Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Two

Ellie would not be asking anyone to bring Mr. Henbury his biscuits.

She kept her back straight as she walked down the long, gloomy hallway to the archivists’ room. As she stepped inside, she was greeted by a rush of schoolboy whispers from a trio of her colleagues who were lingering by the tea service. One of them distinctly chortled under his breath.

Ellie staunchly ignored the sound as she crossed to her desk and sat down in her chair.

Of the six desks in the archivists’ room, Ellie’s was by far the most tidy. Her drawers were neatly labeled: To Be Reviewed, In Process, Inquiry Required, Ready to File. The surface of the desk itself was clear of everything save her desk pad, blotting paper, ink, pen, and letterbox. She slid open the top drawer. It held a box of sharp pen nibs, a stack of perfectly-sized notepaper, and her copy of The Short History of the Yuan Dynasty, which she had been enjoying on her lunch breaks.

She took out the pen nibs and the book, slipping them into the leather briefcase on the floor by her chair. Her umbrella was already tucked through the bag’s straps. Ellie checked to make sure they were tightened.

There was nothing else to do. Her only other personal item was a small potted fern on the windowsill behind her station. Given that it wouldn’t fit in her briefcase, she would have to carry it.

Her works in progress were all painstakingly organized. Anyone would be able to pick up from exactly where she had left off without any trouble, so long as they had a modicum of intelligence. Ellie winced at the notion of which of her colleagues might be assigned that responsibility. She hoped it was Mr. Barker. Mr. Lloyd would make an absolute mess of it. Only yesterday, Ellie had barely managed to save a set of maps of Kwangtung Province from being sent by Mr. Lloyd to the Sussex Ordnance Survey file (OS2 665) instead of to Hong Kong (CO 700, Box 3A).

She forced herself to take a breath. There was nothing she could do about it anymore.

It was time to go.

Mr. Henbury’s envelope crinkled in her pocket. She stuffed her hand inside to take it out and pop it into her briefcase—and stopped as her fingers brushed against the calf bound psalter Ellie had knocked off Mr. Henbury’s desk.

She had very nearly walked out with it. How silly of her that would have been.

Ellie took the book from her pocket and set it on the desk. She supposed she really ought to bring it back to Mr. Henbury… but the notion of receiving the inevitable self-righteous lecture about misplacing records from a man whose desk looked like the aftermath of a rummage sale made her feel ill.

No—she would simply leave the book here. It would undoubtedly find its way back to Mr. Henbury again, where he’d proceed to lose it once more beneath his paper towers. There was no reason for her to humiliate herself any further.

Mr. Barker glanced over at her, looking uncomfortable and slightly guilty. As a socialist, he likely thought he should speak up about her dismissal but lacked the courage to do it.

The other archivists had forgotten her. They were still dawdling over their tea, talking about cricket.

Leaving the archivists’ room so quickly after entering it felt terribly like running away—like losing. Ellie mustered a spark of rebellion. She would not let them chase her out. She would take a few extra moments to examine the psalter. That way, she could leave it on her desk with a note as to the proper place where it might be either filed or forwarded.

She untied the black ribbon that held the book closed and lifted the cover to examine the title page. It was written in Latin. Versio Gallicana, she thought reflexively, from Jerome’s second translation of the Septuagint. The Gallicana was a version that had been commonly used in the Roman church during the seventeenth century. That made the psalter unlikely to be English, as the printing of Catholic texts had languished there after the Reformation.

Ellie quickly scanned the rest of the page. A word caught her eye—Salmanticae. The book had been printed in Salamanca, Spain.

It made the book’s presence in the mess of PRO documents on Mr. Henbury’s desk even more intriguing. How had a Spanish psalter, of all things, landed in the British records office?

Idly, Ellie flipped through a few more pages… and stared down at a mutilation.

Past Psalm Four—Give ear unto me when I call—the interior of the book had been raggedly cut out, the pages gutted to create a secret hollow.

Ellie had to stifle a muted squeak of horror at the sight. The Versio Gallicana was common enough, but when dealing with a book of such venerable age, every volume had to be considered historically valuable. It felt like sacrilege that someone would carve out a square from the middle of the pages.

The hollow in the book had not been left empty. There was a folded piece of parchment inside, yellowed with age. Gingerly, Ellie lifted it out.

The document was oddly heavy for its size. A few lines of faded brown script—iron gall ink, Ellie distractedly noted—were visible on the outside surface of the neatly bundled package of it. Those had also been written in Latin. Ellie struggled a tad with the quirks of the ecclesiastical spelling as she translated it.

Map indicating the location of the Inhabited Kingdom discovered by Fr. Salavert, which May Be Supposed to lie behind the legends of The White City.

Ellie blinked down at the lines and forced herself to check her translation again.

