Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries Read Free

their daughter, Cornsilk, and the man who would become Cornsilk’s husband, and the greatest prophet in their history, the Blessed Poor Singer.
    In the final scramble for power in a dying nation, the First People had grown suspicious of each other. They started hiring assassins to take each other’s lives. They called them White Moccasins and considered them to be sacred warriors. The rulers selected their best warriors, groups of no more than ten, and sent them out to destroy anyone who might threaten them. They paid these assassins too handsomely to believe, showering them with baskets of coral, jet, turquoise, and rare seashells from the distant oceans. The fools did not realize what would happen next. When you give men such unrestrained power and wealth, it is like a Spirit plant in the veins. The assassins quickly amassed enough wealth so that they could adopt their own rules for who should live and who should die. Few escaped their wrath.
    As Stone Ghost walked, a young man’s face peered out from his memory. The ghostly eyes watched, unblinking, large and black, trying to measure his soul.
    Is that what had happened twenty sun cycles ago? Stone Ghost had been fighting White Moccasins and hadn’t known it?
    Stone Ghost ignored the phantom’s gaze and climbed step after step, feeling tightness in his withered leg muscles. The sandals on his age-thickened feet looked more like dark blobs against the ground. He had seen the like on the paintings his people did on sandstone cliffs.
    I am nothing more. A thin drawing. Colors dabbed on the stone face of life. He could feel parts of himself flaking away, fading; just as paint made from flowers, fat, and charcoal did after too many searing suns.
    The face in his memory nodded, the eyes large with sad anger.
    “Forgive me, I was as arrogant as my ancestors,” he whispered to the hovering apparition. “ Two Hearts set the trap, but I was the weapon he wielded.”
    What difference would it have made if Ocher—yes, that was the young warrior’s name—had lived and sired children? With the coughing disease, the constant raids, with clans turning against their own, and drought, famine, and holy war broken loose in the land, would Ocher’s life have meant anything? Or would he and his just be more moldering bodies lying in the bottom of some burned kiva? Had his death been such a tragedy, or only the difference of a couple of sun cycles?
    Stone Ghost stepped over the crest of the terrace and gazed out at the sunset; it lay bruised against an indigo horizon of flat-topped buttes. To his right a pile of stones lay in a jumble: one of the First People’s shrines, abandoned and collapsed.
    “What are you doing out here?” a voice hissed from one side. His nephew, War Chief Browser, rose from behind a sagebrush. He had a round face with thick
black brows and a flat nose. A gray blanket, the color of the soil, draped his shoulders. “Uncle Stone Ghost, didn’t I tell you to stay in the village? Did you forget?”
    Stone Ghost smiled. He did seem to be getting terribly forgetful of late, so his nephew’s words didn’t particularly bother him. He answered, “The only thing I forgot is how foolish you are.”
    Browser gave him an irritated look and hooked his war club to his belt again. In the twilight the angry red scar on Browser’s forehead looked purple. A bandage swathed his arm.
    Browser turned. “It’s my uncle,” he called in a soft voice.
    “I know.”
    From several paces away, Catkin stood. A beautiful woman, she had cut her hair in mourning, and it hung about her oval face in irregular locks. Her long legs and slim figure made her appear taller than she was. She cast wary glances over the edge of the terrace.
    “What are you doing out here, Uncle?” Browser demanded. “You, of all people, should know how dangerous it is. The White Moccasins might be anywhere.”
    “You and Catkin are not up here hunting White Moccasins, Nephew.” Stone Ghost looked down