Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Thirty-Eight

The tunnel narrowed as Ellie and Adam moved on. The ceiling dropped until Adam had to duck to pass under some of the lower curves. Around another turn, the flickering glow of their torch revealed the dark mouth of a perfectly squared opening.

The natural shape of the cave had been carved to form a deliberate doorway. Its three sides were lined with painted rows of Tulan’s language.

Ellie took a few steps closer. She reached out but stopped her hand just short of touching the characters. The colors still looked fresh, likely because they hadn’t been affected by weather and time like the art above ground.

“I am starting to suspect that this cave has been deliberately modified for ritual purposes,” she said carefully as she studied the painted words. “For an initiation, perhaps—some trial for new kings or religious elites. Tulan was also called the City of Seven Caves, but not just any caves. Xibalba—the underworld home of the gods of death. That’s what is supposed to lie beneath Tulan.”

“So you’re saying we’re in Hell,” Adam filled in as he gave her a flat look.

“Er… a ritual approximation of Hell,” Ellie corrected him uncomfortably.

“Great,” Adam muttered as he took the torch back from her. “Let’s go see what Hell looks like.”

He ducked through the doorway. Ellie followed in his wake.

A short length of tunnel opened into a chamber full of monsters.

Gruesome, distorted shapes loomed over the moderate space of the cavern. Though they were merely wooden statues, their expressions seemed to grimace with lifelike horror in the flickering light of the torch.

The figures were perhaps twelve feet tall, and were arranged in a rough circle on thrones built of quarried stone that pressed up against the walls of the cave. Any irregular expanses of the cavern’s natural shape had been blocked up with mortared rubble. The changes made the space claustrophobic.

The carved shapes were detailed and vividly painted. The gleaming, faceted eyes of an insect and the jaws of a crocodile gaped at Ellie from the dancing shadows.

“Any idea what this is about?” Adam asked carefully. He stepped into the center of the chamber to give the figures a better look.

“I believe they are the Lords of Death,” Ellie replied uneasily as she looked up into the bulging eyes of a goddess with a blue face. A noose hung tightly around her neck.

“Sure,” Adam muttered unhappily. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

He explored the cavern with the torch as Ellie circled the ring of gods.

Bloodstained, canine teeth grimaced at her. Beside them glared the avian eyes of a vulture.

A woman with a skull for a face gazed down from her throne, draped in beautiful finery. Ellie paused in front of her.

“There are twelve figures,” she pointed out. “That fits with the accounts from the Popol Vuh.”

Adam finished circling the chamber. “I don’t see another way out,” he concluded.

“There must be!” Ellie replied, startled out of her study. “How else could they have brought all this down here?”

“It’s possible there was another branch tunnel we missed when we were moving through the dark.”

“If we go back with the torch, we might run into those bugs again. We don’t have anything else to lure them away with,” Ellie pointed out.

“I don’t know what else to tell you, Princess.”

Ellie ran her eyes carefully over the walls of the cavern.

“This cave has been heavily modified,” she said. “Most of this isn’t the natural wall. It’s been filled in, particularly around the statues.”

“You’re saying that the way out must be behind one of the walls,” Adam offered.

Ellie stopped in front of the beautiful skull goddess. The statue drew her. It was somehow more comforting than the other gods. The lines of its posture were graceful.

Her eyes drifted to the base of the skull goddess’s throne. A lever protruded from a vertical slot in the center of it. It was pointed up.

She looked around. All of the gods had levers. All of the them were up.

“What do you think those are for?” Adam asked.

He stood in front of a giant spider god and tapped the side of the lever with his boot.

The lever thumped down to the base of the slot.

Adam stared down at it.

“Why do I have a feeling that’s gonna turn out to be a bad thing?” he said.

Ellie’s nerves jarred with alarm.

“It’s just a cave,” she assured him weakly. “Nobody has maintained any of this for well over two hundred years. What could it really do?”

A low, unmistakable grinding noise roared through the chamber from behind the bricked-up walls. The sound reminded Ellie of opening a giant window. Counterweights, she thought.

A stone thudded into place, blocking the tunnel through which they’d come.

Adam immediately raced over to it. He dropped the torch and shouldered at the rock.

Ellie’s eyes were elsewhere—on the center of the chamber floor, where she could now see that twelve holes, each a few inches in diameter, had been drilled into the stone.

“It won’t budge,” Adam announced as he hauled at the base of the slab blocking the tunnel. He gave it a frustrated kick.

The grinding behind the walls stopped. In its place rose a low, sibilant hiss.

“What’s that?” Adam demanded.

Ellie gazed down at the holes in the floor with a growing sense of unease.

“I think it’s coming from there,” she replied.

