Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Nineteen

Ellie ran her fingers over the carved surface of the monument. Suffused by amazement, she brushed a bit of moss off the stone.

The towering pillar was a stela—a rectangular block that had been set up to commemorate some lost ruler or great event.

The stela was dominated by the bas relief carving of a single, powerful figure—a man in the prime of life, draped in elaborate finery. He wore a headdress of jeweled feathers. His cape was carved with the spots of a jaguar pelt. A line of skulls danced at his feet.

The borders of the stone were covered with square symbols.

“Bates, some of these signs are identical to the ones on my medallion!” Ellie’s skin danced with an electric sense of potential. “Do you realize what that means? On its own, the medallion might have been a clever hoax—but this? No one could possibly have come out here and forged this.”

She moved closer to the stela. Her thoughts raced in time with the pounding of her heart.

“Look at this marking.” Ellie pointed to an anthropomorphic glyph. “That’s another deity related to God K. These carvings over here look similar to the dots and bars of the Mayan number system. And this…” She stopped, her fingers hovering over the surface of a polished black circle, which was framed by the hands of the king. “The Smoking Mirror, if I am not mistaken.”

“Princess…” Bates began.

Ellie barely heard him. Her mind was spinning with the possibilities.

“The iconography and the language glyphs don’t match up with Mayan or Aztec characters,” she concluded firmly. “The symbolism here combines elements of both civilizations. It could belong to a descendant culture, of course—but then, why wouldn’t the Spanish have heard about it? Either way, the implications are clear. This means… This is…”

Wonder choked off the flow of her words.

“Something new,” she finally blurted.

Something new. The stela was clear evidence for the existence of a previously unknown Mesoamerican culture… and Ellie had the map to the heart of it tucked into her corset.

“Hand me my pencil,” she ordered.

“Pretty sure it’s my pencil,” Adam countered lightly.

“And the notebook. I need to make a complete record of all this—” Ellie stopped. “The notebook! It was in the rucksack! It will have been soaked through. How am I going to document our finds if I don’t have anything to write in?”

“We’ll dry it out.” Bates tugged her back from the monument. “But first, we need to set up camp. We’ve only got about three hours before dark, and we do not want to get caught out here unprepared when the sun sets.”

Ellie bit back the curse that leapt to her lips. She cast one more longing look at the feathers and bones that punctuated the carving, enraptured by the conjunction of the elegant and the brutal. An unknown language whispered to her of as-yet-undreamed knowledge.

She tore her gaze away.

“What do we need to do?” she asked.

“You need to collect any dry wood you can find,” Bates replied. “I’ll do the rest.”

“Surely, there is more that I might do in addition to picking up sticks,” she insisted.

“Nope.” Bates peeled his machete off the stela. “Get a whole lot of sticks. Pine is great. Don’t touch anything with thorns. Keep your eye out for snakes—and ants. Great big lines of carnivorous ants.”

“What am I supposed to do if I see one?” Ellie protested as he moved away.

“Walk the other way!” Bates called back to her.

Ellie did not see any snakes, or ants. She did disturb some sort of oversized brown rodent—it moved too quickly for her to identify it clearly—as well as a nest of hurrying little spiders.

Finding fuel turned out to be more of a challenge than she had thought. So many of the branches that she stumbled across were damp. She finally discovered that she could gather dryer wood if she managed to scramble up the trees a bit and kick loose any dead branches.

She also dragged a few yellowed, curling palm fronds to the fire pit that Bates had scraped out of the earth, deducing they might make for decent kindling.

Ellie was rapidly acquiring a greater appreciation for Bates’s excessively large knife. The machete was a remarkably versatile tool. He used it to neatly whack down thin saplings, which he laid across the branches of two adjacent trees to form a platform safely suspended above the ground. He lashed these supports together with strips of shaggy bark that he peeled off another tree, and then layered a small mountain of palm fronds on top of it all.

Bates used the blade to trim a branch into a flexible wand that he fashioned into a trap by the river. The snare snapped to life an hour later with an enormous wriggling iguana suspended from it.

The machete also neatly dispatched the iguana.

