The Smoke Hunter

by Jacquelyn Benson

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

"Indiana Jones meets Lara Croft" in this debut and engrossing action thriller with the fate of the world in one person's hands (RT Book Reviews).

Frustrated suffragette and would-be archaeologist Ellie Mallory stumbles across a map to a city that shouldn't exist, a jungle metropolis alive and flourishing centuries after the Mayan civilization mysteriously collapsed. Discovering it would make her career, but Ellie isn't the only one after the prize. A disgraced professor and his ruthless handler are hot on her heels, willing to go any extreme to acquire the map for themselves.

To race them through the uncharted jungle, Ellie needs a guide. The only one with the expertise is maverick surveyor Adam Bates. But with his determination to nose his way into Ellie's many secrets, Bates is a dangerous partner.

As Ellie gets closer to her goal, she realizes it's not just her ambitions at stake. A powerful secret lies hidden in the heart of the city - and if it falls into the wrong hands, it could shake the very fate of the world.

Release date: September 13, 2016

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 449

Sample

Cayo District, New Spain, 1632

FOR THE HUNDREDTH TIME, Friar Vincente Salavert sank to his knees and prayed, begging forgiveness. He knew now that he, and no other, had been the agent of death for thousands—among them hundreds of women and children, the innocent and the helpless.

His prison cell was little more than a hole in the ground, a gated underground chamber at the end of a long, dark tunnel. No sound from the world beyond reached him here, nor a single glimmer of light. In the black and the silence, time stretched and contracted, becoming meaningless. He countered disorientation with the regular rhythm of prayer.

Prayer was all he had left. There could be no escape from this pit. When he next saw the glory of sunlight or the pale glimmer of the moon, he would be marching to his death.



It had begun with a whisper. Salavert first heard it six months ago in the mission of San Pedro de Flores, a primitive outpost on a stinking swamp of a shoreline, plagued by mosquitos and disease. The New World, they called it. Salavert preferred the old, but it was here where God’s great work needed to be done. An entire continent deprived of the love of Christ, and Salavert could be the one to bring it to them.

He had crossed the sea, carried by visions of the thriving population of a new continent hungry for salvation. The reality had been starkly disappointing. The villages that sprouted up around San Pedro de Flores like a fungus held only a huddled mass of small, dark people, most of them sick, all of them filthy. The rest of the population of this “New World” was scattered through the thick, humid wilderness that surrounded them. Four days slogging on muleback through the jungle might bring him to a collection of farms with perhaps a hundred souls, most of whom would refuse to hear the Word of Christ, or pretended to listen, only to return to their old gods as soon as Salavert and his brothers had departed.

He had been near despair when the rumors first came to him, stories of a great city hidden in the unexplored vastness of the mountains. Some described a metropolis of marble palaces and gleaming temples, a paradise where even the poor laborers drank from jeweled goblets and the kings slept in rooms tiled with gold. Others spoke of a land of demons disguised as men, horrors that lived on the raw flesh of children, painting the steps of their temples with blood.

Some called it the White City. El Dorado, others said. A place of gold and death.

No one, of course, had seen it for themselves, or even claimed to have met one who had. It was a river of story without a source, something that haunted the jungles of New Spain like the ghost of one who had never lived.

That did not stop it from sinking hooks into Salavert’s imagination. Day after day, he worked to bring the light of Christ into the minds of the pitiful groups of natives who found their way to the mission. But if he could find a place inhabited by more than a scattered, impoverished few, imagine what an effect he might have. He would bring God’s Word to the heart of a native king, and like a Constantine of the New World, he, in turn, would impose it upon his people. With one blessed act, Salavert could be responsible for bringing thousands of souls to the faith.

He had tried to inspire his abbot with this vision, but the man remained stubbornly blind to its potential. The great cities that peppered the jungles had been abandoned centuries ago, he said. They were all ruins, buried in thick vegetation and avoided by the small tribes of natives, who called the places haunted. Only far to the north, in the land of the Aztecs, had such metropolises remained alive and thriving, though, of course, Cortés had seen an end to that. Now even the halls of Tenochtitlán were silent, save for the beating wings of swallows nesting where princes and warriors once walked.

