The Seventh Stone (5 page)

“
The walls are more Incan than Anasazi,” she said. “The sandstone blocks are precisely hewn and fitted together, without mortar.” The beasts’ howls grew more strident, a bone-chilling chorus of yelps and wails. All she needed was one speck of evidence, one clue to the location of the Turquoise, to know that this was worth the risk, to take that last leap of faith. The chamber was eerily beautiful, and utterly empty.

Dad would have found it, an archaeological anomaly, an unnaturally shaped stone,
a bump in the wall
. Her beam tripped over it, on the stone abutting the entrance, no more than a flicker of a shadow. She drew closer and ran her fingertips over a rough brick of stone. It was eye level, a perfect, 15-inch square. In its center, it had an indentation nearly obscured by centuries of dust. She directed her light and blew on the stone. A billow of fine, silvery sand danced in the beam of her light. This was no stonecutter’s slip. It was a symbol. Joseph came beside her. The symbol had four cardinal points, like a compass, each point marked with four lines, like rays.

“
The Navajo symbol for sun,” said Joseph. He wiped his sleeve across his sweaty upper lip. “For life, growth, and all that is good.”

“
Of course, I recognize it now.” She brushed off the stone’s squared edges with the flat of her hand. “This stone with the symbol isn’t flush like the others. It sticks out a little. It could hide a secret niche. The Turquoise could be right here, behind this stone.” The beasts yowled. “Come on, help me get it out.” She hooked her fingertips on the edge of the stone and shimmied it. Dust and gravel rained down on them from the pyramid roof above them. The whole chamber shook and trembled. A massive brick cracked out of the ceiling. It slammed to the floor so close that its concussion puffed away the dust at her feet. Stupid. She knew better. It wasn’t the first trap that had almost killed her. “A booby trap,” she said. “Remove the wrong brick, the ceiling collapses on top of us.”

“
Jenga,” said Joseph.

“
Navajo for we’re screwed?”

“
My grandson’s favorite game as a boy,” he said. “Small, rectangular wooden blocks, assembled criss-crossed on top of one another to make a tower. The trick is to remove a block low down on the tower without knocking over the whole thing. It’s all about balance, and choosing the right brick.”

“
My father and I played a game like that, with river rocks at the digs.” They were too busy traipsing over the world to buy her any mass manufactured toys. “Of course, it didn’t involve being crushed to death, most of the time.”

“
The tribe that lived here centered their lives on protecting the Turquoise. When the Spaniard brought it to them, they picked this cliff because of its inaccessibility. They built this chamber before the cataclysmic sandstorm hit, to hide the clue to the Turquoise so that no outsider could attain it.”

“
Until us,” she said. “I haven’t seen a single potsherd. People that meticulous had a reason for carving this symbol and leaving it behind. Maybe they thought their descendants would return, and retrieve the Turquoise. They wouldn’t want them killed for their trouble. So they left them a sign.”

Joseph directed his headlamp around the room, landing on another eye level stone that protruded from the west wall. He hurried to it, blew away the dust. “The morning star,” he said. The carving looked like a blend between a cross and a diamond, “honored by the people of the Plains as a symbol for courage and purity of spirit.”

“
So it’s a pattern.” She crossed to the wall opposite him. Brushed it off. “A circular symbol,” she said. “A complex maze, with a stick man above it.”

“
The man in the maze,” said Joseph, “signifying life and choice. Choose wisely, and you will find harmony with all things, although the road may be long and difficult.”

“
Choice is highly over-rated,” she said, “especially with malicious beasts breathing down our necks, not to mention whatever is howling all the way to hell out there.”

They moved to the north side of the round chamber, opposite the entrance. A fourth protruding stone. A fourth symbol. Joseph blew off the dust.

He frowned. “Square with rounded edges, border of zigzag patterns surrounding a simple face with closed eyes,” he said. “I do not recognize it.”

Outside, the howls intensified. At least three large animals shrieked like demons in a chorus of murderous intent. “It’s Mayan,” she said. “It is Pakal, the glyph for shield.”

She recognized it, all right, but hadn’t seen a carving like this since her research trip to the Yucatan for her doctoral thesis on the conquistadors. “A Mayan glyph, hundreds of miles from Mexico,” she said. “The conquistadors searched this area for Cibola, the legendary lost city of gold, but they didn’t give a rat’s ass about Mayan culture. I think our odds of finding the actual Breastplate Turquoise just went up.” She fished the Mayan knife out of her pack. “The Spaniard who brought the Turquoise here, he must have brought this knife along, too. It’s Mayan. I’m sure of that now.”

Joseph played his fingers over the shield glyph. “The clue to the Turquoise is hidden behind one of these symbols. Four possibilities, one answer.”

“
And three potential death traps, if removing the wrong one makes that ceiling collapse.”

The howling stopped with the unexpected abruptness of a trap door slamming shut. She listened for the stealthy pad of clawed paws. She sniffed to detect a musky smell through the lingering wisps of fine sand. Joseph unsheathed his hunting knife, its blade glinting in the beam of his headlamp. “The predator grows silent when it smells its prey,” he said.

“
I don’t suppose that means those animals are closing in on the bad guys with guns.”

“
The beasts awoke to protect the Turquoise. They are very close.”

“
This Mayan knife was used for sacrifices, not defense.” She frowned at the pathetic blade.

“
Only a bullet dipped in white ash will kill a Skinwalker,” said Joseph. He wasn’t joking. He faced her. “Which symbol do we look behind?”

She stepped back. “How would I know?”

“
You know.”

And the weird thing was, she did know. She could almost feel it, a tingling coming from behind one of the four symbols. “The Pakal,” she said. “We have to look behind the Mayan Pakal symbol.”

Joseph stabbed the blade into the seam around the carved block, wedging it into the crevice. The ceiling peppered them with dust and grit.

