Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Thirty-One

Ellie was trapped near the back of the caravan when the trees parted before her, revealing a soaring gray cliff split by a twisting ribbon of black stone. The sight sent a wild thrill chasing through her.

The River of Smoke.

“I’m going up there,” Ellie announced.

“?Ay, mierda!” Mendez groaned.

Ellie whirled in the saddle to pin him with a glare.

“Did Jacobs specifically order you not to allow me to approach the cliff?” she demanded.

“I do not believe he did,” Flowers helpfully replied.

Mendez glowered over his mustache.

“Then I am going.” Ellie declared, and neatly hopped down from the saddle. “Mr. Pacheco! Would you mind my mule, please?”

Pacheco flashed her a charming smile.

“Of course, cari?o,” he replied.

“Thank you.” Ellie tossed him the reins. “That is most kind of you.”

She set off without waiting for any further debate, pushing her way through the brush at the edge of the caravan. The line was already disintegrating into a muddle as more men shuffled their way toward the base of the cliff.

At last, Ellie fought her way through a mess of palms to gaze up at the soaring wall of limestone. A narrow, shadowy crevice split the length of it right where the unusual line of black stone marred its surface.

The expedition’s leaders had gathered by the opening… along with Adam and his guard, Staines. Ellie slipped and apologized her way toward them through the uncertain men and mules. Mendez elbowed his way in her wake as Flowers followed more easily behind him.

The break in the cliff was perhaps six feet wide. Ellie could see into it a little way before her view was obscured by the shadows of the ravine.

She shouldered between some of the onlookers and popped out to Dawson’s left. The professor gave a little start of alarm as he realized that she was there. He took an uneasy step away from her.

“Shouldn’t you be under guard?” he demanded.

“Oh, they’re coming,” Ellie cheerfully assured him.

She caught Adam’s eye across the black gap of the opening. He looked uncharacteristically worried.

Velegas emerged from the gap.

“The way appears to be clear,” he announced. “I can scout the rest of it if you would like.”

The tracker took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a careful handkerchief.

“Surely a few of us should go forward as well,” Dawson objected.

The professor was clearly itching with his eagerness to pass through the crevice and get his hands on whatever lay on the far side.

“Dawson, myself, Velegas,” Jacobs declared. He cast a sideways glance at Adam. “And I suppose we had best include Mr. Bates.”

“And me,” Ellie declared, stepping forward.

Dawson huffed with outrage.

“I should think not!” he exclaimed.

Jacobs shifted his cool, impenetrable gaze to her—and then back to Adam again.

“The woman comes,” he smoothly ordered. There was a hint of a smile on his face as he said it.

Adam’s expression went grimmer.

Perhaps Jacobs only wanted Ellie there to better threaten Adam into compliance. That was fine. At least she would be going along, rather than moldering back here with the mules where she stood no chance of protecting whatever lay on the other side.

Jacobs flicked a hand at Mendez, Flowers, and Staines.

“You three stay with them,” he ordered, and stepped into the dark mouth of the cliff.

The air inside the crevice was strangely cool. The walls rose dizzyingly to either side, and then narrowed to frame a line of hazy blue sky. The light that filtered down to where Ellie and the others walked was dim and otherworldly.

The wall to her right was all jagged gray limestone. On her left, the limestone mingled with threads of the thick vein of obsidian which ran through the mountain.

Verdant life surrounded her. Plants clung to the stones, sending tentative tendrils down toward the ground. They were framed by patches of jewel-green moss and bundled orchids.

The clamor of the caravan faded. In its place was only the soft crunch of boots against the packed earth and the uneven breathing of the men who surrounded her.

The way broadened ahead of them. A wider patch of sky overhead spilled light down into a slight opening in the ravine, revealing something that brought the entire scouting party to a reverent halt.

On the wall before her, all the remaining limestone had been chipped away to expose the gleaming obsidian beneath. The black mineral had been carved into an elegant mural which rose at least twenty feet up the face of the cliff.

The bas relief depicted an assemblage of gleaming figures. Each of them was elegantly ornamented with ear plugs, wrist cuffs, and necklaces. They were crowned with feathers and elaborate sculpted headdresses.

It was a dynasty—an awe-inspiring conclave of kings, queens, and priests. As Ellie studied it, details leapt out at her from the scene.

