Page 93 of Empire of Shadows

“Princess…” Bates began.

Ellie barely heard him. Her mind was spinning with the possibilities.

“The iconography and the language glyphs don’t match up with Mayan or Aztec characters,” she concluded firmly. “The symbolism here combines elements ofbothcivilizations. It could belong to a descendant culture, of course—but then, why wouldn’t the Spanish have heard about it? Either way, the implications are clear. This means… This is…”

Wonder choked off the flow of her words.

“Something new,” she finally blurted.

Something new. The stela was clear evidence for the existence of a previously unknown Mesoamerican culture… and Ellie had the map to the heart of it tucked into her corset.

“Hand me my pencil,” she ordered.

“Pretty sure it’s my pencil,” Adam countered lightly.

“And the notebook. I need to make a complete record of all this—” Ellie stopped. “The notebook! It was in the rucksack! It will have been soaked through. How am I going to document our finds if I don’t have anything to write in?”

“We’ll dry it out.” Bates tugged her back from the monument. “But first, we need to set up camp. We’ve only got about three hours before dark, and we do not want to get caught out here unprepared when the sun sets.”

Ellie bit back the curse that leapt to her lips. She cast one more longing look at the feathers and bones that punctuated the carving, enraptured by the conjunction of the elegant and the brutal. An unknown language whispered to her of as-yet-undreamed knowledge.

She tore her gaze away.

“What do we need to do?” she asked.

“Youneed to collect any dry wood you can find,” Bates replied. “I’ll do the rest.”

“Surely, there is more that I might do in addition to picking up sticks,” she insisted.

“Nope.” Bates peeled his machete off the stela. “Get a whole lot of sticks. Pine is great. Don’t touch anything with thorns. Keep your eye out for snakes—and ants. Great big lines of carnivorous ants.”

“What am I supposed to do if I see one?” Ellie protested as he moved away.

“Walk the other way!” Bates called back to her.

?

Ellie did not see any snakes, or ants. She did disturb some sort of oversized brown rodent—it moved too quickly for her to identify it clearly—as well as a nest of hurrying little spiders.

Finding fuel turned out to be more of a challenge than she had thought. So many of the branches that she stumbled across were damp. She finally discovered that she could gather dryer wood if she managed to scramble up the trees a bit and kick loose any dead branches.

She also dragged a few yellowed, curling palm fronds to the fire pit that Bates had scraped out of the earth, deducing they might make for decent kindling.

Ellie was rapidly acquiring a greater appreciation for Bates’s excessively large knife. The machete was a remarkably versatile tool. He used it to neatly whack down thin saplings, which he laid across the branches of two adjacent trees to form a platform safely suspended above the ground. He lashed these supports together with strips of shaggy bark that he peeled off another tree, and then layered a small mountain of palm fronds on top of it all.

Bates used the blade to trim a branch into a flexible wand that he fashioned into a trap by the river. The snare snapped to life an hour later with an enormous wriggling iguana suspended from it.

The machete also neatly dispatched the iguana.

“Do we have enough wood now?” Ellie demanded as Bates ignited a pile of dry grass and pine shavings with a match.

“Nope,” he returned without looking at her. “Bring me big stuff now. Doesn’t matter how wet.”

Ellie dragged logs across the uneven ground. Sweat dripped down her face as she cursed and swatted at the annoying buzz of a mosquito. As she returned with the better part of a small tree, she saw Bates spear the gutted corpse of the lizard on a pointed stick with one practiced tug.

The sight made her feel a bit ill.

Bates glanced up at her as she dropped the log beside him… perhaps because she opted to do it rather closer than she had before.

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