1534

The woman’s left foot caught on a root as she raced through the inky blackness of the forest.  She landed hard, scraping her hands and knees. She grimaced, and cursed inwardly, but did not cry out, for fear of alerting her pursuers.  She pulled herself up and leaned against a tree, slowing her ragged breath, and straining to listen over the thundering sound of her blood pounding.

There; not 100 yards distant, coming in from the right, were the sounds of a foot patrol, searching for her.  The bishop’s men had climbed faster than she thought; she did not have much time.

As she watched the three men pass by, their faces illuminated by the torches they carried, she realized that if she hadn’t fallen, their paths would have intersected.

“Thank you, my lord,” she breathed silently to herself.  Obviously her god had placed that root before her to help her reach her destination. 

She crept within feet of the last soldier, as he stumbled, wide-eyed and shaking, through the pitch black night.  She thought briefly that she could reach around him from behind and slit his throat with her obsidian dagger, but quickly rejected the thought, not wanting to defile the sacred tool with his blood.  She had a higher purpose in mind for the knife.

A huge rattlesnake slithered across her path, bringing her up short for a moment. The snake paused, hissed, then moved off in the direction of the soldiers.  A few minutes later, she heard a high scream of pain, followed by cursing, and she smiled, knowing her god was again helping her.

She slowed to a quick walk, angling up the steep slope, towards the temple at the top of the mountain.  She listened as teams of hunters called out to one another.  They, too, were angling towards the top.  They must know where she was headed, she thought.  She picked up her pace again.  She must reach the door  first.

She reached the clearing around the temple ahead of her enemy, but she could hear them crashing up the slope behind her. The ancient stones were illuminated only by the light of the full moon, and the doorway leading inside was a black hole. Fortunately, she did not need to see where she was going— she had been there many times before.

Easing her way past the chacmool statue in the center, she could feel electricity surging through the room already;  Tlaloc recognized her as his own and welcomed her back as priestess of his order.

“Great Lord, I don’t have much time,” she said out loud, her words ringing in the small stone room. “Our enemies are approaching, and I do not have time for a full ceremony.  I hope you will forgive me, but what I do is to protect you and your realm.  They must not use this doorway.”

Faintly glowing red and blue mist seeped out of the stone seams of the wall in front of her, to coil around her feet. Behind her, she could see over her shoulder, the harsh yellow light of the soldiers’ torches flickering across the doorway as they reached the summit.

She turned her back on them, and on all mankind.  She drew a deep breath, and quickly slashed through her left wrist with the sacred obsidian knife.  She changed hands and cut her right wrist.  As her blood poured freely from her wrists, she placed her hands against the wall.  Electricity crackled along the stones, and the mist flared up brightly, taking the form of two priests.

“I implore you, my lord Tlaloc, accept my blood sacrifice, and seal this portal from all who would defile it and the lands within...

2025

David sighed as the front right wheel of the library cart caught on a tuft of gray carpet lint, locking the wheel up and causing the trolley to veer into the library stack, dumping out the top layer of books. In the quiet, cavernous library, the slamming books sounded shockingly loud.

David sighed again, as he bent over to gather up the books for shelving.  He knew this cart tended to drift to the right; he should have grabbed either the yellow handled cart, or the one with the dented-in handle, but he had let his mind drift again. Gotta pay attention to the details, he reminded himself.  Can’t afford to get sloppy in this business.

David’s business was assistant librarian at the Cumbres Public Library, the biggest building on Main Street, in the teeny tiny mountain town of Los Leones, in southern Colorado.  The town’s tourism marketing phrase proclaimed Los Leones to be in the Center of Everything, but David always thought to himself the opposite was true; this place was the center of nothing.  The nearest shopping mall or movie theater was fifty miles away.  The town  boasted several burger joints and Mexican restaurants, but any higher caliber dining was done when you left town to do your shopping and see a movie.  That’s what everybody did; they left town to tend to their grocery or clothes shopping, take in a movie, and then dinner.

Or they simply left town, and didn’t come back.

The town’s population had dropped by more than half since the last coal mines closed in the 1930s.  Nowadays, most people had to work two or more jobs to make ends meet, and it was not uncommon to see your seventy-year old former teacher behind the counter at McDonalds, or run into your uncle restocking the shelves at the 7-11.