“Do we have enough wood now?” Ellie demanded as Bates ignited a pile of dry grass and pine shavings with a match.

“Nope,” he returned without looking at her. “Bring me big stuff now. Doesn’t matter how wet.”

Ellie dragged logs across the uneven ground. Sweat dripped down her face as she cursed and swatted at the annoying buzz of a mosquito. As she returned with the better part of a small tree, she saw Bates spear the gutted corpse of the lizard on a pointed stick with one practiced tug.

The sight made her feel a bit ill.

Bates glanced up at her as she dropped the log beside him… perhaps because she opted to do it rather closer than she had before.

“Have some water,” he ordered. “And use this.”

He pulled a small tin canister from the rucksack and tossed it at her.

“What is it?” Ellie opened the container and gave the jelly-like substance inside an experimental sniff. It smelled of herbs and citrus with bitter undertones.

“Rub it on any exposed skin,” Bates said. “It’ll help keep the bugs off.”

Ellie scooped a little of the salve out with her fingers and rubbed it onto her neck and wrists.

“You need a break?” Bates asked.

“Certainly not,” Ellie returned a bit defensively.

“Great.” He drove the pole with the dead lizard into the earth by the fire. “Grab us another couple logs.”

By the time Ellie dropped a final pile of slimy wood on the stack, Bates had finished constructing their shelter. It looked surprisingly sturdy and comfortable. He had added a simple frame of saplings to the platform. The mosquito net hung over it, covered with more palm fronds to keep off both the bugs and the damp.

The platform was not particularly large. Ellie would be sleeping quite close to Bates. Of course, the hammocks on the Mary Lee had hardly been much further apart. Ellie reminded herself that in practice, there had been nothing terribly indecent about that. Besides, they were in the back country now. Survival obviously took precedence over any silly social constraints.

Bates sat on a rock by the little blaze and gave the coals a stir. The skin of the spitted iguana had gone black and crackly.

He shoved a few more sticks into the earth around the fire. They were speared with chunks of a thick white vegetable.

“What are those?” Ellie asked as she plopped down beside him.

“Palm hearts,” he replied.

He plucked the spit with the iguana from the ground and dropped the cooked lizard onto a pile of plantain leaves.

“Hot hot hot…” he cursed, shaking out his fingers.

The iguana tasted better than it had any right to. Ellie devoured it, along with the grilled palm hearts.

She had just drained the last mouthful of water from the canteen when she was struck by a terrible realization.

“We can’t refill this from the river!” she blurted. “The water might not be safe.”

“Nope,” Bates agreed.

“And we have nothing in which to boil water,” she pointed out urgently.

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“You really think I made it this far in my life without knowing how to find water out here?” he prompted. “I can get you some now, if you’re thirsty. Or… you can help me drink this.”

He reached into the rucksack and pulled out a bottle, which he gazed at with an appreciation that looked almost loving.

Ellie recognized it as the mysterious item that Bates had wasted precious seconds adding to his bag when their boat was about to plummet over a cliff.

“Please tell me that’s medicinal,” she commented flatly.

“It’ll cure what ails you.” Bates set the blade of his machete to the wax-covered cork. “Veni, Sancte Spiritus,” he recited and neatly popped it loose.

“Come, Holy Spirit?” Ellie automatically translated, both impressed and slightly aghast. “Did you just apply the Pentecostal liturgy to your whiskey?”

“It’s rum.” Bates took an indulgent sniff at the top of the bottle. “The best rum in the world, and thank all Sanctis Spiritibus, it made it ashore in one piece.”

“It’s just ‘spiritūs’ in the accusative,” Ellie replied automatically, using the longer ‘u’ to indicate the plural.

“Us, ūs, uī, um, u, ūs, uum, ibus, ūs, ibus.” Bates cheerfully rattled off the Latin fourth declension, then lifted the bottle and took a generous swig. “Carpe diem.”

“This is the rum you swore on,” Ellie quickly deduced. “When you—ah…”

She trailed off with a flush.

“Promised not to look at your underwear,” Bates filled in cheerfully. “And I didn’t, did I?”

