The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries (3 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries
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Browser walked to the first doorway and pulled aside the leather curtain. “Matron?” He had been in this room three days ago. “Matron Eagle Hunter?”
All of her belongings lay as he remembered. Baskets stood stacked in the corner to his right. Black-and-white pots lined the wall to his left. Her bedding hides lay rolled in the rear of the chamber. If she had run away in fear, she would at least have taken her bedding.
Browser backed out. Moonlight flashed from the cliffs and the tattered Cloud People that drifted over the rim. The katsinas vanished, then reappeared in a sudden wash of light and wavered …
Dancing
. He could see it. Awe swelled his heart. They slipped from light to dark, their white kirtles swaying as though they’d lifted their sacred feet to Dance the world out of existence. Browser could almost hear their animal voices calling to him, delicate and birdlike, tinged with a panic that echoed his own.
His thoughts leaped from one possibility to another. Perhaps the mummy had been left by the fleeing villagers, not by invaders. Maybe it hadn’t been a warning, but an offering. The mummy had been precious to someone. Matron Eagle Hunter? One of the other villagers? If so, she’d given it up, left it for … whom? Had the attackers threatened the village to obtain the mummy? Then why hadn’t they taken it with them when they’d gone—if they’d gone?
He trotted the length of the village, ducking into doorways, peering through windows. Everything appeared normal. If these people had left in a hurry, he could see no sign of it. The more chambers he searched, the more certain he became that they’d all packed up and left for a few days, perhaps to attend a nearby celebration, a marriage, or burial feast. Clearly, they had planned to return. Perhaps the people who’d painted and then desecrated the katsinas had come in after the villagers were gone.
When he reached the western edge of the village, Browser looked up the trail. Cloud People had covered Sister Moon’s face again; he didn’t have enough light to see tracks, but he searched for them anyway. He had ordered Walker and Bole to come down this trail. There should be some evidence of their descent. Overturned pebbles, scuffed soil, snapped twigs.
Browser walked halfway up the trail before he found the place where one of the men’s moccasins had slid and grooved the soft dirt. He turned around.
The copper bells winked at him. Taunting. Calling to him.
Browser marched down the trail and across the plaza to the kiva. As he stepped onto the roof, the scent of smoke grew stronger. Smoke and something else.
Browser knelt beside the dark brown buffalo hides. He jerked off the ladder and dragged the hides away from the square hole. A wave
of warm air bathed his face, and the sickening coppery tang struck him like a blow to the stomach.
“Matron Eagle Hunter?” he called, his voice frantic now. “It’s Browser! I would speak with you. Are you down there?”
The kiva seemed to exhale suddenly. A gush of warmth blew over him. Had someone moved? Perhaps disturbed the air?
Browser reached for the ladder and almost missed the marks. Long dark streaks covered the roof. They might have been soot or mud, but they looked more like the claw marks made by bloody fingers.
He touched them, matching them with his own fingers, then jerked his hand away.
“Matron! I’m coming down.”
He lowered the ladder through the entry and it hit the ground with a solid ordinary thump.
The dark pit reeked of rot and corruption. It took an act of will to convince himself to put his feet on the rungs. Every instant he expected an arrow in his back. His gaze searched the village again, then he took the rungs down two at a time.
He stepped off onto the kiva floor and blinked at the darkness. Ash puffed beneath his feet, and the stench almost gagged him. If someone wished to attack him, now was the time. He held his war club at the ready and fought to keep his breathing even.
When his eyes adjusted, he saw the fire hearth three paces in front of him and the woodpile stacked beside it. A faint crimson gleam lit the hearth’s center. Browser went to the woodpile, pulled out a branch, and stirred the ashes until he found red coals. He broke his branch into pieces, placed them on the coals, and bent down to blow on the kindling.
The clawing again.
Desperate, erratic.
“Hello?” he called. “Is anyone in here?”
Something about the urgency of the clawing suggested human hands, someone trying to get to him.
