The Day of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

need it, and if
they see it, it will only draw them to us that much
faster.’
    She nodded, but she didn’t
look happy. Tomas wasn’t surprised. Descending into an unknown
labyrinth that probably looked pitch dark even with her
goggles would have upset most people. But there wasn’t much to
see, unless she liked the look of striated stone and deep, dark
holes branching off here and there. That was all until they reached
the populated areas. And then, she was probably better off if she
couldn’t make out what lay ahead.
    The four of them entered the tunnels,
and almost immediately Tomas found himself struggling to breathe
against a thick, smothering pressure, voices rising like a tide in
his head. He’d killed before he came to Alejandro, fighting against
the men who had come across the sea to steal his homeland. But
those deaths had never bothered him, he’d never lost one night of
sleep over them, because those men had deserved everything he did
to them. The ones he’d taken in these halls were
different.
    Taken. It was a good word,
he thought bleakly, seeing with perfect clarity the bodies, pale
and brown, young and old, faces spattered with blood, bodies
cracked and split open. They had bled out onto the thirsty earth
because the ones who hunted them had been so sated that they could
afford to spill blood like water. And none of it had been due to
the hand of God, through some natural, comprehensible tragedy. No,
they had died because someone with god-like conceit had stretched
out his hand and said, I will have
these , and by that act ended lives full of
hope and promise.
    More often than not, Tomas had been
that hand, the instrument through which his master’s gory commands
were carried out. He hadn’t had a choice, bound by the blood bond
they shared to do as he was bid, but that had somehow never done
much to soothe his conscience. He had known it would be hard to
return, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite this overpowering.
Four hundred years of memory seemed to permeate the very air, the
taste of it thick and heavy, like ashes in his mouth.
    He glanced at his companions. Forkface
had an utterly blank stare, cold as ice, while the fanatic kept
muttering silently to himself and fingering a necklace of what
looked like withered fingers around his neck. Sarah was looking a
little green, as if something about the atmosphere was getting to
her, too. He swallowed, throat working, and said roughly, ‘Are you
all right?’
    She nodded, but didn’t try to reply.
He decided not to press it, struggling too much with the weight of
his own memory. They silently moved forwards.
    It was deeply strange to walk through
the familiar halls, the bumps and jagged edges of the lintels
stretching out claws of shadow that even his eyes couldn’t
penetrate. He’d done so much to try to forget this place, but he’d
been branded by Alejandro’s mark too long for that. The feeling of
familiarity grew with every step, like each one took him further
into the past. He kept expecting to meet himself coming around a
corner, as if part of him had never left at all.
    Tomas wondered what he might have been
like, if he’d never been taken. Or if his first master hadn’t
decided to show off his new acquisition at court, where Alejandro
had chosen to claim him. Once, he’d yearned for freedom with
everything in him, hungered for it as he never had food, lusted for
it as he never had any woman. But it didn’t seem to matter how long
he waited or how much power he gained, the story was always the
same.
    He’d had three masters in his life,
but had never been master himself. The idea of being free was like
an old photograph now, faded and dog-eared, and Tomas didn’t think
he could even see his face in it anymore. All he wanted now was to
end this.
    Sarah stopped suddenly, breathing
heavy, her hand gripping the wall hard enough to cause bits of
limestone to imbed themselves under her nails. She saw him notice
and tried to smile.