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

by Anna Butler

  “Rafe!” Ned, staggering to keep his balance, came to meet me as we tumbled into the chamber. “What’s going on?”

  “Shutting off the machine had consequences we couldn’t predict. I think we’re in trouble.” I fought to keep my breathing even. The room was empty of people, but for Banger Bill, who panted as heavily as we did. “Is everyone on board?”

  “Yes. I sent them over as soon as the rumbling started. What are we going to do?”

  “Run.”

  Deep inside the pyramid, something boomed and echoed.

  “Run like hell!”

  We did. Fast as the flames of Hell itself, throwing ourselves out of the pyramid into the cool clear day, pounding over the grass tufts to the waiting Brunel. The shaking had spread to the plateau, the rocks heaving and moving. Up the stairs, with one of the Gallowglass guards waiting to retract them and slam shut the access door behind us. Banger stayed to help him. Through the people crowded into the saloon, the injured cushioned on seats, the rest sitting on the floor, bracing themselves against one another and with arms hooked through chair supports. Nell had a seat, with Theo and Whelan on either side of her. I didn’t stop to speak to her on my way through, just looked to be sure she was safe.

  Hugh, may he live for a thousand years, had the Brunel engines on and warming. “I didn’t think we’d have time for test flights.”

  “No.” I flung myself into the pilot’s chair. Grabbed the controls.

  Ned got into the seat behind me, George dropping onto the floor beside him. Ned clamped a hand on his arm to help anchor him.

  “Hold tight.” I opened the throttle.

  She was already pointing into the wind, and I didn’t need much of a runway. Just enough to get some lift under the flight wings, until the paddles under them engaged and flung us up into the sky.

  “Obelisk!” It was an order. Shorthand for Watch for the bloody obelisk and warn me!

  “Nothing.” Hugh twisted in his chair to peer out of the window, head at an odd angle to see behind us.

  George got to his knees, pressed the side of his face against the glass, staring back along the Brunel’s hull. “Still nothing.”

  Hugh counted off the altimeter. “Seventy-five feet.”

  That was the critical height. I circled to gain some altitude before attempting to take her out over the plateau edge and over the tops of the surrounding hills. The pyramid came into view on Hugh’s side as I brought the Brunel round.

  Great blocks of stone bounced down its sides, as if some giant hand shook a child’s building bricks. Sooty fumes and dust poured out of a myriad holes and vents, and the plume of smoke and vapour boiling up from the pyramid tip would have put Vesuvius to shame, surging skyward into a cloud shaped like an inverted cup. Flames licked at the base of the plume. Lightning blazed through it, crackling up to meet the cloud and illuminate it from within with a dirty blueish light.

  George fell back on his expletive of choice. “Bloody hell.”

  Round the back of the pyramid, giving it a wide berth. One hundred and fifty feet and climbing. Still no obelisk.

  At least one thing had gone right that bloody day.

  So far.

  Three hundred feet and we were racing northwest, up over the encircling hills. The plateau was well to our stern now, invisible but for the growing cloud, a malignancy filling the sky.

  “Was it sitting on a volcano or something?” Ned twisted in his chair, but he wouldn’t have been able to see much.

  The explosion behind us shook the world and drowned my reply. The giant who’d been pitching the pyramid’s huge blocks around, now caught the Brunel and hurled it across the sky. She bucked and jerked, the turbulence tossing her all over the bloody shop.

  Bloody he—

  I hauled back on the control yoke. Get her up. Need more sky to play with. Up.

  A boiling mass of smoke and steam enveloped us for an instant. Not even long enough for me to gasp.

  And it was gone, spitting and crackling, whizzing on ahead of us. A great ring of vapour, tinged with that damnable blue light.

  Haul her up. Up.

  And up she came, still hurtling forward, bouncing the way a stone skips over a pond. But she was my stone, and the sky was my pond.

  Another moment and we straightened out, in calmer air. Smoother.

  And we were out of it. Nothing between us and Aegypt now but clear, clean air.

  Safe.

