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

by Anna Butler

  I spun my chair around and caught hold of her. Dear God in heaven. If anything had happened to her, if I’d killed her in this mad attempt to find Ned, I’d never forgive myself.

  She gasped. “You’re squeezing the life out of me!”

  Which was ironic. I gave her a little shake and released her. “All right?”

  “Scared.” Her smile was far more watery and indeterminate than suited my brave, fiery Nell. “I’m fine.”

  I glanced at Reitz, who nodded. “Ja, danke.”

  Theo stumbled into the cabin, his grin closer to a toothy snarl. “All safe. No one’s hurt.”

  “I don’t know we can say the same about the old girl. I need to go out and take a look at her.” I patted the control panel in front of me in mute thanks for her big heart and endurance, threw the switches that in other circumstances would have closed her down, and unbuckled my harness. It took longer than usual. Someone had replaced my fingers with sausages or something just as thick and lacking in fine control. Shaky sausages, at that. Once I pushed myself to my feet and got going, I’d be better.

  The guards in the main cabin were all freeing themselves and getting to their feet. They were euphoric: laughing and poking fun, ribbing one another in the black-humoured fellowship so familiar to me from my service days. I came in for some myself as I went through to the outer portal.

  “You had her flying like a duck!” one of them said as I went past.

  “A dying duck, maybe.” I tried to match his light tone. “Someone give me a hand to open the portal.”

  Tatlock was beside me before I could finish speaking, flat-eyed gaze assessing. His mouth twitched into a grin. A real grin. “More like a bloody house brick.”

  I grinned back before I could stop myself. He was right.

  “Don’t do this again,” he said. “I’d never explain it away to the Guv’nor.”

  “It isn’t an ambition of mine to make deadstick landings a regular feature of my flying style, I promise you. Let’s get this open.”

  The portal doors were mechanical, the latches closed by turning great metal wheels like the doors on a submersible. It was the work of a moment to spin the wheels anticlockwise, moving the system of brass cogwheels to unloose the long vertical bars of the lock, retracting the latches from their boxes inside the Brunel’s walls. We had the portal opened in seconds, and the African evening air roiled in. No power, of course, to extend the stairs, but the rope ladder stowed in a cavity in the bulkhead was an effective alternative. The rope jerked against my hands as I shinned my way down, the roughness soothing. Real.

  I stepped away when I reached the ground. Tatlock followed me, leaving Banger Bill to hold the ladder for the rest. “Help Miss Nell, please, Tatlock.”

  “I reckon she has her young gent for that.”

  But he turned and monitored her progress, presumably to ensure Nell’s young gent fulfilled his duties in that regard. Confident Theo didn’t need my supervision, I turned away to stare at the crashed aeroship, instead.

  Oh, not the Brunel. She had some damage, of course she did. But we had landed hard, not crashed. A cursory glance showed me that if I could fix the engines, she’d fly again. But back there, along the bird’s curved beak, lay the remains of the six-seater Hugh had flown. I didn’t want to look closer. I couldn’t bear it if—

  A shout came from behind me. From the pyramid.

  The Brunel had come to rest a fair distance from it. Figures ran across the rough ground towards me. And while my heart leapt and drummed behind my ribs and every nerve zinged with a power I couldn’t control, I ran, too. Heart thudding and arms pumping the air to lend me speed, legs aching, muscles tense. My foot skidded on a stone once and I stumbled, caught my balance, laughing so loud the skies rang with it, and ran on.

  I stopped dead when I reached Ned, panting. He stopped, too, not an arm’s length away. His mouth, drawn and tired under a light beard, curved up into a smile. He laughed.

  “Ned.” It was all I said. All I could say.

  Then, with what felt like a universe full of suns exploding in my chest, I pulled him into my arms and held on like billy-o. I never, ever, wanted to let him go.

  Never.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Of course, I had to let go. Eventually.

  One final bone-crushing hug to convey the depth of my relief, and I released him and stepped back. One step to put space between us, but not so much I had far to reach if I needed to prove to myself again that Ned was there, unharmed and safe.

  “I knew you’d come, Rafe,” Ned said. “I knew.”

  We nodded at each other. Two people in perfect accord—words weren’t needed.