The abbot believed the rumor was only another dream of the gold-hungry that would drive them to lonely deaths in the wilderness. Try as he might, Salavert could not convince him otherwise. Then God saw fit to call the old abbot into his arms, and the brothers chose one to replace him whose mind was not so closed.

The new abbot gave Salavert permission to seek out the truth behind the rumors, along with two of his brothers in Christ and a dozen new converts to serve as bearers. They trekked north, moving from village to village, following stories of the fabulous city.

It eluded them every time, seeming tantalizingly close, only to fade once more into obscurity, until at last Salavert reached the dark mountains where no Christian foot had ever stepped. What lay beyond was a mystery even to the wildest of natives, and the region was vast enough that he could wander through it for a lifetime and never cross the same path twice.

He had plunged into it, trusting faith to lead him to his destiny, but it seemed that God had abandoned him. Sick and starving, Salavert and his brothers remained lost in a verdant hell for weeks, until at last he had known they must find civilization or die.

Skeletal and sweating, Salavert climbed to the crest of a high mountain ridge. There he fell to his knees and uttered one final plea that he would be chosen for this great work: the saving of an entire city from devil worship and damnation. He put his very soul into the prayer, along with every ounce of his will and the last of his hope.

And he was answered.

In something like a dream, glimpsed through a haze of weakness and desperation, the clouds before him parted and the light of heaven gilded the face of a near mountain, across which wove a dark and distinctive line of stone as black as smoke.

It was the sign he had prayed for. Salavert ran, stumbling, back to his brothers, and told them that they must proceed. The entrance to the city was at their feet. God had pointed the way.

They had doubted him. He read it in their faces. They thought the long weeks of hunger and isolation had finally made him mad.

They were wrong.



He could still remember his first glimpse of the city, how they had staggered out of a narrow ravine to see it glimmering before them, a place even more magnificent than the rumors had promised. Stone towers rose from the dark green of the jungle canopy, shining like the purest white marble. The streets gleamed like rivers of snow. Truly, there was no place on earth so near to paradise.

Or to hell.



They killed the bearers first, opening their throats with blades of obsidian. The ranks of priest-kings in their barbarian finery watched as blood poured down the steps of the temple like a rich red carpet. Salavert was imprisoned with his two brothers in Christ, thrust into a pit where time had no meaning, where all of his awareness was filled with the smell of earth and decay.

They took Brother Marcus first. The light of their torches burned Salavert’s eyes, already so accustomed to the darkness. They bound the monk’s hands and led him down the tunnel. He had prayed as he went, calling out to the Lady of Mercy to protect him.

Salavert could not say how long it was before they returned for Brother Ignatius. The younger monk had gone mad by then, the darkness seeping into his brain. He leapt at the guards as they entered, fighting them like an animal with teeth and nails as Salavert had pressed himself to the far corner of his prison, an instinctive horror forcing him away from the disfigured faces of the soldiers.

The image remained with him long after the guards had carried Ignatius away, his screams echoing down the tunnel behind him. Salavert knew the meaning of the oozing sores that wept down his captors’ cheeks. He recognized the pestilence.

He had been a mere slip of a boy when smallpox had burned through his native Valencia, leaving piles of corpses in its wake. That his expedition was responsible for bringing it here was impossible to deny.

The disease would spread like wildfire. Some would burn with fever, faces swollen and unrecognizable. Others would bleed, life pulsing from every orifice. He had seen what the disease did when it ravaged the villages near San Pedro de Flores. It was murder, carried in the breath or a touch.

But here, in the White City, perhaps it was something else. That he had been called here, Salavert had no doubt. But the people of this place were steeped in a darker wickedness than he ever could have suspected. It occurred to Salavert that instead of the Word, God might have sent him to bring a scourge to this city that would cleanse it of its evil in a way that none could resist or overpower.

The instrument of redemption he had been chosen to deliver was not prayer but death.



Though time was next to meaningless in the darkness of his pit, Salavert felt that the visits of the guards who brought him food and water seemed to be growing further and further apart. The faces of the men who came changed constantly, and increasingly he saw not only the marks of disease on their skin, but fresh wounds, as though they came to him by way of some ongoing battle.

