The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

“When I was finished with Nereus, some of the mermaid creatures were a little upset with me.”
    Billy grinned and opened his mouth to comment, but Machiavelli reached over and squeezed his arm, silencing him.
    “Not having been left with a whole lot of choices,” Black Hawk continued, “I retreated deeper into the tunnel. The women chased me—even without legs they made good time dragging themselves forward with their hands, flapping their tails. A bit like salmon swimming upriver. They were howling and hissing until we reached the bend just there. And then they stopped as if they had run into a wall.” Black Hawk raised his hand and the foul tunnel air swirled with the sharp, clean, vaguely medicinal odor of sarsaparilla. Pale green flames danced along his fingertips, then drifted up to form an amorphous emerald-colored cloud, and the walls of the tunnel blossomed with shimmering, trembling silver-green light. “I saw this,” he said.
    “What is it?” Billy whispered, looking at the walls.
    Black Hawk reached out and ran his right hand down the wall. It was covered with a fine, glimmering coating that came away on his fingers in long gossamer threads. “Spiderweb,” he said. “The walls are covered in web.”
    “That’s a lot of spiders,” Billy said nervously.
    Black Hawk waved his hand and the green cloud drifted deeper into the tunnel, illuminating it. “You can see where it’s torn in places, so something big moved through here.” He stepped forward and scooped a length of wood from the mud. “But this is what really interests me,” he said. “I had just discovered this when I heard your voices.” Black Hawk held out an inch-thick length of solid black wood topped with a long flat leaf-shaped blade. Machiavelli and Billy leaned over to look at the weapon.
    “It’s a spear,” Billy said. “An old one too. I don’t know that blade pattern. It’s not native to the Americas.”
    “Looks African to me—Zulu, perhaps,” Machiavelli said.
    “There are some more in the mud behind me,” Black Hawk said. He brought his hand over the metal head of the spear. The green aura trembling on his fingers illuminated a square hieroglyph painted onto the blade.
    “Ah,” Machiavelli breathed. “What have we here?” As he reached out, his fingertips popped alight and the odor of serpent filled the tunnel.
    “Man, you need a better smell,” Billy said.
    “I like it,” Machiavelli murmured absently, dirty gray light dribbling off his fingers. “It has served me well.” His gray eyes took on the green of Black Hawk’s aura and the square glyph reflected in his pupils. The Italian glanced up at Black Hawk. “You know what this is?”
    “I’ve seen similar spears before,” he said. “And our legends are full of them. They’re ancient and deadly. Only the most powerful of medicine men can carry them.” He pointed to the glyph on the blade. “I’ve never seen that on a medicine man’s spear, though. The pattern looks South American.”
    Billy looked over the Italian’s shoulder at Black Hawk. “I’ve seen something similar in Quetzalcoatl’s Shadowrealm. They’re in the kitchen, over the fridge. . . .”
    “Yes, there’s a wall carved with these square facelike shapes. The wall looks older than the rest of the house,” Black Hawk confirmed.
    “It makes sense that Quetzalcoatl would know the words.” Machiavelli looked around. “You said there were more?”
    Black Hawk lifted another two spears from the sticky mud. The heads had been daubed with more of the square glyphs, though one of them had been partially washed away by the seawater. Billy found two more spears near the tunnel wall. One head bore only a hint of writing, and the second showed signs of a glyph that had been partially scraped away.
    “You’ll note how the lower third of the spear is dark and stained.”
    Black Hawk spun one of the weapons and plunged it butt-first into the ground. The water came up to the mark on the wood.
    “There would have been at least twelve spears,” Machiavelli said, “set out in a particular pattern in the mud.” His hand moved, describing an outline in the air. “The pattern would have formed a matrix of power.”
    “A what?” Billy asked.
    “Think of it as a sophisticated burglar alarm. The head of each spear would have been painted in woad, red ochre or perhaps blood.” He turned the flat head of a spear to the light. “These glyphs might look South American, but