“Oh.” Cleo said the word and it sounded as if she had been punched. “This isn’t making any logical sense.”
“Or,” the queen said, “it has been logical all along, and your mind has simply rejected it. Refused what is …within your own hands, such as they are. You…you are proof that such a thing is possible. You are also proof that what I mean to do is possible. My time here grows short, but my time elsewhere…” She smiled, and it was not the happy expression it should have been. It was broken and crumbling. “We will be far-removed from this place and all will be made well.”
“Highness, what is it you mean to do, then?” Eleanor asked. She moved slowly from Cleo’s side, to take a closer look at the lotus, and the markings upon the distant hives. How like the carnelian bee, as if the clay hives had been impressed with that very piece of carnelian. She turned to look at the queen anew, discovering the bee on her very person, attached to the belt she wore low across her hips. Little bee.
“This world changes,” the queen whispered. “I have used and been used. It is time to pass into another age—an age where we can live as we will, where we can…”
The queen’s hand passed over her chest, lingered at the hollow between her breasts, then moved on. Eleanor knew this motion—it was one she had made, when she wore a ring she kept hidden from the world. She pressed a fist against her breastbone now, not liking this puzzle any more than she had the last.
“Highness, tell me that you don’t intend to eat this honey,” Eleanor said. “That you don’t mean for him to. He won’t—” She broke off. She had no evidence that the body within the honey sarcophagus was that of Mark Antony—none other than the small ring around his finger, a possible remembrance of the woman he loved. “You have no idea if this honey can do such a thing.”
“Evidence stands before me,” the queen said. “You are both here. You have come with my rings—his and mine own from the future world—and she…” Her hand moved toward Cleo, yet didn’t dare touch her. “She would not have lived, not unless my oracles had tended her.”
Cleo took a step backward and Eleanor was not quick enough to reach her side before she stumbled to the marble floor. Cleo threw a hand out to ease the fall, but still landed with a hard thump. She had not taken her eyes from the lotus pool.
“There were figures,” Cleo said.
“My oracles, no doubt,” the queen said.
“And you as well—future you…in our time.”
“The honey is not quite enough on its own,” the queen murmured. “It requires a spark of life.”
Eleanor left the beehives and crouched by Cleo’s side, wanting to help her up. But Cleo recoiled from her touch and shook her head.
“This…is too much.”
“You likely would have died otherwise,” the queen said. “Would you have wished that? Think on all you would not have otherwise seen.”
Cleo pushed herself away from Eleanor and came quickly to her feet, nearly snarling at the queen before them. “Think on all I still cannot do!” Cleo’s mechanical hands curled into hard fists. “I may travel the world and see its every wonder down through the ages, but that is not—” She broke off and looked at Eleanor. “I cannot give my life to any other,” Cleo whispered before Eleanor could ask. “Not as you have.”
“Cle—”
“You will tell me what Doctor Fairbrass did—that surely I can share my life with another. I have only to watch him wither and age as I will ever other person I have ever cared for. I will outlive them all!” Cleo turned her back on the queen and Eleanor both, pacing away from the lotus pool before she turned and came back. “You mean to do the same?” She aimed the question at the queen, as sharp as any viper’s mouth.
“It has already begun, don’t you see? When Antony returns…then, we shall go. They will think us dead and we will be at last able to live under this guise.”
Eleanor bowed her head and pressed a hand against her own breast, thinking of how history had remembered Cleopatra and her love, she dead from the bite of an asp and he dead by his own hand, thinking she was already dead. But neither of them dead? Could it be? Eleanor pushed impossible ideas to the side. There was yet more, with Pettigrew having taken Virgil and Auberon prisoner.
“So what of Pettigrew then?” she asked softly. She could not solve Cleo’s woes, nor change the queen’s mind when she had already taken such steps—her honey, her oracles, her undying. “What is he after with this honey?” She looked at the queen who had said the honey was not quite enough on its own. “Is it ritual? Is it you? Your oracles? That binds the honey to a person and creates the…”
“Spark,” the queen offered when Eleanor fell to silence.
