The Xibalba Prophecy

Chapter 2

The Labyrinth,

Sarisariñama Tepui,

Venezuela

BENJAMIN King crashed through the ancient wall, dust pluming around him. His head smashed the ground, his yellow hard hat taking the brunt of the impact, even as he rolled down the steep incline, leaving it behind. Jagged stone blocks tumbled after him, clattering down the slope to slam into his ribcage.

"Ben!" Sid screamed.

"Get back!" Nadia shouted as the destruction King had wrought continued.

Unlike the refined engineering precision of the rest of the subterranean tunnels, the wall that the three archaeologists had stumbled upon seemed crude, little more than a barrier of rocks and stones pasted together with blobs of grey mortar.

Karen's team had investigated this part of the Labyrinth before her medical evacuation two days ago. They had determined the poorly constructed barrier to be nothing more than another dead-end.

The jig-saw puzzle walls of the rest of the tunnel system, reminiscent of the Incan Polygonal Masonry found throughout the distant Andes, were polished smooth. The blocks sat so snuggly together that few roots from Sarisariñama's jungle-choked summit had broken through. Indeed, Andean examples of the construction technique were cut so precisely that they formed structures strong enough to withstand earthquakes that would topple modern buildings.

Yet, the blocks the three archaeologists had found here were rough. Their unfinished surfaces and ill-fitting shapes allowed thick roots to snake down, cocooning the stone face in a spiderweb-like crust of vegetation.

"It's a partition," King had realised, pushing against the structure, feeling the blocks shift under his weight, unsupported on the far side. "Added after the tunnels' original construction."

That was the moment the wall had given out. Unable to regain his footing, he had smashed through it, triggering a domino effect as block after block tumbled and fell.

Now, all King could do was huddle into the foetal position and clamp his eyes shut until the rumble of falling rock eased.

"Ben?" Sid called again.

"I'm okay," he coughed, uncertain he was telling the truth. He opened an eye, squinting into the darkness of the Labyrinth, his breath pluming around him in rapid puffs of vapour.

The term 'Labyrinth' was an unofficial designation for the Sarisariñama Ruins. It was a sprawling array of tunnels twisting and undulating through the table mountain, often running into dead-ends, sometimes looping around to re-join other branches.

The passageways went nowhere. They achieved nothing beyond channelling rainwater runoff from the surface. But even that seemed to have no place to go, merely sluicing around the bends like some Indiana Jones-themed waterpark.

King had suggested that the ancient facility was a water management system. However, Professor McKinney and her UNESCO funders were uncomfortable with that notion. It was embarrassing to admit they had mounted a multi-million-dollar, high-profile, public-facing expedition to investigate what amounted to an ancient sewer.

Not that the foul-tempered Scottish Lara Croft-wannabe ever entertains my theories anyway, King thought.

She could have utilised the expertise of one of the co-developers of the Universal Motif Language to interpret the single piece of epigraphic evidence found at Sarisariñama. Instead, she had him wandering the corridors, recording measurements and scribbling down observations that any first-year undergrad student could have completed.