“Miss Barclay tells me you have a history with rings,” Pettigrew said, “so it is no wonder that Miss Folley was disturbed to see one. Especially given the one in Paris? It’s a curious story, isn’t it? How a ring in Paris comes to match those she encounters in Egypt.” Pettigrew set the teapot upon the tray and lifted another, to pour for himself. “Couple that with the discovery of the honey, which ties into Miss Barclay’s own Alexandrian history and I would say you are on the cusp of something remarkable. Indeed.”
“What do you—” Cleo broke off, only staring.
Virgil did not care for the sensation that overtook him; it was at once worrisome and nauseating. The room momentarily wavered out of focus, as if there were a much larger world just a step beyond that he could see.
“Cleo, what does he mean?” He looked at Auberon, feeling he knew, but also that the story was Cleo’s to tell, only if she wished.
She withdrew into herself, yet when she spoke, her voice was strong, the surprise having been swallowed down. “My injury occurred in Alexandria, Virgil. This is where I lost my arms. It was… There is a catacomb, and it was there…” She looked at Auberon now, not struggling for words, but only remembering. “The ground gave way, I was pinned by a statue. Auberon climbed down with the rest of my team. They found me in a pool of honey.”
“Doctor Fairbrass says it likely saved her life,” Auberon said. His gaze did not stray from Cleo. “Not allowing the blood to flow freely.”
Virgil drank down his second cup of tea, then set the china cup aside. The shaking within him had not subsided, nor the sensation that matters were rapidly falling apart. “That explains your surprise at the unwrapping, at the discovery of honey,” he said slowly.
Cleo nodded. “It was the same taste. The same—Virgil, you look green…”
The room sloshed around Virgil, as liquid in a cup. Everything slowed, the room itself condensing around them, both tightening and growing brighter. He tried to focus on one thing—why had Pettigrew known about Cleo’s past—but it was Auberon he watched, as the large black man slid off the edge of the sofa.
“This tea…” Auberon said. “Does it…taste funny…”
“Oh!” Cleo stood from the sofa, turning on Pettigrew. “You didn’t. You didn’t!”
“Miss Barclay,” Pettigrew said. “I’m not one for fisticuffs.”
Virgil looked from Auberon, to the arguing Cleo and Pettigrew, but could not make himself move. The sensation that came over him was familiar and his eyes rolled back into his head at the pleasure of it. It was opium rolling through his every limb; the drugged tea spread its contaminated tendrils, soaking him the way it would cloth if spilled over a table. He opened himself to the sensation and leaned back into the chair that held him. Succumbing, he thought, I am succumbing and can do nothing else.
Watching Cleo and Pettigrew argue was like watching them through a pane of glass fogged with opium smoke. Virgil’s mouth opened, he pondered a protest, but then the wolf inside rolled over, reveling in the oblivion it had been denied and everything began to dim around the edges. Soft, hazy, melting.
“You will return to the hotel, Miss Barclay,” Pettigrew said as he advanced upon her. His hands opened and closed into fists, rage barely contained. Virgil knew that if Pettigrew made any advance upon her, he would be helpless to stop the man, so heavy had the drugged tea made his body.
“You will tell Miss Folley that I have her precious beau garçon and yours as well and that I surely mean them no good. You will instruct her to return to my residence with the rings she possesses so that we might make a bargain to please both sides of this equation.”
“Are you ins—”
Pettigrew advanced on Cleo so swiftly, she fell to silence. Pettigrew never laid a hand on her and Virgil, in his drugged stupor, wondered if that was because Pettigrew’s hands were disappearing. The angrier he became, the less form George Pettigrew appeared to possess, but Virgil could not say if it was actually happening or a result of the drugged tea flowing through his own system. Pettigrew looked like black smoke, writhing from his jacket cuffs.
“I am quite sane indeed, Miss Barclay. Time has not yet had its way with my faculties. You know what this honey is capable of—what it has done to even you. Should Miss Folley not contact me, I promise her terrible things indeed. Indeed.”