He extended the bottle to her.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Ellie quickly countered. “I don’t partake in spirits.”

Bates’s expression grew serious.

“This is—beyond all doubt—the finest rum in the world,” he pronounced solemnly. “For all I know, it may very well be the last bottle of it. I had it off a grandma in Jamaica who kept a still in her barn. Tried my damnedest to pry the technique out of her, but she swore she’d take it to the grave. She was ancient then—and that had to be six or seven years ago—so I’d be surprised if she’s still bootlegging.”

“You’ve had this bottle for seven years?” Ellie asked.

“Been saving it for a special occasion.” He took another sip, obviously relishing the taste. His eyes closed with an expression of pure pleasure.

“You are drinking it now,” Ellie pointed out. “This hardly seems like a special occasion.”

“Sure it is.” He raised the bottle in a salute. “To not being dead.”

He took another sip as he leaned against the tree behind him.

“You should at least give it a taste,” he urged. “Can’t be any harm in that, can there? Unless you’re one of those hellfire-and-damnation temperance types.” He cracked a wary eye at her.

“I am not a temperance type,” Ellie returned neatly. “I have simply never seen the appeal of spirits.”

“Some spirits are terrible,” Bates agreed. “And some spirits are sancte. This is the sancte-est of spirits.”

Ellie eyed the bottle warily. The golden liquid inside of it shimmered in the firelight.

Dusk had settled thickly around them as the tropical forest dimmed into gloom. When Ellie looked back in the direction of the river, the pieces of the sky that she could see were streaked with purple and rose.

What harm could there be in one little taste?

Before Ellie could think better of it, she snapped out her hand for the bottle. She tipped it up to her lips and took a sip.

Her mouth flooded with gold. The liquor was all warm spice, caramel, vanilla, and fruit. It tasted like sunshine on Christmas morning.

“Dear God!” she exclaimed wonderingly.

“Gloria in excelsis Deo,” Bates comfortably agreed. “Have another.”

She shouldn’t. Ellie was not a teetotaler, but she had always believed that spirits were generally best avoided. What could they offer, really, that a bracing cup of strong tea could not?

She was a hundred miles from civilization with a belly full of lizard. Ellie took another sip. It was most certainly not tea, and it was wonderful.

Reluctantly, she handed the bottle back. Bates took a swig of his own, and then planted the rum on the ground between them.

“How did you learn to do this?” Ellie asked.

“What—roast an iguana?” he replied.

“No. All of this,” she countered, waving her hand around the camp. “I frankly wouldn’t have known the first thing about how to keep us alive out here.”

“Why the hell would you?” he returned easily.

Ellie tried not to be stung by his reply, but some part of her reaction must have shown on her face.

“I don’t mean it like that,” Bates quickly corrected. “I meant, this isn’t stuff you can find in books. I had no idea what I was doing when I first got out here. I learned from other people who were nice enough to teach me how not to kill myself. Like Cedric Barrow, who you met back in town. Andy Gordon—he was a great guy. Passed away a couple years ago. I got some of my best tricks from Tadeas Chan, a K?iche? Maya grandpa who went on a couple excursions with me. A few things, I figured out on my own by doing something stupid and getting lucky enough not to die. Every now and then, I keep that fine tradition alive—like today, when I threw our boat over a waterfall.”

“Your boat…” Ellie began with a pang of guilt. “Had you had it very long?”

“Pretty much since I got here,” Bates replied.

“I’m terribly sorry it went over the waterfall.” Ellie amended her words with a quick burst of guilt. “I mean that I am sorry that my expedition led to your boat going over the waterfall. You would not have been out here at all, if it weren’t for me.”

Bates watched her quietly as the firelight flickered across his features. He picked up the bottle of rum and handed it to her.

Ellie had another drink. This time, she didn’t have to think about it quite so much.

“You didn’t have to twist my arm too hard to get me out here, Princess,” Bates noted.

“I landed on you whilst bound and gagged,” Ellie retorted skeptically.

He chuckled lowly.

“Yup,” he agreed. “You sure did. Dropped right out of the damned sky.”