  I kept the Brunel circling about twenty miles away while we discussed what to do. Even at that distance, we could see the enormous cloud hanging in the sky over the plateau, a curious bulbous hemisphere balancing on a thick stem reaching down towards the ground the way a tornado does.

  Ned stood in the pilot’s cabin doorway, relaying opinions back and forth. Not surprising, the consensus in the saloon was to get the hell away from the place. I would be more willing if it didn’t feel like I was running away from a responsibility I didn’t want, but I couldn’t shirk. I suspected the pyramid was gone and Thoth’s machinery was safe from misuse in pursuit of mankind’s petty imperial ambitions. But I’d rather like to be sure.

  In the end it was taken out of my hands. The Marconi crackled into life with a tetchy demand I identify myself to His Imperial Majesty’s ship, the Ark Royal, on pain of being shot down if I didn’t comply immediately, while a couple of familiar little aerofighters popped out of nowhere to buzz around the Brunel’s nose.

  The Aero Corps. Late as bloody usual.

  “The Ark!” Hugh’s eyes gleamed with delight. “Sir, it’s the Ark!”

  Our old ship. The one I’d thought it would break my heart to leave. The one it had broken my heart to leave. Then I caught sight of Ned grinning like a lunatic. No. My heart hadn’t been broken. It had been freed to find what it really wanted and needed.

  I did some lunatic grinning back, the tense knot in my chest untwisting for the first time in hours. Life was good. Mind you, it would be even better when I got the chance to kiss Ned into insensibility.

  Commander Abercrombie was still in charge of the Ark. He was related by marriage to Ned. Honestly, the Houses’ genealogy charts must resemble a plate of Italian spaghetti all tangled around the same damn fork. They were far too inbred. Ned and “Jamie”—and wasn’t that a cheerful, affectionate, casual way of referring to the man who chilled hearts for a hundred yards in every direction?—chatted while another pair of aerofighters streaked off to the southeast to see what had become of the pyramid.

  The Ark was a great hulking presence to the south. We circled around each other for several minutes, a polite minuet of a stately dance, until the aerofighters reported back.

  No pyramid. Not even much of a plateau. Only a smoking crater in the ground, a mile across, ripped into the river valley and the hills around it.

  I can’t say I was sorry.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The Ark Royal escorted us as far as Khartoum, where we planned to spend the night. We could have made it to Aswan, but I was exhausted and didn’t fancy all that flying without putting my feet up first.

  “I’ve only been in Aegypt for four ruddy days.” I released the control yoke, as the Brunel came to a stop on the short runway outside Khartoum, and Hugh switched off the engines. “I need a rest.”

  Ned had been morose, almost surly since losing his precious pyramid, but he perked up enough to acknowledge my complaint. “Only four? Really?”

  “Feels like a blasted lifetime. Feels like several. Every one of them as long as Methuselah’s.”

  “Poor Rafe.” And since Hugh and George had left the pilot’s cabin, he dropped a kiss on the top of my head before going forth to give battle against officialdom. I would have left him to it and snatched forty winks, but my conscience wouldn’t allow it. Loyalty was an inconvenient virtue. As was gratitude for stray kisses.

  The Ark Royal hadn’t landed—it was too great a behemoth—but by arrangement, several of its crew had arrived on one of its larger aeroshuttle
s a few moments before we did. Commander Abercrombie had obliged by arming them all to the teeth and beyond. They would guard the Brunel while we rested.

  Best of all, he loaned us the ship’s doctor to see to Sam, Hugh, and Theo. My old friend James Beckett and I had kept up a regular correspondence after I’d been forced into retirement, but hadn’t met since. It was a happy reunion, and in between examining his patients, James returned to me several times to shake my hand and assure me he was delighted to see me again.

  “You’re looking so well, Rafe! And so prosperous! First Heir Stravaigor, eh? Didn’t think you had it in you!”

  “Bit of a surprise for me, too.”

