Chapter 254: The Ruins Secret

The torchlight made one small yellow bite into the chamber, and the darkness swallowed it without complaint. Beyond that little circle of light, the room vanished into black.

Barrel peered beyond the torchlight, one hand cupped over his eyes as if he could bully the darkness into giving up what it hid.

"Light the place. Or are we standing in the doorway of it?"

Then the stone bowl near the entrance, carved into a serpent’s open jaws, caught fire. The flame burst up from its belly with a soft, heavy whump, lighting the serpent’s teeth and the room below.

Not a soul had touched it, or at least, a living one.

"Sweet fucking Christ alive."

Kit whispered, and the dark seemed pleased enough to repeat it a dozen times.

Then the next cresset burst ablaze, and the next. Fire spread down the broad chambers like a broadside across a gun deck, bringing the room out of the black one section at a time.

There, pillars appeared in rows, each one a feathered serpent as thick as a mainmast. Below them, waterways spread through the flagstones like the ribs of a leaf. The chambers were large enough a warship could have been warped in there with room left over for her boats.

Mary’s hand slipped beneath her coat and closed around the pistol at her belt. She didn’t draw it, but she didn’t take her hand away either.

Barrel slowly shrugged, his eyes moving over the chamber now that the flames had found it.

"Can see now."

Ox looked up into the vastness above them.

"Aye."

Bran stared up at the towering pillars, her mouth quivering once before the curses came spilling out, first in English, then in Welsh, each one straight at God.

"Duw above, look at the bloody size of the bastard."

Jim edged back from the snake pillar, keeping a wary eye on the stone jaws.

"Why can’t the dead build with bloody lions for once?"

"Call it a family reunion, bach. After the pit, you’ve already met half of ’em."

James let the sight sit in his mind for one heartbeat. The feathered serpents, the broad stone waterways, the sheer scale of the place tugged his memory. Mesoamerican, or close to it. As for ghosts, he figured a dead sailor from the future shouldn’t be afraid of them.

Then he grinned.

"Keep at it, lads. Some ghostly fire’s no great thing, only the spirit who tends the lamps."

The merry band went down with their torches still burning since none of them would trust supernatural fire.

Across the walls there were more murals, specifically a frieze with blue and red paint still in its cuts. It told a story about some woman in a rippled skirt, who poured rivers from her open hands. Beside her stood the crowned feathered serpent from the door, and a black-faced fellow with a smoking disc held up a mirror.

While the serpent admired himself in it, the fellow’s hand closed around the woman’s wrist and dragged her across a carved sea, her rivers drying into cracks. The serpent lashed snakes into a raft and went after her.

Kit jabbed a finger at the black-faced figure, scandalized by what he was seeing.

"That black bastard’s gone and kidnap her!"

Bran gave a dark little laugh. "Dragged the lass off by the bloody wrist, has he? Filthy whoreson, I’d have that hand off him before he got three steps."

"And the feathered fool’s busy admiring himself. Damned vain bastard."

James knew the serpent. Or at least enough from media culture to vaguely remember its name.

"Quetzalcoatl, the feathered fellow. Can’t say I know about the lass."

"Ketsa-cutlass?" Kit tried. "Fine name for a lizard."

"Call the other Jade Lady and be done with it," said Bran.

"How do you know all that, Cap’n?"

James grinned. "Saw it in a dream, Kit. Gods, ghosts, and a bloody great bird-snake. You’d be surprised what a man remembers from a dream."

He offered nothing more, and no one asked twice.

The frieze flattened out and became a map.

There, a thumb of mainland, a wide sea, a crooked island, and beyond it a ragged spine of land with tiny carved teeth in its eastern side and a bay bitten into the lee while, a small coiled serpent sat inland from the head of the bay.

The last panel showed the lady lying on her back in the entrance of that bay, the serpent coiled around her, its head lowered over her face.

By then, the supernatural fire had spread all around the middle of the chambers, and the floor showed its death.

Forty-odd stone coffins lay in tiers with their feet toward the middle, like berths in a ship. At every foot lay gold ear-spools, jade masks, obsidian blades, turquoise shields, and copper bells, enough treasure to make a viceroy nervous.

At the middle, where all the waterways ended, a low dais held a larger coffin. On its lid lay a woman carved from pale stone, like the effigy on a knight’s tomb, her hands folded and her skirt rippling like water.

She was the lady from the walls.

James held up a hand. "Eyes only. Mark and me touched one shiny thing in this bloody house and damn near earned ourselves a coffin. So look, count, admire the treasure, and keep your bloody fingers off it. Bran, you keep Kit and his wandering hands. Jim, stay with the giants. Mark, you’re with me."

Kit clamped his hands behind his back, then tucked them under his armpits, then sat on them.

"Get your arse up, Kit. You look like you’re trying to hatch an egg."

James led Mary toward the middle.

Every flame leaned toward the lady on the lid at once. The torch in James’s fist bent with them, though the wind against his face had gone completely.

Sweat dripped down his neck in a hall that had suddenly gone cool.

The mask was warm against his ribs, the bundle at his hip warmer still. Then both were hot as a cannon after the tenth broadside.

"What in the seven bloody hells..."

He jammed the torch into a crack in the dais and dragged out the oilcloth. The key went from hand to hand like a live coal while the mask scorched his ribs until he hauled it out too.

Mary caught his sleeve and raised her torch, jerking her chin toward the lady’s face and then the side of the coffin.

Her face held a shallow hollow shaped like a mask, with four small holes around the temple and jaw. Beneath her folded hands were three round sockets in a row, each notched around the rim.

He looked at the stone in his palm, which was the size of one socket, its toothed end matching the notch.

The key beat against his palm, a warm, slow throb like a thumb pressing down. Then it beat again, stronger.

"Don’t you bloody start that again..."

The mask in his other hand took light from inside it, pale gold like sunlight through a shallow bay. It spread across his hands and Mary’s face and lit the lady’s carved features.

The flames remained bent toward her.

"Cap’n!"

Kit’s voice came skittering across the chamber.

"Ye’re bloody glowin’! Yer face is shinin’ like a sovereign!"

There was no reply.

"James." Mary’s voice came low through the chamber.

The key heartbeat started again, and the mask brightened with it.

The two fell into rhythm, stone throbbing and gold rising together like one heart.