by Anna Butler
“You’re doing quite enough.” I squatted beside him, and we watched as a couple of guards manhandled the two-seater out of its little hangar in the Brunel’s belly. “I’m not doing much myself. I’ll leave the heavy lifting to those best suited for it.” We grinned at each other. Hardly news to Hugh, I was sure. “Has Sam been awful?”
Hugh’s grin widened. “He doesn’t do well when he can’t look after Mr Edward. He’s fretting.”
I could empathise, since I’d done some fretting myself since Christmas Eve. Great Caesar’s Ghost, but that had been a mere four days earlier. I felt I’d aged years.
“I know how he feels,” Hugh went on, “since I’m none too keen on you trying this without me at your back.”
I found myself patting his shoulder, consolatory fashion, and assuring him that while I appreciated the sentiment, I preferred him to be fighting fit before he attempted to do anything rashly energetic. He laughed and leaned back, and although his ribs evidently still pained him and he was physically subpar, he seemed better than he had the day before.
“That’s normal for me in the mornings,” he said when I commented on it. “I run out of steam during the day.”
George Todd was, amongst other things, skilled in field medicine and had reassured me Hugh’s pneumonia was clearing: his lungs were less congested and his breathing less laboured. Sam, immobile until his leg knit together, was otherwise well and healthy. Still, it would do no harm to get them to a doctor.
“You’re lucky the infection’s clearing from your chest.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it. George makes me cough up the most disgusting stuff, five or six times a day—”
“I’d rather not see that.”
Hugh relaxed against the warming stone. “You know, sir, for an ex-military man, you’re far too squeamish.”
“I am when the gore and disgusting stuff involves my friends.”
That stopped him short for a moment or two, the red deepening over his cheekbones. He ducked his head, but I could see his mouth curving up.
“And you are a very dear one. So all thanks to George Todd for sterling services in the hacking-and-spitting department, because you, my dearest Hugh, are most decidedly better this morning.”
“I am, I think.” Hugh’s face was still pink, but he gave me a grave nod in acknowledgement. “I feel less like Ben Gunn, if you catch my meaning. We’ve been marooned, sir, without even treasure as compensation. And because I’d crashed, we had no way of leaving. Now you’ve brought us the Brunel, things are more hopeful.” He must have seen my wry expression because he didn’t let me speak, holding up one hand. “Oh, I know we’re still stuck here. But you’ll get us out.”
Quite the encomium to live up to. I promised Hugh I’d do my best.
“It’ll be enough.” His quiet confidence was humbling. He leaned back and closed his eyes to bask in the winter sunshine until it was time for me to take off.
I had the two-seater ready for the test flight in moments, and fitting the Huissher’s Marconi augmentation device took one or two more. It worked well close in. Oh, with some spitting and tchting noises as the signal bounced around the hillsides, but it worked. That was all I needed.
With Nell’s assistance, Theo manned the Marconi in the Brunel. We tested the relay twice to be sure it worked. Mind you, it was such a simple idea it would be hard for it to fail, but Theo had every Winter’s compulsion to dot ‘i’s and cross ‘t’s. They were planners to their toenails, that family. Came from running the Imperium’s money box, I expect.
Once Theo’s urge for perfection was satiated, I went to take my leave of Ned, going into the pyramid’s outer chamber for the first time. I was used to Aegyptian temples where harsh suns had faded the once-colourful decoration, but the chamber was bright and clean, almost untouched by time.
It was a large space, its roof supported by thick stone pillars carved, inevitably, in the likeness of the papyrus reed. The pillars and the chamber walls were thickly plastered and covered in carvings and hieroglyphs, the thin incised lines picked out in a riot of blues, greens, reds, and ochres. One scene mirrored that in the tomb at Thoth’s temple at Hermopolis, with ibis-headed Thoth offering the God’s Eye the machine, the toy he’d created for her. The next stage in the drama was depicted, too: the Eye calm, her bloodlust abated, a lion couchant with the machine held between her front paws, her head tilted to one side, as quiet as a purring tabby.
