the role the sun god was supposed to play.
“So all I’ve got to do is find those prophecies . . . or better yet, a spellbook entitled, How to Put the Sun Back into the Sky.” But, standing naked in the room he’d spent the past six months trying to find, and a decade prior to that dreaming of, even when he hadn’t known precisely what he’d dreamed, he looked around the narrow, jam-packed arcade . . . and realized that he didn’t have the faintest clue where to start. It wasn’t like there was a computerized, searchable cross-ref system already in place.
The memory of putting together just such a system for the Nightkeepers’ archive caught him hard, bringing a blast of the mingled desire and frustration that had ridden him as he and Jade had worked together day after day. Back then he’d done his damnedest to get her to notice him as more than just a friend, only to find that, when he thought he’d gotten past the friends zone, it was only to friends with benefits. At the time, that wasn’t what he’d wanted or needed. And now . . .
“It’s not important,” he said aloud, though that wasn’t entirely true. Jade was very, very important to him, whether as a friend or as . . . whatever they were now. But at the same time, he couldn’t focus on her, or on trying to figure out what sort of relationship they were going to have going forward. He was in the library.
Reminding himself to breathe, he took a long look around.
He was standing in a relatively open space at one end of the narrow room. There was a study area nearby with a low stone table and a couple of fixed benches. Three intricately carved stones were set into the floor beside the table, and several wall hooks held lush-looking woven green robes worked with brilliant yellow at their edges. In one corner, a deep wooden rack contained an assortment of quills, tools, fig-bark strips, limestone wash, and all the other necessities for making the ancient, accordion-folded codices of the Mayan-era Nightkeepers. There was a jaguar statue in the opposite corner; he thought it might have been a fountain at one point. It looked as though water would have emerged from a tiny spout halfway up the wall, then dropped into the open mouth of the snarling stone jaguar. The animal’s lower jaw formed a bowl that would have drained down the back of the creature’s throat, presumably to recirculate.
A second bowl rested between the recumbent jaguar’s paws; it was marked with a looping glyph that resembled a thumbs-up gesture made by a stubby-fingered hand. The glyph, which translated to
“sa,” represented corn or corn gruel, but was more generally taken to mean “food.”
Okay. Food and water. He got that. If he was lucky—or as smart as he liked to think he was—he’d be able to figure out how the rest of the place worked.
He prowled the study area, trying to get a mental picture of the magi who had set it up. If he could understand how they ordered their workspace, maybe he could guess at how they had organized the contents of the shelves. He badly wanted to dive right into the stacks, but held himself back, knowing his own ability to hyperfocus and lose track of things. Odds were that unless he went in there with a plan, he’d get sucked in by the first codex he laid hands on, regardless of its contents. So he behaved, staying in what passed for his analytical brain.
Everything was bright and new, dust free and fresh seeming. Magic, he thought, knowing that also accounted for the torches that burned steadily without emitting smoke or noticeably impacting the oxygen level in the room. Almost as an afterthought, he snagged one of the robes and shrugged it on; it proved to be a loose-fitting ceremonial garment worked with quills and feathers down the back, in the geometric pattern of repeating “G” characters that was often associated with the gods, or places of sacred thought. The realization humbled him with the reminder that he wasn’t just a guy on a mission; he was the latest in a long line of scholars who had served the library. He might not be a mage, but he’d kick the shit out of anyone who tried to take the title of “scholar” away from him. He’d damn well earned it.
“And now it’s time to earn it all over again,” he said, staring at row upon row of racked artifacts and codices and noting the total lack of distinguishing marks on any of the shelves. “But I’ve gotta ask: Is there any way to find what I’m looking for without cataloging every bloody artifact myself?”
With a sudden lurch, his body seesawed into motion without his volition, walking him stiff- legged to an open space near the stone table. Shocked, Lucius cursed under his breath and tried to stop moving but couldn’t, tried to change direction, but couldn’t do that, either. He flashed back hard on the memory of his body doing things his mind couldn’t control. Godsdamn it! But before either panic or rage could fully form, the compulsion drained away and he found himself standing beside the study table, near where the three carved stones were set into the floor.
Magic, he thought, wonder shimmering through the loathing that came with being controlled, compelled. “Don’t do that again,” he warned, though he wasn’t sure whether he was talking to his own body or whatever force had briefly animated it, divorcing his flesh from his soul. Gods, what was it about him? Was he so loosely connected to himself that it was easy to pull that shit? One of these days, would his consciousness take a walk without his corpse, and that’d be the end of things?
Okay, now he was freaking himself out. Focus, moron . Forcing himself back on task, he studied the carved stones. There were three of them arranged in a triangle, all engraved with familiar glyphs. His bare toes were touching the left- bottom stone of the two-dimensional pyramid. The stone at the apex was carved with the so-called “snaggle-toothed dragon” glyph, that of gaping jaws framing an open space. It was one of several glyphs for way.