Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Twenty

Ellie moved blindly through the trees, brushing through the smooth, damp leaves. Vines caught at her feet. She pushed past them as she coughed on the acrid taste of the smoke that filled the air.

Someone was crying nearby. The sound carried to her like a ghost through the still, hot air.

She ought to go find whoever it was. They needed help.

The leaves parted, and she stepped into the city.

It rose before her in gleaming white tiers and columns. The shapes were softened by the ever-present haze of the smoke.

A buzzing rose into her awareness. The hum came from somewhere nearby. Ellie turned to look for it—and realized that she was standing at the edge of a pit full of the dead.

The bodies that had not yet rotted displayed the terrible scars of a disease she knew through books and public health notices.

Ellie staggered back from the pile. She turned instead to the pale facade of an enormous pyramid. It loomed over an alabaster courtyard framed by rows of night-dark stelae.

Someone waited for her in the center of that open space. It was the small, scarred woman whom Ellie had dreamed of before.

The woman was dressed in a spectacular gown of feathers, which mingled bright hues of red, green, blue, gold, and black. The feathers rose behind her head, framing her noble face like the halo of a saint.

“Can you hear it?” she demanded. Her voice was rich and strong.

“Hear what?” Ellie replied.

“The voice of the god.”

Ellie listened.

Silence pressed in around her, as thick as the humid air.

Something slid through it. It crept along the space between words, whispering with a hush like the murmur of a thousand long-dead dreams.

The hairs rose on the skin of Ellie’s arms as an uncanny fear crawled through her.

“I don’t think that’s what God sounds like,” she slowly replied.

The space around her shuddered. The pale ghosts of the palaces and temples lining the courtyard jolted and shivered behind the smoke, flickering like the flame of a candle on the verge of guttering.

Shadows twisted in the corners of Ellie’s vision. The way they moved reminded her of the beating of black wings.

“It is waiting for you,” the woman continued. “You must prepare yourself.”

The color of her eyes spoke of earth and trees. Her slight figure was still and resolute.

“How?” Ellie asked.

It began to snow. Pale flakes spun gently down onto the courtyard, forming little drifts and eddies. A few of them landed on the woman’s warm brown skin.

The skin burned, turning to red, and then a crackling black like the lizard Ellie had eaten the night before.

“Answer the question,” the scarred woman said as the smoke curled up from her charred arms and her crown of feathers smoldered into flame.

“Which one?” Ellie demanded as terror tightened her voice.

The ash fell closer. Delicate flakes of it brushed against Ellie’s hands, sparking bursts of scorching pain.

“What do you want?” the woman replied.

Ellie opened her mouth to scream.

She woke with a jolt.

Her guts immediately revolted against the precipitous movement. Ellie stumbled upright, almost falling from the platform, and then shoved her way out the mosquito netting. She lost the remnants of last night’s lizard behind a fledgling palm as she leaned against the trunk for support.

Her head pounded in time with her own heartbeat as the horror of the dream receded, the pieces of it dissolving like smoke.

Ellie tried to cling to the details, but the remnants slipped away at another roil from her stomach.

She staggered out of the brush a few minutes later to find Adam crouched in front of the fire. More hearts of palm were staked there to grill, along with the carcass of a large catfish.

“Hey, you’re up!” he called over cheerfully without looking at her. His eyes were still on the fire he was tending. “I was starting to think I’d have to shake you out of there. It’s fish and palm hearts for breakfast. Not exactly eggs and bacon, but it’ll get us going.”

As the last wisps of the dream faded, Ellie was forced to acknowledge the obvious. The headache, the nausea, the awful dryness of her mouth… all of it clearly indicated that she was suffering from the legendary after-effects of an overindulgence in spirits.

Adam had consumed at least as much of the blasted stuff as she had. He appeared perfectly, infuriatingly fine.

He finally glanced up at her as she staggered over, and immediately winced.

“Why don’t you sit down, Princess?” he suggested carefully.

“This is your fault,” Ellie muttered thickly as she dropped herself onto a nearby log.

The movement made the pounding in her head intensify.

“Just hang on there a minute,” Adam ordered.

He hopped to his feet with all his usual ease, and then plucked a large green orb from beside the fire. He hacked at it with his machete, pieces of husk flying into the air around him, until he finally chopped open the fibrous exterior.

