Page 51 of Empire of Shadows

“Are you out of your ever-loving—” Bates protested, coming to his feet.

“Here,” she cut in as she extended the lower half of the document toward him.

“What about the rest of it?” he demanded.

“The rest stays with me until we’re well on our way, as my insurance policy,” she replied.

“Insurance against what?” he barked back. “If I was out to steal your map and feed you to the crocodiles, keeping it in your corset isn’t going to stop me.”

Ellie took a step closer to him, steeling her spine.

“I wouldn’t be offering to bring you in on this if I thought you were going to rob me. I am more concerned about being packed back to England out of a convenient sense of chivalry.”

Bates put his hand to the bridge of his nose as if fighting a headache.

“For the record, I do think you’d be a hell of a lot better off back in England,” he noted.

“No,” Ellie replied, an impulsive honesty stripping the words raw. “I am not entirely sure that I would be.”

He dropped his hand and met her eyes—considering.

“Where’s this city of yours supposed to be?Approximately,” he added as her posture quickly turned defensive.

Ellie turned to the sprawling map on the wall. The detail and organization of the hand drawn document stood in stark contrast to the messy chaos of the room that surrounded her. She studied the notes and lines for any sign of the landmarks listed on her parchment.Nothing she could see resembled aBlack Pillar that Draws the Compassor anArch Hollowed by the Hand of God. She would have to rely on other means of estimating the place theXon the parchment indicated.

Not to scale, of course,she thought.The original would have been based on a verbal report by someone lacking modern survey methods… Source would have been traveling by foot. How long could such a man have walked without succumbing to exhaustion or hunger?

Her mind rapidly made the necessary assumptions and calculations, and she reached out to lay her hand across a swath of topography that included the high, jagged peaks of a distant range of mountains. Only a single, powerful word otherwise marked the area:Uncharted.

Bates came to her side, gazing grimly at the spot she had indicated. He stood closer than was strictly polite—all looming, disreputable male, with his suspenders still hanging at his sides. He smelled vaguely of cigars and alcohol. He had left an inordinate number of buttons on his shirt undone, exposing a triangle of skin at his collarbone that was as deeply tanned as the rest of him. The odd implication of that crawled slowly across Ellie’s brain. Did the man do most of his surveying without a shirt?

The notion was uncomfortably distracting.

“Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” he said as he turned to face her. “If I agree to help you with this insanity, I’m the one who calls the shots. I tell you to duck, you duck. Run, you run—and not after you’ve asked me thirty questions or called me a patriarchal good-for-nothing. Where you want to go, there are a whole lot of things that would love nothing more than to cut the pair of us down. However many books you might’ve read, until you’ve been there, pretending to know what you’re doing is a quick way to get yourself killed.”

“If I knew what I was doing, Mr. Bates, I wouldn’t be asking for your assistance,” Ellie tightly replied.

“Well,” he returned coolly. “As long as we know where we both stand.”

The silence that followed felt like a contest of wills fought across the bare foot of space that separated them. Ellie refused to bend to it. He would meet her in this as an equal or not at all—Jacobs and the threat he posed be dashed.

The tension rose. As it did, something shifted in the tone of it—something that made her mouth go a bit dry. She swallowed thickly, conscious of the slow throb of her heart, the sweat lightly glazing her back, and the way the shadows danced across Bates’s jaw with the flicker of the lamplight.

Ellie blinked, forcing the odd sensation back. The tension broke as Bates moved away from her to pluck a battered canvas rucksack from beside the bed. He started tossing things into it.

“How about the story with your friend from upstairs?” he said as he shoved a bundle of mosquito netting into the pack.

“I would say he is a competitor,” Ellie replied tightly.

He paused, glancing over at her.

“A competitor who isn’t averse to tying up and gagging a lady,” he pointed out.

“Er... yes,” Ellie admitted.

“Sounds like fun,” Bates replied in a grumble.

He unclipped his suspenders and tossed them aside. The bands landed in a haphazard pile on top of the unmade bed.

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