Salavert had long since accepted what his end in this dark place must be. He would join the ranks of the holy martyrs, making the ultimate gift to Christ. But as he waited in that long, unending night, it occurred to him that instead of blood on the temple steps, his fate might lie in a slow death by starvation, forgotten in a pit beneath the earth.

The notion filled him with unspeakable horror.

When at last the light glimmered against the tunnel walls, stabbing his unused eyes with pain, he felt not fear but relief.



He emerged, blinking against the agonizing brightness of the day, to find that the city he had seen when he arrived had gone. In its place was a vision of hell.

Bodies were strewn across the ground. They were not the victims of disease, but of the sword. The air was dense with smoke, an acrid burning that told him both the fields and the dead were aflame. Salavert recalled the wounds on the faces of the men who had been tending to him and realized that God, in His wrath against the people of this city, had visited them with war as well as plague.

His escorts pushed him past the carnage, crossing the square to where the great pyramid temple loomed like a pale ghost in the smoke.

The building was massive. Salavert had seen great monuments before, among them the cathedrals of Valencia and Seville. Next to this, those towering tributes to the glory of God seemed like children’s toys, slight and full of air.

When last he had looked upon the temple, its stairs had run red with the blood of the natives who had accompanied him and his brothers from the mission. How long ago had that been? Weeks? Months? It was impossible to say, and hardly mattered anymore.

The climb was endless. He had grown feeble during his long imprisonment and staggered up each step, the guards—weakened themselves by disease—all but carrying him by the time they reached the pinnacle.

A slight figure waited for him there, made larger by the elaborate feather headdress and jade breastplate of a priest.

But this was no priest. It was a mere woman, done up in priest’s clothing. Her face was familiar, and Salavert realized he had seen her before, standing at the back of the assemblage of great men who had presided over the slaughter of his bearers. Her place in the crowd was that of some minor functionary, no one of importance, but the jagged scar that marred the skin of her cheek had marked her in his memory.

Now she wore the finery of the high priest, which sat overlarge on her, as though meant for a bigger man—which he was certain was the case. Around her neck hung one of the medallions of dark stone he had seen on the most prominent of the men who had watched over the sacrifices, a symbol of rank he was sure she would never have attained if not for the plague.

The implication was clear: This woman—this girl—was all that was left of that grim assembly. The elders he had seen before, men who had reeked of power despite being demon-haunted heathens, were all dead. The small, scarred woman before him was all that remained of the rulers of this city.

His impure heart revolted at the thought. Was he really to be martyred by a mere female? The notion filled him with disgust. Yet God would think no less of his sacrifice for its being made at the hand of a woman. It was only his pride that rebelled, and pride was sin.

At least the woman would not hold her blasphemous position for long. Her face was flushed with dark purple patches and small pinprick sores, symptoms Salavert knew indicated a less visible but more virulent form of the disease. It would end in blood, her vital fluid hemorrhaging from every orifice—a horrific way to die.

God had not spared His hand in this place.

The woman made a sign, and the two guards pulled a black hood over Salavert’s head. The cloth stank of another man’s fear, enclosing him once more in the darkness.

He was pushed forward into what must be the narrow sanctuary at the top of the temple, but he did not remain there. Instead, he was dragged along an obscure and tortuous path—up ladders, down sharply twisting stairs, through echoing chambers, and along the length of a long, slippery tunnel. The air around him grew cool, filled with the smell of damp, and he knew he was being taken into the very bowels of the temple.

At long last, they halted. The bag was pulled from his head, and to his profound surprise, Salavert found himself inside a cathedral.

It had been formed by the hand of God from the very earth itself. The cave was massive, filled with soaring pillars and graceful veils of stone. The stone around him glittered in the torchlight, sparkling like stars. Tombs surrounded him, enormous stone sarcophagi engraved with ancient pagan figures. It would have been a sublime vision, if not for the paintings covering the walls.

Their artistry was undeniable. The colors were rich, the figures startlingly lifelike, but the scenes they depicted were images from hell itself, portraits of violence and horrifying decay.

They failed to hold his gaze. Instead, his eyes were drawn to a dark pool that lay in the very heart of the cavern. No, not a pool, he realized. It was a great flat disk of stone. The surface was polished to gleaming perfection, reflecting phantom glimmers of the flames that illuminated the space around them.

