Secret Of The Slaves. Alex Archer

smelled a waft of greens and warm, moist, dark earth—

      She and Dan had spent a hot, tiring and unproductive day trolling the museums, the dark shops and bustling outdoor markets for clues to the fabled lost city of Promessa. As far as Annja was concerned it was anything but promising. For all the apparent conviction of Mafalda’s warning to them the day before, Annja was beginning to suspect they were on a wild-goose chase. And Annja knew enough about folk beliefs and culture to understand too well that Mafalda’s role in the community practically demanded she be a skilled actress.

      But now—

      With a sense of foreboding rising up her neck and tingling at the hinges of her jaw, Annja turned her head.

      A figure stood at the foot of her bed. It was a shadow molded in the shape of a human. As she stared, the light of a streetlight and the half-moon glowed through inadequate curtains and enabled her wide eyes to resolve the form into what seemed to be an Amazonian man, short, wide shouldered, with a braided band holding long heavy hair away from what the shadows suggested was his darkly handsome face. His lean-muscled torso was bare; he appeared to be wearing only a loincloth of some sort.

      As almost self-consciously quaint as this older part of Belém could be, the apparition had no more place in the climate-controlled room in a modern city than a pterodactyl or knight in armor. I don’t believe in ghosts, she thought.

      “I am real,” the apparition said. Did he read my mind, she wondered, or did I speak aloud?

      “You must stop asking the questions you are asking,” the man said. “Please. Otherwise untold harm will result.”

      She struggled to sit up in bed, her heart racing.

      “What about the harm you’re doing by withholding your secrets from the world?” She said it more to see if she got a response than from any belief that such harm was being done, or that such secrets even existed. “Isn’t that the ultimate selfishness?”

      The man shook his head. “You speak of things you do not understand,” he said sadly. “There are many things you do not know, and cannot be permitted to know.”

      “That’s ridiculous.” Anger at the violation of her privacy mixed with the adrenaline of fear surged within Annja.

      “You have been warned,” the man said sorrowfully. “We are willing to die to protect our secret. Consider what we will do to you, if we must.” His apparent sadness only added mass to the soft menace of his words.

      Annja whipped the sheet clear of her with a matador twirl and jumped from the bed. The sword came into her hand.

      During the eyeblink that the sheet obscured her vision, her mysterious sad-voiced visitor had vanished. As if into thin air.

      Scowling ferociously, she searched the room, sword almost quivering with eagerness to strike. Sometimes it seemed to have almost a life of its own.

      She didn’t like to think such thoughts. They smacked of madness. She pushed them firmly from her mind.

      M OMENTS LATER Annja found herself standing barefoot on the threadbare green-and-maroon flower-patterned carpet in the hallway, wrapped in a white bathrobe, aware that her hair and eyes were both wild. She did not carry the sword, since she felt a grim certainty she was much more likely to encounter alarmed innocent tourists or hotel staff than any crafty cat burglars.

      What she did encounter was Dan Seddon, wearing a pair of weathered jeans and a look at once furious and bewildered. His own hair stood out in random directions. Annja thought he resembled Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons she’d loved growing up. She fought a semihysterical impulse to giggle.

      “So I wasn’t the only one who had a night visitor,” Dan said. “You look like an avenging angel on a bad-hair day.”

      “You’re a great one to talk, Calvin,” she said.

      He looked confused. “Never mind,” she said. “What did you see?”

      “A woman,” he said. “Tall, thin, looked African. Had one of those headdresses on, the ones with the flared tops.” He had extensive experience in sub-Saharan Africa, Annja recalled. “She warned me not to keep seeking the quilombo of dreams.”

      “And I suppose she vanished without a trace?”

      “Absolutely. I rolled over to turn on the bedside lamp. When I rolled back I was all alone. Creepy.”

      He made a sound deep in his throat that might have been a chuckle, or passed for one. “Something like this tempts a man to believe there might actually be something to the stories about these Promessans possessing mystic powers.”

      It was Annja’s turn to produce an inarticulate noise, this a distinctly unladylike grunt of confirmed skepticism. “It’s some kind of trick. It’s got to be.”

      “Was your window open? You find any sign the door had been jimmied?” Dan looked at her intently for a moment. “From your expression I’m taking that as a no on both counts.”

      “Well…still. I’m not ready to buy into astral projection or anything,” Annja said.

      He shrugged. “Come to that, if they have some kind of technique of holographic projection, that’d be pretty significant in and of itself, wouldn’t it? Moran seems to think whatever secrets the Promessans have are primarily technological, although he doesn’t say much about the mystic-powers thing one way or another.”

      “But I smelled him. He smelled of soil and plants. Like the rain forest.”

      Dan shrugged. “The Department of Defense was claiming to be able to stimulate various kinds of sensory hallucinations by beaming microwaves directly into people’s skulls in the late 1990s,” he said. “Maybe the Promessans are using a technology that isn’t really that advanced. Just secret.” He uttered a short laugh. “I’m surprised the capitalists haven’t started using it for ads, though. Imagine billboards beamed directly into your brain!”

      “I’d rather not, thanks.” Annja compressed her lips. “Still, I had the absolute conviction he was really, physically there. That I could have hit him with my…fist…if I’d only been quick enough.”

      Dan laughed again, in a lighter tone. “Publico said you were a martial-arts expert with more than a little rough-and-tumble experience. I like that in a woman. And yeah, I had the same sense about the woman in my room. Although it didn’t occur to me to hit her. But which impossibility is going to upset your worldview the most? Astral projection, some kind of technological projection, or teleportation?”

      “I think I’ll just go back to bed,” she said, “and try not to speculate in the absence of sufficient data.”

      “Or an overabundance of uncomfortable data.”

      “I thought you were the hardheaded, skeptical type, too,” she said.

      He shrugged. “Maybe I’m more a reflex skeptic. Sometimes being a skeptic means distrusting the official explanation. Especially when you’ve seen official explanations revealed as flat-out lies as often as I have.”

      Standing in the hallway there was a sudden sense of awkwardness between them.

      Dan grinned. “Guess I’ll go back to bed, too,” he said. He tipped his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles.

      They stood there a moment longer, not precisely looking at each other, not precisely looking away. The dingy off-white wallpaper was starting to come away in patches on the wall, she noticed. No wonder, in this humidity.

      “Well,” he said, drawing it out just a little, “good night.” He turned and padded on his bare feet into his room and shut the door.

      “Night,” she said. She stood looking at his door for a couple of breaths longer. Then she went into her own room.

      She shut the door with more force than necessary.

      “