Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Twenty-Four

Adam watched Mendez drag Ellie from the tent. An unnamable tumult of emotions roiled in his chest at the desperate, scared look she threw back at him.

He gritted his teeth with the effort of not allowing any of it to show on his face—not here. Not in front of the men who’d just captured them.

They already held all the cards. They hardly needed any extra advantages.

“Report the results to me when you are finished, professor,” Jacobs ordered as he moved to leave the tent.

Dawson spluttered a protest.

“Are you just going to leave me here with this… him?” he said, waving an uncomfortable hand in Adam’s direction.

“Mr. Staines will stay with you,” Jacobs replied dismissively.

“I should think we would need more than that!” Dawson retorted. “What if he runs off or… or attacks me!”

Jacobs swung his gaze to Adam. It locked there with quiet confidence.

“I don’t believe we’ll need to worry about that,” he concluded.

Then he left.

Adam forced himself to unclench his fists and breathe. Pounding the nearest person into a puddle wasn’t going to solve any of his problems. He needed to be smart about this.

Setting aside his very real need to hit something, Adam took a better look at his situation.

Dawson’s gaze moved nervously from Adam to the remaining guard. Staines was eyeing the neatly made cot like he very much wanted to plop down onto it and do his guarding from a more comfortable position. After a glance at the red-faced Dawson, Staines obviously determined that the more prudent course was to stay on his feet. He adjusted his grip on the rifle, looking bored and uncomfortable.

The guard wasn’t the only uncomfortable one. The professor was clearly furious.

Adam hadn’t met the guy back at the capital, like Ellie clearly had. Still, he could easily deduce that Dawson must’ve been involved in whatever had got her tied up and jumping over balconies into Adam’s lap.

The man’s tent was ridiculously over-furnished. There were actual carpets on the floor, and a tin dinner service sat on the table where a plantain leaf or coconut shell would’ve done perfectly fine.

A trunk of books was open on the floor by the desk. Dawson had apparently brought a library into the bush with him so that it could get infested by termites or turned to a pulp by the damp. From where Adam was standing, he could just make out some of the labels on the spines. They were mostly bound journals and historical tomes on Mesoamerican civilizations, but he also spotted what looked like a novel alongside a well-thumbed volume of the poetry of Robert Burns.

Pleasure reading, Adam deduced.

Every ounce of it would have to be packed up each time they stopped for the night, and then carefully loaded onto the mules in a way that ensured an even distribution of weight… only to be unpacked and set back up again at the end of a long day’s march.

It was crazy.

The disdain Adam felt was clearly mutual. The professor was eyeing him like something foul he’d just realized he had stepped on. Apparently, the thought of having his work corrected by a filthy, unshaven guy in shirtsleeves got the professor’s goat. The notion might have brought Adam a little burst of satisfaction, if he hadn’t also been burning with fury at how he’d been violently blackmailed into doing this.

Ellie. They were going to hurt Ellie.

Miss Mallory, he corrected himself. His mind shied away from the name. He didn’t want to think about the fact that she’d lied to him about who she really was. He wasn’t sure whether it said something about her… or more about what she thought of him.

Maybe she still hadn’t really trusted him—or maybe she just hadn’t felt like he was worth giving her real name to.

Adam squirmed away from all the unanswered questions. He wasn’t going to think about them right now. He had bigger concerns—like trying to figure out how he was going to get both of them out of this alive.

And it would be both of them. Adam wasn’t sure what he’d say to the woman when he finally spoke to her again… but he sure as hell wasn’t going to leave her to the tender mercies of a guy who threatened to cut her up for what more or less amounted to just business.

Adam couldn’t do much about any of that while he had a gun pointed at his back, no matter how bored the guy with the gun looked. Until he had a chance to make a plan, he needed to suck it up and do what Jacobs had ordered him to do, however much he hated the idea.

He had no doubt that if he didn’t, Jacobs would start hurting Ellie.

“Show me what you’ve got,” Adam ordered.

The professor bristled. He was red-faced from the heat—probably because he was dressed like a Sears catalog advertisement in his khaki field jacket and pith helmet. All of it had blatantly been purchased for the sake of this expedition.

Dawson didn’t wear it well. He looked uncomfortable and kept itching at the skin around his collar.

“I really don’t see how this is necessary.” Dawson glared at Adam from across his desk. “I am a Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Saint Andrews. I am entirely capable of reading some blasted map!”

Adam didn’t bother honoring that with a reply. Instead, he plucked his map canister from Dawson’s hand and turned to the table, which offered more space than the desk once Adam shoved the professor’s excessive dinner setting off to the side. He unrolled the maps across the surface, weighing down the corners with a fork, a knife, a tin mug, and a salt shaker.

At least the idiot hadn’t brought a wine glass.

“Pencil,” Adam ordered, extending his hand.

Dawson gaped at him with outrage, unmoving. Adam sighed and reached back to the desk, snatching a writing implement from the box on the surface. He returned his attention to the maps.

He could feel the professor seething behind him. Eventually, Dawson stomped over to the other side of the table and glowered down at Adam’s work.