Ned and Günter were not so quiet. They were going at it hammer and tongs, arguing the meaning of the hieroglyphs, many of which were combined into words neither had come across before.
“Ach, Ned, no! You are wrong. This determinative…” Günter’s voice trailed off as he traced the line of glyphs with his forefinger. “The Place of Measurement. That is what it means. Measurement.”
“Verification,” Ned countered, tone firm. “Or The Place of Scrutiny. It could be any of them.”
“Verification.” Günter stared at the glyphs as if at a lover. “Ja. Verification.”
“And it’s seated below the Place of Observing.”
“Hmmph. It is possible.” A small pause. “Or Seeing. Or Perception. ‘Seeing’, I think is best.” Günter threw up his hands. “Verdammt! This is—”
“Perplexing.”
“I’m about to take off,” I said.
“What? Oh, good, good. Look, Günni, the direction of the glyphs changes here, right to left. Was Thoth trying to confuse us?”
He wouldn’t have had to put much effort into it, in my case. “I’ll be going, then.”
“Excellent, Rafe.” Ned spared me a glance this time, but it was a mere flick of his eyes in my direction. “This ‘house’ logogram has to mean this pyramid, the House of Thoth. And look—the determinant for ‘secret’, or ‘hidden’.” Ned pointed to the tiny glyph of a man hiding behind a square block.
Günter nodded. “The Place of Verification, hidden within the House of Thoth below the Place of Seeing.”
Progress was being made, evidently.
“Right.” I shook my head to convey heartfelt sorrow. “I need a hieroglyph for ‘Being neglected and ignored fair takes the gilt from the gingerbread’.”
“Mmn?” Ned looked at me properly at last and reddened over the cheekbones. He smiled, the fine lines around his eyes and mouth smoothing out. “Oh, Rafe. There you are.”
Günter, however, didn’t appear to realise I was there. He made a sound denoting the sort of rapture I personally associated with good sex but for him was apparently tied to a hieroglyph composed of a duck and a scarab beetle, and bent to his task of reading the carvings.
Ned glanced at Günter, then stepped away from the hieroglyphs, ceding the carved panel. Günter grunted and pressed closer to peer at the tiny symbols, scribbling all the while in his notebook without appearing to look at the pages, muttering to himself in an inspired mix of German, English, and what must have been ancient Aegyptian.
Ned drew me behind the nearest pillar and gave me a quick kiss. “I’m sorry. We must get inside if we’re to secure this place.”
“I know.”
“Günni is by far the better philologist, and we’re sure to make good progress. But of course my favourite, erm, gingerbread is just as important.” He tried to waggle his eyebrows at me. Horses made the same expression trying to dislodge a particularly persistent fly. His attempt to lift the increasing tension we’d all woken to that morning was short-lived. “Do be careful.”
“I’m always careful.” I indulged in a hug, then pulled away. “Don’t worry if I’m not back for an hour or so. I’m going to take a gander to the north.”
He nodded, starting when Günter let out a cry of triumph, so obviously desperate to return to the hieroglyphs. I kissed him again, pushed him out from behind our sheltering pillar, and shooed him back to Günter’s side. He went, but not without another of those smiles, the ones solely for me. If I’d been a sentimental sort of man, I’d have taken the memory of that sm
ile and those quick, but loving, kisses up with me, to warm me throughout the flight and as a reminder of what I had to come home to. But I wasn’t in the least sentimental, of course—never have been—and went off to put the pyramid’s defences to the test without giving it another thought.
Ha.
The wind came from the northwest as usual, gusting air from Aegypt across the deserts to churn around the mountains of Abyssinia. It brought no scent Thoth would remember, of embalming spices, lotus unguents, and Aegypt’s countless preserved dead. It was clean and cool.
