Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Eleven

Ellie barely dared to breathe as she listened to Jacobs depart. Finally, Bates stepped back into the room and closed the French doors behind him.

She exhaled in relief—a feeling that rapidly dispersed as she took in the expression on the face of the man who had just saved her.

It looked terribly like fury.

“Now, I’m going to take off this gag,” Bates said evenly. “And then you’re going to tell me exactly what sort of trouble you’ve gotten yourself into. Clear enough, Princess?”

Before she answered, Ellie tore her eyes from his face and took a moment to actually look at the place where she’d inadvertently landed.

The room was a disaster. A single glance revealed that it hadn’t been cleaned in months. Every available surface was covered in debris—empty glasses, stacks of papers, teetering piles of books, the cold tail-end of a cigar. The walls were barely visible, buried under pinned-up maps, sketches, and scribbled notes between hooks holding picks, shovels, coils of rope, and wooden tripods. A rifle leaned against the wall in the corner next to a piece of driftwood that looked oddly like a flamingo.

A pair of theodolites, used for accurately measuring distance, sat on a shelf between the skull of an iguana and a jar holding the biggest spider Ellie had ever seen. She was reasonably confident it was dead.

She could feel the crisp pressure of the map in her skirt pocket beside the cold weight of the medallion. An idea began to take shape in her mind.

It was a decidedly terrible idea.

“Well?” Bates prompted, looming over her with all the implied threat of a prowling tiger.

Solemnly, Ellie gave him a nod.

He moved closer. He was a large man, towering over her by a solid six inches. He was near enough for her to feel the warmth that radiated off his very big, very solid body as he reached around her head and gently untied the knot that held her gag in place.

As soon as she felt the tension in the binding give, Ellie ripped it away, coughing at the dryness in her throat. Bates tossed back the rest of his drink, crossed to the washstand, and filled the glass with water from the pitcher there. When he offered it to her, Ellie accepted without protest and gulped down the liquid inside. It burned against her throat before providing a desperate relief.

“I’ll get you another,” Bates said. He plucked the glass from her hands and carried it over for a refill.

Ellie felt shaky. She looked around the room for a place to sit. The only surface that offered itself was the unmade bed. She dropped down onto it and let her face fall into her bound hands.

Chair legs scraped against the floor. A large hand gently tugged at her wrists.

“Hey,” Bates said. “Let me take care of this.”

Ellie allowed him to draw down her arms. He set to work on the knots. The bindings fell away to expose raw, red bands of skin where the cloth had chafed against her wrists.

Something about the man in front of her coiled up dangerously at the sight.

“Was he dragging you around?” he demanded as he raised those shockingly blue eyes to meet her own, his voice rich with threat.

“No,” Ellie said as she drew her arms back away from him and tucked them around her sides. “I probably did that to myself when I was escaping.”

“Of course you did,” Bates replied. He rubbed his hands over his face as though fighting down whatever violent urge had been about to overtake him. “That guy your husband?”

“Absolutely not!” Ellie exclaimed.

“Sorry,” he said. “But it happens more often than you’d like to think.”

The observation surprised her almost as much as the question had. Ellie gave the man in front of her a more thoughtful look.

“I’m aware,” she replied.

Bates pushed back in his chair and turned to a narrow dresser with a chipped finish. The top of it was piled high with letters, some of which were yellowed with age. Most of them looked unopened.

He pulled open a drawer.

“I’ve got some aloe salve in here,” he offered. “Might help.”

“Thank you,” Ellie replied quietly.

He returned with a battered little tin. He screwed it open and scooped out some of the unguent inside.

Ellie offered him her wrists again. He took them gently and smoothed the aloe over her skin. His fingers were roughly calloused, but his touch was careful.

Bates capped the salve and tossed it neatly into the drawer. He leaned back in his chair and pinned her with a look.

“Time to tell me what all this is about,” he ordered.

Ellie’s heart rattled uncomfortably in her chest. She rose from the bed and brushed past him to stand by the map that covered the better part of the wall.

In fact, there was more than just one map. Various layers of them were pinned into place and augmented by sketches and notes.

Possible cataracts, one read. Sinkhole. Cenote. Midden.

The handwriting matched the loose scrawl in a notebook that lay open on the table.