A feathered serpent. A foot of lightning. Jaguar teeth and sprouting maize around falling drops of rain.

Ellie knew those symbols. They were the signs which other scholars had used to identify the gods of the Mayan and Aztec pantheons.

An idea crept to life in her mind.

The portrait clearly depicted the great nobles of Tulan—perhaps even the city’s founders.

How might those awe-inspiring leaders have appeared to the less powerful people who had come to them seeking wisdom? How might they have been transformed in the stories those petitioners carried back to more distant lands?

Perhaps… they might have sounded like gods.

With a jolt of surprise, Ellie wondered if she was looking at the birth of a faith.

The assemblage of nobles was gathered around a circle inscribed at their feet. Each of their hands was pierced by a blade. Blood dripped down from their wounds.

“It’s here,” Dawson uttered with quiet awe as he gazed up at the image.

Ellie startled beside him.

“What is?” she demanded.

Dawson snapped his mouth shut. He treated her to a mulish glare before he stalked away.

Ellie lingered to study the black disk over which the divine figures were gathered.

She didn’t need Dawson to answer her. She knew what it had to be. It was the Chay Abah—the prophecy-granting obsidian stone said to lie beneath the heart of Tulan.

The Smoking Mirror.

“We are losing daylight!” Velegas’s authoritative tones cut through the stillness of the ravine.

“Keep moving,” Jacobs ordered.

Ellie didn’t want to take her eyes away from the dark relief of the mural. A firm but gentle hand on her arm finally caught her attention.

“Come on,” Adam said, gently guiding her after the others.

The passage narrowed once more, winding past spills of rock over which the scouting party had to climb… and then Ellie looked past the shoulders of the men before her to a sliver of green trees and the golden light of late afternoon.

She scrambled down the rest of the crevice and spilled out onto a ledge which overlooked the broad bowl of a valley.

The view was framed by the majestic rise of the mountains, which were now fully upon them. The land below was a rich and vibrant green—a perfect, sheltered paradise framed by tall black peaks and the curving line of the ridge.

White stone towers pierced through the canopy. Ellie’s heart pounded as she gazed out at them.

The low gray clouds to the east shifted. Sunlight spilled out across the scene. The warm rays fell over the crowns of the temples and painted them a startling gold.

“It’s real!” Ellie breathed.

She closed her eyes, half convinced that when she opened them, she would find herself back in the wet gloom of the Public Record Office, staring down at a stack of crumbling tax assessments.

The gilded temples greeted her instead. A flock of tiny birds burst from the canopy to wheel over the ruins.

No—she was not in London.

This was not a dream.

Adam moved to her side. The falling sunlight highlighted his rugged profile.

“Congratulations, Princess,” he said. His voice was flattened with wonder and shock. “Looks like you found El Dorado.”

As he spoke, the clouds shifted, swallowing the sun’s warm rays. A breeze brushed against the back of Ellie’s neck and then stirred the leaves of the trees below her. Ellie turned toward it to see that the sky beyond the peaks had turned thick and gray with the promise of a storm.

“Looks like rain,” Velegas warned. His voice rang out clearly over the ledge.

“Go back to Bones. Tell him to bring the gear and set up camp,” Jacobs ordered flatly. “Let’s get what we came here for.”

He stalked toward the path that led down into the ruins.

The trail descended from the ledge to a thick, verdant forest. The aromatic mountain pines were mixed with trees which Ellie had become more accustomed to seeing in the lowlands. Many of them were fruit-bearing, their boughs heavy with cashews or ripening sapodillas.

Ellie’s mind spun as she wondered whether the people of Tulan had deliberately brought them here.

This was not the same wilderness that Ellie had passed through on her journey. The landscape around her looked more like a long-abandoned garden.

Vines tumbled down from the boughs, some of them as thick as Ellie’s arm. She could hear the rest of the caravan shuffling out onto the ledge above them. Bones’s voice rang out as the foreman organized the movement of mules and gear through the narrow pass.

Beyond the creaking ropes and the quick shouts of the men, the wood around her was eerily quiet. A lush, fertile region like this one should have been crawling with birds, monkeys, and tapir—not oddly deserted. When Ellie spotted the undulating form of a snake hurrying after a quick-darting mouse, she was almost surprised.

