Thunderhead

25

SHOULD WE?” SLOANE MURMURED TO NORA.

There was a long pause. Nora’s eyes followed the benchland as it curved around the canyon. In places where the bench became a narrow ledge of slickrock, she could see that a shallow groove had actually been worn into the sandstone by countless prehistoric feet. One part of her registered all this quite dispassionately; another part was far away, still in shock, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the discovery.

The dispassionate part told her that they should go back for the others, bring in the equipment, begin a formal survey.

“What the hell,” she replied. “Let’s go.”

She rose shakily to her feet, Sloane following. A quick, dreamlike walk brought them around the far end of the canyon to the edge of the great alcove. Here Nora paused. They were now looking on the ruin from the far side, at an acute angle. The morning sun only penetrated the facade of the city; the rest faded back into darkness under the heavy brow of rock, a ghostly ruin melting into purple shadow. Quivira had a gracefulness, a sense of balance, that belied its massive stone construction. It was as if the city had been planned and built as a unit, rather than growing by accretion, as most other large Anasazi cliff dwellings had. There were still traces of gypsum whitewash on the outer walls, and the Great Kiva showed traces of what had once been a blue disk painted on its side.

The four towers were paired, two on each side of the alcove, with the main city lying between and the circular Great Kiva at the very center. Each tower rose about fifty feet. The front two were freestanding; the rear two were actually mortared to the natural stone roof of the alcove.

The ruin was in beautiful condition, but on closer view it was far from perfect. Nora could see several ugly fractures snaking up the sides of the four towers. In one place, the masonry had peeled off part of an upper story, revealing a dark interior. In the terraced city between the towers, several of the third-story rooms had collapsed. Others appeared to have burned. But overall the city was remarkably well preserved, its huge walls built of stone courses mortared with adobe. Wooden ladders stood against some of the walls. Hundreds of rooms were still intact and roofed—a complicated arrangement of roomblocks and smaller circular kivas, dotted with black windows and doorways. The Great Kiva that dominated the center seemed almost untouched. It was a city made to last forever.

Nora’s eyes wandered into the dark recesses of the alcove. Behind the towers, terraced roomblocks, and plazas lay a narrow passageway that ran between the back of the city and a long row of squat granaries. The passageway was low and dim. Behind the granaries appeared to lie a second, even more constricted alleyway—no more than a sunken crawlspace, really—cloaked in darkness. This was unusual: in fact, Nora had never seen anything like it. In most Anasazi cities, the granaries were built directly into the back wall of the cave.

Although the archaeologist in her registered these observations, Nora was aware that her hands were shaking and her heart was thudding at a breakneck pace.

“Is this real?” she heard Sloane mutter hoarsely.

As they slowly approached the city, a remarkable series of pictographs became visible on the cliff face beside them. They had been laid down in several layers, figures painted over figures, a palimpsest of Anasazi imagery in red, yellow, black, and white. There were handprints, spirals, shamanistic figures with huge shoulders and power lines radiating from their heads; antelope, deer, snakes, and a bear, along with geometric designs of unknown meaning.

“Look up,” Sloane said.

Nora followed her glance. There, twenty feet above their heads, were rows upon rows of negative handprints: paint sprayed over a hand held against the rock, a great crowd waving goodbye. Above that, on the domed roof itself, the Anasazi had painted a complicated pattern of crosses and dots of various sizes. Something about it was vaguely familiar.

Then it hit her. “My God, it’s an Anasazi planetarium.”

“Yes. That’s the constellation Orion. And there’s Cassiopeia, I think. It’s just like the Planetarium at Canyon de Chelly, only more elaborate by far.”

Instinctively, Nora raised her camera. Then she dropped it again. There would be time, plenty of time, later. Now she just wanted to simply experience it. She took a step forward, then hesitated and glanced at her companion.

“I know what you mean,” Sloane said. “I feel the same way. It’s as if we don’t belong here.”

“We don’t,” Nora heard herself say.

Sloane looked at her a moment. Then she turned and began to move toward the ruin. Nora followed slowly.

As they walked into the cool darkness, their shadows merged with the shadows of the stone. A group of swallows burst out of a cluster of mud nests above their heads, wheeling out into the sunlight, dipping and crying with displeasure at the intrusion.

They walked toward a broad plaza area in front of the towers, their feet sinking into soft sand. Glancing down, Nora saw there was almost no cultural debris on the surface: many inches of fine, windblown dust had covered everything.

At the front of the first tower, Nora stopped and laid her hand on the cool masonry. The tower had been built straight and sure, with a slight inward slope. There were no doors in its face; entry must have been gained from the back. A few notches far up its flank looked like arrow ports. Peering into one of the cracks in the bottom of the tower, she saw the masonry was at least ten feet thick. The towers were obviously for defense.

Sloane walked around the tower’s front, Nora following in her wake. It was odd, she thought, how they were instinctively staying together. There was something unsettling about the place, something she couldn’t immediately put into words. Perhaps it was the defensive nature of the site: the massive walls, the lack of ground-floor doors. There were even piles of round rocks stacked on some of the frontline roofs, clearly intended as weapons to be dropped on the heads of any invaders. Or maybe it was the absolute silence of the city, the powdery smell of the dust, the faint odor of corruption that unnerved her.

She glanced at Sloane. The woman had recovered her composure and was scratching in her sketchbook. Her calm presence was reassuring.

She turned back to the tower. On the back side, at the second-story level, she could now see a small keyhole doorway, partly collapsed. It was accessible from a flat roof, against which leaned a pole ladder, perfectly preserved. She moved to the ladder and carefully climbed to the roof. Closing her sketchbook, Sloane followed. A moment later, they ducked beneath the doorway and were staring up into the gloom of the tower.

As she had expected, there was no staircase inside. Instead, running up the center, was a series of notched poles, resting on shelves. Stones projected from the inner walls, providing footholds. Nora had seen this type of arrangement before, at a ruin in New Mexico called Shaft House. In order to ascend the tower, one had to climb spraddle-legged, one foot using the notches in the poles, and the other foot using the stones fastened into the wall. It was a deliberately precarious and exposed method of climbing, keeping all four of the climber’s limbs occupied. From above, defenders could knock off climbing invaders with rocks or arrows. At the very top of the tower, the last pole ladder went through a small hole into a tiny room beneath the roof: the last redoubt in case of attack.

Nora looked at the huge cracks in the walls, and at the pole ladders, flimsy and brittle with dry rot. Even when first built, it would have been a terrifying climb; now, it was unthinkable. She nodded to Sloane, and they ducked back through the door and climbed down to the stepped-back facade of the city itself. Any exploration of the towers would have to wait.

Walking away from the tower, Nora approached the foot of the nearest roomblock. Over the centuries, windblown sand had drifted up against the front of the houses. In places, the drifts were so high a person could climb to the flat roofs that led to the upper stories, and from there into the second-floor houses themselves. Beyond the roomblocks, she could see the circular form of the Great Kiva and the stylized blue disk incised into its facade, a white band at its top.

Sloane drifted over silently, glancing first at Nora, then the sandpile. Again, Nora realized that protocol dictated they return for the others, establish a formal pattern of discovery. But she also realized that nobody, not even Richard Wetherill, had found an Anasazi city like this one. The urge to explore was too strong to resist.

They scrambled up the sandpile to the first-story roofs. Ahead of them lay a row of darkened, keyhole doorways. As Nora glanced around, she saw, arrayed along the edge of the roof, partly buried in sand, eight gorgeous St. John’s Polychrome pots in perfect condition. Three of them still had their sandstone lids.

The women paused at the nearest doorway, once again feeling the strange hesitation. “Let’s go inside,” Sloane said at last.

Nora ducked through the doorway. Gradually, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she could see the room was not empty. On the far side was a firepit with a stone comal. Beside it were two corrugated cooking pots, blackened with smoke. One had broken open, spilling tiny Anasazi corncobs across the floor. Packrats had built a nest in one corner, a junk heap of sticks and cactus husks thickly laid with dung. The acrid scent of their urine permeated the room. As Nora stepped forward, she saw, hanging on a peg near the door, a pair of sandals made from woven yucca fibers.

Sloane switched on her flashlight and played its beam toward a dark doorway that beckoned on the far wall. Stepping through, Nora saw that the second room had a complicated painted design running like a border around the plastered walls. “It’s a snake,” she said. “A stylized rattlesnake.”

“Unbelievable.” Sloane ran the beam along the design. “As if it was painted yesterday.” The light came to rest in a niche on one wall. “Look, Nora, there’s something there.”

Nora stepped over. It was bundle of buckskin, about the size of a fist, tightly rolled and tied.

“It’s a medicine bundle,” she whispered. “A mountain soil bundle, from the look of it.”

Sloane stared at her. “Do you know of anyone finding an intact Anasazi medicine bundle?” she asked.

“No,” said Nora. “I think this is the first.”

They stood in the room for a few moments, breathing in the ancient air. Then Nora found her eyes drawn to a third doorway. It was smaller than the others, and appeared to lead to a storage room.

“You first,” Sloane said.

Nora dropped to her hands and knees, crawled through the low doorway, and stood inside a stuffy space. Sloane followed. The yellow pool of light moved about, stabbing through a veil of dust raised by their entry. Gradually, objects and color emerged from the dimness, and Nora’s mind began to make sense of the chaos.

Against the back wall, a row of extraordinary pots was arrayed: smooth, polished, painted with fantastical geometric designs. Sticking out of the mouth of one pot was a bundle of prayer sticks, carved, feathered, and painted, gleaming with color even in the dull light. Beside them was a long stone palette shaped like a huge leaf, on which had been placed a dozen fetishes of different animals fashioned from semiprecious stones, each with an arrowhead tied to its back with a string of sinew. Next sat a bowl filled with perfect, tiny bird points, all flaked out of the blackest obsidian. Nearby was a stone banco, on which a number of artifacts had been carefully arranged. As Nora’s eyes roamed the dimness with growing disbelief, she could see a rotten buckskin bag from which spilled a collection of mirage stones, some cradleboards, and several exquisite bags woven from apocynum fiber and filled with red ochre.

The silence, here in the bowels of the ruined city, was absolute. There’s more in this one room, Nora thought, than the greatest museums have in their entire collections.

She followed the beam of light as it revealed ever more remarkable objects. The skull of a grizzly bear, decorated with blue and red stripes of paint, bundles of sweetgrass stuffed into its eye sockets. The rattles of a rattlesnake tied to the end of a painted stick, human scalp attached. A large sheet of mica, cut into the outline of a hideously grinning skull, its teeth inlaid with blood-red carnelians. A quartz crystal carved in the shape of a corn beetle. A delicately woven basket, its outside feathered with hundreds of tiny, iridescent hummingbird breasts.

Instinctively, she sought out Sloane’s face in the dim light. Sloane looked back, amber eyes wild. The composure that had returned so quickly was gone again.

“This must have been the storage room for the family who occupied these roomblocks,” Sloane finally said, voice trembling. “Just one family. There could be dozens of other rooms like this in this city. Maybe hundreds.”

“I believe it,” Nora replied. “But what I can’t believe is the wealth. Even in Anasazi days, this would represent an inconceivable fortune.”

The dust raised by their entry drifted in layers through the cool, heavy air, scattering the yellow light. Nora took a deep breath, and then another, trying to clear her mind.

“Nora,” Sloane murmured at last. “Do you realize what we’ve found?”

Nora tore her eyes away from the clutter of dim objects. “I’m working on it,” she said.

“We’ve just made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.”

Nora swallowed, opened her mouth to reply. But no sound would come, and in the end she simply nodded.

26

TWELVE HOURS LATER, THE CITY OF QUIVIRA lay in shadow, the late afternoon sun blazing its last on the valley cliffs opposite the ruin. Nora rested on the ancient retaining wall below what they’d come to call the Planetarium, feeling as drained as she had ever felt in her life. She could hear the excited voices of the rest of the expedition ringing out of the city, distorted and magnified by the vast pregnant hollow of rock in which Quivira stood. She glanced down at the rope ladder and pulley system, rigged by Sloane to provide quick access to the ruin. Far below, in the grove of cottonwood trees where they had made their camp, she could see the smoke of Bonarotti’s campfire and the gray rectangle that was his folding serving table. The cook had promised them medallions of wild javelina with coffee barbecue sauce and—amazingly—two bottles of Château Pétrus in celebration. It had been, she thought, the longest—and greatest—day of her life: “that day of days,” as Howard Carter had described it when he first entered King Tutankhamen’s tomb. And they had yet to enter the Great Kiva. That, she had decreed, would be delayed until they had made a rough survey and recovered some sense of their perspective.

From time to time, during the course of the day, Nora had found herself searching among the sandy ruins for footprints, inscriptions, excavations—anything that would prove her father actually reached the city. But the rational part of her knew that the constant currents of wind and animal tracks would have long ago erased any marks of his passing. And it could well be that he, like Nora herself, had been so overwhelmed by the majesty of the city as to feel any modern inscription to be a sacrilege.