Ellie ran her fingers along a line inked in blue that meandered across the wall—obviously the course of a river. It had been drawn in by hand.

“Have you been to all these places?” she asked.

“Not all. Just a good few.”

Bates had come to stand beside her. Ellie hadn’t even heard him move.

“That friend of yours isn’t going to wander around forever,” he pointed out. “If he doesn’t find you where he thinks to look, he’s going to come back here on the chance I did more than let you land on me. I’m not sure we have a hell of a lot of time.”

He was right, and Ellie knew it. She drew a breath and threw herself into the unknown.

“What do you know about the collapse of the Mayan civilization?” she demanded.

One of his eyebrows arched up.

“As much as there is to know, I guess,” Bates said. “They were here—all over the place, if the ruins that keep popping up are any indication—and then five hundred years or so before the Spaniards showed up, something went to hell and the cities were all abandoned.”

“And have you ever heard stories of a city in this region that was not abandoned when the conquistadors arrived?” Ellie asked.

He moved away from her.

“Like El Dorado,” he returned flatly.

“El Dorado is a myth,” Ellie countered. “I am talking about an actual city—one that was still flourishing at the time of the conquest.”

“No,” Bates said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

Ellie could hear his skepticism. It frightened her. In the space of the last few minutes, a very great deal had come to depend upon the outcome of this conversation.

She had to convince Bates to listen to what she was about to tell him. She could think of only one way to do that.

Ellie steeled herself and reached into her pocket to pull out the medallion. The black stone glinted like a jewel as it swung back and forth in the lamplight, dangling from the remnants of her ribbon.

Bates’s focus sharpened. He took the artifact from her carefully and carried it over to the desk for a better look.

“Intriguing trinket,” Bates declared as he turned it over in his hands.

“The iconography and the style of the glyphs appear to be Mesoamerican, but I can’t definitively say anything more than that. Not without access to a proper library,” Ellie said, trying not to sound as nervous as she felt.

“It ain’t Mayan,” Bates replied, picking up a jeweler’s lens from the desk and setting it to his eye. He gave the piece a closer look.

“It’s not?” Ellie said, unable to completely hide her dismay.

He leaned back a bit.

“I mean—I’m not an expert, but I’ve been to a fair number of Mayan sites and I’ve got a pretty good head for images.”

“Like these?” Ellie said as she waved a hand to a cluster of drawings on the wall.

Images of birds and the leaf pattern of a tree mingled there with a sketch of a pillar carved with the solemn face of an unknown god.

Bates must have drawn them. He had a good eye and a careful, detailed hand.

“Yeah,” Bates admitted a little awkwardly before returning to his study of the medallion.

“Now this guy…” He tapped the figure in the center of the disk. “He’s got little pieces of gods I recognize. That line carved across his face—you see that every once in a while. And the snake in place of one of his legs. But they’re usually on different guys.”

“Schellhas’s gods F and K,” Ellie replied automatically.

The keys to the Mayan written language had been lost centuries ago when the Spanish conquerors had outlawed the tongue and burned every written example of it they could find. Only a few documents had survived that apocalypse, and they could not yet be read. A German scholar by the name of Schellhas had recently created a systematic catalog of the symbols and figures one could find in those Mayan codices, even though he couldn’t yet be sure what names to attach to them.

Ellie had read it, of course. She had ordered a copy from Dresden the year before and devoured it in the wingback chair in her room after work one evening.

She always tried to stay up-to-date with the latest research into the ancient history of various parts of the world. It was something of a compulsion, even though it was highly unlikely she would ever have an opportunity to put the knowledge to use.

“Are you familiar with Schellhas’s work?” she asked.

“Nah,” Bates replied. “I just know what I’ve seen.”

“It is quite recent and not yet translated from the original German,” she continued. “But it is my understanding that the slashed face and serpent leg are found combined in the symbology a little further north among the Aztecs—in the god Tezcatlipoca, the master of war, sacrifice, and prophecy. The presence of the disk icon here in the center of the figure would support that identification, as Tezcatlipoca is also strongly associated with the Smoking Mirror…”

“Smoking Mirror?” Bates prompted.

“Oh!” Ellie returned. “Sorry—a mythical piece of flawless obsidian through which the god could supposedly see into the past, the future, or across vast… er, distances,” she finished awkwardly.

