“Dad!” Miranda shouted, but Bell was almost to his goal.
Maddock held his breath as Bell reached the narrow gap between the two carvings, but nothing happened. Bell shone his light into the next row. “There are two more dogs here. This is the way. Follow me.”
Maddock exchanged a glance with Bones.
“Guess it was his turn to go first,” Bones said with a shrug.
Bell led them from row to row, finding the paired dogs that, evidently, indicated safe passage through the death trap. As they progressed, Maddock felt the pins and needles of sensation returning to his frost-numbed fingertips and extremities.
“Thawing out is worse than getting frozen in the first place,” he remarked to Angel.
“I know, right? I take back what I said about wanting to get to Hot House.”
Maddock looked out at her sideways. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like a sauna in here. And getting worse.”
“So it’s not just me.”
Miranda, walking alongside her father, looked back. “Definitely not just you.”
The passage at the far end of Jaguar House was like the open door of a blast furnace, glowing red with radiant energy, and even Bell seemed reluctant to approach it.
“Hot House,” he announced. “Also called the House of Fire. It is said to be filled with fire. The Twins passed through unhurt, but there’s no explanation given as to how they were able to do so. But the lightning dog hasn’t led us astray yet.”
“It’s got to be close to 200 degrees in there,” Angel said.
“Yeah, but it’s a dry heat,” Bones remarked.
He probably meant it as a joke, but Maddock knew that humidity made a big difference as the temperatures increased. During the course of their search for Atlantean technology a few years earlier, he and Bones had rescued their teammate Matt Barnaby from the Cave of Crystal Giants in Mexico. The cavern was filled with enormous gypsum crystals, and situated above a magma plume. The temperature in that cave was only about 150 degrees Fahrenheit, but because the humidity was nearly 99 %, even with protective equipment, the safe limit of exposure was only about half an hour.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have any protective gear now.
“You know,” Bones went on, looking right at Angel. “It just might be hot enough in there to burn all that nasty hair off of your back.”
He quickly retreated a few steps before she could slug him.
Maddock turned to Miranda. “You want this one?”
Miranda stepped back and made a sweeping gesture. “After you, hero.”
I guess she’s done trying to impress Angel, Maddock thought, and then stepped through into the passage.
The cavern was smaller than the last, or at least it seemed that way because the neon red glow emanating from cracks that crisscrossed the floor lit it from end to end. The limestone walls and floor were a uniform white under the beam of his headlamp, which had the effect of distributing the magma-like glow, and presumably the heat as well. There were no shadowy corners or blind spots, but at the opposite end of the chamber, maybe fifty yards away, he could see the dark outline of another doorway. The floor, which appeared to be covered in fine white dust, was mostly flat, except where it was cracked, but scattered randomly throughout were little statues that gleamed a metallic orange in the dull light. He couldn’t tell which if any were dogs, but he was pretty sure that they were all made of the same fire-resistant material.
Gold.
His original plan was to step into Hot House just far enough to identify the specific dangers they would face and, if he was lucky, spot a guidestone or some other relevant marker, but that plan quickly went out the window.
As he took his third step, he heard a sound like an eggshell being crushed. He drew back, but the crunching sound was now coming from his back foot. He moved again, sideways this time, but no matter where he stepped, the floor crunched like thin ice.
It wasn’t ice of course, but rather a thin layer of limestone, baked brittle by the persistent heat of a partially exposed magma pocket.
A line from an old poem flashed through his head. In skating over thin ice, our safety is in speed.
Instead of retreating, he started forward, almost running.
The crackling sound followed ominously, and each step seemed to release a fresh wave of heat.
He doubted that the original architects of Xibalba had done anything to make this room more dangerous. Nature had done all the work for them, but the floor was now almost certainly more fragile than it had been centuries earlier, during the time of the Maya. Still, it seemed logical that the cracks marked the places where the crust was weakest, so he avoided these. The golden statues might have been placed as guidestones or as bait to lure the greedy to their doom; there was no way to know for sure, so he avoided these as well.
The floor held up. He reached the other side in mere seconds, savoring the relative cool of the dark passage beyond, despite the overwhelming stench in the air. The odor stung his nose and brought tears to his eyes.
“I’m across,” he shouted back into the cave. “The floor is thin. I don’t know how much weight it can hold, and I don’t think we want to test it. There’s no trick really, except haul ass and watch your step.”
Behind him, in the darkness, there was a strange chattering sound, and despite the heat, Maddock felt a chill shoot down his spine.
He turned away from the passage and slowly turned his head to illuminate the cavern he had just entered.
Just past the entrance, a flight of irregularly carved steps descended down into a vast, stadium-sized chamber. The floor of the cavern was covered in a substance that looked like dark mud. To get through, they would have to wade through a sea of the stuff, but that was the least of their problems.
He tilted his head back, shining the light up at an angle. Wherever the light touched, the ceiling rippled like a field of wheat being stirred by a stiff breeze.
Bones’ voice echoed across the glowing chamber behind him. “Looks like I’m going last again.”
The chattering got louder and the rustling grew more feverish, as if the ceiling were alive… which in fact, it was.
He had come to the sixth and last house of Xibalba.
CHAPTER 30
After hundreds of years of silence, the Lords of Death were again playing deadly tricks on those foolish enough to enter their dark realm.
Alex had lost two more of his security men. One had fallen victim to a trap in the room Carina had called Blade House. Razor sharp obsidian blades had sprung out of the floor, slicing up through the unlucky man’s boots, turning everything below his knees into bloody chunks. Without legs to stand on, he had promptly fallen over and been impaled on the blade points. The second man had slipped on the icy threshold of Cold House and disappeared into the freezing mist at the bottom of the chasm.
That was when Alex had decided to let Carina’s men take point.
The Serpent priestess clearly wasn’t happy about having to risk her men’s lives, but it was simple math. Alex was down to just four men now. Carina had twice that many, and if the old gods started talking to her, telling her that the gringo intruders weren’t worthy to enter their sacred realm, the odds were stacked against Alex and his surviving men.
And if Carina didn’t actually know how to get them safely through the subterranean death maze, what point was there in keeping her around anyway? So far, Maddock’s expedition was doing a better job of showing them the way forward.
“What’s this place called?” he asked, rubbing his arms to warm them up after the arctic zip-line ride.
“Jaguar House,” Carina replied, not looking away from the rows of statues.