This was the last obstacle, Damir had said, after some experimenting with a candle and other methods that looked nothing short of magic to Volya. Guess it made them even.
Damir swung the pickaxe. The metallic bang resonated off the stone.
Volya had secretly shut down his heart-rate monitor before they entered the cave. Because of this cunning move, nobody but him was aware of how hard his heart hammered against his rib-cage. For this, he also kept his human form.
His nice sister kept a few steps behind, slanting a beam of her flashlight over his shoulder. The centaurs must have sucked their stomachs in to fit through this bottleneck. Volya scraped his elbow by just trying to wipe the sweat off his face. At least they didn't have to bend down. The ceiling of the mountain's butt-crack was high, coming to a zigzagging line four or five feet above his head.
Damir swung again, muscles in his shoulders bulging under a sweat-stained t-shirt.
Marina took an instinctive step back, though her neck remained stretched forward, so tense that Volya could hear the blood rushing through her veins between his own booming heartbeats, ragged breath and the horrible sound of metal hitting stone.
Another hit of the pickaxe—and the stone wall imploded. After the dust settled and the echoes died down, a black gap opened up.
"Yes!" Volya yelled, "yes!"
This was it!
Forgetting where he was, Volya pumped his fist in the air... and hit his funny bone. Before he rubbed the tingling off, cursing, Marina picked a rock and pushed it into his hands. It was about twice the size of a modern brick but five times as heavy.
Good thing all the earthworks build up his muscles. Instead of breaking at the waist with an oouf from the unexpected load, he handed the rock to Kramola.
They had it down to science by now. You got handed a rock, you didn't ask questions. You passed it onto the next pal, sending it out of the cave via the makeshift conveyor belt of hands and paws. And if you were outside the cave, you stacked them in the approved pile.
Luckily, they didn't have to photograph, weigh and label each and every rock, shard and speck of dust, much to Damir's chagrin. And that was the guy who pontificated how accounting was boring!
With a few mighty strokes, Damir expanded the hole in the wall.
Marina handed more rocks to Volya. Volya handed them to Kramola. Kramola handed them to Nadezhda whenever she didn't breathe down Volya's neck.
Nadezhda must have secured her flash-light on some natural shelf in the wall, because its beam illuminated various parts of Damir, as well as dirt and rock beyond.
A couple of times Volya could have sworn, he glimpsed something that was too white to be natural stone. Bones, it had to be bones!
"Damir, please!" Volya finally pleaded. "Are you aiming to erect the Arc de Triomphe or what?"
All they needed was an opening big enough to peek through and see if Yasuwa's bones were stashed inside.
Volya squirmed like he needed to pee. Just big enough... Because it was August 21-st already. Effing twenty-first! Two-one zero-eight. Liam was probably packing right now for goodness' sake.
"Fine." Damir heaved a sigh. "Let's go with this... 'or what'." He lowered his pickaxe and put his hand up, signaling them to back off.
They backpedaled, Kramola less than willingly. So unwillingly, in fact, that Volya stepped on her toe. "Sorry." He wasn't.
Equally, her responding scoff didn't convey, no biggie, my beloved brother!
Damir turned sideways, allowing them all a better view of the gap. It was black. Pitch-black. Like, you know, inside of a cave.
After a moment of contemplating this revelation, they sprung into action. Nadezhda passed the flashlight to Kramola, Kramola passed it to Volya, Volya passed it to Marina, Marina passed it to Damir. Damir waved the beam around to show them the sights.
The very first glimpses sped Volya's heart so much that he momentarily got freaked out that his monitor would turn on through the energy of pure suggestion.
As much as he had told himself that this wasn't going to be a Temple of Doom with web-coated skeletons, jeweled crowns and rusty swords, he couldn't stop his imagination from running wild. It conjured the scenes from the adventure movies in his mind's eyes.
In reality, what he saw was dirt that somehow invaded the floor of the almost circular chamber.
The cold damp wafted from inside, touching his burning cheeks, not entirely unpleasantly. The cave smelled not of decay, but of wet stone. Somewhere, invisible, water dripped. This rhythmic sound was amplified by the stone surfaces.
The middle of the cave had stones protruding from the silt, some by more than a foot, some practically buried. The pattern was a spiral, Volya guessed, following the maze with his eyes. A maze for eternity.
