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“Don’t you?” Ellie countered, confused.

“How would you know what it sounds like?” Bates protested.

“I see,” Ellie said carefully.

He laughed a little darkly.

“Look—I can’t tell you what a Xibalba is, but I’ll keep you from wandering into the wrong snake or eating something that leaves you heaving your brains out for the next forty-eight hours. I might be an oaf, but I’m a reasonably useful one. Afraid you’re going to have to live with that. We’re a little short on scholars around here.”

Ellie had the uncomfortable feeling that she had unwittingly brushed up against one of Bates’s soft spots. She was actually surprised to find that he had any. He had always seemed utterly confident in every situation she’d found him in.

There was nothing at all wrong with not being particularly good with books—as foreign as that might be to Ellie. She was grateful that Bates was who he was. She didn’t need a scholar nearly as much as she needed someone who understood how the bush worked.

She tried to think of a way to tell him as much, but everything that came into her head sounded a bit patronizing—and so she fell back on the safer topic of Mayan mythological literature.

“Xibalba is the Mayan underworld,” she said as she caught up to his longer stride. “It’s described as being the underground home of the gods of death, made up of a series of caves with deadly traps designed to separate the worthy from the unworthy.”

“What kind of traps?”

Ellie worked to pull up memories of a book she had read five or six years ago on a whim.

“There’s… some kind of trial in the council chamber of the gods,” she recalled. “Then a cave of razors… a cave of ice. Jaguars. ‘The House of Gloom,’ which I believe is some sort of room of eternal darkness.”

“Sounds fun,” Bates concluded wryly.

“Xibalba is supposed to lie beneath the mythological city of Tulan. Tulan crops up in both the Popol Vuh and the Annals of the Cakchiquels—”

Bates stopped walking and gave her a look.

“Er… the mythologies of the K’iche’ and Kaqchikel Maya, respectively,” Ellie clarified. “As recorded by Spanish scholars in the seventeenth century.”

“And Tulan?” he prompted as he sloshed his way out of the lake onto the shore.

“Capital of a mythological city-state that supposedly predates the Mayan civilization. It’s described as a shining city of powerful kings where the various Mayan tribes came to gain wisdom, language, the ways of their religion... It was said to be the home of the Chay Abah, a magical scrying stone through which the initiated could receive the wisdom of the gods.”

“Sounds a bit like your Smoking Mirror,” Adam noted.

Ellie brightened.

“Yes—it does, doesn’t it?” she agreed “I should have made that connection myself. I mean, really—of course it must be! The two objects—Chay Abah and Smoking Mirror—serve nearly identical ritual functions in their respective sources—”

“So Xibalba?” Adam cut in, likely looking to head off any further tangents about Mesoamerican religious iconography.

“Right,” Ellie conceded. “You see, Tulan is also referred to as the City of Seven Caves—an obvious reference to Xibalba—and under that name, it also appears in the Aztec origin stories, which belong to an entirely different cultural and linguistic group. The convergence speaks to either a genuine common cultural ancestry or an interchange of myths and stories across both geographic and linguistic barriers and… well, it’s all rather fascinating,” she finished awkwardly and flashed him a smile as she resisted the temptation to delve into her personal theories about cultural transmission.

“So you think maybe the Maya here were trying to build themselves another Xibalba?” Adam offered, waving a hand to take in the vast interior of the cave.

“It is hard to say on the basis of one face petroglyph and a rudimentary stela, but the possibility is… intriguing,” Ellie admitted.

As they stepped from the shallow water onto the shore, Ellie turned to glance back out over the elegant cathedral of the cave. The chamber was quiet and still with an air of timelessness about it that felt haunted.

“Yergh!” Bates cried, jumping back.

He stomped down violently with his boot, then repeated the action, grinding his sole for extra measure.

“What was that? A spider?” Ellie asked as she took an uneasy step back.

“Assassin bug,” he reported, scraping his sole on the stone floor of the cave. “Definitely crunch those if you see them.”