Ellie’s mouth firmed as she struggled to hold back the bubbling urge to laugh at the absurdity of it.

Instead, the stifled impulse came out in the form of a snort. Horrified by it, she clamped her hand over her mouth.

At the sound, Bates let out a clear, happy bark of laughter.

“Gimmie back my bottle,” he ordered, grinning at her.

Ellie realized that she was still clinging to the rum. She handed it over, and he took another generous swig.

“I would’ve been back out here on my own one way or another,” Bates continued. “I like it out here. And it’s always been a matter of sheer, blind luck that I avoided disaster to this point.”

Ellie thought of how he had easily, confidently built their camp out of nothing but a machete and a piece of mosquito net.

“I don’t think that is quite an accurate assessment, Mr. Bates,” she said quietly.

“Adam,” he corrected her. His eyes were a bit shadowy in the gloom that was deepening around them.

“Adam,” Ellie tried carefully.

The name felt strange on her tongue… but not unpleasant. It reminded her of the taste of the rum.

He proffered the bottle. Ellie took another drink.

Her insides were beginning to feel nicely warm. The temperature had dropped with the falling of the sun, making the air around them more comfortable. The smoke and Bates’s salve kept most of the bugs at bay.

Adam’s salve, she corrected herself inwardly.

“And as it turns out, it’s starting to look like there might actually be something to that treasure map of yours.” Adam nodded back in the direction of the black pillar.

The monument was lost in the shadowed darkness. The visible world had shrunk to the circle cast by the orange glow of their fire. Beyond it, strange hoots and chirps rose to fill the silences between their words. Leaves rustled and insects buzzed as the dense tropical growth came to a darker, richer life.

The setting was both intimate and intimidating, though Ellie still felt reasonably safe here by the fire with Adam. She was a little surprised to realize that she trusted he would know if there was any real danger. He wouldn’t have been comfortably sprawled out and drinking his rum if there was.

That feeling—trust—was quite foreign. The enormity of it made Ellie feel a bit solemn, even as the rum still danced in her veins.

“I know we… discussed this earlier,” she said carefully. “But would it be a mistake for us to press forward? Now that we’ve more or less been shipwrecked.”

“If anything, that makes a pretty good case for going forward,” he countered.

“But all of your things went down with the boat!” Ellie protested.

He raised an eyebrow.

“Just how much do you think I cart with me into the bush, Princess?” he asked.

Ellie looked around their primitive campsite.

“More than this?” she awkwardly offered.

“I mean—a little,” he admitted. “But not by that much. The more you have, the more you carry. If we were planning to camp out here and conduct a proper survey for the next four weeks, maybe I’d have brought some more gear along—but we’d still be sleeping rough. We’re not exactly swimming in funds at the surveyor general’s office. The guys who come out here with tents, cots, and afternoon sherry are privately funded, and they’re looking for stuff they can make a whole lot of money off of. I’ve always been a man of relatively simple needs.”

He punctuated the declaration with another sip of his rum and then passed her the bottle.

“That is an understatement,” Ellie retorted before once more filling her mouth with the rich, golden taste of the rum.

She felt a little happily loose in her limbs. Her thoughts, too, ran easily—lightly dancing from one thing to another. Ellie was carried along in a current that smelled of spice and vanilla. Her attention skipped from the big, capable knife at Adam’s belt to his hands, which were roughened from the work she now knew he did when out in the back country.

He was still talking. Ellie only half listened to it as her eyes settled on the way that the firelight flickered along the strong angle of his jaw.

“It makes more sense to try to cut our way overland to the Belize River,” he said. “There’ll be some traffic there even at this time of the year, where the Sibun’s likely deserted for the next fifty miles. We could build a raft, if we had to, and try to float our way back—but I’d sure as hell rather catch a lift, if we can. And if we’re heading that way anyway, what’s an extra day or two detouring to check out this city of yours?” He took another swig.

“Why aren’t you married?” Ellie asked.

Adam spat the rum into the fire. The flames roared up in response.

“Where the hell did that come from?” he spluttered.