“Drink,” he ordered as he handed it to her.

“What is it?” Ellie asked blearily.

“A coconut?” he replied, eyeing her a little skeptically.

Ellie frowned at the big, heavy fruit in her hands.

“Why isn’t it brown?” she demanded.

“Because it’s fresh,” Adam returned carefully.

“Yes.” Ellie mustered an authoritative tone. “Of course. Just slipped my mind for a moment.”

‘Slipped my mind’ felt like a better excuse for failing to recognize the obvious shape of a cocos nucifera drupe than you have burned away half my brain with your demon drink.

“Take that down while I cut you another,” Adam said. “It’ll help with… er, everything.”

Ellie lifted the drupe to her lips and sipped.

She had tasted coconuts before, when Florence carried one of the brown, hairy things home from the exotic grocers in Islington. This was entirely different. The liquid that poured into Ellie’s mouth was cool, sweet, and ever-so-slightly viscous.

“That’s nice,” she concluded and slumped back against the trunk of a nearby cohune palm.

Adam offered her another.

“You know, what’d really help with that hangover is taking the last couple swallows of the rum,” he suggested.

“If you bring that bottle near me, I will beat you with it,” Ellie calmly replied.

“More coconuts then,” he concluded with a cheerful toss of his machete.

Adam set a slow, careful pace as they started out into the wilderness. Ellie wondered whether he did it based on the assumption that she wasn’t capable of going faster, but soon came to appreciate why he’d chosen not to rush them. After a few hours of shoving through the underbrush and scrambling over rocks, her limbs began to ache.

The heat of the day thickened as the sun rose, even though the glow was barely visible through the thick canopy overhead.

Adam kept the machete in his hand. He used the enormous blade to push through brush or point out things that he instructed Ellie to avoid.

“Poisonous spikes,” he said as he aimed the knife at a spiky-trunked tree. He swung it to another target. “Deadly frog. Definitely don’t touch that.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Ellie countered tiredly.

She half expected Adam to whack their way straight through the brush with his knife, but quickly realized the impracticality of that. Instead, he led them down the thin threads of game trails, and only wove them through the thick underbrush when the trails disappeared or veered off in the wrong direction.

He had taken back his compass, which had thankfully survived its plunge into the river. He checked it regularly as they walked, adjusting their course in order to keep them on track. The art of navigation seemed to come naturally to him.

Adam also introduced Ellie to water vines. He grinned like a schoolboy as he severed one with a neat chop and revealed how cool, fresh liquid dripped from inside. Ellie had enjoyed the decidedly strange experience of drinking from a hanging vertical straw.

The day was exhausting but largely without any dramatic incident, save for a brief run-in with an angry herd of javelinas.

Adam had managed to extricate them from that encounter without any major injuries… though the bit where they had nearly plummeted into a sinkhole had been admittedly nerve-wracking.

Ellie had a new appreciation for the threat posed by diminutive wild pigs. When there were eighty of them on one’s tail, it didn’t matter quite so much that the animals were only eighteen inches tall.

As the sun finally dipped toward the horizon, Ellie’s muscles began to voice their protest in a loud chorus. She eyed the deeper angle of the light.

“Shouldn’t we be stopping to set up camp soon?” she asked, recalling Adam’s urgency the previous afternoon.

He flashed her an awkward look and rubbed a line of sweat from his face.

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“Then why haven’t we?”

“Because I’m deciding whether or not to make a gamble,” he admitted.

Ellie narrowed her eyes skeptically.

“What sort of gamble, exactly?” she prompted.

“Smell that?” Adam asked.

Ellie took a surprised moment to tune into her nose—and caught at a distant, wafting note of smoke.

“Fire,” she blurted. “It smells like fire.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s a milpa burn,” Adam said. “It’s the right time of year for it.”

“You mean there’s a Mayan farm nearby,” Ellie filled in carefully.

Ellie recognized the word—milpa—as a term specific to the modern Mayan communities that peppered British Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

“They use the fire to clear the forest for planting, then let the field go fallow and come around a few years later for another burn,” Adam explained.

“So what’s the gamble?” she pressed.

“On the one hand? We get a damned good meal and a comfortable place to sleep for the night,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound terrible,” she returned tentatively. “What about the other hand?”

