Reminiscent of scorched polystyrene, the smooth curve of a human cranium began to emerge from the soil of ages in which it lay entombed. It was large, but not outrageously so. Like the rest of their South American brethren, the Chachapoyans were a people of modest stature.

  With a sigh, Cody straightened. The sun was going down fast now. It would be dark soon, no time to be bumbling around in the area of active excavation. Aside from the danger of stumbling into an open pit, a misplaced foot could do irreparable damage to half-seen, half-exposed relics. Dr. Harbos was an easygoing individual, but not where the work of serious archeology was concerned. One of his rules required everyone to be back in camp by the scheduled dinnertime. In addition to preventing damage to the sites by overzealous diggers, this was also a safety measure. Snakes and uncomfortably large spiders emerged soon after sundown, and in a land of precipitous cliffs and hillsides, wandering about after dark was not a good idea anyway.

  “It’s another skull, all right,” she murmured. Busy appraising the sunset, he did not look down. “But this one’s weird.”

  That drew his attention back to his companion. With the sun setting, it was already dark in the bottom of the pit. “What do you mean, ‘weird’? That’s not acceptable scientific terminology.”

  Bending over the spot, she blocked his view of the emerging bone. “It’s got a hole in it, like the one you’re taking to the lab—but not like the one you’re taking to the lab.”

  “Is that anything like the sense you’re not making?” He knelt to have a look for himself, frowning slightly. His flashlights reposed on the compact field desk back in his tent. At the same time, repressed excitement surged through him. A second trepanned skull lying close to the first would be a good indication that they had stumbled on an important ceremonial or medicinal center, perhaps the nearest thing that existed to a Chachapoyan infirmary.

  Sitting back, she continued to work with the two brushes, using the larger to sweep away clumps of earth and the smaller for cleaning the depressions in the skull. Immediately, he saw what had inspired her comment. There was indeed a cavity in the new skull, but it was considerably larger than the one marring the specimen he was going to deliver to the field lab. No only was it larger, but irregularly shaped, with ragged edges. Even the clumsiest shaman-surgeon could not possibly have expected to cure any patient by opening such a grievous lesion. Furthermore, it was—weird.

  Without waiting for her to finish exposing the base of the skull, he reached down and cupped his long fingers around it, ignoring her protests as he pulled it from the earth. For the first time in centuries, it was fully exposed to the air.

  “Hey!” she objected, “I haven’t finished cleaning that!”

  “Look at this,” he said, holding the osseous discovery out to her, his right index finger tracing paths across the bone as he spoke. “This isn’t weird—it’s impossible.”

  Around the rim of the opening in the roof of the skull, a jagged ridge of bone the diameter of a silver dollar rose upward, like water rising around a pebble dropped in still water. It stood frozen in time, testament to some unimaginable cerebral convulsion.

  Kelli stared. “That’s pretty extreme. It looks like the inside of his head blew up. Some kind of pressure buildup in the cerebral fluid?” Her tone had turned serious.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have that much physiology.” Straightening, he held the second skull up to the rapidly fading light. “It sure doesn’t look like the result of some intentional medical procedure, no matter how primitive. What could cause the bone to rise up and solidify in this kind of position?” Carefully, he ran one finger along the thin, sharp edge of the cranial crater.

  She shook her head. “You got me. It’s ugly. Samms is going to go crazy when she sees this.”

  Gently, he knelt once more to replace the skull in the slight depression from which it had been removed. “I haven’t got another suitable box or any more bubble wrap here, and it’s getting dark. We’ll come back for it tomorrow.”

  Her eyebrows rose slightly. “We? This is your dig.” She nodded briskly to her left. “Mine’s over there, with Marie-Therese, at the base of the serpent wall.”

  He protested. “You found this. It’s unusual, and you’re entitled to the credit.”

  Her head turned slightly to one side as she gazed up at him, carefully placing her brushes back in her shirt pocket. “Okay, then. ‘We’ it is. I’ll come over early and we can pack it up together.”

