Bathsheda stepped through the Portkey landing point and immediately regretted not dressing lighter. The jungle hit her like a warm wet cloth across the face. She adjusted her bag on her shoulder and looked around.
The site was different from two years ago. Quieter, for one. The dig equipment was gone, the tents reduced to a handful of working shelters clustered near the treeline. The local warders had expanded the perimeter wards considerably, she could feel them from here, layered and careful, the kind of work that had been added to over time rather than thrown up in a hurry.
She approved.
Xul'al was waiting at the edge of the outer ward line, arms folded, watching her cross the clearing.
"Professor Babbling."
"Elder Xul'al." Bathsheda stopped beside her and looked toward the pyramid. "What happened?"
Xul'al turned and walked without answering straight away. Bathsheda fell into step beside her.
The old Keeper let out a breath. "Greece temple must've been unearthed. Itza is restless."
Bathsheda's steps slowed. She glanced toward the pyramid, though the canopy blocked most of it from here. The humming she'd felt on arrival made more sense now. Not the ambient magic of an old site. Something reactive, responding to a disturbance somewhere else entirely.
Her left ring finger pulsed faintly. She pressed her thumb against it without thinking. The rune there was warm. Cassian was alive and, probably, being insufferably competent somewhere else.
She let the breath go and kept walking.
"How long has it been restless?" she asked.
"Four days," Xul'al said. "The outer wards held. Your spiral anchors didn't shift. But the stone itself started resonating two nights ago. The frequency's wrong for the seal."
"Wrong how?"
"Pulling inward instead of holding flat." Xul'al paused at the edge of the inner perimeter, where the treeline thinned and the pyramid's lower tiers were visible through the gap. "Like something's tugging at it from underneath."
Bathsheda looked at the stone. From here she could see the lowest layer of the runic ring she'd laid two years ago, pale lines running across the grey surface. At a glance they looked undisturbed. She unshouldered her bag and crouched at the ward boundary, fingers hovering just above the ground.
"Has anyone touched the formation?" she asked.
"No."
"Attempted to?"
Xul'al hesitated for a second. "One of the younger warders thought he could reinforce the outer loop. We stopped him."
"Good." Bathsheda straightened. "Reinforcing it wrong would've made this worse. The spirals aren't independent rings, they're a single continuous structure. You add pressure to one point and the whole thing redistributes the load."
Xul'al nodded, unsurprised. She'd watched Bathsheda build it. She understood more than most.
They crossed the inner perimeter and the temperature dropped noticeably, not the cold of shadow but the stillness that came from heavy warding. The warders stationed along the lower layers noticed her immediately. A few straightened. One of the older ones, a man she recognised from two years ago, gave a nod.
She set her bag down near the base of the first tier and pulled out her notebook. The spiral runes were intact, which was the first thing she checked. No breaks or displacement. There wasn't any sign of the stone shifting beneath them. The lines ran clean and continuous along the surface exactly as she'd left them.
Which meant the problem wasn't in the seal. It was below it. She pressed her palm flat to the stone and closed her eyes. The pulse came again, that irregular inward tug, and underneath it something else. Faint, deeply buried, but moving frequency. Rhythm that felt almost like breathing.
She pulled her hand back and sat with that for a moment.
"It's not reacting to Greece," she said. "Or not only. Something here is waking independently."
Xul'al had settled a few feet away, watching. "We thought the same."
"The seal isn't failing." Bathsheda began sketching the frequency as best she could represent it in rune notation. "It's being pressed from the inside. Like something is testing the boundaries without yet trying to break them."
"Testing," Xul'al repeated. "You think it's aware."
Bathsheda considered that. "Aware isn't the word I'd use. More like... orienting. Like plants growing toward light even before fully formed." She paused over her notes. "It knows something has changed. Somewhere else in the world, something connected to it shifted. And it's starting to respond."
She looked at the pyramid.
"I need to reinforce the anchor points," she said. "There are four load-bearing points along the base where the original working is sunk deepest into the stone. If I can strengthen those, it will hold the inward pressure from the inside."
Xul'al stepped closer. "How long?"
"A few days if nothing complicates it." Bathsheda pulled a piece of chalk from her bag. "I'll need the warders kept back from the north face while I work. The frequency here is close enough to the surface that any additional magical interference could muddy the signal."
The warders had cleared back. Xul'al stood at the edge of the perimeter, watching without interrupting. Bathsheda began to draw.
She was halfway through the third anchor point when she felt something off. She straightened slowly, chalk still in hand. She turned to look at the eastern treeline. The birds had stopped chirping.
Xul'al had gone very still at the perimeter edge, head slightly tilted, eyes on the same direction.
Bathsheda set the chalk down quietly and rose to her feet, her wand already in her hand.
Six shadows emerged from the treeline. Dark robes, hoods drawn, not the rough field gear of researchers or the practical clothing of warders. These were dressed for something entirely different. Each had a wand raised before they'd fully cleared the trees, and the spells that came out weren't diagnostic or warning shots.
They were aimed to kill.
Bathsheda threw a shield across the north face of the pyramid so fast the chalk lines she'd drawn flared and locked into it automatically. The first volley cracked against it and the stone behind her shuddered but held.
Xul'al shouted something in Mayan. The warders at the perimeter responded immediately, wands drawn, moving to flank positions along the ward boundary.
The Covenant.
Of course.
"Ash!"
The rune on her forearm blazed. The air split open. Ash came out screaming. She uncurled from the air above the pyramid in a sweep of crimson-black, wings throwing a shadow across the whole north face, and the six robed figures scattered on instinct. Two of them threw shields up fast.
