Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Thirty-Two

Halfway up the steps of the pyramid, Adam stopped to wait for Dawson to catch up. The professor climbed slowly, pausing frequently to wipe sweat from under the band of his hat and mutter complaints about the weather.

Staines shifted awkwardly behind Adam. He held the rifle, but didn’t look particularly ready to use it. Adam’s guard was becoming a bit complacent—the sort of thing that was bound to happen after days of guarding someone who refrained from doing anything worthy of being shot for.

That was good, because Adam was pretty sure the time was coming for him and Ellie to cut their losses and make a run for it.

Ellie was going to hate the idea. God knew, Adam hated it too. Now that he’d seen the jaw-dropping extent and complexity of the ruins, the idea of leaving it all to the likes of Dawson and Jacobs made him want to break something… but his conversation with Jacobs on the ridge had left him with a bad feeling in his gut.

Adam had a lot of respect for his gut. Listening to it had saved his skin more times than he could count.

Jacobs didn’t buy that Adam was interested in taking over Dawson’s job. Adam wasn’t sure how Jacobs could be so certain about it—surely he wasn’t that bad a liar—but he hadn’t made it this far in life by ignoring his instincts.

Dawson and Jacobs needed him to help find the artifact they were after. Once that was done, he and Ellie would be toast.

Adam had already set the wheels in motion for an escape. He just had to play the game for a little while longer, and then seize the first moment he could to get the pair of them out there. Ellie would be furious with him—but he’d take her being mad at him over being dead.

The two Caulker Caye kids, Pacheco and Lopez, lingered behind Dawson as he caught his breath. Adam caught the pair of them exchanging whispered commentary behind the professor. Pacheco rolled his eyes.

“On we go, then,” Dawson finally said, casting another greedy look up at the temple.

At the top of the pyramid, Adam made the mistake of turning around.

The city sprawled out below him in wild, overgrown luxury. Columned houses and towers flashed through the gaps in the trees as far as he could see. The settlement had to fill most of the low, flat bowl of the valley which lay between the ridge and the mountain that rose up at his back.

The place was a miracle—and it was possible that he was going to be sick.

Adam pressed himself back against one of the columns which lined the facade of the temple, hoping that the solid feel of it under his back would stop his head from spinning.

Why exactly had the people of Tulan decided that the most important place in their damned city needed to be so high off the ground?

The ground was perfectly nice as far as Adam was concerned.

Staines frowned at him with concern. Adam hoped his guard couldn’t tell that he was about to either lose his lunch or fall over.

He could try turning around, but knowing that there would be just a little ledge of stone and then a whole lot of very high nothing behind him was even worse. Instead, Adam stuck himself to the column like a barnacle and waited for a well-dressed looter to haul his way up the stairs.

The very steep, very long stairs.

Dawson finally reached the top, pausing to pant.

“My,” he exclaimed breathlessly. “Quite a climb. Shall we?”

He didn’t wait for Adam to answer. Instead, he stepped between the columns to enter the shaded interior of the temple.

Adam followed and immediately felt some relief.

The arches he had been clinging to framed a long, shallow chamber, backed by a wall of the same pale stone that made up the rest of the city’s structures. The broad, flat surface was covered in another bas relief mural. Adam recognized some of the same god-like figures that he had seen on the carving in the pass. They were depicted standing on the platform in front of the temple. Smaller people kneeled below them in positions of worship.

One of the rulers held out an offering of maize. Another clasped running threads of water. A third extended a clenched fist that dripped with blood.

The carvings were richly detailed and full of life as though at any moment, they might step off the stone and expose themselves to the dying sunlight.

Dawson glanced quickly up and down the chamber.

“There’s nothing here,” he concluded. “But it looks like there’s another room.”

He hurried toward a gap between the stone mural and the far wall.

Adam’s irritation flashed. Dawson clearly expected him to follow along in his wake like an obedient dog.