The glower turned to an outraged stammer.

“You—you can’t just write all over it!” he protested as he waved his hand over the modern map that Adam had taken from the cylinder.

“It’s my map,” Adam returned easily.

“It is not!” Dawson retorted. “It says it came from the survey office, just like ours. We were expressly told that the map needed to be returned in the exact condition in which it was taken out.”

Adam raised his head to meet Dawson’s eyes.

“It’s my map,” he repeated flatly. He pointed to the unrolled sheet. “I drew it. I can keep drawing it if I want to.”

He scratched another mark on it with the pencil.

Dawson made a strangled sound of outrage.

“You aren’t even following the line on the parchment,” he protested.

“Yeah, well. They were a little short on modern survey methods in the seventeenth century,” Adam returned without bothering to look up. “It’s safe to say the line’s an approximation.”

“Surely an approximation is better than making it up off the top of one’s head!”

Adam straightened.

“You wanna try?” He held out his pencil.

The professor hesitated, clearly torn between his desire to be too self-important to take the bait and his need to prove himself superior to Adam.

The latter won.

Dawson snatched the pencil and took Adam’s place at the table as Adam stepped back to make way for him. Dawson thanked him with a glare.

The professor began to scribble onto a piece of notepaper. Adam took the opportunity to glance over at Staines. The guard suppressed a yawn, and then peered out the flap of the tent as though jealous of the men out there sweating through the work of unloading the barges.

Adam drifted closer to Dawson’s desk and took a moment to eye the professor’s things. The surface was cluttered with more books and papers. His eye caught on a slender wooden case carved with words in a language Adam didn’t recognize. After making sure no one was looking, he lifted the lid.

He’d been hoping for a letter opener he might pocket—hardly as useful as a machete, of course, but better than nothing. Instead, he found a small, slender bone resting on a lining of moth-eaten velvet.

Adam frowned down at it. The bone was maybe six inches long. It looked like a wing bone from something roughly the size of a turkey.

What the hell did Dawson have a wing bone in a special case for?

Adam carefully closed the lid of the bone box and turned his attention to the rest of what lay on the desk. A battered, leatherbound notebook looked promising. Adam opened it to a random page.

Dawson’s handwriting was abominable, but Adam still managed to make out bits of it.

Prospects under consideration, location unknown:

Armor of ?rvar-Oddr

Babr-e Bayan of Rostam

Ring of Gyges

It sounded like a load of nonsense except for that last bit. The Ring of Gyges was vaguely familiar. Adam’s brain coughed up something about a Greek myth of a guy who turned himself invisible and caused all kinds of trouble.

He flipped to another page and kept reading.

Received another update from the Unas South Cemetery excavation at Saqqara. Site evidence indicates identification with Horemheb’s tomb may be correct. If confirmed, will require immediate investigation to explore possible connection to the Staff of Moses…

Adam blinked. He’d definitely heard of the Staff of Moses—what with all the plagues of locusts and parting the Red Sea.

Dawson had some weird interests, but none of what Adam had seen so far had a damned thing to do with British Honduras.

He took another careful look at his guard and involuntary captor. Neither Staines nor Dawson were bothering to pay him the least bit of attention.

Adam flipped neatly to the last page in the book with any of Dawson’s abominable scribble on it. He squinted as he tried to translate it. Dawson’s handwriting had grown worse once he got out into the Cayo. The professor must find it harder to hold a pencil when he was sweating.

Adam repressed a chuckle.

A few words made themselves discernible from the mess—Popol Vuh… annals… gifts of prophecy…

Adam frowned and risked leaning down for a closer look.

Two words leapt out at him amid the scrawl.

Smoking Mirror.

“There,” Dawson announced, straightening.

Adam took a quick step back from the desk and did his best to look innocent.

Staines fixed him with a quick, suspicious glare.

“Have a look,” Dawson continued, waving a hand over the maps.

There was a hint of a self-satisfied smile on the professor’s face as he took a step back and hovered there.

Adam braced himself over the table and picked up the pencil. He made another mark on his modern map, which elicited a wince from Dawson—but not a protest. Maybe they were making progress.

“You brought a lot of stuff,” Adam commented as he worked.

Dawson stiffened a bit beside him.

“This sort of travel is hardly pleasurable,” he retorted. “The heat gives me the most dreadful rash, and the mosquitoes! They are incessant. I don’t know how anyone can pretend not to be affected by it. I am quite within my rights to make myself as comfortable as possible while I endure it.”

Adam was quite aware that Dawson’s rights meant the guys outside wrangling a bunch of extra gear through the bush.

“Uh-huh,” he said instead, trying—but not entirely succeeding—in keeping the disdain from his tone.

Dawson managed to stay quiet for maybe another minute while Adam worked before he broke into an uncomfortable stream of chatter.

“I copied the route from the parchment precisely,” he asserted. “I’m sure you’ll see that it’s—”

Adam made another mark. This time, he moved to Dawson’s sheet of notes and firmly crossed out a line.

“Nope,” he declared flatly.

Dawson made a stifled sound of outrage behind him.

Adam crossed out another line, and then a third. He scribbled in a new annotation.

