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The Chinese were gone. The giant snake was gone and the man eating crocodiles were occupied. But he had heard Ming’s radio message.

The United States Special Forces had arrived and Nathan Raine would not let them take him.

Whatever the cost.

18:

The Ashes of Eden

Xibalba,
Sarisariñama Tepui,
Venezuela

“You’ve got to take a look at this.” King exclaimed enthusiastically as Raine staggered into the temple on the summit of the pyramid.

“Glad to see you’re okay too,” he deadpanned. “We’ve got to go.”

King didn’t even notice Raine’s bedraggled state; his soaked clothes, bruised and bloodied face and exhausted expression. He himself had been revitalised. He rushed to the temple’s far wall.

“Here, look at this. I think this place was some sort of hall of records. Like a… a library or something.”

“That’s great Benny, but we really need to keep moving.”

“I thought you said on the radio all the soldiers were dead?”

After surviving his wrestle with the anaconda, Raine had used one of the dead men’s radios to see if King was still alive. The archaeologist had answered his own victim’s radio and given Raine his position.

There was a pause before Raine answered now, and if King hadn’t been so caught up in his discovery, he might have picked up on it. “There’ll be more on the way,” Raine lied.

“Then we still have time. I can’t leave yet.” He thumbed on his torch and shone it at the wall. The bright artificial light cut through the fire-lit gloom and illuminated thousands of carvings of all shapes and sizes. Some were easily recognisable, pictograms of birds and animals, vaguely human-looking shapes, even tools and buildings. Others looked to the untrained eye like nothing more than random squiggles, a series of lines, dots, waves and spirals. King saw the incomprehension on Raine’s face.

“It’s a form of writing,” he explained, his voice filled with enthusiasm. One would never have guessed what dangers he had just lived through. “It incorporates Mayan hieroglyphics into it, but it’s far more in depth than that.” He turned and cast his torch beam over the twelve-foot high stone columns which filled the summit temple like a petrified forest. “It’s on all of these columns as well,” he explained. “But most of it has been erased, chiselled out.” He answered a question which Raine didn’t even ask. “I’m not sure why. I mean, we see this type of erasure on temples around the world when new monarchs come to the throne and want to eradicate the memory of previous rulers. Egypt is full of such examples.”

“Yeah, that’s great Benny,” Raine said half-heartedly, peering out across the city. There was no denying the spectacular sight before him: an entire ancient metropolis sprawling inside an enormous cave, but he kept his mind focussed, peering across to the waterfall down which they had come. He pulled a pair of NVG binoculars which he had taken from a charred Chinese corpse on his way to meet King, and focussed them on the falls. Sure enough, as he had feared, eight black-clad soldiers were abseiling down the slippery rocks on either side of the rushing water.

United States Special Forces.

“We’ve really got to go.” He glanced at the carvings. “Does that tell us how to get out of here?”

Sensing the urgency in his voice, King fell back down to reality. “Not exactly,” he replied, peering across the city to where Raine was looking. “Are you sure they’re Chinese?” he asked nervously. “It could be the Americans—”

He cut himself off, dread dropping like a cold hammer through his belly. The Americans. The very people Raine was trying to flee from before the Chinese showed up.

The two men faced each other, an icy tension settling on them. After saving his life half a dozen times in the last hour, King thought, would Raine really hurt him now?

If he decided to, he realised, after seeing him in action, the swift ease with which he had taken out the Chinese, he knew he wouldn’t stand a chance. His best bet was to play along with him, wait for an opportunity to escape to arise.

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” Raine asked, referring to his previous statement.

“What? Oh. Well, this section—”

“The part that’s missing you mean?” he checked, looking where the archaeologist was pointing. Only the faint outline of the carvings remained, but it was enough for King to formulate a basic hypothesis.

“Yeah. I think it tells the origins of the city. But here, this bit that remains, talks about the ‘Face of the Gods’ appearing in a flash of lightning. Shortly thereafter, most of the city’s population died horrible deaths.” He indicated the crude depictions of twisted and distorted humans, mouths open in silent screams, flesh decaying, blood oozing.

The Curse of the Moon Mask. The flesh-eating ‘Evil Spirit’ of Sarisariñama.

His mind flashed back to the horrors he had witnessed in the base camp and he instantly thought of Sid. Was she okay? Was she even alive?

“It was only part of a face that appeared to them and so, most likely to appease its ravenous appetite, they fashioned it into a mask, venerated it, sacrificed hundreds, possibly thousands of people in hopes of it sparing others.” He ran his fingers over a scene of decapitated bodies.

“Peachy,” Raine quipped. “So, no back door out of here?”

“That’s just the thing,” King continued. He felt his eyes drift across to the waterfall but he could not see the soldiers there any longer. It was a dangerous gamble he was playing, stalling for time. If Raine realised what he was doing, there was no telling how he might react. Not to mention, Raine could be telling the truth after all and all King was doing was giving more Chinese troops the time they needed to catch up with them.

“Whatever this place was originally,” he explained, “it ultimately became Xibalba — the Mayan idea of Hell. It was a place of torment, where the damned would suffer at the hands of the Twelve Lords,” he indicated twelve grotesque-looking figures. “Rumours about this city must have escaped from here in some unknown epoch and spread across the early Andean and Mesoamerican cultures. Rumours of an underground city, adorned with the bones of the dead, where people were forced to endure hideous tests and trials…” he glanced at more images of slaughtered people, of ball courts and rivers of fire. “Then, over the years, these ‘rumours’ engrained themselves into the developing cultures’ mythologies. Their tales of the Underworld. Hell.”

“And if this is hell… then no one gets out,” Raine realised. He refocused his binoculars on the soldiers. They were moving now through the city, towards the pyramid. “One entrance, one exit, and we can’t go back that way.”

“Except, it wasn’t always Hell,” King realised, cutting through the other man’s thoughts. His fingertips gently traced the rough contours of the erased carvings, closing his eyes, his mind trying to digest the tactile sensation, to form a picture in his mind.

He opened his eyes again, ran the torch down the length of the temple wall, then out through the forest of columns. All had once been carved with the history of Xibalba, but only a small section, telling the story from the ‘arrival’ of the piece of the Moon Mask remained intact. Untold years of history had been erased, sponged out by the real-life, though no less hellish leaders who came to power during the dark days following the mask’s arrival.

“This place, this city,” he decided. “It wasn’t custom built to be Hell. No great architect sat down and decided today, I’m going to design the Underworld.” He gazed out across the city, his eyes absorbing its reality for the first time. The channels of fire were diminishing as the oil burned away, subduing the once hellish furnace to a gentle, miasmic glow, flicking upon the buildings. He allowed his mind to drift back, to picture what this place had once been before the near obliteration of its population by the tachyons emitted by the Moon Mask.