Everybody was surprised that David came back to Los Leones after he graduated from college.  He had ‘gotten out’ and left right after high school for a free ride scholarship to a college in Denver. Family and friends were shocked when he returned shortly after he graduated, and applied to work at the library in town.  It was widely intimated that he was throwing his life away, being back home.

There were definitely times when David completely agreed with that assessment, and he daydreamed of quitting and moving back to downtown Denver where he once had an apartment.  He had fond memories of living in a major metropolis, the city humming 24 hours a day.  But he also remembered the choking claustrophobia of being surrounded by over a million other human beings, who clogged up every street and motorway around the city, making it a grueling task to get anywhere.  He remembered the loneliness he felt in all the crowds, and the disconnect he felt there.  He missed his mom and dad, and his huge extended family, which at times seemed to be half of the population of Los Leones.

But most of all he missed his mountains.

Granted, Denver has a big beautiful mountain chain just to the west, dominated by Mt. Blue Sky (though it had been called Mt. Evans when he lived there), but they weren’t his mountains- the Spanish Peaks.

Those ancient twin mountains were a geological anomaly; running west to east instead of north to south like the rest of the Rocky Mountain Front Range; jutting out into the plains, and acting like a beacon for travelers coming across the plains or sweeping upwards from the deserts to the south.

Those peaks were in his blood, and called to his soul, as they had to every generation of his family for over 500 years.

David Cumbres’ family was the closest thing to royalty a backwater, podunk town could have, having been in the original wave of Spanish settlers who migrated up here from New Spain. Five hundred years is a long time, and several generations, so consequently, lots of things in town and the surrounding countryside were named after them- point in case, the Cumbres Public Library, where David worked.  It was started 80 years ago by his great-great-grandmother, and today his mother sat on the board of directors.  But his name and his family pull didn’t get him the job; it was more that he virtually grew up there, spending every day after school and most weekends sitting cross-legged in the stacks.

David loved books, and being surrounded by them was his happy place.  He read constantly, particularly history.  The internet was a late-comer to Los Leones, with spotty coverage and high rates.  The library was one of the first places in town to have wifi, and they were constantly upgrading it.  The library was David’s doorway to the past and his window to the future.

He already knew everything there was to know about the library and the building itself; hiring him was a no-brainer.

David lived with his parents- sort of.  They had a small mother-in-law house at the back of their yard, and David lived there with his two cats; Cinder and Ash. They were fluffy grey strays who he found staring through his screen door one morning when he woke up.  He chucked some ham out the door for them on his way to work, and they were there every day after.  Slowly they worked their way into the house, and now claimed it as their own.  Mostly they didn’t like anyone but David, but could absolutely be bribed with the right kind of cat treat, something his mother did on a regular basis.  They were definitely chunkier than they had been when they’d first shown up.

It was a quiet life.  He didn't do much besides work and surf the internet.  In such a small town, that’s really all there was to do anyway.  Which was fine, he told himself.  Nothing ever happened here, and that was just the way it was, had always been, and as far as anyone could tell, would always be.

Until one night in September, when David had the closing shift at the library, and after locking the door, turned, keys still in hand, and found a man waiting silently outside in the cold air, staring intently in his direction.

The stranger  stood under the one streetlight by the parking lot, the sharp overhead light throwing his face into deep shadow from the hat he wore, as his face tipped down to tuck into his scarf against the wind. His  tan trenchcoat cast a puddle of blackness under his feet.

For a moment, David tensed, clutching his keys tighter. But then the man lifted his head up into the light to face David more fully, and he could see the stranger had a broad, pleasant face and a warm smile, with bright blue eyes that crinkled up at the corners, and his shoulders relaxed.

“Mister Cumbres?” he said, as he stuck out his hand. His accent immediately branded him as an outsider.  David’s mind whirred, he sounded like Obi-Wan Kenobi, or that actor guy anyway, something-or-other McGregor?  Was the stranger Scottish? His thoughts snapped back to the conversation just in time to catch the rest of what the man was saying. “Sorry to be lurking out here on this cold night, but I was wondering if I might have a word with you in private?”

