No Such Thing As Werewolves by Chris Fox Page B

much into things? “Steve has already done a lot of work with it, so you’ve got an incredible foundation to work with.”
    Blair slipped passed her, ducking through the flap and back into the keening wind. Apparently, Northern California’s warm winters had softened him more than he’d thought. Hopefully he’d adjust quickly.  
    Bridget and Sheila ducked through after him, still glaring at each other. Blair stifled a sigh, wondering who’d thought it a good idea to have the pair on the same dig. Things were worse between them than he’d ever imagined. It was disconcerting to see the pair at each other’s throats. Their words were friendly enough, but the underlying tone had been nasty. When Bridget and Blair had been together, they were like mismatched school girls, always gossiping and whispering. He knew why that had changed, but it still saddened him.
    “We’ve excavated a small portion of the wall on the northern slope and another on the southern,” Bridget explained, adjusting her ball cap to provide a bit more shade for her eyes. She wore sunglasses as well, but the glare of the sun was intense. “We wanted to see if the symbols along the lowest part of the face extended all the way around. We’re not positive they do, but we’ve found them everywhere we’ve cleared.”
    “Can you show me?” Blair asked, intensely curious. “The Mayans carved symbols into their pyramids, but the Egyptians left the outside blank.”
    “These symbols aren’t carved,” Sheila broke in, starting toward the pyramid. She threaded through a neighboring group of tents, plunging past the pavilions and toward the structure itself.  
    “Not carved? How did they get there, then? If they were painted, they would have flaked off millennia ago, especially if the pyramid was covered by soil. The acid would have eaten away at the ink,” Blair said, hurrying after her. He peered up at the massive structure, such a baffling enigma.
    The trio picked their way around the mound of dirt, the pyramid filling the sky above. Its gleaming ebony surface was blinding under the sun, a beacon that could have been seen for hundreds of miles if not sheltered by the peaks forming the ravine it rested in.
    Sheila plunged ahead, making for a break in the wall of dirt. The team had excavated a twenty-foot section of the pyramid’s base, revealing incredibly detailed hieroglyphs. The multicolored symbols covered a six-foot swathe, but it was neither their complexity nor their beauty that caused Blair’s jaw to drop. The symbols could have been laser etched. They were absolutely pristine. Whatever dye had been used caught the sunlight, causing the hieroglyphs to glitter and flow as if alive.
    The glyphs had similarities to both Mayan and Egyptian writings. They used clear logarithmic symbols to represent words. That brown one was clearly a mountain. The white, clearly a cloud. Animals of all sorts dotted the panels. Most were recognizable, though, some were long extinct species or fantastical imaginings of the glyphs’ creators.
    “What do you think?” Bridget asked, sidling up next to him. She seemed amused, though he’d bet she’d had a similar reaction when she’d first seen this.
    “I can see what you mean about the builders being incredibly advanced. I’m not sure we could replicate this today,” he admitted, moving closer to the wall. The symbols were even more impressive up close. Though he couldn’t read them, he was left with the impression that they were not mere symbols but rather whole words, much like Japanese Kanji.
    “I think the scope is what gets me,” Sheila added, touching a vibrant red fox. “The entire interior is covered in symbols like these, and it seems likely the whole base is as well. How long must that have taken, and how did they do it? We tried scraping off a sample, but steel didn’t so much as scratch it. We’ve placed an order for a diamond-tipped drill.”
    Something caught Blair’s eye. He wasn’t