I gave the little aeroship her head, sending her over the ground to gain speed. Like all of the Brunel company’s ships, she didn’t need much of a runway, just enough for the aether and phlogiston mix to generate enough steam to thrust her into the sky. She bounced up with all the joyous energy of a terrier after a rat. But this rat would bite back. I yanked on her leash to hold her, skimming over the surface a bare twenty feet above the tops of the bushes, twenty-five feet above the ground itself. Thank Thoth for the lack of real trees on the top of the plateau.
The two-seater was the Brunel in miniature. A single Edison battery stored its charge in a Leyden jar stowed in the swell of the hull beneath my feet, which in turn fired the engine into life. We could take whatever happened to the two-seater and her voltaic equipment as a template for her mother ship. If I could get her up to one hundred feet, the minimum safe flying height for the Brunel itself, without triggering the pyramid’s defences, we stood a chance.
Thoth was having a good laugh at my expense.
We had no chance.
Three times I eased back on the control yoke and let the terrier free to run, and three times that ruddy pyramid started up the instant I reached seventy-five feet. Every single time, I’d inch her skywards until the measuring needle on the aneroid altimeter touched seventy-five, and every single time Theo yelled a warning to me and I’d drop her to fifty feet, fast as a stone down a well.
No chance at all.
Damn it! I would not risk taking the Brunel on a sustained flight at such a low level. Too much updraught and turbulence at the plateau edge, too little clearance winding through the hills until we were far enough away to be out of the pyramid’s reach. However far that was.
Damn.
And why in every hell did an ancient Aegyptian need a weapon like that? What on earth was he firing on?
I called Theo. “No point in trying again. I’m going to make some forays out through the hills instead, until I can gain some height in safety and can use the augmented Marconi to contact your father. I doubt I’ll be able to keep in touch once I’m on the other side of those escarpments. Then I’ll look around to the north. I may be some time.”
“I understand. You realise we won’t be able to warn you if anything happens in the pyramid?”
“I know.”
“Good luck, Rafe.”
“Be careful,” Nell chimed in. “Call us as soon as you can.”
I promised and went northwest, back towards Aegypt. It seemed more fitting. So long as I was careful to keep the two-seater at a steady height below seventy-five feet, the pyramid didn’t present a risk. Not that the flight was without its dangers: the passages between the hills were narrow and twisting, their oft-sheer sides hewn out of the basalt by several millennia of the rivers chewing away at the land. I couldn’t fly over them, thanks to that bloody pyramid. I had to take a weaving, wriggling route between the rocky faces with damn little clearance in places for the two-seater’s wings. Far too narrow for the Brunel.
I flew until the pyramid was invisible behind me, hidden in its bowl of surrounding hillsides, then ventured higher. When I passed the seventy-five feet mark and nothing happened, I relaxed the shoulders I’d apparently hunched up in defensive readiness and blew out a long breath.
I was too old for such foolhardiness. Far too old.
Another mile, and I was at three thousand feet. Giving thanks to every one of Aegypt’s many gods, I keyed in the Marconi augmenter.
The gods were smiling on me. The Gallowglass was at home and receiving callers.
“I’m going to give you every other number in the first co-ordinate, starting with the first number.” I’d passed on the good news that his First Heir was hale and hearty, feeling like an eavesdropper when Madame Gallowglass joined him and I overheard her tear-filled happiness. She had given me several heartfelt messages to relay to Ned and Theo when I landed. Such strong emotion was wearing, and it was a relief when the Gallowglass could return to business. “Then I’ll give you every other number in the second coordinate, starting with the second number. You know where you can fill the blanks.”
“I believe so.” The Gallowglass sounded amused. “Our Transatlantic ally, I assume?”
“Yes.”
“Very circumspect.”
“I don’t want to make it too easy if we’re overheard. Have you spoken to Harry and Jack’s other grandfather, sir, to arrange urgent reinforcements?”
“Things are in train but have to move up the continent from the far south. I’ll remind him of the urgency.”
