Restless Soul - Alex Archer [60]
Annja found Zakkarat on the rise just past the opposite bank, on a narrow game trail leading up the mountain. He’d been dead for at least a few hours, she could tell with a practiced glance, his legs riddled with bullets and a knife stuck in the middle of his chest.
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It was an older military knife, the leather-wrapped handle cracked from age and stained with oil. Annja stared at it, anger and sadness welling up.
“A senseless death.”
She said a silent prayer and allowed herself only a few moments to grieve for Zakkarat and wonder how to find his family and deliver the news. The lodge, she decided, from which he gave tours, would be a good place to start. Someone there would know how to contact his wife. She tugged off his shirt, tried futilely to shoo away the flies with it and laid it across his chest and face. The pockets of it had been ripped, as had his pants pockets. The pieces of jewelry that he’d looped around his neck and stuck on his fingers were gone, too. It looked as if a few of his fingers had been broken in the process of recovering some of the pieces.
So the thieves took back their gains and left Zakkarat’s body to rot. He’d had no weapons. They could have regained the gold without killing him. He was no threat, save for knowing the location of their treasure cavern.
Three empty net bags were strewn a few yards away—what Zakkarat had intended to put more treasure in. She didn’t see the pack she’d put the skull bowl in and that he’d supposedly taken. So the thieves had probably grabbed that, too. She searched for it, though, combing through ferns and looking along the riverbank before finally giving up…and deciding to pursue the men who’d killed Zakkarat.
Annja would have gone after them regardless of whether they’d left behind the bowl. Partly a need for revenge, she recognized, but it was more of a need to stop them from killing anyone else who might chance to get in their way. She took a last look at Zakkarat’s corpse, trying to memorize its location so she could direct the authorities to it. To help, she took one of his net bags and tied it to a tree branch that overhung his body.
Then she started up the mountainside, her feet slipping in the sandals and occasionally getting stuck in pockets of mud. The tracks the men left were easy to follow—their heavy boot prints distinct despite all the rain, and they’d been careless with the foliage, breaking branches and smashing flowering plants in their wake. Even someone without tracking skills could have followed the path they made.
Although Annja knew she might have had difficulty locating the cavern on her own, the terrain being too unfamiliar to her, the men were making it easy. She hoped Luartaro had recovered enough to go in search of the appropriate authorities, that he could either accompany them or give them good enough directions, and that they might be on their way there soon.
Her feet pressed spent bullet shells into the ground as she climbed. She found the whole thing odd. A gun—the one she’d taken from one of the men and briefly used—was decades old, and an old-style military knife had been used on Zakkarat. She’d thought that men with so much treasure could have afforded more modern and expensive weapons. Perhaps they just favored things from the past.
Her mind touched the sword, and she called it into her hand before she had traveled very far up the side of the mountain. She heard or saw no evidence of the men being nearby, and therefore she had no immediate need for a weapon. But the sword’s pommel felt good against her palm, and she wrapped her fingers tight around it as she drew her lips into a thin line.
“I might not have found the cavern again on my own,” she said aloud. “At least not without quite a bit of searching. But you vile men are showing me the way. Might as well have put up a road sign, as clumsy as you idiots are. Please, still be