Bates had gone quiet. He wasn’t looking at the medallion anymore. His eyes were on Ellie.

She was consumed by a familiar, uncomfortable fear. She was doing it again—rattling off an instinctive stream of knowledge in a way that usually ended with people looking at her as though she had just fallen out of the sky.

Ellie fought the urge to flinch. In her experience, men were often particularly ungracious when confronted with the reality that a woman might be as well informed as they were on a subject—or better.

She pushed the feeling aside. She could hardly expect to succeed in what she was about to attempt if she had to conceal the fact that she knew things.

“Yet this isn’t an Aztec artifact,” she continued. “The rectangular structure of these characters more closely resembles Mayan script, and the figures are more stylized—less naturalistic.”

She waited for Bates’s response, brushing a hand uselessly across her skirt. He studied her for a quiet moment before returning his sharp blue gaze to the artifact.

“The glyphs might look like Mayan, but they’re not,” Bates finally said. “I don’t know what they are.”

“I suppose we must admit the possibility that it is a fraud.” Ellie was unable to keep the disappointment from her tone.

Bates leaned back in his chair and frowned at the surface of the disk thoughtfully.

“Damned clever one, if it is,” he replied. “It’d have to have been made by someone pretty familiar with the Mayan language. I mean, a fair few of these symbols look close to stuff I’ve seen out in the field—like this lollipop.”

“What lollipop?” Ellie replied, bewildered.

“This one,” he returned, flipping the medallion over and tapping the lone glyph on its reverse side.

Ellie eyed the circle of spiraling, whirling lines skeptically. There was admittedly something just a bit lollipopish about it.

“I am fairly certain that represents some kind of wind or vapor,” Ellie cut in defensively.

“But if they knew enough to replicate the lollipop, why not just carve the actual characters?” Bates continued. “Why bother changing them around at all when the real thing would’ve been more convincing?”

“Yes,” Ellie agreed. Her interest sparked again as she returned to his side and gazed down at the medallion with him. “That was my reasoning exactly.”

The thoughtful look Bates flashed her was a little difficult to read. She was relieved when he returned his attention to the artifact.

“You can’t reach inside a piece of rock and ask it when it was made,” he asserted. “In determining the authenticity of something like this, a lot of it’s got to come down to knowing where it came from.”

He gave her a meaningful look, waiting.

Ellie felt the tingle of rising nerves.

“I can confidently say that it dates back to at least the mid-seventeenth century,” she offered carefully.

Bates’s tone shifted, taking on a warning note.

“Where’d you get the necklace, Princess?”

She had, of course, stolen it from the archive entrusted with the preservation of the records of the United Kingdom—even if she was quite certain it didn’t belong there.

Ellie could hardly tell Bates that. ‘I stole it’ didn’t sound good no matter how one framed it.

She couldn’t afford to put him off—not when it looked very much like he might be her only hope of finding her city and getting out of this colony alive.

The obvious solution was a lie. It galled her. She was about to ask the man to help her. Surely she owed him better than that?

On the other hand, she barely knew him. Though Bates seemed honorable beneath his appallingly rough edges, surely it was reasonable for Ellie to err on the side of prudence—at least for a little while longer.

“I found the medallion inside an old psalter,” she said. “A family heirloom nobody had ever bothered to open that I picked up at an estate sale.”

“A family heirloom,” he repeated.

She could hear his skepticism. A bit desperately, she waded in deeper.

“My theory is that the book was confiscated from a Spanish ship by an English privateer,” she offered, forcing a bit of cheerful interest into her tone.

“How do you get that from a piece of rock?” Bates returned, puzzled.

“I… don’t,” Ellie admitted. “I get it from this.”

She pulled the map from her pocket.

Bates put down the medallion, took the jeweler’s glass from his eye, and accepted the folded packet.

“Map… signifying… location of… habitatur?” he read, squinting a bit at the faded ink on the outside of the parchment. “Damned Ecclesiastical Latin.”

“Inhabited,” Ellie offered quietly, suppressing a little note of surprise that he could actually read that much of it. She didn’t need to look at the words on the outside of the folded map to remember what they said. “The inhabited kingdom.”