  “Good. That’s fair.” Her acquiescence pleased him for reasons that he did not elucidate to himself. “Walk back to camp?”

  “We’d better.” She scanned the darkening sky speculatively. “Harbos won’t wait five minutes before sending someone to look for us if we’re late. Then we’ll get chewed out for wasting camp resources, et cetera.”

  “Give him credit.” Cody’s long legs made easy work of earthen steps his companion had to negotiate with care. “We haven’t lost anybody on this dig yet.”

  “Sometimes I’d like to get lost.”

  Joining him on the surface, she studied the surrounding mountains. In the distance, smoke rose from the cooking fires of small, vertically challenged farms. No contrails marred the pristine purpling sky. Northern Peru did not lie at the intersection of any major transcontinental jet routes, and there was virtually no local air traffic. A silence that was largely extinct elsewhere in the world stalked the immense mountain valleys like some vast, nebulous, prehistoric visitant.

  “Me too.” Together they followed the trail through the grass that led toward camp, dodging around the huge trees that grew out of the citadel’s soil-cloaked foundation. Around them, the circular walls of empty buildings turned single doorways to the sun, and the rectangular pyramid of the recently identified royal quarters cast its long, broad shadow on their progress.

  The narrow defile, barely wide enough for one person at a time to squeeze through, cut steeply downward through the hundred-foot-high wall. Where it opened onto the rocky, grass-covered slope it was still just wide enough for two men to enter abreast. Eminently defensible against an attacking enemy, it made the immense stone walls that flanked the opening seem even higher and more impressive than they were.

  Turning to their right, they followed the trail that had been etched into the slope along the base of the wall, careful to keep it close at hand. Wander too far away and a thousand-foot drop waited to greet the indifferent. Ahead, the flicker of lanterns coming to life began to dance within the intensifying darkness. There were more than twenty tents for the field team, plus additional lean-tos and makeshift shelters for the native help. By far the largest canopy, a substantial, well-anchored sweep of tough jungle-resistant weave, served as dining room, lecture hall, library, and recreation area. Another, slightly smaller, housed the field lab.

  “Hungry?” he asked her.

  “I’m always hungry, Cody.”

  He tripped over the compliment before he realized it. “I’ve seen you eat, and I wonder where you put it.”

  “Up here.” She tapped the side of her head. “Mental exertion burns a lot of calories.” In the twilight, her smile shimmered like one of the approaching lanterns. “You don’t exactly starve yourself.”

  “When you grow up always hungry, you get in the habit of eating anything and everything that’s offered to you.” Espying a long, twisting shape on the trail ahead of them, he hesitated only an instant before resuming his stride. In this part of the world, a smart hiker was wary even of fallen branches. Anything with multiple curves demanded a second look.

  Her smile faded away and her eyes locked on his as best they could in the gathering darkness. “I don’t know much about you, Cody. You’re friendly, you’ll stop work to chat with anyone, but you never talk about yourself.” In the creeping shadows her slight shrug was barely perceptible. “This is only my second dig. Maybe that’s the normal condition for more advanced field associates like yourself. I don’t know. Or maybe it’s just this place.” A casual sweep of one hand encompassed mountains, valleys, and the citadel wall that towered skyward on their right. “Up here, everyone tends to focus on dead people.”

  “There’s not much to know,” he began, and for the next hour proceeded to give the lie to his own claim of conciseness. Considering how fast her mind and mouth worked, he was astonished in retrospect at how intently she listened.

  Khuatupec was beside himself, literally as well as figuratively. The food was moving away! There was nothing he could do but fume silently, exactly as he had for hundreds of years.

  Nor was he alone. Amnu writhed inside her tree as the food almost, but not quite, brushed against one of its branches. Tsemak twitched below the ground, inexorably wedded to his slice of subsurface stratum. Chakasx hummed within the stream that served as both home and prison. Throughout the citadel, the mountain, and the fortresslike slopes that had protected the Chachapoyans of Apachetarimac for centuries, They stirred. Moved about and were active as they had not been for more than five hundred years.

