Thunderhead

34

AS THEY EMERGED FROM THE GLOOM OF the slot canyon into the cottonwood valley, Nora could tell at a glance something was wrong. Rather than being scattered indolently across the sparse grass, the horses were bunched together by the stream, snorting and tossing their heads. She quickly scanned the valley floor, the stone ramparts, the ragged form of the Devil’s Backbone. There was nobody.

Swire snugged the revolver into his belt and led the way to the horses. “You take Compañero,” he said to Smithback, reaching for a saddle. “He’s too dumb to be scared.”

Nora found her own saddle from among the pile, located Arbuckles, and threw it over his back. Then she held the horses still while Swire knelt to remove the shoes. He worked in silence, using a chisel to get underneath the clinched end of each nail and bending it straight, taking great pains not to clip or crack the nailhole. Once all the nails were straight, he pried the shoe from the hoof with a clinch cutter. Nora found herself impressed by his skill: shoeing and unshoeing a horse in the field without an anvil was neither a common nor desirable practice.

At last he stood up, wordlessly handing Nora fresh nails along with the shoes, hammer, and clincher. “Sure you can do this?” he asked. Nora nodded, and the wrangler gestured for Smithback to mount.

“There was a lot of wind in the valley last night,” Swire said, cinching the saddle tight and handing the reins to Smithback. “Maybe that’s why there ain’t no tracks down here in all this loose sand. Might have better luck on top, or down the far side.”

Nora secured the saddlebags, tested the saddle’s fit, then swung up. “Smithback’s going to need a gun,” she said.

After a moment, the wrangler silently handed over his pistol, along with a handful of bullets.

“I’d rather have the rifle,” the writer said.

Swire shook his head. “If anybody comes over that ridge, I want to have a good bead on him,” he replied.

“Just make sure it isn’t us,” Smithback said as he mounted Compañero.

Nora looked around for a final time, then turned to Swire. “Thanks for the horses.” She nosed Arbuckles away from the group.

“Just a minute.” Nora turned back to see Swire looking at her evenly.

“Good luck,” he said at last.

They rode away from the stream, angling across the uneven land toward the heavy bulk of the ridge ahead, in shadow despite the bright morning sun. Over the thin murmur of the stream and the call of the canyon wrens, Nora could now hear a different sound: a low, steady drone, like the hum of a magneto. Then they topped a small rise and two low forms came into view: the remains of Hoosegow and Crow Bait. A black cloud of flies hung over them.

“Jesus,” Smithback muttered.

Arbuckles began to prance and whinny beneath her, and Nora veered left, giving the carcasses a wide berth on the upwind side. Even so, as they passed she caught a brief glimpse of coiled ropes of entrails, bluish-gray and steaming in the sun, webbed in black traceries of flies. Beyond the scene of the massacre, she stopped.

“What are you doing?” Smithback asked.

“I’m going to take a minute to look more closely.”

“Mind if I stay here?” Smithback asked in a strained voice.

Dismounting and giving her reins to Smithback, Nora walked back over the rise. The flies, disturbed by her approach, rose in a roaring, angry mass. The high winds had scoured the ground, but here and there she could make out old horse tracks and some fresher coyote prints. Except for the marks of Swire’s boots, there were no human footprints. As Swire had said, the entrails had been arranged in a spiral pattern. Brightly colored macaw feathers, shockingly out of place in the arid landscape, protruded from the eye sockets. The carcasses had been stabbed with some painted and feathered twigs.

As she was about to turn away, she noticed something else. A circular patch of skin had been cut from the foreheads of both horses. Examining these more closely, Nora saw that similar patches had been removed symmetrically from a spot on either side of the horse’s chests, and from two more spots on either side of their lower bellies. Why there? What could this possibly mean?

She shook her head and retreated from the killing ground.

“Who could do such a thing?” Smithback asked as she remounted.

Who indeed? It was the question Nora had been asking herself for the last hour. The answer that seemed most likely was too frightening to contemplate.

Within twenty minutes they had reached the base of the ridge. In another twenty, following the gentle trail up, they crested the top of the Devil’s Backbone. Nora brought the horses to a stop and dismounted again, gazing slowly over the vista ahead. The great divide looked out over thousands of miles of slickrock canyons. To the north, she could see the distant blue hump of Barney Top, and to the northeast, the silent sentinel of the Kaiparowits.

And, directly ahead, were the narrow vicious switchbacks that led down the face of the hogback ridge. Somewhere at the bottom lay Fiddlehead, Hurricane Deck, and Beetlebum.

“Tell me we’re not really going down that again,” Smithback said.

Nora remained silent. She dismounted and took a few steps from the horses, scouring the patches of sand that lay among the rocks. There were no signs of a horse; but then, the wind at the top of the ridge would have swept them away.

She looked back down the way they had come. Though she’d kept a careful lookout as they climbed, she had seen nothing but old hoofprints. She shivered; she knew very well there was no other way into the valley. And yet, somehow, the mysterious horse killers had left no sign of their passing.

Tearing her eyes away, she looked back around to the steep trail ahead of them, leading down the front of the Devil’s Backbone. It seemed to simply disappear over the edge into sheer space. She knew it was always more dangerous to descend than to ascend. The terrifying memory of how she’d scrabbled at the cliff face, feet kicking in dead space, returned with redoubled force. She rubbed her fingertips, now free of bandages but still tingling with the memory.

“I’m going to hike down a ways on foot,” Nora murmured. “You wait here.”

“Anything to stay off that trail,” Smithback said. “I can’t imagine a worse way down a cliff than that. Except falling, of course. And at least that’s faster.”

Nora began to pick her way down the steep trail. The first part, all slickrock, not surprisingly showed no signs of the mysterious rider. But when she reached the rock strewn part of the trail, she stopped: there, in a small patch of sand, was a fresh hoofprint. And it was from an unshod horse.

“Are we going down?” Smithback asked with a distinct lack of enthusiasm as she returned to the top of the ridge.

“Yes,” she replied. “Swire wasn’t seeing things. Somebody did come up here on horseback.”

She took a deep breath, then another. And then she began carefully down the ridge, leading Arbuckles. The horse balked at the lip of the trail, and after some firm coaxing Nora got him to take one step, and then another. Smithback followed, leading Compañero. Nora could hear the horse snorting, the scrape of bare hoof on stone. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on the trail ahead, breathing regularly, trying to keep them from straying over the edge into the infinite space below. Once, instinctively, she looked over: there was the dry valley below, the strange rock formations like tiny piles of pebbles, the stunted junipers mere black dots. Arbuckles’s legs were shaking, but he kept his head down, nose to the ground, and they inched their way down. Having been up the trail before, Nora was now aware of the most difficult spots, and worked to guide her horse past them when it was most necessary.

Just before the second switchback, Nora heard Arbuckles’s hooves skid, and in a panic she dropped the lead rope, but after a brief scrabble the horse stopped, shaking. Clearly, the unshod hooves had better purchase on the trail. As she bent down to pick up the rope, two crows, riding air currents up the face of the cliff, hovered past them. They were so close, Nora could see their beady eyes swiveling around to look at them. One let fly a loud croak of displeasure as he passed by.

After twenty more heart-stopping minutes, Nora found herself at the bottom of the trail. Turning, she saw Smithback make the last pitch to the bottom. She was so relieved she almost felt like hugging him.

Then the wind shifted, and a terrible stench reached her nostrils: the three dead horses, lying perhaps fifty yards away, draped over some broken boulders.

Whoever had come this way would no doubt have inspected those horses.

Giving Arbuckles’s reins to Smithback, she walked in the direction of the dead horses, fighting rising feelings of horror and guilt. The animals lay widely scattered, their bellies burst open, their guts thrown across the rocks. And there, too, were the tracks she was seeking: the tracks of the unshod horse. To her surprise, she saw the tracks had not come up from the south, as their expedition had, but led instead from the north: in the direction of the tiny Indian village of Nankoweap, many days’ ride away.

“The trail goes north,” she said to Smithback, indicating for him to dismount.

“I’m impressed,” the writer replied as he slipped to the ground. “And what else can you tell about the trail? Was it a stallion or a mare? Was it a pinto or a palomino?”

Nora pulled the horseshoes from a saddlebag and knelt beside Arbuckles. “I can tell it was probably an Indian’s horse.”

“How in the hell can you tell that?”

“Because Indians tend to ride unshod horses. Anglos, on the other hand, shoe their horses from the moment they start them under saddle.” She fitted the shoes to Arbuckles’s hooves, tapped the nails through, then carefully clinched them down. Swire’s horses, their hooves soft from years of wearing horseshoes, could not be left shoeless a moment longer than necessary.

Smithback pulled out the gun Swire had given him, checked it, then replaced it in his jacket. “And was there somebody on that horse?”

“I’m not that good a tracker. But I sure don’t think Roscoe’s the type to be seeing things.”

Nora fitted the shoes onto Smithback’s horse. Then, leading Arbuckles by the guide rope, she began following the single track, which showed two sets of prints: one going, the other coming. Although the wind had scoured small sections away, the trail was clearly visible as it wound north through the scattered clumps of Mormon tea bushes. For a while, it ran along the base of the hogback ridge, and then it veered away, into a series of parallel defiles hemmed in by low ridges of a black volcanic rock.

“Where’d you learn to track, anyway?” Smithback asked. “I didn’t know the Lone Ranger was still on the lecture circuit.”

Nora shot him an irritated glance. “Is this for your book?”

Smithback looked back in comical surprise, his long face drooping. “No. Well, yes, I suppose. Everything is fair game. But mostly I’m just curious.”

Nora sighed. “You Easterners think tracking is some kind of art, or maybe some instinctive ethnic skill. But unless you’re tracking across rock, buffalo grass, or lava, it’s not all that difficult. Just follow the footprints in the sand.”

She continued northward, Smithback’s voice vexing her concentration. “I can’t get over how remote this land is,” he was saying. “When I first got here, I couldn’t believe how ugly and barren it all was, not at all like the Verde Valley where I went to school. But there’s something almost comforting in its spareness, if you think about it. Something clean in the emptiness. Sort of like a Japanese tea room in that way. I’ve been studying the tea ceremony a lot this last year, ever since—”

“Say, do you think you could hobble that lip?” Nora interrupted in exasperation. “You could talk Jesus out of going to heaven.”

There was a long moment of blissful silence. Then Smithback spoke again. “Nora,” he asked quietly, “what is it, exactly, you don’t like about me?”

Nora stopped at this, turning toward him in surprise. The writer wore a serious expression, one of the few she remembered seeing on his face. He stood, silently, in the shadow of Compañero. The cowboy clothes, which had seemed so ridiculous a week before, had now become a real working outfit, creased and dusty, well suited to his long frame. The pasty complexion was gone, replaced by a ruddy tan that matched his brown hair. She realized, with a small shock, that this was the first time she had heard him call her by name instead of the odious “Madame Chairman.” And although she couldn’t analyze it—and didn’t have the time, even if she felt inclined to do so—a part of her was pleased to think Smithback was concerned about how she felt about him.

Nora opened her mouth to reply: You mean, other than the fact that you’re a brash, smug guy with an ego the size of Texas? But she stopped and turned away, realizing this wasn’t fair to Smithback. For all his eccentric ways, she had grown fond of the journalist. Now that she knew him better, she realized his ego was tempered by a certain self-deprecation that was charming in its own way. “I didn’t mean to snap at you just now,” she said. “And I don’t dislike you. You almost screwed up everything, that’s all.”

“I did what?”

Nora decided not to answer. It was too hot, and she was too tired, for this kind of discussion.

They moved on slowly as the sun climbed toward noon. Though the trail was relatively easy to follow, tracking by eye was still exhausting work. The hoofprints took them through a weird country of broken rocks, knobs, and humps of sandstone. The prints appeared to be following a faint and very old trail. On horseback now, Nora kept them moving as quickly as she could without losing the track. The midday sun beat down relentlessly, burning off the glaring white sand, flattening and draining all the color from the landscape. There was no sign of water anywhere. And then, unexpectedly, they passed through a lush valley, full of grass-covered sand and prickly pear, sprawling in gorgeous bloom.

“This is like a garden of Eden,” Smithback said as they made their way through the brief, verdant patch. “What’s it doing here in the middle of the desert?”

“Probably the result of a heavy rainfall,” Nora replied. “Rain out here isn’t like it is back in the east. It’s very localized. You can get a huge downpour in one place, and a mile away see ground still parched and dry.”

They made their way out of the lush valley and back into the stony desert. “What about lunch?” Smithback asked.

“What about it?”

“Well, it’s almost two. I like to dine fashionably late, but my stomach has its limits.”

“It’s really that late?” Nora looked at her watch in disbelief, then stretched in the saddle. “We must have covered fifteen miles from the base of the ridge.” She paused a moment, considering. “Pretty soon we’ll be crossing into Indian land. The Nankoweap reservation begins somewhere up ahead.”

“So what does that mean? Any chance of a Coke machine?”

“No, the village is still a two-day ride from here, and it doesn’t have electricity in any case. What I mean is, we’ll be subject to their laws. Any Indians we meet aren’t likely to look too kindly on a couple of outsiders blundering in, accusing them of being horse killers. We have to be careful how we do this.”

Smithback considered this a moment. “On second thought, maybe I’m not so hungry.”

The faint trail seemed to go on forever, winding through a senseless tangle of arroyos, hidden valleys, shadowy ravines, and dunefields. Vaguely, Nora guessed that by now they had crossed into Indian country, but there was no fence and, of course, no sign. This was the kind of land that the white men had given to the Indians all over the West, she knew; utterly remote and useless for just about anything.

“So exactly how did I screw things up?” Smithback asked suddenly.

Nora twisted to look at him. “Huh?”

“At the bottom of the ridge, you said that I almost screwed things up for you. I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t see what I’ve done that you weren’t already doing yourself.”

Nora urged Arbuckles forward. “I’m afraid that anything I say, you’ll just use in your book.”

“I won’t, honest.”

Nora moved forward without speaking.

“Really, Nora, I mean it. I just want to know what’s going on with you.”

Again, Nora felt a strange sense of pleasure from his interest. “What do you know about how I discovered Quivira?” she asked, returning her eyes to the trail.

“I know how Holroyd helped you pinpoint the location. It was Dr. Goddard who told me your father was the one who originally discovered it. I’d been meaning to ask you more about that, only . . .” Smithback’s voice fell away.

Only you knew I’d snap your head off, Nora thought with a twinge of guilt. “About two weeks ago,” she began, “I was attacked in my family’s old ranch house by a couple of men. At least, I think they were men, dressed up as animals. They demanded I give them a letter. My neighbor chased them away with her shotgun. At the time, I didn’t know what they were talking about. But then I came upon this letter my father had written to my mother, years and years ago. Somebody mailed it, just recently. Who, or why, I don’t know, and I can’t get that out of my head. Anyway, in the letter, my father said that he’d discovered Quivira. He gave directions—vague, but with Peter’s help, enough to get us here. I think those stalkers also wanted to learn the location of Quivira. So they could loot it, strip it of its treasures.”

She paused and licked her lips, painfully dry in the sun. “So I tried to keep the expedition a secret. Everything was coming together just right. And then you showed up at the marina, notebook in one hand and megaphone in the other.”

“Oh.” Even without turning around, she could hear the sheepish note in the writer’s voice. “Sorry. I knew the purpose of the expedition was secret, but I didn’t realize the expedition itself was.” He paused. “I didn’t give anything away, you know.”

Nora sighed. “Maybe not. But you certainly created quite a stir. But let’s forget it, okay? I overreacted. I was a little tense myself—for obvious reasons.”

They rode quietly for a while. “So what do you think of my story?” Nora asked at last.

“I think I’m sorry I said I wouldn’t print it. Do you suppose these guys are really still after you?”

“Why do you think I insisted on taking this little field trip myself? I’m pretty sure that the people who killed our horses, and the ones who attacked me, might be the same. If so, that means they’ve learned where Quivira is.”

Abruptly, the trail left the weird tangle of stone and topped out on a narrow, fingerlike mesa. Breathtaking views surrounded them on all sides, canyons layered against canyons, disappearing into the purple depths. The snowcapped peaks of the Henry Mountains were now visible to the east, blue and inexpressibly lonely in the vast distance. At the far side of the mesa stood some rocks, hiding the landscape beyond from view.

“I didn’t realize we were gaining so much altitude,” said Smithback, stopping his horse and gazing around.

Just then Nora caught a faint whiff of cedar smoke. She signaled Smithback to dismount quietly.

“Smell that?” she whispered. “We’re not far from a campfire. Let’s leave our horses here and go ahead on foot.”

Tying their mounts to sagebrush, they began walking through the sand. “Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a bathtub full of ice and cervezas on the other side?” Smithback said under his breath as they approached the jumble of rocks. Nora dropped to her knees and peered through a gap in the rocks. Smithback did the same, creeping up beside her.

At the naked end of the mesa, under a dead, corkscrewed juniper, was a small fire, smoking faintly. What appeared to be a jackrabbit, skinned and spitted, was propped between two forked sticks nearby. An old army bedroll lay unrolled in the lee of the rock, beside several buckskin bundles. To the left of the little camp the mesa sloped downward, and Nora could see a horse, picketed on a fifty-foot rope, grazing grass.

The view from the point of the mesa was spectacular. The land dropped away in a great sweep of erosion, down into a wrinkled and violent landscape, dry, lifeless, webbed with alkali washes, dissolving into a badlands peppered with great rock megaliths, casting long shadows. Beyond lay the heavily forested Aquarius Plateau, a black irregular line on the horizon. A grasshopper scratched forlornly in the late afternoon heat.

Nora slowly exhaled. It was a barren place, and she knew she ought to feel a little silly, crawling up the ridge, peering melodramatically through the rocks on hands and knees. Then she thought about the matted, hairy figures in the deserted farmhouse, and about the coils of horse entrails, flyblown and steaming in the sun.

The unshod tracks they had been following led around the rocks and straight into the camp.

“Looks like nobody’s home,” whispered Nora. Her voice sounded loud and thin in her ears, and she could feel her skin prickle with fear.

“Yeah, but they couldn’t be far. Look at that rabbit. What do we do now?”

“I think we mount up and ride in, nice and easy. And then wait until they or whoever returns.”

“Oh, sure. And get shot right out of the saddle.”

Nora turned to him. “Got a better idea?”

“Yeah. How about if we head back and see what Bonarotti’s got cooking for supper?”

Nora shook her head impatiently. “Then I’ll go in there alone, on foot. They’re not likely to kill a lone woman.”

Smithback considered this. “I wouldn’t recommend that. If these are the same guys who attacked you, being a woman didn’t stop them before.”

“So what do we do?”

Smithback thought for a while. “Maybe we should hide ourselves, and just wait near here for them to return. We could surprise them.”

Nora looked at the writer. “Where?”

“Back up in those rocks, behind us. We can look down and over the end of the mesa. We’ll see them as they come in.”

They returned to their horses, moved them well off the trail, and brushed out their tracks. Then they climbed up behind the camp and waited in a small nook between two large boulders. As they settled in, Nora heard an ominous, rattling buzz. About fifty yards away, in the shadow of a rock, a rattlesnake had reared up in an S-coil, its anvil-shaped head swaying slightly.

“Now you can show me your brilliant marksmanship,” said Smithback.

“No,” said Nora instantly.

“Why not?”

“That gun’s going to make a pretty loud doorbell. Do you really want to alert whoever’s out there?”