“If you have already done this,” Eleanor said, “then surely you…you exist within our own time. Our time is also your own, and…” She thought of the Defenders, how they also moved through the ages. “Your oracles?”
The queen nodded. It was a simple motion, it should not have been so elegant, but Eleanor recognized something of Hatshepsut in that motion; something of her grandmother, too. These women who commanded great power as if it were second nature.
“Pettigrew needs your oracles—and possibly you, Highness—to make himself… Undying? So why summon me?”
The queen smiled, an expression that chilled Eleanor despite the warmth of the Egyptian night. “Daughter of Anubis—you are chosen. You have Egypt in your very blood, but something more. The mark of a god, the ability to cross time. You think anyone can do such a thing and survive? Only those chosen are so fortunate. Now that you have found me now…I will know you then should you come to me.”
“And what, I send you an invitation to make Pettigrew’s undying dreams come true?” Eleanor shook her head. “No—this is not a thing that should ever happen.”
“But why take Auberon and Virgil?” Cleo asked. “To force our hand?”
The queen’s smile deepened. “Men may be foolish just as women may, but your Mister Pettigrew wants more than you know. If a thing can create, it can also destroy, is it not so? Just as the stars sometimes fall to earth and destroy themselves…so too is life borne of stardust.”
“Wait. Wait.” Eleanor did not believe she could silence a queen, but Cleopatra fell silent when Eleanor lifted her hands. Perhaps it was the sight of the rings Eleanor still wore, but the smile upon the queen’s face told Eleanor otherwise. “Mister Pettigrew wants more than we know—but how do you know that, Highness?”
The smile upon the queen’s face grew chillingly distant and Eleanor shuddered as though serpent made of ice had slithered down her spine.
“It does not matter what it calls itself,” the queen said. “Come with me.” She plucked a burning torch from its wall bracket, before she rounded the lotus pool and moved through the hives.
Eleanor glanced at Cleo who remained rooted, but when Eleanor began to follow the queen, so too did Cleo fall into step. They followed her through the stone hives, under the shadow of a spreading tree, where they found a doorway. It was as any other Egyptian doorway, columns topped with a thick lintel. Stone steps led downward, into a dark passage.
“This thing is not a man, not entirely,” the queen said. She moved down the dark steps, her voice rising behind her in the dark. “It may take whatever shape it wishes, call itself whatever name sounds pleasing in its mouth. It has a mouth, to be certain.”
A torch sputtered to life in the depth of the dark stone stairwell, the queen having lit it with her own. Eleanor followed down, and Cleo after, loose debris crunching beneath their boots. At the bottom of the stairs, Eleanor could see the stone walls were marked, painted in some places, but there was extensive damage here, and she could read nothing clearly.
“You know Pettigrew?” Eleanor asked her.
The queen continued down the long hall before them. “Knew, is perhaps the better word,” she said. She lengthened her strides, moving down the hall rapidly; the floor angled beneath her boots, indicating they were going down. The
queen’s torch flickered the deeper they went, the air thick and warm.
“He is not a man, though he knits himself together as such,” the queen said as she lit another wall torch. “You may call him evil, but this neither fully applies, as that implies there is an ultimate good to balance him. He is what he is and does what he does. Here.”
The hall turned a final corner before opening into a broader hall, this of columns and a higher ceiling. At the far end another doorway opened into another room, but the walls to either side of the door were decorated in images Eleanor knew far too well. Anubis and Wadjet stood at the ready. The sweet scent of honey and lotus filled the air and Eleanor could see that on either side of the path they now walked, there were pools of the golden stuff; no river, but one made of honey. Immortal-making honey.
“Here.”
The queen walked ahead and touched an image upon the wall. She drew a handful of cobwebs away from the carving and Eleanor sucked in a started breath.
