Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Forty-Three

Sand stung against her skin. Ellie clutched the trowel and brush in her hands as the storm whipped around her, blurring her view of the brown expanse of the Nile…

Smoke hung over a gray London street. The women around her jostled, screaming, with tears of joy on their faces. Grandmothers and schoolgirls jumped, arm in arm, with the joy of victory. Blood stained the white fabric of their blouses…

Calloused hands traced over her skin as they danced along the length of her thigh. A roughly stubbled jaw brushed against her cheek as she felt the delicious pain of a nibble at her earlobe. She grabbed taut skin and lean muscle. The wildness inside of her rose as the walls crumbled away and everything began to burn…

…and she landed on her back on a floor of cool white tile.

Ellie blinked up at the ceiling of a familiar room.

Over a shelf of fluffy white towels, frosted glass windows filtered the soft afternoon light. A steaming tub frothed with rose-scented bubbles.

She sat up, taking in the clean, comfortable glory of the washroom at the Rio Nuevo Hotel.

“How the devil am I here?” she demanded aloud.

“You aren’t.”

Ellie whirled, scrambling to her feet, and saw the woman with the scar on her cheek standing on the other side of the tub. This time, she was dressed like Mrs. Linares in a brightly colored skirt and vibrant jewelry.

“How are you here?” Ellie spluttered.

The woman circled the tub, running a hand along the smooth porcelain rim of it.

“This was the one desire I could break into,” she said distantly as she let her hand fall. “The others were too strong.”

“My desire for… a bath?” Ellie tentatively returned.

The woman’s mouth pulled into a rueful smile that reminded Ellie of an expression Padre Kuyoc might make.

Ellie glanced down at herself. She was still wearing her stolen trousers and one-sleeved shirt. They were covered in cave dirt and bat droppings. So was the rest of her.

She started to reach for her hair, and then thought better of it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know how bad it was.

The smell wasn’t very nice, either.

“Well,” Ellie conceded as she dropped tiredly into the chair beside the tub. “I suppose that’s fair. But why?” The question blurted out of her. “Why am I seeing you at all?”

The woman sat down on the edge of the tub. She trailed her fingers in the rose-scented bubbles. She was small but strong—beautiful in a way that was easy to overlook.

“The amulet found you,” she replied.

Only ‘amulet’ wasn’t quite right. What the woman said was something else—a word that hummed and whispered at the edge of Ellie’s consciousness.

All of the woman’s words were like that, Ellie realized with a jolt. The ones that came into her mind were only approximations, some of them better than others.

What the woman had spoken was ‘amulet,’ but also ‘fragment,’ and ‘key.’

Seeker, Ellie thought as another facet of meaning flashed into her awareness and then slipped away again.

“You mean I found it,” Ellie corrected her uncertainly as her hand moved reflexively to the place on her neck where the black disk used to hang.

“No,” The woman looked at Ellie from across the room. “That is not what I meant at all.”

Ellie absorbed that with a tickling sense of fear. She asked the next question—the one that itched at her uncomfortably from the whitewashed walls and frosted glass.

“Where are we, really?”

The woman drew her hand from the tub and set it regally in her lap.

“We are in the mirror,” she replied.

More echoes. More meanings.

Eye. Blood drinker.

God.

A cool fear whispered across Ellie’s skin. The washroom around her looked safe and familiar, but something… unstable vibrated at her from the lines and the shadows. The tiled floor and the white tub were nothing but a thin veneer over a chaotic darkness that would drive her mad if she actually looked at it.

The more she thought of the veneer, the thinner it became until it seemed as though the contours of the room began to flicker. The shadows grew, and Ellie wondered if she was about to tumble into them—to be chewed up and spat out as something else on the other side.

Suddenly the woman was there. She set a firm brown hand to Ellie’s chin. Her grip was gentle but strong as she turned Ellie’s face so that it was the woman she looked at and not the room.

Her figure shifted as Ellie watched, from the colorful blouse and skirt to an embroidered huipil like those worn by the women of Santa Dolores.

A gorgeous feathered headdress and ornaments of jade. Startling flashes of red body paint and a high-necked English blouse. All of it flickered and twisted around something else that remained steady and unchanging—the dark conviction in the woman’s eyes and the scars that marred her cheek.

“Stay with me,” the woman ordered.

Other meanings, other senses of her words mingled in Ellie’s mind.

Listen. Strength. Hope.

“Who are you?” Ellie gasped.

The woman smiled. The expression was grim and slightly dangerous.

“Do you really wish to know?” she challenged.

The want bloomed up inside of Ellie, driven by curiosity unsatisfied for far too long. For days now, she had sensed that she was at the verge of discovering something desperately important—something that this woman stood at the center of.

The desire focused, deepened—and the room around her snapped from view, replaced by a flash of vivid, painfully distinct images.

A dark-haired, umber-skinned girl of twelve crawled from a black tunnel to a narrow, painted room. A jagged red wound marred her cheek. Women waited for her there as water splashed from a copper pipe in the wall.

