The Light Bringer's Way Part 8

"Yes. I wish they were sungla.s.ses so I could share them with you. The best I can do is draw a picture of what it looks like in the sky."

I grabbed my fork and sketched it onto the hard mud clay that covered the top of the roof.

"That looks exactly like one of the drawings we saw in the cave," Blair said. "How soon until dawn? We've got to get back there."

Patrick looked up at the constellation Ca.s.siopeia. "According to Whitney's celestial clock we have at least nine hours but it must be the middle of the night at home. I am beat. Do you think we will have trouble getting up tomorrow?"

Blair and Reid looked at me and waited for me to answer. "No. We will be ready to go at first light. I will be up at dawn."

Chapter Thirteen: Blair.

It was at least half an hour before sunrise when the vision jostled me awake. Wedged in between Reid and Blair, I had slept soundly and it was with groggy regret I found Vlad Dune's face drifting into the forefront of my mind. I wanted to go back to sleep but the vision would not be ignored. Irritated, I concentrated on the image and groggily groused that a face is not much of a lead.

The sync between the vision and myself was strong; it had to be to get through the magnetic buffer of Reid, and I could tell it was trying to communicate with me. The vision became clearer and I could see Vlad's face in minute detail. He looked younger and thinner than the last time I saw him. His eyes darted back and forth. They were desperate and searching-looking for something. I had the uneasy feeling he was looking for us. Specifically, me.

My heart sank, as I understood Vlad was the message and that was the extent of it. He was looking for me and he looked like he wanted me to help him. I did not know where Vlad was located or how to find him. The words on Reid's sundial, tempus ad lucem ducit veritatem, ran through my head, reminding me that "time brings truth to light" and that having information did not mean you had to act on it.

Sirius, the eastern star, barely remained in the fading night sky, blinking like a hypnotic beacon near the horizon. The same distinct shade of red pulsed from a high peak in the distance. That was interesting, I thought as the scarlet blush of the cliffs turned into a barely perceptible rose glow. I had seen the unusual shade before when we were generating a cinnabar s.h.i.+eld. This "red s.h.i.+eld" was a life force energy and a center of chi. It seemed beyond coincidence it was coming from the top peak of the astronomer's observatory.

I slipped through the mosquito netting Blair had coc.o.o.ned around the four of us. My eyes performed a quick security check; nothing appeared out of place. I ticked through all our areas of vulnerability. There were no other rooftops close to ours, and the bar on the gate was down with our guards on the outer wall. An alarm triggered in my brain. That was an a.s.sumption and not verifiable. The guards were unaccounted for until we opened the gate and, if they were not there, we did not know who would be waiting. Mr. Parks taught me to make my choices based on what felt right in the moment. For some reason, I did not believe Tiembo was outside and I wanted us to find a new exit that would not be so noticeable.

I sensed Reid in my mind trying to figure out what was going on and why I was up and patrolling the roof so early. I showed him my thoughts on Tiembo. He was going to have to trust me and not protest I was overreacting. As he saw my request to go off the roof before first light and head for the cave, he nodded and gave me a small salute. For the first time, I was glad I was field leader. He was not going to question my authority or my choices-even when I couldn't rationally explain myself. Reid picked up some of the backpacks and brought them to the wall we would rappel down into the small alley below.

Relieved, I went to Blair's bag, pulled out the climbing ropes I had seen earlier, and started to tie the lines around the house supports. Reid woke up Blair and Patrick and quietly briefed them about what was happening.

Blair set to work to buy us time from the guards and the villagers by using her air mattress and travel pillow as stuffing for the sleeping bags we would leave behind. Copying her hero, Ferris Bueller, she made it seem like the mattress was a ma.s.s of bodies sleeping under the sleeping bags. The thick, opaque mosquito netting around the jumble of sleeping bags helped with the illusion.

Reid went down the rope and we lowered the packs to him. One by one, we landed into the sandy narrow street and I noticed our tracks. All four of us would leave quite an obvious trail.

I pointed to them, visually explaining my concern. Reid nodded and motioned to Blair and me to wait there. He started walking backward to the start of the alley to leave a set of tracks that would look like someone had turned off the busy main village street. Patrick did the same. Then they retraced their steps back to where we were standing.