Further down, by the opposite wall, the white splotches, indeed, beckoned. They absolutely had to be bones.
"Moisture got in." Damir's voice echoed with an otherworldly sadness. That's what speaking in a gothic cathedral must have felt like. "Sediment washed in."
Marina muttered a few words Volya didn't expect from her under any circumstances.
Staunchly ignoring the bones, Damir searched the ceiling with the flashlight, as if expecting to find the offending leak and plug it.
Marina grabbed Damir's arm. The beam from the flashlight moved back to the floor level. Go, Marina, go!
While Damir and Marina struggled, the light made another circle before it streaked past the biggest pale splotch.
Volya cried out in one voice with the mist-wolf that howled in his head so loudly, that his hands flew up to squeeze his temples.
Damir jerked his hand back, putting the unmistakable shape into the spotlight: the cranial bone of a human skull. The sockets, one undamaged, another one—almost completely destroyed, stared at them from underneath the pronounced brow ridge. The skull didn't have the lower part to give Volya a characteristic grin, but the jaw could have well been in the pile of bones underneath it. It was a big pile, with huge humerus etc, protruding, far, far further out than one would have expected from a human skeleton.
There could be no doubt—they had finally met. The man who had displaced Volya's people millennia ago; who had been cursed by his father; whose body might have had broken on a rock Volya had trodden on his way here... This man stared blankly at him.
"Hello, Yasuwa." Volya bowed with a flourish. "We met at last."
The shadows inside the dead-head didn't glisten like the eyes of the living, but Volya didn't read emptiness in this eternal stare. The darkness within was different from the darkness of the cave. Yasuwa gazed back at him after the millennia of solitude.
Marina, still in control of Damir's arm, moved their flashlight between the smaller piles of bones, all of them positioned by the walls. Thousand years ago, they probably were spaced evenly.
Volya couldn't bring himself to study or count them. He stared Yasuwa down, as if it were his duty.
"There." Marina pointed with the beam of light, "more petroglyphs."
Volya didn't look at the petroglyphs either. He probably would have wasted hours staring down ancient bones of a centaur, but Kramola pushed past him. She angled straight for Yasuwa's skull.
"Is that it?"
"Don't touch it!"
Volya reeled from how loud his scream came out, how it echoed off the domed ceiling. He didn't apologize this time. What could he do but howl? His vision had split into two again, and he was seeing Yasuwa's body, a broken jumble of limbs and flesh, being arranged by the wall.
The mist-wolf echoed, a splitting, shrill howl reverberating from temple to temple, bringing blood out of his nose in a spurt. "Noooo!"
Kramola advanced on him with a frown. "Is. That. It?"
When he didn't respond, she rounded on Nadezhda, who, in the meantime, lit up another flashlight. Despite the gravity of the situation, a smile fleeted to Volya's lips—she was resourceful like that, his twin-sister.
Nadezhda shone the flashlight into Kramola's face.
Volya's smile grew even wider. Yup, very resourceful.
"Is that it?" Kramola demanded, shielding her eyes. "Or do I bag every bone I can find?"
Nadezhda didn't answer. Her glazed, unseeing eyes—and the light—fixed on Yasuwa bones.
Moving like a C-3PO she cut through the maze, to stop about three feet away from Yasuwa's bones. It was as if the skeleton had a super-magnet's pull, drawing her in. But, Volya noticed, she picked her way carefully to avoid damaging the ancient maze.
There she crouched and extended her hands, palms down. Never touching the bones.
"The Snake guards the skull of the Horse."
Volya saw it too. The snake weaving in and out of the ancient bones. One second it was a shadow, another—a solid, glistening ribbon of red and black diamonds.
His breath came in raspy bursts, one burst for every loop of the shadow-snake.
"Don't touch the bones, sister."
Both of them should refrain, actually, but he didn't say that for Nadezhda's sake. Nadezhda knew better. He had every faith in her. It was his other sister who needed a warning.
Damir crossed the cave in two insanely wide strides, positioning himself in the middle of the maze, half-way between Yasuwa-Nadezhda odd pairing and Kramola.
"We," he started in a quivering voice, "We should seal this tomb."
***
AN: Did you know? At the University of Tennessee you can view this reimagined excavation of a centaur.