Words leapt out at her. Inhabited Kingdom. White City.

The White City was indeed a legend—a myth that had woven its way through the Spanish conquest of South and Central America. The rumors of a flourishing Indigenous settlement of untold riches were often seen as a variation on the more well-known story of El Dorado.

The allure of the White City’s wealth was a golden fever-dream that had led countless explorers and adventurers to their deaths.

It was nonsense, of course. The Mayan civilization had flourished in Mexico and Central America for over a thousand years, only to mysteriously collapse sometime between 800 and 1000 AD, centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. The great ruined cities that had been discovered in the Yucatan and further south had been just that—ruins—by the time the first Europeans had reached the region. The Mayan people who remained had lived in smaller villages and settlements that were quickly ravaged by disease, forced relocation, slavery, and murder during the conquest.

The Aztec cities to the north still stood at the start of the colonial period—but those had been well-known to the conquistadors. They would hardly have warranted being described as legends.

Ellie gingerly unfolded the parchment. Something slipped loose from it and fell heavily into her lap. Surprised, she picked it up.

The object was a thin disk of stone perhaps three inches in diameter. The glossy black surface caught and reflected glints of the gray light from the window behind her.

The carved image of a single figure dominated the center, surrounded by rows of neat, square hieroglyphs. With their dots, bars, and stylized animal heads, the characters reminded Ellie of the illustrations she had seen in the books on Mayan and Aztec archaeology that she had pored over at the university library. There had not been very many such volumes, of course. The Mesoamerican region was not a part of the world that received nearly as much academic interest as Egypt, Rome, or Ancient Greece.

The figure engraved in the center of the stone obviously represented a deity. Aspects of the iconography were familiar to Ellie from her reading, though the carving combined elements of a few different Mesoamerican gods. Its face was marred by slashing horizontal lines. One of its legs had been replaced by a writhing snake. Angular, batlike wings protruded from its shoulders, with a round disk—a pectoral decoration, perhaps?—dominating its chest.

She turned the medallion over. The back of the object was blank save for a single hieroglyph made up of a circle of swirling lines.

Ellie puzzled over what they might represent. Wind, perhaps? Or smoke?

Smoke, she thought distantly. Smoke feels right.

She shook off the fog of shock as her fingers tightened reflexively on the stone.

Logically, she knew it was possible—perhaps even likely—that the disc was a hoax or a forgery… but if it wasn’t, then Ellie could be holding a fragment of an ancient world.

The notion filled her with a sense of awe.

With some effort, Ellie forced herself to set the artifact aside and focus on the parchment. As promised, it was indeed a map, hand drawn in spidery strokes of aged ink. The undulating line of a coast dominated the right hand side of the page. She identified other lines as hills and mountains. Much of the map’s expanse was blank, but that was unsurprising. Early seventeenth-century knowledge of Central America would have been largely limited to the areas bordering the sea.

A handful of landmarks had been carefully marked across the interior, written in the same Ecclesiastical Latin. Ellie delicately traced them with her finger—the curving course of a river leading to a Black Pillar that Draws the Compass, then a meandering line to an Arch Hollowed by the Hand of God.

Beyond that lay the River of Smoke—and finally, a stepped pyramid marked with a thin, faded X.

Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ellie thought as she looked down at the symbol, her mind whirling.

She forced herself to assess the parchment as she would any other historical document. It was impossible to be certain of its age. The degree to which the material became yellow or brittle over time could vary based on a range of environmental factors, and Ellie had no idea where the psalter had been stored prior to finding its way to Mr. Henbury’s desk. Certainly, the faded color of the ink indicated that the page was at least a couple of centuries old, and the style of the script was appropriate to the seventeenth century. The use of Ecclesiastical Latin supported the theory that the piece had originated in one of the Catholic missions that peppered the American coast during that period.

Now that Ellie thought about it, there was something vaguely familiar about the shape of the sketched coastline.

CO 700, her brain suggested automatically. Box 8. Room 306.

Ellie neatly folded the map back up into its original form, plucking both it and the medallion up from the desk. She hurried out of the room, barely hearing the new rush of whispers that followed her.

She rounded the corner and climbed the familiar flight of stairs to the third floor of the building, steering unerringly to the room she sought.

Like all the other records rooms in the PRO, Room 306 was packed with metal shelves that lined the walls and divided the floor into narrow aisles. Ellie hurried along the rows containing the records of the Commonwealth Office.

She plucked Box 8 from its shelf.

There were no tables in Room 306. The documents were meant to be carried down to one of the reading rooms where those querying the records waited patiently for their papers to be delivered.

Ellie plopped herself down on the floor instead, her tweed skirt pooling around her as she lifted the cardboard lid from the box.

She shuffled carefully through the documents stuffed inside until she found a hand drawn map of New Spain, dated 1688.