Smithback suddenly stiffened. “I think it’s too late for that,” he said.

There, on one of the flanking ridges behind them, Nora saw a lone man silhouetted against the sky, his face in shadow. A gun was hanging off his right hip. How long he had been waiting there, watching them, Nora could not say.

A dog appeared over the ridge behind the man. As it saw them, it broke into a flurry of outraged barking. The man spoke a brief command and it slunk behind his legs.

“Oh, God,” Smithback said. “Here we are, hiding in the rocks. This isn’t going to look too good.”

Nora waited in indecision. The weight of her own gun felt heavy on her hips. If this was one of the men who had attacked her, killed the horses . . .

The man stood motionless as the late afternoon deepened.

“You got us into this,” Smithback said. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know. Say hello?”

“There’s brilliance for you.” Smithback raised a tentative hand. After a moment, the man on the ridge made a similar gesture.

Then he stepped down from the ridge and began walking toward them, a curious walk on stiff, long legs, the dog trotting behind him.

And then, in a instant of terrifying speed, Nora saw him stop short, draw his gun, and fire.

35

INSTINCTIVELY, NORA’S HAND DROPPED TO HER own weapon as the rattler’s head blew apart in a spray of blood and venom. She glanced from the snake to Smithback. The writer’s face was ashen, his gun drawn.

The man walked toward them with slow deliberate steps. “Jumpy, ain’t you,” he said, holstering his gun. “These damned rattlers. I know they keep the mice down, but when I go out to piss at night, I don’t want to step on any mousehunting coontail.”

He was an extraordinary-looking man. His hair was long and white, and plaited in two long braids in the traditional Native American fashion. A bandanna was tied around his head and formed into a bun to one side. His pants, indescribably old but very clean, were at least eight inches too short. Beneath, dusty, sticklike legs plunged sockless into a pair of red high-top sneakers, brand-new and laced up tight. His shirt was beautifully made out of tanned buckskin, decorated with strips of fine beadwork, and a turquoise necklace circled his neck. But it was the face above the necklace that most arrested Nora. There was a gravity and dignity to the face; a gravity that seemed at variance with the glittering, amused liveliness of his black eyes.

“You look a long way from home,” the man said in a thin, reedy voice, with the peculiar kind of clipped yet melodious tone common to many native speakers in the Southwest. “Did you find what you needed in my camp?”

Nora looked into the mercurial eyes. “We didn’t disturb your camp,” she said. “We’re searching for the person that murdered our horses.”

The man gazed back steadily, the eyes narrowing slightly. The good humor seemed to vanish. For a moment, Nora wondered if he would raise his gun again, and she felt her right hand flex involuntarily.

Then the tension seemed to ease, and the man took a step forward. “It’s a hard thing to lose horses,” he said. “I’ve got some cool water down there in camp, and some roasted jackrabbit and chiles. Why don’t you come along?” He paused.

“We’d be happy to,” said Nora. They followed him down the rockpile and into camp. He gestured for them to find a seat on the nearby rocks, then he squatted by the fire and turned the jackrabbit. He poked a stick into the ashes and pulled out several tinfoil-wrapped chiles, piling them at the edge of the fire to keep warm. “I heard you folks coming, so I decided to head on up there and check you out from above. Don’t get a lot of visitors out here, you know. Pays to be careful.”

“Were we that obvious?” Smithback asked.

The man looked at him with cool brown eyes.

“Really,” said Smithback. “That obvious, huh?”

The man pulled a canteen out of the sand in the shadow of a rock and passed it to Nora. She accepted the water silently, realizing how thirsty she was. The man stirred the ashes of the fire, freshened it with a few pieces of juniper, then turned the jackrabbit again.

“So you’re the folks down in Chilbah Valley,” he said, sitting down across from them.

“Chilbah?” Smithback asked.

The man nodded. “The valley over the big ridge back there. I saw you the other day, from the top.” He turned to Nora. “And I guess you saw me. And now you’re here, because someone killed your horses and you thought it might be me.”

“We only found one set of tracks,” Nora said carefully. “And they led right here.”

Instead of answering, the man rose, tested the rabbit with the point of his knife, then sat back down on his heels. “My name is John Beiyoodzin,” he said.

Nora paused a moment to consider this reply. “Sorry we didn’t introduce ourselves,” she replied. “I’m Nora Kelly, and this is Bill Smithback. I’m an archaeologist and Bill is a journalist. We’re here on an archaeological survey.”

Beiyoodzin nodded. “Do I look like a horse murderer to you?” he asked suddenly.

Nora hesitated. “I guess I don’t know what a horse murderer should look like.”

The man digested this. Then the glittering eyes softened, a smile appeared on his face, and he shook his head. “Jackrabbit’s done,” he said, standing and flipping the spit up with an expert hand. He leaned it on a flat rock and expertly carved off two haunches. He placed each on a flat thin piece of sandstone and handed them to Nora and Smithback. Then he unwrapped the chiles, carefully saving the tinfoil. He quickly slipped off the roasted skin of each chile and handed them over. “We’re a little short on amenities,” he said, skewering his own piece of rabbit with a knife.

The chile was almost indescribably hot, and Nora’s eyes watered as she ate, but she felt famished. Beside her, Smithback was attacking his own meal avidly. Beiyoodzin watched them a moment, nodding his approval. They completed the little meal in silence.

Beiyoodzin passed the canteen around and afterward there was an awkward pause.

“Nice view,” said Smithback. “What’s the rent on this joint?”

Beiyoodzin laughed, tilting his head back. “The rent is in the getting here. Forty miles on horseback over waterless country from my village.” Then he looked around, the wind stirring his hair. “At night, you can look out over a thousand square miles and not see a single light.”

The sun was beginning to set, and the strange, complicated bowl of landscape was turning into a pointillist surface of gold, purple, and yellow. Nora glanced in Beiyoodzin’s direction. Though he had never actually denied it, somehow she felt certain he was not the one they were searching for.

“Can you help us find out who killed our horses?” she asked him.

Beiyoodzin glanced at her intently. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “What kind of survey you doing?”

Nora hesitated, uncertain if this was a change of subject or the beginning of some revelation. Even if he hadn’t killed the horses himself, perhaps he knew who had. She took a deep breath, confused and tired. “It’s kind of confidential,” she said. “Would it be all right if I didn’t tell you right now?”

“It’s in Chilbah Valley?”

“Not exactly,” said Nora.

“My village,” he said, gesturing northward, “is that way. Nankoweap. It means ‘Flowers beside the Water Pools’ in our language. I come out here every summer to camp for a week or two. The grass is good, plenty of firewood, and there’s a good spring down below.”

“You don’t get lonely?” Smithback asked.

“No,” he said simply.

“Why?”

Beiyoodzin seemed a little taken aback by his directness. He gave Smithback a curiously penetrating look. “I come here,” he said slowly, “to become a human being again.”

“What about the rest of the year?” Smithback asked.

“I’m sorry,” Nora jumped in. “He’s a journalist. He always asks too many questions.” She knew that in most Native American cultures it was rude to show curiosity and ask direct questions.

Beiyoodzin, however, merely laughed again. “It’s all right. I’m just surprised he doesn’t have a tape recorder or a camera. Most white people carry them. Anyway, I herd sheep most of the time, and I do ceremonies. Healing ceremonies.”

“You’re a medicine man?” Smithback asked, unchecked.

“Traditional healer.”

“What kind of ceremonies?” Smithback asked.

“I do the Four Mountain ceremony.”

“Really?” Smithback asked with obvious interest. “What’s it for?”

“It’s a three-night ceremony. Chanting, sweats, and herbal remedies. It cures sadness, depression, and hopelessness.”

“And does it work?”

Beiyoodzin looked at the journalist. “Sure it works.” He seemed to grow evasive in the wake of Smithback’s continued interest. “Of course,” he went on, “there are always those even our ceremonies can’t reach. That’s also why I come out here. Because of the failures.”

“Some kind of vision quest?” Smithback asked.

Beiyoodzin waved his hand. “If you call coming out here, praying, and even fasting for a while, a vision quest, then I suppose that’s what it is. I don’t do it for visions, but for spiritual healing. To remind myself that we don’t need much to be happy. That’s all.”

He shifted, looking around. “But you folks need a place to lay your bedrolls.”

“Plenty of room out here,” said Nora.

“Good,” said Beiyoodzin. He leaned back and threw his wizened hands behind his head, resting his back on the rock. They watched as the sun sank below the horizon and darkness came rolling over the landscape. The sky glowed with residual color, a deep strange purple that faded to night. Beiyoodzin rolled a cigarette, lit it, and began puffing furiously, holding it awkwardly between thumb and index finger, as if it were the first time he had smoked.

“I’m sorry to bring this up again,” Nora said, “but if you know anything about who might have killed our horses, I’d like to hear it. It’s possible our activities might have offended someone.”

“Your activities.” The man blew a cloud of smoke into the still twilight. “You still haven’t told me about those.”

Nora thought for a moment. It seemed that information was the price of his assistance. Of course, there was no guarantee he could help them. And yet it was critical they find out who was behind the killings. “What I’m about to say is confidential,” she said slowly. “Can I count on your discretion?”

“You mean, am I going to tell anyone? Not if you don’t want me to.” He flicked the cigarette butt into the fire and began rolling another. “I have many addictions,” he said, nodding at the cigarette. “That’s another reason I come out here.”

Nora looked at him. “We’re excavating an Anasazi cliff dwelling.”

It was as if Beiyoodzin’s movements were suddenly, completely arrested, his hand freezing in the act of twisting the cigarette ends. Then he was in motion again. The pause was brief but striking. He lit the cigarette and sat back again, saying nothing.

“It’s a very important city,” Nora continued. “It contains priceless, unique artifacts. It would be a huge tragedy if it were looted. We’re afraid that these people might want to drive us away so they can plunder the site.”

“Plunder the site,” he repeated. “And you will remove these artifacts? Take them to a museum?”

“No,” said Nora. “For now, we’re going to leave everything as is.”

Beiyoodzin continued to smoke the cigarette, but his movements had become studied and deliberate, and his eyes were opaque. “We never go into Chilbah Valley,” he said slowly.

“Why not?”

Beiyoodzin held the cigarette in front of his face, the smoke trickling between his fingers. He looked at Nora through veiled eyes. “How were the horses killed?” he asked.

“They were sliced open,” she replied. “Their guts pulled out and arranged in spirals. Sticks tipped with feathers were shoved into their eyes. And pieces of skin had been cut off.”

The effect of this on Beiyoodzin was even more pronounced. He became agitated, quickly dropping the cigarette into the fire and smoothing a hand across his forehead. “Skin cut off ? Where?”

“In two places on the breast and lower belly, and on the forehead.”

The old man said nothing, but Nora could see his hand was shaking, and it frightened her.

“You shouldn’t be in there,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “You should get out immediately.”

“Why?” Nora asked.

“It’s very dangerous.” He hesitated a moment. “There are stories among the Nankoweap about that valley, and that other valley . . . the valley beyond. You might laugh at me, because most white people don’t believe in such things. But what happened to your horses is a kind of witchcraft. It’s a terrible evil. What you’re doing, digging in that city, is going to kill you if you don’t get out, right now. Especially now that . . . they’ve found you.”

“They?” Smithback asked. “Who’s ‘they’?”

Beiyoodzin’s voice dropped. “The spotted-clay witches. The skinwalkers. The wolfskin runners.”

In the darkness, Nora’s blood went cold.

Beside her, Smithback stirred. “I’m sorry,” he spoke up. “You said witches?”

There was a faint tone in his voice that the Indian picked up. He gazed at the writer, his face indistinct in the growing darkness. “Do you believe in evil?”

“Of course.”

“No normal Nankoweap person would kill a horse: to us, horses are sacred. I don’t know what you call your evil people, but we call ours skinwalkers, wolfskin runners. They have many names, and many forms. They are completely outside our society, but they take what is good in our religion and turn it upside down. Whatever you may think, Nankoweap wolfskin runners exist. And they are drawn to Chilbah. Because the city was a place of sorcery, cruelty, witchcraft, sickness, and death.”

But Nora barely heard this. Wolfskin runners. Her mind fled back to the shadow-knitted ranch house: the dark matted form that had towered over her, the furred thing that had kept pace with her truck along the rutted dirt road.

“I don’t doubt what you say,” Smithback replied. “Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen some pretty strange things myself. But where do these skinwalkers come from?”

Beiyoodzin fell silent, arms propped on his knees, dark hands clasped. He rolled another cigarette, then turned his gaze toward the ground and fell motionless. The silence grew as the minutes passed. Nora could hear the faint cropping sounds of the horse grazing in the draw. Then, eyes still fixed on the ground, cigarette held loosely between two fingers, Beiyoodzin spoke again.

“To become a witch, you have to kill someone you love. Someone close, brother or sister, mother or father. You kill them, to get the power. Then, when that person is buried, you secretly dig the body up.” He lit the cigarette. “Then you turn the life force of that person to evil.”

“How?” Smithback whispered.

“When life is created, Wind, liehei, the life force, enters the body. Where the Wind enters the body, it leaves a little eddy, like a ripple in water. It leaves these marks on the tips of the fingers, toes, the back of the head. The witch cuts these off the corpse. They dry them, grind them up, make a kind of powder. And they drill out the skull behind and make a disk, for throwing spells. If it is a murdered sister, the witch has sex with the dead body. He uses the fluids to make another powder. It’s called Alchi’bin lehh tsal. Incest corpse powder.”

“Good God,” Smithback groaned.

“You go to a remote spot at night. You strip off your clothes. You cover your body with spots of white clay, and wear the jewelry buried with the dead, the silver and turquoise. You place wolfskins or coyoteskins on either side of you. Then you say certain lines of the Night Wind Chant backwards. One of those skins will leap off the ground and stick to you. And then you have the power.”

“What is this power?” Nora asked.

Beiyoodzin lit the cigarette. The repeated hoot of an owl echoed mournfully through the endless canyons.

“Our people believe you get the power to move at night, like the wind, but without sound. You can become invisible. You learn powerful spells, spells to witch people from a distance. And with the corpse powder, you can kill. Oh, can you kill.”

“Kill?” Smithback asked. “Witch people? How, exactly?”

“If a skinwalker can get something from their victim’s body—spit, hair, a sweaty piece of clothing—they place it in the mouth of a corpse. With that, they can cast a spell on the person. Or on his horse, his sheep, his house, his belongings. They can break his tools, make his machines refuse to operate. They can make his wife fall sick, kill his dogs or children.”

He lapsed into silence. The owl hooted again, closer now.

“Witch people from a distance,” Smithback repeated. “Move at night, without sound.” He grunted, shook his head.

Beiyoodzin glanced at the writer briefly, his eyes luminous in the gathering darkness, then looked away again.

“Let me tell you a story,” Beiyoodzin said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Something that happened to me many years ago, when I was a boy. It’s a story I haven’t told for a long, long time.”

A hot red ember flashed out of the dark, and Beiyoodzin’s face was briefly lit crimson as he drew on the cigarette.

“It was summer,” he went on. “I was helping my grandfather bring some sheep up to Escalante. It was a two-day trip, so we brought the horse and wagon. We stopped for the night at a place called Shadow Rock. Built a brush corral for the sheep, turned the horse out to graze, went to sleep. Around midnight, I woke up suddenly. It was pitch black: no moon, no stars. There was no noise. Something was wrong. I called out to my grandfather. Nothing. So I sat up, tossed twigs into the coals. As they flared up I caught a glimpse of him.”

Beiyoodzin took a long, careful drag on the cigarette. “He was lying on his back, eyes gone. His fingertips were missing. His mouth had been sewed shut. Something had been done to the back of his head.” The red firebrand of the cigarette tip wavered in the dark. “I stood up and threw the rest of the brush onto the fire. In the light I could see our horse maybe twenty feet away. He was lying on the ground, guts mounded beside him. The sheep in the pen were all dead. All this—all this—without even the sound of a mouse.”

The pinpoint of red vanished as Beiyoodzin ground out the cigarette. “As the fire died back, I saw something else,” he continued. “A pair of eyes, red in the flames. Eyes in the darkness, but nothing else. They never blinked, they never moved. But somehow, I felt them coming closer. Then I heard a low, puffing sound. Dust hit my face, and my eyes stung. I fell back, too scared even to cry out.

“I don’t remember how I made my way home. They put me to bed with a high fever. At last, they put me in a wagon and took me to the hospital in Cedar City. The doctors there said it was typhoid, but my family knew better. One by one, they left my bedside. Except for my grandmother, I didn’t see any of my relatives for a couple of days. But by the time they returned to the hospital, the worst of the sickness had passed. To the surprise of the doctors.”

There was a brief silence. “I later learned where my relatives had been. They’d returned to Shadow Rock, where we’d camped. They took the village’s best tracker with them. A set of huge wolfprints led away from the site. They followed the tracks to a remote camp east of Nankoweap. Inside was . . . well, I guess you would have to call him a man. It was noon, and he was sleeping. My relatives took no chances. They shot him while he slept.” He paused. “It took a great many bullets.”

“How did they know?” Smithback asked.

“Beside the man was a witchcraft medicine kit. There were certain roots, plants, and insects: taboo items, forbidden items, used only by skinwalkers. They found corpse powder. And up in the chimney, they found certain . . . pieces of meat, drying.”

“But I don’t understand how . . . ?” Smithback’s question trailed off into the darkness.

“Who was it?” Nora asked.

Beiyoodzin did not answer directly. But after a moment, he turned. Even in the dark, Nora could feel the intensity of his gaze.

“You said your horses were cut in five places, on the forehead and two places on each side of breast and belly,” he said. “Do you know what those five places have in common?”

“No,” Smithback said.

“Yes,” Nora whispered, her mouth dry with sudden fear. “Those are the five places where the fur of a horse forms a whorl.”

The light had completely vanished from the sky, and a huge dome of stars was cast over their heads. Somewhere in the distance, out on the plain, a coyote began yipping and wailing, and was answered by another.

“I shouldn’t have told you any of this,” Beiyoodzin said. “No good can come to me. But maybe now you know why you must leave this place at once.”

Nora took a deep breath. “Mr. Beiyoodzin, thank you for your help. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t frightened by what you’ve said. It scares me to death. But I’m running the excavation of a ruin that my father gave up his life to find. I owe it to him to see it through.”

This seemed to astonish Beiyoodzin. “Your father died out here?” he asked.

“Yes, but we never found his body.” Something about the way he spoke put her on guard. “Do you know something about it?”

“I know nothing.” Then the man was abruptly on his feet. His agitation seemed to have increased. “But I’m sorry to hear about it. Please think over what I’ve said.”

“We’re not likely to forget it,” said Nora.

“Good. Now I think I’ll turn in. I’ve got to get up early. So I’ll say goodbye to you right now. You can turn your horses out to graze in the draw. There’s plenty of grass down by the stream. Tomorrow, help yourself to breakfast if you like. I won’t be around.”

“That won’t be necessary—” Nora began. But the old man was already shaking their hands. He turned away and began to busy himself with the bedroll.

“I think we’ve been given the brushoff,” murmured Smithback. They went back to their horses, unsaddled them, and made a small camp of their own on the far side of the pile of rocks.

* * *

“What a character,” Smithback muttered a little later as he unrolled his bag. The horses had been watered and were now nickering and muttering contentedly, hobbled nearby. “First he spooks us with all that talk about skinwalkers. Then he suddenly announces it’s bedtime.”

