Eleanor hurried her pace in an effort to catch Anubis, but he remained elusive, a dark and shifting mirage ahead of her, the scent of death unspooling from where he went. Eleanor pushed herself even so, stretching her jackal body to its limits, until her breath came hard and she had to slow. She sank into the warm sand, to breathe and quell the shaking in her legs, and ahead, Anubis stilled as if he had never been running. He turned as though he had been only standing in one place, and looked down at Eleanor. He was as inscrutable as the sky beyond his black head. She might see the majesty, but could not understand what it might mean on a larger scale.
Tell me.
You know what you need to know.
Eleanor pushed herself to standing, but her legs wanted to buckle. She forced herself to quietness, watching Anubis. She was not ready for these long runs in soft sand, was not ready to press an ancient god for answers he would not give. Could not? She didn’t know and pawed at the sand in her frustration.
She considered the bodies she had unearthed in her time as an archaeologist. Each was more than whatever bones remained for others to find; each was a body that had lived a life no outsider might ever understand. Letters, seals, mirrors, other artifacts would always give an incomplete picture of the life that had gone before, no matter how well intentioned their reconstruction. You know what you need to, Anubis told her. So Eleanor tried to not reach beyond that, to know more, if she already knew what she needed.
She knew the glass falcon and the bone.
She knew the love letters and the seals.
She knew the hollow feeling of the catacombs, the jagged bones that filled the corridors to overflowing, and remembered the screams of the dead.
And what had he said? The problem with mortal constructs is the way they often and always overthink the simplest of matters.
She bowed her jackal head and the desert faded, the walls of her room knitting together around her. She found herself—her human self—crouched beside the bed, in her undergarments as if she had never transformed and gone. But as she stood, her aching legs told her otherwise, and her feet were gritty with sand. She plucked the scrolls and clay seals from the bed and they felt somehow heavier now, more in need of resolution. No—that wasn’t the word.
“I would know this,” she said to Anubis, who was nowhere she could see. “Are we putting her to rest?”
Rest was the word; putting what remained to rest, seeing them to their proper places.
The question lingered between them, Eleanor holding to the scrolls as she waited. The world beyond her windows was as immobile as water in winter, twice as dark as any night before, but when finally the light did shift, she felt Anubis’s hand over her own, enclosing the ancient scrolls between them. He was as warm as a furnace, fury and sorrow barely contained. Were she made of anything other than flesh and bone, he might have melted her.
Yes.
When the shadows shifted once more, his burning touch was gone.
VI.
“I have a theory,” Eleanor said, as she reached for the cream and added a generous pour to her coffee. It bloomed within the black coffee, opening in the warm sunlight that streamed down the middle of the table. The Mistral dining hall was quiet and they had taken a table beside the windows that overlooked a quiet street.
Across the breakfast table, Mallory and Auberon watched everything she did; Eleanor was quite aware of the way she had piled her plate with sausages and slices of toast glowing golden with butter.
“My theory involves two gods,” she said around a hearty bite of sausage. “Two gods who meant entirely well, but managed to tangle things even so, because their hands are not human hands, and as such, incapable of actions we rather take for granted. Reaching into a vitrine to pluck out a glass seal, for example.”
She could not help but notice the way Mallory’s eyebrow notched up and she nodded.
“What god thinks they need to open the case the way a mortal would? Locks and doors are foolish things, surely beyond gods, and they should be able to reach in and take what they like, yes?” She chewed a bite of toast and shook her head. “But in fact, they discover themselves mistaken when they try, and the thing they sought to claim begins to melt and breaks rather than being drawn through the glass. So one is left with a broken fragment of a seal.”
She waited for the men to leap in with explanations and theories of their own, but they waited and Eleanor smiled at the space they gave her to present everything she believed she had sorted in Anubis’s wake.
“Attempt one, the glass seal, fails. So they attempt to reclaim another piece of our scribe’s life, a bone presumed to be of her very body. But their hands are unlike ours, they are unable to take what they wish from even the catacomb, resulting in its damage as well. They are just enough removed from mortality that they cannot impact the world the way we can.”
