The Buried Pyramid

by Jane Lindskold

  “Let him do the donkey work, eh?” Stephen said, chuckling.

  “I’ll axe him,” Eddie retorted, and with mutual grins for their cleverness they parted.

  “That exchange of what passes for wit finishes me,” Jenny said, gathering up her books. “I’m going to my room to let Emily unlace me so she and Bert can retire.”

  “Good thought,” Neville said. “Emily will be glad for something to do. I think neither of the Hamiltons quite knows what to do with their leisure.”

  “Have them start conditioning your field gear,” Jenny suggested. “Sea travel will have done it no favors, and they won’t be along to put burst seams right. Stephen will need to be measured for his kit, as well—unless his father included desert adventuring among his interests.”

  “That was not Father’s idea of an adventure,” Stephen agreed, a trace of sadness coming through despite his determined good humor. “I do hope you won’t expect me to give up my sartorial statement.”

  “That,” Neville replied dryly, “is not the type of statement I wish you’d give up.”

  “Pun my word,” Stephen said happily. “A palpable hit.”

  Once alone, Neville began to review the list he and Eddie had put together. His attention would not stay on the neatly printed words.

  I wonder if the others would mind if I invited Lady Cheshire and her friends to accompany us to the pyramids tomorrow. We might even treat them to luncheon. I seem to recall some lovely places along the river. Eddie would know the best.

  Imagination wandered through the delights of a day spent in that lovely lady’s company. He sketched out details. Eddie had mentioned donkeys. In his day there had been camel rides, too. Harder animals to manage for the unskilled.

  Must get Stephen some training, he thought. Wonder if Eddie can manage something innocent-looking. Might be easier if we just got him a horse. Still, that’s a lot more feed. Even Arab steeds are fragile compared to camels.

  He found himself imagining Lady Cheshire mounted upon a camel. The image was not dignified. A horse though, sleek and fine-lined. Black to match the shining glory of her hair? Or white as sunlit sand for contrast? He toyed with both ideas, accessorizing the lady to go with each and deciding in the end that he preferred the black.

  Smiling at his own conceit, he finished undressing and retired to the curtained alcove that held his remarkably comfortable bed. The sheets had been scented with something spicier than the lavender used by his housekeeper back in England. Perhaps he should lay in a supply.

  On such domestic thoughts, he fell asleep. Perhaps that was why, when he awoke, he thought he was still dreaming.

  Afterwards, Neville thought it must have been the sound of the door latch falling shut that had awakened him. At the time, though, he was in the dark, straining to separate form from shadow. Something was moving in the greater reaches of his room, something trying very hard not to make a noise as it felt its way along. He sensed it rather than saw it, felt it in the motion of the air in the enclosed space.

  Neville had blown out the candle after he had gotten into bed, but it remained within reach, a box of matches near to hand. He reached toward it, stopped, feeling ashamed, the way he had as a child when he’d been moved from the nursery into his own room and the isolation had awakened fears of monsters lurking in the darkness.

  He’d fought the impulse to light the candle then, certain that the maids or someone would guess from the spent taper or the depleted box of sulfur tips that he’d been afraid. Fear of seeming foolish again made him pause, and that pause was a moment too long. When he reached through the netting, something was between him and the candle.

  The obstacle was damp, hot, and solid.

  Naked flesh , Neville thought, his mind filling with elaborate childhood images of monsters. His hand, jerking upwards and away from that startling contact, touched the hem of a garment.

  “What the…” Neville gasped, almost more an intake of breath than a word.

  As if that sound had been a signal, Neville heard a tearing sound, and felt the bed curtain falling around him, enshrouding him. Something hard hit him in the upper torso, releasing a warm flood of blood. Neville flailed wildly, seeking to free himself from the smothering fabric, thoughts confused, intertwined as they were within the haze of nightmare.

  Then, distantly, through the muffling of the thick walls he heard a shrill scream, a snap that his battle-conditioned mind recognized as the report of a gun.