The group emerged from the ruin, Sloane bringing up the rear. Swire and Smithback came toward Nora and the rope ladder. Swire simply slumped down, flushed beneath his leathery tan, but Smithback remained behind, talking animatedly. “Unbelievable,” he was saying, his voice loud and grating in the ruin’s stillness. “Oh, God, what a find. This is going to make the discovery of King Tut’s tomb look like a . . .” He stopped, temporarily speechless. Nora felt inexplicably annoyed that his thoughts would coincide with her own. “You know, I did some work in the New York Museum of Natural History,” he began again, “and their collection couldn’t begin to hold a candle to this place. There’s more stuff here than in all the museums in the world, for chrissakes. When my agent hears about this, she’s going to get such a—”

Nora’s sudden glare silenced the writer.

“Sorry, Madame Chairman.” Smithback settled back, looking only momentarily put out. He whipped out a small spiral-bound notebook from a back pocket and began jotting notes.

Aragon, Holroyd, and Black joined them along the wall, followed by Sloane. “This is the discovery of the century,” Black boomed. “What a cap to a career.”

Holroyd sat down by the retaining wall, slowly and unsteadily, like an old man. Nora could see his face was dirty and streaked, as if he had wept at the sight.

“How are you doing, Peter?” she asked quietly.

He looked at her with a weak smile. “Ask me tomorrow.”

Nora turned to Aragon, glancing curiously at his face, wondering if the magnitude of the discovery would break his usual dour reserve. What she saw was a face covered with a sheen of sweat, and a pair of eyes that had grown as dark and glittery as the obsidian the city was full of.

He looked back at Nora. And then—for the first time since she’d met him at the fire circle—he smiled, widely and genuinely, white teeth huge in the brown face. “It’s fantastic,” he said as he took her hand and pressed it. “Almost beyond belief. We all have a lot to thank you for. Perhaps myself more than the rest.” There was a curious force in his low, vibrant voice. “Over the years I’d come to believe, as much as I believed anything, that the secrets of the Anasazi would never be ours. But this city holds the key. I know it. And I feel fortunate to be part of it.” He removed his knapsack, placed it on the ground, and sat down next to her.

“There’s something I must tell you,” he said. “Perhaps now isn’t the right time, but it will only become more difficult the longer we are here.”

She looked at him. “Yes?”

“You know my belief in Zero Site Trauma. I’m not as zealous as some, but I still feel it would be a terrible crime to disturb this city, to remove its essence and squirrel it away in museum storage rooms.”

Black snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re a sucker for that bullshit. Zero Site Trauma is a passing fad of political correctness. The real crime would be to leave this place unexplored. Think of all we can learn.”

Aragon looked at him steadily. “We can learn everything we need to know without looting the city.”

“Since when is a disciplined archaeological excavation called looting?” Sloane asked mildly.

“Today’s archaeology is tomorrow’s plundering,” Aragon replied. “Look what Schliemann did to the site of Troy a hundred years ago, in the name of science. He practically bulldozed the place, destroyed it for future generations. And that, for its day, was a disciplined excavation.”

“Well, you can tiptoe around all you want, taking pictures and touching nothing,” said Black, raising his voice. “But I for one can’t wait to tuck into that midden.” He turned toward Smithback. “To the uneducated mind, all these treasures are amazing—but nothing tells you what you want to know like a trash mound. You’d do well to remember that for your book.”

Nora looked from one member of the group to the other. She’d expected this discussion, although not quite so soon. “There’s no way,” she said slowly, “that we can really begin to excavate this city, even if we wanted to. All we can hope to do in the next few weeks is to survey and inventory.”

Black began to protest, and she raised her hand. “If we are to properly date and analyze the city, it’s necessary to be a little invasive. That’s Black’s job, and he’ll confine any site disturbance to test trenching in the trash mound. No part of the city itself will be excavated, and no artifacts will be shifted or removed, unless absolutely necessary, and with my express permission.”

“Site disturbance,” Black echoed sarcastically, but he sat back with a satisfied air.

“We’ll have to bring back a few type specimens for further analysis at the Institute,” she went on. “But we will only bring back inferior artifacts that are duplicated elsewhere in the city. Long-term, the Institute will have to decide what to do with the site. But I promise you, Enrique, that I’ll recommend they leave Quivira untouched and intact.” She glanced pointedly at Sloane, who had been listening intently. “Do you agree?”

After a brief pause, Sloane nodded.

Aragon glanced from one to the other. “Under the circumstances, that will have to be acceptable.” Then he smiled again, suddenly, and stood up. A hush fell on the group.

“Nora,” he said, “you have the congratulations of all of us.”

Nora felt a sudden flush of pleasure as she listened to the chorus of clapping punctuated by a long loud whistle from Black. Then Smithback too was on his feet, hoisting a canteen.

“And I’d like to propose a toast to Padraic Kelly. If it weren’t for him, we’d never be here.”

This sudden reference to her father, coming from a source as unexpected as Smithback, brought a sudden welling of emotion that closed Nora’s throat. Her father had never been far from her thoughts all day. But in the end, she had seen no trace of him, and she felt grateful for Smithback’s remembrance.

“Thank you,” she said. Smithback took a drink and passed the canteen.

The group fell silent. Light was draining fast from the valley, and it was time they made their way down the rope ladder to supper. And yet everyone seemed reluctant to leave the magical place.

“What I can’t figure out is why the hell they left all that stuff behind,” Smithback said. “It’s like walking away from Fort Knox.”

“A lot of Anasazi sites show a similar abandonment,” Nora replied. “These people were on foot, they had no beasts of burden. It made more sense to leave your goods behind and make fresh ones when you arrived at your new home. When the Anasazi moved, they usually only carried their most sacred items and turquoise.”

“But it looks like even the turquoise was left behind here. I mean, the place is full of it.”

“True,” Nora said after a moment. “This was not a typical abandonment. It’s like they left everything. That’s part of what makes this site unique.”

“The sheer wealth of the city, and the many ceremonial artifacts, makes me think it must have been a religious center that overshadowed even Chaco,” said Aragon. “A city of priests.”

“A city of priests?” Black repeated skeptically. “Why would a city of priests be located way out here, at the very edge of the Anasazi realm? What I found more interesting was the amazingly defensive nature of the place. Even the site itself, hidden so perfectly in this isolated canyon—it’s damn near impregnable. You’d almost think these people were paranoid.”

“I’d be paranoid if I had the kind of wealth they had,” Sloane murmured.

“If they were impregnable, then why did they abandon the city?” Holroyd asked.

“They probably overfarmed the valley below,” Black replied with a shrug. “Simple soil exhaustion. The Anasazi didn’t know the art of fertilization.”

Nora shook her head. “There’s no way, given its size, that the farmland in the valley could support the city to begin with. There must be a hundred granaries back there. They had to have been importing tons of food from someplace else. But all this begs the question: why put such a huge city here in the first place? In the middle of nowhere, at the end of a circuitous road, at the end of a narrow slot canyon? During the rainy season, that canyon would have been impassable half the time.”

“As I said,” Aragon replied. “A city of priests, at the end of a difficult ritual journey. Nothing else makes sense.”

“Of course,” Black said scornfully. “When in doubt, blame it on religion. Besides, the Anasazi were egalitarian. They didn’t believe in a social hierarchy. The idea of them having a priestly city, or a ruling class, is absurd.”

There was another silence.

“What really intrigues me,” Smithback said, notebook once again in hand, “is the idea of gold and silver.”

There he goes again, Nora thought. “Like I told you on the barge,” she said a little more loudly than she intended, “the Anasazi had no precious metals.”

“Just a minute,” Smithback said, folding his notebook and shoving it into his pants. “What about the Coronado reports Holroyd was reading aloud? All that talk of plates and jugs of gold. You mean that was just bullshit?”

Nora laughed. “Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. The Indians were just telling the Spanish what they wanted to hear. The idea was to tell the Spanish that the gold was somewhere else, far away, to get rid of them as quickly as possible.”

“Perhaps something was lost in translation,” said Aragon, with a smile.

“Come on,” Smithback said. “Quivira wasn’t made up by the Indians. So why should the gold be?”

Holroyd cleared his throat a little tentatively. “According to that book I was reading, Coronado had gold samples with him. When he tested the Indians by showing them samples of gold, copper, silver, and tin, the Indians identified the precious metals from the base. They knew what they were.”

Smithback folded his arms. “See?”

Nora rolled her eyes. One of the foundations of southwestern archaeology was that the Anasazi had no metals. It almost wasn’t worth arguing the point.

Black suddenly spoke up. “All over the Southwest,” he said, “Anasazi graves have been found containing parrot and macaw feathers imported from the Aztec empires and their Toltec predecessors. They’ve also found New Mexico turquoise in Aztec burials. And we know that the Anasazi traded extensively with the Toltecs and Aztecs—slaves, obsidian, agate, salt, and pottery.”

“What are you getting at?” Nora asked.

“Simply that with all this trade going on, it’s not entirely unreasonable to think the Anasazi obtained gold.”

Nora opened her mouth, then shut it again, surprised at hearing this from Black. Holroyd, Swire, and even Sloane were listening intently.

“If they did have gold,” Nora began, trying to keep patient, “then, in the tens of thousands of Anasazi sites excavated over the last hundred and fifty years, we’d have found some. But not one excavation has ever turned up even the tiniest speck of gold. The bottom line is, if the Anasazi had gold, then where is it all?”

“Maybe right here,” said Smithback quietly.

Nora stared at him. Then she began to laugh. “Bill, put a cold compress on that fevered imagination of yours. I just saw a dozen rooms full of incredible stuff today, but not a single glimmer of gold. If we do find gold in Quivira, I’ll eat that ridiculous hat of yours. Okay? Now let’s get down and see what miracle Chef Bonarotti has prepared for dinner.”

27

NORA GAZED ANXIOUSLY UP AT THE FIGURE rapelling down the rock wall four hundred feet above her head, a brightly colored bug against the sandstone. Beside Nora, Black and Holroyd gaped upward, motionless. Nearby, Smithback stood, notebook at the ready, as if waiting for some disaster to happen. A sharp clang rang out as Sloane drove an angle into the deep red rock with her wall hammer. As Nora watched, Sloane affixed the next portion of the rope ladder to the cliff face, then slid easily another ten feet down the rockface to drive in the next piece of gear.

In order for the weather receiver and communications gear to operate, it was necessary to place them atop the rim of the canyon, far above Quivira. Two hours earlier, Nora and Sloane had determined the best place to set up the gear, basing their estimates on a combination of the easiest climb and lowest clifftop. The site turned out to be just beyond the far end of the city, overlooking the valley floor by the entrance to the slot canyon through which they had entered.

Easiest climb, perhaps, but still frightful. Nora’s eyes had traveled up the wall, stopping at the last pitch. It was obviously the most difficult, a beetling brow of rock that hung out into space. But Sloane had just smiled. “Grade 1, 5.10, A-two,” she’d murmured, visually rating the difficulty of the climb. “Look at that secure crack system, goes almost all the way to the top. No problem.” And, in a spectacular feat of bravura climbing, she proved herself correct. An hour later, as they waited nervously below, slings and a haul bag tumbled down from above, indicating that Sloane had reached the top and was ready to hoist up the radio gear.

And now Sloane was making her way back down to the bench that held Quivira, placing the ladder as she went. Another ten minutes, and she dropped nimbly into the group to a round of applause.

“That was fantastic,” Nora said.

Sloane shrugged and smiled, obviously pleased. “Another ten feet and we’d have run out of ladder. Is everybody ready?”

Holroyd looked up, swallowing. “I guess so.”

“I have important work to do,” Black said. “Can someone remind me again why I have to risk life and limb on this little climbing expedition?”

“You won’t risk anything,” Sloane laughed in her deep contralto. “Those placements of mine are bombproof.”

“And it’s your misfortune,” Nora said, “that you’ve been on a lot of digs and know how to use the radio equipment. We need a backup for Holroyd.”

“Yeah, but why me?” Black asked. “Why not Aragon? He’s got more field experience than all of us put together.”

“He’s also got twenty years on the rest of us,” Nora replied. “You’re much better suited to a physical challenge like this.” The buttering-up seemed to have its intended effect: Black pulled in his chest and looked sternly up the cliff.

“Let’s get started, then.” Sloane turned briefly toward Smithback. “You coming?”

Smithback looked speculatively upward. “I’d better not,” he said. “Somebody has to stay behind to catch the ones that fall.”

Sloane raised one eyebrow, with a look that said she’d thought as much. “All right. Aaron, why don’t you lead, and I’ll follow. Peter, you come third, and Nora, please bring up the rear.”

Nora noticed that Sloane had staggered the inexperienced climbers with the more experienced ones. “Why do I have to go first?” Black asked.

“Believe me, it’s easier when nobody’s ahead of you. Less chance of eating a boot that way.”

Black looked unconvinced, but grasped the base of the rope ladder and began hoisting himself up.

