Burial Ground

II

3:43 p.m.

Dahlia was positive they must have found something truly amazing inside that cavern. Why else would they have posted sentries to keep them out? It infuriated her. Here they had traveled halfway around the freaking globe to document a landmark discovery, and they wouldn't even let her commit it to film. Had Leo not been her principle financial backer, she would have shoved her way through the guards and let him have a piece of her mind. What were they going to do, shoot her? No chance of that, but worse would be the loss of funding for production and distribution, both of which were integral to the process, probably even more so than the quality, loath as she was to admit it. So for now, she would bide her time. When Leo finally saw fit to grant them entrance, she would be ready.

And there had better damn well be something absolutely mind-blowing in there.

Fortunately, Sam, who was even more perturbed than she was, didn't need to kowtow to Leo like she did. Sam had been up in arms, demanding to see what was hidden in that crevice, but had ultimately been shunned as well. The only consolation was that Sam had promised they would return in half an hour, and either they would be allowed to pass peacefully, or there was nothing on God's green earth that would stand in their way.

Dahlia respected her all the more for it. They were cut from the same cloth: ambitious, determined, indomitable. And there was no one she would rather follow through these ruins. If there was anything important out here, Sam would find it. And when she did, Dahlia would make sure Jay committed it to tape.

Sam seemed only peripherally aware of their existence as they followed, which was more than Dahlia could ever have hoped for. All of her reactions would be candid, uncensored. Even with the mounting tension, Dahlia's heart raced at the prospect of where Sam might lead them.

They headed south, the rumble of the waterfall waning behind them, toward where Sam suspected they would come upon the main entrance to the fortress. Merritt trailed behind them, his eyes distant as though lost in thought. More of those round stone huts surrounded them in various states of deterioration, overgrown by groves of ceiba trees riddled with epiphytes and vines to such a degree that it was nearly impossible to imagine that anyone had ever dwelled in them. It was frightening the amount of damage nature could inflict over the span of five hundred years. This entire fortress hadn't been demolished by an invading army, but by the gentle advance of saplings. Its former occupants were another story. What forces had annihilated them?

Dahlia peered into the living areas behind the rubble. Rounded shards of ancient pottery poked out of the soil, along with the remnants of tattered textiles, wooden and stone utensils, and the rotted roofs. The former occupants hadn't even had time to gather their belongings in their final hours. It was as though those that hadn't been slain had simply vanished into thin air. Unless there was some stockpile of bodies or a mass grave, there weren't enough remains to match the number that must have lived here. Sam's theory was that the lion's share of the population had relocated to the valley and built the fortress they had already encountered. However, that still left the most puzzling question of all.

Why?

Sam appeared hell-bent on discovering the answer. She hadn't shared any of her preliminary theories, but the way she combed through the village, she was obviously looking for something in particular. Dahlia instructed Jay to stay at Sam's shoulder. Whatever caught her eye, Jay's mandate was to capture it with his camera.

Sam slowed and stood in the crumbled threshold of one of the huts. She cocked her head as she scrutinized something inside. Dahlia had to slide to the side and stand on her tiptoes to see over the rim. There were more bones near the rear wall, though these were dramatically different from the others. They were partially buried by years of amassed dirt that had blown in through the doorway. The sharp ends of the broken bones had been smoothed by time and the elements, while the normally white calcium density had weathered to a muddy brown. But it wasn't the spider web of fractures transecting the frontal bone of the lone visible skull or the disarticulated leg that stood erect like a tombstone that held their attention. A revolver was partially concealed by the damp, rotting leaves, its owner's skeletal digit still curled around the trigger. The metal had rusted to a flaking orange.

Dahlia didn't know the first thing about firearms, but this one looked as though it had been ripped straight out of the Wild West. It had to be at least a hundred years old.

"We aren't the first to find this place," Sam whispered. She turned and resumed her trek through the ruins.

"Jesus," Merritt said. He studied the carcass for a long moment before hurrying to catch up with Sam.

"Hurry up and get a shot of that," Dahlia said.

Jay stepped into the collapsed stone ring and directed the lens first at the bones, then at the revolver. He scraped away a patch of rust with his thumbnail.

"Colt Frontier Six Shooter," he read from the inscription on the barrel. "Wait. There's more writing here." He carved away the rust below the trigger guard and zoomed in. PNT. Sept. 12, 1870. He turned to face her, eyes wide, face pale. The camera visibly trembled in his grasp. "I'm starting to get a really bad feeling about this."

