Page 163 of Empire of Shadows

Usually, someone expecting Adam to do something was all the reason he needed to do something else—but Adam wasn’t quite ready to make that move. Not yet.

He turned through the narrow opening after Dawson.

The second chamber was long, like the first, but slightly broader. Soft illumination glowed through five narrow windows which looked out the back of the temple. The pyramid on which the temple stood had been built almost flush with the steep face of the mountain. The waterfall that ran down the rocky surface was visible through the openings in the wall. The flow was currently a trickle, but it likely turned into an impressive rush during the rains.

The air inside was cooler. It smelled of stone and old wood. The shelves lining the walls were packed with objects.

Dawson hurried closer, his eyes darting over the assorted artifacts.

Curiosity drew Adam after him.

The shelves held a collection of seemingly ritual materials. There were masks—one made from a jaguar skull, another from chips of jade—beside an elaborate feather headdress. The colors of the feathers had barely faded, though some of the leather which bound them together looked rotten. Small, beautifully glazed pots likely held perfumes or paints.

There were jewels as well—gold cuffs and ear plugs. A few glints of silver flashed from among the jumble—platinum, Adam recognized with surprise. Silver would have been tarnished.

Platinum was a tough metal to shape, and Adam didn’t know of any sources of it in British Honduras. The nearest platinum mine was in Colombia.

That meant the people of this place had been trading, even as they kept the truth about their city secret enough to turn it into a myth.

Adam stepped deeper into the room, glancing out of one of the windows as he passed. The face of the mountain was startlingly close. He followed the trail of the waterfall with his gaze until the narrow wash of it disappeared into the plants at the base of the structure. He couldn’t see any stream leading away from it.

A shelf on the far wall drew his attention. It was covered in folded bundles of stiff, slightly yellowed paper.

They were books, he realized with a jolt—a whole wall of books.

Adam was no expert on Mayan culture, but he’d certainly picked up enough to know that damned few books had survived the conquest.

It looked like the people of Tulan had left an entire library behind.

Insects should have chewed any paper apart out here several centuries ago. Adam guessed that the scribes here must have known some way to treat their documents in order to protect them. He was pretty sure he shouldn’t even be breathing near something so delicate, but he couldn’t resist a peek at the covers. They were vibrantly painted like the medieval manuscripts in the Cambridge library. Illustrated scenes intermingled with lines of the square characters that made up the language of this place.

If Ellie were there, she’d probably be grabbing the front of his shirt and shaking him right about now, Adam thought with a smile.

Behind him, Dawson coughed.

Adam stiffened as reality crashed back in. He was here with someone a hell of a lot less fun than Ellie.

Staines wide-eyed gaze flickered to the more obvious treasures that glittered from among the less shiny artifacts. Pacheco and Lopez lingered in the doorway.

“Has to be here somewhere…” Dawson muttered to himself. He crouched down, studying the lower shelves with uncomfortable haste.

Another mural decorated the inner side of the wall which divided the two chambers. This one had been carved into the city’s other favorite material of night-black obsidian.

The bas relief was dominated by the feathered serpent king whom Adam had seen on the stela they’d passed on the way there. He stood in the corner of the image, looking down at a round opening in the ground connected to the long neck of a tunnel. It led to a series of chambers which were depicted more or less as round bubbles on the wall.

In each of the bubbles, the king struggled against some adversary—an army of nasty-looking insects, a whirlwind of daggers, a pack of jaguars. There was another room that followed, but Adam couldn’t tell what it might have held. A piece of the obsidian facing had fallen off and shattered on the ground.

In Adam’s admittedly inexpert opinion, the carving looked a heck of a lot like the way Ellie had described Xibalba, the Mayan underworld which was supposed to lie beneath Tulan.

Ellie would go wild over that, too.

The last chamber depicted on the mural was by far the largest, but Adam couldn’t make out much of it beyond the fact that it showed the serpent king surrounded by a group of odd-looking figures looming over something that lay on the floor. The shadows in that part of the room were too deep—and there was a corpse in the way.

The body was a humble pile of bones and rotting fabric slumped into the corner between the mural and the wall. The bones had mostly collapsed into a loose jumble within remnants of desiccated leather and a pile of jade beads which must once have been an ornate necklace. The skull, aged to a rich brown, gazed sightlessly up at him.

It was another case of someone who had been left to decay where they fell. Based on the richness of the person’s attire, they had clearly been someone of importance. Adam wasn’t an expert, but he was pretty sure important people weren’t left lying where they died unless something had gone real wrong, real fast.

What the hell had happened in this place?

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