“Yes,” Nora replied. “Just when the talk got around to my father.” She shook out her own bedroll.

“He never said what tribe he was from.”

“I think Nankoweap. That’s how the village got its name.”

“Some of that witchcraft stuff was pretty vile. Do you believe it?”

“I believe in the power of evil,” Nora said after a moment. “But the thought of wolfskin runners, witching people with corpse powder, is tough to swallow. There are millions of dollars worth of artifacts at Quivira. It seems more likely that we’re dealing with a couple of people playing at witchcraft to frighten us away.”

“Maybe so, but it seems like a pretty elaborate plan. Dressing up in wolfskins, cutting up horses . . .”

They both fell silent, and the cool night air moved over them. Nora rubbed her arms in the sudden chill. She could offer no explanation for what had happened to her at the ranch house, the matted form running alongside her truck. Or the same dark figure, racing away from her kitchen door. Or the disappearance of Thurber.

“Which way is downwind?” Smithback asked suddenly.

Nora looked at him.

“I want to know where to put my boots,” he explained. In the dark, Nora thought she could see a crooked smile on the journalist’s face.

“Put them at the foot of your bedroll and point them east,” she said. “Maybe they’ll keep the rattlers away.”

She pulled off her own boots with a sigh, lay down, and pulled the bag up around her dusty clothes. A half-moon had begun to rise, veiled by tatters of cloud. A few yards away, she could hear Smithback grunting as he flounced around, making preparations for sleep. In the calm darkness, the thought of skinwalkers and witches fell away under the weight of her weariness.

“It’s strange,” Smithback said. “But something is definitely rotten in the State of Denmark.”

“What, your shoes?”

“Very funny. Our host, I mean. He’s hiding something. But I don’t think it has to do with the horses.”

From far overhead came the sound of a jet. Idly, Nora located its faint, blinking light, crawling across the velvety blackness. As if reading her mind, Smithback spoke: “There’s some guy,” he said, “sitting up in that plane, guzzling a martini, eating smoked almonds, and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.”

Nora laughed quietly. “Speaking of the Times, how long have you written for them?”

“About two years now, since my last book was published. I took a leave of absence to come on this trip.”

Nora sat up on one elbow. “Why did you come?”

“What?” The question seemed to take the writer by surprise.

“It’s a simple enough question. This is a dangerous, dirty, uncomfortable trip. Why did you leave comfortable old Manhattan?”

“And maybe miss out on the greatest discovery since King Tut’s tomb?” Smithback turned in his sleeping bag. “Well, I guess it’s more than that. After all, I knew there was no guarantee we’d find anything. If you get right down to it, newspaper work can be boring. Even if it’s the New York Times and everyone genuflects when you enter the room. But you know what? This is what it’s all about, really; discovering lost cities, listening to tales of murder, lying under the stars with a lovely—” He cleared his voice. “Well, you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” Nora said, surprised at the sudden excitement that flooded through her.

“Lying under the stars with someone like you,” he finished. “Sounds kind of lame, doesn’t it?”

“As come-ons go, yes it does. But thanks just the same.”

She glanced at the lanky form of Smithback, faintly outlined in starlight, his eyes glinting as he looked skyward. “So?” she said after a moment.

“So what?”

“Over the last week, you’ve had your spine realigned by hard saddles, you’ve gone without water, been bitten by horses, almost fallen off cliffs, avoided rattlesnakes, quicksand, and skinwalkers. So are you glad you came along?”

His eyes turned toward her, luminous in the starlight. “Yes,” he said simply.

Holding his gaze in her own, she reached toward him in the darkness. Finding his hand, she squeezed it briefly.

“I’m glad, too,” she replied.

36

BY MIDNIGHT, A HALF-MOON HAD RISEN IN the dark sky, and the gnarled badlands of southern Utah were bathed in pale light. At the foot of Lake Powell, Wahweap Marina dozed, its jetskis and houseboats silent. To the north and west, the labyrinthine system of narrow canyons leading ultimately toward the Devil’s Backbone were still.

In the valley of Chilbah, two forms moved slowly up a secret notch. It was less a trail than a fissure in the rock, fiendishly hidden, now worn away to the faintest of lines after centuries of erosion and disuse. It was the Priest’s Trail: the back door to Quivira.

Emerging out of the inky blackness of the rocks, the figures topped out on the sandstone plateau in which the valley of Quivira was hidden. Far below, in the long valley behind them, a horse nickered and stamped in agitation. But this evening they had left the horses unharmed, just as they had slipped past the cowboy who guarded them without running a knife across his throat. He sat there still, hand on his gun, the ground around him damp with tobacco juice. Let him sit; his time would come soon enough.

Now, with animal stealth, they scuttled along the wide mesa far above the valley floor. Though the moon laid a dappled byway across the sandstone, the figures avoided the faint light, keeping to the shadows. The heavy animal pelts on their backs draped down over their sides, dragging along the rough rock beneath them. The figures moved on, silent as ghosts.

After an eternity of movement they stopped, as if possessed of a single mind. Ahead, a well of darkness loomed: the tiny valley of Quivira. Far below, at the base of the canyon, the little stream shimmered in the moonlight. From the higher ground away from the stream, a faint glow arose from the dying campfire, and the even fainter smell of woodsmoke reached the figures peering down from the canyon rim.

Their eyes moved from the fire to the dim figures that lay around it.

Several tents ringed the camp, pallid in the dim moonlight. A number of bedrolls lay near the campfire, seemingly flung down at random. With the tents closed and darkened, it was impossible to count the number of the company. They stared long, bodies motionless. Then they eased forward along the brow of rock.

With consummate stealth they moved along the top of the canyon, pausing now and then to look down toward the sleeping expedition. Occasional sounds drifted up from below: the call of an owl, the babble of water, the rustle of leaves in a night breeze. Once, a belt of silver conchas clinked around the midriff of one of the figures; otherwise, they made no noise in the time it took to reach the top of the rope ladder.

Here the figures paused, examining the communications equipment with intense interest. A minute passed, then two, without movement.

Then one of the figures glided to the edge of the cliff face and gazed down the thin ladder. It disappeared back beneath the brow of rimrock. The figure looked out, into the valley. He was almost directly above the camp now, and the glow of the fire, eight hundred feet below, seemed strangely close, an angry nugget of red in the darkness. A low, guttural sound rose out from deep within his frame, at last dying away into a groan that resolved itself into a faint, monotonous chant. Then he turned back toward the equipment.

In ten minutes, their work there was done.

Slinking further along the rimrock, they made their way to the end of the canyon. The ancient secret trail wormed down through a cut in the rimrock, descending toward the narrow canyon at the far side of the Quivira valley. The trail was perfectly concealed against the rock, and terrifyingly precipitous. The faint sounds of the waterfall echoed up below them, the water thrashing and boiling its way on the long trip down to the Colorado River.

In time, the figures reached the sandy bottom. They moved stealthily out of the curtain of mist, past the rockfall, then along the base of the canyon wall, keeping in the deeper darkness of moonshadow. They stopped when they neared the first member of the expedition: a figure beyond the edge of the camp, sleeping beneath the stars, pale face looking deathlike in gray half-light.

Reaching into the matted pelt that lay across his back, one of the figures pulled out a small pouch. It was made of cured human skin, and in the glow of the moon it gave out an otherworldly, translucent sheen. Loosening the leather thong around it, the figure reached inside and, with extreme caution, drew out a disk of bone and an ancient tube of willow wood, polished with use and incised with a long reverse spiral. The disk flashed dully in the moonlight as he turned it over once, then again. Then, placing one end of the tube to his lips, he leaned toward the face of the sleeping figure. There was a sudden breath of wind, and a brief cloud of dust flowered in the moonlight. Then, with the tread of ghosts, the two figures retreated back toward the cliff face, disappearing once again into the woven shadows.

37

COUGHING, PETER HOLROYD WOKE abruptly out of dark dreams. Some stray breeze had chased dirt across his face. Or more likely it was dust from the day’s work, he thought blearily, still weeping out of his pores. He wiped his face and sat up.

It had not been the dust alone that awakened him. Earlier, there had been a sound: a strange cry, borne faintly on the wind, as if the earth itself were groaning. He might have thought he’d dreamed the noise, except that nothing remotely like it had ever existed in his imagination. He was aware that his heart was racing.

Gripping the edges of his bedroll, he looked around. The half-moon threw zebra stripes of silvery-blue light across the camp. He glanced from tent to tent, and at the still black lumps of bedrolls. Everything was still.

His eyes stopped at a spot on a small rise, perhaps twenty yards from the campfire. Usually Nora would be at that spot, sleeping. Tonight she was gone—gone with Smithback. Many times during the desert nights Holroyd had found himself looking in her direction. Wondering what it would be like to creep over and talk to her, tell her how much all this meant to him. How much she meant to him. And, always, the last thing he wondered was why he just never had the guts to do it.

Holroyd lay back with a sigh. Even if Nora had been around, though, tonight he had no desire to do anything but rest. He was bone-tired; more tired than he remembered ever being in his life. In Nora’s absence, Sloane had directed him to clear away a tidal wave of sand and dust that had risen up against the back wall of the ruin, not far from Aragon’s Crawlspace. He hadn’t understood why he needed to dig that particular spot; there were many sites in the front of the ruin that had yet to be studied. But Sloane had brushed off his questions with a quick explanation about how important pictographs were often found at such sites at the rear of Anasazi cities. He was surprised at how quickly and completely, after Nora left, Sloane assumed command. But Aragon had been working by himself in a remote corner of the city, his face dark and severe; apparently, he’d made yet another disturbing discovery, and he was too preoccupied to pay attention to anything else. As for Black, he seemed to yield up all critical sense in Sloane’s presence, automatically agreeing with whatever she said. And so, from morning until dark, Holroyd had wielded a shovel and a rake. And now it seemed to him that, even after a month’s worth of baths, he’d never get all the dust out of his hair, nose, and mouth.

He stared up at the night sky. There was a funny taste in his mouth, and his jaw ached. The beginning of a headache was forming around his temples. He didn’t know what he’d expected to do on the expedition, but his vague romantic notions of opening rich tombs and deciphering inscriptions seemed a far cry from the endless grunt work he’d been doing. All around lay fantastic ruins of a mysterious civilization, while they were immersed in gridding this and surveying that. And moving piles of empty sand. He was sick of digging, he decided. And he didn’t like working for Sloane. She was too aware of her perfection and the influence she cast on others, too willing to use her charm to get what she wanted. Ever since the confrontation with Nora at Pete’s Ruin, he’d felt on his guard when she was around.

He sighed, closing his eyes against the pressure in his head. It wasn’t like him to be this grouchy. Normally, he only got grumpy when he was coming down with something. Sloane was all right, really; she was just outspoken, used to getting her way, not his type. And it didn’t matter if he was digging sand or breaking rocks. The important thing was he was here—here at Quivira, at this miraculous, mythical place. Nothing else mattered.

Suddenly, he stiffened, eyes opening wide. That sound again.

Pushing the blanket to one side, he rose to his knees as quietly as he could. Whatever he’d heard, it had stopped. No, there it was again: a murmur, a low groan.

But this sound was different from the sound that had awakened him. It was softer, somehow; softer and nearer.

In the pale light, he hunted around for a stick, a penknife, anything that could be used as a weapon. His hand closed around a heavy flashlight. He hefted it, thought of switching it on, then decided against it. He rose to his feet, staggering a moment before gaining his balance. Then, silently, he moved in the direction of the noise. All had grown quiet again, but the sound seemed to have come from beyond the stand of cottonwoods near the stream.

Cautiously picking his way around boxes and shrouded packs, Holroyd moved away from the camp toward the stream. A cloud had passed over the moon, darkening the landscape to an impenetrable murk. He felt hot, uncomfortable, disoriented in the close darkness. The headache had grown worse when he stood up, and it almost seemed as if a film lay in front of his eyes. In a detached way, he made out what looked like a patch of highly poisonous druid’s mantle a few feet away. Instead of taking a closer look, he regarded it with uncharacteristic disinterest. He should be resting in his blanket, not wandering around on a fool’s errand.

As he was about to turn back, he heard another sound: a moan, the soft slap of skin against skin.

Then the moon was out again. Stealthily, he moved forward, looking carefully to both sides. The sounds were clearer now, more regular. He tightened his grip on the flashlight, grasped the trunk of a cottonwood, and peered through the curtain of moonlit leaves.

The first thing he saw was a tangle of clothes on the ground beyond. For a moment, Holroyd thought somebody had been attacked, and their body dragged off. Then his eyes moved farther.

On the soft sand beyond the cottonwoods lay Black. His shirt was bunched up around his armpits, his bare legs were splayed, knees bent toward the sky. His eyes were squeezed shut. A small groan escaped him. Above, Sloane was straddling Black’s hips, her fingers spread wide against his chest, the sweat on her naked back glowing in the moonlight. Holroyd leaned forward with an involuntary movement, staring in shock and fascination. His face flushed, whether in embarrassment or shame at his own naïveté, he could not say. Black grunted in combined effort and pleasure as he sheathed himself within her, thigh muscles straining. Sloane leaned over him, her dark hair falling over her face, her breasts swaying heavily with each thrust. Holroyd’s eyes traveled slowly up her body. She was staring at Black’s face intently, with a look more of rapt attention than of pleasure. There was something almost predatory in that look. For a moment, he was reminded of a cat, playing with a mouse.

But that image dissolved as Sloane thrust downward to meet Black, again and again and again, riding him with relentless, merciless precision.

38

WITH A TUG ON THE GUIDE ROPE, NORA brought Arbuckles to a halt. She stood beside the horse and looked down from the crest of the Devil’s Backbone, into the valley the old Indian had called Chilbah. She felt drained, sickened, by the climb back to the top, and Arbuckles was shaking and lathered with stress. But they had made it: his hooves, once again freed of iron, had gripped the gritty sandstone.

The wind was blowing hard across the fin of rock and several ragged afternoon thunderheads were coalescing over the distant mountains to the north, but the valley itself remained a vast bowl of sunlight.

Smithback came to a stop beside her, white, silent. “So this is Chilbah, sinkhole of evil,” he said after a moment. His tone was meant to be light, but his voice still held a quiver of stress from the terrifying ascent of the hogback ridge.

Nora did not reply immediately. Instead, she knelt to reshoe the horses, letting a full sense of control return to her limbs. Then she stood, dusted herself off, and reached into a saddlebag for her binoculars. She scanned the bottomlands with them, looking for Swire and the horses. The cottonwoods and swales of grass were a welcome sight after the long, hot ride back from the sheep camp. It was now half past one. She located Swire alongside the creek, sitting on a rock, watching the remuda graze. As she stared, she could see him looking up toward them.

“People are evil,” she said at last, lowering the binoculars. “Landscapes are not.”

“Maybe so,” said Smithback. “But right from the beginning, I’ve felt there was something strange about the place. Something that gave me the willies.”

Nora glanced at the writer. “And I’ve always thought it was just me,” she replied.

They mounted their horses and moved forward, making the descent into the valley in silence. Nosing their horses directly toward the grassy banks of the creek, they remained in their saddles while the animals waded in to drink, the water burbling around their legs. From the corner of her eye, Nora could see Swire trotting up the creekbed toward them, riding bareback, without bridle or reins.

He pulled to a stop on the far side of the creek, looking from Nora to Smithback and back. “So you brought back both horses,” he said, looking at Nora with ill-disguised relief. “What about the sons of bitches who killed my horses—you catch them?”

“No,” said Nora. “The person you saw at the top of the ridge was an old Indian man camping upcountry.”

A look of skepticism crossed Swire’s face. “An old Indian man? What the hell was he doing on top of the ridge?”

“He wanted to see who was in the valley,” Nora replied. “He said nobody from his village ever goes into this valley.”

Swire sat silent a moment, his mouth working a lump of tobacco. “So you followed the wrong tracks,” he said at last.

“We followed the only tracks up there. The tracks of the man you saw.”

In reply, Swire expertly shot a string of tobacco juice from his lips, forming a little brown crater in the nearby sand.

“Roscoe,” Nora went on, careful to keep her tone even, “if you’d met this man, you’d realize he’s no horse killer.”

Swire’s mouth continued working. There was a long, strained silence as the two stared at each other. Then Swire spat a second time. “Shit,” he said. “I ain’t saying you’re right. But if you are, it means the bastards that killed my horses are still around.” Then, without another word, he spun his horse with invisible knee pressure and trotted back down the creek.

Nora watched his receding back. Then she glanced over at the writer. Smithback merely shrugged in return.

As they set off across the valley toward the dark slot canyon, Nora looked up. The northern sky had grown lumpy with thunderheads. She frowned; normally, the summer rains weren’t due for another couple of weeks. But with a sky like this, the rains could be upon them as early as that very afternoon.

She urged her horse into a trot toward the slot canyon. Better get through before the system moves in, she thought. Soon, they reached the opening. They unsaddled their horses, wrapped and stowed the saddles, then turned the animals loose to find the rest of the herd.

It was the work of a long, wet, weary hour to toil through the slot canyon, the gear dead weight on their backs. At last, Nora parted the hanging weeds and began walking down toward the camp. Smithback fell in step beside her, breathing hard and shaking mud and quicksand from his legs.

Suddenly, Nora stopped short. Something was wrong. The camp was deserted, the fire untended and smoking. Instinctively, she looked up the cliff face toward Quivira. Although the city itself was hidden, she could hear the faint sounds of loud, hurried conversation.

Despite her weariness, she shrugged the pack from her back, jogged toward the base of the rope ladder, and climbed to the city. As she clambered onto the bench, she saw Sloane and Black near the city’s central plaza, talking animatedly. On the far side of the plaza sat Bonarotti, legs crossed, watching them.

Sloane saw her approaching and broke away from Black. “Nora,” she said. “We’ve been vandalized.”

Exhausted, Nora sank onto the retaining wall. “Tell me about it,” she said.

“It must have happened during the night,” Sloane went on, taking a seat beside her. “At breakfast, Peter said he wanted to go up and check his equipment before getting to work. I was going to tell him to take the day off, actually—he didn’t look that well. But he insisted. Said he’d heard something during the night. Anyway, next thing I know he was calling down from the top of the cliff. So I went up after him.” She paused. “Our communications equipment, Nora . . . it’s all been smashed to pieces.”

Nora looked over at her. Sloane was uncharacteristically unkempt; her eyes were red, her dark hair tousled.

“Everything?” Nora asked.

Sloane nodded. “The transmitter, the paging network—everything but the weather receiver. Guess they didn’t think to look up in that tree.”

“Did anybody else see or hear anything?”

Black glanced at Sloane, then turned back to Nora. “Nothing,” he said.

“I’ve kept a sharp eye out all day,” Sloane said. “I haven’t seen anybody, or anything.”

“What about Swire?”

“He went out to the horses before we learned about it. I haven’t had a chance to ask him.”

Nora sighed deeply. “I want to talk to Peter about this. Where is he now?”

“I don’t know,” Sloane said. “He went down the ladder from the summit before I did. I figured he’d gone back to his tent to lie down. He was pretty upset and . . . well, frankly, he wasn’t making much sense. He was sobbing. I guess that equipment really meant a lot to him.”

Nora stood up and walked to the rope ladder. “Bill!” she shouted down into the valley.

“Ma’am?” the writer’s voice floated up.

“Check the tents. See if you can find Holroyd.”

She waited, scanning the tops of the canyon walls. “Nobody home,” Smithback called up a few minutes later.