The wound resolved into a scar. The face and body matured, and were decked in jade, gold, feathers, and paint. Her arm wrapped around the throat of a drugged deer. She held an obsidian knife in her hand.

Black glass glittered beneath her as others, older and more elaborately costumed, watched solemnly at her back.

Another word slipped into Ellie’s mind as meanings fell over each other in layers.

Initiate. Priestess. Blade.

The woman knelt before an elder who wheezed with weakness. His skin was ravaged by sores as he placed a heavy black stone around her neck.

Bearer. Queen.

A familiar pair of eyes shone with warmth. The delicate hands of the woman who owned her heart roved over her skin, tracking the line of her throat.

An elegant flow of syllables slipped into Ellie’s mind—more intimate and more true than what had come before.

Lover. Companion. Ixb’ahjun.

White tile and frosted glass slammed back into place. The silhouette of leaves danced against the window as steam rose slowly from the tub.

“I know,” Ellie gasped.

The scarred woman’s eyes softened with a gentle sadness.

No—not the woman. She had a name.

She was Ixb’ahjun.

She brushed her thumb against Ellie’s cheek with a tired affection before she firmed again, straightening her shoulders.

“You want to know who we were,” Ixb’ahjun said.

It was not a question. Ixb’ahjun’s words were a statement that danced over Ellie’s skin. In its wake sparked the familiar, hungry feeling of a burning need to understand.

“Of course,” Ellie replied.

Even as she spoke it—as she felt it—the shadows shifted along the walls. The washroom itched as though a horde of insects crawled behind it. A buzz rose at the back of her mind, whispering of other wants—recognition, respect, freedom.

Ellie did not realize that she had fallen to her knees. Ixb’ahjun stood over her with a calm, unwavering authority.

“Want it,” she ordered.

Padre Kuyoc’s words danced in the back of Ellie’s mind.

The mirror was made to grant knowledge… It seeks the answer in your heart—in your desire.

The woman above Ellie was a ghost—a memory. How was she here?

The grip on Ellie’s chin firmed. Another word fell from Ixb’ahjun’s lips, harsh and demanding. It felt like a title—a name.

Acolyte. Granddaughter. Warrior.

“Want it,” Ixb’ahjun said again.

Yes. She could want it. Ellie had always wanted to know—to learn.

“Show her,” Ixb’ahjun commanded. Her voice rang through the ordinary washroom as though it were the great, soaring nave of a cathedral carved from the earth itself, rich and resonant with power.

Knowledge flooded into Ellie.

She reeled against the onslaught of it as the tiled floor beneath her shattered into the sea of thousands of years of history.

Temples rose, curving into the mountains. A city grew and sprawled with elegant architecture and marvels of engineering. Water and stone, paint and music—laughter, joy, ritual.

Progress. Power… and deep beneath the earth—blood.

Pierced tongues. Severed earlobes. Birds and lizards. Greater creatures—a screeching tapir, the crimson-flecked pelt of a jaguar.

Captives of war—taut-bodied men with slit throats and opened chests.

Elders and criminals.

The drugged fear of children.

And always the blood.

Bodies piled in the darkness. The glass whispered its truths.

Above, the city thrived. Sparks of wisdom branched out from it to light up the forest with threads of influence that shaped other peoples as they rose, blossomed, fell, and transformed themselves into something else.

Priests wrangled the dark eye like a powerful, dangerous beast, understanding how easily the thirst for more could grow… how quickly terrible it could become.

Then the pale-skinned foreigners arrived, dragging disease in their wake. The desperate push for a solution. So much blood spilled, the most precious and terrible offerings made, only for answers that came in visions of impossible machines, slender points of metal, and fragile tubes of translucent glass.

All of it rippled too far ahead of them—too strange and distant to comprehend and replicate.

Panic. Flight. A civilization crumbling into death and smoke… and then the silence of corpses and the green, relentless life of nature creeping over all that they had built.

Ellie slammed back into the washroom of the Rio Nuevo. She was sprawled on the floor of it. Her head pounded in time with the twisting of her stomach.

How long had she been here? How much time did she have?

Her brain pulsed with knowledge—with dynasties and games, parenting techniques, artistry, engineering, laughter, song, mistakes…

How they built. What they ate. Why they worshiped. How they loved…

It was too vast—too much. Ellie felt as though she would burst from it.

She couldn’t. Not yet.

Ixb’ahjun—priestess and blade, queen of Tulan’s final hours—stood over Ellie as she pushed herself to her knees.

“There was never just one of us.” Ixb’ahjun’s voice rang out through a space far larger than the washroom. “Not until the end when all the rest were dead. There were always more, so that if the wrong desire crept into one of our hearts, the others could see the path to stop it and keep the balance.” She closed her eyes against the pain of remembering. “We all knew of the time in the earliest days when one blade controlled the stone—a time of burning, conquest, famine, and death. All that had been here before was devoured by it, leaving only scattered fragments. The founders of Tulan overcame that at terrible cost, and it was their wisdom that the stone could only be used safely with the balance of a council.”