Reid flipped his pack around to the front and pointed to the end of the road that led in the direction to the astronomer's observatory and the cave. It was flat and open and the ground there looked like baked concrete. Once we reached the open area, there was less deep sand and our tracks would be more difficult to find. It was a short distance and our best option, so I agreed with a nod of my head and strapped on my pack. Reid bent down and I climbed onto his back.

A red mark caught my eye. Reid's hair was caught in his baseball hat strap and his Poseidon Program tattoo of an eagle clutching the trident and pistol had the same faint red glow as the Sirius star and the area of the cave I saw this morning. I remembered Reid had said it was an identifier. I thought he had meant by the military. Now, I was wondering who else could identify him.

Reid was not moving and I noticed he was waiting for Blair to get on Patrick's back. She was frozen, petrified to make such a bold move even though Patrick had his hands on his knees so she could get on his back. I realized she needed a push so I made it a nonnegotiable directive. I pointed to her and then to Patrick and tapped my wrist, telling her we needed to move. Patrick leaned his head toward the end of the road like he was ready to go and she complied.

The guys tried to walk in existing tracks down the alley. The dryness of the sand would work in our favor because scent tracking required moisture. That's also why none of us smelled from the heat-sweat did not linger long enough on our skin to stink.

After we reached the clearing, Reid headed for a lone baobab tree. The desert tree looked like it was planted upside down with roots sticking up in the air. There were no lush green leaves like we were used to back home and its silhouette was stark and eerie.

"Here we are. This is the local McDonald's. Who wants a monkey-bread fruit happy meal?" Reid asked as we walked under the tree. I jumped off and saw his face was red from carrying the weight. I pulled out my water bottle and handed it to him. He took it but added, "It wasn't THAT heavy, Whit. It's this heat. It is stifling. I will be glad to leave the desert."

"Are you sure that is fruit, Reid? They look like dead rats hanging from the branches," Blair said with skepticism. In the dim light before dawn, Blair had a point. The gourds were hairy lumps of a rodent brown color. The tree's white flowers had a rotten smell that was grossly unappetizing.

Reid arched an eyebrow at Blair. "Blair. How can you not recognize this super fruit packed with vitamin C?" He made a playful tsk-tsk noise. Uh-oh, I thought, as Blair folded her arms across her chest. She was not a morning person and this was not a good time to tease her about her culinary skills.

"Seriously, Empath? Don't discount the edge you have on all of us." Her voice had a kick to it. They often ribbed each other but this time I felt I was missing something because my intuition s.h.i.+vered for a second and then subsided.

"OK. OK. Let me rephrase that. I thought your taste buds would be curious to try an exotic fruit. Of course, you are correct that I can impart more knowledge from touching this tree than most." Reid held his hand against the trunk. "Inside here, it is hollow except for the gallons and gallons of water. That's why the baobab tree is also called the Tree of Life. And why it is fireproof. No funny business, Patrick. We are trying to keep a low profile." Reid pointed a finger at Patrick and Patrick flipped up his hands to show him he was innocent of any hijinks.

Dr. West had mentioned empaths could be skilled water diviners or dowsers. Finding important resources or commodities in the earth was the way Reid had explained his family wealth. In the desert, nothing could be more precious than water, and I was relieved Reid could find it if we needed it.

"Should be called the Tree of Ugly," Blair muttered. She was cranky. We were all jet-lagged and hungry. "Or Tree of Stench."

"Now, now. Don't judge a book by its cover...or its smell." Reid pulled two gourds down and tossed them to Patrick and Blair. "I'm told they are quite tasty. You can eat them on the way. Sorry, Whit, but you know the rules. We have to stick with what we know is safe." Reid tossed me an orange from his backpack and started to peel one he kept for himself.

Blair muttered, "Chewy goat last night for dinner and dead rat fruit for breakfast...makes me wish I had a food allergy..."

The juicy fruit in my hand was exactly what I needed to quench my thirst and give me a boost but I offered it to Blair. She was not eating her baobab fruit and we all needed fuel. As the field leader, I had to put my team first and I wasn't all that hungry yet.

She declined. "No. Reid's right. This will be fine once we get moving. It's the smell of these musky blossoms decaying on the ground that is bothering me. Reid may be an empath but I doubt he knows how it feels to have my sense of smell. It's a family curse." Blair stared hard at Reid and once again I felt like I was missing something. They seemed to be fighting without words but I could not hear what it was about. Before I could intervene, Reid quelled the argument.

