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She gave up, tried to calm herself, panting. She closed her eyes, her bleeding cheek pressed hard against the damp wall, desperately seeking strength. She was pouring sweat, rivulets of it dripping over the caked blood on her face. She looked down. She was only wearing her khaki trousers and a T-shirt, torn and soiled. Someone had stripped off her sweater. Her watch was missing. She was burning hot, feverishly hot. She suddenly felt terribly dehydrated, desperate for a drink, and began to lick the sweat and blood off her lips.

She pushed herself upright again, swallowed hard and forced herself to look around. Everything looked damp, covered in green slime. She was in a rectangular chamber about ten metres long and five metres wide. There was some kind of entranceway at one end, a deep cut into darkness.

She thought of the buildings she knew at Iona, the old chapel on the north side, the refectory. She quickly dismissed all of them. The floor where she was now was natural rock, limestone by the look of it, smoothed in places but nothing like the granite bedrock at Iona. In the centre was a circular slab of wood, like a lid, as if this were a well-hood. The lid looked like an exotic hardwood, darker even than old oak. At the other end of the chamber was a mass of fallen masonry, clogging the space from ceiling to floor. From the white patches in the rubble she could see where stones had been recently removed, flung out on to the floor. Where the wall protruded from the rubble it was covered with wooden boards, a crude protective screen that extended for three metres or so towards the centre of the chamber opposite her.

Maria raised herself, pushing up against the wall behind, feeling woozy and unstable. She stood for a moment while a wave of dizziness passed, then hesitantly stepped to where she had seen the splashes of colour. The heat was stifling, like walking in a sauna. One thing was for sure, she was no longer in the western isles of Scotland. The walls looked as old as the monastery, but everything else told her she was almost inconceivably far removed from Iona. It was a possibility her mind simply refused to analyse any further.

She tottered across to the wall opposite. The single candle that provided the only illumination stood on a small flat stone in front of her. She picked it up, throwing shadows in a demented dance all round the chamber, then held it with both hands to stop it shaking. She peered at the wall.

Her jaw dropped in amazement.

She blinked hard. She knew her body was on its last reserves, that she had been without food and drink for hours, days. She could be hallucinating. She looked again.

The red splashes were truly there. They were blood. But they were not real blood, as in O’Connor’s study. This was a different kind of horror. She saw blood spurting out of necks, blood gushing from bodies gouged open, blood spilling in a livid slipway down a stepped slope.

It was a fresco, a wall-painting of unimaginable barbarity, a mass execution. Naked victims were being led up one side of a high temple. At the top, one was splayed out and held down on an altar, the executioner’s hands plunged into his innards, another figure holding up a ripped-out heart. Maria felt her stomach convulse again. The executioner was a fearsome giant, stripped to the waist, with a sloping, flat forehead and hooked nose, wearing a loincloth and an elaborate headdress. Above him were stylised symbols. Jaguars, birds, garish monsters. The symbol directly above the executioner looked familiar. Maria flashed back to the moment the nightmare began, when she had been in her study at Iona, peering at the picture of the eagle-god pendant Jack had sent her.

She blinked hard, trying to register what she was seeing. She took a few faltering steps back, the candle wavering in her hands. To the right she could see the victims assembled, like prisoners after a battle. The wall-painting was clearly a narrative, a progression of scenes in a story, going from right to left. She looked at the ceiling again. She tried to marshal her thoughts, to think like someone whose mind was highly trained. As if in another lifetime, she remembered her tutorials years before when she and Jack were undergraduates together, on the history of architecture. Corbel vaulting. One major civilisation had built all their vaults this way, had never learned to make an arch. One civilisation, famous for its architecture, infamous for its cruelty.

She looked back at the wall. Corbelled vaulting. Narrative scenes from right to left. Fearsome warriors with flat foreheads. The symbols, glyphs. Human sacrifice on a temple altar, sacrifice on a prodigious scale. She began to think the unthinkable.

The Maya.

She staggered back, hit by a wave of dizziness, then rallied her strength and took a few steps to the right, until she was standing beside the wooden lid. She held the candle up against the wall. She was midway between two scenes, the first of the paintings. The scene at the outset showed a naval engagement, long canoes full of warriors, one with a square sail. The next scene showed a bloody battle, this time on land. Warriors dressed identically to the executioner were battling other warriors, those who would soon become prisoners. All had sloping foreheads, but the vanquished were even bigger, giants. All were stripped to the waist. In the foreground were the dead of both sides, some dismembered, some in a river, seemingly underground. The victors were wielding clubs and maces, the vanquished swords and axes.

Maria stopped herself. Swords and axes.

She looked more closely. She began to tremble, and made herself steady the candle. The sloping heads of the vanquished were not foreheads, but the nose-guards of helmets. They were stripped to the waist but wore leggings, not the kilts and loincloths of the victors. They were bearded. They were blond. They had broadswords and huge, single-bitted axes.

Varangian battle-axes.

Maria reeled. It seemed as if she were dreaming the final chapter of the story that had possessed her for days now, a chapter so extraordinary it could only be fantasy. She wished Jack were here next to her, his calm, reassuring voice telling her this was all the stuff of fiction. She looked back at the scene of sacrifice, to the altar and the executioner where the wall seemed to be oozing blood. She staggered back and sank against the other wall, shutting her eyes tight, desperately trying to wake up back in the monk’s cell at Iona, to feel the warmth and steady breathing of another beside her.

“Dr. de Montijo. So good of you to come. The effects of the drug will wear off shortly.” A voice was addressing her, a real voice. “You are in Mexico.”

Maria jolted blearily awake. “Yes,” she said, the word coming out even before she had registered what was happening. “I know.”

“How?” The voice sounded shrill, testy.

Maria tried to stand, but slipped down the wall again to where she had been lying. She could see nothing, her vision blinded by a torch shining directly into her face. Her mouth was bone-dry, and her voice was a croak. “I worked it out.”

The torch snapped down and she saw a short, wiry man standing in front of her, his black hair slicked back from his forehead. She guessed he was about seventy, his hair obviously dyed, though he had the physique of a man thirty years younger. He had washed-out grey eyes.

The truth dawned on Maria. She looked at him with sickening certainty, scarcely believing she was finally in his presence. Everything else, her appalling state, even O’Connor’s death, was eclipsed from her mind. He was the one. She fought to control her emotions, to keep her cool. She was suddenly wide awake. “Pieter Reksnys. I see your father taught you well. Lithuanian, I believe? The master race.”