  Jenny’s derringer! Neville thought, and the sensation of nightmare vanished, leaving his mind clear and his thoughts crisp and calculating. One might scream at a nightmare, but one did not shoot at it. Remembering how flimsy the bed curtains were, Neville stopped fighting against them, gathered both legs, and kicked out.

  His bare feet impacted squarely with what felt like the thighs of someone who had presumably been bending over him. The force of his kick was somewhat impeded by the downed bed curtains, but it landed with sufficient power that he heard his assailant stagger back and crash into a chair not far from the bed.

  His wound was throbbing, washing his chest with blood. Neville grabbed the bedpost with his right arm, using his left arm to claw away the remainder of the bedclothes.

  “Who are you?” he shouted inanely, repeating his question in Arabic, then in French.

  His attacker wasn’t answering. Neville heard what was presumably the man rising, then the slap of bare feet on the tiled floor. Neville turned, following the sound, willing himself to motion, though he was uncomfortably aware that he was bleeding freely.

  The assassin was moving in the direction of the window.

  Barred , Neville thought with grim satisfaction. You won’t find exit there, my lad.

  He paused, taking advantage of this moment of opportunity. His fingers found the reassuring weight of the revolver and were bringing it around into line with his target. Then with his first clear look at his opponent, the nightmare returned with staggering force.

  Silhouetted, solid dark against the dim rectangle that marked the window from the surrounding wall, Neville saw a long-nosed, pointed-eared shape—unmistakably the head of a jackal, but a jackal larger than a large man.

  Neville groaned. What was Anubis, the Egyptian god associated with burials, doing in his bedroom? Had he lost enough blood that he was hallucinating?

  “Stop!” he shouted, but the word echoed strangely in his ears. “Stop, I say!”

  The jackal-headed figure gave an odd, barking laugh, placed its hands on the broad sill and smashed its shoulder against the bars.

  Moving forward, gun held ready in anticipation of his triumph, Neville waited for the impact of flesh against metal. Instead, with a shriek of protest, the bars tore free. Neville heard them hit the street outside. The jackal-headed figure leapt lithely to the sill, barked another high-pitched laugh, then was gone.

  At that moment, the door to Neville’s room burst open. Jenny, clad in a nightdress of some pale-colored fabric, her hair an unbound tangle, stood there. She held a six-shooter competently, and cast around as if seeking a target. Stephen Holmboe towered above and behind her, the candelabrum in his hand back-lighting Jenny while casting himself into grotesque shadow.

  Jenny seemed to take in the situation in a glance. She ran across the room, gun in one hand, encumbering skirts gathered in the other. Approaching the window from one side, she peered out.

  “Hard to tell in this light,” she said, “but whoever it was is gone.”

  Stephen had brought the candelabrum into the room and was lighting Neville’s reading light from it.

  “Don’t get in front of the window,” Jenny ordered. Then she saw her uncle clearly for the first time. “Uncle Neville, you’ve been shot!”

  “Stabbed, actually,” he said calmly and, as if the words had been some sort of release, fainted dead away.

  Jenny stood frozen as Uncle Neville collapsed, then, lowering the hammer of her six-shooter on an empty chamber, she bolted to his sid
e.

  “Stephen, get that light over here, then call Papa Antonio!”

  Stephen did so, for once shocked into silence. By the time Papa Antonio arrived, Jenny had ascertained the basics of her uncle’s condition.

  “He’s been stabbed. A long ‘T,’ but I don’t think it did more than slice muscle. I’ll need my doctor’s bag. It’s in my trunk, next to the rifle case. Emily should know. Can you get me some boiled water and clean linen?”

  “I can do this,” Papa Antonio said.

  Stephen returned, bringing with him more light. “Will Sir Neville be all right?” he asked hesitantly. “Should we call a doctor?”

  “Help me get him on the bed,” Jenny said by way of reply. “You’re big enough to lift his shoulders without twisting him about too much. I’ll get his feet.”

  Stephen moved to obey, and Jenny belatedly remembered his questions.

