There were very few residents in the town, and even the handful who remained stayed hidden inside their homes. Most of the people walking through the streets were Trinity soldiers. They carefully scrutinized everyone who passed by, and a high-powered jammer had even been installed on the raised platform in the center of town. If the Brotherhood had not started using some Cybertronian technology, Desmond Miles would have had no way to contact headquarters.
"That man should be Trinity's leader, Dr. Dominguez." Desmond Miles stood with Bella inside a crude two-story building, watching a middle-aged man outside the town in the distance as he spoke sternly about something.
Both of them possessed Eagle Vision, so a distance of more than a hundred meters posed no problem at all.
At a glance, Dr. Dominguez had the distinctive features of a local South American. His skin was rough, his build tall and lean, and his large hooked nose and severe gaze both suggested that he was an extremely difficult man to deal with.
Bella gave him only a casual glance before losing interest. He was not her target.
She asked Desmond Miles, "How are things going with the Paititi locals?"
The young assassin scratched his head awkwardly. Not long afterward, he brought over a woman with a yellow-brown complexion who looked four or five years older than Desmond.
Bella glanced at the distance between them. Standing that close? That was couple-distance! They said marrying a woman three years older brought a fortune. What did four or five years older mean again? Wait, that wasn't the point! What did this mean? It meant old William Miles was about to get a daughter-in-law?
Desmond hemmed and hawed for ages without knowing how to begin, but the woman took the initiative. "I am the leader of Paititi's resistance. My name is Unuratu. Are you truly willing to help us?"
Unuratu did not speak English. The locals in Peru spoke Spanish, which Bella had studied as her second foreign language in high school, so the two had no trouble communicating.
Bella nodded solemnly. "You know the Brotherhood's creed, don't you? We fight for free will. We are completely different from an organization like Trinity, which seeks power by controlling freedom. You can trust us, and we ask for nothing in return."
Unuratu was very satisfied with that answer. She looked openly at the young assassin beside her. "Desmond passed the Mouth of the Jaguar, the Spider Trial, and the Eagle Trial. He is the hero our people have waited so long for. Could you let him remain in Paititi? I can marry him and make him heir to Paititi's throne."
Bella looked at Desmond Miles twice with a strange expression. She was not surprised that the young assassin had passed some Eagle Trial or Spider Trial. What she had not expected was for the guy to go away on one assignment and come back with a wife! Did your dad know about this?
Bella neither approved nor objected. This was his freedom and had nothing to do with her.
"The Brotherhood's creed is freedom. As long as Desmond does not violate the Brotherhood's three tenets or do anything that harms the Brotherhood, I have no objection. As for you... never mind. It's nothing."
Bella had originally wanted to say that Unuratu ought to ask Desmond's father for his opinion, but then she remembered that the men and women around here did not seem to care much about what their parents thought, so she let the matter drop.
Her request to learn about Paititi's ancient history was no issue at all. Unuratu readily agreed.
That afternoon, Bella, Desmond Miles, and Unuratu entered the mountains together. They traveled through range after range until they reached a valley. This was where Paititi's resistance was currently based.
Paititi still maintained the social structure of ancient times and stubbornly clung to its own culture and traditions. Its people resisted many things from the outside world.
As Bella walked through the valley, most of the people she saw were elderly, women, or children. There were very few young adults.
Paititi called itself a kingdom, but the United Nations did not recognize it at all. Bella even doubted whether these locals knew an organization called the United Nations existed. There were at most eight hundred to a thousand people here, yet even that small population was split into two factions that challenged each other to fights at the slightest excuse.
In the valley, Bella saw Unuratu's son, a boy a little over five years old. That meant Desmond did not merely have a wife and his own kingdom now—he even had a son! If this marriage actually went through, William Miles, far away in New York, would be promoted straight to grandfather!
"Around 1000 BCE, the Maya left the lands their ancestors had inhabited for generations because of natural disasters, human conflict, and other causes. To protect our sacred artifacts, our ancestors decided to make a pilgrimage south. We departed from Cozumel in Mexico and followed the Amazon River all the way to Peru. Some of our people remained downstream, while our ancestors continued until they reached the Amazon's source. There they saw a snow-covered mountain, and within those mountains they founded Paititi...
"Our ancestors formed an alliance with the Inca, learned agriculture from them, and built two temples in the deepest part of the valley to worship our god, Kukulkan!"
Unuratu assumed Bella did not understand the Mayan language, so she told the history of her people in Spanish.
According to her account, the Key of Chak Chel and the Silver Box of Ix Chel were sacred artifacts used to summon the creator god Kukulkan. During the great migration, one group remained in the lower Amazon and safeguarded the Key of Chak Chel, while the branch that eventually founded Paititi carried away the Silver Box of Ix Chel.
Paititi's current king was the Trinity leader they had seen earlier, Dr. Dominguez. Using knowledge he had acquired in the outside world and Trinity's military support, he had seized Paititi's throne after the death of the previous king—Unuratu's husband. Afterward, he began mobilizing large amounts of manpower and resources to search for the Silver Box of Ix Chel, which had already been missing for many years.
"If you came here in search of the Silver Box, then I'm afraid I can only say I'm sorry. No one knows where it is. Dominguez and I both have no idea. Whatever concrete information once existed has probably been buried by time."
Unuratu also told her about many clues left behind by earlier generations who had searched for the Silver Box. Bella listened casually and did not take any of them to heart. The clues were completely useless, every one pointing in the wrong direction. It would be a miracle if anyone found the thing by following them!
Bella roughly knew where the Silver Box was. Once she had found Paititi, obtaining the Box was already half done. The Key of Chak Chel, on the other hand, would be harder to locate.
The place names recorded in Paititi were different from their modern names, and the colonizers had killed far too many local people, severing many lines of knowledge that had once been passed down continuously.
Bella could theoretically retrace the route of their ancient migration and search backward along it. It would simply take an enormous amount of time.