It was a mirror. A massive black mirror made of stone instead of glass.

Dark, ruddy stains marked the ground that surrounded its still, flawless surface. With the instinct of a cornered animal, Salavert knew he was looking at the remnants of centuries of blood. The implication was as clear to him as the painted horror on the walls of the cave.

They had made sacrifices.

A primal fear choked him, banishing all his martyr’s resolve and leaving in its place only the pure, animal urge to flee.

He screamed, the sound echoing off the delicate frills of stone, but the guards held him fast, dragging him to the mirror’s edge as the small priestess began her incantation.

The droning, singsong tones of her chant melded with the fading echo of his terror, the cave transforming her worship and his cry into a symphony.

She took a small, wicked blade of obsidian from a sheath at her waist, and Salavert began to recite the last contrition, grasping frantically for some semblance of self-control. He must meet his God in peace and acceptance, not howling like a beast at the slaughterhouse. Still, sweat dripped down his body beneath the remains of his cassock, and he stumbled over the words that should have been as familiar to him as his own name.

But the knife did not move for his throat. Instead, the priestess drew it across the skin of her own palm. She whispered something, a few phrases laced with grief and desperation, the tones very like those of a prayer. Then she knelt at the edge of the dark glass and pressed her bleeding hand to the surface.

There was a hiss like water on a hot pan. Smoke welled up from between her fingers. The priestess leaned into it, breathing deeply. Her eyes glazed over.

The air around Salavert seemed to grow colder, and the monk was overwhelmed by the awareness of something at work in that unholy cathedral—something old and powerful. Something that had nothing at all to do with God.

Her eyes still unfocused, the woman extended her free hand, uttering a single word of command. To Salavert, it seemed as though two voices spoke, both priestess and something that was more than an echo.

He wanted to run, but the guards were strong, and they dragged him to her side, forcing him to his knees. He closed his eyes, trying to prepare for the inevitable blow, but instead her small hand grasped the neck of his robe. With shocking strength, she pulled his face into the column of smoke that rose from the place where her blood met the mirror’s surface.

The cave vanished.



Salavert was in a place he knew well. Around him soared the elegant walls of the cathedral of Valencia. He stood in the nave, looking down the aisle toward the altar, a rich and glorious monument to the might of God. This was the place where he had been called to a life in Christ, where he had begun to believe that he, the third son of a butcher, might have a greater destiny than anyone suspected.

The pews were deserted. Candles flickered along the aisle, but all the usual quiet activity—the muffled voices and reverent footsteps—were gone. Only silence remained.

Silence, and a woman.

The priestess stood at the altar, holding aloft the Santo Cáliz—the very chalice of Christ, believed by many to be the Holy Grail itself. Salavert had seen it before, during the grandest of church ceremonies he had attended as a child. The finely wrought gold, framing a bowl of bloodred agate, looked even grander now, clasped in the woman’s small, dark hands.

Her heathen trappings had been replaced by the robes of a bishop, and her face was free of smallpox sores. She looked as she had when Salavert had first seen her at the temple, solemn and sad as the Holy Virgin.

Some remote, near-forgotten part of his brain knew that he should find this the most profound blasphemy: a woman wearing the garb of a priest of the Holy Church. The thought was only an itch at the back of his mind, overwhelmed by the pensive silence that surrounded him.

The light shifted, and his eye was drawn to the familiar frescoes that decorated the walls. But the images he remembered vividly, the lapis-toned scenes from the lives of Christ and the saints, were no longer there. In their place were scenes of horror like those he had left behind in the cave. He saw knights of the Crusade storming Jerusalem, their swords red with the blood of children. There were women tied to stakes and screaming as the flames licked at their feet, men twisted on the rack of the Inquisition. Massacre, torture, and slaughter surrounded him.

“Where am I?” he demanded, his voice shaking with outrage and fear.

“We are meeting in the heart of something very old and very dark. A place shaped by will and desire,” the priestess replied. There was no wonder in him that he could understand her words. He would not have wondered if the sky had turned around to lie under his feet.

She lifted the cup once more, her eyes closed in fierce concentration, then set it down reverently on the altar.