Ellie thought of the majestic portrait in the ravine—the assembled figures that reminded her of the gods of Mayan and other Mesoamerican myths. Not one but many, all different, each with their own strengths and flaws.

It was… quite brilliant, actually, she thought with a quick burst of admiration.

Ixb’ahjun knelt, bringing herself to Ellie’s level, and fixed her with a serious, challenging gaze.

“Are the men of your world capable of such balance?” she demanded.

Ellie raised an eyebrow at the question. The answer was obvious.

“The men?” she retorted. “Goodness, no.”

Ixb’ahjun cocked her head as a flash of humor brightened her eyes.

“The women?” she prompted.

Ellie considered it more seriously. What the mirror could offer to women…

They could find the path to their emancipation. To equal treatment—equal rights. All of it could be within their grasp…

Padre Kuyoc’s voice echoed through the back of her mind.

It showed me the way to what I wanted in my heart… and it was a path paved with death.

The mirror was an arcane force fed with blood—a force that required sacrifice.

Ellie wondered what must be growing—building—inside of something that had gorged itself on countless hundreds of lives.

Ellie’s dreams were big. They were dangerous.

The bigger the dream, the greater the sacrifice.

What would Ellie be willing to sacrifice to pay for her big, dangerous dreams?

The thought of it tore the fantasy away with a sick lurch in her gut—and suddenly she was not in the washroom at the Rio Nuevo anymore.

Ellie knelt beside Ixb’ahjun on a surface of black glass as flawless and dark as a starless night. The cave arched over her head. Stalactites were illuminated by the glare of the paraffin lamps.

Jacobs must have slipped from Adam’s grasp. Adam was grappling with Staines now, wrestling him for the Winchester. They were frozen like flies in amber except that their movements slowly, almost imperceptibly, continued to shift.

Padre Kuyoc walked toward the water at the back of the cave. Instead of rushing, the stream undulated, slow and graceful as the shifting of summer clouds. His hands were raised and his eyes rolled toward the ceiling as a dark, self-aware humor twisted his lip.

Dawson’s mouth was open in a silent, aggravated protest as his hands waved slowly in the air at everyone around him—at the priest, and at Buller and Price as they swung their rifles into place.

Pacheco held a hammer mid-blow over the nearly completed crate.

Charlie and Lessard were caught in the middle of exchanging a grim, determined glance.

Then there was Jacobs.

He stood two steps from where Ellie herself slumped across the surface of the mirror. Smoke still hissed up in slow, thin curls from where her bleeding arm met the surface. Jacobs’ gaze fixed on her with sharp intention. He held a knife ready in one hand as the other reached for her, inch by painstaking inch.

“Why are we back here?” Ellie asked.

The answer crept up from inside Ellie’s heart even as Ixb’ahjun answered.

“Your desire is changing,” she said.

Ixb’ahjun gently took hold of Ellie’s hands. The blood from Ellie’s wound stained Ixb’ahjun’s skin where their fingers intertwined.

“Tell me what you want,” Ixb’ahjun ordered.

Ellie fought for the answer through the tumult of conflicted emotion inside of her. “I… I can’t let them have it. I need to… I must…”

“Feel it,” Ixb’ahjun prompted urgently. “Shape it in your heart.”

The other Ellie—the one collapsed on the mirror—stirred. The hand of her injured arm clenched reflexively.

Ixb’ahjun flickered. The motion in the cavern lurched dangerously forward for the space of a breath.

The Winchester flew from Staines’s hands into a shadowy field of stalagmites as Adam shouted in protest.

Jacobs’ hand moved closer to Ellie’s neck.

What I want… What I want… What I want…

Ellie’s dreams cried out in protest—sand rippling through her fingers, the silence of a rapt and respectful lecture hall.

A cry of victory in the embrace of her sisters-in-arms.

She remembered the bones that lay under her feet—that terrible, forgotten mountain of the dead.

“I have to destroy it,” Ellie said as the truth dawned over her, both terrible and undeniable.

Ellie’s resolution firmed.

“I want to destroy it,” she declared.

The ghost across from her smiled, tired and relieved, as she squeezed Ellie’s hands.

“Thank you,” Ixb’ahjun said—and then vanished, guttering like a candle flame going out.

Knowledge slammed into Ellie’s brain.

The blade in Jacobs’ hand. Charlie and Lessard hovering a few steps away by the crate.

Dawson reaching into the pocket of his jacket.

A rifle rising to point at Padre Kuyoc as Adam’s eyes narrowed with fear and determination.

The breastplate of hollow reeds lying on the ground by a hole into bone-filled darkness, discarded like a piece of trash.

No, Ellie realized with a sharp, clear fear. That wasn’t right.

The reeds were not hollow at all.

The mirror told her what she must do—and spilled out the inconceivable chaos that would follow.

Really, it all came down to a simple matter of geology.

“Oh blast,” Ellie cursed, her eyes going wide—and then the mirror spat her out.

She slammed back into her slumped, bloodstained body as Jacobs’ hand twisted into the back of her shirt.