by Anna Butler
Ned’s grimace would have soured new milk. “They would have killed every last one of us, and you know it. You’d have let that happen? After all the years I’ve known you? I thought we were friends.”
Reitz flushed a dull red over his cheekbones.
“Put the gun down,” George said, at my shoulder. “Put that bloody gun down.”
Most of the Gallowglass guards had fanned out, aiming their pistols at Reitz, intent on Ned’s protection. One stooped over the downed Prussians, disarming the last of them. He’d already taken the others’ pistols, tossing them away out of reach. Another was yanking Altenfeld to one side, anything but gently.
“Ned.” Reitz moved towards him. “Ned, listen. I would never have had you hurt—”
“Stay back, sir.” George reached around me to clamp a hand on Ned’s arm. “Get behind me.”
Ned shook George off, his focus only on Reitz. “You wouldn’t have been able to stop him either, even if you wanted to. And I don’t know that you did.” Ned was like steel. Cold and unyielding. I’d never heard that tone before. “You killed Jim Baxter, didn’t you?”
“I— He had not eaten his stew. I did not realise he was awake. I was taken by surprise, Ned. It was not my plan to hurt him.”
“No. I don’t suppose he planned not to like your stew, either. I won’t forgive that. I don’t know what we’ll do with you. Take you back and hand you over to the Huissher, probably. Let him deal with you. Drop the pistol, Günni. My men will shoot you down if you don’t.”
Reitz’s face scrunched up in puzzlement. He looked down at the pistol in his hand as if he’d forgotten it was there, as if he couldn’t feel the weight. He didn’t drop it. He raised it.
As if to shoot.
Something flashed past my ear, coming close to putting a new parting into my hair.
An aether pistol boomed.
I hurled myself at Ned, using every ounce of weight to send him staggering several feet sideways to crash into Banger Bill. Banger, never slow, caught Ned by the shoulder and shoved him on farther, into shelter behind two of the guards. Balance shot to hell under the violence of my lunge at Ned, I stumbled to my knees, helped on by a strong hand striking me between the shoulder blades. Only then could I draw in enough air to gasp out Ned’s name. Nell squeaked somewhere off to one side. And then I was looking around to see where the terrible high whining noise was coming from.
Günter Reitz stood with his hands clasped to his face and the aether pistol on the floor at his feet. It must have discharged when it hit the floor. It was a miracle no one had been shot. He was making the dreadful keening noise, the inhuman whining.
His hands fell away. George Todd’s slender, black-bladed knife jutted out of his right eye, blood tracking down his cheek and dripping from his chin. The whining faltered, hitched on a breath that reminded me of the bubbling gurgle of a pot of porridge. He pitched over, feet drumming on the stone floors.
They stopped when his heart did.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Theo had been right after all: when it came to a contest between House guards and the Prussians, the House guards would win. Reitz hadn’t stood a chance.
Altenfeld and five of his men survived, although they’d do better with proper medical attention. Two of the Prussians from the Verification Chamber and the man Ned had hit in the tent, who had a pigeon’s-egg lump and a headache the size of the pyramid if his squinting eyes were anything to judge by, were in no danger. The man I’d hit out by the Brunel was in direr straits, though still breathing, and his companion, the one Ned had shot, was deeply unconscious but likely to live. Altenfeld’s face and neck were red and weeping with burns, and most of his hair had burnt off. He was lucky it wasn’t worse. George had done what he could for him and the others, but the medical kit’s stock of opiate tinctures was dwindling.
“Use this if you need to. You can make a tea with it. That should knock them out.” I handed him the bag of mafeisan herbs I’d taken from Günter Reitz’s pocket. “As you know, it’s potent stuff.”
“Even in stew.” George eyed the bag askance, but he took it.
I left him to it. When I turned, I caught Theo watching me. When we’d all got our breath back upstairs, I’d hugged Nell to within an inch of her life, scolded her for endangering herself by stowing away in the first place, and hugged her again until she squeaked. More than once. But now she was sound asleep, wrapped in a blanket and held on Theo’s lap.