“But—” Auberon began, but stopped, gesturing for Eleanor to continue.
“Ask,” she said, taking advantage of the lull; she sliced another generous bite of sausage off and chewed.
“Horus gave you the broken bone,” Auberon said, “but not the broken seal—if he possessed the other half of that, from his, or Anubis’s, botched attempt at the museum, why not give you that, thus solving the confusion as to its damage?”
Eleanor swallowed her sausage and reached for her creamed coffee. “Oh, for that, we need to look to the scrolls and clay seals, I think,” she said, and looked to Mallory as she drank her coffee down.
Mallory considered the idea, then slowly nodded. “Aye, I think you’re right,” he said. “If the scrolls are presumed to be love letters—at the very least, personal correspondence between our scribe and a gentleman who may be Horus or of Horus, the way you are of Anubis.” He inclined his head toward Eleanor.
Auberon cleared his throat. “But what has that to do with—” And then he broke off, seeming to realize something else entirely before he had finished that thought. “Oh.” It was a soft sound and his shoulders slumped a little. Eleanor thought it was a blush she saw stealing across his face at the notion of a romantic correspondence, but she stayed focused on the theory at hand. There would be time for Auberon’s embarrassments later, she hoped.
“If Horus knew,” Eleanor said, “or was involved, he might like to keep that information private. It is not our place to know, even as they need our assistance.”
“To what end?” Auberon asked.
“One of the most simple things,” Eleanor said. “To put this scribe to proper rest.” She nodded toward Mallory. “Virgil said it—perhaps Anubis hasn’t had access to someone like me before. Maybe it’s something they’ve longed to do, but have been unable.”
Mallory’s eyes narrowed. “Let us hope they don’t intend to put everyone and everything in the Louvre to great and good rest.”
But Eleanor smiled at the idea, picturing the Egyptian artifacts within the museum’s walls, and the personal story each contained. More stories than they would ever probably know. “Think of the adventures, Mallory!”
* * *
They returned to the catacomb much as they had arrived a few days prior, but this time they were responsible for having the catacomb cleared of visitors, rather than the Paris police. The people were no less upset at their eviction this time around, most refusing to go home, as they had not yet seen every nook and cranny though they had paid to do so.
Eleanor and Mallory swept into the catacombs to greet Monsieur Dernier once again. Dernier didn’t look pleased at the notion his catacombs were being taken over again, either, no matter that Eleanor told him their business would be swift, provided he didn’t argue with the writ she produced. Dernier argued.
He stared at the page that granted Mistral permission to reclaim the remains of the Egyptian dead from the Paris catacombs. “Thou mayest take,” he muttered as he read from the page. “Thou mayest not take.” He folded the page in half with shaking hands. “I am well-acquainted with Mistral’s methods,” Dernier said
, eyes edging from the paper to coldly pin Eleanor where she stood, “but if you believe that I will allow you to remove anything from these catacombs, you are quite, quite, quite mistaken, Miss Folley. These bones have been entrusted to me, and I will not, will never, see those who rest here removed and carted elsewhere. No matter where you believe they have originated from. No. They have come to this place of rest and here they shall remain.”
Eleanor offered Dernier an understanding smile. She had expected this response; it probably would have been her own, were the catacombs her domain. “Monsieur Dernier,” she said, reaching for the only threat she had in her pocket, “should these remains…remain…your catacomb may yet be vandalized. It is these very bones the vandals seek to recover and I do not believe they will cease their incursions into your catacombs until they do. They will carelessly destroy more displays until they have found what they seek. Should Mistral remove the bones, and publicly claim them, we can prevent ongoing destruction here.”
At that very moment, as if planned, there came a crack from deeper within the catacomb, as if more bones were being toppled, searched through. Dernier’s eyes widened in accusation at Eleanor, Mallory, and Auberon.