  Theo’s booming yell came from behind me. “Ned! Ned!” He waved and grinned when we turned to him.

  Ned’s face, almost close enough to mine to kiss, showed his astonishment beneath the pale-gold beard. He looked more like a Viking than ever. “Theo? Dear Lord, Theo! And Günni Reitz! Whatever is he doing here?”

  I touched his arm as he passed me on his way to greet his brother, and turned to greet Hugh.

  He wasn’t there.

  He should have been right there, behind Ned. But he wasn’t. Not seeing him was a punch to the gut from some bastard wearing a spiked metal gauntlet.

  I couldn’t see Sam Hawkins, either, and that had the world turning on its head, kicking its heels in the air in impotent disbelief. I doubted if Sam had ever been more than a few yards from Ned for the last thirty years.

  “Hugh. Where’s—” I stopped to swallow hard. “Hugh? And Sam?”

  God alone knows what I looked like, because George Todd leapt forward about five feet and caught at my arm. “They’re fine, sir. Hurt, but we didn’t lose anyone.” He frowned at me, put both hands on my shoulders, and shook me. “Did you hear me? We didn’t lose anyone.”

  He gave me another minute, until the world righted itself again, before nodding and stepping back, giving way to Ned.

  “Oh, Rafe, I’m sorry!” Ned gestured to the pyramid. “I should have said! I gather the same thing happened to you as to us? Some sort of light bursting out of the obelisk?”

  “Yes. Our engines cut out.” I turned to gaze at the pyramid. The crystal obelisk glinted in the westering sun. Unearthly. Inexplicable. Malevolent.

  “Ours, too. Hugh managed to get us down, but at the last minute, the wind caught us and the aeroship flipped over. He got a bang on the head and broke some ribs, and he’s had a fever he can’t quite shake. A touch of pneumonia, we think, but he’s better than he was. Sam broke his leg. The rest of us are fine. Bruised and battered, but unhurt. We’re camped beside the pyramid.”

  I blew out a sharp, shaky breath. My nerves felt shot to hell, my insides griping and complaining. “I have to check on Hugh, first. Then we need to talk.”

  “We do, I ag…” Ned trailed off, his gaze on Nell, who was walking towards us at Reitz’s side. “Your sister? Rafe, you brought your sister?”

  Ned was alive. Hugh was hurt, but alive. My insides gave up on griping, and the resultant surge of tension leaching from my bones and muscles had me lightheaded. I fastened one hand on Ned’s arm, feeling the warmth and the play of muscle and sinew beneath his grubby cotton sleeve.

  “Let’s just say Nell took advantage of the change in the rules. We stopped keelhauling stowaways years ago.” And I laughed.

  My poor Hugh. The giddy relief I’d been feeling since I’d clutched Ned in my arms ten minutes earlier fled in the face of this new anxiety.

  They had pitched their tent at the pyramid’s lowest step along its northern face, so close they’d used the structure as one of the sides, hammering metal pitons into the narrow gaps between the immense blocks from which it was constructed, and tying down the canvas tight to make a flat roof and give them extra space under cover. In the exact centre of this lowest step, a dark doorway led into the pyramid. It had been incorporated into the tent and loomed large when I walked in, a black rectangle taller than a man�
��s height and broad enough for three to walk abreast. But in truth, it didn’t merit much more than a glance—Hugh sat on a pile of thin blankets, thin, white-faced but for patches of red over his cheekbones, face hollowed out, and eyes dulled. He tried to rise when he saw me, but I had no difficulty making him stay where he was, pressing a hand on his shoulder when he attempted it and keeping him in place.

  When I knelt beside him, he grasped my hand in a grip a two-year-old could have broken without effort, and tried to conjure up a smile that twisted his pale face into the a simulacrum of those horrid carved-turnip lanterns Scottish children carry about on guising night. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “For what?”

  “I didn’t do very well. I should have got her down without anyone getting hurt. I should have done better. I should—”

  “Who died?”

  He blinked at me. Frowned. “Died?” His voice wavered. “No one died.”