“Remind me again just how you are qualified for this?” Dawson demanded.

Adam paused and looked up at him.

“Are you forgetting I made the map?” He pointed to the document on the table with his pencil.

“How did you even gain a position at the survey office?” Dawson pressed. “You’re an American!”

He made the word sound like a venereal disease. Adam resisted the urge to throw the pencil at him.

Trying not to get killed, he reminded himself.

“There was an opening. I applied,” he returned thinly.

“How would an American even hear about an opening in the civil service of a British imperial holding?” Dawson protested.

“The Cambridge postings board?” Adam suggested as he made another note.

“You went to Cambridge?” Dawson exclaimed. “As in the university? In England?”

“That’s the one,” Adam dryly confirmed.

“But did you actually study there?”

“Yup.” Adam made another note on the map.

“I… well. That is unexpected,” Dawson said blankly.

The professor was obviously shocked to find that the unshaven guy in his shirtsleeves currently taking up space in his tent was an intellectual peer.

“You covered at least some geography, obviously,” Dawson continued as he flapped a hand at the map. “What about history?”

This line of conversation was starting to irritate Adam.

“Some,” he replied tersely.

“Theology?”

Not if I could help it, Adam thought. He set down the pencil and looked up.

“Does it matter?” he demanded.

Dawson stiffened.

“Hardly.”

Adam worked in welcome silence for another minute before Dawson broke it again.

“Have you traveled over very much of this territory, then?” the professor asked.

The man’s tone had changed. It sounded just a bit more… interested.

Adam’s alarm bells rang.

“You could say that,” he answered carefully.

“I see,” Dawson returned.

Another silence. Adam’s pencil scratched on the paper.

“I noticed that there are quite a few Mayan sites marked on the map,” Dawson noted from behind him.

He had moved closer. Adam resisted the urge to flinch.

“Most of them are small,” Adam replied without looking back at him. “Petroglyphs. Foundation imprints.”

“But you have seen them, then?” Dawson prompted.

Adam’s pencil paused on the paper.

“Some,” he said again.

The word felt a bit thinner this time as Adam endured a barrage of memories of shattered pottery and scattered bones.

“And do you have any theories about the city we are seeking on this expedition?”

Dawson’s question caught Adam off guard. He set his pencil down on the map with a flat snap and looked back at the professor.

“What?” he demanded.

“You are a Cambridge scholar. You have visited a number of other ruins. Do you have a theory?” Dawson repeated impatiently.

“I’m not much on theories,” Adam returned evenly.

He turned back to his work. A distinct sniff sounded from behind him.

“I thought as much,” Dawson noted stuffily.

Adam fought the urge to respond. The man didn’t deserve it. A few moments later, he set down the pencil.

“There’s your route,” he announced.

Dawson hurried in, casting Adam a sideways look as he passed. He peered down at the pages on the table.

Adam put his finger on the modern map and traced a line.

“Your route had us going through the middle of this mountain… and then back through it again. Which makes not one damned bit of sense,” Adam finished neatly.

Dawson bristled but managed to contain himself.

“My route goes through a mountain?” he pressed.

Adam answered by tapping his finger on the mountain in question.

Dawson pulled the papers toward him for a quick, furious examination, and then straightened awkwardly.

“Oh,” he said.

“We gotta follow the line of this ridge.” Adam waved his hand over the entirety of the region. “None of this territory has undergone a formal survey beyond a straight-line expedition to the border with Guatemala a dozen or so years ago. We can be pretty confident about the locations of the various peaks, but that’s about it. Our route’s actually got to run more directly south. It almost doubles back on itself.” He crossed his arms and considered the line against the path that he and Ellie had taken to get there.

The most direct route to the X on the map would’ve required heading west from Padre Kuyoc’s village. Adam honestly should’ve figured that out himself, once Ellie had finally shown him the whole of the map. He’d been so focused on getting them to the next landmark alive and intact, he hadn’t taken the time to plot further.

He burned a bit at the mistake. If he had, they never would’ve bothered hiking to the cataracts—and Jacobs might’ve sat out here waiting for them for weeks.

Which would’ve been just fine with Adam.

“You should be able to make it as far as here tomorrow,” he said and tapped the map. “After that, I’d look for an open stretch of the ridge to see if you can spot this River of Smoke. Whatever that is.”

“Yes, well,” Dawson said stiffly. “Thank you for your assistance.”

“Don’t mention it,” Adam replied thinly.

Assistance. Was it really assistance if he gave it on the threat of Jacobs carving Ellie into pieces?

“You can go now.” Dawson waved a hand dismissively before greedily gathering up the maps.

Adam fought against the urge to tell the professor exactly what he was thinking.

Don’t get killed, he reminded himself again. The phrase was becoming something of a mantra.

Adam pivoted for the door of the tent. Staines snapped to attention behind him.

“Where am I supposed to take him?” Staines demanded.

Dawson looked up, flustered, as Adam paused at the threshold.

“How should I know?” the professor exclaimed. “Ask Mr. Jacobs.”

With a flap of his hands, he dismissed them.