His mind struggled with the enormity of his discovery even as he raced in a straight line through the darkness. He had no idea where the Chinese were, or even where he was, only that he had to keep running. He clutched the pink purse containing the Moon Mask, a distant part of his mind contemplating what the discovery of Xibalba meant for his father’s theories. The Moon Mask, the Bouda, the Progenitors, Xibalba. How were they all linked?
The thought was blasted out of his mind the instant his boot struck something in the darkness. He staggered, Raine’s grip struggling to keep hold of him. He went down to one knee, his weight crushing something that felt very much like a ribcage, before sprawling across the ground.
The stone block beneath him decompressed with his weight. The grinding of stone as he was lowered only an inch seemed deafening in the enclosed environment. A sense of dread clutched at his churning stomach. With his ear to the ground, the sound of grating stone was replaced with another noise. The muffled rush of water below the floor.
Oh no.
Knowing he shouldn’t, he grappled for the torch Raine had given him, clicked the switch and shone the beam back at whatever had tripped him. Sure enough, it was a body, the ribcage now shattered, its skull missing. But in its skeletal fingers, it clutched the hilt of an iron sword, slightly curved. It was as out of place in the Mayan underworld as he himself was.
It wasn’t the body of an ancient sacrifice. It was the remains of a hapless eighteenth century sailor who had triggered the same trap as him.
“Switch the goddamn light off!” Raine cursed.
“Uh, we might have a problem.”
“You only just realised that?”
Another sound echoed from below, louder than ever. The ground began to tremble.
It’s a Ball Court!
“Get down!” King pulled on Raine’s arm, dragging him to the ground just as something whipped through the space his head had just occupied and around them, a river of fire ignited.
Colonel Ming rendezvoused with Lieutenant Xan’s team at the foot of a series of eight giant stairs. He nodded to his subordinate, the silent communication that he was now in charge of the mission. Then he led the six men he had brought with him, as well as Xan and his two surviving team members up the steps and into the long avenue, weapons ready.
With a stroke of luck, his eyes immediately focussed on the ghostly green and white shapes of two struggling humanoids on the ground, only a hundred feet from the far exit of the avenue.
Got you!
He raised his QBZ-95, took aim and—
He registered the rumble beneath his feet only a second before his NVGs illuminated an object hurtling towards him — a rubber ball with razor-sharp blades protruding from its sides.
He dropped flat to the ground but the man behind him was too slow. In the blink of an eye, the blades sliced across his throat, cut through the tendons and muscle of his neck and shattered his spine. Both head and ball hit the ground and rolled into a semi-circular gulley which directed them both towards the base of the spectator-like stands to the right of the avenue, vanishing into a hole.
“Retreat!” he barked at his men as, shuffling on haunches, they turned and—
The incredible wall of flame erupted fifty feet into the underground void, totally blocking the entrance to the avenue, and any hopes of escape.
The ancient mechanism, in some ways crude, in some ways ingenious, had not failed. Unlike other booby traps in ancient ruins the world over, the Xibalbans had not relied on bio-degradable rope or rotten wooden contraptions. They relied, instead, on the power of water and the combustion of a single spark.
As Benjamin King’s weight had depressed the block of stone he had fallen on, a one-inch gap had opened in an underground reservoir. Fed and replenished over hundreds of years by the rainforest’s downpours being directed through an ancient sewage system, built originally for the irrigation of crops, the unleashed fury of the water had surged into the crack. It had pushed the depressed block lower, allowing more and more water to surge through a network of tubes beneath the avenue. Each tube led to a stone ‘plug’ in front of which was a rubber ball, smeared with razors. Each ball was fractionally larger than the hole facing the avenue which prevented it from merely rolling out. As the water built the pressure behind the plug, the ball was compressed until at last it gave in to the weight of water. It popped with tremendous force and speed out of the hole, shooting with deadly menace across the enclosed avenue.
An independent flood of water was directed through the pipes to push against six further ‘plugs’. These plugs did not push against rubber balls, but instead held back reservoirs of highly flammable oil. As the oil was unleashed, it poured out of six holes in the sides of the walls at either end of the avenue. Each ‘tap’ was carved into the ferocious visage of a jaguar-head and, as the oil spilt forth, a single spark created by the stone blocks rubbing against one another ignited it so that it looked as though the monstrous felines spewed forth the fires of hell.
The wall of fire blocked the avenue, but it did not stop there. Instead, the river of oil gushed into indents in the ground, washing away from the Xibalban Ball Court, swirling around corners, sluicing down alleyways, roiling down the gutters of ancient streets, carrying atop it a seething river of flame.
In moments, the entire, enormous underground cavern was alight with the fiery glow. Shadows flickered and flames danced, illuminating ancient stone work, elaborate carvings of mythological beasts, of great and epic heroes, of the demonic overloads of the Mayan Underworld. Skull-lined avenues blazed, the hollow gaze of the dead staring into oblivion. And still the river of fire advanced, circling the entire city to bring light to a world of darkness.
Great columned halls, a rival to the wonders of Karnak, were revealed. Arched gates and monolithic walls all shimmered under the molten glow. Vast sweeps of Andean-like terraces clung to the inner walls of the enormous cave, once the lifeblood of a subterranean culture. The great manors of the Lords of Xibalba were revealed in all their hideous glory, decorated with the bones of sacrificial victims. Limestone temples, hewn and twisted by stonemasons of old stood atop vast platforms which towered above the crumbled slums of the city’s general population. Elaborate networks of aqueducts, viaducts and canals ringed the urban centre, small streams branching off to irrigate the farming terraces, long since abandoned and left to decay in the void.
But, dominating it all, rearing above the city with majestic glory, towered an enormous step-pyramid. Not unlike the famous Temple of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá, the pyramid’s four faces were lined with protruding stairways, balustrades decorated with snarling jaguars and feathered serpents, rising to its flat-topped summit two hundred feet above its base. Covered with only the hardiest vines and vegetation which struggled to survive in the usually lightless world, the pyramid’s white face, glistening with moisture, reflected the firelight and cast it aglow.
Trapped within the fiery depths of the Xibalban Ball Court as razor-edged projectiles shot from the walls, Benjamin King stared in both awe and horror at his surroundings.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “We’ve got a problem.”
15:
The Ball Game