I didn’t protest about their closeness. She’d spent some considerable time fussing over Theo, and when I drew her aside to allow George to examine Theo’s injuries in relative privacy, she’d indulged in a moment or two of un-Stravaigorish tears.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine.” I’d had no pocket handkerchief to give her, so allowed her to mop her eyes against the shoulder of the scorched jacket I’d retrieved from the floor of the Verification Chamber. “You like him, don’t you, Nell?”
She nodded, and sniffed in very ungenteel fashion. “Very much. He’s kind, and generous, and he doesn’t treat me as if being female means I can’t do anything…”
With one exception back in Aswan, perhaps, but he’d learned his lesson well.
“He’s a good chap. Almost good enough for you.”
“He is good enough for me.” Nell gave another horrid-sounding sniff. “And mine’s the only opinion that counts.”
All of which suited me as perfectly as it suited Nell. Theo was a good chap, and if she loved him, it behoved me to make sure she got him. I had administered another crushing hug to assure her the choice was hers, and let her free to run back to him the instant George had finished.
So I allowed her to sleep in Theo’s arms, my conscience clear about her future. Theo was awake, probably couldn’t sleep for the ache in his back. At least he wasn’t pissing blood, but he, too, should see a doctor. The expression on his face was grave. He looked from me to Nell and back again. We nodded at each other. Cairo was the farthest I was willing to allow that to go before I herded the pair of them in front of a chaplain.
Instead of bothering them, I opted for bothering Ned, who sat against the wall near Sam’s cot, where Sam could keep an eye on him. I sat beside him, shoulder to shoulder. “I’m sorry about Günter.”
“I’ve known him since my first dig. We both worked with Flinders Petrie.” Ned tipped his head until it rested against mine. “I wish I’d had the chance to keep him under guard as he asked—”
“He plotted against us, Ned. He would have stood back and allowed Altenfeld to slaughter everyone here. You know that. You couldn’t have trusted him. He might have shot you. George did the right thing.”
“I know. I know he did, really. Do you think he would have shot at me?”
“I don’t know. We were all on the knife edge. George reacted so fast… I don’t know.”
Ned pressed his head a little closer against mine. “I’m sorry to lose a friend, that’s all. But perhaps he was never that.”
Perhaps he wasn’t. Altenfeld hadn’t said much, but had revealed Reitz had been an agent for the Stadtschloss for years. All the time our people had thought he was a low-level spy for the Imperium, he had been working to get his father’s lands returned to him. I couldn’t find it in me to blame him overmuch. He had been an exile, and I could understand his longing for his own place.
“I was astonished when I saw signals from the pyramid.” Altenfeld had winced under George’s ministrations. “I knew who he was, from my briefing with the Kaiser. We waited until his second signal, when he confirmed he’d disabled all Winter’s guards.” He scowled. “I should have known better than to trust to one of Von Meiningen’s people.” At which point he had closed his mouth against our questions. He was a sulky brute.
Had Reitz been a friend?
“We’ll never know for certain, now. But I think he was a man torn between conflicting loyalties.”
“And in the end, it destroyed him.” Ned drew a long, wavering breath. “
Poor Günni.”
Speculation was profitless. I pulled my watch from its pocket. “It’s almost four. Dawn in a couple of hours. We should try to get away, Ned. We need to get to Khartoum, take the injured to a doctor. I hope your father has pulled off a miracle and found an Aero Corps ship to give us some support.”
“You have a plan?”
“Well, a couple of suggestions. We’ll try to stop the machines, get airborne and off the plateau. Once we’re higher up, we’ll use the Marconi and find out what’s happening with air support. If your father’s pulled the rabbit from the hat, we can hand over to whoever’s in command and return to civilization. All right?”
“Yes. I’ve had enough of the pyramid for now.”
“But you’ll be back.”
He smiled at me. I didn’t need any other answer. Of course he’d be back.
Despite the guards, Theo, the Prussians… despite the entire world, I took his hand, and closed my eyes.
