The God's Eye (Lancaster's Luck Book 3)

by Anna Butler

  The God’s Eye

  Anna Butler

  Sequel to The Gilded Scarab and The Jackal’s House

  Lancaster’s Luck: Book III

  Published by

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The God’s Eye © 2019 Anna Butler

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. An eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other enquiries, contact Anna Butler at annabutlerfiction@gmail.com

  Editing

  Desi Chapman, Blue Ink Editing

  Megan Reddaway

  Cover Art

  © 2019 Reese Dante

  http://www.reesedante.com

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  Map and other internal artworks

  © 2019 Margaret Warner

  mwa2808@gmail.com

  Contents

  ABOUT THE GOD’S EYE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  GLOSSARY FOR THE LANCASTER’S LUCK WORLD

  Thank you for reading!

  ABOUT THE GOD’S EYE

  Third in the Lancaster’s Luck series, following The Gilded Scarab and Rainbow Award winner The Jackal’s House.

  Rafe Lancaster is reluctantly settling into his role as the First Heir of House Stravaigor. Trapped by his father’s illness and his new responsibilities, Rafe can’t go with lover Ned Winter to Aegypt for the 1902/03 archaeological digging season. Rafe’s unease at being left behind intensifies when Ned’s fascination with the strange Antikythera mechanism and its intriguing link to the Aegyptian god Thoth has Ned heading south to the remote, unexplored highlands of Abyssinia and the course of the Blue Nile.

  Searching for Thoth’s deadly secrets, Ned is out of contact and far from help. When he doesn’t return at Christmas as he promised, everything points to trouble. Rafe is left with a stark choice – abandon his dying father, or risk never seeing Ned again.

  With love and gratitude, this book is dedicated to Claire, Sally, Elin, Desi and Megan who helped me polish Rafe into brilliance. And to Sandra, for her invaluable help with the German phrases. Thank you, all. Without you, Rafe would not shine so brightly.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Aside from a passion for waistcoats of the same liturgical purple oft sported by the Archbishop of Canterbury—a pleasing shade for a gentleman of my years and colouring—I am not a religious man.

  This should surprise no one. The Church looks askance at a confirmed bachelor unless he’s vowed to a life of quiet celibacy and good works. And while I am the most confirmed of bachelors, quiet and celibate I am not. The only work I care to contemplate involves Gallowglass First Heir Ned Winter and horizontal surfaces where we might celebrate our carnal urges with enthusiasm and a great deal of noise.

  My chief complaint, though, is that the Good Book has some distressing, wrongheaded ideas about the culpability of children when it comes to the sins of their fathers.

  With a father like mine, the injustice fair takes the breath away.

  I was thirty when I learned that while Richard Lancaster (deceased) may have been my mother’s husband, a country squire, and a lover of the music hall, the one thing he had never been was my father. He stood Moses for me and, I am told, said not one word of blame to his wife, but I was not of his begetting.

  I discovered this in Abydos, Aegypt, in the early days of 1901. The man I had supposed was my half-cousin John, First Heir of Minor House Stravaigor—my House—tried to kill me. John, it turned out, was not any sort of cousin at all, but the elder half-brother determined to get rid of me before our father, the head of our House, the Stravaigor, could disinherit him and put me in his place. He failed, and the Stravaigor removed him from the succession. Permanently. John lies now under a shady palm in the Aegyptian desert near Abydos, and I—Raphael James Lancaster, better known as Rafe—was proclaimed First Heir.

  A tale with all the barbaric bloodthirstiness of the Old Testament. But that’s the Britannic Imperium for you. Ruthlessness is the Imperium’s very lifeblood, bred into the flesh and bone of every House within it, from the most powerful of the Convocation Houses to the smallest, most insignificant of the Minor Houses, their satellite allies. Assassination has been the tool of choice for generations of Houses jockeying for power and position, all champing at the bit to govern the Imperium. It’s the tradition, you see, and we British are very fond of traditions. It makes for an exhilarating social and political system, where the Imperium’s great men won’t even go to the lavatory unless escorted by guards so well armed they could start their own war.

  The Imperium steamed on in this merry, sanguinary way, unchallenged for centuries until Queen Victoria applied the brakes. With her liking for good order, and unamused by the constant, messy internecine war between the Houses, she threatened to demote any House that used assassination. That brought the Imperium’s favourite tradition to a juddering, steam-belching halt.

  “She took umbrage when my grandfather was killed eight years ago,” Ned had told me one night in Abydos, the evening of John’s funeral when I was still reeling from my sudden elevation. We had talked a great deal about politics as Ned tried to reconcile me to my doom. “I was with Flinders Petrie at Luxor, but with my father taking over the House, I came home. Papa told me the Queen’s temper tantrum blew out half the windows in Windsor.”

