“Shhh,” Raine hissed, a finger to his lips. He wasn’t trying to hurt him, but protect him.
“I thought you’d left,” King whispered accusingly.
Raine shrugged. “Couldn’t just leave you to the natives now, could I,” he replied. “Here, you dropped this.” He dropped the pink purse containing the Moon Mask into the archaeologist’s lap.
King stared at him for several long moments, his face a mask of puzzlement. “You’re a difficult man to work out, Nathan Raine.”
Raine ignored him. “The Americans, the real Americans, will be here anytime now. We’ll find somewhere secure for you to hide until they arrive. Then I’m out of here.”
King studied the hard lines of the other man’s face. Whatever he had done in his past, there was no denying that he had saved his life more times than he could count in a matter of hours. He could have taken the mask and vanished forever, but instead, he had come back to ensure the mask got into the right hands. To ensure that he was safe.
King nodded his agreement.
They waited until the rustling in the leaves was gone, and then Raine led them in the opposite direction. They kept low and moved fast, trying to disturb the undergrowth as little as possible.
The jungle grew darker as the blood-red rays of the dying sun sank below the western horizon. The rainforest grew more alien, the noises more terrifying. Then again, he had just survived a rollercoaster ride through hell so he wondered if he could ever be terrified again.
After some time, Raine slowed, holding out a hand to stop him. After checking the vicinity for signs of the enemy, he crept forward again.
“What the hell is that?” he whispered in the gloom.
King peered beyond him at the odd construction in the jungle.
Encrusted with snaking vines and draped in a blanket of rotting vegetation was an alien shape.
King recognised it instantly. “It’s a ship,” he gasped.
To call it a ship was an exaggeration. In truth, little remained of the ocean-going vessel, merely a handful of metal fittings, pulleys and fallen canon, all encrusted with vegetation. The towering masts and their massive sails had been claimed by the jungle, as had much of her wooden hull. But, before her body had rotted away in the humid damp of the rainforest, the jungle had grown over her, encompassing her hull. Vines had snaked and coiled and wrapped themselves around her masts, the undergrowth had, in turn, decayed and rotted upon her hull, leaving behind a hollow, crusted shell.
A glint of tarnished metal reflected up from the jungle floor not far from the stern of the vessel. King ran to it.
“Benny,” Raine warned, but he ignored him, picking up and rubbing the plaque clean. Beneath the centuries of jungle muck, crude, engraved letters could still be seen.
Hand of Freedom.
“This was Kha’um’s ship,” he realised.
“Bit of a leap, isn’t it?”
King shot him an angry look. “I can’t explain it… I just know this was his ship.”
“But I thought Nadia said our bony friend was Caucasian?”
King’s mind worked it all through, pulling the pieces of the jigsaw together. “He was a competitor,” he realised. “Someone else after the Moon Mask too. He followed Kha’um here, they fought—” Then it hit him. “It was Pryce! The remains that we found. He must have defeated Kha’um, found the Xibalban mask but got trapped in the tunnels and died.” Then he realised something else. “If Kha’um’s body is still on this ship, it would prove everything!” He turned and ran around the vessel’s hull, excited as a school boy.
“Benny,” Raine called after him, trying to keep his voice low. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
But it was no use. King found a crack in the crusted shell of the ship and squeezed inside. Almost all of the wood had rotted away over the centuries, including the dividing decks. Before it had done so, however, the jungle had claimed the wreck, clawing out with snaking limbs to coat the entire structure with plant life. By the time the ship’s hull had rotted away, a carbon-copy shell had replicated its shape. It reminded King of making paper mâché models of the earth by plastering the paper mâché over a balloon. Once the paper mâché set hard, the balloon was pierced with a needle, popping to leave behind only the outer shell.
The undergrowth squelched beneath his feet as Raine pushed inside behind him.
“Ben,” he whispered but King ignored him. A scurry of small mammals, insects and reptiles hastily evacuated, disturbed by the intruders as King switched on his torch, bringing the muted details of the interior into stark focus. The carpet of plant-life swept like a meadow over the fallen rubble of the ship, metal cannons and tar-hardened barrels presumably filled with loot and other less-degradable materials.
But King’s eyes were focussed on one thing only.
The sole occupant of the ghost ship.
“Benny,” Raine hissed angrily. “We’ve gotta go. The soldiers could be here any second.”
But King wasn’t listening. “It’s him,” he said reverently. He knelt down in front of an obscure mound of vegetation and began to carefully peel back the growth. Gently, layer by layer, King peeled back the living cocoon of jungle life to reveal the skeletal remains of a large man beneath. Just as he had expected, the tarnished remains of a brass sword and dagger hung from rotten scabbards around its waist. “It’s him,” he repeated. “It’s Kha’um.”
A noise whipped Raine’s attention around to the hole they had entered through. The flash of red feathers revealed a bright parrot taking flight.
“That’s great,” he said through clenched teeth. “Now it’s time to—”
“He’s holding something,” King interrupted. Raine’s keen eyes scanned their surroundings, searching for danger, while King’s expert fingers uncovered the skeleton’s hands.
Raine did a double take when he saw what he was holding. “Another mask?”
King carefully extracted the second mask from the dead man’s grip and examined it. He removed the first from the purse he had hastily tied back together and compared the two.
“It’s very similar to the one we found in the temple,” he explained and sure enough Raine could make out the similarities — the distorted, near-human shape, the large eye holes, the bared teeth. The colour, however, was quite different. Instead of the blood-red glow of the mask found in Xibalba, the second mask’s metallic composition was a much more subtle, slightly ochre tint. It was also composed out of a single piece of metal, rather than a composite of two.
“It’s a fake,” King realised. “A copy of the real mask. The Xibalbans must have fashioned it to use as a decoy, in public ceremonies or when it was a risk of being damaged.” He glanced sadly at Kha’um’s remains. “He came all this way to find the final piece of the mask, only to steal a fake.”
Raine shrugged. “You can’t win ‘em all,” he said and started for the exit.
“Hang on, what’s this?”
“Now what?!” Raine snapped, swinging around. His irritation was lost on King as he pulled free the skeleton’s other hand. In it, he grasped a single, flat piece of bone, polished smooth. It was roughly four inches in length but both edges had been cut into a knobbly shape.
“What is that?” Raine asked.
“It’s a map,” King said wondrously.
Raine frowned, unconvinced. “Looks like a hair-comb if you ask me.”
“It’s a tactile map,” he explained, closing his eyes and feeling the contours of the bone. “These edges are carved to depict a coastline. A number of cultures use them for navigating in the dark. Trust me, it’s a map.” He opened his eyes and stared at the piece of bone, noting a slight circular depression on what he assumed to be the bottom edge. A metaphoric X. “It’s a treasure map.”