“It’s just like climbing the ladder to Quivira, only longer,” Sloane said. “Keep your body hugged to the rock, and your feet apart. Take a rest at each bench. The longest pitch is the last one, maybe two hundred feet.”

But Black, scrabbling at the second step, suddenly lost his footing. Sloane moved with the swiftness of a cat as Black came lurching downward. She half caught, half tackled him, and they ended up sprawled in a soft drift of sand at the base of the cliff, Black atop Sloane. They lay still, and Nora came running over. She could see that Sloane was shaking and making a choking sound; but as she bent down in a panic she realized the woman was laughing hysterically. Black seemed frozen in either fear or surprise. His face was buried between Sloane’s breasts.

“Death, where is thy sting?” Smithback intoned.

Sloane continued to gasp with laughter. “Aaron, you’re supposed to be climbing up, not down!” She made no move to push Black away, and after a few moments the scientist sat up, hair askew. He backed away, looking from Sloane to the rope ladder and back to Sloane again.

Sloane sat up, still giggling, and dusted herself off. “You’re letting yourself get psyched out,” she said. “It’s just a ladder. But if it’s falling you’re afraid of, I’ve got a wall harness you can use instead.” She stood up and walked over to her equipment duffel. “It’s for emergencies, really, but you can use it to get familiar with the climb.” She pulled out a small harness constructed of nylon webbing and fastened it around Black. “You are just going to jumar your way up the rope. That way, you can’t fall.”

Black, strangely quiet, simply looked at Sloane and nodded. This time, with the mental security of the harness and Sloane’s encouragement, he got the hang of using the jumar and was soon moving confidently up the cliff. Sloane followed, then Holroyd reached hold of the lowest rung.

Nora had noticed that, in the sudden scramble, Sloane hadn’t bothered to check on the image specialist’s state of mind. “You up to this, Peter?” she asked.

Holroyd looked at her and smiled bashfully. “Hey, it’s just a ladder, like she said. Anyway, I’m going to have to climb this thing once a day. I’d better get used to it.”

He took a deep breath, then began to climb. Nora followed carefully. She tested one or two of Sloane’s placements and found them to be as tight and secure as the woman had said. She’d learned from experience it was best not to look down on a long climb, and she kept her eyes on the three figures ranged up the face above her. There were long minutes of almost vertical climbing. They caught their breaths at each ledge. The final pitch ended with a brief, frightening moment of hanging backward as she worked around the protruding rimrock. For an instant, Nora was reminded of the Devil’s Backbone: the scrabbling at the slickrock, the frightened screaming of the horses as they hurtled to their deaths below her feet. Then she took another determined step upward, hoisted herself onto the top of the cliff, and collapsed, gasping, to her knees. Nearby sat Holroyd, sides heaving, head resting on crossed arms. Beside him was Black, trembling with exhaustion and stress.

Sloane, alone, seemed unaffected by the climb. She began moving the small array of equipment a safe distance from the edge of the cliff: Holroyd’s satellite positioning unit, now sporting a long UHF whip antenna; the microwave horn; the solar panel and deep-cycle battery; rack-mounted receivers and transmitters. Beside them, winking in the morning light, the satellite dish was still enmeshed in nylon netting from the trip up the cliff face. Nearby was the weather-receiving unit.

Holroyd struggled to his feet and moved toward the equipment, followed reluctantly by Black. “Let me get this stuff set up and calibrated,” Holroyd said. “It shouldn’t take long.”

Nora glanced at her watch with satisfaction. It was quarter to eleven, fifteen minutes before the appointed hour for their daily transmission to the Institute. As Holroyd initialized the radio unit and aligned the dish, Nora looked around at the surrounding vista. It was breathtaking: a landscape of red, yellow, and sepia clifftops, unfolding for countless miles under brilliant sunlight, covered with sparse piñon-juniper scrub. Far to the southwest, she could make out the sinuous gorge through which ran the Colorado River. To the east stood the brooding rim of the Devil’s Backbone, running off and behind the Kaiparowits Plateau. The purple prow of the Kaiparowits thrust above the land, like a great stone battleship ploughing through the wilderness, its flanks stripped to the bone by erosion, riven by steep canyons and ravines. The landscape ran on endlessly in all directions, an uninhabited wilderness of stone covering many thousands of square miles.

To improve reception, Holroyd climbed into one of the stunted juniper trees nearby and screwed the twenty-four-hour weather receiver into the highest part of the trunk. He then wrapped the unit’s wire antenna around a long branch. As he adjusted the receiver’s gain, Nora could hear the monotonous voice of the forecaster reading out the day’s report for Page, Arizona.

Black, having watched Holroyd set up the equipment, was now standing well away from the rim, looking pleased with himself, the smugness somewhat diluted by the harness that still clung to his haunches. Sloane, meanwhile, stood perilously close to the edge. “It’s amazing, Nora,” she called out. “But looking down from here, you’d never know there was an alcove, let alone a ruin. It’s uncanny.”

Nora joined her at the edge. The ruin, set far back, was no longer visible, and the brow of rock below their summit shut out any hint that a cave lay underneath. Seven hundred feet below, the valley lay nestled between walls of stone like a green gem in a red setting. The stream ran down the center of the valley, and Nora could see more clearly the tortuous boulder-strewn path of the frequent floodwaters, a hundred yards wide, that ripped through the center of the valley. She could see the camp, blue and yellow tents scattered among the cottonwoods well above the floodplain, and a wisp of smoke curling up from Bonarotti’s fire. It was a good, safe camp.

As eleven o’clock neared, Holroyd shut off the weather receiver and returned to the radio unit. Nora heard a bark of static, the whistle of frequency overload. “Got it,” Holroyd said, tugging on a pair of headphones. “Let’s see who’s out there.” He began murmuring into the microphone, almost toylike in its diminutive size. Then he straightened up abruptly. “You won’t believe it, but I’ve got Dr. Goddard himself,” he said. “Let me patch this through to the speaker.”

Abruptly, Sloane moved away from the edge and busied herself coiling rope. Nora watched her a moment, then turned her glance to the microphone, feeling the excitement of the discovery kindling once again inside her. She wondered how the elder Goddard would react to the news of their success.

“Dr. Kelly?” came the distant voice, crackling and small. “Nora? Is that you?”

“Dr. Goddard,” said Nora. “We’re here. We made it.”

“Thank God.” There was another crackle of static. “I’ve been here at eleven every morning. Another day, and we would have sent out a rescue party.”

“The canyon walls were too high, we couldn’t transmit en route. And it took us a few more days than we anticipated.”

“That’s just what I told Blakewood.” There was a brief silence. “What’s the news?” Goddard’s excitement and apprehension was palpable even through the wash of static.

Nora paused. She hadn’t quite prepared herself for what to say. “We found the city, Dr. Goddard.”

There was a sound that might have been a gasp or an electronic artifact. “You found Quivira? Is that what I just heard?”

Nora paused, wondering just where to begin. “Yes. It’s a large city, six hundred rooms at least.”

“Damn this static. I didn’t catch that. How many rooms?”

“Six hundred.”

There was a faint sound of wheezing or coughing, Nora couldn’t tell which. “Good lord. What kind of condition is the ruin?”

“It’s in beautiful condition.”

“Is it intact? Unlooted?”

“Yes. Nothing’s been touched.”

“Wonderful, wonderful.”

Nora’s excitement grew stronger. “Dr. Goddard, that’s not the most important thing.”

“Yes?”

“The city is unlike any other. It’s absolutely filled with priceless, priceless artifacts. The Quivirans took nothing with them. There are hundreds of rooms filled with extraordinary artifacts, most of them perfectly preserved.”

The voice took on a new tone. “What do you mean, extraordinary artifacts? Pots?”

“That and much more. The city was amazingly wealthy, unlike any other Anasazi site. Textiles, carvings, turquoise jewelry, painted buffalo hides, stone idols, fetishes, prayer sticks, palettes. There are even some very early Kachina Cult masks. All in a remarkable state of preservation.”

Nora fell silent. She could hear another brief cough. “Nora, what can I say? To hear all this . . . Is my daughter there?”

“Yes.” Nora handed the microphone to Sloane.

“Sloane?” came the voice from Santa Fe.

“Yes, Father.”

“Is all this really true?”

“Yes, Father, it is, and it’s no exaggeration. It’s the greatest archaeological discovery since Simpson found Chaco Canyon.”

“That’s a pretty tall statement, Sloane.”

Sloane did not answer.

“What are the plans for the survey?”

“We’ve decided that everything should be left in situ, undisturbed, except for test trenching in the trash mound. There’s enough here for a year’s worth of surveying and cataloguing, without moving anything. Day after tomorrow we plan to enter the Great Kiva.”

“Sloane, listen to me: be very, very careful. The entire academic world is going to be judging your every move after the fact, second-guessing you, picking apart everything you did. What you do in the next days will later be analyzed to death by the self-appointed experts. And because of the magnitude of the discovery, there will be jealousy and ill will. Many of your colleagues will not wish you well. They will all think they could have done it better. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” said Sloane, returning the mike. Nora thought she detected a momentary edge of irritation, even anger, in the woman’s voice.

“So what you do has to be perfect. That goes for everyone else. Nora, too.”

“We understand,” said Nora.

“The greatest discovery since Chaco,” Goddard echoed. Again, there was a long period of static, punctuated by electronic pops and hisses.

“Are you there?” Nora finally asked.

“Very much so,” came Goddard’s voice, with a little laugh, “although I have to admit an urge to pinch myself to make sure. Nora, I can’t emphasize how much you are to be commended. And that goes for your father.”

“Thank you, Dr. Goddard. And thanks for your faith in me.”

“Good lady. We’ll expect your transmission tomorrow morning, at the same time. Perhaps then you can provide some more concrete details about the city.”

“Yes. Goodbye, Dr. Goddard.”

She handed the mike back to Holroyd, who powered-down the transmitter and began securing a lightweight tarp over the electronics. Nora turned to find Sloane gathering her climbing gear, a dark look on her face.

“Everything all right?” Nora asked.

Sloane slung a coiled rope over her shoulder. “I’m fine. It’s just that he never trusts me to do anything right. Even from eight hundred miles away, he thinks he can do it better.”

She began to walk away, but Nora put a restraining hand on her arm. “Don’t be too hard on him. That caution was as much to me as it was to you. He trusts you, Sloane. And so do I.”

Sloane looked at her for a moment. Then the darkness passed and she broke into her lazy smile.

“Thanks, Nora,” she said.

28

SKIP STOPPED AT THE TOP OF THE RISE, THE SUDDEN dust cloud rolling over the car and drifting off into the hot afternoon sky. It was a parched June day, the kind that only occurred before the onset of the summer rains. A single cumulus cloud struggled pathetically over the Jemez Mountains.

For a moment he decided the best thing would be to simply turn around and go back into town. He’d sat up in bed the night before with a sudden inspiration. Thurber was still missing, and Skip still felt responsible, in some formless way, for the disappearance. So, to make up, he’d take Teresa’s dog, Teddy Bear, under his wing. After all, Teresa had been killed in their home. And who better to take care of her dog than her old neighbor and friend, Nora?

But what seemed like such a good idea last night didn’t seem so great now. Martinez had made it clear that the investigation was still active and that he wasn’t to go to the house. Well, he wasn’t going to the house: he was going to Teresa’s place. Still, Skip knew he could get in a lot of trouble just for being here.

He put the old car into gear, eased off the brakes, and coasted down the hill. He drove past their old ranch house and up the rise to Teresa’s place. The long, low structure was dark and silent, the livestock all taken away. This was stupid, Skip thought. Whoever took the animals probably took Teddy Bear, as well. Still, he’d come all this way.

Leaving the car running and the door open, he got out, walked around to the front, and called out. There was no answering bark.

He walked up to the front of the house. The old screen door, taped in countless places with black electrical tape, was shut tight. His hand raised automatically to knock, then he stopped himself.

“Teddy Bear!” he called out, turning.

Silence.

He found himself looking down in the direction of Las Cabrillas. Maybe the dog had wandered down toward their old house. He started forward for the old path, then stopped. His hand slid down to his belt and rested briefly on the handle of his father’s old .357. It was big and clumsy, it fired like a cannon, but it stopped whatever it hit. He’d only fired it once, damn near fracturing his wrists and making his ears ring for two days. Reassured, he continued down the dirt path, then circled around to the back of the ranch house. “Yo, Teddy, you old mutt!” he called in a softer voice.

He stepped up onto the portal, through the doorless frame and into the house. The kitchen was a whirlwind of ruin, the floor torn apart, holes like ragged eye sockets staring at him from every wall. At the far end of the room, he could see a yellow band of crime-scene tape barring entry into the living room. Several small lines of small, purplish-black pawprints ran from the living room to the kitchen door. Avoiding the prints, he stepped gingerly forward.

The smell assailed him first, followed almost instantly by the roar of flies. He took an instinctive step backward, gagging. Then, with a deep breath, he moved cautiously up to the tape and peered into the living room.

