Kingdom Keepers VII(5)

For the last three years since the cruise, things have been quiet. The Keepers have officially done little more than some image maintenance and new voice recordings for their in-park holographic guides. Unofficially, they have gone on occasional DHI “surprise inspections” of the Walt Disney World parks—late night walkabouts to make sure the peace is being kept. Now this.

One everyday skill that all the Keepers have developed as a result of their DHI service is the ability to fall asleep easily. All the Keepers, and Amanda and Jess too, can lie down and drift off in a matter of minutes. Once asleep, they can be “crossed over” and make the jump to their DHI hologram form—a bio-electronic mechanism that hasn’t ever been fully explained to any of them. Nor is it fully understood by anyone but the old man who serves as their mentor, Wayne Kresky.

“Where?” Finn asks.

“Everyone else is in the back of Maybeck’s van, waiting.”

Finn looks Philby up and down, taking the measure of his seriousness, and decides this is not a practical joke.

With one word, Amanda lets Finn know that she both understands the situation and feels hurt nonetheless—a one-two punch that leaves his stomach in a knot. “Go,” she says.





OUTSIDE THE TUNNELS, Tia Dalma takes her rest in the shade of a tree beneath the blue moonlight. It is sweltering, the air thick as mud. Jungle birds caw and complain. Creeping critters crush and disturb the oversize foliage, their intrusion very much felt though they go unseen.

Tia Dalma raises her hand like a priestess. The buzzing jungle goes instantly quiet. As still as a pond on a windless morning.

A rhythmic thumping intrudes, like a hammer striking metal. It amplifies the pain in her head, encouraging anger to rise from her belly like lava. A mechanical, entirely human sound, it has no place in the thick of the Mexican jungle. She wills it away, but to no effect. The unwanted clanging is as steady as a heartbeat.

The remains of the walls and temples are revealed in the moonlight as rubble, oversize cubes of weathered limestone tossed about as if a child has wrecked his castle of wooden blocks. They form a festive weed-and-vine-covered courtyard, with a sacrificial table at its center. Two pyramids have been lopped off at the top, like bridal cakes decapitated. A third remains intact, the stones stacked in diminishing tiers like massive stairs rising to the heavens. The rock is crusted with colorful lichen, reminding Tia Dalma of spilled blood, with white splashes of bird droppings and vivid green weeds, air plants, and orchids forgoing dirt and living off the wet of the air itself. The pyramid has stood scabbed in silence for thousands of years, has no doubt witnessed atrocities, marriages, deaths and births, cyclones, deluge, and drought. But this constant, dull pounding from the distance arrives as an abomination.

Already agitated by her general lack of progress in the catacombs, Tia Dalma can take it no longer. A woman who gets what she wants and suffers no fools, she plots her course, electing to climb the stepped central stripe that symmetrically divides the pyramid. No stranger to religious ceremony, she is mindful of this elaborately carved aisle’s possible significance, imagining—even sensing—a procession of high priests ascending it in colorful robes as thousands of jungle-dwelling peasants gather to witness the spectacle. She can see herself among them—a high priestess, in gold and jewels, clad in a breastplate of hammered silver and a necklace of mummified animal heads, carrying a black ironwood staff topped with the hollow-eyed stare of a human skull. She carries herself accordingly as she climbs: square-shouldered, straight-backed. Her mystic powers transcend the present; instead of the intrusive pounding, she hears thousands of voices chanting a guttural language she cannot understand. It drives her and the priests ever higher. No commoner is allowed the privilege of seeing the world from the top of the temple’s peak, of looking into the future, of viewing the past, of talking directly to the gods.

Wooden drums take up the beat of the chant as the priests climb higher. The high priest arrives at the summit, stops, and turns dramatically to look down on his flock. His face is painted like a monster’s. Bare-chested men in the crushing crowd begin leaping and cheering; women faint. Children cry.

Tia Dalma finds herself standing upon the flat-topped pyramid, her right arm extended as if holding a staff, looking down at the tangle of jungle that has consumed everything in its path but the most inhospitable rock.

From behind her comes the rhythmic punch of metal on metal, the sound like the ticking of a giant clock. She spins to address the intruder, but is faced with the treetops of jungle as far as she can see. If there are roads, they do not reveal themselves; nor do structures or villages. Tiny specks—flying birds—interrupt the sky, some in groups, some solo. Only through focused concentration is Tia Dalma able to detect a smudge of gray at treetop level—a faint stain of discoloration in the verdant green, like a watermark on a kitchen window.