Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Seventeen

Adam tossed a compass at Ellie as the Mary Lee puttered from the gloom of the cave.

“Here,” he said.

The instrument was housed in a scratched and battered case of gold. Ellie found an engraving inside when she popped open the lid.

To A—May you always know your path. GB

George Bates. Ellie remembered Adam mentioning his father’s name.

The case was dented with a bit of rust starting to show on the hinges.

The landscape continued to rise around them. The water narrowed as the territory became more obviously mountainous. The thick, green foliage of the banks began to blur as Ellie’s eyes flickered from the shadows between the thick-trunked trees to the instrument in her hand while she searched for the next landmark on the map—a Black Pillar that Draws the Compass.

Their progress upriver was slower than the day before. The current that pushed against them grew stronger as they moved higher into the mountains, forcing the engine to work harder. Going too fast might also mean missing an all-important flicker of the compass’s needle.

By the time evening began to settle in, Ellie was ready to drop.

Bates tied the boat to the bank. The Mary Lee immediately began to tug at her makeshift anchor against the force of the stream. The forest around them had changed from the world of the night before. New birds darted overhead and stranger rustles disturbed the underbrush.

“How can I be this tired?” Ellie protested as Bates pulled more cans out of the hold. “All I did was sit in the bow.”

“You were concentrating,” Bates replied. She could hear the exhaustion in his voice as well. “That’ll take more out of you than you realize.”

“More beans?” she guessed tiredly as she eyed the cans.

“No idea. The cans aren’t labeled. That’s why I got them at a discount.” He popped off the lid and gave the contents a sniff. “Beef,” he concluded. He peeked into the next. “Tomato soup.”

He considered them for a moment, then resignedly dumped the contents into the same pot and gave it a token stir.

Ellie dropped her gaze to the hedgehog-shaped rock on the small shelf by the boiler. She recalled how Bates had given it a tap when they had first boarded the steamer back in Belize Town.

“What is that stone for?” she asked.

“It’s my lucky rock,” Bates replied.

Ellie frowned. The rock was conspicuously ordinary.

“What makes it lucky?” she pressed.

“I didn’t crack my head open on it,” he returned easily.

“You may need to elaborate,” she noted as she leaned back against the rail.

“Right after I started the job, I went out during the rainy season. Thought maybe folks were exaggerating how bad it was.” Bates dropped down to the deck beside her. “The ground was saturated and gave way beneath me. I found myself riding a landslide. Just a little one, but even a little one can be bad. When I stopped, I was staring at that rock—which was sitting about an inch from my skull.” He shrugged. “So now it’s my lucky rock.”

“How is it lucky, exactly?” Ellie wondered skeptically.

“As long as it’s on the boat, we’ll have smooth sailing,” Bates asserted confidently.

“How on earth can you expect a rock to do that?”

Bates blinked at her uncomprehendingly.

“Because it’s lucky,” he replied as though the answer should have been obvious.

Ellie had no response to that. Instead, she looked to the peaks that shadowed the violet sky. They were much closer now than they had been the night before.

The air grew cooler and more delicate as the heat of the day broke into twilight, and the world of the Mary Lee narrowed to an intimate circle against the gloom.

The memory of her conversation with Bates in the ruined cave chamber earlier that day continued to tug at her. Now that the stillness of evening had replaced the exhausting focus of their work through the afternoon, Ellie thought she ought to say something more about it—but what? Anything that came into her exhausted mind seemed awkward and inadequate… nor was she at all certain that her attempts at consolation would be welcomed.

“Should we have found the Black Pillar by now?” she asked instead—and immediately feared how Bates would answer.

“It’s hard to say.” He let his head fall back to rest against the rail as his legs sprawled out in front of him. “The map’s not to scale.” He cast a meaningful glance over at her. “Though that might not matter if you let me see the rest of it.”

His routine jibe about the map failed to spark the usual irritation. Instead, Ellie unbuttoned the top of her shirt.

Bates’s gaze sharpened, but Ellie’s thoughts were elsewhere—on the parchment she pulled out from the top of her corset.

His expression shifted from taut focus to a look of dismay.

“Aw hell—were you wearing that when I pulled you into the river?” he moaned.

“It’s iron gall ink on parchment, as is typical for the period,” Ellie replied calmly. “You can tell by the surface etching and light oxidation. Iron gall ink on parchment is more or less waterproof.”

Ellie unfolded the still-damp page and laid it down in front of Bates… and a dark, irresistible laugh rose up from low in his chest.

“What’s so funny?” Ellie demanded, her defenses prickling.

“It’s got an X on it,” he pointed out.

She gritted her teeth.

“The fading of the ink and the quality of the parchment are clear indicators that the age of the document is genuine,” she rattled off authoritatively. “You have seen for yourself that it is an accurate representation of the colony, even if not to scale, and the use of Ecclesiastical Latin is appropriate for purported authorship by a Spanish monk in the mid-seventeenth century.”

“Great, big ole’ X,” Bates continued, barely stifling a snort. “X marks the spot.”

Ellie fought a wave of both anger and a hot mortification.

“Are you quite done?” she prompted thinly.

Bates coughed back whatever remaining laughter was in his chest and rose to collect his own maps. He spread the lot of them out across the deck and bent over them with concentration.

Ellie went to the stove while he worked. The contents of the pot were already hot. She filled a pair of bowls and rinsed the pan in the river as she’d seen Bates do the day before.

She set his bowl down beside him. Uncharacteristically, he ignored it.