Even the ever-present hum of the insects was lessened here, which Ellie would have thought impossible.

Adam walked beside her. She bit back the urge to grab his arm and drag him over to examine every thrilling discovery she made, like the divots in the earth alongside their path which likely indicated the presence of cellar holes for wooden dwellings. She was conscious that anything she said would be overheard by Flowers, Staines, and Mendez, who trudged along at their heels.

Ellie dropped her gaze to the remarkably even path on which she walked. The ribbon of land was slightly raised up from the ground around it as it curved away ahead of her.

She grabbed Adam by the elbow.

“Bates… I think we are walking on a road!” she exclaimed.

Adam cocked an eyebrow at her, and then kicked thoughtfully at the forest debris under his boot.

“You’ll disturb the layers!” Ellie protested with a squeak of panic.

“If it’s a road, there’s a hell of a lot of it, Princess,” Adam returned. “I think you’ll still have plenty of layers to play with.”

Ellie dropped to her knees in order to give the area Adam had cleared a closer look.

The toe of his boot had exposed a surface of pale, mud-stained stone. She shoved more of the debris aside with her hands and revealed a long, straight line where two blocks had been joined together. Their edges were perfectly matched.

“They’re pavers,” she said. Her voice was strangled with wonder. “Cut, quarried pavers. They paved the road. Bates, do you have any idea what sort of engineering prowess would have been required to—”

“Let’s keep moving, Princess,” Adam cut in. He gently tugged her back up with an uneasy look at where Jacobs walked ahead of them.

The landscape around them shifted. The cellar holes gave way to moss-grown piles of tumbled stone which peered at Ellie from between the trees in every direction.

They had to be houses—actual houses, where everyday people had lived rather than the elites of the city. There would be room layouts for her to discern, along with hearths and sleeping areas that hinted at the local kinship structures.

And there would be middens.

The thought of an ancient trash heap between those buildings waiting to be discovered filled Ellie with a wild and impatient joy.

“Bates,” she exclaimed. “This one is intact!”

Ellie didn’t wait for him to follow. She dashed over to the building that she had spotted not far from the road ahead of them. Parts of the walls were still standing.

Mendez grumbled out a curse behind her.

Ellie stopped on the threshold to study the interior. The roof had rotted away long ago, and the ground was thick with fallen leaves and debris.

She let out a strangled squeal.

“Pots!” she gasped as her heart pounded with the enormity of what she was looking at. “Intact pots!”

There were four of them, each roughly three feet in height, standing in the corner of the structure. Hints of colorful glaze peered through the verdigris which discolored them.

Ellie’s desperate desire to get closer to the objects warred with her fear of damaging something within the house if she walked into it.

She took a breath, steadying herself. The bases of the pots were buried at least four inches into the ground. There was two hundred years of sediment in here. Ellie wasn’t going to break anything by walking on that.

She dashed inside, crouching down to give the artifacts a better look.

“Oh God,” she groaned. “I think there’s still wax around the lids! Bates, do you have any idea what that means?”

“Pretty sure you’re going to tell me,” Adam replied as he made a quiet, thoughtful examination of the rest of the room.

“It means they might still be sealed,” Ellie emphasized, buzzing with the joy of it. “Sealed! The implications are… I’m not sure I can even… Bates?” she finished less certainly.

Adam had gone silent. He crouched in the opposite corner, looking down at something he had carefully exposed by brushing away a few layers of dried leaves.

Ellie noticed the unusual solemnity of his focus and rose to join him. She found herself looking down at the jumble of a skeleton half-buried in the sediment. Only parts of it were visible—but one of those pieces included what was very obviously the eye socket of a human skull.

“Oh,” she breathed softly as she carefully brushed a bit more of the debris away. “The bones are still somewhat articulated. That’s odd for a body left above ground like this. One would have expected the local wildlife to have done more damage to it.” She frowned. “Why wouldn’t it have been damaged? And why leave the body here at all? Surely a city with such extensive resources had procedures for the ritual disposal of the dead, and this clearly isn’t a deliberate excarnation. It’s as if there was…”

“…nobody left to bury her,” Adam finished, looking down at the place where the missing eye was now filled with soft brown earth.

Ellie felt a chill that defied the thick, hazy heat. A breeze rustled through the tall, elegant trees overhead. The canopy swayed gently as wind whispered through the leaves.

