The corridor was long, slanting steadily upward. Runa finally called a halt. “Wait here,” she said, and hurried off.
She disappeared around the bend, leaving them with their own dark thoughts.
“I do not think an imperial assassination was what the Queen had in mind,” Mabruke said. “I don’t think we are responsible for this turn of events.”
Oken exhaled sharply, shaking his head in dismay. “I’m just glad you’re the one who has to file this report.”
Mabruke squared his shoulders manfully. “I shall endeavor to face the Queen’s wrath, and protect your delicate hide, to the best of my ability. It is my duty.”
The two men grinned at each other.
Runa reappeared, signaling them to come ahead.
They found themselves in a large building with a high ceiling. The scent of raw cacao was heady in the darkness. Oken could just make out long tables in rows, piled high with filled sacks. Runa whistled, a sound exactly like the night birds in the gardens. An answering chirp came from the far end. She ran forward, the men at her heels.
Warmi Irqi stepped forward, and the two hugged each other quickly. She gestured to the men. “You may trust them, my child,” she said quietly. “They may hear your words.”
The boy bowed crisply to them. He was dressed in black, much like his mother, and also carried a backpack. “I am honored to meet the prince who makes such excitement in our house hold.” His diction was clear, his child’s voice an echo of Runa’s.
Mabruke bowed in return. “It is an honor to meet the firstborn of Lady Runa, young man.”
Runa hastened them forward, out into the cool night air.
They were on the mountainside above and to the side of the Queen Mother’s manor, with the stand of trees between them. The rocky riverbanks were a few hundred cubits downhill. Runa started to lead them toward the river; then the shouts of men from the manor docks made her freeze.
Oken motioned for them to stay under the cover of the trees while he risked a look.
Warriors in black garb were boarding a small riverboat from the docks in front of the manor. Apparently having failed to find the foreigners they sought, they were leaving. Oken thought that strange. Why were they not searching the grounds? He wondered what Usqhullu had told them that sent them away. What had made the Queen Mother scream so horribly? Was their Princess Wildcat safe from Pachacuti?
Oken went back to where Runa and the boy were waiting under the trees with Mabruke. “They’re leaving,” he whispered. “Nine men.”
Mabruke also thought that strange. “They’re not searching for us?”
Oken shrugged. “They got in a boat, headed to town by the looks of it. If we wait here, they will be out of sight in a few minutes.”
“Was my father with them?” Runa’s question was barely audible in the night.
“No—they were just soldiers.”
Shouts of command from men on the river sounded fainter already. Mabruke made them wait, until Runa was vibrating in place with anxiety. After ten minutes or more, he relented, and they went down the slope as quickly as possible without sliding on the steep ground, until they reached the riverbank, where hard, red stone met the rushing water.
Runa led them away, upriver from the manor, with her son close at her heels. Oken kept glancing over his shoulder, expecting pursuit. The voice of the river was clear in the night. The manor house behind them was lit brightly, as though some sort of commotion were taking place. Oken frowned and hissed at Mabruke, gesturing behind them. Mabruke threw a quick glance over his shoulder. He shook his head then with an unhappy look, and kept running.
Runa halted abruptly. She and Warmi Irqi dashed off the path into a stand of trees. They returned quickly, dragging a boat built from bundled reeds. It was small, yet adequate to carry the four of them. A head with a puma face, carved from a large squash, was lashed to the prow. In the starlight, the head looked startlingly real.
Oken and Mabruke helped her and the boy to drag it down to the river. Once it was on the shore, Runa took out the oars and gave one to each of the men. She lifted the boy and climbed in, seating herself behind him so that she could hold him close to her. Mabruke took the fore. Oken pushed the boat down the shore the last few inches, then leaped into it.
Out in the open water, Mabruke turned his head and said quietly to Oken, “To the opposite shore. We have some demons to visit.”
“No!” Runa said in a fierce whisper. “Usqhullu said I must take you to Ricardo, in Quillabamba!”
