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Inside the temple of the Brujas de Sangre, the American strike force traded shots with the Inquisition troops scattered throughout the flooding temple.
I wanted to run to her but fifty feet of water separated the ziggurat’s island from where she had entered the cavern. Water that churned as the giant temple guardians launched themselves from the water, dragging men down into its depths. The cavern continued to fill and the mountains of gold were slowly slipping into the lake. The temple’s wealth held no real value to me, but the less of it that made its way into the Inquisition’s hands the better I felt.
I could make out Lara crouched among the treasure, taking cover while the soldiers around her harried the Inquisition.
I ran for my life. Torquemada and his escort climbed the ziggurat below me, and I had no choice but to continue the climb.
I needed the Inquisition and Section 9 forces to keep each other occupied for long enough that I could search the inner sanctum. If they didn’t, I was simply running to the place of my sacrifice.
On the level beneath me, Torquemada clutched the ancient tome under his arm, all the while barking orders at his men, redirecting their focus against the Section 9 forces entering the temple through its new...skylight? Wall-light didn’t quite have the right ring to it.
I dismissed the distraction and carried on up the ramp, the temple’s inner sanctum finally within my reach. I had to hurry, no matter who triumphed below; once the fighting ceased, I’d be trapped. I needed the chaos to mask my escape.
As I crossed through the threshold onto the temple summit, a wave of energy enveloped me.
It was immaterial and yet I could feel it thick against my skin. The arcane energy of the temple here was twisted, corrupted somehow. The magic of the temple had been perverted from its normal purpose. The residue that remained was unmistakable. It was black magic.
The air itself was thick with it, and it pressed against me as if it were trying to smother me beneath its mass.
My father was right. This was definitely where it had all begun. A curse powerful enough to kill four centuries of my ancestors would leave a sickly stench in its wake. This curse polluted the entire inner sanctum.
I steeled my mind against its choking grip. To a wizard, black magic is anathema. It uses the supernatural to corrupt and destroy. Practitioners were outcasts that were hunted in every jurisdiction. No such laws had held sway over the Brujas de Sangre.
The stone chamber atop the ziggurat was a simple cube, fifteen feet wide. It had a half-wall over which I could see into the temple chamber beneath, but the same wall largely shielded me from those below.
At the center of the perfect cube was an altar of pure gold. The altar itself was covered in ancient glyphs of the same language as the Máscara de la Muerte.
Channels had been shaped into the altar, and their narrow passageways were stained crimson brown as the blood of a thousand victims had run through them. Atop the altar lay the remains of the last person whose life had been lost here.
The skeleton was all that remained, its skin and organs having long since faded to dust. A few strands of grey hair clung to the skull, and buried in its chest cavity between two ribs was a golden dagger, its hilt still clenched in its hands. The blade’s hilt was a golden skull in which rubies had been set for eyes. A long wicked curved blade reached from the hilt, through the chest cavity of the sacrifice.
The victim’s jaw hung open, and I could almost hear their final scream as they took their own life. Golden jewelry clung to the skeleton’s arms and ankles, but all of it paled next to the massive golden neckpiece that rested on its ribcage. The piece would have made the Pharaohs of Egypt self-conscious.
This was no ordinary victim. The jewelry itself bore the same runic language the temple was covered in.
Staring at the altar I knew I was looking at the earthly remains of Ellawaya’s mother, the high priestess of the Brujas de Sangre.
“Hello, Aleida,” I whispered.
“Welcome home, child.” The voice spoke within my mind. I jumped. It was the same voice that had warned me to put on the mask.
“You can cut the act,” I replied. “You’re not on my side any more than they are.”
“What makes you say that?” the disembodied voice replied.
I looked around the chamber but couldn’t find its source. I pointed at her remains. “Anyone who is willing to do this to curse their own daughter isn’t going to help me break it.”
“Maybe I just wanted her to come back. Resume her obligations to the temple. But she was a flighty little bird, not content to follow in her family’s traditions. You know something of that, don’t you, Seth?”
I ignored her. I didn’t have time for a lecture. I tried to blot out the rotten aura of the dark magic that hung heavily about the altar. I had learned more in the last few moments than my family had learned in four hundred years.
“Yes, your father seems to understand my predicament,” Aleida taunted. “Doesn’t want to admit it but he faces the same struggle. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“You know nothing of my father,” I spat, leaning on the altar.
“I’ve been inside his mind for years.” The voice laughed. “I know him better than you ever will. You’ve been such a disappointment, Seth. When are you going to grow up?”