Usually, someone expecting Adam to do something was all the reason he needed to do something else—but Adam wasn’t quite ready to make that move. Not yet.

He turned through the narrow opening after Dawson.

The second chamber was long, like the first, but slightly broader. Soft illumination glowed through five narrow windows which looked out the back of the temple. The pyramid on which the temple stood had been built almost flush with the steep face of the mountain. The waterfall that ran down the rocky surface was visible through the openings in the wall. The flow was currently a trickle, but it likely turned into an impressive rush during the rains.

The air inside was cooler. It smelled of stone and old wood. The shelves lining the walls were packed with objects.

Dawson hurried closer, his eyes darting over the assorted artifacts.

Curiosity drew Adam after him.

The shelves held a collection of seemingly ritual materials. There were masks—one made from a jaguar skull, another from chips of jade—beside an elaborate feather headdress. The colors of the feathers had barely faded, though some of the leather which bound them together looked rotten. Small, beautifully glazed pots likely held perfumes or paints.

There were jewels as well—gold cuffs and ear plugs. A few glints of silver flashed from among the jumble—platinum, Adam recognized with surprise. Silver would have been tarnished.

Platinum was a tough metal to shape, and Adam didn’t know of any sources of it in British Honduras. The nearest platinum mine was in Colombia.

That meant the people of this place had been trading, even as they kept the truth about their city secret enough to turn it into a myth.

Adam stepped deeper into the room, glancing out of one of the windows as he passed. The face of the mountain was startlingly close. He followed the trail of the waterfall with his gaze until the narrow wash of it disappeared into the plants at the base of the structure. He couldn’t see any stream leading away from it.

A shelf on the far wall drew his attention. It was covered in folded bundles of stiff, slightly yellowed paper.

They were books, he realized with a jolt—a whole wall of books.

Adam was no expert on Mayan culture, but he’d certainly picked up enough to know that damned few books had survived the conquest.

It looked like the people of Tulan had left an entire library behind.

Insects should have chewed any paper apart out here several centuries ago. Adam guessed that the scribes here must have known some way to treat their documents in order to protect them. He was pretty sure he shouldn’t even be breathing near something so delicate, but he couldn’t resist a peek at the covers. They were vibrantly painted like the medieval manuscripts in the Cambridge library. Illustrated scenes intermingled with lines of the square characters that made up the language of this place.

If Ellie were there, she’d probably be grabbing the front of his shirt and shaking him right about now, Adam thought with a smile.

Behind him, Dawson coughed.

Adam stiffened as reality crashed back in. He was here with someone a hell of a lot less fun than Ellie.

Staines wide-eyed gaze flickered to the more obvious treasures that glittered from among the less shiny artifacts. Pacheco and Lopez lingered in the doorway.

“Has to be here somewhere…” Dawson muttered to himself. He crouched down, studying the lower shelves with uncomfortable haste.

Another mural decorated the inner side of the wall which divided the two chambers. This one had been carved into the city’s other favorite material of night-black obsidian.

The bas relief was dominated by the feathered serpent king whom Adam had seen on the stela they’d passed on the way there. He stood in the corner of the image, looking down at a round opening in the ground connected to the long neck of a tunnel. It led to a series of chambers which were depicted more or less as round bubbles on the wall.

In each of the bubbles, the king struggled against some adversary—an army of nasty-looking insects, a whirlwind of daggers, a pack of jaguars. There was another room that followed, but Adam couldn’t tell what it might have held. A piece of the obsidian facing had fallen off and shattered on the ground.

In Adam’s admittedly inexpert opinion, the carving looked a heck of a lot like the way Ellie had described Xibalba, the Mayan underworld which was supposed to lie beneath Tulan.

Ellie would go wild over that, too.

The last chamber depicted on the mural was by far the largest, but Adam couldn’t make out much of it beyond the fact that it showed the serpent king surrounded by a group of odd-looking figures looming over something that lay on the floor. The shadows in that part of the room were too deep—and there was a corpse in the way.