The provenance documents for the map were thankfully complete and up-to-date. The piece had been seized along with other papers from a Spanish privateer who had ended up on the losing side of a conflict with the Royal Navy. Ellie had always liked this particular record because the parchment featured marginal annotations in three different hands—likely from a succession of captains who had made use of it.

Ellie swept the dust from the floor with the sleeve of her white blouse, leaving a gray smudge along her arm, and then laid the parchment from the psalter and the confiscated map side by side on the ground before her.

The maps covered slightly different areas, but Ellie could make out the distinctive shape of the Yucatan’s Bay of Chetumal on both, and used it to orient herself. The coastlines did not precisely match, nor were they to scale—but that was to be expected, given the limits of seventeenth-century survey methods.

The note on the parchment had spoken of an inhabited city. The geography in front of her was nowhere near any of the regions known to have had thriving urban areas at the time of the Spanish conquest. The map depicted the region where the Mayan ruins had been found—the Mayan ruins that had been abandoned for centuries by the time her secret map had purportedly been drawn.

Then again, her map did not claim to show the location of a Mayan ruin. It spoke of a legend.

A rising excitement began to itch at the back of Ellie’s mind. She worked to wrangle it into a suitably scholarly submission.

Just fairy tales and hokum, she thought forcefully to herself as she continued her careful, rational examination.

Key river mouths were marked on the map from Box 8, though their routes extended only a few miles from the shoreline. Pirates, after all, had little need to navigate far inland.

On the map from the psalter, one river traced its way much further into the interior, where the other landmarks—like the Black Pillar and the Arch Hollowed by the Hand of God—peppered the page. The undulating line looked as though it had been drawn based upon the report of someone who had traveled far beyond the boundaries of the colonial settlements into unexplored territory.

Only one coastal community was named on the parchment—a site labeled with a carefully inscribed cross and the initials S. P. F.

Ellie turned her attention to the pirates’ map, where over a dozen villages had been drawn along the meandering line of the shore—Port des Chevaux… San Cristóbal… Coban…

At the southern end of what was now the colony of British Honduras lay another dot—and the neatly written name of San Pedro de Flores

Ellie’s pulse kicked up. She yanked Box 8 closer and quickly shuffled through the other papers inside. She plucked out a block cut, printed map from the mid-eighteenth century—approximately seventy years later—and studied it furiously.

The place where the mission of San Pedro de Flores should have been was blank. The mission, then, had not survived long into the eighteenth century.

If the map from the psalter was a forgery, whoever had created it must have had access to an extraordinary archive of historical maps, as well as possessing the skills to do a very fine job artificially aging both the material and the ink.

Or else the document really had been drawn two hundred and seventy-odd years ago.

Ellie leaned back against the shelf of records, her eyes wide.

It could still be a hoax—a very old and very convincing hoax.

But as a woman of logic and science, Ellie had to consider the alternative possibility that her discovery was exactly what it appeared to be… a map to an unknown civilization.

After properly refiling the documents in Room 306, Ellie wandered downstairs in a daze. She was surprised to realize that her feet had taken her to Mr. Henbury’s door—but then, Mr. Henbury’s door was the responsible place for her to go. For all his numerous faults, Mr. Henbury was still the Assistant Keeper of the Rolls. Stumbling across the potential key to an immense archaeological discovery hiding amongst the records was surely the sort of thing Ellie was supposed to bring to his attention.

Her heart sank at the prospect, bringing her to a halt in the hall. She had absolutely no doubt that the moment she gave the map and medallion to Mr. Henbury, she would be cut out of whatever happened next. That would have been true even if she hadn’t just been handed her dismissal papers for a bit of high-principled rioting.

A terrible little thought slipped into her mind. Mr. Henbury was clearly unaware of the existence of the artifacts in her pocket. If he had opened the psalter, he hardly would’ve left it lying around in his stacks of papers. Even someone as dim and self-absorbed as Mr. Henbury would have recognized their significance. If Mr. Henbury had seen them, he would have forwarded them to either the British Museum or the Royal Geographical Society, the two organizations best qualified to further assess the provenance of the map and potentially mount an expedition to the region.

An expedition…

Ellie imagined pushing her way through the virgin rainforest, following the winding path of a game trail as the orchids bloomed around her and tropical birds chattered overhead. She would be carrying basic survey equipment with her, of course. Even a preliminary investigation of a potential archaeological site should entail a thorough documentation of the visible structures.

She might even lay a small grid in a promising location and dig a few test pits. A cluster of chipped stone could turn out to be a remnant of flint knapping activity while a layer of crushed shells might indicate a midden or the site of a past feast.