“You are the vandals, are you not? Who has come with you? Who has tunneled their way into the heart of my tombs!”
Auberon caught Dernier around the shoulders when the man meant to charge into the depth of the catacombs. Dernier, a good deal smaller than Auberon, did not struggle. “None who has come with us. We shall secure the entrance here,” Auberon said as Mallory withdrew his revolver from its holster.
Eleanor knew that Auberon would also sit on Dernier if so required, to ensure the man didn’t meddle, and moved toward the downward passage.
“Vile vandals!”
Dernier’s hiss echoed as Eleanor and Mallory followed the narrow stone passage down, and down some more. It remained cool beneath the streets of Paris, though she could feel the damp today, too, and shivered more than a little as they emerged into the first room. They paused and Eleanor looked at Mallory, already knowing where they needed to go.
“Do you think your gods simply could not wait?” Mallory asked, his tone more than a little vexed.
Eleanor strode down the corridors they had traversed on their first visit, wending her way toward the room where Dernier had shown them the spilled bones. With every step, she recalled the screams of the dead entombed here, the sound of the ancient bones.
“That doesn’t seem likely, given that their two attempts have met with failure, Mallory.”
So then who?
Her heart hammered a frantic beat the deeper into the catacombs they went. From the chambers ahead, she heard voices, one as vexed as Mallory, but the other higher pitched and demanding she be released. She? Was it the scribe, come to some horrible life she could no longer understand. Skeletons, Eleanor told herself, did not possess vocal cords. They did not. They absolutely did not.
She and Mallory emerged into the room to find two figures—neither Anubis nor Horus—before the newly-spilled bones. Eleanor recognized the woman immediately—it was not an ancient Egyptian scribe pulled from the afterlife but Miss Sophie Baker herself. At her side and holding not a bone but something that shone as ancient glass would, was a gentleman who looked murder at Eleanor and Mallory both.
“Miss Baker!”
Miss Baker’s cheeks flushed with color and she stumbled backward from the gentleman, before he could claim her with his free hand. She looked at Eleanor with horror in her eyes.
“This is not—”
“…what we think,” Eleanor murmured, recollecting the very strange call she had received from Miss Baker through the archive’s vocalization conduits. Someone had been telling Miss Baker about the catacombs and the bones, and while Eleanor had presumed she was overhearing the report as to the destruction, she rather thought it was something entirely different now. A plot, to reclaim not the bones but the shining glass seals held in his hand.
“Mister Louis Vacher,” Miss Baker said and leveled a finger at him. “H-he was on your list…”
Eleanor’s eyes widened at the woman’s intuition. “Oh, indeed he was.”
Louis Vacher took a step backward, hands lifted in deference to the thrust of Mallory’s raised revolver, but he did not let the glass seals fall from his grip. He was dressed as well as Mallory, his trousers and coat the color of an evening January sky, but he bore the look of a man who had been searching for a treasure he had not found until now, now when it was too late, because a-ha, here was Mistral after all. But Louis was Mistral too, wasn’t he? Eleanor’s jaw tightened.
“You kept a list, Miss Folley?” Louis asked. “I presume a list of…known associates of Howard Irving, was it?”
“Only suspected,” Eleanor said, “but it seems we have crossed the line into known now, yes?” She looked to the woman cowering against the wall. “I think you have gone above and beyond, Miss Baker.”
“Hasn’t she though?”
Louis lowered his hands slowly, showing what he held in the one. Small, glass seals, one of blue and one that edged into green, rested in his palm. They were hollowed out, as Eleanor had seen others be, so the scribe could wear them, could always be prepared to seal any document. Placed with the scribe’s own bones?
“I do not know if the lovely Miss Baker meant me harm, but one wonders now.”
“I brought no weapon, sir,” Miss Baker said.
“But certainly knew other agents were inbound,” Louis said. He raked her with a scathing look before turning his attention back to Eleanor. “There is nothing…extraordinary to these seals. Beyond their age, they are nothing.”
