by Andrew Lane
A gust of hot wind followed them out of the doorway, dissipating in the fresh air outside.
Somewhere in the distance, on the other side of the hill that contained the tomb, rocks and stones sprayed into the air, followed by a thin plume of smoke.
Sherlock stood up, and pulled Phillimore to his feet.
And then the entire hill shuddered and seemed to lift up into the air. As Sherlock fell he could have sworn that he saw cracks open momentarily in the earth, revealing red hot fire beneath, and then the hill settled back, sealing the cracks again. Dust drifted across the tomb – the only sign that anything had happened far below.
‘The oil will keep burning, underground,’ Sherlock said, climbing to his feet again. ‘If what you said about Greek fire is correct, then nobody will be able to put it out.’ As he spoke he found himself wondering what Matty and James Phillimore, in their own tomb, would make of the explosion. He hoped that it hadn’t dislodged any stones and trapped them.
‘There are other tombs, and other reservoirs of oil,’ Phillimore pointed out, running a hand through his hair. ‘They will need to be destroyed as well, otherwise they could be used to set fire to the canal.’
Sherlock glanced over at him. ‘Then you and your brother will have your work cut out for you,’ he said. ‘Just as long as you know you’re doing the right thing, and making the world a better place.’
It was at that point that a sound drifted across from the direction of the canal: a chugging, chuffing noise, like a steam train setting off from a station.
‘What’s that?’ Sherlock asked.
Phillimore frowned. ‘It’s one of the dredging machines,’ he said, frowning, ‘but the canal has been finished here for weeks. Why would anyone be starting up one of the dredgers now?’
‘Because it’s the dredger that George Clarke supplied,’ Sherlock said grimly, ‘the one that’s connected to the oil reservoir in the tombs. Someone is trying to pump the oil out before it all burns away!’ He pushed Phillimore away. ‘Go and find your brother – he’s somewhere in the other tombs. Find my friend Matty as well. Tell them what’s happening.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to stop that pump!’
Sherlock ran towards the distant verdant line of the canal, leaving Phillimore and the tomb behind him. He didn’t know what he was running towards, but he knew that he couldn’t leave things the way they were. After everything he had been through, to leave someone pumping that oil out into the canal would have been wrong.
By the time he got to the canal, and the nearest of the dredging machines, he was exhausted. So much had happened that his energy reserves were spent. There was nothing left.
The metal machine towered over him: a central series of metal tanks and units bolted together with big rivets and painted a rusty red. Girders and strange metal arms led away from the main body, sticking up into the air. Pipes – like the ones that he’d seen below the ground, in the tomb – emerged from the sand and plugged straight into the underbelly of the machine.
He walked to the front, overlooking the Suez Canal.
It reached from the horizon on his left to the horizon on his right – a deep groove in the ground that might have been made by a sword-cut inflicted by the gods, filled with sparkling blue water. Green bushes and reeds lined its banks. Sherlock had seen canals back in England – Matty had spent a large part of his life travelling on them – but this was different. This was so wide that he couldn’t have thrown a stone to the far bank, and so deep that whales could have swum in it. The Suez Canal was an unequalled feat of human engineering.
Beneath him, in the sandy, pebbly bank, there were several round openings where the pipes from the tomb ended. No oil was pumping out yet, but it was only a matter of minutes.
Who, he wondered desperately, had started the pumps? One of George Clarke’s men? Some unknown conspirator?
Or . . . ?
‘Sherlock,’ a voice said. ‘I’m sorry it had to be this way.’
He turned around. There were several ‘last people in the world’ it could have been, standing there in the hot Egyptian sun, facing him. Amyus Crowe . . . Virginia Crowe . . . his brother Mycroft . . .
In the end, it was Rufus Stone.
He stood with the pumping machine behind him, holding a cutlass. The breeze blew his black hair back from his face. His mouth was open in – not a smile, but a grimace. The sun shone on his single gold tooth. His expression was . . . regretful. Even sad.