Okenagreed, and the men paddled as quietly as they could, pushing up around the bend to the opposite shore. In a few minutes, the boat was scraping against a spit of sand across the river. Mabruke leaped out, and pulled the boat onto the stony shore. Oken leaped out to join him. They gave the oars to Runa.
Her face showed terror and dismay, and she pleaded silently.
Mabruke leaned close to her, to look her in the eyes directly. The starlight was bright here, so close to the river. “Please, Runa,” he whispered to her gently. “You and your son are not safe with us. Find Usqhullu. She will protect you. She loves you. Scott and I have to find a way to get your uncle out of this. I promise you, my lady, we will do everything we can in his behalf!”
Runa nodded. Tears ran down her cheeks, shining in the starlight. She settled herself in the boat, hugged the boy, and whispered something to him; then she took the oars. The two men pushed the boat off into the water. She skimmed away, oars dipping silently.
They watched until Runa and the boy had disappeared around the curve of rock that stuck out into the river. Then Mabruke looked up the mountain, tilting his head from side to side as he considered.
“There,” Oken said quietly, pointing to a cleft where vegetation had a hold in the rock, visible in the starlight as a dark, ragged line against the lighter stone running up the stony face.
Mabruke agreed and the two men climbed. The stone was rough and the brush scratchy. They climbed together, one on either side of the cleft. The incline was relatively sharp, but after ten or fifteen minutes, they stepped out onto a dirt walking path that gleamed in the starlight, hard-packed by the passage of many feet over time.
Oken looked across the river to the manor, now below them. He could see into the central courtyard and the gardens, made sharply visible in the night because the three floors were alight, every window of the manor. Shadows of people moving within suggested dramatic events. Mama Kusay’s kitchen kingdom cast wedges of firelight onto the servants’ yards.
Mabruke pointed to the left, and the two men set off at a jog. The path zigzagged back and forth, switchbacks snaking sharply up the stony slope in silvered lines. The river sang below, and the stars sang above. The unreal nature of the night’s events grew in terrible proportions in the predawn dark, with only the stars as witness.
THEY REACHED the top of the stony ridge with dawn glowing ahead of them, drawing a fine mist that flowed across the treetops and hard stone like a caress from the sky. Every breath tasted of rain. They looked down into a blanket of silver fog, to another small vale perhaps a half league across.
The river sound was only a faint whisper behind them. There was the buzz of insects flitting around in search of skin, the scrabble of gravel disturbed by their passing. The ground was reddish orange and crumbly. The slopes held clumps of scrubby pine, with scatterings of smaller trees and spiky grasses. Stone huts among them looked deserted, the thatch decaying. There was no temple compound, no building big enough for rockets. Sections of trees and scrub had been burned and rocks blackened. Pieces of burnt and twisted metal were flung across the scene, speared into the stumps of blackened trees. Fog covered them in a translucent shroud.
“They must be farther into the hills,” Mabruke said finally. “Good thing I wore my hiking boots,” Oken said, taking out his pocket farscope. He methodically scanned the scene before them. No one moved among the trees or around the buildings. He put away the farscope and the two men descended
into the little vale, along an ancient path at the western end. A cold stream ran down the center. They stopped there to drink, finding the icy water bracing. The air was still. They startled wild conies from time to time, who ran out from the brush and dashed away from the men’s feet. There were not many birds. Fire falling from the sky had perhaps chased them away.
The day was warming as they climbed the next slope, a half league or so from the manor, Oken guessed. A path zigzagged up this slope as well. Oken noted the faint marks of heavily shod boots on the path, with a familiar pattern from the hard heels of European- style boots. He wondered about that, and pointed them out to Mabruke. Mabruke examined the heel marks carefully, then looked around at the quiet landscape. “Let usrest here a bit.. The air is thinner here than in Memphis, and I do not want to tire us out too quickly.” They picked a site under the thickest stand of nearby pines and settled on the stone beneath the roots, swept clean of fallen needles by the winds. Mabruke pulled off his backpack, and Oken did the same. Inside they found leather flasks capped with gold and still warm, containing another hardy serving of demon’s piss. “Excellent,” Mabruke said as he tasted his. “What was this called again?” He was pleasedwhen Oken told him. “Fortifying, indeed.” Oken sat, knees drawn up, surveying the options of the landscape around them. The fog was thinning as the Sun rose. They sky was turning blue above the wisps. The innocence of the place seemed to float along with the mist, as though nothing could happen here that was not accepted by the gods of the land.