  “Exactly.” I held his hand in both of mine. “Everyone except you and Sam walked away from that crash. In your shoes—a new pilot, under those conditions—I’m not sure I could have pulled it off. I had more brute power in the Brunel to play with than you did in the Bazelgette, and years more flying, and we still made a bloody hard landing. You did well, so stop apologizing. I’m proud of you.”

  This time the smile was stronger, and he looked less like a guising lantern and more like his old self, if thinner and more worn than I liked. His eyes showed less strain, the fine lines around them smoothing as he relaxed.

  “Of course,” I added, “the minute I get you back to London, I’m going to make you practise stalled landings until you can do them in your sleep.”

  “I never want to do another one!”

  I found myself snorting out a pained laugh. “Oh, Hugh. This is Ned Winter, the Houses, and the Imperium we’re talking about here. The sort of trouble that combination attracts, we’ll be doing forced landings for the rest of our lives.”

  While a couple of Gallowglass guards unloaded the extra tents and the food supplies we’d brought with us—“Thank God,” George Todd said. “I have my doubts about what a baboon might taste like, and I was about to start hunting one for the pot”—the rest of us gathered in the tent. I sat near Hugh, where I could keep one eye on him and the other divided between Ned and the ominous low doorway a few yards away. Sam Hawkins sat propped up in a narrow cot nearby, his left leg held in a rough-and-ready splint fashioned from broken wooden spars from the crashed Bazelgette. I shall only say that pain and enforced inactivity did not sweeten Sam’s temper, and leave it there, shall I?

  We covered the initial mutual thanksgivings and grinned at each other as Ned said, yet again, he knew we would come for them. And though he waved a hand to encompass everyone from the Brunel, his gaze was on me.

  “Pity you had to crash too.” Sam was as gracious as ever.

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought so.”

  “Not much of a rescue.” Sam Hawkins would never change. His entire focus was on Ned, and nothing else mattered but Ned’s safety.

  “Sam.” Ned was all gentle admonishment, and Sam grunted but subsided.

  I turned to Ned, who grinned and rolled his eyes at me. “Your father sent us. And I’m glad he did, given what we’ve discovered since we landed in Cairo on Christmas Day. Good Lord, barely two days ago! Listen, you have to—”

  I broke off, interrupted by a percussive tsunami of noise erupting through the open doorway of the pyramid. The great structure rumbled and groaned, clamouring in the manner of a labouring hippopotamus.

  The din bombarded us until the tent shook with it, resonating with the stentorian grate of stone on stone and metal, the spine-shuddering shriek of metal scraping against itself, the clink-clunk-clank of gears shifting and grinding, the chang-chang-chang-a-chang rattle of jangling chains evidently thick enough to tether Titans, steam whooshing and hissing like dragon-breath—the reverberating, pounding, pulsing boom of some immense machine at work creating the growl of a distant thunderstorm so powerful it shook the earth.

  We all froze when the noise assaulted us. Even tough House guards shrank within themselves, their shoulders hunched up to provide instinctive protection to the vulnerable necks. Nell raised one hand to press her fingers against her mouth. Theo had half turned towards her, as if to offer reassurance, but had petrified in place before he could begin. Reitz held his pipe suspended in midair, forgotten. Hugh looked to be in pain, his hands at his temples, and Sam’s fingers had whitened on the butt of his pistol.

  “What in every hell!” I pushed myself up to grab Nell with one hand and reached for Hugh with the other. “What is it?”

  “Think it’s safe enough, to be honest, sir,” George said. “It’s done this before.”

  Ned tilted his head towards the sounds as if to hear more clearly, but Lord, a man would have to be deafer than the proverbial post to miss it. “It’s the obelisk retracting, I think. It’s not always there, not always visible. It’s extruded when the pyramid detects a threat. An assumption, mind you, but it seems reasonable.”

  I’d seen the obelisk rise up out of the pyramid myself. It made sense—since we appeared to have landed in a world where the inexplicable could make sense—that the obelisk would disappear again when its job was done. I nodded at George and jerked my head towards the tent door. He was gone in an instant. I pulled Nell up to be ready to run, just in case.

  If the obelisk was being pulled back into the body of the pyramid, it needed a monster of a machine. The pyramid obviously housed such a beast—one returning to whatever light and restless slumber was its normal lot, the grinding and shrieking fading into an uneasy quiescence.

