“Now we’re getting somewhere. That could be how I get out of here.” It might be as simple as standing on the stone and saying the word, or it might involve a blood sacrifice. He wasn’t ready to leave yet, but it was good to have a starting point when the time came.
He stared down at the two other carved insets. The one on the left, the one he’d first stood on, was an intricate glyph: a large, rounded square flanked with two rounded rectangles, one ending in a fanlike shape. Each of the main shapes had shapes within shapes, curling and looping back on one another in the Mayan tradition, which was as much about beauty as writing. “Yilaj,” he said softly, translating the three phonetic symbols spelling out yi-la-ji. It meant “was seen.” The other stone bore a stylistic reptile’s face in profile, with a closed eye and an appended symbol for a second syllable, written phonetically. Ma ilaj. “Was not seen.”
Ohhh-kay, he thought, trying to parse it out. He had was seen and was not seen. Positive and negative. Or . . . yes and no.
Lucius’s breath shuddered out of him as he remembered the last thing he’d said before his body walked him over to the “yes” glyph. He tried it again. “Is there a trick to help me find what I’m looking for in here?”
His body jerked and he took a step forward. Yilaj. Yes.
Oh, holy flying fuck. He was in the middle of a Nightkeeper Ouija board, and he was the damned planchette.
Pulse racing, he stepped off the carved stone and tried another question. “Is Jade safe?” He hadn’t meant to ask that, really. But he needed to know. His body jerked and he found himself standing on ma ilaj. No, she wasn’t okay. Shit. “Is she in danger?” he demanded quickly. Nothing happened. Realizing he hadn’t stepped off the indicator stone, he jumped to neutral ground and repeated the question. He found himself standing back on the “no” stone, which didn’t make any sense. How could she be unsafe, but not in danger?
She couldn’t be. Which meant he’d screwed up the translation, or its intent.
He looked back down at the glyphs for a moment, then got it. Stepping to neutral ground, he said, “Does ma ilaj mean you can’t answer the question?” Yilaj. Okay, at least he’d cleared that up. The library’s magic—or was this the Prophet’s magic itself?—not only had its limitations, it knew what they were. Cool, he thought, pulse starting to skim faster now, not from his dislike of his body being used this way, with or without his permission—though there was some of that—but with the sort of academic anticipation he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Back at UT, when the most important thing in his life had been finishing up his thesis, he’d felt the buzz every time he made even infinitesimal progress in finding the elusive screaming-skull glyph that was rumored to mark Nightkeepers’ involvement in the end-time. At Skywatch, he’d felt the buzz nearly every damned day at first, when he’d suddenly found himself surrounded by the people of legend and been given access to archived codices and artifacts that were purely unknown in the outside world. Since his return, though, there hadn’t been any buzz. There had been only failure and frustration. He might have grown into himself physically, but in doing so, he’d lost part of that other side of himself without even really realizing it.
Now, standing in the library of the ancients, finally in a position to do something to help the Nightkeepers rather than hurt them, he felt the buzz. And he fucking loved it.
Grinning, he stepped off the stone. He didn’t let himself ask again about Jade. She was safely back at Skywatch. And besides, the library didn’t know her status. Which brought up an interesting point, come to think. “Are you unable to answer because the question relates to current events rather than something contained specifically within this library?” Yilaj. He was getting the hang of this, he thought. But when he stepped off the “yes” stone again, he stumbled. As though it had been hovering at the periphery of his consciousness, waiting for him to notice it, dizzying exhaustion suddenly roared through him, graying his vision and making the floor pitch beneath him.
“Knock it off,” he told himself, his words going slurred. “You’re not that guy anymore.” He was finished with being weak, finished with fading and giving up when people needed him most. He was a new man now. So fucking act like it. Granted, magic burned an enormous amount of energy—he’d seen the magi refueling like marathoners and then crashing hard after major spell casting—but he didn’t have access to food right now, so he was just going to have to suck it up and deal. It’d probably be a good idea for him to get going on his research, though. Either that, or figure out how to make the stone jaguar in the corner cough up some grub.
Steadying himself through force of will, he stepped to neutral ground and took a moment to formulate his next question, eventually coming up with: “Can you tell me how the Prophet’s magic works?”
Yilaj.
“How?”
No answer.
He stepped off the stone, forced himself to focus through the whirling dizziness, and realized he hadn’t asked an actual question. He tried again: “How does the Prophet’s magic work?”
This time it wasn’t so much of a surprise when his body did an about- face without his input, but it was still damned unsettling to have the scenery passing by him without knowing where he was going.
He could feel his muscles interacting as he walked toward the racks, but couldn’t tell where the neural inputs governing those actions were coming from. Before, the demon had invaded his skull, pushing him into a corner of his own consciousness and eventually severing his connection with the outside world. Now the magic was somehow controlling his body without pressuring his mind. On one level, that was a relief. On another, it squicked him right the hell out, because if he couldn’t sense the invader, he couldn’t defend himself against it, either.
Then he passed the first rack and discomfort gave way to some serious gawking. If he’d been moving under his own steam, he would’ve stopped at a row of carved heads with the smashed-in, crooked noses of pugilists or ballplayers. Or he would’ve poked through a rack of accordion-folded codices, almost certain to find stories, histories, maybe even poems and songs. Only a tiny fraction of the vibrant culture of the ancient Maya had survived through to modern day on Earth, and at that, most of the info came from versions of oral traditions that had been written down by Spanish missionaries in the fifteen hundreds.
Lucius’s soul sang the “Ode to Joy” at the sight of so many codices in one place. His body, though, kept walking until it stopped at the eighth rack in. Unbidden, his hand reached out to touch a stack of fig-bark pages that weren’t folded accordion-style, but rather were bound along one side with bark strips that had been soaked and bent, then threaded through holes bored down the left side of each page.
For all that it was made of fig bark, the thing looked like a spiral-bound notebook, jarringly modern in the ancient surroundings. The cover was unadorned, giving no hint to the volume’s contents.