Thorn Fall (21 page)

“On the walls only,” he said.

“Paintings?” I pulled myself inside, too excited at this verification that we might have found the right cave to remember to worry about my lack of grace.

Alek stood inside a chamber much larger than the one Temi and I had visited, this one largely emptied out, too, but there were charcoal and pigment-based images all over the flattest of the walls. I dug into a pocket for my flashlight with fingers so eager they were shaking. Or maybe they were shaking because of the climb. Either way, I tripped in my haste to scramble over and check out the pictographs.

Alek caught me before I planted my nose in the rocks.

“Thanks,” I managed, though I scarcely would have noticed if I had fallen. I was already flicking on the light to scan the wall’s offerings.

As before, the ones closer to the cave entrance were typical of the era—black snakes in zigzag patterns, outlines of hands, and stick-figure animals. But in the back, there were more careful, more serious paintings, ones clearly intended to tell a story.

“Four portals this time,” I whispered, touching the wall. “Again with something coming out of them. And over here… It’s not typical for paintings to have a chronological representation or order of events, but it’s almost as if these do, like panels on a comic strip, except backward. Here the portals are like slits or eyes that are closed, not yet opened, and, look, it’s the guy with the sword again. He’s traveling this time. Coming into… I wonder if this represents some canyon in Sedona? Or the Verde Valley as a whole? Am I reading too much into this? Look at all these people. This almost looks like he’s going to get attacked, doesn’t it?” I laid a hand on the cool wall, as if I could absorb the information in the overwhelming cornucopia of images. I couldn’t believe this wasn’t out there in the literature anywhere, that it hadn’t been photographed and catalogued. Was it possible nobody had been here since that landowner? Had he taken the picture I had seen in that old newspaper? Granted, it was a tough climb, and there wasn’t much else of value up here—there was some debris in the back corner, but nothing of significant size remained. Of course, who would have brought piles of pots up here, anyway? This was more likely some shaman’s alcove or an outpost for observing the canyon. “I need to take pictures.”

As I pulled out my phone, I remembered I wasn’t alone and gave Alek an apologetic shrug. I had been blathering in English, so I doubted he had caught much of it. He gave me an enigmatic smile though—maybe he found my babbling amusing—then pointed at the rope and to the entrance.

“Oh, right. The others. I suppose we could invite them up.” I handed him the gear and pantomimed drilling an anchor into the rock to support the rope.

“You two having a make-out session up there, or what?” Simon called up.

“Yes, do you mind not interrupting it?” I called back down, then returned to the wall. The way Alek arched an eyebrow made me wonder once again if he knew more English than he let on. I might have blushed if I weren’t obsessed with the pictographs. I snapped a number of pictures, wishing I had thought to bring my better camera. Then I simply stood back to stare at the paintings, trying to see through the centuries to the message the artist or shaman had been trying to leave behind. “More and more, I’m convinced that’s Temi’s sword,” I said, though Alek was busy working on that anchor, so he wouldn’t have responded even if he did understand some of what I was muttering. “Is this the guy who first brought it here?” I touched the stick figure, the one that looked like he was about to be ambushed by other stick figures. “And he was attacked for some reason? Then is this him again, under the portals? Or is that someone who took the sword and went to the portals? Then this last painting… people walking. Leaving? Fleeing the area? Man, how awesome would it be if this was the key to why the Sinagua left? It couldn’t be tied into the sword somehow, could it?” I chewed on my lip, afraid I was making all kinds of crazy assumptions. Scientists weren’t supposed to do that; they were just supposed to record evidence. But you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t speculate some. You just couldn’t act upon the speculation… or publish things that would later make you look stupid. Not that I had to worry about my reputation getting
worse
.

“It really looks like the sword opens the portals, doesn’t it?” I asked.

Alek walked over, touched the man holding the sword—all right, it was a stick figure holding a stick—then pointed outside and raised his brows.

