by Anna Butler
On the north face of the column, the framework soared higher, adding another section to the top. A worm wheel, as wide as the stone island upon which the machine stood, faced us at right angles to the stacks below it, moving so slowly, if it moved at all, time seemed stilled.
The device… engine… whatever it was… had an odd, skeletal appearance. It wasn’t one solid mass of metal, but set on its frameworks, had considerable amounts of empty space between the various cog-and-wheel systems. It lacked bulk. It had, instead, a delicacy and a curious elegance, with all the mechanisms, systems, and spheres connected and moving in some unknown, unknowable harmony.
And it was silent. The room was silence made manifest. For a long time, all I could hear was our breathing.
Then the worm wheel moved the distance of one tooth, meshing with the worm screw attached to its side. A lever jerked upwards, pulling a globe of roiling scarlet gas with it.
Chukkkkka-thunk.
That was it. Just the one thunk, the pyramid’s heart taking a single beat, an immense, if brief, roar of sound that battered us as if with physical menace. My heart flared up to match it, thumping and battering against my ribs. Then silence again, a silence raw and pressing, quenching all thought and feeling.
I had one hand on Ned, the other around Nell’s wrist, and no memory of taking a step nearer to either one of them, nor of reaching out. Every breath was shallow, every muscle so tense I risked cramp. Nell’s face was close to mine as we listened, her mouth partly opened. Her eyes moved, restless glances from side to side, and her breast made a rapid rise and fall. Stricken. She looked stricken.
“Gott.” It was a prayer. I didn’t know how Günter had found courage enough to voice it.
Nell murmured something, a protest. I shared it, the desire to be small and quiet and unnoticed, and pray whatever lived in the deeps passed us by.
Long minutes crawled by. Five, at least. The silence went on.
Ned straightened up. He’d been hunched over, defensive. We had all been.
I let out a sigh and breathed in again, taking the air deep into my chest. The strained constriction eased. I let go of Nell’s wrist. I left marks, poor girl. “That was something mechanical.” I managed not to squeak, but it was a near thing. “To do with the obelisk, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.” Ned rubbed over his mouth with his hand, as if to hide that both hand and chin trembled. I didn’t judge. My own hands had a palsy shake. “Stay well clear of the machine for the moment, but let’s continue to explore the rest of this place. I think we must be somewhere close to its centre. Please be careful and don’t touch anything without speaking with Günni or me first. If you find something interesting—and what in here isn’t!—make a note of it, and one of us will come and look at it when we can.” He took a folding wooden rule from his belt. “Günni, I want to measure the trench and the island, if you’ll help.”
“Of course!” Günter hurried to join him.
And just like that, our apprehension over the unearthly noise was dismissed, and Ned had us all running to do his bidding. As usual. As Hugh once remarked when watching Ned organise the dig at Abydos, you could tell the man had been born First Heir of the most powerful House in the Imperium.
I wandered over to where Ned and Günter were measuring the square trench. Ned’s rule had been custom-made for him. Good old imperial yards and feet on one side, Aegyptian royal cubits on the other.
“It’s twelve cubits square.” Ned twirled the unfolded rule like a baton. “I’d say the column in the middle, the one forming the island, is four—”
“Ja.” Günter nodded. “And the narrower column standing on it must be three, allowing for the machine embracing it. Of course.”
They grinned at each other until I prodded them to explain the joke.
“More of Thoth’s humour.” Ned abandoned the measuring rod for his notebook. “Twelve months of the year, three Aegyptian seasons of four months each.”
Oh. Very droll, I was sure. I took a swift glance over the edge of the trench and away again. The sides were sheer smooth black basalt, and the bottom impossible to fathom. It was, quite literally, a black pit.
It would be a long fall.
I went back to staring at Thoth’s toys and wondering what in hell they did. And this time, when the machine whirred into life, I was almost—almost—ready for it.