Ordinarily, strange older men found lurking in shadows got the cops called really quick, but this man was polite and foreign and David was bored, so he stopped his hand from going for his cell phone, and instead nodded cautiously, saying , “Um ... I suppose.  What can I do for you?”

“My name is Alistair Caltram, and I have come a very long way, and have spent a very long time reading up about you, so that I might be able to shake your hand in person.  You’re a rather remarkable young man.”

This last line broke the spell David was falling under, as he knew above all things, he was unremarkable. David snorted and shook his head, grinning. “Sorry, buddy; you have the wrong guy. I don’t have any money, I don’t want to buy anything, and I’m not gay.”

David turned away and began walking towards his car, when the Scotsman sighed and called after him, “Ach; I’ve made a right cock-up of that introduction.  David, please allow me to try that again; I’m here to offer you a job.  A very easy job, that pays very well, and everybody keeps their clothes on.”

David stopped, and slowly turned around. A job offer was always interesting, but that wasn’t what caught his attention.  “How do you know my name is David?”

“I wasn’t lying when I said I know a great deal about you,” Alistair answered. “David Daniel Cumbres, only child of Isaac and Rachel Cumbres.  Born October eighth, two thousand and four. Five-foot, eleven inches, or one hundred eighty centimeters, when measured properly. About eighty-six kilograms; maybe a pinch more. Brown hair- normally cut; bless you; and brown eyes, no glasses. You didn’t even need braces when you were young. You didn’t go out for many sports in school, instead you played euphonium in the school band and Dungeons and Dragons after school.  You graduated salutatorian, though I personally think you were robbed of the top spot. Your grades and community service earned you a full-ride scholarship to the University of Denver, where you changed majors three times before ultimately graduating with a dual degree in anthropology and English.  And here you are now, back in Los Leones, working the closing shift at the library, shelving books that were ancient when you read them as a boy. I guess in a way, you are using your two degrees.”

David stared speechless for a good three seconds, before his hand snatched up his cell phone and began to swipe it open.

“Ach, now; would ya be calling the authorities before we even get to the money part?  I told you all that, David, to prove to you that I have studied you, and you are the remarkable person I said you are. Or rather, you have some remarkable information that I would be willing to pay handsomely for.  See?  Nothing creepy.”

“Nothing creepy?” David answered. “You have information on me that isn’t in any digital database, which means you went through the paper records at my old high school. That, dude, is Creepy As Fuck.”

“Okay, yes; a bit, I suppose.  But I wanted to make sure I had the right person before I showed up to offer you $30,000 to tell me about your family’s history- you’ve changed a bit from your high school yearbook photo; filled out a bit- you look quite handsome- in a platonic sense, of course.”

The evening was getting stranger and stranger, and David shook his head. “Thirty thousand? That’s more than I make in a year here at the library.”

“Yes; I know,” Alistair said, smiling. “Why don’t we start at the beginning of why I am talking to you?  This might take a while.  Is there someplace we could go for a coffee?”

David scoffed, eyeing Alistair up.  “If you’ve studied this town, you know there is NOTHING open at this time of night.”

“How about that Loaf ‘N Jug just down the street?” Alistair suggested, naming the one gas station in town that was open 24 hours. “I thought I spied a little table wedged in the back when I got a slushie earlier today.”  David shrugged, staring at him.  The strange Scotsman seemed to take that as an agreement however.  “Right!  Let’s do it, then!” and marched off down the street.  It took all of thirty seconds for David’s internal battle to be fought, but the wretchedly curious side of him won out, and, with a groan, he followed.

“So;” Alistair said, as they sat down at the battered orange formica table tucked in between the slushie machine and the hot dog roller. “As I said, my name is Alistair Caltram. I am the head of the Midas Company.  We’re a small, family held business,  and we  specialize in treasure hunting.”

This was the first thing that made sense to David all evening. The Spanish Peaks had been the focus of intensive gold mining in the 19th century, with everything from old prospectors with pans, to industrialized digging and ore crushing.  A lot of gold had been found, but all the big veins had been played out decades ago, and now the mountains bankrupted more miners than it rewarded.