  Abercrombie had called ahead of our arrival, and various officials now waited on the other side of the cordon sanitaire provided by the Ark crew. One wore an expression of pained outrage—the German envoy, Abercrombie told Ned over the Marconi, come to collect his errant Prussians. Or what remained of them. The tall Sudanese official was the aeroport manager. The most important was Matthew Lee, the Cartomancer’s nephew and aide-de-camp to the Governor-General of Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate. Lee waited in a cooled aerolandau, with a small fleet of aerocars around him. I hoped those were our transports to the government guest house Abercrombie had requisitioned on our behalf.

  When we appeared, Lee emerged from his cocoon and rolled over the Germanic opposition with tart remarks about unacceptable acts of aggression that had the German envoy reddening and spluttering. He negotiated the handover of our Prussians in short order, conveniently not mentioning Altenfeld, whose fate, he said in private later, would be decided by Wingate. The legal basis to deal with him was tenuous, the Imperium having abandoned its Abyssinian interests before I was even born. It wasn’t one of our territories where he could be held to be in contravention of our laws. But that was Wingate’s problem, not mine. It would be enough for me to see the back of the man.

  The discomforted envoy withdrew with haughty dignity, and Lee finally greeted Ned with a hearty “Delighted to see you again, Winter, although I could wish the circumstances were better.”

  Ned acknowledged him, his gaze on the autohearse carrying away Günter Reitz and the other dead.

  “They’ll bury them before sunset,” Lee said.

  “Do you know where?”

  “Probably the small Anglican graveyard here. I can arrange for you to attend, though given the circumstances, the Germans may protest.”

  Ned turned his gaze onto Lee. “I’d like to go. I knew Günni for years. Thank you.”

  “Do you wish to have your own people interred there?”

  “No. No, thank you. We’ll take them to Cairo.”

  Where we could ensure their graves were cared for. I understood Ned’s reasoning, and Beckett had brought a portable ice machine with him to enable us to preserve the bodies.

  Lee didn’t argue, but as soon as the German envoy was out of sight, he had Altenfeld whisked away to face Wingate’s justice and bundled the rest of us into the waiting autocars. Beckett went with us, intending to watch over his patients until we left again.

  “Accommodations at the guest house should be comfortable, I hope. Sir Reginald assigned a unit of troopers to ensure you aren’t disturbed and sent in one of his personal cooks. It’s fully staffed, so you don’t need to lift a finger.” Finally Lee nodded to me. “First Heir Stravaigor. My uncle charged me with offering you every assistance.”

  Had he now? “That’s very kind of him.”

  Lee smiled. “Yes. But of course we take particular care of our allied Houses. I look forward to our association with you in the future.”

  By which he meant The old jackal is dying, and we couldn’t work with him. He ran rings around us, tricksy old devil that he was. We need to keep you sweet until we have House Stravaigor back under full control.

  I smiled back. House politics exhausted me more than exploding pyramids. I was silent for the rest of the journey, then ate a late luncheon with James Beckett at the guest house after he’d finished encasing Sam’s leg in a Pirogov dressing, before taking myself off to rest.

  My room was small but sufficient. What’s more to the point, when I closed the door, I had some privacy at last. I’d already given some thought as to where I might stow the papyri I’d abstracted from the pyramid. I had an anxious moment folding them to the requisite shape, fearful they would crack and break, but as Ned had noted, the papyri were astonishingly flexible. Lancaster’s Luck was on my side again: they folded as if they’d been thick parchment, and slid into their leather hiding place with relative ease.

  Job done, I retired to my lonely bed, where I slept away the afternoon like one of the dead.

  I missed Günter Reitz’s funeral. But then, I had a burial of my own to see to.

  We reached Cairo on New Year’s Eve, well before noon.

  We’d stopped off in Aswan and Hermopolis the previous day. Aswan for luncheon, and Hermopolis for a celebration with our friends for our safe return, and to stay overnight before pressing on to Cairo. Friedrich Lansbach had still been there, sharing Willem Baumann’s tent and refusing to return to Altenfeld’s dig at Antinoë. He was grieved about Altenfeld but had already washed his hands of him. Ned welcomed him back to the team with open arms.