We were alive. We were unhurt. Ned’s hand was warm in mine.
It didn’t get better than that.
At least we got our socks and boots back.
I laced mine tight. George had already donned his and clambered to his feet, picking up the aether lantern we’d brought to illuminate our attempts to stop the great machine. He moved with less grace than usual. We’d slept for a few hours. Too few, and after too much exertion. I felt rather as if I’d been trampled by a herd of stampeding mastodons. I wasn’t moving my shoulders much at all in an effort to lessen the muscle ache. I doubted he’d admit it, but I suspected George felt as weary.
Ned was overseeing the preparation of the Brunel. He had one guard doing the preflight checks under Hugh’s supervision. Three more guards watched over the Prussians in the Deliberation Chamber, and the remaining two were loading the hold with as many of the toys and models from the Verification Chamber as they could cram in.
And bodies. They were loading the hold with bodies, since we couldn’t dig graves into the rock of the plateau. We kept Tatlock and Jim separate from the Prussians. We’d buy ice in Khartoum, to allow us to take them to Cairo and the English cemetery there. We planned to leave the injured Prussians and those dead that we had—Altenfeld had told us two of his men and the pilot of his aeroship had died in the crash and had been left at the crash site—in Khartoum. I didn’t quite know if that would include Altenfeld himself. That would depend on who turned up to support us, and if they’d take him off our hands. We just wanted shot of him somehow.
Meanwhile, I was trying to devise some way of countering the pyramid’s defences and making sure we could leave.
Banger Bill would deal with the Antikythera machine upstairs. I’d been all over it with him but couldn’t find anything that could pass for a switch or brake. Instead, Banger had watched the way the worm wheel moved and how it coincided with the pyramid’s heartbeat, and opted for the simple solution. He’d wait until we’d signalled that we’d stopped the great machine, then he’d shove a harquebus into the worm wheel just below the worm itself. That should stop the wheel turning.
Sadly, we wouldn’t be doing the same to the great machine in front of us. The worm wheel on the Antikythera machine upstairs was a good five feet or more across. This one was the size of the dial of Big Ben’s clock, and I’d need an iron spar to jam that whopper. A chunk off the Eiffel Tower might do it.
“If we’re lucky, Bill stopping the one upstairs will close down this one.”
George snorted. “We aren’t that lucky.”
No. We weren’t. Not even with Lancaster’s Luck.
He wandered off to circle around the machine, examining it from every angle while I lifted my aether lamp high to see if anything in this benighted pit room would offer inspiration.
Nothing, other than the big throne. I could only assume Thoth came down here to sit and look at his machine. To each his own. When it came to entertainment, I preferred the music hall.
The throne was the twin of the one in the Verification Chamber above. I still didn’t feel the urge to copy Von Altenfeld’s hubris and sit in it, but—
I lifted the two papyri from where they lay on the seat. They were covered, back and front, in those neat hieroglyphs and curious, detailed drawings.
Well now.
A quick glance showed me George was invisible, hidden by the bulk of the great machine, the only evidence he was in the room at all coming from the glow of his aether lamp gleaming on metal and glass. Thank God the papyri were so narrow and short. I rolled them into a single tight cylinder and slid it into the inside pocket of my jacket, just as George reappeared. I went to meet him.
He wasn’t reassured by his perambulations. “Can’t say it’s any clearer what we should do to shut it off, no matter how many times we walk around it. What do you think, sir?”
Sir thought there wasn’t much point in procrastinating, so we crossed onto the walkway and ducked into the machine. The worm wheel was far above our heads.
“We need an engineer to know what any of this stuff is doing. It’s all interconnected.” I traced the links between a nearby bevel gear, through sets of spinning horizontal toothed wheels and the slow rotating aether spheres that looked like baby planets. I still couldn’t tell if it was one single machine built with a hollow centre to enclose the column, or four separate ones, each built on its framework over a face of the column. “Stopping any of these lower segments of the machine might be enough to work through and stop all of it.”