“Can we be done, please?” Staines complained from the doorway. “The others are getting ahead of us.”

Adam pushed the leaves back over the bones, carefully covering the body before he rose to go.

The road continued to unfurl in wide, well-planned curves past structures that grew gradually larger and more complex until Ellie had to crane her neck in order to look up at them.

Here and there, three-story complexes of columns and balconies were more or less intact. Others had fallen into nothing more than vine-draped facades.

Ellie’s skin buzzed with excitement. She’d read about all the major Mayan cities which had been found so far. These ruins were nothing like them. Certainly, there were familiar elements—the shape of an elegant tower, or a colonnaded facade—but the architecture here was both grander and more graceful.

The sheer scale of it was like nothing she had heard of.

The wild, seemingly impossible dream that a lost city lay at the end of Ellie’s map had compelled her to grab it from her desk and race off to corroborate it against the records. Even so, she would never have dared to dream of something like this. This wasn’t just another ruin. It was an upheaval of everything the world had known about Mesoamerican history—and Ellie was standing in the middle of it.

Every one of the magnificent structures they passed demanded investigation. Ellie’s hands itched for a notebook and pencil—for string, stakes, and measuring tape. They should have been embarking on a thorough survey of the entirety of the ruins, identifying potential sites, digging test pits—and documenting, documenting, documenting.

Instead, Jacobs and Dawson led them past archaeological wonders as if they were merely lumps in the landscape. It took all of Ellie’s willpower not to shout the whole expedition to a halt so that she could start making some measurements… and yet at the same time, the gorgeous question of what might still lie ahead of them tugged at her as hard and sure as a fishing line. Even as her mind spun to organize a responsible approach to examining the ruins, another part of her wanted to race through it all like an overeager puppy.

The rest of the caravan sprawled along the road behind them. The line of men and mules was setting a better pace than usual, aided by the flat surface of the ancient road.

The mules’ ears lay back flat along their necks as the animals hurried along. Ellie wondered whether the animals had sensed the significance of the thick gray clouds which rose over the ridge to the east through breaks in the trees.

The buildings around them had grown even more elaborate—a signal that they must be approaching the center of the city.

Ellie’s attention was arrested by a glimpse of something through the thick-leaved flowers to her right. She veered from the road, pushing through the blooms as Mendez grumbled another complaint behind her.

On the far side lay a verdigris-covered basin measuring at least forty feet long. A staircase descended along the inner wall to a layer of green water which was perhaps six feet down from the surface.

Ellie eyed the periphery, noting the places where small notches had been cut into the top of the walls. They led to stone-lined channels which wound into the overgrowth around her.

The stone head of a feathered serpent protruded from the higher wall to her left. A trickle of water dripped from its gaping jaw, which was easily big enough for Ellie to have crawled inside it.

She leaned forward for a better look. The throat of the sculpture was a black tunnel leading into darkness.

As Adam arrived beside her, Ellie whirled toward him.

“Bates, do you realize what this is?” Ellie demanded.

“A half-empty swimming pool?” he replied, frowning down at the murky water.

“It’s a reservoir!” she countered. “Look—there are aqueducts carrying water to other areas of the city. They wouldn’t be using this for irrigation in the middle of a population center. It can only be some sort of municipal water system.” She gripped his shirt, beaming up at him with excitement. “A municipal water system, Bates!”

Ellie released him to scramble along the edge of the pool to the serpent statue.

“I think the water must be coming through this—but from what source?” Ellie stuck her head inside the sculpture’s mouth and shouted back. Her own voice echoed wildly around her. “I can’t see where it goes. There must be some sort of underground source.”

“Princess…” Adam cut in carefully.

Ellie pulled her head back out into the daylight to glance back at him.

Their guards lingered at his back—Staines looking uncomfortable, Mendez tapping his foot, and Flowers seeming mildly amused.

“Er… right. We should probably keep going,” Ellie reluctantly declared.

She couldn’t entirely hide her disappointment. The discovery of a municipal water system was revolutionary. It overwhelmed her with the awareness of how very much there was to learn… but this wasn’t a normal archaeological survey. It was a crime in the making, and she was a prisoner within it.

The truth of that tore at her as she gazed at the murky water of the reservoir.

Adam gave her shoulder a squeeze. “I know,” he said quietly.