“It wants me to ask a different question. One that leads to great glory… and a greater feast of blood.” She seemed to be engaged in some immense effort, her hands clenched, sweat breaking out on her brow. “I will not ask it.”

“Ask what? What’s happening? Why am I here?”

“So much death.” Her face twisted with grief. “Centuries of death. It made us great, but what is greatness? It is a sport for men.” Her bitterness was palpable, and for the first time since the dream had begun, she looked to where Salavert stood, helpless and terrified, in the midst of the empty pews.

“It would use you,” she accused. “It would make you the doorway to a greater world in which it could satisfy its thirst for blood.”

“We are but feeble sinners.” His reply was instinctive, and even to himself, the words seemed lame.

She didn’t answer. Her eyes slid closed again. She seemed to be gathering herself, concentrating both body and will.

“I would know how to stop this,” she cried fiercely, her small frame trembling with power. The call echoed off the graceful arches of the cathedral, filling the silence and resonant with significance.

It seemed to Salavert that something answered her. It came in an uncanny wind, stirring the folds of his tattered cassock and carrying with it the sense of a thousand voices whispering in concert from every corner of that vast and holy place.

She listened, her body held in perfect stillness, her eyes closed. Then the wind moved through, and the silence that descended once more was broken by the harsh bark of a laugh that was very near a sob.

“So that is to be the way of it.”

Grief shuddered through her frame. She opened her eyes, her gaze locking onto Salavert once more, direct and forceful as a blow.

“Wake up,” she ordered, and he did.



He came to choking, lying on his side at the edge of the devilish mirror. The priestess was beside him, her arms shaking with the effort of holding herself up.

She climbed painfully to her feet, giving a sharp command to the guards. They responded with a shocked exclamation, clearly doubting the evidence of their own ears, but the priestess’s look left no room for debate. Salavert was yanked away from the mirror, back the way he had come.

Hurrying now, he was pushed through a tunnel carved into the rock, the priestess following at a stately pace. They emerged into a room full of wonders. Mysterious objects glittered from tables on every side. In the center of the room, a great gilded weight swung slowly and silently back and forth like the mechanism of some enormous clock. He realized that he had sensed the thing when he had passed through here before, blindfolded and disoriented. It had felt like a whispering, ghostly movement, some uncanny force flying through the darkness around him. He had been blind then, but sure of his martyrdom. That certainty had been whisked away from him, and the unknown that rose in its place disturbed him more than the promise of his own death.

“What is happening?” he demanded.

The priestess did not answer. Instead, she moved to the center of the room. As the great pendulum swung at her, she caught it, halting its regular progress.

The silence that followed had weight, as though filling a space that had never been silent before. He saw one of the guards make a strange gesture and knew on instinct that it was a ward against evil.

The woman approached Salavert and drew her knife once more. He felt a moment’s fear that he had escaped that hellish cavern and the hunger of its dark fetish only to die here instead, but once again the knife moved to her body, not his own. She severed a leather thong at her throat and caught the weight of the medallion in her hand. Seen up close, it looked as though it were made of the same dark stone as the mirror, carved with the image of one of their heathen gods.

She grabbed his wrist and forced the cursed thing into his hand, closing his fingers over it.

He glanced down at it and shuddered. The stone gleamed in the torchlight, undoubtedly the devil’s own icon. It felt cool against his palm, uncannily so, given that it had just been worn against the skin of a woman flushed with fever.

He knew that he should toss it aside. He was a man of God, prepared for his own martyrdom. He should not suffer such a fetish to contaminate his holy person.

But he did not. Instead, he clasped it tightly.

The priestess saw his movement and something gave way in her as though a great burden had been set down. She seemed to age before him, the exhaustion concealed by her regal bearing at last plainly apparent.

She looked at him once more, her eyes full of unspeakable sorrow, and uttered a single word. Though he did not know the tongue, he could not mistake its meaning.

Go.

He offered no resistance as the guards hauled him toward a narrow doorway on the far side of the room. Only as he was about to pass out of that strange, secret chamber did he stop and look back.

