Beautiful Sacrifice

exclusively to Kawa’il.
    The blackware vases were perfect—suspiciously so to Lina, but it wasn’t her collection, so she said nothing. Their glyphs were outlined in red. Kawa’il’s sigil was absent.
    Hunter absorbed each artifact in turn. The ornamental carved stones were new to him.
    “What’s their purpose?” he asked aloud.
    “Perhaps good luck, perhaps simple offerings flung into a sacred cenote,” Mercurio answered. “I haven’t had time to translate the glyphs, which appear to be Terminal Classic on first look.”
    Hunter switched his attention to tiny pottery faces, misshapen and broken, as though cast aside. “These?” he asked.
    “Supernatural faces,” Lina said when Mercurio didn’t answer. “Some of the many, many gods of the Maya. They look like imports from the highlands. Anywhere from Classic to Late Terminal Classic. Probably cenote offerings.”
    “Very good,” Mercurio said in surprise. “But then, you always had an enviable eye. Are you certain I can’t lure you to the Yucatan full-time?”
    “Quite certain,” Lina said absently.
    Her attention was on pots with knobby animal feet at the bottom. Again, probably made as offerings to one god or another. But it was a string of pale, carved jade beads that made her breath stop. The beads looked like a snake swallowing its own tail. Some of the beads were chipped or cracked, but it didn’t detract from the impact of the whole.
    Lina had seen only one thing like the beads—a big jade medallion of a jaguar head wreathed in a feathered snake devouring its own tail. The piece probably had been part of a priest’s regalia. She had found it at one of her father’s digs.
    The piece had vanished into her father’s scholarly collection. She wondered if he had ever written the article he had talked about doing on the jade. If he had, it hadn’t been published in any source she knew. And she knew all of the scholarly ones as well as some that were more shadowy.
    “This is extraordinary, Mercurio. Where did you get it?” she asked
    “I traded for it,” he said.
    Hunter managed not to laugh out loud. He’d bet that the beads were—at best—a gray-market trophy.
    Lina frowned. “Was the previous owner Mexican?”
    “He had the requisite papers,” Mercurio said. “The beadscame from the first dredging of Chichén Itzá. One of the worker’s descendants sold them for cash before anyone had dreamed up antiquities laws. Someone strung the beads. The result came down through the years in a Maya family. They sold it to pay for doctors for their son.”
    “You’re very fortunate they came to you,” Lina said carefully.
    “Yes.”
    She waited, but Mercurio said no more.
    Listening with a small part of his attention, Hunter had ruthlessly moved from artifact to artifact while Lina and Mercurio danced around the subject of questionable provenance. Obviously Mercurio wasn’t into the Caesar’s wife strategy of business.
    “What’s that?” Hunter asked finally. “Paper?”
    Instantly Lina was at his side. “Looks like it. Birch bark.”
    There were fragmentary symbols on one side of the piece. She couldn’t read them. There simply wasn’t enough left.
    “What is it?” Hunter asked.
    “It looks like a bit torn from a Maya codex, but…” She shook her head. “All of the five surviving codices are accounted for. This could be a fragment from one of them.” Her tone said it was unlikely. “Bishop Landa and his soldiers were very thorough. If there were any books they didn’t find and burn, the climate eventually destroyed them. Five hundred years in a jungle…” She looked at Mercurio and raised one dark eyebrow. “Any comments?”
    “The paper came in the same lot as the beads,” he said. “The owner said it was a fragment of an unknown codex.”
    “You believed him?” Hunter asked.
    “No,” Mercurio said bluntly. “That would be too much. Simply fantastic.”
    “Understatement,” Lina said. “Proof of an ancient, unknown codex would rock the Maya world like a nuclear bomb. Finding a sixth surviving book is the holy grail of every Maya archaeologist.”
    “Collectors, too?” Hunter asked.
    “Of course,” Mercurio said.
    “It could never be displayed,” Lina said at the same time. “You could have a stack of provenance going back to Bishop Landa himself, and Mexico would still scream patrimony.”
    “Not all collectors would care,” Hunter said.
    “But gossip goes through solid stone walls,”