In truth, the question had been the sort of rogue thought that Ellie would normally have judiciously kept to herself… as was the next one, which spilled out of her mouth just as easily as the first.

“I mean, you’re reasonably good-looking…” she began.

Adam gaped at her, then snapped his mouth shut.

“You aren’t indigent, despite your unorthodox lifestyle,” Ellie continued. “You are well-educated, with good overall career prospects. You must be rapidly approaching thirty…”

“I'm twenty-seven,” he said back. He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, and then took another deliberate swig of rum.

Part of Ellie’s brain watched the whole scene unfold with a sense of horrified embarrassment, but it seemed to be walled off from the neurons that were actually making her mouth move.

“Surely some woman has set her cap at you by now,” she rambled, “and most men of your position would’ve at least been thinking of settling down. I hardly expect you’ve been remaining celibate—”

Adam choked.

“—but there are other features of a marriage which most men seem desirous of acquiring.” Ellie’s mouth firmed into a grimmer line. “After all, the relationship has been structured to accrue all the possible benefits to them at the expense of the women involved.”

“You—ah—speaking from experience there?” he prompted tentatively.

Ellie recalled with a start that she was supposed to be masquerading as a widow. She was reminded—very uncomfortably— that she still wasn’t being completely honest with him.

She needed to remedy that… and yet the thought of doing it now—of how it would so quickly and thoroughly shatter this quiet camaraderie by the fire—made her chest feel tight.

“Sorry,” he went on without waiting for her answer. “I’m not looking to pry. But… to answer your question, since you have asked it—I am not married because I don’t want to be married.”

“But why not?” Ellie demanded, guiltily latching on to the change in subject.

“It just… wouldn’t work out.”

“I should think it would work out very nicely for you,” she grumbled.

“No woman is going to want to put up with me running off into the wilderness for the better part of the year,” Adam protested. “She might say she doesn’t mind, but that wouldn’t last. Couple kids come along, it’d change.”

“Children,” Ellie echoed darkly. The word sounded like a curse.

“You, ah… not fond of kids?” Adam offered carefully.

“Children,” she asserted as she warmed to the topic, “are another weight added to the chains of marriage. They trap a woman in the most intolerable of circumstances, depriving her of any slim hope she might have had of intellectual freedom or achievement. Do you know that as soon as a woman even becomes engaged to be married, she is dismissed from the civil service? It’s one thing to be removed because you were arrested—”

“Arrested?” Adam cut in as his eyes sharpened with interest.

Ellie clamped her mouth shut.

“Oh, no. No, you don’t,” he pressed, leaning forward. “You don’t drop a juicy tidbit like that and get away without elaborating. Did you get yourself arrested for something, Princess?”

“I… may have… chained-myself-to-the-gates-of-Parliament,” Ellie finished quickly and snatched the rum from his hand.

A low, rumbling chuckle rolled out of him.

“Do you have any idea,” he offered darkly, “how much I would’ve paid to see that?”

Ellie shot him a glare.

“It was hardly the most edifying spectacle,” she pointed out crossly.

“You telling me you regret it?” he prompted.

“Absolutely not!”

His grin widened devilishly.

“The police only held me for a few hours,” Ellie finished thinly. “And they agreed not to press charges if I signed a statement promising good behavior in the future.”

Adam cocked up an eyebrow.

“And you signed it?” he asked with obvious disbelief.

Ellie raised her chin defiantly.

“It is possible that I wrote down the name of the Right Honorable William Gladstone instead of my own,” she admitted stoutly.

Adam burst out laughing.

“It’s their own fault if they didn’t bother to read it,” she cut in scathingly over his hysterics. “Surely, the prime minister of a nation which continues to systematically oppress the rights of half its population is more in need of ‘good behavior’ than I am.”

Adam shook his head. His eyes were watering with mirth as he looked up at her again.

“They really broke the mold with you, didn’t they?” he said wonderingly.

At the affectionate humor in his words, Ellie’s skin began to warm.

The sensation slipped along her limbs, tingling into her fingers and toes—then shifted, turning wilder and more electric. It buzzed through her as her attention sharpened on the details of the man before her.