“I’m not sure,” I said, switching to Greek. “But yes, I think it might be Temi’s sword. This would have been made around 1350… almost seven hundred years ago. Jakatra and Eleriss retrieved that sword from the cavate more than fifty miles from here, but for all we know, it could have been buried around the same time these paintings were drawn.”

“This is your… love?” Alek waved at the wall.

“Uh, I guess it is. My passion. Finding stuff. Solving mysteries. It’s what I always wanted to do and what I studied in school, but… sometimes what you love doing doesn’t quite match up with the jobs that are available.” I shrugged, doubting he would have a common frame of reference.

“Only one job for a man in Sparta,” he said dryly.

Oh, maybe he understood not being able to do what one dreamed about doing after all. Not just as a slave to the elves, but even earlier, as a man growing up in a rigid society where one’s destiny was predetermined.

“If you could have done anything, what would it have been?” I asked.

Grunts and scrapes came from outside. Temi and Simon climbing up, I assumed. Alek had finished with the rope, and it dangled out the entrance. Neither of them was an expert on pictographs, so there probably wasn’t a reason for them to come up, but maybe they would feel safer in here than down on the forest floor. Just because we hadn’t heard the drone of the
jibtab
yet didn’t mean it wouldn’t find us eventually.

“I wanted to be… like Odysseus. An explorer. I loved the tales of Cinaethon and Homer. Do you remember them? Your people? Our people?” He shrugged. He might understand that a great deal of time had passed, but understanding that and knowing how to explain it were different things.

“Homer, definitely. Cinaethon sounds familiar. Another poet?”

“Yes. He was long dead in my time but from Sparta.” His chin came up with a hint of pride.

I should have known better, but it was strange to realize that the Spartans, so known for their warrior culture, might have idolized poets and have wanted to go off and have adventures. At times, the history books made it easy to generalize. But people were people, no matter what century, so it shouldn’t have struck me as odd.

“I like exploring too,” I said, then immediately felt foolish. Next I would be asking him what his favorite color was, so I could pretend mine was the same.

“I gathered that,” he said, his tone dry again.

I was tempted to ask if he had been out exploring somewhere when the elves found him, but decided I didn’t want to kill his good humor. I had only known him for a few days. I would have to trust that maybe one day he would be comfortable telling me that story.

Not surprisingly, Temi reached the cave first. Simon had probably stopped halfway up to pop a can of soda and replenish his reserves.

“What do you think?” I pointed to the pictures. “Does that look like your sword?”

“The stick?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, but I am getting something of a… sensation from it.” She touched the pommel, which was sticking up over her shoulder. I wasn’t surprised she hadn’t left it behind for the climb.

“Because it knows it was immortalized in a cave painting seven hundred years ago, or because the
jibtab
is on its way?”

“I’m not sure,” Temi said. “I’m still waiting for the app that teaches me how to speak its language.”

“You probably need the elves to create that. What did you and Jakatra work on out in the woods last night, anyway?”

“Dodging projectiles,” Temi murmured.

She was standing in front of the painting and gestured for my flashlight, but when I handed it to her, she didn’t take it. Her gaze had locked onto the wall. I shined the light on the pictographs for her.

“See something I don’t?” I asked.

“Just… getting the impression that maybe it’s a good thing that we didn’t get closer to those flashing lights last night.”

“Oh?” I frowned at the image in front of her. “Why?”

“Well, if it opens portals…” She touched the last scene, the one with the people leaving the area. “Don’t you get the impression something bad happened?”

“Yes, but…” I paused. I hadn’t considered the possibility that the “something bad” had been a result of opening the portals, but maybe I should have. Wasn’t the definition of a portal that it went to some place or came from some place? And couldn’t there be other… entities in those other places?

Temi turned toward me, her eyes troubled. Was she thinking of how close we had come to walking over to those flashing lights? And what might have happened if the sword
did
open portals? And if something had come through that we couldn’t handle?

I faced the pictographs again, trailing my fingers along the figure with the sword, the one I’d thought had been walking into an ambush. “Eleriss admitted that his people were here in the past.”

