Page 175 of Empire of Shadows

Pacheco and Lopez exchanged a look before setting themselves to the task, peering carefully into corners and poking at the stones.

Adam stood back and watched.

Dawson studied the black mural, and then stalked back to the front chamber, muttering to himself as he tested every edge and corner. After a minute he came back and shot Adam a glare.

“Need I remind you that your continued value to this expedition depends upon yourusefulness, Mr. Bates?” Dawson snapped. “Shall we see what happens when you are no longer of value?”

Adam was supposed to make himself useful by finding an entrance that didn’t exist. There was no secret chamber in this pyramid. As far as Adam had ever seen, Mesoamerican pyramids didn’t conceal chambered tombs like their Egyptian counterparts. Dawson was mixing up his continents.

He ground his teeth against the inanity of it.Thiswas what he was being pushed around and threatened for?

Staines stood at Adam’s back with the rifle. He looked bored.

Could Adam do it? Could he pretend to hunt around the chamber like Pacheco and Lopez, who were currently exchanging low, dry whispers aboutelgringo loco? Would he play Dawson’s game in order to buy himself and Ellie a little more time?

Adam’s patience felt like the burnt end of a cigar. His mind still reeled with Dawson’s revelation that the magical gizmos of history might be more than just bedtime stories—and what the hell was he supposed to do with that?

He’d been playing this game for days now, and there had only ever been one way it was going to end.

He turned his gaze to the mural. The final panel of it was easier to see, now that Pacheco had brought the lantern. The figures that flanked the serpent king in that last great chamber weren’t the elegant nobles of the bas relief in the pass or the worshipers from the stela.

They were monsters.

Adam picked out the faces of lizards, jaguars, and insects—the rotting visage of a corpse and the stripped bone of a skull.

They were the same monsters he’d seen honored on carvings in Mayan ruins across the colony. Adam didn’t need to have read a bunch of books to recognize them for what they were—the gods of Hell.

The king held something in his arms. Adam knelt down for a closer look.

It was a child—a small, skinny little girl.

The guy had thrust a knife into her heart.

Blood poured from the wound, dripping onto the object that lay at the feet of the gods—a round, black disk.

The scene made for a hell of a contrast with the grace and beauty of the art Adam had seen in the pass.

His gaze dropped to the corpse on the floor. Maybe she had been some kind of priestess. The description felt right. He looked at the knife she still held in her hand.

What here would’ve been worth dying to protect?

A buzz built in the back of Adam’s brain.

The mural was bordered by a row of carved stone blocks inscribed with the characters of Tulan’s language. Adam studied the ones closest to the dead priestess. The symbols there reminded him of parrots, monkeys, ears of corn, and a grinning skull.

One in particular caught his eye. Adam realized that he had seen it before.

It was the damned lollipop.

Well—he knew it wasn’t a lollipop. The familiar swirling pattern was far more likely to represent the wind… or maybe smoke, Adam thought as he looked at it. There was definitely something a little smoke-like about it.

What he did know for certain was that the same symbol adorned the back of Ellie’s medallion.

The glyph sat in the border of the mural, directly below the carved image of the mirror at the feet of the king. Before time had withered her away, the dead woman’s back would have been covering it when she fell.

Adam ran his fingers along the edges of the block.

The stone popped loose, revealing a cavity in the wall.

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