Trash heaps, she thought with a dreamy sigh. What she wouldn’t give to sink her hands into a lovely, ancient trash heap and pull out all those wonderful details about the real lives of people from a thousand years ago.

Of course, that was pure fantasy. No self-respecting British institution was going to fund sending someone like her to the other side of the world.

The daydream crashed to the ground, and Ellie realized that there were people speaking on the far side of Mr. Henbury’s office door.

One of them, unsurprisingly, was Mr. Henbury. He sounded oddly nervous.

“I’m telling you, it was right here this morning,” he said. “I haven’t moved it anywhere. I hardly ever move any of these things!”

“Spread this all out.”

The other voice in the room was deep and authoritative, for all that it betrayed just a hint of a less-than-respectable accent—a subtle note of the East End, Ellie deduced absently. Ellie certainly hadn’t heard it in the records office before, which meant that it didn’t belong to someone who worked here.

Even slightly muffled by the interruption of Mr. Henbury’s door, the voice reminded Ellie vaguely of the cold wind before a storm.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jacobs,” Mr. Henbury said. “As you can see, there isn’t really a great deal of room—”

His words were cut off by the crash of a few hundred papers flying to the floor.

Mr. Henbury emitted an alarmed squeak, and Ellie took a fascinated step closer.

“That simply isn’t…” Mr. Henbury started before stammering to a halt. “You—You can’t possibly…”

His words were partially drowned out by the further rush of papers being kicked aside. Ellie jumped back a step as a pair of folders slid partially through the crack at the bottom of the door.

Wills and marriages, she thought automatically, glancing down at them. Gloucestershire. ER 3. Box 12.

The man behind the door—Jacobs—was violently searching for something… something that had until recently been buried in the pile of neglected work on Mr. Henbury’s desk.

The map crinkled against the fabric of Ellie’s skirt as the ferocious rustling from within the office settled to a halt.

A crunch of paper sounded from beyond the door. He is walking on top of them, Ellie thought with distant alarm. That intimidating man is walking on top of the records.

The notion snapped her out of the fog of surprise. She straightened as a burst of outrage cleared her thoughts.

She absolutely could not stand by and eavesdrop when someone was walking on the records.

“Not here,” the resonant, chilling voice concluded.

Ellie strode forward, raising her hand to give the door a firm knock. Before she could strike, the slab of wood shuddered with the impact of something roughly the size and weight of Mr. Henbury.

Ellie froze. What sort of person resorted to tossing people around in the otherwise civilized confines of the Public Records Office?

Certainly not a fellow archivist. Such intimidation was the sort of thing one might expect from a criminal—but how would a criminal have come to know about the artifacts in the psalter?

The answer to that question was obvious. There was only one way the well-spoken, calmly violent Jacobs would know that there was anything worth looking for in Mr. Henbury’s office.

Mr. Henbury had told him.

None of the other records in Mr. Henbury’s pile had any real financial value… not like the sort of value one might find in a map that potentially led to a previously unknown city full of precious artifacts.

Ellie’s hand instinctively moved to her pocket as a theory whirled into shape in her mind.

The psalter must have come from an uncategorized box of records. Lord knew, there were plenty of them about, as the British government continued to work to consolidate all its old papers under the umbrella of the PRO. One of her colleagues must have come across the psalter and dumped the item on Mr. Henbury’s desk.

By some arcane chance, Mr. Henbury had actually bothered to open the book—and when he saw what it contained, instead of properly logging and assessing it, he had determined to try to hawk it for a quick bit of dosh.

As a hypothesis, it was all too terribly plausible. If the man inside the office did not do away with Mr. Henbury, Ellie would be sorely tempted to murder him herself.

“Who has been inside of your office since we spoke?” Jacobs asked.

The question was unsettlingly composed. One might almost think that tossing high-ranking public officials against their office doors was the sort of thing Jacobs did all the time.

“Nobody!” Mr. Henbury spluttered.

Jacobs’ reply was cool, controlled, and entirely confident.

“That isn’t entirely true. Is it, Mr. Henbury?”

“What?” Mr. Henbury sounded genuinely confused. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re—”

There was another shudder of impact against the door.

“Wait—wait!” Mr. Henbury hurried to reply. His tone hiked up to a brighter note of panic. “There was that woman! She was here! She was here all by herself for ages! She must have taken it.”

Ellie’s outrage heated into the sort of inferno which had last seen her chaining herself to the gates of Parliament.

That weaselly little man was not about to toss her to a violent ruffian who walked on historical records. Surely, not even Mr. Henbury could sink that low.

“What woman?” Jacobs calmly pressed.

Ellie took a quiet, instinctive step back from the door as a quick blade of fear mingled with the fury roiling under her skin.

“Miss Mallory,” Mr. Henbury replied to the obviously dangerous man currently assaulting him. “It was Miss Eleanora Mallory.”