“Are…” She crossed the distance that divided them, and touched the carving herself, the stone rough and damp beneath her fingers. The man’s face was one from history, refined and proud, and known well to this queen. “…you are telling me this man is Julius Caesar?”
The queen’s laughter was soft. “I am telling you he can take what form he will—that he has been this man and more besides—but should you unwrap him, he is nothing more than air and whispers. Ages will pass while he rests—he rests now, for Caesar was slain, was he not? But he will rise again, when he once again escapes the weight of years.”
“Was Caesar his last incarnation?” Cleo asked. She moved deeper into the catacomb behind Eleanor, toward more walls coated in cobwebs.
“If he has drawn you back to this point, perhaps. I cannot say how long he has been simply…nothing.”
Eleanor watched Cleo carefully pull more gossamer threads from more engravings, and as Eleanor was able to make out the words, she snatched the torch the queen held, to better angle the light so that she might read.
“Oh my god,” Eleanor whispered. Her fingers traced the words, knowing them from a poem that, in this year, had not yet been written. But here the words lingered, in an ancient Egyptian tomb. These words from Shelley himself—
“Look on my works, ye Mighty,” Cleo read aloud, “and despair.”
Chapter Eleven
November 1889 – Alexandria, Egypt
Dear Eleanor,
I read your letter with a heavy heart. These are questions I wonder myself. In a world where such things are possible—we stood beside Hatshepsut herself!—how can we know where we are truly anchored and what has come to pass? I wonder of the rings, too. The archive where the Lady took her rest all these years is now empty; Mistral has not recovered her body or her rings. Will this come to pass again? What will happen should someone else discover her? Perhaps these are questions we can only leave to future minds.
One of the hardest things we do is walk forward, when we wish to only look back. I look back at the years I have lived, especially those before the loss of my arms, and wonder at the way I spent the time. Wonder at the people I loved and pushed away. Selfishly, sometimes, yes.
I hope you have no doubt that your mother loved you, even if she pushed you away, even if she, in the end, came to live in a place you cannot reach. People are driven, by motives they cannot always explain. Pushing someone away does not make a situation any less painful, but it is, perhaps, how they endure. How they get through to the next day. She loved you and had her reasons for setting you aside. You understand some of them and may never understand more—this will be something you struggle with. It is something I struggle with—as you may well know.
There are ghosts of my own making in this world, Eleanor. They terrify me—I fear they will be torn apart in these still-awkward hands. No matter how I master this metal, I can still be careless with these fingers, paying little attention to the way they may poke through paper, fabric, or heart. Some days I do not know how to move forward and yet I do. I hope the same will prove true of you.
I look forward to seeing Paris at your side. Your friendship is something I have grown to cherish and I did not expect. Not because of you—but rather because of me. Whatever else these mechanical hands are capable of, they are so very skilled at pushing people away. Saying yes is impossible, whereas saying no is ever easy. Help me never do this again.
Christmas in Paris? Until then, I am your dear friend,
Cleo
* * *
December 1889 – Alexandria, Egypt
“How could you?”
“How could I not? Are you proposing, Mister Auberon, that I should have let her perish when I, in my capacity as a doctor, had the ability to save her? The catacombs spelled out the solution—”
“You cursed her, Fairbrass.”
“With life?”
“Gentlemen.”
Under other circumstances, Virgil might have found it in himself to laugh at the circular argument, but he could not, given that he found himself dangling in the center of a cold laboratory, naked and dripping honey onto a clear glass platform beneath him. The honey was sprinkled with dark wolf hair, Pettigrew having hauled a half-transformed and fully-drugged Virgil into the contraption that now held him.
Auberon and Doctor Peregrine Fairbrass were strapped to stretchers nearby, though not near enough that they all might free one another and flee this captivity. Depraved, endless, captivity. Whether it was day or night, Virgil could not say; there were no windows that might reveal such information, nor clocks upon any of the walls.