“Getting threatened with knives and chased across the district?” Adam offered back with an awkward smile.

Ellie stared at him.

“It’s a really small other hand,” he hurried to assure her.

“How small?” she pressed.

“The Mayans who choose to stay out here in the Cayo instead of moving closer to the coast usually aren’t looking for visitors,” Adam explained. “They tend to make their settlements deliberately hard to find. But if there’s a milpa here, then there’s a village nearby—and we might be able to talk them into letting us stay the night. It’d be a damned sight more comfortable than sleeping rough in the bush again, and the food’s usually amazing.”

“Do you expect talking them into that to be very difficult?” Ellie pressed cautiously.

“Well… last time I was at one of their villages, I was with a Mayan,” Adam admitted. “Can’t be entirely sure how it’ll go showing up on our own unannounced. Most of the Mayan folks who live out this way came here in order to get away from being hijacked into forced labor over in Guatemala. Somebody trying to enslave you or your family can make you a little skittish.”

He pushed his way through another stand of brush.

Ellie stopped walking.

“Should we really be bothering them, then?” she demanded.

Adam paused to consider it.

“Maybe not,” he allowed. “But it’s also possible they’ll know something about this city of yours. How about if we feel like we’re not welcome, we make a graceful exit?”

Ellie realized that he was waiting for her to answer. She gave him a careful nod.

He led them into the brush, and the scent of a recent fire grew stronger. A short while later, the trees parted to reveal a broad clearing of freshly charred ground. Some of the stumps were still smoldering.

As they reached the milpa, a figure slipped from the brush to Ellie’s right—a reedy stick of a boy. He dashed up a barely perceptible game trail that she could now see lined the edge of the field.

No, she corrected herself. It was not a game trail. It was a path to the village.

“Should we follow him?” Ellie asked cautiously.

“If he didn’t want to be followed, he would’ve made sure we didn’t see him,” Adam replied confidently.

He set off after the boy. The trail wound along the milpa, and then crawled up the side of a steep, forested hill. Ellie’s legs had just begun to ache from the climb when the foliage parted, and the village revealed itself.

A scatter of houses sat along a ridge that clung to the steep hillside. A creek ran beneath the settlement, fed by a low waterfall to the north. The buildings were palm-thatched and neatly whitewashed, set behind little fenced yards with colorful, abundant gardens.

The game trail Adam and Ellie followed widened into a road. Chickens wandered around in the middle of it, squawking and fluttering in alarm at their approach. There was no sign of the boy they had followed, but other children materialized from the houses and yards as they drew closer. The young people were dressed in light, undyed cotton shirts, with leather sandals on their feet. They formed little clusters at the verge of the road, staring and whispering. Their eyes were bright with curiosity.

A rooster crowed out a warning, and a trio of women—two middle-aged and one older—poked their heads out of one of the houses. Their gazes were slightly more tinged with suspicion than those of the children.

“Buenas días,” Adam said. “?Dónde está el alcalde?”

The women’s eyes narrowed. Ellie tried to make out Adam’s Spanish. She was only peripherally familiar with the language.

“What’s an alcalde?” she asked quietly.

“It means mayor. It’s what they call the village leader,” he explained in a low mutter. “Maybe I should try Mopan...”

“Do you speak Mopan?” Ellie asked with surprise, recognizing the name of one of the other Mayan languages used in the region.

“Er—sort of?” Adam hedged. He turned his attention to the women again. “Tub’aj yan alcalde?”

His efforts earned him a flash of surprise, but didn’t entirely banish the women’s suspicion. The trio ducked back inside and whispered furiously.

“Hope I didn’t just ask them how to sail a fish or something,” Adam grumbled awkwardly.

The children looked far more comfortable with their presence. A little scattering of them had drifted out of their hiding places to form a cluster at Ellie’s back. The group grew as Adam gave the house of unfriendly women an awkward wave, and then guided Ellie deeper into the village.

The road widened until it formed a rough square of beaten earth that surrounded a well. At the far end of the bare plaza stood a slightly larger thatched roof building with a cross hung over the door—clearly the local church. Ellie hadn’t read a very great deal of Mayan ethnographic literature, as there wasn’t an awful lot of it to begin with—but she did know that most of the Maya were practicing Catholics, albeit with a few local variations on the faith.