“It’ll be easier to reach one of these lower gears, that’s for sure.”
“We can try it. Look for anything that might be a switch or brake.”
We worked our way around the machine, enduring one “heartbeat” by dint of pressing ourselves against the column and, in my case, sticking my fingers in my ears. When the last sound died away, we kept at it. Towards the end of another half hour we’d found over twenty possible brakes we could reach, five or six on each of the four faces of the machine: pivoting metal bars that, when turned, slotted between the teeth of a gearwheel and stopped it engaging. Whether this would stop the whole machine… well, that was on the lap of the gods. Or Thoth’s, at least.
We did a second circuit of the machine, tripping the brakes—they were substantial and several took both of us and all our strength to move into place—and sat back to see the effect.
Wheels ground to a halt. Spiral gears juddered in their places, unable to turn, rat-tat-tatting against each other. Pinions stopped revolving on their racks. Axles stopped rotating. Above my head, one of the planetary spheres froze, immobile, the stack of gears inside it at a standstill, as if riveted in place. The sphere whirred as it pressed against its constraints. The machine rattled and grumbled its complaints.
We returned to the floor of the pit room, and stared at the machine. Nothing was moving.
“That looks hopeful.” George signalled Banger Bill through the simple medium of flashing a message up the shaft using the aether lantern. The responding flash from Banger was heartening. George fished his pocket watch out of his vest pocket. “Five minutes to go. Why do you call it a heartbeat, sir?”
“Lack of imagination to come up with anything better.”
He chuffed out a laugh, and we waited.
Time.
Tcck, said the machine, juddering the huge worm wheel a couple of times as though testing the restraints we’d put on it.
And that was all it did.
At least, that was all it did for two or three minutes, tccking quietly to itself like some crusty old man complaining about someone watering his Scotch.
I let my shoulders relax. “It worked.”
“Thank God.” George put away his watch, and we turned to leave. “Now we can get away from here.”
“I’ll make a trial flight in the two-seater, to be sure. But I think so.”
Thoth, of course, had other plans for us.
A hiss of steam, and a crack sharper than the bark of a harquebus. When I spun around t
o face the machine again, it was moving.
Oh, not the wheels or cogs or gears. They remained motionless, trapped by the brakes. The machine’s framework, though, moved. In a flash, it expanded outward towards us, the arms of the framework extending and each face of the machine separating from the ones at right angles to it until they’d cleared the edges of the walkway. The bridge to the walkway retracted somehow. Thoth alone knows where it went and how.
For an instant the machine—machines?—quivered over the pit beneath, then whatever anchors held it to the column gave way, and it shot down into the abyss like an elevator with a failed Otis brake. It was out of sight in an instant.
I closed my mouth, dashed to the edge of the pit, and stared.
Far, far below the twisting aether flared. Cobalt blue lightning crackled up the column, flashing past us and on through the shaft to the Verification Chamber above. It illuminated the pit clearly for the first time.
I’d caught glimpses of machines far below earlier, but in the incandescence putting the darkness to flight it was clear that however smooth the column was, machinery lined the sides of the pit: great wheels and coils, generators huffing out steam and smoke and blue sparks, and immense Leyden-like jars made of some translucent material full of blue gases and wearing metal caps adorned with revolving brass spheres. Lightning arced from wheel to coil to translucent jar, running horizontally and vertically over the column. Sparks the size of a man’s head buzzed like a plague of cobalt wasps. The air was sharp, clean-smelling.
George’s jaw dropped. “Bloody hell!”
The floor of the pit room trembled beneath our feet.
I grabbed George’s arm. “Out!”
Great gouts of blue flame boiled and seethed out of the pit.
We bolted.
By the time we reached the Deliberation Chamber, the pyramid’s slight tremble had become a deep, juddering shaking. The whole thing rumbled and thundered, its foundations shifting. The staircases and corridors shuddered beneath our feet as we ran, the vibration intensifying with each step. It couldn’t have shaken more if it had been a rat in a terrier’s mouth.