‘Following orders?’ Sherlock said, pulling the sword from his belt – the one that Mohammed Al-Sharif had given him.
‘I have a job to do,’ Rufus said. ‘It’s one of the problems with being an adult – we don’t get a choice. There’s always someone telling us what to do.’
‘In your case, it’s my brother.’
‘And in his case,’ Rufus pointed out, ‘he has his superiors. And they have their superiors. And their superiors have their own superiors. And so on. And so on.’
‘Where does it end?’ Sherlock asked, taking up a guard stance. ‘The Prime Minister? The Queen?’
Rufus adopted a similar stance. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s above my pay grade.’ He paused, sighing. ‘I don’t want to be here, Sherlock, but I’ve been told what needs to be done. You have to be stopped from destroying the oil. If that proves impossible, the oil needs to be immediately pumped into the canal and set on fire.’
‘Mycroft told you to kill me? I don’t believe that he would do that.’
‘Mycroft told me to stop you from alerting the Suez Canal Company to the sabotage. He sent a telegram to them to warn them about you, and tell them that you were a fantasist. He told me that if you continued to look for the actual sabotage itself, if you actually found the sabotage and tried to prevent it from happening, then I was to stop you. He didn’t say how, and he didn’t give me any limits or boundaries. He trusts me to find a way to get you to stop without killing you, but frankly that’s up to you. If you try to get past me then I will fight you. If we fight then I will beat you. If I beat you there is a chance that I might accidentally kill you. The best way to avoid that is for you not to get past me. Let it be, Sherlock. Let events occur as they will.’
‘It’s wrong, Rufus.’
‘It’s life, Sherlock.’
Sherlock instinctively felt his body lower its centre of balance in anticipation and preparation, the point of his sword aimed towards his friend. ‘Amyus Crowe warned me to be careful of you,’ he said. Somewhere inside him he knew that there was a twisting, roiling core of disbelief, but on the surface he was calm. He had to be. ‘Amyus told me that Rufus Stone wasn’t even your real name. It’s a place in Hampshire.’
‘I found it on a map,’ Rufus said, also leaning forward and extending his blade. ‘I’m warning you, Sherlock – don’t make me do this. If it comes to a fight I can’t guarantee that I can injure you without killing you. Sharp blades are dangerous, unpredictable things.’
‘You taught me to play the violin. You were my friend.’
‘I taught you the violin, but I didn’t teach you sword-fighting. There was a reason for that.’ His eyes seemed to cloud over momentarily. ‘And yes, I was your friend.’
Sherlock looked at the pumps, then looked at the distant hills beneath which the oil was waiting to be pumped. He looked back at Rufus Stone, whose face was strained and unhappy.
He had no choice.
Sherlock sprang forward, his sword slashing down at Rufus’s arm, hoping to disarm him with only a small injury. Rufus immediately pronated his guard into the ‘guard of quinte’ and parried.
Remembering the lessons that Reilly had taught him on the SS Princess Helena, Sherlock kept slashing his sword towards Rufus, trying to force his friend to back away, or get him to drop his own sword. Together they moved back and forth across the sand: slash and parry, lunge and block. Gradually the fight shifted so that Rufus was on the attack rather than in defence. He ha
d obviously realized that Sherlock wasn’t going to give up.
Sherlock’s entire attention was focused on the next few seconds. He couldn’t spare any thought for the future, any consideration over what was going to happen next. He had to restrict himself to blocking Rufus Stone’s blade every time it came flashing towards him.
He couldn’t counter-attack. He tried, but he just couldn’t. Rufus was his friend. Rufus had saved his life more times than he could count.
But that wasn’t stopping Rufus. Face grim, he was pressing Sherlock back, closer and closer to the bank of the canal. His blade seemed to appear from nowhere – above, below, left, right, it kept forcing Sherlock to retreat. All of his energy was being poured into defending himself.