A huge pool of blood had congealed in the center of the room, punctuated here and there by the blacker holes of missing floorboards. Involuntarily, Skip gasped with revulsion. Jesus, I didn’t know a human body held that much blood. It seemed to spread in twisted, eccentric rivulets almost to the far walls. At its periphery, countless little pawprints could be seen. He could make out blowfly maggots wriggling in the places where the blood had pooled deeper.

Skip swayed slightly, and he reached for the doorframe to steady himself. The flies, disturbed, rose in an angry curtain. A camera tripod stood folded in one corner, SANTA FE P.D. stenciled in white along one leg.

“Oh, no, no,” Skip murmured. “Teresa, I’m so sorry.”

He stared hard at the room for a minute, then two. Then he turned and walked on wooden legs back through the kitchen.

Outside, the air seemed almost cool after the dark oppressive heat of the house. Skip stood on the portal, breathing slowly, looking around. He cupped his hands. “Teddy Bear!” he called out one last time.

He knew he should leave. Some cop, maybe even Martinez, could come by at any time. But he remained another minute, looking out over the backyard of his childhood. Although what had happened to Teresa remained a mystery, the house itself felt somehow tired and empty to him. It was almost as if whatever evil might have lurked here had dissipated. Or, perhaps, gone elsewhere.

Teddy Bear had clearly been taken away with the livestock. With a sigh, he stepped down into the dirt and walked back up the hill toward his car. It was an old ’71 Plymouth Fury, his mother’s, faded olive green and pocked with rust; yet it was one of his most treasured possessions. The front grille, with its heavy chrome fangs, listed slightly to the left, giving it a shambling, menacing appearance. There were just enough dents here and there around the body to let other drivers know that one more wouldn’t make any difference.

There, sitting in the driver’s seat, was Teddy Bear. His monstrous tongue hung out in the heat and was dripping saliva all over the seat, but he looked fine.

“Teddy Bear, you old rascal!” cried Skip.

The dog whined, slobbering over his hand.

“Move over, for chrissakes. I’m the one with a driver’s license.” He shoved the hundred-pound dog into the passenger seat and got behind the wheel.

Placing the gun in the glove compartment, Skip put the car in gear and maneuvered back onto the dirt road. He realized that he felt better than he had all day; somehow, despite the grimness and tragedy of the scene, it was a relief to put this particular pilgrimage behind him. Mentally, he began sorting out his evening. First he’d have to load up on dog food; it would bust his slim budget, but what the hell. Then he’d swing by the Noodle Emporium for some curried Singapore mei fun, and study the book on Anasazi pottery styles that Sonya Rowling had given him two days before. It was a fascinating text, and he’d found himself staying up late, underlining passages, scribbling notes in the margin. He’d even forgotten to crack open the new bottle of mescal that stood on his living room table.

The car rattled over the cattle guard and Skip lurched onto the main road, pointing the Fury toward town and gunning the engine, eager to put the ranch house far behind. The dog hung his head out the window, the low whining now replaced by an eager snuffling and slobbering. Strings of saliva curled away into the breeze.

Skip descended the hill toward Fox Run, fitting pot pieces together in his mind, as the desert dirt road fell away and macadam and manicured golf links took its place. Some half a mile ahead, at the base of the long downhill, the road curved sharply before passing the clubhouse. As a boy, Skip had ridden his father’s dirt bike right through where the clubhouse now stood. That was ten years ago, he mused. There hadn’t been a house within three miles. Now it was home to seventy-two holes of golf and six hundred condominiums.

The big car had picked up speed and the curve was coming up fast. Mentally returning to his potsherds, Skip put his foot on the brake.

And felt it sink, without resistance, to the metal floorboards.

Instantly he sat forward, adrenaline burning through his limbs. He pressed the pedal again, then stamped on it. Nothing. He looked ahead through wide eyes. Just a quarter mile ahead now, the road veered to the left, avoiding a huge ledge of basalt that thrust out of the desert. With horrible clarity, Skip could see a metal plaque screwed into the ledge.

FOX RUN COUNTRY CLUB

CAUTION: GOLFERS CROSSING

He glanced at the speedometer: sixty-two. He’d never make the turn; he’d wipe out, turn over. He could throw it into reverse, or even park, but that might pitch the car out of control and wrap him around the ledge.

In desperation, he jammed on the emergency brake. There was a sudden lunge and a high squealing sound, and the smell of burning steel filled the car. The dog sprawled forward, yelping in surprise. Dimly, he was aware of a party of white-haired golfers on a nearby green, swiveling their necks and staring, open-mouthed, as he flew by. Somebody jumped out of a golf cart and began to sprint toward the clubhouse.

The wheel bucked in Skip’s hands and he realized he was losing control. The basalt ledge yawned ahead, no more than a few seconds away. He turned the car sharply to the left. It twisted beneath him, turning wide, then swinging around in one complete revolution, then another. Skip was shouting now but he couldn’t hear himself over the squealing of the tires. In a dense pall of burning rubber, the car sheered off the road, still spinning, the tires catching first gravel, then grass. There was a tremendous lurch and the car came to a violent stop. A thick wash of cream-colored sand settled on the dashboard and hood.

Skip sat motionless, fingers glued to the dead wheel. The squeal of tires was replaced by the tick of cooling metal. Dimly, he was aware that he had landed in a bunker, canted sharply to one side. Black, foul-smelling, slobbering lips and tongue hovered before his eyes as Teddy Bear frantically licked at his face.

The sounds of pattering feet, quick worried conversation, then a rap on the windshield. “Sonny?” came the concerned voice. “Hey, son, you okay?”

If Skip heard, he gave no sign. Instead, he removed his trembling hands from the wheel, grasped the two ends of the seat belt, and slowly fastened them around his waist.

29

THE REST OF THE FIRST FULL DAY OF WORK AT Quivira went exceptionally well. The core members of the expedition set to their tasks with a professionalism that both impressed and heartened Nora. Black, in particular, had settled down and was quickly confirming his reputation as a top-notch field-worker. With remarkable speed, Holroyd had assembled a wireless paging network, designed around a central transmitter, to allow the members of the group to communicate with each other from anywhere within the site. The fascination and allure of Quivira worked a special magic on professional and amateur alike. Around the campfire that evening, again and again, conversation would spontaneously cease; and, as if with a single mind, all eyes would be irresistibly drawn up the dark walls of the canyon, in the direction of the invisible hollow where the city was concealed.

As the following morning drew to a close, early summer heat had settled in the canyon below; but halfway up the cliff face, beneath the shadow of the rock, the city itself remained cool. Holroyd had ascended the ladder, checked in with the Institute, and descended without incident, returning to his task of scanning the roomblocks with the proton magnetometer. Once that was done, he would use a handheld remote for the GPS system to survey the major points of the site.

Nora sat on the retaining wall at the front of the city, near the rope ladder leading down to the valley floor. Bonarotti had sent up their sack lunches using the pulley system, and Nora opened hers with anticipation. Inside was a wedge of Port du Salut cheese, four generous slices of prosciutto di Parma, and a marvelously thick and dense hunk of bread that Bonarotti had baked in his Dutch oven that morning after breakfast. She ate with little ceremony, washing the meal down with a swig from her canteen, and then rose to her feet. As leader, she was putting together the data for a field specimen catalogue, and it was time to check on the progress of the others.

She walked beneath the shadows of the ancient adobe walls to the far end of the ruin’s front plaza. Here, near the foot of the Planetarium, Black and Smithback were working in the city’s great midden heap: a dusty, oversized mound of dirt, broken animal bones, charcoal, and potsherds. As she approached, she could see Smithback’s head pop up from a cut at the far end, face dirty, cowlick bobbing with displeasure. She smiled despite herself at the sight. Though she’d never give him the pleasure of knowing it, she’d begun dipping in to the book he had given her. And, she had to admit, it was a fascinating, frightening story, despite the near-miraculous way Smithback had of taking part in almost every important or heroic event he described.

Black’s voice came echoing off the cave wall. “Bill, haven’t you finished grid F-one yet?”

“Why don’t you F one yourself,” Smithback muttered in return.

Black came around the mound in high spirits, carrying a trowel in one hand and a whiskbroom in the other. “Nora,” he said, with a smile, “this will interest you. I don’t believe there’s been a clearer cultural sequence since Kidder excavated the mound at Pecos. And that’s just from the control pit we dug yesterday; now we’re completing the first baulks of the test trench.”

“The man says ‘we.’” Smithback leaned on his shovel, and held out a trembling hand to Nora. “For the love of Jaysus, can ye not spare a wee drop for a poor dying sinner?”

Nora handed him her canteen, and he drank deeply. “That man is a sadist,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I’d have been better off building the pyramids. I want a transfer.”

“When you signed on, you knew you were going to be a digger,” Nora said, retrieving the canteen. “What better way to get your hands dirty, literally and figuratively? Besides, I’ll bet it isn’t the first time you’ve done some muckraking.”

“Et tu, Brute?” Smithback sighed.

“Come and see what we’ve done,” said Black, guiding Nora to a small, precise cut in the side of the mound.

“This is the control pit?” Nora asked.

“Yes,” Black nodded. “Beautiful soil profile, don’t you think?”

“Perfection,” Nora replied. She’d never seen such neat work or such potentially rich results. She could see where the two men had cut through the midden, exposing dozens of thin layers of brown, gray, and black soil, revealing how the trash mound had grown over time. The stratified layers had each been labeled with tiny, numbered flags, and even smaller flags marked spots where artifacts had been removed. On the ground beside the cut were dozens of Baggies and glass tubes, carefully aligned, each with its own artifact, seed, bone, or lump of charcoal. Nearby, Nora could see that Black had set up a portable water flotation lab and stereozoom microscope for separating pollen, small seeds, and human hair from the detritus. Next to it was a small paper chromatography setup for analyzing solubles. It was a highly professional job, executed with remarkable assurance and speed.

“It’s a textbook sequence,” said Black. “At the top is Pueblo III, where we see corrugated and some red ware. Under that is Pueblo II. The sequence begins abruptly at about A.D. 950.”

“The same time the Anasazi started building Chaco Canyon,” Nora said.

“Correct. Below this layer”—he pointed to a layer of light brown dirt—“is sterile soil.”

“Meaning the city was built all at once,” Nora said.

“Exactly. And take a look at this.” Black opened a Ziploc bag and gently slid three potsherds onto a nearby piece of felt. They glinted dully in the noon sun.

Nora drew in her breath sharply. “Black-on-yellow micaceous,” she murmured. “How beautiful.”

Black raised an eyebrow. “The rarest of the rare. So you’ve seen the type before?”

“Once, on my Rio Puerco dig. It was very weathered, of course; nobody’s ever found an intact pot.” It was a testament to the richness of the site that Black had found three such sherds in just one day’s digging.

“I’d never actually seen a piece before,” Black said. “It’s amazing stuff. Has anybody ever dated it?”

“No. Only two dozen sherds have ever been found, and they’ve all been too isolated. Maybe you’ll find enough here for the job.”

“Maybe,” Black replied, returning the fragments to the plastic bag with rubber-tipped tweezers. “Now look at this.” He squatted beside the soil profile and pointed his trowel tip at a series of alternating dark and light bands. Each was littered with distinct layers of broken pottery. “There was definitely a seasonal occupation of the site. For most of the year, there were not many people in residence, I’d guess fifty or less. And then there was a large influx every summer; obviously a seasonal pilgrimage, but on a far vaster scale than at Chaco. You can tell by the volume of broken pots and hearth ashes.”

A seasonal pilgrimage, Nora thought. Sounds like Aragon’s ritual journey to a city of priests. She decided not to antagonize Black by saying this aloud. “How can you tell it was summertime?” she asked instead.

“Pollen counts,” Black sniffed. “But there’s more. As I said, we’ve only started the test trench. But already it’s clear that the trash mound was segregated.”

Nora stared at him curiously. “Segregated?”

“Yes. In the back part of the mound there are fragments of beautiful painted pottery and the bones of animals used for food. Turkeys, deer, elk, bear. There are a lot of beads, whole arrowheads, even chipped pots. But in the front we find only the crudest, ugliest corrugated pottery. And the food we found in the front of the mound was clearly different.”

“What kinds of foods?”

“Mostly rats,” said Black. “Squirrels, snakes, a coyote or two. The flotation lab has brought up a lot of crushed insect carapaces and parts as well. Cockroaches, grasshoppers, crickets. I did a brief microscopic examination, and most of them seem to have been lightly toasted.”

“They were eating insects?” Nora asked incredulously.

“Without a doubt.”

“I prefer my bugs al dente,” said Smithback, with an unpleasant smacking of his lips.

Nora looked at Black. “What’s your interpretation of this?”

“Well, there’s never been anything like it in Anasazi sites. But in other sites, this kind of thing points directly to slavery. The masters and slaves ate different things and dumped their trash in different places.”

“Aaron, there isn’t a shred of evidence that the Anasazi had slaves.”

Black looked back at her. “There is now. Either slavery, or we’re looking at a deeply stratified society: a priestly class that lived in high luxury, and an underclass living in abject poverty, with no middle class in between.”