The body was a humble pile of bones and rotting fabric slumped into the corner between the mural and the wall. The bones had mostly collapsed into a loose jumble within remnants of desiccated leather and a pile of jade beads which must once have been an ornate necklace. The skull, aged to a rich brown, gazed sightlessly up at him.

It was another case of someone who had been left to decay where they fell. Based on the richness of the person’s attire, they had clearly been someone of importance. Adam wasn’t an expert, but he was pretty sure important people weren’t left lying where they died unless something had gone real wrong, real fast.

What the hell had happened in this place?

A glittering, wickedly sharp obsidian blade lay among the bones, jammed between a pair of ribs.

Some of the corpse’s fingers still clung to the handle, with just enough dried tissue remaining to keep them articulated.

Had they been pulling the knife out, or driving it in?

The question put a deeper chill into the atmosphere of the room.

Whoever the body on the floor had been, someone had either killed him right here in the ritual heart of Tulan—or else he’d done it to himself.

Or herself, Adam thought uncomfortably, noting the diminutive size of the bones.

There was a clatter behind him. Adam turned to see Dawson rifling through the objects on the shelves. The professor peered under the delicate pots and pushed aside ancient garments that cracked and collapsed at his touch.

“Whoa—hey!” Adam cut in. “Watch how you’re handling that stuff.”

“But it has to be here!” Dawson shot back. He stomped his foot with frustration.

“What—your Smoking Mirror?” Adam retorted irritably.

Dawson’s eyes widened. He looked anxiously toward Staines, Pacheco, and Lopez—and then back to Adam again.

He narrowed his gaze thoughtfully.

“You three,” the professor said, waving dismissively at the others. “Go out on the platform. No, wait!” he quickly corrected himself. “Give me that first.”

He flapped a hand at the rifle Staines was carrying.

Staines cast him a surprised look, but handed the gun over before he left.

Adam wondered if he was about to be shot. Dawson didn’t seem like the kind of guy who shot people. He probably had no idea where to put the bullet.

Adam debated whether that was a good or bad thing.

Dawson skipped over to the doorway and peered out at the departing men.

“My apologies,” he said. “I needed to make sure we weren’t being overheard.”

Adam raised an eyebrow. Did the professor not want to be overhead murdering him? Or was something else going on here?

The way the man held the rifle was all wrong. It was obvious he barely knew how to use it, if at all.

An idea sparked to life inside Adam’s mind. It was probably a bad one—but Adam was going to consider it anyway.

“I am aware you are not particularly fond of me, Mr. Bates,” Dawson began.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Adam replied automatically, still distracted by his bad idea.

Dawson hardly seemed to notice. He rolled on into a monologue.

“…but there is far more at stake in this than personal regard. You may be a bit… rough,” Dawson said awkwardly as he eyed Adam’s filthy borrowed shirt and unshaven jaw. “But I do not believe you to be a man completely lacking in principles.”

“I didn’t realize you could tell a guy’s principles by his wardrobe,” Adam dryly returned.

“Entirely correct, Mr. Bates,” Dawson agreed obliviously. “Sometimes, appearances can be quite deceiving! But if I am right, and you are a man of principle, then perhaps you might like to know that the very future of our civilization might depend upon our efforts in this place.”

That sure as hell hadn’t been what Adam expected to hear, and Dawson looked damned earnest about it.

“I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to explain that a little better,” Adam replied.

The professor shifted his grip on the rifle as though it were a bit too heavy for him to comfortably hold.

“I told you that my colleague and I had been dispatched to this place to retrieve a single artifact,” he went on. “You were clever enough to deduce that the artifact in question was the Smoking Mirror.”

After you told me it was mirror-sized, Adam thought, resisting the urge to roll his eyes.

“But did it not occur to you to wonder why we would go to such trouble and expense for just a single object?” Dawson added significantly.