Nora returned to the retaining wall, shivering now. She realized she was still wet from the trip through the canyon. “Then he must be in the ruin somewhere,” she said.

“That’s possible,” Sloane replied. “He said something yesterday about calibrating the magnetometer. Guess we lost track of him in all the confusion.”

“What about the horse killers?” Black interrupted.

Nora hesitated a moment. She decided there was no point in alarming everybody with Beiyoodzin and his story of witches. “There was only one set of prints on the ridge, and they led to the camp of an old Indian. He clearly wasn’t the killer. Since our equipment was smashed last night, that probably means the horse killers are still around here somewhere.”

Black licked his lips. “That’s great,” he said. “Now we’re going to have to post a guard.”

Nora looked at her watch. “Let’s find Peter. We’re going to need his help setting up some kind of emergency transmitter.”

“I’ll check the roomblock where he stashed the magnetometer.” Sloane walked away, Black following in her wake. Bonarotti came over to Nora and drew out a cigarette. Nora opened her mouth to remind him that smoking wasn’t allowed in the ruin, but decided she couldn’t summon up the energy.

There was a scuffling noise, then Smithback’s shaggy head appeared at the top of the rope ladder. “What’s up?” he said, coming over to the retaining wall.

“Somebody snuck into the valley last night,” Nora replied. “Our communications gear was smashed.” She was interrupted by an urgent shout from within the city. Sloane had emerged from one of the roomblocks on the far side of the plaza, waving an arm.

“It’s Peter!” her voice echoed across the ghostly city. “Something’s wrong! He’s sick!”

Immediately Nora was on her feet. “Find Aragon,” she said to Bonarotti. “Have him bring his emergency medical kit.” Then she was running across the plaza, Smithback at her side.

They ducked inside a second-story roomblock complex near the site of the burial cyst. As Nora’s eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, she could see Sloane on her knees beside Holroyd’s prone form. Black was standing well back, a look of horror on his face. Beside Holroyd lay the magnetometer, its case open, components scattered across the floor.

Nora gasped and knelt down. Holroyd’s mouth was wide open, his jaw locked solid. His tongue, black and swollen, protruded from puffy, glaucous lips. His eyes were bulging, and a foul graveyard stench washed up from each shallow breath. A slight, thready gasp escaped his lungs.

There was movement in the doorway, then Aragon was beside her. “Hold my light, please,” he said calmly, laying two canvas duffels on the floor, opening one of them, and removing a light. “Dr. Goddard, could you please bring the fluorescent lantern? And the rest of you, please step outside.”

Nora trained the light on Holroyd, his eyes glassy, pupils narrowed to pinpoints. “Peter, Enrique’s here to help you,” she murmured, taking his hand in hers. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Aragon pressed his hands beneath Holroyd’s jaw, probed his chest and abdomen, then pulled a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff from the duffel and began to check his vital signs. As the doctor opened Holroyd’s shirt and pressed the stethoscope to his chest, Nora saw to her horror a scattering of dark lesions across the pale skin.

“What is it?” Nora said.

Aragon just shook his head and shouted for Black. “I want the rest of you to get a tarp, ropes, poles, anything we can use for a stretcher—and tell Bonarotti to get some water boiling.”

Aragon peered intently back into Holroyd’s face, then examined the man’s fingertips. “He’s cyanotic,” he murmured, fishing in one of the duffels and pulling out a slender oxygen tank and a pair of nasal cannula. “I’ll set the flow at two liters,” he said, handing the tank to Nora and fixing the cannula into Holroyd’s nostrils.

There was the sound of feet, then Sloane returned with the lantern. Suddenly, the room was bathed in chill greenish light. Aragon pulled the stethoscope from his ears and looked up.

“We’ve got to get him down into camp,” he said. “This man needs to go to a hospital immediately.”

Sloane shook her head. “The communications gear is completely trashed. The only thing still functioning is the weather receiver.”

“Can we cobble something together?” Nora asked.

“Only Peter could answer that question,” Sloane replied.

“What about the cell phone?” Aragon asked. “How far to the nearest area of coverage?”

“Up around Escalante,” said Sloane. “Or back at Wahweap Marina.”

“Then get Swire on a horse, give him the phone, and tell him to get going. Tell him to call for a helicopter.”

There was silence. “There’s no place to land a helicopter,” Nora said slowly. “The canyons are too narrow, the updrafts on the clifftops too precarious. I looked into that very thoroughly when I was planning the expedition.”

Aragon looked at Peter, then looked back at Nora. “Are you absolutely certain?”

“The closest settlement is three days’ ride from here. We can’t take him out on horseback?”

Aragon gazed at Peter again, then shook his head. “It would kill him.”

Smithback and Black appeared in the doorway, carrying between them a crude stretcher of tarps lashed to two wooden poles. Moving quickly, they set Holroyd’s rigid body on the stretcher, restraining him with ropes. Then, carefully, they hoisted him from the ground and carried him out into the central plaza.

Aragon followed them with his kit, despair on his face. As they came out from beneath the shadow of the overhanging rock and approached the rope ladder, Nora felt a cold drop on her arm, then another. It was beginning to rain.

Suddenly Holroyd gave a strangled cough. His eyes bulged wider still, ringed red with panic, searching aimlessly. His lips trembled, as if he was trying to force speech from a paralyzed jaw. His limbs seemed to stretch, stiffening even further. The ropes restraining him creaked and sighed.

Instantly, Aragon ordered them to ease the stretcher to the ground. He knelt at Holroyd’s chest, fumbling in his duffels at the same time. Instruments went clattering to one side as he pulled out an endotrachial tube, attached to a black rubber bag.

Holroyd’s jaws worked. “I let you down, Nora,” came a strangled whisper.

Immediately, Nora took his hand once again. “Peter, that’s not true. If it weren’t for you, none of us would have found Quivira. You’re the whole reason we’re here.”

Peter began to struggle with more words, but Nora gently touched his lips. “Save your strength,” she whispered.

“I’m going to have to tube him,” Aragon said, gently laying Holroyd’s head back and snaking the clear plastic down into his lungs. He pressed the ambu bag into Nora’s hands. “Squeeze this every five seconds,” he said, dropping his ear to Holroyd’s chest. He listened, motionless, for a long moment. Another tremor passed through Holroyd’s body, and his eyes rolled up. Aragon straightened up and, with violent heaves, began emergency heart massage.

As if in a dream, Nora sat beside Holroyd, filling his lungs, willing him to breathe, as the rain picked up, trickling down her face and arms. There were no sounds except for the patter of the rain, the cracking thumps of Aragon’s fists, the sigh of the ambu bag.

Then, it was over. Aragon sat back, agonized face drenched with rain and sweat. He looked briefly up at the sky, unseeing, and let his face sink into his hands. Holroyd was dead.

39

AN HOUR LATER, THE ENTIRE EXPEDITION had gathered around the campfire in silence. Swire joined them, wet from the slot canyon. The rain had ended, but the afternoon sky was smeared with metal-colored clouds. The air carried the mingled scents of ozone and humidity.

Nora glanced at each haggard face in turn. Their expressions betrayed the same emotions she felt: numbness, shock, disbelief. Her own feelings were augmented by an overpowering sense of guilt. She’d approached Holroyd. She’d convinced him to come along. And, in some unconscious way, she realized she had manipulated his feelings for her to further her own goal of finding the city. Her eyes strayed toward the sealed tent that now held his body. Oh, Peter, she thought. Please forgive me.

Only Bonarotti continued with business as usual, thumping a hard salami down on his serving table and setting loaves of fresh bread beside it. Seeing that nobody was inclined to partake, the cook flung one leg over the other, leaned back, and lit a cigarette.

Nora licked her lips. “Enrique,” she began, careful to keep her voice even, “what can you tell us?”

Aragon looked up, his black eyes unreadable. “Not nearly as much as I would like. I didn’t expect to be performing any postmortems out here, and my diagnostic tools are limited. I’ve cultured him up—blood, sputum, urine—and I’ve stained and sectioned some tissue. I took some exudate from the skin lesions. But so far the results are inconclusive.”

“What could have killed him so fast?” Sloane asked.

Aragon turned his dark eyes to her. “That’s what makes diagnosis so difficult. In his last minutes, there were signs of cyanosis and acute dyspnea. That would indicate pneumonia, but pneumonia would not present that quickly. Then there was the acute paralysis . . .” He fell silent for a moment. “Without access to a laboratory, I can’t do a tap or a gastric wash, let alone an autopsy.”

“What I want to know,” Black said, “was whether this is infectious. Whether others might have been exposed.”

Aragon sighed and stared at the ground. “It’s hard to say. But so far, the evidence doesn’t point in that direction. Perhaps the crude bloodwork I’ve done, or the antibody tests, will tell us more. I’ve got test cultures growing in petri dishes on the off chance it is some infectious agent. I really hate to speculate . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Enrique, I think we need to hear your speculations,” Nora said quietly.

“Very well. If you asked me for my initial impression—it happened so fast, I would say it looked more like acute poisoning than disease.”

Nora looked at Aragon in sudden horror.

“Poisoning?” Black cried, visibly recoiling. “Who could have wanted to poison Peter?”

“It may not be one of us,” said Sloane. “It may have been whoever killed our horses and wrecked our communications gear.”

“As I said, it’s speculation only.” Aragon spread his hands. He looked at Bonarotti. “Did Holroyd eat anything that the others didn’t?”

Bonarotti shook his head.

“And the water?”

“It comes from the creek,” Bonarotti replied. “I run it through a filter. We’ve all been drinking it.”

Aragon rubbed his face. “I won’t have test results for several hours. I suppose we have to assume it might be infectious. As a precaution, we should get the body out of camp as soon as possible.”

Silence fell in the canyon. There was a roll of distant thunder from over the Kaiparowits Plateau.

“What are we going to do?” Black asked.

Nora looked at him. “Isn’t it obvious? We have to leave here as quickly as possible.”

“No!” Sloane burst out.

Nora turned to her in surprise.

“We can’t leave Quivira, just like that. It’s too important a site. Whoever destroyed our communications gear knows that. It’s obvious they’re trying to drive us out so they can loot the city. We’d be playing into their hands.”

“That’s true,” said Black.

“A man has just died,” Nora interrupted. “Possibly of an infectious disease, possibly even by murder. Either way, we have no choice. We’ve lost all contact with the outside world. The lives of the expedition members are my first responsibility.”

“This is the greatest find in modern archaeology,” Sloane said, her husky voice now low and urgent. “There’s not one of us here who wasn’t willing to risk his life to make this discovery. And now that somebody has died, are we going to just roll things up and leave? That would cheapen Peter’s sacrifice.”

Black, who paled a bit during this speech, still managed to nod his support.

“For you, and me, and the rest of the scientific team, that may be true,” Nora said. “But Peter was a civilian.”

“He knew the risks,” Sloane said. “You did explain them, didn’t you?” She looked directly at Nora as she spoke. Though she said nothing more, the unspoken comment couldn’t have been clearer.

“I know Peter’s presence here was partly my doing,” Nora replied, fighting to keep her tone even. “That’s something I’ll have to live with. But it doesn’t change anything. The fact is, we still have Roscoe, Luigi, and Bill Smithback with us. Now that we know the dangers, we have no right to jeopardize their safety any further.”

“Hear, hear,” Smithback murmured.

“I think they should make their own decisions,” Sloane said, her eyes dark in the stormy light. “They’re not just paid sherpas. They have their own investment in this expedition.”

Nora looked from Sloane to Black, and then at the rest of the expedition. They were all looking back at her silently. She realized, with a kind of dull surprise, that she was facing a critical challenge to her leadership. A small voice within her murmured that it wasn’t fair: not now, when she should be grieving for Peter Holroyd. She struggled to think rationally. It was possible that she could, as expedition leader, simply order everyone to leave. But there seemed to be a new dynamic among the group now, in the wake of Holroyd’s death; an unpredictable urgency of feeling. This was no democracy, nor should it be: yet she felt she would have to roll the dice and play it as one.

“Whatever we do, we do as a group,” she said. “We’ll take a vote on it.”

She turned her eyes toward Smithback.

“I’m with Nora,” he said quietly. “The risk is too great.”

Nora looked next at Aragon. The doctor returned her gaze briefly, then turned toward Sloane. “There is no question in my mind,” he said. “We have to leave.”

Nora glanced at Black. He was sweating. “I’m with Sloane,” he said in a strained voice.

Nora turned to Swire. “Roscoe?”

The wrangler glanced up at the sky. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said gruffly, “we should never have entered this goddamned valley in the first place, ruin or no ruin. And now the rains are here, and that slot canyon’s our only exit. It’s time we got our butts out.”

Nora glanced at Bonarotti. The Italian waved his hand vacantly, sending cigarette smoke spiraling through the air. “Whatever,” he said. “I will go along with whatever.”

Nora returned her gaze to Sloane. “I count four against two, with one abstention. There’s nothing more to discuss.” Then she softened her tone. “Look, we won’t just leave willy-nilly. We’ll take the rest of the day to finish up the most pressing work, shut down the dig, and take a series of documentary photographs. We’ll pack a small selection of representative artifacts. Then we’ll leave first thing tomorrow.”

“The rest of the day?” Black said. “To close this site properly will take a hell of a lot longer than that.”

“I’m sorry. We’ll do the best we can. We’ll only pack up the essential gear for the trip out—the rest we’ll cache, to save time.”

Nobody spoke. Her face an unreadable mask of emotions, Sloane continued to stare at Nora.

“Let’s get going,” Nora said, turning away wearily. “We’ve got a lot to do before sunset.”

40

SMITHBACK KNELT BY THE TENT AND GINGERLY lifted the flap, gazing inside with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Aragon had wrapped Peter Holroyd’s body in two layers of plastic and then sealed it inside the expedition’s largest drysack, a yellow bag with black stripes. Despite the carefully sealed coverings, the tent reeked of betadine, alcohol, and something worse. Smithback leaned away, breathing through his mouth. “I’m not sure I can do this,” he said.

“Let’s just get it over with,” Swire replied, picking up a pole and ducking into the tent.

No book advance is worth this, Smithback thought. Reaching into his pocket for his red bandanna, he tied it carefully over his mouth. Then he tugged a pair of work gloves over the rubber gloves Aragon had given him, picked up a coil of rope, and followed Swire into the tent.

Wordlessly, Swire laid the pole alongside the bagged corpse. Then, as quickly as possible, the two men lashed it to the pole, winding the rope around and around until it was secure. Swire tied off the ends with half-hitches. Then, grasping each end, they hefted the body out of the tent.

Holroyd had a slight frame, and Smithback raised one end of the pole onto his shoulder with relative ease. I’ll bet he weighs one fifty, one sixty, max, he thought. That means eighty pounds for each of us. Strange how, at times of severe stress, the mind tended to dwell on the most trivial, the most quotidian details. Smithback felt a pang of sympathy for the friendly, unassuming young man. Just three nights before, under Smithback’s journalistic probing by the campfire, Holroyd had opened up at last and talked, at unexpected length, about his deep and abiding love for motorcycles. As he’d talked, the shyness had left him, and his limbs had filled with animation. Now those limbs were still. All too still, in fact; Smithback did not like the stiff, unyielding way Holroyd’s bagged feet jostled up against his shoulder as they proceeded toward the slot canyon.

He thought back to the discussion about what to do with the body. It had to be placed somewhere secure, away from camp, elements, and predators, until it could be retrieved at a later time. They couldn’t bury it in the ground, Nora had said; coyotes would dig it up. They talked about hanging it in a tree, but most of the trees were inaccessible, their lower branches stripped away in flash floods. Anyway, Aragon said it was important to get the body as far from camp as possible. Then Nora remembered the small rock shelter about a quarter of the way through the slot canyon, above the high-water mark and accessible via a stepped ledge. It was a perfect place to store the body. The place was impossible to miss: the shelter was twenty feet off the canyon bottom, just above the trunk of a massive cottonwood that had been wedged between the walls by some earlier flood. The threat of rain had passed—Black had checked the weather report from the canyon rim—and the slot canyon would be safe for the time being. . . .

Smithback brought himself back to the present. There was a reason his mind was wandering. He knew himself well enough to understand what was happening: he was thinking about something, anything, to keep his mind off the job at hand. Deep down, for some reason he didn’t fully understand, Smithback realized he was profoundly frightened. He’d been in more than his share of life-threatening situations before: struggling against a killer in a vast museum; and later, caught fighting for his life in a warren of tunnels far beneath New York City. And yet here, in the pleasant afternoon light, he felt as threatened as he ever had in his life. There was something about the diffuse, vague nature of the evil in this valley that unsettled him most of all.

Once again, Holroyd’s rigid foot pressed sharply into Smithback’s shoulder. Ahead, Swire had stopped and was glancing upward toward the mouth of the slot canyon. Smithback followed his gaze into the narrow, scarred opening. Clearing skies, Black had said; Smithback hoped to hell the weather report was right.

Once in the slot, they were able to float the wrapped body, buoyed by the drysack, across the stretches of slack water. At the base of each pourover, however, Holroyd’s corpse had to be half pushed, half dragged up to the next pool. After twenty minutes of pushing, wading, swimming, and dragging, the two men stopped to catch their breath. Farther up the winding passage, Smithback could make out the massive cottonwood trunk that marked the location of the rock shelter. He moved a few feet away from the drysack, untied the bandanna from his mouth, shook it out, and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.

“So you think that Indian you saw had nothing to do with killing my horses,” Swire said. They were the first words he’d spoken since they left Holroyd’s tent.

“Absolutely not,” Smithback replied. “Especially since the people who killed your horses must have been the ones who wrecked our communications gear. And we were with the shepherd when that happened.”

Swire nodded. “That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

Smithback saw that Swire was still staring at him. The brown eyes had long ago lost the humorous squint Smithback remembered from the first days of their ride. In Swire’s sunken cheeks, bony face, and tight jaw, Smithback could see a great sorrow. “Holroyd was a good kid,” he said simply.

Smithback nodded.

Swire spoke in a low voice. “It’s one thing to get in trouble back there”—he jerked his head in the hypothetical direction of civilization—“but it’s a whole other deal to run into trouble out here.”

Smithback looked from Swire to Holroyd’s body, then back to Swire. “That’s why Nora’s doing the right thing,” he said. “Getting us out as quickly as possible.”

Swire spat a line of tobacco across a nearby rock. “She’s a brave woman, I’ll give her that,” he said. “Volunteering to track those horse killers on her own . . . that took guts. But guts alone ain’t enough. I’ve seen even the smallest problem end up killing people in a place like this. And you know what? Our problems ain’t small.”

Smithback didn’t answer. His thoughts were still on Nora: her quick tongue, appraising eyes, resourceful pluck—her courage and determination. And he realized, with a sense of astonishment, that he was scared, not so much for himself but for her.

Swire appraised him, eyes glittering. Then he stood up and grabbed the lead end of the pole. Smithback rose, snugged the bandanna once again around his mouth, and scrambled toward the corpse. They climbed the rest of the way to the rock shelter in silence.

41

AARON BLACK STOOD IN THE DAPPLED shadows of the westernmost tower, surveying his test trenches and portable lab setups with a practiced eye. The soil profiles were perfect, naturally: a textbook model of the latest in stratigraphic analysis. And the labs were, as always, a picture of economy, efficiency, and accuracy.