Fighting his own sense of dread, Browser went back to blowing on the coals. A flame licked up. Then a branch popped in the fire, and sparks whirled toward the entry. Light flared.
Browser couldn’t move.
The flickering images burned themselves into his souls.
The bodies had no heads.
The feral eyes of wood rats blazed as they scrambled from one bloody scrap of cloth to another. The rats must have gotten in through the kiva’s ventilator shaft, a narrow opening in the wall designed to bring fresh air into the kiva.
Most of the bones had been stripped of flesh, then scattered, but a few still had tatters of clothing clinging to arms or legs. He saw an infant’s head lying on the floor to his right. It looked as though it had been tossed. Was this a child he’d seen three days ago? One of the happy little boys playing in the plaza when he arrived? He looked to be about four summers old.
Claws. Behind him.
Browser turned and stepped into a pool of blood. “Oh, dear gods.”
Walker and Bole slumped against the curving rear wall. They were so recently dead the rats feared to approach them. The little animals raced forward, bit a piece of cloth, and scurried backward, their feet scratching the floor for purchase.
“What happened?” Browser murmured.
The fools must have come down long before his signal. They must have disobeyed …
Perhaps they’d been
forced
down.
“Right after Catkin and I left.”
Walker’s intestines had been pulled out onto the floor and his decapitated head stuffed into the gaping cavity. His wide eyes stared through the slit in his stomach, as though he’d been surprised by his killer.
Bole—he thought it was Bole—leaned against Walker. His face had been mutilated, but the obsidian-studded war club stuffed down his throat had belonged to Bole.
Browser locked his knees. He had seen a great deal of warfare and raiding. This was neither. Raiders killed in haste and stole food and trinkets to take home to their families. Warriors slaughtered their enemies and burned their villages. But this was calm, methodical butchery.
Browser took a shaky step backward and forced himself to count the dead. He had to know if the entire village had been massacred or if some people had escaped before the murderers trapped them.
As he counted, he noticed the layer of soot that coated the ceiling and the black heaps of debris around the fire hearth. Blood covered the new katsinas on the walls, as though someone had filled pots and
splashed them with it. All of the babies had been decapitated, but some had not been stripped of flesh. The youngest infants hung from cradle boards. Thick soot furred their chubby arms and legs. The eyes in the babies’ severed heads bulged.
“They must have forced the villagers into the kiva, tied them up, then dumped burning wood and bark inside”—he looked up—“and sealed the entryway.”
The people had suffocated.
He picked his way across the slaughter ground to the ventilator shaft and looked inside. No wonder they couldn’t get air. Someone outside had wedged a newborn in the opening, head-down. A narrow beam of moonlight penetrated around the child’s head. The rats’ pathway? Had the boy’s parents heard him screaming before they died?
Browser forced himself to think. “What happened? They—they—round the villagers up, force them into the kiva and suffocate them, then they come back and take time to strip the bones? That’s insane!”
And the heads—where were the people’s heads?
He gripped his club and his hand shook. What had they done with the flesh? It wasn’t here. He scanned the floor. They must have gathered the piles of meat and taken it outside. Horrifying memories began to flit across his souls. He’d heard Traders talk …
Footsteps creaked on the roof.
Browser jerked his leather shirt over his head and tossed it onto the fire to smother the light, then he backed into the black recesses of the kiva.
Is this what had happened to Walker and Bole?
A slender arm passed through the moonlight above the entry, and a copper bell bounced across the kiva floor.
Browser braced his legs. His enemy? Or a survivor?
“Hello?” he called.
Laughter, soft and sensuous. Then a woman whispered, “Who are you, War Chief? Are you one of us, or one of
them
?”
Delicate hands reached for the ladder, and he thought she planned to climb down.
With several quick jerks, the ladder disappeared through the entry, and buffalo hides flopped into place.
“Wait!” he screamed.
For three heartbeats, nothing, then …
“
Mother?
” a little girl called.