  Tom Causton and the others were philosophical about the loss of the pyramid and everything in it.

  “They didn’t see it.” Ned was still melancholy. “I can’t expect them to understand. They don’t know what they missed.”

  No indeed, exploding pyramids being quite out of the ordinary. They must have been very sorry indeed to have missed that.

  Nell was going back to Cairo with me, and then home. The Gallowglass, when Ned and I spoke to him from Khartoum, had reported my father was failing—“Perhaps, Rafe, you ought not to delay too long.”

  Madame Stravaigor, though, refused to accompany us. “I have no reason to return. He is already dead to me.” A trifle cold-hearted, perhaps, but she did a volte-face in regard to me and was very civil. I expect she remembered who would be responsible for paying her widow’s portion when she qualified for it.

  I was taking Hugh home until he was well. Then Ned decided he was coming, too. “I must see the boys, and I want our own doctors to check that Sam’s leg is healing. Tom can manage without me. I may get back out here before the season ends, but I’m writing this year off.”

  I was constrained in expressing my delight by the fact of, well, tents. Useful for camping, doubtless, but hardly soundproof, and so unhelpful when it came to providing your lover with truly thorough consolation for his archaeological disappointments. I promised to make up for it when we reached Cairo, shut off the aether lantern to ensure no telltale silhouettes made a shocking shadow-puppet play against the canvas walls, and kissed him a great deal instead.

  I was quite eager to ring in the New Year, providing I was doing it with Ned in a comfortable bed in Shepheard’s.

  With the Gallowglass’s help, I’d made the arrangements from Khartoum. The Pasha kindly provided our transport again, and we went straight from Cairo’s aerodrome to the English cemetery on Misr Al Qadimah, where the Rev. Temple Gairdner waited.

  Albert Tatlock had not been a religious man, but he’d had a sense of what was proper and correct—from a House chief guard’s perspective. He would have appreciated the graveside service on those terms. By his own lights, he had been the good and faithful servant that Gairdner called him. All I could do for Tatlock now was acknowledge it in granite.

  We buried Jim Baxter in the next-door grave. They hadn’t known each other well, but House guards always find common ground. They’d probably spend the afterlife comparing weapons and grousing about how unreasonable their respective First Heirs were. Company for each other, at least.

  Nell was sombre and tearful. She had known Tatlock all her life. “He was always kind to me. I’ll miss him.”

  I put an arm around her shoulders and turned her away from the pile of freshly turned earth. “He hono
ured the family. I think he’d approve then, if we go straight to the place where the missionaries hold their services, and marry you and Theo. What do you say?”

  I had never before disconcerted my little sister, and I doubted I’d ever manage it again.

  “Rafe!”

  “Well, I say yes!” Theo chimed in, his face threatening to split from the width of his smile. “That sounds the most delightful start to 1903! Do say yes, too, Nell darling.”

  “But Papa—”

  I took both her hands in mine and squeezed. “If you wait until we get home, you may not be able to marry for a year. You’re likely to be in mourning, Nell, this time next week. Marry now, and I can guarantee our father will be over-the-moon delighted, however sorry he will be not to have squired you down the aisle.”

  Her chin quivered.

  “He won’t want you to wait, Nell. And there’s no reason to.” A thought struck me. “Do you want your mother present? I could go and collect her—”

  “No. Maman wouldn’t approve of anything short of a nuptial mass, and since I’m not a papist, that’s not going to happen anyway.”

  I wasn’t sufficiently mean-spirited to comment on the lack of a nuptial mass when it came to Madame Stravaigor’s liaison with her cousin Archambault. Besides, I was glad I didn’t need to go back to Hermopolis, and had been delivering a mental bastinado to myself for not mentioning this brilliant idea before we’d left earlier that day.

  Nell freed one of her hands from mine and held it out to Theo. “Do you truly want to do this?”

  “Try and stop me.” With a gallantry unusual in accountants, Theo raised her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers.

  Her smile would have ignited granite. “Then, yes. Yes! Let’s get married.”