"Blair, you lead since you know where we are headed. Whitney wants us to get to the cave as soon as possible which, given the brain-boiling heat, seems like a good idea as the sun will only make it worse," Reid suggested, and Blair agreed. Her countenance brightened and I was glad Reid had brokered a truce. Navigation was one of her many talents. In fact, she and Reid were both excellent at orienting themselves to our position and direction.

I looked toward the cave, trying to judge its distance, but the flat plain devoid of landmarks made it difficult. "Let's put some s.p.a.ce between ourselves and the village as quickly as possible. We want to make it to the cave before the sun melts us."

Reid stuffed his orange peel in his pocket. We didn't want to leave a careless trace of ourselves on the ground and I had the sensation we were being tracked despite our precautions. We had to get out of the open plain and to higher ground. I wondered if it was Vlad.

"Blair, got any more Diet c.o.ke in your backpack?" Patrick croaked. His voice was rusty with sleep. "This may be a super fruit but I am still super tired." Blair's eyebrows shot up in delight and I felt a smile turn my lips, as we both knew Patrick was going to reap the benefits of her Mary Poppins backpack. "As a matter of fact, I do. It's the last one so enjoy it."

"Don't you mean, *Have a c.o.ke and smile,' Blair?" Reid asked. I groaned inwardly. Why did he have to keep teasing her? I made the cut it sign to him across my neck. He opened his mouth, about to protest, but Blair took care of herself.

"Thanks, Mean Joe Green, but that slogan is for c.o.ke and about ten years too old. We are talking about DIET c.o.ke here and its slogan is *Just for the taste of it.'" Patrick caught up to Blair and took the Diet c.o.ke. I could hear the two of them discussing how ridiculous it was that Reid was so culturally out of touch. I saw the twinkle in Reid's eye at his small success and with a wave of his hand he showed me this was what he intended. It was cla.s.sic crane to take a hit to make a bigger gain. I smiled and grabbed his hand as we walked across the hard and barren ground, happy.

I felt him in my mind again. "How are you doing that so easily? Have you been practicing with Mr. Parks?"

Reid laughed. "No, I think it is more that you are not blocking me so much. I am always intrigued by what you are thinking and feeling. And, I am not as disciplined as you are so I can't seem to help myself but try and uncover these answers. I don't want to scare you but I think you are actually starting to trust me. Or at least that's what I could feel when we were dancing at Mr. Parks' house." As we walked toward the cave, I thought about what Reid said and realized he was right except for one thing-Karen.

In front of us were the steep steps up to the cave; they were made out of rock. It was impossible to climb wearing our packs and there was only one rope left. I thought about the Air Force's "Rule of Three" that I learned during my shadow week of training with F-15 fighter pilots. The number three could keep you alive if you remembered you could last three minutes without air, three weeks without food, three days without water, and three hours without shelter in extreme conditions. It made the decision of what to bring simple: we needed water and some food and the rest we could leave and hide at the base of the cliff.

"I didn't know you went to Fairchild. It's not in your file," Reid said with interest. He was in my mind again and my eyes flashed with surprise because I hadn't thought about anything that would have given away the Spokane, Was.h.i.+ngton, Air Force base training location.

He answered the questioning look on my face. "You were remembering the Rule of Three in Bosco's voice. He was also my instructor." Reid gave me a sheepish shrug. "And my cousin."

Bosco was a burly man with a voice as loud as a cannon. He was a terrific instructor and had kept a close eye on me. "He was your cousin?" I asked. I did not think about it until now but there was a family resemblance.

"Of course. Whit, the Cloccans are your sworn guardians. You didn't think you were shadowing that camp completely alone, did you? Cloccans have surrounded you your entire life," Reid said in a gentle voice. That's when it clicked in my mind and my eyes looked to Blair. It all made sense. How could I have missed it? She was a Cloccan like Reid.

Chapter Fourteen: Canary in a Coal Mine.

I s.h.i.+fted through the information that had shaped my friends.h.i.+p with Blair. We had become friends through sports, and working together was the foundation of our relations.h.i.+p. Blair and I had always been a team as we competed against opponents and not each other. There was equality and support in our friends.h.i.+p and that's why I never questioned why she went on training trips and h.e.l.lish camp sabbaticals with me. Her support and effort were part of her personality; it was even present in kung fu, and the reason Mr. Parks said he trained us both as panthers was because he said we shared the same destiny. Best friends were on the same path no matter what.