They must have been standing right over the hides, probably arranging the ladder to keep them in place.
“
Mother, I’m tired. Can we go now?
”
Laughter again, almost shrill with delight. “I told you the brightness of the heart flows from bright veins. It was beautiful, wasn’t it?”
The child skipped across the roof, and the woman’s footsteps followed.
Browser cried, “Wait! Who are you? I’m War Chief Browser from Longtail village. Let me out!”
Silence. But only for a moment.
With the darkness, the rats grew frenzied. They scampered and squealed, fighting over the best nesting materials. The scratching of animal claws on human bone unnerved him.
Browser clenched his fists and shouted: “Catkin?
Catkin!
”
C
ATKIN KNELT IN THE LEE OF THE BOULDER WITH HER war club across her knees. Wind gusted through the forest, flailing the branches and stroking her flesh with icy fingers. Every muscle in her body cried out for sleep. They had run the canyon rim for three days, stopping only to gobble a bowl of food, or close their eyes for a few hands of time. She needed rest badly.
“Soon,” she promised herself.
The mummy swayed and the rope around her middle raked the stone. Catkin reached up to steady her, and her gaze rested on the ridges of scar tissue that crisscrossed the mummy’s legs and back. She had been studying the mummy. Several of her toes had been cut off and the bleeding stanched with fire. Hideous burn scars covered her feet.
Catkin whispered, “Who hurt you, Mother? Did you know them, or were they … ?”
Feet struggled for purchase on the dirt trail below. Catkin went still.
Browser had a light tread she would recognize a thousand sun cycles from now in the Land of the Dead. Walker or Bole? Young and brash, they both thundered about like bull buffalo in rut. It might be one of them.
Catkin eased to her feet.
Barely audible, a woman’s voice rose, deep-throated, anguished.
Catkin had seen warriors drawn into ambushes by women pretending to be injured. She stepped back into the thick shadows cast by the boulder.
A low, wolfish growl eddied on the wind.
Catkin took her club in both hands.
Predators didn’t pursue the healthy. The scent of blood and death drew them.
As the terrible growls grew louder, Catkin took deep slow breaths. The fire-hardened wood in her fists felt cool.
Sobs.
Catkin almost stepped out, but forced herself to stay put. The sobs shuddered, as though the woman could find just enough air to give voice to her pain.
The growl became a deep hoarse rumble—the sound made by a wolf that’s been chasing wounded prey for days and knows the end is near.
Whatever was going to happen, it would happen soon. The cries and growls closed in.
Catkin searched the trees for hidden warriors. Pines and brush rustled … and fingernails clawed at the dirt less than a body length away.
“Halt!” Catkin ordered, and leaped onto the trail with her war club over her head.
The woman lay on her belly. Blood soaked her clothing, and locks of long blood-clotted hair covered her face. Her skin shone like frost, as if she’d lost a good deal of blood—or perhaps she had rubbed her hands with a mixture of corn flour and ground evening primrose in honor of White Shell Woman, the grandmother of Father Sun. But only worshipers did that for rituals. Had the people of Aspen village been engaged in a ceremony when the attack came?
Catkin scanned the trail and the forest behind her, then knelt at the woman’s side. “What happened? Tell me quickly.”
The woman’s head wobbled as she lifted it, and a large black pendant fell from her dress. The jet had been beautifully carved to show a snake coiled in the center of a broken eggshell. Catkin’s fingers dug into her war club. She had seen a pendant like that before—
around the throat of a friend who would soon be dead.
Through the thick tangle of bloody hair, one of the woman’s black eyes gleamed, as though she sensed Catkin recognized it.
“The War Chief,” the woman whispered. “He—he’s in the kiva. Hurry.”
A shot of fiery blood flushed Catkin’s veins. “Were you attacked by Fire Dogs? Flute Player Believers?”
The woman’s lips moved. Catkin had to lean down to hear the murmur: “They are coming back. You must go. Now.”
“Who’s coming back?”