Virgil gave one more attempt to remove himself from the chair, but could not. The opiate within the tea was enough to drug both him and the wolf inside. He could not change forms, nor make any move toward Cleo. The room gave one final heave, as a boat on a sickening sea, and then mercifully fell to shadow.
Chapter Nine
July 1887 – Alexandria, Egypt
Dear Auberon,
I cannot thank you enough for the gloves you sent last month. Given that I am still learning the way these arms operate, they are exactly what I need. The self-lacing ability will be invaluable, I am certain. I am not certain, however, how you had them made so precisely. I feared the narrow leather fingers would constrict and not allow the hinges of these metal fingers to work, but that is not the case. They work perfectly well together.
As you can see from this letter, my handwriting improves. At least I believe it does, so please have care to not disabuse me of this notion. Doctor Fairbrass encourages me to write some every day, so this letter shall be written over the course of a week. I know exactly when the airships arrive and when they are headed north to Paris. Perhaps we shall see a change in my handwriting over this week.
Tuesday: [blotch of black ink]
Thursday: It has been a trying week; if not for the gloves you sent, I might have given myself up to despair entirely. Doctor Fairbrass had to remove one of my fingers after it was caught inside a pulley as I attempted to try my hand—no pun intended—at some of the field work I once conducted. This went poorly and I am discouraged. I know setbacks are likely, and indeed shall teach me more along the way, but I have no desire to learn the way my arm detaches itself from my body. No one should have to see such a thing, and me more than once.
The doctor was able to re-seat the finger without a problem—it is a simple connection, after all, which is like magic if you do not understand how it works. And yet. It bothered me, Auberon, to see a part of myself taken so casually off and away.
This unease will pass. So too shall this letter, north upon the next airship where it shall find you. I remain in Alexandria,
Cleo
* * *
The house Akila led Eleanor to was little more than a hovel in a congestion of others. Still in jackal form, Eleanor smelled no other people nearby, but still followed Akila inside cautiously. Her legs trembled, the anger bleeding out of her to leave her in danger of changing forms.
Akila bent to the embers in the hearth, encouraging them back to life as she lit candles with her fingertips. The room glowed warmly, showing Eleanor a kitchen, a bed, and little else. Everything was rough around the edges, no curtains, no rugs, a film of sand over most items within the room. Eleanor paced, leaving paw prints with each step.
“Go on, girl,” Akila said. “Drop your form. Here.” Akila retrieved a cotton robe from the wardrobe and dropped it on the kitchen table. “I have no doubt you are hungry and have questions you cannot ask with that mouth.”
Eleanor could deny neither thing. She did not want to change her form in front of Akila, but there was little choice. She would not risk retreat into the street where others might yet come. With a concentrated effort, Eleanor let the form be drawn back inside, realizing only then that the clothes she had worn that night were well and truly tatters across the streets of Alexandria. She pulled the robe around herself, shivering even though the night was warm.
“A-answers,” she whispered.
Akila’s proud face split with a smile. “No niceties?” she asked, her mouth taking time to form the words in the French Eleanor spoke. “You may have trouble believing I am genuine, but I meant your friend no harm when I wished to study her—a
nd I mean you no harm now. Your mother and her people know of me and mine. I would have us be… If not friends, then acquaintances who trust one another.” She slid a cup of warm broth toward Eleanor. “You have been drawn into something I have been trying to prevent for quite some time. George Pettigrew is no ally.”
Eleanor sat on the long bench at the table and wrapped her hands around the cup, but did not drink. Her throat was dry, but Akila was right, she did not trust this woman. “Tell me, then, what I have been drawn into.”
“You will call me absurd and a liar.” Akila drew a loaf of cloth-wrapped bread down from a shelf and offered it to Eleanor at the table.
Eleanor exhaled and stared at the woman. “I probably will,” she agreed, “but you have offered a story. Tell it or shall I continue to plague you unintentionally? I would rather it be with intention, wouldn’t you?”