Maybe she did partic.i.p.ate in some of these things to help me because she was Cloccan...but if the shoe was on the other foot, I would have done the same for her. Blair was Cloccan but it didn't change anything. That was not the reason for our friends.h.i.+p and I always felt a part of her family. That's when it occurred to me.

"It's her whole family, isn't it?" I asked Reid. The Delaney family had taken care of me my whole life. They never asked many questions and given Blair permission to go with me all over the country, sometimes returning thinner and bruised from "camp."

"Yes. The Delaneys are Cloccan but you were not their a.s.signment. You and Blair found each other on your own and, after you became friends, some of the security division in the Cloccan tribe approached them. It was arranged as an informal agreement that they would keep an eye on you, and I think they offended Mrs. Delaney by asking her. She would have done nothing less," Reid said holding onto my hand. "Whitney, I promised you I would not keep you on the outside of conversations. Cloccans can create and hear very low sound waves. Earlier, I know you sensed something in the air between Blair and I. That was Blair pretty much giving me the equivalent of the Cloccan middle finger." Reid laughed and his eyes shone with amus.e.m.e.nt. "I'm not complaining about Blair. Lucky for me she didn't use her fingernails across my back like her much more volatile best friend. I'm telling you to clear the air." I cringed at Reid's reference to my swipe and was glad for the small pebbles cascading down the cliff as Patrick walked to the edge to find us.

"Come on, guys. What is taking you so long?" Patrick was wearing the pack full of water and food we had sent up. He looked impatient and ready to go. We climbed to the top of the steps and discovered a narrow plateau with a worn path that meandered to the astronomer's observatory.

Outside the astronomer's hut there were rectangles of sand that had lines and rocks placed on them. It was an instrument to divine the future and reminded me how important the astronomer was to the Dogon. He was a seer who declared the arrival of the Sigi, the ceremony that took place once every sixty years.

In short order, we arrived at the opening of the small cave and it was not as big as I expected. The drawings on the inside were low to the ground, as if a child had done the etchings into the rock. The exactness and intricacy of the work defied this possibility-extremely short adults had mapped the constellations. The Tellem.

"Did the Munchkins live here?" Reid asked as he b.u.mped his head on the ceiling. He was hunched over and had a hard time bending down to see the drawings on the cave.

"Good guess but I'm thinking no. Remember what Tiembo told us? The Tellem people lived here before the Dogon and were called *the small red people.' They were pygmies," I answered in a soft whisper. Blair was right, there was a sacred feeling to the place.

"Really?" Blair asked, turning around and looking at me from the front of the line. I wondered what I said that caught her attention. Then I realized that it did sound crazy.

"Trust me, it's too early for me to be creative and my brain is on overload," I said with a nod. We moved deeper into the cave and thankfully it got taller and wider. Even though Reid was able to stand up the drawings only went as tall as his waist and he had to bend down to see the stones. The red stones Patrick described were strategically placed into each drawing. I could not see a path to a larger stone. To me, it looked haphazard.

Reid felt one of the red stones with his hand. "It's cinnabar. It is the common ore of mercury. It's strange to find it here. Usually, this metal is a.s.sociated with volcanic activity and hot springs, not a desert."

The hair on my arm rose. I had been thinking of the cinnabar s.h.i.+eld this morning and that I had seen the red color of Sirius and the light from the cliff before. Red was a color that kept popping up and I felt it was not a coincidence.

Patrick stood in the small concave dip in the cave and spun around. "See? This is what I did to see the path of the red stones. This is how you find the door."

"Yeah, and I have a feeling once you see inside the door you will know why the Tellem were red," Blair cryptically said to me.

"Sounds interesting," I said as I followed Patrick into the sunken portion of the cave. I spun around to see if I could see the path he was talking about and was unprepared for the infrared impact on my eyes. The cave floor blurred with red. Ominous small cracks began to fracture the ground with the scarlet glow. Soon, they would cover the entire area. We had set off some sort of trap.

"Don't move," I commanded in a voice that was rigid and direct. Reid and Blair were outside the circle and they froze. A thin path toward a narrow threshold materialized, as it remained the only area untouched by the red fissures spreading like angry capillaries across the cave floor.