He guided her back through the tangles of overgrown flowers to the road—and Ellie realized that it had ended.

The broad path stopped at the bottom of a wide staircase. Bits of white stone showed where the debris had blown aside rather than rotting in place. Voices rang out from above them in tones of greedy excitement.

Ellie mounted the steps into the heart of Tulan.

She stood at the edge of an open plaza longer than a cricket pitch. The space was paved entirely in gleaming white stones. The structures that bordered it had to be the most important buildings in the city.

A sprawling palace complex lay to the west, punctuated by towers that reminded her of church belfries. Colonnaded passages lined the way between shallow ornamental pools and broken fountains.

Stelae dotted the perimeter, carved in a familiar night-black obsidian. Their surfaces were inscribed with some of the same figures Ellie had seen honored on the bas relief in the passage.

The altar stones at their feet still held fragments of broken offering vessels.

Looming over all of it was the temple. The pyramid was by far the tallest structure in the city. Its white stone tiers rose to a height which Ellie thought might rival that of Westminster Abbey—and that was frankly astonishing. She knew of no other pre-Colombian monuments that could even come close to it.

Nature had tried to reclaim the enormous, graceful structure. Here and there, it had succeeded in gaining a foothold. Roots had worked their way into small cracks between the stones, while little shrubs and vines marred what must otherwise have been a mind-boggling feat of engineering.

A squat temple structure crowned the top of the pyramid. Five elegantly arched portals fronted it, leading to an interior swathed in shadows. A narrow ledge in front of the entrance offered space for more public rituals.

Behind it all rose the steep, ragged face of the mountain. A waterfall glittered against its surface, trickling down to some unseen place behind the temple.

There were other pyramids as well. A smaller one lay to the east, and the peaks of a cluster of others emerged from further out in the canopy.

The last gasp of afternoon light slipped out from between the mountains and the bank of charcoal clouds which hung threateningly against the horizon. It turned the whole of what Ellie was looking at to a sun-blessed gold, giving her a heart-wrenching glimpse of what must once have been an astonishingly beautiful and powerful nation.

She took it in with wonder… and then with an uncomfortable sense of recognition. The white pyramid, the rows of waiting gods embodied in black stone, the broad stones of the plaza, and the graceful palace in the distance… it all seemed familiar.

Ellie shook the feeling off. Most Mesoamerican cities boasted a central temple district organized around a ritual square or plaza. She had probably just read about the arrangement so many times that it had taken up residence inside her mind.

The sunlight slipped away in a breath. The stones turned to a cooler gray as the wind picked up once more. It rustled uneasily through the leaves of the nearby trees.

“Foodstuffs, hammocks, fuel, and ammunition—inside!” Bones called out as the mules began to clomp noisily up the stairs. The foreman’s attention was focused on the encroaching clouds rather than on the wonders of the lost city. “Clear the most secure structure for quarters. We are preparing for rain.”

The word—rain—rang out like a curse, shivering down Ellie’s spine.

A quick gust of wind broke through the waiting stillness of the ruins, sending the trees into a restless sway.

The men hurried to their work, elbowing each other out of their open-mouthed gaping at the ruins. They loosed the crates and bundles from the mules, and then formed quick lines to shuffle the gear into some of the low, open structures that bordered the plaza.

None of the buildings had been properly cleared. There could be historical material under the debris layers inside. They certainly shouldn’t be used as camps.

Ellie bit back her protest. No one would listen to it anyway… and she was consumed by a rising, irrational feeling that there was something strange about this place—something that went beyond the mere shock of a remarkable discovery.

“Hey,” Adam said, frowning down at her. “Everything okay?”

Ellie looked around the pale plaza, from the black sentinels of the nameless ancestors to the imposing, glimmering bulk of the temple—and then firmly shook the feeling off. She was a scholar. She approached the unknown with the twin weapons of knowledge and rationality. She knew better than to pay heed to something as illogical as a hunch.

“It’s nothing,” she asserted.

Adam looked concerned—but before he could respond, a call rang out across the stones.

“Mr. Bates! With me, if you will.”

Dawson waved imperiously from the foot of the pyramid.

Adam glanced down at Ellie again—this time with all the sharp focus of a promise.

“I’ll be back,” he said, then left her alone in a field of white stone.