The voice was Aleida’s but the words I had heard before. They were my father’s.
Anger and pain welled up within me and I wanted to break something. The voice in my mind simply laughed.
“Just give up, Seth. You’re a child treading water in the deep end of the pool. Sooner or later, you’re going to go under.”
“Shut up, you wretched witch,” I shouted, grabbing my head with both hands. I needed to focus but she wouldn’t leave me alone.
I decided to try a different tactic.
Turning, I addressed the chamber. “You know, I’m beginning to see why your daughter ran away.”
“Silence.” Her voice shook with rage.
“Oh yeah. Mother of the year, right here. She hated you so much she moved to England. From here! I mean, think of the weather—she moved from paradise to England, just to get away from you!”
“Shut up!” the voice screamed, shrill and full of venom.
I did not. “You’re the kind of mother that daughters immigrate to avoid. You might have put a curse on her, but even that couldn’t get her to come home. Next to you, my father’s a saint and that’s saying something.”
“Shut up!” Her voice boomed so loud I thought my ears might bleed.
I leaned on the altar. “Make me.”
My heart raced. I had no idea what power the voice possessed but I was dearly hoping it was confined to haunting my mind, as I’d just kicked the proverbial hornet’s nest in an attempt to drive it away and buy myself some space.
Nothing happened.
And then I realized, if Aleida had possessed any ability to carry out her will, I’d already be dead. The voice was all she had.
“You can’t, can you?” I asked, this time genuinely curious.
When the voice didn’t answer, my lips turned up into a smile.
“What happens to you, when I break the curse?”
“That will never happen,” Aleida answered, her voice raspy.
“I’m coming for you,” I said. “Your days are numbered.”
“Just you wait. Old Frank is almost at his wit’s end. It will be your turn very soon. If you live long enough, that is. Good-bye, Seth, for now.”
And then the voice vanished, its invasive presence in my mind just gone.
Fascinating. If I wasn’t marooned in a flooding temple surrounded by zealots, and a CIA strike team I would have liked to give that some more thought.
I looked at the altar. It was a crucial focus for the blood magic practiced in the temple. Somehow, it must channel the power of the ley line coursing through the earth beneath. Aleida’s sacrifice performed here, at the seat of her power, fueled by her own blood sacrifice, would have been all the power the curse would need to be brought into being.
A curse that was steadily choking the lifeblood from the Caldwell Dynasty.
She’d been willing to end her own life to do it. My father’s words echoed in my mind: nothing as deadly as a true believer.
I searched the sanctum hoping to find some ancient tome or tablet carved with instructions. Something, anything at all, that might give me an insight into the curse itself. If I could understand how the curse was shaped, with enough time and access to the right power, I might be able to break it and save me and my father from our fate.
The water level was rising in the cavern beneath the ziggurat. Shouting rose from below, punctured by bursts of gunfire. I reached into a pouch in my vest and pulled out a waterproof case. Opening it, I drew out a small camera and snapped as many pictures as I could of the temple’s inner sanctum.
There was every chance it wouldn’t survive the destruction being wrought below. Section 9 was operating with the gentle touch of a herd of stampeding buffalo. They had already hit the temple with two cruise missiles, for crying out loud.
I wanted to break the curse here and now, but I was short on both knowledge and time. Aleida’s willingness to leave me alone spoke volumes of my chances. No, if I wanted to break the curse, I was going to need more time, and the ability to recreate the sanctum if needed.
Moving around the sanctum, I snapped several pictures of the high priestess and the altar from each direction, taking care to get the runic inscriptions clearly. Such things mattered with magic. Where focuses were involved, the devil was truly in the detail. Trying to carry out a ritual with the wrong focus was like trying to bake a cake using a nuclear reactor instead of an oven. It would end poorly.
The runes set in the altar began to glow crimson with power.
I wondered for a moment whether destroying the altar itself might end the curse. There was no way of knowing, but magic seldom worked that way. A curse so carefully wrought would have to be painstakingly undone. Knowledge was required and I simply didn’t know enough to get the job done.
Trudging over to the altar, I examined Aleida’s remains. How could anyone do something like this to their own daughter?
Betrayal. The kind of pain that tore at the soul with icy fingers until nothing but agony and torment remained. I could almost imagine the bitter resolve on her face as she enacted the bloody ritual. Looting conquistadors storming her people’s most sacred temple. Her own daughter fleeing into the night with some foreign rogue, abandoning hundreds of years of tradition and reneging on her familial duty. The Brujas de Sangre were waning, Aleida’s dynasty was coming to an end, and she’d taken that betrayal and heartbreak and shaped it into a curse of dizzying power.