The corpses of the gods’ demonic enemies lay scattered over this valley. What were the priests telling the people about these burntmetal bones on the sacredbattleground? Oken felt a moment of cultural superiority, accompanied by a pang of guilty pride. No Egyptian child could behold such a scene without wanting to understand the reality behind it. No Egyptian adult would tolerate such intentional obfuscation of the facts.
Mabruke was surveying the vale’s silent story with a look of scholarly dismay. “They have been doing this for years. What keeps all those people silent? Surely they saw what we saw? Heard what we heard?”
Oken shrugged. “What ever the priests are doing, it’s working.” He picked up his backpack and slipped it on. “Let’s go ask some questions.”
From the top of the next ridge, they found it in the little vale below. The Sun had dried the mist, leaving the temperate air comfortably fresh under a clear blue sky. A long slope led down to their goal—high stone walls around a compound that could easily be the site from which the errant rocket had taken off, ending its flight so abruptly.
Oken and Mabruke stretched themselves out flat on the sharp ridge of reddish rock, to survey the landscape before them. Oken took out the farscope and adjusted it to see the inner courtyard of the compound. Mabruke waited patiently beside him, chin on hands, seeing what he could with the naked eye.
The compound was quiet. There was no movement, no sign of guards. A central courtyard was surrounded on three sides by low buildings, attached to the compound wall. The fourth wall was a fortified entrance with heavy steel barricades. Everything within the compound, and on the perimeter for many cubits, was coated with soot, so that the bright sunshine was dimmed, a pall hanging in the air.
At the center of this was a square block, a giant altar with a blackened gantry atop it, much like the railing around Mixcomitl’s viewing platform, thicker and more complex. A stone-covered access corridor led from the middle building to the outer edge of the blackened altar. A noise teased the morning air, almost beyond the edge of hearing, a snarling, unhappy sound of metal on metal.
Oken memorized the layout of the buildings ahead of them, then handed the farscope to Mabruke.
He took it without comment and scanned the scene before them, then returned it to Oken.
Oken put it away and looked over at Mabruke, an eyebrow raised in query.
Mabruke nodded. The two men slipped over the crest of the ridge and slid down the face of the rock to the single path leading to the compound. They ran quickly down this path, then dashed into the stand of pines at the bottom of the slope. Mabruke motioned for Oken to stop.
“What’s the plan?” Mabruke said.
Oken almost laughed. “You’re leading this charge!” he whispered.
“I am just consulting your expertise.”
“We can use the trees as cover,” Oken said. “That will get us close enough to work out the next step.”
They turned off the path and slipped deeper into the shadows under the trees. As they made their way toward the compound, the grinding snarl grew clearer, accompanied by muffled bangs, which made them bolder. Their approach might be seen, but no one would hear them. They paced through the trees, scanning the walls as they went past. The walls were high—seven or eight cubits, Oken estimated—of the same enigmatic stonework, so closely fitted that no fingerholds could be found.
The sound of hounds barking caught them up sharply.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MABRUKE POINTED a direction, and they took off through the trees as quietly as they could.
The next sounds were even more ominous. A steel barricade was raised with a hard clang. Oken and Mabruke ran, more concerned with distance than quiet. The barking of the hounds stayed relentlessly behind them.
Oken had a sudden idea, and called a halt. “How are you at tree- climbing?”
“I grew up in the desert. I can ride anything on four legs, but I’ve never ridden a tree.”