A grinding echoed through the room. Behind the priestess, the opening in the floor that led back into the nightmarish caves below slid closed. The woman knelt before it, the obsidian knife in her hand. As Salavert watched, she lifted the blade over her head, then plunged it deep into her own chest. She fell to the ground, her blood seeping out across the stones.

After that, Vincente Salavert began to run.

London, April 18, 1898

ELEANORA MALLORY SAT IN the office of Mr. Henbury, assistant keeper of the rolls, waiting to be fired. It was morning, and the narrow, high-ceilinged room was silent save for the drumming of the rain against the tall, thin windowpanes. The shelves that lined the walls were covered in disorganized piles of books and papers. Mr. Henbury’s desk was even worse, a mountain of documents where sixteenth-century court proceedings cozied up against bundles of eighteenth-century receipts in a chaos that made Ellie’s fingers twitch. Henbury was constantly finding fault with her work but let his own responsibilities sink into shocking disarray. It was high on the rather long list of things about him that infuriated her.

His tardiness was another. She had been summoned here from her desk almost as soon as she’d arrived, but that had been more than twenty minutes ago, and Henbury still hadn’t bothered to make his appearance.

She’d been so unsure of how briefly she would be allowed to remain in the building, she hadn’t bothered to remove her coat. Of course, the place was also freezing. The Public Record Office was never heated. It was too much of a risk to the precious documents housed within. And on an April morning that felt far more like February, a coat was close to a necessity.

Ellie knew perfectly well that Mr. Henbury had never liked having a woman working in his section—particularly not a young, unmarried woman with a university degree. It was undoubtedly the degree that had gotten her in the door. That and the near-perfect score she had earned on her civil service exams. The degree also meant that she was technically as well educated as Mr. Henbury himself, and more so than the vast majority of her fellow archivists. Mr. Henbury did not like that at all.

She looked around the gray, gloomy office and tried to decide how upset she would be if Henbury did indeed enter gleefully wielding the ax of dismissal. After all, the prisonlike building on Chancery Lane was hardly what she had dreamed of while she’d worked for her degree at the University of London. She had wanted what her cousin Neil—now Dr. Fairfax, she reminded herself—had practically been handed: a position as a field archaeologist. At this very moment, as she sat watching the rain streak dully down the windowpane, Neil was off in the deserts of Egypt excavating ruins and uncovering knowledge lost for millennia. She closed her eyes and imagined the hot sun on her skin, sand sticking to sweat as she worked with a brush in her hand, dusting away the debris of centuries from ancient stones.

Since she was a girl, she’d dreamed of working to recover the past, reading every book and journal on the subject she could get hold of. She had been only nine years old when she decided to conduct her first excavation, digging up the garden in front of their home on Golden Square. She could still remember Aunt Florence’s histrionics about her dahlias, which had not been abated by Ellie’s assurance that she would put them back once she had determined nothing of importance was concealed beneath them. At that tender age, it had never occurred to her that the life she dreamed of was an impossibility—that no amount of intelligence and determination would overcome the handicap of her sex.

It could have been worse, of course. At least her position as an archivist had enabled her to get her hands on history, if not quite in the way she’d expected. And the money had been very good, or would have been if she had spent any of it. Uncle David had begrudgingly agreed to her taking a job, but the suggestion that she let a room of her own had thrown Aunt Florence into hysterics.

“You’ll never find a husband living on your own!” Aunt Florence had wailed. The horror of it had driven her to fan herself vigorously, declaring she was feeling faint. In the end, Ellie had capitulated. She had done it for the sake of maintaining peace with the beloved relatives who had raised her—certainly not because she had any desire for a husband. Marriage would mean the end of any work for her besides “managing the household,” which sounded to Ellie like a slow-burning hell.

It might be all that was left to her now. Dismissal from her position would mean the gates of the civil service would be closed to her. What other options were there? Teaching—the last resort of all women unfortunate enough to be educated. The thought was more depressing than the weather.

She checked her pocket watch. She had thought he would have been eager for this particular meeting, given that he’d undoubtedly been looking forward to it for a long time.

Ellie rose and strode over to Henbury’s chair, plopping down into it with a happy little sigh of rebellion. This should have been her chair, really. She was cleverer than Henbury, and both of them knew it. And she certainly never would have let the assistant keeper’s