"What is it?" Blair asked. Her voice was as tense as her muscles. Reid had crossed into my mind and saw what was happening. My eyes scanned the cave and amid the red eruptions there was a series of boulders that formed an escape ladder.

Reid knew what to do and remained calm. "Blair, we need to move three feet to the left and stand on that large boulder. Then we will move precisely two feet at a time to the other boulders around the cave until we can make the jump into the depression with Patrick and Whitney. Let's make it quick on three. One, two...three." Blair and Reid moved with grace and precisions around the perimeter of the cave until they were finally close enough to jump. My heart was pounding. The red cracks were amplifying and I could feel a vibration beneath us. I wondered if the entire cave was about to collapse.

They jumped. Patrick and I were able to steady them as they hit the uneven ground. The path to the door was getting thinner. I did not want to walk a tightrope so I started to cross.

"Wait, Whitney." Reid grabbed my arm to prevent me from walking across. His face was scrunched up in pain and he and Blair had their hands over their ears. There must be noise in the cave Patrick and I could not hear. "When Blair and I went around the boulders, it triggered an infrasound Cloccan distress call. If a Cloccan constructed this hidden chamber, they will expect someone who knows the rhythmic key to find the hidden door. Blair, you must have been the first to walk toward the door to the chamber yesterday since your walk is set to Cloccan rhythm. We have to repeat the harmony to keep the bridge from crumbling."

All this time, I had thought Reid and Blair had a confident swagger because they played sports. I would have never guessed it was because they were Cloccan.

"OK," I agreed as I banked the distance of the bridge with my hands so everyone could see its width. Reid called out the dimensions and the northeastern heading to Blair as if he saw them on a map. My sense of timing reached urgent. "Let's move. It looks like the rock of the cave floor is melting and it feels really hot in here."

Reid and I followed Blair and Patrick. Then Reid turned around. He picked me up and spun me around to rest on his toes. "Sorry, Whit. I can't take the chance. Without music, I am leery of your sense of rhythm. Do me a favor and hold onto me like we did in dance practice as we move across." There was not enough time to argue. I looked around the cave and saw the floor starting to turn vermilion.

"Someone made this pretty challenging. I wonder how many people did not make it to the chamber at all," Patrick murmured.

My skin tingled at Patrick's words and I felt a deep sense of profound grat.i.tude to Marlin Steele because his enhanced vision had saved our lives. Marlin was precognitive...what if the extractor experiment was a sacrifice and not an accident?

The gilded statues at the end of the Memorial Bridge appeared in my mind. Dr. West had led us to the one called Sacrifice on his scavenger hunt. A rider on a horse flanked the bridge on each side. One showed a warrior leaving his family, t.i.tled Sacrifice, and the other had a man and woman going into battle, t.i.tled Valor. Together, they were referred to as the Arts of War.

Before this moment, the scavenger hunt had seemed like a silly exercise. In fact, it had annoyed me. I recalled questioning Dr. West about why he put us through the ruse. As a precognitive, it was not like him to waste time-his or mine. That told me something. It may have contained information we would need later.

"I would have never thought of that," Reid said with a smile, watching me think of our scavenger hunt destinations in my mind. "I think my respect for the guy b.u.mped up a few notches. I thought he was one of those people who enjoyed being a pain in the neck for the fun of it."

As I moved in time and across the bridge with Reid, the purple glow reappeared in my mind. The luminous swirl of color blended into a delicate violet cloud. Something transcendent happened between us when I totally dropped my guard. Whatever it was, the light show stretched beyond my ordinary range of perception and I did not usually see expressions of color inside my head.

I concentrated on my actual eyesight to push away the internal image. The b.u.t.tons of Reid's s.h.i.+rt came into sharp focus while behind me I could hear stone sc.r.a.pe against rock. It created a chalky smell and I turned my head to see what caused the noise. The chamber door was sliding open and the heat around us magnified. I faced Reid and leaned around him to look back toward the source of the heat. I gripped onto him as I saw the molten red color oozing across the bridge. The open door had triggered the bridge to dissolve.

"Hurry, Reid," I said as I held onto him. "The bridge is about to collapse." I hated that I couldn't see where we were going. That's when I remembered what Mr. Parks had taught me to do when I lost my sight: to use Reid's eyes. We had a short distance left to cross.