“
Wait,” she said, “I’ll do this. You stand guard at the portal. Keep watch for those beasts.” This was absurd. Her “tingling” could crush them both.

Joseph’s blade scraped against the rock, clawing at the silence. It was more unnerving than the howls. But at least the ceiling wasn’t collapsing, yet. He jimmied the stone outwards, striving for every millimeter. “The Turquoise stone is called the Yikaisidahi. It is Navajo for It Waits for Dawn, the name of a constellation. And, truly, the Yikaisidahi is of the heavens.”

“
I had a hunch, not divine guidance, in choosing the Pakal block,” she said. And she was headed to hell, not heaven, if her hunch killed this kind, old man. “I’m doing this for my father. You don’t owe him. I do.”

He wedged his knife deeper into the seam, levered it back and forth. “I am the guardian, my destiny inherited from my father, and his father before him. Since my son was killed in the war, my grandson was to become the next guardian. I have sworn my life to protect it.” The chamber trembled. “I cannot let the Yikaisidahi Turquoise fall into the hands of the evil ones. The Yikaisidahi can destroy,” he said. “Or it can heal.”

Now he was sounding like her father. “The destroying part I get,” she said. “The jury is still out on the healing.”

He grunted with exertion and pulled his knife back. “It isn’t moving.”

“
The stones are meticulously fitted together. Maybe it’s locked in place somehow, with a mechanism.” She looked closer and rubbed the dust from the face of Pakal. “Pakal’s mouth,” she said. “It’s not just a carving. It goes deeper than that.” She held the Mayan knife close to it. “Looks like the blade is a perfect fit. But that can’t be right, not if it means defacing Pakal. The Mayan chief would behead me for sacrilege, after he sliced out my beating heart with this knife. It might trigger the ceiling to collapse.”

“
You know what you must do,” Joseph said. “You are not here by accident, Christa. You are the chosen one.”

“
You mean the sucker,” she said.

His eyes turned to hers. “Are you ready to cross that line, between reality and faith?”

She wiped the sweat stinging her eye and looked away. Joseph couldn’t possibly know. Her father never spoke of it, not even with his closest friends. She had reached the brink before, but was too frightened to step over that precipice between reality and faith. Even to reach Mom. “I’m here to find an historical artifact,” she said, “not religion.”

Joseph slipped his knife back into its sheath. “You must find one to find the other.”

She wasn’t going to find anything but a shallow grave if she didn’t hurry up. She drew in a deep breath and plunged the Mayan knife into the stone. The tip of the blade hit something solid, hesitated, and plunged in deeper. A clunking sound. The chamber trembled. She was wrong. The chamber was collapsing. “Get out of here,” she yelled. “I’ll pull out the knife. Try to reset the mechanism.” She yanked. It didn’t budge. The knife was stuck. Pakal scowled. She pulled again. The sandstone block shifted. The crack exhaled a cold draft, emitting the dry breath of an ancient time.

She pressed her foot against the wall for leverage and yanked back the Mayan knife. It worked. The full weight of the stone block slid out. They sprang back as it fell with a thud to the ground and cleaved in two. The Mayan knife dropped to the floor. The chamber quaked. Christa grabbed Joseph’s hand as they fought to stay balanced. Then the chamber became utterly still.

A chorus of howls rent the air. She spun around, throwing up her arm in defense. They sounded that close. She directed her headlamp beam through the narrow opening into the night. The dark was alive with guttural, savage voices. A black shadow skulked across the open portal, then another. The beasts cut off their only escape.

CHAPTER
7

The
Aquila
took on a festive air as the men stowed the lines and began preparations to hoist the anchor. Ahmed could delay no longer. His breaths came short and shallow as his chest tightened. He looked to the sky.
Allah forgive me
. He had pressed the button.

Nothing happened. No sound beeping. No light flashing. Yet everything aboard the treasure hunter
Aquila
had changed. The cool sea breeze that had fluttered his djebella teasingly across his breast just moments ago now felt like fingers of death clawing at him before snatching him down, down, to the deep, dark ocean bottom. The sun, once welcomed, even celebrated, now promised the burn of the Christian hell. The laugh of the albatross that had been circling the
Aquila
all morning now sounded like the cry of a child who has lost his father at sea.

“
Ahmed! Ahmed!” Captain Bertoni clanged up the metal stairs to the flying bridge, laughing aloud as he reached Ahmed’s side. He clapped him on the back and, for the fifth time that morning, tugged the velvet pouch from his pocket.

The velvet pouch was new. Ahmed had bought it in the medina and presented it to Bertoni before they left port. “It contains a prayer,” he had told his captain, “that we find the treasure we seek.” Ahmed’s prayer had been answered, but his soul was damned.

Like a starving dog eyes the bone in the hands of his master, Ahmed watched Bertoni ease apart the drawstrings of the velvet pouch. He watched the pouch’s contents tumble onto his captain’s open palm. The sun glinted on the stunning Emerald, a deep green gem the size of a walnut.

“
A cat’s eye Emerald,” Bertoni said, “extremely rare.”

“
Unique,” said Ahmed, glad to tell the truth, at least in this, “in all the world.” He fought the compulsion to reach out and snatch away the gemstone, to close this eye of the all-seeing God.

“
The Muisca Indians called Emeralds the tears of the moon,” Bertoni said. He blinked away his own unwanted tear. Bertoni was an emotional man.

But even Ahmed could feel the palpable energy that the gem emitted. It hadn’t been found in
San Salvador’s
main strongbox, which held the lion’s share of Emeralds, Turquoise, gold and silver. At the time, Ahmed was afraid, and hoped, that this cat’s eye Emerald would never be recovered. Then, on the last day, they found the smaller strongbox on one, final submersible dive.