As he stared, the satisfaction he usually felt when admiring his work was eclipsed by a stab of disappointment. Muttering under his breath, he drew a large tarp over the test trench and staked it down, pinning the sides with rocks. It was a wholly unsatisfactory way to preserve his accomplishments, but at least it was better than backfilling. Here he was, about to run away from the site that, by all rights, should be the crowning glory of his career. God knows what they would find when they returned. If they returned at all.

He shook his head in disgust and pulled a tarp over the second trench. Still, he wasn’t entirely sorry to be leaving. His usual assistant, Smithback, was off burying Holroyd, and as Black worked he managed to feel deeply thankful that particular task had not fallen to him. It didn’t really matter whether poison or disease had killed the technician. Either one was dangerous. A part of Black hungered for civilization—telephones, fine restaurants, hot showers, and toilets that flushed—a world hundreds of miles away from Quivira. Of course, he’d never admit this to Sloane, who had moved off in stony silence to take the final photographic records of the site.

As his thoughts turned to Sloane, he felt a hot flush begin to spread out from his vitals. Memories of the night before gave way to hopes and fantasies for the night to come. Black had never had much luck with women, and Sloane was a woman, all right; a woman who . . .

Tearing himself from these thoughts with difficulty, he turned to the flotation lab. Unhooking the jug of distilled water from the apparatus, he dumped the water pan over the edge of the cliff. Then, with a sigh, he began unscrewing the equipment, draining the hoses, and packing everything into two metal suitcases filled with custom-cut foam. It was a job he had done many times before, and despite everything he prided himself on his tidiness. Snapping the suitcases closed, he set them aside and began breaking down the paper chromatography setup.

He paused in the act of stacking the unused papers into plastic folders. By rights, they would have all been used over the coming weeks, forming the foundation for half a year of analysis back in his comfortable lab. He stared at them, all the brilliant articles he planned to write for the most prestigious scientific journals going up in smoke inside his head.

Suddenly, a gust of wind caught a pack of the chromatography papers, blowing them toward the back of the cave. He watched as they scattered and disappeared into the darkness.

Black swore out loud. The papers were ruined—contaminated—but he couldn’t just leave them. He’d publicly humiliated more than one archaeologist for leaving trash in a ruin.

He finished packing the chromatography setup and buckled the case shut. Then he stood up and walked toward the back of the cave, eyes to the ground. The papers had scattered along the very back of the midden heap; he could see some still blowing about in the random eddies of wind. Muttering again, he walked past the first granary along the rear wall of the ruin, trapping the papers with his foot as he went, picking them up and shoving them into a pocket. Soon he had counted eleven. The papers came twelve in a pack, he knew; where the hell was the last one?

Ahead of him lay the narrow opening to the Crawlspace, and he moved toward it, bending low under the rock roof. It was too dark to see, and he fumbled in his pocket for a penlight. Its feeble gleam struggled to pierce the darkness, illuminating dust, scattered bones, and—about ten yards away—the last paper, caught on a piece of broken skull.

To hell with Aragon and his ZST, Black thought sourly, getting down on his hands and knees and childishly shoving the bones out of his way. Another eddy of wind stirred up the dust inside the Crawlspace, and he sneezed explosively. Kicking the bones aside, he grabbed the final paper and stuffed it in his pocket. As he turned to go, he saw a large pack rat shamble into the beam of his flashlight, disturbed by the clatter of bones. It turned to face him, yellow teeth bared.

Black shied back, sneezed again, and waved his hand. The animal backed up with a chattering protest and a flick of its tail, but it did not flee.

“Yah!” Black cried, picking up a longbone and aiming it at the rat. With a sudden movement, the rat vanished into a small pile of rock, lying against the back wall of the Crawlspace.

Curious, he moved forward. On closer inspection, he could see that the rocks had not fallen from the ceiling of the Crawlspace, as he had assumed; they were of a different material than the sandstone cave. In the bottom of the pile of rocks the pack rat had made his opening, lined with twigs and cactus husks.

Black crawled closer, wrinkling his nose at the strong smell of guano and rat urine. As he played his light into the rathole, he saw that it led to a black space beyond: a large black space.

He examined the rocks again. It looked to his expert eyes that they were not a natural event. Rather, they had been piled there deliberately. A great deal of care had been taken to conceal this opening: Aragon must have passed it at least two dozen times without noticing anything, and Aragon had sharp eyes, even for an archaeologist. But his own eyes, Black mused, were better.

He sat in the darkness, feeling his heartbeat quicken. Something had been deliberately hidden behind the rock pile; painstakingly, cunningly hidden. A burial, most likely, or even a catacomb. Perhaps of great archaeological value. He glanced up and down the Crawlspace. He was alone, Aragon busy elsewhere on Holroyd’s postmortem analysis. He shone his light into the hole once more, probing farther.

This time, something glinted back at him.

Black withdrew the light, sat up, and remained motionless for a moment. And then he did something he had never done before. He picked up a stray bone and began working loose the small rocks around the rathole. Carefully at first, then with greater and greater urgency, he scrabbled with the rocks, pulling them out. Soon, a small opening in the back of the cave became visible. Thoughts of discomfort, disease, and poison evaporated from his mind, replaced by a new thought: a consuming desire to see what lay on the far side.

Dust began to cake on his sweaty skin; he tied a bandanna over his mouth and nose and continued. The bone fell apart and he continued working with his hands. In five minutes, he had cleared an opening large enough to admit his bulk.

Breathing deeply, he wiped his hands on the seat of his pants and plucked the bandanna from his mouth. Then he put his hands on either side of the opening and pulled himself through.

In a moment he was on the far side. He scrambled to his feet, panting hard. The air was thick, hot, and surprisingly humid. He looked around, his penlight stabbing through skeins of dust.

Almost immediately he saw the glint again—the unmistakable glint of gold—and for a moment his heart stopped. He was in a large black cavern. There, rising in front of him, dominating the cavern, was another Great Kiva. Incised and painted on its side was a huge disk that winked gold in his light. The Great Kiva had once had a door in the side, also blocked with loose stones and half buried in sand. Behind it stood an exquisite Anasazi pueblo, small but perfect, its two-storied roomblocks and ladders sealed in the cave and untouched for more than seven centuries.

He scrambled to his feet and approached the kiva, touching the gold disk with a trembling hand. The effect of gold had been created with a deep yellow pigment—Black guessed it was yellow ochre of iron—mixed with crushed flakes of mica. The whole thing had then been polished, creating a shimmering surface that looked remarkably like gold. It was the same method used to make the image in the Rain Kiva, only this disk was ten feet in diameter.

He knew then that he had found the Sun Kiva.

42

THE DIRTY SKY OF THE AFTERNOON HAD lifted, and the air above the canyon of Quivira was suffused with the last golden light of sunset. Already, the gloom of night was gathering in the bottom of the canyon, in strange juxtaposition to the brilliant narrow strip of sky above. The brief rain had released the scents of the desert: wet sand, the sweet smell of cottonwoods, mingled with the fragrant cedarwood from Bonarotti’s fire.

Nora, struggling to close one of the drysacks, noticed none of the beauty, smelled none of the scents. To her, still numbed by the events of the day, the valley was anything but benign. A few minutes before, Swire and Smithback had returned from their grisly errand, and they now rested by the fire, exhausted, faces blank.

With an effort, she heaved the drysack alongside the growing pile of equipment, then grabbed an empty duffel and began to fill it. Much of the evening would be spent packing the gear, caching some of it, getting the rest ready for the long, wet trip out the slot canyon to the horses. Once they had packed and gotten away from the valley and its divisive influences, she felt sure, they would be able to function as a team once again; at least, long enough to bring the details of their remarkable find back to the Institute.

A harsh, ragged shout from the direction of the rope ladder intruded on her thoughts. She looked up to see the tall figure of Aaron Black come striding through the gloaming, his face gray with dirt, his clothing streaked, hair wild. For a terrifying moment, she was certain he had caught whatever it was that killed Holroyd. But this fear was quickly dispelled by the look of triumph on his face.

“Where’s Sloane?” he boomed, looking around animatedly. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Sloane!” The valley reverberated with his shouts.

“Are you all right?” Nora asked.

As Black turned toward her, Nora could see sweat springing from the mud caked to his brow, running in dun-colored rivulets down his face. “I found it,” he said.

“Found what?”

“The Sun Kiva.”

Nora straightened up, releasing her hold on the duffel and letting it fall back into the sand. “You found what?”

“There was a blocked opening behind the city. Nobody noticed it before. But I did. I found it.” Black’s chest was heaving, and he could barely get out the words. “Behind the Crawlspace is a narrow passageway that leads into another cavern behind the city. And, Nora, there’s a whole secret city hidden back there. Right in front is a Great Kiva, a sealed kiva. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before.”

“Let me get this straight,” Nora said slowly. “You broke through a wall?”

Black nodded, his smile broadening.

Nora felt sudden anger course through her. “I specifically forbade any disturbance like that. My God, Aaron, all you’ve done is open up a new area to be looted. Have you forgotten we’re about to leave?”

“But we can’t leave now. Not after this discovery.”

“We absolutely are leaving. First thing in the morning.”

Black stood rooted in place, anger and disbelief growing in his face. “You haven’t heard what I said. I found the Sun Kiva. We can’t leave now. The gold will be stolen.”

Nora looked more intently at his face. “Gold?” she repeated.

“Christ, Nora, what else do you think is in there? Corn? The evidence is overwhelming. I just found the Anasazi Fort Knox.”

As Nora stared at him, in growing consternation and disbelief, she saw Sloane come up through the twilight, oversized camera under one arm.

“Sloane!” Black called out. “I found it!” He rushed over and embraced her. Smiling, she disentangled herself, and looked from him to Nora with a quizzical expression. “What’s this?” she asked, carefully setting down the camera.

“Black found a sealed cave behind the city,” Nora replied. “He says the Sun Kiva is inside it.”

Sloane looked at Black quickly, smile vanishing as comprehension dawned.

“It’s there, Sloane,” he said. “A Great Kiva, sixty feet in diameter, with a sun disk painted on its side.”

A powerful play of emotions ran quickly across Sloane’s face. “What kind of disk?”

“A great sun in yellow pigment, mixed with mica and polished. It looks just like gold. I thought it was gold when I first saw it.”

Sloane suddenly became very pale, then flushed deeply. “Paint mixed with mica?”

“Yes. Crushed biotite mica, which has a golden cast to it. A brilliant imitation of the real thing. Which is exactly the kind of symbolic representation you’d find on the outside if they were storing—”

“Take me to it,” Sloane said urgently. Black grabbed her hand and they turned away.

“Hold on!” Nora barked.

The two turned to look at her, and with dismay Nora read the passion in their faces. “Just a minute,” she continued. “Aaron, you’re acting like a pothunter, not a scientist. You should never have broken into the back of the cave. I’m sorry, but we can’t have any more disturbance.”

Sloane looked at her, saying nothing, but Black’s face grew dark. “And I’m sorry,” he said loudly, “but we’re going up there.”

Nora looked into Black’s eyes, saw there was no point in arguing with him, and turned to Sloane instead. “For good or ill, everything that happens here is going into the final report,” she went on urgently. “Sloane, consider how your father will react if he hears we busted willy-nilly into that kiva. If Black is right, this could be the most important discovery yet. Even more reason why we have to proceed carefully.”

At the mention of her father, the sudden hunger seemed to leave Sloane’s face. She tensed, struggling to regain her composure.

“Nora, come up with us,” she said with a quick smile. “All we’ll do is look. What harm is there in that?”

“Absolutely,” said Black. “I’ve touched nothing. Nothing has happened here that can’t go into a public report.”

Nora looked at each of them in turn. Smithback, Swire, and Bonarotti had come over and were listening intently. Only Aragon was missing. She glanced at her watch: almost seven o’clock. She thought about what Black had said: a hidden city, the Sun Kiva. What was it Aragon had said in the Rain Kiva? “There’s a piece of the puzzle still missing. I thought it would be in this kiva. But now, I am not so sure.” If Aragon were here, no doubt he’d disapprove. But she knew Black’s find could mean the key to everything. The fact that it might be looted and destroyed after they were gone filled her with a helpless anger. Because of that, they had an obligation to document the inner cave, at least in photographs. Besides, if she were to keep the group together, she felt she had no choice but to bend just a little. The harm had been done; Black’s transgression would be dealt with later, and not by her.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll make a short visit. Only long enough to take photographs and decide how best to reseal the cave. No more violations of any sort. Am I understood?” She turned to Sloane. “Bring the four-by-five camera. And Aaron, you get the fluorescent lamp.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, a small group stood huddled together in the confines of the inner cave. Nora gazed in awe, overwhelmed despite herself by the richness of the site, by the perfect little gem of an Anasazi pueblo hidden behind the mysterious kiva. The greenish glare of the lamp threw magic-lantern patterns on the irregular walls. It was a small pueblo, no more than thirty rooms; no doubt some kind of sanctum sanctorum for the priests. For that reason alone, it would be exceedingly interesting to study.

The Sun Kiva itself was unadorned except for the great polished disk, glinting in the harsh light. Thick ribbed dust lay in drifts against its base and along its walls. The kiva had been carefully plastered with adobe, and she saw that the only opening in its side had been blocked with rocks.

“Look at that stonework,” said Black. “It’s the most fortified kiva I’ve ever seen.”

A pole ladder was leaning against one side of the kiva. “That was leaning against the roomblocks,” Black said eagerly, following Nora’s glance. “I brought it over and climbed onto the roof. There’s no roof opening. It’s been totally sealed shut.” His voice dropped a notch. “As if it’s hiding something.”

Sloane broke away from the group and walked up to the sun disk. She stroked it lightly, almost reverently, with her fingers. Then she glanced back at Nora, briskly unpacked her camera kit, and began setting up the first shot.

The group stood silently while Sloane moved about the cavern, shooting the kiva and its associated roomblocks from a variety of angles. Soon she rejoined them, folded up her tripod, and put the camera body back in its case.

Even the loquacious Smithback had remained silent and, most uncharacteristically, taken no notes. There was a palpable tension in the air; a tension quite different, Nora realized, than any she had felt at the site before.

“Done?” she asked. Sloane nodded.

“Before we leave tomorrow morning,” Nora went on, careful to keep her voice neutral, “we’ll reblock the hole as best we can. There’s not much to bring a looter back behind the granaries. If we hide it well, they’ll miss it.”

“Before we leave?” Black repeated.

Nora looked at him and nodded.

“By God, not until we open this kiva,” said Black.

Nora looked at his face, then at Sloane. And then at Swire, and Bonarotti, and Smithback. “We’re leaving tomorrow,” she said quietly. “And nobody’s opening this kiva.”

“If we don’t do it now,” Sloane said, her voice loud, “nothing will be left when we return.”

There was a tense silence, broken by Bonarotti. “I would also like to see this kiva full of gold,” he said.

Nora waited, taking measured breaths, thinking about what she was going to say and how she was going to say it.

“Sloane,” she began quietly. “Aaron. This expedition is facing a crisis. One person has died. There are people out there who killed our horses, and who may try to kill us. To open and document this kiva properly would take days. We don’t have days.” She paused. “I’m the leader of this expedition. It’s my choice to make. And we’re leaving tomorrow.”

A tense silence gathered in the cave.

“I don’t accept your so-called choice,” Sloane said in a low tone. “Here we are, on the verge of the greatest discovery, and what is your answer? Go home. You’re just like my father. You have to control everything. Well, this is my career, too. This is my discovery as much as it is yours. If we leave now, this kiva will be looted. And you’ll have thrown away perhaps the greatest discovery in American archaeology.” Nora saw that she was shaking in anger. “I’ve been a threat to you from the beginning. But that’s your problem, not mine. And I’m not going to let you do this to my career.”

Nora looked hard at Sloane. “You mention your father,” she said slowly. “Let me tell you what he said to us, right before we left for Quivira: ‘You are representing the Institute. And what the Institute represents is the very highest standard of archaeological research and ethical conduct.’ Sloane, what we do here, what we say here, will be studied, debated, second-guessed by countless people.” She softened her tone. “I know how you feel. I want to open this kiva as much as you do. And we will be back to do this the right way. I promise you’ll get all the credit you deserve. But until that time, I absolutely forbid the opening of this kiva.”

“If we leave here now, there will be nothing left when we return,” Sloane said, her eyes locked on Nora. “And then we’ll be the ones doing the second-guessing. Go on and run, if you want. Just leave me a horse and some supplies.”

“Is that your final word?” Nora asked quietly.

Sloane merely stared in return.

“Then you leave me no choice but to relieve you of your position on the archaeological team.”

Sloane’s eyes widened. Then her gaze swivelled to Black.

“I’m not sure you can do that,” Black said, a little weakly.

“You’re damn right she can do it,” Smithback suddenly spoke up. “Last time I checked, Nora was leader of this expedition. You heard what she said. We leave the kiva alone.”

“Nora,” Black said, a pleading note entering his voice, “I don’t think you appreciate the magnitude of this discovery. Just on the other side of that adobe wall is a king’s ransom in Aztec gold. I just don’t think we can leave it for . . .”

His voice trailed off. Ignoring Black, Nora continued to look hard at Sloane. But Sloane had turned away, her eyes fixed on the large painted disk on the kiva’s side, glowing brilliantly in the fluorescent light. Then she gave Nora one last, hateful look and walked to the low passageway. In a moment she was gone. Black stood his ground a little longer, staring from the kiva to Nora and back again. Then, swallowing heavily, he tore himself away and wordlessly made his way out into the Crawlspace.

43

SKIP KELLY MADE HIS CAREFUL WAY DOWN THE far reaches of Tano Road North, doing his best to keep the VW from bottoming out on the dirt road. It was terrible road, all washboard and ruts: the kind of road that was a much-coveted asset in many of Santa Fe’s priciest neighborhoods. Every quarter mile or so, he passed another enormous set of wrought-iron gates, flanked by adobe pillars, beyond which a narrow dirt road wound off through piñon trees: portals to unseen estates. Occasionally, he caught glimpses of buildings—a caretaker’s cottage, an immaculate set of barns, an enormous house rising from a distant ridgeline—but most of the great estates along Tano Road were so well hidden that one hardly knew they existed.

The road narrowed, the piñons crowding in on either side. Skip slowed even further, eased his foot onto the clutch, elbowed Teddy Bear’s huge muzzle out of his face, and once again checked the number scribbled onto a folded sheet of paper, dim in the evening light. Not far now.

He came over the brow of a hill and saw the road peter out a quarter mile ahead, ending in a thicket of chamisa. To the left, a great rock of granite rose out of the earth. Its face had been polished flat, and ESG had been engraved on it in simple, sans-serif letters. Beyond the rock was an old ranch gate. It looked much more battered than the shiny monstrosities he had just driven past. As he eased the car closer, however, he saw that the shabbiness of the gate belied its immensely strong construction. Beside it was a small keypad and an intercom.

Leaving the engine running, he got out of the car, pushed the single red button beneath the intercom’s speaker, and waited. A minute passed, then two. Just as he was preparing to get back into the car, the speaker crackled into life.

“Yes?” came a voice. “Who is it?”

With mild surprise, Skip realized that the voice wasn’t that of a housekeeper, chauffeur, or butler. It was the authoritative voice of the owner, Ernest Goddard himself.

He leaned toward the intercom. “It’s Skip Kelly,” he said.

The speaker was silent.

“I’m Nora Kelly’s brother.”

There was a brief movement in the vegetation beside the gate, and Skip turned to see a cleverly hidden camera swivel toward him. Then it panned away, toward the Volkswagen. Skip winced inwardly.