The woman collapsed to the dirt, panting, and moaned, “Don’t you understand? They will kill him! As they did the others! They are c-come …” Her eyes rolled back into her head and she went limp.
Catkin leaped from the woman and ran with all her might.
 
THE RATS STOPPED TEARING AT THE CLOTH WHEN THEY heard the footsteps on the roof and began anxiously tapping their feet to signal each other of the approaching danger.
Browser stood alone in the darkness, breathing hard.
A sliver of light appeared, and rat eyes sparkled all around him.
He waited, his sweaty palms on his war club.
The hides moved away enough for the person on the roof to smell the blood and corruption, but not enough to expose himself to an arrow from below.
A whisper of wind flowed over Browser’s face and he tingled as if he could already feel the sting of the knife as it carved the flesh from his bones.
“Browser?”
“Oh gods, Catkin!” Relief coursed through him, leaving him light-headed. “Lower the ladder!”
The hides flipped off, and the ladder came down with a thump. Ash glimmered in the sudden flood of moonlight. Catkin started to step onto the top rung, and he shouted, “No! Don’t come down! I’m coming up.”
He ran for the ladder and climbed.
Catkin extended a hand to him and pulled him off the ladder onto the roof. He saw in her eyes how he must look, his round face streaked with soot, his moccasins dripping blood.
“I am uninjured,” he said.
“What of Bole and Walker?”
“In the kiva. Dead.”
Her face slackened and he longed to touch her, like a man drawing strength from a Power bundle or finely carved fetish, but her voice stopped him:
“We have to get back up the trail, Browser.
Now.
I found a badly wounded woman. She’s the one who told me you were in the kiva. I pray she lives long enough to tell us what happened here.” She turned to go.
He gripped her arm. “What woman? The woman with the little girl?”
“What are you talking about?”
“There—there was a woman with a girl on the roof of the kiva. She—”
“Tell me on the way,” Catkin said, and hurried across the plaza.
Browser followed her into the dappled moonlight of the trail, but as they started to climb, he stopped suddenly and spun back around. “Catkin? Did you pick up the bells?”
“Bells?” she said, confused. “You mean the one in the dead woman’s belly? You took it.”
His skin crawled. “Never mind. I’ll explain later.”
As they neared the top of the trail, Catkin slowed briefly, then broke into a run.
“What’s wrong?” he called as he sprinted after her.
Catkin stopped near the painted boulder and stared at the ground. She leaned over, touched something, and rubbed her fingers together.
Browser kept his eyes on the trees. “What’s the matter? Where’s the woman?”
“She was here when I left.” Catkin held up her hand and Browser saw the blood shining blackly on her fingers. “But, then, the mummy was here, too.”
Browser jerked around. White paint splashed the boulder, as it had before, but now it shone, radiant in the moonlight. In the mummy’s place two figures had been painted, a man and a woman. Both wore the long capes of the Katsinas’ People. From the woman’s feet, a black line extended, then coiled, getting smaller and smaller, the rings tighter, until the spiral became a dark abyss.
“What is that?” Browser asked.
Catkin stood up and scrutinized the painting. “Us, maybe. Perhaps she thinks we are walking a path into darkness.”
“She?” Browser’s gaze pinioned Catkin.
“Yes. The woman I thought was injured. Even with the bad light you can see she wasn’t dragged or carried from this spot. If someone had pulled her to her feet, there would be long bloody scrapes in the dirt. If they’d carried her, we’d find a blood trail. Unless she wasn’t bleeding as badly as it appeared, I think she got up and walked away.”
Browser’s jaw clamped; he didn’t answer for a time. “Perhaps she’s trying to tell us that we’re doomed to end up like the others down there.”
Cold wind teased Catkin’s hair around her face. She shivered and started backing away, heading for the trail that led away from the canyon rim. “Let’s go, Browser. Whoever painted this is close by. I can
feel
her out there. And I don’t believe her only companion is a little girl.”

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