“But Irving knew of them,” Mallory said.
“Indeed. Presumed quite a good many things were buried here, where we’d never looked and once we did look…well. How did I manage to summon the interest of not one but two gods—clearly there was magic here beyond Irving’s imagining. In these old bones.”
Eleanor canted her head at his arrogance. “Did you see them, then? Anubis and Horus?”
Louis stared at her, silent, as if processing what she had said. “What are you…” He trailed off, a tremor running through his entire body. His hand tightened around the seals.
“Anubis and Horus,” she repeated, slowly. As she said the names, she felt them near, though not within the catacomb itself; they were a presence removed from the current chamber, close but not interfering with her work.
“You… Know of them? They came to me. For me. I was chosen, Miss Folley.”
Eleanor smiled soft, for she knew entirely too much about being chosen. “They came to put the scribe to rest, Louis, nothing more.”
He stared at her, as if he were having difficulty with the idea that someone believed and accepted the idea that ancient gods walked among them. And then, “No. They came for me—to show me the way. They asked me to be their hands—”
Eleanor could not say how it happened, if the world shifted, if Anubis and Horus tried once more to stick their godly hands where they did not belong, but the chamber in which they stood shuddered and began to collapse, as if someone somewhere had had quite enough of Louis Vacher and his grand pronouncements about the gods and what they meant for him.
The bones shuddered free from their displays, cascading to the floor as if imitating water, and when the walls were emptied, more bones yet came. Eleanor could not fathom the numbers of dead, but the bones surged around them, tangling Vacher to the ground, and she and Mallory and Miss Baker a moment later.
The bones were so infinite, the walls of the room vanished and Eleanor could see only bones. She heard Mallory call her name, but could not see him, no matter how she pushed at the bones swelling around her. The bones possessed a current, strong and determined, and she could not move against it. She reached for a hand, but found only bones grasping hers in return. She swallowed a scream as the skeletal beasts of the catacombs pulled her down.
She was helpless to resist
them, could not anchor herself in place as they swept onward; she was tangled head over heel, until her boots briefly hit the catacomb floor. She slipped in the dirt, but could not outrun the flooding skeletons. The jumbled bones filled the narrow corridor behind her, surging and pressing her onward, rolling under her boots until she was thrown to the ground again, overwhelmed by the skeletal tide. In the tangle, she spied Mallory’s hand, but could not reach it before he too was claimed by the heaving dead.
Eleanor screamed for him and Miss Baker both, but her scream was lost amid the screams of the dead. The sound threatened to overwhelm her, but Eleanor forced herself to breath, to concentrate so that she did not become a jackal amid the chaos. She needed her human hands, her human mind, and forced herself to stillness, so that the bones buoyed her up and carried her as a boat upon the Seine. She spread her hands out and willed herself to breathe and float until Anubis’s voice crept back to her and with it the clinging stench of the dead.
Your mortal hands. You will know your people when you touch them, Daughter.
And she did. She did not know through what means, but when her hands slid over a long leg bone, and then around the curve of a skull, she knew. This was Nebtawy and Eleanor held to her bones, drawing them against her as she might a child in the rush of a river. She reached for the bones as she would reach for Anubis, with something beyond hands, beyond mind, and two more bones came to her.
When at last the flood of departed began to recede, the level of bones lowering as if the tides were going out, Eleanor held Nebtawy’s skull and a jumble of other bones, though it could not be said to be a whole woman. Eleanor cradled them in her skirt, spying the glass seals in among the fragments.
As Mallory helped Miss Baker from the ground and then came to Eleanor’s side, they watched in silent horror as Louis Vacher could not escape the bones. He tried to pick himself up from the ground, well-bruised from his tumble in the flood, but all around him, the bones knit themselves into monstrously large hands that snatched the thief deeper into the catacomb walls. His screams were muffled by a flood of new bones as the dead assembled themselves back into the walls they had ever been.
The Glass Falcon (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 2) Page 7