Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

Forty-Five

Kuyoc knew a shortcut. He led them across the mountains along an obscure sequence of game trails, ridges, and the short tunnel of another cave. They followed the rushing tracks of newly rain-fed streams until the thick, green lushness of the forest opened onto the neatly organized expanses of newly planted milpas.

Shortly afterwards, two girls of perhaps eight and twelve slipped from the trees and legged it up the path, undoubtedly to give Feliciana and the others word of the ragged horde heading for Santa Dolores Xenacoj at the heels of their iconoclastic priest.

The light over the tidy little cluster of houses was golden and warm as Ellie walked up the path to the village. Kuyoc led the way along with a small army of children who had slipped from doors and fences as they approached. They danced around the priest and peppered him with questions.

She could smell roasting meat and the warm aromas of chili and beans.

Feliciana emerged with the other women, who descended on them like a flock of noisy doves. They fussed over Ellie’s ruined shirt until Feliciana’s granddaughter, Itza, spotted the wound on Ellie’s arm and shouted the news of it.

The mass of busy Mayan grandmothers separated her from Adam. A pounded mess of plants was slapped onto her wound, which was then wrapped in a clean bandage.

A wrinkled, fairy-sized woman whom Ellie didn’t yet know dabbed the rest of the mud from Ellie’s face with a damp cloth. She rattled on in Mopan the entire time, which Héctor helpfully translated.

“She says you need a bath because you smell like rotten plantains,” he declared.

At last, Ellie was deposited on one of the stools in front of Feliciana’s tidy home, and a plate of food was set in her hands. She tore into it with a sigh of relief and satisfaction, stuffing herself with warmly spiced beans, roasted game, fresh herbs, eggs, and a mass of tortillas.

When she was done, she leaned back against the house and considered all the places where her body ached.

Adam dropped down beside her a moment later. His hand and arm both sported fresh bandages with a greenish tinge, which told Ellie that he had also been poulticed.

He still didn’t have a shirt. It clearly wasn’t de rigueur to go around Santa Dolores without one, though at least he wasn’t breaking any actual indecency laws.

Ellie found that she had a greater respect for indecency laws as her eyes dropped involuntarily to Adam’s chest. Even when still slightly filthy and moderately bruised, that torso could cause a riot.

He grinned down at her.

“You look terrible,” he said.

Ellie glared at him as he reached over and gave a tangled lock of her hair a little tug.

“Itza offered to comb it, but it would have meant delaying dinner,” Ellie retorted. “Which was not going to happen. Paolo!” she called, flagging the boy down as he scurried past. His pet chicken followed at his heels.

“?Quieres más?” Paolo guessed.

“Yes,” Ellie replied with relief. “Sí!”

Paolo grinned at her and dashed into the house, where he called out a quick line of Mopan to those inside.

Adam chuckled.

“What did he say?” she demanded.

“Something along the lines of the foreign lady is hungry as a boar,” Adam replied.

“I don’t care what he calls me as long as he brings me more tortillas,” she returned.

“That’s my girl.”

Ellie startled a bit at Adam’s easy, comfortable words. A tumult of unsettling questions sparked to life inside her.

Before she had a chance to ask them, they were joined by Padre Kuyoc. The priest had fully washed up and changed into clean clothes.

“Nice sunset,” he commented as he plopped down beside them.

He had a cup in his hand. The contents smelled lightly of booze. He raised it.

“To accidentally wiping out every vestige of a lost world,” he said.

Ellie’s stomach dropped. She had been ruminating uncomfortably over the disaster for their entire walk to the village. She was a scholar, for goodness’ sake! She was supposed to learn, document, and preserve—not drop the relics of an entire culture into a giant hole in the ground.

She slowly lowered her face into her hands, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the disaster that she had created. It felt particularly awful as she sat in the middle of a village full of people who could very likely have claimed Tulan as part of their own heritage… had Ellie not blown it up.

“I’m supposed to honor the past,” she said without looking up. “I’m supposed to protect it.”

Beside her, Kuyoc took another sip of his drink.

“Did you want to destroy Tulan?” he asked easily.

Ellie’s head snapped up.

“Of course not,” she retorted.

His sharp eyes met her steadily from under a fringe of white hair.

“You followed the path the mirror set for you,” he said.

Ellie was painfully conscious of Adam beside her. They hadn’t talked about any of that yet.

She had just dropped Kuyoc’s potential ancestral legacy into a sinkhole. She could hardly do that and then fail to tell him the truth about it.

“Yes,” she confessed.

Kuyoc shrugged. His shoulders relaxed as he took another sip of his drink.

“Well, there you are, then,” he concluded.

“That’s it?” Ellie demanded with a flash of temper.