“Ah;” David said. “You’re hoping my family’s status will mean I can get you a claim. My family DOES own a ranch high up on the East Peak, but we’ve never found gold on it, and we’ve never been miners- at least not of gold.  Got a lot of coal miners in our family tree.” He slumped back in his seat– not so exciting after all, just another fool with dreams of fortune to be pulled from the rocks.  The only thing coming out of the mountains these days were tourists in the summer.

Alistair was unfazed. “Well, you’re mostly right; we ARE searching for gold, but not just a large vein or deposit; we are looking for a source; a very large source, that we believe was mined almost 600 years ago.”

The date surprised David. The first organized efforts at mining in the area began with the Spanish in the mid 1500s, nearly two centuries off Alistair’s mark.

“Your dates seem… off;” David said hesitantly.  Surely a man who has done this exhaustive level of research wouldn’t have made such an easy mistake?

The smile on Alistair’s face remained.  It was starting to be annoying. “True, laddie,” he said, “if I were after conquistador gold... But I’m not looking for the Spanish dog holes. I’m searching for something earlier, and bigger.”

“But the local tribes that lived and traveled through here didn’t have much use for gold,” David responded, intrigued despite himself. “Certainly not in an organized mining sense.”

“Local tribes; no,” Alistair agreed. “But there are others, who did dig that gold, or had it dug for them, on a huge scale.”

“What?” David asked, confused. “...Who?”

Alistair fell quiet for a moment as a customer turned the corner towards them, meandering slowly towards the bathroom, muttering about the high price of Doritos.  After the door snicked shut again, he turned his attention back to David. “Laddie, I know you well enough to know you ought to be able to figure this one out yourself. Who were the biggest players on the continent at that time? Who held a vast empire, who was the supreme military power, who controlled people and resources? Who was here before the Spanish arrived and loved gold?”

David just stared at Alistair, not quite believing what the man was suggesting.  He realized he was absentmindedly picking at a chipped and peeling corner of the table top and pulled his hand back into his lap.

“The Aztecs, David,” Alistair broke in, saying it for him. “The Aztecs were the major players, and they held sway for hundreds of miles in any direction from their power base.   Their Triple Alliance controlled every resource, or had it brought to them as tribute or trade from lesser tribes. Jade, obsidian, feathers, food, slaves, all poured into what they called the navel of the world, at Tenochtitlan, what is today called Mexico City.

“Gold, in large quantities, had to be brought in from greater distances, and the largest source, we believe, was found here in the Spanish Peaks,” he said. “The mountains have always been held in high religious and mystical esteem by every tribe that has ever seen them – you know that.” He continued, “And gold from the sacred mountains… magical.”

Shaking his head, David decided to focus on the more rational points of the discussion.  His mind racing, he thought about what Alistair had said.  “Yes; the Spanish Peaks have always been a sacred place, and yes, there is, or was, gold here, but not nearly in the quantities you’re suggesting,” David said, slipping into Academic Mode. “The transportation of that much gold would have worn a walking path into the ground that could be seen from space.  There was some sporadic, small trade going on, but nothing like what you’re suggesting.  The Spanish at least would surely have made note of a massive gold train; there just aren’t any records documenting anything like this.”

“Yes, laddie, there are,” Alistair said, reaching across the table and taking ahold of David’s hand, which had crept back up to pick off another piece of orange formica without him noticing. David flinched a little at the sudden contact, but the other man didn’t seem to notice.  “Do you think I’m pulling all this hooey outta me rear?  Do you think I’d go through the dusty filing cabinets in the basement of Leones High School, looking up your information, if I hadn’t done the big research first?  I’m a professional treasure hunter, David, from a long line of treasure hunters. This is what we do. And I’m not suggesting they walked it back all the way to Tenochtitlan- they took the expressway.”

An image of gold-laden Aztecs, decked out in feathered headdresses and jaguar capes, crammed into SUVs and heading down Interstate 25 while honking at each other, filled David’s head.  He snorted, then saw the smile had finally dropped from Alistair’s face, replaced by a look that said he wasn’t joking.  “The expressway?  What the…? Alistair, as you’ve probably guessed, the history of the Spanish Peaks is a large hobby of mine, and I have pored over everything there is to know about this area. I’ve read every damned book kept in the Western History Collection of the Denver Public Library when I was getting my anthropology degree.”

