The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries Read Online Free PDF Page B

If someone had pulled her to her feet, there would be long bloody scrapes in the dirt. If they’d carried her, we’d find a blood trail. Unless she wasn’t bleeding as badly as it appeared, I think she got up and walked away.”
    Browser’s jaw clamped; he didn’t answer for a time. “Perhaps she’s trying to tell us that we’re doomed to end up like the others down there.”
    Cold wind teased Catkin’s hair around her face. She shivered and started backing away, heading for the trail that led away from the canyon rim. “Let’s go, Browser. Whoever painted this is close by. I can feel her out there. And I don’t believe her only companion is a little girl.”

3
    Santa Fe, New Mexico, October
    “M Y GOD, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.”
    William “Dusty” Stewart lifted his magnifying lens and studied the intricacies of the artifact. A master stoneworker had carved the image of a serpent coiled inside a broken eggshell into this flawless piece of anthracite, or jet. It stared up at Dusty with one glistening red coral eye.
    Dusty backed the lens away and caught his own reflection in the glass. His freshly washed blond hair and beard shone, but his blue eyes had a worried gleam. A woman he’d rather forget had once told him he’d be drop-dead good-looking if it weren’t for the weathered look of his tanned skin. At the age of thirty-seven, lines already etched his forehead and cut crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. He brushed at the dirt that had fallen from the artifact onto his holey gray T-shirt and faded blue jeans, but it didn’t improve his appearance any.
    Dusty turned the artifact in his left hand. He had to draw it perfectly for the museum records. As he dipped his crow quill into the ink bottle, a gust of wind rattled the cottonwoods and whistled up the canyon from Santa Fe. The tin walls of his trailer shivered.
    That old Keres medicine woman, Hail Walking Hawk, wanted this artifact buried forever. She said it was a witch’s amulet.
    The thought stuck in Dusty’s mind as he crosshatched the serpent’s outline on the paper, then carefully sketched it to represent the original. He remembered the day he’d unearthed el basilisco , also called a “basilisk.” It had been resting on a dead woman’s sternum. Elder Hail Walking Hawk, and her young niece, Magpie, had been horrified and ordered it reburied immediately. Dusty, naturally, had collected it, as he would have any other artifact from the 10K3 site in Chaco Canyon.
    In the end, scientific responsibility had won out over his respect
for Native religious traditions, and he’d bagged the artifact, catalogued it, and now recorded it for the final report that would be turned in to the Park Service, the NOAA, and the University of New Mexico, where the artifacts and skeletal material would be curated.
    Dusty turned the basilisco in his hand and watched the polished black artifact flash in the light. His greatest fear was that all such priceless bits of the past would be lost to human greed and ignorance, and with them any chance he had of understanding who the prehistoric peoples were and what had happened to them. He truly believed that modern people had a great deal to learn from the past. Especially from the Anasazi, or Ancestral Puebloans.
    During the thirteenth century, the Four Corners region had seen a mass exodus. The Anasazi had abandoned their magnificent multistoried towns and fled to other larger pueblos. No one knew why exactly, but Dusty had excavated enough burned pueblos and skulls with club wounds to put warfare at the top of his list. While he didn’t have any solid proof, he suspected it was the nastiest kind of war: holy war. The earliest images of the katchinas dated to the 1200s. The word was spelled many different ways: kachina, thlatsina, ka’atsina. They were often called “ancestor spirits,” but the katchinas were a great deal more than that. The invisible forces of the universe manifested themselves in the spirits of