Strike crossed to the coffin and dropped to his knees, though she couldn’t have said whether the move was shock or obeisance. Leah moved up beside him, braced one hand on his shoulder, then passed another along a line of boxed text, something that looked partway like a cartouche, partway like Mayan glyphs. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s the First Father’s tomb.”
Strike nodded raggedly. “I think so. Anna will have to translate everything and confirm, but . . . yeah. It’s him. The First Father.” He reached out a shaking hand, let it hover for a moment, then touched the carved stone with deeply ingrained reverence. “Gods.”
Of all of them, it made sense that the king would be hit hardest by the discovery, because he’d known all along that the Nightkeepers were real, the histories were real. According to those histories, a single adult mage had survived Akhenaton’s massacre to lead the Nightkeepers’ children and the newly made winikin out of Egypt to the Mayan territories. From there, the First Father had created the original writs. He’d shaped how their civilization was to proceed along the millennia until the end-
time. He’d written down the thirteen original prophecies, and then the demon prophecies that Iago had used to destroy the skyroad. The First Father had been the beginning of so many things, the wellspring of so much of the history and culture of the Mayan-era Nightkeepers, that it seemed impossible to believe he was truly a historical figure. Yet Sasha was actually standing there, staring at the sarcophagus that had been wrought by the people who had known him, lived with him, and had fashioned his last resting place after those of the god-kings they had known in another land, half a world away. And now, it seemed, that coffin also held the answer to the Nightkeepers’ prayers: the library scroll.
Michael took a long look at the carvings on one side of the sarcophagus: a stylized scorpion atop a pair of wavy lines, with row upon row of hieroglyphs below it. “Hey, Rabbit. Is this your scorpion?”
The younger mage darted through the crowded chamber, glanced at the carving, and whipped out his cell phone to take a few snaps.
“I’m guessing that’s a ‘yes,’ ” Michael said dryly. But then he glanced at Strike, making sure he and the others were wrapped up in their own explorations of the chamber. Lowering his voice, he said, “Ambrose said something about using the scorpion spell to break his connection to the barrier.” He paused. “What, exactly, did you ask the scrying spell right before you saw the carvings?”
Rabbit hesitated only fractionally before he said, “I started by asking how to call a new nahwal, and how I’m supposed to help in the war, but I didn’t get shit. Last thing I asked was how to keep Myrinne.”
Michael smiled grimly. Yeah, that was about what he’d figured. “So the answer was for you to get rid of the Xibalban’s mark?” He supposed it made sense that the Nightkeepers’ purest connection, that of the jun tan, would be unable to form in the presence of dark magic.
Rabbit nodded, eyeing the hieroglyphs. “If it broke Ambrose’s connection to the barrier, d’ya think it’d break the hellmark connection, too?”
“Your scrying spell seems to think so.” Which made Michael wonder what other connections it could break.
“What have you two got?” Strike asked from the other side of the tomb.
“Not sure,” Michael answered. “Maybe nothing.” But maybe everything.
He’d almost killed Sasha. When she’d put herself between his machete and her father’s demi- nahwal, Michael had seen her, had known who she was, but he hadn’t registered it or cared; he’d been too damned caught up in the raging fury. In that moment he’d hated himself, hated the world.
The sluice gates had held, but somehow the Other had been inside him regardless, urging him on, bringing the blood fury it had been taught to love, to feed on.
Who the hell was he? Michael? The Other? Both? Neither?
He didn’t know how he’d stopped himself from cutting her head off, and he couldn’t promise he’d be able to stop himself the next time. The muk hovered at the edges of his soul. The dam hadn’t cracked or broken; it had gone insubstantial, friable, like the barrier was becoming as the countdown to the end-time continued. And he knew, deep down inside, that if the Other broke through now, there would be no stopping it until everything—and everyone—around him was dead. Where the Other had once killed with all manner of human weapons, now his alter ego wielded the muk like a weapon, with deadly and precise command.
More, Sasha had flat-out asked him about the “silver magic,” which he feared meant she was already too close to it. The Other’s power had been drawn to her from the very beginning; it wanted her goodness and life, wanted to corrupt her, use her, destroy her balance. And that absolutely, positively could not be allowed to happen.
He’d die first, damn it.
“Ambrose said the scroll is inside the coffin,” she said in answer to a question from Strike.
“According to him, it’ll open during the solstice, and we’ll find the scroll, which will tell us how to summon something—or some one—called a Prophet. It all has to happen during the peak of the solstice.”
“The solstice,” Strike murmured. He looked down at Leah, hope kindling in his eyes. “We could have the library a week from now.”
“The timing will be tight,” she warned, but her eyes were alight with hope.
Rabbit was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet, still taking pictures of the carved hieroglyphs. “We’ve gotta get these pictures to Anna, ASAP, but I’ve got zero signal.”
Strike nodded. “You’re right, we need to get Jade and Anna on this, on all of it. We’ll have to head topside, though—there’s no way I can ’port from down here, either. Too much interference.”
Cell phones were pressed into service to record the site for initial analysis, and then the magi formed a rough line and headed out. This time, Strike and Leah led the way, with Sasha near the end.
Michael fell in behind her, forming the rear guard. As he did so, her sex magic slid along his skin. The darkness within him locked on the sway of her hips, the lethal grace of her movements, and the glitter of pure red-gold magic that sparked in the air around her. Like matter drawn to antimatter, he reached for her—no, the Other reached for her. Michael fought the monster back. Barely.
When they came to the point where the spell-cast rubble had blocked the tunnel, Strike paused while the others caught up. “We need to guard the tomb entrance, or close it off or something.” There had been no sign of Iago, but that didn’t mean he was unaware of their success. Given the power of the tomb it seemed unlikely the Xibalban could ’port directly into the chamber itself, but he’d already proven able to zap himself into the tunnels. They had to believe he’d try it again, if he could.
“I could collapse it for real,” Rabbit offered. He didn’t look like he was kidding.
“Don’t you dare,” Leah said immediately. To Strike, she said, “I hate to split the manpower, but maybe we should post guards.”
Michael prowled the area, partly to distance himself from Sasha, partly drawn by a tendril of power.
He ran his hands along the tunnel walls, finally finding the point where it was strongest. “Gotcha.”
“You see something?” Strike asked.
“No, but I feel it. Some sort of variant shield magic . . . there it is. Got it. I don’t think this is Ambrose’s spell. I think it’s an older one, with an on/off switch of sorts.”