The Jackal's House

by Anna Butler

  “I know we’ve never been fond of each other and my friendship with Ned caused you some embarrassment with your father, but you cannot seriously expect me to think that’s enough for you to go to all this trouble. Whatever else is bothering you… well, no, John. I have no idea.”

  He lifted his scotch, but the movement was suddenly arrested, the glass halfway to his lips. He stared at me. His eyes, dark as my own, glittered in the lamplight. “I believe you’re telling the truth.”

  “I am generally quite honest. Please let Archambault take Harry back to Abydos.”

  He smiled then, and raised the glass the rest of the way. He took his time, pretending to relish the taste of the scotch, swilling it around in his glass and taking a second sip. His smile was… smug. That’s the word. Smug and self-satisfied. “Well, now. He hasn’t said anything to you, then. My father, I mean.” A sidelong glance at Tatlock, who was wandering quietly around the room making people nervous. Even Sulayman turned on his heel to keep Tatlock in full view. “Our revered House Princeps.”

  I shook my head.

  “I thought he might. Didn’t you, Peter?”

  Peter squeaked out something that might have been agreement. He looked ill, his face drawn and unhealthily pallid.

  “Has he said anything to you, Tatlock?”

  “I don’t talk about what his nibs tells me, sir. You know that.”

  “I see.” John put the glass down onto the floor. He leaned forward, steepling his hands together. He probably felt it made him look wise and imposing, but he had to look up to me where I stood. He wasn’t as commanding as he hoped. He smiled again, mirthless, yet coldly amused, and looked at Sulayman. “Finish it. I’m very bored with all of this.”

  I raised my left hand to cover my mouth as if in shock. “Bark,” I said into the Marconi taped to my wrist.

  John turned back to me, his smile twisting into a frown. “What?”

  “What’s he up to?” Peter straightened in his chair. “What are you doin—”

  The whole world flashed scarlet through the curtains, accompanied by a roar of sound—the yelping not of a thousand jackals, though it was loud enough, but the great booming, bawling howl of Anubis himself.

  The Dog had arrived.

  Chapter 28

  SULAYMAN’S ATTENTION switched like lightning to the windows facing west, those overlooking the canal and the shore opposite the village. The curtains glowed ruby red with the light behind them. He leapt forward to drag them aside and stared out, squinting against the brilliance outside. John and Peter both sprang up from their chairs and ran to the windows to join him. Tatlock turned to face me, pushing back his bowler hat. His slight smile didn’t waver.

  For the moment, my imminent demise was forgotten by everyone. This was our chance. But Tatlock’s appearance had thrown a spanner into the steam engine. How in heaven’s name was I to get Harry out of there with the added problem of a trained House assassin on the prowl?

  “What is it? What’s going on?” Archambault’s grip on Harry tightened visibly.

  The awful howl ululated out of the Western Desert, wrapping itself around the Theban Princess and the village until the air trembled with it. Shouts of alarm could be heard from the deck as the crew reacted to Anubis belling like some almighty hound. Feet slapped against the decking above our heads as the guards Sulayman had sent up there ran for the staircase to the lower deck.

  “Efnouti nai nan!” Sulayman said, shaken out of his studied calm. “Something is coming. I can’t make it out…. Can you see? Out there!”

  From where I stood, I could just see past John’s shoulder. The desert and the hills were black and shadowy, their heads among the stars, but for a great open space, almost circular, that throbbed and blazed with a light so white and pure it seared the eyeballs. Onto this natural stage strode Anubis. He was lit brighter than day, stalking down toward the shore. His black jackal head was set on broad shoulders, bare but for the pectoral glinting in the light and sparking off little coruscations of blue and gold. He wore the white pleated linen kilt familiar from myriad tomb and temple paintings, and in his left hand he carried the crook and flail; the right held the was scepter or staff. When the next howl came, he raised the scepter and flourished it at the dahabiya, his long jackal’s snout lifting up as if the growling shriek came from him.