Another glob of honey slid from Virgil’s back, tracing a gooey wet line down his hip before it broke free and landed with a plop on the glass below. He shuddered, every sensation heightened after his dalliance with laudanum.
“Are you telling me that this honey will have the same effect upon me? Upon any of us?” Virgil eyed Fairbrass, who quickly shook his blond head.
“I am not. It isn’t so simple as the honey—nothing is ever simple, is it? The honey is infused with healing properties on its own, as is any honey—it seals, it protects. But it requires a spark for anything more—the hand of the woman who first infused it with such m—”
“You will not call it magic,” Auberon interrupted, “not when you have cursed Miss Barclay to—”
“To what?” Fairbrass spat, a glob of spit joining the honey that pooled beneath Virgil. “A life fully lived when she would have very well died that day?”
“Gentlemen!” Virgil growled the word out. “You will cease, so that we may construct a way out of this prison. There is no sense in arguing over Miss Barclay. She is what she is at this point in time—as are we all.”
A laugh erupted from the doorway as Pettigrew made himself known, striding toward the glass platform where the honey pooled. He bent, and with bowl and knife, collected a generous blob of honey and wolf hair.
“You can certainly construct a way out, but this does not ensure its success,” Pettigrew said. His eyes lingered on Virgil a moment before he crossed the room and daubed honey onto a slide of glass. “You have no idea where we are, do you? What waits beyond these walls.”
“Whatever it is, I’m developing a rather…robust appetite,” Virgil said. Truth be told, the laudanum had left him drained and shaky. He wasn’t entirely sure he would be able to stand, given the way Pettigrew was intent on making him transform or keeping him doused with opium. Auberon and Fairbrass had not been drugged a second time; Virgil had been drugged four more times that he could count. Everything lost its focus after that. That he was conscious now was possibly debatable; nothing had a completely solid feeling to him.
“I am certain you are, Mister Mallory. Let us see what the honey is doing to you, shall we?”
“It hasn’t made me immortal, if that’s what you mean.” Virgil watched Pettigrew cross to his work table, where he tucked the slide into position beneath the lens of his microscope.
“Oh, no�
��we don’t want that, do we, Mister Mallory?” Pettigrew bent his head to the task before him and made a murmur before adjusting the magnification. “We spoke before of undoings, yes.”
The silence was uncomfortable for Virgil, the scrape of a steel nail against bare flesh. The longer Pettigrew studied the honey before him, the more Virgil began to shake, as countless possibilities scurried through his mind like mice beneath the growing shadow of an owl.
To ease the panic, he counted his fingers, he counted his toes; he double checked every body part and it did not appear had been undone, not until he touched upon the wolf inside him. The wolf was curled into a ball, small and soft, and Virgil could not rouse him. Whether caused by the honey or the laudanum, Virgil did not know.
“Pettigrew.”
“See here.” Pettigrew gestured to the microscope, even though Virgil could see little beyond the basic set up. “The fine hair begins to dissolve. They honey eats away what should not be there. Much as it would consume death, it eats this, too. As ravenous as you become, Mister Mallory, so has this honey always been. Eating away impurities, infections. Eating away the very demons that plague us. It needs only a spark to work more quickly…a spark your ladylove may yet provide.”
Virgil stared, silent. Pettigrew bent his head back to his work, and Virgil noticed then what he had noticed before—the man’s hands were not entirely solid, but looked as though they were fading from the world. It was not the laudanum this time, Virgil told himself; he could actually see the microscope through Pettigrew’s hand as he made another adjustment.
“… stamped up on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed,” Pettigrew murmured as he worked. “It’s all downhill from here boys, worry not. We get closer and closer.” Pettigrew freed the slide from the microscope and astounded Virgil by licking it clean, honey and hair and all. “I have waited so long and oblivion presses closer.” His eyes met Virgil’s.
The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3) Page 15