The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries Read Free

was he doing here?
    Browser had joined the Katsinas’ People four summers ago because his wife threatened to leave him and take their infant son away if he did not join. He hated the katsinas. They had been Ash Girl’s gods, not his. But Ash Girl had been dead for nine moons, along with his precious son, Grass Moon. Why didn’t he go home to his own people? Warfare raged across the country. Most of his clan had been driven out of the northern mountains and taken refuge with other clans in the desert regions to the south. They needed him.
    Though I doubt they want me.
    He had just passed his twenty-ninth summer, but he felt old. Old and afraid. The constant sun and wind had turned his skin as brown as old leather. White strands sparkled in his black hair. And by now his family would have heard that he’d killed his own wife.
    Catkin eased up beside him and her face tensed. “Look.” She pointed to a large boulder thirty paces ahead.
    The painter had splashed white on the rock, then carefully filled the center with the black silhouette of a hunched beast.
    “What is it?” he whispered.
    “I can’t tell.”
    Something about the image struck him as menacing. It didn’t seem to be painted on the stone, but rather attached to it. Browser walked forward.
    Behind him, he heard Catkin’s steps, then she whispered, “Blessed Spirits.”
    Wisps of long gray hair clung to the mummy’s desiccated scalp. She had been laid on her side at death, her knees lifted and elbows bent. She had dried in a fetal position with her skeletal hands curled beneath her chin. Long ago her eyes had rotted away, leaving dark empty sockets to stare up at them.
    Catkin recoiled a step. “Look at her mouth.” Stubby brown teeth filled her gaping jaws. “She must have screamed at the end.”
    Browser studied the rope that wrapped the mummy’s waist and looped over the top of the boulder. “Someone hung her here for us to see.”
    “A warning not to take the trail down to the village?”
    He looked out at the fallen trees and rocks that loomed in the darkness. “Perhaps, but a mummy is a poor substitute for freshly mutilated bodies.”
    Catkin glanced around, then stepped closer to look at the mummy. “Where do you think she came from?”
    “Many of the dry caves in this region contain burials.” He gestured to the dark hollows that pocked the cliffs on the opposite side of the canyon. “They could have stumbled upon her while sneaking up to get a better look at Aspen village.”
    “And carried her away?” Catkin scoffed. “I do not think so. War parties travel fast and light. She would have been a silly burden.”
    “Warriors are often silly, Catkin. They do unfathomable things when they are tired and hungry.”
    The quartzite cobble on the end of Catkin’s war club lowered to the woman’s right wrist. “Her arms were broken. It looks like she used them to block blows.”
    The bones had not mended correctly and stuck out like knobs on old limbs.
    “But not blows from fists,” he said. “Something that could snap bone. An ax or stone-headed club.”
    Catkin’s war club moved to the mummy’s head. “Her arms weren’t the only things they struck.”
    The skull undulated like the surface of a rotten melon. The numerous small dents meant the woman’s skull had been cracked by a master, a man who knew how to strike hard enough to injure, but not hard enough to kill.
    “And look at this,” Catkin said.
    Browser knelt at Catkin’s side and saw the tattoo. Black spirals decorated the mummy’s chin. Three or maybe four. A cold sensation filtered through him. His grandmother and all of her people had proudly worn spirals on their chins. He did not know what the spirals stood for, but … it seemed odd that this ancient corpse would carry the same symbol. Could she be one of his distant relatives?
    Catkin whispered, “Isn’t that the same—”
    “My great-uncle, Stone Ghost, has three black spirals on his chin. My grandmother