Oken quickly slipped off his backpack and unlaced it just enough to reach inside and find, by touch, the leaf-wrapped dried fish. He shredded the fish quickly, scattering the pieces into the brush beside the path. He then motioned for Mabruke to run in the opposite direction, to a stand of wind-twisted pines. In the center of the stand, Oken hissed at Mabruke, then pointed upward. “Like this,” he mouthed, then leaped up to grab a low-hanging branch with both hands and swing himself up. As he climbed from branch to branch, he kept looking down at Mabruke, watching his progress. They reached a section of dense needles, where the branches from several trees pushed together, and Oken signaled a halt.
Mabruke drew the hieroglyph for Nubia in the air with his fingertip. Oken nodded.
Tense minutes passed while the barks and whines of the hounds weaved around the confused trail Oken had set out. Much too quickly, the baying of the hounds came closer, bringing with them the tramp of booted feet.
Oken kept a tense watch on the ground at the foot of their perch.
A trio of black and gray Alsatian hounds appeared, circling the base of the tree while sniffing eagerly at the trunk. They wore leather collars banded with steel spikes, as well as protective leather guards around their ankles. They raised their heads, and their eyes lit with triumph. They whined, and pawed at the tree as though they might climb up after their quarry.
A man called the hounds with a voice immediately commanding and pompous, “Stumm, kinder! Sitzen zie!”
The dogs sat, with eager whines in their throats.
The man stepped into view and leaned his head back to look up at Oken, meeting his eyes.
Oken’s first impression was a man made of iron—shiny, gray, and hard. He was not young. Long years of experience and pressure had shaped his face into strict lines behind the sharply trimmed thatch of his wide mustache. Oken did not need the immaculate cut of his gray military uniform, cuffed gauntlets, and thigh-high boots to recognize this man. Oken had seen photographs and portraits of that face since his first classes in the P.S.I Academy. This was Graf Otto von Bismarck himself, Minister of War for Victoria, Queen of Oesterreich. The only person more determined to destroy Egypt than Bismarck was Victoria herself.
“Meinen herrn?” Bismarck said crisply.
Oken smiled amiably. “Hoy!” He made his voice slip into the brogue of his childhood bodyguard, the happy Gaelic soldier. “Fine hounds, those be. A fine afternoon for a run with them, eh?”
“Namen?” Bismarck said in sharp demand. His iron-c
olored eyes did not leave Oken’s face. His expression did not change.
“Hoy, names you be wanting!” Oken gestured at Mabruke, not daring to look away from Bismarck’s fierce gaze. “This be Professor Mabruke, from Nubia. Not a word of Trade. He’s stubborn that way, just like his mum. Me? Scott Oken, along as his interpreter. And yourself, sir?”
“Bismarck. Graf von Bismarck.” An expression in his eyes, a brief flash quickly submerged, told Oken that the right note had been struck.
Mabruke nodded gravely, greeting Bismarck in high Nubian. He smiled down at him as might Osiris or Rae, drawing mere humans into his golden gaze, then flashed a look at Oken, in a gesture of one accustomed to waiting for a translator’s exchange. He returned his powerful beam to the man looking up at him.
“The professor, here, he says that you have some beautiful hounds,” Oken said. “He wonders if you might introduce him?” Oken smiled as one might while indulging a child or a favorite nephew—or a less than brilliant employer. “He’s quite fond of animals, ain’t he, now, the professor. Quite fond of animals, he is. They are fond of him the same, ain’t they now.”
Bismarck continued to stare at Oken, brows drawn down.
“You speak Trade, sir?”
Bismarck nodded, inclining his neck in its high, stiff collar without releasing Oken from his gaze.
“Hoy, that be fine, then. The professor and me been weeks in these mountains, looking for new plants and such for his perfumes and skin-oils. He heard tell of some fabulous black orchids growing in this magical valley here, the Land of Endless Summer.” He glanced over at Mabruke with an indulgent smile. “Ain’t had no luck on that end, though.” He turned his smile to Bismarck. “You maybe heard rumors of black orchids in these parts, sir? If you been here long enough?”
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