A dozen or so men were gathered in front of the building. They sat on low stools or hovered in the shade. The members of the group wore simple shirts and trousers. Some shaded their faces with hats woven from dried palm fronds.

None of them looked very friendly—or surprised. Ellie guessed that the boy from the milpa had already spread the news of their arrival.

As a welcome, it did not seem very promising.

“Don’t worry,” Adam said quietly from beside her. “I’ve talked my way out of worse.”

His comment was far from reassuring.

The train of children dissolved to take up positions around the square. A few of them climbed into the trees while others peered from behind rocks or fences.

Adam slapped a deliberately friendly smile on his face. He raised a hand in greeting as he approached the men.

“D’yoos b’o’tik,” he said. “K’aat janal, naj’a ak’a.”

Ellie guessed that he was using Mopan again. She could hear how awkwardly the words fell from his tongue.

The men continued to glare at them suspiciously.

“What did you say?” she asked in a whispered hiss.

“Just whether there’s a place where we could stay for the night,” he countered defensively. “I think.”

“Are you sure they’re Mopan speakers?” Ellie pressed. “There are quite a few distinct Mayan languages...”

“Well, it’s not like I know all of them,” he retorted, and then took a breath. “Lemme try something else. Bix a beel! Tu’ux u alcalde?”

One of the oldest fellows clustered by the church raised his head. His lean, weathered face was marred by a pale scar on his forehead—a jagged line that ran into the white fringe of hair under his straw hat. A wooden cross hung around his neck alongside another rough pendant that looked like a fang from some large, hungry animal.

“Is that supposed to be Yucatec?” the older man asked in accented but clearly fluent English.

Adam shuffled a little awkwardly beside her.

“Er… yes?” he offered.

“Padre Amilcar Kuyoc,” the older man said, introducing himself. “Your offense against my language is forgiven—but we don’t have an alcalde here. You are looking for a place to stay for the night?”

“If it isn’t too much trouble,” Adam replied, brightening.

“You married?” Kuyoc pressed crisply.

Ellie startled at the unexpected inquiry from the man, whose title revealed him to be the village’s priest. She flashed an alarmed glance at Adam.

“You mean, like… to each other?” Adam asked tentatively.

Kuyoc raised a wry eyebrow. “Are you married to somebody else?”

“No,” Adam replied quickly.

“I’m a widow,” Ellie blurted instinctively, even as she inwardly winced at the discomfort of the continued fiction about her marital status.

“She’s a widow,” Adam confirmed. “I’m not.”

“Not a widow?” Kuyoc repeated carefully.

“Not married,” Adam clarified. “To anyone. Including her.”

Kuyoc blinked at them.

“I see,” he said flatly. “Are you here to convert us?”

“To what?” Adam returned dumbly.

“I don’t know,” the priest returned a bit impatiently. “Methodism?”

“Er… no,” Adam said.

“We’re not missionaries,” Ellie added neatly.

An awkward pause followed—one where some statement about their actual business should have gone. Ellie flashed Adam a look as she struggled to think of a way to describe their mission that wouldn’t see them get chased back into the bush.

Adam shrugged—which was singularly unhelpful.

“Riiight,” Kuyoc said with a bit of a sigh. “Welcome to Santa Dolores Xenacoj. Why don’t we get you sorted?”

“We’re staying?” Ellie exclaimed.

The priest threw her another skeptical look.

“Would you prefer to go?” he asked.

“No,” she quickly replied.

“We’re very grateful for your hospitality,” Adam added helpfully.

Kuyoc gave them a longer study—one that made Ellie feel distinctly aware of just how painfully awkward their introduction had been. She flashed him a smile, hoping that might help make up for it.

The priest shouted a few lines of Mopan back toward the men by the church. They made an easy reply, and the atmosphere of the square shifted as everyone went back to what looked like normal life.

“Follow me,” Kuyoc ordered. He set off up the road.

The track switchbacked steeply up the hillside. Ellie quickly found herself sweating again at the effort of the climb. Her legs had already been aching.

The priest didn’t seem to have any trouble with it at all, despite the fact that he was clearly a man in his seventies.

“Keep up!” he called back from ahead of them.

“He has a great deal of energy for someone his age,” Ellie commented a bit breathlessly.

“He probably didn’t hike through fifteen miles of bush today,” Adam grumbled in reply.