Nora glanced around the city, quiet in the noonday sun. The discovery seemed to violate all that they knew about the Anasazi. “Let’s keep an open mind until all the evidence is in,” she said at last.

“Naturally. We’re also collecting carbonized seeds for C-fourteen dating and human hair for DNA analysis.”

“Seeds,” Nora repeated. “By the way, did you know that most of those granaries in the rear of the city are still bulging with corn and beans?”

Black straightened up. “No I didn’t.”

“Sloane told me earlier this morning. That suggests the site was abandoned in the fall, at harvest time. And that it was abandoned very quickly.”

“Sloane,” Black repeated casually. “She came by here a little earlier. Where is she now, anyway?”

Nora, who’d been looking away, looked back. “Somewhere in the central roomblocks, I think. She’s beginning the preliminary survey, with the help of Peter and his magnetometer. I’ll be checking in with her later. But now I’m off to see what Aragon is up to.”

Black seemed to be thinking about something. Then he turned and laid a hand on Smithback’s shoulder. “Care to finish up F-one, my muckraking friend?”

“Slavery still exists,” Smithback muttered.

She raised her radio to her lips. “Enrique, this is Nora. Do you read?”

“Loud and clear,” came the answer after a moment of silence.

“Where are you?”

“In the crawlspace behind the granaries.”

“What are you doing back there?”

There was a short silence. “Better see for yourself. Come in from the west side.”

Nora walked around the back of the midden heap and past the first great tower. Typical cautious Aragon, she thought; why couldn’t the man simply come out and say what was up?

Just beyond the tower she picked up the small passageway that ran behind the granaries toward the back of the cave. It was dark and cool here behind the ruin, and the air smelled of sandstone and smoke. The passageway doglegged through a gap in the granaries, and there she came to a sunken passage—Aragon’s Crawlspace—at the very rear of the city. Once again, the Crawlspace was a feature unique to Quivira. As Nora moved forward, the ceiling of the passageway became so low that she had to drop to her hands and knees. There was a long moment of close, oppressive darkness, then ahead she could see the glow from Aragon’s lantern.

She rose to her feet inside a cramped space. Before her sat Aragon. Nora drew in her breath: beyond him lay a sea of human bones, their knobby surfaces thrown into sharp relief by the light. To her surprise, Aragon was holding a bone in one hand, examining it with jeweler’s loup and coordinated calipers. Beside him lay the tools for excavating human remains from surrounding matrix, barely necessary here: bamboo splints, wooden dowels, horsehair brushes. The place was silent save for the hiss of the lantern.

Aragon looked up as she approached, his face an unreadable mask.

“What is all this?” Nora asked. “Some kind of catacomb?”

Aragon did not reply for some time. Then he carefully placed the bone back on the heap beside him. “I don’t know,” he said in a flat tone. “It’s the largest ossuary I’ve ever encountered. I’ve heard of such things in Old World megalithic sites, but never in North America. And never, ever, on this kind of scale.”

Nora glanced from him to the bones. There were many complete skeletons lying on the top of the pile, but beneath them appeared to be a thick scattering of disarticulated bones, most of them broken, including countless crushed skulls. Punched into the stone walls at the back of the cave were dozens of holes, a few rotten timbers still jutting out of them.

“I’ve never seen anything like this either,” Nora said in a low voice.

“It’s like no burial practice, or cultural behavior, I’ve seen before,” Aragon said. “There are so many skeletons, so loosely thrown about, even a horizontal section is unnecessary.” He gestured at the closest skeletons. “It’s clearly a multiple interment of sorts: a series of primary burials, overlaying a vast number of secondary burials. These skeletons on top, the complete ones, weren’t even ‘buried’ in the archaeological sense of the word. The bodies seem to have been dragged in here and hastily thrown on top of a deep layer of preexisting bones.”

“Are there any signs of violence on the bones?”

“Not on the whole skeletons on top.”

“And the bones underneath?”

There was a short pause. “I’m still analyzing them,” Aragon replied.

Nora looked around, feeling an unpleasant gnawing in the pit of her stomach. She was far from squeamish, but the charnel-house nature of the place made her uncomfortable. “What could it mean?” she asked.

Aragon glanced up at her. “A large number of simultaneous burials usually means a single cause,” he said. “Famine, disease, war . . .” He paused. “Or sacrifice.”

At that moment her radio crackled. “Nora, this is Sloane. Are you there?”

Nora pulled her radio from her side. “I’m with Aragon. What is it?”

“There’s something you need to see. Both of you.” Through the microphone, the quiver of suppressed excitement in Sloane’s voice was clear. “Meet me at the central plaza.”

A few minutes later, Sloane was leading them through a complicated series of second-story roomblocks at the far end of the ruin. “We were doing a routine survey,” she was saying, “and then Peter found a large cavity in one of the floors with the proton magnetometer.” They stepped beneath a doorway and entered a large room, only dimly lit by the portable lantern. Unlike most of the other rooms she had seen at the ruin, this one was strangely empty. Holroyd stood in a far corner, tinkering with the magnetometer: a flat box rolling on sliding wheels, the long handle projecting from its side ending in an LCD screen.

But Nora wasn’t looking at Holroyd. She was gazing into the center of the room, where a section of floor had been removed, exposing a slab-lined cyst. The enormous flat stone that had covered it lay tipped up carefully against one wall.

“Who opened this grave?” she heard Aragon ask sharply.

Nora stepped forward, anger at this breach of authority flooding through her. Then she looked down and stopped short.

Within the cyst was a double burial. But it was no ordinary Anasazi burial, graced perhaps with a few pots and a turquoise pendant. The two completely disarticulated skeletons lay in the center of the grave, the broken bones of each arranged in a circular pattern in its own large painted bowl, surmounted by their broken skulls. Over each bowl had been draped cotton mantles, which had rotted down to the warp. Enough shreds remained, however, to see that they had once been extraordinarily fine, a pattern of grinning skulls and grimacing faces. The scalps of both individuals had been laid in the grave on top of their skulls. One had long white hair, beautifully braided and decorated with incised turquoise ornaments. The other had brown hair, also braided, with two huge dishes of polished abalone fixed to the ends of each braid. In both skulls, the front teeth had been drilled and inlaid with red carnelian.

Nora stared in astonishment. The bodies were surrounded by an unheard-of wealth of grave goods: pots filled with salt, turquoise, quartz crystals, fetishes, and ground pigments. There were also two small bowls, carved of quartz, filled to the brim with some kind of fine reddish powder—more red ochre, perhaps. Nora’s eyes moved over the cyst, picking out bundles of arrows, buffalo robes, soft buckskins, mummified parrots and macaws, elaborate prayer sticks. The entire burial was covered with a thick layer of yellow dust.

“I examined that dust under the stereozoom,” said Sloane. “It’s pollen, from at least fifteen different species of flowers.”

Nora stared at her in disbelief. “Why pollen?”

“The entire cyst was once filled with hundreds of pounds of flowers.”

Nora shook her head in disbelief. “The Anasazi never buried their dead like that. And I’ve never seen inlaid teeth like that before.”

Suddenly, Aragon knelt by the grave. At first, Nora had the odd notion he was going to pray. But then he bent down, shining a flashlight over the bones, scrutinizing them from a very close distance. As he probed the two pots of bones with his light, Nora noticed that many of the bones had been broken, and some showed signs of charring at their ends. Then Nora heard a sharp intake of breath, and Aragon quickly straightened up. His expression had suddenly changed.

“I would like permission to temporarily remove several bones for examination,” he said, his voice coldly formal.

More than anything else, this request, coming from Aragon, capped Nora’s mystification. “After we photograph and document everything, of course,” she heard herself say.

“Naturally. And I’d like to take a sample of that reddish powder.”

He departed wordlessly, but Nora continued to stand at the edge of the cyst, staring down into the dark hole in the floor. Sloane began setting up the 4x5 camera at the edge of the gravesite, while Holroyd powered down the magnetometer. Then he came over to Nora.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” he murmured in her ear.

But Nora paid no attention to this, or to the excited undercurrent of Sloane’s voice in the background. She was thinking of Aragon, and the sudden look that had come over his face. She felt it too: there was something odd, even wrong, about the burial. In some ways, she thought, it wasn’t like a burial at all. True, some Pueblo IV cultures cremated their dead, and others dug up and reburied their dead in pots. But this: the bones broken and burned; the thick flower dust; the grave goods ranged so carefully.

“I wonder what Black will make of this burial,” came Sloane’s voice, intruding on her reverie.

I don’t think this is a burial at all, Nora thought to herself. I think it’s an offering.

* * *

As they stepped out onto the first-floor roof, its farthest edges tipped in noontime sun, Nora gently laid a hand on Sloane’s arm.

“I thought we had an agreement,” she said.

Sloane turned to look at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You shouldn’t have opened that grave without consulting me first. That was a major violation of the ground rules for this dig.”

The amber color of Sloane’s eyes seemed to deepen as she listened to Nora. “And you don’t think opening the burial was a good idea?” she replied, her voice suddenly low, an almost feline susurrus.

“No, I don’t. We have a whole city to survey and catalog, and burials are particularly sensitive. But like I told you at Pete’s Ruin, that’s not the point. This isn’t how a professional archaeologist should work, simply digging up what interests her.”

“You’re saying I’m not a professional?” Sloane asked.

Nora took a deep breath. “You’re not as experienced as I thought you were.”

“I had to open that cyst,” said Sloane abruptly.

“Why?” asked Nora, failing to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Were you looking for something?”

Sloane started to answer, then stopped short. She moved closer, so close that Nora could feel the heat and anger radiating from her. “You, Nora Kelly, are a control freak. You’re just like my father. You’ve been breathing down my neck, hoping for mistakes, ever since I first flew in. I did nothing wrong in opening that burial. The magnetometer showed a cavity and all I did was lift the stone. I touched nothing. It was no more invasive than walking through a doorway.”

Nora struggled to maintain her composure. “If you can’t abide by the rules,” she said as evenly as she could, “I’ll place you under Aragon, where you can learn respect for the integrity of an archaeological site. And obedience to the expedition director.”

“Director?” Sloane sneered. “By all rights, I should be the expedition director. Don’t forget who’s paying for all this.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Nora said, voice steady despite the heat of her anger. “Just one more example of your father not trusting you, isn’t it?”

For a moment, Sloane stood before her speechlessly, limbs taut, face dark under the deep tan. Then, wordlessly, she pivoted on her heel. Nora watched her descend the ladder and walk deliberately away, erect and proud, her dark hair burned violet by the sun.

30

THE GROUP ASSEMBLED IN THE EARLY MORNING silence at the base of the rope ladder leading to the city. Even Swire and Bonarotti were on hand. The swallows, now acclimated to the human intrusion, no longer raised their usual clamor of indignation. An unusually subdued Bill Smithback was fumbling with a cassette recorder. Beside him stood Aragon, face gray and thoughtful. Despite his preoccupation with the bone-filled crawlspace, he had left his work to join them. This, more than anything, underscored the importance of what they were about to undertake.

A rough preliminary survey of the city had been completed, and Holroyd had downloaded the location coordinates and field elevations established by his GPS equipment into a geographic information systems database. It was time to enter the Great Kiva, the central religious structure of the city. For much of the previous night, Nora had lain awake, wondering about what they might find. In the end, her imagination had failed her. The Great Kiva was equivalent to the cathedral of a medieval city: the center of its religious activity, the repository of the most sacred items, the locus of social life.

Black was resting on a rock, drumming his fingers with ill-disguised anticipation. And chatting with him, oversized plant in his hand, was Peter Holroyd, loyal and uncomplicated. The only person missing was Sloane, whom Nora had scarcely seen since the previous day’s confrontation.

As if sensing her glance, Holroyd looked her way. Then he stood and approached her, shaking the plant he was holding. “Have a look at this, Nora,” he said.

She took the plant: an oversized, bushy explosion of green stalks, with a tapered root at one end and a creamy flower at the other.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Oh, about five to ten in a Federal prison.” Holroyd laughed.

She threw him an uncomprehending gaze.

“It’s datura,” he explained. “That root’s loaded with a highly potent hallucinogen.”

“Hallucinogen?”

“The alkaloid is concentrated in the upper sections of the root,” Aragon interjected. “Among Yaqui shamans, fortitude is measured by just how far up the root you can ingest.” He glanced at Holroyd. “But certainly you’ve noticed that’s not the only illegal plant in this valley.”

Holroyd nodded. “Not only datura, but psilocybin, mescal cactus . . . the place is a veritable smorgasbord of psychedelics.”

“The curious thing,” Aragon said, “is that those three plants you mention—which seem to run riot here—are sometimes taken by shamans and medicine men. In combination, they can induce a wild frenzy. It’s like an overdose of PCP: you could get shot at close range and never feel it.”

“Those priests knew what they were doing, settling here,” Smithback cackled.

“The flower’s pretty, at least,” Nora said.