  “Yes,” she said, lifting Uncle Neville’s feet. “With luck he should pull through this. I’d guess blood loss put him out. If Papa Antonio knows a reliable doctor who will come at this hour, I won’t complain, but right now I can do as much for his wounds as any doctor.”

  Stephen didn’t protest. They’d had time on Neptune’s Charger to exchange histories, and he knew she had studied medicine with her father. Jenny appreciated his acceptance. Maybe living with his sisters and mother had helped Stephen accept that women weren’t all fools.

  Emily brought Jenny’s doctor’s bag, and for a time the surrounding world vanished as Jenny concentrated on tending Uncle Neville’s injury. He had bled a great deal. Traces of the bed netting in the wound showed that the knife had caught in several layers of fabric, which had doubtless lessened the force of the blow. While that had saved Neville from more serious injury, it also meant that Jenny had to painstakingly clean the wound before stitching it up.

  Uncle Neville came around while she was still cleaning the slash. After reassuring him that he was in no danger, Jenny said wryly, “Well, Uncle, I don’t have anything to put you under, but I can offer you a bullet to bite or a tot of something strong.”

  Neville merely cocked an eyebrow as if to say that opiates were not to be thought of for such a minor wound, and accepted a piece of soft wood to clamp between his teeth so he wouldn’t risk biting his tongue. He didn’t refuse the stiff whiskey Papa Antonio brought, though.

  Jenny could feel Uncle Neville flinch as she plied her tweezers and needle, but she’d sewn conscious patients before. Her father had begun her training on freshly slaughtered pigs before he let her move on to unconscious patients, but he’d always insisted that she wouldn’t know whether she had what it took to be a doctor unless she worked in less ideal circumstances.

  She still hated that slight flinch that reminded her she was inflicting pain, but she’d learned to push her reaction into the back of her mind. If sometimes she still needed to retire to a private place to settle her stomach afterwards, she didn’t think that invalidated her professional calling.

  Tonight, though, she was too keyed up to become nauseated. After she’d finished stitching and bandaging Uncle Neville, she suddenly felt tired, but not too tired to find out what had been going on while she worked.

  Bert and Emily had arrived and were curtaining over the window with thick muslin. From outside came the sound of metal clattering, doubtless someone moving the bars which had failed to stop the would-be assassin’s escape.

  “Would someone,” Uncle Neville said, speaking very carefully, as if reluctant to admit that either pain or alcohol were affecting his thought processes, “tell me precisely what happened tonight? I heard noise from outside my room while I was dealing with my own little problem—a scream, I thought, and a shot.”

  Jenny answered, “Those were me, Uncle Neville. I had just gotten out of bed—too much coffee, I fear—and was answering nature’s call.”

  She colored at this indelicate admission, then went on.

  “To my astonishment, I saw the door to my room start to open. I thought it might be Emily, coming for something she’d forgotten, and was about to say something. Then I realized that the shadow this person was casting—it was back-lit from the courtyard—was far too big to be Emily. It was huge…”

  She paused, and then went on.

  “I realized that in the dim light—I had not bothered to light a candle—this stranger didn’t know I wasn’t asleep. My derringer was on the table next to the bed. I rose quietly, and reached for the gun, but he must have heard me move for he turned with incredible agility and stabbed at me with his knife. I screamed and fired. I saw him stagger, then dive out the window. I’d just gotten my six-shooter from the trunk—the derringer’s a one-shot model—when Stephen came banging at my door. He’d barely had time to come in with his light when we realized that there was noise from your room. We ran, then, but we didn’t get here in time.”

  Uncle Neville smiled. “I don’t know about that, Jenny.”

  She returned his smile. “What I still don’t know is how Stephen happened to be so opportunely awake.”

  Stephen looked embarrassed.

  “Nothing so grand, I’m afraid. I must have fallen asleep while I was sitting up reading. My candle had guttered to almost nothing. Something woke me—perhaps one of your assailants moving about. I thought nothing of it and had just lit fresh tapers so I could find my things—I’m afraid I’d left them rather higgledy-piggledy when we were making equipment lists earlier—when I heard Jenny’s scream. I grabbed up the candelabrum and ran.”