Adam moved to the openings and reached out to touch them. He yanked his hand back, waving it awkwardly.

“There’s steam coming out of them,” he declared.

“Steam?” Ellie echoed nervously. “How can there be steam in here?”

“I don’t know!” Adam retorted. “Maybe they tapped into a magma incursion or something.”

Ellie’s interest perked. “What a fascinating suggestion!” she exclaimed.

“Princess…” Adam growled warningly.

A dart of fear tickled at her as the room grew warmer.

“There’s nothing to worry about. This is perfectly fine,” she asserted. “It must be some kind of test, that’s all. If this is an initiation trial, then it makes sense that there are obstacles to overcome. Oh—of course!” she burst out as she remembered. “There were tests in the Popol Vuh when the hero twins went to Xibalba to retrieve the head of their father—”

“Wait—his head?” Adam cut in.

“Never mind that,” Ellie hurriedly said. “The Mayan storytellers must have been passing down some version of the initiation rituals of Tulan—and we are walking in the middle of it! Adam, have you any idea of the potential historical implications of that?”

“Not sure I’m too concerned about historical implications at the moment,” Adam called over as he made another survey of the cavern walls. “I’m more worried about what happened to your twins if they got it wrong.”

“It’s different in each of the caverns of Xibalba,” Ellie hedged.

“How about this one, Princess?” Adam pressed impatiently.

The heat in the room was rising, as was the humidity. Sweat broke out on her skin as she thought uneasily of the answer to Adam’s question.

“They were… ah, roasted alive,” Ellie informed him.

“We’re looking a bit more like poached here,” Adam pointed out soberly. “How do we get out of it?”

Ellie paced the ring of close-packed, looming figures.

“This is the council chamber,” she noted. “In the council chamber of the Popol Vuh, the gods of death were trying to trick the twins by putting both real deities and false ones—statues—in the room. If the twins greeted a statue with the same reverence as a god, they would be punished for it.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, these are all statues,” Adam shot back. He waved a hand up at the grinning crocodile head.

“I can see that,” Ellie retorted. Her breath was coming a little more heavily as the heat grew denser. “But there must be something different about them.”

“Maybe it’s a beauty contest.”

“That isn’t helping,” Ellie pointed out.

“Well, what’d it say in your book?”

“That they were helped by a mosquito,” she admitted.

“What?” he exclaimed.

“It pricks each of the gods. The real ones yell about it.”

“That’s it?” He gaped at her from across the hissing vents in the floor.

“It’s a cultural record,” Ellie snapped. “It might have been passed down orally dozens of times before it was committed to written form. All sorts of things might have changed since then!”

“Where are we supposed to find a mosquito down here?”

“I don’t know!”

The heat was making it hard to think. Ellie felt as though she couldn’t draw enough breath.

The chamber wasn’t that big. The steam was collecting quickly, and it was hot.

At normal atmospheric pressure, steam was precisely 100 degrees Celsius. If Ellie estimated the cubic area of the room, the ambient temperature, and the rate at which the hot vapor was coming in, she could calculate the precise number of minutes they had before they succumbed to heat stroke.

Ellie shook off the thought. She was getting distracted. Her brain was flailing for the wrong sort of answers.

“There is a solution in here somewhere,” she stubbornly insisted. “We just have to think.”

Adam pivoted.

“I’m going to break down the wall,” he declared.

Ellie jolted with a quick panic.

“You can’t do that!” she protested.

“Why not?”

“This is a priceless piece of Mesoamerican history!”

“It’s trying to kill us, Princess!” he shouted back.

“You might smash up whatever controls our way out of here,” she retorted as she jabbed her finger at him.

Adam muttered a colorful string of curses and gave the wall a kick.

Ellie stared up at the bulging eyes of the suicide goddess. The figure was depicted with uncomfortable realism, right down to the divots in her flesh where the noose tightened around her neck.

There was something odd about the base of the statue’s throat.

She needed to get a closer look at it.

The scholar in her rebelled against the obvious solution. These statues could be thousands of years old. They might be incredibly fragile, with their painted surfaces vulnerable to chipping or marring…

Ellie swayed a bit as the blue face of the goddess doubled. Sweat streamed down her back.

They were going to die down here.

“I’m sorry,” Ellie gasped as she grabbed onto the hanged woman’s knee. “I’m so dreadfully sorry.”

She hauled herself up. Her boots slipped unsteadily on the slick surface of the wood. It had been treated with some sort of oil—likely a natural preservative to prevent insect damage and oxidation, she thought with a distant spark of scholarly interest.

Her toe skidded. Ellie latched onto the statue’s enormous arms to keep herself in place.