“Christ, laddie; do ya think they keep treasure maps in the western history section of the library?  Or MAYBE they keep that sort of thing hush-hush? Like, maybe the king of Spain and a few dozen of his closest advisors would know about this incredible source of gold? I’m thinking that no more than a hundred men have known about this mine since 1521.  Now you make one hundred and one.”

“Well...” David said, gobsmacked by what Alistair was saying.  David didn’t believe him, of course not, it was ridiculous.  Secret Aztec gold mines and hidden highways in his backyard?  Puh-lease.  Alistair told his story very convincingly, sure, but David didn’t spend half his life in a library to trust someone with no citable sources.  “How is it that you, a Scotsman, have come into this great secret that so few know of?  If it was such a closely held secret by the kings of Spain, why would anyone tell you?”

“That’s the trick of a well-kept secret, laddie. Once those who knew it died, people forget about it.  What was once one of the top secrets of the Spanish court has, over the centuries, slipped into rumor, and what very few records kept about get shuffled off to dry storage to sit, moldering for centuries.  Unlike secrets, rumors are spread freely.  I heard enough to pique my interest, and so my organization and I have spent months combing through the royal Spanish archives, page by crumbling page, tracking down records and reports and the ever-so-few first person reports from the field.  I must admit, my dreams for a while consisted of endless parchment pages, and my team and I would talk to each other in royal Castilian Spanish. And then, we hit paydirt, in a manner of speaking. Buried deep in a file; actually, it was mis-filed- it was an accident we found it; was a diary.  The diary of one of Hernán Cortés’s captains, Gonzalo de Sandoval. He was Cortés’ right-hand man, whom he trusted with the dirtiest jobs and the protection and safety of all the treasure.  One of his jobs was to find the source of all the Aztec gold, and if that meant torturing priests and priestesses for every scrap of information, he did so.  He also recorded all of it.  His diary is a horrifying, bloody treasure-trove that listed all the people he questioned- and one woman who got away. 

“He wrote, with no small amount of disgust, mind you, how one of his lieutenants, Francisco de Aguilar, fell in love with an Aztec priestess he was supposed to be torturing. She ended up pregnant, and the two ran off together.  After a year, the man was hunted down and killed, but de Sandoval had no description of what happened to the woman or child. Presumably, they got away.

“De Sandoval returned to Spain, where he died in 1529, and the royal crown swept up all his personal writings as a state secret.  And there they rested, until we came along.”

The first seed of doubt crept into David’s mind.  That was oddly specific, the crackpot stories he usually heard from confused lonely people staggering into the library were way less coherent.  He could almost feel his hands twitching with a desire to get ahold of the secret diary.  Then a bucket of ice water crashed through his thoughts again, and the fantasy shattered.  “Wait a minute; what the hell do I have to do with this entire fairytale?”

“You? Almost nothing. But your family? The Cumbreses, dear boy, have a critical role in this whole adventure.”

“You lost me again,” David said. “I come from a long line of farmers, ranchers, coal miners and rubes who found a comfortable bump in the road about 500 years ago, and haven’t left since.  We aren’t conquerors, we don’t have secrets.”

“Yes, David, your family has been here for 500 years. But do you know where your family was from before that?  One of your ancestors led a wagon train north out of Mexico City, where the family had been settled for decades after being forced to abandon their position of courtiers of the king’s court in Spain and flee to the New World.”

“What?! How do you-”

“Research, laddie. Ninety-five percent of treasure hunting is research. The other five percent is rather more exciting. Your family has been eyewitnesses to some of the most history shaping events on this continent.  Remember how I mentioned earlier that our research in Spain turned up a very few first hand accounts? Your family name was written down in one such account. That report might not be found in the Cumbres public library, but it can be found in the royal records in Madrid. And we think, David, from the information we gleaned about the kind of people you are, there’s a good chance you might still have a record of it.”

“The kind of people we are?” David snorted. “What the hell does that mean?”

“The kind of people who value knowledge. The kind of people who value history. The kind of people who know how to keep a secret.  You’ve had to, so very often, to save your lives. You are a crypto-Jew, David, and your family has given up everything multiple times to remain Jewish.”