“What is it, Skip?” the voice said. It did not sound particularly friendly.

Skip swallowed. “I need to talk to you, sir. It’s very important.”

“Why now? You’re working at the Institute, are you not? Can’t it wait until Monday?”

What Skip didn’t say was that he had spent the entire day locked in a debate with himself over whether or not to make this trip. Aloud, he said, “No, it can’t. At least, I don’t think it can.”

He waited, painfully conscious of the camera regarding him, wondering what the old man would say next. But the intercom remained silent. Instead, there was the heavy clank of a lock being released, and the old gate began to swing open.

Skip returned to the car, put it in gear, and eased past the fence. The winding driveway threaded its way along a low ridge. After a quarter of a mile, it dipped down, made a sharp turn, then rose again. There, on the next crest, Skip saw a magnificent estate spread along the ridgeline, its adobe facade brocaded a rich evening crimson beneath the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Despite himself, he stopped the car for a moment, staring through the windshield in admiration. Then he drove slowly up the remainder of the driveway, parking the Beetle between a battered Chevy truck and a Mercedes Gelaendewagen.

He got out of the car and closed the door behind him. “Stay,” he told Teddy Bear. It was an unnecessary command: even though the windows were rolled all the way down, the dog would never have been able to squeeze his bulk through them.

The entrance to the house was a huge set of eighteenth-century zaguan doors. Pulled from some hacienda in Mexico, I’ll bet, Skip thought as he approached. Clutching a book under one arm, he searched for a doorbell, found nothing, and knocked.

Almost immediately the door opened, revealing a long hallway, grandly appointed but dimly lit. Beyond it he could see a garden with a stone fountain. In front of him stood Ernest Goddard himself, wearing a suit whose muted colors seemed to match the hallway beyond almost exactly. The long white hair and closely trimmed beard framed a pair of lively but rather displeased blue eyes. He turned without a word and Skip followed his gaunt frame as it retreated down the hall, hearing the click of his own heels on the marble.

Passing several doors, Goddard at last ushered Skip into a large, two-story library, its tall rows of books clad in dark mahogany shelves. A spiral staircase of ornate iron led to a second-story catwalk, and to more books, row upon row. Goddard closed and locked a small door on the far side of the room, then pointed Skip toward an old leather chair beside the limestone fireplace. Taking a seat opposite, Goddard crossed his legs, coughed lightly, and looked enquiringly at Skip.

Now that he was here, Skip realized he had no idea exactly how to begin. He fidgeted with unaccustomed nervousness. Then, remembering the book beneath his arm, he brought it forward. “Have you heard of this book?” he asked.

“Heard of it?” murmured Goddard, a trace of irritation in his voice. “Who hasn’t? It’s a classic anthropological study.”

Skip paused. Sitting here, in the quiet confines of the library, what he thought he had discovered began to seem faintly ridiculous. He realized the best thing would be to simply relate what had happened.

“A few weeks ago,” he said, “my sister was attacked at our old farmhouse out past Buckman Road.”

“Oh?” said Goddard, leaning forward.

“She was assaulted by two people. Two people wearing wolfskins, and nothing much else. It was dark, and she didn’t get a very good look at them, but she said they were covered with white spots. They wore old Indian jewelry.”

“Skinwalkers,” Goddard said. “Or, at least, some people playing as skinwalkers.”

“Yes,” said Skip, relieved to hear no note of scorn in Goddard’s voice. “They also broke into Nora’s apartment and stole her hairbrush to get samples of her hair.”

“Hair.” Goddard nodded. “That would fit the skinwalker pattern. They need bodily material from an enemy in order to accomplish their witching.”

“That’s just what this book says,” Skip replied. Briefly, he recounted how it had been his own hair in the brush, and how he had been the one who almost died when his brakes failed so mysteriously.

Goddard listened silently. “What do you suppose they wanted?” he asked when Skip had finished.

Skip licked his lips. “They were looking for the letter Nora found. The one written by my father.”

Goddard suddenly tensed, his entire body registering surprise. “Why didn’t Nora tell me of this?” The voice that had previously expressed mild interest was now razor-sharp with irritation.

“She didn’t want to derail the expedition. She figured she needed the letter to find the valley, and that if she got out of town fast and quietly, whoever or whatever it was would be left behind.”

Goddard sighed.

“But that’s not all. A few days ago, our neighbor, Teresa Gonzales, was murdered in the ranch house. Maybe you heard about it.”

“I recall reading something about that.”

“And did you read that the body was mutilated?”

Goddard shook his head.

Skip slapped Witches, Skinwalkers, and Curanderas with the back of his hand. “Mutilated in just the way described in this study. Fingers and toes sliced off, the whorl of hair on the back of the head scalped off. A disk of skull cut out underneath. According to this book, that’s where the life force enters the body.” He paused. “Nora’s dog disappeared while she was in California. After reading this book, I searched the woods behind her townhouse. I found Thurber’s body. His paws had been cut off. Front and back.”

Goddard’s blue eyes flashed. “The police must have questioned you about the murder. Did you tell them any of this?”

“No,” Skip said, hesitating. “Not exactly. Well, how do you think they’d react to a story about Indian witches?” He put the book aside. “But that’s what they were. They wanted that letter. And they were willing to kill for it.”

Goddard’s look had suddenly gone far away. “Yes,” he murmured. “I understand why you’ve come. They’re interested in the ruins of Quivira.”

“They vanished just about the time the expedition left, maybe a day or two later. Anyway, I haven’t seen or heard any sign of them since. And I’ve been keeping a close eye on Nora’s apartment. I’m worried they may have followed the expedition.”

Goddard’s drawn face went gray. “Yesterday we lost radio contact.”

A feeling of dread suddenly gripped Skip’s heart. This had been the one thing he didn’t want to hear. “Could it be equipment trouble?”

“I don’t think so. The system had redundant backups. And according to your sister, that imaging technician, Holroyd, could have rigged a transmitter out of tin cans and string.”

The older man rose and walked to a small window set among the bookshelves, gazing out toward the mountains, hands in his pockets. A quietness began to gather in the library, punctuated by the steady ticking of an old grandfather clock.

“Dr. Goddard,” Skip blurted suddenly, unable to contain himself any longer. “Please. Nora’s the only family I’ve got left.”

For a moment, Goddard seemed not to have heard. Then he turned, and in his face Skip could see a sudden, iron resolve.

“Yes,” he said, striding to a telephone on a nearby desk. “And the only family I’ve got left is out there with her.”

44

THAT NIGHT, A SOFT BUT STEADY RAIN drummed on the tents of the Quivira expedition, but when morning came the sky was a clear, clean, washed blue, without a cloud in sight. After a long and restless night during which she’d split the guard duty with Smithback, Nora was grateful to step out into the cool morning world. The birds filled the trees with their calls, and the leaves dripped with water that caught and fractured the bright rays of the rising sun.

As she emerged from her tent, her boots sunk into soft wet sand. The creek had risen, she could see, but only slightly—these first rains had been soft enough to soak into the sand without running off. But now the ground was saturated. They had to get out of the canyon before another hard rain, if they didn’t want to be trapped by rising water . . . or, God forbid, something worse.

She glanced toward the row of packed equipment, arranged the night before for transport out of the canyon. They were only taking the minimum they needed to get back to Wahweap Marina—food, tents, essential equipment, documentary records. The rest was being cached in an empty room in the city.

Uncharacteristically, Bonarotti was up early, tending the fire, the espresso pot just signaling its completion with a brief roar. He looked up as Nora came over, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “Caffé?” he asked. Nora nodded her thanks as he handed her a steaming cup.

“Is there really gold in that kiva?” Bonarotti asked in a quiet voice.

She eased herself down on the log and drank. Then she shook her head. “No, there isn’t. The Anasazi didn’t have any gold.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Nora sighed. “Trust me. In a century and a half of excavations, not one grain of gold has been found.”

“But what about Black? What he said?”

Nora shook her head again. If I don’t get them out of there today, she thought, I’m never going to get them out. “All I can tell you is, Black’s wrong.”

The cook refilled her cup, then turned back to his fire, silent and dissatisfied. As she sipped her coffee, the rest of the camp began to stir. As they approached, one at a time, it was clear to Nora that the tension of the previous day had not gone away. If anything, it had increased. Black took a seat by the fire and hunched over his coffee, his face dark and inflamed. Smithback gave Nora a tired smile, squeezed her shoulder, then retreated to a rock to scratch quietly in his notebook. Aragon looked distant and absorbed. Sloane was the last to appear. When she did, she refused to meet Nora’s eyes. A resolute silence gripped the camp. Nobody looked like they had slept.

Nora realized she had to establish a momentum, keep things moving toward departure, not allow anyone time to brood. She finished her cup, swallowed, cleared her throat. “This is how it’s going to work,” she said. “Enrique, please secure the medical gear we’ll need. Luigi will pack up the last of the food. Aaron, I want you to climb to the top of the rim and get a weather report.”

“But the sky is blue,” protested Black, with a distasteful look at the dangling ladder.

“Right here, it’s blue,” said Nora. “But the rainy season has started, and this valley drains off the Kaiparowits. If it’s raining there, we could get a flash flood just as sure as if it were raining directly on top of us. Nobody goes through the slot canyon until we get the weather report.”

She looked at Sloane, but the woman hardly registered that she had heard.

“If it’s clear,” Nora continued, “we’ll make the final preparations to leave. Aaron, after you get the weather report, I want you to seal the entrance to the Sun Kiva. You broke into it—you leave it just as you found it. Sloane, you and Smithback will take the last of the drysacks up to the caching spot. As soon as Aaron gets the weather report, I’ll take a load out through the canyon, then make sure the site is secure.”

She looked around. “Is everyone clear on their duties? I want us out of here in two hours.”

Everyone nodded but Sloane, who sat with a dark, unresponsive look on her face. Nora wondered what would happen if, at the last minute, she refused to go. Nora felt sure that Black wouldn’t stay behind—deep down, he was too much of a coward—but Sloane was another matter. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Nora thought.

Just as she was rising, a flash of color caught her eye: Swire, emerging from the mouth of the slot canyon and coming down the valley. Something about the way he was moving toward them filled her with dread. Not more horses, please.

Swire sprinted across the creek and into camp. “Someone got Holroyd’s body,” he said, fighting to catch his breath.

“Someone?” Aragon asked sharply. “Are you sure it wasn’t animals?”

“Unless an animal can scalp a man, cut off his toes and fingers, and drill out a piece of his skull. He’s lying up there in the creek, not far from where we put him.”

The group looked at one another in horror. Nora glanced at Smithback and could tell from his expression that he, too, remembered what Beiyoodzin had said.

“Peter . . .” Nora’s voice faltered. She swallowed. “Did you go on to check the horses?” she heard herself ask.

“Horses are fine,” said Swire.

“Are they ready to take us out?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then we have no more time to waste,” Nora continued, standing up and placing her cup on the serving table. “I’ll take that load out through the slot canyon, and pick up Peter’s body on the way. We’re just going to have to pack it out on one of the horses. I’ll need someone to give me a hand.”

“I’ll help,” said Smithback quickly.

Nora nodded her thanks.

“I will go, too,” said Aragon. “I would like to examine the corpse.”

Nora glanced at him. “There are things here that you need to do—” The sentence went unfinished as she saw the significant look on his face. She turned away. “Very well. We could use a third hand with the body. And listen, all of you: stay in pairs. I don’t want anyone going anywhere alone. Sloane, you’d better go with Aaron.”

Nobody moved, and she glanced around at the faces. The tension that had drawn her nerves tight as a bowstring—the fear and revulsion she felt at the thought of Peter’s body, broken and violated in death—suddenly coalesced into exasperation.

“Damn it!” she cried out. “What the hell are you waiting for? Let’s move!”

45

SILENTLY, AARON BLACK FOLLOWED SLOANE toward the rope ladder. Their private discussion the night before had resolved nothing. At the last minute, Sloane would refuse to leave; Black felt certain she would. But when he questioned her, she had been impatient and evasive. Though he would never admit it to her, Black’s own intense desire to stay had been slightly tempered by fear: fear of what killed Holroyd, and, worse, of what had attacked their horses and equipment; and now, added to that, fear of what had mutilated Holroyd’s body.

Reaching the base of the ladder, Sloane pulled up onto the first rung and began to climb. Black, irritated when she did not wait to see him safely into the harness, pulled the reinforced loops into place around his waist and crotch, tested the ropes, and started up. He hated this climb; harness or no harness, it terrified him to be swaying five hundred feet up on a cliff, hanging on to nothing but a flimsy nylon rope.

But as he mounted the ladder, slowly, one painful rung at a time, the terror began to abate. A phrase began running through his mind; a phrase that had never been far from him since he first discovered the Sun Kiva, stuck in his head like a singsong melody. As he climbed, he recited the entire passage, first silently, then under his breath. “And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold.”

Everywhere the glint of gold. It was that final phrase, more than anything else, that kept repeating itself in his mind like a mantra.

He thought back to his childhood; to when he was twelve years old and had first read Howard Carter’s account of discovering the tomb of Tutankhamen. He remembered that moment as well as he remembered the passage itself: it was the very moment when he decided to become an archaeologist. Of course, college and graduate school quickly dispelled any notion that he would find another tomb like King Tut’s. And he had found rich professional rewards in the mere dirt—very rich rewards indeed. He had never felt the slightest dissatisfaction with his career.

Until now. He climbed hand over hand, moving up the ladder, stopping occasionally to check his harness. Now, dirt seemed a poor substitute for gold. He thought about all the gold that Cortéz had melted down into bars and sent back to Spain; all the splendid works of art turned into bullion, lost to the world. Its twin treasure sat in that kiva.

The fever he had felt as a twelve-year-old, first reading that account, now burned in him again. But again he was torn: there was danger here, he knew. And yet, leaving the valley without seeing the inside of the Sun Kiva seemed almost unimaginable to him.

“Sloane, talk to me,” he called. “Are you going to leave the kiva behind, just like that?”

Sloane didn’t answer.

He heaved up the ladder, sweating and grunting. Above, he saw Sloane preparing to make the final climb around the terrifying brow of rock below the summit. Here, the sandstone was still streaked with moisture from the rain, and it glowed a blood-drenched crimson.

“Sloane, say something, please,” he gasped.

“There’s nothing to say,” came the clipped response.

Black shook his head. “How could your father have made a mistake like putting her in charge? If it were you, we’d be making history right now.”

Sloane’s only response was to disappear around the brow of rock. Taking a deep breath, Black followed her up the last pitch. Two minutes later, he struggled up over the rim and threw himself into the sand, exhausted, angry, utterly despondent. He sucked the air deep into his lungs, trying to catch his breath. The air was a lot cooler up here, and a stiff breeze was blowing, smelling of pine and juniper. He sat up, pulling off the annoying harness. “All this way,” he said. “All this work. Just to be cheated out of the greatest discovery at the last minute.”

But Sloane didn’t answer. He was aware of her presence standing to one side, silent and unmoving. Everywhere the glint of gold. . . . Remotely, he was curious why Sloane was just standing there, making no move to get started. With a muttered curse, he stood up and glanced at her.

Sloane’s expression was so unfamiliar, so unexpectedly dramatic, that he simply stared. Her face had lost all its color. She remained where she was, unmoving, staring out over the trees, her lips slightly drawn back from her teeth. In a strange trick of the light he saw her amber eyes deepen to mahogany, as if a sudden shadow had been cast upon them. At last, unlocking his eyes from her face, he slowly turned to follow her gaze.

A dark mass rose above and far beyond the ridge, so enormous and fearsome it took Black a moment to comprehend its true nature. Above the lofty prow of the Kaiparowits Plateau rose a thunderhead the likes of which he had never seen. It looked, he thought distantly, more like an atomic explosion than a storm. Its moiled foot ran at least thirty miles along the spine of the plateau, turning the ridge into a zone of dead black; from this base rose the body of the storm, surging and billowing upward to perhaps forty thousand feet. It flattened itself against the tropopause and sheared off into an anvil-shaped head at least fifty miles across. A heavy, tenebrous curtain of rain dropped from its base, as opaque as steel, obscuring all but the very point of the distant plateau in a veil of water. There was a monstrous play of lightning inside the great thunderhead, vast flickerings and dartings, ominously silent in the distance. As he watched, mesmerized and terrified at once, the thunderhead continued to spread, its dirty tentacles creeping across the blue sky. Even the air on the canyon rim seemed to grow charged with electricity, the scent of violence drifting through the piñons as if from a faraway battleground.

Black remained motionless, transfixed by the awful sight, as Sloane moved slowly, like a sleepwalker, toward the stunted tree that held the weather receiver. There was a snap of a switch, then a low wash of static. As the unit locked onto the preset wavelength, the static gave way to the monotonous, nasal voice of a weather announcer in Page, Arizona, giving a litany of details, statistics, and numbers. Then Black heard, with superhuman clarity, the forecast: “Clear skies and warmer temperatures for the rest of the day, with less than five percent chance of precipitation.”

Black swivelled his eyes from the thunderhead to the sky directly above them: bright, flawless blue. He looked down into the valley of Quivira, peaceful and quiet, the camp awash in morning sunlight. The dichotomy was so extreme that, for a moment, he could not comprehend it.

He stared back at Sloane. Her lips, still withdrawn from her teeth, looked somehow feral. Her whole being was tense with an internal epiphany. Black waited, suddenly breathless, as she snapped off the instrument.

“What—?” Black began to ask, but the look on Sloane’s face silenced him.

“You heard Nora’s orders. Let’s get this disassembled and down into camp.” Sloane’s voice was brisk, businesslike, neutral. She swung up into the stunted juniper and in a moment had unwound the antenna, taken down the receiver, and packed it in a net bag. She glanced at Black.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Without another word, she swung the bag over her shoulder and walked to the ladder. In a moment, she had disappeared down into blue space.

Confused, Black slowly buckled on his harness, took hold of the rope ladder, and began to follow her down.

* * *

Ten minutes later, he stepped off the rope ladder. His distraction was so complete that he only knew he had reached the bottom when his foot sank into the wet sand. He stood there, irresolutely, and again turned his eyes upward. Overhead, the sky was an immaculate azure from rim to rim. There was no hint of the cataclysm taking place twenty miles away, at the head of their watershed. He removed the harness and walked back toward camp, his steps stiff and wooden. Despite the burden of the receiver, Sloane had scuttled down the cliff face like a spider, and she was in camp already, dropping the equipment beside the last pile of drysacks.

Nora’s urgent voice brought Black out of his reverie. “What’s the report?” he heard her ask Sloane.

Sloane didn’t answer.

“Sloane, we have no time. Will you please give me the weather report?” The exasperation in Nora’s voice was unmistakable.

“Clear skies and warmer temperatures for the rest of the day,” Sloane said, in a monotone. “Less than a five percent chance of precipitation.”

Black watched as the strained look on Nora’s face was replaced by a flood of relief. The suspicion and concern vanished from her eyes. “That’s great,” she said with a smile. “Thanks, you two. I’d like everybody to help take the last of the drysacks up to the caching site. Then, Aaron, you can go ahead and seal up the entrance to the hidden cavern. Roscoe, perhaps you should go with him. Keep a close eye on each other. We’ll be back to help you take the last load out in ninety minutes or so.”

A strange, utterly foreign sensation began to creep up Black’s spine. With a growing sense of unreality, he came up beside Sloane and watched as Nora gave a shout and a wave to Smithback. They were quickly joined by Aragon. Then the three walked toward the rows of supplies, shouldered their drysacks, and started for the mouth of the slot canyon.