“You didn’t want to destroy Tulan,” the priest replied. “But you wanted something else. What was it? Fame? Wealth? The admiration of your peers—the men who do not think you are capable of doing this work? Did blowing up the cave with my terrible old dynamite bring you any of those things? No.” He shot her another careful, penetrating look. “You destroyed the Smoking Mirror. You buried it with the bones of all its dead. If Tulan went with it, perhaps that was the only way to be sure no one would come and try to dig it out again.” He chuckled as he looked away again. “You must have wanted that very much.”

Ellie absorbed it all with shock. Beside her, Adam was quiet, but she could feel him carefully listening.

She was still a little afraid to find out what he thought of it all.

The things she had seen inside the mirror had blurred in her mind like a dream that she only remembered after she had already staggered from bed for a cup of tea. She recalled the scarred woman’s face and a shocking sense of intimacy—of shared purpose. A mind-blasting flood of information that had slammed into her brain, overwhelming her with its sheer volume.

There was no way she could hold it all inside her mind—yet even as she looked around Santa Dolores, small things winked out at her, glowing with a spark of added significance.

The way the stream had been shored up and shaped as it tumbled down to the lake. The layout of the village houses with their tidy front gardens. The flashes of bright jewelry on the arms of the women. How the air mingled with tobacco smoke and the smell of roasting maize.

Ellie was suffused by a sense of the past threading itself through the present, even as so much had very obviously changed.

She should be writing it down, she thought with a jolt of panic. She needed to scribble as much of it as she could on paper before it slipped away from her—but even as she reached for it, the knowledge fled back into the depths of her mind.

Cruzita’s voice rang out over the village. A moment later Paolo darted by, clutching his pet hen to his chest. Relieved laughter rang out from where Ram, Pacheco, and several of the other fellows from the expedition sat with a few of the men from the village, rattling off stories in a shifting kaleidoscope of languages.

Charlie leaned against a cashew tree a little further on, quietly smoking a cigarette with a Mayan old timer, as Lessard trimmed his beard with his machete.

Nigel Reneau bent over a soup pot and quizzed one of the older women there about the spice she was adding to the warming chocolate.

Between and around it all ran the children. Aurelio scolded them when they wheeled too close to where the mules grazed in their quickly rigged corral.

It felt right—like everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be. There was a surprising comfort in it.

Adam leaned back against the house with his eyes closed. He was obviously exhausted, but he looked peaceful.

He felt like he belonged there too—dozing beside her with his conspicuous lack of a shirt.

Kuyoc took another sip of his drink as he gazed out over the sunset.

“I think perhaps we are all lucky that you wanted it so badly,” he said. He cast his eyes over the warm noise of the village as he set down his cup. “I couldn’t do it myself. For me, the mirror was…” He shook his head. and his eyes were tiredly drawn with all the things he couldn’t say. “And it would have been too much to ask of the people here. They fought hard for the peace and quiet of this life.”

The priest stood up. Adam cracked open his eyes as the older man looked down at them.

“But you two are not looking for a quiet life,” Kuyoc noted significantly. “Are you?”

He ambled away from them then, raising a hand to the comfortable greetings of the people of his adopted home.

Adam slipped an arm over Ellie’s shoulders, pulling her a bit closer.

“Well, Princess,” he said. “You sure know how to conduct an excavation.”

Ellie groaned miserably. Her shoulders slumped.

Adam’s blue eyes brightened with a laugh, and then sobered a bit as he looked at her.

“What’ve you got in your pocket?” he asked.

“Magnifying lens,” Ellie recited automatically. “A needle. An empty flask.”

Adam raised a waiting eyebrow.

“And this,” she added awkwardly. She took out Dawson’s bone.

It looked like an ordinary humerus from the wing of a largish bird. A few characters had been roughly scraped into the surface. Ellie recognized the language as Glagolitic, an old Slavic script.

She didn’t know what they said—yet. She was a little rusty with her Glagolitic.

“How many more things like that do you think are lying around out there?” Adam asked.

“Speaking in terms of pure logic, if we have already encountered two of them, I think we must assume there are a fair quantity of others,” Ellie rambled, and then caught herself. “Though of course, there is nothing logical about any of this.”

“I’ve never been that crazy about logic anyway,” Adam replied. “I’m more of a winging it kind of guy.”

“Dawson… Jacobs…” Ellie burst out. “They couldn’t possibly be trusted with anything like the power inside that cave. Nor could anyone who would hire them.”

“Can’t say I disagree,” Adam replied grimly.

“But they’ll keep looking for more of them,” Ellie filled in. “Won’t they?”

“Seems more than likely,” Adam agreed. “I mean heck—I’m pretty sure I saw their list.”

Ellie stiffened.

“You saw a list?” she echoed urgently.

