Prologue

"Haliksa'i! Listen now to my story. So it was that Ogre, God of Fighting, taker of men, and devourer of souls was cast down. In the belly of Mother Earth, was Ogre sealed. Kokyanwuhti, the Spider Woman, bound him in webs and, with her eight arms, rolled a massive boulder to block the path to his prison.

"The darkness alive slept, defeated but not dead. The taker of men cannot be killed. He slumbers in Mother Earth, awaiting the fourth season of man. His breath is fire and his gaze is terrible to behold. The blood of the people killed in battle feed him; he drinks the blood from the red soaked ground and grows strong.

"At the end of the fourth season, he will come. The devourer of souls will awaken and once again roam the earth. Light will fade from the world. Taiowa, the Sun and the Great Creator, shall hide his face and the hochichvi pendant will be the only light upon the earth."

-fragment of "The Destruction of Tuwaqachi*"

* Tuwaqachi: Hopi word for "the fourth world". According to Hopi legend each time the world became too corrupt for the creator to tolerate, he would gather up the righteous people and guide them to a safe haven underground, destroy the world and create a new world for the faithful. The Hopi consider the present day earth the "fourth world."

* * *

With an explosion of dust, the seal of the rock wall blocking the tunnel entrance broke. The man with the jackhammer switched it off and stepped back so the crew with crowbars and ropes could pry open the ancient doorway. It was eased down and the man with the jackhammer squatted at the edge of the trench. A soft whistle of surprise and satisfaction came from his lips. "Looks like you found the right spot, Doc."

"Looks like it." Doctor Arlene Henklemann stepped forward. The sun was low, at just the right angle to always be in her eyes no matter how she moved. The tunnel seemed to bubble like tar. A large hazel eye, like a god's, seemed to float just above the black.

'All tricks of the light,' Arlene told herself. The bubbling was caused by her eyes trying to focus on the darkness while the sun was trying to whitewash her vision, and the eye was obviously hers, reflected off the inside lenses of her glasses. It was nothing to worry about.

The hem of her dusty tee-shirt fluttered in the warm Guatemalan wind. It was the first breeze they'd had since they first arrived nearly three weeks ago. In all that time, not a single cooling wind had stirred the camp, and not a drop of rain had fallen. Now, in the last few hours, wind had begun to filter down the rock walls framing the shallow valley, and in the distance were dark anvil heads ready to have the hammer of the gods strike out sparks over the earth, the resounding clang echoing for miles in peals of thunder.

One of the workers looked up at the sky. "Maybe the gods are angry," he said to nobody in particular.

"In some places, rain is a blessing," Arlene replied. She knew many of the other archaeologists and workers were wary about this excavation. Nobody, not even the natives, had known this valley contained a temple. There was no "X" on the ground, nothing to distinguish this patch of dirt from any other. If the first week hadn't been spent using ground-penetrating radar to map out the valley, the hidden temple may have gone undiscovered for many more centuries. The radar specialist had been instrumental in locating the tunnel entrance. Had it not been for some wealthy sponsor, they might have had to do without the assistance of the remote sensing. With it, they had been able to narrow their dig sites to ones of almost certain payoff.

Arlene examined the stratigraphy of the trench. There were at least two distinct time periods distinguishable from the color and consistency of the dirt, perhaps as many as four. If the slab had once been above ground, then it had been placed long enough for earth to completely engulf the stone and level the ground. Arlene's throat went dry.

"What's next?" someone whispered in her ear. "Will you make water pour from the rocks?"

"Step back and maybe you'll learn something," Arlene whispered back to Alan Forester. "All right," she called out to everyone else. "It looks like a storm's on its way. I want all the equipment packed up and stored away as soon as you can. I want the dirt samples categorized, labeled, and covered. We're on the verge of a great discovery, my friends, but excitement is no excuse for being sloppy. So let's make sure we get everything done swiftly and correctly. I'm going to look inside. With any luck I'll be back with enough information that we can all get a better idea of what tools we'll need to get started with the temple excavation. Let's go."

She clapped her hands twice and workers jumped to their tasks. "Mr. Forester, care to go for a walk?"

"After you," he said, handing her a torchlight.

* * *

"How'd you do it?"

Arlene didn't slow down. "What are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about. If I knew we were going to be this lucky, I would have bought a lotto ticket before we left. You may fool the natives and the grad students you've got out there digging holes and shifting through buckets of dirt that your research led you here, but I know better."