  I turned swiftly to Archambault—he had Harry in his arms now and was trying to rise—ready to dart across to help him get out if I could. But Sulayman was fast and clever, a redoubtable assailant with quick wits and even quicker reactions. He spun around to face me, while John and Peter yet gaped at the sight on the opposite shore.

  “This is your doing. There’s something….” He scowled, looked with less certainty at the door to the passageway to the deck. The crew’s cries of alarm were louder, and once again running feet were heard above our heads. A shot rang out. More than one.

  Gallowglass had arrived.

  Thank God. I needed the support. I could trust George Todd to handle Tatlock and Sulayman. Probably one-handed.

  “It’s a trick! A trick of some kind.” John gestured frantically at Tatlock, the one person he automatically looked to for protection.

  “The Dog,” Sulayman said, glaring.

  “Damn the dog!” John breathed loudly through his mouth and nose. He spun on his heel to point at me. “It’s all your bloody fault! It’s always your fault. Kill the bastard, Tatlock. Kill him!”

  Tatlock brought the long-barreled gun to the ready, slapping the barrel into the palm of his left hand to steady it. The gun was primed and ready, the power unit glowing violet with a twist of crimson phlogiston writhing through the aether inside it.

  Kill mode.

  I’d never seen a gun like it before. Longer than a normal pistol, shorter than a musket or harquebus, two wide barrels stared back at me, two black, empty eyes. The bore on each was so wide I could have flown an airship down one side and back out of the other. It could swallow the world. It could certainly swallow me. If that thing went off, it would make mincemeat of me.

  I froze where I was, a foot or more away from Archambault, meeting Tatlock’s gaze. His eyes were cold, appraising. No mercy there.

  When phlogiston fires, it burns like pitch to ignite the aether and blast out a shot of light energy that kills anything before it. My mouth dried up under the imagined heat, and I had to lick my lips to moisten them. My breathing was harder, faster, lighter than it should be. I might be an ex-military man and used to danger, but no one could look a charged aether gun in the face without a pang of apprehension and an accompanying prayer that his bladder wouldn’t disgrace him. As the world knows, every English gentleman is born equipped with a stiff upper lip. Mine was petrifying into granite with the effort not to show how damned bloody scared I was.

  I stuck my hand into my pocket and clenched it around the scarab and the few coins in there. The other was behind my back. No one would see them shaking.

  They say your life flashes before your eyes when you face death. I can’t say mine did, but I found myself thinking of some aspects of it. Mostly thinking of Ned. I was sorry I wasn’t going to get the chance to say goodbye to him. But I would be damned, thrice damned, if I let them see how affected I was. Instead I tried to think of Ned and how very dear he was to me. If I were to have a last thought, let it be of him.

  “Oh, I’ll do it!” Sulayman said, snappish and impatient.

  “No. It’s my job to protect the Heir.” And with a lazy grace I hadn’t associated with the appearance he always gave of being more of a prosperous greengrocer than a deadly assassin, Tatlock twitched his hand sideways and took out Sulayman with a single shot.

  SULAYMAN WENT down without a sound, dead before he hit the Persian rugs covering the polished decking, the dismay and surprise on his face almost comical. He didn’t have time even to gasp. Some autonomic processes carried on for a few seconds as if his body hadn’t quite realized it was defunct, and his limbs shook with a palsy as
the aether-waves rattled through him.

  If time slowed for an instant to allow Sulayman his moment to die, it came rushing back in a series of jerks. Archambault gasped and clutched Harry close. John shrieked like a demented banshee. Peter, white-faced, backed away so quickly he almost fell over a chair, and only an eel-lithe twist had him falling into it instead. And behind me the door burst open and Hugh charged through, my pistol in his hand.

  “No!” I hurtled forward to put myself between Tatlock and Hugh. My heart thumped so much it threatened to come up through my throat, my hand jerking out of my pocket and opening in a spasm, scattering the pennies I’d been clutching. They caught and winked in the light as they showered all around me. The scarab bounced on the carpet, a flash of bright blue as it fell. “No!”

  Tatlock’s reactions were razor-sharp. He’d turned on a sixpence to bring his gun to bear on Hugh but relaxed almost instantly. “I know him. Your servant.”