Ellie dug into her own dinner while she waited. Bates’s haphazard combination of tinned beef and tomatoes was surprisingly palatable.

“We went the wrong way,” Bates announced as he leaned back and picked up his bowl.

Ellie stopped with her spoon halfway to her mouth.

“What?” she blurted.

“See this?” Bates tapped a spot on Ellie’s half of the map that lay a little beyond the Black Pillar where a few rippled lines had been carefully inked beside the label for one of the other landmarks—Arch Hollowed by the Hand of God. “Pretty sure those are cataracts.”

Ellie leaned over for a better look, careful to keep her bowl aside so that she wouldn’t drip tomatoes onto the precious documents.

“I suppose they could be,” she agreed a little uncomfortably.

Bates took a bite of his dinner. His eyebrows went up appreciatively at the flavor. He slurped down another mouthful before pushing the old maps carefully aside and tapping the newer one beneath them.

“And what do you see here?” he probed.

Ellie frowned at the blue line he indicated. The narrower band of it wriggled across the landscape to join up with a far more substantial watercourse—one that ran directly into the center of Belize Town.

“Which—ah—river is that?” she asked, even as her heart sank.

“That’s the Belize,” Bates replied.

“The river that runs right through the capital?” Ellie’s voice came out with just a hint of an awkward squeak.

“Uh-huh.” He rapped his finger against the rogue bit of blue ink. “And this is a new tributary that a pair of logging scouts reported to me last year. They said this whole section was taken up with rapids.”

Ellie pulled both halves of the older map closer and studied them as Bates blithely shoveled more of the soup into his face.

She sat back and looked down at the papers with dismay.

“We went the wrong way,” she admitted numbly.

“Sure did,” he agreed.

“We should have gone directly up the Belize and looked for the arch. It would have cut…”

“A solid day off the ride,” Bates filled in around a mouthful of beef and tomatoes. “And probably two or three days’ of trekking through the bush.”

Ellie closed her eyes and fought the need to curse.

“Should we go back?” she asked.

“Not at this point,” he replied. She heard him carefully fold up the maps. “We’re too far along now for it to be worth backtracking, but it does mean that we don’t have to find your pillar to know where we’re going. We’ll follow the river up another ten miles or so—however far we can get at this time of the year—and then cut overland until we hit the tributary. But…”

He trailed off, and Ellie felt another little jolt of alarm.

“But what?” she prompted.

The look he gave her was unsettlingly sympathetic.

“If we don’t find your Black Pillar, you might want to ask yourself whether it’s worth it,” he quietly noted.

“Worth it?” Ellie returned as her sense of dismay grew deeper.

“The location of that tributary on my map is approximate,” he said. “I haven’t surveyed it myself—I was just going off of what was reported back to me, which isn’t always terribly reliable. If we head in the right direction, we’ll eventually hit it or some other branch of the Belize… but there’s no telling how long we’ll have to hack our way through the bush to get there, or what we’ll find when we do,” he added warningly.

“You still think the map might be a hoax,” she pressed. Her throat felt tight.

“I think there’s a distinct possibility that even if there is an El Dorado at the end of your rainbow, we’re gonna find it in the same state as that cave chamber this morning,” Bates concluded bluntly.

His words struck Ellie like a blow.

She thought of the look in Bates’s eyes as he had surveyed the devastation in the looted cavern.

Her White City might not be marked on Bates’s map on the colony—but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t already found it and cleaned it out.

For an agonized moment, Ellie considered whether Bates might be right. Did she really want to chance facing that terrible disappointment on an even grander and more awful scale?

She thought of Bates’s tense confession that he had stopped adding the new Mayan sites he discovered to his maps. It had shocked her, as documentation was such an essential part of her training—but she could understand what might have driven him to do it.

Ellie would have to report their find if it turned out that there really was a city behind that dratted X on the map. She could hardly keep such an important scientific discovery to herself.

Of course, when she did, it would become clear to Bates that she’d been lying to him all this time about her name.

Guilt burst over her at the thought. Thanks to Bates’s annoying habit of referring to her as ‘Princess,’ Ellie had forgotten about her obnoxious alias.

Obviously, she needed to remedy that. Her traveling companion had more than proved that he deserved her trust. The reminder that she had engaged his assistance under false pretenses—and then maintained them long after she had any reasonable excuse for it—made her feel a little ill.

Her name. The truth about how she acquired the map. The teensy little fact that she was related to one of his best friends.

She would fix all of it, she determined firmly. Just… not tonight.

Ellie knew it was weakness, but they were both exhausted by the efforts of the day and the disappointment of discovering the looted cave. She’d find the right time to tell Bates the truth—soon, she promised herself.

Bates’s voice startled her out of her reverie.

“Hey—you all right?”

“Yes, of course,” Ellie replied quickly. “I am well aware of the various risks of hiking overland. I would still like to try, if you’re willing to continue.”

Their eyes locked. Ellie felt an unexpected tension build inside of her… and then Bates’s gaze dropped to her collarbone.

Her currently exposed collarbone.

Buttons, Ellie thought with a distant alarm as she clamped her hand onto the front of her shirt, which she had neglected to do back up after removing the map.

“Hiking,” Bates blurted, snapping his gaze away from her. “Love hiking. Sounds good to me. Best get some sleep.”

“Right,” Ellie agreed awkwardly. “An eminently wise suggestion.”

She rapidly restored her buttons and climbed into her hammock.

“Good night, Mr. Bates,” she said, resolutely directing her gaze at the canopy which hung overhead.

“Sweet dreams, Princess,” Bates replied, staring up at the canvas from beside her.