"So you say, Alan."

"Hey, who helped defend your theory that the ancient pueblo were descendants of the Aztecs to the department head of archaeology? Who was the first to accept your idea that Jacqueline Turner was wrong in her assertion that part of the ancient pueblo civilization became cannibalistic and terrorized the rest of the population into submission?"

"Anyone with half a brain should be able to see that the Hopi are linguistically isolated from all the neighboring tribes. Their language is even called Uto-Aztecan. How much more obvious can that be? And who would believe that a civil war wouldn't have left behind signs of a battle?"

"Anyone with a quarter of a brain would know you're trying to avoid my questions."

"You know, there are some things you just shouldn't dig into."

"You're in the wrong line of work if you believe that."

Arlene sighed. Alan was an archaeologist of people, no doubt about that. He could read them like layers of dirt, shift through their buried secrets, and identify the artifacts from rocks. He knew the payoff sites, the places to hit hardest. With Arlene, he had tread the site of her life for long enough that he did not have to dig long to find what he wanted. She decided to caved in.

"All I can tell you," she said, "is a stack of high-altitude images were delivered to my desk almost a year ago. They were what gave me the idea to look deeper into this area of Guatemala. I don't know how they got to me, but whoever sent them has much more than curiosity invested in this excavation. The University was given a grant by some company in Japan - Mishima Financial or something like that. That's why we have the equipment we do."

"Why would a company in Japan be interested in your work?"

"I don't know." Arlene ducked as the ceiling dipped down. "I'm just happy to be able to search for more evidence for my theory that ancient Pueblo Indians are descendants of an Aztec offshoot."

"You know you have to stay objective in all of this. We're not here to prove anything, just to record our findings and conjecture on the nature of our discoveries."

"If I remember correctly, you gave a speech once that objectivity does not exist. Objectivity was simply the filtering of a bias to an average, and as such was a bland interpretation of an individual's truth."

Alan smiled in the edges of the light. "Touche."

"Besides, who knows how many more years I would have had to toil away in my office until I could get funding like this?"

"And have you recently had dealings with a tall man with horns and a pitchfork?"

"Hush, Alan. I know damn well you're just as excited to get out of your closet of an office and in the dirt as I am."

"What do you think we'll find?"

"I don't know. The Aztecs practiced cannibalism, believing that eating the flesh of their enemies would not only transfer their enemies strength to them but ward off any retaliation from the remaining tribe. If the ancient pueblo Indians were once part of the Aztecs but didn't agree with the cannibalism and traveled north, maybe the Aztec wanted these people back for some purpose. Maybe a part of the Aztec culture followed them."

"And we'll find out what part that was?"

"Perhaps." The edge of the torchlight began to climb up from the ground as they approached a dead end. "Looks like the end of the line. I just want to take a closer look for a few minutes and then we'll go back." Arlene touched the rock and her eyes widened. "Alan, look at this anachronism." she shined the torchlight on the wall. "See the layers and the color. It's different than the other surrounding rock. This is sandstone."

"What is a single piece of sandstone doing here?"

"Exactly. It's almost as though it was used as a door to seal something off." She lightly hit the wall a few times. "We're close to something amazing, but I don't think we'll be able to know anything until we break through this wall."

Something wrapped around her neck as an object was butted against the back of her head. She dropped the torchlight as she staggered. Five glowing dots peered out from the darkness. Light exploded and gouged her eyes. She flailed her arms blindly as rough hands seized her until something hard and blunt snapped down on her cheek. Her body went limp for a few seconds, paralyzed by the pain.

The original light that had blinded her was turned off, and a flare sizzled to life. In the red glow, stood five people in what looked like full riot gear. The two in the back even had the high impact resistant shields strapped to their forearms. Ski masks hid their faces and complicated looking goggles rested on their foreheads. Their body armor would have been invisible in the darkness, a livid color bordering on black. On the left chest plate of each of the figures armor were the letters "TF" painted in burgundy. All except the leader, who gripped a pistol in his right hand, held assault rifles.

"Doctor Henklemann. We knew you'd come through for us. We'll handle the rest of the excavation."

"Who are you people? We are part of a sanctioned excavation by the University of Utah and the Guatemalan government. You have no right to -"

The tall figure standing in front of Arlene simply raised his right hand and Arlene silenced her protest. "I'm glad you live up to your reputation as a quick learner, doctor. Your assistance is no longer required. Your friend, though, needs to learn to relax a bit." One of the other soldiers struck Alan on the side of the head with a rifle butt which knocked the fight out of him.