  The relaxation of tension was palpable. People blew out sighs and glanced around, avoiding prolonged eye contact and looking rather sheepish.

  Nell leaned against me, her breathing that of a woman who’d just run from Marathon to Athens. “What was that?”

  “A machine of some sort.” I gave her a fraternal hug. “All right? It’s been a taxing half hour. Delicate sensibilities in equilibrium?”

  “They will be.” Nell pulled away and straightened her shoulders. She blew out a gentle breath and nodded. “They are.”

  That was my brave girl, though I valued my life too much to say so aloud. She sat beside Theo again. I thought for an instant he was about to say something stupid, but he had learned his lesson from earlier. He smiled at her.

  “Adventures!” he said, in a what can we possibly do with this bally nonsense? tone that had her smiling back at him.

  Young love. Quite sickening. I took my seat beside Hugh and tried to ignore Romeo and Juliet on my other side.

  George came back. “The obelisk’s gone back inside the pyramid again.”

  I was no Aegyptologist, but after more than two years as the lover of one, I’d gained some expertise. “I thought pyramids are solid. Isn’t that the case?”

  “In Aegypt, yes.” Reitz glanced at his pipe as if he’d never seen such an object in his life before. “They are made of immense stone blocks and the burial chambers inside are small. Those in the Great Pyramid are tiny.” He allowed the pipe to finish its journey to his mouth, and spoke rather more indistinctly around its stem as he lit it and puffed like fury to get the tobacco smouldering. “They are not hollow, and they do not possess mysterious obelisks and machinery. They are not as regular in shape and size, nothing as precise as this monster.”

  “That unholy racket started up for the first time last night,” George said. “We got out of here smartish, as you might guess. I thought I heard an aeroship’s engines, but it was dark and overcast.”

  Ned nodded agreement. “I wasn’t certain I heard anything. Not over the noise from the pyramid.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t bet my mother’s life on it, sir. But that obelisk thing was sticking up again, that we hadn’t seen since it shot out its fire at us the day we arrived.” George turned to me. “It disappeared after we crashed, while we were busy
hauling Sam and Hugh out of the wreckage and trying to make sure everyone was safe. When we’d sorted ourselves out, it had gone, and we haven’t seen it since. Anyhow, there the thing was again, a stick poking up into God’s eye. And then this”—he hooked his thumb at the pyramid—“flashed the sky up like a lightning strike. Played hell with my night sight, so I can’t say for sure but I had the impression, like, of something high up. Seemed to veer off to the north.”

  “Not you, I take it, Rafe?” Ned asked.

  I had been exchanging grimaces and significant looks with Theo and Günter Reitz. “No, it wasn’t us. We didn’t leave Aswan until this morning.”

  “If you can call something that early and that dark, ‘morning’,” Nell muttered.

  “I didn’t see anything on the way in, but then I curved our course to bring her in from the northeast. It was more likely to be our friend Altenfeld.”

  “Leo Altenfeld?” Ned was nonplussed, his tone a pitch-perfect rendition of a surprised spinster finding a man hiding under her bed. “What does he have to do with anything? Why on earth would he be in Abyssinia?”

  So I told them about Altenfeld, with Theo and Reitz putting in their tuppence-worth as I recounted everything we’d learned in the last thirty-six hours. Everything. It left them all staring, particularly when I told them about the probable connection to the Prussian military.

  “Altenfeld? A Prussian agent? With about a dozen soldiers with him?” Ned turned his boiled owl stare onto Reitz. “And you, Günni? An agent for us? Really?”

  Reitz hissed a testy dissent through his teeth. “No! I provided some information…” He trailed off and scowled, clamping down so hard on his pipe stem it was a miracle it didn’t snap. I’d wager he left toothmarks.

  “Why on earth would the Kaiser be so interested in an archaeological dig? I—” Ned stopped dead and grimaced, glancing over his shoulder at the pyramid.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Every world power thirsts for such weapons. And, as Günter said a few hours ago, the German Empire and the Imperium want the same thing, and we’re fired by the same desire to keep expanding. The world is rather small for both of us, and a device like this would give an immeasurable advantage.”