I lifted the knife from her hands, and slipped the wicked blade between my combat rigging and my vest. Perhaps it would give me some insight into Aleida’s curse. My curse.
Like the mask, the touch of the golden haft of the dagger was almost electric. It coursed with the power of the temple, as if it was tied to the raw magic of the ley line.
Like the Belt of Zeus, the blade had been crafted by a knowledge that had since been lost. The dark ages had been cruel. Untold knowledge imparted by the gods had been squandered as wizards and supernatural creatures were purged from the earth.
I had never met a Spell Smith with skill sufficient to make such a blade. Perhaps understanding the blade would give me insight into the curse it had wrought.
“Desterrar,“ a basso voice bellowed behind me.
I spun to find the Bishop standing in the threshold of the inner sanctum. His right hand held the dark tome. His left hand was stretched toward me as a bolt of black power slammed into my chest. The dark light hit me like the hind legs of a bull, and I flew backward into the stone wall. My head struck the stone with enough force for me to see stars. Lots of stars.
I drew on my power and raised a hand to muster a defense.
“Apretar.“ Torquemada’s mouth moved but the voice was not his own.
Dark tendrils sprang from his hand as if shaped from the dark matter filling the sanctum. The tendrils seized me like a boa constrictor, crushing my hands to my side, the tendrils threatening to squeeze the life from me.
“How?” I gasped.
Torquemada wasn’t a wizard, and that voice was utterly alien. The Inquisition hated people that worked magic. Yet here among their inner circle, the highest echelons of their organization, was someone that was not only versed in the forbidden, but wielded it with ease. He was capable of working black magic with a deadly efficacy I couldn’t reconcile with everything I knew about the Bishop or the Inquisition.
Torquemada loomed over me, tome still clutched in one hand; only now I could make out the crimson runes glowing against the worn black leather. That wasn’t good.
The runes flashed and shifted, making it impossible to read their meaning. The runes almost hurt my eyes to look at. My eyes watered as I tried to focus through the pain, but my head was still ringing from the impact.
“Never doubt the measure of my resolve, child,” Torquemada gloated.
I squirmed, but the tendrils held me firm. “You’re a wizard? Inside the Inquisition?”
He laughed. “Such a narrow world view. There are many things that would allow one to manipulate the arcane; not all of them are the purview of you wizards. You see yourselves as the gatekeepers of the World of Magic, but you are the tired remnants of a dying race. To call me a wizard? It’s insulting.”
Torquemada’s eyes were nothing but black orbs pulsing with the same dark light he’d cast at me.
I drew on my magic, but the tendrils of power that bound me seemed to absorb it, leaching the arcane energy from my body before I could form it into a spell of my own.
Torquemada chortled, his lips spread wide into a manic grin. “Child. Do not trouble yourself. Your death will bring about something far grander than you could ever conceive.”
I stopped struggling. Something was wrong, something in the sanctum itself. Extending my senses, I felt it. Not the black magic I had sensed when I had first arrived. There was something else, something that was very much alive and well. There was a dark presence looming behind the priest. I could feel it.
The rune-inscribed tome made more sense. Torquemada had found something he shouldn’t have. Maybe it had been buried in the Inquisition’s archives. A forbidden tome, full of knowledge. Dangerous knowledge. If I had to hazard a guess, the glowing sigils on the cover weren’t simply the title of the book, they were a name. The name of a creature from beyond the Veil.
Names have power, particularly for spirits and Fae creatures. If Torquemada had learned the creature’s name, it would explain where his power had come from. He had made some bargain with a being of spirit. No human should know the things he knew.
I tried to focus on the glyphs once more but again they shifted before my eyes. It was as if they just refused to be read.
The priest shoved aside the remnants of the high priestess, pushing them off the altar, the ancient bones clattering to the floor, Aleida’s skull breaking free from her spine.
“Hold them off,” Torquemada bellowed from the sanctum as the gunfight intensified below. “Just a little longer.”
With the hole blasted by Section 9 there was no chance of the chamber flooding. Which was something. But if there was one thing I shared with Indiana Jones, it was that every ancient temple I found myself inside wound up utterly destroyed. Which, while not my fault, was certainly bound to damage my reputation. I preferred to preserve and protect history, particularly true history, not the crap made up by those who wrote most history books. Unfortunately, those who sought for power cared little for what they tore down in the process. It annoyed me no end, and now they were destroying the temple. The temple I needed.