“It was just some stuff Dawson had scribbled in the back of his notebook,” Adam hedged. “I dunno if it was in any order of priority, but the last bit mentioned a dig at Saqqara.”

“Egypt,” Ellie clarified automatically, and her attention abruptly sharpened as a rising alarm rang through the back of her mind.

“Yeah, Egypt,” Adam drawled in reply. “I’m not that bad at geography. I do draw maps for a living.”

“But where at Saqqara?” she pressed urgently.

Adam seemed to pick up on her change in tone. His expression grew more serious.

“Unas South Cemetery,” he replied carefully.

“Unas South Cemetery,” Ellie repeated. Her head started to feel tight. “Where Neil is digging?”

“Is… ah… that where he is?” Adam returned tentatively.

“What were they hoping to find there?” Ellie demanded.

Adam took a moment to answer. When he did, his words had an uncharacteristic weight.

“They mentioned something about the Staff of Moses.”

“The Staff of Moses,” Ellie echoed queasily. “The one that parted the Red Sea. That unleashed the ten plagues on the Egyptians. Turned water to blood. Brought down a thunderstorm of hail and fire, and then killed the firstborn sons of an entire nation.”

“Yeah,” Adam answered quietly. “Pretty sure that’s the one.”

“But they can’t possibly…” Ellie spluttered as panic rose in her throat. “For someone like Dawson or Jacobs to possess… For even a fragment of that kind of power to fall into the wrong hands…”

She shook her head and fought for some sense of logic.

“If Neil is tangled up in it, he can’t possibly understand the real implications,” she insisted. “He hasn’t the imagination for that. And even if he figures it out, he’s not remotely equipped to handle this sort of thing. This is Neil we’re talking about. He gets lost in libraries!”

The rest of the truth settled neatly into place. It was as undeniable as it was terribly intimidating. Ellie’s heart pounded with it as she raised her head to meet Adam’s gaze.

The words fell numbly from her lips.

“We have to stop them,” she said.

Adam’s expression shifted in a way that made the air around Ellie begin to feel just a little warmer.

“Interesting ‘we’ you’ve got there,” he noted.

Her heart hammered awkwardly in her chest. For a moment, Ellie considered whether she should try to brush it off—but only for a moment. It took no longer than that for her to know that she could never hide from this and fail to regret it later—no matter what happened in the next few minutes.

“I know there’s still… unfinished business between us,” she said, picking the words carefully. “I wronged you, and I don’t expect you to simply forget about all of that. Because it matters. And I…” She swallowed thickly and steeled herself. “I know you think we must get married to protect my family and your friend from being hurt by this mess the pair of us have gotten ourselves into. Of course, I am still staunchly opposed to the entire institution, regardless of situations where a pair of perfectly reasonable adults are being forced to bind themselves together for life for no other reason than—”

“Ellie…” Adam began warningly.

“Wait,” she said as she raised her hand. She took another breath to regain control of herself. “What I am trying to say is that I… I don’t care. About any of that. I don’t give a… a damn about it.” The curse felt good. Ellie smiled at the way it burst happily from her mouth as she raised her eyes to Adam’s once more. “What I do give a damn about is… this.”

The word hung awkwardly in the air between them. Ellie pressed on.

“The truth is that I am having a very hard time imagining what it would be like if you decided you didn’t want to be around any longer,” she admitted. “And I think I am having that difficulty because the notion makes me feel rather desperate—”

“Princess,” he cut in firmly, halting the manic flow of her words.

“Yes?” Ellie said weakly.

Adam’s arm slid down her back. His hand rested warmly against the curve of her spine as he looked down at her.

“What do you want?” he asked.

The question grew richer and deeper with meaning as it echoed through her mind in the voice of a ghost… in the whispering promise of a god.

What do you want?

There was no need to search for an answer this time. It was right there inside of her, thrumming with certainty regardless of whatever logic might have to say about it.

It simply waited to be spoken.

“You,” she replied.

Adam answered her with a grin. It was big and unapologetically happy, and the sight of it warmed Ellie up like someone had lit a cheery little fire inside of her.

The look in his eyes sharpened, speaking to something a bit more dangerous. The little fire simmered further up Ellie’s veins, sparking her nerves to quick, delicious life.

“Good,” he declared and kissed her.

Someone hooted at them from across the camp. It sounded like Lessard. And maybe that was Flowers who was laughing, and Feliciana telling him to shush.

Ellie didn’t really care. Adam’s arms were holding her close, and his mouth tasted like rum, waterfalls, and campfires—and thank god nobody had bothered to find the man a shirt, because Ellie was wildly certain that she had never been so happy before in her life.

“Geh wahn room!” Charlie shouted to another raucous burst of laughter—and when they started pouring the chocolate, Ellie didn’t even care.

She had everything she could possibly want right there.