“Looks like a morning glory, doesn’t it?” Holroyd asked. “That’s another funny thing. There’s an enzyme in the datura root that the body can’t metabolize. Instead, it gets exuded in the sweat. And I’ve heard that’s exactly what people who take it smell like. Morning glories.”

Unconsciously, Nora leaned forward, bringing the flower to her nose. It was large and white, almost sexual in its ripeness. She inhaled the delicate scent deeply.

Then she froze, fingers turning cold. In a moment, her mind was back in the upstairs hallway of her parents’ abandoned ranch house, hearing the crunch of glass underfoot, smelling the scent of crushed flowers on the still night air...

She heard a clatter, and turned to see Sloane approaching, burdened by a portable acetylene lantern, a chalk information board, and the 4x5 camera. Sloane caught her eye. Immediately, the woman put down the equipment and came over. She slid a graceful arm around Nora’s waist.

“Sorry,” she whispered in Nora’s ear. “You were right. As usual.”

Nora nodded, pulling herself back to the present. “Let’s not talk about it.”

Sloane drew away slightly. “I guess it’s obvious. I have a problem with authority. Something else I have to thank my father for. It won’t happen again.”

“Thank you,” Nora said, dropping the plant. “And I shouldn’t have made that crack about your father. It was unkind.”

Then she turned to the group, doing her best to push thoughts of Holroyd’s plant out of her mind. “Okay, here’s the protocol. Sloane and I will enter the kiva first, to make an initial analysis and do the photography. The rest of you will follow. Agreed?”

Black frowned, but there was nodding and murmuring from the rest of the group.

“Good. Then let’s get started.”

One at a time, they ascended the rope ladder. Moving through the central plaza, they climbed a nearby sandpile and walked across the first setback of roofs. Mounting an Anasazi ladder placed against the second story—still in perfect condition, lashed with sinew—they topped out on the second story setback. The entrance to the Great Kiva lay at the back, its vast circular bulk in purple shadow. Another ladder had been placed against its wall, and in a moment Nora and Sloane stood on the roof. It was covered with a thick layer of adobe and felt immensely solid beneath Nora’s feet. As with all kivas, it was entered from a hole in the roof. Protruding from the opening were the two ends of a ladder, leading down into the interior. As she stared at the ladder, Nora felt her mouth go dry.

She moved slowly toward it, stopping just before the opening. “Let’s light the lantern,” she said.

There was the hiss of gas, and with a pop of ignition the lantern sprang to life. As they knelt by the opening, Sloane directed the brilliant white light down into the gloom.

The ladder descended about fifteen feet, ending in an anchor groove cut into the sandstone floor. Sloane angled the beam around, but from their vantage point nothing but bare floor was visible: the kiva was sixty feet in diameter, and the walls were beyond reach.

“You can go first,” Nora said.

Sloane looked at her. “Me?”

Nora smiled.

Quickly, Sloane climbed down the first five rungs, then held up her hand for the lamp. Climbing down a few more rungs, she stopped to direct the light around the walls. Nora could not see what Sloane was looking at, but she could see the expression on the young woman’s face. The kiva, she knew then, was not empty.

Sloane rapidly descended to the bottom, and after a last deep breath Nora followed. A moment later she stepped off the ladder, her eyes following the lamp’s broad illumination.

The circular wall of the kiva was covered with a brilliantly colored mural. The images were highly stylized, and Nora had to examine them for a moment before she realized what they represented. Ranged around the top were four huge thunderbirds, their outstretched wings almost covering the entire upper part of the kiva wall. Jagged lightning shot from the birds’ eyes and beaks. Below, clouds drifted across a field of brilliant turquoise, dropping dotted curtains of white rain. Running through the clouds was a rainbow god, his long body encircling almost the entire circumference of the kiva, his head and hands outstretched and meeting at the north. Toward the bottom of the mural was the landscape of the earth itself. Nora noticed the four sacred mountains, placed at each of the cardinal directions. It was the cosmography that still ran through most present-day southwestern Native American religions: the black mountain in the north, the yellow mountain in the west, the white mountain in the east, and the blue mountain in the south. The mural was executed in the finest detail, and the colors, so long buried in darkness, seemed as fresh as if they had been painted the day before.

Nora dropped her eyes. Below the mural, ranging around the circumference of the kiva, was a stone banco. On the banco lay a huge number of gleaming objects, appearing and disappearing as the lantern beam moved slowly over them. As she stared, Nora realized, with a kind of remote surprise, that they were all skulls. There were dozens, if not hundreds of them: human, bear, buffalo, wolf, deer, mountain lion, jaguar—each completely covered with an inlay of polished turquoise. But it was the eyes that struck Nora most of all. In each eye socket lay a carved globe of rose quartz crystal, inlaid with carnelian, that refracted, magnified, and threw back the beam of the lamp, causing the eyes to gleam hideously pink in the murk. It was a grinning crowd of the dead, a host of lidless ghouls, ranged around them, their eyes glowing maniacally, as if caught in the headlights of a car.

Aside from the skulls, Nora saw, the room was completely bare. There was the usual sipapu, the hole to the underworld, in the exact center of the kiva, and two firepits on either side. To the east, she noticed the standard spirit opening, a narrow keyhole channel running up and out of the kiva. But the mural and the skulls were, like almost everything else in Quivira, unique.

Nora glanced at Sloane, who had already turned away from the sights and was arranging the camera’s three flash units.

“I’m going to invite the others in,” said Nora. “There’s very little they can disturb in here if they stay away from the walls.”

Sloane nodded curtly. As she busied herself with the exposure meter, Nora thought she saw a kind of disappointment on the woman’s face. Then the first bank of flashes went off, illuminating the entire grinning company for a ghastly moment.

The others filed down the ladder in silent astonishment and gathered at the bottom. Nora found herself drawn to a curious design of two large circles at the northern end of the mural. One circle enclosed an incised disk of blue and white, showing miniature clouds and rain, done in the usual Anasazi geometric style: a miniature version of the huge circle painted on the kiva’s exterior. The second circle was painted yellow and white, and it enclosed an incised disk of the sun, surrounded by rays of light. As the beam of the lantern moved across it, the image glittered like a disk of gold. As Nora examined it closely, she could see that the effect had been created using crushed flakes of mica mixed with the pigment.

Sloane had repositioned the camera, and she now gestured for Nora to move out of the way of her shot. As Sloane bent over the ground glass screen of her camera, Nora heard a sharp intake of breath. Sloane abruptly straightened up, walked over to the small image of the sun, and began examining it intently.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

Sloane turned away and her face broke into a broad lazy smile. “Nothing in particular. Curious design. I hadn’t noticed it before.” She went back to the camera, finished photographing the design, and moved on.

“This is obviously a moiety,” said Black, approaching. He pointed at the two circles, his large, craggy face backlit by the lamp.

“A moiety?”

“Yes. Many Anasazi societies—as well as other societies—were organized into moieties. They were divided into halves. Summer and winter societies, male and female, earth and sky.” He pointed to the two circles. “This blue disk matches the one outside this kiva. That would imply that this city was divided into rain and sun societies. The first circle represents the Rain Kiva, and the second the Sun Kiva.”

“Interesting,” said Nora, surprised.

“Of course. We must be standing in the Rain Kiva itself.”

There was another blinding leap of light as Sloane took a third exposure.

“So?” said Smithback, who had been listening. “Go ahead and drop the other shoe.”

“What do you mean?” Black replied.

“If this is the Rain Kiva, then where’s the Sun Kiva?”

There was a silence, interrupted only by the soft sound of another flash. Finally Black cleared his throat. “That’s actually a very good question.”

“It must be at some other site, if it exists at all,” Nora said. “There’s only one Great Kiva here at Quivira.”

“No doubt you’re right,” Aragon murmured. “Still, the longer I am here, I, too, have this feeling of something . . . something that, for whatever reason, we’re not seeing.”

Nora turned to him. “I don’t understand.”

The older man returned the glance, his eyes looking hollow and dark in the lantern light. “Don’t you get the sense that there’s a piece of the puzzle still missing? All the riches, all the bones, all this massive construction . . . there has to be some reason for it all.” He shook his head. “I thought the answer would be in this kiva. But now, I am not so sure. I dislike making value judgments, but I feel there was an overarching purpose to all this. A sinister purpose.”

But Black was still considering Smithback’s question. “You know, Bill,” he said, “your question raises another one.”

“And what’s that?” Smithback asked.

Black smiled, and Nora saw something in his face, a kind of glittering intensity that she had not seen before. “Turquoise was the stone the Anasazi used in the rain ceremony. This was true at Chaco Canyon, and it is obviously true here. There must be hundreds of pounds of turquoise in this room. That’s quite a lot for a culture in which even a single bead had great value.”

Smithback nodded. Nora looked from one to the other, wondering where Black was headed.

“So I ask you: if turquoise was the material used in the rain ceremony, what material was used in the sun ceremony?” He pointed to the image of the Sun Kiva, its mica disk glittering in the reflected light. Both Bonarotti and Swire had come over, and were listening intently. “What does this look like to you?”

Smithback gave a low whistle. “Gold?” he ventured.

Black merely smiled.

“Come on,” Nora said impatiently, “let’s not start on that business again. This is the only Great Kiva in the city. And the thought of a Sun Kiva, or any kiva, being filled with gold is ridiculous. I’m surprised to hear this kind of wild speculation from you, of all people.”

“Is it wild speculation?” Black asked. “First,” he said, ticking the points off on his fingers, “we have legends of gold among the Indians. Then we have Coronado’s and Fray Marcos’s reports of gold, among others. And now we have this pictograph, which is a pretty remarkable imitation of gold. As Enrique will confirm, the dental modifications to these skulls are pure Aztec, and we know they had tons of gold. So I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t some reality behind the legends.”

“Find me this Sun Kiva full of Aztec gold,” said Nora wearily. “Then I’ll revise my opinion. But until then, stifle the treasure talk, okay?”

Black grinned. “Is that a challenge?”

“It’s more like a plea for sanity.”

There was a laugh behind her, husky and sotto voce. Nora glanced over to see Sloane, looking from her to Black and back again, her amber eyes twinkling with some private amusement of her own.

31

NORA SLEPT POORLY AND AWOKE EARLY, the memory of ugly dreams receding quickly into forgetfulness. The gibbous moon was setting and the valley was heavy with moonshadows, the night just yielding to color. She sat up, immediately wide awake, and heard the distant plash of water in the creek. She glanced around. Swire was already up and gone on his wearisome daily slog through the slot canyon to check on the horses. The rest of the camp slumbered in the predawn darkness. For the second night in a row, the light had remained on in Aragon’s tent; now, in the early dawn, it was dark and silent.

She dressed quickly in the shivery cold. Shoving her flashlight into her back pocket, she walked over to the kitchen area, unbanked the coals, and tossed some twigs on to start the fire. Reaching for the blue-flecked enamel coffeepot that always stood at the ready, she filled it with water and placed it on the grill.

As she did so, she saw a form emerge from the darkness of a distant grove of cottonwoods: Sloane. Nora momentarily wondered why she had not slept in her tent. Probably likes to sleep under the stars, like me, she thought.

“Sleep well?” Sloane asked, tossing her bedroll into her tent and taking a seat beside Nora.

“Not especially,” Nora said, gazing into the fire. “You?”

“I did all right.” Sloane followed her gaze to the fire. “I can see why the ancients worshiped fire,” she went on smoothly. “It’s mesmerizing, never the same. And it sure beats watching TV. No ads.” She grinned at Nora. She seemed in high spirits, a stark contrast to Nora’s own subdued mood.

Nora smiled a little wanly, and unzipped her jacket to let in the heat of the fire. The coffeepot began to stir and shake on the grill as the water boiled. Heaving herself to her feet, Nora removed it from the fire, threw in a fistful of grounds, and stirred the pot with her knife.

“Bonarotti would die if he saw you making that cowboy coffee,” Sloane said. “He’d brain you with his espresso pot.”

“Waiting for him to get up and make coffee in the morning is like waiting for Godot,” Nora said. While they were on the trail, the cook had always been the first one up. But now that they were encamped at Quivira and working a more routine schedule, Bonarotti had steadfastly refused to leave his tent in the morning until the sun could be seen striking the clifftops.

She put the pot back on the fire for a moment and stirred the grounds down. Then she poured them each a cup. Steam came off the surface of the coffee, filling her nose with the strong bitter scent. She inhaled it gratefully.

“Bet I can guess what you’re thinking about,” Sloane said.

“Probably,” Nora replied. They sipped their coffee a while in silence.

“It’s just so unexpected,” Nora found herself saying, as if they’d been conversing all the while. “We find this place, this enchanted and marvelous place. Filled with more artifacts, more information, than we could ever hope for. Suddenly it seems as if we’ll get all the answers, after all.” She shook her head. “But all we get is riddles, strange unsettling riddles. That kiva filled with skulls is a perfect example. Why skulls? What does it mean? What could the ceremony have possibly been?”