I was wrenched into the air by charcoal black tendrils that lifted me up as if I weighed nothing at all.
The priest chanted as I hovered in the air, my body stiff as a board as I came to rest on the altar. I kicked at the altar with my boots, trying to shove myself off it, but the black tendrils held me fast. I stretched my fingers, reaching for my tactical rigging, but I simply couldn’t get the distance. The Belt of Zeus gleamed gold against the choking black bands that held me bound.
I couldn’t draw on its power. Something about the magic was overwhelming my mind, confusing and disorientating me in its debilitating haze.
Its power was there but I couldn’t channel it.
Torquemada reached down and knocked my hat off my head. The worn fedora hit the stone and I groaned.
“Now you’re really starting to piss me off.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
I opened my mouth, but he rested a finger on my lips. “Die, Seth. That’s all that is left for you. To die for a higher purpose.”
“Torquemada.” I gasped as the tendrils tightened. “What price did you pay for your power?”
He cocked his head to the side. “You couldn’t possibly comprehend.”
As he spoke, the skin of his face seemed to shift like something beneath it was trying to escape.
There was something within him. The priest had promised himself to some creature from the realm beyond. The price of such power was one he would not comprehend, until it was too late. I had met such creatures before. Once. In Rome.
Whatever creature had given him knowledge and power would only be serving its own agenda. The priest was going to try and tear down the Veil, the wall between realms. The Veil existed to protect mankind from the World of Spirits, not vice versa. If it failed, all manner of creatures would be able to flood into our world.
Not that I’d live to see the carnage; I’d be dead. Perhaps mercifully so, but if the Veil was torn asunder and such beasts spilled into our world, everyone here was as good as dead, including Lara.
“Lara,” I whispered with barely enough breath to speak as I kicked against the dark arcana that held me in its grip.
“Patience, child,” Torquemada said, in a voice that did nothing to put my mind at ease. “The time is almost at hand.”
He towered over me. With a demented smile, he reached into my vest and drew forth the ceremonial knife of the Brujas de Sangre and raised it high above his head.
He began to chant, his basso voice uttering syllables in a tongue I had never heard. Power gathered all about us. I felt it rising up from beneath the temple. It coalesced beneath me in the sanctum’s altar. I could feel the energy building; it was as if I were laying atop an armed nuclear weapon.
Torquemada was drawing enough power to level the entire structure, perhaps the entire plateau.
Light played along the blade’s edge as it plunged toward my chest.
Three gunshots rang out in the sanctum.
Torquemada paused mid-sentence as blossoms of red drenched the front of his robes.
My head lolled back, as the binding that held me to the altar loosened. I turned my head and found Lara standing in the sanctum’s entrance. Faint wisps rose from the barrel of the pistol in her hand.
The dagger fell from Torquemada’s grip and I caught it in my hand.
Torquemada’s magic waned. I pushed myself off the altar and drove the knife into his chest.
Blood gurgled from his lips and he collapsed. The tome slipped from his grip, before coming to rest beside him on the stone floor.
Torquemada slumped to the side, and I drew a deep breath of relief. I turned to Lara whose gaze floated from me to the bloody dagger in my hand.
Her emerald eyes studied me. “Seth, what on earth is going on here?”
“There’s no time to explain it now,” I said, sensing the arcane power surging through the ziggurat. Power that now had nowhere to go. Whatever ritual the priest had begun was rapidly spinning out of control.
The tome lay open beside Torquemada’s body. Its ancient pages promised power that my mind could not begin to fathom, but whether I could comprehend it or not, it would consume me like it had the Bishop.
“The temple’s going to blow,” I told Lara. “We need to get outta here.”
“Not without that.” She pointed at the tome.
I looked back at the relic, and something in the book called to me. It was a seductive plea, a promise of ancient power whispered sensuously to my soul. Could it truly break my curse? I bent down to take a closer look. The runes on its cover were beginning to come into focus. I could almost make them out.
As I reached for the book, something sailed over the stone wall of the inner sanctum and clattered across the stone floor. It was two somethings, actually. A pair of high explosive grenades rolled to a halt between me and Lara.
She was wearing a vest, but that wasn’t going to mean a thing. At this range, the grenades would kill us both.
Time slowed almost to a halt, as the tome pleaded for me to take it, but there wasn’t time to save them both. It was Lara or the tome.
“I can do it. I can break your curse,” the basso voice whispered in my mind.
Lara stood rooted to the spot, her eyes looking for an escape, but there was none.
I made my choice.