Page 221 of Empire of Shadows

She shifted her fingers lower as an awful suspicion rose in her mind. They brushed across a row of distinctive ridges.

“Adam?” Ellie said carefully as her pulse jumped uncomfortably.

“What now?” he groaned.

“I believe I am holding a human skull.”

Adam’s hands brushed over hers as he explored the object that she held.

“Yeah,” he concluded as he plucked it from her hands. “That’s a skull.”

She heard the soft clatter as he set it down.

“We’re standing in a pile of bones,” Ellie said. “Aren’t we?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?” Adam returned tentatively.

Ellie’s weight shifted a bit. The ground rolled under her boots in protest and she dropped down another inch.

“How many bonesarethere?” she exclaimed.

“Er… sounds like a lot of them, Princess,” he said.

“Could they be animal bones?” Ellie pressed hopefully.

“Sure,” Adam replied a bit too quickly.

She closed her eyes as she fought a sudden burst of nausea.

“Right,” Ellie said thinly.

Closing her eyes didn’t make much difference. She couldn’t see anything with them when they were open, either.

“I think I’d better chance a match,” Adam said uneasily from beside her.

“Certainly,” Ellie agreed.

The words came out more steadily than they had any right to, given that something—a tibia, perhaps?—had just cracked under her heel.

Adam rustled in his pocket. A moment later, a tentative spark of light flared to life.

The first thing Ellie saw was his face. He was filthy.

Ellie was filthy as well. She was certain that she was the filthiest she had ever been in her life. It almost made her laugh—but then her eyes adjusted to take in more of their surroundings.

They were not standing in a pool of bones. They were at the edge of a veritable mountain of them.

The mound rose to fill most of the chamber. It peaked on the opposite side, just below a dark opening that Ellie could see in the upper corner.

The mass of the dead was easily three times Adam’s height. It spilled out to flood the edges of the floor. From the shape of the pile, Ellie could tell that the bodies to which the bones had once belonged must have been dropped through the hole in the ceiling like so much refuse.

Her gut wrenched with the horror of it.

There were animals in the pile. She picked out the skulls of deer, jaguars, birds, and lizards. There were also people… a very great number of people.

Some of them were small.

Her brain skipped and stuttered as it struggled to think of what that meant.

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