The fine, joyful creases at the corners of his eyes. The lazy, powerful line of his shoulders.

Rum heated her veins. Her tongue still tasted of sweet vanilla fire. The firelight caressed his skin, dancing along the elegant angle of his stubble-roughened jaw.

Ellie’s gaze locked onto the place where the curve of his well-muscled forearm was revealed by the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. There was something deeply, wildly appealing about that forearm.

Her mouth was dry. She needed… she wanted…

She wanted.

The realization struck her with all the force of a blow to the head.

She wanted him.

Ellie was in the throes of a primitive, overwhelming, and undeniable lust.

Her mind burned with the possibilities. Recklessly disobedient brain cells sparked to life with the image of Adam’s bare torso from after Ellie’s disastrous swim by the Mary Lee… and then her wretched thoughts shifted to vividly imagining what it would feel like to trace her fingers over every delicious angle.

She wondered how the scruff on his face would feel scratching against her cheek… her lips…

Mortification rolled over her. Everything the temperance people said about drink was true. Here Ellie was, just partway through that bottle of liquid gold, and she had turned from a rational, modern woman into a savage beast.

If she climbed onto Adam’s lap and kissed him right now, he would taste like more of that rum.

It was abominable. These were not the thoughts of a rational mind. Adam’s spiritus was transforming her into an animal… and there was nothing to stop her from acting on her terrible impulses.

The realization set Ellie’s heart pounding. She and Adam were alone in the back country, miles from even the most remote outpost of civilization. What happened between them here need never find its way back to Neil or her parents—to the rest of the world.

She could unleash her wildest desires without any fear of the social consequences.

Ellie leaned toward Adam, drawn like the needle on his compass. A lingering shred of her rational mind marveled at it wonderingly.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to put my hands on him—and I’m not going to stop.

Adam’s expression shifted—first to curiosity, and then to something that radiated both surprise and a sudden heat.

The silence of the night was shattered by a roar.

The sound echoed through the trees, echoing eerily off the river nearby. A primitive instinct drove Ellie to her feet. Her pulse pounded as she looked around helplessly, but her eyes refused to penetrate the velvet darkness that surrounded them.

“Jaguar,” Adam said as he rose gracefully beside her.

“Are we in danger?” Ellie demanded.

Her gaze flew to his belt, where his machete remained sheathed.

“No,” he replied evenly. “It won’t come near the fire.”

“Right, then,” Ellie announced awkwardly. “I suppose I should be getting to bed.”

The word—bed—seemed to linger mercilessly in the air. It recalled, in painful detail, everything Ellie had been about to do before the jaguar had interrupted her.

Her face flushed. She hoped the ruddy firelight would disguise the change until she could make her escape.

“We do have a long day ahead of us tomorrow,” she finished stiffly.

“Go on ahead,” Adam replied. “I’m going to build up the fire a bit more.”

Ellie nodded awkwardly, then pivoted and stalked quickly to the shelter. She crawled under the mosquito net. The thick bed of palm fronds rustled beneath her.

Over by the blaze, Adam easily tossed an enormous log onto the fire. The sparks whirled up around him, illuminating his figure in a way that sent another uncomfortable and unwelcome jolt through her.

Ellie lay down on the platform and deliberately put her back to him as she scooted as close to the far edge as she could.

She knew, in theory, that the strict standards of virtue imposed upon the women of England were yet another tool of oppression. Still, she had assumed that as a scholar and a suffragist, she could choose her own noble principles… and then actually stick to them.

Now, she knew that to be nothing but an illusion. All it had taken was a few sips of rum to send her moral fiber shrieking into the abyss. She had very nearly thrown herself at a man whom she had only known for a matter of days.

A few minutes later, Ellie felt the shelter shift with Adam’s weight as he joined her. She kept carefully silent, curled up into a ball on her side of the platform. He didn’t try to speak to her. He simply lay down beside her, decently arranged with his head at her feet. A reasonable few inches of space kept them separate.

Ellie didn’t move. She barely breathed as that coiled, ravenous beast inside of her hissed its low demands until she was finally graced with oblivion.