  In that time, other food had come close, though none had been so tasty as this promised to be. Its sheer virgin delectability was unprecedented in Khuatupec’s long experience. To have it pass so close, on so many occasions, was maddening. There was nothing he or any of the others could do. In order to eat, it was the food that would have to make proper contact with them. They could not leave their situs to initiate feeding. It was an infuriating, horrific existence, mitigated only by the fact that Khuatupec’s kind were almost impossible to kill. Yet, he thought furiously, to suffer near immortality in a state of perpetual craving was as much curse as good fortune.

  Even worse than not being able to feed on such delectables was the thought that contact might be made with another of his kind instead of him. Watching another feed in his place would be almost as intolerable as not being able to feed himself. Should that occur, there would remain only the hope of snatching up some carelessly discarded leftovers from the main feeding.

  It might not come to that. He could still be the first. Thus far, none had managed to feed on the newly arrived food, although a week ago Sachuetet had come close. She had been too quick, however, from an eagerness to eat born of hundreds of years of abstinence. Sensing that something was not right, the food had freed itself before Sachuetet had been able to begin feeding fully. Her agonized cry of frustration and loss had resounded throughout the mountain.

  From the others she drew no solace. Khuatupec and his kind knew nothing of compassion. They knew only how to wait, and to eat. The light was vanishing from the mountain as if sucked up by the ground. Light or dark, day or night, it was all the same to Khuatupec and the others. They never slept, not in the thousands of years of their existence. As a concept, sleep was known to them. Food, for example, slept. Trees and rocks and water did not. Khuatupec and Anmu and Tsemak and the others did not. Even if they had known how to go about initiating the process, it was something they would have avoided assiduously. Self-evidently, sleeping was dangerous. Sleeping was risky.

  Sleep, and you might miss a feeding.

  Two

  As Coschocton Westcott and Kelli Alwydd had suspected it would, the second skull did indeed drive Kimiko Samms crazy. Struggling with her laptop, supplementing the information stored on her hard drive with disc after disc of data, the expedition’s forensics expert could find no medical condition compatible with a culture as ancient as that of the Chachapoyans that might account for the spectacular and unsettling hole in the cloven skull. Such an extensive, presumably violent perforation should have driven the cranial bone inward, or shattered the surface into small fragments. Due to the age of the subject material, she could not even determine if whatever had caused the inexplicable calcareous formation was the cause of its owner’s death.

  “C’mon,” Kelli asked her one day, “surely somebody couldn’t walk around with a cranial deformation like that!”

  The diminutive Samms was noncommittal. “People with far worse deformities have survived. The Elephant Man, lepers, Asian and African peoples suffering from severe elephantiasis, ancient dwarves and hunchbacks—you’d be surprised.”

  “It’s not the circular bone ridge that makes me wonder, extreme as it is.” Standing alongside the anthropologist, Kelli examined the skull and its inscrutable rupture. “It’s the exposure of the brain.”

  “People can live with that, too.” With the delicacy of a surgeon, Samms was using a fine brush to coat the interior of the skull with a stabilizing preservative. “Maybe not for long, but they can live.”

  Kelli’s gaze drifted to the ingress to the big tent, the outside masked by the protective insect mesh that was all that presently restricted entry. “Whatever the cause of the initial trauma, it must have been hellishly painful. The mother of all migraines.”

  Samms concentrated on her work. “We don’t know that. There are people with cranial deficiencies who, though they have to wear protective headgear all the time, live normal and productive lives.” Sitting back, she rubbed at her eyes, swatted away a mosquito that had slalomed the mesh screen, and smiled speculatively up at her visitor. In front of her, the laptop glowed insistently.

  “Speaking of productive lives, I haven’t seen much of your tall, silent-type, warrior chieftain lately.”

  They shared a mutual chuckle. His ethnic origins notwithstanding, the owlish, workaholic Westcott was about as far from either woman’s image of a warrior chieftain as could be imagined. Or as Samms had put it on a previous occasion, definitely not romance-novel cover material.