Alistair could have said, ‘you blue-footed booby people,’ and David would not have been more surprised. His first thought, oddly enough, was, “What are we going to tell cousin Tim?” who was currently a priest in New Mexico.

“Well, that’s going to come as a surprise to mom and dad,” David finally managed to say.

The infuriating smirk returned to Alistair’s face.  “Perhaps not as big a surprise as you might imagine,” he said.  “After all, secrets only work if people don’t know them. I would lay money down right now that your family does things differently than others and you’ve never questioned it– had weird rituals none of your friends ever did, specific prayers or beliefs, that sort of thing.  If you were to take a look at the Jewish faith, you might start recognizing some of your own family traditions.”  

David’s brain quickly flashed to his mother’s insistence they light candles on Friday nights and the way everyone had to sit on the floor when his abuelo died.  His friends used to laugh about that and he always shrugged it off.  Pushing the thoughts away, he focused back on the man before him.  “So, tonight has been a lot of firsts for me. I learned that the Aztecs had an ancient treasure trail that almost no one but the Spanish king knew about leading out of my mountains, my family is Jewish, and that stupid peppy cheerleader Rene Salazar cheated me out of being valedictorian. Any other big surprises you want to drop on me?”

Alistair sighed, looking across at David and steepling his fingers. “Yes, actually. We touched on it earlier and you brushed it off, but it’s time to get serious.  When I said the gold was ‘magical’, I meant it.  Magic is very real.”

David gaped, finally being pushed just a little too far. The illusion the Scot was spinning for him, of gold and mystery and secrets, shattered. “Of course it is. And so is Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Mister Caltram, it’s been a very entertaining evening, but it’s late, I’m tired, and I actually have to open in the morning, so I am going to bid you goodnight.”

As David stood up to leave, Alistair quietly slid a thick envelope across the peeling greasy tabletop.

“What’s this?” David asked suspiciously, as he shouldered on his coat.

Alistair’s concentration however, was on the tabletop, where he rested all ten of his fingers. “This tabletop has been here since 1985,” Alistair said offhandedly.

“No; THIS.” David said, gesturing towards the fat envelope, suspiciously shaped like a stack of money.

Alistair looked up absently at him.  “Hmm? Oh.  Five thousand dollars, for sitting here listening to me. You made it farther into my tale than some of my crew thought you would.”

“That’s a peculiarly exact date to put on this tabletop,” David said, feeling a bit dizzy about both answers and choosing to focus on the stranger one. “My father says it’s the exact same one when he and his friends came by here after school.  How do you know this?”

“It’s one of my… talents you might say. One of my magical talents.  I can touch an inanimate object, and can tell you a great deal about it. This formica table top was made in 1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio. I can also tell it doesn’t get cleaned regularly, but that doesn’t take a magical ability to know,” he said, as he plucked a paper napkin out of the dispenser on the table and wiped both his hands.

David’s focus on the tabletop was losing against the draw the white envelope had, Alistair’s ridiculous claim notwithstanding.  Hand trembling slightly, he reached for the envelope. “Just for listening to you? No strings attached?” David asked, as he thumbed through the thick wad of $100 bills.

“All yours.  We can be done now, and I’ll try some other way to find my information, or you can sleep on what I told you, and you can get ahold of me at the Sleepy Miner Inn on the edge of town.  I’m in room 11.” 

“I know where it is,” David said absentmindedly, gazing at the money that suddenly meant he could get his car fixed, and maybe a new computer monitor to boot. “Don’t get the breakfast burritos there; they use too much flour in their green chili.”

“Duly noted. Thank you for your time, Mister Cumbres. Please think about what I said.”

As David reached the double doors of the Loaf ‘N Jug, he hesitated, and turned back to Alistair, still sitting in the booth, looking at where David had been sitting. “Why did you say magic is real?” he asked.

“Because it is, David. When I say my family is treasure hunters, I really mean we are magical treasure hunters. We don’t find shipwrecks; we find treasure that has been lost or hidden through magic. Think of King Midas and all his treasure.”

David shook his head again, turning to the door once more. “Of course. All of this makes sense now.  Goodnight.”