It was still a thunderclap, painful, making us all but cower before it. When the echoes died, and I could straighten again, Theo was pulling Nell in close, and Ned pushed back his shoulders and blew out a long breath.
But it was Günter who spoke. “One half of an hour. Since the first time we heard that.”
I pulled my watch from its pocket and glanced at it. Thirty minutes. That felt about right. “So it moves one tooth of the wheel every half hour, and it’s noisy. If that’s all it does, then we have plenty of time to look around and be ready for the next one. In twenty-nine minutes, stick your fingers in your ears.”
They all stared at me. The guards, Tatlock included, were blank-faced. Theo frowned, Nell’s mouth hung open in a somewhat less than flattering fashion, and Günter imitated a goldfish gasping in air.
Ned, though, smiled. “Well, it was uncomfortable, but Rafe’s right, and we’ve come to no harm, I think?” He waited for everyone’s nods. “We know what the noise is now, but not what this machine does. Rafe, Theo, we need to see if there are other entrances and exits. Miss Lancaster—”
“Will go with me, I think.” Theo’s tone suggested he’d mow down any opposition in a heartbeat.
Ned’s mouth twitched. “Of course. Günni and I will continue here.”
Close to the machine? Rather him than me. I quite fancied putting some distance and the cushioning effect of dense stone between me and that diabolical thunking. It was with some alacrity that Theo and I agreed to return to the vestibule and explore the staircase and the other corridor.
Nell’s gaze met mine, her eyes shining. “Is this what it’s like? Archaeology?”
“I’ve always found it quite exciting,” I said, thinking of Abydos two years earlier, the place of Anubis. Perhaps Anubis and Thoth were acquainted. They both throve on mysteries.
She smiled and tucked her hand into the crook of Theo’s elbow.
We tested our personal Marconi communicators before setting off on our explorations. They worked within the Verification Chamber, although Tatlock was gloomy about their chances of continuing to do so once we had any substantial amounts of stone between us. I conceded the point, but it was still comforting to know we could keep in touch to some extent.
Once back in the vestibule, we fired up our brimstones. The light lit up the lowest treads of the spiral staircase and penetrated a few yards down the other corridor we’d noticed earlier.
We tossed for it in the end. Tatlock and I went up the staircase, while Nell and Theo, dogged by Whelan, disappeared into the right-hand corridor to follow it wherever it led. I was unconcerned to see her go. Whelan might be less green than a gooseberry but had the same quelling effect on inappropriate ardour.
“That looks serious.” Tatlock jerked his head in the lovebirds’ direction, raising his brimstone to shine it up the stairs.
“I hope so. Theo’s a good chap.”
Tatlock grunted. “Almost good enough for her.”
I stared. “I do believe this is the first time you and I have agreed on anything, Tatlock.”
“I’m just wearing you down, sir.”
God’s truth. He was.
We started up the staircase. It curved away from us, reaching into the darkness. Ned was probably right that it led to Thoth’s Seeing place on the roof, but it was going to be one hell of a climb. The riser on each tread was a fraction too high for comfort, jolting the spine on each step. Thoth must have had thigh muscles like a wrestler’s, to use this staircase with any regularity. Within a few moments, Tatlock, portlier and older than me, was blowing hard. To be fair, I wasn’t doing much better. T
hose stairs were hell on the knees.
The staircase had landings aplenty, broader than the stair treads curving up through the dense stone blocks, but no sign of corridors or chambers leading from them. A hundred feet up, the landing was bigger than any we’d seen so far.
“I think we should be at the level of the third step now.” I used my brimstone to illuminate the walls, moving the beam of light with slow care.
Nothing. No evidence the third step held any chambers. Except, I suspected, a square pit running through it with the column in its centre. Right up the pyramid, all six hundred and so feet of it, with the obelisk perched on its top. That made sense, if anything in the pyramid could be said to do so.
“That’s as high as we’ve come?” Tatlock was aghast. “That’s bloody all?”
“Be grateful. Ned thought earlier we’d be climbing up the outside all the way to the roof to find our way inside. This staircase is an improvement.”