When Eleanor didn’t take the bread, Akila set it upon the table, adding a jar of darkly purple olives. “Your friend, Mister Pettigrew, is no friend. This is something you surely know, based on what you have seen of his home. Have you solved the riddle of his mummies?” She sat at the table with a long exhale and pushed a bowl of olive oil toward Eleanor. “Most make no sense—they stand alone, they are not a piece of any grand puzzle. It is only the last one that matters, Miss Folley. Only the last we should concern ourselves with.”
Eleanor tore a chunk of bread free and dunked it into the oil she’d been offered. She didn’t trust the woman, but the hunger gnawing in her belly was no better. “The sarcophagus of honey. Is Pettigrew ill? Does he believe the honey will cure him of some terrible disease?” Eleanor pondered and shook her head. “I am not certain it will ever restore his personality to something more tolerable.”
Akila’s laugh was low and she shook her head. “You know some of the rumors about the honey then, the mellified man, the way a body dissolves itself into the sweet over hundreds of years. But this honey… Where did it come from, Miss Folley?”
“The auctioneers claimed the sarcophagus had no provenance, that they did not—” She broke off, swallowing a bite of oil-drenched bread. “Naturally, that could be a false claim.”
“That sarcophagus came from Alexandria—not far from where we are,” Akila said. “It has been under this city since the time of Cleopatra’s reign, since she and her Antony called these shores home and ruled with graciousness and civility.”
Eleanor raised an eyebrow at that. “You sound as if you knew her.” This, she realized, would not be impossible. “Did you, then?”
“As a Defender, it is my place to watch over Egypt. Her people, her goods. It does not matter what century it is. Egypt is eternal. The tombs will fill with dust and sand, and we will be here even so, prepared to defend what needs defending.”
“Vague, but illuminating.” Eleanor brushed her hands together to remove a dusting of crumbs. “So, we have sarcophagi that date from Cleopatra’s reign. Honey that is possibly older…unless of course it’s not. And strange iron rings that Anubis claims came from the stars. One I discovered this very evening upon the body within the honey.”
Akila looked at though she had been hit in the face at this news. She stared at Eleanor without blinking, and then slowly bowed her head. “I hoped it would not be so. Pettigrew is close then, very close.”
“Close to what, Akila?” Eleanor pressed. “If you want my assistance—”
“I do not!” Akila rose from the bench, her robes sweeping a violet circle between her and Eleanor. “Pettigrew summoned you from Paris with that ring, did he not? He drew you here, into his foolish game.” Akila drew a steadying breath and lifted her hands, to forestall Eleanor from saying more. “Listen. It is not simply that the honey heals a body. This has been known for centuries, has it not? Honey seals a wound, keeps bad air from sinking inside. This honey does more than that—and I believe it’s the more that Pettigrew is hoping to capitalize on.”
“What do you mean by more?” Eleanor asked when Akila paused and did not continue.
Akila shook her head, silver braids whispering against her shoulders. “Once again, I find myself in the position of having to allow an outsider in. You may well be the daughter of Dalila el Jabari, she who is daughter of the Queen of the Mirror, but you are also one who would carry Egypt away bit by bit.”
“No.” Eleanor rejected that idea out right. “I am one who would preserve what Egypt is—”
“Even if that means taking her artifacts to other lands to keep them ‘safe’?”
“I… I don’t know the answer to that, Akila. Keeping them safe is vital—surely you and I agree on that—and if they are not protected here—be it from robbers, or dealers, or even those like Pettigrew… Anyone who means to exploit them—Can you argue that they are not better being elsewhere?”
“Hidden from view, from the people who birthed them?”
Eleanor shook her head. “I don’t know, Akila.” What she knew was the insistent worry that grew inside her. Worry over the rings, and the honey, and what Pettigrew meant to do. “Tell me about Pettigrew. Tell me about the honey, if you would have me help you. Don’t leave me on the outside where I blunder my way through and complicate your….whatever this is. Quest? Divine right?”
Akila sank back to the bench. “Pettigrew believes the honey will make him immortal,” she said.
This information took a moment to register, because Eleanor somehow wasn’t surprised. Why couldn’t it be that he simply wanted something ancient on his morning toast? A taste of the ancient world to hearken back to—
“How does that work, exactly?” she asked. Maybe he did want it for his morning toast, after all.