One didn't.
Ash's tail clipped him across the chest and sent him spinning into the treeline. He hit a trunk with a sound like a snapping branch and didn't get up immediately.
Bathsheda moved the moment Ash had their attention, dropping low and cutting sideways along the base of the pyramid. One of them recovered fast and sent a curse screaming past her left ear, close enough that the air burned. She pressed her back to the stone and breathed.
Xul'al ordered others into the battle formation. The warders split into two flanking lines, the senior ones driving forward while the younger pair fell back to guard the outer wards. Good instincts. Keep them from the seal first, worry about winning second.
A bolt of compressed dark magic tore through the clearing and one of the young warders went down hard, shield shattered, arm folded. His partner dragged him back behind the ward line, both of them out of the fight.
Bathsheda swore under her breath. She raised her wand and murmured. The darkness came out fast, swallowing the light in a ten-foot radius around her position. Lumos Noctis, eating everything it touched. She heard one of them shout in surprise and another curse sharply in a language she didn't recognise.
She was already moving before they could adjust. She stepped left along the pyramid base, silent in the darkness, and pressed her palm to the ground, raising four rough shapes from the dirt, human-sized, head and shoulders, scattered at angles across the clearing. They wouldn't fool anyone up close. But it would do.
She threw a voice illusion into the air above the false shapes and listened. Three of them responded to the decoys. Spells cracked out rapidly. She felt the directions.
Two had gone wide, circling to flank. One of the flanking pairs was already halfway to the wards, going for the seal directly. Ash hit him from above, driving him backward with her snout buried in his chest. He fired straight at her face. The blast caught her jaw and she recoiled with a sound that shook the clearing, smoke curling from her scales, but she didn't go down. She snapped, and he scrambled backward off and dropped hard to the ground below.
He got up. That was the problem with these six. They didn't go down easily.
Xul'al had engaged the two who'd broken toward the outer perimeter. She fought like someone who had been fighting since before half the people here were born. She turned a killing curse with a ward so dense it physically displaced air and sent a retaliatory chain of binding work at the first figure that would have stopped a charging centaur. He tore through it. It slowed him. She used the two seconds it bought to get Keeper Teo in position to hit him from the side.
Teo's spell, something dark and fast from a tradition Bathsheda didn't fully know, punched through the figure's guard and dropped him to one knee. First real damage on that side. But the second one had Xul'al pinned behind her own ward and was methodically dismantling it, layer by layer.
Bathsheda turned back to her own problem.
Two of the remaining figures had spread wide, one on each side, classic bracketing. She was between them and the pyramid behind her was not a position she could hold. She needed space.
She moved toward the clearing's centre, drawing them with her, and raised her wand.
"Aero Spicula."
The air compressed in front of her and then three bolts of pure pressure shrieked out in a fan. The left figure threw herself sideways, the right one threw up a block, a good one, solid, the kind that would have been impenetrable from a standard casting.
Her version hit harder than standard. The block fractured and the figure behind it staggered, arm thrown wide, guard broken for two seconds.
The left figure came at her fast, closing the distance. At close range the enormous killing spells became a liability. The woman had to adjust and in the half-second she took Bathsheda shoved her elbow into the inside of her wand arm, a purely physical disruption, and the spell that fired went into the ground.
The woman grabbed her by the robes and threw her.
Bathsheda hit the dirt, rolled, came up with blood in her mouth.
Ash screamed overhead. She was keeping two of them occupied by the pyramid steps, taking hits that should have put her down and refusing to fall, but the scales on her left flank were dark and slick and she was favouring that side. She couldn't do this indefinitely.
Teo shouted something and Bathsheda looked up to see him go down, a curse hitting him in the back while his attention was on the figure Xul'al had been fighting. He dropped and didn't move. The figure who'd hit him turned toward Xul'al.
Three Keepers left. Two figures still mobile on that side.
Bathsheda got to her feet and wiped her mouth. Her arm ached from the throw. The figure who'd done it was already coming back at her, and the one she'd contained had broken free, the containment spell scattered across the ground in fragments.
She was down to the last option she'd been avoiding because she wasn't sure it would work, and because Cassian had told her about it while laughing in that way that meant he was serious and pretending not to be.
"Technically birds," he'd said, "if you go back far enough."
Bathsheda raised her wand and cast Avis.
The magic went down instead of up, boring into the earth below the clearing, and she fed it pure intent, ancient, enormous, feathered, territorial, bird-shapes from the part of history that had not yet learned to be small.
The ground erupted.
Three of them came out. A shape that might have been a Carnotaurus, something like an Ankylosaurus only larger and angrier-looking, and one that was mostly neck and head, moving with the kind of velocity that suggested it had opinions about being called into existence in a jungle clearing not far from the cause of its extinction.
The figure coming at her ran straight into the neck-and-head one.
She heard the impact from ten feet away.
The Ankylosaurus shape moved toward the pyramid steps and the two figures harassing Ash pulled back sharply, and for one second the whole clearing shifted as everyone on both sides took stock of what had just walked into the fight.
Ash shrieked in approval.
The remaining free figures rallied. They were regrouping near the treeline, which was the correct tactical choice, and Bathsheda watched them do it without moving to stop them. She couldn't. Her arm hurt, her legs were shaking, and the conjured shapes wouldn't last more than another minute before the spell-mass burned through.
Xul'al stepped up beside her, breathing hard. There was blood at her temple and her robe was torn from the shoulder but she was upright and her staff was steady.
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