After a moment, Black tore himself away and turned toward Sloane. “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice cracking.

Sloane met his gaze. “What am I doing? I’m not doing anything, Aaron.”

“But we saw—” Black began, then faltered.

“What did we see?” Sloane hissed suddenly, rounding on him. “All I did was get the weather report and give it to Nora. Just as she demanded. If you saw something, say so now. If not, then shut your mouth about it forever.”

Black stared into her eyes: her whole frame was trembling, her lips white with emotion. He glanced upcanyon, in time to see the group of three cross the stream, toil briefly up the scree slope, and disappear into the dark, terrible slit of rock.

Then he looked back at Sloane. As she read his eyes, the tension in her frame ebbed away. And then, slowly, she nodded.

46

JOHN BEIYOODZIN HALTED HIS HORSE AT THE top of the hogback ridge and looked down into the valley of Chilbah. The horse had taken the trail well, but he was still trembling, damp with perspiration. Beiyoodzin waited, murmuring soothing words, giving him time to recover. The late morning sun was glinting off the peaceful thread of water winding through the valley bottom, a ribbon of quicksilver amid the lush greenery. On the high benchlands above, the wind stirred the cottonwoods and copses of oaks. He could smell sage and ozone in the air. There was a sudden stirring of wind that pressed at his back, as if urging him over the side. Beiyoodzin restrained an impulse to look; he knew all too well what loomed up behind him.

The buckskin shook out his mane, and Beiyoodzin patted him soothingly on the neck. He closed his eyes a moment, calming himself, trying to reconcile his mind to the confrontation that lay ahead.

But calm would not come. He felt a sudden surge of anger at himself: he should have told the woman everything when he had the chance. She had been honest with him. And she deserved to know. It had been foolish to tell her only half of the story. Worse, it had been unkind and selfish to lie. And now, as a result of his weakness, he found himself on a journey that he would have given almost anything to avoid. He could hardly bring himself to contemplate the terrible nature of the evil he had to confront. And yet he had no choice but to prepare himself for conflict; perhaps, even, for death.

Beiyoodzin finally saw the situation clearly, and he was not happy with the role he had played. Sixteen years before, a small imbalance, a minor ugliness—ni zshinitso—had been injected into the small world of his people. They had ignored it. And as a result the small imbalance had become, as they should have known it would, a great evil. As a healer, he should have guided them to doing what was right. It was precisely because of this old imbalance, this absence of truth, that these people were now down in Chilbah, digging. He shuddered. And it was because of this imbalance that the eskizzi, the wolfskin runners, had become active again. And now it had fallen to him to correct the imbalance.

At last, he reluctantly turned around and gazed toward the storm, amazed to see it still growing and swelling, like some vast malignant beast. Here, as if he needed it, was a physical manifestation of the imbalance. It was releasing ever thicker, blacker, denser columns of rain down onto the Kaiparowits Plateau. It was a tremendous rain, a five-hundred-year rain. Beiyoodzin had never seen its equal.

His gaze moved over the distant guttered landscape between the thunderhead and the valley, trying to pick out the flash of moving water; but the canyons were too deep. In his mind’s eye he could see the torrential rains falling hard on the slickrock of the Kaiparowits, the drops coalescing into rivulets, the rivulets into streams, the streams into torrents—the torrents into something that no word could adequately describe.

He untied a small bundle from one of his saddle strings—a drilled piece of turquoise and a mirage stone tied up in horsehair around a small buckskin bag, attached to an eagle feather. He opened the bag, pinched out some cornmeal and pollen, and sprinkled it about, saving the last for his horse’s poll. He brushed first himself, then his horse’s face, with the eagle feather. The horse was prancing now in growing agitation, eyes rolling toward the thunderhead. The leather strings of the saddle slapped restlessly in the growing wind.

Beiyoodzin chanted softly in his language. Then he repacked his medicine kit, dusted the pollen from his fingers. The landscape was now divided sharply between brilliant sunlight and a spreading black stain. A chill, electrically charged wind eddied around him. He would not, of course, attempt to ride into the second valley, the valley of Quivira, through the slot canyon. The flood would be coming through within minutes. That meant he would have to take the secret Priest’s Trail over the top: the long, difficult rimrock trail that his grandfather had told him of in broken whispers but that he himself had never seen. He thought back, trying to recall his grandfather’s directions precisely. It would be necessary to do so, because of the cleverness with which the trail was hidden: it had been designed to be an optical illusion, its cliff edge cut higher than the edge along the rockface, rendering it practically invisible from more than a few feet away. The trail, he had been told, started up the cliffs some distance from the slot canyon, crossed the wide slickrock plateau, and then descended into the canyon at the far end of the valley of Quivira. It might be very difficult for an old man. Maybe, after all these years, it would be impossible. But he had no choice; the imbalance had to be corrected, the natural symmetry had to be restored.

He started quickly down into the valley.

47

NORA PARTED THE CURTAIN OF WEEDS AND glanced upward. The slot canyon snaked ahead of her, the sunshine striated and shadowy in the reddish half-light, the hollows and polished ribs of stone stretching ahead like the throat of some great beast. She eased into the water and breaststroked across the first pool, Smithback following, Aragon bringing up the rear. The water felt cool after the dead, oppressive heat of the valley, and she tried to empty her mind to it, concentrating on the pure physical sensation, refusing for the moment to think of the long trip that lay before them.

They traveled in silence for a while, going from pool to pool, wading along the shallows, the quiet sounds of their passage whispering off the confined spaces of canyon. Nora hefted the drysack from one shoulder to the other. Despite everything, she felt less troubled than she had over the last three days. It had been her great fear that Black and Sloane would descend the ladder with reports of bad weather brewing. It would have been credible, given the recent rains. And she would have had to decide whether they were telling the truth or giving a phony report in order to remain at Quivira. But the report of good weather—though grudgingly given—proved they were resigned to leaving the city. Now all that remained was the grueling multiple portages out through the slot canyon to the horses.

No, that was not quite all; her mind had never been far from Holroyd’s remains, waiting for them a quarter mile up the slot canyon. And with those remains came the message that the skinwalkers were close; perhaps watching them right now, waiting to make their next move.

She glanced back toward Aragon: the man had made it clear he wanted to speak to her about something. Aragon looked up, read the question in her eyes, and merely shook his head. “When we reach the body,” was his only reply.

Nora swam across another pool, climbed up a pourover, and squeezed sideways through a narrower section. Then the steep walls widened a little around her. In the distance ahead, she could make out the massive cottonwood trunk, suspended like a gigantic spar, wedged across the walls of the canyon. Just above it, in deep shadow, was the narrow ledge that led to the space where Holroyd’s body had been laid.

Nora’s eyes fell from the ledge, to the jumble of rocks below, to the narrow pool that stretched the eight or ten feet across the canyon’s bottom. Her gaze came to rest at a smear of yellow, floating at the near end. It was Holroyd’s body bag. Gingerly, she came forward. Now she could see a long, ragged gash in one side of the bag. And there was Holroyd’s body, lying on its back half out of the water. He looked strangely plump.

She stopped dead. “Oh, God,” came Smithback’s voice by her shoulder. Then: “Are we exposing ourselves to some kind of disease, wading about in this water?”

Aragon heaved himself up behind them. “No,” he said, “I don’t believe we are.” But there was no consolation in his face as he spoke these words.

Nora remained still, and Smithback, too, hesitated behind her. Aragon gently pushed past them toward the body. Nora watched as the doctor pulled it onto a narrow stone shelf beside the pool. Reluctantly, she forced herself forward.

Then she stopped again with a sudden gasp.

Holroyd’s decomposing body was swollen inside its clothes, a grotesque parody of obesity. His skin, protruding from his shirt sleeves, was a strange, milky bluish-white. The fingers were now just pink-edged stubs, having been cut away at the first joints. His boots lay on the rocks, slashed and torn, and his feet, that same pale white against the chocolate rock, were missing their toes. Nora gazed in mingled disgust, horror, and outrage. Even worse was the back of the head: a large circular whorl of hair been scalped off, and the disk of skull directly beneath drilled out. Brain matter bulged from the hole.

Working swiftly, Aragon donned a pair of plastic gloves, removed a scalpel from his kit, positioned it just below the last rib, and with a short movement opened the body. Reaching inside with a long narrow set of forceps, he twisted his hand sharply, then retracted it. On the end of the scalpel was a small bit of pink flesh that looked to Nora like lung tissue. Aragon dropped it inside a test tube already half filled with a clear liquid. Adding two drops from a separate vial, he stoppered the tube and swirled it around in his hands. Nora watched as the color of the solution turned a light blue.

Aragon nodded to himself, carefully placed the tube inside a styrofoam case, and repacked his instruments. Then, still kneeling, he turned toward Nora. One gloved hand lay, almost protectively, over the corpse’s chest.

“Do you know what killed him?” Nora asked.

“Without more precise tools, I can’t be a hundred percent sure,” Aragon replied slowly. “But one answer does seem to fit. All the crude tests I’ve been able to run verify it.”

There was a moment of silence. Smithback took a seat on a rock a cautious distance from the body.

Aragon glanced at the writer, then back to Nora. “Before I go into that, I need to tell you some things I’ve discovered about the ruin.”

“About the ruin?” Smithback asked. “What does that have to do with his death?”

“Everything. I believe the abandonment of Quivira—indeed, perhaps even the reason for its very existence—is intimately connected with Holroyd’s death.” He wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “No doubt you’ve noticed the cracks in the towers, the collapsed third-story rooms of the city.”

Nora nodded.

“And you must have noticed the great rockfall at the far end of the canyon. While you were off searching for the horse killers, I talked with Black about this. He told me that the damage to the city was done by a mild earthquake that struck around the same time the city was abandoned. ‘The dates are statistically equal,’ he said. The landslide, according to Black, also occurred at the same time, no doubt triggered by the earthquake.”

“So you think an earthquake killed all those people?” Nora asked.

“No, no. It was just a temblor. But that rockfall, and the collapse of some buildings, was enough to raise a large cloud of dust in the valley.”

“Very interesting,” Smithback said. “But what does a seven-century-old dustcloud have to do with Holroyd’s death?”

Aragon gave a wan smile. “A great deal, as it turns out. Because the dust within Quivira is riddled with Coccidioides immitis. It’s a microscopic fungal spore that lives in soil. It’s usually associated with very dry, often remote desert areas, so people don’t come into contact with it much. Which is a very good thing. It’s the cause of a deadly disease known as coccidioidomycosis. Or, as you might know it, valley fever.”

Nora frowned. “Valley fever?”

“Wait a minute,” Smithback interjected. “Wasn’t that the disease that killed a bunch of people in California?”

Aragon nodded. “Valley fever, or San Joaquin fever, named after a town in California. There was an earthquake in the desert near San Joaquin many years ago. That quake triggered a small landslide that raised a cloud of dust, which rolled over the town. Hundreds became ill and twenty died, infected with coccidioidomycosis. Scientists came to call this type of deadly dustcloud a ‘tectonic fungal cloud.’” He frowned. “Only the fungus here in Quivira is a far more virulent strain. In concentrated form, it kills in hours or days, not weeks. You see, to get sick you must inhale the spores—either through dust, or through . . . other means. Mere exposure to a sick person is not enough.”

He wiped his face again. “At first, Holroyd’s symptoms were baffling to me. They did not seem to be from any infectious agent I knew of. Certainly he died too quickly for any of the more likely suspects. And then I remembered that rust-colored powder from the royal burial.”

He looked at Nora. “I told you about my discoveries with the bones. But do you recall those two pots, full of reddish dust? You thought they might be a kind of red ochre. I never told you that the dust turned out to be dried, ground-up human flesh and bone.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Nora cried.

“Let’s just say you were preoccupied with other things. And I wanted to understand it myself before I dangled yet another mystery in front of you. In any case, while puzzling over Holroyd’s death, I remembered that reddish dust. And then I realized exactly what it was. It is a substance known to certain southwestern Indian tribes as ‘corpse powder.’”

Nora glanced at Smithback and saw her own horror reflected in his eyes.

“It’s used by witches to kill their intended victims,” Aragon continued. “Corpse powder is still known among some Indian groups today.”

“I know,” Nora whispered. She could almost see Beiyoodzin’s drawn face in the starlight, telling them of the wolfskin runners.

“When I examined this powder under the microscope, I found it absolutely packed with Coccidioides immitis. It is, quite literally, corpse powder that really kills.”

“And you think Holroyd was murdered with it?”

“Given the huge dose he must have received to die so quickly, I would say yes. Although his illness was surely made worse by constant exposure to dust. He did quite a lot of digging in the rear of the ruin in the days before his death. The fact is, we’ve all been exposed to it.”

“I did my share of digging,” Smithback said, his voice a little shaky. “How much longer before we get sick, too?”

“I don’t know. A lot depends on the health of our immune systems, and on the degree of exposure. I believe the fungus is much more concentrated in the rear of the city. But regardless, it’s vital that we get out of here and get treatment as soon as possible.”

“So there’s a cure?” Smithback asked.

“Yes. Ketoconazole, or in advanced cases where the fungus has invaded the central nervous system, amphotericin B injected directly into the cerebrospinal fluid. The ironic thing is, ampho is a common antibiotic. I almost brought some along.”

“How sure are you about this?” asked Nora.

“As sure I can be without more equipment. I’d need a better microscope to be absolutely sure, because in tissue the spherules are only about fifty microns in diameter. But nothing else explains the onset of symptoms: the cyanosis, dyspnea, the mucopurulent sputum . . . the sudden death. And the simple test I just performed on Peter’s lung tissue confirmed the presence of coccidioidin antibodies.” He sighed. “It’s only in the last day or so that I began putting this together. Late yesterday evening, I spent some time in the ruin, and found other examples of corpse powder stored in pots, as well as various odd types of tools. From this, and from all the trashed bones in the Crawlspace, it became quite clear that the inhabitants of Quivira were actually manufacturing corpse powder. As a result, the whole city is contaminated with it. The entire subsoil of the ruin is full of the spores, its density increasing toward the back. That puts the greatest concentration in the Crawlspace, and especially in the cavern of the Sun Kiva that Black discovered.”

He paused. “I told you my theory that this city was not really Anasazi after all. It was Aztecan in origin. These people brought human sacrifice and witchcraft to the Anasazi. It’s my belief that they are the marauders, the conquerors, who caused the collapse of Anasazi civilization and the abandonment of the Colorado Plateau. They are the mysterious enemies of the Anasazi that archaeologists have sought all these years. These enemies did not kill and exert control through open warfare, which is why we’ve never found the evidence of violence. Their means of conquest and control were more subtle. Witchcraft and the use of corpse powder. Which leaves little or no trace.”

His voice fell. “When I first analyzed that burial cyst Sloane uncovered, I felt it to be a result of cannibalism. The marks on the bones seemed to point to that. In fact, Black’s protests to the contrary, it was the obvious deduction to make: Anasazi cannibalism is currently a hot, if controversial, theory. But I no longer think cannibalism is at the bottom of all this. I now believe those marks on the bones tell an even more terrible tale.”

He looked at Nora with haunted eyes. “I believe the priests of the city were infecting prisoners or slaves with the disease, waiting for them to die, and then processing their bodies to make corpse powder. The trash from that terrible operation lies in the back of the cave. With the powder, these conquerors could maintain their rule through ritual and terror. But in the end, the fungus turned on them. The mild earthquake that damaged the towers and caused the landslide must have raised a tectonic fungal cloud in the valley here, just like in San Joaquin. Except that here, in the confined space of the canyon, the dustcloud had no place to go. It filled the alcove, enshrouded the city of Quivira. All those skeletons, thrown atop the broken bodies in the back of the cave, were its priestly Aztec victims.”

Aragon stopped speaking and looked away from Nora. His face, she thought, had never looked so drawn, so exhausted.

“Now, it’s time for me to tell you something,” Nora replied slowly. “Modern-day witches may be the ones trying to drive us out of the valley.” She briefly told Aragon about the attack in the ranch house and the more recent conversation with Beiyoodzin. “They followed us out here,” she concluded. “And now that they’ve found the site, they’re trying to drive us away so they can loot it for themselves.”

Aragon thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think they’re here to loot the city.”

“What are you talking about?” Smithback interjected. “Why else would they be trying to drive us away?”

“Oh, I don’t dispute they’re trying to drive us away. But it’s not to loot the city.” He glanced once again at Nora. “You’ve been assuming all along that these skinwalkers were trying to find the city. What if they were actually trying to protect it?”

“I don’t—” Smithback began.

“Just a minute,” Nora broke in. She was thinking quickly.

“How else could they have traced us here so quickly?” Aragon asked. “And, if indeed they killed Holroyd with corpse powder, where else could they have gotten it, except from this place?”

“So they weren’t after the letter to learn Quivira’s location,” Nora murmured. “They wanted to destroy the letter. To keep us from coming here.”

“Nothing else makes sense to me,” Aragon replied. “Once, I believed that Quivira was a city of priests. Now, I believe it was a city of witches.”

They sat a moment longer, three figures ranged around the still form of Holroyd. Then a sudden breeze, chill with moisture, stirred the hair on Nora’s forehead.

“We’d better get going,” she said, rising. “Let’s get Peter’s body out of the canyon.”

Silently, they began rewrapping the body in the ripped drysack.

48

AS JOHN BEIYOODZIN URGED HIS HORSE down the trail into the valley of Chilbah, his heart quickly sank. From the first switchback, he could make out the expedition’s horses; the remuda was watering at the stream. The tiny creek meandered down the center of a great flood-plain, torn and guttered, scattered with boulders and tree trunks. He glanced upward anxiously, but the thunderhead was now out of sight, hidden behind the fin of rock.

He knew only too well that this valley was a bottleneck for the vast watershed of the Kaiparowits. The flood, coming down the miles off the Kaiparowits Plateau, would gradually coalesce as the canyons came together in the upper reaches of the Chilbah Valley. It was all uninhabited, from the Kaiparowits to the Colorado River—except for the archaeologists in the valley beyond, which lay directly in the path of the water.

He looked to his right, where the valley broke up into a series of canyons and dry washes. The water coming off the Kaiparowits Plateau would enter the Chilbah Valley through these circuitous, twisting canyons. It would then race through the lower valley in one overwhelming mass. It would be colossal, covering the entire floodplain and probably tearing into the banks. If the horses weren’t moved well out of the plain and up into the high benchlands on either side of the valley, they would be swept away. Many of his people’s horses had died in flash floods. It was a terrible thing. And if there were people on the floodplain of the valley beyond—or, even worse, in the slot canyon that connected the two valleys . . .

He urged his horse into a plunging lope down the rubbled trail. He just might have time to reach the horses and scare them up to higher ground.

Within five minutes he had reached the bottom, his horse heaving and slick. He let the animal drink at the creek, all the while listening up the valley with a keen ear for the sound he knew only too well: the peculiar vibration that signaled a flash flood.

Out of sight of the thunderhead, the horse was calmer, and he drank deeply. When he had slaked his thirst, Beiyoodzin steered the animal across the floodplain, then urged him up the steep banks. Once up in the rocky benchlands well away from the stream, he kicked the buckskin into a lope, then a hand gallop. As long as they stayed on the high ground, they would be safe.