Bates frowned down at the words.

“You have a treasure map,” he said a bit dully.

Ellie stifled an exasperated huff.

“It is not a treasure map,” she retorted.

He frowned at her and moved to open the parchment.

With a quick, panicked instinct, Ellie plucked it from his hands.

“Hey!” he protested.

She held the map protectively to her chest, her heart pounding.

“Do you want me to look at it or not?” he demanded.

“If I show the map to you, that’s it,” she countered, the words spilling out of her with all the force of truth. “You’ll have everything you need to find the city. You won’t need me anymore.”

“I can’t find it at all if you don’t show me the map,” Bates countered crossly.

Ellie clutched the parchment, torn with the impossibility of the situation. Bates was right, of course. She had to give him something if she wanted him to partner with her on this mad quest. She couldn’t possibly expect him to agree based on her word and a lump of stone.

But she knew all too well what would happen if she handed the map over. Even though Bates had proved himself to be a decent fellow—protecting her from Jacobs without a question—he was still a man. He would have been raised all of his life to see women as fragile beings in need of protection… if they weren’t simply to be exploited. Centuries of cultural conditioning couldn’t be overcome on a whim—not even if he meant her well. Meaning her well could easily turn into sticking her on a boat back to London.

The solution to the problem crept across her mind. It was simple, really… and it went against her every bone-deep instinct as an archivist charged with a sacred responsibility to preserve.

Ellie opened the folded packet of the map and ripped it neatly in half.

“Are you out of your ever-loving—” Bates protested, coming to his feet.

“Here,” she cut in as she extended the lower half of the document toward him.

“What about the rest of it?” he demanded.

“The rest stays with me until we’re well on our way, as my insurance policy,” she replied.

“Insurance against what?” he barked back. “If I was out to steal your map and feed you to the crocodiles, keeping it in your corset isn’t going to stop me.”

Ellie took a step closer to him, steeling her spine.

“I wouldn’t be offering to bring you in on this if I thought you were going to rob me. I am more concerned about being packed back to England out of a convenient sense of chivalry.”

Bates put his hand to the bridge of his nose as if fighting a headache.

“For the record, I do think you’d be a hell of a lot better off back in England,” he noted.

“No,” Ellie replied, an impulsive honesty stripping the words raw. “I am not entirely sure that I would be.”

He dropped his hand and met her eyes—considering.

“Where’s this city of yours supposed to be? Approximately,” he added as her posture quickly turned defensive.

Ellie turned to the sprawling map on the wall. The detail and organization of the hand drawn document stood in stark contrast to the messy chaos of the room that surrounded her. She studied the notes and lines for any sign of the landmarks listed on her parchment. Nothing she could see resembled a Black Pillar that Draws the Compass or an Arch Hollowed by the Hand of God. She would have to rely on other means of estimating the place the X on the parchment indicated.

Not to scale, of course, she thought. The original would have been based on a verbal report by someone lacking modern survey methods… Source would have been traveling by foot. How long could such a man have walked without succumbing to exhaustion or hunger?

Her mind rapidly made the necessary assumptions and calculations, and she reached out to lay her hand across a swath of topography that included the high, jagged peaks of a distant range of mountains. Only a single, powerful word otherwise marked the area: Uncharted.

Bates came to her side, gazing grimly at the spot she had indicated. He stood closer than was strictly polite—all looming, disreputable male, with his suspenders still hanging at his sides. He smelled vaguely of cigars and alcohol. He had left an inordinate number of buttons on his shirt undone, exposing a triangle of skin at his collarbone that was as deeply tanned as the rest of him. The odd implication of that crawled slowly across Ellie’s brain. Did the man do most of his surveying without a shirt?

The notion was uncomfortably distracting.

“Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” he said as he turned to face her. “If I agree to help you with this insanity, I’m the one who calls the shots. I tell you to duck, you duck. Run, you run—and not after you’ve asked me thirty questions or called me a patriarchal good-for-nothing. Where you want to go, there are a whole lot of things that would love nothing more than to cut the pair of us down. However many books you might’ve read, until you’ve been there, pretending to know what you’re doing is a quick way to get yourself killed.”

“If I knew what I was doing, Mr. Bates, I wouldn’t be asking for your assistance,” Ellie tightly replied.