"Don't worry, we are almost there," Reid answered. He glided us onto the threshold with Blair and Patrick. "Hopefully, someone will have turned on the air conditioning inside the chamber. Man, it's hot. Patrick, can't you do something about this?"

"I could if I could see the atoms I needed to control. This trap is designed to stump pyrokinetics as well. We were lucky we got this far yesterday by accident." Patrick rubbed his hands together and created a small flame. The fire made the room bloom with scarlet light from the l.u.s.trous red crystal that covered the walls.

I looked on the ground and saw the floor was solid although coated with a fine red dust. Patrick and Blair's footprints had left a trail through the chamber the day before to where they must have exited through a large tunnel on the left. "The floor looks solid. Can you hear anything?" I asked Reid and Blair. They shook their heads no. "I'm not convinced it is safe since getting here almost killed us. I don't think getting out is going to be any easier. We need to be careful."

Patrick walked into the cave. The light from his hand illuminated the entire chamber. There was not one but three tunnels. The largest was to the left, a middle one straight ahead, and a small one to the right. The chamber door behind us sc.r.a.ped shut. My throat tightened with the claustrophobic realization we would be going through one of them. Danger, not the spear, was in this room.

I scanned the room and on the wall were glowing red symbols. It took me a second to understand what they were. "Reid, I think I see Egyptian hieroglyphs on the wall. Can you read them?" I pointed to the wall. The surprised look on their faces showed me that was not what they were expecting to hear. To them, the wall was blank. "Cross over into my mind."

Reid ran his hand over the symbols I could see on the wall in a right to left motion. The symbols were so varied and intricate, I could not make a pattern out of them. There was a half circle, an eye, a bird in flight, squiggly lines, and marks that resembled a feather, among dozens of others, and I wondered if they were hieroglyphs at all. They could have been scratches made by the chisel that put the carving there.

I realized that was why Reid was feeling the wall. Dr. West said Reid could unlock messages and codes with his empath ability. Dr. West had given me the more modern example of Reid knowing the pin number of an ATM machine. I hoped his ability also worked in ancient foreign languages.

"It is really hard to make out. Not all vowels are written and it seems to be expressing more of an idea than a direct message. Knowledge is a power like a flowing river. If you hold its source and bottle it as your own you will gain everlasting fame and power is what the first part says. It is also written in Latin underneath so I can understand it better," Reid explained. He held his hand on the wall in an area that looked blank to me. I walked closer to see what he was doing. "The stone for the second stanza has been removed. I can feel what it said. Knowledge is the tool but wisdom is the craft. They cannot be separated to gain the sharp edge of enlightenment." The hair on my arm tingled. The spear. We would need the books to help us get to the spear.

Reid held his hand on the wall and his face furrowed with concentration. "The last part is confusing. The first symbol is almost the same except the first is in the masculine tense and the second is in the feminine tense. I think it says, HIS-story is closed. HER-story is open. Then it has a list of what it calls predictions. But some of these sound like they have already happened. Here's the first one: Royalty will become headless by a block and a blade freeing an enslaved populace. A blaze in 1666 will kill many of the same sect and will burn for three days. An evil man will seduce a great troop with his tongue and his fame will increase toward the east causing cries and tears for a chosen people..."

"Nostradamus. These are similar to the quatrains of some of his most famous predictions. You know, the guy who called the French Revolution, the great fire of London, Hitler?" Blair asked, nodding her head and leading us to agree. Reid gave her a blank look and she asked him in disbelief, "Reid, do you live under a rock? How could you have never heard of him?"

"I have," Patrick piped up. "But only because he was an apothecary. He is credited with distributing a rose-colored pill that helped lessen the impact of the bubonic plague in France. Biochemical researchers are trying to figure out what was in his antidote that had such remarkable healing properties against the black death."

"The pill was red? Duh. Maybe it was cinnabar," Blair said, pointing to the red dust on the ground and the red walls. "Maybe he came here and this is where he got his prophecies from and the knowledge about the plague. Plus, he was also an astronomer and he would have fit right in with the Dogon."

"It's a good hypothesis. Timbuktu reached its apex during the years of the worst plague outbreak in history. It seems this region was spared for some reason," I said.

Reid nodded. "It could be the underground water supply. The rivers of this region flow through the rock and ore of cinnabar. It would fortify their water with cinnabar and no one would know it."