The Well of Sacrifice by Chris Eboch

Author:Chris Eboch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter Fourteen

I awoke in silence and darkness. When the pounding in my head had receded to a dull thud, I felt around me. I was still in the burial chamber. I steadied myself on the coffin as I rose. The stone slab now covered the top. Where had everyone gone?

I felt around me in the blackness until I found my torch. With the obsidian knife I had slipped in my waistband, I cut a piece of my skirt, wrapping it around the top of the wood and tucking the end under. Then I dipped my fingers into the clay pots and jugs around me, feeling corn, beans, shells, peppers, and finally oil. I dipped my torch into the small jug.

I found an incense burner nearby and with it some flint. After a few tries, I got enough of a spark to light the torch. I held it carefully until the flame licked over all the cloth. Finally I stood to look around me.

Light flickered over the king’s sarcophagus, sealed with the stone lid painted red and carved with an image of the king falling down the World Tree. His royal jade belt lay across the lid.

In the shadows beyond the coffin, a massive stone block filled the entrance to the crypt. In front of it were six bodies wrapped in red shrouds.

I began to scream.

When I could stop sobbing, I picked myself up off the floor and retrieved the torch that threatened to light my hair on fire. I went to the bodies and knelt beside the one I knew, intuitively, was Smoke Shell.

I had failed.

I stroked his chest, my fingers turning red from the cinnabar ore sprinkled over him. Exhausted, I shifted to lie down beside him. A scrap of linen came loose from my waistband. I picked it up slowly. The writing on it was rough and blurred. It seemed to have been written in blood.

It said, “Courage, sister. I go willingly.”

Smoke Shell’s last message, meant to comfort me. He knew that sacrificial victims got lives of ease in the otherworld. And he thought he was doing what was right for his king and his people. He would be, in death as in life, a hero.

I tucked the cloth back into my skirt carefully. Great Skull Zero must have allowed that message, but surely Smoke Shell hadn’t known I would be left in there. He must have been told that I would be removed before they closed the tomb.

Had they forgotten me? Had Great Skull Zero thought me dead? Or had he left me to die slowly?

I could no longer save Smoke Shell, but I would have to try to save myself. I knew I could never move the stone blocking the entrance. Anyway, the stairway would have been filled with rubble. Still, I pushed against it with all my force. Nothing.

The stones were cemented together with a limestone mortar that hardened to become as solid as the rocks themselves. Breaking straight out through a wall was impossible.

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