  The Stravaigor had mentioned it when I left the Aero Corps over a year previously. “I remember the Stravaigor telling me those House Principes she gave a talking-to about it are still trembling at the knees and wiping shaking hands across their troubled brows.”

  Even with me draped over him in our favourite sandy hollow out in the desert, the stars filling the skies with incandescent glory, Ned had shrugged, more cynical than usual. “I don’t think so. All that’s changed is the Houses are more circumspect. They at least try to make their assassinations look like accidents.”

  His wi
fe had been killed in such an “accident”, leaving his sons motherless. I tightened my arms around him and let the talk drift into silence. In comparison, my concerns were mere pinpricks. After a respectful interval, I offered what comfort I could, tracing the scars left on his chest from the same accident with fingers and tongue until he forgot politics and my worries about my clouded future slipped from my mind.

  For a little while.

  That so-called accident—engineered, House Gallowglass suspected, by fellow Convocation House Pannifex—proved the Stravaigor wasn’t alone in his devotion to preserving and furthering the power and influence of his House by any means necessary. The clever old man, subtle as a snake, had plotted and contrived for the benefit of our family for the last forty years. Even now, ailing as he was—dying—he had but one objective: House Stravaigor must thrive. To that end, he had sacrificed, without apparent remorse, the son he’d raised himself, and doubtless thought of it as his duty to preserve the well-being of the House.

  John’s view of the matter, I suspect, would differ. But then, John had never been altruistic.

  “So here I am in John’s place,” I said to Ned, one balmy August evening some eighteen months after John’s death and my translation to his honours. Ned’s polite inquiries about my father’s poor health had transmuted themselves, like a reverse alchemy of gold to base metal, into a threnody on my position vis-à-vis my House. We were at Margrethe’s, the premier club for gentlemen of our persuasion. Dinner had been an epicurean delight, and I was sipping an excellent full-bodied Château Margaux grand vin. “On the one hand, proud to be a gentleman, a confirmed bachelor, coffeehouse owner, and ex- Imperial Aero Corps aeronaut”—I smiled at him and took his hand under the table—“and most of all, proud to be your lover. On the other, I’m mortified I’m First Heir. It might not be so bad if Stravaigor weren’t at odds with our Convocation ally, but the Cartomancer sneers down his nose at us. I sneer at my House myself, but I do draw the line at outsiders indulging in the practice. You might well laugh! I do have some proper feeling, you know. Not much, I acknowledge, but some. I might have more if I hadn’t been hauled in to take my turn at protecting a House filled with people I neither like nor trust—”

  “Reluctantly,” Ned murmured. “Reluctantly hauled in. Don’t forget the mere ‘corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative.’”

  I did not need Ned singing from the Mikado, though I acknowledged his advice was sound. “Most reluctantly hauled in. I’ve come to the conclusion I’m no more altruistic than my predecessor in the job.”

  Under cover of the table, he squeezed my hand. “You are altruistic to a fault.”

  “I don’t feel it. I feel as though I’m hanging between opposing poles, stretched until I’m pulled out, attenuated. Strung between the conflicting stars like Odin on the tree.”

  Good Lord. Claret made me more poetic than was wise. We stared at each other in consternation.

  Ned wore the expression of a man who had suffered a sharp kick to a sensitive ankle from someone wearing size ten boots. He has exquisite ankles. With his free hand, he moved the claret jug out of my reach. “I think you’ve had rather too much of that. You’ll be declaiming in heroic couplets next, and if I’m to deal with you being poetic, I’ll need to be far more foxed than I am.”

  I laughed. We turned to other talk and ended the evening in the most energetic and satisfactory way in one of Margrethe’s luxurious bedrooms, forgetting House politics for a while.

  From this you will understand why I baulk at paying for another’s sins. I have more than enough of my own.

  The next morning, Hugh Peters and I visited the aerodrome at Friary Park, then returned to town before noon in my one concession to the improvement in my circumstances: a light, sleek sporting vehicle, a two-seater autocurricle powered by the latest in aether combustion engines.

  We’d been to Friary Park for our regular training flight. Hugh, my lieutenant at the coffeehouse and all-round sustainer of my way of life, had attained his pilot’s license a few months earlier and needed the practice. In my own case, it gave me an excuse to fly.

  When I crashed my aerofighter at Koffiefontein during the Boer War and permanently damaged my eyesight, my one consolation at losing my military flight credentials was that, with spectacles, I could still see well enough to keep my civilian aeronaut’s licence. I still had my wings. I loved flying, and supporting Hugh’s endeavours added the gloss of altruism to a selfish desire for a few barrel rolls and tailspins. We’d spent an invigorating morning tootling about the skies above north London in one of the smaller aeroships, looping loops, spinning, corkscrewing, and performing other exhilarating military manoeuvres frowned upon by the civilian aero-regulatory authorities.