"If you're going to kill us, there'll be repercussions."

"Don't try to intimidate us, doctor. Had it not been for our employer, you would never have made it down here." The leader continued to guard Alan and Arlene as the team behind him began setting up what looked like tripods connected to car batteries.

"Rope is secured," one of the masked men said. "All we got do is pull."

"Good." The leader pulled Arlene towards the waiting men and then jerked his head towards the dead end. One of the figures jumped forward. The rest of the team pulled back as the demolition expert attached what looked like chewed gum to the boulder and inserted a wire. After joining the rest of the team behind the riot shields, the demolition expert pressed a button and a spark shot down the line. The explosion blew out the middle of the boulder, pelting the shields with rocks.

While most of the boulder's bottom stayed wedged in the opening, the top half crumbled and provided enough space for the team to slip through one at a time. The first one in switched on the searchlight on the side of his rifle barrel and swept it around the room. Apparently satisfied that the area was secure, the scout motioned for the others to enter.

* * *

There was nothing but darkness and the odd feeling of weightlessness. It was like being underwater, where the world shifted in and out of focus and sounds were muffled and yet seemed to be right next to you. Time moved like a dying moth: short, intermittent flutters before stopping completely. And so it stayed, silent and unmoved, until one day voices echoed down the rock tunnel, distorted and faint. Time twitched.

"Who are you? We are part of a sanctioned excavation by the University of Utah and the Guatemalan government. You have no right to -"

There was a dull crack like blunt metal striking bone and the woman's voice stopped for a moment. When she spoke again, it was low and pained. "If you're going to kill us, there'll be repercussions."

A male responded. "Don't try to intimidate us, doctor. Had it not been for our employer, you would never have made it down here."

An explosion shook the rocks, and the top half of the wall crumbled. Time and air stormed through the opening, desperate to escape the centuries of isolation. From somewhere in the tunnel came the sound of retching and between the gagging was the woman's voice. "Sweet Jesus, what is that smell?"

Light slashed through the cold darkness, hovering on translucent strands of spider silk turned gray with dust. A man wriggled his way through the opening, breathing through a strange tube, and swept the light around the tomb. He waved at the opening and other figures entered, one of them held the shoulder of a nauseated woman. More lights circled the room.

The woman placed her forearm in front of her nose. "You're stepping on artifacts."

"Shut up." Flares were ignited, covering the chamber in an unearthly sparkling red.

It watched them: figures moving in slow motion through its murky vision. The red light and the haze that covered its vision made it seem as if it was looking through blood jetting in water, a spreading cloud which danced lazily, waiting for the predator to explode from the screen again to ram teeth through the soft underbelly. Faces turned up, and time began to beat its wings again.

"Oh my God," the woman whispered, barely breathing.

Fear. It was wonderful to taste it once again. It was like smelling salt, blowing away the cobwebs in one acrid, almost tangy breath. The figure called out to them with its mind. Approach, approach and free me.

They circled, marvelling at the figure above them. The skin had wrinkled and hardened, pulling the flesh away from the teeth, setting the mouth into an eternal grin. Spider webs wrapped around the figure like a shroud. Even dangling in a half-fetal position, the figure was massive. It must have been seven and a half, maybe eight feet from heel to the top of its head. The rib cage was large enough to enclose an average man's entire upper body, waist to head. As shrunken as they were, the atrophied muscles of the hanging figure still resembled those of a body builder. It stared at the intruders with large, vacant eye sockets.

One of the soldiers yelled out in pain. He reached to his neck and wrenched away what looked like a black stone worn smooth, except the stone had legs. His body armor seemed to ripple as the dark bodies of spiders swarmed over the soldier, crawling between the joints of his armor and injecting biotoxins into his blood. The leader shouted something and pointed, but his message was lost amid the soldier's screams and flailing. The soldier bucked and writhed, tightening his muscles as if the resulting tension might thicken his skin enough to prevent the spiders from puncturing it. His finger squeezed the trigger and the woman's body jiggle and jump in a crazy looking dance. The wounds mushroomed out, spattering blood and fragments of internal organs onto the hanging figure.