  John screeched again, drawing every eye to him. He stood near Sulayman, shaking as if he’d jolt himself into pieces. His legs were planted wide apart, his chest thrust forward and his arms windmilling. His head jerked spasmodically, and his face darkened to the unhealthy magenta that betokened an apoplexy—he seemed beyond speech. When the next Anubis howl came, John echoed it.

  “John! John!” Peter stared at him, hands flapping uselessly. “John. No. Be calm! Listen to me—”

  The effort John made was palpable. His breath came in short, harsh pants, snorted out through his nose, and he forced out words on every breath. “No. I won’t have it. I won’t.” He turned the glare onto me. “I won’t let you take what’s mine! You! You worthless piece of dung! You’re nothing, you hear me? Less than nothing!”

  I could only spread my arms to convey that I had no idea why he was so agitated about me. God help me, I didn’t.

  John moved in a series of jerks, an automaton whose batteries were on the blink. Each stiff-legged step lurched him forward, his upper body and arms a fraction behind the move and jolting in spasms to catch the rest of him up. He couldn’t seem to stop moving despite Peter’s distressed pleas, and we couldn’t seem to take our eyes from him. Even Tatlock watched, frowning.

  “No. I won’t let you.” Another step, another galvanic contortion to get everything in tune, as if he’d been electrocuted. Another eye-bulging stare, words forced through as if he had lockjaw.

  “I can’t let you do it, Mr. John.” Tatlock’s voice was quiet, even regretful. “I have my orders. Stand down.”

  “John,” I said as pity tore at me. “I don’t know what you think I’m taking, but truly—”

  “No!” John’s right hand, spasming with the rest of him, pushed at his left sleeve. “No! I will not allow my father to push me aside and put his by-blow in my place!”

  Time slowed to a snail’s crawl. John jerked the little hideaway gun from its holster, just as Tatlock raised that huge-barreled pistol.

  Tatlock was faster. He was also very good at his job.

  It was a very clean kill.

  Chapter 29

  THE STRAVAIGOR’S by-blow? His by-bl….

  Oh.

  Oh hell. Oh hell with a jester’s cap and bells on.

  Everything slowed and stuttered and stopped. John’s body collapsed in midjerk, the puppet strings sliced through. He hit the side of the chair he’d been seated in earlier, shifting it closer to Peter’s. The chair leg clattered against the whiskey glass he had left on the floor… hours ago, it seemed like. The glass tottered and went over, rolling away to one side. I traced the little half-moon crescent the peaty, amber whiskey made as it arced out to splash over the polished floor. Peter’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear him; my ears buzzed too much, afflicted with a swarm of wasps. He leapt to John’s side and knelt there. Hugh said something, I didn’t know what, and his voice waxed and waned so one word was shouted and the next so quiet I had to strain to hear it. He reached out for me, getting his arms around me to hold me up. Archambault was staring, his eyes as round and bright as new-minted pennies. Tatlock, though, merely turned his head. He looked… he looked just as usual. Nothing changed there.

  Beside me, Hugh was speaking quietly into his Marconi. To Todd, I thought. Telling him it was all over and Harry was safe, that Todd could come into the saloon and not expect a fight. His voice waxed into enough volume for me to catch every word. “It’s a bloody mess, George, but I think the fighting’s over.”

  I raised my hand and rubbed at my mouth. My hands were clammy and yet my mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow. I had to work it a few times before I could swallow easily.

  What everyone in the House fails to understand, however, is that I do have options. And I have a greater regard for you than you realize.

  Months ago the Stravaigor had said that. Long ago, last summer, when he’d visited the coffeehouse to tell me he wanted me precisely where I was: at Ned Winter’s side.

  I do have options. And I have a greater regard for you than you realize.

  And what was it he’d said in November, when Ellis was murdered and he wanted me to join Ned’s expedition?

  You are very like your mother.

  I rubbed my mouth again. Swallowed again.

  I have a greater regard for you than you realize.

  “I don’t think I believe it.” Even to my own ears, my voice was scratchy.

  Peter let John’s hand drop. “It’s true, though.”

