Free The Dagger X (The Dagger Chronicles) by Brian Eames

took her hand in his and guided it over the top of the chest. They each scurried a few inches farther into the darkness. Together they felt something, also wooden. Another chest, small again. This one flipped open easily, and their fingers plumbed through the odd collection of shapes inside.
    “This is not gold,” Ontoquas said. “What is it?”
    “Jewels,” Kitto said, but Ontoquas did not know the word. Her fingers found something quite thin, a tiny chain. She withdrew it slowly from the chest and pulled it to her. Something hung from the chain, something small. It was a necklace. Ontoquas’s people made necklaces from the shells they collected, and from the beads they traded for with the white people. She knew necklaces. Her thin fingers separated the strands, and she draped it over her head.
    “See this,” she said. She found Kitto’s hand and pulled it to her. Why do I find it so easy to touch him? she wondered. She led his hand to the chain, and pushed into his palm the small medallion that hung from it.
    “ ’Tis a cross,” Kitto said. That much he could tell, but there was some other knobbylike protrusion at the bottom that did not make sense to him.
    Ontoquas understood. “Jesus Christ,” she said.
    “Yes. Do you know . . . about him?” Kitto let go of the medallion.
    “Yes. Men come to my people to tell us of him. Man and God. But we have our own gods.”
    Kitto turned back to the chests. The tunnel waswider, and he felt that there was room to move to one side of the first chest. He did so and reached farther back. He felt a third chest. There were at least five if his childhood memory served, and then some loose large items toward the back. He pivoted into a crawling position and painstakingly clambered deeper into the tunnel. Ontoquas stayed where she was, running her hand through the contents of the second chest.
    “How did you know this place?” she said. Moving forward, Kitto felt a fourth chest, then a fifth.
    “When I was a little boy, I dragged all of this in here.”
    “You?”
    “Yes.” He lurched forward a length, and reached beyond the fifth and last chest. His hands rested on something smooth and flat, like a broad bar.
    “I was the only one who could fit in here,” he said as he ran his hands along the bar that lay flat on the floor. “I remember it was all so heavy, but I had to get them around this corner so they could not be seen from the outside if someone had a torch.”
    “Why . . .” The words eluded Ontoquas. Why did these have to be hidden? Wasn’t the cave hiding place enough?
    “I am not sure,” Kitto said, understanding her confusion. “But there was something about this gold, these jewels. Something very special, and almost no one knew about it. My uncle, I remember he told me it was a secret. A ‘family secret,’ he said.” Kitto’s hands bumped against something resting on the bar, something solid but odd in shape. He ran his fingers along it. What is it?
    He edged closer. The object was heavy, but with considerable effort he was able to lift it up and run his hands along its bumpy surface. It, too, was hard, certainly made of metal. Gold? He did not know. It was perhaps two feet tall with a central section and then two parts that reached out, one to the left and one to the right.
    “A cross,” he said.
    “What is it?”
    It was not the cross part he held, Kitto knew. That was the smooth bar on the ground. In his hands was the figure of Jesus Christ, arms spread out in the position of his crucifixion. The figure must attach somehow to the cross on the ground. Kitto ran his hands along the top and felt the sharp points of the crown of thorns at the figure’s head.
    “More of the same,” he said, not sure how he could explain it. Effortfully, Kitto lowered the figure gently back to the ground. It certainly had the heft of gold. But if it were gold, what would the value of something so large be? He could not fathom it.
    “I am coming