Page 81 of Empire of Shadows

“Aw hell—were you wearing that when I pulled you into the river?” he moaned.

“It’s iron gall ink on parchment, as is typical for the period,” Ellie replied calmly. “You can tell by the surface etching and light oxidation. Iron gall ink on parchment is more or less waterproof.”

Ellie unfolded the still-damp page and laid it down in front of Bates… and a dark, irresistible laugh rose up from low in his chest.

“What’s so funny?” Ellie demanded, her defenses prickling.

“It’s got an X on it,” he pointed out.

She gritted her teeth.

“The fading of the ink and the quality of the parchment are clear indicators that the age of the document is genuine,” she rattled off authoritatively. “You have seen for yourself that it is an accurate representation of the colony, even if not to scale, and the use of Ecclesiastical Latin is appropriate for purported authorship by a Spanish monk in the mid-seventeenth century.”

“Great, big ole’ X,” Bates continued, barely stifling a snort. “X marks the spot.”

Ellie fought a wave of both anger and a hot mortification.

“Are you quite done?” she prompted thinly.

Bates coughed back whatever remaining laughter was in his chest and rose to collect his own maps. He spread the lot of them out across the deck and bent over them with concentration.

Ellie went to the stove while he worked. The contents of the pot were already hot. She filled a pair of bowls and rinsed the pan in the river as she’d seen Bates do the day before.

She set his bowl down beside him. Uncharacteristically, he ignored it.

Ellie dug into her own dinner while she waited. Bates’s haphazard combination of tinned beef and tomatoes was surprisingly palatable.

“We went the wrong way,” Bates announced as he leaned back and picked up his bowl.

Ellie stopped with her spoon halfway to her mouth.

“What?” she blurted.

“See this?” Bates tapped a spot on Ellie’s half of the map that lay a little beyond theBlack Pillarwhere a few rippled lines had been carefully inked beside the label for one of the other landmarks—Arch Hollowed by the Hand of God. “Pretty sure those are cataracts.”

Ellie leaned over for a better look, careful to keep her bowl aside so that she wouldn’t drip tomatoes onto the precious documents.

“I suppose they could be,” she agreed a little uncomfortably.

Bates took a bite of his dinner. His eyebrows went up appreciatively at the flavor. He slurped down another mouthful before pushing the old maps carefully aside and tapping the newer one beneath them.

“And what do you see here?” he probed.

Ellie frowned at the blue line he indicated. The narrower band of it wriggled across the landscape to join up with a far more substantial watercourse—one that ran directly into the center of Belize Town.

“Which—ah—river is that?” she asked, even as her heart sank.

“That’s the Belize,” Bates replied.

“The river that runs right through the capital?” Ellie’s voice came out with just a hint of an awkward squeak.

“Uh-huh.” He rapped his finger against the rogue bit of blue ink. “Andthisis a new tributary that a pair of logging scouts reported to me last year. They said this whole section was taken up with rapids.”

Ellie pulled both halves of the older map closer and studied them as Bates blithely shoveled more of the soup into his face.

She sat back and looked down at the papers with dismay.

“We went the wrong way,” she admitted numbly.

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