Page 168 of Empire of Shadows

Charlie raised his head, looking a bit tired.

“Lessard, bali—You still good for throwing your fists around some?” he asked.

Lessard shifted his tobacco to the other side of his mouth. “So long as I get seventy percent,” he replied easily.

“Seventy percent of what?” Ellie cut in, confused and mildly alarmed.

“The bets, Pepa,” Flowers replied cheerfully. “Who you gonna pick a fight with then, Frenchman?”

“Maybe that bakra Pickett,” Lessard offered with obvious relish.

“Pretty sure that one is fool enough to try stabbing you,” Flowers noted.

“Good thing somebody took his knife, then,” Lessard said with a laugh.

A sharp cry rose up from across the camp. It sounded of both alarm and interest.

The noise was followed by a distinct wave of chatter, which emanated from somewhere behind the ruins of the palace.

“C’est quoi ça sacrament?” Lessard demanded with a pointed look at Charlie, providing Ellie with a lovely example of the Quebecois habit of using sacred terms as profanity.

Charlie sighed.

“Suppose we better go find out,” he concluded and set off across the plaza.

Ellie leapt up as well and fell into step behind them. With a shake of his head, Flowers followed, slinging his rifle over his shoulder.

Mendez jogged up to meet them, flustered and out of breath.

“The boss wasn’t at any temple. I don’t know where he’s gone,” he said with a note of panic.

“He wants you, he’ll come and find you,” Flowers assured him, waving it off.

“What’s all this?” Mendez demanded.

“I think maybe somebody found something,” Flowers replied and nodded to the thick cluster of men ahead of them.

The crowd had gathered in a circle. Ellie scurried around the edge of it, with Mendez complaining at her heels. She picked out a less thickly packed spot and nudged her way in.

The men were clustered around an open hole in the ground. It dropped perhaps ten feet down. Ellie recognized the general form of it as a sinkhole.

There must be more caves under the city, which meant that Tulan likely sat at the edge of the place where the limestone karst met the harder stone of the mountains.

Between the clouds and the encroaching sunset, it was getting darker. A pair of lanterns flared to life at opposite sides of the gap. The light spilled across the pit and revealed what had sparked that shout of surprise.

The sinkhole was full of bones.

They were browned with age, jumbled into a pile, and twisted through with vines. Moss grew from them in places. Ellie could pick out faded remnants of tattered cloth and old leather.

Scattered throughout the debris were distinct hints of gold, which glinted in the light of the lanterns.

It was a grave—a mass grave where the bodies of the people of Tulan had been tossed as though there had been no time to do anything better for them.

With a cold shock, Ellie realized that she had seen it before… that she had seenallof it before.

The white road that led to the city. The plaza with its palaces and temples—and this, the grave that lay before her.

She haddreamedit as a scarred woman spoke of the voices of gods and ash rained down from the sky.

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