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More relevant, in Logan's eyes at least, was the fact that it would burn endlessly until it was extinguished by the mage who had created it.
We might be going down into the underworld, but we won't be doing so in the dark, at least.
A final glance back to be certain the others were ready, and then, with an impatient nod from H
ale, Logan stepped forward and passed through the mouth of the cave.
The tunnel sloped downward at a deceptively gentle angle, but it went on for a long way, and by the time it leveled out Logan had no doubt that they were a couple of hundred feet below the surface. The tunnel was high enough for him to walk upright without fear of banging his head, and wide enough that the party could have walked two abreast if Hale had so ordered, which he had not. It was cool and dry, unlike the jungle outside, and the rock underfoot was mostly free of debris, which made movement easy.
Logan could almost have imagined he was out for a bit of afternoon exploring if it wasn't for the sense of oppressiveness that hung over the place and the knowledge of what they'd come here for.
Yum Cimil was the Mayan god of death. He--it?--was often represented in the Mayan culture as a skeletal being adorned in the bones of his victims, or as a body covered with the black spots of decomposition. Ruler of the nine-level underworld known as Mitnal, Yum Cimil was judge, jury, and executioner when it came to the souls of the dead, believed to take great delight in torturing those who deserved punishment. According to legend, those who had committed particularly grievous crimes would have their eyes torn from their sockets and added to a necklace that Yum Cimil wore, granting him the power inherent in their evil souls.
Logan and the rest of the expedition team were here because Hale believed that the necklace was stored in a chamber deep within this cave system and he intended to retrieve it for his own. Doing so wouldn't be without its challenges; there were more than a few stories about those who ventured into these depths being lost forever, and Logan was enough of a realist to believe that there was some truth to those stories.
He was no innocent himself, after all. He'd stopped being one the day he'd discovered his talent for necromancy. That had radically changed his life, and he was determined to cultivate his power in any way possible. If that meant raiding the tomb of an ancient Mayan death god, so be it.
The team had been moving through the tunnel for nearly twenty minutes when a rough chamber spread wide before them. It was rectangular in shape and clearly man-made; tool marks could be seen on the walls, and the floor was covered with some kind of crude stone tile.
Logan hesitated. Something about the room didn't feel right. Nothing looked overtly threatening, but his gut was telling him something was off here. He turned to the man behind him and sent word back down the line.
A few moments later Hale stepped up beside him.
Hale surveyed the room and then asked, "Do you see the path?"
Logan shook his head. There was a thick coating of dust on the floor, covering most of the tiles, and it didn't look like anyone had come this way in a very long time.
Hale gave voice to several words of power and then flung the energy his spell had conjured up into the room before them. It ripped through the small space, blowing the dust from the surface of the stones and turning several of them as dark as charcoal before the power exhausted itself against the far wall.
In its wake, a clear path across the room was laid out in darkened stones.
"Stay to the path; do not stray from the revealed stones," Hale told him.
Logan wanted to ask what would happen if he made a misstep, visions of poisoned dart traps a la Indiana Jones running through his head, but the look on Hale's face told him in no uncertain terms that he really didn't want to know. Apparently ignorance truly was bliss.
Logan set off, carefully making his way across the room step by step, never straying from the darkened stones. Then, and one by one, the others followed until they were all on the far side.
With their first obstacle successfully navigated, the group continued onward.
They moved as quietly as possible, as if afraid of waking something lingering here in the depths of the earth. No one spoke, and the only sound came from the occasional rock rolling away underfoot or the swish of their equipment brushing up against the tunnel walls.
They had just moved through a long stretch of straight tunnel--the sameness of the rock around them lulling them into a kind of mental daze--when Logan stopped short, causing the next man in line to bump into him, nearly sending them both to their deaths.
Less than five feet in front of Logan the floor abruptly ended even as the curved walls went onward, creating the illusion that the tunnel continued ahead of them.
If I'd been looking forward rather than down at my feet . . . He shook himself, chasing away thoughts of what could have happened, even as the man behind him passed the word back down the line to hold in place.
Logan took another step forward and extended his torch, looking over the edge of the drop.
At the bottom of the cliff face, forty, maybe fifty feet below, was an open space, like a roofless chamber. The tunnel continued forward on the opposite side.
While this particular trap hadn't been included in their intelligence briefing, they'd come prepared for a wide variety of eventualities.
"Ropes!" Logan called, and two of the men behind him got to work, removing long doubled-nylon climbing ropes from their packs and securing one end of them to the tunnel floor with pitons. Once they were tested, the ropes were passed up the chain to Logan, who threw them over the edge. The ropes cascaded down the cliff, coming to rest in a puddled heap at the bottom.
Length was not going to be a problem, it seemed.
Logan fashioned a makeshift harness by straddling the cord, then wrapping it around his hip and over his left shoulder, around his neck, and back down past his right arm. The weight of his body would act as a brake as he slowly lowered himself down the side of the cliff.