With all the excitement, it was an easy observation to miss. When the blood splashed onto the figure's mouth, it was almost immediately absorbed. The muscles expanded slightly, and the skin began to soften, almost like a dried sponge had been dropped into water. The black clouds covering the eyes lifted, and dust was expelled from the throat as the chest began to heave like billows. Had it not been for the gunshots, the crackling of the heavy jaw would have been heard as it yawned open. Flexing its muscles, the ogre began to stretch the spider webs. The webs snapped away and Ogre fell to the chamber floor.

The spiders were everywhere now, seemingly pulling themselves from the rocks themselves, but they were weak. They could no longer pierce Ogre's skin, but the bullets might. He should escape, but the soldiers had not yet realized another was among them. Ogre twisted one soldier's neck with a satisfying snap. Lifting him up to his face, he opened his mouth and breathed, taking in the red mist that seeped from the man's skin. Muscles regained their mass, skin closed up rejuvenated, no longer thin and brittle. The desiccated body hit the ground with the sound of dried wood. A soldier collapsed from the spider bites, and the others ran for the exit. Tripping over themselves, the soldiers scrambled to the chamber opening. Falling, rising, clawing at their bodies.

The woman was left behind, her body propped up in the center of the chamber by what looked like a stone bench. From each corner, a pole in the shape of a snake rose as though to guard the treasures on the bench: a round shield with elaborate decorations and an artifact that resembled an open face knight's helmet. Ogre stepped forward and looked down at her.

Her breath came in punctuated gasps; her heart fluttered like a dying moth. The spiders were leaving her alone, knowing she could do nothing more. She tried to turn her head as Ogre reached out a hand to her face. She stiffened as her mind was opened. Through it, Ogre saw the long tunnel she had walked to discover its tomb, the students and natives on the surface who were categorizing buckets of dirt and labeling shards of pottery. It saw the hem of her dusty tee-shirt fluttered in the first breeze they'd had since they first arrived nearly three weeks ago. Above were dark anvil heads ready to have the hammer of the gods strike out sparks over the earth, the resounding clang echoing for miles in peals of thunder.

A voice echoed through the hallways of her brain. "Maybe the gods are angry."

"In some places, rain is a blessing," she had replied.

Laughing, Ogre placed his hand over her face. A blessing .... Ogre felt the woman's warm breath against his palm, the erratic pulsing of blood in her veins. Time was slowing down for her; the moth struggling toward the light at the end of a tunnel, propelled sporadically on her breath. The light winked and disappeared as the tunnel caved in.

Ogre wiped the brains from his hand. This one had not been a warrior, not worth absorbing, but there was another. A warrior woman who had defeated him a long time ago. It was she who had imprisoned him beneath the earth, bound like a sacrifice and guarded by her children. "The Spider Woman," he thought as he sneered and brushed spiders from his body. A goddess from the north, guardian of the corn people - thieves. She protected those who stole his cuauhxicalli, the eagle vessel, the sacred bowl that had fed him.

The memories of the last soul he had absorbed before being reawakened swam in his mind: Toltecatl, a priest of Tenochtitlan. When he had been brought before Ogre, his collarbone had been fractured and blood was clotting in the back of his brain, but he did not show any fear. Indeed, he had seemed eager to be absorbed. It had been Toltecatl's soul which gave Ogre enough strength to break the blood magic which had bound him to the Aztecs' will; Toltecatl's spirit had grown strong over the years of winning the favor of gods, and that strength had become Ogre's. With Toltecatl's knowledge, Ogre acted out his role as the "Night Drinker," absorbing the souls of his victims until Toltecatl's voice spurred him northward to confront those who had taken the sacred relics. Even now, it sought vengeance against their descendants.

Curling a massive hand, Ogre stared at his fist. He had failed the first time; he had underestimated the guardian, Kokyanwuhti. The first time he attacked, it had been unexpected. The people of the cliffs had been petrified at Ogre standing atop the homes they had carved out of canyon walls. The feast had been large; most of the Hisatsinom had been consumed in the first few days. A few escaped further north, but they wouldn't have gotten far had it not been for Kokyanwuhti.

It would be different this time. This time, he would not waste his time on broken prisoners or men who fought out of fear. No, this time he would seek out only the most powerful warriors and absorb their strength. Their training would be his. Kokyanwuhti would not just fight him, but the experience of the greatest fighters spanning several lifetimes. Smiling, he strapped the shield to his left forearm and donned the helmet with an air of dark majesty. Throwing out his arms, Ogre roared a challenge for the earth to try and trap him. The earth shook, but did not fall. Ogre was free.