Page 92 of Empire of Shadows

He promptly dropped to the ground and flopped onto his back again.

Ellie stared down at him in surprise.

“Are you ill?” she demanded.

“No. Nope. Just great.”

“Then why are you on the ground?” she pressed, exasperated—and an unexpected suspicion popped into her mind. “Bates—are you afraid of heights?”

“Nope. Not me,” he returned thickly. “Not afraid at all. Just sensibly cautious.” He paused and then blurted out the rest, still looking a bit green. “They might also make me feel like I’m gonna puke on my boots.”

Ellie knelt down beside him.

“Perhaps we’ll set up our camp a little further inland,” she suggested.

“Great idea,” he agreed. “Setting up. Gotta get ourselves organized before…”

His voice trailed off as his hand moved automatically down to the sheath of his machete—and then continued. He groped along the length of the blade as his features creased into a frown.

“Knife’s gone a bit…” he started.

He lifted his head to gaze down across his torso. Ellie followed the direction of his look, and her own eyes widened with surprise.

The leather sheath danced away from his thigh, pulling out toward the dense foliage.

Bates poked at it curiously, shoving the blade back down an inch. As he removed his hand, it sprang back up again.

“That’s awkward,” he commented.

Ellie had already leapt to her feet. She pushed into the tangle of palms and vines.

Shoving aside a stand of ferns, she revealed a tall, glittering pillar of night-black stone.

Bates scrambled up beside her. He gazed at the monument in wordless surprise. He took the machete from his belt. Slowly, he extended the blade out before him, stopping an inch or so from the fierce visage of the figure carved into the surface of the black monument.

He let go.

The knife snapped across the remaining space and stuck to the stone with a clank.

“Well, Princess…” he said wonderingly. “It looks like you found your rock.”

?

Nineteen

Ellie ran her fingersover the carved surface of the monument. Suffused by amazement, she brushed a bit of moss off the stone.

The towering pillar was a stela—a rectangular block that had been set up to commemorate some lost ruler or great event.

The stela was dominated by the bas relief carving of a single, powerful figure—a man in the prime of life, draped in elaborate finery. He wore a headdress of jeweled feathers. His cape was carved with the spots of a jaguar pelt. A line of skulls danced at his feet.

The borders of the stone were covered with square symbols.

“Bates, some of these signs are identical to the ones on my medallion!” Ellie’s skin danced with an electric sense of potential. “Do you realize what that means? On its own, the medallion might have been a clever hoax—but this? No one could possibly have come out here and forgedthis.”

She moved closer to the stela. Her thoughts raced in time with the pounding of her heart.

“Look at this marking.” Ellie pointed to an anthropomorphic glyph. “That’s another deity related to God K. These carvings over here look similar to the dots and bars of the Mayan number system. And this…” She stopped, her fingers hovering over the surface of a polished black circle, which was framed by the hands of the king. “The Smoking Mirror, if I am not mistaken.”

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