“Well,” he returned coolly. “As long as we know where we both stand.”

The silence that followed felt like a contest of wills fought across the bare foot of space that separated them. Ellie refused to bend to it. He would meet her in this as an equal or not at all—Jacobs and the threat he posed be dashed.

The tension rose. As it did, something shifted in the tone of it—something that made her mouth go a bit dry. She swallowed thickly, conscious of the slow throb of her heart, the sweat lightly glazing her back, and the way the shadows danced across Bates’s jaw with the flicker of the lamplight.

Ellie blinked, forcing the odd sensation back. The tension broke as Bates moved away from her to pluck a battered canvas rucksack from beside the bed. He started tossing things into it.

“How about the story with your friend from upstairs?” he said as he shoved a bundle of mosquito netting into the pack.

“I would say he is a competitor,” Ellie replied tightly.

He paused, glancing over at her.

“A competitor who isn’t averse to tying up and gagging a lady,” he pointed out.

“Er... yes,” Ellie admitted.

“Sounds like fun,” Bates replied in a grumble.

He unclipped his suspenders and tossed them aside. The bands landed in a haphazard pile on top of the unmade bed.

He yanked open the door to his closet. Something lurched at him from inside in a blur of yellow eyes and rows of wicked teeth. Ellie’s throat closed with panic as she recognized the form of a bizarrely upright crocodile.

Bates’s hand flashed out and caught the beast by its chest. He pushed it back into the closet automatically, still rifling through the hangers.

With a blink of surprise, Ellie amended her impression. The crocodile was stuffed.

Bates emerged with a sturdy, weathered leather belt. He wrapped it around his waist with an easy, practiced motion as he kicked the dead reptile back into place and shut the closet door.

Ellie recognized the handle of his enormous knife protruding from a sheath attached to the belt. The sight of it made her stomach drop a bit further.

What was she getting herself into?

“Probably best if we avoid going back to your room,” Bates pointed out. “And we’ll need to travel light. Is there anything you absolutely can’t do without?”

The question startled her. Ellie’s heart pattered uncomfortably at the sudden realness of what was happening.

She flashed her gaze to the equipment hanging from the nails driven into the walls: levels, stakes, theodolites, and spools of masonry string. She had meant to acquire a pick, screen, brush, and shovel in case she decided to dig a small test pit on the site, but as she faced the reality of carrying those items across an unknown span of rainforest, she realized how foolish that had been.

Ellie forced herself to take a breath. This was a preliminary expedition. There was only one thing she needed in order for it to be a success.

“Do you have a blank notebook?” she asked.

Bates’s hand moved unerringly to a thin, leatherbound volume that lay among the piles of papers on his desk. He flipped through it quickly and shrugged.

“Mostly blank,” he offered as he held it out to her. “Will that do?”

“Yes,” Ellie said, looking down at the unassuming book.

She was overwhelmed by the sense of what those ordinary pages meant.

They were potential. They were hope.

Bates held out the rucksack.

“Add it to the kit,” he said.

Ellie let the notebook slide from her hands into the bag—then quickly darted out to grab a pencil from the desk and throw it in as well.

“Have you a sharpener?” she asked.

He answered her with a grin.

“Sure. It’s right here.”

He tapped the place where the enormous knife hung at his belt.

Slinging the bag over his shoulder, he paused to eye her figure, eyes roving carefully from her tousled hair to her somewhat dirt-smudged cotton shirtwaist, and finally her feet.

“Those leather boots?” he asked.

“What?” Ellie returned as she lifted the footwear in question. “Er—yes?”

“No heels,” Bates commented approvingly. “New laces. How long have you had ‘em?”

“About a year?” Ellie returned, confused by the question.

“Do much walking?”

“I do a very great deal of it,” she replied as she crossed her arms over her chest and fought a rising note of irritation. “May I ask why it matters?”

“You don’t want to be out there in bad shoes,” he replied.

Bates paused, his expression going over a bit awkward as he scratched at the side of his jaw.

“Look. I—ah—don’t usually much concern myself with this sort of thing, but I should probably make it clear before we do this,” he declared awkwardly. “We go out that door, it’s going to be just the two of us. I don’t usually bring a team with me on this sort of initial expedition, even if that would’ve made any kind of sense given your current circumstances.”