She pushed herself up, using a wooden arm for leverage, until she was eye-level with the goddess’s throat.

The dark spot she had seen from the ground was a hole.

Ellie scrambled her way higher, bracing an arm around the hanged woman’s unsettlingly realistic throat, and peered around the statue’s head.

A slender wooden tube protruded from the back of its throat.

No, Ellie realized. It wasn’t wood. The tube was a carefully shaped piece of hollow bone.

“Oh blast,” Ellie blurted as her inspiration crystallized into an idea.

She wondered what sort of bone it was. Probably not human, she thought with uncomfortable relief. Human bones weren’t naturally hollow…

…unless someone had hollowed one out.

Below her, Adam kicked at the throne of a giant bug god.

“I don’t see a way out of this,” he called. His voice was tight with frustration.

Ellie took a breath to steel herself, set her lips to the bone, and blew.

A clear, delicate note floated through the enclosed space of the chamber.

Adam gaped up at her.

“What did you do?” he demanded.

“I… found a flute,” Ellie awkwardly replied as she waved at the back of the statue’s neck.

Adam met her gaze from across the length of the suicide goddess—then lifted his boot and stomped down on the lever.

Unseen weights moved behind the walls as something ground and cranked into place.

“Was that a good noise?” she asked tentatively.

“Keep blowing and let’s find out,” Adam retorted. He pivoted over to an enormous anthropomorphic spider and grabbed one of its eight arms to haul himself up.

“Right,” Ellie confirmed breathlessly.

She clambered down from the hanged goddess and hurried to the next statue—the bloody-toothed crocodile. She scaled up its body, using its open jaws to pull up to its neck.

She blew through the bone flute that she found protruding from the back.

There was no sound.

Across the room, the spider god emitted a haunting, elegant note.

Adam slid down the front of it. He kicked the lever as he went.

Another scrape and clank sounded from behind the walls.

Ellie half-fell down the front of the crocodile. She ran to a god that vividly resembled a rotting corpse, right down to the wooden maggots wriggling in the gaps of its skin.

She eyed it distastefully, but there was no way around it. Ellie climbed up. Her boots slipped on the slick surface. The decaying flesh had been depicted with such realism that she almost expected it to squish under her grip.

Thankfully, there was no squish.

She reached the top, swung herself around to the back of the corpse’s neck—and panicked.

“It’s not here!” she cried out.

“What do you mean, it’s not there?” Adam hopped down from a handsome male god who appeared to have slit his own throat.

“The… the bone! The flute! It’s broken off!” Ellie exclaimed.

“Skip it and go to the next one,” Adam ordered as he scaled up the torso of a beady-eyed vulture. “If we get through all of them and nothing’s happened, then we’ll know which way it’s supposed to go.”

The suggestion was perfectly sensible. Ellie’s brain took an inordinately long amount of time to absorb it.

The air was making it hard to breathe—hard to think. She felt dizzy and thick.

“Yes,” she said aloud, as though the words could force her body into moving. “Yes, I’ll do that.”

She climbed down. Her grip on the corpse slipped, sending her into a skid. Ellie caught herself on a handful of maggots.

Adam threw her a worried glance from across the room.

His bare chest glistened with sweat in the light of the torch, which he had jammed into a crack in the stones. His hair was damp as well, mussed and unruly above those piercing blue eyes… eyes that went from dangerous to sparkling with humor in a breath.

And that stubble, which was so scratchy and yet soft at the same time. The way his hands felt when he grabbed hold of her—

“Princess?” Adam cut in. His perfect eyes were lined with concern.

Ellie shook her head to snap herself out of it.

“I’m fine,” she assured him unevenly. “Keep going.”

He didn’t believe her. The fact of it was written clearly on his face—but they were running out of time.

Adam hauled himself up the side of a god with a dog skull instead of a face. Ellie approached the next statue.

This one was some sort of bat. Black wings extended out from either side of it, pointed and leathery. Red eyes caught the torchlight and flickered it back at her.

They looked like glass… or maybe rubies. Were there rubies in British Honduras?

Ellie’s thoughts drifted into possible trade routes.

She shook off the haze and forced herself to climb. Her hands gripped soft fur and leathery skin.

Ellie suppressed a yelp—and realized that it was only wood, lightly textured by some expert, long-dead hand. It had not felt like wood… which meant that she was starting to hallucinate.

Hallucination was one of the more advanced symptoms of heat stroke.

The bat god had fangs. They were long and wickedly pointed.

Yes, Ellie thought distantly. That made sense.

The fangs were not wood. When she touched them, she felt bone.

Perhaps she was hallucinating again.