Sloane put down her coffee and looked searchingly at Nora. “But don’t you see,” she said in a low voice, “we are getting the answers. It’s just that they aren’t the ones we expected. Scientific discovery is always like that.”

“I hope you’re right,” Nora replied. “I’ve discovered things before. And they never felt like this. Something in my gut just doesn’t feel right. And it hasn’t felt right since I first laid eyes on Aragon’s Crawlspace, littered with those countless bones, thrown about like so much trash.”

She fell silent as dark shapes bundled out of the dark. Smithback and Holroyd came over and joined them at the fire. Black soon appeared out of the twilight and hunkered down beside them. The dark branches of the cottonwoods were just beginning to separate themselves from the night.

“It’s as cold as Lenin’s balls around here in the mornings,” Smithback said. “And on top of that, my valet neglected to polish my boots, although I specifically left them outside my door.”

“It’s so hard to find good help these days,” said Black, in a whiny imitation of Smithback’s voice, and poured himself a cup. He held it to his nose. “What a barbarous way to make coffee,” he said, setting the cup down. “And when are we going to eat? Why can’t that Italian fellow get himself out of bed a little earlier? What kind of camp cook is this who won’t get up until the crack of noon?”

“He’s the only cook I know who can make pommes Anna as well as the best chefs of Paris, but with a twentieth of the equipment,” said Smithback. “Anyway, forget breakfast. Only savages and children eat breakfast.”

They sat around the fire, all but Sloane grumpy in the predawn air, nursing their coffee and speaking little. Nora wondered if the discoveries in the city and the Great Kiva were casting a pall over them, as well. Gradually the rising sun poured more color into the landscape, transforming it from gray to rich reds, yellows, purples, and greens.

Smithback saw Nora’s eyes traveling around the cliffs, and he said, “Paint by the numbers, right?”

“What a poetic thought,” said Nora.

“Hey, poetic thinking is my business.” Smithback chuckled and fished some grounds out of his coffee with a spoon, flicking them into the bushes behind him.

Nora heard the whisper of footfalls on sand and looked up to see Aragon, bundled against the chill. He sat down and wordlessly poured himself a cup of coffee. He drank it off with extreme rapidity and refilled the cup, hands unsteady.

“Burning the midnight oil again, Enrique?” Nora asked.

It was as if Aragon hadn’t heard. He continued drinking his coffee and staring into the fire. At last, he turned his dark eyes to Nora. “Yes, I was up quite late. I hope I did not disturb anyone.”

“No, not at all,” Nora replied quickly.

“Still working on those bones of yours, I suppose?” asked Black.

Aragon took a final swig of his coffee and refilled the cup a third time. “Yes.”

“So much for ZST. Find anything?”

There was a long pause. “Yes,” Aragon repeated.

There was something in his tone that silenced the company.

“Share with us, brother,” intoned the oblivious Smithback.

Aragon set his cup down and began slowly, deliberately, almost as if he had prepared his words ahead of time. “As I told Nora when I first discovered it, the placement of the bones in the Crawlspace is exceedingly odd.” There was a pause while he carefully removed from his coat a small plastic container. He placed it on the ground and gently unbuckled the lid. Inside were three fragmentary bones and a portion of a cranium.

“Lying sprawled on top are perhaps fifty or sixty articulated skeletons,” he continued. “Some still have the remains of clothing, rich jewelry, and personal adornment. They were well-fed, healthy individuals, most in the prime of their lives. They all seemed to have died at the same time, yet there is no sign of violence on the bones.”

“So what’s the explanation?” Nora asked.

“It seems to me that whatever happened, it happened so suddenly that there wasn’t time to give the bodies a proper burial,” Aragon replied. “My analysis turned up no clear disease process, but many diseases leave no osteological traces. Apparently, the bodies were simply dragged, intact, into the back and thrown on top of a huge existing pile of bones.” His expression changed. “Those bones underneath tell a very different story. They are the broken, disarticulated remains of hundreds, even thousands, of individuals, accumulated over years. Unlike the skeletons on top, these bones come from individuals who clearly died of violence. Extreme violence.”

He passed his dark eyes around the group. Nora felt her unease grow.

“The bones from the bottom layer display several unusual characteristics,” Aragon said, wiping his face with a soiled bandanna. He pointed with a pair of rubber-tipped forceps at a broken bone in the tray. “The first is that many of the long bones have been broken, perimortem, in a special way, like this bone here.”

“Perimortem?” asked Smithback.

“Yes. Broken not before death, and not long afterward, but about the time of death.”

“What do you mean, broken in a special way?” Black asked.

“It’s the same way the Anasazi broke deer and elk bones. In order to extract the marrow.” He pointed. “And here, in the cancellous tissue of the humerus, they actually reamed out the center of the bone to get at the marrow inside.”

“Wait,” said Smithback. “Hold on. You mean to extract the marrow for—?”

“Let me finish. Second, there are small marks on the bone. I have examined these marks under the microscope and they are consistent with the marks made by stone tools when a carcass is dismembered. Butchered and defleshed, if you will. Third, I found dozens of fractured skulls among the litter of bones, mostly of children. There were cut marks on the calvaria that are made only by scalping: just like the skull we found at Pete’s Ruin. Furthermore, the children’s skulls in particular showed ‘anvil abrasions.’ When I reexamined the Pete’s Ruin skull, I found anvil abrasions on it, as well. I also found that many of the skulls had been drilled, and a circular piece of bone removed.”

“What are anvil abrasions?” Nora asked.

“A very specific kind of parallel scratch mark, made when the head is laid on a flat rock and another rock is brought down on it to break open the brainpan. You normally see it on animal skulls whose brains have been extracted for food.”

From the corner of her eye, Nora saw that Smithback was furiously taking notes.

“There’s more,” Aragon said. “Many of the bones show this.” He picked up a smaller bone with the forceps and turned it to the light. “Take a look at the broken ends with this loup.”

Nora examined it under magnification. “I can’t see anything unusual, except maybe for this faint sheen on the broken ends, as if they used the bone for scraping hides.”

“Not scraping hides. That sheen has been called ‘pot polish.’”

“Pot polish?” Nora whispered, the coil of fear growing tighter within her.

“It only occurs to bones that have been boiled and stirred in a rough ceramic pot for a long time, turned around and around.” And then he added, unnecessarily: “It’s how you make soup.”

Aragon reached again for the coffee pot and found it empty.

“Are you saying they were cooking and eating people?” Holroyd asked.

“Of course that’s what he’s saying,” Black snapped. “But I’ve found no evidence of human bones in the trash mound. Though it was filled with animal bones that had clearly been consumed for food.”

Aragon did not respond.

Nora looked away from him, turning her gaze out over the canyon. The sun was rising above the rimrock, gilding the clifftops while leaving the valley below in Magritte-like shadow. But the beautiful canyon now filled her with apprehension.

“There’s something else I should mention,” Aragon said in a low voice.

Nora looked back. “More?”

Aragon nodded to Sloane. “I don’t believe the tomb you found was a burial at all.”

“It seemed like an offering,” Nora heard herself say.

“Yes,” said Aragon. “But even more than that, it was a sacrifice. From the marks on the skeletons, it seems the two individuals had been dismembered—butchered—and the cuts boiled or roasted. The cooked meats were probably arranged in those two bowls you found. There were bits of a brown, dusty substance lying with the bones: no doubt those were the mummified pieces of meat that had retracted and fallen off the bone.”

“How revolting,” Smithback said, writing eagerly.

“The individuals were also scalped, and their brains extracted and made into a kind of—how does one say it?—a compote, a mousse, spiced with chiles. I found the . . . the substance placed inside each of the skulls.”

As if on a macabre cue, the cook emerged from his tent, fastidiously zipped up the flap, then approached the fire.

Black shifted restlessly. “Enrique, you’re the last person I would have suspected of jumping to sensational conclusions. There are dozens of ways bones could be scratched and polished other than cannibalism.”

“It is you who use the term ‘cannibalism,’” Aragon said. “I’ll keep my conclusions to myself for the moment. I am merely reporting what I’ve seen.”

“Everything you’ve said has hinted at that conclusion,” Black bellowed. “This is irresponsible. The Anasazi were a peaceful, agrarian people. There’s never been any evidence of cannibalism.”

“That’s not true,” Sloane said in a low voice, leaning suddenly forward. “Several archaeologists have theorized about cannibalistic practices among ancient Native Americans. And not only among the Anasazi. For example, how do you explain Awatovi?”

“Awatovi?” Black repeated. “The Hopi village destroyed in 1700?”

Sloane nodded. “After the villagers of Awatovi were converted to Christianity by the Spanish, the surrounding Indian towns massacred them. Their bones were found thirty years ago, and they bear the same kind of marks Aragon found here.”

“They may have been facing a period of starvation,” said Nora. “There are plenty of examples of starvation cannibalism in our own culture. And anyway, this is far from Awatovi, and these people are not related to the Hopi. If this was cannibalism, it was ritualized cannibalism on a grand scale. Institutionalized, almost. A lot like—” She stopped and glanced at Aragon.

“A lot like the Aztecs,” he said, finishing the sentence. “Dr. Black, you said Anasazi cannibalism is impossible. But not Aztec cannibalism. Cannibalism not for food, but as a tool of social control and terror.”

“What’s your point?” Black said. “This is America, not Mexico. We’re digging an Anasazi site.”

“An Anasazi site with a ruling class? An Anasazi site protected by a god with a name like Xochitl? An Anasazi site that features royal burial chambers, filled with flowers? An Anasazi site that may or may not display signs of ritual cannibalism?” Aragon shook his head. “I also did a number of forensic tests on skulls from both the upper and lower set of bones in the Crawlspace. Differences in cranial features, variations in incisor shoveling, point to the two groups of skeletons as being from entirely different populations. Anasazi slaves beneath, Aztec rulers above. All the evidence I’ve found at Quivira demonstrates one thing: a group of Aztecs, or rather their Toltec predecessors, invaded the Anasazi civilization around A.D. 950 and established themselves here as a priestly nobility. Perhaps they were even responsible for the great building projects at Chaco and elsewhere.”

“I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous,” Black said. “There’s never been any sign of Aztec influence on the Anasazi, let alone enslavement. It goes against a hundred years of scholarship.”

“Wait,” Nora said. “Let’s not be too hasty to dismiss it. Nobody’s ever found a city like this before. And that theory would explain a lot of things. The city’s strange location, for one thing. The annual pilgrimages you discovered.”

“And the concentration of wealth,” Sloane added, in a low, thoughtful voice. “Maybe trade with the Aztecs has been the wrong word all along. These were foreign invaders, establishing an oligarchy, maintaining power through religious ritual and sacrificial cannibalism.”

As Smithback began to ask a question, Nora heard a distant shout. In unison, the group turned toward the sound. Roscoe Swire was running down the canyon, bashing and stomping crazily through the brush as he approached camp.

He came to a frantic stop before them, still dripping wet from the slot canyon, breathing raggedly. Nora stared at him in horror. Bloody water dripped from his hair, and his shirt was stained pink.

“What is it?” she asked sharply.

“Our horses,” Swire said, gasping for air. “They’ve been gutted.”

32

NORA RAISED HER HANDS TO SILENCE THE immediate explosion of talk. “Roscoe,” she said, “I want you to tell us exactly what happened.”

Swire sat down near the fire, still heaving from his scramble through the slot canyon, oblivious to a nasty gash on his arm that was bleeding freely. “I got up around three this morning, just as usual. Reached the horses about four. The cavvy had drifted over to the northern end of the valley—looking for grass, I figured—but when I reached them, I found they were all lathered up.” He stopped a moment. “I thought maybe a mountain lion had been after them. A couple were missing. Then I saw them . . . what was left of them, anyway. Hoosegow and Crow Bait, gutted like . . .” His face darkened. “When I catch the sons-a-bitches that did this, I’ll—”

“What makes you think humans did it?” Aragon asked.

Swire shook his head. “It was done all scientific. They slit open the bellies, pulled out the guts, and—” He faltered.

“And?”

“Sort of made them into a display.”

“What?” Nora asked sharply.

“They unwound the guts and laid them out in a spiral. There were sticks with feathers, shoved into the eyes.” He paused. “Other stuff, too.”

“Any tracks?”

“No footprints that I could see. Must’ve all been done from the backs of horses.”

At the mention of the spirals, the feathers shoved into the eyes, Nora had gone cold. “Come on,” she heard Smithback say. “Nobody could do all that from the back of a horse.”

“There ain’t no other explanation,” Swire snapped. “I told you, I saw no footprints. But . . .” He paused again. “Yesterday evening, when I was about to leave the horses for the night, I thought I saw a rider atop the hogback ridge. Man on a horse, just standing there, looking down at me.”

“Why didn’t you mention this before?” Nora asked.

“I thought it was my imagination, a trick of the setting sun. Can’t say I expected to see another horse atop that goddamned ridge. Who’d be way the hell out here?”

