Slowly the maze of corridors grew narrower, and they ran across fewer people. Eventually they reached a walkway the golf cart couldn’t navigate and Wolf parked along the wall.
This section of the facility looked old, ancient even, the path carved from damp stone. Rawls followed Wolf in silence. A hundred feet in, his escort suddenly took a hard right and disappeared through the rugged rock wall. Rawls blinked, but he didn’t see the narrow, irregular gap in the wall until he was right next to it.
It was a tight fit squeezing his body through the opening, which meant Wolf must have scraped off a layer of skin forcing his considerably larger frame through the hole. More of those caged lamps burned along the walls of another narrow corridor. He could just make out Wolf’s big shadow ahead and increased his stride.
The rock passage wound from left to the right, but after the fourth bend, it opened into a large cavern. Rawls stopped in the mouth of the cave and stared. Caged lamps ringed the walls here too, but several were dark. Flickering shadows twisted and twined along the stone, highlighting faded white-and-red images of stick animals and stick people and strange prehistoric symbols that reminded him of cave paintings he’d seen in National Geographic.
They looked old, thousands of years old. Reluctantly, he dragged his gaze from the walls to check out the rest of the room. In the middle of the cave, large white rocks, identical in size and color, had been placed next to each other, so close they were touching, and then curved into a perfect circle. Outside the circle of white rocks were four split logs. Each log was braced on more of the white rocks to form a bench.
Rawls slowly stepped into the room.
In front of each bench burned a small fire ringed with smaller white stones. The scent of smoke hung heavy in the air and stung his eyes.
“Come,” Wolf said from his left, and Rawls turned.
His escort was standing beside four men with graying braided hair and a patchwork of wrinkles carved into their leathery faces. Each of the elders wore a poncho-type garment made out of hide. Etched on the front was the same layered sunburst symbol that was woven into the hiixoyooniiheiht.
Like the amulet that had been given to him and the one Jude carried, each of the elders’ ponchos was embossed with dual colors, but in varying combinations.
The elder closest to him wore a sunburst of deep red and vivid yellow. The elder closest to Wolf carried colors of forest and pea green. Another, blue and yellow. The last, flat red and vivid green. Rawls sensed that the colors had some significance, but doubted he’d be told what it was. It wasn’t until he got closer that he noticed each of the elders carried a leather pouch with a sunburst matching the design on their garments.
Once he was in front of them, Rawls stopped and shifted uncomfortably. Should he offer a greeting and handshake? Or would touching them be considered an insult?
“They are ready to begin,” Wolf said, taking the decision out of Rawls’s hands. “Give me your hiixoyooniiheiht.” He waited until Rawls had removed the cord from around his neck and handed the weaving over. “You will stand beside me until they give you leave to summon your biitei.”
Rawls nodded his understanding. The elders started to chant, their voices lifting and waning in unison. In a straight line, led by the man with the red-and-yellow sunburst, they began a slow, rocking path to the circle of white stones. As they traveled the outside edge of the circle and slowly rocked a chanting path around the white rocks, their hands would dip into the pouches hanging at their sides and toss whatever they removed into the circle.
And sweet hell, with each toss from the pouches, the small fires burning so sedately in front of the log benches would erupt into spitting, hissing, ferocious flames. After two trips around the circle, the elders stopped and shouted. Whatever they said was in Arapaho, so Rawls couldn’t understand it, but Wolf did. Stepping forward, he handed Rawls’s hiixoyooniiheiht to the leader wearing red and yellow and then took three huge steps back.
The elder held the object up and the chanting resumed. The rocking, chanting parade continued with two revolutions to the right, at which point the elders pivoted and did three more to the left. And then suddenly, when each elder was in front of a bench, they simply stopped. Silently, three of the men sat behind their small fires, leaving only Red Poncho to stand and chant. After a few more seconds of chanting and rocking—standing in place this time—the elder dropped the corded amulet into the flames at his feet.
The fire spat, flames leapt, devouring the weaving instantly. Once the fire had settled back into its sedate glow, the elder motioned Rawls over.
“It is time,” the man said in perfect English. “Summon your biitei.”
Yeah . . . how did one go about summoning a ghost? That wasn’t something taught in SQ training.