Temi nodded. “It’s apparently forbidden now, except with rare exceptions, but they told me it had once been like going on a vacation or adventure for them, coming here. The way European explorers went to dark, savage continents back in the day.” Her mouth twisted, and she made air quotes as she said dark, savage. Yeah, I wasn’t going to agree with that description.

“And some of them took slaves while they were here,” I said.

“They didn’t tell me about that.”

I looked at Alek, who had grown silent since Temi’s arrival. He was standing against the back wall, watching and listening. I might have to try and pry his story out of him, after all.

“So was it one of their people who wandered through the Southwest and found some portals to open for kicks?” I asked. “Or was an elf maybe the one ambushed here? And then it was someone else who wandered around and accidentally opened a portal?” I tapped on the figure with the sword. Alas, there weren’t any big triangular ears sticking out of the circle of a head that might have implied someone other than a human.

“I wouldn’t call their people infallible,” Temi said, “and some of them clearly wish humans would disappear from the universe—Jakatra admitted as much—but I’m skeptical that they would accidentally open a portal that let something evil into a world, especially if it harmed more than humans.”

“I don’t know if it
did
harm more than humans.” I drummed my fingers on the seam of my jeans. “The Sinagua disappeared from the area, yes, but there’s no evidence of a mass extinction or anything like that. Still… I see what you’re saying, and it does seem like the type of thing that could have been done accidentally. By someone curious.” The type of person who climbed dangerous cliffs to look into caves…

“Or someone drawn to the vortexes by the sword,” Temi pointed out. “If a previous owner felt the pull, as I did, and didn’t know to avoid it…”

“Maybe we better focus on the
jibtab
and do our best to avoid anything tugging at your sword.” I grimaced at the idea of walking away from the vortexes without ever seeing what happened when the sword was plugged into one, but I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for unleashing some horrible evil on mankind.

“I think we need to talk to Eleriss and Jakatra again,” Temi said.

“They’re your buddies. Can you make that happen?”

“They didn’t tell me where they went, just that they were hunting the other elf.”

“Delia?” came a distant call. Simon. It sounded like he was still on the ground.

I rushed to the cave entrance, worried he had heard the monster coming. At first, I didn’t spot him down there, but something moved in the trees, drawing my eye. He and Naomi had wandered away from the cliff wall with the metal detector.

“What is it?” I called.

Neither of them answered.

“Let’s get back to the van,” I said.

Simon and Naomi had disappeared in the trees, and I wanted to make sure they were okay, but we ought to head out, anyway. The sun had dipped below the canyon wall on the opposite side of the highway. It wouldn’t be that long before night fell.

Despite my words, I took a moment to take a few more pictures of the wall and to check all of the edges and nooks in the cave. I found the remains of a hollowed stone with dark paint smudges and imagined someone in here, centuries earlier, mixing paints to share his story. That was it as far as relics went.

Temi climbed down first, and Alek waited for me at the exit.

“I have been through the portals before,” he said when I joined him, about to crouch for the rope.

I froze. “These portals?” I waved toward the pictographs.

“No, the ones the
Dhekarzha
create. Those went to places they desired to go, some similar to their world and similar to ours. Some went to foul and dangerous places. I was made to travel to such a place once for a… test.” His jaw tightened and his brown eyes narrowed in anger at some memory. That couldn’t be the word he wanted. “Entertainment,” he amended. “
Their
entertainment.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, wishing it weren’t such a useless thing to say.

Alek looked out at the forest, the carpet of greens and yellows and browns stretching across the ground below us, the creek visible in spots, the water glinting in the afternoon sunlight. “It is in the past and does not matter now. I tell you this for a warning. For us, the portals may not be known until they are entered, and they don’t always have… doors on both sides.” He shook his head, clearly frustrated by the lack of words in Ancient Greek to explain all of this. I doubted English had the appropriate words, either. “Wild ones, natural ones, are even less predictable. You should not open the ones here. And you must not go through.”