Logically there was no way out. If he wasn’t prepared to attack, then Rufus would eventually wear him down. And he wasn’t prepared to attack. He couldn’t hurt his friend.
Each time their blades clashed, the impact vibrated up Sherlock’s arm, weakening him, sending pulses of pain through his shoulder and chest.
Slash and parry. Lunge and block.
The lessons that Maestro Reilly had drilled into him, the exercises the two of them had been through, hour after hour on the ship – that was what he fell back on. The mechanics of fighting, the intuition of protecting his body with the numerous guards. But his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t want to win. Not against Rufus Stone.
The trouble was, if he couldn’t win, then he was going to lose. That was the inexorable logic of the fight.
Rufus’s sword flickered like the tongue of a snake: always just where he wasn’t expecting it. Instinct kept his sword flashing to the right place to intercept Rufus’s blade each time, but where Rufus’s movements were smooth and flowing, Sherlock’s were becoming clumsy and rough. He knew that he was going to lose. It was just a matter of time.
And all the time they were fighting, he could hear the chug-chug-chug of the pump, pulling the viscid oil from the black depths of the tomb. It didn’t matter that far below, the oil was on fire – that was just on the surface. The oil beneath the surface was still viable – for now. Even if some of the burning oil was pulled through the pipes, it didn’t matter. That was what Rufus’s masters wanted, after all – burning oil, floating on the surface of the Suez Canal.
His attacker’s relentless strength, coupled with the effort and strain of parrying and absorbing the repetition of blows, pushed Sherlock in retreat. In the end, Sherlock’s foot caught in a tuft of reeds close to the bank of the canal. He fell backwards, his head actually emerging from the vegetation and hanging above the glittering surface of the virgin waters. His hand let go of his sword, and it fell, turning and turning, until it hit the water and sank.
Rufus stood above him, his blade pointed at Sherlock’s throat.
‘Every part of me wishes that things were not this way,’ he said. His cheeks were wet with tears. ‘But they have to be. We all do what we have to do.’
‘We do what we choose,’ Sherlock said. His hand was beside him, and for some reason he found that it was reaching into his pocket. He felt his fingers close on something: a mass of cloth. He pulled it out and held it up: a red handkerchief that he had forgotten about, given to him by Mrs Loran back on the SS Princess Helena.
He held it up. The cloth shone like a flame in the light of the morning sun.
‘Turn around,’ a voice said. He recognized the voice. It belonged to Maestro Reilly: the man who had taught him swordsmanship on the Princess Helena. The man who, he now realized with crushing despair, was an agent of Mrs Loran, of the Paradol Chamber, placed on the ship to prepare him for what had to inevitably happen.
Rufus Stone looked over his shoulder. Sherlock couldn’t see Reilly from where he lay, gazing up at the blue sky, but he saw Rufus moving away.
There was a great deal of clashing of metal. Somewhere off to one side. Sherlock just lay there, staring upward. Virginia Crowe had betrayed him, his brother had betrayed him, and Rufus Stone had betrayed him. Friends meant betrayal. Best, he thought tiredly, not to have any friends at all. If he got out of this, he promised himself that he would be on his own, forever.
Clashing of metal, louder and softer as they moved closer and further away. Sounds of heavy breathing. Two evenly matched swordsmen.
And then silence.
After a long, long while, Sherlock decided that he needed to stand up. After a much longer while, he decided to do something about it. He eventually rolled over, every muscle in his body protesting. He used his hands and his feet to push himself up. Eventually he was standing.
The sunlight glittered on the surface of the canal. There was no oil out there, and the noise of the pump had stopped.
He turned around.
K. James Marius Reilly – his erstwhile sword tutor – was standing with his sword pointed at the ground. At the far end of his sword, Rufus Stone was lying on the ground. The sword had penetrated about half an inch into Rufus’s chest, directly above his heart.
‘You need more lessons,’ Reilly observed calmly to Sherlock. ‘Your defences were acceptable, but you lacked the conviction to attack.’