Dahlia inwardly agreed, but refused to speak the words out loud.

"You'd better catch up with Sam," she said instead.

Jay nodded and followed the overgrown trail toward where Merritt crashed through the bushes behind Sam. After several more minutes, during which they passed another half dozen of the round structures in various states of decay, Sam stopped at the foot of what appeared to be a giant conglomeration of vegetation that reached up into the dense ceiling of leaves. The branches of the surrounding trees held it in a wooden embrace. From their boughs dangled the vines and roots that cascaded over it like a canopy over a bassinette.

Sam approached it slowly and tugged away the vegetation with a series of snapping sounds. It was definitely a manmade construct. At first it reminded Dahlia of the statues in the cave overlooking the river, but this one was made of limestone. As Sam revealed more and more of the sculpture, Dahlia realized that they were viewing it from behind and dragged Jay around to the other side by the elbow, where she could now see the outline of the southern fortification through the trees. She noticed a small break in the obsidian wall where the ground in front of it dipped out of sight. Was that the entrance to the village?

By the time she returned her attention to the statue, Merritt had helped Sam completely expose it. The contours had been dulled through the ages, and what little paint still clung to it looked more like curled flecks of lichen, but it was still easy to decipher the details.

"Quetzalcoatl?" Sam whispered. The surprise in her voice was evident. She did a double take before stepping back to appraise it as a whole. "This doesn't make sense."

"What do you mean?" Merritt asked. "It looks just like the faces that were carved into the walls in the village down in the jungle."

Dahlia scrutinized the monolith. It had to be close to fifteen feet tall, and chiseled from a single block of stone. As with the purunmachus, the style was more abstract than anatomic. The body was smooth and contoured, and tapered to a long, slender neck with a broad head and elongated face that reminded her of a blunted crocodile's snout, filled with triangular teeth. A crown of what at first looked like thorns adorned the crest of the cranium and the sides of the face. She stepped closer and realized that they were feathers like those sculpted onto the golden headdress. They tapered down the short forehead into a dramatic widow's peak that terminated in a point between two recessed eye sockets. A bluish-green gemstone glinted from the left orbit while the right was filled with shadows. Raindrops rolled down its form, shimmering like a serpent's scales.

"I didn't make the connection at first," Sam said, "but the similarities are undeniable. Quetzalcoatl was the Aztec god of the morning star, their creator. He had the body of a serpent and the brightly-colored plumage of a Quetzal. The Aztec civilization flourished at roughly the same time as the Chachapoya and Inca, from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, thousands of miles from here. They couldn't have come into contact with one another, especially this far south. And the Maya had a similar deity hundreds of years earlier. Kakulcán, the feathered serpent of the sun. While our understanding of the Chachapoya is limited thanks to a lack of archaeological evidence, we know much more about the Inca. They had a similar feathered serpent god called Viracocha, but even post-conquest, it's hard to believe that the Chachapoya would assimilate another culture's deity."

"Common threads run through all of the major religions today," Dahlia said.

"But not to this degree. Buddha doesn't have a beard and I haven't seen any renditions of Jesus with a potbelly," Sam said. She lowered her brow and stared holes through the sculpture.

"Oh God," Merritt said from somewhere behind Dahlia, who turned at the sound of his voice.

He stood twenty feet away through the maze of vegetation, nearly hidden by the overgrowth of ceibas, halfway to the point where the southern wall met with the mountainside.

"What's wrong?" Dahlia asked, shoving her way through the masses of shrubs that grew from the broken stone tiles of what once must have been a courtyard of some kind. She was nearly to Merritt when she heard a buzzing sound. It was faint at first, but grew louder with every step until it filled her ears even over the tumult of the rain and the ruckus of their passage.

She followed his gaze toward the overhanging stone cliff, beneath which she could see arched swatches of forest green and khaki. A furious black cloud roiled around them. Ebon arcs streaked the granite wall, visible even from afar. She reached Merritt's side and could now clearly see the details through a gap in the trees. Two tents had been erected under the stone ledge, and had partially collapsed onto their contents. The fabric was torn in sections, through which she could see a jumble of belongings crawling with flies and---

Dahlia caught a glimpse of a disembodied torso and had to avert her eyes, yet the image persisted. Blood-crusted ribcage knotted with the cartilage that still held the broken bones in place. Acutely fractured cervical column capped with only the base of a skull.

"What in the name of God happened here?" Merritt whispered, and struck off toward what was left of the tents.