I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. No nation of mankind was ready to take responsibility for the fearsome machinery Thoth had left behind, none of them being fit and proper guardians of Thoth’s legacy, none of them trustworthy. Not the German Empire, or the Americans, or the Russians. Not even the Imperium.
Perhaps, especially the Imperium. But better the devil you know.
“Thank you, sir. I stress they should land several miles away and approach by land, bringing equipment to ford white-water rivers—of which there are many. Ned’s found something that could give a frightening tactical advantage. It brought down three aerocraft.”
A pause. “I’ll pass it on.”
“Good. You may also want to seek the Pasha’s aid, sir. He promised to support us, and he could deal with loose ends in Aegypt. The Hermopolis contingent may still be in some danger if it becomes known they can pinpoint our whereabouts. He’ll probably be willing to send guards.”
“That seems prudent. Yes. Thank you, Rafe.”
“I’ll give you the coordinates now. Are you ready? First set of numbers. One. Blank. Full stop. Six…” I worked my way through the map coordinates, making him repeat them back until I was sure he had the numbers and blanks correct. Tom Causton back in Hermopolis would give him the missing numbers, all right.
I was cheered when we were done. It was a meagre light, but it lifted a little of the darkness.
I swung around to the north, the direction taken by the mysterious aeroship George had heard. The hills grew ever steeper and higher as they sloped up into the Ch’ok’ē Terara peak a dozen miles away.
The terrain was precipitous and bleak, each hillside cut off from the next by rushing rivers and broad streams tumbling headlong through rock-strewn rapids to feed the Blue Nile. Passable on foot, perhaps, although crossing the raging waters would be no sinecure. Altenfeld, if he were indeed there, couldn’t rush with the same breakneck abandon as the Nile’s eager tributaries. He’d be moving with caution, with a deliberation that wouldn’t cost him broken legs or men falling into ravines. He couldn’t afford to lose any one of his party. He knew he’d be facing House guards. He’d need every man he had.
A moment’s thought and I changed direction, flying east to west in a long ellipse. On my second pass, I moved the ellipse north, but kept the major axis in the east-west orientation. I felt no great desire to make it easy for Altenfeld. It was possible he’d see or hear the two-seater, and I didn’t want him working out the location of the Thoth plateau from my flight path. A little misdirection would not hurt.
The morning was wearing on, and Ra’s solar barque rose towards its zenith. Below me, each hillside, ridge, and plateau seemed populated by nothing more than baboons and ibex moving amongst the grass and bushes. Had George been mistak—
There it was.
The one advantage the Telford Menai had over the Brunel
was the much smaller body size relative to the surface area of its wings. In other words, it glided a great deal better than the Brunel, for far longer distances, and with finer control. The Menai must have been at a much higher altitude than we were, too, when the pyramid had disabled it, allowing Altenfeld’s pilot more time and airspace to try to make a controlled landing. For all the advantages, he’d failed. Understandable in the dark of early night and with no power, but a comprehensive failure for all that.
The scar he’d left ran across the steep slope of a distant hillside, one of the high eastern foothills of Ch’ok’ē Terara perhaps ten miles almost due north of the plateau, the uprooted bushes and grasses scoring the rock. The crushed remnants of the tail were scattered a good four or five hundred yards from where the rest of the Menai lay broken-backed, its wings in splinters.
Good. Altenfeld wasn’t going anywhere in it. If they’d survived, he and his men were on foot.
I didn’t make a nearer approach, keeping my east-west course and passing well to the side of it before starting my slow elliptical return home, moving the ellipse back south as gradually and carefully as I’d moved it north.
And there.
Movement caught from the corner of my eye. Something— several somethings in the thick brush in a ravine, too big to be baboons, too upright to be ibex on the move. A flash of colour where no colour should be, and amid the figures ducking under the cover of the African junipers and cherry trees cloaking the ravine’s steep sides, the unmistakable flash of auburn hair.
I turned the two-seater back towards the east, and flew for several miles before setting my course to return to the Thoth plateau in a long, curving arc.