“Not much of one.” He looked upwards, with an expression indignant enough to ignite the basalt blocks. “All the way up? Strikes me he’s too stubborn for our good, much less his own.”
I smiled. “Yes, he’s stubborn.”
“Got other qualities then, I take it.” Tatlock affected innocence as he regarded me, blinking.
I let my smile broaden. “Oh, yes. He certainly has.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ned was unimpressed when we gave up on the stairs and came back to the Verification Chamber.
“You didn’t go any higher than the fourth step? Not to the top?” Ned looked up from the small sheet of papyrus he had spread open on the table, holding it gingerly at the edges, as he tried to use his disappointment to make me feel guilty.
I wasn’t having any of that. “I’d need the entire day to explore to the roof, and Tatlock’s knees were giving out.” I indicated the papyrus. “What do you have there?”
“Hard to say. It’s a mix of hieroglyphs and something almost unique in Aegypt—representational art. Well, diagrams. Ancient art was wrapped up in religion and politics. It never changed. Look at decorations of the first king, Narmer, and the Ptolemys three thousand years later, and they’re using the same poses, the same colours, the same way of presenting Pharaoh as a powerful, all-conquering god-king. Look here.” Ned beckoned me closer. “Standard hieroglyphs for the most part, although combined into words I haven’t come across before. And amongst them, diagrams of machines. See?”
“I thought papyri were longer. The ones I saw in the museum were. What’s this one? Eighteen inches?”
“Just over twenty. A royal cubit, in fact.”
Of course. What else? “Thoth is turning out to be the predictable sort.”
Ned grinned at my tone. “He liked precision.”
“The soul of an engineer.”
“Anyhow, you’re right. Usually the papyri we find are dried fragments from a longer scroll, written on the horizontal. Most have not fared well over the eons.” Ned indicated the papyri piled at his elbow. “But these are as fresh as if the papyrus had been made last week, still pliable. They were cut to this size—a perfect rectangle one cubit long and half a cubit deep. Each one’s about something different, though. This one, for instance, seems to be about that instrument at the end of the table. The round one with the dials. And this one matches this little apparatus here.”
He nodded towards a small machine at his elbow. I bent over the scroll. The illustration depicted the device Ned had indicated, surrounded by serried ranks of small, neat hieroglyphs. This chamber hewn out of the pyramid must have been some sort of laboratory, where Thoth built and tested his machines.
“His notes on his experiments, do you think?” I let my finger trace the outline of the diagram, hovering over and not quite touching the ancient papyrus.
“I would expect quick notes to be less considered. It takes time and care to draw hieroglyphs, and these are exquisite.” Ned huffed out a laugh. “But then, I don’t know why I’m surprised. He was the god of scribes. He invented writing.”
I had to suppress the desire to roll my eyes. “Along with everything else. It’s a wonder the man had time to breathe. If not laboratory notes, perhaps it’s a manual? Decode this, and you’ll know what the little gadget drawn on it does. Or did.”
Ned’s mouth tightened, and his expression sobered. He took the scroll from me. “I think so, too. We’ll take all of these with us when we go.”
“I don’t think we can carry the machines too.”
“We’ll take a few with us, if we can.”
“We can try.”
“What we need,” Ned said, with a nod to the centre of the room, “is the papyrus for that. Günni’s looking for it now. We also have to consider there might be other rooms and other machines—”
“I do hope not, Ned. Chills the blood, to think of more than this one.”
“Yes.” Ned looked from the toys and models scattered over the table to the Antikythera machine, frowning. “That is the only thing we’ve found so far that seems likely to be related to the pyramid’s defences. That spire of rock it’s sitting on is in the exact centre of the pyramid, you know.”
“And probably ends in the lightning obelisk which brought us down.”
“I think that’s very likely. If we’re to get away from here, once we’ve solved the problem of the Prussians, we’ll have to put it out of action.”
