“If you say so. You sure you’re okay to make it across?”
“I’ll do what I have to do.” He straightened, took another shallow, halting breath, and then took his first step.
She stayed as close as she dared, but as they ventured deeper into the maze-like path, it was all she could do to stay focused on her own footing. The immediacy of the peril presented by the gleaming black scorpions felt like a physical assault. One slip, one misstep, one minor miscalculation and…
“Oh!” Bell gasped.
Miranda snapped her gaze forward. Charles Bell was bent over, one hand clutching an ankle. “Dad?”
“I’m okay,” he said, though the quaver in his voice indicated he was anything but. “It’s just a scratch.”
Miranda felt her own pulse quickening. “Dad. You have to keep going. Get to Maddock. He’ll be able to help. He can… ” She had no idea what Maddock would be able to do for her father.
“I know,” Bell said after a moment, sounding a little calmer. “You know what, I think it is just a scratch. I don’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Maybe they didn’t use poison after all. Or maybe it’s lost its potency.”
Miranda hoped he was right. Only time would tell. “Just keep going, Dad. And for God’s sake, be careful.”
Maddock shared Miranda’s horror at Bell’s misstep, as well as her utter helplessness. But the archaeologist completed the rest of the journey with no further difficulty. The wound, a two-inch long slice just above Bell’s ankle, was weeping blood, but the surrounding skin was not inflamed, suggesting the cut was clean. Maddock rinsed the wound and bound it with gauze and an elastic bandage, finishing up just as Angel arrived. Bones was still making his way through the maze, but Maddock could see that the big man was carrying one of their SCUBA rigs on his shoulder.
“Show-off,” Maddock said as Bones got within shouting distance.
“Hey, I don’t mind humping in the gear, but if it comes to swimming through rivers of blood and pus, this stuff’s all yours.” The big Indian was grinning, but the beads of perspiration bore testimony to the difficulty of the effort. As he took the final step, he shrugged the bag with the diving gear off his shoulder and tossed it to Maddock.
At that very instant, a low rumbling rose up through the stone floor, and with a faint snick, the obsidian scorpions retreated back into the floor of the chamber behind them.
Bones looked over his shoulder. “Huh. If I’d known that was going to happen, I’d have waited a few more minutes.”
“I think the floor’s weight sensitive,” Maddock said.
“Still trying to convince me that I’m fat,” Bones said, shaking his head sadly. “You’re just revealing your own insecurities.”
Maddock ignored him. “Once you stepped off and there wasn’t any pressure on it, the mechanism reset. I don’t know if it’s safe to walk on now or not.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Bell said. “Our path lies forward.”
Maddock shone his light down across the trough, illuminating the nest of sharp wooden stakes protruding out from the walls on either side. Some of the spikes held onto skeletal human remains. Others were crusted with a dark flaky-looking substance,
“Looks like a BYOB river of blood,” Bones observed. He paused for a second, then added, “You know, ‘bring your—’”
“Your own blood,” Maddock finished. “Yeah, got it. Dr. Bell, do you agree?”
Bell was nodding his head. “I would concur. Fail to make the crossing, and your blood is added to the river. Just like that poor soul.” He pointed to a nearby skull, impaled on a stake through the eye socket.
“How do we get across?” Angel said. “Jump?”
“It’s not that far,” Bones said, “But that platform is only about a meter wide. You’d have to be a cat to stick that landing.”
“There’s got to be another way,” Miranda said. “There’s no way my dad can make that jump.”
Maddock leaned forward a little, playing the light down into the depths of the chasm. It was deep, at least fifteen or twenty feet down, but something was reflecting the light back from the bottom, glittering like a pinpoint of starlight. “There’s something down there,” he said. “It looks like gold.”
“Maya bling,” Bones surmised. “Maybe skelly there was wearing a gold chain around his neck.”
Maddock turned to Bell. “Didn’t the Maya adorn their sacrificial victims in gold?”
Bell’s eyes widened in comprehension. “Of course. The skeletons aren’t from people who failed to make the jump. They’re sacrificial offerings, brought along by pilgrims making the journey to Xibalba. Blood for the river.” He turned to Bones. “Just like you said. BYOB.”
“Wait, so you mean we have to make a human sacrifice before we can go across?” Bones shook his head. “Not it.”
Maddock brought his light back to the protruding spikes. “I wonder… ” He straightened. “Maybe it’s not about the blood. We just need something that weighs enough.”
“Enough to what?”
Maddock turned to him, then picked up the bag Bones had humped through the scorpion maze. With two full SCUBA bottles, and sundry other pieces of equipment, it weighed a good sixty pounds. “It’s a bit light, but hopefully it’s enough.”
He took out a coil of rope and tied one end around the carrying straps. As soon as he was finished, he measured off several arm-lengths of rope, passing the remainder to Bones. “Hang onto it,” he said, and then heaved the heavy parcel out over the edge.
The bag crashed into the nearest spike which, brittle with age, snapped off with a sound like breaking bones and an explosion of dust. The bag continued to fall, the rope snaking into the chasm, but at almost the same instant that the spike broke off, there was another sound, a deep rumbling that vibrated in the stone underfoot. And then the floor upon which they were standing began to move, sliding forward, partially covering the trough. The stone platform on the far side of the chasm was also moving, sliding out from the opposite direction to completely bridge the gap.
The shift was abrupt, almost unbalancing them. Maddock and Angel reacted by instinctively widening their stances to stay on their feet, as did Bones and Miranda, with the latter gripping her father’s arm, helping him stay on his feet. Bones then went into motion, furiously pulling up the bag with their gear lest it become permanently lost, but his haste was mostly unnecessary. When the leading edges of the two platforms were just six inches apart, they stopped moving. Maddock could now see faint paw prints etched in the stone on the far side.
“There,” he said, pointing to the mark. “Step there. Move it.”
With Angel’s hand in his, he hopped over the narrow gap onto the far platform. Miranda and Bell quickly followed, and Bones, still trailing the rope attached to their substitute “human” sacrifice, brought up the rear. As soon as he was across, the two platforms began moving again, sliding back to their original configuration before grinding to a halt. The only difference was that now the five explorers were stranded in the middle of the chamber.
There was another channel on the other side of the platform, but instead of a deep chasm like the one they had just crossed over, this was a comparatively shallow trough — only about six feet deep — accessible by a steep flight of stone steps that descended down to the bottom of the trough, but at either end of the trough, another flight of steps rose to a third platform on the far side. There were no spikes and no sign of skeletal remains, but the bottom of the channel, however, was far from empty.
Maddock shone his light down revealing what looked like a long bramble of dried thorn bushes, covered in a fine powdery black substance, like velvet on a buck’s antlers.