  “He’s not my warrior chieftain, or anything else.” Alwydd’s prompt reply was convincing. “But he is the senior student on site, so everybody has to spend time with him.” She fiddled with a can of fixative. “That is, they do if they want answers to questions. Harbos is always busy.”

  “So’s Westcott, from what I’m told.” The anthropologist indicated the overflowing folding table that had to serve as lab bench, research facility, and office. “I wouldn’t know, myself.” She grinned, a misplaced elf with short black hair, dirt-streaked face, and impressively elevated IQ. “I don’t get out much. People bring me bits of dead folk and from that I’m expected to explicate entire civilizations.”

  “Easier than trying to explicate Coschocton Westcott.” Alwydd started for the mesh that separated the sterile, white interior of the tent from the green and brown world of bites and stings that lay in wait outside. “And he isn’t even dead.”

  “Good luck trying to understand him.” Samms snapped her high-powered, self-illuminating magnifying glasses back down over her eyes. “Me, I’ll stick with dead people. Dead men might be full of contradictions, but at least they’re soft-spoken. And more predictable in their habits.”

  “Cody’s predictable.” Alwydd drew the mesh aside and stepped out into the stark mountain sunshine. “He just doesn’t know how to relax.”

  Hunched over instruments and skull, Samms replied without looking up. “Sure you want him to relax?”

  Standing outside the tent, her expression scrimmed by the mesh, Alwydd stuck her tongue out at her seated, preoccupied colleague. “Funny lady. Stick to your bones.”

  Despite her studied indifference, Alwydd found herself spending more time in Westcott’s company than could simply be justified by the need to know. Perhaps she was intrigued by his failure to fall all over her, as every other student on the site had already done. She loved a challenge, be it scientific or social. Or maybe it was because, despite his denials to the contrary, he was different. Or possibly it was nothing more than the ease with which they worked together. He was one bright guy, with a genuine insight and intelligence that did not arise solely from the study and memorization of standard texts. Or maybe she was just bored.

  Not with her work. That was more than sufficiently fascinating in its own right. But aside from her studies, working on her paper, and keeping records, there wasn’t much to do at Apachetarimac. Not with the nearest town days away by mule, and the only city of any consequence another half-day’s jarring journey via minibus or jeep.

  So she shadowed him when she could spare the time, admiring his skill with the tools of archaeology, his persistence and patience with something as insignificant as an unsculpted potsherd. And then one morning, when she awoke well before dawn, she decided to go and see if he wanted to join her in watching the sun come up over the east end of the citadel. That was when she found his tent empty, lights out, sleeping bag neatly zipped and stretched out on its cot. His predawn absence bemused her. Even workaholics at the site, of which Coschocton Westcott was not the only one, needed their sleep after a hard day of laboring in the cloud forest. Harbos insisted everyone be back in camp by a certain hour, but there was no monitoring of those who might want to arise and begin work before breakfast.

  She ought to go right back to bed, she knew. But—where the hell was he? Making allowance for a possible call of nature, she waited outside the tent. Fifteen minutes later he still had not returned. A check of her watch showed the time: 3:20 A.M. . Even the Peruvian support staff, including those charged with preparing the morning meal, were not stirring yet.

  Where in the name of Atahualpa’s ghost had he gone?

  She had put fresh batteries in her flashlight just a week before. Thus armed against the night, with light and firm knowledge of the citadel’s layout, she still hesitated. Stumbling around the site in the dark was not a good idea, even for someone like herself who knew the location of every pit and preliminary excavation. Curiosity finally overcoming caution, she started out of camp and up the main trail that led to the citadel.

  There was no moon that morning, and the stars were far away and little comfort. The beam of illumination that her flashlight cut through the darkness seemed spare and constricted. Twisting trees heavy with orchids and other epiphytes pressed close around her. Soft-footed creatures and things with no feet at all rustled in the brush on either side of the narrow path. Snakes hunted at night, she knew, and wolf spiders as big as tarantulas, with half-inch-long brown fangs and multiple eyes that gleamed like black mabe pearls. She did her best to avoid brushing against the suffocating vegetation lest she spook something small and hungry that might be living among the leaves.