Who indeed? Nora thought, desperation rising within her. Over the past several days, she’d grown certain she had left the strange apparitions from the ranch house far behind. Now that certainty was fading. Perhaps they’d been followed, after all. But who could have had the skill, or the desperate resolve, to track them across such a harsh and barren landscape?

“That’s dry sandy country,” Swire was saying, the dark uncertain look replaced with a new resolve. “They can’t hide a track in it forever. I just came in here to tell you I’m going after them.” He stood up abruptly and went into his tent.

In the ensuing silence, Nora could hear the rattle of metal, the sound of bullets being pushed into chambers. A moment later he reemerged, rifle slung behind his back, revolver buckled around his waist.

“Wait a minute, Roscoe,” Nora said.

“Don’t try to stop me,” Swire said.

“You can’t just rush off,” she replied sharply. “Let’s talk about this.”

“Talking to you only causes trouble.”

Bonarotti walked wordlessly to his cabinet and began loading a small sack with food.

“Roscoe,” Sloane said, “Nora’s absolutely right. You can’t just head off like—”

“You shut your mouth. I’m not going to have a bunch of goddamn women telling me what to do with my own horses.”

“Well, how about a goddamn man, then,” said Black. “This is foolhardy. You could get hurt, or worse.”

“I’m done with discussion,” Swire said, accepting the small sack from Bonarotti, tying it into his slicker, and throwing it over his shoulder.

As Nora watched him, her fear and shock at this new development suddenly turned to anger: anger at whatever was bent on disturbing a dig that had begun so successfully; anger at Swire for behaving so truculently. “Swire, stand down!” she bellowed.

There was a breathless hush in the little valley. Swire, momentarily taken aback, turned to face her.

“Now look,” Nora went on, aware that her heart was hammering in her rib cage and that her tone was uneven, “we have to think this through. You can’t just run off without a plan and go kill someone.”

“I’ve got a plan,” came the answer. “And there’s nothing to think about. I’m gonna find the bastard that—”

“Agreed,” Nora said, cutting off Swire’s words. “But you’re not the person to do it.”

“What?” Swire’s expression turned to one of scornful disbelief. “And just who else is going to do it for me?”

“I am.”

Swire opened his mouth to speak.

“Think for a minute,” Nora went on quickly. “He, or they, or whatever, killed two horses. Not for food, not for sport, but to send a message. Doesn’t that tell you something? What about the rest of the horses? What do you think is going to happen to them while you set out on your lynching party? Those are your animals. You’re the only person who knows enough to keep them safe until all this is resolved.”

Swire pursed his lips and smoothed a finger over his mustache. “Someone else can watch the horses while I’m gone.”

“Like who?”

Swire didn’t answer for a moment. “You don’t know the first thing about tracking,” he said.

“As a matter of fact, I do. Anyone who grew up on a ranch knows something about tracking. I’ve looked for plenty of lost cows in my day. I may not be in your league, but you said it yourself: out here in sandy country, there’s no great trick to it.” She leaned toward him. “The fact is, if somebody has to go, I’m the only choice. Aaron, Sloane, and Enrique’s work is essential here. You’re vital to the horses. Luigi’s our only cook. Peter isn’t an experienced enough rider. And besides, he’s necessary for communications.”

Swire looked at her appraisingly, but remained silent.

Black turned to Nora. “This is insane. You, alone? You can’t go, you’re the expedition director.”

“That’s why I can’t ask anybody else to do this.” Nora looked around. “I’ll only be gone a day, overnight at the most. Meanwhile, you, Sloane, and Aragon can make decisions by majority consent. I’ll find out who did this, and why.”

“I think we should simply call the police,” Black said. “We have a radio.”

Aragon burst out in a sudden, uncharacteristic laugh. “Call the police? What police?”

“Why not? We’re still in America, aren’t we?”

“Are we?” Aragon murmured.

There was a brief pause. Then Smithback spoke up, surprisingly quiet and firm. “It’s pretty obvious that she can’t go alone. I’m the only person who can be spared from the dig. I’ll go with her.”

“No,” Nora said automatically.

“Why not? The trash mound can spare me for a day. Aaron over here hasn’t been getting nearly enough exercise lately. I’m not a bad horseman and, if necessary, I’m not a bad shot, either.”

“There’s something else to think about,” Aragon said. “You said these killings were meant to send a message. Have you thought about the other possibility?”

Nora looked at him. “And what’s that?”

“That the killings were done to lure people away from camp, where they could be dealt with individually? Perhaps this man on the ridge showed himself to Swire deliberately.”

Nora licked her lips.

“Another reason for me to go,” Smithback said.

“Now hold on,” came the cold voice of Swire. “Aren’t we forgetting about the Devil’s Backbone? Three of my horses are already dead, thanks to that goddamn ridge.”

Nora turned to him. “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “You said you saw a rider atop the ridge the other day. And obviously, people got into the outer valley on horseback last night. There’s no other way in save over the ridge. I’ll bet they used unshod horses.”

“Unshod?” Smithback asked.

Nora nodded. “A horse without shoes would have surer footing on a narrow trail like the Devil’s Backbone. Iron on stone is like a skater on ice. But the keratin of a horse’s hoof would grip the stone.”

Swire was still staring at her. “I’m not letting my horses get their hooves all chewed up out in that bad country.”

“We’d tack the shoes back on once we get to the bottom of the ridge. You’ve got farrier’s tools, don’t you?”

Swire nodded slowly.

“All I’m going to do,” she continued, “is try to find out who did this, and why. We can let the law take care of it when we get back to civilization.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid of,” said Swire.

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life in prison for murder?” Nora asked. “Because that’s exactly what will happen if you go out there and shoot somebody.”

Swire did not reply. Wordlessly, the cook turned on his heel and entered his tent. A moment later, he emerged with his weapon, a box of bullets, and a leather holster. He handed them to Nora. Strapping the holster around her waist, Nora opened the heavy gun, spun the cylinder, and closed it again. Ripping the top off the box of bullets, she poured its contents into one hand and rapidly shoved them into the bullet loops. Then she dropped the empty box into the fire and turned toward Swire.

“We’ll take care of it,” she said evenly.

33

SKIP PAUSED AT THE METAL DOOR TO ELMO’S Auto Shoppe, pausing a moment to build up a full head of righteous indignation. The metal, quonset-hut garage lay baking in the heat at the long sad end of Cerrillos Road, an ugly strip of fast-food restaurants, used automobile dealerships, and malls south of town. Beyond Elmo’s stretched nothing but bulldozed flat prairie, decorated with billboards, FOR LEASE and WILL BUILD TO SUIT signs—the expanding edge of Santa Fe’s uncontrolled growth.

Skip set the expression on his face and pushed through the door, pulling Teddy Bear behind him on a short, thick leather leash. In the farthest bay, perched high atop the hydraulic lift, sat his Fury, tires drooping mournfully. It was a great deal sandier than it had been the day before.

Beneath it stood the proprietor of Elmo’s Auto Shoppe, a tall, gangly man in faded dungarees and torn T-shirt. The shirt was liberally stained with oil, and it sported an oversized Rolling Stones tongue, jutting salaciously from dewlap lips. The shirt formed an appropriate reflection of Elmo’s own pendulous lips and doleful expression.

“Why’d you have to bring that with you?” Elmo whined, nodding at the dog. “I’m allergic to dog hair.”

Skip opened his mouth to deliver his speech and Elmo raised his clipboard in protest. “Broken rocker assembly,” he began quickly, licking a long, grease-sodden finger and folding the pages on his clipboard back as he spoke. “Emergency brake trashed. Hub bent. You’re looking at, oh, five, six hundred at least. Plus the tow from the third fairway.”

“Like hell I am!” Skip dragged Teddy Bear forward and paced angrily in the shadow of his car, forgetting his carefully crafted speech. “I had this in here for an oil change and tuneup just three weeks ago. Why the hell didn’t you tell me the brakes were going?”

Elmo turned his lachrymose face toward Skip. His droopy eyes always looked on the verge of weeping. “I checked that invoice already. There was nothing wrong with the brakes.”

“That’s bullshit.” Skip glanced at the mechanic in disbelief. He so rarely bothered to pay for car servicing that now, having shelled out fifty-seven dollars just a few weeks before, his righteous indignation knew no bounds. “I tell you, I had zero brakes left. Zero. I might as well have tried to use a kickstand. I could have been killed. And now you want me to pay for the privilege? Yeah, right.”

“The brake system was dry as a bone,” said Elmo, doggedly, looking at the floor.

“See?” Skip slapped a balled fist against his palm. “That proves it. You should have seen that leak when the car was here before. I’m not going to pay for—”

“But there ain’t no leak.”

Skip halted in mid-rant. “Huh?”

Elmo shrugged, his eyes rolling toward Skip. “We pressure-tested the brake system. There’s no leak, no sprung seal, nothing.”

Skip stared at Elmo. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Elmo shrugged again. “Besides, there would have been signs of a leak. Look at that.” He grabbed a basket lamp and pointed it up at the Fury.

“It’s the underside of a car. It’s sandy and greasy. So what?”

“But none of that’s brake fluid. No drips, no spray marks. Nothing to show any leak at all. Where do you park it regularly?”

“In my driveway, of course—”

“You see a big stain on the ground lately?”

“Nothing I noticed.”

Elmo looked down again, nodding sagely, his big ears wagging.

Skip started to retort, then stopped, mouth open. “What are you saying?” he said at last.

“I ain’t saying nothing. Your brakes were drained clean.” Elmo’s rubbery lips twisted into what might have been a smile, and he licked at them with a red tongue. “Got any enemies?”

Skip scoffed. “That’s crazy. No, I . . .” He paused a moment thinking. “You mean, somebody could’ve drained them? Deliberately?”

Elmo nodded again, and inserted a finger into one ear, giving it a few hard twists. “Only problem is the brake fluid cap was rusted shut, so’s how it got drained is kind of problematical.”

But Skip was still thinking. “No,” he repeated at last in a softer voice. “The brakes were working fine one minute, gone the next.” He glanced at his watch, irritation once again welling up within him. “I’m late for work. I’ve got this boss who rips the balls off people who are late. And on top of everything else, you give me this—” He gestured at Elmo’s loaner car, an ancient Volkswagen Beetle with a crumpled rear fender and doors of mismatched colors. “I’d rather drive my own, even without brakes.”

Elmo worked his shoulders through their perpetual shrug. “It’ll be ready by five P.M. Friday.”

“And rework that bill while you’re reworking the car,” Skip replied. “There’s no way I’m paying six hundred for somebody else’s negligence.” With effort, he stuffed Teddy Bear into the Beetle, then lowered himself gingerly into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine.

He eased into first and chugged noisily out into traffic, pointing the car’s snout down the strip that eventually would bring him back to town, the Institute, and the waiting Sonya Rowling. He could feel a headache coming on, faint for the moment but getting stronger. It seemed to encircle his temples, like a headband. Despite his bluster, he felt profoundly disturbed, and his heart raced as he worked his way up through the gears. For a minute, he thought of heading back out to Teresa’s, checking the ground where he’d parked the car for a puddle of fluid. But even as the thought came to him, he knew he never wanted to see the place again.

Then, on impulse, he pulled the car onto the shoulder and slipped the gearshift into neutral. Something about this didn’t seem right, at all. And it wasn’t just the bizarre circumstances, either; the moment Elmo had mentioned enemies, a sudden chill had enveloped Skip.

He sat on the shoulder, thinking. Vaguely, very vaguely, he remembered his father, sitting at the dinner table, drinking coffee and telling him a story. For some reason, Skip couldn’t remember the story. But he remembered his mother frowning, telling Skip’s dad to talk about something else.

Something else . . . there was something else that had happened recently, something that dovetailed with all this in a strange and awful way.

Suddenly, Skip put the Volkswagen into gear and, with a quick glance over his shoulder, urged the car back into traffic. But instead of heading toward the Institute, he peeled off at the next corner and began threading his way through a maze of seedy side streets, urging the old car forward, cursing it, his fingers drumming impatiently on the wheel.

Pulling up at last in front of his apartment, he half ran, half leaped up the flight of stairs, dragging Teddy Bear behind him, fumbling with his keychain and unlocking both locks as quickly as he could.

Inside, the apartment smelled of unwashed socks and ancient half-eaten meals. Jerking the chain of an overhead light, Skip made a beeline to the cinderblock-and-plywood bookshelf that leaned precariously against a far wall. Kneeling in front of the lowest row, his finger traced across the old spines of the books that had been his father’s, the faded titles etched faintly in lines of dust.

Then his finger stopped on a thin, battered gray book. “Skinwalkers, Witches, and Curanderas: Witchcraft and Sorcery Practices of the Southwest,” Skip softly breathed the title aloud.

The urgent rush that had propelled him back to the apartment was now replaced by hesitation and uncertainty. There was terrible and hideous knowledge in this book, he recalled. More than anything, Skip did not want to have that knowledge confirm the fear that was now growing inside him.

He knelt there, by the old books, for what seemed a long time. Then at last he gripped the volume in both hands, carried it to the orange couch, opened it carefully, and began to read.