Circumstances like the murderer upstairs, Ellie thought grimly.

“That means you’re going to be out in the bush alone with a strange man, possibly for weeks,” he went on. “I’ve never been one to give much of a damn for my reputation, but I’ve also never been considered a debaucher of proper young ladies. I’m not sure that’s a distinction I’d like to earn.”

Ellie was aghast.

“Are you telling me that the future of this endeavor depends upon whether or not I am a virgin?” she demanded.

Bates blushed. It was a rather ferocious blush. It had to be in order to make its way through the deep tan of his skin.

“That isn’t what I… That’s not…” He took a breath and raised his eyes to the ceiling as he tried to gather himself. “What I’m saying is, I’m not in the market for some outraged father or brother to come pounding on my door demanding I make an honest woman of you. Nor do I think you’re looking to undertake this expedition at the cost of being hitched to some guy you barely know for the rest of your life. Look… if you just need to get that bastard and whoever he’s working with off your tail, there are other ways to do that. I don’t exactly maintain friends in high places, but if it’s a matter of beating a guy like that out of the idea of wanting anything to do with you or your map—I might find a certain kind of pleasure in that.”

There was a rough and delicious edge to his voice. Ellie had little doubt that part of him very much liked the idea of engaging in a bout of fisticuffs with Jacobs.

Bates might even come out on top of such an engagement—but she uneasily found that she could not be entirely sure. For all Bates’s virile strength and cat-like readiness, there was something very sharp and wicked about Jacobs that made her warily consider just how dangerous he might be.

No—Ellie could not allow Bates to take that risk. She wondered whether she ought to simply free him of any obligation he felt to lend her aid.

Ellie thought about what she had observed of Bates’s character so far, and considered how likely it was that she might convince him to leave the matter alone.

She had as much chance of redirecting a gorilla.

Traveling with him to search for the city was decidedly better than allowing him to barrel off after Jacobs and possibly get himself gutted. Ellie could not let some outmoded concern about social mores and the repressive control of female virtue stand in the way of it.

Besides, no one was going to hear about what she got up to in this place—certainly not her father with his nose in the newspaper and her stepbrother Neil all the way off in Egypt.

What happened in the wilderness could stay in the wilderness.

“That needn’t concern you,” Ellie informed him evenly. “I am not a virgin.”

Bates’s eyebrow cocked with surprise.

“I mean that I am a widow,” Elle quickly corrected. She extended her hand. “Mrs. Nitherscott-Watby, at your service.”

He took her hand. For a moment, he simply held it, as though the imminent shake that would seal their arrangement were suspended somewhere in the air around them.

“Bit of a mouthful there,” he commented.

The texture of his skin was weathered and calloused, but he clasped her fingers with an unexpected delicacy of pressure.

“Then you may call me Eleanora,” she declared with slightly more firmness than she was feeling.

“Eleanora, huh?”

She wriggled a little uncomfortably. She had never loved her full name. It had always sounded a bit ponderous.

“Maybe just Ellie,” she allowed.

He considered it—considered her—and Ellie was gripped by the quick and uncomfortable fear that he could see right through all of her prudent fictions.

“What the hell?” he abruptly declared.

He gave her hand a single powerful shake and released her.

Bates plucked the rifle from where it leaned beside the bed. The wooden stock was polished to a gleam, the black barrel neatly oiled. He swung the weapon over his shoulder alongside the rucksack.

“Let’s get moving,” he announced.

“Are you sure the firearm is strictly necessary?” Ellie demanded, eyeing the gun with distaste.

“This is a Winchester lever-action repeater,” Bates protested, obviously offended. “It’s the best-made gun in the world. Hell yes, it’s necessary.”

“I see,” Ellie said, quickly sensing that the presence of the gun was not a battle she would win. “And is there anything I can carry?”

“Everything else we need is with the Mary Lee,” he replied.

“Who is Mary Lee?” Ellie asked.

“My boat.”

Bates blew out the lamp and strode toward the French doors that led to the veranda.

“We are going out through the garden?” Ellie blurted as she stumbled into motion after him.

“Where else would we go?” Bates replied. “I gotta steal you some trousers.”