Ben looked around. “Beautiful.”
“But over time…”
Tenzin kicked at a pile of sheep droppings. “People graze animals. They have to eat.”
The more people, the less wild. That’s what Ben was learning the longer he lived. “At least this piece has been preserved,” he said. “Tenzin, where did Liya indicate the possible site was?”
Tenzin was already looking at the map. “This way.” She pointed past the wall. “This is one of the active sites she mentioned, so let’s take care not to wake up any priests.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” Daniel followed Tenzin, hopping over the stone wall and leaving the dark safety of the forest. “And let’s not tell my father we’re digging for treasure on holy ground, shall we?”
“It won’t be the first time,” Ben muttered.
Daniel shot him a dirty look.
“What?” Ben looked around at the terrain as they left the shelter of the church forest.
There were no houses nearby, and only the hint of cultivated land that started on the terraced hillsides. Still, his senses were on alert.
“Are you getting any old vampire signatures?” Daniel asked Tenzin.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “None of our kind have been here in a long time.”
“I’m sensing the same thing,” Daniel said. “Lots of human activity, but no immortal.”
“That’s good.” Ben watched Daniel. “Are you getting anything from the ground yet?”
“Not yet.” He looked at them, then looked at the ground. “Just to warn you, I need to get significantly more naked to do this properly.”
“That’s what she said,” Tenzin muttered.
Ben looked up. “Tiny!”
Tenzin looked surprised. “What?”
“That joke actually worked.” Ben was astonished. Tenzin’s attempts at anything approaching a joke about sex usually fell very flat. “Good job.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve been out of isolation for fifteen years now, and I can finally tell a joke that makes sense.”
He looked at her while Daniel was stripping to his skin. “You know what? Don’t minimize that accomplishment. You should be proud.”
“I know who should be proud, and it’s Daniel for his very well-developed—”
“You know what?” He put his arm around her shoulders and casually pinched her lips together. “Don’t spoil your moment of triumph. Let’s let the earth vampire work.”
“Mm shh gnnng naa ahshhh.”
“Shhhhh.” He kissed the top of her head. “We should be quiet.”
She reached up, grabbed his hand, and sank her fangs into his wrist.
“Ow.” Ben winced but didn’t say more. It hurt… but it also felt good.
Behold, the twisted nature of vampire relationships.
Daniel was lying on the ground; he was, in fact, stark naked. Ben and Tenzin watched as the ground slowly opened up and closed around him. He could feel Tenzin shudder under his arm. She dreaded being underground and sometimes lost hold of reality when that happened. He knew from firsthand experience that anything causing her to taste dirt was reason for concern.
Ben didn’t know if it was his imagination or not, but he could almost feel Daniel moving around below them.
“Tenzin, is there any way we could be—”
“You control air, Benjamin.” She looked up at him. “There is air everywhere. In the earth. In water. Even fire feeds on what we offer it.”
A light went on inside him. “Fire feeds on air.”
She nodded slowly.
“So if we needed to quench fire—”
“It takes very fine control,” she said. “But I know you’ve been thinking about Arosh.”
“But it’s possible? Nothing is a vacuum, so how would you—”
“How do you fly without eating bugs?” She cocked her head. “Think.”
“I create a bubble of air.”
She shrugged. “So create a bubble without air.” Tenzin walked off, tracking a subtle rise in the hillside that was overgrown with brush and a few wild flowers that hadn’t been eaten by the goats yet. She pushed her arms out, palms facing down. “Here.”
As if on cue, the ground beneath her started swelling. A few moments later, a filthy Daniel popped his head out of the ground like an overgrown meerkat. “I definitely found something.”
Ben crouched down. “Can you clear it?”
“It’ll take a while. The ruin isn’t intact. It’s all fallen in on itself.”
Ben knew that even unearthing a site without painstaking documentation was anathema to professional archaeology, but they simply didn’t have time. “Gently please,” he said. “Expose the site as carefully as you can.”
Daniel crawled out of the ground like a kid climbing out of a pool. He knelt on the ground and dug both hands into the earth. He was covered in dirt from head to toe, but Ben had to admit that watching him work was oddly entrancing.
The ground was re-forming before his eyes, a shaking, trembling shift that sent vibrations into the air and dust into the sky. Tenzin quickly wafted away the debris as centuries of topsoil, dust, animal bones, and rock were shunted away from the site in a smooth torus of earth.
Hours after he had begun, Daniel sat back and breathed out in relief while Ben and Tenzin stared at the ruins that now lay exposed to the night sky.
Daniel had exposed four walls and the collapsed structures within them. There were toppled benches and even a few pieces of dry wood that had been preserved beneath the ground.
“Amazing.” Tenzin rose and floated herself into the pit. “You have proven your worth, son of Carwyn.”
“Thanks.” Daniel looked exhausted. “I need to hunt.”
Tenzin waved him away. “There are plentiful cattle in a small pen halfway down the hill in that direction.” She pointed over her shoulder. “Let us work.”
Ben gingerly floated over the walls and joined Tenzin. “Where do we start?”
She pointed to some of the stones lying on the ground. “Here, do you see it?”
Ben crouched down. “It’s stained. Like… It’s dark, so maybe—”
“Fire.” Tenzin touched the toppled stone with the tip of her shoe. “What you’re seeing are scorch marks.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that Arosh and Saba were probably already here.” She stood in front of the last standing wall, which had flecks of paint still clinging to it. “This is a picture of a king, not a saint.”
“So this wasn’t a church.”
She frowned. “Depends on the king. There were numerous Ethiopian emperors—like Lalibela—who were priests as well as kings. Some are venerated as saints now.” She held her hand in front of the wall. “But no, I don’t think this was a church.” She looked around. “It’s not built correctly for that. You’ve seen Ethiopian Orthodox churches now. What’s missing?”
“I’ve seen newer churches, Tenzin. I don’t know if anything I’ve seen about them—”