As he galloped, winding among huge boulders and outcrops of rock, Beiyoodzin’s thoughts returned to the people in the second, smaller valley beyond. He wondered if they would hear the flood coming. He knew there was some benchland on either side of the creek, and he hoped the people had known enough to pitch their camp up there. The woman, Nora, had seemed to know a little about the ways of the desert. They could survive if they were smart—and if they heeded the warnings.

Suddenly, he reined his horse to a violent stop. As the flurry of sand subsided around them, Beiyoodzin remained still, listening intently.

It was coming. So far, it was only a vibration in the ground, an unsettling tingle in his bones. But it was unmistakable.

He clicked his tongue and urged the horse forward. At a dead run, the buckskin flashed across the sandy ground, leaping rocks and bushes, dodging cottonwoods, racing toward the grazing horses. Now, he could hear the ugly sound rising up in the valley, even over the noise of his own galloping horse. It was a sound without direction, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, climbing quickly in pitch from the subsonic to a shriek. Along with it came a wind that started as a gentle breeze and quickly gained strength, shivering the leaves of the cottonwoods.

Again in his mind’s eye he saw a world out of balance. Sixteen years ago, it had seemed a small, harmless thing indeed. Ignore it, everyone had said. If these were to be the consequence of that action, they were terrible consequences indeed.

He reached the edge of the benchland. Below, in the floodplain, he could see the expedition’s horses. They had stopped grazing now and were standing alert, their ears pricked up, staring upstream. But it was already too late to save them. To ride down into the floodplain now would be suicide. He shouted and waved his hat; but his voice did not carry above the growing roar, and the herd’s attention was elsewhere.

The ground trembled. As the noise continued to intensify, Beiyoodzin became unable to separate the terrified whinnies of his own horse from the scream of the coming water. He looked upstream, into the maw of an even stronger wind that thrashed at the salt cedars and pressed the willows almost horizontal to the ground.

Then he saw it come around the bend: a vertical wall twenty feet high, moving with the speed of a freight train, driving the howling wind before it.

But it was not a wall of water. Instead, Beiyoodzin beheld a seething rampart of tree trunks, roots, boulders, and boiling dirt; a huge churning mass, pushed ahead by the flood at eighty miles an hour. He struggled to control his horse.

The horses below wheeled in hopeless fright and ran. As Beiyoodzin watched—in a mixture of amazement, horror, and fearful reverence—the monstrous wall bore down on them relentlessly. In rapid succession the animals were struck and blown apart, turned inside out like the abrupt blossoming of a rose, the ropy eruptions of scarlet, chunks of meat, and shattered legs disappearing into the roiling mass of logs and boulders.

Piled behind the murderous wall of debris came the great engine of its momentum: a tidal wave of chocolate-colored water two hundred yards wide, boiling from benchland to benchland in a flow that for the moment was greater than the Colorado River itself. It blasted a path through the valley, leaping into haystacks of water and standing waves ten feet high. The flood ripped at the edges of the plain like a chainsaw, tearing out hundred-ton chunks of earth and sucking away cottonwood trees. At the same time, Beiyoodzin felt a wave of intense humidity pass over him. The air grew suddenly pregnant with the rich scent of wet earth and lacerated vegetation. Despite his distance, he instinctively backed up his horse as the walls of the benchland began caving in before him.

From still higher ground, he stared down at the humped and gnarled backside of the tidal wave as it thundered down the valley toward the dark slot canyon in the far rock face. As the flood struck the opening of the slot, he felt the brutal crash ripple beneath his feet. An enormous shockwave shuddered backward through the torrent, momentarily stopping the forward motion of the flood, atomizing the water. A vast curtain of brown spume erupted along the rock face, rising several hundred feet up the cliffs with terrifying speed before gradually falling back.

Now the torrent settled into a new pattern. The floodwaters continued to pile up against the slot canyon, forcing their way in, creating an instant lake: a huge, angry maelstrom of water boiling at the canyon’s mouth. Man-sized splinters of wood were thrown from the water as the swirling trees were torn apart by the violent pressure.

Another huge piece of benchland caved in before him. Shaking, Beiyoodzin turned his horse from the appalling scene and headed in the direction of the old Priest’s Trail: the back door into the valley of Quivira. It had been too late to save the horses. And now he wondered if anyone—including himself—would get out of Chilbah Valley alive.

49

WITH THE HELP OF ARAGON AND SMITHBACK, Nora tied off the ripped covering around Holroyd’s body bag and lashed it to the pole. Then she stood back, wiping her brow with the back of her hand. Although she knew it had to be done, she was reluctant to begin the awkward, arduous, depressing task of lugging Holroyd’s body, along with several drysacks full of gear, out to where the packhorses waited.

She looked up, scanning the canyon ahead. On the far side of the pool and well above her head was the massive cottonwood trunk. Beyond was a steep climb to the next pool; it was going to be hell, she knew, to get across it. The rising wind blew a strand of hair across her face, which she unconsciously tucked back behind her ear. She took a deep breath, knelt, and grasped one end of the pole.

Then she froze. There was another breath of wind on her cheek, stronger this time. Along with it came the sudden, strangely pleasant scent of crushed vegetation.

Fear sent blood surging in her ears. The wind was accelerating with an almost machinelike precision, very different from a natural, intermittent breeze. Even as she paused it became stronger.

“Flash flood,” she said.

“Yeah?” The sky overhead was calm and blue; Smithback’s tone was curious, not worried. “How can you tell?”

But Nora didn’t hear him. Her mind was calculating furiously. They were at least a quarter mile into the slot canyon. There was no way to get out in time. Their only chance was to climb, to get above the level of the flood.

Quickly, she pointed up toward the cavity in the rock where Holroyd’s corpse had been stored. “Drop the body,” she said urgently, “drop everything. Let’s go!”

Smithback began to protest. “We can’t just—”

“Move!” Aragon said urgently, releasing the other end of the pole. The body slid into the pool, turning lazily. Nora began thrashing through the water downstream, toward the spot where the ledge angled upward to the small cave.

“Where are you going?” Smithback called, disbelief strong in his voice. “Shouldn’t we be heading the other way?”

“No time!” she cried. “Come on, hurry! Hurry!”

Beneath the driving wind, Nora could now hear a faint noise: a low-frequency sound, deep and menacing. The calm pools of water in the stream broke into a dancing chop. The hastily abandoned drysacks began to bob and roll wildly.

She floundered across the pool, breath coming in sobs. The wind grew, and grew, and then there was a painful pop in her ears: a drastic change in air pressure. She looked back at Smithback and Aragon, wet and bedraggled, and tried to scream at them to hurry. Her voice was drowned by a vast, distorted roar that washed through the slot canyon, popping her ears a second time.

In its wake came an intense silence. The wind had suddenly dropped.

She hesitated, confused, her ears straining to catch every nuance of sound. From what seemed to be a vast distance, she could make out clatterings and crunchings, strangely distinct despite their remoteness. She whirled toward the ledge again, realizing she was hearing the sound of boulders and logs jamming into the stone slot, ricocheting off the narrow canyon walls on their way toward them. As she ran, a fresh wind rose to a screaming pitch, tearing shreds of water from the surface of the stream. The flood, she knew, would first turn the slot canyon into a wind tunnel.

She thrashed forward. The sound in the canyon grew to a terrible howl, and the ever-rising hurricane of wind tore at their backs. We’re not going to make it, Nora thought. She glanced back and saw that Aragon had fallen behind. She held out her hands to him, urging him on, screaming words that had no sound over the blast.

Suddenly a boulder came down the canyon from behind them, bounding between the rock walls with thunderous booms, roaring over their heads with horrifying speed. Another, even larger, followed in its wake, propelled ahead of the water by a stochastic amplification of momentum. It hit the jammed cottonwood trunk with a shattering force and continued downcanyon, leaving behind the smell of smoke and crushed stone.

Gasping and coughing, Nora reached the ledge and grasped it with both hands, pulling herself out of the water. She scrambled up the rock, trying to maintain her purchase on the slippery ledge. The air had grown full of pulverized water, which lashed at them mercilessly. She hugged the rockface in an effort to keep the wind from plucking her off.

An advance guard of water blasted through the canyon just below them, and the light above dimmed. Events were happening so quickly—the day had grown so suddenly, completely violent—for a moment it seemed to Nora that she was locked in some terrible dream. She could barely make out Aragon’s form below her, struggling up the ledge.

A second tongue of twisting water came racing past below them, almost sucking Aragon from the canyon wall. Pausing in his climb, Smithback reached back, grabbed Aragon’s shirt, and hauled him upward. As Nora watched from above, powerless to help, another surge grabbed at Aragon’s leg. Over the cry of the flood, she thought she heard the man scream: a strange, hollow, despairing sound.

Smithback lunged for a better hold as Aragon was dragged from the ledge, dangling into space. A passing rock smacked into Aragon, spinning him around; there was a soundless parting of fabric and Smithback fell back against the cliff, a tattered remnant of Aragon’s collar in his hand. A furious gust of wind buoyed Aragon above the dancing rocks, whirling him downstream. Caught by another packet of water, his body was slammed into the canyon wall and dragged across it like cheese across a grater. In his wake, gobbets of red lay scraped across dark rock, vanishing quickly, like Aragon himself, into the boiling spume.

Choking back a sob, Nora turned and grabbed the next handhold, hoisted herself up, then reached for the next. Higher, she thought. Higher. Behind her, Smithback was coming up fast. She scrambled, slid back, regained her footing, then fell again, the wind tearing her from the rock. As she slid away, Smithback’s arm wrapped itself around her, and she felt herself pulled up the narrow ledge, closer and closer to the cavity in the rock.

And then, at last, the main body of the flood came: a huge shadow, looming far above them, a wedge of darkness shutting out the last of the light; a foaming spasm of air, water, mud, rock, and brutalized wood, pushing before it a wind of tornadolike intensity. Nora felt Smithback lose his grip briefly, then regain it. As he jammed her into the cavity, forcing himself in after her, there was a sudden fusillade of sound as countless small rocks scoured the walls of the canyon. She felt Smithback go rigid, heard the wet hollow thumps as the rocks glanced off his back.

Then the beast descended, wrapping them inside an endless, black, suffocating roar. The noise went on, and on, and on, the roar and vibration so loud that Nora felt she was losing her sanity. Rolled into a protective ball, she squeezed her arms tighter around herself and prayed for the shaking to stop. Jets of water forced their way into the cavity around her, battering her shoulders, pulling at her limbs as if trying to suck her out of the refuge.

In a remote corner of her mind, it seemed strange that it was taking so long to die. She tried to breathe, but the oxygen seemed to have been sucked out of the air. She felt the iron grip of Smithback’s arms relax with a horrifying twitch. She tried to breathe again, hiccupped, choked, tried to scream—and then the world folded in on itself and she lost consciousness.

50

BLACK SAT ON THE RETAINING WALL, BREATHING heavily. The four expedition members remaining in camp had all taken several trips up into Quivira, lugging the unnecessary gear into the empty caching room they had chosen in a remote part of the city. There—with any luck—it would remain hidden, dry and free from animals until they returned.

Until they returned.... Black found himself sweating profusely. He licked his lips, staring at the blue sky above the canyon rim. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe it would happen someplace else.

One at a time, Sloane, Swire, and Bonarotti emerged from the darkness of the city and joined Black at the retaining wall. Bonarotti removed a canteen and wordlessly passed it around. Automatically, Black took a drink, tasting nothing. His eyes roved over what remained of the camp: the tents, already broken down and ready to be carried out; the neat row of drysacks beside them; the small pile of equipment that still had to be lugged up to the cache site . . .

It was then that he heard something. Or perhaps he felt it, he wasn’t exactly sure: a strange movement of the air, almost a vibration. His heart began to race, and he looked toward Sloane. She was staring out into the valley. Aware of his gaze, she glanced toward him for a moment, then rose to her feet.

“Did you hear something?” she asked nobody in particular. Handing the canteen back to Bonarotti, she moved toward the edge of the cliff, followed by Swire. A moment later, Black came up behind.

The valley below still looked pastoral: somnolent in the heat, drenched in late morning sunlight. But the vibration, like a deep motor coming to life, seemed to fill the air. The leaves of the cottonwoods began to dance.

Bonarotti came up beside him. “What is it?” he asked, looking around curiously.

Black didn’t answer. Two emotions were warring inside him: terror and a breathless, almost nauseating excitement. There was now a rising wind coming from the mouth of the slot canyon: he could make out the saltbushes at its fringe, gyrating as if possessed. Then the canyon emitted a long, distorted, booming screech that grew louder, then still louder. It must be in the canyon now, thought Black. There was a buzzing sound, but he wasn’t sure if it was coming from the valley or inside his head.

He glanced at the company ranged beside him. They were all staring toward the mouth of the slot canyon. On Swire’s face, puzzlement gave way first to dawning understanding, then horror.

“Flash flood,” said the wrangler. “My God, they’re in the canyon . . .” He broke for the ladder.

Black held his breath. He thought he knew what was coming; he felt that he was prepared for anything. And yet he was totally unprepared for the spectacle that followed.

With a basso profundo groan, the slot canyon belched forth a mass of boulders and splintered tree trunks—hundreds of them—which burst from the narrow crevice and came spinning down to earth. Then, with the swelling roar of a beast opening its maw, the slot vomited forth a liquid mass—chocolate-brown water, mingled with ropes of viscous red. It coalesced into a rippling wall that fell in thunder against the scree slope, sending up secondary spouts and smoking plumes. It tore down the floodplain, smoking along the banks, ripping away chunks of the slope and even peeling off pieces of the canyon wall in the extremity of its violence. For a moment Black thought, with horror, that it would actually surmount the steep banks on either side of the plain and take away their camp. But instead it worried, chewed, and ate away at the stone edges of the benchland, its fury contained but made all the more violent. Near the bank of cottonwoods, he could make out Swire, shielding his face with his arms, beaten back toward camp by the fury of the blast.

Black stood at the edge of the cliff, buffeted by the wind, motionless in shock and horror. Beside him, Bonarotti was yelling something, but Black did not hear it. He was staring at the water. He could never have imagined water capable of such fury. He watched as it swept down the center of the valley, tearing at the banks, engulfing entire trees, instantly turning the lovely, sun-dappled landscape into a watery vision of hell. A thousand rainbows sprung up from the spume, glistening in the appalling sunlight.

Then he saw a flash of yellow amid the churning chocolate: Holroyd’s body bag. And then, moments later, something else, caught in a standing wave: a human torso, one arm still attached, wearing the shredded remnants of a tan shirt. As Black stared in mingled shock and disgust, the gruesome object erupted off the top of the wave and spun around once, the limp arm flapping in a travesty of a gesture of help. Then it bobbed over in a haze of chocolates and grays and was swallowed in the flood.

Almost unconsciously, he took a step backward, then another and another, until he felt his heel bump against the rock of the retaining wall. He half sat, half collapsed onto it, then turned his back to the valley, unwilling to see any more.

He wondered what it was he had done. Was he a murderer, after all? But no: not even a lie had been told. The weather report had been clear and unequivocal. The storm was twenty miles away; the water could have gone anywhere.

The roar of the flood continued behind him, but Black tried not to hear it. Instead, he raised his eyes to the cool depths of the city that lay spread before him: dark even in the bright morning sun, serene, utterly indifferent to the calamity that was taking place in the valley beyond. Looking at the city, he began to feel a little bit better. He breathed slowly, letting the tightness in his chest ease. His thoughts began trending once again toward the Sun Kiva and the treasure it contained—and especially of the immortality that it represented. Schliemann. Carter. Black.

He started guiltily, then glanced over toward Sloane. She was still standing at the edge of the cliff, staring down into the valley. Her look was veiled, but on her face he read a play of emotions that she could not hide completely: amazement, horror, and—in the glint of the eye and the faintest curl of the lip—triumph.

51

RICKY BRIGGS LISTENED TO THE DISTANT sound with irritation. That rhythmic swat meant only one thing: a helicopter, heading this way by the sound of it. He shook his head. Helicopters were supposed to keep out of the marina’s airspace, although they rarely did. There were often choppers doing flybys of the lake, or en route to the Colorado River or the Grand Canyon. They annoyed the boaters. And when the boaters got annoyed, they complained to Ricky Briggs. He heaved a sigh and went back to his paperwork.

After a moment, he looked up again. The helicopter sounded different from usual: lower, throatier somehow. And the sound of the engine seemed strangely staggered, as if there were more than one. Over the drone, he could hear a diesel pulling up beside the building, the chatter of onlookers. Idly, he leaned forward to glance out the window. What he saw caused him to jump from his seat.

Two massive helicopters were beating up from the west, coming in low. They sported amphibious hulls, and Coast Guard logos were emblazoned on their sides. They slowed into a hover just beyond the marina’s no-wake zone, huge airfoils beating the sky. A large pontoon boat dangled from one of them. Below, the water was being whipped into a frenzy of whitecaps. Houseboats were rolling heavily, and pink-skinned bathers were gathering curiously along the concrete apron.

Briggs grabbed his cellular and ran outside onto the shimmering tarmac, punching up the number for the Page air-control tower as he lumbered along.

Out in the baking heat, an additional surprise awaited him: a huge horse trailer parked at the ramp, same as before, SANTA FE ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE stenciled on one side. As he watched, two National Guard trucks pulled in behind it. Ranks of guardsmen scrambled out of the rears, traffic barriers in hand. A murmur came up from the crowd as the pontoon boat was dropped from the helicopter with an enormous splash.

His phone chirruped, and a voice sounded through the tiny speaker. “Page,” it said.

“This is Wahweap!” Briggs screamed into the telephone. “What the hell is going on at our marina?”

“Calm yourself, Mr. Briggs,” came the unruffled voice of the air-traffic supervisor. “There’s a big search-and-rescue being organized. Just learned about it a few minutes ago.”

One group of guardsmen was laying down the traffic barriers, while another group had gone down to the ramp to clear a trail, shooing boats away from the marina. “What does that have to do with me?” Briggs shouted.

“It’s in the back country, west of Kaiparowits.”

“Jesus. What a place to be lost. Who is it?”

“Don’t know. Nobody’s saying anything.”

Must be those dumb-ass archaeologists, Briggs thought. Only a crazy person would go into that back country. Another approaching engine added to the din, and he turned to see a semi backing a large, sleek-looking motorboat toward the water. Twin-diesel housings jutted from its stern like machine gun turrets.

“Why the helicopters?” Briggs complained into the phone. “There’s such a maze of canyons back there you’d never find anything. Besides, you couldn’t land anywhere even if you did find something.”

“I understand they’re just ferrying equipment to the far end of the lake. I told you, this is big.”

The boat had been set in the water with remarkable speed, and with a roar the semi pulled away, leaving the ramp awash. The boat rumbled to life, turned, and nudged the dock, waiting just long enough for two men to board: one, a young man wearing a José Cuervo T-shirt, the other a thin, gray-haired man in khakis. A monstrous-looking brown dog leaped in behind them. Immediately, the boat took off, roaring through the no-wake zone at full speed, leaving a hundred jetskis bobbing madly in its wake. The huge helicopters dug their noses in the air and turned to follow.

Briggs watched with disbelief as the horse trailer came sliding down the ramp toward the waiting pontoon boat.

“This can’t be happening,” he murmured.

“Oh, it’s happening,” came the laconic reply. “I’m sure they’ll be calling you, too. Gotta go.”

Briggs punched at the phone furiously, but even as he did so it began to ring: a shrill, insistent chirp over the grinding of gears and the calls of the onlookers.