  Ned Winter and I found trouble so often, Hugh needed such military skills. It reconciled him to the idea of learning to fly, to be honest.

  Becoming a pilot is a rich man’s pursuit, with the same costs and cachet as keeping one’s racing yacht at Cowes or buying one’s shotguns at Purdey’s. I’d insisted on his training, even though Hugh considered the whole enterprise above his station and demurred at first with a modest “I’m not a gentleman, sir. It’s not seemly.” Such nonsense. The Good Lord knew I didn’t want to lose him—I wouldn’t last five minutes without Hugh to manage me—but I’d make sure he gained the skills and training to make his own way if ever he needed to. Pilots being such a rare breed, he would always be in high demand. It was the least I could do, to give him a chance of independence if he wanted it.

  And all practicality aside, Hugh might not have been born in the purple, but he was one of the truest gentlemen I knew.

  Our drive back to town was far more sedate than the flying lesson. Hugh took the wheel, and he is several degrees more staid than I am. I dare say he didn’t consider even one barrel roll en route.

  Hugh didn’t so much as take his eyes from the road when I relayed this trenchant criticism. “Never once crossed my mind, sir, the curricle not having wings.”

  Prosaic beggar.

  He drew up outside Stravaigor House in Kensington. My father would have preferred me to live there, but I had established myself in a successful coffeehouse near the Britannic Imperial Museum in Bloomsbury when I’d been given a medical discharge from the old Queen’s Aero Corps in late 1899. I wouldn’t give that up for the inconvenience of living under an inimical paternal eye. The coffeehouse was my insurance, if you like. If First Heirhood turned out to be unsustainable, I needed a bolthole that would allow me a living outside the House. I’d keep my independence, thank you. Not even my father’s dire health following a heart attack in May had been enough to move me. He could tap on his dickey heart and look as wistful as he liked, but no.

  Not yet.

  “I’ll make my own way home, Hugh. Don’t wait.”

  “If you’re sure, sir.”

  Sir was sure, and he drove off to freedom while I trudged up the steps to enter durance vile. The heavy bronze doors closing behind me as I stepped into the hall did nothing to reconcile me to my fate.

  Not long after my arrival in my father’s rooms, the butler presented the midday post on a large silver salver. One letter was for me.

  An embossed spread of playing cards, the ace topmost, decorated the gold wax sealing the heavy cream parchment envelope. I knew that seal. Not a bill, then, but a formal communication from House Cartomancer, the Convocation House to which we’d been allied since the House system was created by Good Queen Bess, who connived with eight powerful nobles to keep out the Spanish Armada. Ever since, we have committed our government into the care of those best placed to steer the helm of state: the eight great Convocation Houses under the leadership of the reigning monarch—Gallowglass, Cartomancer, Huissher, Justiciar, Pannifex, Archiator, Quister, Venator—supported by their Minor House allies. No flirtation with Athenian democracy for us, of course. We don’t need it.

  The most gentlemanly o
f hands had addressed this envelope. My father, casting his eye over it before tossing it to me across the width of his desk, drew my attention to the elegant script. “The Cartomancer’s own writing. Unusual.”

  Indeed. Most of the letters from him I’d seen in the past had been in the sharp angled script of his private secretary, its calligraphic tetchiness reflecting both the Cartomancer’s temper and the usual state of relations between his House and mine. This, though, was penmanship of a more florid, less constipated style.

  R. J. Lancaster, Armiger. First Heir, House Stravaigor.

  “Rafe,” my father said, while I tutted over the pretentious use of Armiger when the workaday Esq. did the job just as well. He nodded at the letter in my hand. “You will find it easier to read if you open it.”

  He had the lion’s share of the post on his side of the big desk set before the window. At the end of July, when he had first recovered enough to leave his bed, I’d entered the house one day to find him halfway down the stairs, clutching the banister. His valet, Harper, fluttered at his side, bleating out protests. Baffled by his managing to get so far, and stronger than the old man now, I’d gathered him up and swept him back to his rooms. My remonstrance was more effective than Harper’s. Louder and more emphatic, anyway.

  He was obdurate about his need to oversee House business, and I’d set four brawny footmen the task of rearranging the furniture to placate him, moving a desk into the small sitting room attached to the master’s suite. Now, in middle of August, on a good day he could walk from his bedroom next door to the desk, leaning on Harper’s arm, or mine if I’d arrived early enough to be co-opted in support. On not so good days, Harper pushed him in a light bath chair. On the whole, the wheeled chair was preferable, as the exertion of walking thirty feet or so left him ashen-faced and shaky, in need of the small white foxglove pills the local apothecary created to ease his labouring heart.