‘There’s a reason for that,’ Sherlock said. He started to walk past Reilly.
‘Would you like me to kill him?’ Reilly called to him.
Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s always best to know who your enemies are. Leave him. Let him live.’
He walked towards the dark red bulk of the dredging machine. It was stationary now, no longer pumping. There were three people standing by its base. As he got closer he saw that it was the two Phillimore brothers – very similar in build, but one a lot thinner and dustier than the other – and Matty.
‘We stopped the pump,’ Jonathan Phillimore observed.
‘Good,’ said Sherlock. He realized that he was intellectually pleased that the threat to the Suez Canal had been stopped, but emotionally he was dead. There was nothing there. He didn’t care.
‘What now?’ Matty asked. He was staring at Sherlock in concern. ‘Where do we go? Back to England?’
‘No,’ Sherlock said, surprising himself. ‘There’s nothing for me there.’
‘Then where?’ Matty’s face was folded into a mask of concern and puzzlement. ‘Where do we go now?’
‘India isn’t too far away,’ Sherlock said calmly. ‘I thought we could go and find my father.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It’s funny, but I always find this bit of the book the most difficult to write. That’s probably because I can’t hide behind anything, like a particular writing style, or exciting events, or fast-moving action (‘Quick, look over there! Don’t look at me!’). It’s just me, talking. And those of you who’ve seen me talk will know that I get embarrassed doing that, and tend to shy away from it.
The first thing to say, I guess, is that I’m sorry it’s taken me eight books to get around to introducing Sherlock’s sister, and his old family home. In the books from Death Cloud onwards I wanted Sherlock to feel disconnected from his roots – a loner; someone who had nowhere comfortable to live and who only had his brother, Mycroft, to fall back on, and often not even that. All the time, however, I knew that I wanted Sherlock to eventually go home, but at a point when it wasn’t really home any more. His mother is dead, his father is missing in action, and his brother has finally shown that his work comes before family and indeed morality. The older, adult Sherlock Holmes that Arthur Conan Doyle and so many other authors have written about never talks about his past and obviously has a difficult relationship with his brother, and that’s what I’ve finally been able to get around to addressing in my books. Now you know why he is the way he is.
There are still some things for Young Sherlock to do before he becomes Old Sherlock, of course. The spectre of his father, which has been haunting him since Death Cloud, needs to be put to rest once and for all, and there are still some things he needs to learn (or learn better) – particularly chemistry and the art
of theatrical disguise. He also needs to resolve his rather complicated relationship with the Paradol Chamber – is he working for them, or fighting against them, or both? Oh, and I think that Amyus Crowe and Virginia Crowe need to turn up again, just to give him something else to complicate his life. So, if there is a ninth book (and that’s out of my hands, I’m afraid), then you can probably expect it to be set at least in part in India, with Sherlock going after his father and coming up against the forces of the Russian Empire (they were very active in India at the time, fighting both secretly and openly against the British).
While I’m here, however, I need to give you some kind of historical context for this book – because I don’t just make things up, you know. The Suez Canal is a real thing, and it was built in the way I’ve described in this book. At the time it was probably the most impressive engineering project that the world had ever known. I have to admit that I have fudged the date of completion a little bit, just for literary purposes. But that’s okay; I’m allowed to do that. The stuff about the British Government being very much against the construction of the canal, which was pushed through by the French, is however completely accurate.
Most of the research for this book was done using only two volumes:
Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal by Zachary Karabell (John Murray, 2003) – this book tells the whole story of the political and engineering challenges that dogged the construction of an artificial channel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea – the kind of project that, these days, would either be deemed too difficult or too expensive or both;
Victorian Women visiting the Pyramids by John Theakstone – this collection of diary extracts from real Victorian women who had visited the pyramids in Egypt was invaluable in giving me a flavour of what it was actually like to be there in the 1870s. I would think twice about going now (too hot, too many insects), but these indomitable ladies managed it when the only choice of transport in going from Cairo to the pyramids was by donkey or camel.