She reached the back of the bat’s neck and found the flute. The note it sounded was a screech nearly too high in pitch for her ears to hear it.

Ellie collapsed back to the ground, too weary and disoriented to climb. The air was so hot—too hot.

She threw herself against the lever. It gave under her weight and clanked down. More noises ground from within the walls.

There was still no way out.

Ellie slumped down on the ground beside the lever.

No—she had to keep going.

She dragged herself to her feet and stumbled to the final statue. The skull-faced woman was framed by a halo of golden feathers and draped in rich, colorful robes.

Ellie had seen her before—painted onto a cheap paper card set in a wooden frame on an altar in Santa Dolores, honored with flowers and candles.

“Santa Muerte,” Ellie gasped as her head spun dangerously.

It seemed that the skull-faced woman nodded, as regal as a queen accepting her tribute.

Ellie set her hands on the goddess’s knees and pushed herself up. She climbed the figure slowly—a hand to her silk-covered shoulder, a foot on her skeletal hand. She wrapped her arms around the statue’s back, clinging to her like an exhausted child as she pulled herself the last bit of distance to her goal.

Her eyes rested on the back of Death’s throat.

The bone was broken.

Shadows crept into the sides of her vision. They swarmed there, dancing and shifting. The scope of what she could see narrowed, and Ellie wavered unsteadily.

Her arms gave way. She slid into Santa Muerte’s lap, and then fell to the ground as the monsters around her blurred into a kaleidoscope of flower petals and rot.

Adam’s face hovered above her. The familiar lines of it were drawn with concern.

“Damn it,” he cursed.

Solid arms lifted her as he clutched her to his sweat-slick chest.

“She’s…” Ellie groaned.

“She’s what, Princess?” Adam demanded.

“Broken,” Ellie replied.

She let her head fall against his skin. Her eyes drifted closed.

All of her was drifting. Only the feel of Adam’s chest against her cheek and the powerful strength of his arms kept her from floating away.

“That’s lovely,” Ellie sighed as she drifted deeper.

“Ellie,” Adam said. He deliberately jostled her. The shake snapped her slightly more awake.

“Hasss to be one of them,” she slurred. “Her or… maggot face… How can we…?”

“You’re passing out,” Adam declared.

“Ssssallright,” Ellie replied.

The world blurred into a swimming dance of color—bones and feathers, jaguar skin and jagged teeth.

“Ah, to hell with it,” Adam muttered from somewhere above her.

His body swayed awkwardly as he lifted up one of his feet and stomped down on the lever.

A louder clank sounded from within the walls. Ellie had the vague sense of something benevolent and grotesque moving past her. It reminded her of the shadow of a great wing.

“Thank Christ,” Adam coughed. He clung to Ellie as he shoved his back against an enormous, looming object, which moved aside on a well-oiled pivot.

Cool air blasted over her face. Ellie gasped it in as Adam staggered forward. He collapsed awkwardly to a knee, and then to the ground. He leaned back against a wall, letting Ellie fall into his lap.

Her vision slowly cleared. Adam’s head had dropped back against the stone. Only the silhouette of his face was visible in the dim torchlight that carried through to them from the other chamber.

She looked past him to see an open doorway cut into the rock. A figure loomed on the far side of it. It was the skull-faced woman, who had swung free of the exit that she had been concealing behind all of her deathly elegance.

Ellie swallowed thickly. Her throat was dry.

“How… How did you know which one it was?” she asked.

“No idea,” Adam replied without opening his eyes. “Just guessed.”

Horrified alarm made Ellie sit up straighter in his lap.

“You guessed?”

“Figured a fifty-fifty shot was better than getting cooked.” He cracked a tired eye at her as his mouth pulled into an approximation of his usual roguish smile.

“What if you had guessed wrong?” Ellie pressed, aghast.

“Would’ve cooked us a little faster.” Adam shrugged.

She gaped up at him. “You’re unbelievable,” she said.

He was definitely smiling at her.

“Thanks.” His expression sobered a bit. “Looks like this ritual of yours is meant to kill whoever gets it wrong.”

“That would fit with the written accounts,” Ellie returned uneasily. “How are we going to get past it?”

“With whatever else is in that big brain of yours,” he said. “And luck.”

Ellie’s stomach dropped.

“That isn’t very reassuring.”

“Best we’ve got,” Adam concluded.

He shifted her from his lap, climbed to his feet, and extended a hand down. Ellie accepted it and let him pull her upright.

He ducked back into the council chamber to retrieve the torch. It illuminated the way ahead—a low-ceilinged labyrinth of veils, pillars, and stalagmites, which creeped with shadows.

Ellie faced it with grim determination. They would get through this. They had to.

Everything depended upon it.