  I felt a faint pity for him. I’d always thought Peter had been John’s barnacle, stuck to him like a malignancy, for the very Stravaigor-like reasons of knowing upon which side his bread was buttered. But he seemed genuinely shocked.

  “No,” I said.

  Peter sat back on his heels and scrubbed at his face with both hands. “John wasn’t sure, not until a month or so ago.” Peter glanced up at me and away again.

  “When you decided you’d help him kill me.”

  He ignored that. “His mother knew. She always knew, I think, but it wasn’t until the Stravaigor alarmed her… I don’t know. Perhaps he hinted at what he was planning. It was enough for her to break her silence and tell John about you. And he told me. So then we went looking for the evidence. He’s getting careless as he gets older, you know. The Stravaigor, I mean. He should have hidden it better. He has it all drawn up, the legal Instrument of Disinheritance, the declaration that he recognizes you as his Heir… all signed and sealed and ready to lodge with the Convocation. He shouldn’t have left it for us to find.”

  Deliberately, I’d wager. That old jackal did nothing by accident. He had probably meant for Madame Stravaigor to break her long silence, meant for John and Peter to find the papers. For whatever twisted, cynical reason.

  “It’s nothing to do with me.” I had to moisten lips so dry they felt cracked. “I don’t want anything to do with it. Whatever the Stravaigor….”

  My father. God damn it, my father.

  “Whatever he has planned, I want nothing of it.”

  “Of course not.” Peter’s sneer was the most magnificent and genuine thing about him. “We’re not a tenth as rich as Gallowglass, but still the House could buy your little coffeehouse a thousand times over and barely dent the bank balance. Of course you don’t want to be rich. Of course that’s all beneath you.”

  “I don’t give tuppence for the House. I never tried to take John’s place from him. I don’t belong there. I don’t want it.”

  “Well.” Peter turned his attention back to John. “You’ve got it.”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that, so I didn’t bother. I bent to rescue the scarab instead. It seemed to be the only thing in the room that had somewhere to belong, back in my pocket where it was safe.

  I DON’T know how I got to the divan to sit beside old M. Archambault, but there I was, sitting with Harry on my lap and trying to work out which way was up.

  George Todd was the only Gallowglass guard in the saloon. He had quietly negotiated some sort of truce with Tatlock, wh
ich was a relief. I really didn’t want a general war declared. Tatlock, like all House guards, was frighteningly efficient. He’d lose against so many Gallowglass guards, but he’d put up a spirited resistance, I was sure, and people would get severely hurt in the process.

  Hugh came to sit on my other side. “Mr. Causton’s brought down the curtain on Anubis. He’s ferrying the professor over to the dock to join us. George says the whole of the village is up and running about out there, scared as hell over the Dog.”

  I nodded, trying to take my eyes off Peter. They’d pulled one of the throws from the divan and put it over John. Peter was fussing over getting it placed just so, twitching it into position. He was far calmer than I would have expected, given how close he and John had been all their lives. Perhaps it hadn’t sunk in that John was dead.

  “You all right, Captain?” Todd squatted down in front of me.

  “I could do with some sleep, George.”

  He nodded. “We’ll get a boat and take you, Harry, and the professors home. Mr. Tatlock arrived on a steam launch. We’ll maybe use that. Give me five minutes to arrange it.”

  “Of course.” I glanced over at Tatlock, who had drifted close by. “Why are you here?”

  “The Princeps sent me because he’d never heard nothing from you, and what he had heard about the expedition, from the letters to Madame Stravaigor from the professor here, had him on the fret.”

  “Never heard from me?” I stared. “Was he expecting me to send him a picture postcard every week or something?”

  “He might have taken it as a kindness. Anyhow, he took it into his head to send me here to see what’s what. ’Spect he heard that someone tried to stick a knife in you in Cairo. Caught up with that bit of news, I did, when I got there.” Tatlock sounded a touch put out. But whether it was at the attempt or the failure was harder for me to determine. “But mostly I expect he was worrying because Mr. John left for Aegypt.” Tatlock pulled a sealed envelope from his jacket breast pocket. “He said to give you this.”