There was no arguing with that. The most obvious answer was to find the power source and switch it off. The photon globe lamps around the room had to be aether powered. They burned with the bright steady light I’d expect from an ionic-gas discharge lighting apparatus, without flickering or power surges. They were as familiar as any in Stravaigor House, although here they had been hung on carved stands not merely to chase away the dark, but to illuminate mysteries.
I gestured to the machine. “How do you think that thing is powered?”
Ned rubbed his hand over his mouth. “No idea. It looks like aether vapour inside the spheres.” He flung out an arm to indicate the lights scattered around the chamber on their stands. “They are so like aether lamps at home, it’s not funny. But if it is aether, where’s it being generated and stored?”
“I have no idea. However Thoth did it, and wherever his generator is, it’s still working, still producing aether. Nothing we have can do that.”
Aether in its natural liquid state is the most volatile element mankind has ever discovered, more flammable than a dragon’s breath. It can be—and, of course, is—stored for use in everything from lighting entire cities to cooking a man’s lamb chops at suppertime, from fuelling an aeroship’s engines to powering the pistol I had on my belt. But it takes extreme care, engineering know-how, and constant maintenance to keep the supply lines open and safe. Phlogiston, used to control the aether burn, is even worse to store for any length of time. There’s no system on earth that can hold either for thousands of years.
What’s more, aether and phlogiston hadn’t been harnessed into power sources until the middle of the last century, when the legendary Jacob Berzelius, working on papers left by Humphry Davy, isolated the element, found methods for generating it, and, in a moment of supreme foolhardiness, combined it with a few molecules of phlogiston. The resulting explosion flattened his laboratory. By some miracle escaping with minor burns, Berzelius threw himself into replicating the release of energy in a slightly more controlled fashion and gave birth to an entire new way of powering everything. Aether is at the root of all we do, all we’ve achieved. Without it, the Imperium would be nothing but empty ambition, and we’d still be using sailing ships and horse-drawn carriages.
Could Thoth’s machine for harnessing the aether have been lost for the better part of five thousand years, until accidentally rediscovered by a Swiss chemist who blew off his own eyebrows? And if this pyramid’s defences were aether-powered, could we switch them off without blowing off ours?
I went through this argument with Ned, who nodded.
>
“Then we split our resources,” he said. “Günni and I focus on the machine here, and try to work out what it is and what it does. You explore. See what you can find.”
“Done.” I turned my eyes from the Antikythera machine to my watch. “Almost time for the worm wheel to move another cog. Theo and Nell aren’t back, I see.”
Tatlock gave the machine an inimical glower. “I’ll go and find Miss Eleanor, sir. Before that thing goes off again like Big Ben. Remind ’em.”
“Tell them on the Marconi.”
“No good. Too much solid rock between us. The Marconi’s fine for close-up chat, but not much use to us otherwise. I’ll go and look for them.”
“Good idea.” I wandered over to the edge of the pit after he left, watching the slow revolution of the central part of the machine, the part that might be a model of a solar system. Ned came with me, George Todd hovering at his elbow.
Günter joined us, more papyri in his hands. “There are dozens of these! Quite remarkable. I cannot wait to decode them. But nothing yet, Ned, on the machine.” He glanced at me. “Tired of exploring already?”
“I’m leaving it to the children. They’re more adventurous.”
“And wanted an opportunity to flirt, natürlich.”
“Natürlich.”
He opened his mouth, but whatever he planned to say died into silence. In front of us, the worm screw turned. So minute a change I couldn’t see it, but the worm wheel jerked one tooth. That great, reverberating chukkkkka-thunk was bearable now because we were ready for it, had braced ourselves to endure it.
I thought I saw something. I pushed my spectacles up my nose to focus better. A hint of the lightning thrown out at us by the obelisk, perhaps, flashing and stirring in the depths of the pit? I didn’t mention it. My eyes, not the sharpest these days, might have been playing tricks on me.
Silence settled on us again, thick as pitch and twice as unpleasant.