“How the hell should I know?” Adam retorted with a flash of irritation. “Why do collectors raise all sorts of hell for anything? Some rich guy got fixed on it and threw a bunch of money at you to bring it back for him.”

Visions of all the looted sites he had stumbled across flashed through his brain—broken pots, defaced walls, torn up foundations, and bones scattered like refuse.

Adam’s hands clenched.

“But I do not work for a single individual, Mr. Bates,” Dawson returned meaningfully. “I am employed by… an association of individuals. Tell me—what collector who simply seeks to satisfy his greed has ever agreed to share his spoils with others?”

It was as if Dawson had flipped over a table. He worked for a group?

The professor was right. Adam didn’t know of any collector who cheerfully shared his stuff—not unless it was going to a museum that’d put his name in big letters all over it.

“What unites a group is purpose,” Dawson continued pointedly.

The room in which they stood was growing more gloomy. The increasing darkness was due either to the onset of evening, or to the thickening clouds overhead. Adam couldn’t see the sky through the narrow, mountain-facing windows cut into the wall, but he could feel the tingling drop of pressure in the air, which promised a turn in the weather.

“I have not yet told you our true purpose here,” Dawson said. “I have kept it from you because I have been strictly sworn not to reveal it, even upon the pain of death. But I will tell you that a single, overarching goal indeed unites the association I am privileged to call myself a part of, and it is one that no man of morals and logic could fail to support… once he acknowledged the shocking truth that underlays it.”

Dawson spoke like a preacher firing up for a sermon. The tone set Adam’s nerves on alert. In his experience, men got more dangerous the more fervently they believed in something—and Dawson was still the one in the room with a gun.

“What truth is that?” Adam asked carefully.

“What do you know of the Smoking Mirror?” Dawson demanded.

“Not much,” Adam admitted bluntly.

“But you are aware that the mirror is both the name of a god and a mythological artifact of reputedly immense power.” Dawson’s eyes were bright with fervor. “A disk of polished obsidian in which one is said to be able to see across both time and distance—deep into the past, or far into the future. An object through which one might look with the very eyes of the gods themselves! Think on that, Mr. Bates—think what that would mean. The movements of any enemy could be laid out before you without relying on the vagaries of scouting or the terrible risk of observation balloons. The wisdom of our ancestors might simply unlock itself for our perusal. The unimaginable technology which our descendants will dream into life could be within our grasp even now—requiring the most rigorous investigation to understand and replicate, of course, but think how much progress might be achieved were we merely able to see where the end result is destined to take us.”

“You’re talking like you think this thing is real,” Adam carefully noted.

“An alliance of highly educated, influential, well-bred individuals has gone to a very great deal of trouble and expense to acquire the mirror, Mr. Bates,” Dawson countered. “Tell me—why on earth would they have done so if there were not a very good chance that it is, in fact, real?”

“Look, professor… I dunno who put this notion in your head, but I think maybe you and the rest of your highly influential people are getting conned,” Adam replied.

In response, Dawson tucked the rifle under his arm awkwardly. With his free hand, he reached into the inner pocket of his field jacket. He took out a slender wooden case—one Adam recognized from the moments in which he’d been able to make a brief snoop of the professor’s desk. Dawson opened it and removed the delicate bird bone from inside. He held it up like a trophy with a slyly triumphant expression.

“This is the humerus of a firebird,” he announced grandly. “It was recovered by one of our agents in the beechwood outside Vihorlat in Austria-Hungary. It is only a minor arcanum—a feather, I am told, would have a more immediate and impressive effect. This one takes a hair more effort, but I find it to be quite useful.”

Dawson proceeded to shake the bone vigorously.

For the first time, Adam wondered whether the man in front of him might not be a self-important academic but rather a complete and utter lunatic.

That would not bode well for his and Ellie’s prospects… which hadn’t been great to begin with.

Then the bone bloomed with a wild and fiery light.