  “So you were not attacked?” Neville asked.

  “No, sir.” Stephen looked thoughtful. “Perhaps my light deceived any watchers into believing I was more alert than I was.”

  “Quite likely,” Neville agreed.

  He looked straight at Jenny with an odd uncertainty to his usually direct gaze.

  “Jenny, you said you saw your attacker fairly clearly. You mentioned he was huge. Did you notice anything else?”

  Jenny swallowed hard.

  “I did. He…” She looked pleadingly at him. “Don’t think me crazy, Uncle, but he looked just like one of the pictures from Stephen’s books, a man dressed like an ancient Egyptian—wearing one of those short tunics or kilts. He had a broad collar around his neck and over his upper chest.”

  Uncle Neville continued to fix his gaze on her.

  “Is that all?”

  She felt suddenly defiant.

  “No, that isn’t. Above that collar, the man had a jackal’s head, just like the god Anubis does in the pictures. I’m not crazy, and the light was poor, but there was enough coming from behind him that I’m sure of what I saw.”

  She was ready for objections, but none came.

  “That matches what I saw,” Uncle Neville said, “though I didn’t get as clear a look—just a glimpse before my man went out the window—and most of what I saw was the head. He was probably dressed like your assailant, though. I remember being surprised that his legs were bare.”

  Jenny felt a wash of relief. Stephen seemed about to say something, but Uncle Neville cut him off.

  “Did you hit your man?”

  “Yes. There was blood on the floor, though not much. I may have only nicked him. I didn’t take much time to aim.”

  “Still,” Uncle Neville said, “we may be able to track him by the blood drops. Where’s Papa Antonio? Has anyone checked around outside?”

  Bert came over in response.

  “Mr. Donati has gone outside with several of his staff to check the surrounding area. He left when Miss Benet was performing her surgery, but said he would be available if you needed him.”

  “Find him for me, would you, Bert?” Neville said. “Emily? Is anyone about in the kitchen?”

  “Just about everyone is awake, sir,” the maid replied. Unlike Bert, who was acting as if attacks by masked assassins fell into a footman’s daily routine, she was clearly terrified.

  Jenny reached out and patted her shoulder comfortingly. “Come with me,
Emily. We’ll go over to the kitchen and see if one of the staff can help us make tea. I’d like Uncle Neville to have some broth as well. It will strengthen him against the blood he’s lost.”

  When they returned with their supplies, Papa Antonio had come in from making his inspection.

  “I thought,” he was saying, “that it was too much bad luck that both sets of window bars were weak enough for a man to break through. I went out with lanterns and some of my good Copts, and do you know what we find?”

  “What?” Jenny asked, setting down her tray and offering her uncle a bowl of beef consommé.

  Sir Neville looked vaguely disgruntled at this nursemaiding, but Jenny cocked an eyebrow at him after the manner of a very disagreeable teacher at her boarding school, and he subsided.

  Papa Antonio grinned, accepted a cup of tea from Emily, and with a fine sense of theater said, “We find that it is no chance the window bars break so easy, for where they are set into the wall it has been cut away at, even softened with a bit of water beneath where the stucco is. You understand?”

  Everyone did understand. Stephen tried to make light of it.

  “People who live in mud houses shouldn’t hire window washers, I see.”

  “I not hire these window washers,” Papa Antonio replied, “as I think you know. No, what I think happened is this. Someone come along when the street is quiet—as it is on that side of the house, which is why I put my treasured guests there. The guests are away, perhaps at the bazaar. This person chips away the stucco to loosen the bars, then squeezes in some water, just to help.”

  Jenny shuddered. Suddenly the thickness of the mud brick walls seemed very insubstantial. She controlled her trembling lest she dribble soup onto Uncle Neville.

  “I think,” that gentleman said, holding up a forestalling hand, “you found more than that, Papa Antonio.”

  Papa Antonio nodded. “We did. I decide we should check all the other windows. Of all the windows in the house, only one more set of bars is loose—those on Stefano’s room.”