“Ingestion, submersion, arcane rite,” Akila said. She avoided Eleanor’s gaze, standing from the bench as she began to collect the remains of their small meal. “No one yet knows, Eleanor. If it was as simple as eating it, he would have already.”
“There would be no telling if he had, would there? Is it an immediate effect, or—” Eleanor broke off. Within her mind’s eye, she imagined Cleo standing beside the sarcophagus. Dipping her metal fingers into the black hole. Honey coated and—
Cleo had tasted it.
Cleo had—
“It won’t be that simple, surely,” Eleanor said. Akila had not been at the unwrapping, had not seen Cleo taste the honey and faint. “Nothing in this country is simple—rings need blood, so honey needs…” Her gaze came back to Akila and again, Akila’s flitted away. “Rings. What of the rings, Akila? You looked sickened when I mentioned we had found another.”
“The rings will carry you,” Akila whispered.
“No. I’m not going anywhere.” Eleanor slammed her hands onto the table, rage beginning to consume her. The jackal inside her took small, hard bites of her, as if it meant to claw back out. Even as much as she wanted to wear the rings, no. “No more games and no more riddles, Akila.” She stood from the bench and rounded the table to grasp Akila by the arms. She was tired of games and tired of half-truths. “Tell me.”
Eleanor’s voice sounded like that of Anubis, dark and commanding, and it looked as if even the night had grown darker, the air around them thick and impenetrable. Eleanor fought to keep her human form, but snarled even so.
“Tell me.”
Akila fought the influence of the voice, even as it flowed like an undammed river through Eleanor. Eleanor felt intoxicated, adrift and barely anchored as Akila grit her teeth and tried to escape Eleanor’s hold.
“Tell me,” Eleanor said again.
“These rings…” Akila bit out the words, clearly trying not to; Eleanor knew she was sworn to keep secrets, sworn to protect Egypt, but if she thought Pettigrew was a threat to that, surely she would break and share what she knew.
“Tell me of the rings.”
“They come from the s-stars,” Akila spat. “Fashioned from that which fell, that which is now eternal. She will want them when you finish—they are rightly hers.”
Eleanor’s grip on Akila d
id not lessen. She pressed the woman into the wall, bowing her head against Akila’s own, to look deep into her brown eyes.
“Whose?”
The single word trembled in Eleanor’s mouth; they were coming full circle, inescapable, she was being drawn back in and refused, refused, refused.
“Cleopatra’s,” Akila whispered. “D-don’t you know… They are w-wedding bands.”
Eleanor released Akila as though she had been burned. “Wedding—”
She moved away from the woman, pacing through the small room. The walls were too close, the fire too warm, and her skin prickled as if about to crawl off. Akila was in little better condition, reaching for the table before she sank back to the bench. She took up her remaining broth and drank in long, slow swallows.
“Start from the beginning,” Eleanor said.
Akila’s shoulders slumped. “There is no precise beginning,” she murmured. She cradled her head within her hands, breathing low. “It is what it ever was between them. An eternal love, much like mine for this land. Bound with one’s blood. Some things reach beyond this world— she wanted them to as well.”
“Them?”
“Who did Cleopatra love the way I love this land?” Akila spread her hands carefully on the table top, still trying to breathe normally. “The way the wolf loves you?”
Eleanor twitched, but said nothing.
“These are not my secrets to tell.” Akila lifted her head. “They are mine to protect and defend. You will take the rings and go. As you must.”
The night was strangely quiet when Eleanor left the house. Akila had given her a pair of sandals, but Eleanor found her own discarded boots in the street as she walked. How far was it to the hotel? She did not care. How far was it back to Pettigrew’s house? She also did not care. She walked, mindless for the moment, letting the quiet of the night work its way into her. She walked with eyes open and eyes closed, and felt closer to the world than she ever had. The weight of the world rested not in her hand, but on her shoulders; it was not uncomfortable, only insistently present.
The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3) Page 12
